The Totems of Abydos

by John Norman

  “You don’t think the captain would really care, do you?” asked Rodriguez.

  “No, not the captain,” said Brenner.

  “He is a good fellow,” said Rodriguez. “To be sure, he is a bit formal, but his species tends to be reticent.”

  Brenner nodded. That was true. Members of the captain’s species had sometimes squatted before emissaries, and even one another, when time permitted, for several divisions, as though absorbing one another’ presence, and the warmth of a benign sun, before, subject to the imperatives of, say, business or diplomacy, eventually breaking the thitherto sustained purity of silence, muchly prized amongst them, with an almost apologetic courtesy. The entire crew of the ship, incidentally, was of the captain’s species. Very few ships maintained mixed crews. There were a number of excellent reasons for this, having to do with several matters, such as optimum atmospheres and temperatures, difficulties of communication, particularly in emergency situations, diverse chemical requirements, diverse parameters pertinent to comfort and accommodation, numerous diverse methods-engineering factors, such as colors most easily discriminated and odors most easily detected, suitable placement of instrumentation, and numerous diverse devices, designed for convenience, depending on the prehensile appendages in question, for controlling the ship’s systems. There were senses in which many species did not even see, feel, hear, smell, or taste the same world, so to speak, that is, that their experiences would have been exotic and perhaps even unintelligible to those of other species. To be sure, these numerous experiences would presumably be related in some topological manner to an independent reality, or, at least, that seemed the most economical hypothesis to explain how two different species, say, Zatans and Ellits, could get different ships to the same place by prearrangement at the same time. Without some such accommodations interstellar commerce, warfare and such, would have been almost impossible. Certain of the manufacturing worlds did design ships for diverse species. There were even ships in the galaxy which were designed for, and had been purchased by, and were flown by, representatives of Brenner’s and Rodriguez’ species, to be sure, those of colonial worlds, that is, of individuals whose ancestors had purchased passage on alien vessels to other worlds, often individuals who had been uncomfortable, inefficient, or unsuccessful on the home world. Indeed, some such individuals had been deported, that their ideas could remain in quarantine, so to speak, in remote asylums, unlikely to contaminate the ideal tepidities, or, more kindly, the serenities, of the home world, achieved at such cost over many centuries. To be sure, this was now seldom done, because of advances in neurological engineering achieved over the past two centuries, in virtue which triumphs many notable successes had been achieved in reforming the eccentricities of such deviants. Indeed, some of these individuals had climbed to unusual heights in the bureaucracy, and even, it was rumored, in the metaparty, the existence of which was often denied. The convert, after all, is the most zealous of adherents, as he must, before his own stern tribunals, before his own doubts and remorse, suspecting himself, not certain of his true motivations, defend and justify his decision, or betrayal. Another technique was that of the postnatal abortion, in which a mother’s oversight, forgivable given her ignorance, her lack of foresight, was rectified by court order and the state at a later time. The state, after all, and the metaparty, with which it was in effect identical, if such a party existed, surely in its collective wisdom, knew better than any particular individual. Indeed, Rodriguez had fled more than one world to escape such a termination, not of his person, of course, which would have been heinously immoral, but, retroactively, of his judicially decided nonperson. Postnatal abortion had replaced capital punishment, the immorality of which was notoriously transparent. On some worlds populations had been subjected to such abortion. An additional argument of great force in favor of such merciful termination, done with all kindness, and all possible avoidance of pain, was that the state, the people, the community, or whatever putative entity might be involved, or the metaparty, if there were such an organization, was asserted to be the truest “Mother,” and accordingly, at her discretion and convenience, had inalienable death rights over whatever might be temporarily housed within her.

  “We can get away with a great deal,” said Rodriguez to Brenner, “as we are known as slovenly creatures in the galaxy, and little is expected of us. For example, if a Narnian were to have said what I said, there might have been something of a flap.”

  “I see,” said Brenner.

