Keeping Up With The Joneses, a story by: GF Willmetts.
Whoever said colonising another planet would be easy, even when the inhabitants were welcoming offworlders. The only problem was they couldn’t tell us apart. Our first coloniser introduced himself as Jones. So, to them, we were all Jones, not humans. Would you go up to an extraterrestrial and say, ‘I’m human’? Well, maybe, but you wouldn’t expect them not to be able to tell the difference between us all. These didn’t recognise us as individuals. As one of the colonisers commented, it could have been worse. A misheard swear word, and we’d all be shits or worse. They were the Skwor’kala to us, and we couldn’t really tell them apart, so maybe this is where their problem came from.
The settlement programme when it came to inhabited planets was only for a small colony. We were just a small outpost/waystation for colonisers who were going further. Much of that was done in an orbital station, but we still needed some proper gravity under our feet. This planet had only a tenth more gravity than Earth but was passable. The spinning space station above could only achieve 8/10th gee, so it was a good compromise.
A species with no or little understanding of individualism meant more study and being careful with how we said things. It did mean we could alternate team members and not have problems. Well, other than calling each other Jones. We found ourselves conditioned by this that, even in private, we started calling each other Jones. Were we losing our own individualism? Is that what conditioned the Skwor’kala to be the way they were?
Their dictionary, assuming they had one, would be very short. Their nouns would be whatever the first word given to something the first time they encountered. We had that problem on Earth. When the first settlers in Australia asked the aboriginals the name of a species with big ears and leaps on its two hind feet, he was told it was ‘a kangaroo’. Actually, it was thought he didn’t know what the settler meant but actually ‘edible animal’ but the name stuck forever more. The speed that new word Jones got around beats us. One of the techs says it was based on rings around the encampment after we settled. If they were that receptive to new words for new things quickly spreading, it also meant they were capable of learning.
There were a lot of arguments about this. Was our multiple names for everything better than theirs? A single-word noun identification was a lot easier. Were we being shown better language?
It did make problems where the difference between things needs a clearer identification. Could they distinguish between different physical injuries, let alone different mental problems, so they could be correctly cured? We hadn’t come across anyone with a broken limb yet, so we couldn’t offer them a splint as the first stage to repairing a bone. Perhaps they never got injured. Maybe their solution was the same for all injuries. I doubt if they’d let us study their biology too quickly yet. Explaining what the devices were would be hard enough, let alone the new names they might give them and we would have to adopt when we talk to them about it. Of course, we could give them the right name from the start, but they were just as likely to call all machines by the same name. They had no machines like ours as far as we knew, so we couldn’t do cultural shock. Think about asking them to get a particular machine in an emergency and bringing the wrong one. We were going to have to get them to move beyond that single collective noun.
They were sophisticated in some ways. It was just confusing with the language barrier. It’s not that they didn’t understand, just the way they adjusted it to their language, and we saw signs that they could keep changing. For them to understand our language, we would have to teach them our different nouns for everything. They would probably even pick up faster than we to adapt to their approach, especially the way they adopt our words. We need to establish a system they could recognize, at least with numbers.
Someone suggested we try cards. Point out the different suits first and then show them on cards as well. It would also give an opportunity to show them our numbering system and see if they could understand decimals. Well, at least up to ten. Quite how they would handle the picture cards would be a lot more difficult, although someone suggests we ought to leave them out. If they thought base 13, we’d be forever making conversions ourselves. Forty instead of fifty-two cards. Good thing no one suggests tarot cards. It would be easier to work with cards, which we could carry in our pocket, than anything more intricate.
The first objective would be to establish the objects. Symbolically, at least their names resembled what they looked like. At least to us. A diamond would be a jewel. A club could be seen as a weapon. A spade as a digging tool. But the heart? Would that symbolize love or the organ in our chests to pump blood? The last thing we wanted to do was establish a ritual sacrifice. They didn’t know the full deck, so we took out the hearts cards. The club was making us wary. If they thought it was a weapon or they wanted to see it as a weapon, so that was another ten cards gone.
So we had to look at tarot cards after all. Swords were out of the question. Like clubs, too much like a weapon. A wand was just a stick for a similar reason. Pentacles or coins assumed they had money, but we had seen no sign of it. At least with cups, it would be something they’d recognize because we’d seen them drink, although whether they would use our name is open for grabs. A food item might be wrong if they decided to rename it. We’d noticed they would rename something after what we called something we thought was similar to our own but not always to our name. It showed flexibility but not necessarily accuracy. We would have to be careful. Renaming things would have to have some logic that we could follow. I mean, most new things were named the first name they gave them. We were Jones, not humans.
We should have chosen chess, but explaining 9 pieces and their moves couldn’t be simplified. They’d more likely just look at it under one name and not understand it. One thing at a time, but what could you play with three suits of ten cards each? One of the youngsters smirked and said, Snap! I don’t think it was going to be taken seriously, and a deck of cards could end up being called Snap! They could win a hand. That would make it non-verbal.
Three players. Cards shuffled. The second two players have to match the first card put down. They do, and the first player wins the hand, and it moves to the next player to start. If there is no match, the card is discarded or put to one side. It keeps going around until there are no matches. It can either be the player with the most hands or the player with the fewest cards. You could have two winners.
Sounds a lot like an old game called Hearts, except there are no hearts to trump the game. We could always introduce that as an advance game. Find another choice than a heart. The whole point was to forget it was a game but a means to teach them not to generalize an object under one name. If we can get something like our numbering system over, so much the better.
We had to put some planning into this. Doing it in stages would at least let us resolve any problems.
The first stage was easy. Get them to understand the shapes of diamonds, spades, and cups. Each was a distinctive shape, and the last two had something similar in their own culture as a tool and drinking vessel.
We followed this with numbers in a similar fashion. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. I’m glad we hadn’t introduced the Zero yet. Useful in math, but we would have had to ditch another card. Down to 27 cards would make an odd number. Math would have to come later. Algebra much, much later. Algebra would mean spelling before changing to symbols. Alphabets of 26 letters would all be called the same name.
At the last moment, one of the team members thought we ought to change the shape of the cards to hope they wouldn’t be seen as a collective. So they were based on the distinctive shapes of diamonds, spades, and cups. We showed them, repeating their names.
So far, so good. They were different enough.
Now the game. First with three of us, and then for one of us to drop out and one of them to take over. We completed a couple games, pointing out they had to be similar in numbers to win.
He looked at them and us and put his cards down.
‘They are not identical. Joneses cheat.’
That stopped us dead. How did they know about cheating? It looks like we would be keeping up with the Skwor’kala.
end
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