Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  Now the flesh on the bed began to change more rapidly. It had organized itself. It slid and smeared out of shape, or flowed in on itself with smacking noises. The cockroach was absorbed. Then, compressing itself, the mass formed back into one human form: Cyro’s. Face, body, colour of hair, eyes — all became like Cyro’s, and every drop of flesh was squeezed into her making. As her last fingernail formed, Gerund rolled over and sat up.

  Surprise seized him as he stared about the cell.

  It had seemed to him that he had been senseless only a second, yet the sick man had gone! At least Cyro looked better now. She was smiling at him. Perhaps, after all, his anxiety had produced some kind of optical illusion when he entered the cell; perhaps everything was all right. But, on looking more closely at Cyro, his returning sense of reassurance vanished.

  It was uncanny! The person sitting on the bed was Cyro. And yet — and yet — every line of her face, every subtle contour Gerund loved so well, had undergone an indefinable transmutation. Even the texture of her flesh had changed. He noticed that her fingers had grown. And there was another thing — she was too big. She was too thick and too tall to be Cyro, as she sat on the bed looking at him, trying to smile.

  Gerund stood up, faintness threatening to overwhelm him again. He was close to the door. He could run, or he could call for Jeffy, as his instincts bid him.

  Instead, he conquered his instincts. Cyro was in trouble, supreme trouble. Here was Gerund’s chance, possibly his final one, to prove his devotion to her; if he ran from her now, his chance would have passed forever — or so he told himself, for Gerund could not believe his wife’s indifference rested on anything but a distrust of his integrity.

  He turned back to her, ignoring her frightfulness.

  “Cyro, Cyro, what is wrong?” he asked. “What can I do? Tell me what I can do to help. I’ll do anything.”

  The creature on the bed opened its mouth.

  “I shall be better in a minute,” it said huskily. The words did not quite coincide with its lip movements.

  With a heave, it stood on its feet. It was over seven feet tall, and burly. Gerund stared at it as if hypnotized, but managed with an effort of will to hold out a hand to it. “It’s my wife,” he told himself, “it’s only my wife.” But as it lumbered toward him, his nerve broke. The look on its face was too terrible... He turned, too late to get away. It stretched out its arms and caught him almost playfully.

  In the cloister, Jeffy was growing bored. For all the affection he bore his master, he found the life of a bond servant a tedious one at times. Under the fishy eye of the old guard, he spread himself along the bench, preparing for a nap; Gerund would call him soon enough when he was wanted.

  A bell rang in the radio room.

  Casting one last suspicious look at Jeffy, the old man went to answer the call. Jeffy settled back to doze. In a minute, scuffling sounds made him open an eye. A monstrous form, its details lost in the feeble lighting, lumped along on eight or ten legs and vanished into the street. Jeffy was on his feet instantly, a wave of cold horror brushing tenderly over his skin. He turned and made at a run for the sick cell, instinctively connecting this monster with a threat to those he served.

  The cell was empty.

  “Here, what are you up to?” asked a voice behind him. The greybeard had come up at the sound of Jeffy’s footsteps. He peered past Jeffy’s elbow into the room. As soon as he saw it was empty, he pulled out a whistle and began to blow wildly on it.

  Judge: “You offer as an explanation of the disappearance of your master and mistress the possibility that they may have been — er — devoured by this monster you claim you saw?”

  Jeffy: “I didn’t say that, sir. I don’t know where they went to. I only say I saw this thing slipping out of the hospital, and then they were gone.”

  Judge: “You have heard that no one else in the subport has seen any such monster. You have heard the evidence of Laslo, the hospital guard, that he saw no such monster. Why, then, do you persist in this tale?”

  Jeffy: “I can only say what happened, can’t I?”

  Judge: “You are supposed to say what happened.”

  Jeffy: “That is what happened. It’s the truth! I’ve no secrets, nothing to hide. I was fond of my master. I would never have done away with him — or my mistress.”

