by Brian Aldiss
Fieldman sighed with intellectual satisfaction and settled himself for his greater concentration.
Delray found it next.
He came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.
It was naked satiation.
It was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.
Intalgo found it the last of all.
He stood murmuring into the recorder, his eyes fastened on the three, distant shapes, frozen in a fresco of bone and flesh and pulsating blood. Around him the air hung like many folds of scented silk.
==========
They have not moved for hours and are obviously unaware of any form of physical discomfort. The thing is divided between them, but it must be some kind of snare. The builders of this monolith must have devised means to protect it from intruders such as ourselves. In. a short while I will go across to them and try to restore their senses and recall their responsibility.’
He hesitated, then switched off the instrument.
There was really nothing more he could say.
Say, but not think. The dead words of the dead captain came to him as he walked across the plain of yellow dust to where his companions sat in frozen concentration.
Rats scurrying among the granary of the stars.
Rats!
The Pentarch would not be amused, but he knew now why he had depicted Man as being suspended from a cross. Man with his own face. Man, tormented in his eternal search for…
He saw what the others had found.
It was pure art.
It was the thing he had sought all his life and it held so great a joy that he felt tears sting his eyes and overwhelming emotion fill his heart.
Sitting he stared at it.
Man lives by his search for Heaven. This thing was Heaven—for all of them.
They could never leave it.
* * *
Section 4—Mar sand Venus—Love and War
==========
In the 1850s, William Whewell published anonymously a book entitled On the Plurality of Worlds. Whewell did not believe in the possibility of life oil Venus. He suggested that, because of the proximity of Venus to the sun, she ‘may have cooled more slowly and quietly, like glass which is annealed in the fire; and hence, may have a smooth surface, instead of the furrowed and pimpled visage which the Moon presents to us.’ It is an attractive idea. With the cult of nostalgia affecting even science fiction, a writer might do worse than seize on Whewell’s Venerian model for a story background. I can see it now: ‘Witch-Ball World’.
Venus and Mars are our nearest planetary neighbours, and so have been the most popular targets for imaginary populations, whatever purists might say. Mars has been the more popular by far. Mars is good to observe, it turns a marked face towards us—and there was that mistranslation of the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli’s ‘canelli’ into ‘canals’ (instead of ‘channels’), which started erroneous but stimulating trains (or barges) of thought. Whereas Venus’s proximity to the sun has made her difficult to observe, and clouds shroud her surface in any case.
Stories about Mars have been predominantly of a martial character, as if dedicated to the God of War. ‘Baleful’ is the word that crops up when descriptions of the Red Planet are concerned. Martians traditionally feature as invaders of a nasty order, from the time of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS onwards. Venus has preserved the name of the Goddess of Love; stories about her tend to be visionary, like C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra. She’s a bit watery, and visitors from Venus to Earth tend to drop in with feeble pleas for help, instead of trying to take over, like the obstreperous Martians.
As for expeditions from Earth to our neighbours, the same rule applies: they’ve always been much less likely to make Love than War.
Reality—so often a swindle—turns out disappointing again in this case. Neither planet proves capable of supporting any life more animated than a handful of gravel.
Both planets are still capable of surprises, if of a low order. As I write this, the Viking orbiters have been using infra-red grating spectrometers on the North Pole of Mars. Results indicate that the ice caps are, in fact, frozen water, rather than the frozen carbon dioxide which has been the acceptable model for several years. Who knows: we might find a few frozen coelacanth yet.
It is fitting to have a section dedicated to these two familiar planets. In the sixties, I compiled, with the aid of Harry Harrison, a volume entitled Farewell, Fantastic Venus!: A History of the Planet Venus in Fact and Fiction. Avoiding the material I used there, I have selected a story by the late Cordwainer Smith. A very strange story it is.
No less remarkable is the novella by P. Schuyler Miller. Miller was an effective writer at a time when most science fiction was badly written and based on absurd premises, like ‘Moon of Mad Atavism”, which I mentioned earlier. Miller had a feel for alien life, portraying it as definitely odd but in no way horrifying or comic. This comes through in such stories as ‘Trouble on Tantalus’ and ‘The Cave’. Since I have anthologized both stories in the past, I resist the impulse to repeat the performance here. So you get ‘The Titan’ instead.
Science fiction, often called ‘the literature of the future’, seeks out the ancient past. Our friend the Sack was four hundred thousand years old. It’s the quest for distance. A feeling for antiquity permeates ‘The Titan’. Its own bibliographical antiquity is not without complexity.
After several rejections by other magazines, Miller’s novella began to appear as a serial in a semi-professional magazine entitled Marvel Tales. Unfortunately, Marvel Tales was not successful and ceased publication in 1935, with the final chapters of ‘The Titan’ still unpublished. (A similar accident occurred to Poul Anderson’s serial ‘The Escape’, when Space Science Fiction ceased publication in 1953.) Eventually, the complete novella was published in hardcover by Fantasy Press, in a limited edition in 1952. A couple of years later, it was published in this country by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, only to be remaindered. Well, here it is again, and this time you’re bound to like it, vampirism and all…
If you see thousands and thousands of people drifting towards you, the mathematics may make you pause. That’s what the weight of numbers is all about.
