As soon as we left the ship, however, the sight of three aliens in sealed suits galvanized them. They flowed about us, prodded us, patted up, and Rhoda was able to record her first samples of the Clayfolk speech as they made noises at us and about us.
Rhoda was a lithe young Negress, Lobsang a middle-aged Tibetan male, and I, as you can see, am a red-haired Celt, as speckled with freckles as any hen. Our features showed through our face plates, but the basic impression our suits gave was one of perfect triplet identity. It was this fact that disturbed the Clayfolk. But we only cottoned on to that later ... (If indeed that was the truth.)
Now even I, a mere pilot, and no linguist or social scientist, very soon realized that if the noises they were making were speech, it was a very queer form of it. All the time, that same slobbery glutinous bark; it never varied! After five minutes of it, Rhoda switched her squawk box off in disgust. A language composed of one single word? Preposterous.
Yet as we wandered round their village, it was impossible to avoid the impression of civilization. Cones and cupola clay huts formed a perfect double circle around a central plaza dominated by a large hearth with a roasting spit. The one break in this circle led out along a straight avenue lined by rows of circular clay statues (seemingly of Clayfolk bending over to touch their toes) disappearing into the mists. And the cooking spit itself—made from stalactites bound together by strong fibers! I was amazed at how they’d managed to fashion such a piece of equipment on this soft, wet world, in the absence of metals or firm wood or even, apparently, of hard bones. No charred ribs or femurs lay near the hearth, and their own floppy, rubbery bodies seemed to have nothing stiffer than gristle in them. There was, too, their miraculous mastery of fire, on a world visibly bereft of flints or striking stones, without two dry sticks to rub together.
“If I hear that word once more!” growled Rhoda, as the Clayfolk gestured at their spit, their pots, the roots and fungi and giant snails cooking in them, and named them all urgently for us, all with the same name . . .
“One word contains all words,” remarked Lob- sang mystically. “All words dissolve into one.” Naturally he was happy that we were going to have to rely on his trance technique for a cultural pattern, rather than on Rhoda’s squawk box; that is, her GCSU (General Culture Structures Unit)—which doesn’t translate anything as such, but sets up algebraic maps based on whatever communication system inhabitants use, whether sounds, or light patterns as with the Giant Squids of the Sigma Draconis ocean-world, or gestures as with the Mutes of the thunderous Aldebaran | planet.
“What’s that mean?” she grumbled.
“Well, if you repeat the same word over and over enough times, you start hearing different words, don’t you? Maybe these folk actually hear a whole set of different words? But there’s consensus on the meanings, because they’re linked in some way, empathy, telepathy? It’s an idea.”
“A very foggy one!”
“Foggy place,” retorted Lob.
“Their gestures,” I suggested diplomatically. “Like Aldebaran, maybe? They’re continually pointing and fingering.”
Rhoda shook her head dismissively.
“They point at the same object with any number of fingers—or none at all. I’ve been watching, it’s all random.”
“Then I shall prepare my mind for the trance,” Lob concluded gleefully. “My privilege, "when your methods fail. In my contract, no? We don’t have long here. These beings shall become phantasms and projections of my own mind. I shall become mad and incorporate them.”
Rhoda had little time to feel chagrined, though, for it was just then that the landscape began to change around us . . .
Well, we weren’t exactly taken by surprise! In orbit, we’d spent long enough surveying the respective motions of star, gasgiant, and moon, to forsee some pretty weird days for the latter so far as “daylight” went.
The gasgiant itself, a dazzling blue, had only failed by a few per cent mass to become a second partner star to the bright orange primary. The giant moon was perched precariously just a few thousand miles beyond the Roche limit, that should have broken it into a billion pieces and spread it out like Saturn’s rings had it been any closer. Yet it was unbraked by tidal forces. Every hundred years or so the furthest planet of this system rushed in on a cometary ellipse that took it inside the gasgiant’s orbit and out again— whipping the moon like a top, just enough to compensate for the braking effect.
