Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  The radar man looked at his screen. He said, ‘Search me. I don’t know what it is, either. You’ll have to find out. Let’s just see what happens.’

  Scanner Vomact came into the room. He said, once he had taken a quick, experienced glance at the screens, ‘This may be the strangest thing we’ll ever see, but I have a feeling they’re dropping people. Lots of them. Dropping them by the thousands, or by the hundreds of thousands, or even by the millions. But people are coming down there. Come along with me, you two. We’ll go out and see it. There may be somebody that we can help.’

  ==========

  By this time, Dobyns’s conscience was hurting him badly. He wanted to tell Vomact that he had left Terza out there, but he had hesitated—not only because he was ashamed of leaving her, but because he did not want to tattle on the child to her father. Now he spoke.

  ‘Your daughter’s still outside.’

  Vomact turned on him solemnly. The immense eyes looked very tranquil and very threatening, but the silky voice was controlled.

  ‘You may find her.’ The scanner added, in a tone which sent the thrill of menace up Dobyns’s back, ‘And everything will be well if you bring her back.’

  Dobyns nodded as though receiving an order.

  ‘I shall,’ said Vomact, ‘go out myself, to see what I can do, but I leave the finding of my daughter to you.’

  They went down, put on the extra-long-period converters, carried their miniaturized survey equipment so that they could find their way back through the fog, and went out. Just as they were at the gate, the gatekeeper said, ‘Wait a moment, sir and excellency. I have a message for you here on the phone. Please call Control.’

  Scanner Vomact was not to be called lightly, and he knew it. He picked up the connection unit and spoke harshly.

  The radar man came on the phone screen in the gatekeeper’s wall. ‘They’re overhead now, sir.’

  ‘Who’s overhead?’

  ‘The Chinesians are. They’re coming down. I don’t know how many there are. There must be two thousand warships over our heads right here, and there are more thousands over the rest of Venus. They’re down now. If you want to see them hit ground, you’d better get outside quick.’

  Vomact and Dobyns went out.

  Down came the Chinesians. People’s bodies were raining right out of the milk-cloudy sky. Thousands upon thousands of them with plastic parachutes that looked like bubbles. Down they came.

  Dobyns and Vomact saw a headless man drift down. The parachute cords had decapitated him.

  A woman fell near them. The drop had torn her breathing tube loose from her crudely bandaged throat, and she was choking in her own blood. She staggered toward them, tried to babble but only drooled blood with mute choking sounds, and then fell face forward into the mud.

  Two babies dropped. The adult accompanying them had been blown off course. Vomact ran, picked them up, and handed them to a Chinesian man who had just landed. The man looked at the babies in his arms, sent Vomact a look of contemptuous inquiry, put the weeping children down in the cold slush of Venus, gave them a last impersonal glance, and ran off on some mysterious errand of his own.

  Vomact kept Bennett from picking up the children. ‘Come on, let’s keep looking. We can’t take care of all of them.’

  ==========

  The world had known that the Chinesians had a lot of unpredictable habits, but they never suspected that the nondies and the needies and the showhices could pour down out of a poisoned sky. Only the Goonhogo himself would make such a reckless use of human life. Nondies were men and needies were women and showhices were little children. And Goonhogo was a name left over from the old days of nations. It meant something like republic or state or government. Whatever it was, it was the organization that ran the Chinesians in the Chinesian manner, under the Earth Authority.

  And the ruler of the Goonhogo was the Waywonjong.

  The Waywonjong didn’t come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down into Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make a settlement of that planet possible—people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, the loudies who had been called ‘old ones’ by the first Chineasian scouts to cover Venus.

  The loudies had to be gathered together so gently that they would not die and, in dying, each contaminate a thousand acres. They had to be kept together by human bodies and arms in a gigantic living corral.

  Scanner Vomact rushed forward.

  A wounded Chinesian man hit the ground, and his parachute collapsed behind him. He was clad in a pair of shorts, had a knife at his belt, canteen at his waist. He had an air converter attached next to his ear, with a tube running into his throat. He shouted something unintelligible at them and limped rapidly away.

