by Sam Smith
He had already stitched three sides of the cloth together to make us bedding cloths; and, by stitching two of the cloth leaves together, and leaving holes for the arms and the head, he had made brown tunics for himself and Malamud.
I kept to my begrimed space tunic, not having relished the idea of being clad only in battered leaves. Though I did accept the bedding and the boots. For the nights were cold; and, although thermal slippers may be extremely comfortable in the corridors of Space, they could not withstand the vicissitudes of a planet's surface.
Dag had manufactured the boots by first making a rough clay model of a foot and then roasting the leaves around it. By wearing a sock of the cloth version of the leaves, the boots proved to be quite comfortable, although the vine laces did chafe the ankles. And, with the boots complete, Dag and Malamud now proposed putting into action their long laid plans for a journey.
Insisting that it would be safer if the three of us stayed together, they would not let me remain behind, as was my wish. To placate my fears of missing the rescue ship — if one should come during our absence — they agreed to stay this side of the mountains, to go no further than a low distant peak. And we would take the fire lighting equipment with us to signal our presence to the rescue ship.
As I did not truly believe that a rescue ship would come, yet still not wanting to undertake what I regarded as a foolhardy journey, I raised other objections. My every misgiving they overcame. Wood we could gather as we went, and they had discovered more caves a little way along on either side of our caves. It would appear that a strata of rock along the mountainside had been prone to the erosion that had caused the caves. So we would have somewhere dry to sleep every night.
Once I had grudgingly agreed to go on the journey with then, Dag went on to talk of the forest clearance he was going to essay on his return. He had made himself a large stone axe for felling trees, had decided that one of the lower slopes would be the perfect plot on which to grow our food.
"We will farm as our gravity bound ancestors farmed,” he said. And he pressed me to help him.
I, though, could not be drawn into his enthusiasm. As with their daily explorations, their bathing pool, their leaf tunics and boots, I could take no unconditional pleasure in them. I was a spaceman, not a savage; a technician, not a tiller of the soil. And I knew that if I lost that certain knowledge, that if I accepted life on that planet, then I would never leave it.
Chapter Eight
A journey out of the ordinary. Arguments lead to Malamud being chastened, I am humbled, our position made clear.
When the sun penetrated the morning mist we set out on our journey.
Our bedding cloths we had rolled and tied diagonally across our backs, our hatchets were tucked into our belts, and our boots hung by their laces around our necks.
Our boots proved to be as much an impediment as an aid. Because of their imperfect fit, we only wore them when traversing sharp ground; the rest of the time we had them banging against our chests as we walked barefoot through the dirt.
I was also carrying our fire bow and some dry kindling in case we found none, as well as a bundle of torches to ward off any nocturnal predators. And, should we happen not to chance upon any food, Malamud carried some fruit and cake in a net bag that Dag had made of some vines. While Dag was loaded down with two dried husks of a hollow root, that he used as water containers and grandly referred to as flagons.
Keeping to approximately the same level above the desert as our cave we found many other caves. Not one or them, we loyally decided, was as comfortably situated as our own cave
In one cave we found the bones of several creatures slain, we surmised, by a large predator. Possibly the lair of the creature which had attacked Malamud. We found no further trace of the planet’s inhabitants.
Early in the afternoons of our trek we selected a cave. Malamud then started a fire, while Dag and I, using our hatchets, collected several branches with which to barricade ourselves in for the night. Malamud, meanwhile, gathered fallen branches for the fire. The three of us then foraged for food.
On our third evening out Malamud and I squabbled.
Like all squabbles it began over nothing in particular, simply erupted out of the discord between our disparate personalities.
We had found food and water, the fire was going, and the barricades had been built. I was leaning against the cliff, a little along from the caves, and was gazing down on the reddened desert. Dag was busy within the cave we had chosen for that night. He was seeing what he could make of the bones we had found the previous day: Razor and comb were two objects he had in mind. Malamud, though, had nothing with which to occupy himself. So he came to where I was leant one-legged against the cliff.
“What are you thinking?" he asked me.
Now, whenever Malamud asked me anything, I always glanced at him to see if it might be the prelude to one of his jokes. Most of Malamud's questions seemed aimed to taunt me rather than to learn. However, being unable to tell from his expression, for Malamud could tell the most preposterous tales with a straight face, I had decided to give him always the benefit of the doubt and to seriously attempt to answer his every question. Indeed, of late, he had given up mocking me.
"It's no fun making fun of you Pi," he had complained a few days before. “You just don’t appreciate it."
So, this day, in answer to his question, I told him that I had been looking about me and realising anew that all of nature’s many forms were made of only 123 atoms; and that, by way of mental exercise, I had been naming all 123 to myself.
Malamud didn't seem particularly interested in that, asked me what I thought about in my other one-legged trances.
Now, as I’ve previously stated, I have always found that a difficult question. It's like Dag being asked what does a philosopher do? I have no ready answer. For, although it may appear to an outside observer that my mind is as empty as my gaze, my thoughts are in fact tumbling one over the other. And I can no more specifically say what is in my mind at any one moment, than I could tell of the precise state or my last meal’s digestion.