We foresaw phases of orange sunlight, phases of blue planetlight, phases of bright purple com- binedlight, and finally nights black as pitch whenever the moon faced neither luminary. Phases could be prolonged, annulled, repeated, however, in a quasi-random tic-tac-toe fashion, on account of the way the moon both spun, and tumbled, at once. An overall pattern only really emerged in terms of decades according to our computer’s calculations. That life had arisen, and persisted, on such a world seemed fairly remarkable; that it was apparently intelligent frankly astonished us. Yet slave-drones had sent back TV footage of the Clayfolk village (easily spottable on infra-red from the heat of the fires). We had to accept their existence, illogical as it was! Naturally, they couldn’t have any real understanding of the true circumstances of their world, astronomically, buried away beneath that persistent cloud veil. Things must seem highly mutable to them. “Seasons” and “years” would be meaningless terms. Even “days” must be highly flexible and unpredictable. Rhoda expected a novel and interesting language to emerge to cope with this confusion (but never, poor lady, a language of one word!).
So, as I say, the landscape shifted.
From the blue planetlight phase, to the bright purple of sun and gasgiant in the sky together; and if you think of purple as a dark color, think again. It positively ached at us, till we had to lower the shades in our helmets.
This light change wrought new shapes and contours in the landscape, and erased the old. The blurred shadows we cast now were twin ones; yet each separate shadow seemed to project a cone of light instead of deleting light. Red and blue splotches accompanied us that seemed somehow more genuine than the prevalent violent purple.
Vegetation underwent a rapid change. Fungi wilted and dissolved. Ferns we hadn’t seen before unfurled, fast as a time-lapse movie. Dragonflies hatched and took wing. Worms writhed out of the mud and leapt to catch them in tiny piranha mouths.
The Clayfolk speeded up too, to scoop these worms into pots, all the while chattering animatedly our by now least favorite word.
“My God,” groaned Rhoda, “it might as well be a different world now, just look at it! And still they go on saying “that’s”, “That’s, “that’s” to it.” She mimicked the Clayfolk “word” venomously, giving it an interpretation that it may (or may not) have had.
“In sameness, is difference,” chuckled Lob- sang.
The Clayfolk took no more interest in us right now. We might as well have been invisible; though none of them actually collided with us, I noticed.
“Enough for one day,” Rhoda said decisively. “Let’s look round the village separately, then get some sleep. Try your luck tomorrow, Lob.”
“ ‘Day’?” chuckled Lob later, as we made our way back to the ship, together, through worms and ferns and dragonflies, accompanied by our brighter, more real double shadows, “or ‘season’? Tomorrow, or next year?”
To which, of course, Rhoda had no answer; since it was either, or neither, or both.
When we woke up eight hours later (by ship time) it was pitchblack night, and it stayed that way for two of our days. While we waited for a new dawn, we discussed that avenue of statues—and realized that none of us had actually stepped outside the village to take a closer look at any of them. It was as though the shape of the village was somehow self-sufficient, had penned us in without our knowing it! We spoke of possible kinship patterns for the Clayfolk—another way of getting inside their minds—and discovered that none of us had unearthed the least evidence of how they bred even. Live births, laying of eggs,
fission? Why hadn’t we thought to ask ourselves why we hadn’t, till now? Maybe the constant undulations of their bodies had hopelessly blurred age and sex distinctions to such an extent that we actually found it difficult to think about them until we were back in our neat, functional, logical ship again, with our suits off and our own differences consequently obvious.
“Maybe they melt in the dark to reform next daylight,” offered Lob ironically.
“Ah, the dark!” snapped Rhoda. “Now, there’s one thing they must have a name for, different from the light!”
“What point is there in naming the dark, when you can’t see anything in it?”
“What I mean, you obtuse Sherpa, is there’ll always be a spring or morning time that’s quite distinct! I’m damned if I see how they ever civilized themselves, with all the other confusions. Yet how did they develop a concept of regularity—as witness that line of statues? The key must lie in the dawn!”
She was right. It did indeed. But hardly in the way she expected!
