First Cycle, page 14
"It's no wonder that our tempers are short, Citizen," Harv-Sarov said. "The wonder is that we aren't biting one another. Dealing with those animals is surely a case of Vran testing our patience, our faith, and our fortitude. They are lying to us, those Outsider animals, and laughing in our faces, and we have to smile and pretend to believe them."
"You think so. Citizen?" Skrov-Rogoy asked, taking the priest's arm and guiding him to a nearby bench.
"I wish I could believe that."
Harv-Sarov looked at him in surprise. "Explain, Citizen Skrov-Rogov."
"Look at it this way, Citizen Priest-Professor; if they're lying, they must have a reason for lying, and we should be able to figure out what it is. If they're not lying, if they're telling the truth, it would invalidate everything we have been taught to believe in all our lives. It's like one of those problems in truth-telling you get in school: three people are locked in a room; one of them can only lie, one can either lie or tell the truth, and the third can only tell the truth. What question can you ask any one of them to instantly know which he is, and which the other two are?' Well, in real life the problem is invalid, because nobody always lies or always tells the truth. But with these Outsiders, we are faced with just that problem."
"How do you mean. Citizen?"
"Let me put it this way. Reverend Citizen; these beings claim not to understand what we're talking about when we tell them about the Organic State, because they don't have such a thing. Well, that's all right.
There was a time when we had not evolved to the high point we're now at. So what sort of government do they have? We haven't been able to find out. Why? Because they have no word for the very concept of 'government.' They don't know what we're talking about."
The priest nodded. "Their language, if we are to believe what they tell us, lacks terms for the fundamental social relationships of authority, or regulation, or even law."
"And yet," Skrov-Rogov said, gesturing toward the landing field, from which one of the shuttles was thrusting itself into the atmosphere, climbing its ladder of flame, "they have developed a culture which has produced that. What sort of culture had we before the Citizen-Originator Dov-Soglov and the Citizen-First-Controller Zov-Zolkov? Guns that loaded at the muzzle with loose powder; wretchedly inefficient steam-turbines; no telephones or radio or electric power. Why, all that we have accomplished was accomplished under the Organic State, and yet these creatures, far in advance of our science, claim that they have no equivalent to the Organic State. Worse; they claim they possess no equivalent to the state! Their condition, they would have us think, is more anarchic than any in recorded history." He used an oath at which the priest frowned. "Can we believe them? And, more to the point, Citizen-Priest,dare we believe them?"
Harv-Sarov tied his two hands together with his fingers and stared glumly at the rough concrete walk. "I see what you mean, Citizen Director. But their problem goes much deeper for one of the Shoe, like myself. Their pretended ignorance of the very concepts of religion strike me to my soul. What are we to do with a race like this? How can they have achieved a high state of civilization, and not come to any awareness of the Glory of Vran? How would He have permitted such a thing? Could it be that He is testing us?"
"Would that not be a reassuring answer, Reverend Citizen?"
"For you, perhaps, but not for me. If we are being tested by Vran, then what are the right answers to the test? What is it that Vran would have us do?" He turned to Skrov-Rogov and spread his hands wide, a gesture of bafflement. "Why, the most degraded savage in the darkest corner of the globe before the Englightenment had some concept, dim and barbarous though it might have been, of Vran. Yet you should have heard that female Outsider, the one called Leel-lah Something-Or-Other, with the bright red fuzz on her body and the white splash under her chin. She laughed at me when I tried to explain the existence of the Universe in the Mind of Vran. I tell you, I could hear that laugh echoing in the convolutions of the Mind itself. You know what she asked me? She asked me to tell her whose mind Vran existed in!"
"I saw a peasant on Vashtur hanged by the wrists over a slow fire and roasted to death for such blasphemous talk," Skrov-Rogov said.