  People kept on hitting the ground all around Vomact and Dobyns.

  The self-disposing parachutes were bursting like bubbles in the misty air a moment or two after they touched the ground. Someone had done a tricky, efficient job with the chemical consequences of static electricity.

  And as the two watched, the air was heavy with people. One time, Vomact was knocked down by a person. He found that it was two Chinesian children tied together.

  Dobyns asked, ‘What are you doing? Where are you going? Do you have any leaders?’

  He got cries and shouts in an unintelligible language. Here and there someone shouted in English, ‘This way!’ or ‘Leave us alone!’ or ‘Keep going…” But that was all.

  The experiment worked.

  Eighty-two million people were dropped in that one day.

  ==========

  After four hours, which seemed barely short of endless, Dobyns found Terza in a corner of the cold hell. Though Venus was warm, the suffering of the almost-naked Chinesians had chilled his blood.

  Terza ran toward him.

  She could not speak.

  She put her head on his chest and sobbed. Finally she managed to say, ‘I’ve—I’ve—I’ve tried to help, but they’re too many, too many, too many!’ And the sentence ended as shrill as a scream.

  Dobyns led her back to the experimental area.

  They did not have to talk. Her whole body told him that she wanted his love and the comfort of his presence, and that she had chosen that course of life which would keep them together.

  As they left the drop area, which seemed to cover all of Venus so far as they could tell, a pattern was beginning to form. The Chinesians were beginning to round up the loudies.

  Terza kissed him mutely after the gatekeeper had let them through. She did not need to speak. Then she fled to her room.

  The next day, the people from Experimental Area A tried to see if they could go out and lend a hand to the settlers. It wasn’t possible to lend a hand; there were too many settlers. People by the millions were scattered all over the hills and valleys of Venus, sludging through the mud and water with their human toes, crushing the alien mud, crushing the strange plants. They didn’t know what to eat. They didn’t know where to go. They had no leaders.

  All they had were orders to gather the loudies together in large herds and hold them there with human arms.

  The loudies didn’t resist.

  After a time lapse of several Earth days, the Goonhogo sent small scout cars. They brought a very different kind of Chinesian—these late arrivals were uniformed, educated, cruel, smug men. They knew what they were doing. And they were willing to pay any sacrifice of their own people to get it done.

  They brought instructions. They put the people together in gangs. It did not matter where the nondies and needies had come from on Earth; it didn’t matter whether they found their own showhices or somebody else’s. They were shown the jobs to do, and they got to work. Human bodies accomplished what machines could not have done—they kept the loudies firmly but gently encircled until every last one of the creatures was starved into nothingness.

  Rice fields began to appear miraculously.

  Scanner Voma
ct couldn’t believe it. The Goonhogo biochemists had managed to adapt rice to the soil of Venus. And yet the seedlings came out of boxes in the scout cars, and weeping people walked over the bodies of their own dead to keep the crop moving toward the planting.

  Venusian bacteria could not kill human beings, nor could they dispose of human bodies after death. A problem arose and was solved. Immense sleds carried dead men, women, and children—those who had fallen wrong, or drowned as they fell, or had been trampled by others—to an undisclosed destination. Dobyns suspected that the material was to be used to add Earthtype organic waste to the soil of Venus, but he did not tell Terza.

  The work went on.

  The nondies and needies kept working in shifts. When they could not see in the darkness, they proceeded without seeing—keeping in line by touch or by shout. Foremen, newly trained, screeched commands. Workers lined up, touching fingertips. The job of building the fields kept on.

  ==========

  ‘That’s a big story,” said the old man, ‘eighty-two million people dropped in a single day. And later I heard that the Waywonjong said it wouldn’t have mattered if seventy million of them had died. Twelve million survivors would have been enough to make a spacehead for the Goonhogo. The Chinesian got Venus, all of it.

  ‘But I’ll never forget the nondies and the needies and the showhices falling out of the sky, men and women and children with their poor, scared Chinesian faces. That funny Venusian air made them look green instead of tan. There they were falling all around.

