by Chad Oliver
“It’s not only good, it’s fantastic,” agreed Ashley. “I guess you got it from Rondol, but I didn’t even know he was learning my language while he was teaching me his.”
Shek inhaled another cigarette. “Sure. Smart cookie, Rondol! He sort of picks things up, you see. Best doctor in the system, too. You gentlemen were lucky.”
“We know.”
“Well,” boomed Shek, “so much for the inevitable questions. I told you that you knew all the answers before we started!”
Knew all the answers? I hardly knew the questions!
“Here’s the deal,” Shek told them. His idiomatic English was so absolutely flawless that it was hard to believe that it was not his native tongue. And he had learned it in a few short months. Martin Ashley was almost beyond amazement. If Shek had suddenly sprouted wheels and roared off down the hallway, he probably wouldn’t have flicked an eyelid. “We’ve got a ship going to Centauri the day after tomorrow,” Shek said. “We’ve made it a point so far to avoid Earth shipping, but that’s your ride home. We’ll leave you there and you’ll be picked up in a matter of a few days, I would imagine. Lot of traffic out that way.”
“Home,” said Bob Chavez slowly. “I’m really going home.”
Martin Ashley smoked his pipe and said nothing.
The interview, if such it could properly be called, wore on until long afternoon shadows began to filter down into the vast canyons between the white towers. Martin Ashley felt himself gradually relaxing. The big man was a comfortable sort to be around; he was one of the few men of his type that Ashley had known who was neither a phony nor an ass; Shek really was frank and good-natured, and it was a stupid man indeed who failed to catch the glint of sharp intelligence in his eyes.
Martin Ashley relaxed—and that meant that he could think again. It wasn’t a brooding kind of thought that made him perpetually occupied with Big Problems, which were usually far more ridiculous than many of the “little” problems that all people faced just in the course of growing up and staying alive, but rather a keen curiosity that operated almost on a subconscious level, periodically stepping forward to demand his attention. He had been asking questions ever since he learned how to talk, and for better or for worse it was far too late to stop now.
“It’s so astonishing,” Bob Chavez was saying, shaking his head. “All this, I mean. A few hours ago we were in the middle of nowhere, cut off forever from home and people like ourselves, and now here we are—in this fabulous city, comfortable, and with a ticket for home in our pockets.”
Martin Ashley changed the subject; they had, he figured, about wrung that one dry. “How long have you been in contact with the Nern?” he asked slowly.
Shek smiled. “It’s been a long, long time,” he said. “Not just the Nern, but all the other peoples on Carinae Four. We’ve been in contact for thousands of years. You might say that we sort of grew up together.”
Ashley eyed Shek and asked the question that he had been framing for the past fifteen minutes. It wasn’t worded as a question, but he knew that Shek would catch its import. “You have been remarkably restrained and wise,” he suggested, “in not interfering with their culture. I could see no signs at all that you had tried to make it over in your model, and it must have been a powerful temptation—so close to you, and such a large potential market. Your hands-off policy is practically unique for a culture as highly developed as this one.”
Shek laughed his big booming laugh and stuck another cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “Ashley,” he said, “you know better than that. The fact is that they have been remarkably decent to let us go on our own way as best we could.” He shook his head. “Believe me, it would be utterly fantastic for us even to consider fooling around with the Nern culture—that’s a fast short-cut to oblivion.” He stabbed his finger at Ashley. “We’re not trying to teach them anything—we’re trying to learn!”
Martin Ashley smiled with a certain inner satisfaction.
He had known the answer to that question in advance, too.
VI
It was the next evening, and the lifting of the ship for far Centauri was only fifteen hours away.
Martin Ashley had left Bob Chavez at the spaceport and had more or less invited himself out to Shek’s country home. It hadn’t been very difficult, actually, since the two men had taken an immediate liking to each other.
It was a charming home, set in a landscaped square of grass and flowers. Shek’s wife was just the opposite of her husband, at least on the surface—she was cool, poised, and unobtrusive. The couple had two small children, both girls, who proceeded to chase each other around the living room until they were made to go stand in the corner by their mother. Ashley was vastly amused by the punishment meted out to them—it seemed that methods of disciplining children didn’t change very much even across the gulf of light-years.
Only Shek could speak English, of course, so Ashley had to let smiles and nods do his talking for him. He had a tall cool drink in his hand, which Shek had made with more care than Ashley ever expended on his own drinks, and he experienced a curious duality of feeling that he had known many times before. At once, he was both an outsider and a family friend. He liked it here, and felt that he was liked in return, but somehow he didn’t fit. He was honest with himself about it: he envied Shek his life, and yet he knew that he could never live that way.
“Shek,” he said finally, “there’s some information I’ve got to have, and I’ve come to you to get it. I’ve very little time left now, and I want you to help me fit some pieces together.”
“I’ll try,” Shek agreed readily. The big man was more subdued in his home than he was in his office, and his thoughtful side was much more in evidence. “Shoot.”
