NOT STUPID ENOUGH, by George H. Scithers

Bill Wilkes stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the nearly naked Immigration official. He closed his mouth and firmly reminded himself that he was light-years from Earth, and the thatched roof and log beams of the Customs and Immigration shed should have warned him. Still—Bill glanced back over his shoulder and out across the small spaceport at the reassuring bulk of the freighter that had just delivered him and a dozen other passengers to Garth. Even the unloading equipment was no more than a few dozen years out of date; and then, suddenly, this. Bill turned back to the impressively muscular humanoid to study more carefully the headband and feather, worn Amerindian style, and the bronze-headed ax, belted to the Garthian’s hip.

The Garthian official finished with the passenger ahead of Bill. He glanced up, noticed Bill’s stare, and twitched a bushy green eyebrow in response. “Cultural shock? ’S fact, this gets it over earlier than if we be in Terran costume,” he said, with hardly a trace of an accent, as he reached for the young Earthman’s travel document. After a moment, he looked up from the document at Bill, eyebrows pulled together in a puzzled scowl. “You be connected with that Wilkes who—”

“His grandson,” said Bill. “I heard that in spite of what happened, you have been putting up statues of him, and I wanted to find out what—”

“Not in spite,” said the big humanoid “Because of.” He stopped scowling, twitched his eyebrows. He gestured at a heap of pillows on a low log platform nearby. “Be seated, wait. After I check the others on, we talk.” The Garthian turned to the next passenger in line, reached for his travel document.

While the rest of the passengers filed past Immigration and moved on to claim their baggage from Customs, Bill sat on a pillow. His initial worry gradually turned to indignation, then both were forgotten as he watched a small, furry day-bat scurry around the floor of the shed with wings furled. Emboldened by the young Earthman’s stillness, the day-bat hopped up onto the pillows, then opened its wings and flitted off. Bill glanced up; the big Garthian was approaching. Bill stood up, remembering his indignation; but before he could speak, the Garthian plopped his muscular body down on the pillows, stretched himself in a prodigious yawn, and relaxed.

“Be comfortable, please,” said the Garthian. He twitched his eyebrows as he looked up at Bill. The Earthman started to speak, then grinned instead and sat down. “What do you know about the visit of your ancestor here?” asked the big humanoid.

“Well,” said Bill, squirming for a more comfortable position on the pillows, “I’ve read his diary. And the official report of the expedition he was on, which doesn’t say too much. The thing you’ve got to remember is that back then, Earth—Terra—was still in the Neo-Victorian reaction to the Hallucinated Age. At least, grandfather was, and it sort of gave him a jolt when the local mayor or chief or whoever he was, invited him to…uh—”

“Help service his woman?” The big Garthian twitched an eyebrow in amusement. “Of course even by then, our wisemen and your biographers…no, no, biologists, decided we be not interfertile, even though we correspond in bore and stroke.”

“Bore and—? Oh.” Bill felt his face go warm, saw the Garthian twitch his bushy green eyebrows again, and grinned back.

“High-Chief-by-Election Khlaj was conservative and—you do not have the word—one who observes proper ritual. So, interfertile or not, he extended invitation to service in the proper form. ’S fact, he got a jolt when your ancestor spoke forth a lecture on promiscuity. And then…”

* * * *

The leader of the first Terran expedition to Garth had been in the middle of supper when Dr. Wilkes burst in, panting, “I have it, I have it!”

“Sit down, damnit, Doctor, and stop waving your arms around,” Captain Smithson had grumbled. “The green-hairs aren’t attacking, are they?”

“No. Hardly. Just the—reverse,” Dr. Wilkes had said, between puffs. “They invited me—to an orgy.”

“Well, well, Doctor,” the captain had said. “You’re the expedition’s psychologist; you don’t have to ask me for permission to…ah…observe the natives’ religious—”

“No, no, you don’t understand. It isn’t religious at all; it isn’t even public…I mean it isn’t even—”

“Do sit down,” the captain had said firmly. He had taken another mouthful of supper, then said, “Orgies tend to be something less than private, Dr. Wilkes. And while I wouldn’t presume to prescribe in your field of study, an occasional one does do some—”

“That’s just it. They never get together in private; all their procreative activity is in indecent groups and orgies.”