  Judge: “Bonded servants have expressed such sentiments before, after their masters were dead. If you are innocent of what you are accused of, why did you attempt to escape when old Laslo blew his whistle for the police?”

  Jeffy: “I was rattled, sir, do you understand? I was frightened. I’d seen this — thing, and then I’d seen the empty cell, and then that fool started blowing. I — I just hit him without thinking.”

  Judge: “You do not reveal yourself as a responsible man. We have heard already the witness Laslo’s account of the way you threatened him with force soon after you arrived at the hospital.”

  Jeffy: “And you’ve heard me tell you why I did so.”

  Judge: “You realize, I hope, the serious position you are in? You are a simple man, so I will put it to you simply. Under world law, you are charged with the double murder of your master and mistress, and until their bodies are recovered or further evidence comes to light, you are to be housed in our prison.”

  There were two ways up from the subport to the surface of the Lanic. One way was the sea route, by which both the Bartlemeo and the Gyreses’ plane had arrived. The other was a land route. An underground funicular railway climbed through three thousand feet of rock from the submerged city to the station in Praia, the capital of the island of Satago. It was by this route that Jeffy was brought to prison.

  Overlooking a dusty courtyard sheltered by a baobab, Jeffy’s cell window allowed him a glimpse of the sea. It was good to be above ground again, although the cloudy overcast created a greenhouse atmosphere which was particularly oppressive after the cool air of the subport; Jeffy sweated perpetually. He spent a lot of his time standing on his wooden bed, staring out into the heat. Other convicts, out for exercise, talked to each other under his window in the local lingua crioula, but Jeffy understood not a word of it.

  Toward the evening of the second day of his confinement, Jeffy was at his usual perch when a wind arose. It blew hotly through the prison, and continued to blow. The heavy cloud was shredded away, revealing the blue of the sky for the first time in days. The chief guard, a swarthy man with immense moustaches, came out into the courtyard, sampled the air, approved, and strolled over to a stone seat under the baobab tree. Dusting it carefully with his handkerchief, he lay down and relaxed.

  On top of the wall behind the guard, something moved. A thing like a python uncoiled itself and began to drop down into the courtyard; it seemed to spread over the wall like a stain as it came, but the heavy foliage of the baobab made it difficult to see what was happening. It looked to Jeffy now as if a rubbery curtain set with jewels and starfish were gliding down the wall. Now it landed behind the guard.

  Whatever the thing was, it raised a flapper like a snake about to strike and clamped it over the unsuspecting guard’s face. Then the rest of its bulk flowed over the man, damping his struggles and covering him like a cloak. Jeffy cried out furiously from his cell, but no one answered, no one cared; most of the staff were down on the waterfront with their girls.

  When the thing slid off the chief guard, only a limp and flattened body lay on the bench. The hot wind trifled with its moustaches. The thing grew fingers and expertly removed the ring of keys from the dead man’s belt. A segment of it then detached itself from the main bulk, which remained in the shadows as the segment scampered across the yard with the keys. It looked like an animated stool.

  “My God!” Jeffy said. “It’s coming here.”

  As he backed away from the window to his cell door, the creature, with one bound, appeared between the bars and dropped the keys into the cell. It jumped in after them.

  Bit by bit, more of the thing arrived, d
ropping down before Jeffy’s petrified gaze and finally building into — Gerund, or an intolerable replica of him.

  Gerund put out a hand and touched his servant, almost as if he was experimenting.

  “It’s all right, Jeffy,” he said at last, speaking with obvious effort. “You have nothing to fear. No harm will come to you. Take these keys, unlock your cell door, and come with me up to the warden of the prison.”

  Grey in the face, shaking like a leaf, Jeffy managed to pull himself together enough to obey. The keys rattling in his hand, he tried them one by one in the lock until he found a key that fitted. Like a man mesmerized, he led the way into the corridor, the pseudo-Gerund following closely behind.