Martin Ashley sipped his drink, which was delicious. “Ever since I left the Juarez and headed down for Carinae Four,” he said, “I’ve been sniffing around like an ape at a power generator. I knew there was something utterly out of the ordinary about that planet from the very first, but that’s no answer—it’s just a problem. I saw right away that the Nern were not so simple as they seemed, and I tried to act always on the assumption that they were not primitive, no matter how they looked on the outside. I knew I was right, and you confirmed that for me yesterday when you told us, in effect, that they were way ahead of you, just as you are way ahead of us—”
Shek raised his hand, objecting. “Let’s just say different,” he said. “Or more complex along certain lines. This business of being ‘advanced’ is a pretty subjective thing, in my opinion.”
“Correction noted,” agreed Ashley readily. “But we won’t try to solve that particular problem tonight. But here’s the point, Shek: I know what the Nern are not and I have for a long time. But I don’t know a blessed thing about what they are.” He paused. “Shek, I’ve got to know. Don’t ask me why.”
Shek eyed him carefully. “I guess you do, at that,” he said. “Of course, I can’t pretend to tell you the inside story because I don’t know it all, either. I can give you the general picture, that’s all.”
“That’ll be plenty,” Ashley assured him.
“O.K., Martin. Here, let me fill up your glass again. This will take a little time.”
Martin Ashley leaned forward, hoping that he did not look as excited as he felt.
This was the story Shek told, while the evening shadows marched in steady shadow files on into night.
Man, wherever he is found, is a strange and much misunderstood animal. It was not so much man’s famous “better brain” that made the difference, although he had that, too. Rather, it was his ability to symbolize and thus to be a carrier of culture. The growing totality of culture was passed on from generation to generation, and individuals were born into functioning systems that they themselves had done little or nothing to bring into being.
Each new person did not think up for himself the ideas of cooking food or playing football or using electricity—he just did them “naturally,” because “everybody did it
that way.”
Now, culture is a learned process, which must be taught and absorbed, which is why human children are “helpless” for so long and why they must spend almost half of their lives going to school in one form or another.
As cultures developed, a knotty question appeared: What happens when the culture is so complicated that one person can’t possibly learn it all?
Technological processes snowballed whenever they were set in motion, and when technology changed so did the rest of culture. Cultures ballooned—from cave-dwellers to villages to mammoth cities, from stories told around campfires to libraries filled with so many books that it took a special staff just to keep track of them all.
There was too much to learn. What was the solution?
One way out, the way unconsciously selected by Earth and by the people of Carinae V, was to learn a small core of culture and then specialize with increasing minuteness in a technical field. The results were sometimes painful; scientists who neither knew nor cared about the effects of what they did in their labs, soldiers who fought without knowing why, governments that legislated in mental darkness, writers who wrote glibly about problems which they were incompetent to understand. Men learned and learned and worked and worked and piled up more and more for the next generation to wrestle with—and for what?
For fun, and for an old-age pension that they never learned how to enjoy.
There was another solution, and the Nern had taken it long ago. They edited their culture down to essentials, and learned to live in it.
The very concept of editing a culture assumed an awareness of what culture was—a learned process, the result of arbitrary history, and not an instinctive “right way to do things,” as opposed to all other ways, which were wrong. Getting this idea across to a population was the biggest hurdle to be faced, and when it was done the rest was relatively easy. The Nern handled their indoctrination in what appeared to be a rite of passage, an initiation ceremony for children. It was, indeed, an initiation—the children had been brought up to cherish the ideals of their culture, and now they were told and shown that these ways of living were arbitrary and could be changed. This did not mean that they were no longer to value them—but only that they must be critical of what they valued, and capable of rational evaluation.
There was another problem, or rather two problems. What was essential, and essential for what?
The Nern took as their goal the value of survival with maximum integration, cohesiveness of function, individual fulfillment, constant challenge, and peace. It was no Utopia, of course—this was a real culture, with real human beings in it, with real hopes and fears and sorrows.
They were not helpless, not even after they had decided against a machine culture multiplied forever. They really knew culture, which was man’s most distinctive possession. They were masters of the culture process—they knew what seeds to sow in other cultures to produce almost any desired result. They knew the pivotal points of cultures—they could, at a distance, through psychology and hypnosis and adroit cultural appeals, turn an enemy into an ally or tear it apart with civil war.
They had found the true “uncharted corridors of the mind,” and they had explored them thoroughly.
On the surface, as Ashley had observed, there was a surprisingly uniform planetary culture, with a mixed economy and only the simplest sort of tools. There were shamans and rituals and moiety-type social organizations. There was an elaborate series of myths about the star-brothers, with their campfires in the sky.
But underneath it was different. Very different. Under the surface of that “uniform” planetary culture was tremendous cultural diversity. Each group was unique in the way the elements were put together, in the dominant values by which the culture lived. The hunting and gathering and fishing and limited agriculture served to tie the people to their land, and make them appreciate it, in the absence of a market economy. They had found machines to be useful, and certainly not “bad,” but they had found that machines carried a price tag which they could not afford.
