Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

We were in a cave where dripping limestone had calcified into fantastic shapes, pink like melting flesh or the grayish white of exposed bone. Yellow flames flickered from a hundred oil lamps.

This is a sort of tribunal. When a case is morally peculiar, they enlist our help to bring in foreign advisors, to give them a different perspective. What you decide will not be binding, but will add to the sum of their deliberations .

I asked what the moral problem was.

It has to do with familial responsibility. The female lays eggs in clusters, typically fifty to sixty at once, in pools of warm water. They do this only three times in their life. A male of their choice sprays the eggs with milt and then guards them until they hatch .

It takes about thirty days for them to hatch. The male never leaves, never sleeps. It is physically difficult for him, but an honor that happens only a few times in his life .

He eats about half of the eggs in order to stay alive, one per day. It is his responsibility to study the egg cluster, and cull the least active ones, so as to increase the probability that the ones that hatch will be strong, and survive .

Eating the eggs is physically and spiritually revolting. Sometimes the eggs die, though, and that is much easier .

In this case the male could not bring himself to eat. He starved for eleven days, and then removed fifteen of the eggs from the water. When they dried out and died, he ate them all. He was seen doing this, and does not deny it. Many males do encourage the egg to die before they eat it, although this is considered a venial sin, because the male’s suffering supposedly invests the remaining eggs with strength. Most males and some females consider this to be a meaningless superstition .

But to devour fifteen dead eggs at once is unheard of. The male claims that he was irrational from hunger and a virus that affected his central nervous system. A healer confirmed the presence of the virus, but pointed out that he would not have been infected if he had been properly eating the eggs. It is well known that there is a protein in the eggs that strengthens the immune system, and watcher males who don’t eat them fall ill .

The problem is further complicated because this is the female’s last brood, the brood expected to provide physical support for a female in her declining years. But they are physically incompetent, slow and feeble, all but five of them carried away by predators in their first year .

I said that an obvious approach would be to require that the male support the female, or in some way guarantee her support.

This is not possible. The male agrees that he must die for his irresponsibility .

I asked Why couldn’t he put off dying long enough to guarantee her support?

He must die while the guilt is fresh .

I asked if it could tell me something about the nature of this support. I said that in most human societies, it would be a form of money, which the female would use for food, shelter, and protection.

This culture has evolved beyond the need for that particular abstraction. The support normally offered by the brood is physical: they take turns bringing her food and guarding her while she sleeps .

I asked why the male should not be required to do this himself.

The very sight of him infuriates the female. Only the solemnity of this time and place keeps her from taking his life now .

I asked about his other offspring; whether they could divide among themselves the responsibility for the female’s care.

That would be a possible solution if he had any. This is the first time a female has asked him to mate .

I suggested a community solution, that one baby from each of the next fifteen or twenty broods be given to the female to raise as her own.

They would not obey her. Parents communicate with their infants by smell and they would know she was not their mother .

The tribunal thanks you for your contribution. They have decided . One saurian came up behind another and, in a quick smooth motion, pulled the back of its vest down, pinioning its arms. The trapped one looked up, closed its eyes, and roared. A third one leaned forward almost delicately and bit down on the exposed neck and tore half of the flesh away in one jerk. The roar became a gurgle and the creature sagged, brown blood drooling from the wound. The others looked away until it dropped unconscious, and then they fell on it, feeding noisily.

I said that by my culture’s standards that was an extreme punishment for irresponsibility.

That was not the male who was killed. It was the female, granted a swift and dignified end. The male now faces a premature old age, unprotected by family or society .

Your confusion is understood. Your anger is inappropriate .

I said that I could never be so cosmically objective as to approve of that inequity. If this test is to see whether I can mimic your alien attitudes, then you may as well stop now.

That is not what is being measured. This is not a “test.” Step forward .

We were up in ’Home, in John’s room. He was sleeping calmly, though in his usual tense position, a respirator taped over his nose.

This male faces his old age well protected by family and society. Yet his life is over, except for pain and frustration. At a word from you I will end it quietly, by stopping his heart. No pain, not even a consciousness of the end .

I said no.

You say you love him. You have admitted to yourself that, as far as you can divine his feelings, he does wish to die but is physically incapable of ending his own life. You believe he is not asking for your help only in order to spare you moral pain. You have said this to your wife: “If he wanted our help I would know .”

I said that was an accurate assessment. I asked whether it could use its powers instead to restore John’s abilities.

No more than I could unscramble an egg. Disorder at the quantum level is sacred. Allow me to end his pain .

I said that I could not. That it would be the same as my taking off his respirator and smothering him with a pillow.

This is something you have done in your imagination .

I said of course. Although my imagination favors pills washed down with boo, or intravenous potassium chloride. Die Gedanken sind frei , I told it; my thoughts freely flower. My actions are limited.

Follow me, then .

It was not a planet where humans could live without protection. There was a killing methane smell that stopped after one breath. The gravity was crushing; cartilage creaked and popped and both breasts sagged heavily, as if someone small were hanging on there for dear life. We stood on a pebble beach, like the one at Brighton, but the gray fluid that greasily curled ashore was not water. A thick yellow vapor crawled around my ankles. Lightning danced green overhead, in a sky where particolored clouds raced in swirling parallel bands. I said it felt like Jupiter, in the old Solar System.

It is not. This is much more clement, a neighbor of Epsilon’s. Some day your descendants may live here independent of life support. Of course they will no longer be recognizably human in form. They will be something like this .

I changed. It was horrible. My skin became scales, overlapping plates of some clear mineral like mica. My arms and legs split into four pairs and I fell to the ground, hands and feet like flippers splaying over the shifting pebbles. From my thorax grew two pairs of prehensile tentacles, one pair muscular, ending in hooklike claws, the other ending in a delicate cluster of fingers. I tried to speak, but there was just a clattering of mandibles.