The Totems of Abydos (4 page)

“In the morning, at ten, we will enter orbit at Abydos,” said the captain. This would be ship time, in this case, commercial time, indexed to Commonworld. The ship would not dock at Abydos, of course, but would, so to speak, lie off the reefs, and be served by lighters. Abydos was not an outpost planet, not one lying at the fringes of known life forms, but a backward planet, in its way. It had, in effect, been noted, charted, cataloged, and then left behind in the march of a thousand life forms across the galaxy, with whom folk such as Rodriguez and Brenner had come along, more as passengers than explorers or frontiersmen. Their own world, long ago, had turned inward on itself. It had, as a world, long ago, forgotten to look at the stars. It had turned rather toward comfort, obedience, law, sameness. It was now one of the homogenized worlds which prided itself on its superiority to more ambitious, curious, aggressive worlds, habitats to more ambitious, curious, aggressive species. The promise of the world of Rodriguez and Brenner had never been fulfilled. After all, the stars are far away, and not everyone could reach them. And the long, painful climb toward the stars requires not only strength, but sternness, and will, and hardness, and power, vices of a troubled youth now happily outgrown in the maturity of a species. And so the promise of the world of Rodriguez and Brenner, were it ever truly a promise, had never been fulfilled. Their world had made its decision, cloaked as all such decisions are, and must be, else their pathetic horror might be more easily detected, in moral fervor, and a righteous vocabulary: It had become not great, but nice, not hot and needful, but tame and warm.

“At ten,” repeated the captain.

Rodriguez nodded.

There was little of interest on Abydos to the rest of the galaxy other than its fueling station, one of the several such between certain mining worlds, the charters to which were held by various corporations. To be sure, beyond this, at least in the area of the depot, there were some company dormitories, a parts warehouse, a few muddy streets, some bars, a few small businesses, a barber shop, such things. It did have an atmosphere which might be breathed by both the captain, and his sort, and Rodriguez, and his sort. It was not one of those worlds to which one must take oneself in a bottle, so to speak, enclosing oneself in a surrogate of one’s home world, without which appurtenances an unpleasant death would promptly ensue. If there were difficulties to be met with on Abydos they were not such as to require the encapsulation of visitors in friendly gases and temperatures. Rodriguez and Brenner could walk on Abydos without fear. Its atmosphere was benign, its surface temperatures were within tolerable limits, its water was drinkable, its soil, though thin, was not poisonous, its rain was not lethal, its gravity was not crushing, and its invisible life forms were such that they could be dealt with by the natural defenses of most organic systems. Moreover, its diurnal and annual cycles were similar to those of many comparable worlds, a fact which to many species is morally and psychologically, and even biologically, important. In a sense no species is satisfied until it has come home. Had its soil been more fertile, its mineral resources more remarkable, its vegetation more appealing, its scenery less tenebrous, its mountains less bleak and forbidding, or even if its location had been more propitious, Abydos might have been better known. But as it was, it was not even strictly analogous to a small town, overlooked by progress, on a more favored planet, far off the beaten pathways between more interesting places. Rather it was more, or at least in the vicinity of the depot and yards, a company camp, a merely dirty, unpleasant place, where rough men of ill-favored visage spent brief tours of duty, little more than a convenience to a corporation, to most of whose officers, of those who knew of it, it was no more than an entry on records. Even the captain of the vessel, for example, though he was surely not important in the corporation, had never been on its surface. His first officer, however, had. Still it was not a likely place to put ashore. As you may be interested in knowing what might be the interest of Rodriguez and Brenner in Abydos it had to do with the Pons.

“At ten, then,” said Rodriguez.

The captain then lifted an appendage and Rodriguez, clamping the smoking Bertinian leaf between his teeth, and transferring his stein of Heimat to his left hand, shook one of the extended claws. Brenner, in turn, did the same, leaning forward in the webbing. The claw was dry and well polished. The captain then clapped together his jaws twice, a gesture of contentment and warmth amongst his kind, for even their gods are said to do so, and, with a tiny pressure from his back feet, rose up, turned about, rather like a balloon, in the zero-gravity field, and took his departure.

“Damned reptile,” said Rodriguez.

“He is a nice enough fellow,” said Brenner.

“I like him,” admitted Rodriguez. “At least he can look at you.”

