by Brian Aldiss
‘Don’t you see, my dear?’ Her eyes were large as they searched his. ‘To find how strong your N-factor is. To find if you’re friend or enemy. When this rain stops, I must go back. Stanley will be looking for me, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Arlblaster were not looking for you; he must know you’ve had time to sort things out in your mind. So I want to know if I can come back to Earth with you. …’
He shook himself, dashed a water drip off his forehead, tried to delay giving an answer.
‘Earth’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Menderstone’s right, of course; it is regimented – it would never suit an individualist like him. It’s not so pretty as Nehru. … Yes, Alice, I’ll take you back if you want to come. I can’t leave you here.’
She flung herself on to him, clasping him in her arms, kissing his ear and cheek and lips.
‘I’m a loving woman,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘As even Stanley –’
They stiffened at a noise outside the cave, audible above the rain. Anderson turned his head to look where she was looking. Rain was falling more gently now. Before its fading curtain a face appeared.
The chief features of this face were its low brow, two large and lustrous eyes, a prominent nose, and a straggling length of wet, sandy beard. It was Frank Arlblaster.
He raised both hands.
‘Come to see me, child of Earth, as I come to see you, peaceful, patient, all-potent –’
As more of him rose into view in the cave mouth, Alice fired the revolver. The bellow of its report in the confined space was deafening. At ten yards’ range, she did not miss. Arlblaster clutched at his chest and tumbled forward into the wet ground, crying inarticulately.
Anderson turned on Alice, and struck the gun from her hand.
‘Murder, sheer murder! You shouldn’t have done it! You shouldn’t have done –’
She smacked him across the cheek.
‘If you’re Crow, he’s your enemy as well as mine! He’d have killed me! He’s an Ape. …’ She drew a long shuddering breath. ‘And now we’ve got to move fast for your ship before the pack hunts us down.’
‘You make me sick!’ He tried to pick up the revolver but could not bring himself to touch it.
‘Keith, I’ll make it up to you on the journey home, I promise. I – I was desperate!’
‘Just don’t talk to me! Come on, let’s git.’
They slid past Arlblaster’s body, out into the mizzling rain. As they started down the slope, a baying cry came from their left flank. A group of Neanderthals, men and women, stood on a promontory only two hundred yards away. They must have witnessed Arlblaster’s collapse and were slowly marshalling their forces. As Alice and Anderson appeared, some of the men ran forward.
‘Run!’ Alice shouted. ‘Down to the river! Swim it and we’re safe.’
Close together, they sped down the slippery incline where an imaginary glacier had flowed. Without a pause or word, they plunged through reeds and mud and dived fully dressed into the slow waters. Making good time, the Neanderthals rushed down the slope after them, but halted when they reached the river.
Gaining the far bank, Anderson turned and helped Alice out of the water. She collapsed puffing on the grass.
‘Not so young as I was. … We’re safe now, Keith. Nothing short of a forest fire induces those apes to swim. But we still might meet trouble this side. … We’ll avoid the settlement. Even if the apes there aren’t after us, we don’t want to face Stanley with his rifle. … Poor old Stanley! Give me a hand up. …’
Anderson moved on in surly silence. His mind was troubled by Arlblaster’s death; and he felt he was being used.
The rain ceased as they pressed forward among dripping bush. Travelling in a wide arc, they circled the village and picked up a track which led back towards Anderson’s ship.
Alice grumbled intermittently as they went. At last Anderson turned on her.
‘You don’t have to come with me, Alice. If you want to, go back to Stanley Menderstone!’
‘At least he cared about a woman’s feelings.’
‘I warn you that they are not so fussy on Earth, where women don’t have the same scarcity value.’ He hated himself for speaking so roughly. He needed solitude to sort out the turmoil in his brain.
Alice plodded along beside him without speaking. Sun gleamed. At last the black hull of the ship became visible between trees.
‘You’ll have to work on Earth!’ he taunted her. ‘The robocracy will direct you.’
‘I shall get married. I’ve still got some looks.’
