Stranger in a Strange Land (15 page)

But he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as irrelevant. This human animal had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to a non-human society—but as a malleable infant. Could he, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical and much more difficult for an adult? Dr. Harshaw intended to find out; it was the first time in decades he had taken real interest in the practice of medicine.

Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government filled him with sharper zest than he had felt in a generation.

AROUND A minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.

On the fourth pebble the ancient Martians were not disturbed by contact with Earth. Nymphs bounced joyously around the surface, learning to live and eight out of nine dying in the process. Adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from nymphs, huddled in faerie, graceful cities and were as quiet as nymphs were boisterous—yet were even busier and led a rich life of the mind.

Adults were not free of work in the human sense; they had a planet to supervise; plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed 'prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized; the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and metamorphosed into adults. All these must be done—but they were no more the “life” of Mars than is walking the dog twice a day the “life” of a man who bosses a planet-wide corporation between those walks—even though to a being from Arcturus III those walks might seem to be the tycoon's most significant activity—as a slave to the dog.

Martians and humans were both self-aware life forms but they had gone in vastly different directions. All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. The same was true of Mars, but in mirror corollary. Mars had the efficient bipolar pattern so common in that galaxy, but Martians had it in form so different from Terran form that it would be “sex” only to a biologist and emphatically not have been “sex” to a human psychiatrist. Martian nymphs were female, all adults were male.

But in each in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polarity which controlled human lives could not exist on Mars. There was no possibility of “marriage.” Adults were huge, reminding the first humans to see them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentally active. Nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindless energy. There was no parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.

Mars, geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the
Envoy
and the
Champion.
The events were too recent to be significant—if Martians had used newspapers, one edition a Terran century would have been ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to Martians; it had happened before, would happen again. When a new other race was thoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium or so) would be time for action, if needed.

On Mars the currently important event was a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters. Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.

Unexpected discorporation was rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death at the appropriate selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied that he forgot to come in out of the cold; when his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He had not noticed his discorporation and had gone on composing his sequence.

Martian art was divided into two categories; that sort created by living adults, which was vigorous, often radical, and primitive; and that of the Old Ones, which was usually conservative, extremely complex, and was expected to show much higher standards of technique; the two sorts were judged separately.

By what standards should this opus be judged? It bridged from corporate to discorporate; its final form had been set throughout by an Old One—yet the artist, with the detachment of all artists everywhere, had not noticed the change in his status and had continued to work as if corporate. Was it a new sort of art? Could more such pieces be produced by surprise discorporation of artists while they were working? The Old Ones had been discussing the exciting possibilities in ruminative rapport for centuries and all corporate Martians were eagerly awaiting their verdict.

The question was of greater interest because it was religious art (in the Terran sense) and strongly emotional: it described contact between the Martian Race and the people of the fifth planet, an event that had happened long ago but which was alive and important to Martians in the sense in which one death by crucifixion remained alive and important to humans after two Terran millennia. The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed. This new work of art was one of many attempts to grok the whole beautiful experience in all its complexity in one opus. But before it could be judged it was necessary to grok how to judge it.

It was a pretty problem.

On the third planet Valentine Michael Smith was not concerned with this burning issue; he had never heard of it. His Martian keeper and his keeper's water brothers had not mocked him with things he could not grasp. Smith knew of the destruction of the fifth planet just as any human school boy learns of Troy and Plymouth Rock, but he had not been exposed to art that he could not grok. His education had been unique, enormously greater than that of his nestlings, enormously less than that of an adult; his keeper and his keeper's advisers among the Old Ones had taken passing interest in seeing how much and of what sort this alien nestling could learn. The results had taught them more about the human race than that race had yet learned about itself, for Smith had grokked readily things that no other human being had ever learned.

At present Smith was enjoying himself. He had won a new water brother in Jubal, he had acquired many new friends, he was enjoying delightful new experiences in such kaleidoscopic quantity that he had no time to grok them; he could only file them away to be relived at leisure.

His brother Jubal told him that he would grok this strange and beautiful place more quickly if he would learn to read, so he took a day off to do so, with Jill pointing to words and pronouncing. It meant staying out of the swimming pool that day, which was a great sacrifice, as swimming (once he got it through his head that it was
permitted
) was not merely a delight but almost unbearable religious ecstasy. If Jill and Jubal had not told him to, he would never have come out of the pool at all.

