Shame of Man (56 page)

“Because you're the softer touch, and once you agree, so will she, being the perfect wife.”

And he would agree, because he could deny his daughter nothing that was within law and custom. It was a standing joke that was true: Daddy's little girl did bend him around her little finger. “Okay, Minne. Mock marry him.”

“Great, Dad!” she exclaimed, leaning over to plant a fervent kiss on the side of his face. He liked that, too, more than he cared to admit. There had always been something special about her; she really did seem to be blessed by the spirits. Bille was one supremely fortunate young man.

They were now well into the forest, moving slowly and silently. Hugh was peering left, and Minne right, their eyes accustomed to the darkness. He hoped they would find nothing, but he was sure Joe had reason to check the forest this night.

“I see him,” Minne said. “Around the next curve.

Hugh braked the car, peering ahead. “Are you sure? I don't see anything.”

“Use your scope.”

He opened the door, got out, and reached back to take the rifle, moving deliberately so as to make no noise. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and sighted through its infrared scope.

There was a man, using a muffled handsaw to cut a medium tree he had already felled. This was the poacher, without doubt.

Hugh lifted the rifle and aimed. The scope made it easy. When he had the figure centered, he fired, once. The man jumped and fell.

Hugh quickly put the rifle back into the car and got in himself. He turned it and drove away. He had done his job, perhaps murdering a man. He felt numb, and feared the time when that numbness wore off.

“It's Bubba,” Minne said. She had sharper eyes than he, even without the scope, or perhaps some other way of knowing.

Bubba. Hugh was not surprised. The man had been bad seed throughout. But he was glad that he had not known the man's identity, so that he could reassure himself that it had not been a vengeance shot. It had been ugly duty, no more.

The drive back seemed much shorter than the drive in, though the car moved just as slowly and carefully. Neither of them spoke again. When they approached the gate by the guard complex, it opened. Joe was there.

“Done,” Hugh said grimly. “Midforest.”

“Thanks, stranger.” Then Joe opened the other gate, and they drove onto the coast road. They paused only long enough for Joe to reach in for the rifle. Then they moved out, no other words spoken.

“So we're anonymous,” Minne said. “No one will ever know who did it.”

“Or admit what they suspect,” Hugh said.

Once they were sufficiently on their way, he turned on the headlights. Then they could travel at full speed.

“But maybe tell Serilda.”

He hadn't thought of that. But she was right. Serilda surely knew what her brother was up to, but would be technically innocent. She was not as bad as Bubba, but couldn't stop him from his way. And she was Scevo's natural mother. He owed her that much.

When they came to the town, he drove first to Serilda's address. He parked the car, got out, and went to the door. The woman evidently saw him coming, because Serilda opened the door as he approached it.

Hugh just stood there, unable for the moment to find the necessary words. But she knew them anyway. “Oh!” she said, and turned away, closing the door.

Hugh returned to the car. “She knows.”

“I thought she would.”

They drove on home. Hugh parked, and they entered. The dog didn't even bark, knowing them by sound and smell.

Anne was waiting for him. “Trouble?” she asked, because they were late returning.

“Minne wants to mock marry Bille,” he said. “We talked. I agreed to adopt Faience, if you do.”

“Of course,” Anne said softly. Then Minne went to the room she shared with Skevor, and Hugh and Anne went to theirs.

Then, in bed, in darkness, he told her. “I shot Bubba in the forest. I let Serilda know.”

“Of course,” she said, and kissed him. Then she held him while he suffered his reaction, stifled until now. She knew they would never be able to speak of this. Bubba, if he survived, would be banished to the penal colony on Tasmania, and his sister would become their heir, provided there was no evidence suggesting her complicity. They knew there would be none, because his warning had given Serilda time to cover any traces.

They had repaid her for Scevor. Perhaps that was why Joe had selected Hugh for this mission, suspecting who the poacher was.

It was a nice ceremony of mock marriage, next afternoon. Hugh played his clarinet, and eight-year-old Scevor his dulcimer, and Anne danced, for the first time doing it not for credit as entertainers, but for their own folk. Bille was suitably handsome, and Minne was stunning in the dress she had made for herself. They kissed, and it was done, to general applause.

