Stranger in a Strange Land

Martians and humans were both self-aware life forms but they had gone in vastly different directions. All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. The same was true of Mars, but in mirror corollary. Mars had the efficient bipolar pattern so common in that galaxy, but Martians had it in form so different from Terran form that it would be «sex» only to a biologist and emphatically not have been «sex» to a human psychiatrist. Martian nymphs were female, all adults were male.

But in each in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polarity which controlled human lives could not exist on Mars. There was no possibility of «marriage.» Adults were huge, reminding the first humans to see them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentally active. Nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindless energy. There was no parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.

Mars, geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the Envoy and the Champion. The events were too recent to be significant — if Martians had used newspapers, one edition a Terran century would have been ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to Martians; it had happened before, would happen again. When a new other race was thoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium or so) would be time for action, if needed.

On Mars the currently important event was a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mind edly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters. Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.

Unexpected discorporation was rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death at the appropriate selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied that he forgot to come in out of the cold; when his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He had not noticed his discorporation and had gone on composing his sequence.

Martian art was divided into two categories; that sort created by living adults, which was vigorous, often radical, and primitive; and that of the Old Ones, which was usually conservative, extremely complex, and was expected to show much higher standards of technique; the two sorts were judged separately.

By what standards should this opus be judged? It bridged from corporate to discorporate; its final form had been set throughout by an Old One — yet the artist, with the detachment of all artists everywhere, had not noticed the change in his status and had continued to work as if corporate. Was it a new sort of art? Could more such pieces be produced by surprise discorporation of artists while they were working? The Old Ones had been discussing the exciting possibilities in ruminative rapport for centuries and all corporate Martians were eagerly awaiting their verdict.

The question was of greater interest because it was religious art (in the Terran sense) and strongly emotional: it described contact between the Martian Race and the people of the fifth planet, an event that had happened long ago but which was alive and important to Martians in the sense in which one death by crucifixion remained alive and important to humans after two Terran millennia. The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed. This new work of art was one of many attempts to grok the whole beautiful experience in all its complexity in one opus. But before it could be judged it was necessary to grok how to judge it.

It was a pretty problem.