by Chad Oliver
They eyed him without fear—without even curiosity, as far as he could tell. A long sixty seconds passed. Then one of the men smiled, making Ashley feel a little silly, and put his bow on the ground. The other man promptly followed his example, and the woman put down her metallic club.
Taking no chances, Ashley took out his gun and placed it on the pile with the other weapons. The others smiled approval.
The first man said something to him, speaking slowly and softly. Testing? Ashley could not, of course, understand a word. He replied in English: “I know that we can’t understand each other yet, but I hope that understanding may come.” He smiled a little and added, “It had better come—and soon.”
The native appeared satisfied. He pointed toward the east, where the forest trees loomed up like a wall beyond the grass, made the shape of a hut in the air, and then pointed at Ashley. The meaning was clear enough—Ashley was welcome to come to the village if he so desired.
Ashley did some pointing of his own, to indicate that he wanted to go back to the ship first. The natives understood instantly. They’re not stupid, Ashley thought, and that’s for sure.
Ashley went back to the shuttle and told Bob and Ernie where he was going. He told them to give him four days and then clear out if he didn’t make it back. He shook hands with both of them and rejoined the three natives.
They picked up their weapons and Ashley picked up his, and no one bothered about them again. The first native led the way through the damp grass, with Ashley second and the other man and the woman following behind. The natives talked quietly among themselves and seemed perfectly at ease.
Martin Ashley felt the sun getting hotter on his back and tried to tell himself that the wrongness he felt was only nerves.
But he knew better.
Once contact had been made, the rest slipped easily into routine—for a while. Ashley had to constantly remind himself that this time it was different. There was no Juarez to report back to, no paper to write up about a people whose lives had intersected his for a brief few weeks and then been lost again among the stars.
This time it was for keeps.
This time the people were his people.
But routine is an insidious thing; it dulls the mind and lulls the senses with the comfort of the familiar. Martin Ashley liked his work, and did it with pride, but it was hard now to remember that it was more than a job.
It was life itself.
He got to know the village very well during the next month, while he was learning the native language as he had learned so many others in his life. There were sixteen structures in the village—fourteen rectangular log family houses built around a central plaza, a large ceremonial building in the center of the plaza, and a partially underground storage chamber for agricultural produce. Eighty people lived in the village, neatly divided into five old men, five old women, fifty persons in the young-to-middle-aged bracket, and twenty children.
The natives were friendly and helpful, and Ashley had gone back for Chavez and Gallen on the third day. They had built themselves a small log hut on the edge of the village, and they spent most of their time wandering around and waiting impatiently for Ashley to tell them what the score was. They both seemed pleased with what they saw, and they both were beginning to think that Ashley was taking everything a shade too seriously. After all, here they were in a peaceful and rather pleasant village, with plenty to eat and time on their hands. Here they were, and here they would probably stay. They had ideas and they wanted to get started on them. They were not selfish men, as men go, but they were human. They felt that they had forgotten more than the people around them had ever learned, and they wanted to help them out. Why, these natives had not even discovered the wheel—and they had landed on the planet with atomic power!
The future was wide open before them.
But they waited.
And while they slept, a puzzled Martin Ashley worked far into the night—juggling columns of figures that wouldn’t add up.
The native who taught Ashley the rudiments of the language was named Rondol. He was a specialist in the native social structure, obviously a shaman among other things. Apparently, he had other capabilities as well. He was a brash man, a bit pompous, shrewd, and a good teacher. It early became clear that he was teaching Ashley a simplified form of the language of his people—scaling it down for ready comprehension.
That was unprecedented.
“I will teach you the rest when you are ready for it,” Rondol said to him, with a faintly superior air. “To understand, one must start at the beginning.”
“Drop dead, brother,” Martin Ashley said—to himself. He wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he was annoyed at his own inability to comprehend the culture in which he found himself.