"May he find forgiveness in the Memory of Vran," the priest mumbled, making the Holy Sign. "But that's not the worst of it. Disbelief we can handle, even from aliens. The Successor-Controller has authorized the Office of the Stabilization of the Faith to start a new Bench. It will be called the Bench for the Propagation of the Word of Vran Among the Outsiders. Of course, we are not to do any propagating now; nothing to annoy the fuzzy beasts yet. But when we have the upper hand-we'll convert them, or we'll eliminate the race trying!"
"That's the idea," Skrov-Rogov approved.
"But their attitude, and their behavior; I don't know how long I can stand it. They have no sense of shame or morality. They degrade women by letting them do men's work."
"They do seem to have complete equality of the sexes," Skrov-Rogov said.
"Disgusting!" the priest said. "And have you seen how they behave toward each other? Running around naked; both sexes bathing together. And they certainly like to bathe-they're the cleanest beasts I ever saw. And the other day I came across two of them under a tree-a male and a female. And they were-openly-fornicating. And when they saw me watching, it didn't seem to bother them at all. Not at all.
Just like animals."
"And yet--" Skrov-Rogov looked toward the landing field. "The problem is real. If they're lying to us-in word, deed, and behavior-they are not only impeccably schooled in the lie, but they must have a powerful motive. What could it be? And if they are not lying, if their every word and every action reflects what they truly believe, who they truly are--" He paused, thoughtfully. "Why?" he asked, of the air in front of him, not of the priest. "Why would the universe look thus to them and thus to us? And who is right?"
"Citizen Skrov-Rogov!" the priest said, the shock evident in his voice.
Yssa Balkadranna looked up from the writing machine and her stack of notes as Lylla Rovorrido came into the room and laid her notebook on the table in front of Vandro.
"Anything new?" Vandro asked.
Lylla shrugged. "I'm afraid I horrified one of them, again. Harv-Sarov, the one who always wears that blue smock with the gold trimmings, and the shoes with the gold buckles. Just asked him a simple question, too. These people are so sensitive, and about the silliest things."
Dantro Fanzagarro, who had been dozing on a couch across the room, opened one eye. "What was it this time, Lylla?" he asked. "Tizzy and Puzzy and Vran; or the mind-cells and the body-cells and everybody in his place?"
"It was Tizzy and Puzzy this time. It seems you mustn't ask questions about that. What kind of a civilization can you develop if you can't ask questions? How did they get as advanced as they are without asking questions? And how did they ever get a system of beliefs like that?"
"Don't ask me," Dantro said. "Ask them."
"I have done so," Lylla said. "I asked why I shouldn't ask, and he told me not to ask that. And I then asked him how we could learn if we didn't ask."
"What did he say to that?" Vandro asked.
"He said I was only to ask the approved questions, that that was the only way to learn."
Yssa leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. "I hate to say this," she said, "but I'm beginning to suspect that Our Sister's Children are crazy. All of them."
"Yssa," Vandro said, looking up from the notebook, "that's not fair, really. Different from us, even very different, is not necessarily crazy."
"I don't mean different from us," Yssa said. "I mean crazy. Not sane."
"The whole planet? All the people?"
"If this is a representative sample, yes. Of course there's always the possibility that we've landed in an insane asylum. I spent some time working in an insane asylum in my youth. There are certain similarities in behavior between the poor unfortunates in there, and the people of this planet."
"Well, they don't run around frothing at the mouth and biting people, and they don't go off and sit in dark corners with blankets over their heads, mumbling to themselves. That's how all the crazy people I've ever seen acted," Vandro said.
"You never saw that poor woman at Salgrazzo's Town, did you?" Lylla asked. "The one whose child burned to death in the grainery fire? She refuses to believe the child is dead, and goes all around town hunting for it and calling its name. She isn't sane, is she?"
. "Thank you, Lylla," Yssa said. "That's the sort of thing I mean. I think we have a whole planet here that suffers from what that poor woman suffers-from. It's a systematic rejection of reality and substitution of delusion-belief. That woman couldn't endure the reality of her baby's death, and so she rejected it. She substituted the fiction that the child was alive somewhere out of her sight. No one can convince her of the truth; for her, the delusion hasbecome the truth."