Shortly after we’d slept again and awoken to eat another breakfast in the dark, it dawned—a bright ruddy orange dawn, from the Sun-alone. We watched from the cabin window as the Clayfolk swarmed out of their huts towards that spit at the heart of the village; and, in horror, the use they actually put that piece of equipment to . . .
They seized one of their own number out of the crowd, slung him over the cooking spit and wrapped him round it flexibly, binding his feet and head together. One dayman stuck long, thin clay pipes into the victims’ mouth, nostrils and rectum. Another kindled a fire beneath the spit. A third began cranking the handle to turn it. Others slapped wet clay onto the victim’s body.
“Those figures outside the village, along the road! They’re not statues at all,” cried Rhoda. “They’re them, themselves!”
“They must breed rather rapidly,” observed Lobsang with equanimity. He was already gearing his mind to regard all Clayfolk as equivalent to phantasms from the Tibetan Book of the Dead- purely subjective demons of the mind, that couldn’t ever trap the man who realized this. “Quite an attrition rate for a little village to bear ... if they sacrifice to the dawn every day like this!”
“Sacrifice? Oh, they are doing something, certainly, the demons. But who knows what?”
“What are those pipes for?” she whimpered. “In his face and his behind.”
“Stop him exploding as they heat him up,” I said, ever the practical engineer. “Let the hot air out.” Managing to sound tough, but equally appalled, to tell the truth.
The fire glowed, they turned the spit, slapping on fresh clay as the first coat hardened.
And we watched what had once been a living alien being transformed slowly and methodically into something far more alien and hideous— something which we, in our rashness, had glibly classified among “works of art” not so long ago. At what stage in the cooking process the poor tortured being inside that clay case ceased to be alive, I do not know. I only hoped it was soon, but I feared not, given the elaborate precautions to prevent early asphyxiation; as I now saw those pipes also to be. At least we were spared, by the ship’s solid hull, from hearing the being’s screams.
The cooking went on for half an hour, till the circular statue was completed to their satisfaction; then they doused the fire, and let the thing cool.
When it had cooled enough, a triumphal procession of the Clayfolk hauled it away on a stalactite pole, down along the Road of Statues.
“I suppose we have a history of human sacrifices ourselves,” muttered Rhoda. “People being cooked in bronze bulls and burnt at stakes ... I guess if dawn is the only fixed point in their world it’s only predictable they’d worship it pretty fiercely.”
“Worship? You do leap to conclusions, Rhoda.”
“Do you have any better explanation? It certainly isn’t a fertility rite!”
“I shall apply my fertile imagination to what it is. Lamas may slip in, where squawk boxes fear to tred, eh?”
Which was perfectly true. As the human race rapidly found out in its explorations among the stars, the alien wears many garbs—which sociomathematical disciplines, the like of Rhoda’s, couldn’t necessarily always penetrate. Usually she did well enough—and Lob found his time taken up tidying phonemes and smoothing out kinks in her algebras of alien world views (being a trained ethnomathematician, as well as a lamaist magician)—and only occasionally asked Lob to help out with a trance insight when she ran up against some hopelessly alien cultural pattern. But this time she had run into a stone wall right at the very start, with a vengeance: a stone wall with precisely one stone in it!
Lobsang was an adept in the Tibetan chod ritual, where the celebrant offers himself up body and soul as a banquet for alien demons and imagines himself devoured by them, and a proficient in the various maps of hell-worlds and paradise-worlds oftheBardo Thodol, the Book of the Dead. So very remote from earthly reality, Lobsang could shortcut his way, via such psychic netherlands, into alien mindscapes that resisted Rhoda’s science; seeing all forms of being, from his Tibetan heights, as mere fluxes in the same universal illusion. If there was a wall here, then he would burrow under it: fearlessly, with peace of mind. The Tibetan chod banquet was a more gruelling, gruesome business than this cooking of the dayman, the way Lob had described it! The sense of one’s bowels being torn out, one’s veins sucked dry, the marrow spooned from one’s bones by demons! To experience all this—and believe it to be literally happening—yet observe it all with perfect composure . . . Lob was well prepared psychologically.
