The Totems of Abydos

by John Norman

  “The Pons do not eat insects and grubs,” Brenner had observed to Rodriguez a day or two earlier.

  “I don’t either,” had said Rodriguez.

  Brenner could still not place what had seemed to him odd about the scarp he had examined.

  Rodriguez rose up and clapped his hands. “Let us be on our way,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  “Are you awake?” asked Brenner.

  He and Rodriguez lay near the remains of a small fire, surrounded by Pons, the sled, too, within the circle.

  “Yes,” said Rodriguez.

  “They speak the dominant language of Company Station,” said Brenner.

  “You have known that since the station,” said Rodriguez. “They trade there.”

  This was the sixth day out from the station, and today was the first time that either Brenner or Rodriguez had heard the Pons speak. That some of them, at least, were familiar with the language most spoken at the station had been known for days, of course, as they had regularly understood Rodriguez’ instructions, Brenner’s questions, and such. Too, they would have found the language useful in their trading at the station.

  “You do not understand,” said Brenner. “They spoke it amongstst themselves, or something like it. I could understand them.”

  “I heard,” said Rodriguez.

  “Surely it is not their common language,” said Brenner.

  “I would not think so,” said Rodriguez.

  “What would that be?” asked Brenner.

  “I have no idea,” said Rodriguez. “The matter is not clear in the records.”

  “That would seem to be the first thing to be made clear,” said Brenner.

  “One would think so,” said Rodriguez.

  “Different parties who contacted them must have spoken different languages.”

  “One would suppose so,” said Rodriguez.

  “It is tactful for them to speak only in our language before us,” said Brenner.

  “Yes,” said Rodriguez. “That seems thoughtful.”

  “That would fit in with their diffidence, and commitment to proprieties, politeness, and such,” said Brenner.

  “They are excellent mimics,” said Rodriguez.

  “They would pick up languages quickly?” said Brenner.

  “Possibly,” said Rodriguez.

  “It seems odd that most of them, at least, should be familiar with our language,” said Brenner.

  “Not necessarily,” said Rodriguez. “These may be their traders, their contact individuals. You must remember that they have been in contact with Company Station, and its predecessors, for generations.”

  “They could be like border peoples, to whom more than one language would be familiar?”

  “Possibly,” said Rodriguez.

  “It would not be spoken in their village or villages?” said Brenner.

  “One would think not,” said Rodriguez, “but who knows? They may have adopted the language gradually, over hundreds of years. The prestige of superior life forms, such as we, may have influenced this sort of thing. Doubtless we, even such as we are, are like gods to them. Diffusions and interchanges take place, losses, abandonings, accretions, transformations, developments, borrowings, and such, occur. Over generations a language can change beyond recognition.”

  “You think, then, that they might speak our language,” said Brenner.

  “There is another possibility, of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “What is that?” asked Brenner.

  “That we speak their language,” said Rodriguez.

  “That is very funny,” said Brenner.

  “There are many differences, of course,” said Rodriguez, “aside from the difference in tonal quality, the high-pitchedness, the shrillness, and such, differences, literally, in pronunciation, and certainly in vocabulary.”

  “It is a dialect,” said Brenner.

  “Each individual,” said Rodriguez, “speaks an idiolect, in a sense, his personal language, with its pronunciations, its lexicon, and such. In this sense there are as many languages as there are speakers. If enough idiolects have enough in common, in phonemic quality, in intonation contours, and such, we may speak of a dialect. If the dialects have enough in common we may speak of a language. The division between a dialect and a language is often arbitrary. In innumerable areas, as on a river, there may be ten consecutive villages, or speech communities, any two of which, adjacent to one another, understand one another very well, but the speech of, say, the first village will be clearly unintelligible to that of the tenth village. Thus, in that set of villages, using mutual intelligibility as a criterion, there must be at least two languages, but where does one stop and the other start? You must invent your criterion. Then, with your criterion, it becomes, and only then becomes, a scientific question, a question of fact, as to how many languages are spoken on the river. One criterion may give you ten languages, another five, another two, and so on.”

  “I wonder what is their native language,” said Brenner.

  “I wonder what is ours,” said Rodriguez.

  “There is something about them that makes me uneasy,” said Brenner.

  “What?” asked Rodriguez.

  “There is something remotely familiar about them,” said Brenner. “It is as if I knew them.”

  “Have you been to Abydos before?” asked Rodriguez.

  “No,” said Brenner.

  “Then do not be foolish,” said Rodriguez.

  “On the first day,” said Brenner, “when you took the hood from the Pon, and you looked at its teeth.”

  “Yes?” said Rodriguez.

  “I am curious about something,” said Brenner.

  “What?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Did you count the teeth?” asked Brenner.

  “Of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “How many teeth did it have?” asked Brenner.

  “Thirty-two,” said Rodriguez.

  “That is interesting,” said Brenner.

  “I agree,” said Rodriguez.

  “They make me uneasy,” said Brenner.

