The Totems of Abydos Read online

  That very night, still shuddering from the dream, drenched with sweat, shivering in his blanket, Horemheb rose up and, heedless of the stealthy ones, hastened to the platform. He had realized that the secret he sought lay not in the bright court of the village, to be found in the light of day, within the fence, but outside the village, beyond those frail palings, through the forest, away from the village, in the darkness. That was the first time he had gone to the platform at night. He had come back alone in the morning from the platform. He had been noticeably different then from what he been the day before. He sat alone in his hut for three days, seeing no one and not eating. On the third day he taken his scarp and gouged out his own eyes. This, as I have indicated, occurred long ago. Indeed, as I have indicated, there are none alive today who remember it, other than Horemheb himself. He did not explain why he had done what he did, nor was he asked. The brethren are a tactful folk and the endemic courtesy which is custom, if not law, with them mitigates against the impropriety of inquiring too deeply into matters which might prove sensitive. They assumed, doubtless, that Horemheb had had his reasons for his act, reasons which must be, in his own mind at least, sufficient for its accomplishment, reasons it might not be wise to inquire into. They did determine that he had gone to the platform at night, however, which is not customary, though it is not unlawful, for the brethren. Perhaps he should not have done that. Who knew what he had seen there? It was conjectured it must have been unpleasant. The brethren were content to let Horemheb bear the weight of this secret, if it were one. Better he than they. Now, of course, all accepted the fact that Horemheb was blind, and old, and foolish. Still he had seen something that they had not seen. But perhaps it was better that it not have been seen.

  Horemheb, of course, never told anyone what he had seen. From this one might have supposed that perhaps he had learned the secret, or that he had apprehended the truth, or that he had discovered the memory, or the thing like a memory, which lay like a stone and a fountain within the brethren. But this was not so. If he had learned these things, or recollected them, or whatever, he would not have returned later to the platform. You see, to the contrary, at the platform that night, he had not really learned the secret; he had not there, before the platform, understood the memory, the half-suspected memory, which might not even exist; no, he had not there, at the platform, perceived the truth at last, something which might have redeemed himself and the brethren, which might have made it all worthwhile, or, if not that, at least intelligible; no, no coin was obtained there of inestimable worth, or even one of paltry value, nor even a truth which might in its glory or hideousness have blasted him. Rather it was something else he saw there, something which he had not expected and which frightened him. It was only after he had returned home and thought and thought, and twice dreamed, that he suspected the meaning of what he saw, not that he knew that meaning, or understood it, but only that he suspected it. What he had seen there, he became certain, although it was not in itself the secret, not in itself the truth, or the memory, was something which nonetheless appertained to the secret, something which was not the truth or the memory but which might not be entirely unrelated to the truth, or to the memory, something which had something to do with all three, or one, as the case might be, or else it was something which might, in some terrible way, itself know the secret, the truth, the memory. After Horemheb had inflicted such indignity and pain upon himself, he did not return for revolutions to the platform. Then, one evening, ten revolutions, and a hundred mournings and festivals, after he had inflicted his cruel injuries upon himself, that he might not again see what he saw, that his eyes should never show him such a thing again, he returned to the platform. We do not really know why he returned to that fateful place. Perhaps, in the beginning, he was curious to know if he had been mistaken on that distant night, if he had really seen what he thought he had seen, or if it were an illusion of the senses, or a dream. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was mad or labored in the grip of some monstrous compulsion. In any event he had had the string tied by the brethren during the brightness of the day and then, one evening, when the sun was sinking behind the trees and the shadows of the fence were long and jagged on the clearing, and the fruit of the lantern trees was becoming visible in the gloom, he returned to the platform. Since that time he had made the journey several times, many, many times, a great number of times, taking with him his staff and his small sack of meal. The string which was now again dried and thin, worn by the winter and the weather, pelted by the rain, sometimes sheathed with ice, chilled by snow, swaying beneath the trees, had been replaced a number of times. But it was, in a sense, you see, the same string; it was always the same string, as it always marked the same trail; it always traced the same journey. It is in that sense it was the same string. It always led to the platform. Why then did Horemheb return to the platform? We do not really know. I think it was because he suspected that in its vicinity was the secret, the memory, the truth. I think he came back to the platform because he wanted to know, because even in his age and pain, and his fear, and given the terror of what he suspected, he wanted to know, or perhaps because it was merely he had not yet been satisfied, or because he was insatiably restless, or because he was inveterately curious, that perhaps as a consequence of some ineradicable affliction inherited from some remote unknown ancestry, an ancestry he might in an earlier day have despised or found laughable had it suddenly, from a depth of bushes, peered out at him, or perhaps because he still hoped to unravel the riddles of his distant youth, that youth like an unfinished dream, so lost, yet so constantly present, so far away, yet so near. On the other hand, he may have come back to the platform because he had no choice really, because the journey called him. Perhaps the truth is as simple as that. Let those to whom journeys call speculate on the possibility of that. For myself I do not know, and I do not think others do either. Perhaps he was merely the sort who cannot refrain from digging with sticks into the sores on his own body. That is possible. The species are rare in the universe, but they exist, those which torture themselves.

