The Totems of Abydos

CHAPTER 7





“May I see?” asked Brenner, speaking clearly.

The tiny creature, some three Commonworld feet or so in height, looked up from its work, where it was gouging in the dirt, digging for tubers.

Brenner smiled, and extended his hand.

He could have lifted the Pon with one hand, but, unlike Rodriguez, he had chosen not to impress his greater strength on them.

Reluctantly the Pon held the scarp out to Brenner. He did not have enough sense, Brenner noted, to reverse it in his hand, but Brenner took it carefully. It was sharp, but not all that sharp. Small, sturdy, broad, slightly curved, it was less a knife than a gouge, less an instrument for stabbing or cutting, than for digging or scraping. To be sure, Brenner supposed it could be dangerous. It could, for example, administer a shovel-like wound, or scrape flesh from bones.

Brenner looked at the object carefully. He turned it about. To this one, at this time, there clung particles of moist earth. It was the first time he had seen one closely. It was the single most common implement of the Pons. The second most common implement seemed to be the pointed stick.

“Thank you,” said Brenner, handing back the tool.

When he rose to his feet he saw that two others of the Pons had been watching him.

There had seemed something unusual about the scarp to Brenner, but he was not certain, at that time, what it was.

He then returned to where Rodriguez was resting.

It was in the vicinity of noon, on the fifth day from Company Station.

He looked back at the Pon who had now freed a tuber from the earth.

Pons did not use the scarps for scraping the interiors of hollow trees, for insects, or for scraping aside damp leaves, or turning rocks, in pursuit of grubs, as might have other forms of simiantype life. The customs of the Pons, or their taboos, or principles, he had gathered, did not condone such predations. The complex worlds could learn much from the Pons, with their reverence for life. Happily, too, the Pons did not seem to realize that the grains, the roots, the vegetables, and such, on which they fed sparingly also shared the chemistries of life. He trusted that Rodriguez would not bring this to their attention. It would not do at all, if the Pons, who seemed to be an unusually consistent sort of creature, decided that they had a duty to starve themselves to death. Too, they need not know of the dangers they posed to small creatures in performing actions so simple as taking a drink of water, washing their bodies, or, indeed, in even breathing. To be sure, lunatic moralities had caught on here and there throughout the galaxy, at least officially, through well-organized political action, by means of which it seemed that anything could be accomplished, no matter how insane or destructive, but even so, sanity, forced into the guise of hypocrisy, had usually prevented the wholesale extinction of peoples. As a case in point, the examples of saints who had murdered their own children, and then as many other people as possible, and then themselves, in expiation, and to provide compensatory justice for worms, and such, despite their inspirational value, and the sentimentality, poignancy, and sympathy with which they were portrayed in various media, were more likely to be objects of public praise than private emulation.

“The Pons do not eat insects and grubs,” Brenner had observed to Rodriguez a day or two earlier.

“I don’t either,” had said Rodriguez.

Brenner could still not place what had seemed to him odd about the scarp he had examined.

Rodriguez rose up and clapped his hands. “Let us be on our way,” he said.