by Brian Stableford
The first sign that anything was wrong was the radio going dead. At first, it was possible to hope that it was a simple failure of that particular piece of equipment, but within minutes the tell-tales on the instrument panel began winking out, and Connolly knew that the whole system had a bad case of the rot. The rot was a slow-growing hemophilic bacterium, which thrived on the first-generation technology that was still standard throughout the archipelago. In time, it wouldn’t be a problem, but for now it was a curse— especially for flyers.
The plane would have been sprayed regularly in order to keep its guts healthy; the real problem was that extensive spraying was selecting out immune strains, which could flourish regardless. For nearly a year, things had been getting worse instead of better, and Connolly knew that his name was about to be added to the statistics testifying to that deterioration. He was two thousand kilometers from Martinstown base, without so much as an atoll in between. The archipelago’s nearest airbase was no closer, and if he turned the plane he’d be flying into the prevailing wind. There was little he could do except pray that the engines would hold out.
Within twenty minutes he knew that his prayers hadn’t been answered. He was beginning to lose fuel; the feed-line was punctured. That meant that there was a danger of fire on top of everything else. Connolly began to regret that he’d ever left Earth for the sake of a colony world whose surface was ninety per cent ocean, the eco-sphere of which was cursed with bugs that loved to live on the surface of steel wires and steel plates, turning those surfaces brittle while they did so.
He wondered whether there was a reasonable chance that his life-raft might be spotted in time by another plane. Experience suggested that the probability was low: there was simply too much ocean. There was, however, one other chance. In latitudes not too far south of his present position, great tangled masses of floating weed and gigantic lily-pads gathered at this time of year: temporary islands that supported a rich epiflora throughout the calm summer until the coming of the storms. The ocean-dwelling indigenes, called “aquamen” by the colonists, used these gargantuan rafts as breeding grounds, and it was said that if a human could figure out which fruit it was safe to eat, and could catch fish with a line, he might live on such a raft for months. The scientists at First Landing sent out boats occasionally to visit the aquamen’s communities, taking their annual opportunity to study the aliens. There was also the chance of seeing a plane from the raft, whose attention he might be able attract by means of the flare-gun in the lifeboat.
While he still had some degree of control left, Connolly turned south. There was no guarantee that he’d sight a raft before he went down, but that was the way to maximize his chances—or so he figured.
The feed-line problem got worse, and it wasn’t too long before the engine went dead. The plane was now in a long, shallow glide. Connolly thought that he was lost for sure, when his sharp eyes picked out the floating island dead ahead. His spirits seized the opportunity to soar, and he was still bathing in the thrill of exultation when the fuel that had leaked from the feed-line caught fire, and it began to seem that he might be roasted in the very moment of his triumph.
He baled out, as rapidly as he possibly could, and let the burning plane glide on to its doom. The parachute slowed the descent of the ejector-seat, but he’d been very low and there was an almighty splash as the blue water rushed up to meet him. He was shaken, but not concussed, and he stayed calm until the seat bobbed up and let him draw air into his lungs. He had no trouble getting the lifeboat free, and, as he watched it inflate, he reflected that all was as well as could possibly be expected.
The floating island was still visible, but it seemed a long way off. There was no current, and he had to paddle to bring himself closer, but the sea was calm and it seemed easy enough to make progress. He was glad when the loose strands of floating weed began to foul the paddle, and gladder still when he began to bump the edges of the vast leaves with their walled edges and huge yellow flowers. He pushed on, heading for the heart of the raft, where towering tangled dendrites carried multicolored flower-heads and seed-pods high into the air, reaching for the sun. He was even glad when the aquamen suddenly broke surface around the dinghy, until one of them hauled himself into the boat, grabbed the paddle from Connolly’s hands, and smashed him over the head with the blade.
He just had time to stop being glad before unconsciousness claimed him.
