The Totems of Abydos

CHAPTER 8





“Are you awake?” asked Brenner.

He and Rodriguez lay near the remains of a small fire, surrounded by Pons, the sled, too, within the circle.

“Yes,” said Rodriguez.

“They speak the dominant language of Company Station,” said Brenner.

“You have known that since the station,” said Rodriguez. “They trade there.”

This was the sixth day out from the station, and today was the first time that either Brenner or Rodriguez had heard the Pons speak. That some of them, at least, were familiar with the language most spoken at the station had been known for days, of course, as they had regularly understood Rodriguez’ instructions, Brenner’s questions, and such. Too, they would have found the language useful in their trading at the station.

“You do not understand,” said Brenner. “They spoke it amongstst themselves, or something like it. I could understand them.”

“I heard,” said Rodriguez.

“Surely it is not their common language,” said Brenner.

“I would not think so,” said Rodriguez.

“What would that be?” asked Brenner.

“I have no idea,” said Rodriguez. “The matter is not clear in the records.”

“That would seem to be the first thing to be made clear,” said Brenner.

“One would think so,” said Rodriguez.

“Different parties who contacted them must have spoken different languages.”

“One would suppose so,” said Rodriguez.

“It is tactful for them to speak only in our language before us,” said Brenner.

“Yes,” said Rodriguez. “That seems thoughtful.”

“That would fit in with their diffidence, and commitment to proprieties, politeness, and such,” said Brenner.

“They are excellent mimics,” said Rodriguez.

“They would pick up languages quickly?” said Brenner.

“Possibly,” said Rodriguez.

“It seems odd that most of them, at least, should be familiar with our language,” said Brenner.

“Not necessarily,” said Rodriguez. “These may be their traders, their contact individuals. You must remember that they have been in contact with Company Station, and its predecessors, for generations.”

“They could be like border peoples, to whom more than one language would be familiar?”

“Possibly,” said Rodriguez.

“It would not be spoken in their village or villages?” said Brenner.

“One would think not,” said Rodriguez, “but who knows? They may have adopted the language gradually, over hundreds of years. The prestige of superior life forms, such as we, may have influenced this sort of thing. Doubtless we, even such as we are, are like gods to them. Diffusions and interchanges take place, losses, abandonings, accretions, transformations, developments, borrowings, and such, occur. Over generations a language can change beyond recognition.”

“You think, then, that they might speak our language,” said Brenner.

“There is another possibility, of course,” said Rodriguez.

“What is that?” asked Brenner.

“That we speak their language,” said Rodriguez.

“That is very funny,” said Brenner.

“There are many differences, of course,” said Rodriguez, “aside from the difference in tonal quality, the high-pitchedness, the shrillness, and such, differences, literally, in pronunciation, and certainly in vocabulary.”

“It is a dialect,” said Brenner.

“Each individual,” said Rodriguez, “speaks an idiolect, in a sense, his personal language, with its pronunciations, its lexicon, and such. In this sense there are as many languages as there are speakers. If enough idiolects have enough in common, in phonemic quality, in intonation contours, and such, we may speak of a dialect. If the dialects have enough in common we may speak of a language. The division between a dialect and a language is often arbitrary. In innumerable areas, as on a river, there may be ten consecutive villages, or speech communities, any two of which, adjacent to one another, understand one another very well, but the speech of, say, the first village will be clearly unintelligible to that of the tenth village. Thus, in that set of villages, using mutual intelligibility as a criterion, there must be at least two languages, but where does one stop and the other start? You must invent your criterion. Then, with your criterion, it becomes, and only then becomes, a scientific question, a question of fact, as to how many languages are spoken on the river. One criterion may give you ten languages, another five, another two, and so on.”

“I wonder what is their native language,” said Brenner.

“I wonder what is ours,” said Rodriguez.

“There is something about them that makes me uneasy,” said Brenner.

“What?” asked Rodriguez.

“There is something remotely familiar about them,” said Brenner. “It is as if I knew them.”

“Have you been to Abydos before?” asked Rodriguez.

“No,” said Brenner.

