WE FROM AFAR

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

n the hold, big as a small island, we keep a man and a woman who still remember the Epoch of Divorce, the time before the Gender Wars.  We used to have more, but we lost them before we understood how to prolong their lives through subtle alterations of their body chemistry.  Biologically, our man and woman will never be older than sixty or so, as they are now.

I still question them periodically.  Mostly, they repeat the old tales, the old complaints, but from time to time, even now, there are surprising revelations, or, at least, anecdotes that we have not yet heard, we from afar.  All of it interests us.

We call the man what he asks to be called, "Fred."  The woman we call "Ethel."  It used to be a joke between them‑-we could tell that.  It gave them a feeling of superiority over us, and that seemed healthful for them, so we permitted it.  Now they have forgotten that they ever had other names than Fred and Ethel.

"There was nothing like sex," Fred said to me once.  "Nothing could beat it.  Hell, nothing could match it!  Look at your Taj Mahal.  Guy built it because of that‑-for his lady friend."

"Look at the Parthenon," Ethel snorted.

"Huh?"

"Dedicated to the Virgin Goddess‑-that's what it means, 'Parthenon.'  'Parthenon' means virgin."

Fred made a face.  "Never mind that.  What about your Trojan Wars?  That was all about sex, you know, because Paris had the hots for Helen of Troy."

"What about the Parthenon?"

"Oh, stop it!  That's nothing.  I could mention your chivalry and your courtly love and all the knights of the round table.  I could mention your Divine Comedy, all three books of it.  That whole business was for Dante's Beatrice, you know."

"He never had sex with her."

"He wanted to, is the point."  Fred moved to within inches of her.  His face reddened.  I watched them with very great interest.

"What about the Parthenon?" she insisted.

Fred shrugged in my direction.  "Y'see what we had to put up with?"

 

n the hold, Fred and Ethel have all they want.  They used to wear clothes and eat sit‑down meals and so on, but they have become more at ease in their surroundings now.  They trust more.  They graze on fruits and roots and berries at their leisure.  They understand that nothing here will harm them, unless it is each other‑-and they are past that concern as well: their passions have dulled somewhat, their eyes are not so bright as formerly.  It is easy for us to visit them whenever we like, in order to continue the debriefing, an endless and endlessly fascinating project, and to gather insights that illumine current developments outside.

"The thing about women," Fred told me once, "is that they're never satisfied.  I don't blame them, understand‑-it's how God made them.  It's what they're all about.  Your entire woman, understand, is built around a hole!  Take that on whatever level you like.  It's the gospel truth."

Ethel seemed not quite satisfied with this summary.  "Let's not talk about what men are built around, shall we?"

Fred blushed.  He turned to me.  He always did so without fear.  In physical appearance and in mental constitution we are not greatly dissimilar, we from afar, from Earthly human beings.

Fred addressed me:  "Y'see what I mean?"

I nodded.  If Ethel had made one of her abrasive remarks, I would have nodded the same way.  It is our custom to respond thus to all their appeals and suggestions: to nod.  We must retain our impartiality.  I believe they have come to understand this.  Neither Fred nor Ethel presses us as they once did.  Neither entertains any longer the hope of allying with us against the other.

 

"We are done here.  They are ending like all the rest."

"A while longer!" I pleaded.  "There is something about them . . . "

"You speak like a female!  There is nothing about them.  The Centauri system had more intelligent ones.  The ones near Betelgeuse were more compassionate.  There is no solution in the offing here.  Why watch the whole dreary decline all over again?  We should move on."

"Give it a dozen generations more."

"Oh, all right‑-just to get you off our backs.  But next review‑-no arguments!  If there is no sign of resolution across the sex divide, we move on, period!"

 

hey came to me once, both of them together, to ask me a question that seemed to weigh on them.  Ethel was the spokesperson, but she was obviously posing the question for them both.  With some passion, she asked me:  "What is the difference between men and women, as you see it?  What is it?"

I nodded, and I answered the best way I knew how: "Women produce large immobile gametes.  Men produce small mobile ones."

They looked at each other, then left me without speaking further.  It was a long time before either of them spoke to me again.

Finally, Fred addressed me one afternoon while he was vacantly chewing on a handful of arbor vitae.  "You just don't get it, do you?"