* * * *
Connolly came round to find himself lying on his back, on a “mattress” which seemed to be made out of woven strips of dried seaweed. When he altered the angle of his head the pain dazed him. He blinked furiously, and when his sight cleared he was looking into the face of an aquaman, blue-black and large-eyed, with long whiskers trailing from the blunt, rounded snout. The face seemed to wear an expression of anxious concern and deep sadness, but Connolly knew enough about the aliens to realize that this was mere appearance, and signified nothing in human terms.
For a few moments, the aquaman met his stare, but then the luminous eyes withdrew as the long, supple neck lifted the head away. The alien shifted his posture; he had been leaning forward supported by the knuckles of his webbed hands, but now he squatted back on his froglike haunches.
Another face came into view beyond the alien’s shoulder, and Connelly saw to his astonishment that it was the face of a human woman. The aquaman turned to speak to her in his own tongue—a series of liquid syllables that sounded oddly reminiscent of gurgling water-pipes. She answered in kind, pronouncing the alien sounds easily and confidently. The aquaman then moved away, reaching out to help himself into a semi-upright position by grasping trailing straps dangling from the wooden frame of the tent-like shelter in which Connolly had been placed. Aquamen could not stand properly erect, being designed for swimming and scrambling rather than for walking.
“Am I glad to see you,” said Connolly, wondering why it was that moving his lips made his head hurt so. “For a moment there, I thought I was in trouble.”
“You are in trouble, Mr. Connolly,” she replied, quietly. For some reason, the only implication of the comment that registered was the mysterious fact that she knew his name. Then he remembered that his name-badge was stitched on to his shirt on the rim of the breast-pocket.
“You appear,” he said, with very faint humor, “to have the advantage of me.”
She knelt down beside the head of the pallet. She was about fifty. Her hair was quite white and her taut skin was tanned brown. She was tall and long-limbed, but very thin. She held her body in a peculiar way, as if she were trying to assume the slanting stance of an aquaman.
“My name is Maria Asprey,” she told him. “I’m an anthropologist.”
Connolly narrowed his eyes, wishing that the curtain of pain would not confuse his thoughts so. He saw that she was wearing a T-shirt that was creamy white in front but had blue-black stains reaching over the shoulders and under the arms. If the back was all blue-black, as this pattern suggested, the shirt had obviously been designed in imitation of the coloring of the alien’s hides. Her shorts, though, were faded blue denim. The clothes looked as if she had been wearing them for a long time.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not up to much since that crack on the head. Could you get on the radio and report for me. The rot took out the radio before I could send a mayday and Martinstown won’t know I’m down.”
She put her fingers to the crown of his head, making him wince.
“I don’t think your skull’s cracked,” she said. Then she added: “I’m sorry, Mr. Connolly, I don’t have a radio.”
“What...?” His thoughts were still clouded, and he couldn’t quite register sufficient astonishment. “Your boat....”
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking her fingers away just as her touch had begun to soothe instead of hurt, “I’m making it worse. I don’t have a boat, either. I’m afraid there’s no way I can contact Martinstown, or any other part of the colony.”
There was silence for some moments while he collected his reserves of strength. Finally, he managed to say: “You got shipwrecked too?”
She shook her head. “I’m a voluntary castaway,” she told him. “As I said, I’m an anthropologist. I came here to learn about the ulaquel dur’ya. I suppose you call them aquamen. I came to learn their way of life and their way of thought. The kind of apparatus you’re talking about would only get in the way. As I said, I’m an anthropologist.”
For the moment, it didn’t make sense.
“No radio?” he said, to make certain that he had heard correctly.
“No radio,” she repeated.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
She didn’t smile. Her face seemed set, devoid of expression.
“It’s the only way to learn a new culture,” she said. “Immersion in its way of life. To understand how others live—whether the others in question are human or merely humanoid—you have to be able to live as they do, to adopt their way of being in the world. You have to achieve a kind of empathy that allows you to place yourself, imaginatively, in the shoes of another person, so that you can genuinely interact with him, communicate with him...put yourself inside the context of his meanings so that your intuitions coincide with his—or hers, of course. It’s not easy. It was difficult enough in the old days, on Earth; it’s doubly difficult here, trying to operate in a wholly alien culture. One can’t afford the risk of...distractions. I’ve tried to leave the objects of my own culture out of the reckoning, as far as possible.”
