“With respect to understanding the cultures of such a world,” he said, “it is helpful to keep various considerations in mind. First, human beings were apparently brought to such a world from many different areas and over a period of many hundreds, indeed, presumably even thousands, of years. Accordingly they would have brought with them certain native customs and cultures. Thus it is natural to suppose that on such a world many cultures would bear obvious signs of their origins. The languages of this world, too, would be expected to exhibit similar traces of their antecedents. Secondly, it is useful to keep in mind that the cultures of this supposed world have not been affected by the development of certain vast, far-reaching, centralizing, reductive, dehumanizing, mechanistic technologies; they have not been affected by, for example, global industrialization, socially engineered mass conditioning programs, and gigantic nation states, removing freedoms and powers, one by one, bit by bit, from their victims, hastening to disarm their populaces lest they resist, retaining for themselves alone the means, and tools, of coercion and violence, reducing their supposed citizenries to implicit serfdom. Accordingly, in many respects, not being afflicted by these processes, the human beings of our supposed world, that on which I am inviting you to conjecture, might tend in many ways to be healthier and happier, and to find their lives more rewarding and meaningful, more worth living, than many of their numerous, aimless, confused, unhappy, reduced counterparts on the world with which you are most familiar. The supposed world is then, one supposes, given the evolutionary heritage of the human animal, likely, on the whole, at least, to be much more congenial to human nature, and its fulfillment, than the world with which you are most familiar.”
She wiped her lips with a napkin.
“Would you like more?” he asked. “I can have Tutina fetch you more, or something else.”
The older woman enjoyed seeing Tutina, as she knelt, stiffen slightly, in anger. Was that almost a slight hint of resistance? But when the young man turned to Tutina, her manner underwent an instant transformation, and she shrank down a little, making herself smaller, and, trembling, averted her eyes, not daring to meet his. It pleased the older woman to see the sensuous, hated, beautiful blonde so much in his power.
“No,” said the older woman.
“Thirdly,” said the young man, “consider the following. Incidentally, these are only some simple general things, out of thousands, which I might tell you about this supposed world. I have selected only three, thinking that these might be most helpful to you at this moment.”
The older woman nodded.
“Thirdly,” said the young man,” I would like to call your attention to certain medical, or biological, advances, or, at any rate, capabilities, which exist on this supposed world.”
“I thought your supposed world was primitive,” said the older woman.
“In certain respects, so, in others, not,” said the young man. “The particular advance, or capability, I have in mind may be of some interest to you. Let me begin, first of all, by reminding you that certain areas of technology, of investigation, and such, were denied to humans on our supposed world. The energies then which might have been plied into certain channels, those of weapons, electronic communication, mass transportation, large-scale industrial machinery, and such, were diverted into other channels, for example, into the medical, or biological, sciences. In short, the supposed world, whose existence I should like you to entertain for the moment as a possibility, is, in some respects, far advanced over that with which you are most familiar. For example, on the supposed world aging was understood over a thousand years ago not as an inevitability but, in effect, as a disease and, accordingly, it was investigated as such. Clearly it is a physical process and, like other physical processes, it would be subject to various conditions, conditions susceptible to manipulation, or alteration, in various ways.”
“I do not understand what you are saying,” whispered the older woman, frightened.
“I did not mean to upset you,” said the man. “Forgive me. Let us briefly change the subject. Doubtless you have seen old examples of the film-makers’ art, silent films, for example. Or perhaps even talkies, but dating back perhaps fifty or sixty years?”
“Of course,” she said.
“In the silent films might be seen many women of incredible loveliness and femininity, films made in a time in which these precious, marvelous attributes were celebrated, rather than castigated and belittled by an envious potato-bodied self-proclaimed elite of the plain and politically motivated. Too, even in old talkies, how beautiful, how feminine, were so many of the actresses! How poignant then to realize that these luscious, marvelous creatures would, by now, have so sadly changed, would by now have been mercilessly humiliated, ravaged, eroded into almost unrecognizable caricatures of their once fair, wondrous selves. It is sad. Too, there were women in those days, true women, and two sexes, real sexes, not one blurred, androgynous pseudo-sex, and they were harmoniously interrelated, fitted closely and beautifully to one another as male and female, each inordinately unique and precious, not set at odds by the disappointed, the greedy and rancorous. In those days the pathological virago would not have been a role model but a poor joke, as she is in actuality today, though a joke it is unwise to recognize. Then the forty-nine natural women would not have been belittled, twisted, and commanded to behave like the unnatural “fiftieth woman,” the authentic, disturbed malcontent, consumed with envy, intent on working her vengeance and will on an entire community. If one is to be sacrificed, why not the fiftieth, she alone, why the forty-nine?”
“Let each be as she wishes,” said the older woman.
“But it does not work in that fashion, does it?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered. Then she said, angrily, “We know our values! Let the forty-nine be sacrificed!”
“Perhaps men will not permit it,” he said.
She drew back in the chair, behind the small table, frightened, and put her legs more closely together, and gathered the white gown more closely about her slender body. It had never occurred to her before, perhaps oddly, that men might not permit the transmogrification of her gender. That had never occurred to her, that men might take a hand in such things. Men had always been so stupid, so simple, so weak, so easily confused, so easily influenced, so easily controlled and manipulated. Those, of course, were the men of Earth.
“I have upon occasion,” he said, “seen photographs of older women, sometimes very old women, taken when they were much younger, in the bloom of their youth and beauty. One realizes then, suddenly, that once they were young, and so beautiful. How hard it seems to believe that sometimes, knowing them as they are now. But if one had known them then! Ah, if one had known them then! Then would one not have found them terribly attractive? Would one not have wanted then to know them, to approach them, to touch them?”
“Everyone grows old,” said the older woman.
“I promised you that I would introduce you to the individual whom you remembered from long ago,” he said.
“Is he in the house?” she asked, suddenly.
“Yes,” said the young man.
“Please be merciful!” she begged. “If I am to see him, give me clothing to wear! Do not let me appear before him like this!”
“Was he a lover?” asked the young man.
“No!” she cried. “Of course not!”
“I shall introduce you to him now,” he said.
“Please, no,” she begged. “Not while I am like this!”