“So?” the expedition’s botanist had asked. “Maybe something in their instincts requires that they—”

“No, no, no. I talked to them. Preached to them, almost. They just never thought of being private about it, you know, monogamous. But with a little persuasion—”

“Persuasion!”

“Don’t you see? That’s the key to the whole Garthian behavioristic complex. No interspecific competition of exclusive access to the chosen female, no system of paternal descent, no basis even for monotheism replacing polytheistic idolatry, which is the basis for the concept of a law-bound universe, on which our whole scientific—”

“Yes, yes, but aren’t you getting a bit emotionally involved?” the captain had asked.

“Involved? Even…even tomcats don’t invite their neighbors in for…for…you’ve seen how primitive they are, living in dirty huts—”

“It seems to me,” the expedition’s zoologist had objected, “that you are getting emotional. The huts are clean, even if they’re built of rammed earth. And I’ve never seen a tribe of tomcats with an elected chief and a system of letters of credit, even if they are written on pieces of bark. And the bridgekeeper on the river a couple dozen kilometers west has been doing some interesting work on the statistics of day-bat breeding. Furthermore—”

“I AM NOT GETTING EMOTIONAL.”

“Furthermore, I haven’t seen any signs of a, as you call it, polymorphic idolatry to get replaced.”

“Polytheistic, you pot-head. And if you can’t see it’s our plain duty to enlighten these poor savages, then—”

“Pot-head? I am not going to sit here and get insulted by a sanctimonious shrink who’s meddling—”

“GENTLEMEN!” the captain had bellowed at that point. “That’s better. Dr. Wilkes, if you do not shut up and sit down, I shall have the chief machinist make me some irons so I can put you in them. Just because we are one hundred thirty-five light-years from Terra is no reason we can’t have a quiet, peaceful supper at the end of a hard day. I daresay Chief Khlaj keeps better order during his orgies than some of the meals in this madhouse, and—”

* * * *

“…Your ancestor began his crusade to reform all Garth,” the big Garthian native said. “He persuaded the captain of the expedition to allow it, saying that it was to our own good. So in spite of the Terran rules—”

“Yes, that was the biggest problem,” said Bill, rolling over onto his stomach and tucking a pillow under one elbow. “According to grandfather’s diary, he had as hard a time persuading the captain not to interfere as he did persuading…uh…Chief Khlaj to give up orgies in favor of restricting sex to just the…uh…essential two participants. Talking the young bucks into the idea of not sharing their mates was almost easy, compared to those two. He had a lot in the diary about substitution and sublimation and reinforcement of post-adolescent intraspecific competition which I didn’t—still don’t understand at all.”

“Well, ’s fact that my folk didn’t understand that part either. What they did understand was that he said giving up orgies meant getting Terran technology. That wasn’t fact, as they found out; but at the time it did make sense.” The Garthian twitched his eyebrows; Bill found himself smiling back.

“But—” Bill’s smile faded. “He didn’t mean to lie. According to the diary, he thought if he got you going with monogamy, then monotheism and the whole idea of a rational universe running on universal laws would take hold, superseding a lot of local superstitions and capricious gods and like that. Instead—”

“Instead, there were no capricious gods until your ancestor persuaded the village storyteller to invent some.”

“Only, Grandfather didn’t realize he—the storyteller—was inventing them on demand, though he did mention the storyteller seemed to have an endless supply.” He glanced out the side of the Customs and Immigration shed, away from the spaceport, spotted a pair of thin lines strung from tree to tree through the woods. “Hey, you do have electric power, then.”

“’S fact. We decided there be no reason to cut down trees and cut off branches and put trees back in holes. Our power lines be strung from trees already there. And drains and running water in some of the towns.” The big native rolled over, sat up. “Of course, we insisted the first visiting Terran running-water engineer be not admitted to Garth until a drains engineer has been here and started teaching and building. Otherwise”—his eyebrows lifted as he looked directly at the young Earthman—“it be as bad as a man who teaches first and learns afterwards.”

* * * *

Bill felt his face go warm. He sat up, glared at the big Garthian sprawled on the pillows beside him. “Now look, none of you guys…people…knew about the way your sexes and things worked then either.”

“Two genders and three sexes?” The Garthian twitched his eyebrows lazily.

