Dealing in Futures Part 1

Haldeman, Joe.

Dealing in Futures.

CONTENTS.

Introduction 1.

Seasons 4.

A !Tangled Web 59.

Manifest Destiny 84.

Blood Sisters 100.

Blood Brothers 117.

You Can Never Go Back 136.

More Than the Sum of His Parts 202.

Seven and the Stars 221.

Lindsay and the Red City Blues 235.

No Future in It 251.

The Pilot 259.

The Big Bang Theory Explained 265.

The Gift 269.

Saul's Death 271.

Afterword 273.

INTRODUCTION.

When I put together my first short story collection, Infinite Dreams, the publisher asked that I introduce each story with a note about how it came to be written. I complied and, as here, had them put the notes in a different typeface, so those who wanted to get straight to the stories could easily slip by the blather.

That book produced more letters from readers than most of my novels have and, to my surprise, as much of the mail was about the blather as about the stories. I suspect that's because so many science fiction readers write the stuff themselves, or would like to, and so have a special taste for confessional bookchat.

One reader came up with an interesting observation, noting that I obviously had to pull my punches in the introductions sometimes, because telling all would have given away the ending of the story. He suggested that in the next collection I write afterwords instead, so I wouldn't have to work under that constraint.

The only problem with that is that there are villainous people, like myself, who always flip through a collection and read the introductions first, and we would probably do that even if they were afterwords instead. But the notion started me thinking, and I came up with a compromise that resulted in the way this book is put together.

This collection is arranged as a continuum, each story having an afterword that blends into the introduction of the next story. Yes, it's a cheap trick, an attempt to keep sucking you into the next story until you've read them all. But sometimes the relationships between the stories are interesting-and besides, you paid for all of them. Might as well give them a try.

The novella that follows came to be written because of an odd coincidence. I accepted a one-year visiting professorship at MIT, to teach science fiction writing and one other course each semester. For the second semester I was handed "Reading and Writing Longer Fiction," which was a lecture-and-workshop course on the theory and practice of writing novels and novellas. Novels, fine; I'd written a dozen and had even studied some of the theory. But of the theory of the novella I had read only one mercifully short essay by Henry James, and I hadn't actually written one of the little devils in at least ten years.

(When literary folks talk about a novella they usually mean anything that's too long to be considered a short story but isn't long or complex enough to be a novel.

Commercial writing makes the further distinction between the novelette, a long story that '.

s less than 17,500 words long, and the novella, which can run up to 30,000 or 40,000.).

People who write for a living don't write many novellas. They demand at least as much work as the equivalent wordage of a novel-usually rather more-and pay perhaps an order of magnitude less. Magazine editors have little enthusiasm for them because they take up a third of the magazine but only add one t.i.tle to the table of contents. So even if you can place one, it goes for a low rate of pay.

I was in a bit of a quandary. Teaching instinct, and to a certain extent conscience, told me that if I was going to make my students write novellas, I should sit down and write one myself. But my baser practical instincts were telling me that I'd be an idiot to invest a couple of months' work in a piece that would only bring a few hundred bucks.

This was where coincidence struck. The day after I learned I was going to teach the course, I was sitting in my office scratching my head over the dilemma, and the phone rang. It was Betsy Mitch.e.l.l of Baen Books, asking whether I would like to write a novella for the book Alien Stars, a collection of three novellas on the theme "conflict with aliens." I recovered from synchronistic shock just long enough to ask for more money-the freelancer's primary conditioned reflex-and she said she'd check and call back.

That phrase sometimes means you've blown the deal. I'm no more superst.i.tious than the next writer, which is to say that if somebody stole my lucky coffee cup I'd have to look for another line of work. Face it, the last time an editor had called asking for a novella was 1972! This was a portent. The Muse had sent me a sign and I had rejected her.

But she called back-Betsy Mitch.e.l.l, not the Muse-agreeing to my terms, so I immediately got down to work. And discovered I had a real problem.