This day, however, I attempted to give Malamud some idea by telling him what the majority of my thoughts had been since we had been marooned. I told him that I often went over all that I had learnt, going from one fact to the next, so that I would forget nothing. For, unlike Malamud, who was quick to learn, and, I must add, equally quick to forget, learning for me had been hard work. It had required discipline and dedication on my part; and to know that all that hard-earned knowledge was now of no use was a bitter fact to accept.
So I would pose myself hypothetical problems, try to solve them in my imagination; itemise the every particular of a machine say. Or I would hear the cry of a bird, try to imagine it in musical notation. For I knew that I must forget nothing, that if I let any knowledge slip from me, then soon I would forget who I was — a spaceman — and I would be stuck on this filthy planet forever.
But the more, that evening, that I told Malamud of my remembering, the less he appeared to listen.
That was the usual outcome of my every conversation with him: they grounded on his lack of learning, on my inability to make myself understood in any but technical terms. For instance, I had tried to teach Malamud that all light is electricity, that anything which gives off light is emitting electromagnetic waves. So too the fire. But his studies were so lacking that he had not the elementary knowledge to understand even that.
So, throughout every age, I consoled myself, must learned men have shaken their heads over the ignorant folly of their contemporaries.
Nor, on the other hand, would it have been the first time that Malamud had deliberately misunderstood what I had said for the sake of a puerile joke. I did not, however, normally allow myself to become irritated by him. This evening I did.
I cannot now remember what it was that, at that moment, I was endeavouring to explain to him. But, as always when he grew bored, he tried to sum up all that I had sai
d in one phrase,
"So it's like..."
"No it's not at all like..." I snapped at him.
“Ah what's in a word," he dismissed it with a wave of his hand.
I, however, was not going to accept his offhandedly casting aside all that I had just so painstakingly described to him. I hurried after him back to the cave.
"Words are important,” I said. "Anyone who calls a tree a flower is a fool."
“Who was talking about trees and flowers?"
We were, by now, back in the cave.
"No-one was,” I said, puzzled and made angrier still by being taken so readily so far from my argument.
“Been better if you had," Malamud said. "What use is all that bumph you've been telling me?"
"It's of great use!" I roared at him. "Because, unlike you, I am not prepared to become a savage. I am a spaceman!"
Dag, his bones in his lap, had been looking from one to the other as we had spoken. Now, seeing my anger, he put his bones aside and raised calming hands.
"What is this all about?” he asked both of us.
My anger had increased to such a pitch that I could not speak.
"It's him," Malamud said. "Words words words.”
"What about them?” Dag asked him.
"’But it's not exactly like that’," Malamud mimicked my hesitant manner of speech. I saw Dag suppress a smile.
“He'll be eating living creatures next!" I pointed accusingly at Malamud.
"And if it wasn't for us, you'd starve to death!” Malamud shrieked back at me.
"Gentlemen. Gentlemen," Dag said soothingly. "I propose that we sit around this fine fire and calmly talk this over."
"More words!" Malamud scoffed.
"Enough Malamud," Dag checked him. "Sit down." Malamud obeyed.
When I too had seated myself, Dag told us that we were both in error.
"You to begin with Malamud.”
“Might've guessed I’d be first," Malamud sulked.
“Pi is correct in always using the exact word. That is the way he's been trained.”
“But even if you ask him how he feels, he’s precise about it.”
“And he’s right. Infuriating at times, I admit, but he’s right. The wrong word can lead to vast misunderstandings. For instance, in the very early days of their space travel, as a shorthand for describing great distances Earthmen called them light years. They then talked of going faster than the speed of light. So, having confused speed with time, some then actually believed that, if one travelled faster than the speed of light, one would travel faster than time, that one would, in effect, go backwards in time.
“One writer, for instance, postulated that if one was to leave a point, travel in a circle faster than the speed of light and return to that same point, one would arrive before one had left. Apart from failing to allow for acceleration and deceleration, they had muddled, by an unwise choice of words, the laws of relativity and the laws of constancy. What is is, what has been has been. Simple to us because we are capable of experiencing it. No conflict of ideas for us.
“Though why it should have so confused them is still a puzzle to me. Their infamous bullets almost travelled faster than the speed of light; but they didn't expect the people those bullets killed to die before the bullet left the gun.
“What I’m trying to say is that their confusion only arose because of that one term, ‘light years’. Words do matter.”
"Word words words," Malamud rudely muttered.
"Another Earth example,” Dag persevered, "Take the second generation of the legendary Zachary Dart. In their solar colonisation their sole ownership of the moon offended the less successful colonists. So, in a classic diplomatic feat, they acquired the exclusive — and much wealthier — mineral rights to the smaller moons of Mars and Saturn by putting half of the Earth’s moon up for grabs. It became the first space rush, and the deal subsequently became known as the Dart side of the moon. It's a classic.
