by Chad Oliver
“It’s true, Frank. Our opinions won’t change it any.”
“But look.” Frank nodded his head up and down solemnly, determined to explode the fallacies in the argument. “It just doesn’t stand to reason. You say these natives live practically forever. OK. That means that they are maybe thousands of years old. Think what a man could learn if he lived to be a thousand years old! Dammit, he wouldn’t be living like a savage. He would have developed a superior, advanced kind of culture. Isn’t that true?”
Canady stoked up his pipe. He was feeling light-headed from the long hours without sleep. But if he could just make Frank see—
“I agree. He wouldn’t be living like a savage. And he would live in a very advanced type of culture.”
Frank threw up his hands. “Well?”
“Well what?” Canady leaned forward. “Think a minute. Are The People really living like savages, and what the devil does that mean anyhow? Do you mean they are savages because they hunt animals for food? Or because they live in tents instead of skyscrapers? Or because they use bows and arrows instead of rifles or atom bombs?”
“But their technology is simple. You can’t deny that.”
“I don’t have to deny it. Just the same, simple isn’t savage. After all, what’s a technology for? How do you judge it? I would think you have to rate it by seeing what it does in terms of its own cultural context. The only real index of technological advancement is one of relative efficiency. What do you want a rifle for if you don’t need one? What do you need a doctor for if you never get sick?”
“It isn’t an efficient technology. You can’t tell me a bow is more efficient than a rifle for a hunter. It isn’t.”
“It is in a special situation, and this is one of them. Look, it’s obvious that for some reason these societies must be kept small. Not only that, but they must be peaceful. If they’ve hit a perfect balance in ecological terms with a bow and arrow, a rifle would just foul everything up. The one cardinal fact about an immortal society is that it must survive. If it doesn’t, it’s not immortal. And therefore anything that in the long run does not contribute to survival cannot be tolerated. Hell, you can’t argue with the thing. It works.”
“All right, all right.” Frank poured himself another cup of coffee, “But all that is theory, speculation. It doesn’t prove that those natives live forever.”
“True enough. But try this on for size: there is not a single child in this village. There is not a single elderly person. The People can hardly remember when they were young, it was so long ago. And until Mewenta chose to destroy himself, Lerrie could not have a child. When Mewenta died it was such a singular event that natives for miles around came into camp just to witness it. When Lerrie announced that she was pregnant, the whole tribe went into a delirium of joy. It can only mean one thing: this is a rigidly controlled population. No child can be born until the death of an adult makes room for a new member of the society. It would have to work that way. If nobody dies and children keep on being born The People would breed themselves into extinction.”
“I’ll go along with that up to a point. I think you have demonstrated that we have a rigidly controlled population here. I admit that I’ve never heard of anything like it. But that still doesn’t prove all this immortality stuff.”
Canady sighed. He was talking to a stone wall. “Look, Frank. Why didn’t The People accept those sewing machines and rifles? Why weren’t they impressed with that bomb we dropped, or with this sphere for that matter? Why have we failed to make the slightest impression on them?”
“You said it yourself. If you destroy a perfect ecological adjustment …” Frank stopped.
“Exactly. But how do they know that? Who told them about ecological adjustments? How could they possibly know what effect a rifle will have on their culture? You started out by saying they were a bunch of savages. Now you’re saying they know all about the effects of acculturation and cultural dynamics. You can’t have it both ways.”
Frank lapsed into silence.
“It’s more than just ecology, Frank. I’m convinced that this immortality angle is part of their culture—a product of it. It isn’t a mutant gland or a shot of wonder drug in the gizzard. It comes about because they live the way they do. They know that. So of course they’re not going to jeopardize it by changing their culture. What’s a rifle or a spaceship against the prospects of living forever? Think of it, Frank! No lying awake nights wondering if that ache in your belly is cancer. No sitting in a hospital room wondering if your wife will live until morning. No certain knowledge that you will see your father and mother buried in a hole in the ground. No waiting for your muscles to turn flabby and the saliva to drool from the corners of your mouth when you eat. No watching a friend get skinnier day by day, no watching the light go out of his eyes. My God, would you trade that for a sewing machine?”
Frank shook his head. “I always read that if you lived forever you would be unhappy and bored stiff. How about that?”
Canady laughed. “Man, that is the rationalization of the ages. You can’t live forever, therefore you don’t want to. You can’t have a steak, therefore you aren’t hungry. Are The People unhappy? I’d say they’re a million times happier than most men and women on Earth. And would you really fight against it if you knew you could live forever? I wouldn’t! My life hasn’t been any screaming ecstasy but I’ll hang onto it as long as I can. And if I could live forever, if I could really do the things I love—”
How do you speak of these things to another? How do you tell of blue skies and sunlight and the laughter of love? How do you tell of the joys of just being alive, of knowing that the world of winds and trees and mountain streams is yours to cherish forever? How do you tell of a love that endures for all the years, all the springs?
“Mewenta killed himself,” Frank said bluntly.