There was a refreshment and dance break before the second ceremony. Bille and Minne danced together, then split to dance with guests. Scevor went to join Serilda, who had been invited. Scevor had joined the family in a real, not mock, adoption, so his natural mother had no further rights, but their relationship was no secret. Serilda, however, had distractions, because she was now of greater interest to men, having become an heir. There had been no announcement yet, but such news traveled invisibly at light speed.

Hugh talked with Bill, as one father to another, as they gazed on the proceedings. But their dialogue was not what others might have expected.

“They found Bubba slumped over the tree he was poaching,” Bill said. “One bullet through his side. Not fatal, but he'll be some time recovering. No question of his guilt. They're tracing down his contacts now.”

“Any notion who shot him?” Hugh asked.

“Maybe one of the guards. Joe won't say, as a matter of policy, but he's obviously pleased. There probably won't be any more trees poached for a long time.”

So if Bill knew, he wasn't letting on. Bill was concerned because he was the forester. When he discovered trees being poached, he had taken the matter to Joe, and Joe had handled it. That was the usual quiet way of such matters; the real leaders did not advertise.

Someone laughed. It was Serilda, because of something Scevor had whispered to her. “She does like that boy,” Bill remarked.

“He's a good boy,” Hugh said. “Instead of her having a bad influence on him, he has had a good influence on her.”

Then it was time for the second ceremony. Hugh joined Anne, and Bill joined Faye. Their fifteen-year-old daughter Faience stepped up to stand before Hugh and Anne. She was a lanky, freckle-specked blond girl with barely a trace of the beauty of Minne, but universally pleasant and fun to be with. Scevor liked her almost as well as he liked his big sister, because she would roughhouse with him and had a sense of mischief. Hugh knew she would be no trouble, and of course she had made it possible for her brother to mock marry, by agreeing to mock adopt out. She had done it because of her friendship with Minne, but it showed her nature.

Hugh's sister Bea did the honors. “Hugh and Anne, do you accept this girl Faience as your mock daughter, to live with you on your lot?”

“We do,” Anne said, speaking as the heir of the pair.

Bea turned to the boy. “And do you, Scevor, accept this girl Faience as your mock sister, to share your room?” For he had rights too, especially as a prospective heir.

Scevor stood up straight. “I do not,” he said clearly.

Bea blinked. Others glanced at him, surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

“I'll mock marry her instead,” Scevor said. “And she'll mock marry me. Ask her.”

“Yes,” Faience agreed. “We'll marry instead.”

There was a round of chuckles. Now Hugh understood what had made Serilda laugh: the boy had confided his secret to her. The two youngsters had cooked up a surprising, but viable alternative. For they could indeed mock marry, age being no barrier. The net effect would be similar: Faience would come to live with Scevor. Their mock rights with respect to each other would be broader, but it didn't really matter. They would be referred to as man and wife rather than as brother and sister, and would have to have an announced mock divorce before Faience could marry elsewhere for real, but such things were easy enough to do. Children did mock marry on occasion, making their point, such as when their parents did not agree to mock adoptions. Children did have rights.

So there was a second mock marriage ceremony instead, with Faience donning a white dress that did lend her some appeal, and Scevor acting his part flawlessly. Hugh knew it would be some time before the news of this event became passe. And it might even eventually be that their mock marriage would become a real one, for there was no barrier there either, once both parties were of age. The two did like each other very well, and Scevor would be an heir, and Faience was not the kind to bedazzle men. Friendship marriages were becoming as popular as romance marriages or convenience marriages.

“Worse could happen,” Anne said, knowing his thought.

Overall, Hugh liked the look of the future.