Obviously not.  But that is why we are here, we from afar.  That is why we had to come so far to begin with.  Oh, that we had understood from the beginning!  Oh, that we had avoided the unnameable vast sufferings of interstellar space travel by knowing this one needful thing!

What is the difference between men and women?  What do they want, men and women?  Dear God, what do they want?

"Of course you wouldn't understand," Fred told me, "you from afar!  You're all alike.  You have no sexes."

"Oh, no, you're mistaken!"  For a moment, I forgot myself.  I neglected to nod.  I neglected to think before speaking.  "We are all of one sex here, we from afar, it is true, but only because we permitted none of the other sex to come along.  They are all at home‑-if they live."

Fred and Ethel stared at me.  I jotted something on my clipboard.  I busied myself looking at this and that and taking notes, uselessly.  Even as I withdrew, my back to them, I felt the heat of their regard.

It is lucky that I did not say more.  I could have told them how lonely I always am.  I could have told them how broken and empty I feel, as if a half of me had been torn away and the rest never healed.  My whole skin is a gaping wound, aching for completion, but my other half is light‑years away, and the cost would be too high anyway‑-we have our own "Gender Wars"‑-unless these of Earth should find a way that we from afar might emulate.

So far, it seems clear, they are as much in the dark as we.

#

We are engineers who seek in Nature Herself the answer to a design problem.  We wander far.  We study widely.  The design problem is in ourselves.  We seek beings whom Nature has designed like ourselves‑-male and female made She us‑-but in whom She may have provided a way out.

We fail, we fail, we fail!

 

n the main, Fred and Ethel are pacific.  Perhaps it would be otherwise if they were aware that human history is not, as we have always given them to understand, at an end.  We conceal from them the life outside the ship.  It is a hell where men and women touch only in desperation and in mortal fear of one another.  They sneak away from their tribes and come upon one another in the forest.  Then it is like a mauling or like a collision or like a robbery, each stealing something from the other, then fleeing.  Sometimes there is trouble between them and one dies, sometimes the man, sometimes the woman.

Still, if Fred and Ethel were aware of this life, they might struggle to get out.  They might become dissatisfied with the hold and want to rejoin their worldfellows, however wretched.  Humans are like that‑-as are we from afar.

"Tell us again, Sad Eyes,"‑-that is what Fred calls me‑-"tell us how life on Earth ended.  Ethel here says it was the bomb, but as I recall, just before you fellows saved us few, everybody was being neutered by pollution.  I say they just died off.  Which of us is right?"

I nodded.  "It was both ways.  Most died in the explosions or in the long winter after, but there were still many survivors.  They were all barren."

"You see?" said Ethel.

"What do you mean?" said Fred.  "I was right all along!"

In fact, there were no bombings, and we ended the pollution soon after we had sequestered our subjects.  Oh, we are powerful, powerful!  We can do so many things!  But if we could do them all, we would not be on Earth these many ages, waiting, watching, praying for an answer.  Neither bombs nor pollution brought about the unfolding debacle outside.  It was the Gender Wars.

We are now observing their denouement.

 

"Every place we visit is the same.  We have found nothing more powerful and destructive than the divide of sex.  Bombs and pollution are nothing to that."  My shipmate's frustration caused him to raise his head almost to my level, but one sharp look reminded him of his place, and he gazed at my feet again.

"Something is changing," I said.  "Something is different‑-I feel it."

"He feels it!" my current superior scoffed.  He belittled me by addressing my shipmate and speaking of me rather than to me.  "The review is imminent.  Then we shall see.  We shall see, do you understand, as males see!  We shall not have to utter such feminine incoherencies as 'I feel it!'"

 

Sometimes, when the night watch of the hold falls to me, I hear Fred and Ethel talk to each other in the low voices they use for intimacy.  They must realize by now that we are always watching and listening, and they must understand that the volume of their speech makes no difference at all‑-if a bird should fall, we would know it‑-but their old conditioning constrains them to act a certain way, regardless.  They becloud themselves.  They forget what is possible and what is not: perhaps it is a survival mechanism.  This frivolous bent may have caused a range of variability in the behavior of their species, as in ours, that somewhat enhanced their evolutionary fitness in times of unpredictable environmental change‑-the very thing that makes sexual reproduction preferable to asexual, in fact, in similar circumstances.

