The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 1) (The Brian Aldiss Collection)

by Brian Aldiss

  They shook hands, and Dr Mays patted the phototect awkwardly on the shoulder.

  ‘You mustn’t think of me purely as an idealist,’ he said. ‘We stand to gain more ultimately from studying Damonn than ruining it. On the voyage here in the John Russell, when the environment machinery went wrong, I was thinking that an intelligent plant would do the job so much better – remove the carbon dioxide from the air, exhale oxygen, and advise when anything went wrong. Do you think these plants would take to space travel?’

  ‘There’s an idea, Harry,’ Ann said. ‘We’d better lay it before your uncle.’

  ‘First catch the uncle,’ Harry said, smiling. As he began to walk, the others fell in beside him. Skirting the area of the blaze, they began to head towards the reclamation camp.

  Flickering in the grass about them, little coloured signals of hope were passed back to the secret vegetable intelligence that ruled all Damonn.

  Sector Green

  Kakakakaxo is presently being colonised by ten thousand men, women and children from the depressed worlds of the Rift.

  Craig Hodges has every reason for being concerned about these populations and their depredations on ‘new’ planets. Fortunately, Starswarm Birthstrike has the matter very much under control. This galaxy-wide organisation educates the planets of the federation in new methods of mental contraception.

  Although this operation is costly, it proves less expensive – and exacts less toll on human sensibilities – than the business of establishing colonists on virgin planets.

  Birthstrike is undoubtedly the chief factor causing a slowdown in the rate of galactic expansion. With its enlightened use practised on some eleven and a half thousand worlds, overcrowding is not the problem it was even two eras ago.

  We are apt to forget that the methods of mental contraception were formulated on the watery world of Banya Ban, in Sector Green, over fifty eras ago. That they have taken so long to spread is hardly surprising to anyone familiar with the Theory of Multigrade Superannuation, which has some sensible things to say about ideas being acceptable only to the group in which they emerge.

  Banya Ban has changed almost as much as Droxy and Dansson in the last fifty eras. It is a world of immense inventiveness coupled with little drive. These characteristics are evident as much in Banya Ban’s literature as its life, as the following brief chronicle shows.

  I

  The way of telling time in Mudland was ingenious. Double A had a row of sticks stuck in the mud in the blackness before his eyes. With his great spongy hands that sometimes would have nothing to do with him, he gripped the sticks one by one, counting as he went, sometimes in numbers, sometimes in such abstractions as lyre birds, rusty screws, pokers, or seaweed.

  He would go on grimly, hand over fist against time, until the beastly old comfort of degradation fogged his brain and he would forget what he was trying to do. The long liverish gouts of mental indigestion that were his thought processes would take over from his counting. And when later he came to think back to the moment when the takeover occurred, he would know that that had been the moment when it had been the present. Then he could guess how far ahead or behind of the present he was, and could give this factor a suitable name – though lately he had decided that all factors could be classified under the generic term Standard, and accordingly he named the present time Standard 0’Clock.

  Standard 0’Clock he pictured as a big red soldier with moustaches sweeping around the roseate blankness of his face. Every so often, say on payday, it would chime, with pretty little cuckoos popping out of all orifices. As an additional touch of humour, Double A would make 0’Clock’s pendulum wag.

  By this genial ruse, he was slowly abolishing time, turning himself into the first professor of a benighted quantum. As yet the experiments were not entirely successful, for ever and anon his groping would communicate itself to his hands, and back they’d come to him, slithering through the mud, tame as you please. Sometimes he bit them; they tasted unpleasant; nor did they respond.

  ‘You are intellect,’ he thought they said. ‘But we are the tools of intellect. Treat us well, and without salt.’

  II

  Another experiment concerned the darkness.

