by Brian Aldiss
‘What was more, after careful inquiry the Royal Society gentlemen found that the movements of the major perturbation and our minor artist coincided.’
With a nervous gesture, Mankiloe pulled off his spectacles, mopping first them and then his countenance. Thameson noted the gesture and moved in his seat with such ponderous dignity that Acne was inspired to announce: ‘Earth’s greatest mountain range is the subterranean Mid-Atlantic range, which is over 7,000 miles long.’
‘Silence! Proceed, Inspector Thameson,’ ordered Thatch.
‘I was about to. The next step in the inquiry was to place the whole matter into the capable, conscientious – never mind inspired – hands of a man actually on the spot, a highly talented individual we will call Inspector X.
‘Now the Royal Society was fortunate in its man. Inspector X had not only a wide knowledge of matters scientific at his fingers; he also had a unique appreciation of things artistic. And he had imagination. With the comparative nearness of the sun, unusual stresses are formed on Mercury’s surface that may form lesions in the fabric of space. It did not take the Inspector long to grasp that these gravitic plexuses, as the perturbations are called, might well be the gateways to other dimensions and other worlds.
‘He got in touch with the RODS operative – Research Into Other Dimensions – and that gentleman confirmed the likelihood of the Inspector’s supposition about the gateways.
‘Obviously this artist fellow could see through these gateways. The question the wily Inspector next asked himself was – why should he alone be able to see through them? And the answer would seem to lie in the peculiar construction of the artist’s eye.
‘The artist, who was a little fellow like you, Mankiloe, wore specs just like you. So our Inspector cabled off to Earth to make a few inquiries. Eventually he got a highly satisfactory answer.
‘It appears our artist had bummed around a bit before leaving Earth. He lit out for Mercury from the space port in Hong Kong, but before leaving there he had had a new pair of spectacles made in the Celestial Chuckle Ophthalmic Studios. These studios in due course forwarded details, forwarded exact details of a rare type of astigmatism from which the artist suffered, and which his spectacles were designed to alleviate.’
With a well-timed gesture the Inspector leapt forward and twitched the spectacles from Hengist Mankiloe’s nose.
‘And, gentlemen, here by more than coincidence is the very pair of glasses to which I refer.’
He waved them aloft.
‘Notice that on the nose-piece or bridge is stamped the word “Ha-ha”, the trade mark of the Hong Kong optician in question. So let us descend from fantasy to fact. I, gentlemen, am Inspector X. Hengist Mankiloe, you are the painter!’
Calmly, Mankiloe retrieved his spectacles and wedged them back into place.
‘You have been ingenious, Inspector, you have been thorough, whereas I on the other hand am going to have another beer. But where does all this airy-fairy nonsense get you? Where does it get me?’
‘It’s going to get you into trouble if you don’t watch your step,’ Fillbrook said.
‘Quiet, Fillbrook,’ Thatch ordered. ‘This needs handling with tact. I’ll speak to him.’
He squared his shoulders and advanced on the painter.
‘Listen, Mankiloe, we’re going to let the Army Technical Wing have these astigmatism specifications. They’re going to build big lenses with the same properties as your eyes. Obviously it just happens that your retina defects coincide with the degree of stress in the major gravitic plexus. But once we are equipped with these lenses, we’ll be able to see what you see. How do you like that?’
‘I dislike it intensely,’ Mankiloe said. ‘Just as I dislike you intensely.’ He turned to the Inspector.
‘Mind you, I’m admitting nothing, but suppose this were all true. Suppose these Army lenses were made and you people discovered this new dimension. Then what would you do?’
‘Well, er … the question of colonisation would naturally arise …’ The Inspector seemed ill at ease.
‘Of course it would, and that would be my province,’ Thatch said, coming to the fore again with the verve of a heavyweight back off diet on to red meat again. ‘We’d go in with guns, prepared to meet any trouble the natives felt inclined to offer us.’
‘The Strychnos Nux-Vomica is an Indian tree of the family Loganiacae. It contains strychnine, the formula for which is C21H20O2N2. Strymon, Struma Strutt, Struve, Strumica in Macedonia …’ interposed Acne, pursuing her own line of reasoning.
