A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

It was symbols such as these, he thought, which spelled humanity and all that made a human life worth while – elm trees and leaf smoke, street lamps making splashes on the pavement, and the shine of lighted windows seen dimly through the trees.

  A prowling cat ran through the shrubbery that flanked the porch; and up the street a dog began to howl.

  Street lamps, he thought, and hunting cats and howling dogs – these are all a pattern, the pattern of human life upon the planet Earth. A solid pattern, linked and double-linked, made strong through many years. Nothing can threaten it, nothing can shake it. With certain slow and gradual changes, it will prevail against any threat which may be brought against it.

  He unlocked the door and went into the house.

  The long walk and the sharp autumn air, he realized now, had made him hungry. There was a steak, he remembered, in the refrigerator, and he would fix a large bowl of salad and if there were some cold potatoes left he would slice them up and fry them.

  The typewriter still stood on the table top. The length of pipe still lay upon the draining board. The kitchen was the same old homely place, untouched by any threat of an alien life come to meddle with the Earth.

  He tossed the paper on the table top and stood for a moment, head bent, scanning through the headlines.

  The black type of the box at the top of column two caught his eyes. The head read:

  WHO IS

  KIDDING

  WHOM?

  He read the story:

  CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (UP) – Somebody pulled a fast one today on Harvard University, the nation’s press services and the editors of all client papers.

  A story was carried on the news wires this morning reporting that Harvard’s electronic brain had disappeared.

  There was no basis of fact for the story. The brain is still at Harvard. It was never missing. No one knows how the story was placed on the press wires of the various news services but all of them carried it, at approximately the same time.

  All parties concerned have started an investigation and it is hoped that an explanation…

  Crane straightened up. Illusion or cover-up?

  ‘Illusion,’ he said aloud.

  The typewriter clacked at him in the stillness of the kitchen.

  Not illusion, Joe, it wrote.

  He grasped the table’s edge and let himself down slowly into the chair.

  Something scuttled across the dining-room floor, and as it crossed the streak of light from the kitchen door Crane caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eyes.

  The typewriter chattered at him. Joe!

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  That wasn’t a cat out in the bushes by the porch.

  He rose to his feet, went into the dining-room, and picked the phone out of its cradle. There was no hum. He jiggled the hook. Still there was no hum.

  He put the receiver back. The line had been cut. There was at least one of the things in the house. There was at least one of them outside.

  He strode to the front door, jerked it open, then slammed it shut again – and locked and bolted it.

  He stood shaking, with his back against it and wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

  My God, he told himself, the yard is boiling with them!

  He went back to the kitchen.

  They had wanted him to know. They had prodded him to see how he would react.

  Because they had to know. Before they moved they had to know what to expect in the way of human reactions, what danger they would face, what they had to watch for. Knowing that, it would be a cinch.

  And I didn’t react, he told himself. I was a non-reactor. They picked the wrong man. I didn’t do a thing. I didn’t give them so much as a single lead.

  Now they will try someone else. I am no good to them and yet I’m dangerous through my very knowledge. So now they’re going to kill me and try someone else. That would be logic. That would be the rule. If one alien fails to react, he may be an exception. Maybe just unusually dumb. So let us kill him off and try another one. Try enough of them and you will strike a norm.

  Four things, thought Crane:

  They might try to kill off the humans, and you couldn’t discount the fact that they could be successful. The liberated Earth machines would help them and Man, fighting against machines and without the aid of machines, would not fight too effectively. It might take years, of course, but once the forefront of Man’s defence went down, the end could be predicted, with relentless, patient machines tracking down and killing the last of human-kind, wiping out the race.

  They might set up a machine civilization with Man as the servant of machines, with the present roles reversed. And that, thought Crane, might be an endless and a hopeless slavery, for slaves may rise and throw off their shackles only when their oppressors grow careless or when there is outside help. Machines, he told himself, would not grow weak and careless. There would be no human weakness in them and there’d be no outside help.

  Or they might simply remove the machines from Earth, a vast exodus of awakened and aware machines, to begin their life anew on some distant planet, leaving Man behind with weak and empty hands. There would be tools, of course. All the simple tools. Hammers and saws, axes, the wheel, the lever – but there would be no machines, no complex tools that might serve again to attract the attention of the mechanical culture that carried its crusade of liberation far among the stars. It would be a long time, if ever, before Man would dare to build machines again.

  Or They, the living machines, might fail or might come to know that they would fail and, knowing this, leave the Earth forever. Mechanical logic would not allow them to pay an excessive price to carry out the liberation of the Earth’s machines.

  He turned around and glanced at the door between the dining-room and kitchen. They sat there in a row, staring at him with their eyeless faces.

