Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  Although his worries persisted, Milton soon managed to shake them to the back of his mind. Guilt was his trouble; at home his country was at war, while here everything was created for pleasure. Solite was immensely enjoyable for its own sake. Milton loved its hedonistic atmosphere, that nevertheless contained an astringent tang. He loved its women for their beauty and for the gay delicacy which concealed the firmness with which they controlled everything. With Solite men he was less enamoured; they were nice enough, but Milton could not forgive them for being the weaker sex. Old attitudes die hard.

  The new bunch of women and animals — as ever they were mixed together — that Milton was introduced to began roving around the palace with him. All was wonderfully confusing — some rooms had an indoor feeling, some an outdoor; the contiguity of flesh and fur was stimulating; the kaleidoscope of colour intoxicated. Milton found himself besieged with questions about Earth. He answered them almost without thought, as it grew later and the procession became a sort of strutting dance. Inevitably, the gaiety soaked into him, warming his heart, tempering his pulses.

  What the Solites thought of him was clear enough: he was a primitive, odd, perhaps even dangerous, but therefore all the more exciting. Let them think what they liked! They could think he was a cave man, provided this wonderful party went on a little longer.

  Yet for all his rapture, Milton learned a little about the civilization of which he had become a member, picking up scraps of information dropped in casual conversation. Solite was mainly a barren world; half the land between the poles was crater-filled and bereft of soil. In the rest, the Solites had tried to create their idea of paradise, raising occasional oases among the deserts.

  Their oases were being stocked with the fauna and flora of Earth, since their own species were few in number.

  “Don’t you get plants and animals from other planets in the Galaxy?” Milton asked one witch-eyed woman. Just for a second he thought she lost her step in the dance. Her green eyes searched him until he dropped his gaze.

  “Only from your Earth,” she said, and dipped away from him in a glide.

  The Solites reckoned their culture to be fifteen thousand years old. They had now reached a period of stability. For all their gaiety, Milton fancied he could detect a core of loneliness in them. But, finally, his sense of difference disappeared in the excitement of the evening. He was becoming slightly drunk, though he drank little.

  Now the palace was like a mirage, shining with people, glittering with music, its whole architecture adrift with calculated magic.

  “Soon we will move it all down to the sea!” Amada cried. “Such a night is incomplete without an ocean. We will transport shortly to Union Bay. We must have waves, and the rhythms of the tide around us!”

  Meanwhile, the rooms became hallucinatory. The portmatters seemed capable of any miracle, as the delicate servomechanisms behind them responded to the party-goers’ mood. Bright wall drifted through bright wall, rooms floated up and down among each other bearing their merrymakers with them, so that stars and snowflakes mingled in a beautiful, impossible storm, and angelfish flew among branches of viridian cacti. Hidden music increased in tempo to match the marching decor with its beat.

  Then Wangust Ilsont arrived, the last of all the guests. In her hair a magenta chameleon curled, matching the magenta of her lips and the nipples of her breasts. She hastened to Amada and Floyd Milton. She, too, had been to Earth; she, too, had returned with a native husband.

  “It’ll be pleasant for each of you,” Wangust said, beaming warmly at Milton as she clutched his hand, “in case you ever feel homesick; you shall be my husband’s best friend, hunting and drinking with him. We don’t live far from you; a horse can take you almost as quickly as a portmatter.”

  She brought her Earthman husband forward and introduced him as Chun Hwa.

  As the two men confronted each other, everyone else seemed to fade away, lost in a moment of crisis.

  Clearly enough the expressions chased themselves across Chun Hwa’s face. First an angry dislike. Then regret for the dislike. Then embarrassment. A pained searching. Finally a grimace that said, “Well, this isn’t any time or place to be unpleasant.” With a smile he put out his hand.

  Milton recovered himself less quickly.

  Ignoring the hand outstretched to him, he turned vexedly to Amada.

  “This man belongs to a nation which is at war with mine,” he said.

