Joe Haldeman - Seasons.pdf - Joe Haldeman - margozap

SEASONS

Transcripts edited from the last few hundred hours of recordings:

Maria

Forty-one is too young to die. I was never trained to be a soldier. Trained to survive, yes,

but not to kill or be killed.

That's the wrong way to start. Let me start this way.

As near as I can reckon, it's mid-noviembre, AC 238. I am Maria Rubera, chief

xenologist for the second Confederacion expedition to Sanchrist IV. I am currently

standing guard in the mouth of a cave while my five comrades try to sleep. I am armed with

a stone axe and flint spear and a pile of rocks for throwing. A cold rain is misting down,

and I am wearing only a stiff kilt and vest of wet rank fur. I am cold to the very heart but

we dare not risk a fire. The Plathys have too acute a sense of smell.

I am subvocalizing, recording this into my artificial bicuspid, one of which each of us

has; the only post–Stone Age artifacts in this cave. It may survive even if, as is probable, I

do not. Or it may not survive. The Plathys have a way of eating animals head first,

crunching up skull and brain while the decapitated body writhes at their feet or staggers

around, which to them is high humor. Innocent humor but ghastly. I almost came to love

them. Which is not to say I understand them.

Let me try to make this document as complete as possible. It gives me something to do. I

trust you have a machine that can filter out the sound of my teeth chattering. For a while I

could do the Zen trick to keep my teeth still. But I'm too cold now. And too certain of

death, and afraid.

My specialty is xenology but I do have a doctorate in historicultural anthropology, which

is essentially the study of dead cultures through the writings of dead anthropologists. In the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still

existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization

beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their

contact with civilization, but civilization by then could afford the luxury of science, and so

there are fairly complete records. The records are fascinating not only for the information

about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating cultures' unconscious

prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribes, and (by necessary

association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less

benignly destroyed them.

I will try not to stray from the point. That training is what led to my appointment as

leader of this band of cold, half-naked, probably doomed, pseudo-primitive scientists. We

do not repeat the errors of our forebears. We come to the primitives on equal terms, now,

so as not to contaminate their habit patterns by superior example. No more than is

necessary. Most of us do not bite the heads off living animals or exchange greetings by the

tasting of excrement.

Saying that and thinking of it goads me to go down the hill again. We designated a

latrine rock a few hundred meters away, in sight of the cave entrance but with no obvious

path leading here, to throw them off our scent at least temporarily. I will not talk while

going there. They also have acute hearing.

Back. Going too often and with too little result. Diet mostly raw meat in small amounts.

Only warm place on my body is the hot and itching anus. No proper hygiene in the Stone

Age. Just find a smooth rock. I can feel my digestive tract flourishing with worms and

bugs. No evidence yet, though, nor blood. Carlos Fleming started passing blood, and two

days later something burst and he died in a rush of it. We covered his body with stones.

Ground too frozen for grave-digging. He was probably uncovered and eaten.

It can't be the diet. On Earth I paid high prices for raw meat and fish and never suffered

except in the wallet. I'm afraid it may be a virus. We all are, and we indulge in discreet

copromancy, the divining of future events through the inspection of stools. If there is blood

your future will be short. Perhaps it was stress. We are under unusual stress. But I stray.

It was specifically my study of Eskimos that impressed the assigning committee.

Eskimos were small bands of hearty folk who lived in the polar regions of North America.

Like the Plathys, they were anagricultural carnivores, preying on herds of large animals,

sometimes fishing. The Plathys have no need for the Eskimos' fishing skills, since the sea

teems with life edible and stupid. But they prefer red meat and the crunch of bone, the

chewy liver and long suck of intestinal contents, the warm mush of brains. They are likable

but not fastidious. And not predictable, we learned to our grief.

Like the Eskimos, the Plathys relish the cold and become rather dull and listless during

the warm season. Sanchrist IV has no axial tilt, thus no "seasons" in the Terran sense, but

its orbit is highly elongated, so more than two thirds of its year (three and a half Terran

years) is spent in cold. We identified six discrete seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter,

dead winter, and thaw. The placid sea gets ice skim in mid-fall.

