the Dark Light Years

by Brian W Aldiss

  Manna Warun had collected disciples and left the traditional wallows and salads of his people. His band had moved to the wastes, there to spend many years refining and developing the ancient and traditional skills of the utods. Some of his group left him; more joined. There they stayed for one hundred and seventy-five years, according to the old priestly histories.

  During that time, they created what Manna Warun called "an industrial revolution". They learnt to make many more metals than their contemporaries knew of: hard metals, metals that could stretch thin and convey new forms of power along their lengths. The revolutionaries scorned to walk on their own six feet any more. Now they rode in various sorts of car that boasted a multitude of tumbling feet, or they flew in the air in other cars with wings. So said the old legends, though there was no doubt that they liked to lay it on a bit thick.

  But when the revolutionaries came back to their people to try and convert them to new doctrines, one feature of their lives in particular seemed strange. For the revolutionaries preached - and dramatically practiced - what they called "cleanliness".

  The mass of the people (if the old reports were to be believed) were well disposed towards most of the proposed innovations. They were particularly pleased with the notion that terms of motherhood might be eased by introducing one or more systems that would abolish mind-suckle; because for most of the fifty years of a utod's childhood a mother was committed to mindsuckling her child on the complicated law and lore that was racial history and habit; and the revolutionaries taught that this function might be handled by mechanism. But "cleanliness" was something different altogether - a real revolution.

  Cleanliness was a difficult thing to grasp, if only because it attacked the very roots of being. It suggested that the warm mud banks in which the utod had evolved might now be abandoned, that the wallows and middensteads and middens which were effective mud-substitutes be abandoned, that the little parasite-devouring grorgs which were the traditional utodian companions be also abandoned.

  Manna and his disciples demonstrated that it was possible to live without all this needless luxury ("dirt" was another term they used for it). The cleanliness was evidence of progress. That in the modern revolutionary age, mud was bad.

  In this way, the revolutionaries had turned necessity into virtue. Working in the wastes, far away from the wallows and their sheltering ammps, mud and liquid had been scarce. In that austerity had been born their austere creed.

  They went further. Once he had started. Manna Warun developed his theme, and attacked the established beliefs of the utods. In this he was aided by his chief disciple, Creezeazs. Creezeazs denied that the spirits of utods were born into their infant bodies from the ammps; he denied that a carrion stage followed the corporeal stage. Or rather, he could not gainsay that the bodily elements of the corporeal stage were absorbed into the mud and so drawn up again into the ammps, but he claimed that there was no similar transference for a spirit. He had no proof of this. It was just an emotional statement obviously aimed at getting the utod away from their natural habit; yet he found those who believed him.

  Strange moral laws, prohibitions, inhibitions, began to grow up among the believers. But it could not be denied that they had power. The cities of the wastes to which they withdrew blazed with light in the dark. They cultivated the lands by strange methods, and drew strange fruit from them. They took to covering their casspu orifices. They changed from male to female at unprecedented rates, indulging themselves without breeding. All this and more they did. Yet it was not noticeable that they were exactly happier - not that they preached happiness, for their talk was more of duty and rights and of what was considered good or bad.

  One great thing that the revolutionaries achieved in their cities stirred everyone's imagination.

  The utods had many poetic qualities, as their vast fund of tales, epics, songs, chants, and were whispers show. This side of them was touched when the revolutionaries built some of their machinery into an ancient ammp seed and drove it into and far beyond the skies. Manna Warun went in it Since pre-memory days, before mindsuckle had made the races of utod what they were, the ammp seeds had been used for boats with which to sail to less crowded parts of Dapdrof. To sail to less crowded worlds had a sort of crazy appropriateness in it. Down in the wallows, the complicated nexi of old families began to feel that per-haps after all cleanliness had something. The fifteen worlds that circled about the six planets of the Home Cluster were all visible at various times to the naked eye, and hence were known and admired. To experience the thrill of visiting them might even be worth renouncing "dirt".