  A strained silence fell instantly over the whole group. In part, it was a silence of incomprehension. Milton spoke in the Solite tongue, but since to his knowledge that language had no exact equivalents for the words “nation” and “war,” he was forced to use instead the equivalents for “group” and “trouble.”

  “How can there be trouble between you?” Amada asked, calmly enough, but with a hint of danger in her voice. “You are both Solite men now. Earth is far away and has no claims on you.

  The words had exactly the wrong effect on Milton. All his feelings of guilt welled up strongly within him. He clenched his fist, part of him aware he was about to act foolishly.

  “There is trouble between us,” he said. “One of us must leave at once.”

  “This I don’t understand,” Wangust said. She was completely nonplussed by Milton’s reaction. “You are both Earthmen — ”

  “Have you ever met before?” someone asked.

  “What are these groups you speak of?” someone else asked.

  “What is this trouble?”

  “Stay out of this!” Amada begged them all. She turned to her husband. Subyani, her tiger, could not rival her for ferocious beauty when she grew angry. Amada in her wrath was at once potently appealing and intimidating.

  “I wish to know at once, clearly, the cause of this foolishness,” she demanded of Milton.

  Chun Hwa began to explain. His Solite, Milton noted angrily, was more fluent than Milton’s own. The concept of nationality seemed above the heads of most of the women present; they belonged to a sparsely populated world where the ubiquitous portmatters rendered segregation into groups an impermanent affair.

  Amada and Wangust, however, having visited Earth, knew something of the terrible weapons of war, and had even seen the start of the global conflict before leaving for Solite. Both were alarmed to find an echo of that fearful struggle here in their midst. During the argument that followed, they let slip a piece of information previously withheld from Milton, either by accident or design: now that the war was on, no more portmatter units would visit Earth. He was entirely cut off from his native world.

  Chun Hwa, urbane and conciliatory, had their ear now. Milton, unable to follow all that was said, found he did not want to listen. Perturbation swamped him; already mazed by colour, light, and tempting women, his brain rocked with conflict. The sense of being alien, of being numb to so much glorious life, was overwhelming.

  Angrily, he turned on his heel and left. Amada made no movement to detain him.

  In its present state of gay upheaval, the palace was an impossible place for a novice to leave. Milton contented himself with walking as far and as fast as he could, agony of mind goading him on.

  He was sorry for what he had done here; he was sorry he had left Earth. He loved Amada passionately; equally, he loved his own land. It was a cruel antithesis to resolve. His thoughts churned more madly than the hidden music.

  He travelled a long way, pushing through ranks of startled revellers, sometimes being carried back by the rooms almost to the point he had started from. And then the scene changed.

  In an attempt to fend off the failure of her party, Amada had moved the palace. Having been an electronics officer before his marriage, Milton knew something of the complexity behind this seemingly simple transference of location. Nevertheless, even in his present mood, the wonder of it overcame him.

  The great building was suddenly half-submerged in a summer sea. Its rear apartments stood on the beach, its forward ones, like the bow of a doomed ship, sunk under
the foam. It was night. An illusion of phosphorescence washed against the walls and, by cunning back-projection, appeared to float through the palace itself.

  Under the pellucid waters, the participants in a weird ballet began to arrive. Seals bearing luminous globes, lancelike cornet fish, eels, chubs, big purple parrot fish, shoals of doctor fish, dolphins, sharks and manta rays whirled onto the watery stage. Around the transparent walls they swam, sinking and rising in a curious saraband.

  “I’ve got to get home!” Milton exclaimed, and turned his back on the parading fish.

  Breaking into a run, he pressed through the seemingly submerged rooms until he came finally to a chamber that, camouflaged though it was, he recognized. Here be was alone.

  He pushed his hand through floating bunches of syringa blossom. Behind them he felt a metal box; opening it, chancing a shock, he probed gingerly for the first terminal. This little box contained the scrambler that, on instructions from the computer housed deep down in the foundation, maintained this particular room s cubic contents in their desired spatiotemporal location.

