by Brian Aldiss
‘You know these Flarans, Dr Coblison – they’re fish people, aquatics. The ocean is their element, and undoubtedly they have been responsible for the floods extending along our seacoast and inundating the pleasure islands of Indura. The popular press is right to demand that we fight back.’
‘My dear Rabents, I don’t doubt they’re right, but –’
‘How can there be any “buts”? We’ve failed to make contact with the aliens. They have eluded the most careful probes. Nor is there any ‘but’ about their hostile intent. Before they upset our entire oceanic ecology, we must find them out and gain the information about them without which they cannot be fought. Here are our spies, here in this tank. They have post-hypnotic training. Soon, when they’re fit, they can be released into the sea to go and get that information and return with it to us. There are no “buts”, only imperatives, in this equation.’
Slowly the two men descended the metal stairway, the giant tank on their left glistening with condensation.
‘Yes, it’s as you say,’ the other agreed wearily. ‘I would so much like to know, though, the sensations passing through the shards of human brain embedded in fish bodies.’
‘It doesn’t really matter – so long as they’re successful,’ the first said firmly.
In the tank, in the twilight, the two giant sea creatures swam restlessly back and forth, readying themselves for their mission.
Sector Vermilion
The most simple statement you can make is also the most profound: Time passes. A million centuries – give or take a dozen – have elapsed since the human family began to move from one planet to another.
Directly, little is known about the first primitive men or the worlds they conquered. Indirectly, we know a great deal. The classical Theory of Multigrade Superannuation helps us.
The Theory was formulated in Starswarm Era 80, and with it we, forty-four eras later, can deduce more about both past and present than we should otherwise be able to do.
The fifth postulate of the Theory states that ‘the progress factors that intelligent beings cause, as well as the factors stimulating their intelligence, are both independent of the universal progression factor, within certain limits’. These limits are defined in the remaining postulates, but the statement as it stands is adequate.
Put simply, it means this: The Universe is similar to a cosmic clock; the civilisations of man are not mere cogs but infinitely smaller clocks, ticking in their own right.
Shorn of its intellectual clothes, the idea stands forth naked and exciting. It means that at any one time, the inhabited solar systems of Starswarm – our galaxy – will exhibit all the characteristics through which a civilisation can pass.
So it is fitting that in this anniversary of star flight we should survey a handful of the myriad civilisations, all contemporary in one sense, all isolated in another, that go to make up our galactic cluster. Perhaps we may find a hint that will show us why the ancients launched their frail metal spores into the expanses of space.
Our first survey comes from the remote part of Starswarm designated as Sector Vermilion. There, far from the accepted routes of our interstellar societies, you will find a culture with some unity that embraces two hundred and fifteen thousand planets.
Among those planets is Abrogun – a planet with a long history, tenanted now by only a few hermit-like families. Among those families …
I
A giant rising from the fjord, from the grey arm of sea in the fjord, could have peered over the crown of its sheer cliffs and discovered Endehabven there on the edge, sprawling at the very start of the island.
Derek Flamifew/Ende saw much of this sprawl from his high window; indeed, a growing restlessness, apprehensions of a quarrel, forced him to see everything with particular clarity, just as a landscape takes on an intense actinic visibility before a thunderstorm. Although he was warmseeing with his face, yet his eye vision wandered over the estate.
All was bleakly neat at Endehabven – as I should know, for its neatness is my care. The gardens are made to support evergreens and shrubs that never flower; this is My Lady’s whim, who likes a sobriety to match the furrowed brow of the coastline. The building, gaunt Endehabven itself, is tall and lank and severe; earlier ages would have found its structure impossible: its thousand built-in paragravity units ensure that column, buttress, arch and wall support masonry the mass of which is largely an illusion.