"So?" Vandro asked. "I sympathize with the poor woman, but what has that to do with Our Sister's Children?"
"That woman and these people have the same sort of non-sanity. Sanity, in this context, consists of thinking-patterns that are in agreement with perceptible reality. What that woman did, and what these people are doing, is rejecting reality and setting up a consistent system of delusion-beliefs."
"But that woman was under a tremendous stress," Vandro said. "You can't think every person on this planet has had a loved-one burn to death?"
"That woman," Yssa said, "was under a tremen:dous stress for a very short period of time. What would happen to someone who was put under a smaller stress, but over a much longer period of time?"
"I don't know," Vandro said.
"Neither do I," Yssa admitted, "but I think there's a pretty good chance that it's the explanation of what's happened here."
Dantro swung his legs over the edge of the couch and sat up. "Now, there's an idea we want to kick around for a while," he said. "I'm glad it occurred to Yssa, for it wouldn't have occurred to any of the rest of us. We don't have many really non-sane people at home; and those we have are cared for out of common funds in special asylums. We've never found any way to cure these people, although sometimes they get well spontaneously. Is that right, Yssa?"
"That's right," she said.
"So," Dantro continued, "we don't understand deviations from sanity too well. Most of us tend to think of frothing at the mouth, or other obvious symptoms. But you can't tell that delusional people are crazy; not unless you happen to know the truth about whatever their delusion is. I mean, if you were a stranger in Salgrazzo's Town, and ran across that poor woman, you'd have no reason to think she wasn't looking for a perfectly real, living child, that just happened to be out of sight."
"That's true," Vandro agreed. "So, what's the point?"
"The point is that if these people are really non-sane, we'll have to stop trying to deal with them as though they were sane. It won't do any good."
"Maybe it's just a question of different kinds of sanity," Vandro suggested.
"Oh, no!" Dantro expostulated. "Didn't we just define sanity as thinking in a manner in agreement with objective reality? How many kinds of reality are there, anyhow? I mean, it's not insane to believe that your child is missing if you have no evidence to the contrary. But if you have perfectly objective evidence that your child is dead, such as having seen the body, then continuing to believe that it is merely missing, while unfortunate and pathetic, is also insane."
"Well, while we're on the subject, how about this Tizzy-Puzzy-Vran business?" Lylla asked. "Is that sanity, now? We have a universe which we know-not just assume; know from actual physical-structure examination-to be composed of quanta of energy, grouped into atoms, which are grouped into molecules, which are grouped into macroscopic masses. Yssa, you're the physicist; do we or don't we know that?"
"Well--" Yssa looked up at the ceiling, wrinkling the fur between her eyes. "When I perform an experiment, and check the results with my senses, and check my senses against one another and against instruments, and somebody else performs the same experiment and our results agree; and then another researcher uses those results to set up a second-stage experiment and predicts the results accurately based on our data. Yes, without getting onto any ontological-epistemological merry-go-round, I'd say we know that."
"All right. Now then, what about this universe-in-the-Mind-of-Vran? Without cracking wise about what would happen if Vran ever got seriously absent-minded, I say that the whole thing is systematized delusion and rejection of reality; and if that isn't a description of non-sanity, I'd like to hear one. The very fact that they won't allow themselves to ask questions ought to be proof enough. You try to convince that woman we were talking about that her child isn't alive, and see what happens."
"That's the sort of thing I mean," Yssa said. "But what I was thinking about, more than Tizzy and Puzzy, was this big animal that they all think they're parts of. Now, if that's an example of sanity, then I'll kiss the man who calls me crazy!"
"But, Yssa," Vandro objected, "they don't really believe that they're cells in the body of some big animal.