  ‘You know something, young man?’ said Dobyns Bennett, approaching his fifth century of age.

  ‘What?’ said the reporter.

  ‘There won’t be things like that happening on any world again. Because now, after all, there isn’t any separate Goonhogo left. There’s only one Instrumentality, and they don’t care what a man’s race may have been in the ancient years. Those were the rough old days, the ones I lived in. Those were the days men still tried to do things.’

  Dobyns almost seemed to doze off, but he roused himself sharply and said, ‘I tell you, the sky was full of people. They fell like water. They fell like rain. I’ve seen the awful ants in Africa, and there’s not a thing among the stars to beat them for prowling horror. Mind you, they’re worse than anything the stars contain. I’ve seen the crazy worlds near Alpha Centauri, but I never saw anything like the time the people fell on Venus. More than eighty-two million in one day, and my own little Terza lost among them.

  ‘But the rice did sprout. And the loudies died as the walls of people held them in with human arms. Walls of people, I tell you, with volunteers jumping in to take the places of the falling ones.

  ‘They were people still, even when they shouted in the darkness. They tried to help each other, even while they fought a fight that had to be fought without violence. They were people still. And they did win. It was crazy and impossible, but they won. Mere human beings did what machines and science would have taken another thousand years to do…

  ‘The funniest thing of all was the first house that I saw a nondie put up, there in the rain of Venus. I was out there with Vomact and with a pale, sad Terza. It wasn’t much of a house, shaped out of twisted Venusian wood. There it was. He built it, the smiling, half-naked Chinesian nondie. We went to the door and said to him in English, ‘What are you building here, a shelter or a hospital?’

  ‘The Chinesian grinned at us. “No,” he said, “gambling”.”

  ‘Vomact wouldn’t believe it: “Gambling?”

  ‘ “Sure,” said the nondie. “Gambling is the first thing a man needs in a strange place. It can take the worry out of his soul”.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said the reporter.

  ==========

  Dobyns Bennett muttered that the personal part did not count. He added, ‘Some of my great-great-great-great-great-grandsons may come long. You count those greats. Their faces will show you easily enough that I married into the Vomact line. Terza saw what happened. She saw how people build worlds. This was the hard way to build them. She never forgot the night with the dead Chinesian babies lying in the half-illuminated mud, or the parachute ropes dissolving slowly. She heard the needies weeping and the helpless nondies comforting them and leading them off to nowhere. She remembered the cruel, neat officers coming out of the scout cars. She got home and saw the rice come up, and saw how the Goon-hogo made Venus a Chinesian place.’

  ‘What happened to you personally?’ asked the reporter.

  ‘Nothing much. There wasn’t any more work for us, so we closed down Experimental Area A. I married Terza.

  ‘Any time later, when I said to her, “You’re not such a bad girl!” she was able to admit the truth and tell me she was not. That night in the rain of people would test anybody’s soul, and it tested hers. She had met a big test and passed it. She used to say to me, “I saw it once. I saw the people fall, and I never want to see another person suffer again. Keep me with you, Dobyns, keep me with you forever.”

  ‘And,’ said Dobyns Bennett, ‘it wasn’t forever, but it was a happy and sweet three hundred years. She died after our fourth diamond anniversary. Wasn’t that a wonderful thing, young man?’

  The reporter said it was. And yet, when he took the story back to his editor, he was told to put it into the archives. It wasn’t the right kind of story for entertainment, and the public would not appreciate it any more.

  * * *

  The silence on Mars is deep and undisturbed. Nobody has given it more authentic voice than the author of The Titan’.

  THE TITAN

  by P. Schuyler Miller

  ==========

  Spring Night

  Korul drew farther back into the shadow of the tapestry.

