The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “But the Ruml—!” said Swanson, impatiently.

  “That’s it,” said Jase. “The Ruml are carried for three years inside the mother’s body, and for six years after in a marsupial-like—say kangaroo-like—pouch, during which six years they’re only semiconscious. Then they start to grow suddenly, emerge from the pouch, and within a week they’re on their own. They wander away from their mothers and pick up the language and customs during a few weeks of extremely rapid learning of the type we call ‘imprinting’ here on Earth, when we observe it in young babies and animals. Within weeks they’re small adults, individually independent and responsible.”

  “I see . . .” said Swanson slowly. “They operate by reflex where we think, is that it?”

  “And we operate by reflex in areas where they think,” said Jase. “The young puppy, for example, on earth goes through four stages of very important development: neonatal, the nursing stage; transitional, when he starts to shift to adult methods of locomotion and feeding; socialization, in which he learns to play and respond with his fellows; and juvenile, a final weaning stage of achieving independence. By contrast, a song sparrow has six stages. The Ruml have none—that correspond. When the young human child is learning and responding to the affectionate social structure of the human family, the young Ruml is still unconscious in his mother’s pouch. He emerges from that pouch essentially adult and independent. He’ll hardly remember his mother, let alone have any affection for, or any imprinted reflex of affection for, her. Being so, the Ruml couldn’t develop a society on the same basis as ours.”

  “Well?” said Swanson. “What’s their basis?”

  “Are you sure you know what ours is?” Jase asked. “Oh, that’s right, you said you heard what I told Mele in the hospital just now. Well, I’ll say it again to make sure. Our instinct as humans is to protect the race as individuals. The Ruml, lacking the early formative years of human development, have instead an impulse to protect the race as an idea—a system of Honor which tends to insure the survival of the race.”

  He looked directly at Swanson.

  “That’s what I was working for,” he said. “Some way to convince them they should live peacefully side by side with humans. But a way that could be expressed in terms of Honor as they saw it—not in terms of our own human rights and feelings about the matter, which are invisible to a Ruml. Literally, they .don’t exist for him. To us—for example—it would be immoral to condemn our best friend unjustly to death just to impress other people. To someone like Kator there was no connection between morals and such an action. What was moral to him was to succeed in Founding his Kingdom. Everything that helped him to that end was moral because it was aimed at improving the Ruml race—by justifying the survival and spread of his particular superior genes as Head of a Family with unlimited children, whereas because of space limitations on the already settled worlds most Ruml are restricted to one son.”

  Jase paused and closed his eyes for a moment, to rest. He heard the others fidgeting impatiently and opened his eyes.

  “What’s immoral, then?” asked Swanson, as if he wished to prod Jase back into talking rather than as if he was actually interested in the answer. But Jase chuckled, a little weakly.

  “I’m glad you asked that,” he said. “I was just going to get to it. It’s immoral to fail. That’s what’s immoral among the Rumls. The whole Ruml race is like a kingdom of subjects, ready and waiting to be taken over by anyone who has the guts to put on the crown and lead them forward into the future. But if he puts on the crown, he has to present them with unvarying success-that’s why only one Ruml in millions tries it. Any failure, no matter how slight, condemns him. That’s why I added that section to Kator’s recording.”

  “What do you mean?” said Swanson.

  “I mean—”

  “Just a minute!” interrupted one of the uniformed men by the window looking out on the spaceship. “Something’s happening. There’s more of them coming out. There’s one in the center with a sort of metal belt—"

  “The Keysman.” Jase tried to get up. “That’ll be the Keysman. Someone ought to go meet him—”

  “Sit down.” Swanson’s hand held him in the chair. “Tell us why you did that with Kator’s recording.”

  Jason smiled sadly.

  ‘To prove him a failure,” he said. “The fact we’d known about him all this time, and the fact I claimed—that we’d been using him—made him a failure. That made everything he had done immoral instead of moral. He had been a false leader. He should have driven the Expedition ship into the nearest sun or cut his throat.”

  “Why didn’t he? Did you know he wouldn’t?” demanded Swanson.

  “I knew,” Jase nodded. “I’d been living in his mind and body for weeks. He was too great a man—too great a Ruml, if you like—to take the easy way out. Instead of killing himself and ending his shame, and it’s a shame human beings can’t even imagine, at killing fellow Ruml who might otherwise have sired sons who would be true leaders, he decided to live with it. He decided to go back and tell the Family Heads on Homeworld. He decided to ask them—you saw him ask them—to let him live long enough to make his knowledge of us useful to them in their action against us. You saw what happened.”

  “They killed him,” said Swanson. His eyes were hollow with lack of sleep and tension. “They didn’t know any better, then.”

  “They knew better. They promised him to think for a day before they acted. Remember?” Jase said. “But when they came down to it, and were faced with the fact he was a failure, they acted instead of thinking. As with all of us, Ruml and human, both. As with Mele, in a different way, when she was faced with a decision between her intellectual justice and her instinctive urge to protect me under any circumstances. Their instinctive reaction overrode their intellectual centers.”