  People, converts and perverts, began to trickle into the cities of the wastes.

  Then something odd happened.

  The word began to get about that Manna Warun was not all he had made himself out to be. It was said that he had often slid away to indulge himself in a secret wallow, for instance. Rumours spread thick and fast, and of course Manna was not there to deny them.

  As the ugly rumours grew, people wondered when Creezeazs would step forward and clear his leader's name.

  At last, Creezeazs did step forward. Heavily, with tears in his eyes, speaking through his ockpu orifices only, he admitted that the stories circulating were true. Manna was a sinner, a tyrant, a mud-bather. He had none of the virtues he demanded from others. In fact, though others - his friend and true disciple Creezeazs in particular - had done all in their power to stop him. Manna had gone to the bad. Now that the sad tale had emerged, there was nothing for it. Manna Warun must go. It was in the public interest. Nobody, of course, would be happy about it; but there was such a thing as duty. People had a right to be protected, otherwise the good would be destroyed with the bad.

  Hardly a utod liked all this, although they saw Creezeazs' point of view; Manna must be expelled.

  When the prophet returned from the stars, there was a reception committee waiting for him on the star-realm-ark field.

  Before the ark landed, trouble broke out A young utod, whose shining but alarmingly cracked skin showed him to be a thorough-going Hygienic (as the Corps of the Revolution were currently calling themselves), jumped up on to a box. He deretracted all his limbs and cried in a voice like a steam whistle that Creezeazs had been lying about Manna to serve his own ends. All who followed Creezeazs were traitors.

  At this moment, an unprecedented event occurred, occurred even as the star-realm-ark floated down from the sides: fighting broke out, and a utod with a sharp metal rod hastened Creezeazs on to the next stage of his utod-ammp cycle.

  "Creezeazs!" gasped the third Politan.

  "What make you mention that unfortunate name?" inquired the Cosmopolitan.

  "I was thinking about the Revolution Age. Creezeazs is the first utod in our history to be propelled along the utod-ammp cycle without goodwill," Blug Lugug said, coming back to the present.

  "That was a bad time. But perhaps because these thin-legs also seem to enjoy cleanliness, they also hasten people round the cycle without goodwill. As I say, they are bad in a healthy way. And we are their random victims.”

  Blug Lugug withdrew his limbs as much as possible. He shut his eyes, closed his orifices, and stretched himself until his external appearance was that of an enormous terrestrial sausage. This was his way of expressing priestly alarm.

  There was nothing in their situation to warrant the cosmopolitan's extreme language. True, it might become rather dull if they were kept here for any length of time -one needed a change of scenery every five years or so. And it was thoughtless the way the lifeforms removed the signs of their fertility. But the lifeforms showed evidence of goodwill: they supplied food, and soon learned not to bring items that were unwelcome. With time and patience, they might learn other useful things.

  On the other hand, there was this question of bad. It was indeed possible that the lifeforms had the same sort of madness that existed in the Revolution Age of Dapdrof. Yet it was absurd to pretend that, however alien they might be, these
thinlegs did not have an equivalent evolutionary cycle to the utodammp cycle; and this, being so fundamental, could only be something for which they would have a profound respect - in their own peculiar way, naturally.

  And there was this: the Revolution Age was a freak, a mere flash in the pan, lasting only for five hundred years -half a lifespan - out of the hundreds of millions of years of utodammp memory. It would seem rather a tall co-incidence if the thinlegs happened to be undergoing the same trouble at this moment.

  It was notorious that people who used violent words like bad and random victim, the very words of madness, were themselves verging on madness. So the Sacred Cosmopolitan. ...

  At the very thought, the Politan quivered. His fondness for the Cosmopolitan was deepened by the fact that the older utod, during one of his female phases, had mothered him. Now he stood in need of consolation by the other members of his wallow; clearly, it was time they were get-ting back to Dapdrof.