  He had found a place close to the wall of the great hall, half-hidden by a hanging, where he could watch without being drawn into the saturnalia. As First Man of the Blood-Givers, he must rule there as nominal master of the revels—man over Master, here and in every city of Mur—but the spectacle of Masters and Blood-givers wallowing in their own drunken lust brought a bitter taste to his mouth, and the old, black hatred back into his heart. The barriers were there, built up by blood and breeding for generations. Why must his people mock themselves and their servile place with this pretense that for one night, over half their dying world, Masters and Givers were equals.

  Equality! That had ended long ago, farther than the oldest writing of the Searchers for Truth could reach. And yet, once it had been real. Once, they said—thousands of centuries ago, when the race was young and there were great cities where the crimson sands now lay—the two races had been one flesh and one blood. In that time the Masters came to the power that they had never lost. They looked upon themselves as a caste apart, born to rule, self-dedicated to contemplation and self-gratification while a servile breed worked to maintain the planetary culture they adorned. For thousands of years they lived as parasites, in ease and indulgence, and then those of them who still dabbled with science discovered a terrible thing!

  In the blood of every man are certain substances, generated by the glands of his body to control its life-force and functions. Without them life seeps away or runs wild, uncontrolled and unpredictable. Somewhere, the Masters found, a germ of dissolution had found its way into their blood. Through centuries of inbreeding and inactivity, the vital glands were shriveling up or disappearing. The vital secretions were no longer generated, and in some of the most inbred strains subtle poisons were being created in their place. Men and women withered away in the prime of their years, if indeed they lived beyond infancy. Freaks were born in increasing numbers. And so the Blood-Givers were created.

  Thanks to the labor to which they were born, the servile caste was physically as the gods had made it—strong, virile, with legs, arms, bodies, and minds created and trained to battle hostile Nature and to win. Their blood had not thinned; life and the love of living were still strong in them. And so the Masters decreed that these must be their lives
as well.

  Komi’s long fingers crept up under his robe to the little platinum tube buried in the flesh at the base of his throat. At birth every Blood-Giver was branded with the mark of his servitude, the little valve cunningly inserted in the great vein of his throat where the pulse of blood was free and strong, and grafted into the flesh itself. With maturity, man and woman alike must carry the pouch containing a simple pump, a tube, and sterilizing materials. At intervals set by law he must pump his blood into the veins of one of the Masters, drawing the poisoned blood into his own body to renew the stuff of life. Only two days before he, Korul, had been summoned to bleed for a paunchy, flabby woman who leered and fondled his bare skin, and made pointed jokes about his strength and manhood. There were some of his kind, he knew, who would have been glad of her favors. Out there in the Hall of Masters their kind and hers were locked in each others’ arms in an orgy of unrestrained, drunken emotion.

  All but one.

  ==========

  He had been watching her narrowly all that night. A few at a time they had gathered in the hall, the Masters rolling on their wheeled tlornaks, propped up among their silken cushions with their gaudy robes draped skillfully about them to hide the stumps or flabby tabs of flesh which passed for legs among their degenerate kind. In larger groups the Blood-Givers had straggled up from their dingy quarters, deep in the lower levels of the city. The men were naked to the waist, scrubbed and oiled to show the play of their muscles and the breadth of their shoulders to whichever woman of the Masters should claim them first. The women, girls just reaching maturity and matrons mated for many years, were more modestly and guilefully dressed in garments which would be put away after the night’s revels to serve another year, when another Spring Night came and the polar sluices were again thrown open to send the waters of the melting ice-cap flooding through the ancient rock-hewn channels to bring new life and new beauty to half of Mur.

  As First Man of the Blood-Givers, last of a line which reached back to the tribal chieftains who ranged the still-green uplands of a young planet, Korul was ‘master’ of Spring Night. He had gone through the ancient ritual, coming to the hall with his little retinue, going through the ceremony of mock-brotherhood with the First of the Masters and ‘deposing’ him, closing and locking the great book of the law—or what purported to be the law. When the signal came from the pole, it was Korul whose bare arm was raised to open the revels—then as the flutes shrilled, and the babble of voices and ring of crystal rose around him, he had slipped away to the place against the wall, where hidden by a tapestry he could see without being seen.