Connolly was beginning to feel slightly better, though he had to keep perfectly still.
“No radio and no boat,” he said, his voice hardly above a whisper, “seems to be taking things to absurd extremes.”
“At the end of the season,” she said, “a boat will come out from First Landing to pick me up. The ulaquel dur’ya return to the sea, then.”
“Well,” said Connelly, after a moment’s hesitation. “I guess if you can take it, so can I. I’ll try not to get in your way. I wouldn’t want to be a distraction.”
She didn’t respond immediately, and he gradually realized that something was wrong. Belatedly, he remembered the very first words she had spoken. He tried to lift his hand in order to take her by the arm, and his head began to throb again. He had a sudden vision of the paddle coming down, wielded by the furious alien.
“He tried to kill me,” said Connolly, faintly. “But they’re supposed to be friendly...docile.”
“They’re normally non-violent,” she confirmed. “You don’t know what happened, do you?”
Obviously, she read in his eyes that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Your plane,” she said, levelly, “crashed into the raft. It smashed up the heart pretty badly. It killed seventeen people, mostly women and children.”
Maria Asprey’s face was still almost devoid of expression, but he knew that she was concealing strong emotion. She was suffering inside, as the aquamen must be suffering.
“Oh my God,” he said, weakly. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t see her go down....I guess I was fighting with the ejector-seat or trying to get the dinghy inflated. I didn’t think....”
He stopped, studying her face carefully, trying to understand what he saw there. “It was an accident,” he said, feeling that it was necessary to make that clear. “It wasn’t my fault. They must understand that.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “They can’t.”
* * * *
When Maria Asprey returned, Connolly had recovered sufficiently to sit up. She had brought him a bowl made from some kind of vegetable gourd, which contained a lukewarm soup smelling strongly of fish. He stirred it with a spoon made from slightly rubbery wood, and eventually plucked up the courage to taste it. The salinity was so strong that it made him wince.
“Do you eat this stuff often?” he asked.
“Not so very often,” she replied. “But it is warm.”
“Almost,” he said, unenthusiastically. “They have fire, then?”
“They use clear shells from swimming mollusks as burning glasses. Their use of fire is very limited, though.”
He spooned soup into his mouth for a minute or two, quickly getting used to the taste. She offered him a shallow cup containing fresh, if slightly murky, water and he gulped it down gratefully. She waited, squatting on her haunches in evident imitation of the way the aquamen sat.
“Have you explained to them—about the accident?”
She shook her head.
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s not that easy, Mr. Connolly. There’s no concept in their way of thinking, no word in their vocabulary, which corresponds to ‘accident’. In their way of thinking, nothing is accidental. There’s no such thing as chance. Everything that happens has a cause, not only in a physical sense but in a moral sense too. Misfortunes are brought by men upon themselves, if they offend the ancestral spirits—either that, or they’re the result of evil magic. In the case of the plane, they don’t even need to resort to magical explanation. You brought it, and they hold you responsible.”
He struggled to sit up straighter, but found it more difficult than he had anticipated. In the end, he collapsed back until he was again supported on one elbow.
“Do they think I wanted to crash?”
“No,” replied the anthropologist. “But they hold desires and intentions in far less respect than we do. Among the ulaquel dur’ya, individuals are held responsible even for the unintended consequences of their actions—even unforeseeable consequences—except in cases where a person’s actions are held to have been guided, either by sorcery or by the ancestral spirits. There’s no distinction here between murder and manslaughter, and no such thing as accidental death.”
“Don’t they ever get ill?” inquired Connolly, in surly tones.
“They hold that all illness is caused supernaturally; it’s either punishment or bewitchment.”
“You haven’t tried to explain to them, I suppose, that they’re crazy?”