  That implied that they should speak with these aliens and hasten their return. The Cosmopolitan forbad communication - and quite rightly - on a point of etiquette; but it began to look more and more as if something should be done. Perhaps, Blug Lugug thought, he could get one of the aliens on his own and try to convey some sense to it. It shouldn't be difficult; he had memorized every sentence they had spoken in his presence since their arrival in the metal thing; although it made no sense to him, it should be useful somehow.

  Pursing one of his ockpu orifices, he said, "Wilfred, you don't happen to have a screwdriver in your pocket, do you?”

  "What's that?" asked the Cosmopolitan.

  "Nothing. Thinlegs-talk.”

  Sinking into a silence that held less cheer than usual, the third Politan began to think about the Revolution Age, in case it had any useful parallels with the present case to offer.

  With the death of Creezeazs and the return home of Manna Warun, more trouble had begun. This was when bad had flourished at its grandest. Quite a number of utods were thrust without goodwill into the next phase of their cycle. Manna, of course, returned from his flight in the star-realm-ark very vexed to find how things had turned against him in the Cities of the Wastes.

  He became more extreme than before. His people were to forswear mud-bathing entirely; instead, water would be supplied to every dwelling. They were to keep their casspu orifices covered. Skin oils were forbidden. Greater industry was required. And so on.

  But the seeds of dissatisfaction had been well sown by Creezeazs and his followers, and more blood-shedding ensued. Many people returned to their ancestral wallows, leaving the Cities of the Wastes slowly to fall into ruin while the inhabitants fought each other. Everyone regretted this, since there existed a genuine admiration for Manna which nothing could quench.

  In particular, his journey among the stars was widely discussed and praised. Much was known, even at that period, about the neighboring celestial bodies known as the Home Cluster, and particularly about the three suns, Welcome White, Saffron Smiler, and Yellow Scowler, around each of which Dapdrof revolved in turn as one esod followed another. These suns, and the other planets in the cluster, were as familiar - and as strange - to the people as the Circumpolar Mountains in Dapdrof's Northern Shunkshukkun.

  Whatever woes the Revolution Age had brought, it had brought the chance to investigate these other places. It was a chance the ordinary utod found he wanted.

  The Hygienics had control of all star-realm travel. The masses of the unconverted, pilgrimaging from all over the globe to the Cities of the Wastes, found they could par-take in the new exploration of other worlds under one of two conditions. They could become converts to the harsh disciplines of Manna Warun, or they could mine the materials needed for building and fuelling the engines of the arks. Most of them preferred to do the latter.

  Mining came easily; had not the utod evolved from little burrowing creatures not unlike the Haprafruf Mud Mole? They dug the ores willingly, and soon the whole process of building star arks became routine, almost as much a folk art as weaving, platting, or Wishing. So in turn travel through the star realms took on something of the same informality, particularly when it was discovered that the Triple Suns and their three near neighbors supported seven other worlds on which life could be lived almost as enjoyably as on Dapdrof.

  Then came a time when life indeed was rather pleasant on some of the other worlds: on Buskey, for instance, and Clabshub, where the utodammp system was quickly established. Meanwhile the Hygienics split into rival sects, those that practiced retraction of all limbs, and those that deplored it as immoral.

  Finally, the three nuclear Wars of Wise Deportment broke out, and the fair face of the home planet underwent a thoroughly unhygienic bombardment, the severity of which - destroying as it did so many miles of carefully tended forest and swamp land - actually changed climatic conditions for a period of about a century.

  The resulting upheavals in the weather, followed by a chain of severe winters, concluded the wars in the most radical of ways, by converting into the carrion stage almost all the surviving Hygienics of whatever persuasion. Manna himself disappeared; his end was never known for sure, although legend had it that a particularly fine ammp, growing in the midst of the ruins of the largest of the Cities of the Wastes, represented the next stage of his existence.

  Slowly, the old and more reasonable ways returned.