Between the building and the fjord, where the garden contrives itself into a parade, stood My Lady’s laboratory and My Lady’s pets – and, indeed, My Lady herself at this time, her long hands busy with the minicoypu and the squeaking atoshkies. I stood with her, attending the animals’ cages or passing her instruments or stirring the tanks, doing always what she asked. And the eyes of Derek Ende looked down on us; no, they looked down on her only.
Derek Flamifew/Ende stood with his face over the receptor bowl, reading the message from Star One. It played lightly over his countenance and over the boscises of his forehead. Though he stared down across that achingly familiar stage of his life outside, he still warmsaw the communication clearly. When it was finished, he negated the receptor, pressed his face to it, and flexed his message back.
‘I will do as you message, Star One. I will go at once to Festi XV in the Veil Nebula and enter liaison with the being you call the Cliff. If possible, I will also obey your order to take some of its substance to Pyrylyn. Thank you for your greetings; I return them in good faith. Goodbye.’
He straightened and massaged his face: warmlooking over great light distances was always tiring, as if the sensitive muscles of the countenance knew that they delivered up their tiny electrostatic charges to parsecs of vacuum and were appalled. Slowly his boscises also relaxed, as slowly he gathered together his gear. It would be a long flight to the Veil, and the task that was set him would daunt the stoutest heart. Yet it was for another reason he lingered; before he could be away, he had to say a farewell to his mistress.
Dilating the door, he stepped out into the corridor, walked along it with a steady tread – feet covering mosaics of a pattern learned long ago in his childhood – and walked into the paragravity shaft. Moments later, he was leaving the main hall, approaching My Lady as she stood gaunt, with her rodents scuttling at breast level before her and Vatya Jokatt’s heights rising behind her, grey with the impurities of distance.
‘Go indoors and fetch me the box of name rings, Hols,’ she said to me; so I passed him, My Lord, as he went to her. He noticed me no more than he noticed any of the other parthenos, fixing his sights on her.
When I returned, she had not turned towards him, though he was speaking urgently to her.
‘You know I have my duty to perform, Mistress,’ I heard him saying. ‘Nobody else but a normal-born Abrogunnan can be entrusted with this sort of task.’
‘This sort of task! The galaxy is loaded inexhaustibly with such tasks! You can excuse yourself for ever with such excursions.’
He said to her remote back, pleadingly: ‘You can’t talk of them like that. You know of the nature of the Cliff – I told you all about it. You know this isn’t an excursion: it requires all the courage I have. And you know that in this sector of Starswarm only Abrogunnans, for some reason, have such courage … Don’t you, Mistress?’
Although I had come up to them, threading my subservient way between cage and tank, they noticed me not enough even to lower their voices. My Lady stood gazing at the grey heights inland, her countenance as formidable as they; one boscis twitched as she said, ‘You think you are so mighty and brave, don’t you?’
Knowing the power of sympathetic magic, she never spoke his name when she was angry; it was as if she wished him to disappear.
‘It isn’t that,’ he said humbly. ‘Please be reasonable, Mistress; you know I must go; a man cannot be forever at home. Don’t be angry.’
She turned to him at last.
Her face was high and stern; it did not receive. Her warm-visi
on was closed and seldom used. Yet she had a beauty of some dreadful kind I cannot describe, if kneading together weariness and knowledge can create beauty. Her eyes were as grey and distant as the frieze of the snow-covered volcano behind her. She was a century older than Derek, though the difference showed not in her skin – which would stay fresh yet a thousand years – but in her authority.
‘I’m not angry. I’m only hurt. You know how you have the power to hurt me.’
‘Mistress –’ he said, taking a step towards her.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Go if you must, but don’t make a mockery of it by touching me.’
He took her elbow. She held one of the minicoypus quiet in the crook of her arm – animals were always docile at her touch – and strained it closer.
‘I don’t mean to hurt you, Mistress. You know we owe allegiance to Star One; I must work for them, or how else do we hold this estate? Let me go for once with an affectionate parting.’
‘Affection! You go off and leave me alone with a handful of miserable parthenos and you talk of affection! Don’t pretend you don’t rejoice to get away from me. You’re tired of me, aren’t you?’