That's just a sort of figure of speech. They mean that they have constituted their society so that it resembles a living organism--"
"I know perfectly well what they mean. They mean that a little gang that call themselves the brain-cells can tell everybody else what to do and what not to do, and what to wear and eat, and who to mate with, and where to work, and what house to live in; and everybody thinks it's for their own good, and it's the way Vran intended for them to live. And if you don't happen to think so, why then 'you're too afraid to mention it to anyone. You know what would happen at home if anybody tried any trash like that? You know how long the Halzorro Gang lasted, after they tried to do about one-millionth of what this Organic State thing gets away with? Why, as nearly as I can see, the whole and sole purpose of this Organic State thing is to make everybody as wretched as possible. Beside that, the Tizzy-Puzzy-Vran thing is practically sane. You know what I think? I think we ought to go home, all of us, and blow up the ship, and dismantle the radio station on Skystabber, and forget all about this place. The way these beings behave isn't just non-sane; it's anti-sane!"
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
As he sat by the window just forward of the edge of the plane's wing, waiting for Valla Alvararro to get the transport into the air, Vandro Hannaro thought, for the thousandth time, of what Yssa had said twenty years before, and found himself wishing devoutedly that her advice had been followed. When it came to that, he wished that his mother had interested herself in anything besides contacting Shining Sister, that he had found his mother's interests boring, that Kartho Alvararro had broken his neck halfway up Skystabber. But it was too late, now, even for regrets. The destinies of the twin planets were inextricably tangled, and could only get more so.
The plane shuddered slightly as Valla fed more fuel into her jets to keep them hot. Opening his eyes, Vandro saw that they were still motionless in the same place.
"Valla!" he called. "What's the delay?"
"It's the plane ahead of us," she replied. "A big Zemnovarro Gang transport. It should be taxi-ing over to the edge of the runway for the take-off run, but the Zemnovarro's are having some kind of a hassle with some passengers. They look like greenies. Probably claiming that their luggage has been searched, judging by my experience with the breed."
Vandro twisted in his seat and looked forward along the direction his plane was pointing. The big six-jet transport ahead of them was in the next slot for the runway, but instead of the gangway stairs being pulled away, there were fifteen green-skinned, green-downed natives of Shining Sister gathered around the foot of the gangway. While the transport rumbled in place, alternately puffing its jets, two of the green-skins were gesticulating angrily as they argued with a couple of members of the Zemnovarro Gang, while the rest stood in a clump. Only three of them were armed; they would be members of the Organic State Police, each watching the other two while all of them watched the rest.
This was typical of relations between the two planets and their races. He remembered the first of Shining Sister's Children to visit his world. There had been twelve, including Skrov-Rogov. He and two others, members of the Organic State Police, had brought weapons, the peculiarly-shaped automatics designed for a two-thumbed hand, and had gone to considerable trouble to secrete them. They probably thought they were succeeding, too, despite the tell-tale bulges in their clothing, until one of their guides asked them why the others were not also armed. None of them would go anywhere or do anything without the permission of Skrov-Rogov. None of them would talk to any Hetairan alone. As a result, they did everything in a clump.
They were given a tremendous ovation everywhere they went, and taken to see everything of interest.
They would go to tremendous lengths to learn, in strange, sneaky ways, all sorts of things that they could have found out simply by asking. When they were about to go back, one of their pieces of luggage had broken open and it was revealed stuffed with notes and books of all sorts of scientific and technical information. They went into a panic of discovery, which amazed the Hetairans, who, in turn tried to convince them that they didn't care; that the Thalassans were free to take back whatever they wished.
Which amazed the Thalassans even more.
"They're always screaming that we're searching their luggage," the girl sitting beside Vandro said. "They never have gotten it inside their heads that we don't care where they come or go, or what they take-as long as they pay for it."
"Maybe it would be a good idea to search their luggage occasionally," Vandro said. "We'd find out what they're so afraid of, and give more of an air of reality to their fears."
"That's the lot from Zagannos' Landing," another of his companions said. "Four of them wouldn't go back; said they'd rather stay on a decent world and dig ditches for a living. So the Zagannos took them in, of course. That's what the rest are so sore about."