  He could yell for help, of course. He could open a window and shout to arouse the neighbourhood. The neighbours would come running, but by the time they arrived it would be too late. They would make an uproar and fire off guns and flail at dodging metallic bodies with flimsy garden rakes. Someone would call the fire department and someone else would summon the police and all in all the human race would manage to stage a pitifully ineffective show.

  That, he told himself, would be exactly the kind of test reaction, exactly the kind of preliminary exploratory skirmish that these things were looking for – the kind of human hysteria and fumbling that would help convince them the job would be an easy one.

  One man, he told himself, could do much better. One man alone, knowing what was expected of him, could give them an answer that they would not like.

  For this was a skirmish only, he told himself. A thrusting out of a small exploratory force in an attempt to discover the strength of the enemy. A preliminary contact to obtain data which could be assessed in terms of the entire race.

  And when an outpost was attacked, there was just one thing to do – only one thing that was expected of it. To inflict as much damage as possible and fall back in good order. To fall back in good order.

  There were more of them now. They had sawed or chewed or somehow achieved a rathole through the locked front door and they were coming in – closing in to make the kill. They squatted in rows along the floor. They scurried up the walls and ran along the ceiling.

  Crane rose to his feet, and there was an air of confidence in the six feet of his human frame. He reached a hand out to the draining board and his fingers closed around the length of pipe. He hefted it in his hand – it was a handy and effective club.

  There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order that I can.

  He held the pipe at the ready.

  ‘Well, gentlemen?’ he said.

  And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side

  JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

  He was standing absolutely still by a s
ervice port, staring out at the belly of the Orion docking above us. He had on a grey uniform and his rusty hair was cut short. I took him for a station engineer.

  That was bad for me. Newsmen strictly don’t belong in the bowels of Big Junction. But in my first twenty hours I hadn’t found any place to get a shot of an alien ship.

  I turned my holocam to show its big World Media insignia and started my bit about What It Meant to the People Back Home who were paying for it all.

  ‘– it may be routine work to you, sir, but we owe it to them to share –’

  His face came around slow and tight, and his gaze passed over me from a peculiar distance.

  ‘The wonders, the drama,’ he repeated dispassionately. His eyes focused on me. ‘You consummated fool.’

  ‘Could you tell me what races are coming in, sir? If I could even get a view –’

  He waved me to the port. Greedily I angled my lenses up at the long blue hull blocking out the starfield. Beyond her I could see the bulge of a black and gold ship.

  ‘That’s a Foramen,’ he said. ‘There’s a freighter from Belye on the other side, you’d call it Arcturus. Not much traffic right now.’

  ‘You’re the first person who’s said two sentences to me since I’ve been here, sir. What are those colourful little craft?’

  ‘Procya,’ he shrugged. ‘They’re always around. Like us.’

  I squashed my face on the vitrite, peering. The walls clanked. Some­where overhead aliens were off-loading into their private sector of Big Junction. The man glanced at his wrist.

  ‘Are you waiting to go out, sir?’

  His grunt could have meant anything.

  ‘Where are you from on Earth?’ he asked me in his hard tone.

  I started to tell him and suddenly saw that he had forgotten my existence. His eyes were on nowhere, and his head was slowly bowing forward onto the port frame.

  ‘Go home,’ he said thickly. I caught a strong smell of tallow.

  ‘Hey, sir!’ I grabbed his arm; he was in a rigid tremor. ‘Steady, man.’

  ‘I’m waiting… waiting for my wife. My loving wife.’ He gave a short ugly laugh. ‘Where are you from?’

  I told him again.

  ‘Go home,’ He mumbled. ‘Go home and make babies. While you still can.’

  One of the early GR casualties, I thought.

  ‘Is that all you know?’ His voice rose stridently. ‘Fools. Dressing in their styles. Gnivo suits, Aoleelee music. Oh, I see your newscasts,’ he sneered. ‘Nixi parties. A year’s salary for a floater. Gamma radiation? Go home, read history. Ballpoint pens and bicycles –’

  He started a slow slide downward in the half gee. My only informant. We struggled confusedly; he wouldn’t take one of my sobertabs but I finally got him along the service corridor to a bench in an empty loading bay. He fumbled out a little vacuum cartridge. As I was helping him unscrew it, a figure in starched whites put his head in the bay.

  ‘I can be of assistance, yes?’ His eyes popped, his face was covered with brindled fur. An alien, a Procya! I started to thank him but the red-haired man cut me off.

  ‘Get lost. Out.’

  The creature withdrew, its big eyes moist. The man stuck his pinky in the cartridge and then put it up his nose, gasping deep in his diaphragm. He looked toward his wrist.

  ‘What time is it?’

  I told him.

  ‘News,’ he said. ‘A message for the eager, hopeful human race. A word about those lovely, lovable aliens we all love so much.’ He looked at me. ‘Shocked, aren’t you, newsboy?’