Since he was not permitted to swim at night he read all night long. He was zipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica and sampling Jubal's medicine and law libraries as dessert. His brother Jubal saw him leafing through one of the books, stopped and questioned him about what he had read. Smith answered carefully, as it reminded him of tests the Old Ones had given him. His brother seemed upset at his answers and Smith found it necessary to go into meditation—he was sure that he had answered with the words in the book even though he did not grok them all.

But he preferred the pool to the books, especially when Jill and Miriam and Larry and the rest were all splashing each other. He did not learn at once to swim, but discovered that he could do something they could not. He went to the bottom and lay there, immersed in bliss—whereupon they hauled him out with such excitement that he was almost forced to withdraw, had it not been clear that they were concerned for his welfare.

Later he demonstrated this for Jubal, remaining on the bottom a delicious time, and tried to teach it to his brother Jill—but she became disturbed and he desisted. It was his first realization that there were things he could do that these new friends could not. He thought about it a long time, trying to grok its fullness.

 

Smith was happy; Harshaw was not. He continued his usual loafing, varied by casual observation of his laboratory animal. He arranged no schedule for Smith, no program of study, no regular physical examinations, but allowed Smith to run wild, like a puppy on a ranch. What supervision Smith received came from Gillian—more than enough, in Jubal's grumpy opinion; he took a dim view of males' being reared by females.

However, Gillian did little more than coach Smith in social behavior. He ate at the table now, dressed himself (Jubal thought he did; he made a note to ask Jill if she still had to assist him); he conformed to the household's informal customs and coped with new experiences on a “monkey-see-monkey-do” basis. Smith started his first meal at the table using only a spoon and Jill cut up his meat. By the end of the meal he was attempting to eat as others ate. At the next meal his manners were a precise imitation of Jill's, including superfluous mannerisms.

Even the discovery that Smith had taught himself to read with the speed of electronic scanning and appeared to have total recall of all that he read did not tempt Jubal Harshaw to make a “project” of Smith, with controls, measurements, and curves of progress. Harshaw had the arrogant humility of a man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance; he saw no point in “measurements” when he did not know what he was measuring.

But, while Harshaw enjoyed watching this unique animal develop into a mimicry copy of a human being, his pleasure afforded him no happiness.

Like Secretary General Douglas, Harshaw was waiting for the shoe to drop.

Having found himself coerced into action by expectation of action against him it annoyed Harshaw that nothing happened. Damn it, were Federation cops so stupid that they couldn't track an unsophisticated girl dragging an unconscious man across the countryside? Or had they been on her heels?—and now were keeping a stake-out on his place? The thought was infuriating; the notion that the government might be spying on his home, his castle, was as repulsive as having his mail opened.

They might be doing that, too! Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling—oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

It was possible, even probable, that the administration knew where the Man from Mars was and chose to leave it that way.

If so, how long would it go on? And how long could he keep his “bomb” armed and ready?

And where the devil was that young idiot Ben Caxton?

 

Jill Boardman forced him out of his spiritual thumb-twiddling. “Jubal?”

“Eh? Oh, it's you, bright eyes. Sorry, I was preoccupied. Sit down. Have a drink?”

“Uh, no, thank you. Jubal, I'm worried.”

“Normal. That was a pretty swan dive. Let's see another like it.”

Jill bit her lip and looked about twelve years old. “Jubal! Please listen! I'm terribly worried.”

He sighed. “In that case, dry yourself off. The breeze is chilly.”

“I'm warm enough. Uh, Jubal? Would it be all right if I left Mike here?”

Harshaw blinked. “Certainly. The girls will look out for him, he's no trouble. You're leaving?”

She didn't meet his eye. “Yes.”

“Mmm . . . you're welcome here. But you're welcome to leave, if you wish.”

“Huh? But, Jubal—I don't
want
to!”

“Then don't.”

“But I
must!”

“Play that back. I didn't scan it.”

“Don't you
see
, Jubal? I like it here—you've been wonderful to us! But I can't stay. Not with Ben missing. I've
got
to look for him.”

Harshaw said one earthy word, then added, “How do you plan to look for him?”

She frowned. “I don't know. But I can't lie around, loafing and swimming—with Ben missing.”

“Gillian, Ben is a big boy. You're not his mother—nor his wife. You haven't any call to go looking for him. Have you?”