  “Hundreds of life forms have that number of teeth,” said Rodriguez, sleepily.

  “There seems to me something oddly familiar about the Pons,” said Brenner.

  “There should,” said Rodriguez. “You are spiritual brothers. You both subscribe to a morality of lunacy.”

  “Do you not agree that if you do not regard the bacterium as your equal you have an inferiority complex?”

  “No,” said Rodriguez. “But if I did regard it as my equal, that would be evidence that I had such a complex, and a severe one. More likely, of course, I would simply be insane.”

  “There are more of them than you,” said Brenner.

  “That is true,” admitted Rodriguez.

  “And you cannot reproduce by fission,” pointed out Brenner.

  “Yes,” admitted Rodriguez, sleepily, “they have me there.”

  Brenner supposed that if there were no values, no standards, in the universe, if it did not draw a distinction between, say, the bacillus and the megabregma, or was not interested in the differences between them, it was not, then, that the bacillus and the megabregma were equal, but, rather, that equalities and inequalities, so to speak, did not exist. If there are no values, nothing has value, and, in that sense, things cannot be of equal value, unless one counts all as of zero value, or such. But there were values in the universe, obviously. If nothing else, they had been put there as needed, or desired, by various organisms. Values were real; it was merely that they were indexed to species, or individuals. To be sure, they might be incommensurable. But incommensurability did not imply illusion, nor inconsistency, nor unreality.

  “If the bacterium has equal value with us, then, so, too, must the Pon,” said Brenner.

  “Why not?” said Rodriguez, affably.

  “But you do not regard the innocent, harmless Pon as our equal?”

  “What do you mean by ‘equal’?”
asked Rodriguez.

  “That is interesting,” said Brenner. “That is usually left unspecified.” He had never really thought about that. Such words commonly functioned noncognitively, usually being used as touchstones to test group allegiances, rather like special signals, pullings on the ear, strange motions with the foot, secret handshakes, and such. You could, of course, use words to mean almost anything. The usual trick was to take a good word, one with favorable connotations, and then change its meaning to something one approved of. For example, if one approves of totalitarianism one simply redefines, say, ‘democracy’, so that it now means what, or much what, ‘totalitarianism’ used to mean. Then anyone who disagrees with you is put in the position of being opposed to “democracy,” and such. The obvious fraudulence of this tactic, interestingly, seldom acts as a deterrent to its effectiveness.

  “The literal meaning of ‘equal’ is sameness or identicality,” said Rodriguez.

  “Yes,” said Brenner.

  “In this sense almost nothing is the same as anything else,” said Rodriguez. “Nor need it be, nor should it be,” he added.

  “We are the same as the Pons in the sense that we both have a single nose, and such,” said Brenner. “And we are the same as the bacterium in the sense that we both contain various chemical elements.”

  “True,” said Rodriguez.

  “Thus we and the Pons, and bacteria, are equal,” said Brenner.

  “The fallacy should be obvious, even to you,” said Rodriguez. “You shift from sameness or equality in one respect, usually a quite general or trivial one, to sameness or equality in some substantial or totalistic sense, denying differences. I do not deny that you and the bacterium have something in common, for example, that you both occupy space, but it does not follow from this that you are a bacterium.”

  “I see,” said Brenner.

  “Be what you are, a man,” said Rodriguez, “and be one fully. Do not deny what you are, or let others cheat you of it, or make you ashamed of it. Be what you are, in joy, in freedom, and power. Walk, and run, and climb, as nature intended you should. To do otherwise is to betray yourself. It is to commit treason to your own reality. Let the wolf be a wolf, the man a man.”

  Chapter 9

  “Did you see it, over there!” said Rodriguez, excitedly.

  Brenner peered intently in the direction indicated by Rodriguez.

  “No,” said Brenner.

  It was now the ninth day from Company Station.

  “It is the second time,” said Rodriguez. “I am sure I saw it before, and this time.”

  “What was it?” asked Brenner, uneasily.

  “It is like a shadow,” said Rodriguez. “It is large, very large, out there. I saw it twice, I am sure I saw it twice. You did not see it?”

  “No,” said Brenner.

  One of the Pons looked up at Rodriguez, its small, wide nostrils flat in its face. It blinked twice.

  “You are probably mistaken,” said Brenner.

  For the last two days Rodriguez, and Brenner with him, had remained close to the sled. Brenner had kept this post naturally enough in camaraderie with Rodriguez, that they might the more easily converse as they trekked. Too, he found the humility, kindliness, politeness, and gentleness of the Pons, those ideal, simple children of the wild, clad in all the glory of their unassuming primeval innocence, vaguely disquieting. Too, of course, he told himself that his position near the sled had a practical justification, as well, as it enabled him, and Rodriguez, to assist the Pons with the sled, particularly in steep or narrow places. But now, suddenly, Brenner realized that Rodriguez, himself, might have had a different reason for his positioning himself by the sled. Rodriguez had now removed his hand from the brass instrument, that resembling an optical instrument, which lay in the opened pack on the sled.