  Even sprawling in the mud with his legs amputated unfortunately represented a compromise. Double A had to admit there was nothing final in his degradation, since he had begun to – no, nobody could force him to use the term ‘enjoy the mud’, but on the other hand nobody could stop him using the term ‘ambivelling the finny claws (clause?)’, with the understanding that in certain contexts it might be interpreted as approximately synonymous with ‘enjoying the mud’.

  Anyhow, heretofore it remained to be continued that everywhere was compromise. The darkness compromised with itself and with him. The darkness was sweet and warm and wet.

  When Double A realised that the darkness was not utter, that the abstraction utterness was beyond it, he became furious, drumming imaginary heels in the mud, urinating into it with some force and splendour, and calling loudly for dark optics.

  The optics were a failure, for they became covered in mud, so that he could not see through them to observe whether or not the darkness increased. So they came and fitted him with a pair of ebony contacts, and with this game condescension on their part, Double A hoped he had at last reached a point of noncompromise.

  Not so! He had eyelids that pressed on the lenses, drawing merry patterns on the night side of his eyeballs. Pattern and darkness cannot exist together, so again he was defeated by myopic little Lord Compromise, knee-high to a pin and stale as rats’ whiskers, but still Big Reeking Lord of Creation. Well, he was not defeated yet. He had filled in Application Number Six Oh Five Bark Oomph Eight Eight Tate Potato Ten in sticks and sandbars and the old presumption factor for the privilege of Person Double A, sir, late of the Standard O’Clock Regiment, sir, to undergo total partial and complete Amputation of Two Vermicularform Appendages in the possession of the aforesaid Double A and known henceforth as his Eyelids.

  Meanwhile, until the application was accepted and the scalpels served, he tried his cruel experiments on the darkness.

  He shouted, whispered, spoke, gave voice, uttered, named names, broke wind, cracked jokes, split infinitives, passed participles, and in short and in toto interminably talked, orated, chattered, chatted, and generally performed vocal gymnastics against the darkness. Soon he had it cowering in a corner. It was less well-equipped orally than Double A, and he let it know with a rollicking ‘Fathom five thy liar fathers, all his crones have quarrels made, Rifle, rifle, fiddle-faddle, hey’, and other such decompositions of a literary-religio-medico-philosophico-nature.

  So the powers of darkness had no powers against the powers of screech.

  ‘Loot there be light!’ boomed Double A: and there was blight. Through the thundering murk, packed tight with syllables and salty with syllogisms, he could see the dim, mud-bound form of Gasm.

  ‘Let there be night!’ boomed Double A. But he was too late, had lost his chance, had carried his experiment beyond the pale. For in the pallor and squalor, Gasm remained revoltingly there, whether invisible or visible. And his bareness in the thereness made a whereness tight as harness.

  III

  So began the true history of Mudland. It was now possible to have not only experiments, which belonged to the old intellect arpeggio, but character conflict, which pings right out of the middle register of the jolly old emotion chasuble, not to mention the corking old horseplay archipelago. Amoebas, editors and lovers are elements in that vast orchestra of classifiable objects to whom or for whom character conflict is ambrosia.

  Double A went carefully into the business of having a C.C. with Gasm. To begin with, of course, he did not know whether he himself had a C.: or, of course squared, since we are thinking scientifically, whether Gasm had a C. Without the first C., could there be the second? Could one have a C.-less C.?

  Alas for scientific inquiry. During the o’clock sticks that
passed while Double A was beating his way patiently through this thicket of thorny questions, jealousy crept up on him unawares.

  Despite the shouting and the ebony contacts, with which the twin polarities of his counternegotiations with the pseudo-dark were almost kept at near-maximum in the fairly brave semistruggle against compromise, Gasm remained ingloriously visible, lolling in the muck no more than a measurable distance away.

  Gasm’s amputations were identical with Double A’s: to wit, the surgical removal under local anaesthetic and with two aspirin of that assemblage of ganglions, flesh, blood, bone, toenail, hair and kneecap referred to hereafter as Legs. In this, no cause for jealousy existed. Indeed, they had been scrupulously democratic: one vote, one head; one head, two legs; two heads, four legs. Their surgeons were paragons of the old equality regimen. No cause for Double A’s jealousy.

