Klamath Valley Center for Development of Human Potential
One of Moolkri's drones had buzzed all around it for more than seven days, cataloguing the human creatures as well as the other fauna of the area (dragonflies, moths, rabbits, twenty-three kinds of birds, forty relitiles and amphibia, microorganisms past counting). There were sixteen of the humans, and they were playing a game.
The Get understood games. They enjoyed play. They even understood consciousness-raising games; those were the only games they ever played, except for athletic ones like vibrissa trilling and obstacle scuttling. They discovered the name of the human game was "Primal Weekend, which meant nothing to them, but watching the game itself was a grand spectator sport. The cluster squirmed itself into such position that all several score of them could see clearly into one monitor or another. They studied the pictures the drone was transmitting with, for the first time since they had approached this messy little G-type star, a certain empathy and joy.
Some of the aspects of the game were peculiarly ludicrous to them. Not threatening. Just funny, and they laughed and laughed, in their way. (They did not know that some of the aspects would have been ludicrous to most humans, too.. . not necessarily the same aspects.) For instance, there was a game in which fifteen of the players locked arms and braced hips in a tight ring, while the sixteenth, sobbing and fighting, struggled to get into the group. How funny they thought the notion that any group might try to keep a member out! Another game involved a forty-one-year-old male player who rinsed out a pair of his underdrawers in a bucket while all the others squatted in a circle around him, calling out words of encouragement and love. (He had soiled himself in a passion of weeping and writhing a few minutes before.) The symbolism of this game was perfectly apparent to the Get, and they responded not with laughter but with understanding and joy.
But other games troubled the Get immensely.
The weekenders played the game called Psychodrama a lot. In one of the episodes two humans squatted facing each other, again in the circle of the ring. "I'm your wife, said one cheerfully. "I castrate you. Her voice grew more threatening. "You're not a real man! She spat the words. "If you were half a man you'd beat me black and blue!
"1 want to, I want to, sobbed the male player. "I can't, I can't.
"Then I'm going to leave you, shrilled the female one, and, "You mustn't, you mustn't, wept the male.
The Get revolved uneasily, changing grips and communicating fearfully. They could not take their eyes off the monitors. They felt ill and damaged, in ways they had never felt before. They listened with sick fascination to the translations of the audio track: "Kill her, Ben! shouted the players in the ring. "Walk out on her! Kick her ass off! Hey, Ben, slap her with the plastic bat!
Walk out on her?
The Get shivered. They could find no empathy whatever in the situation. Even their empathizers merely shook in fear. A mated couple planning to split? How could that be?
Among Moolkri and Mawkri's people, you see, such a thing is impossible. It is not statute or custom. It is natural law. When a seed planter like Moolkri intromits an egg ripener like Mawkri, the fertilization takes the form of a sort of allergic reaction. The Get that result are, in a sense, only hives.
Intromission plays more than a merely reproductive function with them, as screwing does with us. But the biology of it is ironclad. At first sexual encounter each partner builds up specific antigens. They cannot produce offspring without them. They can never have sexual intercourse with any other. The antigens produced from any other mating, or from intercourse with an unmated person, would kill them immediately in great, bloated, pustulant pain.
There is therefore no question of sexual morality among the Get or their planet-gotten. It is a boy-meets-girl world, a Cinderella planet on which when the prince discovers that She Is The One, they do indeed live happily together ever after, or else they do not live happily (or at all). They do not have the option of promiscuity. They have only one source of sexual pleasure. One partner for life.
And of course they only produce a Get once-subsequent intromisstons are sterile, though a lot of fun- but as there are up to five hundred individuals in each get (more than half dying in the first half hour), the race goes on and grows.
So the Get were shocked and terrified, and some of them even made physically ill, by this inexplicable vice their specimens displayed. Their medical members were kept furiously busy, scuttling around the cluster to tend the damaged ones, when they were not too damaged to function themselves.
Moolkri and Mawkri's people are no better than human beings. Their first reaction was total revulsion and a wish to destroy, like the stamp of a four-year-old foot on a spider. Their collective claws were trembling near the clasps for the planet busters, when one of the smallest of the Get, and usually one of the quietest, piped up, sobbing:
"But they can't help it.
Through a warped window both sides look strange to each other. Humans looked strange to Moolkri Mawkri's Get. Now consider how strange the Get look to us:
"They can't help it is a concept none of them had ever heard before.
They chattered wonderingly for a while, and as they talked, the claws withdrew from the buster clasps. They cant help it. It was so strange a thought that it seemed to excuse almost any perversion, even promiscuity. And then an observer, restlessly examining the environment, cried, "Look what they're doing! And they all quieted and stared at the monitors, still faithfully conveying what was happening at the Klamath Valley Center for the Development of Human Potential, and there they found an empathy they had not expected.
One corner of the building was an add-on shed of tar- paper and sheet metal, extending over a concrete pool.
A century and more before, some hungry and hopeful men had channeled a creek into a sluice in order to pick flakes of gold out of the water. They hadn't found much, but they had kept trying, relays of them for a couple of decades, and each one had deepened and widened the channel and the pool.
Now the gold was all gone, geologists having tracked the stream to its source and ripped out the auriferous rock that had given its flakes to the stream, but the pool was still there. The Center had cemented its bottom and covered its top and put in a heater. Now it was kept at hot blood temperature (the Get liked that, it reminded them of home), and in it all sixteen of the humans (their coverings gone, only their hides still enclosing them) were knotted and seething together in the amniotic waters (the Get liked that too, it reminded them of their own cluster). The name of the game the people played in the water was float. Naked and touching, they formed a chain. "Passer down, cried the ones at the lower end, and at the top two humans picked up a third and slid her passively, relaxedly, half floating and half supported, touched and soothed and caressed, from hand to hand through the warm pool.
The Get chittered among themselves. It was almost like a Get cluster, the touching and the support. It was almost inviting enough to join; and perhaps it was not the fault of the humans that they did not have mouthhooks or spiracles so that they could join together properly.
"They can't be all bad, mused the little Get-sibling aloud. And he spoke for all of them.
"I think, said Moolkri, reaching over to glance at Mawkri for concurrence, "that we should study these people more. I do not know what to do, he added.
"We cannot stay very long, warned a rememberer. They all knew it was true. They had been a long time traveling. The Get was ripening, it was time to return home and seek partners.