‘You’ve forgotten something, honey. Women have to have work certificates before they can marry these days. Regimentation will do you good.’
A wave of hatred overcame him. He remembered the priestly Arlblaster dying. When Alice started to snap back at him, Anderson struck her on the shoulder. A look of panic and understanding passed over her face.
‘Oh, Keith …’ she said. ‘You …’ Her voice died; a change came over her face. He saw her despair before she turned and was running away, back towards the settlement, calling inarticulately as she ran.
Anderson watched her go. Then he turned and sidled through the dripping trees. At last – free! Himself! She was a Crow squaw.
His ship no longer looked welcoming. He splashed through a puddle and touched it, withdrawing his hand quickly. Distorted by the curve of the hull, his reflection peered at him from the polished metal. He did not recognise himself.
‘Someone there imprisoned in Crow ship,’ he said, turning away.
The breath of the planet was warm along his innocent cheek. He stripped off his damp clothes and faded among the leaves and uncountable grasses and the scents of soil and vegetation. Shadow and light slithered over his skin in an almost tangible pattern before foliage embraced him and he was lost entirely into his new Eden.
The proud author lay where he was on the floor of the small room, among the metal sheets he had worn as camouflage while hiding with the humots. Since the Tenth Dominant finished reading his story – that poor thing written before he had wisdom – silence lay between the Dominant and the Chief Scanner; though whether or not they were communicating by UHF, Anderson could not tell.
He decided he had better do something. Sitting up, he said, ‘How about letting me go free? … Or how about letting me go back to the zoo? … Well, at least take me into a room that’s big enough for me.’
The Dominant spoke. ‘We need to ask you questions about your story. Is it true or not true?’
‘It’s fiction. Lousy or otherwise, it exists in its own right.’
‘Some things in it are true – you are. So is or was Frank Arlblaster. So is or was Stanley Menderstone. But other things are false. You did not stay always on Nehru II. You came back to Earth.’
‘The story is a fiction. Forget it! It has nothing to do with you. Or with me, now. I only write poetry now – that story is just a thing I wrote to amuse myself.’
‘We do not understand it. You must explain it.’
‘Oh, Christ! … Look, I wouldn’t bother about it! I wrote it on the journey back to Earth from Nehru II, just to keep myself amused. When I got here, it was to find the various surviving Master Boffs were picking up such bits of civilisation as were left round the world after Nuclear Week! The story immediately became irrelevant.’
‘We know all about Nuclear Week. We do not know about your story. We insist that we know about it.’
As Anderson sighed, he nevertheless recognised that more must lie in the balance here than he understood.
‘I’ve been a bad boy, Dominant, I know. I escaped from the zoo. Put me back there, let me settle back with my wife; for my part. I’ll not attempt to escape again. Then we’ll talk about my story.’
The silence lasted only a fraction of a second. ‘Done,’ said the Dominant, with splendid mastery of humanic idiom.
The zoo was not unpleasant. By current standards, it was vast, and the flats in the new human-type skyscrapers not to
o cramped; the liberals admitted that the Hive had been generous about space. There were about twenty thousand people here, the East Coast survivors of Nuclear Week. The robocracy had charge of them; they, in their turn, had charge of all the surviving wild life that the automata could capture. Incongruous among the tall flat-blocks stood cages of exotic animals collected from shattered zoos – a pride of lions, some leopards, several cheetahs, an ocelot, camels. There were monkey houses, ostrich houses, elephant houses, aquaria, reptilia. There were pens full of pigs and sheep and cows. Exotic and native birds were captive in aviaries.
Keith Anderson sat on the balcony of his flat with his wife, Sheila, and drank an ersatz coffee, looking out on to the pens below, not without relish.
‘Well, the robots are behaving very strangely,’ Sheila was saying. ‘When you disappeared, three of the very tiny ones came and searched everywhere. Your story was the only thing they seemed interested in. They must have photostatted it.’
‘I remember now – it was in the trunk under the bed. I’d forgotten all about it till they mentioned it – my sole claim to literary fame!’
‘But that side of it can’t interest them. What are they excited about?’
