CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO  Outpost, Refiner Camp

Everything was a bit stuck until Pete got stronger. He was the only one of the League group empowered to discuss much of anything with any real authority. He was prepared to discuss technology trades, exchanges of ambassadors (or whatever the local equivalent was), and most importantly, a mutual assistance pact against the Guards and the Nihilists. But it would have to wait—and the flap over the transfusion made the situation that much more delicate.

All the humans were dumbfounded by the way L'awdasi, by all accounts a mere hobbyist in such things, had duplicated human blood overnight, but Charlie Sisulu was hit much harder by it than the rest. He knew better than the others just how complicated blood was. And if one amateur Outposter could do that overnight, what could a team of crack professionals do in a week, given the raw materials of a few human cells to work with? Clone a man? Clone an army of men? If they could make blood, surely they could make diseases, nightmare plagues. And none of them had even seen a human before last year. And with such biological power, what could they do to each other? With a biological science that powerful, Charlie could almost understand the medical tabu. Better the thousand natural shocks than the unnatural horrors a thousand L'awdasis might accidentally whip up any weekend.

And yet, it didn't quite play. Any element of human medicine could be abused, used to kill, from a scalpel used to slash a throat to an overdose of aspirin. Humankind had had the knowledge to unleash plagues at will for one hundred fifty years—but that didn't make anyone want to ban doctors.

Well, no percentage in playing until he understood the game. And Charlie did not yet know enough.

Lucy had mentioned to C'astille that Charlie was a biologist, and C'astille had instantly wanted to talk with him. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask. Charlie, needless to say, was delighted with the chance himself. So, an hour or two after getting the message safely off to Ariadne, C'astille met the two humans by the entrance of their wagon and the three of them went for a walk. C'astille led them to a quiet corner of the clearing. The two humans sat down on the ground, a bit awkward in their pressure suits. C'astille folded her legs up beneath herself and curled her long tail around her body. Lucy thought the moment proper to offer her gift, the big picture book of Earth and the solar system. She pulled it out of her carrypack. "Here you go, C'astille," she said. "Take a look at this and you'll be all set to play tourist when you get there."

C'astille took the book eagerly, and spent a half hour with the humans, pointing to the pictures and asking endless questions. Lucy was pleased to have chosen a gift her friend enjoyed so much. It was good to get to safety, to the protection of the Refiners. The biggest part of her duty seemed to have been done. Charlie seemed far less relaxed. He found it very strange and incongruous to sit back in the grasslands, here on this world, with the sun shining, the sky blue, the area cleared of rapacious animals. To Charlie, Outpost would always be that deadly trek through the forest, and all the planet's other moods mere trickery and misdirection.

It was stranger still to sit with a six-limbed thinking creature nearly the size of a small horse, with a long reptilian tail, and big doll's eyes set in the front of that strange, egg-on-its-side-shaped skull—a creature who thought nothing of creating whole human blood from scratch overnight.

He found himself watching her hands most of all. Four long, slender fingers, all opposable to each other. Those were graceful, toolmakers' hands, strange to watch in their fluid motions that did what human hands did, but in a radically different way.

Finally, he got a bit tired of Lucy and the 'Poster oohing and aahing over pictures of Paris and the Outback and the space colonies. "C'astille," he said at last, in as cheerful a tone as he could manage. "We need to get started. I am so curious about you and your world! You said you wished to ask me questions, and I promise you I can match you, bafflement for bafflement. Time is short, so perhaps we might begin?"

C'astille nodded and regretfully closed the picture book. "You are right. The lovely pictures must wait until later. You have travelled far, at great risk, and the time might come quickly when we will need knowledge of each other."

"Good!" Charlie replied. "But let me say one more thing. Our peoples are quite strange to each other, and there is much we would Know. Some questions might be delicate, but we have no way of knowing which ones. So if I speak rudely, I do not mean to, and I ask that you excuse me. Lucy and I will likewise not take offense, for we know none is meant."

"Thank you!" C'astille said. "I have been hunting the words to say that to you. I am glad you found them for me. And I'll test your promise about taking offense at once," she said with a cheerful tone. "L'awdasi, in the non-incident of this morning, noted something about your genes. Due to their structure, they are far less liable to mutation than our own. That would suggest that your species should look much more like one another than ours does—and yet just the opposite is true."

