Pallas (15 page)

“That’s what life is all about?” He raised an angry finger—and noticed that his hand was shaking—to point indignantly through the wall toward the front porch. “That’s who you are? Needlessly murdering helpless, innocent animals who feel pain, and breathe, and eat, and sleep, and think, just like you and—”

“We’re predators, Emerson, that’s who we are. Take it easy, will you?” Gretchen shook her pretty head in exasperation, as if she’d been through this a thousand times before. Her dark hair tossed in silky waves and he caught the scent of woodsmoke again. “And besides, who told you that they think? We’re not talking about human beings, here. It’s never been proven that their intelligence is in any way—”

Emerson was still shaken and disgusted. There just had to be more to life than simply killing and being killed. “Come on, Miss Singh! I don’t know about you, but my compassion for someone isn’t limited to my estimate of their intelligence!”

She looked him straight in the eye. “Mine is.”

Emerson’s dinner that evening was a rather somber, solitary affair of pan-fried cornmeal mush and scrambled eggs which Mrs. Singh prepared for him—although he’d offered to fend for himself or do without—before she and her daughter walked the short distance into town to join the boarders and other well-wishers at the Nimrod Saloon & Gambling Emporium which Brody ran in Curringer.

Emerson became suspicious of her reasons for insisting on fixing his meal before leaving for town when, having set the plate before him, she’d gone to the living room and returned shortly afterward with a well-worn book which she placed on the table beside the Grizzly pistol that was still lying there, untouched.

Of Gretchen he hadn’t had so much as a glimpse since their rather one-sided conversation earlier that afternoon. Having said what she’d said, she’d gone upstairs to her room, apparently to bathe and rest before the evening’s outing.

“We’re outspoken folks here on the Outside, Emerson,” Mrs. Singh informed him now. “Plenty of times when we were just getting started here, the plain, undecorated truth—told quickly, without wasting too much time on a buildup—spelled the difference between living and d
y
ing, and that habit’s hung on with us.”

She sighed and sat down in the opposite chair, reflexively swiveling the Grizzly on its side a few inches so that its muzzle pointed at neither of them.

“I know it isn’t always that way with other folks in other places. We set considerable store by the truth, like I said, but to others it’s a highly overrated commodity, a whole lot less important than feelings, and a
l
together too easy to come by for comfort. Some people dedicate their lives to avoiding it, or even thinking about it, and there are entire la
n
guages—like Japanese, for instance, so I’m told—that consist of nothing but fancified hemming and hawing.”

Emerson didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

Mrs. Singh wasn’t through, in any case. “You’re a free man now,
your own person. Nobody on this asteroid is gonna make you hunt animals or shoot a gun or do anything else you don’t want to, i
n
cluding listen to the truth. That’s the whole point of being here, after all. But there are reasons, most of them having to do with preserving individual sovereignty and dignity, why hunting and shooting—and speaking the truth—are important to us, just like there are reasons, most of them having to do with gaining and holding onto political power at any cost, why all that sort of thing was so violently disco
u
raged back on Earth.”

She put a finger on the cover of the book,
Hunting and Humanity
by Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy. “I don’t mean to preach at you, Emerson, and this sure as hell ain’t no Bible, but it might help you understand what I’m talking about.”

She stood up, sighed again, patted him on a shoulder, turned, and walked out of the kitchen. In a few minutes he heard muffled female voices, then the front door open and close.

After Mrs. Singh and Gretchen had departed and he’d finished eating, he washed all the dishes carefully, dried them thoroughly, and put them away. Then he went up to his room, taking both the Grizzly Win Mag and Drake-Tealy’s book with him, but laying them aside as he sat down on the bed to try sorting things out as he listened to the old familiar voice of the radio station in Curringer.

He tried not to imagine the revelry he was missing at the
Nimrod,
and the jokes at his expense.

Most of all, he tried not to see Gretchen’s lovely image whenever it swam up before him in his mind’s eye, or to imagine the scent of sage and woodsmoke in her hair.

For dear life, he concentrated on the radio.

It seemed odd to him, hearing it all coming openly through a loud
s
peaker rather than his handmade earphone. The receiver in his room was large, heavy, and painted with a black crinkly finish which gave it a mi
l
itary look. Its face was covered with knobs and dials. He had a feeling that, if he’d known how, he’d have been able to tune in stations on Earth, but all he’d been shown was how to turn it on in order to receive signals
from the only commercial transmitter on the asteroid.

He’d liked to have seen television, but Mrs. Singh wouldn’t have one and the radio station was only broadcasting pictures a few minutes a day anyway. Mrs. Singh claimed that television was one of the principal a
n
noyances she’d left Earth to get away from.

In the end, even the radio betrayed him.

“Young Gretchen Singh, lovely daughter of the proprietor of Mrs. Singh’s Boarding House—where many of us, including yours truly, spent our first few weeks on Pallas—has killed her
first big game, a buck pronghorn, down in Grennell’s Gulch.