“And…and I don’t quite understand it even yet,” Bill said. “Could you—?”

“Your ancestor had all the facts himself. He visited the Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl shortly after he—your ancestor—began his crusade for procreative propriety, and while Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl was even then puzzling over the results of his day-bat breeding…”

* * * *

“Perhaps,” the hereditary-bridgekeeper had said, “animals do not inherit characteristics in the same clear way that plants do. I have not yet found out, because of the other problem, which seems to be even more interesting than the first.” He had gestured at a tidy row of wicker cages, each containing from two to a half dozen furry day-bats.

The engineer of the first expedition, one of three Earthmen visiting the bridgekeeper, had been itching to ask about the bridge itself, for he’d never seen a warren truss executed entirely in wood with bronze fastenings before; but the bridgekeeper spoke no Terran, and the engineer had to depend on Dr. Wilkes for translation into the local language. The expedition’s botanist had asked for more details, through Dr. Wilkes, of the Garthian’s hobby, before the engineer changed the topic.

“Yes, yes,” the hereditary-bridgekeeper had said, “it is that the number of males so affects whether there are day-bat pups. One male, any number of females, no pups. Two males, and in fourteen out of thirty cages, none of the females had pups, not counting, of course, two cages that my third son dropped and broke, and three more where one of the males died. After that, I decided the number of females in the cage be immaterial; either none had pups, or all, always excepting one or two who didn’t like their mates or something.” He had twitched his eyebrows then. “Day-bat females are like all women. Contrary. Howsoever, we had then ten man-bodylengths of decking of the bridge to replace before the seed-shipping season. My third son and my second daughter took over the day-bat breeding then, and did almost as well as I.

“Let’s see now; with three males in a cage, but five of eighteen cages were without pups, again not counting cages with escaped or sick day-bats.” He had sighed then. “It is not a simple, done-again-easily trial, like the famous Wilj and his measurement of the increase of speed of down-dropping weights from whence he called out the number-rule that all weights—but you Terrans be far beyond our feeble efforts in the study of non-alive things.”

The engineer had demanded Dr. Wilkes get more details from the bridgekeeper, saying this Wilj sounded like a Garthian Galileo or Newton, but Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl had resumed his account before the psychologist could translate the Terran engineer’s question.

“Then,” the Garthian had said, “with four males in each cage, we have two out of fourteen cages without pups, leaving out the three cages that my fourth son’s pet fnurr got into. I cannot yet decide if the rule underlying is one half, one third, one fourth; or if it is one half, one fourth, one eighth; with two, then three, then four males.” The native had shaken his head slowly. “It would be much easier if I knew if number-rules in animal-study be simple numbers or messy ones. Or, maybe, I do no better than measure the mood of the lady day-bats, and you know what the mood of any female can be.” He had twitched one eyebrow then…“Now, for the other Terran visitor, I show the bridge and his questions answer.” The botanist had followed the bridgekeeper’s second son back to the wicker cages of lively day-bats, while the other two Terrans followed the bridgekeeper up the abutment of the bridge.

* * * *

“…And your ancestor,” the Garthian Immigration official asked Bill, “did his diary hold comment on the bridgekeeper’s work?”

Bill shook his head. “He didn’t think much…uh—”

“Go on, speak fact; it be safe.”

“Yeah…uh…well, Dr. Wilkes…Grandfather didn’t think much of whatever the bridgekeeper was computing on, but he did get all excited about his doing anything scientific since he—the bridge keeper lived alone with his woman and their kids. He figured this proved his argument about monogamy and monotheism and modern technology.” He paused, frowned at the big Garthian, who seemed about to go into convulsions. “But when he tried this in his speech on giving up orgies, at the next village, the…the audience…hey!”

The muscular Garthian rolled off the pillows, jerking and squirming, yelping and wheezing. Bill scrambled to his feet, wide-eyed with bewilderment, then suddenly realized the Garthian was laughing. He slumped back on the pillows and sat, scowling while the Garthian rolled on the floor.

“I be sorry, young Wilkes,” the Immigration official finally gasped. He stood up, eyebrows still twitching, brushed himself off, and then stretched his big body on the pillows beside Bill again. “The listeners, ’s fact they would laugh and be thinking he be telling a joke. Hereditary-bridgekeepers be in our jokes as traveling salesmen in yours.”

