Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

"So they lied to them ?" Yann was horrified. "On Crane? And on all the other planets?"

"It must have seemed like the kindest thing to do," Tchicaya protested. "And when it started, no one seriously expected them to reach another planet. When they did, though, word had gone ahead of them, so people were much better prepared."

"And this happened six times ? Even if they were fed the same story on every planet, by the time they’d had a few chances to compare it with reality — "

Tchicaya shook his head. "They weren’t fed the same story on every planet; that would have defeated the whole point. They’d traveled into the future in the hope of being entertained in a very specific way. On Crane, they’d revealed a lot about the kind of histories and practices they expected to encounter on their voyage, and so people played along with their expectations. The locals there told them that all the men had been wiped out by a virus shortly after settlement, and made a big song and dance about the struggle to adapt: one faction trying to reinvent the lost sex; another, bravely pursuing monosexuality, finally triumphant. The anachronauts lapped it up, oohing and aahing over all the profound things this told them about gender. They made notes, recorded images, observed a few fake ceremonies and historical re-enactments…then moved on."

Yann buried his face in his hands. "This is unforgivable!"

Tchicaya said, "No one lied to them about anything else. They had some equally bizarre notions about the future of physics, but the people on Crane gave them an honest account of all the latest work."

Yann looked up, slightly mollified. "What happened next?"

"After Crane? It became a kind of competition, to see who could Mead them the best: make up the most outlandish story, and get the anachronauts to swallow it. A plague wasn’t really barbaric enough. There had to be war between the sexes. There had to be oppression. There had to be slavery."

" Slavery ?"

"Oh yes. And worse. On Krasnov, they said that for five thousand years, men had slaughtered their own firstborn child to gain access to a life-prolonging secretion in mother’s milk. The practice had only ended a century before."

Yann swayed against the bed. "That’s surreal on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin." He regarded Tchicaya forlornly. "This is really what the anachronauts expected? No progress, no happiness, no success, no harmony? Just the worst excesses of their own sordid history, repeated over and over for millennia?"

Tchicaya said, "On Mäkelä, the people insisted that their planet had been peaceful since settlement. The anachronauts were terribly suspicious, and kept digging for the awful secret that no one dared reveal. Finally, the locals reviewed the transmission from Crane describing the first contact, and they realized what was needed. They explained that their society had been stabilized by the invention of the Sacred Pentad, in which all family units were based around two males, two females, and one neuter." Tchicaya frowned. "There were rules about the sexual relationships between the members, something about equal numbers of heterosexual and homosexual pairings, but I could never get a clear description of that. But the anachronauts were thrilled by the great cultural richness they had finally uncovered. Apparently, their definition of cultural richness was the widespread enforcement of any social or sexual mores even more bizarre and arbitrary than the ones they’d left behind."

Yann said, "So what happened on Turaev?"

"The ship had been tracked for centuries, of course, so the mere fact of its arrival was no surprise to anyone. My father had known since early childhood that these strangers would be turning up, somewhere on the planet, at about this time. A variety of different hoaxes had been advocated by different groups, and though none of them had gained planet-wide support, the anachronauts rarely visited more than one place, so it would only require the people in one town to back each other up.

"My father wasn’t prepared at all, though. He hadn’t kept up with news of the precise timing of the ship’s arrival, and even though he’d been aware that it would happen soon, the chance of planet-fall outside his own town had been too microscopic to worry about. He’d had far more important things on his mind."

Yann smiled expectantly, despite himself. "So when the flames died down, and the dust settled, and your father’s Mediator dug up the visitors' ancient language from its files…he had to stand there and insist with a straight face that he knew nothing whatsoever about the subject of their inquiries?"

"Exactly. Neither he nor Lajos had the slightest idea what they were supposed to tell these strangers. If they’d read the reports on the anachronauts, they’d have realized that they could have claimed all manner of elaborate taboos on discussing the subject, but they weren’t in a position to know that and invoke some imaginary code of silence. So all they were left with was claiming ignorance: claiming to be both prepubescent, and stupid." Tchicaya laughed. "After six months of longing for each other? Within days, or even hours, of consumation? I don’t know how to translate that into terms you’re familiar with — "

Yann was offended. "I’m not an idiot. I understand how much pride they would have had to swallow. You don’t need to spoonfeed me similes."

Tchicaya bowed his head in apology, but he held out for precision. "Pride, yes, but it was more than that. Claiming anything but the truth would have felt like they were renouncing each other. Even if they’d known their lines, I’m not sure that they could have gone through with the charade." He held a fist against his chest. "It hurts, to lie about something like that. Other people might have been swept up in the excitement of the conspiracy. But to Lajos and my father, that was just noise. They were the center of the universe. Nothing else mattered."

"So they told them the truth?"

Tchicaya said, "Yes."

"About themselves?"

He nodded. "And more."

"About the whole planet? That this was the custom all over Turaev?"

"More."

Yann emitted an anguished groan. "They told them everything?"

Tchicaya said, "My father didn’t come right out and state that all their earlier informants had lied to them, but he explained that — apart from a few surviving contemporaries of the travelers themselves — there’d been nothing resembling sexual dimorphism in the descendants of humans, anywhere, for more than nineteen thousand years. Long before any extrasolar world was settled, it had gone the way of war, slavery, parasites, disease, and quantum indecisiveness. And apart from trivial local details, like the exact age of sexual maturity and the latency period between attraction and potency, he and his lover embodied a universal condition: they were both, simply, people. There were no other categories left to which they could belong."

Yann pondered this. "So did the intrepid gendographers believe him?"

Tchicaya held up a hand, gesturing for patience. "They were far too polite to call my father a liar to his face. So they went into town, and spoke to other people."

"Who, without exception, gave them the approved version?"

"Yes."

"So they left Turaev none the wiser. With an unlikely tale from two mischievous adolescents to add to their collection of sexual mythology."

Tchicaya said, "Perhaps. Except that since Turaev, they haven’t made planet-fall anywhere. They’ve been tracked, the ship’s still functioning, and they’ve had four or five opportunities to enter inhabited systems. But every time, they’ve flown on by."

Yann shivered. "You think it’s a ghost ship?"