The Totems of Abydos Read online

  “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.

  “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.