“Oh.” Bill started to relax, then frowned in puzzlement. “But how? If they’re off by themselves—”

“With all the traffic to market and back over the bridge for him to see over and pick from?”

“Oh.” Bill grinned slowly. “I see. Anyway, Grandfather…uh…went along with the joke, even put it in as a joke on himself, from then on. He must have had a way of talking, getting people—Garthians—all enthusiastic about something. He kept getting guys so sold on his idea that they’d join him and then go out and preach on their own. Of course, not having Earth gadgets and things to show off put the Garthian…uh…assistants back a bit, but they did know the language better. I think he had about ten of them when…when the trouble started.”

“But about the day-bat breeding?”

“No pups unless there are two males, and then only half the time?” Bill looked thoughtfully at the native sprawled comfortably beside him. “You’re trying to find out if I can figure it out?”

The Garthian nodded, face suddenly serious. “Your ancestor did not; it was Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl who found out why, for villages and villages around the Terran landing site, women stopped becoming predicate…no, that is not the word…pregnant.”

Bill chewed his lip. “Three sexes and two genders. If there were two kinds of males, and you had to have the right one…no, that’s not it, since with one male there were never any pups. And with two…hey, it’s like going to a bureau drawer for socks in the dark, and if there’re two kinds and you want a pair…no, that’s not it either; with three, you always got a pair.” He glanced at the Garthian, grinned at his bewildered expression, and explained.

“Two kinds of socks in a drawer. You can’t tell which is which when you pick them out. If you take three, you’re sure to have a pair, because if one’s black and the other’s, say, white, then the third one’s got to be either black or white and you’ve got a pair…pair! That’s it.”

“Pair?” asked the big native, sitting up.

“With socks, you gotta have two of the same kind. But for…uh breeding, you gotta have opposite kinds, so if you got three, then let’s see, you’d get a fifty-fifty chance that the first two turn out to be the same, so there’s half that chance that the third is like the first two. But that would make it a quarter—one fourth—of the cages without pups, not two out of fourteen, or whatever it was.”

“Real number-results do be messy, ’s fact,” said the big Garthian. “Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl came to the same thinking you do now.” He twitched his eyebrows once. “But without the trips to the clothes-bucket to get socks. It outcomes as you think, that we be of two genders, male and female; but three sexes, female, one kind of male, other kind of male. Germ cells from all three be necessary for conceptions.”

“Two kinds of males.” Bill stared at the Garthian for a moment. “Uh which kind are you?”

“No usable way to tell. Only difference is which kind of germ cells I make. And it be that we change, now and then, from one male sex to the other.”

“Damn. No wonder you guys have orgies,” said Bill, shaking his head. “Or at least enough of an orgy for your women to…uh…meet one of each kind of male. But that monogamy crusade Grandfather was on—”

“Without that, Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl would not easily have persuaded folk of his discovery, so it was not all bad. At the time, however…”

* * * *

“Well,” Dr. Wilkes had snapped, “I hope it’s important. Your ’copter landed in the middle of one of the biggest crowds I’ve had yet. I’ll take hours to get them back out of the woods and settled—”

“It’s important, Doctor. What’s more, you aren’t about to collect your audience again, today or ever. This foolishness has—”

“Sir! This is unheard of! I am conducting a—”

“You have been conducting a genocidal pogrom. There hasn’t been a Garthian woman got with child since you started your blasted preaching in the villages, and it’s been spreading, as far as the natives can tell, as fast as your prudery crusade, for the past three months.”

“Sir! I will not stand here—”

“You, Doctor, will get in that ’copter or be carried there.”

Dr. Wilkes got.

* * * *

Back at the expedition’s base camp, they had landed to find High-Chief-by-Election Rhyl—High-Chief-by-Election Khlaj having been impeached—and a half-dozen other Garthians waiting for them.

“What’s this?” the expedition’s captain had demanded.

“Trial,” the expedition’s botanist had explained. He had become pretty fluent in the local dialects in the past three months, while Wilkes was away on crusade. “Judge, jury, the works.” He had smirked then. “And an indictment, even if it is written on a sheet of bark.”

