New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  Conway gave the signal to begin only seconds before his communicator chimed and Murchison, looking dishevelled and very cross, filled the screen.

  ‘There has been a slight accident, an explosion,’ she said. ‘Our type two flew across the lab, damaged some test equipment and scared hell out of-’

  ‘But it was dead,’ protested Conway. ‘They were both dead—Prilicla said so.’

  ‘It still is,’ said Murchison, ‘and it didn’t fly exactly—it shot away from us. I’m not yet sure of the mechanics of the process, but apparently the thing produces gases in its intestinal tract which react explosively together, propelling it forward. Used in conjunction with its wings this would help it to escape fast-moving natural enemies like the barnacle. The gases must still have been present when I began work.

  ‘There is a similar species, much smaller,’ she went on, ‘which is native to Earth. We studied the more exotic types of Earth fauna in preparation for the e-t courses. It was called a bombardier beetle and it-’

  ‘Doctor Conway!’

  He swung away from the screen and ran into the main compartment. He did not need to be an empath to know that something was seriously wrong.

  The team leader of the maintenancemen was waving frantically and Prilicla, encased in its protective globe and supported by gravity nullifiers, was drifting above the man’s head and trembling.

  ‘Increasing awareness, friend Conway,’ reported the empath. ‘Suggesting rapidly returning consciousness. Feelings of fear and confusion.’

  Some of the confusion, thought Conway, belongs to me...

  The maintenanceman simply pointed.

  Instead of the hard coating he had expected to see there was a black, oily, semi-liquid which flowed and rippled and dripped slowly on to the floor plating. As he watched the area where the flame was being applied, the stuff rolled away from one of the barnacles, which twitched and unfolded its wings. The wings flapped, slowly at first, and it began pulling free of the patient, drawing its long tendrils out of the bird until it was completely detached and it went blundering into the air.

  ‘Kill the torches,’ said Conway urgently, ‘but cool it with the air hose. Try to harden that black stuff.’

  But the thick, black liquid would not harden. Once initiated by the heat the softening process was self-sustaining. The patient’s neck, no longer supported by solid material, slumped heavily on to the deck followed a few seconds later by the massive wings. The black pool around the patient widened and more and more of the barnacles struggled free to blunder about the compartment on wide, menbraneous wings, trailing their tendrils behind them like long, fine plumes.

  ‘Back everybody! Take cover, quickly!’

  Their patient lay motionless and almost certainly dead, but there was nothing that Conway could do. Neither the maintenancemen nor the medical technicians were protected against those fine, harmless-looking tendrils of the barnacles—only Prilicla in its transparent globe was safe there, and now there seemed to be hundreds of the things filling the air. He knew that he should feel badly about the patient, but somehow he did not. Was it simply delayed reaction or was there another reason ?

  ‘Friend Conway,’ said Prilicla, bumping him gently with its globe, ‘I suggest that you take your own advice.’

  The thought of fine, barnacle tendrils probing through his clothing, skin and underlying tissues, paralysing his muscles and scrambling his brain made him run for the side compartment, closely followed by Brenner and Prilicla. The Lieutenant closed the door as soon as the Cinrusskin was inside.

  There was a barnacle; already there.

  For a split second Conway’s mind was like a camera, registering everything as it was in the small room: the face of O’Mara on the communicator screen, as expressionless as a slab of rock with only the eyes showing his concern; Prilicla trembling within its protective globe; the barnacle hovering near the ceiling, its tendrils blowing in a self-generated breeze, and Brenner with one eye closed in a diabolical wink as he pointed his gun—a type which threw explosive pellets—at the hovering barnacle.

  There was something wrong.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ said Conway, quietly but firmly, then asked, ‘Are you afraid. Lieutenant?’

  ‘I don’t normally use this thing,’ said Brenner, looking puzzled, ‘but I can. No, I’m not afraid.’

  ‘And I’m not afraid because you have that gun,’ said Conway. ‘Prilicla is protected and has nothing to fear. So who...’ He indicated the empath’s trembling feelers. ‘... is afraid?’

  ‘It is, friend Conway,’ said Prilicla, indicating the barnacle. ‘It is afraid and confused and intensely curious.’

  Conway nodded. He could see Prilicla beginning to react to his intense relief. He said, ‘Nudge it outside, Prilicla, when the Lieutenant opens the door—just in case of accidents. But gently.’

  As soon as it was outside, O’Mara’s voice roared from the communicator,

  ‘What the blazes have you done?’

  Conway tried to find a simple answer to an apparently simple question. He said, ‘I suppose you could say that I have prematurely initiated a planetary re-entry sequence...

