to the nearest Pon, gesturing ahead.
Again the party moved forward.
“You are certain you saw nothing?” asked Rodriguez.
“Yes,” said Brenner. “I am certain.”
Chapter 10
“I have it!” said Brenner. “I now know what it was!”
“What?” asked Rodriguez.
“Some days ago I examined a scarp,” said Brenner. He looked about himself. No Pons were close at hand. They had drawn off a bit. It was noon, and the party was resting. “There was something unusual about it, something I could not at the time place, but troubled me.”
“Why are you speaking so softly?” asked Rodriguez.
“It was not something on the scarp, not something there. That is what I noticed, not something there, but that something was not there!”
“I do not understand,” said Rodriguez.
“The Pons are amongstst the most primitive forms of rational, or semirational life, we know of,” said Brenner.
“True,” said Rodriguez.
“They do not even have a native pottery,” said Brenner.
“No,” said Rodriguez.
It might be mentioned here that the Pons did, of course, have a nonindigenous pottery, in the sense of a pottery received in trade from Company Station. Too, of course, they had certain other goods from Company Station, scarps, as we have noted, and, too, naturally, certain other items, for example, pots and kettles.
“Even their form of social organization is primitive,” said Brenner. “They lack chieftains, or kings.”
“It seems so,” said Rodriguez.
“They are utterly simple, utterly primitive,” said Brenner.
“Not really,” said Rodriguez. “They have had contacts with more advanced cultures, for example.” To expand briefly on this we might note that it is difficult for a “primitive society” to remain primitive after it is discovered, because, almost immediately, exchanges occur and influences begin. In this sense, the very investigation of the data tends to contaminate the data. The observer’s presence, so to speak, obtrudes into the data, not simply in his categories, his concepts, his judgments, in his interests, and such, but, even more insidiously, at least from the point of view of an objective inquiry, in his own cultural influence. The very beads he distributes create new values. What he chooses to wear and eat, and how and where he sleeps, may constitute implicit criticisms, and so on.
“They are amongst the most primitive peoples known to science,” said Brenner.
“They are perhaps more advanced than some totemic cultures,” said Rodriguez, “as they are supposed to possess at least the rudiments of an agriculture.”
“A primitive level of agriculture at best,” said Brenner.
“That would seem to be the case,” said Rodriguez.
Some of the Pons on the trek, it might be observed, had supplemented a diet of roots and brush fruit with meal, boiled with water, which practice, of course, tended to corroborate the existence of a native form of agriculture, of some level at least.
“Where would you rank them?” asked Brenner.
“Technologically?” asked Rodriguez.
“Yes!” said Brenner.
“Very low,” said Rodriguez. “For most practical purposes they are a stone-age culture, except, of course, that they do not hunt animals, and do possess something of an agriculture. Too, they can weave, obviously. Certain other limitations in their culture are doubtless by choice, such as the refusal to herd animals, or to use them for food. It is even likely they deny themselves the use of bone implements, because of similar reservations.”
“You see them then as a mix, as being anomalous in some ways?”
“Certainly,” said Rodriguez.
“How do you see them biologically?” asked Brenner.
“That is where in particular I think they are extremely important,” said Rodriguez. “I see them as biologically primitive, as basically unevolved, as, in effect, simplistic simian organisms. In this sense I think they are, in their psychic development, in their rudimentary capacities, in their intellectualistic dispositions, in their world picturings, in their mental outlook, in how they think, and such, at a very primitive level. That is what makes them such a beautiful object of study. They do not even have the mental capacity to borrow and adapt the subtleties of later cultures, and not even the subtleties of mathematics and science, but the subtleties even, say, of heroes and gods, of myths and religions. In this sense, as much or more than culturally, I think of them as being, as I said on the ship, “at the beginning.” Here, in their thought, in their totemism, I hope to find the seeds of civilization, where it came from, how it arose. Here we revisit the earth, as it was, so to speak, before the Garden of Eden.”
“You do regard them as primitive, biologically, and culturally?”
“Of course,” said Rodriguez.
“They trade for their scarps,” said Brenner.
“Of course,” said