Foragers Read online

  FORAGERS

  Charles Oberndorf

  BANTAM BOOKS

  NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  For my grandparents

  Lillian Oberndorf (1889-1956)

  Walter Oberndorf (1888-1965)

  Charles Gleason (1890-1956)

  and

  Mary Louise Vail,

  who provides support

  and a place to write each summer

  And for the Hanover Wind Ensemble

  (1981-1988)‚

  my second family:

  Gunnel Clark

  Tony Geist

  Paul Hecht

  Roberto Mayoral

  Abe Osheroff

  John Wing

  NATURE AND NURTURE

  Author's Note

  Several characters in this novel speak a click language spoken by the Ju/’hoansi‚ who have been called the !Kung in the anthropological literature, and who are referred to here by the 1950s spelling, Ju/wasi. I have included some of the clicks for flavor. For those who enjoy such things, here is roughly how they sound:

  / is a dental click—the tongue is pulled away from the teeth as in “tsk‚ tsk.”

  ≠ is an alveolar click—the tongue is pulled away from the ridge connecting upper teeth to gums.

  ! is an alveopalatal—the tongue is pulled away from the roof of the mouth making a sound like that of a cork coming out of a bottle.

  // is a lateral click—the tongue is pulled away from the sides; in English this sound is sometimes used to urge on horses.

  These soldiers are the owners of fighting. They fight even when they play, and I fear them. I won’t let my children be soldiers, the experts at anger. The soldiers will bring the killing.

  — ≠oma Word, 1978

  Lions eat alone, not people.

  — Ju/wasi saying

  Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

  — Edward Abbey

  Introduction to the Second Alternative Edition

  Two decades after its first appearance, it may be difficult to remember why Foragers was both reviled and celebrated in its time. The Human-Slazan War had entered its own second decade, and each meager attempt at negotiation had failed. One world, which had originally been shared by humans and slazans‚ had been obliterated. Human warships and slazan warships patrolled space, searching for enemy ships to destroy while seeking out the location of enemy installations, orbital colonies, and homeworlds.

  The novel’s author, Pauline Dikobe‚ was a little-known anthropologist and the only human to have had the opportunity to study any slazan culture for a substantial length of time. Three years before, a human-programmed exploration probe had discovered a lost colony of slazans. A warship was dispatched in secret, taking one lone anthropologist to study the solitary aliens far away from the war. She carried out her studies over the course of two hundred local days, working out of a diplomatic shuttle craft—complete with shower, bed, and working kitchen—that had been modified to carry some of the latest and some of the oldest kinds of equipment available to an ethnographer, everything from a spade to imaging pins.

  After her time in the field had ended, Dikobe returned to the warship, expecting to spend her time during the journey home analyzing the wealth of data she had gathered. She found instead that the ship’s intelligence had confiscated and sealed off all the collected data; even her own notebook was inaccessible. A recorded message notified her that the military required raw data presented with a minimum of interpretation. She was thanked for her efforts, reminded of the substantial pay she would receive, and removed from the project. “I was glad,” she later said, “that the ship’s captain hadn’t been ordered to jettison me from the ship.”

  She was left with a four-month-long journey and time to kill. She first found out that even though her home planet, E-donya E-talta‚ was a freenet world, there were wartime laws that allowed the military to claim rightful ownership of the data she had collected. She didn’t want the trip to disappear into secrecy, so she started writing a personal account of her six months on the planet. But with no field notes at hand, she believed such an account would be unreliable and unprofessional; furthermore, she ran the risk that the military might be able to claim ownership of this work, too. After days of hesitation and doubt, Dikobe found herself writing a novel in which she tried to dramatize the nature of slazan life through a series of highly dramatic events. She studied slazans for 200 days, but for unity of action, she has the novel take place over the course of 17 days, in which a human soldier attempts to find a missing anthropologist, whose name, ironically, is Pauline Dikobe.

  Everyone who had followed the war knew there had been a secret mission to study a colony of slazans living in primitive conditions, and there was a hunger for some account of that voyage. Foragers filled that need. It did not matter that parts of the story were terribly fictionalized. It quickly became common knowledge, for instance, that Pauline Dikobe was the only person who had joined the warship’s crew for this mission. The novel’s human protagonist, the Ju/wa soldier who called himself Esoch al-Schouki‚ was Dikobe’s invention, as were the four military scientists Dikobe included to make the fictional expedition appear more realistic.

  Although it was clearly a work of fiction, readers were sure the novel contained a version of her own experiences. They saw in the fictional devices a well-intentioned subtext, and sometimes there was greater debate about the meaning of the subtext than about the anthropological detail itself. The reading public trusted Dikobe’s anthropology: this was how the slazans really were, this was how they behaved, this was how they felt.

  Literary historians have to go back several centuries to find a written fabrication such as hers that moved people to action. Those who were knowledgeable of such things compared Foragers to Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Jungle‚ works that both changed and charged public opinion. Each novel attacked oppressive social institutions by showing how human its victims were. In Dikobe’s novel the enemy had been given a new face, and it had been given a heart. The socially accepted institution of the Human-Slazan War now seemed not only wasteful, but immoral.