  * * * *

  The report from Torrance arrived just before Conway reached O’Mara’s office. It said that one of the two stars had a light-gravity planet which was inhabitable while showing no indications of advanced technology, and that the other possessed a large, fast-spinning world which was so flattened at the poles that it resembled two soup bowls joined at the rims. On the latter world the atmosphere was dense and far-reaching, gravity varied between three Gs at the poles to one-quarter G at the equator, and surface metals were non-existant. Very recently, in astronomical terms, the world had spiralled too close to its sun and planet-wide volcanic activity and steam had rendered the atmosphere opaque. Torrance doubted that it was still habitable.

  ‘That supports my theory,’ said Conway excitedly when O’Mara had relayed the report to him, ‘that the bird and the barnacles, and the other insect life-form, originate from the same planet. The barnacles are parasites, of course, with a small individual brain capacity, but intelligent when linked and operating as a gestalt. They must have known that their planet was heading for destruction for centuries, and decided to escape. But just think of what it must have taken to develop a space-travel capability completely without metal

  Somehow they had learned how to trap the giant birds from the heavy-gravity polar regions and to control them with their tendrils—the barnacles were a physically weak species and their ability to control non-intelligent hosts was the only strength they had. The birds, Conway now knew, were a non-intelligent species as were the tendril-less beetles. They had taken control of the birds and had flown them high above the equator, commanding maximum physical effort to achieve the required height and velocity for the link-up with the final propulsion stage—the beetles. They also had been controlled by the barnacles, perhaps fifty to each parasite, and they had attached themselves to the areas behind the wings in a gigantic, narrow cone.

  Meanwhile the bird had been shaped and paralysed into the configuration of a supersonic glider, its claws removed to render it aerodynamically clean, and injected with the secretions which would arrest the processes of decomposition. The crew had then sealed it and themselves in position and gone into hibernation for the duration of the voyage using the bird’s tissue for life-support.

  Once in position the propulsion cone comprising millions of insects, hundreds of thousands of which were the intelligent controllers, had begun firing. They had done so very evenly and gently, so as not to shatter or crush the narrow apex of the cone where it was attached to the bird. The beetles could be made to deliver their tiny modicum of thrust whether they were alive or dead and, even with their ability to seal themselves inside a hard coating, the propulsion controllers had not lived for very long—they also were expendable. But in dying they had helped an organic starship carrying a few hundred of their fellows to achieve
escape velocity from their doomed planet and its sun.

  “... I don’t know how they intended to position the bird for re-entry,’ Conway went on admiringly, ‘but atmospheric heating was intended to trigger the organic melting process when they had braked sufficiently, allowing the barnacles to pull free of the bird and fly to the surface under their own wing-power. In my hurry to get rid of the coating I applied heat over a wide area of the forward section, which simulated re-entry conditions and-’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said O’Mara testily. ‘A masterly exercise in medical deduction and sheer blasted luck! And now, I suppose, you will leave me to clean up after you by devising a method of communicating with these beasties and arranging for their transport to their intended destination. Or was there something else you wanted?’

  Conway nodded. ‘Brenner tells me that his scoutship flotilla, using an extension of the search procedure for overdue ships, could cover the volume of space between the home and destination stars. There are probably other birds, perhaps hundreds of them-’

  O’Mara opened his mouth and looked ready to emulate a bombardier beetle. Conway added hastily, ‘I don’t want them brought here, sir. The Corps can take them where they are going, melt them on the surface to avoid re-entry casualties, and explain the situation to them.

  ‘They’re colonists, after all—not patients.’

  <>

  * * * *

  THREE ENIGMAS

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Brian Aldiss last appeared in New Writings in SF in 1964. His talents which have recently been so successfully displayed to a wider public here dazzlingly create a distorting mirror which reflects in an off-centre and out-of-focus reality the way things might have been had they not been as they are—and by things we are at liberty to imagine existence, life, causality, love and even science fiction.

  * * * *

  Introduction

  Here are three of my Enigmas. Consider them as paintings, as Tiepolo’s engravings crossed with de Chirico’s canvases.

  I have written other Enigmas and shall write more. When I have written fifty, the best of them can be collected and published as a book.

  Consider that statement. Its author appears to operate securely within well-defined parameters; his chart of his known world plainly contains at least a portion of the future. One would not suspect from the statement that the world in which he operates is full of ambiguities, of alternatives that open and close like sliding doors.

  Yet so it is. The author of the statement has chosen to make assumptions. He operates on the basis of those assumptions just as navigators of old operated on the assumption that the Pole Star was fixed. That assumption worked, although it was totally erroneous—the Pole Star travels millions of miles a year on its ineluctable errands. Which was something the ancient navigators could never guess.

  So with these other assumptions. They are probably incorrect in ways we cannot attempt to understand. And that is the assumption which underlies the Enigmas: that the world is a stage on which we, the players, have no adequate means of determining the nature of the drama in which we enact our bit parts—despite various dogmatic assertions on the subject from Religion or Science.