  “Our species is despised throughout the galaxy,” said Rodriguez.

  “Absurd,” said Brenner.

  “And quite rightfully so, in my opinion,” said Rodriguez, “in spite of the titles of politeness. They change nothing of importance, you know, at least when we consider the interstellar expanses, the multiplicity of worlds, and such. Only people like you take them seriously.”

  “Surely that’s not true,” said Brenner.

  “So don’t worry,” said Rodriguez, blearily.

  Sometimes Brenner did not care to talk with Rodriguez, though, to be sure, he had really not often done so, not to a great extent at any rate. It was not as though they were cronies or confidants, in spite of the months they had spent, even at hyperlight velocities, making their way from one port of call to another, from one system to another, sometimes on commercial lines, of one grade or another, sometimes on military vessels, patrol ships, and others, sometimes on research ships, most often, on one or another of the out-the-way routes, on one freighter or another. Rodriguez, except when drunk, tended to keep his own counsels, and if Brenner belonged to a species Rodriguez felt was rightfully despised throughout the universe, he had little doubt but what his own particular portion of that species, in the lofty criticality of Rodriguez, within the scope of which he undoubtedly, with magnanimous consistency, included himself, was not likely to be much more exempt, if that, than any other. Talking with Rodriguez was a bit unnerving at times, much like handling an unfamiliar piece of charged apparatus, not wholly understood, which occasionally, for no clear or obvious reason, reciprocated the attentions bestowed upon it with a series of unpleasant shocks. Brenner did know, of course, that his species was not generally regarded as one of the serious life forms of the galaxy, which discovery by the species, which had stood at the top of its own food chain for centuries, had come as a disillusioning surprise. A great deal of literature, poetry, and philosophy had come, almost immediately, to be seen in a quite different perspective. But then his species had encountered such surprises before. It did disturb Brenner to know that his species, a backward one, except in its own view, a view adjusted in such a way as to define progress in its own terms, commanded so little respect in the galaxy. It was generally regarded as a set of weak, uninteresting, self-righteous mediocrities. It was not a species with a project, not a species with a dream, to accomplish which it was willing to work and sacrifice. It was not, many said, a species which belonged amongst the stars. It would stain the stars or demean them. There was some agitation to keep it isolated, and treat it as unwholesome vegetable matter, not to be brought across stellar borders. It was better left, some said, to crawl on the surface of its own world, like worms, looking for small comforts. They were not giants, whose hands might pull them upward, from planet to planet, scaling the cliffs of space, giants whose brows might crash against stars, in whose hair would race the stellar winds. It did not strive, it did not care, except for itself; it did not think in terms of millenniums, but in terms of the day. Take one day at a time, it said. And that is how many of its members managed it. They took one day at a time, until one day came along on which they died. So, asked Brenner to himself, are we really no more than the clowns and cabin boys we are taken for, no more than tiny riders clinging in the fur of more venturesome, nomadic animals, in effect, parasites surviving in the chinks permitted to us by higher forms of life? How something deep in Brenner rebelled at this thought, yet, how quickly, he censured himself for his unworthiness, his en
vy, and rebellion, his defiance, and ambition, such atavistic temptations belonging to violent, archaic eras. “If you cannot kick, you cannot run,” had sung a poet of such a violent time. “If you cannot form a fist, you cannot grasp.” Brenner shuddered. Rodriguez was looking off, across the lounge, lost in his own thoughts, and the smoke, and the Heimat. No, thought Brenner, there are few mixed crews. How different it turned out from the crude fantasies of the early medieval period, days when it had been conjectured that his species would set the pace to the stars, joining in joyous brotherhood with other life forms. Indeed, such fantasies, until a century ago, had still been popular on the home world, where the real truth was not generally known, or, at any rate, much publicized. The naivety of such fantasies, their neglect of thousands of practical factors, had not militated against their popularity. And, indeed, they had even been used as devices to propagate the very values which would preclude their accomplishment in reality. On the other hand, they were now outlawed because they did call attention to the stars, and to what the species was not. They directed attention, you see, upwards and outwards, rather than downwards and within. They spoke, even in their beautiful, childlike simplicity, of unfavored ends, and of action, and of ardor and achievement, not of tranquility; too, they challenged the imagination; they issued, in their way, a rallying cry in a world weary of rallies, a world which suspected them, and feared them, and perhaps for good reasons; and they suggested a goal, a project, an adventure, and projects and adventures are always dangerous, even in the imagination. The stars, you see, may lure and summon, much as mountains did once, and then later, the sky; and there might be those who would hear this call, really hear it, and actually, completely misunderstanding the matter, place their feet upon such trails. Rejecting the values, and the absurd means, they might accept the end, the goal, the adventure. This would be dangerous, and jeopardize the hard-won victories of centuries. And so such things, innocent as they might seem, were outlawed. Yet, their outlawry was probably not essential, for in a leveled world, where even the tallest, their backs aching, must bend down and pretend to be little, in a world in which elites, whether they existed or not, were illegal, a world which would by statute subvert, squander, and repudiate its occasional gifts won in the genetic lottery, its own pathfinders, its own commanders, its own aristocracy, as it might spring up here and there, like flowers and trees, the stars could not be achieved. How insignificant are the parameters of physics compared to the gravity of the mass. From that bulk what must be the accumulated force, the consolidated and directed power, that could achieve escape velocity? And so organisms such as Brenner and Rodriguez were, on the whole, little more than passengers, neglected and scorned, amongst the stars. Yet Brenner did not begrudge his fortunes. He would have come, really, even in spite of his being “assigned,” for he could have challenged the assignment, with anyone to the stars, even such as the captain, even such as Rodriguez. He was there, and this was enough for him. He would have been happy, could he have afforded it, to have purchased passage in steerage; he would, like many others, if he had received the opportunity, have been delighted to work his passage from system to system; he would have cheerfully kept cabins and polished brass; he would cheerfully have carved strange vegetables in the galleys; he would cheerfully have cleaned the cages of transported animals, even those of the blue-skinned Serian slave girls, bred for beauty and passion over generations, as loving as dogs, as incapable of rebellion as cattle and sheep; or even the slaves taken from his own planet, many of them, in their cages and chains, as lovely and as needful as the Serian sluts, women who had been homeless on a world shut against them and their deepest, loving nature. They would find worlds on which they were prized, worlds on which they brought high prices.