WHEN THE PEOPLE FELL
by Cordwainer Smith
==========
‘Can you imagine a rain of people through an acid fog? Can you imagine thousands and thousands of human bodies, without weapons, overwhelming the unconquerable monsters? Can you—’
‘Look, sir,’ interrupted the reporter.
‘Don’t interrupt me! You ask me silly questions. I tell you I saw the Goonhogo itself. I saw it take Venus. Now ask me about that!’
The reporter had called to get an old man’s reminiscences about bygone ages. He did not expect Dobyns Bennett to flare up at him.
Dobyns Bennett thrust home the psychological advantage he had got by taking the initiative. ‘Can you imagine showhices in their parachutes, a lot of them dead, floating out of a green sky? Can you imagine mothers crying as they fell? Can you imagine people pouring down on the poor helpless monsters?’
Mildly, the reporter asked what showhices were.
‘That’s old Chinesian for children,’ said Dobyns Bennett. ‘I saw the last of the nations burst and die, and you want to ask me about fashionable clothes and things. Real history never gets into the books. It’s too shocking. I suppose you were going to ask me what I thought of the new striped pantaloons for women!’
‘No,’ said the reporter, but he blushed. The question was in his notebook, and he hated blushing.
‘Do you know what the Goonhogo did?’
‘What?’ asked the reporter, struggling to remember just what a Goonhogo might be.
‘It took Venus,’ said the ol
d man, somewhat more calmly.
Very mildly, the reporter murmured, ‘It did?’
‘You bet it did!’ said Dobyns Bennett belligerently.
‘Were you there?’ asked the reporter.
‘You bet I was there when the Goonhogo took Venus,’ said the old man. ‘I was there, and it’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. You know who I am. I’ve seen more worlds than you can count, boy, and yet when the nondies and the needies and the showhices came pouring out of the sky, that was the worst thing that any man could ever see. Down on the ground, there were the loudies the way they’d always been—’
The reporter interrupted, very gently. Bennett might as well have been speaking a foreign language. All of this had happened three hundred years before. The reporter’s job was to get a feature from him and to put it into a language which people of the present time could understand.
Respectfully he said, ‘Can’t you start at the beginning of the story?’
‘You bet. That’s when I married Terza. Terza was the prettiest girl you ever saw. She was one of the Vomacts, a great family of scanners, and her father was a very important man. You see, I was thirty-two, and when a man is thirty-two, he thinks he is pretty old, but I wasn’t really old, I just thought so, and he wanted Terza to marry me because she was such a complicated girl that she needed a man’s help. The Court back home had found her unstable and the Instrumentality had ordered her left in her father’s care until she married a man who then could take on proper custodial authority. I suppose those are old customs to you, boy—’
The reporter interrupted again. ‘I am sorry, old man,’ said he. ‘I know you are over four hundred years old and you’re the only person who remembers the time the Goonhogo took Venus. Now the Goonhogo was a government, wasn’t it?’
‘Anyone knows that,’ snapped the old man. ‘The Goonhogo was a sort of separate Chinesian government. Seventeen billion of them all crowded in one small part of Earth. Most of them spoke English the way you and I do, but they spoke their own language, too, with all those funny words that have come on down to us. They hadn’t mixed in with anybody else yet.
Then, you see, the Waywonjong himself gave the order, and that is when the people started raining. They just fell right out of the sky. You never saw anything like it—’
The reporter had to interrupt him again and again to get the story bit by bit. The old man kept using terms that he couldn’t seem to realize were lost in history and that had to be explained to be intelligible to anyone of this era. But his memory was excellent and his descriptive powers as sharp and alert as ever…
==========
Young Dobyns Bennett had not been at Experimental Area A very long before he realized that the most beautiful female he had ever seen was Terza Vomact. At the age of fourteen, she’ was fully mature. Some of the Vornacts did mature that way. It may have had something to do with their being descended from unregistered, illegal people centuries back in the past. They were even said to have mysterious connections with the lost world back in the age of nations when people could still put numbers on the years.
He fell in love with her and felt like a fool for doing it.
She was so beautiful, it was hard to realize that she was the daughter of Scanner Vomact himself. The scanner was a powerful man.
Sometimes romance moves too fast, and it did with Dobyns Bennett because Scanner Vomact himself called in the young man and said, ‘I’d like to have you marry my daughter Terza, but I’m not sure she’ll approve of you. If you can get her, boy, you have my blessing.’
Dobyns was suspicious. He wanted to know why a senior scanner was willing to take a junior technician.
All that the scanner did was to smile. He said, ‘I’m a lot older than you, and with this new santaclara drug coming in that may give people hundreds of years, you may think that I died in my prime if I die at a hundred and twenty. You may live to four or five hundred. But I know my time’s coming up. My wife has been dead for a long time, and we have no other children, and I know that Terza needs a father in a very special kind of way. The psychologist found her to be unstable. Why don’t you take her outside the area? You can get a pass through the dome any time. You can go out and play with the loudies.’