  No one was about. At one point a guard slept in a tipped-back chair, his heels resting high above his head on the whitewashed wall. They did not disturb him. They unlocked the big, barred door at the foot of a private staircase and so ascended into the warden’s office. Open doors showed them the way to a balcony overlooking the bay and the central peaks of the island.

  On the balcony, alone as usual, drinking wine as usual, a man sat in a wicker chair. He looked small and — yes, alas! — infinitely tired.

  “Are you the prison warden?” Gerund asked, stumping into the room.

  “I am,” I said.

  He looked at me for a long while. I could tell then that he was not — what shall I say? — not an ordinary human being. He looked what he was: a forgery of a human being. Even so, I recognized him as Gerund Gyres from the photographs the police had circulated.

  “Will you both take a chair?” I asked. “It fatigues me to see you standing.”

  Neither servant nor master moved.

  “Why have you — how have you released your man?” I asked.

  “I brought him before you,” Gerund said, “so that you may hear what I have to say, and so that you may know that Jeffy is a good servant, has never done me harm. I want him released forthwith.”

  So, this was a reasonable creature which had compassion. Human or no, it was something I could talk to. So many men with whom I have to deal have neither reason nor compassion.

  “I am prepared to listen,” I said, pouring myself more wine. “As you see, I have little else to do. Listening can be even pleasanter than talking.”

  Whereupon Gerund began to tell me everything I have now set down here to the best of my ability. Jeffy and I listened in silence; though the bondman undoubtedly understood little, I grasped quite enough to make my insides turn cold. After all, was not my copy of Pamlira’s work on paraevolution lying at my elbow?

  In the quiet that fell when Gerund finished, we heard the sunset Angelus ringing out from a Praia steeple; it brought me no anodyne, and the hard, hot wind carried its notes away. I knew already that a darkness was falling that no prayers would lighten.

  “So then,” I said, finding my voice, “as warden, the first point I must make is that you, Gerund Gyres, as I must call you, have committed murder: on your own admission, you killed my chief guard.”

  “That was an error,” Gerund said. “You must realize that I — who am a composite of Je Regard, Cyro Gyres and Gerund Gyres, to say nothing of the numerous fish absorbed on my swim up from the subport — I believed I could absorb any human being. It would not be death; we are alive. But your guard defied absorption. So did Jeffy, here, when I touched him.”

  “Why do you think that is?” I asked stiffly.

  He grew a smile on his face. I averted my eyes from it.

  “We learn fast,” he said. “We cannot absorb humans who are not conscious of themselves as part of the process of nature. If they cling to the outmoded idea of man as a species apart, their cells are antagonistic to ours and absorption will not take place.”

  “Do you mean to tell me you can only — er — absorb a cultured man?” I asked.

  “Exactly. With animals it is different. Their consciousness is only a natural process; they offer us no obstacle.”

  I believe it was at this point that Jeffy jumped over the balcony rail into the bushes below. He picked himself up unhurt, and we watched his massive frame dwindle from the road as he ran away. Neither of us spoke; I hoped he might go to bring help, but if Gerund thought of that he gave no sign.

  “Really, I don’t think I understand what you mean at all,” I said, playing for time. And I don’t think I did grasp it then; to tell you the truth, I was feeling so sick that the whole prison seemed to reel around me. This heavy pseudoman made me more frightened than I knew I could be. Though I fear neither life nor death, before the half-alive I was shivering with the chill of horror.

  “I don’t understand about absorbing only cultured people,” I said, almost at random.

  This time it did not bother to open its mouth to answer.

  “Culture implies fuller understanding. Today there is culturally speaking only one way to that understanding: through Galingua. I can only liberate the cells of those who are able to use that semantic tool, those whose whole biochemical bondage has already been made malleable by it. The accident that happened to Je Regard releases abilities already latent in every Galingua-speaking person throughout the Galaxy. Here and now on Yinnisfar, a giant step ahead has been taken — unexpected, yet the inevitable climax to the employment of Galingua.”

  “So then,” I said, feeling better as I began to comprehend, “you are the next evolutionary step as predicted by Pamlira in Paraevolution?”

