The Alien Way

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The song came to an end. The woman went back to her raking. Jason stood, filled with the pictures the song had painted in his imagination. Like himself, the original Brutogas had been only a distant connection of an illustrious blood line. —Not that that had anything to do with it. Great men appeared in all places—but quality bred quality, there was no denying that… And quality was in Jason’s ancestry, though he was several orders of relationship removed from the main line.

  He came at last to the gates of the Brutogas Castle and was passed in by the porter at the gate, who was required to know by sight all those of the Family. He entered the ground-level courtyard, beneath the second story, where the immediate members of the family lived, and the third—the highest legally permissible level of dwelling—where lived the current Brutogas himself. He, and all the mothers of his sons, spread out through the nearly half square mile of corridors and rooms.

  Jason’s room, as a Secondcousin, was on the top of the fifteen basement levels of the Castle. He went down to it. It felt good to shut the door behind him on this small, square, blank-walled room with the image of the first Brutogas in one corner. It was as he had left it to go on scout work, half a season before. The sunlight slanted in through the high half-window just at ground level above Jason’s head, and the light fell familiarly upon the small washing pool beneath it, the circular sleeping pad, and the cabinet of Jason’s possessions.

  He had just taken off his harness when the door spoke to him, saying there was someone outside. He opened it and saw the tall shape of Bela Firstcousin, one generation older than he and one degree of relationship closer to the present Brutogas. Bela handed him a small, gold-glinting object.

  “This to you from the Brutogas,” said Bela. They were relatives and almost friends, and so they looked at each other with hardly any guarding tension. “And you are to move up to a room on the ground level tomorrow.”

  He saluted and left Jason. Jason looked down at the gold object in his furry hand. It was a half-Honor, the smaller of two Family tokens which the Family head could bestow on his lesser relatives. Jason’s chest swelled, and deep feeling moved him. It had not passed unnoticed—the fact that he, one of the Family, had encountered a manifestation of the Random Factor like the alien artifact and had then returned alone.

  True, there had been only one other man on the scoutship with him… And it had been with eleven others that the original Family head had fought that past day-to say nothing of those who had been original members of the expedition from which the original Brutogas and his companions had returned. But his own modest case had not passed unnoticed.

  His chest expanded with love and pride. He turned toward the picture of the original Brutogas in the corner and shrank slowly down on his haunches before it. He crossed his forearms upon his unharnessed chest. A joy and pain too great to bear moved through him. He stayed in the reverential position as the sun mounted outside his room and the light moved across its floor.

  “Give me shade… give me water… give me strength…” he prayed.

  Back in his own basement room on earth, Jason—alone—woke to find once more his pillow wet with tears.

  Chapter Six

  “—But why,” demanded Thornybright at the next meeting of the Board, “isn’t he passing the worm along so that we can get the mechanisms into the bloodstreams and brains of some others of them?”

  “You can’t influence him in any way?” asked Heller.

  Jase shook his head.

  “I’m only a passenger,” he said to Heller. “I know there was hope that just by sheer chance, with an alien, a subject like me could exert some mental pressure, or domination.” He smiled for a moment, wryly. “Just like nobody’s ever really given up the fear that maybe Kator is subtly starting to dominate me. But I give you my word, neither of these things is happening. It’s just as it was when I tested with another human, before the Program got under way. The sleeping or inactive subject is simply carried about by the contact. He experiences what the contact experiences. And that’s all.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” said Thornybright

  “I don’t know the answer.” Jase turned to the lean psychologist, looking past Mele at him. Mele, as usual, was sitting in on the Board meetings although she remained officially unconnected and unvoting, her only duties being that of observing and helping Jason with his paperwork and written reports on the Rural during the daylight hours. “He’s hanging on to it for some purpose of his own. He thinks of it as ‘Founding a Kingdom.’”

  “Maybe he plans to use it as some sort of symbol?” said Dystra, looking shrewdly at Jase. "To start an uprising against the Family Heads? To put himself in power through a Revolution against the established procedure on that Homeworld of his?”

  “No. Nothing like that.” Jase shook his head. “You can’t see their society as I see it. Any kind of Revolution is… unthinkable. I don’t mean impossible. I mean…”—again he fumbled for a word—“unthinkable. The Ruml are complete individualists. The structure of social authority among them is an instinctive, not a sociological, arrangement.” Inspiration came to him. “If you had Kator here right now and you could explain to him what you mean by ‘revolution,’ he’d stare at you finally and say, ‘against what?” You see, even if a Ruml should for some—to them—insane reason, gain the power of life and death over his fellow Rumls, it wouldn’t mean anything.”

  “Wouldn’t mean anything?” echoed Thornybright.

  “I mean—” Jason fumbled. “The authority he gained would have no meaning in terms of desirability to the Ruml nature. What are desirable are Honors—which are abstract things. It’s true they call the badges they wear on their harnesses, Honors. But the badges are actually just like our medals—they represent the actual Honors. And the actual Honors have some deep, basic connection with the instincts of perpetuation and evolution of the Ruml race.”

