Jem by Frederik Pohl

Thursday. He was driving the A-37 bus you took from the station to the Federal Building, and you were late for your appointment with the tax examiner because this man would not change a five-dollar bill.
    What do you say then? Perhaps you say, Christ, fellow! I remember the incident well! But that was no amiable folk dancer. That was a bus driver!
    That's how it would be with Sharn-igon. It's easy enough to imagine you meeting him (provided we don't worry about how you get there). Let's make the mind-experiment to see what would happen. Suppose you are standing outside of time and space somehow, like an H. G. Wells god looking down from a cloud. You poke your finger into the infinitesimal. You touch Sharn-igon's planet, and you uncover him. You look him over.
    What do you see?
    One might try to describe him to you by saying that Sharn-igon was politically conservative, deeply moral, and fundamentally honest. One might try to elicit your sympathy by saying that he (like who that you know?) was screaming inside with unhealed pain.
    But would you see that?
    Or would you glance and gasp and pull back your finger in loathing and say:
    Christ, fellow! That's no person. It's an alien creature! It lives (lived? will live?) a thousand light-years away, on a planet that circles a star I have never even seen! And besides, it looks creepy. If I had to say what it looked like, giving it the best break I could, I would have to say that it looked like half of a partly squashed crab.
    And, of course, you would be right. . . .

    The way Sharn-igon looked to himself was something else again.
    For one thing, he is not an instant invention for your eye to see. He is a person. He has relationships. He lives (will live?) in a society. He moves (moved?) around and through a dense web of laws and folkways. He wasn't like every other Krinpit (as his people called themselves), no matter how indistinguishable they might look to your eyes. He was Sharn-igon.
    For example, although it was Ring-Greeting time, Sharn-igon hated Ring-Greeting. To him it was the loneliest and worst part of the cycle. He disliked the bustle, he resented the false and hypocritical sentiment. All the shops and brothels were busy as everyone tried to get gifts and to become pregnant, but it was an empty mockery in Sharn-igon's life, because he was alone.
    If you had asked him, Sharn-igon would have told you that he had always hated Ring-Greeting, at least ever since his final molting. (When he was a young seed just beginning to wave on his male-mother's grate he loved it, naturally enough. All seeds did. Ring-Greeting was for kids.) That wasn t quite true. The cycle before, he and his he-wife, Cheee-pruitt, had had a very cheerful Greeting.
    But Cheee-pruitt was gone. Sharn-igon signaled at his screen, almost stumbling over an Inedible Ghost that lay before it. There was no answer. He hesitated. Something—perhaps the ghost—seemed to be calling his name. But that was ridiculous. After a moment of indecision, he scuttled across the crowded run to the—call it a bar—to chew a couple of quick ones.
    Look at Sharn-igon munching on strands of hallucinogenic fern among a crowd squeezed two or three deep around the Krinpit who was kneading and dispensing the stuff. He was a fine figure of a person. He was masculinely broad—easily two meters from rim to rim; and pleasingly slim—not more than forty centimeters to the tip of his carapace. In spite of his mood, unpaired males and females of all descriptions found him attractive. He was young, healthy, sexually potent, and successful in his chosen profession.
    Well, that is not strictly true, because a paradox is involved. Sharn-igon's profession was a form of social work. The more successful he was in terms of his own personal ego needs, the worse his society was. It was only when Krinpit were in trouble that they turned to persons like Sharn-igon. The Krinpit were socially interdependent to a degree not usually associated with a