And so a sustainable society came to Earth, with absolute population control, and fanatic protection for the world's remaining resources. The unrestricted increase in human population had been a disaster, and the heedless destruction of all the Earth's natural resources, both wilderness and civilized, was the shame of man. It had to stop, but only in the outlying fringes was a balance found, where pollution wasn't as bad and the plants and animals had not been ravaged as harshly. A stable, nonpolluting, nondestructive life-style was the ideal, and perhaps at last it had been achieved. Maybe, as the Earth recovered, similar societies would spread.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

T
HIS is the second volume in the Geodyssey series, this time covering eight million years of prehuman and human history—twice the range I expected. It represents my response to the kind of history teaching I deplore, which is filled with names and dates and obscurities that make it an aversive chore to assimilate. History in its essence is fascinating, representing as it does the lessons of the past that signal our future, if we just pay attention. The third volume,
Hope of Earth,
should follow another family through a similar chain of different settings, interacting with the first two volumes as this one interacts with
Isle of Woman.

As before, I used my quarter century collection of books on history, archaeology, anthropology, and human nature. I got fed up with having to search for half an hour for a book I knew I had, so this time we got my home library organized. Now all my reference books are marked according to the system used by the Library of Congress, and listed in a computer file; I can locate any one of them quickly. As before, my research assistant Alan Riggs struggled to keep up with the vagaries of my settings. Again, the University of South Florida was kind enough to let us borrow research books whose specialization went beyond what I had. And as before, I found that the sublime themes and aspects of history I wanted to explore got shoved aside by the mundane necessities of reality and plotting.

For example, I had this lovely scene in mind for Chapter 11, “Philistine,” wherein a man in a swan suit raped a girl on stage, to the delight of the spectators. Leda and the Swan is a famous incident of Greek mythology; after being raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, Leda duly laid two eggs, from one of which hatched Helen, antiquity's most beautiful woman, who later made her fame in connection with the Trojan War. In addition, by sheer coincidence the name Leda fit exactly into the name pattern for a woman who plays a role in my protagonist's life: Le, Lee, Lea, Leda. Beautiful; it would look like genius writing. But Alan's research indicated that this was a later myth, tacked onto the Trojan War story perhaps as an
afterthought, and was not current circa 1000
B.C.
Helen herself had started as a nature goddess, rather than as the wife of a Greek king. Since this fiction is historically accurate wherever I can verify the material, that myth could not be used, and I had to substitute something that was at least arguable. Thus Helen and Baal the Bull. But I did name the actress Leda, thus salvaging just a whiff of the original vision. History could not deny me my fictional character. But anthropology did deny me another thing I had wanted: to show how mankind's recovery of color vision gave him a significant advantage in finding ripe fruit and berries to eat. I could not verify when he had ever lost color vision, or whether he had; it seems to have existed throughout the period of this novel. So my throwback character with the color vision had to be scratched. Ouch. There were a number of such disappointments, as I gradually replaced supposition with information. Writing any novel is a learning process, and this is especially true in the Geodyssey series.

For this volume I did research on left-handedness, and that proved to be fascinating. I noted even as a child that those things I was taught to do, I did right-handed, while those I taught myself I did left-handed. Later I tried switching over by playing Ping-Pong (my one competent sport) left-handed, writing left-handed, and eating left-handed. Though my left had learned a great deal more rapidly than my right hand had, I saw in due course that the left hand did not then excel the right hand in these things; the velocity of learning seemed to stem from my prior familiarity rather than inherent talent. So I concluded that I am after all naturally right-handed, and I retained left-handedness only in eating, because it seemed prudent not to have all my skills invested in one hand. What, then, of my self-taught things? They were two-handed tasks, like picking berries, where perhaps the dominant hand chose the first aspect—holding the can—and left the second aspect—the actual picking—to the other. But I learned that few people are completely left- or right-sided; most have some things they happen to do “wrong.” That would account for me. But the matter left me with an interest in handedness, and I thought it was time to explore it. Hence my left-handed protagonist.