Some of the most perfect stories in our language are novellas: Heart of Darkness, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. In science fiction we have such gems as The Marching Morons, Universe, Flowers for Algernon. But if they stand out as gems, it's at least partly because their companions are such mundane gravel. Most novellas are either bloated short stories or amputated novels. I had to stay away from those two traps.

To further complicate things, it seemed to me that most good novellas have a p.r.i.c.kly kind of singularity about them-that is to say, it '.

s impossible to make useful generalizations about what makes them stand out. (It is possible to make useful generalizations about the novel and the short story.) I had set myself up for a real job.

I'll spare you a description of all the theoretical considerations that went into the piece. Suffice it to say that I've written novels (adventure novels, anyhow) that took less time and effort than Seasons. Novellas are hard.

The perverse thing is that I'm itching to write another.

SEASONS.

Transcripts edited from the last few hundred hours of recordings: Maria Forty-one is too young to die. I was never trained to be a soldier. Trained to survive, yes, but not to kill or be killed.

That's the wrong way to start. Let me start this way.

As near as I can reckon, it's mid-noviembre, AC 238. I am Maria Rubera, chief xenologist for the second Confederacion expedition to Sanchrist IV. I am currently standing guard in the mouth of a cave while my five comrades try to sleep. I am armed with a stone axe and flint spear and a pile of rocks for throwing. A cold rain is misting down, and I am wearing only a stiff kilt and vest of wet rank fur. I am cold to the very heart but we dare not risk a fire. The Plathys have too acute a sense of smell.

I am subvocalizing, recording this into my artificial bicuspid, one of which each of us has; the only postStone Age artifacts in this cave. It may survive even if, as is probable, I do not. Or it may not survive. The Plathys have a way of eating animals head first, crunching up skull and brain while the decapitated body writhes at their feet or staggers around, which to them is high humor. Innocent humor but ghastly. I almost came to love them. Which is not to say I understand them.

Let me try to make this doc.u.ment as complete as possible. It gives me something to do. I trust you have a machine that can filter out the sound of my teeth chattering.

For a while I could do the Zen trick to keep my teeth still. But I'm too cold now. And too certain of death, and afraid.

My specialty is xenology but I do have a doctorate in historicultural anthropology, which is essentially the study of dead cultures through the writings of dead anthropologists. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their contact with civilization, but civilization by then could afford the luxury of science, and so there are fairly complete records. The records are fascinating not only for the information about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating cultures' unconscious prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribes, and (by necessary a.s.sociation) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less benignly destroyed them.

I will try not to stray from the point. That training is what led to my appointment as leader of this band of cold, half-naked, probably doomed, pseudo-primitive scientists. We do not repeat the errors of our forebears. We come to the primitives on equal terms, now, so as not to contaminate their habit patterns by superior example.

No more than is necessary. Most of us do not bite the heads off living animals or exchange greetings by the tasting of excrement.

Saying that and thinking of it goads me to go down the hill again. We designated a latrine rock a few hundred meters away, in sight of the cave entrance but with no obvious path leading here, to throw them off our scent at least temporarily. I will not talk while going there. They also have acute hearing.

Back. Going too often and with too little result. Diet mostly raw meat in small amounts. Only warm place on my body is the hot and itching a.n.u.s. No proper hygiene in the Stone Age. Just find a smooth rock. I can feel my digestive tract flourishing with worms and bugs. No evidence yet, though, nor blood. Carlos Flem- ing started pa.s.sing blood, and two days later something burst and he died in a rush of it. We covered his body with stones. Ground too frozen for grave-digging. He was probably uncovered and eaten.

It can't be the diet. On Earth I paid high prices for raw meat and fish and never suffered except in the wallet. I'm afraid it may be a virus. We all are, and we indulge in discreet copromancy, the divining of future events through the inspection of stools.

