Enemies of the System

by Brian W Aldiss

  “You should have called to them,” Dulcifer said. “They would have liked your company. They would have given you peaches.”

  “I never had the courage to call to them. I kept my window closed.”

  “It’s hard to ask for what we want most, isn’t it?” He regarded her almost shyly.

  She kicked the ground at her feet and did not reply.

  They had halted at the bridge to allow the chief hunter to transfer his captives officially to the sentries. First went the spitted boar.

  The transaction took place as a slow ceremony. The commander of the sentries, a sturdy man with bow legs and a head thrust forward from rounded shoulders, gave a salute of thanks. The chief returned it, touching the skull on his head. Then the prisoners were prodded across the bridge. The hunters stayed on their own side, stiff and watchful.

  As they crossed the bridge, Takeido looked back and gave the chief a mocking salute of farewell. The chief did not respond.

  So they arrived under the towering cliff, its face pocked with entrances. From one hole, a stream gushed, falling free to splash among rocks and feed the river. To other holes, ladders led. There was very little activity, the sentries at the cave-mouths always expected. In the graying light, the place presented a dismal appearance; to the utopians, accustomed to their graceful pyramidal cities, it looked like a rats’ warren, awaiting extermination.

  The prisoners’ bonds were cut. They were driven by the sentries to climb one of the ladders. It was about seven meters high, and groaned and swayed as they climbed. A guard at the top hauled them one by one into the mouth of the cave.

  VIII

  They were made to squat at the entrance of the cave, as if in preparation for a long wait.

  They had the outside world to sit and look back on as they rested. An uncomforting place it was: the ruinous landscape was now loaded with grey; it was that time of evening when the brightness in the sky merely accentuated the darkness gathered on the ground. The hunters who had captured them were allowed over the bridge. As they trundled across, round-shouldered and no longer alert, the chief removed the skull from his head to swing it at arm’s length with a thumb hooked in one eye-socket.

  A pack of mongrels was unleashed to patrol the cliff-foot; the melancholy howling of the creatures reinforced a general desolation.

  Yet, forbidding as it was, all this formed part of a world the captives knew. As such, it appeared desirable in comparison with the dark warrens into which the tunnel behind them led. Noises and odors were wafted to them from that direction on a clammy wind; none was appealing.

  “You don’t need reminding that we are in deep trouble,” said Kordan, speaking in a low voice. “Without consulting me, you attacked the guards and were inevitably defeated. Such undisciplined behavior has lessened our chance of reaching any form of agreement with these savages. What you hoped could be gained by it, I can’t imagine.”

  It was the youngest member of the party, Ian Takeido, who answered him. “Without disrespect, Utopianist Kordan, that is exactly your problem—being unable to imagine. Imagination is necessary for control of the outside world.” He closed his eyes tightly as he spoke. “When any new thing is presented to our senses, it is only with the aid of imagination that we can appreciate to which value-group it belongs and rank it accordingly. Reason alone is not sufficient. I daresay you would agree with me there, Che Burek?”

  “To put it bluntly, no,” said Burek. “I think you are a bit of an intellectual prig, comrade, and I can’t see that imagination will get us home.”

  “He’s not a prig!” exclaimed Constanza, putting an arm defensively round Takeido. “Even if he does say some indiscreet things.”

  “Perhaps, Utopianist Takeido, you will be good enough to imagine us back to the safety of Unity,” Kordan said, smiling thinly as if in pain.

  “Imagination is not a trick but a principle of life,” Takeido answered, biting at his knuckles. “What we should determine, whilst there is time, is to what category these creatures belong.”

  “That’s intellectual rubbish,” said Burek. “Remember the old saying, ‘It doesn’t matter if the honey does not forgive the bear.’ The point is that they decide in which category we belong—protein category, most likely.” He leaned back contentedly against a rock, folding his arms.

  “That sort of defeatist answer proves my point,” said Takeido, his eyebrows moving rapidly up and down with nervousness. “Our image of these savages has been ad hoc all along. First as animals, then as capitalists, now as cannibals. I’m sorry you choose to disagree with me and insult me, Utopianist Burek, because in fact I take my cue from something you said when we were waiting at the bridge, about the story of Lysenka II being, not a story of defeat, but a fable of triumph. If only our imagination will permit us to encompass a few millennia, we may perceive that these beings are in a super-category above animal, capitalist, cannibal, a super-category not unlike our own. They also are trapped on an alien planet—a planet that can never cease to remain alien however long they or their descendants exist here. So we can find common cause with them. We all need to get off Lysenka II. With that cause established—and communication must be possible—we become allies rather than enemies and can negotiate with them. In exchange for our freedom, the system agrees to settle Lysenka’s human tribes on Earth.”

  Sygiek clapped her hands. “Brilliant deductions. I said reason was needed.”

  “Brilliant imagination,” said Kordan. “And nothing more. We have been accustomed all our life to what you call negotiation; it is our directing principle. Do you think these barbarians, on their uncompromising world, will understand such a concept? I doubt it! For them, it must inevitably be a quick meal today rather than rescue next year.”

  “You will accept nothing you do not think of yourself,” said Constanza angrily.