“Informants, er, inform us that she did it with a running downhill shot at over two hundred yards, using a ten-millimeter
longslide customized by one of our local gunsmiths
—
who’ll have to
pay for any further advertising he gets here.

“Congratulations, Gretchen! We’ll be joining you ourselves
this evening at the Nimrod to raise a glass at Aloysius Brody’s ex
pense. That is, if our relief ever gets here. Meantime, here’s a num
ber just for you, Tom Lehrer’s ‘Hunting Song.’”

A scratchy-sounding record began to play, a man accompanied by a piano, singing something about somebody shooting “two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.”

Emerson arose, snapped the radio off in angry disgust, and flopped back onto the bed. He was utterly mystified by these people who seemed, by turns, so kindly and generous—and then so cruel and arrogant. How could a pretty girl like Gretchen, with merry eyes and small, soft hands, coldly use them to end the existence of another living, breathing creature? How could her mother—and everybody else on the asteroid, apparen
t
ly—possibly approve of such a thing?

His hand strayed to the book Mrs. Singh had left with him.

Maybe it had some answers.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting
life style in human history...If the history of the human race began at midnight...by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time...we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture.

—Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of
the
Human Race,”
Discover
Magazine, 1 May 1987

F
irst it had been an antelope.

Now Emerson was witnessing the slaughter of a sacred cow.

Mankind’s highly touted invention of agriculture, in the view of ra
d
ical, controversial, and outspoken anthropologist Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy—a principal influence, just as the Greeley Utopian M
e
morial Project’s Education and Morale staff had maintained, on Pallatian life outside the Project—was not at all synonymous with human progress or with the development of genuine civilization.

According to his book,
Hunting and Humanity
, lying open now in Emerson’s hands, it was far likelier to prove a catastrophe from which humanity would never recover.

In a black-and-white photo which took up the whole back of the worn and faded dustcover, the author was depicted against a backdrop co
n
sisting of the front cover painting—a primitive, hairy, not-quite-human hunter stalking some sort of protoelephant across the African veldt while he inserted a spear in his spear-thrower. In the author’s almost equally hairy hand
lay
a heavy rifle described as a .416 Rigby. Emerson had harvested perfectly healthy carrots smaller than the enormous cartridge Drake-Tealy was pushing into its open bolt-action.

The book was an irresistible mixture of scientific fact and speculation, social, political, and economic argument, and outdoor adventure story. By the time he’d reached the second chapter, Emerson had forgotten his own problems, along with the room around him, the people he’d met, and the sights he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours. It would have been inconceivable, had the thought occurred to him, that at exactly the same time yesterday evening, he’d been trudging along a strange road in the
dark and the rain, homeless and with no place to go.

It would have been more inconceivable, had he known more of human nature, that in such a short span of time, there were now people who trusted him alone in their home, people he trusted himself, despite their foreign, sometimes repelling ways.

Before long, he’d lost all track of what time it was. Whatever the truth of Drake-Tealy’s propositions, the man had an appealing and persuasive way of expressing them, and Emerson had no trouble staying interested. It wasn’t so much that he agreed with everything—or anything—he was reading, but that he was fascinated to have been handed a collection of ideas so different from those he’d grown up with.

He turned another page, adjusted a lampshade, sighed with uncon
s
cious contentment, settled back against the pillows on his bed, and crossed his ankles.

For most of human history, according to the traditional kind of thinking, people had supported themselves on a hand-to-mouth basis, precisely as their prehuman ancestors had for uncounted hundreds of thousands of years before them, by killing wild animals and foraging for wild plants, a lifestyle often described by philosophers (Emerson had to take Drake-Tealy’s word for that, not knowing any philosophers himself) as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Since no food was grown deliberately and very little of it stored, this grim struggle, theoretically, began afresh each day to find something to eat and avoid starving.

Escape from this presumably miserable existence had come only about ten thousand years ago, when people first began to domesticate plants and animals. The resulting “agricultural revolution” gradually spread, until today there were only a few hunter-gatherers surviving in Earth’s r
e
motest deserts and jungles.

Emerson had been taught—and to a degree unusual for him, simply assumed it was true—that the adoption of agriculture had been one of the most critically important decisions his species had ever made in the struggle for a better life. What modern observer could possibly disagree with that? People today were infinitely better off, in every imaginable way, than their primitive prefarming ancestors. Everywhere, they enjoyed
more varied and abundant food, better clothing and shelter, better tools and other material goods; they led longer, healthier lives, and were completely safe from dangerous predators—all of it due, directly or i
n
directly, to the invention of agriculture.

What kind of lunatic would advocate trading twenty-first-century life for that of a caveman?

Drake-Tealy had a different perspective.

Go to the mirror, open your mouth, look at your teeth,
count out from the center—top or bottom, it won’t matter—one, two, three. This isn’t the dental hardware of a herd beast, a cud-chewing herbivore, but a carnivore, a
predator, a killer-ape, one I’m well satisfied—despite common wi
s
dom—was no pack-harrier, but a solitary hunter.

