Asimov's Science Fiction (16 page)

A pulse pumped in my neck. "My skin is softer than yours," I said.

Abruptly, Bubba and Jolly settled down, as though my explanation had bridged a conceptual gap that they couldn't cross by themselves.

"It is," said Bubba. "This gunnug differs from this bnebene."

I remain at a loss to explain my clan's gender disparity. During Golovlyov's sojourn with his Merchanter clan, he established, if only by the verbal evidence of his interview subjects, that bnebene genders are determined chromosomally and that bnebene have three chromosomes to determine gender, resulting in four viable combinations: two male and two female, with a fertile and sterile caste in each pair. Thus:

TU-breeder female

ST-breeder male

SU-female neuter

TT-male neuter

Golovlyov's observations of his host clan and other Merchanter bnebene confirmed roughly equal gender numbers.

The same should be true of my caravan clan. Yet the clan includes four neuter-mothers (three adult, one juvenile), three adult neuter-males, nine breeder-females (including three juveniles), and six related breeder-males (in caravan nomad society, the "hunter-males," two of which are juvenile). There are another four unrelated hunter-males traveling with the clan at present. I discount planted saplings, since they do not begin to express gender until after they uproot.

When I asked Bubba if he has any hunter-brothers who are not currently traveling with the clan, he replied, "There are seven little-brother-subfractions of this bnebene that are elsewhere."

Observations of other caravan nomads indicate that the clan's gender balance is usual for Tinkers, with breeder-male numbers consistently 40 to 50 percent higher than breeder-females. The difference is not readily explicable. It would be remarkable for females to be significantly less viable than males.

Bubba fell into step beside me as the clan ambled along beside the river after breaking camp. In his hands, he cradled the pot of a young sapling, its not-yet-animated trunk resting against his shoulder.

"Good morning," I said.

Bubba's habitual response to this greeting is to consider a moment before replying, "It is."

This morning, he hummed deep in his torso—a pre-verbalization, from the fact that my Babel offered no translation. After a lengthy pause, he asked, "What fractions has this gunnug?"

I felt a little thrill. Following from his prod at my leg a fortnight ago, this was only the second indication I'd had from him of active intellectual curiosity about me.

I answered deliberately, "I am one and whole."

"One?" he repeated.

I watched him closely. "Yes."

"Hree!" he cried, making me jump, and strode away, his leaf collar flared trembling stiff around his head.

"Hree!" I heard from his neuter-brothers further ahead.

I took a couple of deep, slow breaths, then jumped again as two more tall figures appeared abruptly on either side of me. A pair of the clan's hunter-males—Moose and Black Pete—their long rifles cradled in their arms.

Black Pete said, "Come, gunnug."

Bnebene hunter-males are very different creatures to their neuter-brothers. Bubba's "little brothers" exude a palpable aura of
purpose,
the way a gun has a sense of purpose. These I can well imagine as the clan's warrior defenders.

Moose and Black Pete steered me, sandwiched between them, over to where Pixie rode at the open front of one of the ondrordore. My mouth was very dry. Hell, I thought, they're going to kick me out. My bright future career was fading before my eyes.

Pixie said, "Gunnug, you must be circumspect in your dealings with big-brotherfraction. Big-brother-subfractions are the simplest of this bnebene and easily upset. They struggle to grasp that a gunnug person may have only one body."

"They are prone," said Black Pete, "to conflate 'confusion' with 'threat.' "

"This bnebene is concerned that the consequences for this gunnug, having only one body, could be very great," concluded Moose.

I swallowed a couple of times so that I could answer, relief tempered by an entirely new fear. The clan wasn't going to expel me, but, even as alarming as their recent reactions had been, I had not considered that the neuter-males' intellectual confusion could trigger an outburst of actual physical violence. I had no doubt over the amount of damage a bnebene neuter-male could do to an unprotected human. "I understand."

"It is well that you do," said Pixie. "Sister-fractions will be watching."