Dobyns Bennett was almost as insulted as if someone had given him a pail and told him to play in the sand pile. And yet he realized that the elements of play in courtship were fitted together and that the old man meant well.
The day that it all happened, he and Terza were outside the dome. They had been pushing loudies around.
Loudies were not dangerous unless you killed them. You could knock them down, push them out of the way, or tie them up; after a while, they slipped away and went about their business. It took a very special kind of ecologist to figure out what their business was. They floated two meters high, ninety centimeters in diameter, gently just above the land of Venus, eating microscopically. For a long time, people thought there was radiation on which they subsisted. They simply multiplied in tremendous numbers. In a silly sort of way, it was fun to push them around, but that was about all there was to do.
They never responded with intelligence.
Once, long before, a loudie taken into the laboratory for experimental purposes had typed a perfectly clear message on the typewriter. The message had read, ‘Why don’t you Earth people go back to Earth and leave us alone? We are getting along all—’
And that was all the message that anybody had ever got out of them in three hundred years. The best laboratory conclusion was that they had very high intelligence if they ever chose to use it, but their volitional mechanism was so profoundly different from the psychology of human beings that it was impossible to force a loudie to respond to stress as people did on Earth.
==========
The name loudie was some kind of word in the old Chinesian language. It meant the ‘ancient ones’. Since it was the Chinesian who had set up the first outposts on Venus, under the orders of their supreme boss, the Waywonjong, their term lingered on.
Dobyns and Terza pushed loudies, climbed over the hills, and looked down into the valleys, where it was impossible to tell a river from a swamp. They got thoroughly wet, their air converters stuck, and perspiration itched and tickled along their cheeks. Since they could not eat or drink while outside at least not with any reasonable degree of safety—the excursion could not be called a picnic. There was something mildly refreshing about playing child with a very pretty girl-child but Dobyns wearied of the whole thing. Terza sensed his rejection of her. Quick as a sensitive animal, she became angry and petulant. ‘You didn’t have to come out with me!’
‘I wanted to,’ he said, ‘but now I’m tired and want to go home.’
‘You treat me like a child. All right, play with me. Or you treat me like a woman. All right, be a gentleman. But don’t seesaw all the time yourself. I just got to be a little bit happy, and you have to get middle-aged and condescending. I won’t take it.’
‘Your father—’ he said, realizing the moment he said it that it was a mistake.
‘My father this, my father that. If you’re thinking about marrying me, do it yourself.’ She glared at him, stuck her tongue out, ran over a dune, and disappeared.
Dobyns Bennett was baffled. He did not know what to do. She was safe enough. The loudies never hurt anyone. He decided to teach her a lesson and to go on back himself, letting her find her way home when she pleased. The Area Search Team could find her easily if she really got lost.
He walked back to the gate.
When he saw the gates locked and the emergency lights on, he realized that he had made the worst mistake of his life.
==========
His heart sinking within him, he ran the last few meters of the way and beat the ceramic gate with his bare hands until it opened only just enough to let him in.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked the doortender.
The doortender muttered something which Dobyns could not understan
d.
‘Speak up, man!’ shouted Dobyns. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The Goonhogo is coming back and they’re taking over.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Dobyns. ‘They couldn’t—’ He checked himself. Could they?
‘The Goonhogo’s taken over,’ the gatekeeper insisted. ‘They’ve been given the whole thing. The Earth Authority has voted it to them. The Waywonjong has decided to send people right away. They’re sending them.’
‘What do the Chinesians want with Venus? You can’t kill a loudie without contaminating a thousand acres of land. You can’t push them away without them drifting back. You can’t scoop them up. Nobody can live here until we solve the problem of these things. We’re a long way from having solved it,’ said Dobyns in angry bewilderment.
The gatekeeper shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me. That’s all I hear on the radio. Everybody else is excited too.’
Within an hour, the rain of people began.
Dobyns went up to the radar room, saw the skies above. The radar man himself was drumming his fingers against the desk. He said, ‘Nothing like this has been seen for a thousand years or more. You know what there is up there? Those are warships, the warships left over from the last of the old dirty wars. I knew the Chinesians were inside them. Everybody knew about it. It was sort of like a museum. Now they don’t have any weapons in them. But do you know—there are millions of people hanging up there over Venus, and I don’t know what they are going to do!’
He stopped and pointed at one of the screens. ‘Look, you can see them running in patches. They’re behind each other, so they cluster up solid. We’ve never had a screen look like that.’
Dobyns looked at the screen. It was, as the operator said, full of blips.
As they watched, one of the men exclaimed, ‘What’s that milky stuff down there in the lower left? See, it’s—it’s pouring,’ he said, ‘it’s pouring somehow out of those dots. How can you pour things into a radar? It doesn’t really show, does it?’