“Indictment? Now look here,” Dr. Wilkes had shouted, shifting to the local dialect of Garthian. “Are you blaming me for this supposed infertility of your women?” He had gone on at some length, pointing out that he was hardly expected to know the details of Garthian genetics; diagnosing the sudden lack of pregnancies in the regions he’d been preaching to as a psychosomatic, to be combated by closer adherence to the principles of private, proper procreative practices; and denouncing any theories that might be advanced by anyone of loose morals, such as hereditary-bridgetenders.

He had stopped for breath at last, whereupon Chief Rhyl announced that he and the jury would withdraw to consider sentence.

“SENTENCE? Now? When they haven’t even—” Dr. Wilkes turned to the captain: “Are you going to put up with this…this—Why the prosecution hasn’t even stated—”

“Don’t need to,” the botanist had said, dryly. “Not after that confession of yours.”

“Confession?” the captain had asked. “But he hadn’t even heard the charge.”

“Well, seeing that he didn’t wait to hear what it was before he started yelling, that rather confirms it.”

The captain had grinned, started to snicker. Dr. Wilkes had demanded, “Just what in Space am I charged with, then? I told them I didn’t understand their genetics, but—”

“Exactly. And the indictment was for the crime of stupidity.”

“Stupidity?” Bill Wilkes asked. “In the diary—” He frowned. “But stupidity? But if he didn’t know—”

The muscular native sat up suddenly, face serious. “I know. You Earthmen do not count stupidity among the crimes. But things do.” He pulled from his belt the bronze-headed ax and held it out to Bill. “If you run your hand over the edge, hard, ax will cut. It makes no difference if you didn’t know, or meant well. The ax does not care. Be stupid, get cut. ’S fact?”

Bill nodded slowly. “Uh…yeah. It…it is fact, O.K. So that’s why the expedition got cut short—the diary didn’t say, and the official report just talked around it, but—”

“But your ancestor was expelled from Garth for extreme stupidity.”

“Yeah.” Bill sighed. “I sort of suspect the captain was glad to get away before your people thought of raising a charge of Genocide or Indigenous Interference.”

The big Garthian twitched his eyebrows a few times as he put away his ax, then lay back on the pillows again. “Why should we? We were being stupid, too—following your ancestor. And as for the stop of pregnancies, that was easy to fix. Fun, too.”

Bill grinned. “Then…hey, that’s the thing Grandfather never could understand—how you guys managed to get anything done without intraspecific competition…uh…you know, competing for wives and stuff. Instead, you just invite in the neighbors and…you know.”

“So? We be puzzled about how you manage with so much competition. ’S fact, though, that with you, take the job of immigrations. You would have a clerk, and a high clerk to be bossy to him, and a higher clerk over him, and then a committee to be boss over them, all because of your competition-drive. Here, I be in charge. If I do well, other Garthians leave my job alone. If I do badly, I get expelled from job. You see? Low drive to be bossy, low drive to keep other person from interfering. Works out almost the same, both ways.”

“And so, you’re the…the only one to decide I’ll get onto the planet? I suppose, because Grandfather was so stupid, you’re afraid that…hey, what about the statues? Or—”

“Statues we be putting up of your ancestor?” He looked somehow embarrassed for a moment as he went on, “Look at it from the Garthian position, be Garthian for a short time. Earthmen arrive out of the sky, with flying machines, overwhelming powers, great wisdom, everything. All suddenly, we be stupid, weak, nothing. And your ancestor told us we were even wrong in our way of reproducing, in groups; and if we changed, we could be like Earthmen. Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl said no, we must reproduce our way. So: your ancestor was wrong and Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl was right.”

“So the statues are to…to remind you guys how dense Terrans can be? And you’re worried that I’m not smart enough to allow onto your planet?”

“Partly fact, partly not,” said the big Garthian. “’S fact we be careful who we let onto planet now. And ’s fact your ancestor be…well, the standard of stupidity on Garth. He be very useful, telling us always that Earthmen are not all smarter, just started sooner, telling us we can catch up in our own way.” He sat up beside Bill, put a thick arm across the young man’s shoulders. “You be not stupid, young Wilkes. It is the other way around, with the importance of keeping…how you say…down your ancestor’s reputation.”

“You mean?” Bill grinned.

“’S fact. You’re not stupid enough to run around loose on Garth.”