I am uncertain whether this was intended as a warning or a reassurance, or why Pixie's statement excluded the clan's hunter-males. Perhaps the female genders have greater sway over the neuter-males when they are distressed?

I avoided Bubba and his neuter-brothers for the rest of the day, but they came to me as I ate my dinner of dried apricots and yesterday's leftover rabbit.

The three of them squatted around me. Bubba put his potted sapling down by his side and repeated his question. "What fractions has this gunnug?"

For the first time, their great size seemed intimidating. I was sitting away from the main part of the camp, my mobile and interface pad propped up on my pack while I ate. None of the female bnebene were near. Black Pete stood in the river about twenty meters away with Silent Bob, one of the unrelated hunter-males. My mind raced.

I said, "I have many fractions and subfractions."

"Where are they?"

Damn. I wetted my lips. "Here."

In near unison, the three of them half stood, squatted again. "But where are the rest?"

Black Pete looked toward us. He started to wade out of the water.

"They are all here," I said.

"Hree!" Bubba rose, leaf collar stiffening and arms spreading wide in an obvious threat display.

"Hree!" Jolly and Big Red crowded in beside me.

Black Pete splashed ashore with stop-motion speed.

"How many subfractions has your fraction of this bnebene?" I asked Bubba, quickly.

His arms lowered. Their leaf collars drooped. Bubba squatted again. Black Pete slowed his charge.

"Three, now," said Bubba. "Four, soon." His fingers reached absently for the sapling.

I held out my bowl of dried apricots, knowing that they enjoy the flavor. Bubba took a wrinkled fruit and tucked it under his apron. Jolly and Big Red copied him, reaching over me. Trying to control the shaking of my hands, I resumed eating.

This interaction—along with my other, less alarming observations—supports the conclusion that the bnebene "person" is synonymous with the matrilineal kin group—encompassing both the eusocial, matrilocal clan and any related hunter-males living autonomously. Each gender set within the clan is, in Raffarinian terminology, a "fraction" of the person, and each member of the set is a "subfraction." The actual bnebene words translate literally as "essential part" and "smallest part," respectively. I have not yet observed any evidence that my clan members conceptualize themselves as anything other than parts of the collective whole.

That said, the fact that at least some of the clan can readily grasp that my person-hood is contained within my single body, superficially weighs in favor of Raffarin's position that the "dividual" bnebene person is an ideological construct and therefore consistent with her theory of the Universal Metaperson. However, even these members seem utterly perplexed that the label "Irene Matsui" should apply only to me, and that other Irenes are not then synonymous with me (not all "this Irene").

I have tried to explain to Pixie my conceptual need to apply nicknames to her and her clan members. She seems unable to distinguish which member of a gender set any given nickname refers to, even when I say, for example: "Chuckles is that sistermother-subfraction that is older than this sister-mother-subfraction." She grasps the kin relationship I'm referring to, but seems unable (or unwilling) to associate this with the label "Chuckles." It is the extremity of this behavior that led Golovlyov to his proposal that since bnebene are biologically eusocial, therefore their "dividualism" is biological—that is, bnebene personhood
fundamentally
resides at a group level and they can
only
conceptualize themselves in terms of their relationships.

Unfortunately, while I am inclined to sympathize with his view that Raffarin's theory is anthropocentric, because of Golovlyov's widely derided supplementary claims, intellectual association with anything more than his basic observations is a greased slope to scholarly oblivion.

Bubba and his neuter-brothers have been bringing their sapling to awareness. When we camp, they spend most of their days gathered around its planter box, singing low, rumbling songs from which my Babel is unable to discern any words. On days when the caravan moves, they have taken to carrying the sapling by turns, rather than loading it into the ondrordore with the rest. At the beginning and end of travel days, they sing to it for at least an hour.

The clan's several saplings are at varying stages of maturity and the progression is fascinating to see. At first, they have an appearance akin to sunflowers, having a long, straight stem and large, single flower head with two leaves just below it. As they mature, the lower part of the stem bifurcates, the leaves lengthen and shape into arms and the flower head hardens, olfactory fronds unfurl, and it grows into a face. By the time the sapling is ready to uproot, they look like a perfectly rendered, skeletally thin statue of a breeder-female. Visible gender characteristics, including the massive size of the male genders, develop after uprooting.