  Within two years a new, more extensive set of negotiations, led by General Muhammad ibn Haj‚ was begun, and an end finally came to a ghastly and costly war. Many credited the novel for playing a role in changing public opinion enough so that the military had to end the war. General ibn Haj‚ representing the military, argued to the contrary. Peace had been their goal all along, he said, and if Dikobe had been allowed to publish a monograph rather than a novel, the public image of slazans would not have been so happily changed.

  Ten years after the novel was released, the military declassified most of the contents of the notebook Pauline Dikobe had kept during the expedition and made those sections of it available to scholars of the war. Fadl Sidnal and Yusuf Niws‚ of the Institute of Interspecies Conflict, edited an alternative edition of Foragers‚ one that included excerpts from Dikobe’s notebook.

  The notebook turned out to be a hodgepodge of musings and journal entries, which indicated that all along Dikobe had considered writing a personal account of the mission. Its contents surprised many. First, it became clear that she had been contemplating the idea of the novel during the off hours of her research. Second, the slazans she observed seemed very different from the ones she had invented. In the notebook entries, we see slazan actions but not the slazan heart, and the actions do not always create easy reader empathy.

  Those who claimed that Foragers was propaganda when it was first released now believed they had the evidence to prove their case. Those who had lived and worked among the slazans were divided into two camps. One camp argued that Dikobe, with a novelist’s eye for the truth
, understood the slazans well; the other argued that she understood very little, that all she did was imbue slazan behaviors with human emotions.

  Over time, however, it became clear that the alternative edition had been edited with an astute political eye. The editors included only sections of the notebook that highlighted the differences between the slazans Dikobe observed and the fictive ones she wrote about. A huge scholarly apparatus was used to point out how fictional the fiction was.

  When other scholars read the original notebook, they discovered that Sidnal and Niws had omitted pertinent entries. All of Dikobe’s musings about her novel and its relationship to truth were gone. Any incident that clearly inspired some moment in the novel was absent. The editors, in Dikobe’s words, “made me look like a cheap propagandist.”

  In one interview Dikobe said, “I worked hard to make my fictional slazans as slazan-like as humanly possible. I took observed behavior and employed those behaviors in the narrative. A good part of the dialogue is lifted from conversations our eavesdropping devices recorded. If the military would declassify all the research tapes, you would see that the story is perhaps structured too much like a certain kind of human story, that perhaps the behavior of the slazan characters is determined by the way things go wrong in order for the story to be dramatic, but you would also see that what my fictive slazans say and do corresponds closely to what I saw real slazans saying and doing.”

  This new edition that you hold in your hands takes selections from Dikobe’s attempted memoir and her notebooks to give a better sense of this process. With Pauline Dikobe’s permission I have changed the name of the warship and the names of its crew to preserve their privacy at home. In each case, where possible, I substituted the name used in the novel.

  For centuries now anthropologists have been of two minds as to whether anthropology is a scientific art that relies on understanding through empathy or if it is an artfully practiced science that achieves understanding through empirical data. Foragers—published with these excerpts from Pauline Dikobe’s notebook—dramatizes that conflict well.

  At the time of this writing, tensions are escalating on Tienah‚ the world where Pauline Dikobe made her fame by studying a small colony of slazans. The several slazan populations and the two large human settlements that once coexisted peacefully are now involved in several disputes over territory and trade. The recent imprisonment of three slazans‚ who were arrested for spying, and the retaliatory bombing of a human embassy building has only made matters worse. In light of this current tragedy, it is important to remember the role that empathy played at the end of the Human-Slazan War, a war that we hope historians will never have to write about with the use of a numerical qualifier.

  —Fawiza Muneef

  Executive Director

  Department of Slazan Cultures

  Institute of Cultural Studies

  E-donya E-talta

  Foragers

  by Pauline Dikobe

  The following is taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept during her 200 day study of the slazan foraging population on Tienah.

  Day Eight

  It is the third day that I am ill, on this planet that has no official name and no official number. I should be outside, but instead I lie here, in this converted shuttle craft, on my bed, reeking of sweat and sickness. There’s something in the atmosphere that’s working hard to find an ecological niche inside me, a secure haven where it can survive and prosper. Each morning, vaguely refreshed, my blood filtered and replenished with nutrients, I step outside the shuttle craft. I am dressed like a primal forager, wearing a leather pubic apron and sandals. The morning air is chilled, and my skin is hard with goose bumps.