Charlie smiled thinly. He thought of a lot of people back home on Earth who would say otherwise—"they all look the same to me." Black, yellow, white, whatever, he had heard people of every color say that about people of every other color. "Let me save you some time, C'astille. You're leading up to asking why I in particular look so much more different than the other humans you have seen. Why is my skin so dark, why is my hair curly, why are my nose and lips wider?"

"Yes, I suppose that you're one example. But this Mac M'Larson must be twice the size of Lucy here, and she and Joslyn have quite different proportions than the rest of you."

Charlie found himself vaguely embarrassed. What could this extraterrestrial know of racial tension, of guilt and anger for deeds done a hundred, a thousand years before? She asked about variation in a population and he got his back up on the old prejudices. "Hmmm. Well, let me explain my case. Maybe that would help illustrate the others. Forgive me if I simplify a bit, but here is the basic explanation.

"All our people probably started out looking pretty much alike, when they all lived in one place, one climate. But our race, homo sapiens, humankind, had settled over pretty much all of our home world, Earth, by about forty thousand years ago, maybe a bit earlier. Some people lived in cold parts that didn't get much sun. Mac's ancestors came from such a place. Light-skinned people can absorb a lot of something in sunlight that humans need to stay healthy, because their skin is transparent enough to let in a large fraction of the light. My ancestors grew up in a place with very strong sunlight. Their skin needed to be dark to protect them from getting too much light.

"In Mac's part of the world, if your skin was too dark, you were likely to get sick and die from a lack of this special thing in sunlight. So mostly light-skinned people, with genes for light skin, survived to pass on their genes. In my part of the world, if you were too light-skinned the sun was so strong it could kill you. So only darker people, with genes for dark skin, survived. People in temperate climates survived best with a skin color somewhere in the middle. Once people had invented civilization, and could control their environments more, it didn't really matter what color you were, so there were no selection pressures for one shade over another and people moved about as they wished. The other differences between us have similar explanations. The people who survived in various spots on the globe and lived to have children were the ones who, by chance, had traits and genes for those traits that gave them a little edge over everyone else. Obviously, they passed their genes on to their children. But in terms of evolution, these differences are trivial. We are all one species, but with each individual still carrying around adaptations to whatever climate his or her ancestors lived in.'

The explanation didn't seem to satisfy C'astille altogether. "I see. But while she was with us, Lucy's skin grew darker, and she explained this was a reaction to the sunlight. Suppose that she bore children while she was here and her skin was dark. Wouldn't those children start out darker, inheriting the tendency for darker skin?"

"No, no, of course not. That would be inheritance of acquired traits. Let's see. What would be a clearer example? Okay. There's an animal on Earth called a giraffe. It has a very long neck, perhaps two meters long, and the long neck helps it eat leaves at the tops of trees no other animal can reach.

"Long ago, it used to be thought that some short-necked proto-giraffe managed to stretch its neck through exercise, and passed that slightly longer neck along to its offspring, and the offspring did the same, and so on. The theory had the physical shape of the body affecting the genes, and not the other way around. That's the classic example of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or Lamarckism, after the man who thought of it. But it doesn't work."

C'astille looked straight at Charlie, and pulled her head in toward her body in surprise. "On Outpost, it does work," she said, in a strange, querulous voice. "If I cut off my finger, within a month the regulator cells of my body will record the change and implant it in my ovaries. My children, and their children, and theirs, will have a finger missing. Or perhaps they will carry the gene for a missing finger from one generation to the next, until it shows up again, after skipping many generations."

Charlie stared back at her, astonished. Real, honest-to-God Lamarckian biology? It was incredible, but it explained so much. He was tempted to contradict her, to say that it must be a superstition, that she had to be wrong. But these people were master biologists. They would know. The implications went reeling through his head. It was a revelation of the greatest importance. Lamarckism! It must have shaped their skill in modifying and creating life forms. It must have been easy to create a new and different animal with simple surgery. They would have been past masters at bio-engineering before they even invented the microscope and learned to manipulate genes directly.

All of that shot through his mind in a moment. "That's fantastic, C'astille," he almost shouted. "It's so unexpected, so astonishing I don't know what to say. The implications— my God, they're endless!"