She regarded him calmly, refusing to acknowledge his hostility or his irony. “They’re not crazy,” she told him. “They simply have a different view of the world. I’m here to learn about it, not to change it. I’m trying to understand the way they see things, to enter into their way of life. I can’t impose my own ways of thinking upon the life of the tribe. I have to set aside my own judgments and my own ideas. It’s the only way to achieve empathetic understanding—what social scientists call verstehen.”
He gave her back the empty bowl.
“So you haven’t explained to them that the crash was an accident—something I couldn’t help.”
“No,” replied Maria Asprey. “No, I haven’t. As I said, I couldn’t begin to make them understand.”
“So what happens to me?”
“I’ve put in a plea on your behalf to the culumesqua.”
“What the hell’s a cul...” He tried to get his tongue around the alien syllables, but failed.
“He’s responsible for the medical and moral welfare of the clan. He deals with illness, with the detection of magic, with the everyday business of prophesy. He has nothing to do with crimes and civil wrongs, which are the elders’ business, but in all issues which touch on what you’d call the supernatural, his word is law.”
“What I’d call the supernatural?” he echoed.
“They don’t think in the same terms,” she reminded him.
“In other words,” said Connolly, “he’s the witch-doctor.”
“That’s rather a misleading term,” she told him, “even in its original usage and implications. It carries all the wrong connotations. The culumesqua carries the primary responsibility for the moral wellbeing of the community. He is the one to whom they turn in times of crisis. His role is to soothe their fears, to offer them responses at times when they feel helpless, to give them confidence not only in the continued survival of the tribe, but in the rightness of their conduct.”
“Great,” said Connolly. “What’s he going to do for me?”
“He has agreed to journey to uru, to obtain judgment on your guilt or innocence.”
“Where?”
“Uru. It’s...I suppose you’d call it a mythical place, beyond dreams. His spirit can journey there through the medium of a drug-induced trance. There the culumesqua can attain direct communication with the ancestral spirits, in symbolic dreams which only he and his kind can interpret.”
Connolly could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Jesus Christ.” he croaked. “You’ve asked this goddam witch-doctor to dive into some kind of hallucination to find out whether or not I’m guilty. What the hell happens if he says I am? What’s to stop him making up his mind any old how?”
Maria Asprey shifted her position slightly, to rest fatigued muscles.
“Look, Connolly,” she said, “there’s no other way to approach this problem except through their frame of reference. They’re the ones who have to make a decision; they’re the ones who have to come to terms with the loss of seventeen people, including nearly a third of the season’s brood. There’s nothing I can do except explore the avenues that their culture makes available.”
“You could make them see the bloody truth!”
“They have their own ways of defining truth and falsehood.”
“But they’re crazy!”
She shook her head. “It’s a way of being in the world,” she told him. “It works, for them. It’s coherent, in its own terms. Whenever evil manifests itself, they feel compelled to debit the moral responsibility. They have to be reassured that someone is responsible, because the idea that they might be the helpless victims of an uncontrollable fate would be intolerable to them—they live too close to the margins of survival for that. Belief in chance is a luxury. Mr. Connolly; we can afford it only because we’re so well-equipped to preserve ourselves against its vicissitudes. Even we have trouble coming to terms with misfortune, don’t we?”
“You’ve got to help me,” he said, dully.
“I am helping you,” she told him. “I’m doing everything that can be done. I can’t do the impossible.”
“You’re letting my life hang on the whim of some hophead’s dream.”
“No, Mr. Connolly...I’m appealing to the Supreme Court. I’m doing everything that can be done to preserve your life. If I fail...there was nothing else I could do. Nothing.”
“You half-believe that I’m guilty yourself,” he accused. “You’re that far ahead on the road to insanity yourself.”
“I’m trying to understand the aquamen,” she said, allowing herself to use the human word without inflection. “I’m trying to cultivate the ability to enter into their way of life, to be able to see situations as they see them. I’m not becoming one of them. I can still see things from your point of view, as well. The crash was an accident, caused by the rot. But Martinstown lies due west of the archipelago, and you approached the raft from the north. You did change the airplane’s course, Mr. Connolly, didn’t you? You did head for the raft.”