“Sure. Not all people are happy, and these natives are people. And perhaps a man might even sacrifice eternal life to bring joy to his fellow man, the joy of children. I have heard that when a man of The People feels restless or discontented, he sets out on a Long Walk alone. He gets close to the land to cleanse his heart. It usually works. If not, there’s always the fire.”
“You spoke of peace. How about all this raiding that goes on?”
“You mean counting coups?” Canady shrugged. “Sure, they go off and rustle the mharu herds. They have real knock-down fights too. Bur who said a culture like this has to be dull? It couldn’t be dull. They don’t kill each other in the fights. Have you noticed the combs the men wear in their hair? That’s what they take instead of scalps. It serves the same purpose. You don’t kill a guy in a football game either, but you can get plenty steamed up about it. Everything in the culture is set up to avoid boredom. They alternate roles, for one thing. Every five years or so everyone switches positions. Plavgar is the headman now, but that is only one of the many parts he has played in his life. And all the ceremonies, the periods when the sex tabus are lifted—they all serve the same purpose. Dammit, The People like to have fun.”
Frank lit another cigarette. “If it’s true, Arthur—we’ve got to find out how it’s done. We’ve got to.”
Canady smiled. “Have The People ever lied to us?”
“No, I guess not.”
“How do they say it’s done?”
“I don’t follow you.”
Canady go up, stretched, and yawned. “I think you better brush up on your guardian spirits, Frank. I think you better start thinking about the Old Ones.”
Frank stared. “But that’s all superstition—”
“Is it? How do you know? Have you ever fasted on Thunder Rock?” Canady turned before Frank could answer him. He peeled off his clothes and fell into his bunk. He closed his tired eyes.
And he thought—
The world of winds and trees and mountain streams yours to cherish forever …
V
The days flowed into weeks and the weeks became months. The People drif
ted south along the sheltered slopes of the blue mountain range and the cold winter snows settled on the grasslands in a blanket of white. Only the brown and black tips of the grasses showed above the rolling sea of snow and the yedoma herds turned their backs to the wind and pawed at the frozen soil with cold and bleeding hooves.
Arthur Canady lived as though in a dream. He was not himself and he felt the very foundations of the world he had known crumbling away beneath him. Subtly, without any clear time of transition, he found himself caught between two different ways of life. He lived in a cultural twilight, an outsider, belonging neither to the world of his past nor to the world that had suddenly opened up before him.
I’m a marginal man, he thought. Me, Arthur Canady, a scientist. I don’t fit anywhere. Maybe I’ve never fit in, not really. Maybe I’ve been searching all my life, never finding, never knowing what it was I sought….
He spent part of his time in the sphere with Frank, surrounded by the familiar gadgets he had always known, both attracted and repelled by the personality of his companion. The man was such a mixture of receptiveness and bull-headedness. Like most naive men, Frank prided himself on being utterly practical. He was tolerant and respectful of new ideas, but he could never change beyond a certain point. His personality was a finished thing; it had nowhere else to go. Canady envied him in a way, but he was unable to communicate with him except on a very superficial level.
He spent part of his time with The People, riding with them on the winter-thin mharus, facing the wind-driven snows with Plavgar and Lerrie and Rownar. He learned to bring down the mooselike yedoma bulls with an arrow behind the left shoulder, learned to cut the blood-warm hides from the bodies with a stone knife, learned to drink the hot blood against the cold of the winter plains. He sat in the smoke-hazed tipis at night, sweating with the others around the tiny fires of yedoma chips, listening to the stories of The People.
Still, he did not belong.
The People smiled at him and seemed glad to see him, but there was a barrier he could not cross. The men were friendly without being his friends, the women cordial but invincibly remote. Canady let his hair and beard grow long and began to dress in the skin clothing of the natives. There were many times when he set out across the plains alone, eyes narrowed against the cold, and there were many nights that he looked up at the frozen stars and wondered which one was the sun he had known on Earth….
And the dark, terrible irony of the thing that was happening gnawed at his mind day and night. He would sit and smoke his pipe staring at Frank. Didn’t he know?
Canady had always been a lonely man, lonely not only for companionship but for a richness and a fullness he had never found in life. His loneliness was made doubly unbearable by the vitality of the life around him. The People offered him nothing, denied him nothing. They made no overtures. They were simply there.
And life everlasting …
Canady abandoned all pretense of scientific investigation. He went to see Plavgar. He seated himself in the tipi on Plavgar’s right, ate of the ritual food, and groped for words.
“The Old Ones were here before The People came,” he said, thinking like a native. But his mind refused to stay on that level. He thought: Everything they have told me has been the literal truth, There are Old Ones. What are they? In the vastness of the universe, life must take many forms. Do they co-exist with men, manifesting themselves only in visions? Could they have existed on Earth, serving as the basis for primitive legends? Who knows what we destroyed when we sailed into strange harbors with our ships and our diseases? We never saw our natives until we had corrupted them. “They must be powerful beings. Did they not try to defend their world?”
