by Brian Aldiss
Murrag halted on the way upstairs to his room. He came back to peer into the globe with the shepherd. Even Hoc the house dog glanced up momentarily at the assured face that appeared in the bright bowl.
‘CVA Touchdown talking,’ the face said, smiling at its unseen audience. ‘The FTL ship Droffoln made a safe and successful entry on the Flange some three hundred and twenty miles outside Touchdown station. As you can see from this live shot, passengers are already being met by helicar and taken to the FTL port in Touchdown. The Droffoln comes from Ryvriss XIII in Sector Maroon. You are looking at a typical Ryvrissian now. He is, as you observe, octipedal.
‘We will bring you news and interviews with passengers and crews when all the occupants of the FTL have undergone revival. At present they remain under light-freeze.
‘We go now to Chronos-Touchdown for the revised time check.’
The assured face gave way to a shaggy one. Behind it, the untidy computing room of this astronomical department greeted viewers. The shaggy face smiled. ‘As yet we have only a rough scheme for you. It will, as usual, take a little while to feed accurate figures into our pressors, and some reports have still to come in.
‘Meanwhile, here is an approximate time check. The FTL ship entered Flange influence at roughly 1219 hours 47·66 seconds today, Seventeenday of Cowl Month. Impetus-absorption thrust Tandy through approximately 108·75 degrees axial revolution in approximately 200 milliseconds. So the time at the end of that very short period became roughly 1934 hours 47·66 seconds.
‘Since that was about twenty-four and a half minutes ago, the time to which everyone in Touchdown zone should set their watches and clocks is … coming up … 1959 hours and 18 seconds … Now! I repeat, the time is now 1959 hours, one minute to eight o’clock at night, plus 18 seconds.
‘It is still, of course, Seventeenday of Cowl.
‘We shall be back to bring you more accurate information on the time in another two hours.’
Dourt snorted and switched the globe off. It slid obediently out of sight into the wall.
‘Here I’ve just had my midday bite,’ he growled, ‘and there’s Bes upstairs putting the kids to bed!’
‘That’s what happens on Tandy Two,’ Murrag replied, edging from the room. Without wishing to seem rude, he was bored with Dourt’s complaints, which occurred with little variation once a fortnight – whenever, in fact, an FTL ship arrived. He almost scuttled up the stairs.
‘It may happen on Tandy Two,’ Dourt said, not averse to having only Hoc to talk to, ‘but that don’t mean to say Col Dourt has to like it.’ He squared his broad shoulders, thrust out his chest, and stuck his thumbs in his spunsteel jacket. ‘I was born on Droxy, where a man gets twenty-four hours to his day – every day.’
Hoc thumped his tail idly as if in ironic applause.
As Murrag came upstairs, Tes marched past him on her way from the washing room. She was absolutely naked.
‘High time the girl was taken to civilisation and learned the common rules of decency,’ Murrag thought good-humouredly. The girl was several months past her thirteenth birthday. Perhaps it was as well the Dourt family were off back to Droxy in three weeks.
‘Going to bed at this hour of the day!’ Tes grunted, not deigning to look at her father’s helper as she thudded past him.
‘It’s eight o’clock at night. The man on the CV has just said so,’ Murrag replied.
‘Poof!’
With that she disappeared into her room. Murrag entered into his room. He took the time changes in his stride; on Tandy now the changes had to be considered natural, for use can almost change the stamp of nature. Life on the farm was rigorous. Murrag, Dourt and his wife rose early and went to sleep early. Murrag planned to lie and think for an hour, possibly to write a page more of his book, and then to take a somnuliser and sleep till four the next morning.
His thinking had no time to grow elaborate and deep. The door burst open and Fay rushed in, squealing with exuberance.
‘Did you see it? Did you see it?’ she asked.
He had no need to ask to what she referred.
‘I sat on the top of a cliff and watched it,’ he said.