“That doesn’t make me a murderer,” he said, spitting the words out sourly.
“I know that,” she said, softly. “But we’re on a floating island on an alien world. That changes...everything.”
“Miss Asprey,” he said, as though he was fated to repeat it over and over in an eternally hopeless attempt to win her comprehension, “it wasn’t my fault. If anything happens to me...how are you going to square your conscience?”
Her voice was thin and distant, and she turned her face away to look out through the opening of the shelter even while she made her response. “Conscience,” she said, “doesn’t come into it. It doesn’t come into it at all.”
* * * *
Evening fell, and the twilight slowly ebbed away. There had been plenty of light inside the shelter, whose walls were crudely-woven, but now it rapidly grew dark. The moon was nearly full, but it was a small moon, and its light was meager by comparison with the white glare of Earth’s companion. The stars were bright, but they seemed impotent to interfere with the gathering gloom inside the alien nest.
Maria Asprey returned again, this time carrying a strange night-light: a bowl made out of translucent shells cemented together, filled with a suspension of bioluminescent algae. The light it gave out was cold and very weak, but it was enough to fill the shelter with radiance and shadows.
“Get me to the boat,” said Connolly, trying once again to sit up straight, hoping against hope that he could stand.
“Where could you go?” she asked. Her voice was still unnaturally calm. “The ocean is their world. You couldn’t get away.”
“There’s a flare-gun in the emergency-kit. I could defend myself. It’s a chance, but I might get clear, under cover of the darkness.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said, squatting down as before. “They’d slit the fabric of the dinghy from below. Your flare-gun would be useless. Darkness is no cover; they see well by moonlight, and they remain active by night. It’s not possible.”
“Then bring the gun to me here.”
“Why?” she asked, tiredly.
“Because I’m damned if I’ll give in without a fight. If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to have to work to do it.” His voice was high and urgent, but far from hysterical. His anger was under control.
“You’ve already been the cause of seventeen deaths,” she told him, flatly.
He felt helpless even to protest against the injustices.
“How the hell are you going to explain this,” he asked, “when the season ends and you have to return to your own kind? How?”
“I’ll just have to do my best,” she said. “If the people at First Landing think that I’ve done wrong, and that I should have acted differently... well, that’s for them to judge.”
“Maybe you can suggest that they shoot up with dope and consult the ancestors in order to figure out whether you’re on the right side of fate—except that all the ancestral spirits got left behind on Earth, sixty-six light years away.”
“For the ulaquel dur’ya,” she said, “the world of uru is as real as this one. Even the dreams of ordinary men and women are sacred and meaningful. They’re the medium in which they see through reality, into the greater realm where this world is simply a fragment, where the futures of men and of worlds are determined, and where the moral order of the universe is preserved. The culumesqua might discover in uru that there was a reason for those people to be killed today. He might find that it was part of some misapprehended pattern—that you were just the instrument through which other forces were working. Perhaps the responsibility for the deaths rested with the dead themselves, in consequence of some evil they harbored. Perhaps powerful sorcerers were at work, attempting to destroy the tribe, requiring the tribe to make powerful magic in reprisal. Don’t mock, Mr. Connolly—your very life depends on the culumesqua’s journey.”
“At best, on a whim of chance,” he countered, “and, at worst, on a decision he’s already taken. It’s too easy for him to tell them what they want to hear—that I’m guilty and that they can take out their frustrations by killing me. Too bloody easy by half.”
His head was on fire and he couldn’t find the words to go on. Helplessly, he let his eyes close, and wondered if what was happening really mattered at all. At Martinstown, in the hospital, he’d be a sure bet to recover but out here, in the middle of nowhere, without proper care and proper food, he might be finished any way....already prepared by circumstance as a human sacrifice.
