The Nail and the Oracle (30 page)

The pre-Nova ancient Plato tells of the earliest human, a quadruped with two sexes. And one terrible night in a storm engendered by the forces of evil, all the humans were torn in two; and ever since, each has sought the other half of itself. Any two of opposite sexes can make something, but it is usually incomplete in some way. But when one part finds its true other half, no power on earth can keep them apart, nor drive them apart once they join. This happened that night, beginning at some moment so deep in sleep that neither could ever remember it. What happened to each was all the way into new places where nothing had ever been before, and it was forever. The essence of such a thing is acceptance, and lest he be judged, Charli Bux ceased to judge quite so much and began to learn something of the ways of life around him. Life around him certainly concealed very little. The children slept where they chose. Their sexual play was certainly no more enthusiastic or more frequent than any other kind of play—and no more concealed. There was very much less talk about sex than he had ever encountered in any group of any age. He kept on working hard, but no longer to conceal facts from himself. He saw a good many things he had not permitted himself to see before, and found to his surprise that they were not, after all, the end of the world.

He had one more very, very bad time coming to him. He sometimes slept in Tyng’s room, she sometimes in his. Early one morning he awoke alone, recalling some elusive part of the work, and got up and padded down to her room. He realized when it was too late to ignore it what the soft singing sound meant; it was very much later that he was able to realize his fury at the discovery that this special song was not his alone to evoke. He was in her room before he could stop himself, and out again, shaking and blind.

He was sitting on the wet earth in the green hollow under a willow when Vorhidin found him. (He never knew how Vorhidin had
accomplished this, nor for that matter how he had come there himself.) He was staring straight ahead and had been doing so for so long that his eyeballs were dry and the agony was enjoyable. He had forced his fingers so hard down into the ground that they were buried to the wrists. Three nails were bent and broken over backwards and he was still pushing.

Vorhidin did not speak at all at first, but merely sat down beside him. He waited what he felt was long enough and then softly called the young man’s name. Charli did not move. Vorhidin then put a hand on his shoulder and the result was extraordinary. Charli Bux moved nothing visibly but the cords of his throat and his jaw, but at the first touch of the Vexveltian’s hand he threw up. It was what is called clinically “projectile” vomiting. Soaked and spattered from hips to feet, dry-eyed and staring, Charli sat still. Vorhidin, who understood what had happened and may even have expected it, also remained just as he was, a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Say the words!” he snapped.

Charli Bux swiveled his head to look at the big man. He screwed up his eyes and blinked them, and blinked again. He spat sour out of his mouth, and his lips twisted and trembled. “Say the words,” said Vorhidin quietly but forcefully, because he knew Charli could not contain them but had vomited rather than enunciate them. “Say the words.”

“Y-y—” Charli had to spit again. “You,” he croaked. “You—her
father!”
he screamed, and in a split second he became a dervish, a windmill, a double flail, a howling wolverine. The loamy hands, blood-muddy, so lacked control from the excess of fury that they never became fists. Vorhidin crouched where he was and took it all. He did not attempt to defend himself beyond an occasional small accurate movement of the head, to protect his eyes. He could heal from almost anything the blows might do, but unless the blows were spent, Charli Bux might never heal at all. It went on for a long time because something in Charli would not show, probably would not even feel, fatigue. When the last of the resources was gone, the collapse was sudden and total. Vorhidin knelt grunting, got painfully to his feet, bent dripping blood over the unconscious Terran, lifted
him in his arms, and carried him gently into the house.

Vorhidin explained it all, in time. It took a great deal of time, because Charli could accept nothing at all from anyone at first, and then nothing from Vorhidin, and after that, only small doses. Summarized from half a hundred conversations, this is the gist:

“Some unknown ancient once wrote,” said Vorhidin, “ ‘Tain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you do know that ain’t so.’ Answer me some questions. Don’t stop to think. (Now that’s silly. Nobody off Vexvelt ever stops to think about incest. They’ll say a lot, mind you, and fast, but they don’t think.) I’ll ask, you answer. How many bisexual species—birds, beasts, fish, and insects included—how many show any sign of the incest taboo?”

“I really couldn’t say. I don’t recall reading about it, but then, who’d write such a thing? I’d say—quite a few. It would be only natural.”

