Stranger in a Strange Land, Page 44

  Jubal nodded. “I know. Gillian has an invincible innocence that makes it impossible for her to be immoral.” He frowned. “Ben, I am afraid that you—and I, too—lack the angelic innocence to practice the perfect morality those people live by.”

  Ben looked startled. “You think that sort of thing is moral? I meant that Jill doesn’t know she is doing wrong—Mike’s got her hornswoggled—and Mike doesn’t know it’s wrong, either. He’s the Man from Mars; he didn’t get a fair start.”

  Jubal frowned. “Yes, I think what those people—the entire Nest, not just our kids—are doing is moral. I haven’t examined details but—yes, all of it. Bacchanalia, unashamed swapping, communal living and anarchistic code, everything.”

  “Jubal, you astound me. If you feel that way, why don’t you join them? They want you. They’ll hold a jubilee—Dawn is waiting to kiss your feet and serve you; I wasn’t exaggerating.”

  Jubal sighed. “No. Fifty years ago—But now? Ben my brother, the capacity for such innocence is no longer in me. I have been too long wedded to my own brand of evil and hopelessness to be cleansed in their water of life and become innocent again. If I ever was.”

  “Mike thinks you have this ‘innocence’—he doesn’t call it that—in full measure now. Dawn told me, speaking ex officio.”

  “Then I would not disillusion him. Mike sees his own reflection—I am, by profession, a mirror.”

  “Jubal, you’re chicken.”

  “Precisely, sir! But my worry is not over their morals but dangers to them from outside.”

  “Oh, they’re in no trouble that way.”

  “You think so? If you dye a monkey pink and shove him into a cage of brown monkeys, they’ll tear him to pieces. Those innocents are courting martyrdom.”

  “Aren’t you being rather melodramatic, Jubal?”

  Jubal glared. “If I am, sir, does that make my words less weighty? Saints have burned at stakes ere this—would you dismiss their holy anguish as ‘melodrama’?”

  “I didn’t mean to get your back up. I simply meant that they aren’t in that sort of danger—after all, this isn’t the Dark Ages.”

  Jubal blinked. “Really? I hadn’t noticed the change. Ben, this pattern has been offered to a naughty world many times—and the world has always crushed it. The Oneida Colony was much like Mike’s nest—it lasted a while but out in the country, not many neighbors. Or take the early Christians—anarchy, communism, group marriage, even that kiss of brotherhood— Mike has borrowed a lot from them. Hmm . . . if he picked up that kiss of brotherhood from them, I would expect men to kiss men.”

  Ben looked sheepish. “I held out on you. But it’s not a pansy gesture.”

  “Nor was it with the early Christians. D’you think I’m a fool?”

  “No comment.”

  “Thank you. I wouldn’t advise anyone to offer the kiss of brotherhood to the pastor of some boulevard church today; primitive Christianity is no more. Over and again it’s been the same sad story: a plan for perfect sharing and perfect love, glorious hopes and high ideals—then persecution and failure.” Jubal sighed again. “I’ve been fretting about Mike; now I’m worried about them all.”

  “How do you think I feel? Jubal, I can’t accept your sweetness-and-light theory. What they are doing is wrong!”

  “It’s that last incident that sticks in your craw.”

  “Uh . . . not entirely.”

  “Mostly. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with—in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called ‘Morals.’ Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.

  “You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul—and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against the same Judeo-Christian code . . . so automatically your stomach did flip-flops . . . and you think that proves you’re right and they’re wrong. Faugh! I’d as lief use trial by ordeal. All your stomach can reflect is prejudice trained into you before you acquired reason.”

  “What about your stomach?”

  “Mine is stupid, too—but I don’t let it rule my brain. I see the beauty of Mike’s attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven’t the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code—monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth—then fiddle with details . . . even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight!

  “But mostly they debate how we can be made to obey this code—ignoring the evidence that most tragedies they see around them are rooted in the code itself rather than in failure to abide by it.