“Then do not be foolish,” said Rodriguez.

“On the first day,” said Brenner, “when you took the hood from the Pon, and you looked at its teeth.”

“Yes?” said Rodriguez.

“I am curious about something,” said Brenner.

“What?” asked Rodriguez.

“Did you count the teeth?” asked Brenner.

“Of course,” said Rodriguez.

“How many teeth did it have?” asked Brenner.

“Thirty-two,” said Rodriguez.

“That is interesting,” said Brenner.

“I agree,” said Rodriguez.

“They make me uneasy,” said Brenner.

“Hundreds of life forms have that number of teeth,” said Rodriguez, sleepily.

“There seems to me something oddly familiar about the Pons,” said Brenner.

“There should,” said Rodriguez. “You are spiritual brothers. You both subscribe to a morality of lunacy.”

“Do you not agree that if you do not regard the bacterium as your equal you have an inferiority complex?”

“No,” said Rodriguez. “But if I did regard it as my equal, that would be evidence that I had such a complex, and a severe one. More likely, of course, I would simply be insane.”

“There are more of them than you,” said Brenner.

“That is true,” admitted Rodriguez.

“And you cannot reproduce by fission,” pointed out Brenner.

“Yes,” admitted Rodriguez, sleepily, “they have me there.”

Brenner supposed that if there were no values, no standards, in the universe, if it did not draw a distinction between, say, the bacillus and the megabregma, or was not interested in the differences between them, it was not, then, that the bacillus and the megabregma were equal, but, rather, that equalities and inequalities, so to speak, did not exist. If there are no values, nothing has value, and, in that sense, things cannot be of equal value, unless one counts all as of zero value, or such. But there were values in the universe, obviously. If nothing else, they had been put there as needed, or desired, by various organisms. Values were real; it was merely that they were indexed to species, or individuals. To be sure, they might be incommensurable. But incommensurability did not imply illusion, nor inconsistency, nor unreality.

“If the bacterium has equal value with us, then, so, too, must the Pon,” said Brenner.

“Why not?” said Rodriguez, affably.

“But you do not regard the innocent, harmless Pon as our equal?”

“What do you mean by ‘equal’?” asked Rodriguez.

“That is interesting,” said Brenner. “That is usually left unspecified.” He had never really thought about that. Such words commonly functioned noncognitively, usually being used as touchstones to test group allegiances, rather like special signals, pullings on the ear, strange motions with the foot, secret handshakes, and such. You could, of course, use words to mean almost anything. The usual trick was to take a good word, one with favorable connotations, and then change its meaning to something one approved of. For example, if one approves of totalitarianism one simply redefines, say, ‘democracy’, so that it now means what, or much what, ‘totalitarianism’ used to mean. Then anyone who disagrees with you is put in the position of being opposed to “democracy,” and such. The obvious fraudulence of this tactic, interestingly, seldom acts as a deterrent to its effectiveness.

“The literal meaning of ‘equal’ is sameness or identicality,” said Rodriguez.

“Yes,” said Brenner.

“In this sense almost nothing is the same as anything else,” said Rodriguez. “Nor need it be, nor should it be,” he added.

“We are the same as the Pons in the sense that we both have a single nose, and such,” said Brenner. “And we are the same as the bacterium in the sense that we both contain various chemical elements.”

“True,” said Rodriguez.

“Thus we and the Pons, and bacteria, are equal,” said Brenner.

“The fallacy should be obvious, even to you,” said Rodriguez. “You shift from sameness or equality in one respect, usually a quite general or trivial one, to sameness or equality in some substantial or totalistic sense, denying differences. I do not deny that you and the bacterium have something in common, for example, that you both occupy space, but it does not follow from this that you are a bacterium.”

“I see,” said Brenner.

“Be what you are, a man,” said Rodriguez, “and be one fully. Do not deny what you are, or let others cheat you of it, or make you ashamed of it. Be what you are, in joy, in freedom, and power. Walk, and run, and climb, as nature intended you should. To do otherwise is to betray yourself. It is to commit treason to your own reality. Let the wolf be a wolf, the man a man.”