Before we made contact with you, dear Benita, we watched the peoples of Earth for a very long time. It was not necessary for us to learn all the languages, as we have machines to do that, but it was necessary to learn how people think. We watched the Chinese and the Africans, the Indians and Ceylonese. I was particularly interested in the nations where ruling groups had recently come to power through advocacy of specific beliefs, as for example in Afghanistan.
For several days, I was intrigued by one particular person there, one who thought of himself as a warrior and faithful son of the Prophet. We watched his daily routines including the rituals and prayers his people engage in several times each day. Vess listened to his memories: remembered writings, oral histories, the battles he had fought and the victory his people had won. This man—whose name was Ben Shadouf—had been given a half-ruined house, badly damaged during the war. He spent part of each day rebuilding the house where he lived with his wife and his children.
Each evening, when he rose from his prayers, he went to the inner courtyard where his wife had set out his evening meal. On a particular evening, he sat contemplating the food for a long time, then summoned his wife and pointed at the plates before him, asking for meat.
“We had none,” she murmured.
“You have money to buy meat,” he said. I watched his eyes measuring her, examining her face with what I took to be concern. When we first found this family, she had looked quite healthy and vigorous, as you do, dearest Benita, but she no longer did so. Now she coughed often, there were shadows around her eyes, and her hair was rough and uncared for.
“I gave you money,” he said.
“You had no time to go with me to the market,” she replied. Her eyes remained fixed on her feet. She seemed feverish and unwell. “I am no longer permitted to be on the street without a male relative.”
He gritted his teeth and waved her away, fingering the long scar that ran from his forehead down one cheek. Vess told me the man was proud of the scar, for he had killed the Russian soldier who had shot him. The bullet had nicked his cheekbone, however, and it hurt him still. Vess, feeling his mind, said the battles he had fought were more real to him than the present, more real than the victory his group had achieved. He had anticipated victory the way a starving person anticipates food. He had thought it would be satisfying, gladdening, but he found it to be only tiresome. He had agreed to the laws they would implement when the victory came, but he had not known how irritating and inconvenient those laws would be. He had not realized his wife would suffer from them.
The woman, Afaya, could not go into the street without a male relative to protect her modesty, even though she would be covered from head to toe with only tiny mesh openings before her eyes. Afaya had told her husband that wearing the robe was like being blind. The wife of Mustapha, his neighbor and commanding officer, had tripped on the pavement and fallen, allowing her legs to be seen. She was then beaten by those who named themselves Guardians of Modesty. She had died of this beating. Mustapha had shrugged it away, for she was old and there were no children at home for her to care for, but he, too, found the new rules inconvenient.
Vess and I puzzled over this. The woman was a receptor, of course. The men were all inceptors, except the very young ones, who would be, and very old ones, who had been. Was every one of them expected to go into breeding madness if he saw a receptor’s legs? Or her face? Were they totally without self-control or a sense of shame? Seemingly so, for any woman showing her face was charged with being an erotic-stimulator-for-hire who, by showing any part of herself, had stimulated breeding madness in men and must therefore be stoned to death. Actual erotic-stimulators-for-hire, of whom there were a good many, were not stoned to death. And, most interesting of all, even while the men were doing the stoning, they knew the women they called whores were, in fact, innocent. And yet, they did it.
We examined Ben Shadouf’s irritation. He would have to hire a male servant to do the food buying for the household. He would have to sequester Afaya and his daughters to the upstairs of the house, for the servant, being unrelated to them, could not run the risk of coming into contact with them or seeing them. If his wife was not in the courtyard, where the kitchen was, she could not cook his meals! All these endless complications in order to keep his wife, a human being like himself, imprisoned from the sight and hearing of any other man! Even his consciousness of his own frustration annoyed him.
When the wife of Ben Shadouf began coughing again, he looked up in anger. It was a strange anger, directed as much at himself as at her. Her cough had become more dangerous over the previous days. Vess and I believed she was dying. She held memories of the time before the war when she had gone to a clinic staffed by women doctors, but women were not allowed to work any longer. Their place was at home where their purity could be protected by their menfolk.
We sought throughout the city and found the clinic, which had set up anew in a private home. It was staffed only by women who did not go out, who received shipments of medicines from outside the country and who had husbands or brothers to shop for them. Vess put the knowledge of this place into Ben Shadouf’s head. We saw him thinking the women doctors were probably Americans, or influenced by Americans who were always trying to seduce followers of the Prophet to their evil ways. He worried whether he could risk defilement by going to the clinic with her, and he feared the satanic notions they would put into her head. Perhaps it would be better, he thought, to let her die and then find a new wife, one with a brother who could share the duty of protecting her.
And yet, he loved her. We saw tears in his eyes.
Vess and I tried to make sense of this as we watched him picking at the vegetables: lentils and onions and herbs, which had a flavorful aroma. His wife was dying, his children would be motherless, and he could not engage in any constructive action.
Abruptly he pushed the food aside and got up. Calling loudly, he said, “I am going into the town for my meal. This food is fit only for women.”
As he left, he heard her coughing again.
Intrigued by this episode, we sought similar confusions where religion warred with good sense. We found them in many parts of the world: in Afghanistan, Moslem against Moslem. In India, Moslem against Hindu against Christian. In Israel, Moslem against Moslem against Israelis who are against other Israelis. This particular observation saddened us, for all the pain that was in it, and it excited us, too, for it showed us there are ways in which we know we can help your world. While you are putting together your household, Benita, we are taking our first action, not in your country, where we had planned to do so, but in Afghanistan and Israel and India and so on. Your Moses, in your holy book, brought down plagues upon his adversaries. So Vess and I will bring down plagues upon that part of your world.