  “Now comes the Man from Mars, looks at this sacrosanct code with a fresh viewpoint—and rejects it. I don’t know the details of Mike’s code, but it clearly violates laws of every major nation and would outrage ‘right-thinking’ people of every major faith—and most agnostics and atheists, too. Yet this poor boy—”

  “Jubal, he is not a boy, he’s a man.”

  “Is he a ‘man’? This poor ersatz Martian is saying that sex is a way to be happy. Sex should be a means of happiness. Ben, the worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or at least, pleasure.

  “The code says, ‘Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s wife.’ The result? Reluctant chastity, adultery, jealousy, bitterness, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children—and furtive little passes degrading to woman and man. Is this Commandment ever obeyed? If a man swore on his own Bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor’s wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not.

  “Now comes Mike and says: ‘There is no need to covet my wife . . . love her! There’s no limit to her love, we have everything to gain—and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.’ The proposition is incredible. So far as I recall only pre-civilization Eskimos were this naive—and they were so isolated that they were almost ‘Men from Mars’ themselves. But we gave them our ‘virtues’ and now they have chastity and adultery just like the rest of us. Ben, what did they gain?”

  “I wouldn’t care to be an Eskimo.”

  “Nor I. Spoiled fish makes me bilious.”

  “I had in mind soap and water. I guess I’m effete.”

  “Me, too, Ben. I was born in a house with no more plumbing than an igloo; I prefer the present. Nevertheless Eskimos were invariably described as the happiest people on Earth. Any unhappiness they suffered was not through jealousy; they didn’t have a word for it. They borrowed spouses for convenience and fun—it did not make them unhappy. So who’s looney? Look at this glum world around you, then tell me: Did Mike’s disciples seem happier, or unhappier, then other people?”

  “I didn’t talk to them all, Jubal. But—yes, they’re happy. So happy they seem slap-happy. There’s a catch in it somewhere.”

  “Maybe you were the catch.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a pity your tastes canalized so young. Even three days of what you were offered would be something to treasure when you reach my age. And you, you young idiot, let jealousy chase you away! At your age I would have gone Eskimo—why, I’m so vicariously vexed that my only consolation is the sour certainty that you will regret it. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you’ve resisted. I have such regrets—but nothing to the whopper you will suffer!”

  “Quit rubbing it in!”

  “Heavens, man!—or are you a mouse?—I’m trying to goad
you. Why are you moaning to an old man? When you should be heading for the Nest like a homing pigeon! Hell, if I were even twenty years younger, I’d join Mike’s church myself.”

  “Lay off, Jubal. What do you really think of Mike’s church?

  “You said it was just a discipline.”

  “Yes and no. It is supposed to be ‘Truth’ with a Capital ‘T’ as Mike got it from the Martian ‘Old Ones. ”’

  “The ‘Old Ones,’ eh? To me, they’re hogwash.”

  “Mike believes in them.”

  “Ben, I once knew a manufacturer who believed that he consulted the ghost of Alexander Hamilton. However—Damn it, why must I be the Devil’s advocate?”

  “What’s biting you now?”

  “Ben, the foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket of religion. But we must give the Devil his due. Mike does believe and he’s teaching the truth as he sees it. As for his ‘Old Ones,’ I don’t know that they don’t exist; I simply find the idea hard to swallow. As for his Thou-Art-God creed, it is neither more nor less credible than any other. Come Judgment Day, if they hold it, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was Big Boss all along.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Jubal!”

  “All names belong in the hat, Ben. Man is so built that he cannot imagine his own death. This leads to endless invention of religions. While this conviction by no means proves immortality to be a fact, questions generated by it are overwhelmingly important. The nature of life, how ego hooks into the body, the problem of ego itself and why each ego seems to be the center of the universe, the purpose of life, the purpose of the universe—these are paramount questions, Ben; they can never be trivial. Science hasn’t solved them—and who am I to sneer at religions for trying, no matter how unconvincingly to me? Old Mumbo Jumbo may eat me yet; I can’t rule him out because he owns no fancy cathedrals. Nor can I rule out one godstruck boy leading a sex cult in an upholstered attic; he might be the Messiah. The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!”