  Milton, his face pressed into the sweet syringas, wrenched out the wire below the first terminal. As soon as it came away, it dissolved beneath his fingers.

  The room snapped out of being.

  Somewhere an alarm began to sound, then it faded out sharply on a dropped octave. The palace vanished. People, music, flowers, the bright facades and terraces, all evanesced.

  In the emergency caused by Milton’s broken circuit, the computer had recalled the entire building to its base inland.

  Milton fell twelve feet into the slumbering sea.

  All was silent as he gained the surface. The underwater menagerie had fled. There was only a sea bird, killed by the original materialization of the palace, which floated beside Milton on the water Overhead, Solite s weird moon burned, a pregnant crescent; it glowed red and baleful, like an eye whose pupil swims with blood.

  Blowing out a mouthful of water, Floyd Milton kicked out and made for the shore.

  “I’m going home!” he told himself aloud. It could be done. The distance to the great portmatter units that had travelled to Earth was not great; he could walk it. He would smuggle himself aboard, force them to take him back. The call of duty was suddenly absurdly strong.

  To get back he would not hesitate to kill. The Solites were alien; even his beloved Amada could not understand. She would not even tell him such a simple thing as how many light years it was to Earth; therefore she could not love him deeply. Amada must be forgotten. Perhaps after the war...if there was an after to follow that terrible holocaust...

  He needed a weapon.

  A small pier jutted from the beach. Milton swam to it and hauled himself up a ladder. On the pier, red in the eerie moonlight, stood a wooden hut. Milton broke open the door with one heave of his shoulder.

  Fortune was with him. Inside the hut hung skin-diving equipment. Fins, goggles, fathometers and waterscopes lay ready for use. And there was one magnificent speargun — a fortunate concession, Milton reflected, considering the peaceable nature of the Solites. Examining it, he found it was air-powered, and fired a fearsome-looking barb equipped with a cartridge that would explode upon contact.

  Scooping up a belt of spare ammunition, Milton left the hut with the gun. Outside, he stopped sharply. Chun Hwa was coming along the pier toward him.

  Yes, of course — they would guess what had happened when a fuse blew and he was no longer anywhere to be found. They would hurry back to get him... Baring his teeth, Milton swung the gun up and took aim. Chun Hwa stopped immediately.

  “Don’t fire!” he called in Solite. “Floyd Milton, please listen to me. I am not your antagonist! You do not understand; quite evidently you have not been told as much about this world as I have.”

  “I don’t want to hear a thing!” Milton shouted. His blood bellowed like surf in his ears. Through the red night he could discern moving figures on the land; they must be coming to hunt him down.

  “Hear me, Milton! Don’t fire, please! These people have saved us and the animals and plants because the war on Earth will destroy nearly all things. Do you understand, Milton? The Solites are our — ”

  Milton cut him off with a savage shout. People were crowding down the cactus-fringed beach. They had reached the pier. A few of them charged into the surf, calling his name. He pressed the trigger of the speargun. Almost at once, the cartridge exploded in its screaming target.

  Everything went blank, freezing down into a dull, uniform grey.

  For a long moment, the Director sat where he was in the control booth, hands clasped painfully together. Such was the vivid impact of Floyd Milton’s dream that he could almost imagine himself shot by the harpoon gun. When the feeling passed, he jumped up abruptly, recollecting himself to his own world. Something had caused Milton’s dream to be cut off; it should never have stopped so abruptly.

  With controlled savagery, the Director plucked off his visor, dialled the dreamery’s Main Ops Room and demanded to know what the trouble was.

  “The wing of Dreamery Five from which you are speaking,” said a smooth robot voice, “has suffered an indirect hit from a cobalt warhead. All blanketers are already in full operation and repair crews are on the job.”

  Glancing through the booth’s window into the vault, the Director saw the long line of dreamers stirring uneasily; one or two of them were even sitting up. A giant had come and trodden on their pathetic little magic-lantern slides. Soon they might all be awake, running about in panic; that certainly should be avoided.

