Simon put away the banjo, which was looking more like a detachable phallus every minute. He sallied forth determined to use his nondetachable instrument. Ten minutes later, he was back in the ship. The only relief he felt was in getting away from the Shaltoonians. He’d passed by a rain barrel and happened to look down in it. There, at the bottom, was a newly born baby. He had looked around for a policeman to notify him but had been unable to find one. It struck him then he had never seen a policeman on Shaltoon. He stopped a passer-by and started to ask him where the local precinct had its headquarters. Unable to do so because he didn’t know the word for “police”, he took the passer-by to the barrel and showed him what was in it. The citizen had merely shrugged and walked away. Simon had walked around until he saw one of his escorts. The woman was startled to see him without a companion and asked why he had left the ship without notifying the authorities. Simon said that that wasn’t important. What was important was the case of infanticide he’d stumbled across.
She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about. She followed him and gazed down into the barrel. Then she looked up with a strange expression. Simon, knowing something was wrong, looked again. The corpse was gone.
“But I swear it was here only five minutes ago!” he said.
“Of course,” she said coolly. “But the barrel men have removed it.”
It took some time for Simon to get it through his head that he had seen nothing unusual. In fact, the barrels he had observed on every corner and under every rain spout were seldom used to collect drinking water. Their main purpose was for the drowning of infants.
“Don’t you have the same custom on Earth?” the woman said.
“It’s against the law there to murder babies.”
“How in the world do you keep your population from getting too large?” she said.
“We don’t,” Simon said.
“How barbaric!”
Simon got over some of his indignation when the woman explained that the average life span of a Shaltoonian was ten thousand years. This was due to an elixir invented some two hundred thousand years before. The Shaltoonians weren’t much for mechanics or engineering or physics, but they were great botanists. The elixir had been made from juices of several different plants. A by-product of this elixir was that a Shaltoonian seldom got sick.
“So you see that we have to have some means of keeping the population down,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d all be standing on top of each other’s heads in a thousand years or less.”
“What about contraceptives?”
“Those’re against our custom,” she said. “They interfere with the pleasure of sex. Besides, everyone ought to have a chance to be born.”
Simon asked her to explain this seemingly contradictory remark. She replied that an aborted baby didn’t have a soul. But a baby that made it to the open air was outfitted with a soul at the moment of birth. If it died even a few seconds later, it still went to heaven. Indeed, it was better that it did die, because then it would be spared the hardships and pains and griefs of life. Killing it was doing it a favor. However, to keep the population from decreasing, it was necessary to let one out of a hundred babies survive. The Shaltoonians didn’t like to have a fixed arrangement for this. They let Chance decide who lived and who didn’t. So every woman, when she got pregnant, went to the Temple of Shaltoon. There she picked a number at a roulette table, and if her ball fell into the lucky slot, she got to keep the baby. The Holy Croupiers gave her a card with the lucky number on it, which she wore around her neck until the baby was a year old.
“The wheel’s fixed so the odds are a hundred to one,” she said. “The house usually wins. But when a woman wins, a holiday is declared, and she’s queen for a day. This is no big deal, since she spends most of her time reviewing the parade.”
“Thanks for the information,” Simon said. “I’m going back to the ship. So long, Goobnatz.”
“I’m not Goobnatz,” she said. “I’m Dunnernickel.”
Simon was so shaken up that he didn’t ask her what she meant by that. He assumed that he had had a slip of memory. The next day, however, he apologized to her.
“Wrong again,” she said. “My name is Pussyloo.”
There was a tendency for all aliens of the same race to look alike to Earthmen. But he had been here long enough to distinguish indviduals easily.
“Do you Shaltoonians have a different name for every day?”
“No,” she said. “My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it’ll be Quimquat.”
This was the undefinable thing that had been making him uneasy. Simon asked her to explain, and they went into a nearby tavern. The drinks were on the house, since he was working here as a banjo-player. The Shaltoonians crowded in every night to hear his music, which they enjoyed even if it wasn’t at all like their native music. At least, they claimed they did. The leading music critic of the planet had written a series of articles about Simon’s genius, claiming that he evoked a profundity and a truth from his instrument which no Shaltoonian could equal. Simon didn’t understand any more than the Shaltoonians did what the critic was talking about, but he liked what he read. This was the first time he’d ever gotten a good review.
They had ordered a couple of beers, and Pussyloo plunged into her explanation. She said she’d be glad to tell him all she could in half an hour, but shed have to talk a lot to get everything into that length of time. In thirty minutes it’d be quitting time. She liked Simon, but he wasn’t her type, and she had an assignation with a man shed met on her lunch hour. After Simon heard her explanation, he understood why she was in such a hurry.
“Don’t you Earthmen have ancestor rotation?” she said.
Simon was so startled that he upset his beer and had to order another. “What the hell’s that?” he said.
“It’s a biological, not a supernatural, phenomenon,” she said. “I guess you poor deprived Terrestrials don’t have it. But the body of every Shaltoonian contains cells which carry the memories of a particular ancestor. The earliest ancestors are in the anal tissue. The latest are in the brain tissue.”
“You mean a person carries around with him the memories of his foreparents?” Simon said.
“That’s what I said.”
“But it seems to me that in time a person wouldn’t have enough space in his body for all the ancestral cells,” Simon said. “When you think that your ancestors double every generation backward, you’d soon be out of room. You have two parents, and each of them had two parents, and each of them had two. And so on. You go back only five generations, and you have sixteen great-great-grandparents. And so on.”
“And so on,” Pussyloo said. She looked at the tavern clock while her nipples swelled and the strong mating odor became even stronger. In fact, the whole tavern stank of it. Simon couldn’t even smell his own beer.
“You have to remember that if you go back about thirty generations, everyone now living has many common ancestors. Otherwise, the planet at that time would’ve been jammed with people like flies on a pile of horse manure.
“But there’s another factor that eliminates the number of ancestors. The ancestor cells with the strongest personalities release chemicals that dissolve the weaker ones.”
“Are you telling me that, even on the cellular level, the survival of the fittest is the law?” Simon said. “That egotism is the ruling agent?”