He then swirled the stein about, mixing the remainder, popped open the slurp hole on the mug and sucked up some of the fermented poison within.

The captain, of course, was not really a reptile. It was only such things as the skin, the tail, the appendages, the neck, the long tongue, and such things, which suggested that. To be sure, perhaps the captain’s species, in some sense, at some time in the past, might have evolved from reptiles, or something like reptiles, but then, so, too, if it must be known, had that of Rodriguez and Brenner, and from other things before that, which were not even reptiles.

“You are pleased that I called him a reptile,” said Rodriguez, looking narrowly at Brenner.

Brenner blushed. “Was it a test?” he asked.

“No,” said Rodriguez.

Brenner felt ashamed. Although he himself was pleased to hear things said which he himself found amusing, or true, or both, but would not have dared to say himself, he did tend to suffer for it. This was an effect of his conditioning program. But perhaps it had not been totally efficient, or had not fully “taken,” so to speak, for he was not sickened at the vulgarity of Rodriguez, his offensiveness, his abusive honesty, or at least his attempt to speak and say the world as he saw it, as accurate or awry as his perceptions might be. Rodriguez was more free, and more terrible, and more abominable, and more glorious than any human being Brenner had ever known. He did not know how it was that such a man, who in his time it was said, had been a wastrel, a gambler, a freebooter, a smuggler, a soldier, had become involved in his own field.

“Are you afraid the machine is recording?” asked Rodriguez.

“Do you think it is?” asked Brenner.

“No,” said Rodriguez.

“Oh,” said Brenner.

“What if it is?” asked Rodriguez.

“Nothing, I suppose,” said Brenner.

“I don’t think it is,” said Rodriguez. “If I thought it was I would have been more outspoken. There are a few things about the company I would have said.”

This worried Brenner. He did not wish to be stranded on Abydos for an extra three or four of its revolutions, if not indefinitely.

“The politeness titles are not in force out here,” said Rodriguez.

This was good news to Brenner. The politeness titles, some two hundred and six, or so, of them, with their numerous subsections, specified in some detail various behaviors, thoughts and actions which might be construed as impolite. For example, Rodriguez’s referring to the captain as a reptile, regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of this reference to the captain’s ancestry, or his own satisfaction with it, or even his own rightful pride in such a line of descent, or his indifference or insensitivity to it, could be, in various places, subject to various sanctions, ranging from nuisance demands for hypocritical apologies to the removal of a means of livelihood. The politeness titles were usually monitored by bureaucrats, and involved processings which were both lengthy and expensive. These things, interestingly, had usually emerged in putatively democratic societies, much to the surprise of the great majority of the putatively free individuals in such societies, who did not understand how they could have come about. Political scientists still spoke of the “plural-elite” model of governance in which law and policy emerged from the conflicts and compromises of lobbies and power groups, to which groups the putatively freely elected representatives of the putatively free electorate, were beholden, functioning, if they would survive and maintain their own places, positions, and powers, such as they were, as overt or covert agents. Some poets, in underground writings, had likened the politeness titles to the webs of spiders and the bureaucrats to the spiders. The analogy, of course, was not perfect, for a natural spider would eventually in the way of nature, in its directness and cleanliness, devour its prey. With the politeness titles, however, it was more as if a spider’s webbing was hung everywhere, and nothing, not even the zealous bureaucrats themselves, so self-righteous, so eagerly, and narrow-liddedly watchful, so jealous of their modicum of power, could move. And there was nothing to eat the victims. They would just be left in the webbing, unable to fly, unable to move, left there immobile, helpless and tangled, not even to be eaten, just to be left trapped and helpless until they died, with other thousands, just additional nodules in that black, dry carpet of death, over which new insects could scarcely crawl.

“Do you want me to unplug it?” asked Rodriguez.

Brenner looked at him.

Rodriguez stretched out his foot and carefully wound the cable twice about his foot, soberly, and then jerked the cable out of the machine. With a swirl of his foot, rather neatly done, he freed the cable and it floated away like a buoyant snake until it stopped and waved about, as though it had its tail stuck in the wall. Such crude mechanical connections, cords and cables, and such, were inexpensive, and tended on the whole, to be more reliable in the long run than the contrivances responsible for more subtle connections. Similarly many folk preferred, even today, to wrap packages with tape and string, and, similarly, staples, rubber bands and paper clips were still known, as they had been in medieval times.

“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.