Robert Sheckley - Shall We Have a Llittle Talk?

'Yes, wood. A commonplace, dirty old piece of wood. Or at least that's all it would be if people didn't get their feelings so ridiculously involved.'

'What do they do with the wood?' Jackson asked quickly.

'Do with it? Nothing much, when you come right down to it. But the religious aura is simply too much for our so-called intellectuals. They are unable, in my opinion, to isolate the simple primordial fact - wood - from the cultural volturneiss which surrounds it at festerhiss, and to some extent at uuis, too.'

'That's how intellectuals are,' Jackson said. 'But you can isolate it, and you find—'

'I find it's really nothing to get excited about. I really mean that. I mean to say that a cathedral, viewed correctly, is no more than a pile of rocks, and a forest is just an assembly of atoms. Why should we see this case differently? I mean, really, you could elikate mushkies forsically without even using wood! What do you think of that?'

'I'm impressed,' Jackson said.

'Don't get me wrong! I'm not saying it would be easy, or natural, or even right. But still, you damned well could! Why, you could substitute cormed grayti and still come out all right!' Erum paused and chuckled. 'You'd look foolish, but you'd still come out all right.'

'Very interesting,' Jackson said.

'I'm afraid I became a bit vehement,' Erum said, wiping his forehead. 'Was I talking very loudly? Do you think perhaps I was overheard?'

'Of course not. I found it all very interesting. I must leave just now, Mr Erum, but I'll be back tomorrow to fill out that form and buy the property.'

'I'll hold it for you,' Erum said, rising and shaking Jackson's hand warmly. 'And I want to thank you. It isn't often that I have the opportunity for this kind of frank no-holds-barred conversation.'

'I found it very instructive,' Jackson said. He left Erum's office and walked slowly back to his ship. He was disturbed, upset, and annoyed. Linguistic incomprehension irked him, no matter how comprehensible it might be. He should have been able to figure out, somehow, how one went about elikating mushkies forsically.

Never mind, he told himself. You'll work it out tonight, Jackson baby, and then you'll go back in there and cannon-ball through them forms. So don't get het up over it, man.

He'd work it out. He damned well had to work it out, as he had to own a piece of property.

That was the second part of his job.

Earth had come a long way since the bad old days of naked, aggressive warfare. According to the history books, a ruler back in those ancient times could simply send out his troops to seize whatever the ruler wanted. And if any of the folks at home had the temerity to ask why he wanted it, the ruler could have them beheaded or locked up in a dungeon or sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea. And he wouldn't even feel guilty about doing any of those things because he invariably believed that he was right and they were wrong.

This policy, technically called the droit de seigneur was one of the most remarkable features of the laissez-faire capitalism which the ancients knew.

But, down the slow passage of centuries, cultural processes were inexorably at work. A new ethic came into the World; and slowly but surely, a sense of fair play and justice was bred into the human race. Rulers came to be chosen by ballot and were responsive to the desires of the electorate. Conceptions of Justice, Mercy, and Pity came to the forefront of men's minds, ameliorating the old law of tooth and talon and amending the savage bestiality of the ancient time of unreconstruction.

The old days were gone for ever. Today, no ruler could simply take ; the voters would never stand for it.

Nowadays one had to have an excuse for taking.

Like for example a Terran citizen who happened to own property all legal and aboveboard on an alien planet, and who urgently needed and requested Terran military assistance in order to protect himself, his home, his means of a legitimate livelihood...

But first he had to own that property. He had to really own it, to protect himself from the bleeding-hearts Congressmen and the soft-on-aliens newsmen who always started an investigation whenever Earth took charge of another planet.

To provide a legal basis for conquest - that was what the contactors were for.

'Jackson,' Jackson said to himself, 'you gonna git yourself that li'l' ole bromicaine factory tomorrow and you gonna own it without let or hindrance. You heah me, boy? I mean it sincerely.'

On the morrow, shortly before noon, Jackson was back in the city. Several hours of intensive study and a long consultation with his tutor had sufficed to show him where he had gone wrong.

It was simple enough. He had merely been a trifle hasty in assuming an extreme and invariant isolating technique in the Hon use of radicals. He had thought, on the basis of his early studies, that word meaning and word order were the only significant factors required for an understanding of the language. But that wasn't so. Upon further examination, Jackson found that the Hon language had some unexpected resources: affixation, for example, and an elementary form of reduplication. Yesterday he hadn't even been prepared for any morphological inconsistencies; when they had occurred, he had found himself in semantic difficulties.

The new forms were easy enough to learn. The trouble was, they were thoroughly illogical and contrary to the entire spirit of Hon.

One word produced by one sound and bearing one meaning - that was the rule he had previously deduced. But now he discovered eighteen important exceptions - compounds produced by a variety of techniques, each of them with a list of modifying suffixes. For Jackson, this was as odd as stumbling across a grove of palm trees in Antarctica.

He learned the eighteen exceptions, and thought about the article he would write when he finally got home.

And the next day, wiser and warier, Jackson strode meaningfully back to the city.

In Erum's office, he filled out the Government forms with ease. That first question - 'Have you, now or at any past time, elikated mushkies forsically 1 ' - he could now answer with an honest no. The plural ' mushkies ' in its primary meaning, represented in this context the singular 'woman'. (The singular ' mushkies ' used similarly would denote an uncorporeal state of femininity.)

Elikation was, of course, the role of sexual termination, unless one employed the modifier ' forsically '. If one did, this quiet term took on a charged meaning in this particular context, tantamount to edematous polysexual advocation.

Thus, Jackson could honestly write that, as he was not a Naian, he had never had that particular urge.

It was as simple as that. Jackson was annoyed at himself for not having figured it out on his own.

He filled in the rest of the questions without difficulty, and handed the paper back to Erum.

'That's really quite skoe,' Erum said. 'Now, there are just a few more simple items for us to complete. The first we can do immediately. After that, I will arrange a brief official ceremony for the Property Transferral Act, and that will be followed by several other small bits of business. All of it should take no more than a day or so, and then the property will be all yours.'

'Sure, kid, that's great,' Jackson said. He wasn't bothered by the delays. Quite the contrary, he had expected many more of them. On most planets, the locals caught on quickly to what was happening. It took no great reasoning power to figure out that Earth wanted what she wanted, but wanted it in a legalistic manner.