  “You mean?” Thornybright pounced. “That they represent actions showing survival qualities, or actions leading to the continuance and evolution of the race?”

  “Yes…” said Jase, reluctantly. “But I hate to just say yes and let it go at that. What you say is true, and still—it’s more than that to a Ruml. There’s something religious, mystic, deeply noble and emotionally moving to a Ruml about these Honors. We think of something like, say, the Congressional Medal of Honor, as something apart from the man who won it. But to the Ruml, somehow, the man—pardon me, I suppose I ought to say ‘individual’, but they think of themselves as ‘men,’ just as we do—the man is the Honor. It's as if the awarding of the Honor merely recognizes something that was already in him—that’s been in him, or of him, or part of him, since the moment of his birth.”

  He looked around at them with the helpless feeling that he was not getting through to the human brains behind their human faces. Even Mele was looking at him without real understanding.

  “The Congressional Medal winner—,” said Jase. “We’d be shocked of course, but we wouldn’t consider it impossible that someone who’d won it should later turn out to be a coward, a thief, a murderer—somebody utterly reprehensive. To the Ruml, that couldn’t happen. If a man—individual—there should receive an Honor as a brave person, it simply could not happen that at some later time he could prove to be anything but brave. It never happened in the known history of the race, it never could happen. Even if it happened, it couldn’t happen. If he should turn out to be a coward, it would be because he was only apparently being a coward.”

  “You mean they wouldn’t believe it, even if it was true?” said Dystra.

  “I mean it wouldn’t be true. It actually would be because he was only apparently being a coward,” said Jase. “He just—” He stared around at them, helpless to explain it, “wouldn’t be a coward. He couldn’t be.”

  “What keeps mistakes from happening?” demanded Thornybright. “What keeps a coward from getting an Honor for bravery through official mistake?”

  “The
one who received it wouldn’t accept it if it didn’t fit him,” said Jase. “But it wouldn’t go that far. Long before it came to the point of granting an Honor, it would be clear to those who granted it and the one who received it whether it was deserved or not.”

  “These Rumls can’t make mistakes, then?” asked Thornybright. The psychologist’s eyes were sharp as hypodermic needles through which the man’s disbelief sought to pump itself into Jase.

  “They can make mistakes, but—This is a matter of instinct, I tell you!” said Jase. “They don’t go wrong about Honors. They just don’t!”

  Thornybright sat back in his chair.

  “Move we turn this Project over to governmental authorities now,” he said. “The alien contact is holding on to the mechanism-infected worm, and our single human contact is having too large a load of responsibility laid on him to interpret these aliens to us. Meanwhile those Rumls at their ‘Examination Center’ will be deducing more about us from that Bait every day, in spite of all the precautions we took. We’ve got no right to assume the responsibility of contact with a possibly inimical alien race this way.”

  “Second,” said Jules Warbow, the board member next to him.

  “Discussion?” asked Thornybright, looking around the table.

  “We shouldn’t, that’s all,” said Jase. “I can’t explain that to you yet, any better than I can explain the Honors or the Founding a Kingdom business. But I give you my word as the subject involved that we should continue to keep control of this project a while longer.”

  They voted. As usual, it was four-four, with Jase casting the tie-breaking vote that put off the moment of informing governmental authorities about the project and releasing it from Foundation control.

  The Board meeting was adjourned.

  The Board members returned to their individual busy lives outside the walls of the Foundation building. Jase followed Mele back into her small office adjoining the room and sat down in a chair, as she sat down behind the desk with the recorder, prepared to type up the minutes of the meeting.

  “They can’t quite discard the notion,” said Jase, wryly. They can’t forget the possibility that I might be slipping under the domination of Kator’s mind-turning into a sort of TV horror science fiction monster. That’s what’s behind most of the opposition. All but Tim Thornybright. He isn’t afraid of man or monster, but he wants to see the project in government hands and ten times as big as it is now.”

  He watched Mele.

  “Mele,” he said, “you don’t think I’m coming to be dominated by an alien mind, do you?”

  She had been just about to begin typing, her hands poised. She dropped them and looked squarely across the desk at him. She took a deep breath.

  “No,” she said. “But I think you’re wrong, Jase.”

  “Wrong?” Startled, he stared at her.

  “Wrong to keep voting so as to break the tie and keep the Project in Foundation hands,” she said. Her brown eyes were almost hard. “You’re too cautious, you’re too conservative. It ought to be going on with the finances and facilities something like the United Nations can put behind it, not just be confined to one man in a basement and eight scientists—even if they are some of the best minds in the world—sitting around a table making decisions.”

  He looked back at her grimly. She was younger than he was and adventurous. She had read a great many books, and the books were full of solutions to things. He had felt the same confidence in book solutions until he found himself lying out on a mountain hillside watching the spring fighting of the bears, or following a gang of killer whales through the icy Antarctic waters for days in a two-man submarine.

  “Once you turn it over to the authorities, you can’t turn it back,” he said.

  “What makes you so sure you’re liable to want it back?” she counterattacked. “You haven’t come up with any real reasons, any real, logical reasons that outside authorities wouldn’t understand what you’re doing, as well as the Board and the Foundation.”