  Three quarters of the clearing is surrounded by a hill that curves around in a sweeping arc. Up to the crest the hillside is barren of brush; instead there are fresh grasses that glisten each morning with dew. Thick trees form a colorful wail along the crest of the hill. In the morning all the leaves are green, the same shades of green we have observed on Terra, Nueva España‚ E-donya‚ and long-gone New Hope. However, when the sun rises above the horizon and light strikes against the leaves, some chemical reaction is touched off; the leaves of different kinds of trees change to different colors. The thick, heavyset trees take on a deep red, the trees whose tops are pointed sharply become heavy with orange, and the spindly trees that sprout in among the others are ripe with yellow. A wave of color spreads across the clearing as the sun moves across the sky. In the afternoon, as brightness fades with a kind of stillness, the colors of the leaves fade too, and while evening grays deepen into night’s blackness, the colors, too, are bleached away to their original verdant shadows. By morning everything is returned to green. By noon the next day the clearing is lush with reds, oranges, and yellows.

  With the first fresh colors come the locals. They remain at the top of the hill. They stand behind the shadows of trees, watching. They are like ghosts, vague humanoid forms with leathery skin.

  The shuttle craft’s hull is covered with crystalline eyes, and the shuttle’s intelligence magnifies the images on the screens inside. But the natives crouch behind colorful bushes and peer around thick, dark tree trunks, so we catch only glimpses: the tops of heads, the profile of a face, the reach of an arm, the swing of a body turning away, an infant grasping hold of a sagging breast, but we never see an entire body, we never make out individual faces.

  The intelligence combines the data from the images, from motion sensors, from radar, and I get a readout on the number of slazans: anywhere from three to ten individuals may be up there. Each adult sits or crouches or stands a good five meters from another. If an adult is forced to step closer to a conspecific‚ as when returning to a path, both adults turn away: this is our leading cause of detectable motion. Several lactating females carry infants. We have made out two lactating females who carry an infant while a child stands by her side. Childless adults stand alone.

  I vaguely wonder what each one thinks when she watches me totter about the clearing for a while, then half run, half stumble back into the shuttle, where, out of sight and out of sound, I throw up the meager meal I had taken in order to have something to throw up.

  It had been assumed that the adaptation sickness would be mild. During the five months of travel that had brought me here, the warship’s environment had been readjusted by increments so that during the last month of the trip I walked under the same gravity, read under the same lighting, breathed the same atmospheric composition, and paced out the same number of hours that I do on this nameless planet. If nothing else, I was supposed to be cheerier, since it’s past the solstice: day is longer than night.

  But all I can do is lie here in this tiny bed. I sleep restlessly. I awake holding on to the trace fragments of brutal dreams. I want to move. I want to get up and see how well these words have been transcribed. I want the comfort of the written word. I don’t move. I feel as if I’m waiting for something, some rescue. I dream of a man with whom I shared a night five months ago, and I dream he’s coming planetside‚ that he’s making his way through the forest to rescue me. I don’t need rescue. I just need to get better. Why do I yearn for someone whom I knew only for a few hours? Why do I feel that rescue is something I don’t deserve?

  From The Way of God‚ orbiting the skies above me, they talk to me. They speak kindly to me, and I respond with equal kindness. Their voices form an umbilical cord, from this solitary womb of a ship to their larger society above. When I fall asleep, when my mind is set adrift across this nausea, I long to relive the last five months, to say what I truly felt rather than pay attention like a good Muslim girl who was raised to nod and listen, and who later turned those polite skills to anthropology. I want to know what the voyage would have been like if I had traveled it honestly. Would I now be yearning for some masculine rescue from this lonely bed?

  From the skies they monitor the medcomp’s readout, they compare my condition now with my condition yesterday and the day bef
ore, and they tell me I’m doing better, that in a day or two I’ll be fine. I know they’re right, but it feels as if this condition will never end, that the fatigue and nausea and melancholia are mine forever.

  Chapter One

  The Fifth Day

  After five days planetside‚ Pauline Dikobe—who was obviously suffering from adaptation sickness—finished planting a supply of imaging pins around a slazan living area and then half walked, half stumbled through the alien forest and back to the shuttle craft, her specially outfitted anthropological hut, where, without warning or clear motivation, she shut off all communication with the Way of God orbiting above. The enormity of the act was so astounding that the warship’s captain, Alifa al-Shaykh‚ spent a few moments asking various people to confirm the conclusions the ship’s intelligence had already laid out on her command screen in fine columns of Arabic script and numbers. The xenobotanist assigned to the mission confirmed that, yes, the lab was no longer receiving images from the shuttle’s external cameras: the screens were blank. The engineer reported that she had sent her comrade-in-arms to do a personal systems check even though diagnostics showed that the ship’s communications equipment was working perfectly. The AI handler had just finished trying to re-establish contact with the shuttle’s own intelligence, but no luck, nothing.

  Why had Dikobe done this?

  The four women on the bridge, four veiled faces, turned to al-Shaykh as if she could understand the mental workings of this civilian whom they had carried with them for five months to this top-secret location light-years away from the war they should have been fighting. After spending her entire adult life with the military, two years of service with this particular crew, al-Shaykh could read their eyes: an expression that began behind a veil spread to the rest of the face: the raised cheeks or tightened skin around the eyes. She saw worry above their veils, a deep need for a ready answer. After five months of travel, how could everything unravel so easily?