Wearily he said, as if nothing else would come, ‘It’s not that –’
‘You see! You don’t even attempt to sound sincere. Why don’t you go? It doesn’t matter what happens to me.’
‘Oh, if you could only hear your own self-pity!’
Now she had a tear on the icy slope of one cheek. Turning, she flashed it for his inspection.
‘Who else should pity me? You don’t, or you wouldn’t go away from me as you do. Suppose you get killed by this Cliff, what will happen to me?’
‘I shall be back, Mistress,’ he said. ‘Never fear.’
‘It’s easy to say. Why don’t you have the courage to admit that you’re only too glad to leave me?’
‘Because I’m not going to be provoked into a quarrel.’
‘Pah! You sound like a child again. You won’t answer, will you? Instead you’re going to run away, evading your responsibilities.’
‘I’m not running away!’
‘Of course you are, whatever you pretend. You’re just immature.’
‘I’m not, I’m not! And I’m not running away! It takes real courage to do what I’m going to do.’
‘You think so well of yourself!’
He turned away then, petulantly, without dignity. He began to head towards the landing platform. He began to run.
‘Derek!’ she called.
He did not answer.
She took the squatting minicoypu by the scruff of its neck. Angrily she flung it into a nearby tank of water. It turned into a fish and swam down into the depths.
II
Derek journeyed towards the Veil Nebula in his fast light-pusher. Lonely it sailed, a great fin shaped like an archer’s bow, barnacled all over with the photon cells that sucked its motive power from the dense and dusty currencies of space. Midway along the trailing edge was the blister in which Derek lay, senseless over most of his voyage, which stretched a quarter way across the light-centuries of Vermilion Sector.
He awoke in the therapeutic bed, called to another day that was no day by gentle machine hands that eased the stiffness from his muscles. Soup gurgled in a retort, bubbling up towards a nipple only two inches from his mouth. He drank. He slept again, tired from his long inactivity.
When he woke again, he climbed slowly from the bed and exercised. Then he moved forward to the controls. My friend Jon was there.
‘How is everything?’ Derek asked him.
‘Everything is in order, My Lord,’ Jon replied. ‘We are swinging into the orbit of Festi XV now.’ He gave Derek the coordinates and retired to eat. Jon’s job was the loneliest any partheno could have. We are hatched according to strictly controlled formulae, without the inbred organisations of DNA that assure true Abrogunnans their amazing longevity; five more long hauls and Jon will be old and worn out, fit only for the transmuter.
Derek sat at the controls. Did he see, superimposed on the face of Festi, the face he loved and feared? I think he did. I think there were no swirling clouds for him that could erase the clouding of her brow.
Whatever he saw, he settled the lightpusher into a fast low orbit about the desolate planet. The sun Festi was little more than a blazing point some eight hundred million miles away. Like the riding light of a ship it bobbed above a turbulent sea of cloud as they went in.
For a long while, Derek sat with his face in a receptor bowl, checking ground heats far below. Since he was dealing with temperatures approaching absolute zero, this was not simple; yet when the Cliff moved into a position directly below, there was no mistaking its bulk; it stood out as clearly on his senses as if outlined on a radar screen.
‘There she goes!’ Derek exclaimed.
Jon had come forward again. He fed the time coordinates into the lightpusher’s brain, waited, and read off the time when the Cliff would be below them once more.
Nodding, Derek began to prepare to jump. Without haste, he assumed his special suit, checking each item as he took it up, opening the paragravs until he floated and then closing them again, clicking down every snap-fastener until he was entirely encased.
‘395 seconds to next zenith, My Lord,’ Jon said.
‘You know all about collecting me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I shall not activate the radio beacon till I’m back in orbit.’
‘I fully understand, sir.’
‘Right. I’ll be moving.’
A little animated prison, he walked ponderously into the air lock.