  “But they’re here now,” said Swanson.

  “They’ve had plenty of time to think it over,” said Jase. “They’re intelligent, and civilized. They see they should have suffered Kator to endure the moral pain of staying alive and helping them. And they think we have a positive advantage over them because we know about them and they don’t know about us.”

  Swanson stared at Jase for a long moment.

  “You knew they’d kill him!” the spectacled man exploded. “You knew they’d kill Kator when you added that section to his recording.”

  Jase felt the pain of memory like a blow in the body.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just as I knew Kator was great enough to go back instead of taking the way of an easy suicide. It was the only way to convince the Rural we had an advantage over them.”

  “But—” Swanson stared at him, hollow-eyed. “Why stake everything on getting an advantage? Wouldn’t it have been better to try to deal with them through Kator—”

  Jase shook his head.

  “Kator only wanted his Kingdom. Anything less than that would have been failure for him and made his life unbearable anyway, once he had set himself to the task of winning a Kingdom. You’re thinking now like a human. There is no middle ground to a Ruml, because it’s not his own life that’s important—it’s the improvement of his race embodied in the concept and system of what he calls Honor.”

  Jase put his hands on the arms of the chair he sat in, ready to hoist himself up.

  “We had to stop Kator. But by stopping him, we created a question of Honor, a question of whether in stopping him, we were not ourselves in organization behind some one individual who wanted to Found a Kingdom on the Ruml worlds. That question had to be resolved, in Honor. It didn’t make any difference that the civilized, present-day Ruml Family Heads, once they thought about it, could entertain the concept of peaceful association between our two races. Their instincts told them that by stopping Kator, as we had to, since the alternative was becoming his creatures, we had posed a threat to the future of their race. They were in Honor bound to move against us—except for one thing.”

  “What thing?” asked S
wanson. They were all staring at him now, he saw, even Thornybright.

  “The control reflex. The governor. You said you heard what I told Mele in the hospital,” said Jase. “The reflex that keeps nearly all the Ruml individuals from ever attempting to Found a Kingdom. The Ruml know only how to bet everything—or not to bet at all. Their culture rests on the discovery of pure talent. It’s either success or failure—nothing in between.”

  He looked about at them but saw they still did not understand.

  “As I told Mele,” he said, “the fear of failure is intense. Only as a last-ditch, desperate, back-to-the-wall measure will the Ruml nature undertake any attempt where failure seems likely or even possible. That’s why games are unknown among them, and duels are automatically to the death. If you demonstrate an advantage, as I did in the section I added to Kator’s recording, the instinctive impulse in the Ruml is to avoid the contest.”

  “But you said—” Swanson hesitated. “You said that intellectually they were capable of seeing through their instinctive impulses when they had time to think, as after they killed Kator.”

  “That’s right,” said Jase. “And that’s why they’re here now. If the human race does anything to challenge their sense of racial survival, they’ll fight, here and now. But if a challenge like that can be avoided—by us,” he smiled tightly, “—the intellectual centers of their minds will have a chance to gingerly approach and entertain the idea of existing in the same area of interstellar space with monsters like ourselves.”

  “Monsters?” said Thornybright, speaking up now for the first time since Jase had come in. “Do they really think of us as monsters, Jase?”

  “Why not?” asked Jase, grimly. “Don’t we think of them as monsters? After all, they’ve got no milk of human kindness. And we, in their eyes, have no sense of Honor.”

  Swanson nodded. He straightened up, looking down at Jase.

  “I get it, finally,” he said. “Yes, I think if you’re up to it, you’d better come along with us to meet them. We wouldn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”

  He reached down and took Jase’s arm. Jase swayed to a standing position and held himself steady. Now that it was all over, he felt as if a hidden source of strength had been released in him.

  With Swanson on one side and one of the other men in civilian clothes supporting him on the other they went down the elevator and out on to the landing pad. A baggage truck with a low platform was waiting. They stepped up on the platform and rode out to the ship, where the lines of dark-furred Ruml stood clustered in formation, with the metal-belted Keysman before them.

  The truck halted. They got down. Jase, with Swanson and the other man at his side, walked up to within a couple of paces of the Keysman. The Keysman stared at him.

  “You—” The human words came out almost unrecognizably mangled by the narrow jaw and near-lipless mouth in the dark-furred face. “You are the Fisherman!”

  “Yes,” said Jase. He nodded, with the inclining of the head that was the Ruml gesture of respectful assent.

  The Keysman stopped staring. He pulled himself erect. He was an older Ruml, wearing a harness with many Honors clipped to it, and the hair of his upper body was almost uniformly gray.

  “I trust,” he said formally and precisely in the Ruml tongue, “that I am among friends?”

  “Yes,” said Jase in Ruml, “Keysman. Here you are among friends.”