The Totems of Abydos (3 page)

Chapter 2

“So you are at the beginning of your career?” said Emilio Rodriguez.

“Or perhaps at the end of it,” smiled Allan Brenner.

“For you are on your way with old Rodriguez to Abydos?” smiled the other.

“Something like that,” said Brenner. He was not certain, really, how to address Rodriguez. Should it be as “Mister,” as “Professor,” as “Doctor”?

“Didn’t they teach you grantsmanship?” inquired Rodriguez. “Is this the best you could land?”

“I was assigned,” said Brenner.

“To keep an eye on me?”

“I don’t think so,” said Brenner. He didn’t.

“What time is it?” asked Rodriguez.

Brenner smiled. That was an odd question. Did he want a body-time, indexed to some recent port, perhaps one where they had had a layover for bioadjustment; did he want a local time, and if so, indexed to what world, and to what coordinates on what world; would he like a solar time, a sidereal time, or one indexed to the half-life of a specified element, or what? The ship functioned on commercial time, of course, indexed to the prime meridian on Commonworld, a neutral wilderness of little note or interest in the galaxy other than the fact that its imaginary gridwork of coordinates provided more than four thousand worlds with a common frame of reference.

Rodriguez answered his own question. “It’s late,” he said. That seemed an odd answer to an odd question. “It’s late,” he repeated. Brenner assumed he meant that he was tired. That was probably what he meant.

“You have kept much to your cabin,” said Brenner.

“Surely you have no objection to that,” said Rodriguez.

“No,” said Brenner. “But if we are to be colleagues—”

“There are strong worlds and weak worlds,” said Rodriguez.

“What?” said Brenner.

“We come from a weak world,” said Rodriguez.

“You shouldn’t smoke those things,” said Brenner, “and drink that stuff.”

“It will make my heart like the hoof of a four-horned korf,” said Rodriguez, perhaps quoting some authority, and this stuff,” said he, raising his closed mug, the slurp hole closed, “is a bladder irritant, a disaster to the liver, a poisoner of the bloodstream, and a destroyer of brain cells.”

“That is about it,” granted Brenner.

Rodriguez sat back in the webbing. He puffed on a roll of Bertinian leaf. It was outlawed on many worlds, but could be obtained, as one might expect, in various black markets, to which the digital purses of various officials owed remarkable economic latencies, available upon the punching of special numbers, putatively not on file with the state.

An odious cloud, like some noxious fog or lethal gas, drifted toward Brenner but never reached him, being caught up in the intake of the filtering system. In one hand, Rodriguez, his large, slovenly frame back in the webbing, grasped the zero-gravity mug, a stein of Velasian Heimat. “I take a modest pride in being a man of many vices.” he said.

Brenner wondered why Rodriguez didn’t partake of the various lozenges and wafers, the candies, or medications, available on many worlds, and even from the small commissary on the freighter, which provided relatively innocuous intoxicants and controllers, stimulants, euphoriants, anesthetics, depressors, inhibitors and such. But Rodriguez, it seemed, preferred the naivety and violence of more primitive poisons, poisons of a sort which on many worlds had not been known for millennia.

“I have, until now,” said Rodriguez, idly, “courted death.”

“And it seems you are still at it,” said Brenner.

Rodriguez looked up at him.

“With weed and brew,” smiled Brenner.

“I have sought her on mountains, and in the depths of gaseous seas, on fields of war stretched between stars, in the bistros of subterranean worlds, amongst thieves and assassins, in jungles and ice deserts where my footstep was the first from the beginning of time.”

Brenner was silent.

“Do you know why these things are outlawed?” asked Rodriguez.

“Certainly,” said Brenner, “they are poisonous substances.”

“Because,” said Rodriguez, a little wildly, “they are the counterfeits of life, and that it what is fearful about them.

They are false images which call to mind a reality, a reality which is secret.”

“You are drunk,” said Brenner.

“In their pernicious way they point to life,” said Rodriguez, “like a lie points to the truth.”