Lucy looked from her human companion to the Ourposter and back. There was a strange sense in the air, a feeling of being on the edge of a terrible truth. "Charlie—C'astille. What's the big deal? You both look so shocked. So Outposters and humans evolve in different ways. So what?"

"Lucy," C'astille said, speaking with a cautious precision. "Charlie and I have just stumbled across a fact that explains many of the differences between our peoples. It makes you more different from us than I had ever imagined. We Z'ensam wondered at your lack of skill in shaping life. Now I understand. It must take a dozen generation to shape even the slightest modification of Earth life. Given the restraint you have worked under, I am amazed that you have learned as much as you have."

Charlie wasn't listening. A thousand new ideas were racing through his head. "Medicine!" he cried out, so wrapped up in his own amazement that he didn't consider the results of what he was saying. "Given Lamarckian biology, the tabu against medicine makes sense! A clumsy doctor's mistake could cripple not just one person, but all the generations unborn. An early experiment, say equivalent to boring a hole in the skull to let evil spirits out, could literally leave scars that would last forever. If the genes were recessive, old artificial genetic flaws like that lie dormant and could pop up anywhere, anytime, dozens of generations later!"

They do 'pop up,' " C'astille said grimly, "to the present generation. We pay the price for the mischief the body-carvers made thousands of years ago. There are endless folktales of the too-proud fool who promised to 'solve' an illness and left a hideous wreck of a creature behind, one who would pass her deformities down through the genes of all her descendants." C'astille's powerful tail lashed angrily back and forth through the grass. She suddenly seemed much larger, much fiercer, more alien, more unknowable, more unreadable to Lucy than she ever had before. "Lucy, you must answer a most distasteful question. This Charlie has implied that medicine in not tabu among humans. Is this true? Does your kind willingly and shamelessly allow the body-carvers, the animal-healers, to play God with your bodies?"

Lucy was tempted to lie. There was nothing but trouble in an honest answer. But she thought of Peter Gesseti and his bandaged arm. It would be hard to hide that. Worse, C'astille counted Lucy as trustworthy, and being worthy of trust required that Lucy speak truly when the truth could but hurt her. She spoke at last, and spoke slowly, choosing each word. "There is no tabu against medicine. We call our body-carvers 'doctors' and hold their profession in the highest esteem. In its own way, the skill of our healers is as great as the skill of your bio-engineers. They have eliminated many diseases and causes of death. Our race has benefited greatly from medicine, and for creatures made as we are, there is no cause to ban the practice of healing."

To C'astille, it was as if Lucy had claimed there was no harm in being a child molester, or a murderer. "Revulsion is within me,' the native said in her own tongue.

Lucy almost switched to O-l as well to placate C'astille. But no, then Charlie would be left in the dark. And Lucy knew C'astille well enough to know that shifting away from English was a way of rejecting things human. She couldn't let her get away with that. Lucy replied in English. "C'astille! Judge not. My ways are not yours. Your culture and mine were shaped by our biology. I have heard time and time again about frequent, even routine, death by suicide and murder among your elderly. No words of this have been spoken between us, for one must not judge what one does not understand. / still have no understanding. Yet, among humans, such things would be grave crimes, sins of the darkest kind. Your complaints against the Nihilists are subdued, as if you mildly objected to some of their techniques. To me, they are merciless, amoral killers.

"The early would-be healers among the Z'ensam killed and maimed, and so you banned healing. So be it. Very well. It must be that your clinging to that tabu means your people die of infection and injury and illness, though with your current skill you could save them. But I will not judge.

"Our healers save our lives, and our children's lives, and do great good. I do not apologize for them, or for us."

C'astille grunted, a deep, guttural, non-committal noise, before she replied. "You say that you do not condone suicide and mercy killing for those humans near Division, 'elderly' as you say. You call it amoral. What honor, what morality, in letting them go their way to foolishness and idiocy?'

"You make my point for me. Foolishness and idiocy rarely come to an elder human. Some small number, yes. But the risk is small."

"Then humans remain sane after Division, after becoming implanters?" There was shocked surprise in C'astille's voice.