On the surface, it wasn’t too complicated. The natives called themselves the Nern, which simply meant “human beings.” It was quite common for primitive peoples to name themselves in that manner, and the implication was usually obvious—no one else could be a human being, since they were not in the tribe.
It was not, Ashley reflected, a characteristic wholly restricted to primitives.
The Nern, as Ashley had already seen from the shuttle, had a simple mixed economy. They grew a single crop, a sweet tuber not unlike a potato, which they planted with digging sticks and harvested when their supply ran low. They shot several game animals with bows, mostly deerlike creatures that grazed on the great grass plains. They did some fishing in nearby streams, and they gathered a variety of fruits and vegetables that grew wild in the forest.
The Nern were monogamous, and lived in small family units. But they were very conscious of kinship ties, and the little village was divided into halves, or moieties. Each moiety was a unit in the social organization, and they worked together as a reciprocal whole. Marriage always took place between members of opposite moieties.
Nothing unusual there.
There were no clans, although the moieties had some clan characteristics. Sexes, as far as Ashley could tell, had equal rights. There was a “chief” of sorts, a charming man named Catan, but such authority as there was seemed vested in a council of elders—the ten oldest men and women. There was the shaman, Rondol, who was primarily concerned with healing and the supernatural.
Nothing unusual there.
There seemed to be a great emphasis on mythology, or even philosophy. There were many rituals, in which the whole village participated. There was the yearly cycle of ceremonies, a virtual universal among human beings. Some called them Christmas and Armistice Day and the Fourth of July, others rain dances and harvest sings and sacrifices to the sun.
Nothing unusual there.
One night, Rondol stood with Ashley in the central plaza. A cool breeze whispered in off the grass fields and sighed through the forest trees. A few orange fires crackled and hissed softly in front of the log huts of the village.
Rondol pointed up into the night, out into the infinite. “You say you came from the stars, Martin,” he said.
“Yes,” said Ashley. “From the stars, from Earth.”
Rondol smiled. “What you call stars we call campfires in the sky,” he said. “Up there are our ancestors and the never-born. The stars are our brothers.” He looked closely at Ashley. “We call them our star-brothers. Are not stars our brothers?”
The wind murmured in from the fields of grass.
Nothing unusual there?
Martin Ashley looked up, and out.
When they had been in the village two months, they were asked to leave.
For a long time, the social life of the Nern had been “pointing” toward a single event—the initiation of two boys and two girls into adult life. As did many other peoples, the Nern symbolized crisis periods in life with rituals and ceremonies. These were the rites of passage—passage into life when you were born, passage into adulthood when childhood was done, passage into marriage, and the final passage of all when life had run its course.
Now, f
our Nern were ready to take their place in adult society. It would take them four days of fasting and endurance and instruction from tribal elders. It was a precious thing in their lives.
The Nern were very polite about it. They went out of their way to assure the men from Earth that they would be welcome again after the ceremonies. They were profuse and sincere in their apologies.
But there was no doubt that they meant business.
Ashley and Gallen and Chavez went back to the shuttle, silent and alone among the tall grass. There was nothing else they could do.
They waited.
On the fourth night, the last night of the ceremonies, they crept back through the grass to the forest to have a look. They moved quietly and spoke in whispers.
A drum throbbed hypnotically through the evening hush, and they could see the orange warmth of the fires in the village. A chant sobbed out on the moonlight—plaintive and sad and far away. The forest held its breath, absorbing the sounds of life.
Martin Ashley was lonely. He had always been a lonely man. He questioned instead of accepted, and that is a road that all men walk alone. Perhaps all men are lonely, and Ashley hid it as well as any. But Ashley was acutely aware of his loneliness, and now that Carol was gone, and with her the Juarez that had been his only home—
He shook himself. Getting morbid, he thought. Mustn’t do.
But he was looking in at life, warm life in a village one hundred light-years from Earth. And he was isolated, cut off from it. He didn’t belong. Perhaps he could never belong.