  “Roughly speaking, yes,” he said. “I have the total awareness Pamlira spoke of. Each of my cells has that gift; therefore I am independent of fixed form, that bane of every multicelled creature before me.”

  I shook my head.

  “You seem to me not an advance but a retrogression,” I said. “Man is, after all, a complex gene hive; you are saying you can turn into single cells, but single cells are very early forms of life.”

  “All my cells are aware,” he said emphatically. “That’s the difference. Genes build themselves into cells and cells into the gene hive called man in order to develop their potentialities, not man’s. The idea of man’s being able to develop was purely an anthropomorphic concept. Now the cells have finished with this shape called man; they have exhausted its possibilities and are going on to something else.”

  To this there seemed nothing to say, so I sat quietly, sipping my drink and watching the shadows grow, spreading from the mountains out to sea. I was still cold but no longer shaking.

  “Have you nothing else to ask me?” Gerund inquired, almost with puzzlement in his voice. You hardly expect to hear a monster sound puzzled.

  “Yes,” I said. “Just one thing. Are you happy?”

  The silence, like the shadows, extended itself toward the horizon.

  “I mean,” I amplified, “if I had a hand in modelling a new species, I’d try and make something more capable of happiness than man. Curious creatures that we are, our best moments come when we are striving for something; when the thing’s achieved — la — we are full of unrest again. There is a divine discontent, but divine content comes only to the beasts of the pasture, who regardlessly crop down snails with their grass. The more intelligent a man is, the more open he is to doubt; conversely, the bigger fool he is, the more likely he is to be pleased with his lot. So I’m asking, are you, new species, happy?”

  “Yes,” Gerund said positively. “As yet I am but three people: Regard, Cyro, Gerund. The last two have struggled for years for full integration — as do all human couples — and now have found it, a fuller integration than was ever feasible before. What humans instinctively seek, we instinctively have; we are the completion of a trend. We can never be anything but happy, no matter how many people we absorb.”

  Keeping my voice steady, I said, “You’d better start absorbing me then, since that must be what you intend.”

  “Eventually all human cells will come under the new regime,” Gerund said. “But first the word of what is happening must be spread to make people receptive to us, to so
ften further what Galingua has already softened. Everyone must know, so that we can carry out the absorption process. That is your duty. You are a civilized man, warden; you must write to Pamlira for a start, explaining what has occurred. Pamlira will be interested.”

  He paused. Three cars swept up the road and turned in at the main gate of the prison. Jeffy, then, had had enough intelligence to go for help.

  “Supposing I will not aid you?” I asked. “Why should I hurry man’s extinction? Supposing I acquaint the Gal-Fed Council with the truth, and get them to blow this whole island to bits? It would be a simple — get out! — a simple matter — confound it!”

  We were suddenly surrounded by butterflies. In impatiently brushing them away, I had knocked over my bottle of wine. The air was full of thousands of butterflies, fluttering around us like paper; the darkening sky was thick with them. The angriest gestures of the hand could not clear them away.

  “What is this?” Gerund spluttered. For the first time, I personally saw him out of shape, as he grew another attachment to wave the dainty creatures off. It sprouted from what had been his ear, and flailed the air about his head. I can only say I was nauseated. It cost me the greatest effort to keep a grip on myself.

  “As a creature so aware of nature,” I said, “you should enjoy this spectacle. These are Painted Lady butterflies, blown in thousands off their migratory tracks. We get them here most years. This hot wind, which we call the marmtan, carries them westward across the ocean from the continent.”

  Now I could hear people running up the stairs. They would be able to deal suitably with this creature, whose reasonable words were so in contrast to his unreasonable appearance. I continued, speaking more loudly, so that if possible he would be taken unawares. “It’s not entirely a misfortune for the butterflies. There are so many of them, no doubt they have eaten most of their food on the mainland and would have starved had they not been carried here by the wind. An admirable example of nature looking after its own.”