Enemies of the System by Brian W. Aldiss Page A

grew more deafening. The tall man pulled a lever. Faster beat the drums. The seat tipped back, turning into a couch. The drums thundered, the audience screamed at the top of its lungs. Back went the couch, up went the arm of the rider. The noise died to a whisper, the ghost of a whisper. The finger on the end of the arm pointed up, up into the murk, to the patch of open sky. The clouds had rolled away.
    In that patch of sky, one star burned.
    The ceremony was suddenly over. The magic was done. The tall man climbed from his couch. Children started crying and running amid the throng, as everyone began to go home.
    â€œI never thought to see …” Kordan said. “Ritual … it was a primitive ritual —forms of conduct fixed and repeated, the satisfaction of pattern reinforcing lifestyle.”
    â€œYou could be right,” said Dulcifer. “I’ve watched Venusian desert-skimmers performing the same meaningless acts over and over. Presumably they reinforce the image of themselves as desert-skimmers that way.”
    â€œWhy should they put on such a performance for us?” asked Sygiek.
    â€œThere you show your lack of that imagination I spoke of before we came in here,” said Takeido excitedly. “They are doing it for themselves—we don’t come into it. Not yet. I believe Kordan to be substantially correct. I had forgotten the word even: ritual . Performing the same acts over and over, reinforcing an image. Man’s distant ape ancestors on Earth may have had to perform such meaningless acts over many generations before they became human.”
    â€œBut these are not meaningless acts, Ian Takeido,” said Kordan. “For us, certainly not for them. Now I ask you to exercise your imagination. Imagine that capitalist ship over one million years ago. Imagine its survivors forced into various ecological niches in order to survive, losing language and human identity. How many creatures have spread and multiplied across Lysenka, surviving the impoverished Devonian? Several million? I don’t know. But we have the evidence of our eyes that one of those unfortunate groups—and it may be small, may consist of no more than a couple of hundred individuals—has managed to maintain its humanity more or less intact, using hierarchy and ritual to reinforce its distinctness from the creatures on which it must prey.”
    â€œYou speak almost with compassion, Jerezy Kordan,” said Burek.
    â€œIt’s no good being sympathetic to these monsters, Utopianist Kordan,” said Constanza. “They certainly aren’t sympathetic to us. If they don’t rape or kill us tonight, they will in the morning. They are animals. They have not fed us. They have not given us water. Soon we’re going to have to use this cage as a latrine, which is disgusting.
    â€œEven if what you say is true—and personally I don’t give a fig what happened in the past—you are only talking about an extension of the illegal capitalist system, aren’t you? Surely our basic utopian beliefs are put to the test right here. If all the rest of the colonists went under and just this human group survived to prey on the rest, then these are the exploiter class, the bourgeois rabble of Lysenka, and there is more reason to eliminate them than all the rest. Here is the ideological enemy. When we are rescued, they will all be shot.”
    Silence fell.
    â€œAn unexpected speech from you, Comrade Constanza,” said Burek, in his deep, rather mocking voice.
    â€œOh, I know you think I’m just a fool. I think that you are one more élitist bore, Utopianist Burek, and I’m vexed that I am now forced to make water in your presence. Turn your backs, all of you.”
    The cavern had emptied except for two forlorn bent figures, extinguishing candles on the far steps. The crowd had disappeared into side-tunnels, stumbling off to sleep out the long Lysenkan night. The six