Marool sniffed at the rose. “It is wonderful,” she said with an indifferent nod.
“Among the most fragrant in your garden,” Questioner murmured.
“Indeed,” Marool agreed.
They walked on, Ellin burbling on about the beauty and the fragrance of the garden as she sniffed at this and that and Bao offering this or that blossom for appreciation. At the end of their stroll, they departed from their hostess with fulsome expressions of gratitude, and Marool went back to the more decorous parts of her daily routine in a somewhat improved mood. Though Questioner was nothing but a piece of machinery, it was a polite piece of machinery and its aides were polite also. Marool could tolerate them.
Questioner said, “It’s as I thought,” she said. “Mantelby has no sense of smell! The Nova rose is odorless. Did you watch her when Bao waved the crimson stinkbrush in her face?”
Ellin nodded. “She didn’t flinch. She has a smile like a shark, that one.”
“What is it meaning?” asked Bao.
“I have no idea.” Questioner showed her own teeth in a tigerish grin. “It goes down onto my list with all the other odd data.”
“Odd?” Bao raised his eyebrows. “What things are you counting as odd?”
Questioner ticked them off on her fingers. “There’s the oddity of the first colony, the one that disappeared. There’s the oddity of the little houses too small for the people who live in them. There’s the dirty streets and the stink out back, and the fact that Madam Mantelby has no sense of smell. There are those monumental schools that show up on the business inventory, seeming far too large for their stingy classes of little boys. Well, we have a clue to that’ now, don’t we?”
“Consorts?” asked Ellin. “Consort academies?”
“Assuredly. If they are trained to cosset women, they must be trained somewhere. In itself a strangeness. Well, most cultures have oddities of one kind or another.”
“I am not understanding what you mean by strangeness,” said Bao.
The Questioner seated herself comfortably, quite willing to educate a willing listener. “All societies maintain themselves by forcing personal behavior into a mold or pattern which the society calls its ‘culture.’ The patterns are imposed by natural or political conditions; for example, either recurrent drought or recurrent persecution can result in similar patterns. Most patterns require changes in behavior, and that requires changes in belief systems, or vice versa, sort of chicken and egg as to which comes first.
“So a few thousand years go by and the climate changes, or the politics, but the people still follow the same taboos because by now they believe their deity ordered them to do it. Long-practiced behaviors that started as a response to conditions, always fossilizes into ‘traditional values,’ that is, the only ‘right way’ to do things. At that point people no longer use the system in order to survive, the system uses them in order to survive. That’s something people often don’t understand. Systems are parasitical, they have a life of their own, and they, too, evolve and change and try to survive. The one fact that is true of all cultures, without exception, is that it never represents the free desires of the people who are jammed into it even when people are conditioned from childhood to accept uniformation.”
“Really?” asked Ellin. “Never?”
Questioner grinned at her. “Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don’t often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of. So, when the Questioner arrives on a new planet, the people show us the culture. Here, they say, this is what we are, we have nothing to hide. Genetic variation, however, guarantees that sometimes a rebel will be born, and you may be sure the culture has come up with a way to deal with him.
“So, in order to find out what’s really going on, we investigate how the culture reacts to threats, we look for the people who do not fit, we look for the oddities, the strangenesses. When we have enough of them, we learn what the bones and nerves of the culture are really like, beneath the skin.”