  “I was saying,” said Brenner, returning to what had been on his mind before the visit of the captain, a visit a consequence perforce perhaps of etiquette, or perhaps even of his own innate politeness, as landfall, so to speak, at Abydos was to occur in a few divisions, ship time, or, to be more precise, a.s.t., adjusted ship time, her governing chronometer having been set, as was typically the case, and has been suggested, to commercial time, indexed to Commonworld, “that I have read your writings.”

  “No, you haven’t,” said Rodriguez.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Brenner. To be sure, he had probably not read everything which Rodriguez had written, but he had done his best to find what he could, shortly after learning the identity of his projected senior colleague. For the most part he had secured monographs in the library of his base university, to the faculty of which he was attached as an adjunct researcher, certain sections of which he had extracted for personal notes.

  “What did you read?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Congenital Heraldic Design: An Analysis of the Shells of Holarians,” said Brenner. “The Phratries of Chios, Ritual Meiosis: An Essay on Segmentation in Tunnel Societies, Avoidance Behaviors amongst the Milesian Amphibians, Asymmetrical Endogamy amongst Four-Spined Creodonts: A Study in Genetic Randomization, Aquatic Clans, Rites of Passage in Seven Societies, such things.”

  “Rites of Passage?” asked Rodriguez, looking up.

  “I found it in paper,” said Brenner.

  “And you weren’t afraid to read it?”

  “No,” said Brenner.

  “Good,” said Rodriguez. “That was the first book I wrote which was banned.”