  “Whew: Jubal, you should have been a preacher.”

  “Missed it by luck. If Mike can show us a better way to run this fouled-up planet, his sex life needs no vindication. Geniuses are justifiably contemptuous of lesser opinion and are always indifferent to sexual customs of the tribe; they make their own rules. Mike is a genius. So he ignores Mrs. Grundy and diddles to suit himself.

  “But from a theological standpoint Mike’s sexual behavior is as orthodox as Santa Claus. He preaches that all living creatures are collectively God . . . which makes Mike and his disciples the only self-aware gods on this planet . . . which rates him a union card by all the rules for godding. Those rules always permit gods sexual freedom limited only by their own judgment.

  “You want proof? Leda and the Swan? Europa and the Bull? Osiris, Isis, and Horus? The incredible incests of the Norse gods? I won’t cite eastern religions; their gods do things that a mink breeder wouldn’t tolerate. But look at the relations of the Trinity-in-One of the most widely respected western religion. The only way that religion’s precepts can be reconciled with the interrelations of what purports to be a monotheos is by concluding that breeding rules for deity are not the rules for mortals. But most people never think about it; they seal it off and mark it: ‘Holy—Do Not Disturb.’

  “One must allow Mike any dispensation granted other gods. One god alone splits into at least two parts, and breeds, not just Jehovah—they all do. A group of gods will breed like rabbits, and with as little regard for human proprieties. Once Mike entered the godding business, orgies were as predictable as sunrise—so forget the standards of Podunk and judge them by Olympian morals.”

  Jubal glowered. “Ben, to understand this, you must start by conceding their sincerity.”

  “Oh, I do! It’s just that—”

  “Do you? You start by assuming that they must be wrong, judging them by that very code you reject. Try logic instead. Ben, this ‘growing-closer’ by sexual union, this plurality-into-unity, logically has no place for monogamy. Since shared-by-all sexual congress is basic to this creed—a fact that your account makes crystal clear—why expect it to be hidden? One hides what one is ashamed of—but they are not ashamed, they glory in it. To duck behind closed doors would be a sop to the very code they have rejected . . . or it would shout aloud that you were an outsider who should never have been admitted in the first place.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have been.”

  “Obviously you shouldn’t have been. Mike clearly had misgivings. But Gillian insisted. Eh?”

  “That only makes it worse!”

  “How? She wanted you to be one of them ‘in all fullness,’ as Mike would say. She loves you—and is not jealous of you. But you are jealous of her—and, while you claim to love her, your behavior doesn’t show it.”

  “Damn it, I do love her!”

  “So? As may be, you clearly did not understand the Olympian honor you were being offered.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” Ben conceded glumly.

  “I’m going to offer you a way out. You wondered how Mike got rid of his clothes. I’ll tell you.”

  “How?”

  “A miracle.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  “Could be. One thousand dollars says it was a miracle. Go ask Mike. Get him to show you. Then send me the money.”

  “Hell, Jubal, I don’t want to take your money.”

  “You won’t. Bet?”

  “Jubal, you go see what the score is. I can’t go back.”

  “They’ll take you back with open arms and never ask why you left. One thousand on that prediction, too. Ben, you were there less than twenty-four hours. Did you give them the careful investigation that you give something smelly in public life before you blast it?”

  “But—”

  “Did you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ben! You claim to love Jill . . . yet you won’t give her the fair shake you give a crooked politician. Not a tenth the effort she made to help you when you were in trouble. Where would you be if she had made so feeble a try? Roasting in Hell, most likely. You’re bitching about friendly fornication—do you know what I’m worried about?”

  “What?”

  “Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!”