“Wrong. Wrong twice, as a matter of fact.
Homo sapiens
has the patent, Charli—all over the wall-to-wall universe, only mankind. Wrong the second: it would
not
be natural. It never was, it isn’t, and it never will be natural.”

“Matter of terms, isn’t it? I’d call it natural. I mean, it comes naturally. It doesn’t have to be learned.”

“Wrong. It does have to be learned. I can document that, but that’ll wait—you can go through the library later. Accept the point for the argument.”

“For the argument, then.”

“Thanks. What percentage of people do you think have sexual feelings about their siblings—brothers and sisters?”

“What age are you talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Sexual feelings don’t begin until a certain age, do they?”

“Don’t they? What would you say the age is, on the average?”

“Oh—depends on the indi—but you did say ‘average,’ didn’t you? Let’s put it around eight. Nine maybe.”

“Wrong. Wait till you have some of your own, you’ll find out. I’d put it at two or three minutes. I’d be willing to bet it existed a whole lot before that, too. By some weeks.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“I know you don’t,” said Vorhidin. “ ‘Strue all the same. What about the parent of the opposite sex?”

“Now, that would have to wait for a stage of consciousness capable of knowing the difference.”

“Wel-l-l—you’re not as wrong as usual,” he said, but he said it kindly. “But you’d be amazed at how early that can be. They can smell the difference long before they can see it. A few days, a week.”

“I never knew.”

“I don’t doubt that a bit. Now, let’s forget everything you’ve seen here. Let’s pretend you’re back on Lethe and I ask you, what would be the effects on a culture if each individual had immediate and welcome access to all the others?”

“Sexual
access?” Charlie made a laugh, a nervous sort of sound. “Sexual excess, I’d call it.”

“There’s no such thing,” said the big man flatly. “Depending on who you are and what sex, you can do it only until you can’t do it any more, or you can keep on until finally nothing happens. One man might get along beautifully with some mild kind of sexual relief twice a month or less. Another might normally look for it eight, nine times a day.”

“I’d hardly call that normal.”

“I would. Unusual it might be, but it’s one hundred percent normal for the guy who has it, long as it isn’t pathological. By which I mean, capacity is capacity, by the cupful, by the horsepower, by the flight ceiling. Man or machine, you do no harm by operating within the parameters of design. What does do harm—lots of it, and some of the worst kind—is guilt and a sense of sin, where the sin turns out to be some sort of natural appetite. I’ve read case histories of boys who have suicided because of a nocturnal emission, or because they yielded to the temptation to masturbate after five, six weeks of self-denial—a denial, of course, that all by itself makes them preoccupied, absolutely obsessed by something that should have no more importance than clearing the throat. (I wish I could say that this kind of horror story lives only in the ancient scripts, but on many a world right this minute, it still goes on.)

“This guilt and sin thing is easier for some people to understand if you take it outside the area of sex. There are some religious orthodoxies which require a very specific diet, and the absolute exclusion of certain items. Given enough indoctrination for long enough, you can keep a man eating only (we’ll say) ‘flim’ while ‘flam’ is forbidden. He’ll get along on thin moldy flim and live half starved in a whole warehouse full of nice fresh flam. You can make him ill—even kill him, if you have the knack—just by convincing him that the flim he just ate was really flam in disguise. Or you can drive him psychotic by slipping him suggestions until he acquires a real taste for flam and gets a supply and hides it and nibbles at it secretly every time he fights temptation and loses.

“So imagine the power of guilt when it isn’t a flim-and-flam kind of manufactured orthodoxy you’re violating, but a deep pressure down in the cells somewhere. It’s as mad, and as dangerous, as grafting in an ethical-guilt structure which forbids or inhibits yielding to the need for the B-vitamin complex or potassium.”

“Oh, but,” Charli interrupted, “now you’re talking about vital necessities—survival factors.”