So, when the Clayfolk flocked back to the village to resume their peaceful, softly-flowing tasks, Lob went out there with us, right to the patch of ground before the hearth, and drew a white mandala outline on the mud with an aerosol spraycan—he called the shape a kyilkhor in his native Tibetan. Entering his magic diagram, he squatted down cross-legged.
The Clayfolk flowed around the lines of the kyilkhor, touching gently, murmuring that word of theirs. Lob began chanting to himself in Tibetan, a monotonous sing-song refrain to lull himself into a trance:
“Zab-cho shi-hto gong-pa rang-dol lay bar-doi tho-dol chen-mo cho-nyid bar-doi ngo-tod zhu-so . . .” he sang, with superb breath control, his eyes staring wide behind his faceplate, not seeing us at all though we knew he would return briefly, between wave peaks of the trance, to report the situation as he saw it . . .
‘The shapes flow, the colors change, the world walks backwards,” sang Lob after a while in English, staring at us sightlessly.
“Yet we are thinking beings. We make, we build. Yet this world flows to and fro in madness. All we can say is that a thing is, for the time that it is. Not what it is, since it may not be again. A hand, a shadow, a color. We must put a thing into itself and see how it fits. Then it is, and other things are. The fitting of a thing into its own shape is the shape of our agreement. The puttingof oneself into oneself is the Making, at the
dawn . . ."
“That’s why the dayman is tortured?”
“We feel astonished by our agreement,” Lob chanted on. “The sheer possibility of agreement on anything. But should we give thanks to the lights in the sky that we are in agreement? Shall we make gods? Is that what this is, this putting of oneself into oneself? No, it is the prevention of a god! One is a hero, who fits into oneself. If one did not fit into oneself, every dawn, there would be no rules. If one says something different every day, is that a rule? Pain stops the world, in a cry. The cry is the picture of pain. Thus the pain pictures the world . . .”
Then Lob was swimming through alien waves again, seeing us, he later told us, from their viewpoint. What delighted them most was our inflexible similarity. We were three heroes, baked into our suits. Our ship, a single random object, meant nothing compared to our three suited selves. Yet as soon as we uttered noises, we outraged them. However fervently they corrected us we failed to make the same sounds twice running. As heroes, we affirmed the being of the world; yet denied it b
y our every word, so that, in effect, we cancelled ourselves right out for them. We no longer had existence, in their eyes. So they ignored us.
Of course, this was only Lob’s Bardo-vision version—his own effort to fit things into themselves so that they made sense! We could feel free to take it with a pinch of salt.
“Chen-mo cho-nyid bar-doi ngo-tod zhu-so,” chanted Lob; then with a great bound he skipped out of the magic circle and hustled us back to the ship urgently, to tell us more of the way he saw the Clayfolk as seeing things, before the intuitions slipped from his grasp.
We stood by the window, watching Clayfolk molding clay with variable numbers of extruded fingers, their bodies bobbing and undulating in the orange mists. While we watched, the gasgiant planet rose to join the sun in the sky, and there were double shadows in the village again that appeared to cast light, not mask it: then not long afterwards the gasgiant set again below the same westward horizon, casting the day backwards towards morning.
“Don’t we torture the world into categories, in our own way?” grinned Lob lopsidedly. “With words and symbols—English, Tibetan, Syrian . . . They must be the noblest logicians in the universe, these. Number can hardly exist for them, yet they affirm series. Cause constantly cancels logic out because they can’t see into outer space to know the true causes of these strange effects. Yet they affirm logic. They deny the very evidence of their senses for the sake of it. Only thus is culture possible for them. Only thus can there be rules from day to day, and any form ol time-binding. Yet they can’t speak about theii world, because to do so destroys logic.”
“An intelligent species must use language ol some sort to be classified intelligent! What are these, then? Automata? Is this just an illusion ol culture out there? The pots. The huts. You say - they’re logical beings.”
“Ah, but strictly they aren’t so much logical beings, as logic personified, Rhoda. They’re propositions, essences. They can’t afford language here, it’s too destructive.”
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