‘You are lucky!’ She did a pirouette, and pulled an ugly grimace at him. ‘That’s what I call my life-begins-at-forty face, Murrag; did it scare you? Oh, to see one of those starships actually plunk down in the Flange. Tell me all about it!’
Fay wore only vest and knickers. A tangle of arms and legs flashed as she jumped onto the bed beside him and began tugging his ears. She was Tes’s younger sister and, six years old, the storm centre of the household.
‘You’re supposed to be in bed. Your mother will be after you, girl.’
‘She’s always after me. Tell me about the starships, and how they land, and –’
‘When you’ve wrenched my ears off, I will.’
He was not easy with her leaning on him. Rising, he pointed out of his little window with its double panes. Since his room was at the front of the farmhouse, he had this view out across the valley. The girls slept in a room considered more safe, at the back of the house, tucked into solid granite (‘the living granite’, Dourt always called it), and without windows.
‘Outside there now, Fay,’ he said, as the little girl peered into the dark, ‘are vapours that would make you ill if you inhaled them. They are breathed off by the Flange under the stress of absorbing the speed of the FTL ships. The geogravitic screens on this side of the Flange undergo terrific pressures and do very peculiar things. But the beautiful part is that when we wake in the morning the odours will all have blown away; Tandy itself, this marvellous moon we live on, will absorb them and send us a fresh supply of clean mountain air to breathe.’
‘Do the mountains have air?’
‘We call the air on the mountains “mountain air”. That’s all it means.’
As he sat down beside her, she asked, ‘Do the vapours make it dark so quickly?’
‘No they don’t, Fay, and you know they don’t. I’ve explained that before. The faster-than-light ships do that.’
‘Are the vaster-than-light ships dark?’
‘Faster-than-light. No, they’re not dark. They come in from deep space so fast – at speeds above that of light, because those are the only speeds they can travel at – that they shoot right around Tandy one and a half times before the Flange can stop them, before its works can absorb the ship’s momentum. And in so doing they twirl Tandy around a bit on its axis with them.’
‘Like turntables?’
‘That’s what I told you, didn’t I? If you ran very fast onto a light wooden turntable that was not moving, you would stop, but your motion would make the turntable turn – transference of energy, in other words. And this twirling sometimes moves us around from sunshine into darkness.’
‘Like today. I bet you were scared out on the hillside when it suddenly got dark!’
He tickled her in the ribs.
‘No I wasn’t, because I was prepared for it. But that’s why we have to get your Daddy’s sheep all safely under cover before a ship comes – otherwise they’d all get scared and jump over precipices and things, and then your Daddy’d lose all his money and you wouldn’t be able to go back to Droxy.’
Fay looked meditatively at him.
‘Those vaster-than-light ships are rather a nuisance to us, aren’t they?’ she said.
Murrag roared with laughter.
‘If you put it like that –’ he began, when Mrs Dourt thrust her head around the door.
‘There you are, Fay! I thought as much. Come and get into bed at once.’
Bes Dourt was a solid woman in her early forties, plain, very clean. She of them all was least at home on Tandy Two, yet she seldom grumbled about it; among all her many faults one could not include grumbling. She marched into Murrag’s room and seized her younger daughter by the wrists.
‘You’re killing me!’ Fay yelled in feigned agony. ‘Murrag and I were discussing transparency of e
nergy. Let me kiss him good night and then I’ll come. He is a lovely man, and I wish he was coming to Droxy with us.’
She gave Murrag an explosive buss that rocked him backward. Then she rushed from the room. Bes paused before following; she winked at Murrag.
‘Pity you don’t like anyone else to carry on a bit more in that style, Mr Harri,’ she said, and shut the door after her as she left.
It was something of a relief to him that her advances were now replaced by nothing more trying than innuendo. Murrag put his feet up on the bed and lay back.
He looked around the room with its spare plastic furniture. This would be home for only three weeks more: then he would move on to work for Farmer Cay in Region Five. Nothing would he miss – except Fay, who alone among all the people he knew shared his curiosity and his love for Tandy Two.