If you are less than totally ignorant of science, you know that Sanchrist IV is one of the

very few planets with not only earthlike conditions but with life forms that mimic our own

patterns of DNA. There are various theories explaining this coincidence, which cannot be

coincidence, but you can find them elsewhere. What this meant in terms of our conduct as

xenologists was that we could function with minimal ecological impact, living off the fat of

the land—and the blood and flesh and marrow, which did require a certain amount of

desensitization training. (Less for me than for some of the others, as I've said, since I've

always had an atavistic leaning toward dishes like steak tartare and sushi.)

Satellite observation has located 119 bands, or families, of Plathys, and there is no sign

of other humanoid life on the planet. All of them live on islands in a southern subtropical

sea—at least it would be subtropical on Earth—a shallow sea that freezes solid in dead

winter and can be walked over from late fall to early thaw. During the warm months, on

those occasions when they actually stir their bones to go someplace, they pole rafts from

island to island. During low tide, they can wade most of the way.

We set up our base in the tropics, well beyond their normal range, and hiked south

during the late summer. We made contact with a few individuals and small packs during

our month-long trek but didn't join a family until we reached the southern mountains.

The Plathys aren't too interesting during the warm months, except for the short mating

season. Mostly they loll around, conserving energy, living off the meat killed during the

thaw, which they smoke and store in covered holes. When the meat gets too old, or starts

running out, they do bestir themselves to fish, which takes little enough energy. The tides

are rather high in summer and fall, and all they have to do is stake down nets in the right

spots during high tide. The tide recedes and leaves behind flopping silver bounty. They

grumble and joke about the taste of it, though.

They accepted our presence without question, placidly sharing their food and shelter as

they would with any wayfaring member of another native family. They couldn't have

mistaken us for natives, though. The smallest adult Plathy weighs twice as much as our

largest. They stand about two and a half meters high and span about a meter and a half

across the shoulders. Their heads are more conical than square, with huge powerful jaws: a

mouth that runs almost ear to ear. Their eyes are set low, and they have mucous-membrane

slits in place of external ears and noses. They are covered with sparse silky fur, which

coarsens into thick hair on their heads, shoulders, armpits, and groins (and on the males'

backs). The females have four teats defining the corners of a rectangular slab of lactiferous

fatty tissue. The openings we thought were their vaginas are almost dorsal, with the cloacal

openings toward the front. The male genitals are completely ventral, normally hidden under

a mat of hair. (This took a bit of snooping. In all but the hottest times and mating season,

both genders wear a "modest" kilt of skin.)

We had been observing them about three weeks when the females went into estrus—

every mature female, all the same day. Their sexuality was prodigious.

Everybody shed their kilts and went into a week-long unrelenting spasm of sexual

activity. There is nothing like it among any of the sentient cultures—or animal species!—

that I have studied. To call it an orgy would be misleading and, I think, demeaning to the

Plathys. The phenomenon was more like a tropism, in plants, than any animal or human

instinct. They quite simply did not do anything else for six days.

The adults in our family numbered eighty-two males and nineteen females (the terrible

reason for the disparity would become clear in a later season), so the females were engaged

all the time, even while they slept. While one male copulated, two or three others would be

waiting their turn, prancing impatiently, masturbating, sometimes indulging in homosexual

coupling. ("Indulging" is the wrong word. There was no sense that they took pleasure in

any sexual activity; it was more like the temporary relief of a terrible pressure that quickly

built up again.) They attempted coupling with children and with the humans of my

expedition. Fortunately, for all their huge strength they are rather slow and, for all the

pressure of their "desire," easily deflected. A kick in the knee was enough to send them

stumping off toward someone else.

No Plathys ate during the six days. They slept more and more toward the end of the

period, the males sometimes falling asleep in the middle of copulation. (Conversely, we

saw several instances of involuntary erection and ejaculation while sleeping.) When it was

finally over, everyone sat around dazed for a while, and then the females retired to the

storage holes and came back with armloads of dried and smoked meat and fish. Each one

ate a mountain of food and fell into a coma.

There are interesting synchronies involved. At other times of the year, this long period of

vulnerability would mean extinction of the family or of the whole species, since they

evidently all copulate at the same time. But the large predators from the north do not swim

down at that time of year. And when the litters were dropped, about 500 days later, it

would be not long after the time of easiest food gathering, as herds of small animals

migrated north for warmth.