Borrowing the ideas of earlier thinkers and investigators, he mai
n
tained that Stone Age people had been measurably healthier and happier than the early farmers they preceded.

Discoveries made by paleopathologists, scientists who studied signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples, appeared to back Drake-Tealy up, demonstrating that the hunters had been taller—the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was often greater than that of their modern descendants—and lived significantly longer. Furthe
r
more, they’d suffered fewer diseases than those individuals whose r
e
mains—betraying unmistakable symptoms of shortened lifespan, di
s
astrous malnutrition, bone-deforming physical labor, and chronic il
l
nesses like tuberculosis, anemia, and leprosy—were contemporary with mankind’s tragic romance with agriculture.

Once a person began thinking about it, there wasn’t very much my
s
tery to it. Even today, for a variety of reasons, farmers tended to co
n
centrate their efforts on high-carbohydrate crops like wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes. Yet the mixture of wild plants and animal flesh in the diets of early hunter-gatherers had provided more protein and a better overall balance of nutrients than that.

According to Drake-Tealy, the average food intake of Africa’s Kal
a
hari Bushmen, who added no less than seventy-five different kinds of plants to whatever meat they managed to bring home—while living on far less productive land and with less abundant game than the earliest human hunters—was nevertheless greater than the daily allowance reco
m
mended by the United Nations for people of their size.

And it was unlikely they’d ever die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families had during the potato famine of the 1840s. A paleolithic hunter’s diet offered a broad range of nutrients not available again to humanity as a whole until late in the nineteenth century—and then only achieved at a terrible cost of ten thousand years of progress lost to agriculturalism.

Emerson sat back.

All this talk about food had begun to make him feel hungry, although it seemed to him that he’d just eaten. He tried to ignore the feeling and read on, but when he started receiving urgent messages from his bladder as well as his stomach, he sighed, reluctantly closed the book on a finger, and, taking it with him, visited the bathroom down the hall,
then
went back downstairs to the kitchen.

The house seemed very empty and quiet.

It was an experience he’d never had before.

As he pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen, an ast
o
nished glance at the clock built into the microwave oven control pa
n
el—for the first time he noticed that Mrs. Singh didn’t keep very many clocks in her house—told him it was past eleven, and that over four hours had gone by since he’d started reading.

He wondered when Gretchen and her mother would be coming back from their celebration in Curringer, and what condition they’d be in. He didn’t recall it ever being specifically mentioned, but the general i
m
pression he’d received from his Project teachers was that the Outsiders, like all barbarians of song and legend, were given to uproarious, drunken revelries. He had a fleeting vision of a laughing Mrs. Singh, swilling fermented honey and apple juice from a horn-shaped cup and throwing double-bitted axes at her daughter’s pigtails, pinned to a great wooden wheel for the purpose. He laughed at himself and shook it off.

Somewhat absently, he went to the refrigerator to prepare a sandwich as he’d been told he could whenever he wished, his eyes still fastened on the pages as he worked, sat down at the kitchen table to eat it, and co
n
tinued reading.

Drake-Tealy was discussing what he meant by words like “progress” and “genuine civilization.” He seemed to associate both concepts, just as Emerson had suspected he might, with the value any culture placed on its individuals. They certainly weren’t represented, he maintained, by the establishment of agriculturally based mass societies—from those of Sumeria, Egypt, Rome, ancient Mexico, Peru, and China, straight through the Industrial Revolution—in which a nonproductive ruler was God, above contemplation, let alone reproach, and the common individual’s identity and dignity had been all but obliterated.

Unless, as human beings, we come not only to accept but to openly rejoice in our fundamental and inescapable nature as predators, we co
n
demn ourselves, as individuals and as a species, to unhappy, unnecess
a
rily guilt-haunted lives. If we don’t allow ourselves to prey on other creatures, as is our nature, we’ll prey on ourselves and each other as we have throughout most of our agricultural history. Perhaps worse, soaked with guilt, however undeserved, we’ll continue handing our lives and minds over
to any charlatan, however absurd, who offers us expiation,
however false, for our sins, however imaginary.

Somewhere outside the kitchen windows, far off on the prairie, a lone coyote howled. For the first time, Emerson regarded the sound as a friendly one.

A hunter’s life was as free and varied as his diet. Although he might not always have counted it a blessing, it offered continuous challenge to his mind—along with a surprising amount of leisure. Drake-Tealy’s a
v
erage Bushman devoted only twelve to nineteen hours each week to o
b
taining food, the Hadza nomads of Tanzania (whoever they were), fou
r
teen hours or less. Yet the harsh necessities of agriculture had tran
s
formed the former hunter into an overworked victim of weather and other
random, uncontrollable forces—the failure of a single crop, for any one of a thousand reasons, could, and often did, spell disaster for entire civil
i
zations—and condemned him to a life of mind-dulling monotony.