  But. It was within his power to imagine that Gasm’s amputations were other than they were. He could quite easily (and with practice he could perfectly easily) visualise Gasm as having had not two legs but one leg and one arm removed. And that amputation was more interesting than Double A’s own amputation, or the fact that he had fins.

  So the serpent came even to the muddy paradise of Mudland, writhing between the two bellowing bodies. C.C. became reality.

  IV

  Double A abandoned all the other experiments to concentrate on beating and catechising Gasm. Gradually Mudland lost its identity and was transformed into Beating and Catechising, or B & C. The new regime was tiring for Double A, physically and especially mentally, since during the entire procedure he was compelled to ask himself why he should be doing what he was, and indeed if he was doing what he was, rather than resting contentedly in the mud with his hands.

  The catechism was stylised, ranging over several topics and octaves as Double A yelled the questions and Gasm screamed the answers.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘My name is Gasm.’

  ‘Name some of the other names you might have been called instead.’

  ‘I might have been called Plus or Shob or Droo or Harm or Finney or Cusp.’

  ‘And by what strange inheritance does it come about that you house your consciousness among the interstices of lungs, aorta, blood, corpuscles, follicles, sacro-iliac, ribs and prebendary skull?’

  ‘Because I would walk erect if I could walk erect among the glorious company of the higher vertebrates, who have grown from mere swamps, dinosaurs and dodos. Those that came before were dirty brates or shirty brates; but we are the vertebrates.’

  ‘How many are pervertebrates?’

  ‘Why, sir, thirtebrates.’

  ‘What comes after us?’

  ‘After us the deluge.’

  ‘How big is the deluge.’

  ‘Huge.’

  ‘How deluge is the deluge?’

  ‘Deluge, deluger, delugest.’

  ‘Conjugate and decline.’

  ‘I decline to conjuge.’

  ‘And what comes after the vertebrates?’

  ‘Nothing comes after the vertebrates, because we are the highest form of civilisation.’

  ‘Name the signs whereby the height of our civilisation may be determined.’

  ‘The heights whereby the determination of our sign may be civilised are seven in number. The subjugation of the body. The resurrection of the skyscraper. The perpetuation of the speeches. The annihilation of the species. The glorification of the nates. The somnivolence of the conscience. The omnivorousness of sex. The conclusion of the Thousand Years War. The condensation of milk. The conversation of idiots. The confiscation of monks –’

  ‘Stop, stop! Name next the basic concept upon which this civilisation is based.’

  ‘The interests of producer and consumer are identical.’

  ‘What is the justification of war?’

  ‘War is its own justification.’

  ‘Let us sing a sesquipedalian love-song in octogenarian voices.’

  At this point they humped themselves in the mud and sang the following tuneless ditty:

  ‘No constant factor in beauty is discernible.

  Although the road that evolution treads is not returnable,

  It has some curious twists in it, as every shape and size

  And shade of female breast attestifies.

  Pendulous or cumulus, pear-shaped, oval, tumulus,

  Each one displays its beauty of depravity

  In syncline, incline, outcropping or cavity.

  Yet from Droxy to Feroxi

  The bosom’s lines are only signs

  Of all the pectoral muscles’ tussles

  With a fairly constant factor, namely gravity.’

  They fell back into the mud, each lambasting his mate’s nates.

  V

  Of course for a time it was difficult to be certain of everything or anything. The uncertainties became almost infinite, but among the most noteworthy were: the uncertainty as to whether the catechisings actually took place in any wider arena of reality than Double A’s mind; the uncertainty as to whether the beatings took place in any wider arena of reality than Double A’s mind; the uncertainty as to whether, if the beatings actually took place, they took place with sticks.

