The Fresco (38 page)

Dearest Benita, as I write this you are nearby in a rest cubby, soundly sleeping. I amuse myself recalling the surprise on your face when we walked through the back of your elevator and into our ship, your astonishment at learning we had been living just the other side of the wall for all this time. It has been quite convenient and very saving on our power cells. The ship is as morphable as we, and it interpenetrated the third-story offices beside your home with its usual imperturbability. It was the presence of our ship, unfortunately, which brought the Wulivery to your windows. They smelled us out, indeed, and though they did not find our ship, they found you.

We are furious at them, and at the other predators as well. What they did was unethical, though their sins were compounded by humans who see fit to play politics with their fellows' lives. That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics.

We are at the moment, as I write, scudding along at many times light speed in a tube which is, to all intents and purposes, empty. Behind us, the fabric of space thrusts our ma
terial ship on before it, for it seeks always to exclude matter, or at least to clump it insofar as is possible. I could say that space bends behind us to push us. I could say that space ceases to exist in the direction of our movement, lining up on either side in strings of umquah. When we say such things, however, our scientists pish and tush at us, for neither is at all correct.

I confess, I understand neither the universe nor the spacedrive. Only a few of our most intelligent claim to understand the drive, and even they did not invent it. It was made by the Jabal, aeons ago, a people who left the galaxy before our own people existed. We have only the records they left behind on many planets together with plans for their devices: spacedrives, star milkers, fusion generators, morph-engines (tiny implanted ones to change ourselves, large ones to make cities like Jerusalem seem to disappear, though it never really went anywhere) all carefully preserved for whomever came along next. Luckily for us, we emerged originally in a thickly starred part of the galaxy and with even our rather primitive stardrives, we managed to be first in line for a lot of the devices. We moved, later on, to a less thickly settled sector, one quieter, more peaceful, less liable to predatory irruptions. Other races who arrived nearer the center of things profited from discovery, as well. Sometimes we meet during the knitting of the web of universal intelligence into a more durable fabric. This is our purpose and the purpose of all intelligent life. So we believe.

The human recording devices you brought with you are working well. They will keep track of your entire voyage, the interior of the ship, the fact that outside the ship there is nothing, not even light. We move in other dimensions of space and in the null dimension of time. When we draw near our destination, the ship will sense the complex curvature signature, one peculiar to that destination, and the emptiness in which we move will collapse to allow ordinary space-time to curve around us once more.

We intend to take you to several planets besides our own. It will be more convincing to the people of Earth if they see several different races. Your Earth devices will record our ar
rival on each, our departure from each. When we get to Pistach, the devices will probably note some confusion among the Pistach people, for they do not know we are coming. No message could get to our home sooner than we ourselves will arrive. You will not be the first non-Pistach visitors on Pistach-home, but you will be the first who have not yet been admitted to the Confederation. Vess and I have discussed this. We will have to do some of what you call “fast talking.” Still, given the well-known perfidy of the predators, your difficulty will be perfectly understandable, even to the most rigid among us.

I have no trepidation concerning your treatment. Hospitality is a virtue we have polished to a finer sheen than some other of our probities. Though we advocate toleration, we do not do it so well as we do some other things. We are not as unselfish as an advanced race should be. We struggle to burnish all our virtues, but every now and then a rock of reality catches our feet to make us stumble. Though we advocate equality of all intelligences, still we are like most races: happiest among peoples we know well and whose ways we understand.

If the Chapter will allow, you will be welcomed to a guest house of my family, on the Cavita home ground. It is near the House of the Fresco, and we know you will want to see that. Also, it would be pleasant to introduce you to my nootch. She will be most interested in you and in Chad and in the ways of your world. You are, functionally, more nootch than you are receptor, and she will be pleased to recognize someone of like mind and responsibility. I have provided festive red-and-yellow clothing for you, so you will, as you say, “fit in.” Chad could be introduced as an inceptor, of course, but since his “job” on Earth is to keep order and allocate responsibility, the tasks performed by our proffi caste—which also includes doctors and scholars—I intend introducing him as a proffe, dressed properly in formal brown. My evaluation of the two of you indicates you are unlikely to break out in a fit of breeding madness partway through the visit, for which I am very grateful.

As for your son, though he is rather too old for it, we
must dress him as an undifferentiated one. As such, he will be regarded with a good deal of tolerance, more than we manage under most other circumstances. Your young are not unlike ours in being demanding, eager, selfish, gauche. As our sages have said,
youth builds a universe with self at the center.
Carlos will not be an asset. Our position would be improved had we been able to bring an Earthian athyco with us, if there had been one who would have been accepted by all the religions, political bodies, racial constituencies and social movements on your world. Such a one could have spoken pointedly to our Confederation ambassadors, calling them to account for the depredations of the Fluiquosm, et al. No such person exists on your world, so it is left to us. Vess and I will speak, but we will have to be diplomatic. The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

However, there is some time before we get to Pistach-home. We have other worlds to visit first. The subjective time lapse from Earth to the first one, Flibotsia, is about two of your days, and you will sleep during all of it. If we could not travel in the null-time dimension, it would take thousands of your years to reach any of our near worlds, but the drive allows us to stand teetering upon a point of time as we plunge onward in several dimensions of space. Indeed, some of the new drives are virtually instantaneous. One begins here, gets in the ship, has a cup of tea, gets out of the ship, and behold, one is there. Poof. Even so, we are far from the intergalactic drive our religion posits as the next necessary step in the evolution of intelligence! Between the galaxies, so our scientists think, the umquah are more evenly spread and less irritable than where matter annoys them constantly.