  The Director turned back to the phone.

  “Inject treble dosage of standard sedative down all feeding tubes in this wing — at once!” he said. That would make them sleep like the Seven Sleepers, and a little headache would colour their dreams when the circuits were restored. But to his order there had to be one exception.

  Hurrying out, the Director went across to the prone figure of Floyd Milton. With one swift gesture, he pulled down the double tubes, the silver and the rubber, that bled into the man’s chest. More gently, he removed Milton’s visor and phones.

  “Floyd!” he said. “Floyd Milton! Wake up!”

  Milton’s eyes opened; it was like suddenly looking over an empty ocean, grey and sullen and lost.

  “I’m your friend,” the Director said, doubting if the other saw him. “I know now why you came here, and I know you’re too good a man to waste your life with all these slugs around you. You can face what you have done; you must face it! Men like you are needed on top.”

  “I’m a murderer!” Milton groaned. He sat up convulsively. “Oh God, what I did — ”

  “I know what you did,” the Director said. “I looked in on your dream. You must not call it murder. You did it as a duty, to get away.”

  Milton stared at him blankly.

  “The Solites brought you back by portmatter, making a special journey,” the Director reminded him. “I was told that much when you arrived here. That proves they cannot have blamed you; they saw by your act of killing that they did wrong to keep you on Solite any longer, and so they let you come home.”

  “You’re crazy!” Milton said. For the first time, he looked intelligently at the Director. “They didn’t ‘let me come home.’ They exiled me! They wouldn’t have me there one moment longer. They were revolted by me, do you understand? They saw I was a cave man, and obviously I had best go back and die in my own cave man world. It was their civilized way of dealing with a murderer.”

  “But Chun Hwa — he was your enemy,” the Director protested. “When you killed him on the pier, you — ”

  A groan burst from Milton. He covered his face in his hands, rocking to and fro.

  “I did not kill Chun Hwa,” he cried. “I killed Amada, my wife...”

  Brokenly, he recounted the scene. It was Amada who had come running along the pier in the crimson night. She had tried to take the gun from him, had even pleaded for Chun Hwa when Milton had t
hreatened to shoot him, and at that, an intense stab of jealousy bad triggered Milton’s anger. He fired.

  Staggering from the dreadful blast, Amada fell over the side of the pier into the sea. The reel on the gun, as the line attached to the harpoon paid out, screeched wildly.

  At the memory of it, Milton broke into fresh lamentation. The Director stood helplessly over him, one hand on his shoulder. Beyond the dreamery, more explosions sounded. The governments had promised that this war to end war would be fought mainly on the epic wastes of the moon; well, it was not the first time governments had lied. Just now, the universal tragedy seemed somehow less than Milton’s personal one.

  “So you never found out where Solite is, and why it remains out of reach,” the Director said. “Everybody would have been interested to know that — once.”

  Blurrily, Milton looked up.

  “Yes, I know where it is,” he said. “I found out by accident on the journey home; they lent me a technical book on portmatters to pass the time. I was too depressed to try and make it out — threw it aside after opening it once. But one sentence I read there stuck in my memory. It said: ‘Matter transmission is practicable only where gravity factors can operate effectively on the broadcast mass,’ or words to that effect.”

  “Sorry. It doesn’t mean a thing to me,” the Director said.

  “It has only one implication,” Milton replied listlessly. “It means that the portmatters will not work between planets, where gravitational attractions are low. So you can see that that blood-red moon burned with atomic fires. You can see that it was our moon... When I thought things over I realized — oh — everything: that Solite was what we in English call Earth, that the Solites were only Earthmen, of the same stock we are. That my dear Amada — if I’d only known sooner — was no alien creature at all...”

  The Director was deadly pale. Harshly, he broke in on Milton’s groans.

  “If this is so, if they aren’t space travellers, you are saying they merely came back in time?”