If there is blood your future will be short. Perhaps it was stress. We are under unusual stress. But I stray.

It was specifically my study of Eskimos that impressed the a.s.signing committee.

Eskimos were small bands of hearty folk who lived in the polar regions of North America. Like the Plathys, they were anagricultural carnivores, preying on herds of large animals, sometimes fishing. The Plathys have no need for the Eskimos' fishing skills, since the sea teems with life edible and stupid. But they prefer red meat and the crunch of bone, the chewy liver and long suck of intestinal contents, the warm mush of brains. They are likable but not fastidious. And not predictable, we learned to our grief.

Like the Eskimos, the Plathys relish the cold and become rather dull and listless during the warm season. Sanchrist IV has no axial tilt, thus no "seasons" in the Terran sense, but its...o...b..t is highly elongated, so more than two thirds of its year (three and a half Terran years) is spent in cold. We identified six discrete seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, dead winter, and thaw. The placid sea gets ice skim in mid-fall.

If you are less than totally ignorant of science, you know that Sanchrist IV is one of the very few planets with not only earthlike conditions but with life forms that mimic our own patterns of DNA. There are various theories explaining this coincidence, which cannot be coincidence, but you can find them elsewhere. What this meant in terms of our conduct as xenologists was that we could function with minimal ecological impact, living off the fat of the land-and the blood and flesh and marrow, which did require a certain amount of desensitization training. (Less for me than for some of the others, as I've said, since I've always had an atavistic leaning toward dishes like steak tartare and sushi.) Satellite observation has located 119 bands, or families, of Plathys, and there is no sign of other humanoid life on the planet. All of them live on islands in a southern subtropical sea-at least it would be subtropical on Earth-a shallow sea that freezes solid in dead winter and can be walked over from late fall to early thaw. During the warm months, on those occasions when they actually stir their bones to go someplace, they pole rafts from island to island. During low tide, they can wade most of the way.

We set up our base in the tropics, well beyond their normal range, and hiked south during the late summer. We made contact with a few individuals and small packs during our month-long trek but didn't join a family until we reached the southern mountains.

The Plathys aren't too interesting during the warm months, except for the short mating season. Mostly they loll around, conserving energy, living off the meat killed during the thaw, which they smoke and store in covered holes. When the meat gets too old, or starts running out, they do bestir themselves to fish, which takes little enough energy. The tides are rather high in summer and fall, and all they have to do is stake down nets in the right spots during high tide. The tide recedes and leaves behind flopping silver bounty. They grumble and joke about the taste of it, though.

They accepted our presence without question, placidly sharing their food and shelter as they would with any wayfaring member of another native family. They couldn't have mistaken us for natives, though. The smallest adult Plathy weighs twice as much as our largest. They stand about two and a half meters high and span about a meter and a half across the shoulders. Their heads are more conical than square, with huge powerful jaws: a mouth that runs almost ear to ear. Their eyes are set low, and they have mucous-membrane slits in place of external ears and noses. They are covered with spa.r.s.e silky fur, which coa.r.s.ens into thick hair on their heads, shoulders, armpits, and groins (and on the males' backs). The females have four teats defining the corners of a rectangular slab of lactiferous fatty tissue. The openings we thought were their v.a.g.i.n.as are almost dorsal, with the cloacal openings toward the front. The male genitals are completely ventral, normally hidden under a mat of hair.

(This took a bit of snooping. In all but the hottest times and mating season, both genders wear a "modest" kilt of skin.) We had been observing them about three weeks when the females went into estrus-every mature female, all the same day. Their s.e.xuality was prodigious.

Everybody shed their kilts and went into a week-long unrelenting spasm of s.e.xual activity. There is nothing like it among any of the sentient cultures-or animal species!-that I have studied. To call it an orgy would be misleading and, I think, demeaning to the Plathys. The phenomenon was more like a tropism, in plants, than any animal or human instinct. They quite simply did not do anything else for six days.

