The squawk box was urgent. “Captain Uithoudt to the bridge please! Emergency! Captain Uithoudt to the bridge please! Emergency!”
Ram Uithoudt jabbed the acknowledge button, spit toothpaste into the washbowl, took a moment to rinse it down the drain, then pulled on his jumpsuit, zipping it as he strode down the passageway.
“The radio, sir,” the bridge watch told him.
“Ram here,” he said as he hit the command chair.
“Commander Uithoudt?”
The unfamiliar voice was quiet but hard, its words accented.
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“I am Ahmed, consul of the Empire of Kazi. I have your, ah, pinnace in my control-the one called Alpha. I also hold prisoner the two men who flew it, Matthew Kumalo and Mikhail Ciano. I plan no harm to them, as long as you do not try to interfere with me. My fight is not with you. But if you try to interfere, their death will be your responsibility, and it will be a slow and most unpleasant death. I have experts at that.
“You will also leave your radio on at all times; I will want to contact you again.”
Abruptly the signal ended. The two men on the bridge stared at one another.
XII
Each human instinctively and unconsciously develops the equivalent of computer programs in his mind-a set of more or less integrated and often incompatible programs that together crudely simulate the world. Your programs collectively constitute the world as you know it, and the state of those programs at any given time makes up the only world you know. They are the means through which your brain, your organic computer, operates. You make decisions and take actions on the basis of the printouts of that computer, printouts from programs which are part of your model of the world.
Hendricks has discussed the deficiencies of the system at length. Only one of them seems directly relevant to our discussion here-the egocentricity of those programs. The focal point, the emotional center, of the programs constituting your world, is occupied by your enthroned ego. It colors not only all you think and do, but all you “know” as well. It makes your subjective world what Kuznetsov dubbed the ego world.
It has been suggested that this centrality of the ego is essential as an integrating reference point and for survival of the organism; that without it, man would lack, among other things, a survival instinct. The ego may indeed have begun as a reference point for the integration of data, and its growth may have been a by-product of the survival instinct, but it seems unessential to either. Descriptions and analyses of the barbarian telepath, Nils Jarnhann, all point to his lack of an ego, as the concept of ego is defined today. Yet even allowing for some small degree of exaggeration in the reports of the expedition, Nils did an exceptional job of integrating information and surviving remarkably hazardous situations.
To be convincing, any refinement of ego theory must now consider Nils Jarnhann. Which is to say, it must consider the probability of a strong and effective survival mechanism and an integrating center of reference independent of any powerful, albeit unconscious, emotional image of the self as the center of the world.
At the same time, of course, we must reject the “explanations” of the New Movement gnostics. These are essentially pre-technological theology in pseudo-scientific trappings, with the unlikely premise that the human ego is the “spirit” or “soul” in a somehow degraded condition. Nils Jarnhann, then, is “explained” as a case in which the degraded condition was somehow miraculously dispelled or perhaps avoided!…
… Operating with a set of seemingly objective programs, a non-egocentric world model, Nils showed unique ability to learn. Mrs. Kumalo found existing intelligence tests inadequate for precise determination, but established that he did in fact possess “substantially superior mental equipment.”
An alternative, or more likely complementary, explanation might be that his objectivity itself enabled him to discern, learn, and reason more effectively than the great majority of men.
Of course, his direct access to the thoughts of others must have helped, but most other telepaths seem not to approach him in ability to learn or to make correct decisions.
All in all there was that about him which makes one uncomfortable when trying to explain him scientifically. And that is entirely aside from the interesting apocrypha that have grown up about him. It seems as if he was playing a joke on us by being what he was.
Mrs. Kumalo questioned him in a specific effort to understand his gestalt (sensu Watanabe). She stated categorically that she never succeeded, but felt she could characterize certain aspects of it. She wrote that, among other things, he did not have or use a conscious mind in the usual sense of the term. Yet he was obviously very conscious indeed. He was more sensitive to what happened around him, more aware, than anyone else she had ever known, an impression of him shared by the expedition generally. Nor was he a cold hard logic machine-a biophysical computer so to speak. He has been described as cheerful, considerate of others, charismatic, and possessing a sense of humor, which, to me at least, is reassuring.
Even more than with most men, the productive work of his mind apparently took place at a subconscious level. And he does not seem to have reviewed its “printouts” consciously. Whatever monitoring of them he may have done seems, like the computing itself, to have been subliminal. His printouts were available, however, for what we might call conscious expression. That is, he could explain his reasons better and more simply than most of us explain ours, and I suspect that if he were writing this, it would be much simpler and considerably more enlightening.
I can at least hope that if he were reading this, he would not laugh, and might even approve.
From Human Consciousness in the Light of the Barbarian Telepath, Nils Jarnhann, by Muhammad Chao. Pages 39-57, in ADVANCES IN PHILOSOPHY FOLLOWING THE FIRST TWO EARTH EXPEDITIONS. Kathleen Murti, ed. University Press, A.C. 867.
Nikko ducked into her tent and laid the armload of green-leaved willow twigs beside the firewood she’d brought earlier, then hung her canteen from one of the saplings that formed her tent frame. Her light field shoes were wet from the marshy ground where the willows grew. So this is the simple life, she thought. Not bad, as long as someone else provides the food and prepares it. A lot more agreeable than the life Anne and Chan described in the palace. The key difference, she decided, was the people.
As she took the radio from the field chest she wondered what Matthew would assign Chan and Anne to, now that they’d left the orcs, and whether contact with the orcs would be abandoned.
“Phaeacia, this is Nikko. Phaeacia, this is Nikko. Over. Over.”
“Nikko, this is Ram. Over.”
“Good morning, Ram. It really is morning here, you know. The sun is up, birds are singing-you should have heard their chorus about daybreak. ‘Din’ is a better word for it. I just finished my morning duties as a bearer of the wood and drawer of water. And my watch says oh-seven-oh-five local time, which makes it official. We had tough broiled meat again for breakfast, and my jaws are getting so strong I’ll soon be able to hang from a rope by my teeth.”
“Nikko, I’ve got something to tell you.” He said it in a flat even tone of voice, cutting her communication, and it froze the breath in her chest. Fragments of thought splashed through her mind-Matt hurt in a pinnace crash; Ilse, her safeguard, dead in childbirth; something irreparable gone wrong with the space drive. She waited, not asking.
“Matt and Mike and the Alpha were captured by the orcs yesterday. We don’t know how. I was afraid something was wrong when they didn’t come back on schedule with Chan and Anne and we couldn’t raise them on the radio. But we didn’t know anything for sure, and I didn’t want to alarm you when you checked in last evening.