Brenner was quiet.

“Life, and truth, are illegal, like reality,” said Rodriguez. “The small people, the mice, the insects, the flowers, are afraid of them. They do not even recognize the battlefields in their cellars, the jungles beneath their porches.”

“No one is small,” said Brenner.

“True,” said Rodriguez. “All are the same size, by fiat. No one is small, no one is weak, no one is stupid, no one is petty, no one is futile, no one is failed, all are marvelous, and wonderful, and precious, and, a statistical anomaly, all are the same size, except that the smallest are the best, the noblest, and the largest.”

“Do not be bitter,” said Brenner. Difficulties of the sort to which Rodriguez might be alluding had been resolved on certain worlds by court rulings long ago, in particular, those having to do with the oneness and brotherhood of life, in which all life forms on a planet, without discrimination with respect to arbitrary placement on a phylogenetic scale, became citizens of the planet, their votes, in many cases, being cast by proxies. Needless to say, severe political conflicts had occurred over the control of these proxies.

“Do you realize that most of the people you meet are dead?” asked Rodriquez.

“Come now,” said Brenner.

“Yes!” said Rodriguez.

“I never noticed,” Brenner admitted.

“They have never been alive,” said Rodriguez, wiping his face. An escaped droplet of Heimat, like a small, luminescent world floated toward the steel ceiling of the lounge. “And that is the same thing. Then, eventually, their bodies will cease to function and they will never even find out they were never alive. They will never have discovered they were never alive!”

“They are alive,” said Brenner, moodily.

“Yes, I suppose so, in a way,” said Rodriguez.

“Certainly,” said Brenner.

“Chemically,” said Rodriguez.

“More than that,” said Brenner.

“You are a humanist,” said Rodriguez.

“A lifest,” said Brenner. The current conditioning programs instituted in most school systems had rendered the term ‘humanist’ odious, because of its ethnocentric connotations.

“Yes,” said Rodriguez, thoughtfully. “They have their small glow.”

“Certainly,” said Brenner.

“Like the grub, and the flea,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Brenner.

“At one time,” said Brenner, “I courted death, for I thought to find her hand in hand with life. But I do so no longer now, for I am come to Abydos.”

Brenner, who was young and blond, and innocent, and perhaps bright, regarded Rodriguez, puzzled.

“In the end,” said Rodriguez, “do we not all come to Abydos?”

“I have read your writings,” said Brenner.

At this point in their conversation one of the panels in the lounge, some feet from the floor, slid back, it opening to the network of access spaces outside, leading even to the vast hold spaces, some of which were closed, and some open, with the cargo floating in its nets, and the engines, and the captain entered, unblinking, the long digits of his appendages spread, open, climbing across, adhering to it with a secretory fluid, what was to Rodriguez and Brenner, relative to their position and the placement of their webbing, the ceiling, and then down one wall until he rather squatted before them, his hind legs outstretched, only their nails in contact with the floor, the nails of the forward appendages, the digits widely spread, hovering in space. He exchanged pleasantries with the two passengers, who were his only passengers. He seldom had passengers and his ship, a medium-class freighter of the R-series, registry Noton II, with barges in tow, was designed neither for the accommodation or comfort of such and its route was one not likely be taken except by those who did so in the line of business. To be sure, these were not his first passengers. He had occasionally had Ellits, Bellarians, and the tiny Zevets aboard, generally prospectors and mining engineers. Also, he had sometimes had organisms of the sort of Rodriguez and Brenner. It was for such as these that four cabins had been welded onto the girderwork abutting certain closed holds and the small lounge, with its now-closed, shielded port, installed. The conversation, brief and polite, for the captain was a shy, reticent sort, was accomplished by means of a nearby cabinet, of a not very sophisticated design, for it was an old freighter, which translated certain hissing sounds into visual displays, and responsive auditory vibrations, of a sort naturally produced by Rodriguez and Brenner, into variant displays, unintelligible to them but apparently meaningful to the captain. As all were visually oriented organisms all went smoothly, and they felt a certain bond, to some extent, unworthy though it might be, between them, predicated as it was on so arbitrary a basis. With the tiny Zevets the captain had never managed to feel at ease, with their detestation of light and the swift, snapping movements of their tiny wings, so sudden that they had more than once provoked the darting forth of the captain’s tongue, to the embarrassment of all.