‘Shuddup!’ said Babs, who had crept back in on the discussion carrying Joe.
A momentary silence fell in the caravan. Then Thameson thumped the half-finished painting on Mankiloe’s easel.
‘This weird object you’re painting now, Mankiloe. Looks like a cross between a Victorian hat stand and a guillotine-maker’s do-it-yourself kit. You didn’t invent that. You can see it outside when you take your glasses off, can’t you? Come clean, man!’
‘Inspector, do you like my paintings?’
‘Why, yes, I do. They take a bit of getting used to … But – well, suppose this hat-stand affair was one of their trees?’
‘Good guessing, Inspector. And suppose I told you several items you couldn’t guess? Suppose I told you that once you could see into that other world you could walk into it. That it was a wonderland completely new – a dimension where nothing was the same as ours, where new standards of beauty and behaviour existed, where you could ever find things beyond imagining, fresh colours, different perspectives, and even alien qualities in your own body. So that everyone, even the most plebeian person, could just walk in and enjoy an overpoweringly intense aesthetic experience such as only a few rare visionaries have hitherto managed to qualify for …’
‘What a holiday centre it would make!’ exclaimed Fillbrook, polishing his nose in excitement.
‘Go on, Mankiloe,’ said Thameson tensely.
‘Don’t tell them any more, Hen!’ Babs said.
But Mankiloe had removed his glasses and was gazing out of the window like Keats sticking his head through a magic casement and casing the joint for fairy lands forlorn.
‘And supposing that enchanting place were full of enchanting creatures, beings entirely outside our limited sphere of reference. Suppose these people were curious to look on, like a cross between an insect and an involved figure in a geometry book. Suppose they were golden, of a hard unearthly gold, and had dodecahedric heads, with only a blurred suspicion of features … And suppose these people were as innocent as children and as powerful as devils.’
‘Could they come and go into this world?’
‘Yes, though with your everyday eyes you might not recognise them.’
‘All right, Mankiloe,’ Thatch said, in the manner of one who has endured shilly-shally long enough. ‘Obviously this place, this dimension is ripe for exploitation. You’ve admitted it exists and –’
‘I’ve admitted nothing!’ Mankiloe said. ‘I said “suppose” all the time. I’m an artist; I live in a world of suppose. You’ve come here on a wild goose chase, the bunch of you.’
‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ Thameson said. ‘My friend didn’t mean what he was saying about exploitation.’
‘Or about going in armed? Or about establishing holiday centres? Rubbish! I tell you I know nothing! I paint what I imagine. Now take this wretched calico and get out of here.’
‘You’re lying to us, Mankiloe!’
Mankiloe laughed.
‘Of course I’m not. I was kidding you along, that’s all. Now I’m tired of the joke and I want to get on with my painting. There’s the door. Kindly use it.’
Nonplussed, Thatch, Thameson, and Fillbrook fell back like factory owners confronted by a stray shop steward.
‘Look, Mr Mankiloe, we have got all the facts,’ Fillbrook said feebly.
‘A few theories and a Chinese prescription – that’s all you have! Take ’em and go.’
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bsp; ‘We shall pursue this matter to the limit,’ Thatch threatened.
‘Not in my caravan you won’t. Good-bye.’
Recognising defeat, Inspector Thameson picked up the bale of calico and passed it to Fillbrook to carry.
‘You know, Mankiloe,’ he said, pausing reluctantly by the air lock, ‘I’m sorry you have to be like this. One of these pictures – a small one I hold back at Wyndham – it looks almost as if it might have been a child from a strange dimension – polyhedric head, golden skin, just as you said. I thought it was a beauty. I’m sorry – well, I’m sorry it’s not true.’
‘Good, day, Inspector. No charge for the beer.’
Defeated, the three men disappeared.
Mankiloe, Babs and Joe climbed into the blister to watch the bubbletrack crawl off over the desert in a cloud of dust.
