oz@yetti.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) (03/31/85)
Following is a litte story by Dr. Anthony Wallis of York University.
I am posting this to the network on his behalf, with his permission.
Oz
A Fable.
[ Somewhat in the style of Douglas Adam's
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ]
A long time ago, on a planet named Irth (or Urth), a class 3C2
nitrogen-oxygen-water world not far from Sirius, there lived a race of
very strange creatures indeed. They were mammalian, yet almost totally
hairless. Not only that, they walked around on grossly over-developed
hind legs. They claimed that this was necessary to free their front paws,
which looked something like five-legged spiders, for more important work -
such as picking up papers from one place on a desk and putting them down
someplace else on the desk. They also had large brains, which they were
very proud of - but had no idea how to use properly.
However, the most unusual characteristics of this creature were
not its physical oddities but its behavioural obsessions. It spent much of
its time thinking about and preparing for, ceremonial fighting, the second-
and third-order aspects of reproduction, and the true meaning of symbols.
Anyone who has read Zorx's "Psychosociobiologicus Galacticus" will recognise
the first two obsessions as not uncommon in technologies at Federation
Pre-Candidate status. Although it leads inevitably to the extinction of
the species, it is considered fairly harmless to the planetary biosphere.
It is the third obsession, attempting to discern the true meaning of symbols,
which ranks Irth culture as one of the looniest in the history of the Galaxy.
It is conjectured that it all began when a primitive Irthian, who
happened to be the leader of a tribe of tropical hunter-gatherers, had some
time on his paws and so was idly scatching about in the sand with the femur
of an antelope. He - the females were probably too busy with the problems
of bipedal pregnancy, giving birth to babies with large heads, and caring
for the little monsters since it took many orbits of the Moon for them to learn
to walk - noticed that his marks in the sand looked just like a group of
trees a hundred meters from the entrance to the cave. Getting very
excited at his discovery, he called his best friend and huntmate over, pointed
with the antelope bone to the diagram in the sand, then at the trees, and
then back to the diagram again. His friend, wishing to placate his obviously
agitated leader, smiled and nodded in an imitation of wisdom but barely took
his eyes off the far end of the big antelope bone. He was rewarded for his
failure to link symbol and object by having his brains bashed out on the spot.
Thus began the long violent history of Irth technology driven by
disagreements about the significance of symbols. This ended, as we now
know, with the total transformation of the biosphere by nuclear fission and
fusion explosions. This technological finale was initiated, it appears, by
attaching the wrong significance to some symbols appearing on computer
screens as the result of a freak ionic storm over the northern ice cap.
Interestingly enough, about 2000 years before the grand finale,
a teacher of symbolic meanings finally figured it all out and where the
misunderstandings and disagreements would lead to. They once posed a tricky
moral dilemma to him as to whether or not stones should be thrown at a certain
female for her part in an certain obsessive behaviour. The records show that
he drew in the sand before and after delivering his answer. The beautiful
simplicity of his resolution of the moral dilemma astounded them. However,
not long after that they killed him, got confused about the symbolism in his
teachings, and went back to throwing stones and hurling symbols at each other.
A. Wallis 1985-Mar-14