Schild’s Ladder

Yann spread his arms in surrender. "You’ve lost me, then."

"No one had had the heart to tell them," Tchicaya explained. "When they first made contact with a modern society, on Crane, it took a while before they were sufficiently at ease to reveal their purpose. But by the time they got around to asking questions, the locals had already gained a clear sense of the kind of preconceptions these travelers had. They’d been in cold storage for millennia, and now they were finally beginning the stage of their voyage that would justify the enormous sacrifices they’d made. Nobody could bring themselves to break the news that the sole surviving remnant of human sexual dimorphism was the retention, in some languages, of different inflections of various parts of speech associated with different proper names — and that expecting these grammatical fossils to be correlated with any aspect of a person’s anatomy would be like assuming from similar rules for inanimate objects that a cloud possessed a penis and a table contained a womb."

"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?"