“What they originally used the explosive red blobs for, why some of them will rush and trample us and others will panic and dash away,” Eric added, thinking of the practical problems with which he had been grappling at the times when Rachel had been asleep and he had paced back and forth in the cage by himself. “All that you’re saying, though, is that they’re different: they’re not provably better. Maybe this supernatural force thought so, but then I’d argue with it: I’d question its assumptions. On what other basis did our ancestors—this group of them who believed the coming of the Monsters was a judgment—on what other basis could they have been right?”
Rachel smiled at him, her eyes a tiny distance from his face. “You’d argue with the supernatural force, would you, Eric—you’d tell it that it was wrong? I’ll bet you would: I can just see you doing it. You’re the sum of everything that was ever good and bad about the human male. The second basis is moral; you might say it derived from an abiding and justified sense of guilt.”
“Justified? What kind of guilt?”
“Certain beliefs, as I said… somewhere, in each, there’s a significant core of reality. Man was lord of the Earth for a long time, Eric, and for that long time he was guilt-ridden. All of his religion and all of his literature—the literature that was written by sane men and not madmen—was filled with guilt. If you put the legendary part aside and just look at the things he really did, he had reason to be. He enslaved his fellow men, he tortured and humiliated them. He destroyed his fellow civilizations, he demolished their temples and universities and used the stones to build outhouses. Sometimes men would trample on women and mock their hurt, sometimes women would trample on men and mock their hurt. In some places parents would keep children in chains for all of their growing up; in other places children would send useless parents out with orders to die. And this was with his own species, with homo sapiens. What did he do with species that were brothers and with whom he grew to maturity? We know what he did with Neanderthal man: how many others lie in the unmarked graves of anthropological history?”
“Man is an animal, Rachel! His duty is to survive.”
“Man is more than an animal, Eric. His duty comprehends more than survival. If one animal feeds on another and, in the process, wipes it out, that’s biology; if man does the same thing, out of overpowering need or mere caprice, he knows he has committed a crime. Whether he’s right or wrong in taking this attitude isn’t important: he knows he has committed a crime. That is a thoroughly human realization, that it cannot be dismissed with an evolutionary shrug.”
He moved away from the wall and strode up and down the cage in front of her, opening and closing his hands uncomfortably, clasping them together and pulling them apart. “All right,” he said at last, coming to a stop. “Man murdered his brothers all through history and his brother species all through prehistory. Suppose I don’t dismiss it. What then?”
“Then you examine the criminal’s record a bit more thoroughly. What about the other species—those you might call his cousins? I’ve told you of animals he domesticated: the ox, the ass, the horse, the dog, the cat, the pig. Do you know what is covered by the word domestication?
Castration, for one thing, hybridization, for another. Taking the mother’s milk away from her young. Taking the skin away from the body. Taking the meat away from the bones, as part of a planned economic process, and training one animal to lead others of its kind to slaughter. Taking the form away from the creature so that it becomes a comic caricature of its original self—as was done with dogs. Taking the purpose away from the generative powers so that it becomes a mad, perpetual factory of infertile eggs—as was done with hens. Taking its most basic expression of pride and turning it into drudgery or sport as was done with horses and bulls.
“Don’t laugh, Eric. You’re still thinking of man’s survival, but I’m still talking of man’s very ancient moral sense. You do all those things—to your fellow creatures, your fellow species, your fellow men—you do all those things for millennia upon millennia, while you are examining the question of good and evil, of right and wrong, of decency and cruelty, you do all those things as your father did, and his father before him, and do you mean to tell me that whatever plea is made to justify you—by science, by philosophy, by politics—you are not going to feel forever and omnipresently guilty as you stand shivering and naked in your own awful sight? That you’re not going to feel you have accumulated a tremendous debt to the universe in which you live, and that the bill may one day be presented by another species, slightly stronger than yours, slightly smarter, and very different? And that then this new species will do unto you as you have done unto others from the beginning of your life on the planet? And that if what you did when you had the power was justified, then what will be done to you when you no longer have the power is certainly justified, is doubly, triply, quadruply justified?”
Rachel flung her arms out as she finished. Eric looked at her pounding, sweating bosom. Then he followed the direction of her bowed head and stared once more at the transparent cages filled with human beings that dotted the white space beneath them, cages here, cages there, and cages into the furthermost distance.
21
Eric learned many things. He learned about love, for example. He learned about the Aaron People.
Love he found very, very sweet. It started with lust and then became much more complicated. Some parts of it some of the best parts—were downright incomprehensible.
He marveled that Rachel Esthersdaughter, beside whom he was still little more than a bare ignoramus, should defer to his decisions in all matters more and more every day—once she had made the initial decision of giving herself to him. He marveled at the delight she showed in deferring to him, and at the admiration and pleasure she displayed in everything he said and did, he, a brash barbarian who had only discovered from her recently—and then with open-mouthed astonishment—that the burrows in which he had spent most of his life were no more than air spaces in the insulating material with which the Monsters protected their homes from the unpleasant chills of Earth.
He wondered constantly at other changes in her, the way her mad, wild humor seemed to dissolve in his embrace, the way her flashing grin would be insensibly replaced by an intense, caressing smile and her customary twinkle by the most searching of looks in suddenly serious brown eyes. Those looks tore at his heart: they seemed to express a hope that he would treat her well, along with a calm acceptance of the fact that it was entirely his decision to treat her well or ill—and that whatever his decision, she would cheerfully abide by it.
He was entranced by the differences in her body, not the differences he had always noted between man and woman so much as the unexpected ones: the smallness of her fingernails, the otherness of her skin texture, the incredible lightness of her vast length of brown hair.
“Most of the Aaron People have your kind of coloring, don’t they?” he asked, holding her hair in his right hand and winding froths of it round and round upon his forearm.
Rachel snuggled closer and rubbed the top of her head up and down along his arm. “Most,” she agreed. “We’re a bit inbred, I’m afraid. It’s been pretty much the same genetic pool for generations. We don’t capture many women from other tribes and our Male Society rarely initiates an outside warrior.”