A Reasonable World

15

In April, after a full circuit of the Pacific, Sea Venture was again docked in Salmon Bay, where it would remain until July. In June Dorothy Italiano took a week of her vacation time and drove to Oregon for a family reunion. Four of the six sisters were present; Tricia, newly married, was traveling in Greece, and Ellen was on sabbatical in England.

Italiano’s parents still lived in the big old house on Thurman Street; her father smoked cigars and laughed at his own jokes as he had always done; her mother had taken up holoceramics. The sisters, who felt varying degrees of cordiality toward each other, exchanged information about marriages, divorces, promotions, children.

Late one night Dorothy had a long talk with Phyllis, who had always been her favorite. Phyllis, married to a color engineer, was a medievalist at the University of Michigan.

Phyllis said, “I never have quite understood what happened with that Jerry Plotkin thing—was it really as cruel as it sounded?”

“No, I don’t think so. The general feeling is that Jerry was just a jerk—he got in too far and made a dumb mistake. He wasn’t tormenting anybody for the fun of it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do you think anybody does?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wanted to tell you something that happened,” Phyllis said. “Last Saturday, when I got up there was a bird right outside the patio door, a little jay. It was so young it couldn’t even hop, it just sat there. Two or three of the cats were sitting around watching it.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Anyway, I have a reason for telling you this, so don’t cringe. While I was getting my breakfast I heard it scream, and then again afterwards. I went into the other part of the house for a while, and when I came back I didn’t hear anything, and I thought they had killed it, but then it screamed again.

“I knew I couldn’t find the nest, and I knew I couldn’t keep it alive by feeding it. I tried that a couple of times, with finches, and they always died. I couldn’t think of anything to do but to kill it myself. So I walked out into the back yard and found a stick, and I came back and hit the bird as hard as I could and it fell over, but I hadn’t aimed right and I’d hit it in the chest, not the head. So I hit it again, hard enough to break the Stick, and this time it died. I picked it up with a shovel and put it in the garbage can, but I felt awful about it. And I realized that’s something I’ll wish I hadn’t done for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, God. I would, too.”

“I know you would, but then I got to thinking about things that went on in the thirteenth century, and right up to modern times, Chile and Argentina. Dot, you can understand why kings and dictators want to torture people, and even priests, but the question is, where do the torturers come from? There never seems to be any recruiting problem. Do they just sign up because the pay and benefits are good, or do they like it?”

“They say you can get used to anything.”

“I don’t believe it. When my father-in-law died—I saw him die, he was living with us—the doctor said to me, ‘You never get used to it.’ He had seen lots of people die, and lots of people in pain. So there must be people who like to torture other people. I guess I’ll never understand that. It bothers me, because I’m a historian, and I’m supposed to understand everything.”

“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner?”

“I don’t believe that, either. I don’t want to forgive them, I just want to understand them. And I can’t.”

“You know what the nuns would say.”

“Yes, but I don’t believe the nuns. Right now, I don’t believe anything.”

At a party in Portland the next evening Phyllis introduced her to a young lawyer, Willard Ross, who seemed genuinely interested in her work. “And you can really get these symbionts to tell you things the subject doesn’t know?” he asked.

“Yes, but I think that’s secondary. What I’m after is to find out more about the symbionts themselves—what they want, what they’re up to.”

“Okay, what do they want?”

“I think they just want to have a pleasant time inhabiting human beings. If you think about it, you can see that it would be no fun being in a person who’s severely ill, or hungry and cold, or depressed or in pain. They like people who are reasonably happy and have interesting lives. And so they try to protect those people from being killed by other people. You know about that, probably—murderers dying before they can come to trial.”

“Yes, I do know about it.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “In fact, I’m trying to prepare a defense for a man accused of murder here in Portland.”

“He’s alive?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, maybe that means he didn’t do it.”

“There were two witnesses, unfortunately.”

“How interesting. I wonder—”

“Yes?”

“Maybe the symbionts didn’t kill him because from their point of view he’s a good host, a very nice person, and the one he killed wasn’t?”

He called her the next day and asked her to lunch. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you told me,” he said. “I’ve got a wild idea that if I could introduce that kind of evidence, I could get my client off on extenuating circumstances. It’s a last resort, but I haven’t got anything else.”

“You mean, to put a symbiont on the stand and let it testify that your client is a good guy?”

“Something like that. In fact, he is a good guy. I want to keep him out of prison if I can. He’s an outdoorsman, it would kill him.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me some more about this. Who did he kill, and why?”

“He killed a man named Jameson who was trespassing in the woods near his house south of here. The property was posted, but this guy was setting traps for small animals. Leghold traps, nasty things, I hate them myself. Just by bad luck, two hikers from Nevada wandered onto the property at the same time and saw him fire the rifle.”

“Well, isn’t that a defense?”

“Afraid not. You may want to kill someone who tortures small animals, but you’re not supposed to do it.”

She was silent.

“I was thinking—this might not work—but if I had the apparatus you told me about, could I find a symbiont who had been in my client’s mind and Jameson’s? Number two, could I get it to agree to appear for trial?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never tried to get a symbiont to do anything voluntarily. Maybe we should.”

“Then you’ll help me?”

“Let me think about it. When will the trial be?”

“It’s scheduled for October.”

“I could probably get permission to lend you one of the devices we use—or you could get someone to make one for you, they’re not very complicated.”

“I’d really appreciate that. If it pans out, would you be willing to appear as an expert witness?”

“In October? I’ll be somewhere in the Sea of Japan.”

“No problem—you could testify by holo. Think about that, too; there’s plenty of time.”

“All right.”

Later Italiano wrote to her sister:

Dear Phyl,

I’ve been thinking about the question you raised. The issue of cruelty, of taking pleasure in torturing someone else, is troublesome from the genetic viewpoint. If you kill someone before they can reproduce, your genes win, but from the genes’ point of view it doesn’t matter one way or another whether you torture him first, if you see what I mean.

On the other hand, it does make a little sense from a cultural perspective. The Plains Indians tormented their captives, for instance, as a test of their courage. Well, clearly, if this led to the selection of very brave people, that was a survival characteristic for the culture. The funny thing is, though, that the group being tortured gets the benefit. If group A tortures group В and vice versa, they both benefit. But if group A was tortured by В but didn’t torture in return, group A would actually be increasing the benefit to themselves, because the selection pressure to produce brave people would be greater on them than on B.

So far we’re talking about intergroup torture, which can be explained even if not very satisfactorily in cultural terms. But what about people who torture and kill members of their own group? That looks like contrasurvival behavior either from the genetic or cultural standpoint. About the best we can do is to say that this tendency to take pleasure in torturing others is selected for, and maybe that when torture is institutionalized by the culture, that takes care of the impulse, but when it isn’t, people turn on their own group. That’s not a very pretty answer.

Then the third theory, of course, is the psychiatric one which treats this behavior as truly aberrant, a glitch of some kind, like the glitches that produce genetic disease. We say that people who behave this way are “crazy” or “demented” or “disturbed,” and we try to cure them by drugs or counseling. That doesn’t work very well.

And finally there’s the demon theory. Jesus cast out demons, and shamans have been doing the same thing for thousands of years. Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with all our intellectual explanations, and that good and evil really exist. That usually happens before breakfast, though.

Love,

Dot