‘Prothyle is hypothetical primitive matter from which all the chemical elements are supposed to be formed,’ Acne said sadly.
‘It’s all hypothetical,’ agreed Mankiloe. ‘What those blighters will do, I mean.’
‘Oh, Hen, I’m sure they won’t rest with your explanation,’ Babs said, obviously concerned.
‘Probably not.’ He removed his glasses and wiped his face wearily. Then he patted Joe’s little golden dodecahedric head.
‘We’d better go and tell your parents to get their solar annihilators ready,’ he said.
Sector Azure
Even in a survey of contemporary Starswarm so brief as this it would be absurd not to look at the most used form of galactic transportation.
The mattermitters of Sector Yellow and the Burst, or the leisurely light-pushers that are popular in remote regions like sectors Grey or Violet, carry between them only fifteen per cent of the galaxy’s traffic. Small ferry ships and freighters such as those operated by TransBurst Traders account for another eighteen per cent. The rest of the tonnage, goods or passenger, plunges through phase space in FTL (faster-than-light) ships.
The history of the starships is too well known for us to need to go into it here. Many civilisations go through phases in their development when their most typical transport is the oxcart, the stagecoach, or some kind of train. Particularly in their obsolescent stages, these forms of transport excite much affection.
But the FTL ships are most loved of all. They have taken many forms. Always they are just developing or becoming obsolete in some parts of Starswarm. We know that Dansson and the Fire Planets of Sector Diamond cut themselves off from the rest of the galaxy during Eras 83, 84 and 85, and forbade all movement by FTL to or from their planets.
Such post-technological epochs are common. They pass – indeed, under the Theory of Multigrade Superannuation, they must pass. Then the FTL ships roar back.
The following narrative deals with an incident in Sector Azure, where they are developing new (for them) braking systems for their ships. The story, however, does not concern technicalities. It shows what can happen to human character when influenced by new technologies.
If you will, you can regard it as a study in a new (for Azure) perversion. Or you may prefer to think of it as an example of the old (for Azure) problem of where a man should direct his love.
Murrag lay on the ground to await consummation. It was less than five minutes away, and it would fall from the air.
The alarms had sounded near and distant. Their echoes had died from the high hills of Region Six. Stretched full length on the edge of a grassy cliff, Murrag Harri adjusted the plugs in his ears and laid his fume mask ready by his side.
Everything was calm and silent now, the whole world silent. And in him there was a growing tension, as strange and ever delightful as the tensions of love.
He raised oculars to his eyes and peered into the valley, where lay the Flange, that wide and forbidden highway down which the starships blazed. Even from his elevation, he could hardly discern the other side of the Flange; it ran east-west right round the equator of Tandy Two, unbroken and unalterable, an undeviating – he’d forgotten the figure – ten, was it, or twelve, or fifteen miles wide. In the sunlight the innumerable facets of the Flange glittered and moved.
His glasses picked out the mountains on the south side of the Flange. Black and white they were, gnawed as clean as a dead man’s ribs under the abrasion of total vacuum.
‘I must bring Fay here before she goes back to Earth,’ he said aloud. ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’ Assuming a different tone, he said, ‘There is terror here on Tandy’s equator, terror and sublimity. The most awesome place in Starswarm. Where vacuum and atmosphere kiss: and the kiss is a kiss of death! Yes. Remember that: “The kiss is a kiss of death.”’
In his little leisure time Murrag was writing – he had been ever since I first met him – a book about Tandy Two as he experienced it. Yet he knew, he told me, that the sentences he formed there on the hill were too highly coloured, too big, too false. Under his excitement, more truthful images struggled to be born.
While they struggled, while he lay and wished he had brought Fay with him, the starship came in.
This! This was the moment, the fearsome apocalyptic moment! Unthinking, he dropped his oculars and ducked his head to the earth, clinging to it in desperate excitement with all his bones from his toes to his skull.
Tandy Two lurched.
The FTL ship burst into normal space on automatic control, invisible and unheard at first. Boring for the world like a metal fist swung at a defenceless heart, it was a gale of force. It was brutality … but it skimmed the Flange as gently as a kiss brushes a lover’s cheek.