He knew, and he was not ashamed, that he would have given his soul to be in that village now, in with the drums and the songs and the firelight.
Not as a student. Just as Martin Ashley.
“They’re a funny bunch,” Ernie Gallen said. “Beating on those drums just like it was really something. Boy, we really picked us a dilly for home sweet home.”
Bob Chavez was feeling romantic.
“It’s pretty, really,” he said. “Kind of simple and unspoiled. But what’s in it for us? We’ve got to show these people we mean something, got to show them a few things, carve out a place for ourselves. We’re being too careful. After all—”
Yes, thought Martin Ashley. After all, after all.
It was then that he found it.
He picked it up off the ground.
He looked at it. A white tube, four inches long. Machine-made. While he held it between his thumb and forefinger it glowed redly at its tip. A tiny wisp of smoke curled upward into the night.
“A cigarette,” he said slowly. “And better than any on Earth.”
The others stared at him.
“Looks like we’re not the only visitors this planet has had lately,” he said. “Unless—”
“Unless what?” asked Ernie Gallen.
“Unless what?”
Martin Ashley stood in the moonlight under the trees. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
He listened to the lonely chant carried on the night wind and watched the orange fires glowing from far away.
Martin Ashley felt a dawning fear—and a rising excitement.
IV
It was raining—a slow, steady rain that pattered through the trees, dripping from limb to limb, and gurgled down in a miniature river from the gabled roof of the log house.
Martin Ashley stood in the doorway, looking out. The rain was a humming sheet of silver and gray, covering the world but not hiding it. The tall, straight trees accepted the rain patiently, without much interest. The trees were very much like Earthly pines, with dripping needles and cones. They even smelled like pines, with that wet heavy fragrance that could weave synthetic memories for those unfortunates who had none of their own. Glistening village pathways wandered off among the houses, and laughing children played in the mud. The washed air was so clean it invigorated the lungs like a tonic.
Perhaps this, too, is worth something.
Martin Ashley liked the rain.
They had been with the Nern for ten weeks. Bob Chavez sat on a wooden stool in the middle of the room, quiet and depressed. Ernie Gallen, short and stocky and with his blondish hair in his eyes, paced the floor nervously. They were beginning to feel it now, Ashley knew. The isolation, the Earth forever denied them. It wasn’t an unreal picnic any longer. They felt cut off from everything that had ever mattered to them. From copters in the sun, silken women, dark hushed bars with music in the air—
The rain came down—soft, familiar rain. It was the same rain. Ashley had heard it so often—how many times? He had sworn at it while he fished, damned it at Yankee Stadium, listened to its lullaby on the tent canvas before he slept. Yes, the rain was the same.
“Look,” said Ernie finally, stopping his pacing. “We’re all in this thing together, right?”
“Sure, Ernie,” Marlin Ashley said, knowing what was coming.
“Then what say we can all the cryptic references to unsolved primitive mysteries, Martin. We don’t have to take orders from you, you know. We’ve sat on our tails for nearly three months, and still no dope from you on how to proceed. Call me crude, Martin—I want a woman and a decent house and a chance to make something out of this flea-bitten place.”
There was tension in the cabin, then; the ugliness of personalities that couldn’t harmonize.
“I don’t recall giving any orders, Ernie,” Ashley said. “Just advice. Whether you care to take it or not is strictly up to you.”
“Ernie’s right though, Mart,” Bob Chavez spoke up. His voice was tired. “If we’re going to play this game, we’ve got to know the rules.”
Martin Ashley shrugged. Rules? There were no rules out here. Space was long and space was deep. Here were only brains and feelings and wind in the night. “No secrets,” he said. “I just don’t have much to tell.”
“Tell it anyway,” Ernie suggested.
Ashley took his time cleaning his pipe with a pocket knife. He loaded it with his own private blend of bourbon-soaked tobacco, which no self-respecting smoker would touch with insulated tongs, and lit it with that most efficient pipe-lighter of all, a big wooden stick match. He chose his words carefully, knowing that he wouldn’t be believed.