  Dulcifer and Sygiek remained outside the discussion which then took place. He put his arm round her blistered shoulder and she leaned against his comforting bulk. After a while, he said in her ear, “When we attacked the hunters at the pool, why did you not use your gun? You could have killed all five of them. I’m sure killing is not against your principles as it is Kordan’s.”

  “Yes, I would have used the gun,” she said, so quietly that he alone could hear. “Only I do not possess it any more. I must have lost it—or somebody stole it from me.”

  They sat and looked at each other. He dropped his gaze first, sighing wearily. Then he looked up again, grinned, and said, “Peach trees!”

  From the gloom of the tunnel, three savages emerged. One collected the boar from the custody of the guards, shouldered it, and disappeared again, bent double. The other two carried staves with which they prodded the prisoners to their feet. They bowed with an uncouth courtesy before searching them. This search was carried out perfunctorily.

  “We wish to go before your praesidium,” said Kordan. “We have no intention of harming you. Do you understand?”

  The guards took no notice. They saluted the sentries at the tunnel-mouth and motioned with their staves for the tourists to walk before them into the darkness. Constanza clung to Takeido as they went, for it was wet underfoot. Cold drops of water came winging down from the roof and splashed on their heads. Shelves of fungi grew on outcrops of rock to one side. They staggered along unsurely.

  “Oh, powers, this is all a nightmare!” groaned Kordan. “How I long for the safety of the Academy again!”

  Somewhere ahead, a light burned. At closer quarters it proved to be a rough lamp, either of stone or pottery, marking a sharp bend in the tunnel with its uneasy flame. Past the bend stood a wooden stockade. The gate in the middle of the stockade was closed from the inside. Sentries in helmets looked curiously down at the prisoners from a platform set behind the barrier. No move was made to open the gate.

  “Now what are we waiting for?” Sygiek demanded of the escort. She received no answer. The escort stood impassively, letting water drip over their skulls and down
their cheeks.

  Sygiek shivered. She was tired and cold. On the gate of the stockade was emblazoned one of the bogey-man faces. She turned away from it in loathing and said to Kordan, “Why don’t they answer me? They have a language.”

  He laid a hand affectionately on her arm. “They will have their instructions. They may attach some significance to waiting before entrances which means nothing to us. If they have been told not to speak, they do not speak. For all our respect for language, you and I would do the same. Looking at these creatures, I can’t help thinking about this whole amazing paradox of the recession of the Lysenkan colonists into kinds of animals. I believe that language is the key to the mystery.”

  “Why do you say ‘amazing paradox’? Without suitable structural social context, people decline. That’s a truism.”

  Standing huddled together in the semi-darkness as they were, they found any conversation tended to become general. Constanza agreed with Sygiek. “Quite so. The organization withers, the individual is left. Then anarchy follows. The Lysenkan menagerie forms a perfect illustration of the truth of system doctrine.”

  Kordan shook his head. “Without wishing to argue against doctrine, I must point out that it was inevitably by breaking new ground, by forming new tribes, new tongues, new societies, that homo sapiens developed in the first place. Let me explain that such a reversion from manhood to animalhood as we witness on Lysenka runs contrary to evolutionary law as explicated by K. V. Hondaras over two thousand years ago. That is why I speak of a paradox.” He paused and then said hesitantly, “Accepting official explanations, I could scarcely believe that the colonists could have degenerated into those various forms we saw with our own eyes.”

  They fell silent, listening to the water drip into the mud underfoot, until Constanza said, “Did you believe that what you saw was some kind of propaganda-trick?”

  Takeido said, “Excuse me, but the means of evolution are well understood. Duplicate genes provide spare copies in which changes can be accumulated. For an alien strain on Lysenka, changes would be rapid, and the human stock would respond rapidly to natural selection. Where’s your difficulty?”

  “Ah, but what of social selection? These people we’re talking about may have been capitalists but they had comparatively high social organizations. For pre-utopian days.” Kordan hesitated, then plunged in as if deciding that he must talk. “We have spoken all along of these unfortunates in terms of function, as protein-eaters, or capitalists, or colonists. But when their starship crash-landed here, they were bereft of function in that sense. They became passive, malleable, in an evolutionary sense. Reduced to bare existence, they would have been forced by the sterility of Lysenka II to spread out thinly in order to survive on what food there was, digging roots, picking berries, searching for insects under stones … They would be Gatherers, not Hunters, at first. I can imagine that it would take only one generation for them to revert to complete primitivism. Those who could not or would not revert would die off.”

  Burek grunted, “… Or hold the ship and its supplies against all comers and survive that way …”

  “A wasting asset,” said Dulcifer.

  “‘As the teat grows thinner, the kid sucks with greater vehemence,’” Burek replied.

