Araminta Station (79 page)

³
Cultural psychologists have defined the symbology of “wait times”, and its variation from culture to culture. The significance of the intervals is determined by a large number of factors, and the student can easily list for himself, out of his own experience, those which are relevant to his own culture.

“Wait times,” in terms of social perception, range from no wait whatever to weeks and months. In one context a wait of five minutes will be interpreted as “unpardonable insolence”; at another time and place a wait of only three days is considered a signal of benign favor.

The use of an exactly calculated wait time, as every person familiar with the conventions of his own culture understands, can be used as an assertion of dominance, or “putting one in one’s place,” by legal and nonviolent methods.

The subject has many fascinating ramifications. For instance, Person A wishes to assert his superior status over person B, and keeps him waiting an hour. At the thirty-minute mark, which B already feels to be unacceptable and humiliating, A sends B a small tray of tea and sweetcakes, a gesture which B cannot rebuff without loss of dignity. A thereby forces B to wait a full hour and B must also thank A for his graciousness and bounty in the matter of the inexpensive refreshments. When well-executed, this is a beautiful tactic.

Chapter III Footnotes

¹
Andorils: large vicious andromorphs. Because of the difficulties of research, their habits remain obscure.

²
Toctacs are two-legged wolves.

³
As often as not, at Araminta Station young men and women marry to their own inclinations, even, despite family pressure, with collaterals. Nonetheless, when Agency status is at stake, the Housemaster will do his best to arrange an advantageous marriage.

Chapter IV Footnotes

¹

The Bold Lions at Their Table

Arles Clattuc

Kirdy Wook      Uther Offaw

Cloyd Diffin        Shugart Veder

Glawen Clattuc   Kiper Offaw

Jardine Laverty

²
Oomps (contraction of Oomphaw’s Police Sergeantry): members of an elite militia, responsible only to the Oomphaw. They were men of extraordinary physique, with heads shaved bald, ears cropped to points and lips tattooed black. They wore crisp tan tunics, white, knee-length kirtles, and ankle boots of a tough black metalloid substance exuded by a sea snail. A bank of this same glossy black substance encircled their foreheads; to this band were attached spikes symbolic of rank. Most intriguing of all was the emblem, or ideogram, embroidered on the back of each tunic, in black and red; a symbol of unknown meaning.

Chapter V Footnotes

¹
Yoot: a two-legged mandoril-rat hybrid, four feet tall, with a rudimentary intelligence. The creatures are peculiar to the Lutwen islands, and are intensely vicious.

²
Banjee: one of the many varieties of mandoril indigenous to Cadwal. The usual banjee is a massive two-legged creature, somewhat andromorphic, if grotesquely so. The banjee is sheathed in chitin, black in the mature male, which stands eight to nine feet tall. The head is covered with stiff black hair except for the frontal visage of naked bone.

The banjees are remarkable in many ways. They begin life as neuters, become female at the age of six years, metamorphose to males at the age of sixteen, growing each year thereafter in size, mass and ferocity, until they are eventually killed in battle.

Banjees communicate in a language impervious to the most subtle analytical methods of the Gaean linguists. The banjees construct tools and weapons, and exhibit what seems to be the glimmerings of an aesthetic sense, which, like the language, evades the understanding of the human mind.

Banjees are intractable and while ferocious are not actively aggressive under ordinary conditions. They are well aware of the tourists who crowd the terrace at Mad Mountain Lodge to watch them pass, but pay no heed. Reckless persons sometimes approach the marching hordes or even the battles in order to secure dramatic photographs. Emboldened by the apparent indifference of the banjees, they venture a step or two closer, then another step, which takes them past some imperceptible boundary into the banjees’ “zone of reaction,” and then they are killed.

Chapter VII Footnotes

¹
In his monograph
The Purple Sliders of Tassadero
the biologist Dennis Smith uses more direct language: “They give forth a majestic stench, which, beyond cavil or question, is a thing of truly epic scope. The tourist officials fail to mention a curious side effect of this stench: it penetrates the skin and hair of dainty ladies and dignified gentlemen alike, and cannot be eradicated, nor stifled, nor disguised. The stink persists for several months. Sometimes it is argued that the tourist bureaus of Tassadero should be censured for their ambiguities.”