Last night, moonlit, Fred sat by Ethel at the riverbank.  She allowed him to sit there.  Sometimes they copulate or fight over not copulating, but, for them, the old‑timers, it is never as intense as it is on the outside.  They rankle but never become violent.  This night neither felt amorous.

Fred whispered, "Don't look at me.  Keep looking at the water.  Beautiful, isn't it, the moon in the water?  Ethel, let's get out of here."

"Out?"  Her eyes moved to look at him sideways, but she never turned her head.

"Sad Eyes and the other dorks always come from the direction of the mountain . . . "

"Of course!  Of course!  Don't you ever get tired of saying so?"

"Shush, dammit!  Just keep looking at the water.  I say it's time to climb the mountain and see what's up there.  I'm tired to death of being stuck here all alone with you."

"It's no picnic for me either, you better believe, but the mountain‑-that's just crazy!  Number one, we're too old to get halfway up it without keeling over and sprouting daisies.  Number two, this is hell all right, I mean, with you here and all, but up there, well, it could be a worse hell."

"Right."  He stood up and started to walk.

"Where you going all of a sudden?  Is it my breath, or what?"

"I'm going for a walk.  What do you care?"

She watched him for a moment.  She looked troubled.  Her lip quivered.  Then she sprang up with an unaccustomed agility, I thought.  "Wait up!  I'm coming too!"

Their "mountain" is a large mound that camouflages our observation chamber.  From the chamber there is access to both the hold in which Fred and Ethel live and to the outside world, Earth itself, where the scattered descendents of the Gender Warriors continue to exist in their men's tribes and their women's tribes.

As I said, it was my watch.  I was alone in there.  In the entire chamber of perhaps a million cubic meters, there was only myself with tiers and tiers of machines.  Most were environmental control mechanisms; the rest comprised recording and logging equipment, also various arrays for the usual experiments, along with repair tools and modules, untouched for many human generations now, for putting together new experiments.

I misted the entryway as Fred approached it, just as we always did, we from afar, on entering or leaving the experimental area.  That way we seemed to emerge from an indefinite place in a fog rather from a distinct doorway that would demand investigation.  Fred found himself in a sudden fog, I opened the door before him, and he entered the observation chamber without realizing it.  I was an arm's length away, but he could not see me for the mist.

Ethel came in.  She bumped into him from behind.  Their confusion and preoccupation with each other made it easy to coax them through the mist to the opposite door, and through the door into the world outside.  Thus, after a lapse of perhaps a century, Fred and Ethel found themselves on Earth.

 

"First you frivolously impeded our departure.  Now you have taken it upon yourself to contaminate the entire experiment by allowing the control humans, the old ones, out onto the Earth among the new generation.  If there was ever anything to learn in this pedestrian world, you have eliminated the possibility of our learning it."

"Wait!  There is something different here.  I acted in all our interest.  You'll see . . . !"

"No.  You'll see!"  My current superior misted the doorway and had my shipmates expel me onto the Earth.

I turned.  I shouted for them to open up.  I pounded at the door until the metal grew too hot to touch and the noise of the lift engines hurt my ears.  I ran then.  The ship lifted into the sky.  I hid behind a boulder, but I felt my face, shoulders, and hands burn as the slipstream of the rising ship pulled the breath from my lungs.

 

 cooled my burned skin in the river.  Women darted in and out of the trees, venturing nearer until at last seven or eight of them were gathered around me, and twenty or thirty more spread out between myself and the trees, inching nearer but ready to run.  They need not have feared me, and by degrees they discovered that; the atmosphere of Earth is not lethal for us from afar, but we do not do well in it.  I was like an old animal, moving heavily and slowly, with rasping breath.

"Are you a man?  You don't look like a man."

"Doesn't look like a woman, either!"

"He's from the ship!"

"You mean, she!"

I said, "I come from afar.  We have our two sexes as you do, and I represent one of them.  Call me a man, if you like.  I have small mobile gametes."

One came close enough to examine my gonads.  The others tittered at first, but when she touched me they fell silent.  Then she touched me again.  She stroked me tentatively, staring at me with frightening intensity.  Then she grasped my pelvis between her hands, lowered me with her to the ground, and took me inside her.

