I shall be severely punished? Please, no! I do not want to be punished! Have pity on me! I am a woman of your own species! If you wish to see me punished, tie me, and do so yourself! It is, after all, you whom I have offended! Teach me then that my behavior will not be overlooked. Teach me then that I may not do such things with impunity! I acknowledge that I behaved badly! I acknowledge that I deserve punishment! But I beg you to be kind, and not to turn me over to the mercies of the zard!”
Brenner regarded her, sternly.
Swiftly she knelt back, removing her hands from his knees, putting them, palms down, on her thighs, bowing her head, submissively.
“I beg you to stay here tonight,” she said. “I beg it, weeping, on my knees! The room is warm. The bed is soft. You need do nothing! I will not trouble you! You will not even know I am here.”
Brenner smiled to himself. He thought it might be difficult to overlook the fact that such a creature was with him.
“Sleep me naked, uncovered, on the floor beside your bed, or on the floor at the foot of your bed, where you would be less likely to see me,” she said.
He rather thought he would prefer to see her on the floor at the side of his bed, where he might occasionally, as it pleased him, look upon her.
“Please, sir,” she said. It pleased him to be addressed with respect by a woman. It was not an experience which he had had on the home world. Indeed, in several of the states of the home world legislation prohibited the tendering of such terms of respect by females to males. It was claimed by the morality officers, whose opinions and decisions were often fraught with significant consequences for careers, incomes and such, that they were demeaning, degrading, debasing, devolved, and such things, the usual epithets the intention of which was not to describe the world but to influence behavior. Whereas Brenner, some months ago, might have been willing to regard such terms as perilous anachronisms, or dangerous throwbacks to more primitive, violent times, he was no longer sure of it. What if it were acceptable, or even appropriate, for females to show males respect, he wondered. Certainly he knew enough ethology to recognize that deference behaviors, submission behaviors, and such, were pervasive in the animal kingdom, and were particularly prominent amongstst mammals, and amongstst them, amongstst primates. To be sure, it is one thing for something to be a fact and another for it to be morally justified, and such. For example, from the fact that a human being needs oxygen to live, as a fact, it does not follow logically that it has a right to breathe. That is an independent question. Similarly, from the fact that a male requires dominance to actualize his masculinity, rather than deny it, and thereby render himself miserable and shorten his life, it does not follow that he has any right to be himself. On the other hand, by parity of reason, it does not follow, either, that he has a duty to suffocate or shorten his own life. Two different sorts of things are involved, two realms, so to speak, that of fact and that of morality. These realms appear to be logically independent. It is not logically inconsistent, for example, to prefer the destruction of the cosmos to the fulfillment of one’s own nature. Indeed, perhaps it is better, or morally superior, or more fitting, that the cosmos be destroyed than that one be true to oneself. To be sure, Brenner was not satisfied with this approach to matters. Certainly more than logic was involved. There was even the question, an interesting one, as to whether or not there was a moral realm, so to speak, a moral order of existence, objective rights and wrongs, moral facts, like planets and stars, but intangible and invisible, etc., as opposed to preferences, rhetorics, and such. It seemed to be one thing to measure mountains and quite another to take the volume of value, one thing to ascertain the location of iron and another the coordinates of right, one thing to weigh sand and another to weigh competitive moralities. Indeed, who shall we trust to design the scales for such comparisons? But Brenner was certainly not willing to relinquish the familiar stanchions of good and right. He was rather concerned with whether