The adults in our family numbered eighty-two males and nineteen females (the terrible reason for the disparity would become clear in a later season), so the females were engaged all the time, even while they slept. While one male copulated, two or three others would be waiting their turn, prancing impatiently, masturbating, sometimes indulging in h.o.m.os.e.xual coupling. ("Indulging" is the wrong word. There was no sense that they took pleasure in any s.e.xual activity; it was more like the temporary relief of a terrible pressure that quickly built up again.) They attempted coupling with children and with the humans of my expedition. Fortunately, for all their huge strength they are rather slow and, for all the pressure of their "desire,"

easily deflected. A kick in the knee was enough to send them stumping off toward someone else.

No Plathys ate during the six days. They slept more and more toward the end of the period, the males sometimes falling asleep in the middle of copulation.

(Conversely, we saw several instances of involuntary erection and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n while sleeping.) When it was finally over, everyone sat around dazed for a while, and then the females retired to the storage holes and came back with armloads of dried and smoked meat and fish. Each one ate a mountain of food and fell into a coma.

There are interesting synchronies involved. At other times of the year, this long period of vulnerability would mean extinction of the family or of the whole species, since they evidently all copulate at the same time. But the large predators from the north do not swim down at that time of year. And when the litters were dropped, about 500 days later, it would be not long after the time of easiest food gathering, as herds of small animals migrated north for warmth.

Of course we never had a chance to dissect a Plathy. It would have been fascinating to investigate the internal makeup that impels the bizarre s.e.xual behavior.

External observation gives some hint as to the strangeness. The v.u.l.v.a is a small opening, a little over a centimeter in extent, that stays sealed closed except when the female is in estrus. The p.e.n.i.s, normally an almost invisible nub, becomes a prehensile purple worm about twenty centimeters long. No external t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es; there must be an internal reservoir (quite large) for seminal fluid.

The anatomical particulars of pregnancy and birth are even more strange. The females become almost immobilized, gaining perhaps fifty percent in weight. When it comes time to give birth, the female makes an actual skeletal accommodation, evidently similar to the way a snake unhinges its jaw when ingesting large prey. It is obviously quite painful. The v.u.l.v.a (or whatever new name applies to that opening) is not involved; instead, a slit opens along the entire perineal area, nearly half a meter long, exposing a milky white membrane. The female claws the membrane open and expels the litter in a series of shuddering contractions. Then she pushes her pelvic bones back into shape with a painful grinding sound. She remains immobile and insensate for several days, nursing. The males bring females food and clean them during this period.

None of the data from the first expedition had prepared us for this. They had come during dead winter and stayed one (terran) year, so they missed the entire birth cycle.

They had noted that there were evidently strong taboos against discussing s.e.xual matters and birth. I think "taboo" is the wrong word. It's not as if there were guilt or shame a.s.sociated with the processes. Rather, they appear to enter a different state of consciousness when the females are in heat and giving birth, a state that seems to blank out their verbal intelligence. They can no more discuss their s.e.xuality than you or I could sit and chat about how our pancreas was doing.

There was an amusing, and revealing, episode after we had been with the family for several months. I had been getting along well with Tybru, a female elder with unusual linguistic ability. She was perplexed at what one of the children had told her.

The Plathys have no concept of privacy; they wander in and out of each other's maffas (the yurtlike tents of hide they use as shelter) at any time of the day or night, on random whim. It was inevitable that sooner or later they would observe humans having s.e.x. The child had described what she'd seen fairly accurately. I had tried to explain human s.e.xuality to Tybru earlier, as a way to get her to talk about that aspect of her own life. She would smile and nod diagonally through the whole thing, an infuriating gesture they normally use only with children prattling nonsense.

This time I was going to be blunt. I opened the maffa flap so there was plenty of light, then shed my kilt and got up on a table. I lay down on my back and tried to explain with simple words and gestures what went where and who did what to whom, and what might or might not happen nine months later.