  Helped by utods returning from the other planets, the home population re-established itself. Dams were rebuilt, swamps painstakingly restored, middensteads reintroduced on the traditional patterns, ammps re-planted everywhere. The Cities of the Wastes were left to fall into decay. No-body was interested any more in the ethics of cleanliness. Law and ordure were restored.

  Yet at whatever expense it had been acquired, the industrial revolution had borne its fruits, and not all of them were permitted to die. The basic techniques necessary for maintaining star-realm travel passed to the ancient priesthood dedicated to maintaining the happiness of the people. The priesthood simplified practices already smoothed into quasi-ritual by habit and saw that these techniques were handed on from mother to son by mind-suckle, together with the rest of the racial lore.

  All that now lay three thousand generations and almost as many esods ago. Through the disciplines of mindsuckle, its outlines remained clear. In Blug Lugug's brains, the memory of the hideous perverted talk and teachings of Manna and other Hygienics was vivid. He prided himself on being the filthiest and healthiest of his generation of priests. And he knew by the absurd phrases of moral condemnation the Cosmopolitan had uttered that the cleanliness inflicted on his old body by the thinlegs was affecting his brains. It was time something was done.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was an American sage back in the nineteenth century who coined the slogan since used so successfully on the wrappers of every Happy Hypersleep tablet, "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau certainly had a point when he observed that anxiety and even misery feed in the breast of those often most concerned with put-ting up a brave show of happiness; yet such is the constitution of human nature that the reverse holds equally true, and under conditions commonly regarded as most likely to create misery, a man may lead a life of quiet happiness.

  The gates of St. Alban's prison swung open and emitted the prison bus. It bowled out beneath the aluminum legend over the portal that read "To Understand Is To Forgive", and headed for the region of the metropolis called The Gay Ghetto.

  Or so the area was most generally known. Its inhabitants called it The Knackers, or Joburg, or Wonderland, or Sucker City, or indeed any less savory name that occurred to them. The area had been established by a government enlightened enough to realize that some men, while being far from criminal in intent, are incapable of living within the exacting framework of civilization; which is to say that they do not share the goals and incentives of the majority of their fellow beings; which is to say that they see no point in working from ten till four day in and day out for the
privilege of maintaining a woman in wed-lock and x or n number of children. This body of men, which numbered geniuses and neurotics in equal proportions (frequently within the same anatomy), was allowed to settle within the Gay Ghetto, which - because it was unsupervised in any way by the forces of law - soon became the nesting ground also of criminals.

  Within the ruinous square mile of this human game reserve, a unique society formed; it looked at the monstrous machinery of living that ground on beyond its walls with the same mixture of fear and moral disapproval with which the monstrous machinery regarded it.

  The prison taxi halted at the end of a steep brick street. The two released prisoners, Rodney Walthamstone and his ex-cell mate, climbed out. At once the taxi swerved and drove away, its door automatically sliding shut as it went.

  Walthamstone looked about him with unease.

  The drearily respectable dolls' houses on either side of the street hunched their thin shoulders behind dog-soiled railings, averting their gaze from the strip of waste that began where they left off.

  Beyond the waste rose the wall of the Gay Ghetto. Some of the wall was wall; some of it was formed from little old houses into which concrete had been poured until the little old houses were solid.

  "Is this it?" Walthamstone asked.

  "This is it, Wal. This is freedom. We can live here with-out anybody mucking us about.”

  The early sunshine, a snaggle-toothed old trickster, lay its transient gold and broken shadows across the uninviting flank of the Ghetto, of Joburg, of Paradise, of Bums' Berg, of Queer Street, of Floppers.

  Tid started towards it, saw that Walthamstone hesitated, grasped his hand, and pulled him along.

  "I ought to write to my old Aunt Flo and Hank Quilter and tell 'em what I'm doing," Walthamstone said. He stood between the old life and the new, naturally fearful. Although Tid was his own age, Tid was so much more sure of himself.