Of course we never had a chance to dissect a Plathy. It would have been fascinating to

investigate the internal makeup that impels the bizarre sexual behavior. External

observation gives some hint as to the strangeness. The vulva is a small opening, a little over

a centimeter in extent, that stays sealed closed except when the female is in estrus. The

penis, normally an almost invisible nub, becomes a prehensile purple worm about

twentycentimeters long. No external testicles; there must be an internal reservoir (quite

large) for seminal fluid.

The anatomical particulars of pregnancy and birth are even more strange. The females

become almost immobilized, gaining perhaps fifty percent in weight. When it comes time

to give birth, the female makes an actual skeletal accommodation, evidently similar to the

way a snake unhinges its jaw when ingesting large prey. It is obviously quite painful. The

vulva (or whatever new name applies to that opening) is not involved; instead, a slit opens

along the entire perineal area, nearly half a meter long, exposing a milky white membrane.

The female claws the membrane open and expels the litter in a series of shuddering

contractions. Then she pushes her pelvic bones back into shape with a painful grinding

sound. She remains immobile and insensate for several days, nursing. The males bring

females food and clean them during this period.

None of the data from the first expedition had prepared us for this. They had come

during dead winter and stayed one (terran) year, so they missed the entire birth cycle. They

had noted that there were evidently strong taboos against discussing sexual matters and

birth. I think "taboo" is the wrong word. It's not as if there were guilt or shame associated

with the processes. Rather, they appear to enter a different state of consciousness when the

females are in heat and giving birth, a state that seems to blank out their verbal intelligence.

They can no more discuss their sexuality than you or I could sit and chat about how our

pancreas was doing.

There was an amusing, and revealing, episode after we had been with the family for

several months. I had been getting along well with Tybru, a female elder with unusual

linguistic ability. She was perplexed at what one of the children had told her.

The Plathys have no concept of privacy; they wander in and out of each other's maffas

(the yurtlike tents of hide they use as shelter) at any time of the day or night, on random

whim. It was inevitable that sooner or later they would observe humans having sex. The

child had described what she'd seen fairly accurately. I had tried to explain human sexuality

to Tybru earlier, as a way to get her to talk about that aspect of her own life. She would

smile and nod diagonally through the whole thing, an infuriating gesture they normally use

only with children prattling nonsense.

This time I was going to be blunt. I opened the maffa flap so there was plenty of light,

then shed my kilt and got up on a table. I lay down on my back and tried to explain with

simple words and gestures what went where and who did what to whom, and what might or

might not happen nine months later.

She was more inclined to take me seriously this time. (The child who had witnessed

copulation was four, pubescent, and thus too old to have fantasies.) After I explained she

explored me herself, which was not pleasant, since her four-fingered hand was larger than a

human foot, quite filthy, and equipped with deadly nails.

She admitted that all she really understood was the breasts. She could remember some

weeks of nursing after the blackout period the female language calls "(big) pain-in-hips."

(Their phrase for the other blackout period is literally "pain-in-the-ass.") She asked,

logically enough, whether I could find a male and demonstrate.

Actually, I'm an objective enough person to have gone along with it, if I could have

found a man able and willing to rise to the occasion. If it had been near the end of our stay,

I probably would have done it. But leadership is a ticklish thing, even when you're leading

a dozen highly educated, professionally detached people, and we still had three years to go.

I explained that the most-elder doesn't do this with the men she's in charge of, and Tybru

accepted that. They don't have much of a handle on discipline, but they do understand

polity and social form. She said she would ask the other human females.

Perhaps it should have been me who did the asking, but I didn't suggest it. I was glad to

get off the hook, and also curious as to my people ' s reactions.

The couple who volunteered were the last ones I would have predicted. Both of them

were shy, almost diffident, with the rest of us. Good field workers but not the sort of people

you would let your hair down with. I suppose they had better "anthropological perspective"

on their own behavior than the rest of us.

At any rate, they retired to the maffa that was nominally Tybru's, and she let out the

ululation that means "All free females come here." I wondered whether our couple could

actually perform in a cramped little yurt filled with sweaty giants asking questions in a

weird language.

All the females did crowd into the tent, and after a couple ofminutes a strange sound

began to emanate from them. At first it puzzled me, but then I recognized it as laughter! I

Joe Haldeman - Seasons.pdf

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