When we arrive on Pistach-home, I know you will enjoy seeing the House of the Fresco. Oh, I wish it were less obscured by soot, so you could see it as it was when first painted. Though perhaps you would be disappointed. I have seen the Sistine Chapel. I have seen the caves at Lescaux. Your people have an inborn artistry of very high degree. It may be our Fresco would not have impressed you, even
when it was new. The Inkleozese agree that this is probable. They, too, deeply admire the artistry of your race.

We must rest now. When we have rested, Vess and I must argue yet again. We have been arguing about Earth for a very long time, now. There is so much to do, and I want to do it all at once while Vess counsels caution, a little at a time. It was I who insisted upon the Ugliness Plague. “An immediate lesson,” I cried. Even Vess agrees it is working, though many of the women are simply leaving the countries that mistreated them. Whether they do or not is up to them, the men cannot harm them. The important issue, the question of purity versus lust, is for the first time being put into its proper context. Some of the men prefer to continue in the old mold, of course, by trying to kidnap women from neighboring countries, but that won't work. As soon as a man with that attitude touches a woman, she becomes a hag, though only to others. Her mirror continues to show her real self.

We have also scheduled a lengthy time for discussion about your prisons, which preoccupy your people to an abnormal extent. Unfortunately, your penal system is based on religious notions of penitence and reformation, character emendations which can be evoked only where a sense of shame is present. In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.

Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. “Shaming” others is considered an affront to their dignity. Since shame is essential to remorse, which is the natural punishment for misbehavior—just as gut cramps are the natural punishment for eating unripe thrags—if one cannot evoke shame, then forget about penitence or reformation. It won't happen.

In the place of shame you have substituted a meaningless phrase, “Paying one's debt to society.” You send a rapist or murderer to prison for a few years, and then you say he has “paid his debt to society.” Of course, he has done no such
thing. A term in prison pays for nothing, not if it is for ten years or twenty or fifty! The victim or victims are still violated or dead, and to say that the evildoer has paid his debt is to denigrate the value of the victim! This, in turn, causes anger among the victim's family or friends, who wonder why a beloved wife is worth five years while someone else's daughter is worth twice that. This, in turn, causes disrespect for the law. As Canthorel has written, “If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law.”

Vess is astonished that Earthians define as cruel and unusual many acts that are not unusual and not particularly cruel. Breeding madness is cruel, breeding madness is unusual. Most of your men don't have it. Most of your men wouldn't want it. Castration would remove it from those who have it. What is cruel about that? Is the inceptive organ really more important than the mind? Vess and I find this an extremely exotic notion. In your great documents of national purpose, the right to pursue satisfactions in one's own life is asserted, but not at others' expense. People who misuse the lives of others should not be allowed to repeat the act, but your peculiar ideas about cruelty allow it, time and again.

One of the programs we left to start without us, back on Earth, is the rewording of your newspapers and TV shows. They will no longer be able to use empty language, like “paid his debt to society,” or “claimed responsibility” for an act of terrorism. Instead, they must use true words. “He has been sentenced to prison for ten years which will do nothing to ameliorate his urges to molest and mutilate little girls.” Or, “The XX faction has asserted that it committed the cowardly atrocity of killing a busload of schoolchildren.” Earthians must learn to say truly what has happened and not cover it with easy-speak.

Earthians, or perhaps only Americans, must also realize that some persons cannot be fixed, that nurture can go only so far in changing what people are born to be. Some people are born dangerous. We have a saying, we Pistach: “Some pfiggy can't breed, some pfluggi can't bite, some flosti can't fly, some Pistach are glusi.” Pfiggi are small and
numerous, Pfluggi are larger and have sharp teeth. Both live in swamps. In essence, the saying means that we must accept the reality of persons, not what they should be or we wish they were, but what they are. Someone may be born of humans and look like a human without having humanity. Someone may be born of kind parents and raised with kindness and be unkind, just as someone may be born crippled or dwarfed to people who are neither. The biological body may not manifest the psychological quality of humanity, and if it does not, it is not human. We Pistach know what it takes to mend people, and it takes a good deal more than you are willing to do.

Vess and I will also talk about your reproductive habits. Your people have learned a great deal about the subject, but you have applied little sense to it, even yet. Now you are begetting children scientifically, and great law courts grind to stillness on the issues of who owns the resultant child. Is it the donor of sperm or the donor of egg; is it the womb that bears, the person who paid, the doctor who was instrumental, the legal wife of the sperm donor, the legal husband of the egg donor, the legal husband of the womb, the legitimate previous children of the womb, the mate of the person who paid, the person who signed the contract?

We have another saying, “Those who cause, pay.” It is a simple rule, but it has been very, very effective in bringing order to our lives. If a physician helps a woman bear eight children at once, then that doctor must support seven of them! If your congressmen will not vote to control guns, if your NRA fights against gun control, then your congressmen and the members of the NRA must individually help pay for medical care and wrongful deaths and funeral expenses for every accidental shooting death. We will figure out a way to do this. Vess and I have had several good ideas.

Oh, Vess and I have much, much to argue about. Your world has so many difficulties to be straightened out, though it is my belief that many of them will submit to simple cures, forcefully applied and diligently monitored. So many little glitches, and yet…as my nootch said of me, long and long ago, we have such hopes for you, dearest
Benita, such hopes, dear Chad. Such hopes your people will be another node in the weaving of intelligence among the worlds. When I am arguing with Fluiquosm, when I am listening to ego-wrangles on your TV or in my own Chapter House, when I must consider disorders like those on Assurdo and Quo-Tem, even I sometimes lose sight of what we are truly doing. We are spreading throughout all space and time, weaving a mind to the edges of the galaxy, and in time, in time perhaps throughout the universe. So I remember and keep firmly in my mind when I say, dearest Benita, we have such hopes for you.