Pussyloo scratched the itch between her legs and said, “That’s the way it is. There would never have been any trouble about it if that’s all there was to it. But in the old days, about twenty thousand years ago, the ancestors started their battle for their civil rights. They said it wasn’t right that they should be shut up in their little cells with only their own memories. They had a right to get out of their cellular ghettoes, to enjoy the flesh they were contributing to but couldn’t participate in.
“After a long fight, they got an equal-time arrangement. Here’s how it works. A person is born and allowed to control his own body until he reaches puberty. During this time, an ancestor speaks only when spoken to.”
“How do you do that?” Simon said.
“It’s a mental thing the details of which the scientists haven’t figured out yet,” she said. “Some claim we have a neural circuit we can switch on and off by thought. The trouble is, the ancestors can switch it on, too. They used to give the poor devils that carried them a hard time, but now they don’t open up any channels unless they’re requested to do so.
“Anyway, when a person reaches puberty, he must then give each ancestor a day for himself or herself. The ancestor comes into full possession of the carrier’s body and consciousness. The carrier himself still gets one day a week for himself. So he comes out ahead, though there’s still a lot of bitching about it. When the round is completed, it starts all over again.
“Because of the number of ancestors, a Shaltoonian couldn’t live long enough for one cycle if it weren’t for the elixir. But this delays aging so that the average life span is about ten thousand years.”
“Which is actually twenty thousand years, since a Shaltoon year is twice as long as ours,” Simon said.
He was stunned. He didn’t even notice when Pussyloo squirmed out of the booth and, still squirming, walked out of the place.
7
QUEEN MARGARET
The Space Wanderer had been thinking about moving on. There didn’t seem to be much here for him. The Shaltoonians did not even have a word for philosophy, let alone such as ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. Their interests were elsewhere. He could understand why they thought only of the narrow and the secular, or, to be exact, eating, drinking, and copulating. But understanding did not make him wish to participate. His main lust was for the big answers.
When he found out about ancestor rotation, however, he decided to hang around a little longer. He was curious about the way in which this unique phenomenon shaped the strange and complex structure of Shaltoon society. Also, to be truthful, he had an egotistic reason for being a little reluctant to leave. He enjoyed being lionized, and the next planet might have critics not so admiring.
On the other hand, his pets were unhappy. They would not leave the spaceship even though they were suffering from cabin fever. The odor from the Shaltoonians drove Anubis into a barking frenzy and Athena into semishock. When Simon had guests, the two retreated into the galley. After the party was over, Simon would try to play with them to cheer them up, but they would not respond. Their big dumb eyes begged him to take off, to leave forever this planet that smelled of cats. Simon told them to stick it out for another week. Seekers after knowledge had to put up with certain inconveniences. They didn’t understand his words, of course, but they did understand his tone. They were stuck here until their master decided to unstick them. What they wanted to stick and where was something else. Maybe it was a good thing they couldn’t talk.
The first thing Simon found out in his investigations was that ancestor rotation caused a great resistance to change. This was not only inevitable but necessary. The society had to function from day to day, crops be grown and harvested and transported, the governmental and business administration carried out, schools, hospitals, courts, etcetera run. To make this possible, a family stayed in the same line of work or profession. If your forefather a thousand generations removed was a ditch-digger, you were one, too. There was no confusion resulting from a blacksmith being replaced by a judge one day and a garbage hauler the next.
The big problem in running this kind of society was the desire of each ancestor to live it up on his day of possession. Naturally, he/she didn’t want to waste his/her time working when he/she could be eating, drinking, and copulating. But everybody understood that if he/she indulged in his/her wishes, society would fall apart and the carriers would starve to death in a short time. So, grudgingly, everybody put in an eight-hour day and at quitting time plunged into an orgy. Almost everybody did. Somebody had to take care of the babies and children, and somebody had to work on the farms the rest of the day.
The only way to handle this was to let slaves baby-sit and finish up the plowing and the chores on the farms. On Shaltoon, once a slave always a slave was the law. Yet, how do you get an ancestral slave to work all day on the only day in five hundred years that he’ll take over a carrier? For one thing, who’s going to oversee him? No freeman wanted to put in his precious time supervising the helots. And a slave that isn’t watched closely is going to goof off.
How did you punish a slave if he neglected his work to enjoy himself? If you hung him, you killed off thousands of innocents. You also reduced the number of slaves, of which there weren’t enough to go around in the first place. If you whipped him, you were punishing the innocent. The day following the whipping, the guilty man/woman retreated into his/her cell, shut off from the pain. The poor devil that followed was the one that suffered. He resented being punished for something he hadn’t done, and his morale scraped bottom like a dog with piles.
The authorities had recognized that this was a dangerous situation. If enough slaves got angry enough to revolt, they could take over easily while their masters were helplessly drunk in the midst of the late evening orgy. The only way to prevent this was to double the number of slaves. In this way, a slave could put in four hours on the second shift and then go off to enjoy himself while another slave finished up for him. This did have its drawbacks. The slave that took over the last four hours had been whooping it up on his free time and so he was in no shape to work efficiently; But this could not be helped.
The additional slaves required had to be gotten from the freemen. So the authorities passed laws that a man could be enslaved if he spit on the sidewalk or overparked his horse and buggy. There were protests and riots against this legislation, of course. The government expected, in fact hoped for, these. They arrested the rebels and made them slaves. The sentence was retroactive; all their ancestors became slaves also.
Simon talked to a number of the slaves and found out that what he had suspected was true. Almost all the newly created slaves had come from the poor classes. The few from the upper class had been liberals. Somehow or other, the cops never saw a banker, a judge, or a businessman spit on the sidewalk.
Simon became apprehensive when he found out about this. There were so many laws that he didn’t know about. He could be enslaved if he forgot to go downwind before farting in the presence of a cop. He was assured, however, that he wasn’t subject to the laws.
“Not as long as you leave within two weeks,” his informant said. “We wouldn’t want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people.”
Simon didn’t comment. The analogy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.
One of Simon’s favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between diseases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earthman had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn’t let him out of the spaceship until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren’t equipped to handle. After he’d learned their language, he was told that this wasn’t so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps destroying it, with deadly thoughts.