  * * * *

  I. The Enigma of Her Voyage

  As we sat there, bound and helpless, a music of unknown kind moved through the ship towards us. Captain Callard walked over to me and stood in the Aptorex position, smiling as required.

  ‘Your new planet is in sight, Lemmor,’ she said. ‘Soon we shall seek the answer to all your internal enigmas. How do you plead at this continuous moment of cerebral time?’

  ‘I have told you, I may now de-husband myself when you please,’ I answered. ‘Pleasuring is not the all of my life. Things have been achieved.’

  ‘We shall see,’ she said absently. Somewhere an alarm was pleading in a low and intense song, filling the cabin air with ultra-violet.

  Callard moved over to the keyboards, depressing switches. Beyond the vision-screens swam my enigma planet which I had named Benecundria. Our ship had travelled across many sound years—385 million sound years—at many multiples of sound-speed per second, increasing mass as it accelerated, until our mass had been within 0.981 of the universe itself. What large thoughts we had thought then, galaxy-encompassed! Now, under deceleration, the flow of our consciousness returned to us, foaming back down the sound-years from their near infinite journey, chilling us with news of dusty epochs of our being, shrinking us. Soon we would be on Benecundria, human-sized once more, vulnerable to all that was.

  We could never return. Experience was a barrier technology could never overcome. The conceptual universe had captured us.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Callard said, ‘In density, Lemmor!’

  I obeyed. When I awoke, our great ship was down. All the Investigators were being released, prepared to walk out on Benecundria’s ‘surface’. Only I, as creator of the enigma, must remain aboard. As each Investigator passed me, she bowed and smiled.

  They filed out on to Benecundria, to stand on that unending slope I had devised. Even the Husbands would be alert.

  At one of the ports I stood, feeling a sadness that what had been private was now public, part of the endless domain of extending human sensuous experience. My time was short now, my mission accomplished.

  The Investigators were now caught in the ultra-mundane perspectives of my conception. Some of them were gesticulating in an attempt to amplify body-image.

  For me, only one thing was left. I strode to the interior of the ship along the moving walkway. I entered the room of the Husbands.

  There were some ten thousand of them in our reservoir, swimming like young frogs, frog-sized in the vat of lubricants and nutrients. Lying on a couch, I released my personal Husband from the secret recesses of my body, cupping him in my hands.

  I took him over to the reservoir, let him slip into the fluids, watched him flipping down into the depths until he was lost among the little crowding hairless bodies.

  Faintness was overwhelming me. The song was back. Soon I would be part of it. And my enigma—part of the greater enigma of human existence.

  * * * *

  II. I Ching, Who You?

  While the next day was still blank with the mists of dawn, Thwarn descended and entered the window of the room where dinner had been held on the previous night. He waited as contained in his assumptions.

  The air of the room was rich and heavy with the aroma of prawn, flesh, and rice, spiced with a tang of rotting fruit left in the discarded wine bowls.

  The only girl Thwarn remembered was resting in one corner, among the greys where eternity started edging in. The arrangements and precisions of her face startled him anew. They gazed at one another across the spoiled bowls and soiled cloths. She spoke first.

  ‘Procedures for a Webi Hexagram?’

  That loved and dreaded warmth was stealing over him.

  ‘I have a demarcation in Wandrei. Could we agree on that?’

  She hesitated, then came forward, nodding her head slightly.

  Without touching, they cleared a space on the largest table. Thwarn drew feathers and laid them on the table. He was intensely aware of her gaze, fixed like his on the configuration of the feathers as they lay, light as breath, heavy as fate, this way and that, decreeing the day till daylight died.

  Feathers ruled the world.

  ‘Can you dispute it—fire-bird with tail immersed and two spaces in the wood?’

  ‘But the tiger appears in the field...’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed with relief. His interpretation of a tiger in Wandrei was ambiguous, but a time to proceed was indicated. He put his arms about her and kissed her on the lips. What had been a momentary intention became prolonged as her strength and youth moved through to him.

  ‘The fire-bird seems to be leaping up, but is still in the, deep,’ she said breathlessly, when they broke away. ‘Try Redistribution!’

  With one long nail, he swirled the feathe
rs, the two black, the three brown. Again they studied the juxtaposition. The mists remained beyond the window.

  ‘Carrion!’ she said eagerly. ‘And there the trigram for trees and mountains.’

  He stared lovingly at her, drinking her gaze. ‘You spoke of the Webi Hexagram—in conjunction, this trigram could lead to a consequent inferiority.’

  She hopped eagerly on to the table.

  ‘You don’t understand. Yesterday, too, the tiger appeared in the field. So I am encouraged to try and cross the great stream.’

  They stared into one another’s eyes, stared at life inscrutable, stared at all possible alternatives.