The Chief was asking the first: “Eric the Only, do you apply for full manhood?”
Eric breathed hard and nodded. “I do.”
“As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?”
“I wdl steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power and well-being of Mankind.”
“And all this you swear to do?”
“And all this I swear to do.”
The Chief turned to Eric’s uncle. “As his sponsor, do you support his oath and swear that he is to be trusted?”
With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the Trap-Smasher replied: “Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to be trusted.”
There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the Chief’s eyes locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric’s mind at the moment, he noticed it. Then the Chief looked away and pointed to the women on the other side of the burrow.
“He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for proof, for only a woman’s proof bestows full manhood.”
The first part was over. And it hadn’t been too bad. Eric turned to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the Chieftain’s First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared him. The women’s part.
As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues, they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends cannot support him once the women approach.
It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least one of his uncle’s wives would be among the examiners: they were both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about the mysteries of women’s work. But he had drawn a trio of hard faced females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before they passed him.
Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.
“Eric the Only,” she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a name impossible to believe, “Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn’t have enough between them to make a solitary child: is there enough in you to make a man?”
There was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance, and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought any man to the death for remarks like these—any man at all—but who could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of self-control.
“I think so,” he managed to say after a long pause. “And I’m willing to prove it.”
“Prove it, then!” the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long, sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things being done to someone else.
The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out. It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he kept his body still. He didn’t cry out; he didn’t move away; he didn’t raise a hand to protect himself.
Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. “There is no man here yet,” she said grudgingly. “But perhaps there are the beginnings of one.”
He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one, much later, after he had completed his Theft successfully; but that would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation- ceremony. Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it almost gaily.
Meanwhile, the women’s physical test was over. That was the important thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp, prodded his mind into alertness.
“Did that hurt?” he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face, but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry for anybody: she had too many aches and pains and things generally wrong with her to worry about other people’s troubles.
“A little,” he said. “Not much.”
“The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever could.”
“I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I’m taking. The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.”
Rita the Record-Keeper nodded. “Because you steal things Mankind needs in order to live. You steal things that the Female Society can make into food, clothing and weapons for Mankind, so that Mankind can live and flourish.”
He saw the way, saw what was expected of him. “No,” he contradicted her. “That’s not why we steal. We live on what we steal, but we do not steal just to go on living.”
“Why?” she asked blandly, as if she didn’t know the answer better than any other member of the tribe. “Why do we steal? What is more important than survival?”
Here it was now. The catechism.
“To hit back at the Monsters,” he began. “To drive them from the planet, if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But, above all, hit back at the Monsters.”
He ploughed through the long verbal ritual, pausing at the end of each part, so that the Record-Keeper could ask the proper question and initiate the next sequence.
She tried to trip him once. She reversed the order of the fifth and sixth questions. Instead of “What will we do with the Monsters when we have regained the Earth from them?” she asked, “Why can’t we use the Monsters’ own Alien-Science to fight the Monsters?”
Carried along by mental habit, Eric was well into the passage beginning “We will keep them as our ancestors kept all strange animals, in a place called a zoo, or we will drive them into our burrows and force them to live as we have lived,” before he realized the switch and stopped in confusion. Then he got a grip on himself, sought the right answer in his memory with calmness, as his uncle’s wives had schooled him to do, and began again.
“There are three reasons why we cannot ever use Alien-Science,” he recited, holding up his hand with the thumb and little finger closed. “Alien-Science is nonhuman, Alien-Science is inhuman, Alien-Science is antihuman. First, since it is nonhuman,” he closed his forefinger, “we cannot use it because we can never understand it. And because it is inhuman, we would never want to use it even if we could understand it. And because it is antihuman and can only be used to hurt and damage Mankind, we would not be able to use it so long as we remain human ourselves. Alien-Science is the opposite of Ancestor-Science in every way, ugly instead of beautiful, hurtful instead of helpful. When we die, Alien-Science would not bring us to the world of our ancestors, but to another world full of Monsters.”