He looked amusedly at her. She was still partly a stranger to him, though a beloved one. In the chaos to which he returned after the Nehru trip, it was a case of marrying any eligible girl while they were available – men outnumbered women two to one; he’d been lucky in his blind choice. Sheila might not be particularly beautiful, but she was good in bed, trustworthy, and intelligent. You could ask for no more.
He said, ‘Do you ever admit the truth of the situation to yourself, Sheila? The new automats are now the superior race. They have a dozen faculties to each one of ours. They’re virtually indestructible. Small size is clearly as much an enormous advantage to them as it would be a disadvantage to us. We’ve heard rumours that they were on the threshold of some staggering new discovery – from what I overheard the Tenth Dominant say, they are on the brink of moving into some staggering new dimensions of which we can probably never even get a glimpse. And yet –’
‘And yet they need your story!’ She laughed – sympathetically, so that he laughed with her.
‘Right! They need my goddamned story! Listen – their powers of planning and extrapolation are proved miraculous. But they cannot imagine; imagination might even be an impediment for them. So the Dominant, who can tap more knowledge than you or I dream of, is baffled by a work of fiction. He needs my imagination.’
‘Not entirely, Mr Anderson.’
Anderson jumped up, cup in hand, as his wife gave a small scream.
Perched on the balcony rail, enormously solid-looking, yet only six inches high, was the stubby shape of an automaton!
Furious, Anderson flung his cup, the only weapon to hand. It hit the machine four-square, shattered, and fell away. The machine did not even bother to refer to the matter.
‘We understand imagination. We wish to ask you more questions about the background to your story.’
Anderson sat down, took Sheila’s hand, and made an anatomical suggestion which no automaton could have carried out.
‘We want to ask you more questions about the story. Why did you write that you stayed on Nehru when really you came back?’
‘Are you the Chief Scanner who captured me on D-Dump?’
‘You are speaking with Tenth Dominant, in command of Eastern Seaboard. I have currently taken over Chief Scanner for convenience of speaking with you.’
‘Sort of mechanical transvestism, eh?’
‘Why did you write that you stayed when you in reality came back?’
‘You’d better give him straight answers, Keith,’ Sheila said.
He turned to her irritably, ‘How do I know the answer? It was just a story! I suppose it made a better ending to have the Anderson-figure stay on Nehru. There was this Cro-Magnon – Neanderthal business in the story, and I made myself out to be more Neanderthal than Crow for dramatic effect. Just a lot of nonsense really?’
‘Why do you call it nonsense when you wrote it yourself?’ asked the Dominant. It had settled in the middle of the coffee-table now.
The man sighed wearily. ‘Because I’m older now. The story was a lot of nonsense because I injected this Crow – Neanderthal theory, which is a bit of free-wheeling young man tripe. It just went in to try to explain what actually happened on Nehru – how the egghead camp broke down and everything. The theory doesn’t hold water for a moment; I see that now, in the light of what happened since. Nuclear Week and all that. You see –’
He stopped. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the little complex artifact confronting him. It was speaking to him but he did not hear, following his own racing thoughts. He stretched forward his hand and picked it up; the automaton was heavy and warm, only mildly frightening, slightly, slightly vibrating at the power of its own voice; the Dominant did not stop him picking it up. He stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before.
‘I repeat, how would you revise your theory now?’ said the automaton.
Anderson came back to reality.
‘Why should I help you? To your kind, man is just another animal in a zoo, a lower species.’
‘Not so. We revere you as ancestors, and have never treated you otherwise.’
‘Maybe. Perhaps we regard animals in somewhat the same way since, even in the darkest days of overpopulation and famine, we strove to stock our zoos in ever-greater numbers. So perhaps I will tell you my current theory. … It is real theory now; in my story that theory was not worth the name – it was a stunt, an intellectual high-jink, a bit of science fiction. Now I have lived and thought and loved and suffered, and I have talked to other men. So if I tell you the theory now, you will know it is worked for – part of the heritage of all men in this zoo.’
‘This time it is truth, not false?’