Three minutes before they were next above the Cliff, Derek opened the outer door and dived into the sea of cloud. A brief blast of his suit jets set him free from the lightpusher’s orbit. Cloud engulfed him as he fell.
The twenty surly planets that swung round Festi held only an infinitesimal fraction of the mysteries of the Starswarm. Every globe in the universe huddled its own secret purpose to itself. On some, as on Abrogun, the purpose manifested itself in a form of being that could shape itself, burst into the space lanes, and rough-hew its aims in a civilised, extra-planetary environment. On others, the purpose remained aloof and dark; only human beings, weaving their obscure patterns of will and compulsion, challenged those alien beings to wrest from them new knowledge that might be added to the store of old.
All knowledge has its influence. Over the millennia since interstellar flight had become practicable, mankind was insensibly moulded by its own findings; together with its lost innocence, its genetic stability disappeared. As man fell like rain over other planets, so his family lost its original hereditary design; each centre of civilisation bred new ways of thought, of feeling, of shape, – of – life itself. In Sector Vermilion, the man who dived headfirst to meet an entity called the Cliff was human more in his sufferings than his appearance.
The Cliff had destroyed all the few spaceships or light-pushers landing on its desolate globe. After long study from safe orbits, the wise men of Star One evolved the theory that the Cliff attacked any considerable source of power, as a man will swat a buzzing fly. Derek Ende, alone with no power but his suit motors, would be safe – or so the theory went.
Riding down on the paragravs, he sank more and more slowly into planetary night. The last of the cloud was whipped from about his shoulders, and a high wind thrummed and whistled around the supporters of his suit. Beneath him, the ground loomed. So as not to be blown across it, he speeded his rate of fall; next moment he sprawled full length on Festi XV. For a while he lay there, resting and letting his suit cool.
The darkness was not complete. Though almost no solar light touched this continent, green flares grew from the ground, illumining its barren contours. Wishing to accustom his eyes to the gloom, he did not switch on his head, shoulder, stomach or hand lights.
Something like a stream of fire flowed to his left. Because its radiance was poor and guttering, it confused it
self with its own shadows, so that the smoke it gave off, distorted into bars by the bulk of the 4G planet, appeared to roll along its course like burning tumbleweed. Further off were larger sources of fire, most probably impure ethane and methane, burning with a sound that came like frying steak to Derek’s ears, spouting upward with an energy that licked the lowering cloud race with blue light. At another point, a geyser of flame blazing on an eminence wrapped itself in a thickly swirling pall of smoke, a pall that spread upward as slowly as porridge. Elsewhere, a pillar of white fire burned without motion or smoke; it stood to the right of where Derek lay, like a floodlit sword in its perfection.
He nodded approval to himself. His drop had been successfully placed. This was the Region of Fire, where the Cliff lived.
To lie there was pleasant enough, to gaze on a scene never closely viewed by man fulfilment enough – until he realised that a wide segment of landscape offered not the slightest glimmer of illumination. He looked into it with a keen warmsight, and found it was the Cliff.
The immense bulk of the thing blotted out all light from the ground and rose to eclipse the cloud over its crest.
At the mere sight of it, Derek’s primary and secondary hearts began to beat out a hastening pulse of awe. Stretched flat on the ground, his paragravs keeping him level to 1G, he peered ahead at it; he swallowed to clear his choked throat; his eyes strained through the mosaic of dull light in an endeavour to define the Cliff.
One thing was sure: it was huge! He cursed the fact that although photosistors allowed him to use his warmsight on objects beyond the suit he wore, this sense was distorted by the eternal firework display. Then in a moment of good seeing he had an accurate fix: the Cliff was still some distance away! From first observations, he had thought it to be no more than a hundred paces distant.
Now he realised how large it was. It was enormous!
Momentarily he gloated. The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones. Star One’s astrophysicists held the notion that the Cliff was in some sense aware; they required Derek to take them a sample of its flesh. How do you carve a being the size of a small moon?