Yet so mighty was that gentleness that for an instant a loop of fire was spun completely around Tandy Two. Over the Flange a mirage flickered: a curious elongated blur that only an educated retina could take for the after-image of a faster-than-light ship chasing to catch up with its object. Then a haze arose, obscuring the Flange. Cerenkov radiations flickered outward, distorting vision.
The transgravitic screens to the north of the Flange – on Murrag’s side of it, and ranged along the valley beneath his perch – buckled but held, as they always held. The towering BGL pylons were bathed in amber. Atmosphere and vacuum roared at each other from either side of the invisible screens. But as ever, the wafer-thin geogravitics held them apart, held order and chaos separate.
A gale swept up the mountainsides.
The sun jerked wildly across the sky.
All this happened in one instant.
And in the next moment it was deepest night.
Murrag dug his hands out of the soft earth and stood up. His chest was soaked with sweat, his trousers were damp. Trembling, he clamped his fume mask over his face, guarding himself against the gases generated by the FTL’s passage.
Tears still ran down his face as he limply turned to make his way back to the highland farm.
‘Kiss of death, embrace of flame …’ he muttered to himself as he climbed aboard his tractor; but still the elusive image he wanted did not come.
In a fold of hills facing north lay the farmhouse, burrowed deeply into the granite just in case of accidents. Murrag’s lights washed over it. Its outhouses were terraced below it, covered pen after covered pen, all full of Farmer Dourt’s sheep, locked in as always during entry time; not a single animal could be allowed outside when an FTL came down.
Everything lay still as Murrag drove up in his tractor. Even the sheep were silent, crouching mutely under the jack-in-a-box dark. Not a bird flew, not an insect sparked into the lights; such life had almost died out during the hundred years the Flange had been in operation. The toxic gases hardly encouraged fecundity in nature.
Soon Tandy itself might rise to shine down on its earthlike second moon. The planet Tandy was a gas giant, a beautiful object when it rose into Tandy Two’s skies, but uninhabitable and unapproachable.
Tandy One equally was not a place for human beings. But the second satellite, Tandy Two, was a gentle world with mild seasons and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. People lived on Tandy Two, lov
ed, hated, struggled, aspired there as on any of the multitudinous civilised planets in Sector Azure, but with this difference: that because there was something individual about Tandy Two, there was something individual about its problems.
The southern hemisphere of Tandy Two lay lifeless under vacuum; the northern existed mainly for the vast terminal towns of Blerion, Touchdown and Ma-Gee-Neh. Apart from the cities, there was nothing but grassland – grass and lakes and silicone desert stretching to the pole. And by courtesy an occasional sheep farm was allowed on the grasslands.
‘What a satellite!’ Murrag exclaimed, climbing from the tractor. Admiration sounded in his voice. He was a curious man, Murrag Harri – but I’ll stick to fact and let you understand what you will.
He pushed through the spaced double doors that served the Dourt farmstead as a crude air lock when the gases were about. In the living-eating-cooking complex beyond, Col Dourt himself stood by the CV watching its colours absently. He looked up as Murrag removed his face mask.
‘Good evening, Murrag,’ he said with heavy jocularity. ‘Great to see so nice a morning followed by so nice a night without so much as a sunset in between.’
‘You should be used to it by now,’ Murrag murmured, hanging his oculars with his jacket in the A-G cupboard. After being alone in the overwhelming presence of Tandy, it always took him a moment to adjust to people again.
‘So I should, so I should. Fourteen earth years and I still see red to think how men have bollixed about with one of God’s worlds. Thank heaven we’ll be off this crazy moon in another three weeks! I can’t wait to see Droxy, I’m telling you.’
‘You’ll miss the grasslands and the open spaces.’
‘So you keep telling me. What do you think I am? One of my sheep! Just as soon –’
‘But once you get away –’
‘Just a minute, Murrag!’ Dourt held up a brown hand as he cocked his eye at the CV. ‘Here comes Touchdown to tell us if it’s bedtime yet.’