  For it became increasingly obvious that neither Double A nor Gasm had hands with which to wield sticks. Yet on the other appendage, evidence existed tending to show that some sort of punishment had been undergone. Gasm no longer resembled a human. He had grown positively torpedo-shaped. He possessed fins.

  The idea of fins, Double A found to his surprise, was not a surprise to him. Fins had been uppermost in his mind for some time. Fins, indeed, induced in him a whole watery way of thinking; he was flooded with new surmises, while some of the old ones proved themselves a washout. The idea, for example, that he had ever worn dark glass optics or ebony contacts – absurd!

  He groped for an explanation. Yes, he had suffered hallucinations. Yes, the whole progression of thought was unravelling and clarifying itself now. He had suffered from hallucinations. Something had been wrong in his mind. His optic centres had been off-centre. With something like clarity, he became able to map the area of disturbance.

  It occurred to him that he might some time investigate this cell or tank in which he and Gasm found themselves. Doors and windows had it none. Perhaps, like him, it had undergone some vast sea change.

  Emitting a long liquid sigh, Double A ascended slowly off the floor. As he rose, he glanced upward. Two men floated on the ceiling, gazing down at him.

  VI

  Double A floated back to his former patch of mud only to find his hands gone. Nothing could have compensated him for the loss except the growth of a long, strong tail.

  His long, strong tail induced him to make another experiment – no more nor less than the attempt to foster the illusion that the tail was real by pretending there was a portion of his brain capable of activating the tail. More easily done than thought. With no more than an imaginary flick of the imaginary appendage, he was sailing above Gasm on a controlled course, ducking under but on the whole successfully ignoring the two men floating above.

  From then on he called himself Doublay and had no more truck with time or hands or ghosts of hands and time. Though the mud was good, being above it was better, especially when Gasm could follow. They grew new talents – or did they find them?

  Now the questions were no sooner asked than forgotten, for by a mutual miracle of understanding, Doublay and Gasm began to believe themselves to be fish.

  And then they began to dream about hunting down the alien invaders.

  VII

  The main item in the laboratory was the great tank. It was sixty feet square and twenty feet high; it was half full of sea water. A metal catwalk with rails around it ran along the top edge of the tank; the balcony was reached by a metal stair. Both stair and catwalk were covered with deep rubber, and the men that walked there wore rubber shoes, to ensure maximum quiet.

  The whole pl
ace was dimly lit.

  Two men, whose names were Rabents and Coblison, stood on the catwalk, looking through infra-red goggles down into the tank. Though they spoke almost in whispers, their voices nevertheless held a note of triumph.

  ‘This time I think we have succeeded, Dr Coblinson,’ the younger man was saying. ‘In the last forty-eight hours, both specimens have shown less lethargy and more awareness of their form and purpose.’

  Coblison nodded.

  ‘Their recovery has been remarkably fast, all things considered. The surgical techniques have been so many and so varied. Though I played a major part in the operations myself, I am still overcome by wonder to think that it has been possible to transfer at least half of a human brain into such a vastly different metabolic environment.’

  He gazed down at the two shadowy forms swimming around the tank.

  Compassion moving him, he said, ‘Who knows what terrible traumata those brave souls have had to undergo? What fantasies of amputation, of life, birth and death, or not knowing what species they were.’

  Sensing his mood, and disliking it, Rabents said briskly, ‘They’re over it now. They can communicate with each other – the underwater mikes pick up their language. They’ve adjusted well. Now they’re raring to go.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe. I still wonder if we had the right –’

  Rabents gestured impatiently, guessing Coblison spoke only to be reassured. He knew how proud the old man secretly was and answered him in the perfunctory way he might have answered one of the newspapermen who would be around later.

  ‘The security of Banya Ban demanded this drastic experiment. It’s a year since that alien Flaran ship “landed” in our Western Ocean. Our submarines have investigated its remains on the ocean bed and found proof that the ship landed where it did under control, and was only destroyed when the aliens left it.