My research taught me intriguing and alarming things. Actually people are not only handed, they are footed and eyed and perhaps eared. That is, they are right- and left-sided. Their brains are right- and left-sided too, but despite popular wisdom, it seems that this aspect does not relate consistently to physical sidedness. It is true that the right brain controls the left side, and the left brain the right side, but this is generally true regardless of handedness. There do not really seem to be right-brained and left-brained personalities; our brains coordinate so that every person has both aspects. It appears that sidedness stems from the fundamental wiring of the species, and that it developed most significantly when mankind lifted the forefeet from the ground. Since the hands are most obvious, I will orient on them.
Four-footed creatures must use their limbs for locomotion, and they have particular patterns of leg movement, so that the legs don't go in opposite directions or bang into each other. There just isn't much place for left and right; the sides alternate so that the body doesn't fall to the ground. But with two limbs elevated, choice is possible. It seems that our species soon oriented on the right, and that became the template. Mankind is a right-handed species.

What, then, of the roughly 10 percent of people who are left-handed? That has been a riddle long in the fathoming, and doubts remain. There is no compelling evidence for heredity; some families do run to left-handedness, but even there, the majority are right-handed. A left-handed mother may have a left-handed child, but there seems to be no correlation to fatherhood. Thus it was coincidence that Scevor (the name means “a left-handed son") followed his father's way in this respect. It seems that lefties are damaged goods: something happens at a certain point during their gestation that stifles or diminishes their natural rightness, allowing leftness to develop. They may be more likely to have other defects, as stifling may be a generalized situation. (This is intended as a clinical, rather than a value judgment; I am not casting aspersions. Some of my best friends, etc.) And they pay for it. A survey showed that lefties are at risk of death, in our rightie culture. For example, power saws are made for right-handers; use one with the left hand, on the left side, and the blade is next to the body instead of away from it. That's dangerous. Tools are commonly right-handed, if there is differentiation, so are awkward for lefties to use. Even our motor traffic conventions favor the majority, so that when startled a rightie is “fail-safe,” while a leftie may swerve into opposing traffic and crash. And this does lead to a greater incidence of fatality for lefties of about one percent a year. That may not seem like much, but think of it this way: of every hundred lefties, one dies each year, on average, from causes that don't affect righties. By the time a leftie reaches retirement age, by such crude math, he has perhaps a two-thirds chance of being dead. The average leftie dies nine years younger than the average rightie, and there are very few old lefties. I'm not listing my research sources for this volume, but will make an exception here, to forestall the letters of disbelief and outrage I will otherwise receive:
The Left-Hander Syndrome
by Stanley Coren, published by Vintage Books in 1993. Another interesting book, though it doesn't address this aspect, is
Lefties
by Jack Fincher, republished in 1993 by Barnes & Noble. Thus not only have lefties been consciously discriminated against, on a sporadic basis, through human history, the current physical bias against them is deadly. I think of it as an aspect of the shame of man.

Another aspect I wanted to explore more thoroughly, but couldn't quite define, is the full nature of language. Perhaps this will never be completely clarified, but I'll keep searching. I remain fascinated by the connections
between language and art, perhaps because I regard myself as an artist with words: I shape images and moods without paints or music, while appreciating all the other arts. Storytelling may be the most ancient art. But even when it is viewed as straight communication, there are mysteries about language. For example, Noam Chomsky suggests that the human brain is preprogrammed for particular syntax: when children of diverse linguistics are thrown together, they develop new languages with a set variety of syntax resembling that of the existing languages of the world. At first they use pidgin, which is a polyglot assemblage of words from all over. This evolves into a creole, which is an actual new language with syntax. The importance of syntax is unquestioned in this novel; I believe it is what separated mankind from Neandertal man. But is it wired in? I believe it is not—because there has been no actual test of this, no clear indication. The children who formed their pidgin had words borrowed from the several languages of their parents, and also the pattern of syntax from the same source. Naturally they used it in their new language. Thus both individual words and the common syntax were culturally inspired; there is no need to assume hard genetic wiring, and no reason for it to have evolved. But the matter has not yet been settled; if there is some future test that eliminates the cultural influence, the truth may yet come clear.