“Conquest is a delusion of the young, my son,” Plavgar said slowly. “There is room for all. The lives of the Old Ones and the lives of The People touch in only a few places. We are equal but different. To them, as to us, harmony is the highest law of the universe. We all must live so that we blend with one another, Men and Old Ones and plants and birds and animals and sky and water—all must work together to make a world fair and good. The Old Ones have given life to us. In return, we give them happiness. They can feel the warmth of our lives. They need our presence, just as we need theirs. We live together, and we are both the better for it.”
Canady leaned forward. “You too once came to this world in ships?”
Plavgar smiled. “It was long ago. Yes, once we were civilized and advanced, just like yourself.”
The irony of the headman’s words was not lost on Canady. He brushed it aside. “Plavgar, what is the secret? What is the price a man must pay for eternal life?”
Plavgar looked at him steadily. “We do not live forever, my son. A very long time, yes, but not forever.”
“But there must be a secret! What is it?”
“There is only one rule. You must learn to have a good heart.”
Canady swallowed hard. “A good heart?”
“That is all. I have told you the truth. I have concealed nothing from you. We have no secrets. There is no magic pill, no gadget that will bring you what you seek. You must believe, that is all. You must have a good heart.”
“But—” Canady’s mind was dizzy with what Plavgar was saying. A good heart? He had learned many things in many schools, but no one had taught him this. How did a man go about getting a good heart?
“A man’s heart is within himself,” Plavgar said simply. “You must look around you, at the mountains and the skies, at the plants and the animals. You must look within yourself. You must feel that you are a part of all life, and respect it. You must find peace. Then you must go to Thunder Rock and fast for four days. And if you believe, if your heart is good, you will see the Old Ones. The guardian spirit will come to you. Then, my son, you will be one of The People—for always.”
The yedoma-chip fire flickered brightly in the tipi. The shadows closed in around Canady, shadows and something else …
“Thank you, Plavgar,” he said.
He got up and left the tipi, walking out into the cold night air. Hs boots crunched the snow under his feet.
All he had to do was to believe. All he had to do was to reject all he had ever known. All he had to do was to get a good heart.
Simple!
And there were other problems, other loyalties.
He walked back alone to the sphere.
When he told Frank what he was going to do, Frank hit the ceiling.
“You can’t do it, Art.” Frank’s face was very pale. He backed away from his bearded, wild-looking companion as though Canady was a carrier of some frightful disease. “It’s against the law.”
“Whose law? We’re a long way from Earth, my friend. I’m not a soldier. I’m a scientist.”
“You’re a fool! Dammit, can’t you see what you’re doing? You’ve got a wild bee in your brain and all that talk about being a scientist is so much hogwash. You’re going native! You, Arthur Canady, hotshot scientist!”
“All right. I’m going native.”
“Look, Art. It’s more than that. It’s—it’s disloyal, that’s what it is. You can’t just turn your back on your own people for a bunch of wild hunters.”
“I can try.”
Frank’s anger got the better of his caution. “You act like you’re so damned superior to everyone, you and your sarcasm! And look at you! What the hell is a good heart? You’ll park yourself up on the mountain and starve to death waiting for some native gods to come and hand you immortality, It’s crazy, Art! I won’t let you do it”
Canady smiled. He stood there, tall and lean and toughened by his life on the plains. His green eyes were cold. “You can’t stop me, Frank. Don’t try.”
“Forget about me. How about your own people, your friends? Don’t you owe them something? You’re always spouting off about ethics, but what are you doing? You’re a traitor!”
Canady sighed. “You still don’t see it, do you?”
“See what? There’s nothing to se
e.”
“Yes, there is something to see. You spoke of ethics. Have you ever heard a phrase about doing to others as you would have them do unto you? I suggest you think about it a little.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, Frank. We came here from Earth with a lot of high-sounding notions about helping the natives, didn’t we? What was it that we offered them, essentially? We offered them what we thought was progress for a price. We would give them technological advancements if they would simply agree to change their culture, their way of life. All they had to do was learn to live the way we do and we would give them something of what we had. Of course, we didn’t put the offer to them honestly. We tried to trick them into it—all from the very highest motives, naturally. Was that ethical?”
Frank shrugged. “You tell me.”
“I am telling you. If it was ethical, then you can’t damn the natives for giving us a dose of our own morals. If it wasn’t ethical, then it’s pointless for us to prattle about right and wrong. Don’t you see, Frank? They’ve turned the tables on us. They’re offering us exactly what we offered to them. The joker is that the they seem to have the superior culture, if that adjective means anything. They’ll give us what they have: eternal life. And the price we have to pay is the same price we were going to charge them: all we have to do is change our culture and live the way they do. It’s beautiful and neat and maybe a little frightening. But at least they were honest about it: no tricks, no high pressure salesmanship. The choice is there. What we do with it is up to us.”
“It’s fantastic! You can’t believe—”
“I’ve got to believe. That’s the whole point. And don’t make the mistake of underestimating these natives, They are far from helpless. They have the best of all defenses: a good offense. They protect themselves by giving. We could destroy their culture, sure. But if we do we throw away our only chance for immortality! We need their culture. Oh, they’re safe enough.”
“Art, even if you believe all that stuff you still have a duty to your own people. You signed on to do a job. You can’t just walk out on it.”