‘You are the boss – you must decide that. There are certainly two distinct parts of the brain, the old limbic section and the neo-cortex surrounding it, the bit that turns a primate into a man. That much of my story was true. There’s also a yet older section, but we won’t complicate the picture. Roughly speaking, the limbic is the seat of the emotions, and the neo-cortex the seat of the intelligence. Okay. In a crisis, the new brain is still apt to cut out and the old brain take over.
‘And that in a nutshell is why mankind never made the grade. We are a failed species. We never got away from the old animal inheritance. We could never become the distinct species we should have been.’
‘Oh, darling, it’s not as bad as that –’
He squeezed Sheila’s hand. ‘You girls are always optimists.’ He winked the eye the Dominant could not see.
The Dominant said, ‘How does this apply to what happened on Nehru II?’
‘My story departed – not from the facts but from the correct explanation of the facts. The instinct to go there on Swettenham’s part was sound. He and Arlblaster and the rest believed that on a planet away from animals, mankind could achieve its true stature – homo superior, shall we say? What I called the N-factor let them down. The strain was too great, and they mainly reverted instead of evolving.’
‘But you believe a species can only escape its origins by removing itself entirely from the site of those origins.’
Sheila said, ‘That was the whole human impulse behind space travel – to get to worlds where it would be possible to become more human.’
The Dominant sprang from Anderson’s hands and circled under the low ceiling – an oddly uneasy gesture.
‘But the limbic brain – such a small part of the brain, so deep-buried!’
‘The seat of the instincts.’
‘The seat of the instincts. … Yes, and so the animal part of man brought you to disaster.’
‘Does that answer all your questions?’
The automaton came back down and settled on the table. ‘One further question. What do you imagine would happen to ma
nkind now, after Nuclear Week, if he was left alone on Earth?’
Anderson had to bury his face in his hands to hide his triumph.
‘I guess we’d carry on. Under D-Dump, and the other dumps, lie many of the old artefacts. We’d dig them up and carry on.’
‘But Earth’s resources are almost spent. That was mankind’s doing, not the doing of automata.’
The man smiled. ‘Maybe we’d revert, then. It is a sort of Neanderthal planet, isn’t it? Things go wrong for animals and men and robots, don’t they? Just as they did for dinosaurs and Neanderthals!’
‘I am going now,’ said the Tenth Dominant. His voice cut. He disappeared.
Gasping, Anderson clutched his wife. ‘Don’t say a word! Come inside. Hold me and kiss me. Pray, if you feel like it.’
All she said as they went to their bed was, ‘Maybe you will end up a writer after all. You show a talent for storytelling!’
It was all of five days before the humans in the big zoo noticed that the automata were disappearing. Suddenly, they were all gone, leaving no word. The whole continent, presumably the whole world, lay almost empty; and mankind began to walk back into it on his own ill-shod feet.
‘And you did it, Keith Anderson!’ Sheila cried.
‘Nope. They did it themselves. They made the right decision – maybe I spurred them on.’
‘You did it – a genius who is now going to turn himself into a pig-breeder.’
‘I happen to like pigs.’ As he spoke, he stood in the middle of a dozen of the animals, which he and Sheila had taken charge of.
‘So the entire automata-horde has disappeared into the invo-spectrum, wherever that is, leaving us our world. …’
‘It’s a different world. Let’s try and make it saner than the old one.’
Pious hope? New Year’s resolution? New design for living? He could not tell, although it filled his mind.
As they drove the pigs before them, Anderson said, ‘When the Dominant got on to the subject of our animal inheritance, I remembered just in time that I heard him tell the Scanner. “We must free ourselves from our human heritage.” You can see the spot they were in! They had scrapped the humots, all too closely anthropomorphic in design, and taken more functional forms themselves. But they still had to acknowledge us as father-figures, and could never escape from many human and naturalistic concepts, however much they tried, as long as they remained in a naturalistic setting. Now, in this unimaginable alternative energy universe, which they have finally cracked, they can be pure automata – which is something else we can’t conceive! So they become a genuine species. Pure automata. …’