  Now Horemheb continued his journey. Then, after less than one of the twenty-five segments of a rotation, the divisions of a lightness from a lightness, he felt beneath his feet not the softness of the forest trail, the crushed leaves and the dust, that curious mixture of particles wounded to powder by long treading, but the flat stones. It was there that the string ended. With his staff Horemheb tapped ahead of himself, scratching now and then at the stones to determine their setting, and the directions of the cracks between them. It was still night. Had he been able to see them the stars were full and, behind, in the forest, the lantern fruits hung like lamps from the branches of the trees. He supposed the platform looked much the same as always. No one knew its age, but it was known that there had been an innumerable number of platforms before this one, built on this same spot. That was testified to by records as old as those the brethren possessed. No one, at least as far as Horemheb knew, knew why the first one had been built here, or what the point of the platform was.

  In a little time, for the area of the flat stones was not really large, the tip of Horemheb’s staff, moving gently before him, inquisitive, like something alive, sniffing, groping, alert, an extension of his spirit, an emblem of his quest, touched the first stair. There were three of these, if one counts the level of the dais on which the platform had been erected. Horemheb climbed the steps and, because he conjectured he was early, he sat down, cross-legged, before the platform. The platform itself was not high, once one had ascended to the dais on which it was erected. Horemheb, who was not large, not even amongst the brethren, could have put out his hand, had he been standing, and placed his full palm upon it. But he did not stand before the platform, as he was surely early. Rather he sat there, cross-legged, before the platform, with the sack of meal and his staff beside him, took out the parchments, and, from the irregular surfaces, traced the sayings. He did not fear the stealthy ones in this place, for they did not com
e here.

  After a division of a revolution Horemheb rolled the parchments and tied them shut.

  He then rose slowly to his feet. He did not use his staff this time to help him rise. He did hold the sack of meal.

  He had heard it ascend to the platform, with one movement, from the back. It had been quiet but Horemheb did not think that it had been concerned to conceal its presence. Rather that was the way it moved.

  “Speak,” said Horemheb, after a time. “Speak!”

  Horemheb knew it was close to him. He knew its presence, especially here, in this place. Sometimes it was so close to him he could have put out its his hand and touched it. Once he had done so, on a rainy night. The fur had been wet and matted. There had been a strong smell upon it.

  “You know why I have come,” said Horemheb. “Speak.”

  The thing moved about, twice, turning, on the platform, and bit at its fur, doubtless to rid itself of vermin.

  “Speak,” said Horemheb.

  But the thing did not speak.

  Horemheb had read the parchments, but they had been silent. In his distant youth he had sat before the elders, but they had not told him, if they knew. He had made long journeys, even to the place of smoke and ships, but had not found what he sought. Now, again, he had come to the platform.

  “Speak,” begged Horemheb.

  But Horemheb heard only the wind, and the soft sounds from amongst the rocks.

  “I have come through the forest,” said Horemheb. “I have braved the darkness. I have stood before the platform. A thousand times I have brought my body and my staff, and my question, to this place, and have not been heeded. A thousand times I have returned to the village empty-handed.”

  “Speak!” said Horemheb.

  But it did not speak.

  Horemheb then put the sack of meal on the platform, as his small offering, small in value to many, but a gift of considerable price to Horemheb.

  Horemheb then bent down and picked up his staff. He descended from the dais and found the string once more, which he would follow back to the village.

  Behind him the beast looked down at the sack of meal between its paws. It was not such stuff that the beast ate.

  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.