She was more inclined to take me seriously this time. (The child who had witnessed copulation was four, p.u.b.escent, and thus too old to have fantasies.) After I explained she explored me herself, which was not pleasant, since her four-fingered hand was larger than a human foot, quite filthy, and equipped with deadly nails.

She admitted that all she really understood was the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She could remember some weeks of nursing after the blackout period the female language calls "(big) pain-in-hips." (Their phrase for the other blackout period is literally "pain-in-the- a.s.s.") She asked, logically enough, whether I could find a male and demonstrate.

Actually, I'm an objective enough person to have gone along with it, if I could have found a man able and willing to rise to the occasion. If it had been near the end of our stay, I probably would have done it. But leadership is a ticklish thing, even when you're leading a dozen highly educated, professionally detached people, and we still had three years to go.

I explained that the most-elder doesn't do this with the men she's in charge of, and Tybru accepted that. They don't have much of a handle on discipline, but they do understand polity and social form. She said she would ask the other human females.

Perhaps it should have been me who did the asking, but I didn't suggest it. I was glad to get off the hook, and also curious as to my people's reactions.

The couple who volunteered were the last ones I would have predicted. Both of them were shy, almost diffident, with the rest of us. Good field workers but not the sort of people you would let your hair down with. I suppose they had better "anthropological perspective" on their own behavior than the rest of us.

At any rate, they retired to the maffa that was nominally Tybru's, and she let out the ululation that means "All free females come here." I wondered whether our couple could actually perform in a cramped little yurt filled with sweaty giants asking questions in a weird language.

All the females did crowd into the tent, and after a couple of minutes a strange sound began to emanate from them. At first it puzzled me, but then I recognized it as laughter! I had heard individual Plathys laugh, a sort of inhaled croak-but nineteen of them at once was an unearthly din.

The couple was in there a long time, but I never did find out whether the demonstration was actually consummated. They came out of the maffa beet-red and staring at the ground, the laughter behind them not abating. I never talked to either of them about it, and whenever I asked Tybru or the others, all I got was choked laughter. I think we invented the dirty joke. (In exchange, I'm sure that Plathy s.e.xuality will eventually see service in the ribald metaphor of every human culture.) But let me go back to the beginning.

We came to Sanchrist IV armed with a small vocabulary and a great deal of misinformation. I don't mean to denigrate my colleagues' skill or application. But the Garcia expedition just came at the wrong time and didn't stay long enough.

Most of their experience with the Plathys was during deep winter, which is their most lively and civilized season. They spend their indoor time creating the complex sculptures that so impressed the art world ten years ago and performing improvisa- tional music and dance that is delightful in its alien grace. Outdoors, they indulge in complicated games and athletic exhibitions. The larders are full, the time of birthing and nursing is well over, and the family exudes happiness, well into the thaw. We experienced this euphoria ourselves. I can't blame Garcia's people for their enthusiastic report.

We still don't know what happened. Or why it happened. Perhaps if these data survive, the next researchers .. . Trouble.

Gabriel I was having a strange dream of food-real food, cooked-when suddenly there was Maria, tugging on my arm, keeping me away from the table. She was whispering "Gab, wake up!" and so I did, cold and aching and hungry.

"What's-" She put her hand on my mouth, lightly. "There's one outside. Mylab, I think." He had just turned three this winter, and been given his name. We crept together back to the mouth of the cave and both jumped when my ankle gave a loud pop.

It was Mylab, all right; the fur around one earhole was almost white against the blond. I was glad it wasn't an adult. He was only about a head taller than me.

Stronger, though, and well fed.

We watched from the cave's darkness as he investigated the latrine rocs., sniffing and licking, circling.

"Maybe he's a scout for a hunting party," I whispered. "Hunting us.

"Too young, I think." She pa.s.sed me a stone axe. "Hope we don't have to kill him."