“I sure as hell am,” said Vorhidin in Charli’s own idiom, and grinned a swift and hilarious—and very accurate—imitation of Charli’s flash-beacon smile. “Now it’s time to trot out some of the things I mentioned before, things that can hurt you much more than ignorance—the things you know that ain’t so.” He laughed suddenly. “This is kind of fun, you know? I’ve been to a lot of worlds, and some are miles and years different from others in a thousand ways: but this thing I’m about to demonstrate, this particular shut-the-eyes, shut-the-brains conversation you can get anywhere you go. Are you ready? Tell me, then: what’s wrong with incest? I take it back—you know me. Don’t tell me. Tell some stranger, some fume-sniffer or alcohol addict in a spaceport bar.” He put out both hands, the fingers so shaped that one could all but see light glisten from the imaginary glass he held. He said in a slurred voice, “Shay, shtranger, whut’s a-wrong wit’ in-shest, hm?” He closed one eye and rolled the other toward Charli.

Charli stopped to think. “You mean, morally, or what?”

“Let’s skip that whole segment. Right and wrong depend on too many things from one place to another, although I have some theories of my own. No—let’s be sitting in this bar and agree that incest is just awful, and go on from there. What’s really wrong with it?”

“You breed too close, you get faulty offspring. Idiots and dead babies without heads and all that.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” crowed the big Vexveltian. “Isn’t it wonderful? From the rocky depths of a Stone Age culture through the brocades and knee-breeches sort of grand opera civilizations all the way out to the computer technocracies, where they graft electrodes into their heads and shunt their thinking into a box—you ask that question and you get that answer. It’s something everybody just
knows
. You don’t have to look at the evidence.”

“Where do you go for evidence?”

“To dinner, for one place, where you’ll eat idiot pig or feebleminded cow. Any livestock breeder will tell you that, once you have a strain you want to keep and develop, you breed father to daughter and to granddaughter, and then brother to sister. You keep that up indefinitely until the desirable trait shows up recessive, and you stop it there. But it might never show up recessive. In any case, it’s rare indeed when anything goes wrong in the very first generation; but you in the bar, there, you’re totally convinced that it will. And are you prepared to say that every mental retard is the product of an incestuous union? You’d better not, or you’ll hurt the feelings of some pretty nice people. That’s a tragedy that can happen to anybody, and I doubt there’s any more chance of it between related parents than there is with anyone else.

“But you still don’t see the funniest … or maybe it’s just the oddest part of that thing you know that just ain’t so. Sex is a pretty popular topic on most worlds. Almost every aspect of it that is ever mentioned has nothing to do with procreation. For every mention of pregnancy or childbirth, I’d say there are hundreds which deal only with the sex act itself. But mention incest, and the response always deals with offspring. Always! To consider and discuss a pleasure or love relationship between blood relatives, you’ve apparently got to make some sort of special mental effort that nobody, anywhere,
seems able to do easily—some not at all.”

“I have to admit I never made it. But then—what
is
wrong with incest, with or without pregnancy?”

“Aside from moral considerations, you mean. The moral consideration is that it’s a horrifying thought, and it’s a horrifying thought because it always has been. Biologically speaking, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing. I’d go even further, with Dr. Phelvelt—ever hear of him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He was a biological theorist who could get one of his books banned on worlds that had never censored anything before—even on worlds which had science and freedom of research and freedom of speech as the absolute keystones of their whole structure. Anyway, Phelvelt had a very special kind of mind, always ready to take the next step no matter where it is, without insisting that it’s somewhere where it isn’t. He thought well, he wrote well, and he had a vast amount of knowledge outside his specialty and a real knack for unearthing what he happened not to know. And he called that sexual tension between blood relatives a survival factor.”

“How did he come to that?”

“By a lot of separate paths which came together in the same place. Everybody knows (this one
is
so!) that there are evolutionary pressures which make for changes in a species. Not much (before Phelvelt) had been written about stabilizing forces. But don’t you see, inbreeding is one of them?”

“Not offhand, I don’t.”

“Well, look at it, man! Take a herd animal as a good example. The bull covers his cows, and when they deliver heifers and the heifers grow up, he covers them too. Sometimes there’s a third and even fourth generation of them before he gets displaced by a younger bull. And all that while, the herd characteristics are purified and reinforced. You don’t easily get animals with slightly different metabolisms which might tend to wander away from the feeding ground the others were using. You won’t get high-bottom cows which would necessitate Himself bringing something to stand on when he came courting.” Through Charli’s shout of laughter he continued, “So
there you have it—stabilization, purification, greater survival value—all resulting from the pressure to breed in.”