A phrase of hers floated back to him – ‘the vaster-than-light ships’. Oddly appropriate name for craft existing in ‘phase space’, where their mass exceeded ‘normal’ infinity! His mind began to play with the little girl’s phrase; reverie overcame him, so that in sinking down into a nest of his own thought he found, even amid the complexity gathered around him, a comforting simplicity, a simplicity he had learned to look for because it told him that to see clearly into his own inner nature, he had merely to crystallise the attraction Tandy Two held for him and all would be clear eternally; he would be a man free of shackles, or free at least to unlock them when he wished. So again, as on the cliff and as many times before, he plunged through the deceptions of the imagination towards that wished-for truthful image.
Perhaps his search itself was a delusion; but it led him to sleep.
Murrag and Dourt were out early in the cool hour before dawn. The air, as Murrag had predicted, was sweet to breathe again, washed by a light rain.
Hoc and the other dog – Pedo, the yard dog – ran with them as they whistled out the autocollies. Ten of them came pogoing into the open, light machines unfailingly obedient to the instructions from Dourt’s throat mike. Although they had their limitations, they could herd sheep twice as quickly as live dogs. Murrag unlocked the doors of the great covered pens. The autocollies went in to get the sheep as he climbed aboard his tractor. The sheep poured forth, bleating into the open, and he and Dourt revved their engines and followed behind, watching as the flock fanned out towards the grasslands. They bumped along, keeping the autocollies constantly on course.
Dawn seeped through the eastern clouds, and the rain stopped. Filmy sun created miracles of chiaroscuro over valley and hill. By then they had the sheep split into four flocks, each established on a separate hillside. They returned to the farm in time to breakfast with the rest of the family.
‘Do they get miserable wet days on Droxy like this?’ Tes asked.
‘Nothing wrong with today. Rain’s holding off now,’ her father said. Breakfast was not his best meal.
‘It depends on what part of Droxy you live in, just as it does here, you silly girl,’ said her mother.
‘They haven’t got any weather in the south half of Tandy,’ Fay volunteered, talking around a mouthful, ‘’cuz it’s had to be vacuumised so’s the starships coming in at such a lick wouldn’t hit any molecules of air and get wrecked, and without air you don’t have weather – isn’t that so, Murrag?’
Murrag agreed it was so.
‘Shut up talking about the Flange. It’s all you seem to think of these days, young lady,’ Dourt growled.
‘I never mentioned the Flange, Daddy. You did.’
‘I’m not interested in arguing, Fay, so save your energy. You’re getting too cheeky these days.’
She put both elbows on the plastic table and said with deliberate devilment, ‘The Flange is just a huge device for absorbing FTL momentum, Daddy, as I suppose you know, don’t you? Isn’t it, Murrag?’
Her mother leaned forward and slapped her hard across the wrist.
‘You like to sauce your Dad, don’t you? Well, take that! And it’s no good coming crying to me about it. It’s your fault for being so saucy.’
But Fay had no intention of going crying to her mother. Bursting into tears, she flung down her spoon and fork and dashed upstairs, howling. A moment later her bedroom door slammed.
‘Serve her right!’ Tes muttered.
‘You be quiet too,’ her mother said angrily.
‘Never get a peaceful meal now,’ Dourt said.
Murrag Harri said nothing.
After the meal, as the two men went out to work again, Dourt said stiffly, ‘If you don’t mind, Harri, I’d rather you left young Fay alone till we leave here.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
The older man thrust him a suspicious glance, then looked away. ‘Because she’s my daughter and I say so.’
‘Can’t you give me a reason?’
A dying bird lay in the yard. Birds were as scarce as gold nuggets on Tandy Two. This one must have been overcome by the fumes generated in the previous day’s entry. Its wings fluttered pitifully as the men approached. Dourt kicked it to one side.