  The sentries had disappeared from the top of the stockade, but still there was no move to open the gate. The prisoners leaned against the damp rock walls, and Kordan said, “Let me make my point, please. Degeneration is not the same as mutation. How did these people become animal? By renouncing their humanity: an involuntary process. And how was that done? Because they lost the one basic art which makes us homo uniformis and which made them human, the art of language. From his animal forebears, homo sapiens inherited the frozen vocabulary of instinct, and developed it over the millennia into a complex mode of expression whereby he could control, firstly, himself, and then the world. Expression. What does language express? Language is transitive. Between total language and the nature of the cosmos lies a close relationship; indeed, according to Hondaras, mind is the high-point of cosmos, and man the expression of its emergent characteristic. Mind’s vehicle is language. In the End will be only the Word.”

  Sygiek said, “Despite the orthodoxy of K. V. Hondaras’s work, this speculation is still contentious.”

  “We rightly label all speculation contentious,” Kordan replied. “Yet here and now we are forced into a speculative posture. What is sure is that the stranded colonists were faced with disorientation, complete mental disorientation. Time was wrong; the earth failed them. They would have run up against an immutable law which all societies prefer to forget as they become sophisticated: that there is not only no civilization but practically no basis for life where there are no crops. Those tragic colonists planted their grain. It rotted in the ground. Fertilizers had no effect. The land, the time, was against them.”

  He stared up at the distant roof of rock. It was barely visible in the gloom. Only one or two stalactites showed, like distorted stars.

  “No doubt they turned to magic when science failed. Magic and incantation take us back to the roots of language and the power of repetition. But magic also failed. The cosmos was shown to be defective.”

  He pursed his lips. “Try to imagine what they were up against. Human experience proved insufficient to counter their new inhuman experience. They were driven back to instinctual behavior—the subsistence-level of thinking of the Gatherer—and instinct is ultimately the enemy of language. That one unique feature, the pact between the codes of language and the cosmos, was broken for the first time in the history of mankind. In the resulting anomic situation, genetic equilibrium would be disrupted, and the way laid open for regression to animal modes. We are fortunate in that at least we have fallen into the hands of a group which has managed to retain some humanity. It may be such a group as Burek postulates, which managed to hold the original ship and so retain more firmly than other groups old values, including language.”

  Takeido was shivering with cold. Clutching his upper arms, he said, “Don’t be so optimistic. I take a gloomy view of the symbolism of this dark tunnel they have led us into.”

  Dulcifer had been leaning against the tunnel wall, scarcely bothering to listen to the talk. Now he seized on a point that Kordan had made earlier. Wiping the moisture from his face, he looked closely at the other and asked, “Which are you going to believe, then, Kordan? The official line as laid down by K. V. Hondaras, or the evidence of your own eyes?”

  “It is a test, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s why this planet is closed to all but the privileged—it’s a world which doesn’t fit into our system. Perhaps that’s why it’s open to the privileged—they can be tested …”

  Then Kordan looked around and said no more, gnawing anxiously at his lower lip.

  “Aren’t you going to give me an answer, you who are so fond of answers?” said Dulcifer, mockingly. “Put it into language for us. ‘Never think what cannot be said.’”

  “Are you a provocateur or something? Leave him alone,” Burek said, giving Dulcifer a shove. “Maybe Kordan prefers not to say what cannot be thought. What he tells us is interesting, as far as I understood it, and I don’t see why philosophy should cover all contingencies of reality, else philosophy and reality would be indistinguishable—and plainly that was never intended.”

  “Who’s to say what’s intended any more?” Takeido muttered. They stood there in the mud, occasionally lifting a foot. At last the bolts on the stockade gate were withdrawn, and the escort stepped smartly forward to drive its party through. Once they were in, the gate was closed behind them.

  Mud still lay thick underfoot, though there was an encouraging light ahead. Planking and logs had been laid in the mud. From this main tunnel, side tunnels branched. As they went ahead again, picking their way, the darkness became less intense. At last, the tunnel opened into a large chamber, which was well lighted. To one side of this chamber, a cage built of wood had been set up. The guards forced their p
risoners into the cage and secured it shut.

  IX

  Trapped under the epidermis of an alien planet, surrounded by a savage species the more terrible for resembling men, threatened by all manner of fates, the six weary utopians enjoyed the luxury of Biocom: they controlled their thoughts and allowed their unified nervous systems to calm them. There was room in the cage for them all to sit, and it was dry. So they sat down, rested, and awaited events.

  When their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they gained a better impression of the cavern to which they had been brought. It was lit by a few flambeaux standing out from the rock at intervals, and by a fire which burned on a stone in the middle of the enormous space. There were two other, much dimmer, sources of light.

  Firstly, on the far side of the cavern, a hole overhead gave a glimpse of the sky. In the general confusion of shadows and structures which filled the area, this hole was not immediately apparent. Once they perceived it, the prisoners realized with dismay that the outside world was almost as dark as the world inside, and that Lysenka II was already turning toward its lengthy night period.

  Secondly, also on the far side of the cavern, a large building stood. Upon the steps of this building, a number of candles burned, casting the shadows of its columns into the interior. The building was circular in ground plan, and roofless. Its elegance set it at variance with the general roughness of its surroundings. Between its colonnades, a shadowy metal mass could be observed, as well as a ladder-like structure pointing to the hole in the roof above. Puzzle as they might, the prisoners could not make out the function of this building, although as time passed, a number of savages took up candles from the steps, went inside, and paraded formally round.