  “Let us move on,” said Rodriguez to the nearest Pon, gesturing ahead.

  Again the party moved forward.

  “You are certain you saw nothing?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Yes,” said Brenner. “I am certain.”

  Chapter 10

  “I have it!” said Brenner. “I now know what it was!”

  “What?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Some days ago I examined a scarp,” said Brenner. He looked about himself. No Pons were close at hand. They had drawn off a bit. It was noon, and the party was resting. “There was something unusual about it, something I could not at the time place, but troubled me.”

  “Why are you speaking so softly?” asked Rodriguez.

  “It was not something on the scarp, not something there. That is what I noticed, not something there, but that something was not there!”

  “I do not understand,” said Rodriguez.

  “The Pons are amongstst the most primitive forms of rational, or semirational life, we know of,” said Brenner.

  “True,” said Rodriguez.

  “They do not even have a native pottery,” said Brenner.

  “No,” said Rodriguez.

  It might be mentioned here that the Pons did, of course, have a nonindigenous pottery, in the sense of a pottery received in trade from Company Station. Too, of course, they had certain other goods from Company Station, scarps, as we have noted, and, too, naturally, certain other items, for example, pots and kettles.

  “Even their form of social organization is primitive,” said Brenner. “They lack chieftains, or kings.”

  “It seems so,” said Rodriguez.

  “They are utterly simple, utterly primitive,” said Brenner.

  “Not really,” said Rodriguez. “They have had contacts with more advanced cultures, for example.” To expand briefly on this we might note that it is difficult for a “primitive society” to remain primitive after it is discovered, because, almost immediately, exchanges occur and influences begin. In this sense, the very investigation of the data tends to contaminate the data. The observer’s presence, so to speak, obtrudes into the data, not simply in his categories, his concepts, his judgments, in his interests, and such, but, even more insidiously, at least from the point of view of an objective inquiry, in his own cultural influence. The very beads he distributes create new values. What he chooses to wear and eat, and how and where he sleeps, may constitute implicit criticisms, and so on.

  “They are amongst the most primitive peoples known to science,” said Brenner.

  “They are perhaps more advanced than some totemic cultures,” said Rodriguez, “as they are supposed to possess at least the rudiments of an agriculture.”

  “A primitive level of agriculture at best,” said Brenner.

  “That would seem to be the case,” said Rodriguez.

  Some of the Pons on the trek, it might be observed, had supplemented a diet of roots and brush fruit with meal, boiled with water, which practice, of course, tended to corroborate the existence of a native form of agriculture, of some level at least.

  “Where would you rank them?” asked Brenner.

  “Technologically?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Yes!” said Brenner.

  “Very low,” said Rodriguez. “For most practical purposes they are a stone-age culture, except, of course, that they do not hunt animals, and do possess something of an agriculture. Too, they can weave, obviously. Certain other limitations in their culture are doubtless by choice, such as the refusal to herd animals, or to use them for food. It is even likely they deny themselves the use of bone implements, because of similar reservations.”

  “You see them then as a mix, as being anomalous in some ways?”

  “Certainly,” said Rodriguez.

  “How do you see them biologically?” asked Brenner.

  “That is where in particular I think they are extremely important,” said Rodriguez. “I see them as biologically primitive, as basically unevolved, as, in effect, simplistic simian organisms. In this sense I think they are, in their psychic development, in their rudimentary capacities, in their intellectualistic dispositions, in their world picturings,
in their mental outlook, in how they think, and such, at a very primitive level. That is what makes them such a beautiful object of study. They do not even have the mental capacity to borrow and adapt the subtleties of later cultures, and not even the subtleties of mathematics and science, but the subtleties even, say, of heroes and gods, of myths and religions. In this sense, as much or more than culturally, I think of them as being, as I said on the ship, “at the beginning.” Here, in their thought, in their totemism, I hope to find the seeds of civilization, where it came from, how it arose. Here we revisit the earth, as it was, so to speak, before the Garden of Eden.”

  “You do regard them as primitive, biologically, and culturally?”

  “Of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “They trade for their scarps,” said Brenner.

  “Of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “And for pans and such?”

  “Of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “What do you think the likelihood would be of their possessing a native metallurgy?” asked Brenner.

  “Zero, at best,” grinned Rodriguez.

  “You do not think it likely?”

  “No,” said Rodriguez. “Now if you were talking about the six-inch Abderan weed snake or the marine slug of Chios that would be different.”

  “You do not think it likely?”

  “The thought is absurd,” said Rodriguez. “Look at them. Consider them. Their brains are about the size of your fist. They do not even work clay. They do not even have a native pottery.”

  “They trade for their scarps,” said Brenner.

  “Of course,” said Rodriguez.

  “Where do they obtain them?” asked Brenner.

  “Company Station,” said Rodriguez.

  “I examined a scarp recently,” said Brenner. “It did not bear the company mark.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” asked Rodriguez.