  “I do not see why,” said Brenner. “It did little more than collect and record indisputable observations.”

  Rodriguez laughed, a not pleasant laugh. Then he said, “My real writings are all in paper.”

  “In books—with pages?” asked Brenner.

  “That sort,” he said, moodily, “not the sort on spheres, not the sorts on cubes and plates. You can’t broadcast selective magnetic erasure signals, coded to the sphere, the plate, or cube, and destroy the manuscript, simultaneously, wherever it might exist, on an entire world.”

  “‘Book burning’?” said Brenner.

  “One match does for the entire pile,” said Rodriguez.

  Brenner nodded.

  “But with pages, with books with pages,” said Rodriguez, with a sort of grim satisfaction, apparently considering the labors set authorities, “you have to hunt down each one, each one, slowly, painfully, expensively. And how can you be sure you have them all, even if you have? There might be one in hiding, one you do not know of. What do you think of that? Does that not worry you? That is how a book with pages can survive, by hiding. By hiding, and by being copied, often by hand, and passed from one reader to another. Such manuscripts are precious. They are carried from place to place, in knapsacks and boots, like contraband.” He slurped some more Heimat, a word which, incidentally, in a once subtle, expressive, beautiful language, now muchly improved, simplified, and functionalized, had meant “Home” or “Homeland.” Indeed, several such languages had been similarly improved by grammar engineers, until their loftiest flights, those incipient twitches in the wing muscles, were now well within the reach of, could now be easily understood by, the most elementary, or most occupied, or most casual or careless mind. Prose inaccessible to, or not easily comprehended by, the mass violated basic principles of egalitarianism. Its discriminatory nature had been proven in various courts of law, in various historic decisions, by suitable, clear-thinking, humane political appointments. Dissenting judges had occasionally been removed from the bench on the basis of judicial incompetence. On the other hand, the important matter was always the majority, and a token opposition, futile and ineffectual, was desirable, guaranteeing, as it did, the openness and objectivity of the judicial process. To be sure, on some worlds collectors of incunabula, of antique manuscripts, were permitted to pursue their eccentric hobby, and in this way, if no other, certain fragments of a pernicious, superseded literature, putatively valued for its historical value, survived. One manuscript, a tattered hand-copied manuscript of a book called Pride and Prejudice by a J. Austen had brought seven th
ousand, two hundred and twenty-one Commonworld Credits, a standardized economic unit, interestingly indexed to an imaginary economic system on the wilderness of Commonworld, that system itself representing a correlation of more than four hundred common currencies, at a small auction on Naxos. To be sure, at the same auction, a beverage can dating from more than eight centuries ago, had brought more than nine thousand. Interstellar commerce, incidentally, was founded largely on barter, involving a great deal of compromising and bargaining. More than one world’s currency had been subverted through sudden unilateral revisions of its worth, based against the Commonworld Credit. Also, wholesale unilateral abolitions of debts, contract cancellations, expropriations and such, based on perceived internal need or newly discovered moral principles, tended to make interstellar transactions a matter of serious economic risk. It was easier to decide on the value of a weapon-system powerpack or a sack of Bellarian flour, from one’s point of view, as compared to a quantity of ore or a bushel of Velasian grain than on any one of these to a given number of credits, even those of the Commonworld. Speculators in currencies, of course, throve. So, too, did various forms of insurance companies, the professed objective of which was to provide some measure of protection against statistically predictable fluctuations and disasters.

  “I would like to read some of your other works,” said Brenner.

  “You are better off not knowing about them” said Rodriguez.

  “Thank you,” said Brenner.

  “They might confuse you,” said Rodriguez. “They might make you think.”

  “Thank you,” said Brenner.

  “That is a kindness on my part toward you,” said Rodriguez, “indicating I have some concern for your future. Why should I risk you, as I saw fit to risk myself? Too, it is a compliment, as it suggests that I regard you as being capable of thought.”