While Bubba, Jolly and Big Red have been singing to it, the sapling has slowly grown more animated, beginning with small flexing of its fingers and mouth parts, followed by full movement of the arms and head and, finally, articulation of the stem at the knee and hip joints. The climactic moment came this afternoon, when the sapling finally added its voice to those of its brothers.

"Yoom!" they all cried.

"Yoom!" the rest of the clan echoed.

A meal was had this evening, and the neuter-males took theirs squatted beside their new brother. It will be several weeks yet, I understand, before the freshly sapient bnebene is ready to uproot.

I am acutely aware that this opportunity is mine because Utopia is still a young, fringe colony at the back-end of the Line, and Nieu Bactria is the back-end of Utopia. I am the
only
qualified cultural sapientologist at NBU. Being Johnny-on-the-spot, I'd locked in the gig before more distant and better-credentialed colleagues could even hear of the opportunity. But even with this ethnography under my belt, I need to
add
something to the body of knowledge if I am to use it as a springboard up to that esteemed rank of scholars that includes Raffarin and the rest—that
should
have included Golovlyov. Now I have it.

Tonight I witnessed an event from which even Golovlyov was excluded: a mating ceremony.

Toward sunset, all of the adult bnebene gathered in the river. The neuter-males stood behind the neuter-mothers in an obvious protective position. The crowd of breeder-females and males, related and unrelated, faced them in a rough crescent. They sang, a low murmur without—to my human ears—any discernable melody, although I could feel a rhythmic pulse of their sub-sonic vocalizations. "Yoom" was repeated, and several semantically related words.

At the moment the sun's orb touched the horizon, three couples separated from the crowd and approached the neuter-mothers. Each couple comprised a clan member and an unrelated hunter-male. The three mating trios then waded out of the river and made their way to the ondrordore, each party shutting themselves inside a different vehicle-creature. The neuter-males followed, to stand guard outside.

Most remarkable is that one of the pairs who had approached the neuter-mothers was male-male—Black Pete and Silent Bob, who I observed in the river together a few days ago.

A final, curious, point of interest is that the remainder of the adults stayed in the river after the mating trios had shut themselves away. They remained quiet for some time, then gave three collective intonations of "Yoom," close together but not equally spaced. Shortly after, the breeder members of the mating trios emerged from the ondrordore.

That a neuter-mother is included in a non-breeding union prompts the speculation that homosexual relations among bnebene are required to follow the pattern of breeding relations in order to be socially sanctioned. The presence of some interstitial or malleable gender characteristics is also a possibility, but less likely. Previous ethnographic evidence indicates a remarkably strict alignment between ideological and biological gender categories among bnebene, and occurrences of intersexuality have not been recorded.

Since I have been permitted to observe this ceremony, I'm hopeful that Pixie and the other participants will consent to speak with me about it as well.

At dawn, Black Pete and several of the other hunter-males took their juvenile brothers out rabbiting. The neuter-mothers were carried down to the river and planted on their stools. When I tried to approach, Bubba and his neuter-brothers flared their leaf collars in a threat display. I retreated promptly. I was, however, able to observe that Pixie and Old Chook did not appear fully conscious in any case.

Interestingly, Chuckles—who had gone with Black Pete and Silent Bob—exhibited the same behavior. This suggests that intercourse, rather than impregnation, is what triggers catatonia in the mothers. A more intriguing possibility is that Chuckles's behavior is an
act,
part of the ritual of sanctioning the homosexual mating.

More excitement today: toward midday, as the camp drowsed, suddenly
every
member of the clan (except the neuter-mothers, who remained catatonic) leapt to their feet in the same instant and gave a collective cry of, "Hree!" Several minutes of intense agitation followed. The unrelated hunter-males, after their initial surprise, appeared unaffected.