“But its notoriety is such that it has become confused with a poetic image — the dark side of the moon. Pre-space they used that phrase to depict the unknown. Or they supposed that, not blinded by their sun, that they could see further from the dark side of the moon. The Dart deal, however, is so much better known that I have often since picked up books, predating that deal, only to find the poetic image converted by a later editor to the Dart side of the moon.
“Or take a more dangerous example. When we first encountered the Jang. Before voice boxes. The spacemen thought that the Jang were laughing at them. The Jang’s speech sounds like laughter to us. A spaceman was accidentally killed, the Jang got excited, the spaceman thought that the Jang were cackling over that death. So, outraged by the Jang's apparent lack of sensitivity, in a fit of hysteria the spacemen slaughtered then. It took a century to undo that damage. Words do matter."
“You sound," Malamud said, "just like Pi. But we’re not in space now. We’re here."
“And maybe here they're even more important," Dag said, "Suppose here, tomorrow, we chanced upon some or the inhabitants. Suppose you were to confuse their two words 'to kill' and 'to die'. And suppose, in conversation with one of these savage inhabitants, you were to say 'I will kill’, when you meant to say 'I will die'. The savage could perceive your words as a threat and defend himself by killing you."
"So I'd be proven correct," Malamud said, “I would be dead.”
But, though typical of his mocking remarks, the rancour had left his voice.
Dag now turned to me,
"And you Pi are wrong. You are wrong in your assumption that, because you are a Spaceman, you do not have to wholly adapt yourself to your circumstances here. I would remind you that many Spacemen have voluntarily returned to living on planets."
I immediately pooh-poohed the comparison, A bunch of romantics, of malcontents, I told him, thrown up every few generations. Escapists who, unable to come to grips with the complexities of their own time, yearned nostalgically for a simplified past.
"And how long do they last?" I rhetorically asked of Dag, "Two generations at most. Because the generation born upon the planet can't wait to leave it. And so back they come to Space with tales of hardship. Until that's forgotten and some more fools deceive themselves into thinking that life on a planet would be simply wonderful, so natural."
"Nevertheless Pi," Dag said, “your whole approach to life here is wrong. Your attitude is wrong. It is not the attitude of a spaceman. In fact, Pi, you are a snob.
"You think that your interest in the things of space is more worthy than my interest in this planet, is more worthy than Malamud's interest in the creatures of this planet. When all obey universal laws. The scale is all that is different. Whether I'm studying a piece of rock, or Malamud's discovering the diet of a creature here, or you're contemplating a galaxy's spirals, they are all of equal importance and of equal worth.
"Your stubborn refusal to accept the fact of our being here has led to your anger. Malamud just tripped the switch that released it. Like you, I hope that a rescue ship will deliver us from this planet. But it is only a hope. In the meantime we have to advance ourselves by our own efforts.
"We, as Spacemen, have learnt to heed warnings and to circumvent dangers. But always going on, always improving. We, as spacemen, have learnt to be beware of reactionary societies, whose slowness to change inevitably destroys them. That is why we are successful. That is why we belong to The Supreme Civilisation. Because we treat with facts, not myths, with realities, not dreams.
"Malamud has accepted the reality of our being here. It was unworthy of you to accuse him of wanting to eat living creatures. He will not. We are not savages. We are Spacemen. We know our potential. And, knowing our potential, we have had a real problem put before us. We have to, given our circumstances, create civilisation anew by ourselves.
“We have the advantage of knowing what is possible. For instance I have been examining some rocks near the desert edge. Some, I believe, contain minerals. I
f we can extract some of that metal then, possibly, only possibly, we can repair the shuttle. That’s the ultimate aim. For the moment it's one step at a time. And the direct route will not always be the one which will yield results. So we have to work through every age of civilisation, accustom ourselves to working with the material to hand.
"Our advantage, as spacemen, is that we know our goal, can proceed by trial and error towards it. Primitive intelligence comes upon knowledge and techniques by accident, often doesn't realise their importance until years later. So, in a matter of years, we should be able to accomplish what takes them centuries. Do you now see your error?”
I did; and I was humbled. Even Malamud felt sorry for me. When Dag had first started lecturing me, he had rubbed his hands with glee to see me so discomfited; had ended by regarding my squirming with sad-eyed sympathy.
I knew that, for my low opinion of them both, I had been justly rebuked. In fact my recalcitrance had impeded their progress. Whilst being selfishly concerned with retaining all my knowledge, I had denied them the benefits of my expertise.
Now that Dag had made clear his intentions, I knew that he was the true Spaceman, not I. Before I had suspected that he had been infatuated with the novelty of being on a planet, that he had been playing some game best known to himself. But, now that I knew his intentions, I knew that he was right — in all that he had done so far and in what he proposed — and I was excited by the challenge he had lain before me. But why, I beseechingly asked of myself, hadn't he confided his plans to me before? Because, I told myself, before I would probably not have listened.
Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I did not sleep that night. I lied by the glowing fire, turning over in my mind many ideas for assisting Dag in his race to civilisation. With the knowledge I had gleaned from the horticulturist on my mother's outstation I would be able to help Dag with his proposed farming. The metallurgist too would come in useful when we came to refine any ore.