Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.
Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.
Every three years, women were afflicted with arboreal frenzy and compulsively devoured the fruit until they became pregnant. In the meantime, women fell in love with one another, lived amicably or passionately or angrily with one another, were jealous, committed adultery, and, of course, often practiced erotic deviations. One of which, not uncommon, was falling in love with a certain tree and eating fruit out of season.
The main plot of the story was about the insane jealousy of a woman who, thinking that she had been cuckolded by her lover's tree, chopped it down. Grief-stricken, the lover went into a nunnery.
A subplot of the story concerned a science-fiction writer who had imagined another world in which there were no sperm trees. Instead, women had mates who were their counterparts physically except that they had no mammaries and were equipped with a rodlike organ that shot seeds into the uteruses of their lovers.
This method, according to the science-fiction writer in Frigate's story, was a much better method and also eliminated the competition for trees. The mates with the rods were much like the trees in that their vegetable nature made them subservient to the females. But, unlike the trees, they were useful for something besides reproduction. They did the housework and field-work and took care of the babies while women played bridge or attended political meetings.
In the end, however, the rod-creatures, being more human than vegetable and more muscular than the females, rebelled and made the women their servants.
Burton, hearing Frigate's story, had suggested that a better idea would have been to make the humans of one sex, the male, and have them impregnate the trees. The males would also get most of their food from the fruit of the trees. However, being human, the males would want power, and they would war among themselves for the trees. The victors would be rewarded with vast arboreal harems. The defeated would either be killed or driven into the woods to satisfy themselves with an inferior species of vegetation, a bush which could be screwed but which could not bear children.
"A good idea," Frigate had said, "but who would take care of the infants? Trees can't. Besides, the victorious male, the owner of the harem, or grove, would be so busy guarding his trees from other males that he would neglect the infants. Most of them would die. And if he were overcome by another male, his infants would be left to die or perhaps be killed by the conqueror. The victor would not want to raise the other man's children."
"There doesn't seem to be any perfect means for reproduction and caretaking of the infant, does there?" Frigate had said. "Perhaps God knew what He was doing when He made us male and female."
"Perhaps He was limited in His choices and took the best one. Perhaps perfection is not possible in this universe. Or, if it is, perfection rules out progress. The amoeba is perfect, but it can't evolve into something different. Or, if it does, it ceases to be an amoeba and must give up perfection for certain advantages, balanced or imbalanced with certain disadvantages."
And so the splitting of Homo sapiens into two species in the real world and the vagaries of Fate brought together Lieutenant General Joseph Netterville Burton and Martha Baker, the prig and hypochondriac father and the child-spoiling and seductive but moralistic mother. They had gotten married after a short courtship, possibly because the retired officer on half-pay had been induced by Martha's fortune to marry her. He had once had money, but he could not hang onto it. Though he despised gamblers, he did not think that speculation in the market was un-Christian.
On a night circa June 19, 1820, the lieutenant general had launched millions of spermatozoa into the heiress' womb, and one wriggler had beaten the others to the egg waiting in its lair. The chance combination of genes had resulted in Richard Francis Burton, eldest of three siblings, born March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devonshire, England. Richard's mother had been lucky in not being infected by puerperal fever, which killed so many women giving birth in those days. Richard was also lucky in that he caught only one of the childhood diseases that put so many in the graveyard then. Measles laid him low, but he survived unharmed.,.
His mother's father was so delighted when his daughter bore a red-headed and blue-eyed son that he considered changing his will and giving the bulk of his estate to Richard instead of Martha's half-brother. Mrs. Burton fought against this, an act for which Richard never really forgave his mother. Finally, the grandfather decided that he would ignore his daughter's arguments and arrange for his beloved grandson to inherit. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker died of a heart attack as he started to get into the carriage that was to take him to his solicitor. The son got the money, was cheated out of it by a sharpster, and died in poverty. A short time later, Richard's red hair turned to jet black and his blue eyes to a deep brown. This was the first of his many disguises, though not, in this case, the first deliberately assumed.
It was his mother's infatuation with her brother that had caused the first of Burton's many misfortunes. Or so Burton had always thought. If he had been independently wealthy, he, a thoroughly undisciplined and argumentative man, would not have had to endure military life so long in order to support himself. He would not have been deprived of the money needed to make his African explorations thoroughly successful.
And his father's decision to go to the Continent, where life was cheaper and where he might find a cure for his more-or-less imaginary ills, had cut off the father's connections with old school friends who might have advanced his son's career. It also made Burton a wanderer, rootless, one who never felt at home in England. Though it was true, as Frigate pointed out, that he had never felt at home anywhere.
He could not abide to stay in one place more than a week. After that, his restlessness drove him on. Or, if circumstances forced him to stay, he suffered.
Which meant that he was indeed suffering here.
"You could move from one apartment to another," Nur had said to him. "I doubt that that would satisfy you. This is a small world, and you can take only small trips. Anyway, why move? You can change your apartment so that it looks like another world. And when you're tired of that, change it again. You may travel from Africa to America without taking a step."
"You were a Pisces," Frigate had said. "The fish. Ruled by Neptune and Jupiter and associated with the twelfth house. The principle of Neptune is idealism and that of Jupiter is expansion. Pisces harmonizes. Pisces' positive qualities make you intuitive, sympathetic and artistic. Its negative qualities tend to make you a martyr, indecisive, and melancholy. The characteristics and activities of the twelfth house are the unconscious mind, institutions, banks, prisons, universities, libraries, hospitals, hidden enemies, intuition, inspiration, solitary pursuits, dream arid sleep patterns, and your pets are large."
"Sheer jobbernowlry, darkest superstition," Burton had said.
"Yes. But you have always been a fish out of water. Idealistic, though cynical. Expansive, certainly. You've tried to be everything. You have tried to harmonize many fields, synthesize them. You are intuitive, sympathetic and artistic. Certainly, you've made a martyr of yourself. You have often been indecisive. And melancholy! Read your own books.