“In a nutshell,” he said slowly, “I think the Nern are very much more advanced than we are. I think that if we step out of line we’re going to get our fingers burned.”
Harder now, the rain beat down outside, and heavy thunder rolled in from the distant hills.
The others stared at him.
Ernie Gallen jerked his thumb at the huts in the rain. “Them? More advanced than we are? Without even the wheel? You’re nuts, Martin, just plain nuts.”
“Thank you,” Marlin Ashley said.
Ernie hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he offered finally. “Didn’t mean it that way. We’re all in this together.”
“Sure,” Ashley said.
“There is the cigarette,” Bob Chavez said wearily. His face was pale. “I don’t understand that, not at all.”
Martin Ashley waved his hand. “Forget the cigarette for now. I’ve thought that one over. There isn’t any technology to speak of on this planet, unless it’s hidden in a cave or something, and that’s plain garbage. That cigarette came from someplace else, which raises an interesting problem or three. But let it go for now. I wasn’t referring to the cigarette.”
“What then?” demanded Ernie irritably. “How could you possibly—?”
Martin Ashley sucked on his pipe. Where are the words? There are no words. It is like the small boy who asks, “Daddy, tell me about the stars and things. And hurry—I’ve got to go play.”
“I can’t explain it all to you,” he said, “any more than you can make me an expert radio technician in ten minutes. But I’ll try. I warn you that a lot of this is going to sound considerably more subjective than it actually is, but you’ll just have to listen and decide for yourselves.”
“Just don’t throw it too far over our heads,” Ernie said with on
ly a trace of sarcasm. “We’ll try to catch it.”
“Look at it this way,” Ashley began. “It’s easy to count and identify the various items in a culture—a totem pole here, a spear there, a feather cape somewhere else. It isn’t even hard to pick out elements of social organization—here a clan, there the couvade, back yonder a parallel cousin taboo. Unfortunately, however, all that isn’t too important. It doesn’t tell you much that you need to know if you’re going to understand a culture. What counts is how these things are put together. Cultures are not just collections of random ideas and spear points, you see. They are dynamic, integrated systems—blueprints for living.”
“You mean like patterns?”
Martin Ashley had been expecting that one. “Think of it that way if it helps,” he said. He blew a fat, wobbling smoke ring out into the rain. “The point is this: all the ingredients are here, and they all seem simple, if a trifle idealized. But how do they hang together? What is the organizing principle? How does the thing work?”
“You tell me,” encouraged Ernie.
“I don’t know, and I’ll be the first to say so. I can’t get to first base with these people. But I’ll tell you this—this isn’t any primitive culture, and the Nern are not a primitive people. It all looks primitive, but it isn’t. Remember our friend Einstein in his shorts, getting sunburned on the beach. Maybe you’ve heard of convergent evolution—two lines of development that follow entirely different paths but come out looking alike on the surface? Well, pal, this is it, and we are right in the big fat middle of it.”
Ashley could sense the skepticism in the room.
“Hold on a minute,” he said. “I’m not through yet. I want to give you two facts to roll around inside your skulls.” He smiled pleasantly. “First, consider the contact situation. We came zooming down out of the blue in a spaceship, went right over their village, and parked out there in the grass field. A few hours later, and out come three Nern to say hello. They aren’t afraid of us, and what’s more they obviously aren’t even very interested in us. As for the ship, they hardly give it a glance. Old stuff, do you see? Standard operating procedure. Another day, another spaceship. But at the same time their village and their culture shows absolutely no traces of anything taken over from a ‘higher’ culture—no steel knives, no rifles, no plows, no fancy pants, no junk jewelry, no nothing. That’s something to chew on a while, gentlemen. Nothing spectacular, nothing that hits you in the eye, no signpost with a big MYSTERY HERE! painted on it in letters ten feet high—but how do you explain it?”