  Caxton chewed a thumb and said nothing—then stood up suddenly. “I’m on my way.”

  “After lunch.”

  “Now.”

  Twenty-four hours later Ben wired Jubal two thousand dollars. When, after a week, Jubal received no other message, he sent a stat care of Ben’s office: “What the hell are you doing?” The answer was somewhat delayed:

  “Studying Martian—aquafraternally yours—Ben”

  Part Five

  HIS HAPPY DESTINY

  XXXIV.

  FOSTER LOOKED UP FROM WORK IN PROGRESS. “Junior!”

  “Sir?”

  “That youngster you wanted—he’s available now. The Martians have released him.”

  Digby looked puzzled. “I’m sorry. There was some young creature toward whom I have a duty?”

  Foster smiled angelically. Miracles were never necessary—in Truth the pseudo-concept “miracle” was self-contradicting. But these young fellows always had to learn it for themselves. “Never mind,” he said gently. “It’s a minor martyrdom and I’ll guard it myself—and Junior?”

  “Sir?”

  “Call me ‘Fos,’ please—ceremony is all right in the field but we don’t need it in the studio. And remind me not to call you ‘Junior’—you made a very nice record on that temporary duty assignment. Which name do you like to be called?”

  His assistant blinked. “I have another name?”

  “Thousands. Do you have a preference?”

  “Why, I really don’t recall at this eon.”

  “Well . . . would you like to be calle
d ‘Digby’?”

  “Uh, yes. That’s a very nice name. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. You earned it.” Archangel Foster turned back to his work, not forgetting the minor duty he had assumed. Briefly he considered how this cup might be taken from little Patricia—then chided himself for such unprofessional, almost human, thought. Mercy was not possible in an angel; angelic compassion left no room for it.

  The Martian Old Ones had reached an elegant trial solution to their major esthetic problem and put it aside for a few filled-threes to let it generate new problems. At which time, unhurriedly and almost absentmindedly, the alien nestling which they had returned to his proper world was tapped of what he had learned of his people and dropped, after cherishing, since he was of no further interest to their purposes.

  They took the data he had accumulated and, with a view to testing that trial solution, began to work toward considering an inquiry leading to an investigation of esthetic parameters involved in the possibility of the artistic necessity of destroying Earth. But much waiting would be, before fullness would grok decision.

  The Daibutsu at Kamakura was again washed by a giant wave secondary to a seismic disturbance 280 kilometers off Honshu. The wave killed 13,000 people and lodged a male infant high in the Buddha image’s interior, where it was found and succored by surviving monks. This infant lived ninety-seven Terran years after the disaster that wiped out his family and produced no progeny nor anything of note aside from a reputation for sustained belching. Cynthia Duchess entered a nunnery with all benefits of modern publicity and left without fanfare three days later. Ex-Secretary General Douglas suffered a stroke which impaired the use of his left hand but not his ability to conserve assets entrusted to him. Lunar Enterprises, Ltd., published a prospectus on a bond issue for the wholly-owned subsidiary Ares Chandler Corporation. The Lyle-Drive Exploratory Vessel Mary Jane Smith landed on Pluto. Fraser, Colorado, reported the coldest February of its recorded history.

  Bishop Oxtongue, at the New Grand Avenue Temple, preached on the text (Matt. XXIV:24): “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” He made clear that his diatribe did not refer to Mormons, Christian Scientists, Roman Catholics, nor Fosterites—especially not the last—nor to any fellow travelers whose good works counted more than inconsequential differences in creed or ritual . . . but solely to upstart heretics who were seducing faithful contributors away from the faiths of their fathers. In a subtropical resort city in the same nation three complainants swore on information charging public lewdness on the part of a pastor, three of his assistants, and John Doe, Mary Roe, et al. , plus charges of running a disorderly house and contributing to delinquency of minors. The county attorney had no interest in prosecuting as he had on file a dozen like it—complaining witnesses always failed to appear at arraignment.