It would hardly do to tell her so, of course. Members of the Male Society must always maintain a certain essential diplomatic reserve toward members of the Female Society.
He moved back, folding his arms slowly and emphatically on his chest to indicate that the Examination was over.
Rachel relaxed, letting out a huge breath. “Are you satisfied?” she inquired with exactly the proper amount of anxiety. Eric was terribly pleased: he’d been afraid from her jocular manner of speaking that she knew nothing at all of formal behavior.
“I am satisfied,” he told her, using the decorous phrases of the courtship formula. “You please me. I want you for my mate.”
“Good. I am glad. Now I claim the Right of Invitation. You may not approach me sexually for the first time until I give you leave.”
“That is your right,” Eric agreed. “I will wait for your call. May it come soon! May it come soon! May it come soon!”
And it was over. They stood apart and grinned at each other self-consciously, observing mutual individuality return as the ritual prototype was sloughed off. Above them, below them, around them, lay the white vastnesses of Monster territory, the transparent cages in which fellow humans awaited fate and the Monsters’ pleasure. But here in this cage, they were mate and mate, Eric and Rachel, two separate people who would become one, when the girl felt the time was ripe to beckon.
Suddenly Rachel giggled. “I was so nervous! Were you nervous?”
“A little,” Eric admitted. “After all, from start to finish, it was a pretty fast mating. One of the fastest I ever heard about.”
“I hope we didn’t leave anything out, Eric.”
“No, we didn’t leave anything out. Nothing that was important, anyway. Except,” he suddenly remembered with annoyance, “except for a condition I wanted to make. Something I wanted you to agree to do before we went through the ceremony. Then I got so caught up in the ritual responses that I forgot all about it.”
“Your tough luck,” she sang out and began a mad little dance around him. “Too late, too late! Agreements before the mating—never after.” At the angry expression on his face, she stopped and took his hands. “I’m only joking, Eric. I have too much of a sense of humor for my own damn good. Among my people, there is a saying: “Most children are born with a wail. Rachel Esthersdaughter was born with a laugh. And she’ll probably die with a laugh.’ You tell me what you were going to ask, and I’ll do it. Whatever it is. Anything.”
“Well” Now that he had come to it, Eric found difficulty in the phrasing. He didn’t know if a man had ever asked a woman such a thing before. “I want you to teach me. I want you to teach me everything you know.”
“You want me to—you mean, you want an education?”
“That’s it, Rachel, that’s what I want,” he said eagerly. “An education. Knowledge. I don’t expect you to tell me the secrets of the Aaron People’s Female Society—I’m not asking you to break any oaths. But I want to know what at least the average man in your people knows. About the Monsters, about counting, about the history of our ancestors. How Alien-Science came to be, how Ancestor-Science came to be. How Strangers make the things they do, what the things are used for. How—What—I don’t even know what I want to know!” he broke off miserably.
“But I do,” she said gently touching him on the face with an open, caressing palm. “And I’ll be very willing to teach you, Eric, very willing indeed, darling. Don’t you worry about my Female Society and its secrets: engineering is the last thing we’ll get to. Do you want to start now?”
“Yes!” he exclaimed, his eyes shining. “I want to start right this moment!”
“Then sit down.” She lowered herself to the floor and took some writing implements from one of the pockets of the nearby cloak. Eric squatted beside her. Now that he’d been able to put it into words, he found himself filled with a hunger such as he’d never known. The hunger for food, the hunger for sex—they were nothing like this. This was a singing hunger that filled your mind and made it want to hear more and more and more of the song.
Rachel looked at him quizzically for a moment. “What a way to begin a mating! With scratcher and repeatable slate. If my friends back in the Aaron People ever heard of this! If your friends—But Eric, seriously, I’m very pleased. That was the only thing about mating with you that really bothered me: you being a front-burrow barbarian. In our terms, of course, and who are we to say that our terms are right? But it did bother me. I’ll teach you everything I know. Where do you want me to begin?”
Eric leaned towards her, his whole body tense. “Begin with protoplasm. I want to know all there is to know about protoplasm.”
20
Pursuing knowledge, Eric discovered, was like running through the burrows. The corridor you were traveling kept forking off into two or three others. Most of the time, you could only see a little ways ahead; suddenly, you came around a curve into a confrontation that astonished you.
Astronomy, for example, was such a confrontation. At first, it seemed utterly useless: a body of arcane, almost incomprehensible data, unrelated to anything at all real. You learned astronomy by rote, associating the various strange names with little circles scratched out on the repeatable slate.
First there was Earth, Earth which was to be won back from the Monsters. Earth was some kind of ball which hung, or revolved, or wandered in something that was called space. Earth was a planet, and there were other planets in space; there were also stars and comets and galaxies, dust and gas and radiation, all of them likewise in space, most of them incredible distances from Earth.
Eric kept repeating the names of planets and astronomical objects which meant nothing to him, which simply accumulated in his head like so much fuzz, until one day he stumbled on the trick of analogy. If you thought of Earth like a warm, safe corridor that you were in just before you opened the door to Monster territory, well then, opening the door was like soaring off Earth. Monster territory with its alien environment and incredible dangers would be space, and on the other side of it you might find another doorway leading to a strange new burrow-that would be another planet, or another star.
All right, that helped, it made it a bit more understandable; but certainly no more pertinent or useful.
Then came the confrontation in Eric’s mind—and he gasped as he came around the curve.
He remembered the conversation with Walter the Weapon-Seeker while they were on expedition to this place. Walter had talked of a boy in his band who had wondered what lay outside of Monster territory itself, what it was that compared to the Monster burrows as the Monster burrows compared to the human ones. Walter had dismissed the ideas as too much for the human mind to contemplate. But it wasn’t! Here, here in astronomy was the answer. A much larger place, Earth, lay outside and all around Monster Territory. And a much, much larger place, interplanetary or interstellar space, lay outside and all around Earth. The Monsters, in terms of what they ultimately inhabited, were as trivial, as insignificant, as infinitesimal as any human beings.
.And were human beings truly insignificant? They hadn’t always been. Eric thrilled with the pride of belonging to a race that had worked out a system of recorded signals as clever as the alphabet, that could take ordinary numbers and squeeze them into unrecognizable shapes, pulling out a piece here, a piece there…