Lucy opened her mouth to reply, shut it, and stared at C'astille. It all fell into place. It was in that moment that Lucy finally understood. The cryptic remarks, the Out-poster's confusion over pronouns, the obsession with "Division" made sense. Terrible, nightmare sense. She wished desperately for time to think, but there was none. This was the moment. "Charlie, I've just figured it out! C'astille, there is a horrible, ghastly misunderstanding here, and it's all my fault, because all the human understanding of your culture is based on my work, my initial translation of your language. And I made a terrible mistake. From the first time I heard the term 'Division* I assumed it was a euphemism, a prettied-up, polite word for 'death.' But that's wrong. It means something else, doesn't it?"

"Death!" C'astille said in amazement. "No! Division is—Division is the revenge Life takes on us for our intelligence. That is what the Nihilists, and all the other similar Groups of the past, have had as a starting point. To them, death is a welcome means of escape from Division. Our studiers of society say that our population has never been large enough to support a city-based culture because so many escape into death."

Lucy nodded emphatically. "This is all suddenly making sense in my mind. Let me ask you another question. The English terms 'male' and 'female,' 'man' and 'woman'—what do they mean to you?"

C'astille clenched and unclenched her fingers, the Outposter equivalent of a shrug. "They refer to the two basic body shapes for humans. You are female, and Charlie is male. That much I understand. But you have always attached great importance to the concepts, and to using the proper pronoun for male and female. I've never quite understood why. Why do your pronouns focus on that minor a difference? Why not a pronoun-set based on height, or eye color? Such would make as much sense."

"Did you ever get the idea that the reason might have something to do with—Jesus, Charlie, me and my bloody Baptist upbringing! I don't think I ever got around to explaining the words 'sex' or 'reproduction. C'astille, did you ever get the idea 'male' and 'female' might refer to the way humans make more humans?"

"No, not really. Perhaps in the vaguest little way, some slight hint, but I did not wish to ask about such a distasteful thing."

"Ah!” Charlie couldn't contain himself anymore. "Excuse us a minute, C'astille. I think I just need to have Lucy bring me up to date." He pulled the phono jack from his suit and plugged it into the comm panel on Lucy's suit. Both of them cut their external mikes and radio. "Lucy, what's going on here?" he demanded. "How could they not have the concepts of male and female? I got a good look at C'astille and that L'awdasi. They were both obviously female. And I saw some little ones around the camp."

"Charlie. Take a look around at all the Z'ensam when we're back at camp. All of them look to be obviously female.' Until now I took it to mean that appearances were deceiving, or else they had some sort of divided society. I never figured it out. Until now. Shut up and listen. And for God's sake, if you have to talk, be careful what you say." Lucy pulled the connection, and switched her radio back on.

Lucy felt her heart pounding. She knew, somehow she knew, that she was at the crux of everything, at the threshold of the central feat of being an Outposter, a Z'ensam. And she also knew that there was danger, terrible danger, in the knowledge. "Our apologies, C'astille. Charlie wasn't clear on why I was asking such things," she said in a gentle, quiet voice. "Tell me something. Tell me the life cycle of the Z'ensam. Tell me it as if I knew nothing. Tell me the way you'd explain it to a child."

C'astille stared at Lucy for a long moment. "There is a rhyme for young ones," she said at last. "Well, let me try and recite the sense of it in English for Charlie's benefit:

"First there are babies, to play and learn.

Then the adults, to bear young, reason, and teach.

Then the adult is taken by Division in the cocoon s fast

womb. At last, the implanter, more foolish than any child, is

flown from its cocoon, reason having flown long ago. Bewitched by the implanter, the adult makes children,

and so the middle link joins end with beginning."

Lucy said "C'astille, I think I understand. But there must be no mistakes. The time has come when we must risk knowing each other, even if we don't like what we find. Tell me."

"You are right. That poem is so cryptic that I must say more. Especially to aliens. But, please, this is very difficult for me, for any Z'ensam, to speak of. Your medicine is polite conversation by comparison! So—each individual goes through the phases—child, born to adult. Adult, such as myself. There is no clear line between child and adult. One day it is recognized that a child has learned enough. It was a proud day when I was called C'astille and not O'astille, O' being the name-prefix of a child. The name prefixes are based on social status, by the way, not biological state. Someday, I will be M'astille, and then perhaps D'astille. I am still young, and there are perhaps thirty of your years before I must face the process of Division, the next biological phase. When Division comes, it takes only a few days. The first sign is a long red welt that forms down the length of the body.