“I have a heard a noise,” said Rodriguez, addressing the captain, though speaking toward the cabinet.

The captain’s head lifted politely, peering at the cabinet. Such things, thought Brenner, have long necks.

“It comes from somewhere in one of the holds,” said Rodriguez.

The captain’s head turned toward Rodriguez.

Brenner had heard the noise, too, usually in the sleeping period, late at night, so to speak. He had heard it several times. He, too, was curious about it. On the other hand, in his occasional meetings with the captain, or one of the small crew, for the ship was largely automated, there had been no cabinet at hand.

Brenner noted that the captain was looking at Rodriguez, almost as though he could understand him without the cabinet. Its neck is long, thought Brenner.

The captain then turned to the machine. A soft stream of sound, carefully modulated, almost thoughtfully, as though steam escaping from a valve might become a medium of communication, impinged on the receptors of the cabinet. “It is an animal,” flashed on the display panel.

“It must be a very large animal,” said Rodriguez.

“Yes,” said the captain.

Brenner, whose cabin was closer to the sound than was that of Rodriguez, though the cabins of neither directly abutted its presumed holding area, presumably as a tactful gesture on the part of the captain, or of the officialdom of the company whose vessel this was, had often heard it.

“What sort of animal is it?” asked Rodriguez.

“I do not know its code, or its classification,” said the captain.

“Do you know its common name?” asked Rodriguez.

“No,” said the captain.

“It is probably enroute to the games at Megara,” said Rodriguez to Brenner.

Brenner shivered. He did not doubt that Rodriguez, who had seen so much, had looked upon the games of Megara, or games similar to them. Onlookers, tourists, thrill-seekers, gamblers, the jaded of a thousand worlds, the gourmets of the spirit, tasters of exquisite refinements, came from the remote corners of the galaxy to witness such games.

“Perhaps to the preserves on Habitat,” said Brenner, “or to the field laboratories of Freeworld.” These, in effect, were planetwide zoological gardens, with restricted areas for scientists and naturalists.

“It is mammalian, or mammalianlike, and carnivorous,” said Rodriguez.

“Yes,” said the captain.

Brenner, too, had surmised that, from the sounds of the animal. He had often heard it, and was much more aware of it, really, than Rodriguez, as his cabin was much closer to its holding area. Indeed, he sometimes fancied, during the quiet watches, when he was lying buckled in his webbing, trying to sleep, the ship and its barges drifting with their momentum in the loneliness and stillness of space, their path occasionally altered by as little as a finger’s breadth by the brief whisper of a vernier in the night, attended by its vigilant guidance system, that he could detect its pacing, a restless, energetic, relentless, seemingly unceasing pacing. Too, sometimes he heard, with no mistake about it, the scratching of claws on steel, and the hurling of a body with its mass and weight against bolted plates. It did this again and again, but, of course the plates held. It could only hurt itself by doing this, but it did not stop. But there would be no mistaking, either in Rodriguez’ cabin, or elsewhere on that ship, containing more than three cubic acres of interior space, the screams of the animal, or its howlings, or those thunderous roars, those challenges to steel, those protests against a fate not understood but resented, those utterances which came angrily, unresigned, unforgiving, unreconciled, from its dark beast’s heart. Brenner was pleased that there were no pacifiers about, to release the beast, pledged to be the first to die that it might be free. Such things would dominate most food chains. It was for that reason he suspected that the beast was not bound for the gardens of Habitat or Freeworld. He did not think that even the zoologists would care to share their world with it. Only in more natural places, in darker, crueler jungles, could such a thing find its throne.