What of the revulsion I felt at coupling with something so strange to me as an Earth female?  What of it?  Was it anything more than a premonitory twitch installed by evolution to discourage the waste of sperm with the wrong species?  Why should I credit such an emotion, especially when the rest of me was happy?  I had not embraced another for so long, so long!  If she didn't please my evolved eye, then shut it, thought I, and dream!  She took me.  Then the others took their turns, pleased that I was not so quickly depleted as an Earthman.

I heard Fred and Ethel shout from the rocket mountain, "No!  No!  Stop that!  You can't do that!  Sad Eyes isn't a human being, for God's sake, you crazy beasts!"  The women dragged me into the woods.

No one in the enclave that kept me ever risked contact with the men again.  When men came skulking about, the women repelled them fiercely.

 

red visited me in the night.  He crept to the hut where the women had bound me by the ankle to a post.  "Psst!  Sad Eyes, do you want me to cut you loose?"

"No."

Trees soughed in the night breeze; cricket songs stained the dark.  Fred sat just outside the hut and calmed his ragged breath.  He spoke to me through the thatch without ever entering.  I could see the wall press in where he sagged against it.

"Ha ha!  I guess I wouldn't mind trading places with you, boy‑-I mean, if they didn't treat you so much like shit!  Hell, you get all the nooky you can handle, don't you?"

"The pleasure is not as great as you imagine, Fred.  Neither is the pain."

"You lied to us, Sad Eyes.  Why did you lie to us?  The world never ended.  Just went to hell in a hand basket, didn't it?  How come?"

"The Gender Wars."

"Men against women, huh?  I wouldn't have guessed it'd be that bad.  Take Ethel‑-she's a bitch, but she knows she needs me."

"They stopped needing them, Fred."

"I don't believe it . . . "  Crickets.  Wind.  " . . . That's not possible."

His second visit was a week later.  Ethel had gone over to the women in another valley.  "She wouldn't listen to me.  She won't last out there.  Sure, they treat her okay now: she's a novelty, see?  But pretty soon, they'll just dump her.  Then she'll come crawling back."

A month later, Ethel had not returned to Fred, and Fred had had some bad encounters with a men's tribe.  His voice sounded wheezy.  He stopped frequently in the middle of a sentence.  Soon, I thought, the women will catch him‑-if they care to.  Perhaps already they knew all about Fred's little visits.  Perhaps they found the poor old male amusing, he with his small gametes, now largely immobile.

"Why did God make us men this way?" he asked me.  "Why did He make us men wanting everything we don't have?  If I had a couple of bumps and a hole, and if I could coo to myself the way a good woman will do you, that coo that makes all the crap worth taking, why I'd be a whole person.  I wouldn't hardly need to eat, I'd be so goddam happy."

I couldn't say anything to Fred.  It was a mystery to me, too, I from afar.  After a while, he just left.  That was the last visit.

 

 live, I live, I live, I from afar!  Nothing on Earth kills me or causes me to decline further than at my first exposure.  Generation after generation of women keeps me alive, albeit barely.  I am good for little aside from supplying gametes, and yet my presence here has been instrumental in ending the latter skirmishes of the Gender Wars.  The men are no longer seen.  I watched them decline and disappear.  Years?  Decades?  Centuries?  Millennia?  All the women came to me.  I have been their religion.  I have brought them children.  I have brought their children children.

And now the Gender Wars will end for good and all.  Nature no longer sees a profit in sexuality, it seems; life has become that regular that the variability engendered by sex is no longer an advantage‑-quite the contrary, for half of the genetic material of sexed individuals is always lost to the offspring.  There is a new sort of humans increasingly in evidence: the parthenogenones.  Their fitness to survive is twice that of the old sort of human; they need not halve their germ to reproduce.

The women grow old and die.  No one is interested in me, the old god from afar.  The parthenogenones display little curiosity.  Many institutions besides the rituals surrounding myself I see fall into disuse.  With war, civilization generally departs.  Sleepy harmony ensues.  The parthenogenones are content.

I have my answer, I from afar, although the rest of my kind have been cheated of it.  Perhaps even now they skirt yon star, bones of the human specimens rattling in steerage.  The wound of sex cannot be healed; close the gap and kill the spark.  The price of harmony is death.

Now I am ready to pay.