"That is the sign for a Z'ensam to find a safe place. The body—collapses. The skin turns rock-hard to protect against predators. Internally, the body—I do not know a better English word—the body digests itself, reforms itself. Only a very small fraction of the body weight emerges from the body-cocoon, as an implanter.

"These implanters, then—when they find an adult who is ready to bear young, they—they come to that adult, join with the adult. They place within the adult their seed, which combines with the adult's seed, and grows into children, born some months later. When the implanter comes for you it is a terrible and debasing experience. It has only happened a few times to me, and as yet I have no children. But, when the implanter comes you are compelled, by feelings and sensations strong beyond imagining, to submit and cooperate. Nature would have it so, or else the Z'ensam would be no more. But be it unavoidable, be it beyond our control, be it necessary, we find it shameful to be taken so by the mindless implanters, and mortifying to know we will one day be like them. So we do not fault the Nihilists overmuch for offering escape.

"That is our way. I have gradually realized your way is different. Now you must explain it."

A thousand thoughts flashed through Lucy's mind, and she wished desperately for a chance to talk with Charlie privately. But C'astille was already suspicious; another humans-only chat would make it seem as if they were lying, trying to make up a story.

But no wonder the 'Posters didn't understand the male/ female dichotomy. Each 'Poster was first sentient female— adult—and later non-sentient male—implanter—in turn. Whether or not you had a mind was more important in defining yourself than what shape your genitals were. Female/male was submerged under thinking/nonthinking. Lucy knew how careful she would have to be in her answer. "It is quite different. One is born either an immature adult or immature implanter. In either case, one grows up, lives and dies as one or the other. The two kinds come together, as you two kinds do, and the adults bear the children, usually only one at a time."

There was a strange, half envious, half-astonished tone to C'astille's voice when she responded. "You—you adults. You never lose the power of thought? You remain sane and wise all your lives?"

"The vast majority do. But as the body ages and wears out, occasionally the brain, the seat of the mind, wears out as well, and in such cases the mind weakens with the brain. But this is much rarer than it once was." The moment Lucy had finished the last sentence, she wished she had withheld it

" 'Less often' thanks to your wonderful medicine, no doubt," C'astille said bitterly. She shook her head, a human mannerism she had picked up. "Whatever god formed your kind was kindlier than our creators. My life, my culture, my people, are formed, warped, distorted by the certainty that madness and idiocy will overtake any who do not choose to flee the world by suicide. To have the foreknowledge that I would stay sane ..."

"C'astille." Charlie spoke, for the first time in a long time. Philosophy was all very well, but they needed more hard facts. Where the hell were the males? "I would like to ask for something, a favor. It might not be possible for you to do it, or it might be painful or distasteful for you. If so, I withdraw the request. But I would like to see one of your kind in the implanter phase."

The skin on the Outposter's head wrinkled up in humorless amusement. "Then you have seen them and not known it. Did you not know what they were, Lucy? Did you not wonder why we kept them around? Come, I will show you." Abruptly, she got to her feet and trotted off into the underbrush, forcing the humans to scramble after to keep up. "Let me ask you another two words I never quite learned, Lucy." C'astille stared straight ahead, not looking back at her companions, and there was a brittle sharpness to her voice. "The adult who gave birth to me, what is the English for that? And what would you call the responsible implanter."

Lucy ran to catch up, drew up alongside C'astille's head. In a low, hushed, voice, Lucy said "Mother. The English is mother. And the implanter who joined with her to form you—that would be your father."

"Ah. I see. Thank you." C'astille slowed her pace slightly. "We'll be there in a few minutes."

Lucy trudged along in her armored pressure-suit cocoon, shielded from the stench and the dangers of Outpost, only the visual beauty of the day able to penetrate to her. She felt tired, ashamed, guilty, appalled. Madness! Madness, idiocy, and the foreknowledge of coming madness and idiocy the common lot of every person. Nature, Earth's kindly Mother Nature, had shielded her children far better. Could humans have built a culture if their biological heritage had been as cruel as the Z'ensams'? The caravans, the fledgling cities, the tiny population that wouldn't—no, she realized, couldn't control the rapacious Hungry Ones. Those were accomplishments to rival anything humans had done, in the face of such a mocking, demeaning life cycle.

