the level of reportage. We are still theoretically primitive in our science. Indeed, I often envy the fellows who only have to worry about what molecules do, and not what they meant by it, what they had in mind, whether or not it makes sense, what was the point of it, how it came to be done in the first place, whether it should have been done in the first place, how it should best be interpreted, and such.”
“Be serious,” said Brenner.
“Do you have something particular in mind?” asked Rodriguez.
“It was clear in your work, in the Aquatic Clans book, that you disapproved of the sacrifice lotteries of the Zenic crustaceans.”
“They were rigged,” said Rodriguez.
“And that was the foundation of your objection?” asked Brenner.
“I did not think highly of them, independently,” admitted Rodriguez.
“More deplorable was your reference, in the Phratries book, to the feces-tasting ceremony of the feather-gilled Humblers of Lesser Carthage as disgusting.”
“I would not have wanted to do it,” said Rodriguez.
“A great many people on the home world regard that particular ceremony as being very meaningful and beautiful, finding in it a veritable celebration in its way of oneness and love, an emblem of joy and humility, a way in which one life form, with gracious delicacy, acknowledges its own small place in the palace of life.”
“That sounds to me like a value judgment,” said Rodriguez.
“It is not claiming to be science,” pointed out Brenner.
At the time I wrote that,” said Rodriguez, “I had not realized that Humbler missionaries had made so many converts on the home world, but, even so, I would have written it.” A great Humbler prophet, incidentally, over a century ago, had taught the proud, vainglorious Humblers that one did not have to have feather gills to be a Humbler. From his time on, this lesson having been absorbed with due repentance and guilt, Humbleism had been preached even to the diverse assortments of gentiles, so to speak, available in the galaxy. There were many Humbler martyrs.
“We are not supposed to make judgments,” said Brenner. “We are not supposed to prescribe, but to describe. It is not the business of science to change things, or to reform the galaxy, but to explain things, to give accounts of them.”
“Did you have any difficulty telling the facts from the values?” asked Rodriguez.
“Of course not,” said Brenner, irritatedly.
“It is possible to understand something,” said Rodriguez, “and still not like it.”
“Perhaps,” said Brenner.
“Indeed,” said Rodriguez, “it is sometimes difficult to understand things without finding oneself feeling one way or another about them, without coming to like them or dislike them, so to speak.”
“Perhaps,” said Brenner.
“And what better grounds on which to form a liking or a disliking than on an understanding?”
“But anyone could do that sort of thing,” said Brenner.
“Of course,” said Rodriguez.
“Where is your frame of reference?” asked Brenner.
“I carry it with me,” said Rodriguez.
“And so, too, does every Narnian and crocodile in the galaxy.”
“Not mine,” said Rodriguez.
“It is your own gauge,” said Brenner.
“Why then should I throw it away?” asked Rodriguez.
“At best it is relativized to a species,” said Brenner.
“To my species,” said Rodriguez. “That is important.”
“Galactically, that is unimportant,” said Brenner.
“But then I am not a galaxy,” he said.
“I am a modernist, and a lifest,” said Brenner.
“You are a traitor to your species,” said Rodriguez, “or are trying to be, but I suspect you will not manage it.”
Brenner smoldered in fury.
“Others, too, may have suspected it,” said Rodriguez.
“What?” said Brenner.
“That may be why you have been sent to Abydos,” said Rodriguez.
“Nonsense,” said Brenner.
“We are more alike than you know,” said Rodriguez. “But others know it.”
“I am not like you,” said Brenner.
“No species chauvinist?” smiled Rodriguez.
“No,” said Brenner.
“Yet you have come to Abydos,” mused Rodriguez.
“The assignment seemed interesting,” said Brenner. “I did not challenge it.”
“I see,” said Rodriguez.
“What do you think to find on Abydos?” asked Brenner.
“I do not know what I will find,” said Rodriguez. “But I know for what I am searching.”
“What is that?” asked Brenner.
“The beginning,” said Rodriguez.
For those of you to whom this might not be clear Rodriguez and Brenner are anthropologists. To be sure, this designation had become something of an anachronistic misnomer, suggesting, as it does, in its root, that it had to do with a particular species. At present, of course, its meaning was no longer limited in such a provincial and circumscribed fashion. Earlier its scope, in virtue of certain interdisciplinary connections, had been extended to certain organisms on a given home world which were not always of