One solution to a specialized system was to build robots; another was to eliminate the useless jobs entirely. Their crops were non-tedious in nature, requiring very little time and yielding a large return. At the same time, when you ate a meal you knew where it came from and did not take it for granted. The shamans were genuine doctors; they combined advanced psychosomatic medicine with “herbs” similar to natural wonder drugs and sound surgical techniques, and they kept the chants and the singing so as to avoid divorcing science and religion. The rituals restated the values of the culture, and were regarded as both good fun and as efficient structuring devices for the society. The attitude toward them was not unlike that found in America toward Santa Claus—something which only the children believed in literally, but which all the adults could appreciate and participate in. Their dual division of society was a nicely integrated system that provided a framework for sports and games and dancing contests, and their preferred marriage systems were quite workable forms of social insurance. Their language was designed to emphasize cultural tolerance and objectivity. And who could be pressed for time, when it was all the same day, repeating itself forever?
It was not a perfect system, and they knew it. It changed all the time, and its people were human enough to foul things up now and then. But it was a try, a way of doing things, and whether it was better or worse than other ways depended pretty much on how the observer felt about such things.
The Nern had substituted philosophy and songs and dancing for books, and their philosophy was only simple on the surface. The stars were their brothers, because they had sensed a genuine unity of all life everywhere; it was all related because it was all the same process, and to the Nern that was kinship.
And there was the sun, and the trees, and the sounds of happy people. Perhaps, in a way, that was the best of all. The population was small, only some four million people on the whole planet, but they did not place their value in numbers.
“That’s what I know about the Nern,” Shek finished, putting down his cigarette which promptly went out. “And now it’s very late. Come along, Martin, and spend the night with us. I’ll drop you off at the spaceport in the morning.”
“Very kind of you, Shek,” Ashley said. “Thanks.”
He had a room on the second floor, a room with a window open to the cool night air. He lay awake for a long time that night, looking out at the stars, the star-brothers, the ancestral dead and the never-born, sitting around their campfires in the sky—
It was dawn when he slept.
The great gray ship that was bound for far Centauri, one hundred light-years away, pointed her slim snout at the noonday sun and waited.
Martin Ashley had had two tough decisions to make, and he had made them both. He stood with Bob Chavez at the lock elevator, waiting for it to go up and into the ship. The ship towered over his head, a metal giant, pointing.
Quite suddenly, the Earth seemed very near.
“Good-by, Bob,” he said, holding out his hand.
Bob Chavez shook it firmly, and he made no attempt to argue with Ashley about the decision that he had made. Funny what a few months will do to a boy, Ashley thought. Bob has become a man.
He would miss him.
“Best of luck, Mart,” Chavez said. “Sorry I was such a brat at first.”
“You were good company,” Martin Ashley said. “Perhaps one day we’ll meet again.”
“Perhaps. I hope so. I’ll tell Earth you said hello.”
A light flashed and the elevator lifted. Bob Chavez was gone.
Old Alberto Chavez would be proud of his son now, but he would never know. Martin Ashley smiled a little. Fifty-three down and one to go.
He turned and walked away from the great gray ship, the sun in his eyes. He was very much alone. He walked as fast as he could, and he did not look back.
One week later, Martin Ashley was in space again.
The big ship from Carinae V had maneu
vered with rare skill to pace the empty hulk of the Juarez, still circling in its endless satellite orbit about the planet of the Nern.
In a wonderfully light and flexible spacesuit, Martin Ashley pushed himself across to the ship that had been his home. Shek went with him, and they went through the emergency lock together.
There were still enough lights on in the Juarez so that they could see, but somehow they just made the gloom worse. There is nothing more depressing than a dead ship, and the Juarez was dead. There was nothing left now but one mechanical voice, and ghost memories of the dead and the darkness prowled through the hollow rooms and passageways.
In the silent control room, Ashley flicked on a ship amplifier. The message still came, endlessly repeating from the recording, sending Ashley’s own words of a lifetime ago drifting into space:
“THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN … SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE … WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT … SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL …THIS IS THE JUAREZ.”
Martin Ashley canceled the message and turned off the transmitter. There was no need for it now, with Ernie dead and Bob Chavez on his way back home.
The last voice of the Juarez was stilled, and neither Martin Ashley nor Shek broke the silence.
They turned out all the lights and went back to their waiting ship.
The ship flashed on—toward Carinae IV.
“In a way, I envy you, Mart,” Shek said, “but it’s not for me.”
“It’s funny,” Ashley told him, “but that’s just what I thought at your house.”
“I’ll be down to see you, sometime. Sometime soon.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
And the great ship landed—in a sea of grass, beside a tiny shuttle that stood alone, an alien statue in the fields of night. Martin Ashley stepped outside, into the darkness, and moments later the ship from Carinae V lifted away into the great sea of space with a whine and a roar.