C'astille led them into a tiny glade. "They like this place, when we camp here. It is near us, and yet they can play undisturbed. They will be nearby." C'astille raised her head and let out a strange, high-pitched keening.

It took Lucy a second or two to recognize that call. That was the sound they used to call the—

And there they were. Stumblebugs. Wings flapping, coming from all around them, fluttering down to landings in the grass. The laughing, giggling comedians, the silly pets the Z'ensam kept, the pretty, multi-colored, cat-sized flying beasts that Lucy had loved to play with, the cute little things that knew a word or two of 0-1. Lucy had even taught a few of them a word or two of English.

She recognized one of them. The most foolish of them all, the one she had named Zipper for the way he flew so fest.

Zipper spotted Lucy, and let out a cheerful squeak. He hopped over to her, swished his tail back and forth, and chirped "Cookie? Cookie?"

In a voice near to breaking, C'astille said "Lucy M'Calder. Charlie M'Sisulu. Allow me to present Ameser, whom you call Zipper. Allow me to present my father."

"Cookie?"

Lucy tried to speak, but the tears welled up in eyes, ran down her cheek. Her voice choked up, and she let out a strangled sob. She raised her hands to her face, tried to wipe away the tears, but the helmet stopped her hands. She sobbed uncontrollably.

Charlie felt his bile rising, felt the urge to run home to Earth, to claw his way up the sky to a place where the rules of life were not so brutish. These were civilized people, but their creator was a barbarian.

"Cookie?"

Slowly, all too slowly, Lucy forced herself to be calm. She tried to think coldly, to analyze. The irony of it! For she could see at once that culture-making, intelligence itself, were lethal mutations here. From the point of view of a reproductive strategy, from the viewpoint of evolution, the transition of each individual from female to male made good sense. The ancestors of the Z'ensam, who had not yet evolved intelligence, must have been served well by the pattern of their lives. It was the females, the mothers, that needed the smarts, the big brains, the brawn, to shelter and protect the children. And child rearing would be a shared duty in a herd species. The herds, ancestors of the Groups, would have cooperated in raising young. And the males, the flying males, would have been capable of travelling great distances, keeping the gene pool well mixed in the small, widely dispersed population. They could spread any advantageous mutation rapidly, and also ensure that the species stayed genetically cohesive. And each individual had a double chance to spread her/his genes around.

Only when the females developed true sentience, only when they developed the ability to reason and remember and communicate, would the strategy backfire. A thinking creature would know she was the offspring of a mindless animal, fated to mate with an animal, fated to become an animal.

How many humans, suffering brain damage or disease, confronted with the prospect of madness, had killed themselves rather than degenerate? And that happened to all the Z'ensaml

No wonder it was impossible for them to maintain a stable population. No wonder it was easy to find empty camps, the building left by some group of Z'ensam that had just given up. . . .

Lucy thought of her own mother, still strong and sturdy, warm-hearted and sharp-witted, if a bit grayed and tired. Senility, at worst a faint and far-off danger, was nowadays largely preventable. And her father. Her strong, happy, laughing, clever, kindly father, full of wisdom and understanding when his children needed him.

What would she, Lucy, be like, what bitterness would every human child carry inside, if they knew their fathers were mindless brutes?

"Well, then," C'astille said. She looked down at the pathetic, bewildered Zipper, the little fool wondering why his friends were all so sad. "You have seen my future. A gibbering fool who can be trained, with great effort, to ask for a cookie. And this will not happen to you, and that will scar the relations of our species for the rest of time. That saddens me.

"But, I must confess some curiosity. Something I have wondered about, and never dared to ask. But you have seen ours, and turnabout is fair play. You didn't bring them along, of course. But tell me about them. Describe your implanters to me."

Charlie looked sharply at Lucy. My God, he thought, Lucy's little description of our life cycle—she left out that males had minds! C'astille still thinks I'm a female! He caught Lucy's eye, and she nodded. The truth was going to be bad news, probably disastrous. But they owed C'astille the truth, and lying would only make the inevitable discovery of the truth even worse later on. "We did bring 'em along," he said. "Our name for an adult is 'female.' Our name for an implanter is 'male.' You're talking to one of each."