Similarly the truth of dreams has yet to be understood. My conjecture that they represent part of the sorting and classification process for memories is my own; I think it is safe to say that this is not presently accepted doctrine. The human brain, during its sleeping downtime, may be methodically calling up all the memories of the past day and seeking their affinities, however farfetched, in the manner of a computer search for particular combinations of symbols. When a match or partial match is found, it is as if a light flashes, and the two memories are compared in greater detail. Probably the background sorting and comparing is constant, and after affinities are evoked, the sorting is done again to see what new alignments have come into being in the light of that discovery. Most things stay in the background; only when new connections are forged is the dreaming process necessary. Then consciousness is invoked, as when a person checks the match the computer has found and put on the screen, and judges in what ways it makes sense. So our dreams do make sense—in ways we are doomed to forget. It is the startling juxtapositions that may be remembered after we wake, but this is like noting the coincidence of a crack of thunder just as a person invokes God's name: probably not meaningful, but nevertheless memorable. I suspect that most dream analysis, whether psychiatric or amateur, is worthless, because it mistakes the purpose of dreams.

Also as before, I tried to focus on aspects of history that are not currently fashionable, in an effort to broaden my base. The standard model I was raised on suggests that civilization started in Egypt, spread to Greece,
advanced to Rome, and then collapsed into the Dark Ages until the Renaissance, British world dominion, and modern America. That model is an ignoramus. A whole lot was going on in the rest of the world throughout, as these volumes show, and the subject has hardly been addressed. I believe that the roots of civilization reach into many parts of the globe, and that much of what we have called progress has been an ongoing ecological disaster. For example, agriculture is commonly hailed as one of the greatest breakthroughs of mankind, because it enabled our species to control its food supply and prosper. But cultivation of human food crops destroys the natural plant and animal life of the region, helping to impoverish the diversity of the world's life. Similarly the use of wood has to a considerable degree governed the power and prosperity of human cultures, because it is so useful for housing, ships, and fuel. But deforestation is destroying the vitality of the land, leading to erosion and climatic change. Industry has multiplied human efficiency of accomplishment, but left in its wake the pollution of air, earth, and sea. Everything has its price, and the wasteful use and destruction of Earth's natural resources is the shame of mankind, for it is destroying the viability of the natural world and imperiling future human existence. Species extinctions are proceeding at a rate that promises to rival that of the holocaust of the dinosaurs—because of mankind's heedless exploitation of the world. Whether it is the endless destruction of war, as when the Mongols ravaged Asia; or China's Taiping Rebellion killed up to twenty million people and impoverished the nation; or hunting local whale populations to near extinction as the Basques of Terranova did; or leveling the forests of entire continents, as occurred in modern times; or wiping out the American Indians or the aborigines of Tasmania and elsewhere—we are doing it as we always have, everywhere across the globe. For shame.

Mankind is a species running amok. The qualities which enabled our species to prosper are now sending us to doom. Our intelligence and adaptability enabled us to prevail over other creatures and the rigors of the world's climate; they removed our limits of geography and season. Our ability to procreate enabled us to populate the world. Now those same qualities enable us to squeeze out all other life, and to overpopulate the world so badly that little remains ahead but disaster. Because a quality for which we had no prior need is now desperately needed: restraint.

We may already have seen it happen in a microcosm. Chapter 15, about Easter Island, focused on the mystery of the origin of its stoneworking inhabitants: did they come from Polynesia, or South America? The question may be summed up by POT: the lack of POTtery suggests the former, the presence of sweet POTatoes the latter. But if we focus on their later history, the implication is appalling. When mankind came there, the island was covered by forest, a paradise of its kind. But the human population increased without restraint. At one time the island supported several
thousand people, and was making and erecting giant statues at a phenomenal rate. Other arts may have flourished similarly: woodworking, feather working, rock art, tattooing, and specialized cloth making. Civilization, by local definition, was at its peak. But the resources of the land were being squandered. All the trees were taken, leaving the isle bare. Then there was no more fresh wood to make boats, so that no one could seek new land, and deep-sea fishing could no longer be done. The denuded land suffered erosion and loss of fertility. Thus at a time of greatest industrial progress, the food gave out. The statue erection abruptly halted, and the population crashed as the survivors fought over the diminishing resources. Only an impoverished remnant remained, even before the depredations of the Europeans occurred. Thus do we conjecture that paradise became hell—because there was no foresight and no restraint about the exploitation of natural resources.