  “The situation there on the Rural Homeworld,” he said stubbornly, “goes beyond logical reasons. Logical reasons are a part of logical thinking. Logical thinking is a part of the intellectual processes developed in a civilized, complex society—”

  “And the Rural Society isn’t civilized, or complex?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” he said. “But—“

  “Honestly, Jase,” she said, “honestly now, can’t you recognize the fact that you’re dragging your heels about turning the project over not because of anything to do with the situation of those aliens on their world? It’s nothing more or less but your old play-it-safe, cautious attitude that makes you want to hang on to being the only contact with the Rumls until you know everything about them—even if that means forty years more of study. You won’t trust anyone else!”

  Decisively, almost angrily, she began to type. Her fingers rattled on the keys.

  “No,” he said—so harshly she stopped typing after all and looked up in faint surprise. “You don’t understand, any more than anyone on the Board does. The instinctive basis of the Rumls’ civilization is drastically different than the instinctive basis of our civilization. Make a mistake about that and we could find ourselves fighting for our lives against them when it’s the very thing we want to avoid.”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk, staring levelly at him from beneath her two arched brows.

  “Now it comes out,” she said. “You don’t trust anybody else to make contact with a Ruml. Only yourself!”

  “I seem to be the only one who understands that instinct can be a greater determining power than intellect, in matters of survival and nonsurvival!” he said. He heard his voice raising but was without the will to control it. “My God, you’re a woman. Don’t you have any faith in instinct?”

  “I have a good deal of faith in instinct!” she said, icily. “But I happen to have been born now-not five hundred years ago when men like you thought women didn’t exist outside of the four walls of their own houses! I’ve got all the normal, womanly instincts, thanks, but that doesn’t mean I can’t control them with the higher centers of my brain when a conflict comes up.”

  He sat looking at her. Calmness had come back to him.

  “I think,” he said, after a moment, “maybe it’s your personality that’s the problem here, not mine.”

  She began to type.

  “Or, let’s say, as much as mine,” he said. “And one thing more. If you think you can control your instincts, every time, you’re as wrong as everybody else around here seems to be.”

  He got up and went out, hearing the typewriter continue to rattle unceasingly behind him. Outside, in the now deserted library room, the sun had descended, even during his short argument with Mele, into a lean bank of dark cloud streaking the sunset horizon. Earth’s star flooded the empty room now, with a cold red light that left dusky shadows lingering in corners and behind the overstaffed chairs. For a moment Jase leaned against the bookcases along one wall, feeling against the back of his hand the leather binding of old and honorable books.

  He had not meant to fight with Mele. It was bad enough that the Board did not understand the unexplainable, powerful, emotional force he had felt in his contacts with Kator. A crisis was bound to come when their lack of understanding and the possibilities of this force, directed toward the human race, would bring about a moment of dire peril.

  Subconsciously, in that moment, he had counted on the support of Mele. Now whether it was his fault or hers did not matter, but she, too, had deserted his standard.

  He stood on watch alone, like a single armored and sworded soldier of the Roman legions in a pass at night, facing north toward the German wilderness, the darkness and the sound of stirring hordes. The legions he guarded were all asleep in the camp behind him. He had never felt so alone in his life.

  Chapter Seven

  “…And you’re positive,” said the Examiner, “that there’s nothing you’v
e forgotten to tell us about this artifact, nothing you may have done and forgotten in the process of your boarding and searching it?”

  “I’ve forgotten nothing,” said Jase, in Kator’s body. “Nothing.”

  He stood before the Examiner in the Examiner’s interview room of the Examination Center. The Examiner himself was heavy and gray with years. He was the Aton, an honorable man known to all the worlds of men, head of a numerous Family, expert in his field of study of space-found alien fragments and artifacts. He had lived the long lifetime of an honorable man, and his harness was heavy with Honors. He looked down on Jase now not only from the raised platform of his padded tuft, but from the pinnacle of that long lifetime.

  “You are only two seasons adult,” he said, now, glancing at the papers of the artifact report on the small table hinged to one side of the circular tuft, uncurled himself slightly, and straightened up to look down on Jase. “And that’s why you’re certain. I wouldn’t be certain—not after all these years. No matter how careful I had been, if I’d been in your place.”

  “The Random Factor—,” began Jase.

  “Young man,” interrupted the Examiner, but not harshly, “the Random Factor is a dream, a fantasy. Oh, it exists—it exists. But as part of the statistical mass of the universe, not as something to be appreciated and integrated with the individual lives.”

  He fell silent, staring at the papers of the report. Jase felt emotion move him, at the sight of this man of age and Honor, lost in the question of the artifact Jase—Kator, that was—had found. He pulled himself together.

  ‘Is there something—,” he ventured, “something unaccounted for about the artifact, sir?”

  The Examiner raised his eyes from the papers and looked down as if surprised to see Jase still there.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing apparent, young man. Only, it seems to me we’re getting surprisingly little information from it. It’s almost as if the explosion that destroyed the craft it was originally had been intelligently designed to rid the artifact section of as much information-producing elements as possible.”