He didn’t rouse himself from his torpor again until he heard the movements which signified that Maria Asprey was no longer alone in her vigil. She was moving round to sit still closer to his head, while three of the aliens squeezed themselves up against the walls, leaving a clear space between the pallet and the doorway. Into this space moved a fourth aquaman, whose body was decorated with an elaborate costume, decorated with shells and flowers. He was carrying some kind of staff made out of bone, intricately carved.
Connolly opened his mouth to speak—to issue some kind of formal protest—but Maria Asprey immediately laid her fingers across his lips. The pressure of her fingertips was very gentle, but the implied command stilled his protest. He looked up at her face, palely lit by the wan light. She tried to smile, and for the first time he thought that she really was on his side. She seemed to be sympathetic, hoping that things would come right for him. She didn’t seem crazy any more.
There was a rustle and a sequence of clicks as the culumesqua squatted down before him, making passes with the staff as though he were a stage magician declaring to an imaginary audience that without the benefit of wires or mirrors he was about to make Connolly disappear. Eventually, he laid the staff down and produced a small capsule made from a leathery weed-bladder from the folds of his costume. His body was rigid, and his nimble fingers daubed some kind of ointment from the bladder upon his head and breast. Then, raising his eyes aloft, he began to rock gently from side to side, crooning softly in the liquid tones of his language.
Although the words of the song—if they were words—were unlike those of any human tongue, Connolly found the slow rhythm and the cadence strangely familiar. He felt as though he ought to be yielding to hypnosis, but in fact his mind seemed to be growing clearer. Whenever he made some involuntary movement, Maria Asprey misconstrued it, and tried to restrain him. She lowered her crouch somewhat, and both of her hands began to flow over his face, soothing him with caresses. There was sweat on his brow despite the coolness of the night, and she brushed it away with her fingertips.
At first, he thought it would be over quite quickly; the silent watchers were clearly expectant. However, they were also patient, and knew the skill of waiting. Time dragged by, and the song dragged on and on, although the culumesqua was clearly no longer conscious. The minutes turned to hours, and Connolly found himself slipping periodically into a trance of his own, lulled more by Maria Asprey’s touch than by the alien crooning. Always, though, he came back from the brink of sleep, letting memories flow through his mind in an unsteady train, intermingling with his hopes and his fears.
It seems, he told himself silently, that my case is unduly confused. Perhaps the ancestral spirits have never before been faced with a problem of this nature.
When the silence finally did come, it took him quite by surprise, although he made no convulsive movement to betray himself. The silence lasted for two or three minutes before the aquaman began to speak, the syllables spilling from his tongue in an unnaturally regular stream. The voice sounded deeper now than it had when it was singing, and more remote.
He didn’t have to ask about the verdict; it was plain in the way Maria Asprey’s hands suddenly gripped his shoulders. She had been praying for him, he was sure, although he had no idea as to which deity her prayers might have been directed.
He acted swiftly and reflexively, surging forward, with his own hands reaching for the cidumesqua’s unusual throat. She pulled him back, and the others went to help her, though he knew as he collapsed that he wouldn’t have been able to carry through the attack. He was too weak, and they were all too strong.
* * * *
When Connolly was quite dead, spread-eagled across a gigantic lily-pad, with his blood spreading out in the shape of a spiny brittle-star along the leaf-veins, Maria Asprey looked down at the fish-spear in her hands, as if surprised to find the barb stained. Then stain didn’t look like blood; in the half-light of the alien night, there was no color.
Connolly hadn’t screamed for mercy, but instead had shouted his wrath until the breath was gone from him. Strangely, all the anger had seemed to be directed at her, but perhaps she was just being over-sensitive. She was, after all, the one who had tried to help him. He was wrong to have taken the view that she had betrayed him in some way. Perhaps it was only to be expected, but it was still wrong. She had done everything that she could, and she had done what she had to do. She had nothing for which to reproach herself.
It was a pity...such a terrible pity.
Given more time, she felt sure that she could have enabled him to see things as she saw them, and to understand.