‘If you must know – because she’s getting mad on the Flange. Flange, Flange, Flange, that’s all we hear from the kid! She didn’t know or care a thing about it till early this year, when you started telling her all about it. You’re worse than Captain Roge when he calls, and he has an excuse because he works on the damn thing. So you keep quiet in the future. Bes and me will leave here with no regrets. Tes doesn’t care either way. But we don’t want Fay to keep thinking about this place and upsetting herself, thinking Droxy isn’t her proper home, which it’s going to be.’
This was a long speech for Dourt. The reasons he gave were good enough, but irritation made Murrag ask, ‘Did Mrs Dourt get you to speak to me about this?’
Dourt stopped by the garage. He swung around and looked Murrag up and down, anger in his eye.
‘You’ve been with me in Region Six nigh on four years, Harri. I was the man who gave you work when you wanted it, though I had not much need of you, nor much to pay you with. You’ve worked hard, I don’t deny –’
‘I can’t see –’
‘I’m talking, aren’t I? When you came here you said you were – what was it – “in revolt against ultra-urbanised planets”, you said you were a poet or something; you said – heck, you said a lot of stuff, dressed up in fine phrases. Remember you used to keep me and Bes up half the night listening sometimes, until we saw it was all just talk!’
‘Look here, if you’re –’
The farmer bunched his fists and stuck out his lower lip.
‘You listen to me for a change. I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time. Poet indeed! We weren’t taken in by your blather, you know. And luckily it had no effect on our Tes either. She’s more like me than her sister – she’s a quiet sensible girl. But Fay is a baby. She’s silly as yet, and we reckon you’re having a bad influence on her –’
‘All right, you’ve had your say. Now I’ll have mine. Leaving aside the question of whether you and your wife can understand any concept you weren’t born with –’
‘You be careful now, Harri, what you’re saying about Bes. I’m on to you! I’m not so daft as you think. Let me tell you Bes has had about enough of you giving her the glad eye and making passes at her as if she was just some –’
‘By God!’ Murrag exploded in anger. ‘She tells you that? The boot’s on the other foot by a long chalk, and you’d better get that clear right away. If you think I’d touch – if I’d lay a hand –’
The mere thought of it took the edge off Murrag’s wrath. It had the opposite effect on Dourt. He swung his left fist hard at Murrag’s jaw. Murrag blocked it with his right forearm and counterattacked with his left. He caught Dourt glancingly on the ear as the farmer kicked out at him. Unable to step back in time, Murrag grabbed the steel-studded boot and wrenched it upward.
Dourt staggered back and fell heavily to the ground.
Murrag stood over him, all fury gone.
As he helped the older man to his feet, Dourt muttered shamefacedly, ‘I’ve not resented you, man, you know that perfectly well.’
Then they got the tractors out in silence.
The result of Dourt’s fall was what he termed a ‘bad back’. He was – and when he said it, he spoke with an air of surprise more appropriate to a discovery than cliché – not as young as he was. For a day or so he sat gloomily indoors by his CV, letting Murrag do the outside work, and brooding over his lot.
Tandy Two is a harder satellite to take than it seems at first – I know that after two five-year spells of duty on it. The density of its composition gives it a gravity of 1·35 Gs. And the fortnightly time hop when the FTLs enter takes a psychological toll. In the big towns, like Touchdown and Blerion, civilisation can compensate for these disadvantages. On the scattered sheep stations there are no compensations.
Moreover, Col Dourt had found his farming far less profitable than it had looked on paper from Droxy fourteen years ago. Tandy Two offered good grazing in a stellar sector full of ready-made mutton markets – twenty hundred over-urbanised planets within twice twenty light years. But his costs had been stiff, the costs of transport above all, and now he counted himself lucky to be able to get away with enough credits saved to buy a small shop on his old home planet. As it was, margins were narrow: he was reckoning on the sale of farm and stock to buy passage home for himself and his family.
Much of this I heard on my periodic tours through Region Six, when I generally managed a visit to the Dourts. I heard it all again the next time I called, thirteen days after the scuffle between Dourt and Murrag.
I looked in to see Bes, and found Dourt himself, sitting by a fire, looking surly. He had returned to work and wrenched his back again, and was having to rest it.