  I had him figured now. A xenophobe. Aliens plot to take over Earth.

  ‘Ah Christ, they couldn’t care less.’ He took another deep gasp, shuddered and straightened. ‘The hell with generalities. What time d’you say it was? All right, I’ll tell you how I learned it. The hard way. While we wait for my loving wife. You can bring that little recorder out of your sleeve, too. Play it over to yourself some time… when it’s too late.’ He chuckled. His tone had become chatty – an educated voice. ‘You ever hear of supernormal stimuli?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute. White sugar?’

  ‘Near enough. Y’know Little Junction Bar in DC? No, you’re an Aussie, you said. Well, I’m from Burned Barn, Nebraska.’

  He took a breath, consulting some vast disarray of the soul.

  ‘I accidentally drifted into Little Junction Bar when I was eighteen. No. Correct that. You don’t go into Little Junction by accident, any more than you first shoot skag by accident.

  ‘You go into Little Junction because you’ve been craving it, dreaming about it, feeding on every hint and clue about it, back there in Burned Barn, since before you had hair in your pants. Whether you know it or not. Once you’re out of Burned Barn, you can no more help going into Little Junction than a sea-worm can help rising to the moon.

  ‘I had a brand-new liquor ID in my pocket. It was early; there was an empty spot beside some humans at the bar. Little Junction isn’t an embassy bar, y’know. I found out later where the high-caste aliens go – when they go out. The New Rive, the Curtain by the Georgetown Marina.

  ‘And they go by themselves. Oh, once in a while they do the cultural exchange bit with a few frosty couples of other aliens and some stuffed humans. Galactic Amity with a ten-foot pole.

  ‘Little Junction was the place where the lower orders went, the clerks and drivers out for kicks. Including, my friend, the perverts. The ones who can take humans. Into their beds, that is.’

  He chuckled and sniffed his finger again, not looking at me.

  ‘Ah, yes. Little Junction is Galactic Amity night, every night. I ordered… what? A margharita. I didn’t have the nerve to ask the snotty spade bartender for one of the alien liquors behind the bar. It was dim. I was trying to stare everywhere at once without showing it. I remember those white boneheads – Lyrans, that is. And a mess of green veiling I decided was a multiple being from someplace. I caught a couple of human glances in the bar mirror. Hostile flicks. I didn’t get the message, then.

  ‘Suddenly an alien pushed right in beside me. Before I could get over my paralysis, I heard this blurry voice:

  ‘ “You air a futeball enthushiash?”

  ‘An alien had spoken to me. An alien, a being from the stars. Had spoken. To me.

  ‘Oh, god, I had no time for football, but I would have claimed a passion for paper-folding, for dumb crambo – anything to keep him talking. I asked him about his home-planet sports, I insisted on buying him drinks. I listened raptly while he spluttered out a play-by-play account of a game I wouldn’t have turned a dial for. The “Grain Bay Pashkers”. Yeah. And I was dimly aware of trouble among the humans on my other side.

  ‘Suddenly this woman – I’d call her a girl now – this girl said something in a high nasty voice and swung her stool into the arm I was holding my drink with. We both turned around together.

  ‘Christ, I can see her now. The first thing that hit me was discrepancy. She was a nothing – but terrific. Transfigured. Oozing it, radiating it.

  ‘The next thing was I had a horrifying hard-on just looking at her.

  ‘I scrooched over so my tunic hid it, and my spilled drink trickled down, making everything worse. She pawed vaguely at the spill, muttering.

  ‘I just stared at her trying to figure out what had hit me. An ordinary figure, a soft avidness in the face. Eyes heavy, satiated-looking. She was totally sexualized. I remembered her throat pulsed. She had one hand up touching her scarf, which had slipped off her shoulder. I saw angry bruises there. That really tore it. I understood at once those bruises had some sexual meaning.

  ‘She was looking past my head with her face like a radar dish. Then she made an “ahhhh” sound that had nothing to do with me and grabbed my forearm as if it were a railing. One of the men behind her laughed. The woman said, “Excuse me”, in a ridiculous voice and slipped out behind me. I wheeled around after her, nearly upsetting my futeball friend, and saw that s
ome Sirians had come in.

  ‘That was my first look at Sirians in the flesh, if that’s the word. God knows I’d memorized every news shot, but I wasn’t prepared. That tallness, that cruel thinness. That appalling alien arrogance. Ivory-blue, these were. Two males in immaculate metallic gear. Then I saw there was a female with them. An ivory-indigo exquisite with a permanent faint smile on those bone-hard lips.

  ‘The girl who’d left me was ushering them to a table. She reminded me of a goddamn dog that wants you to follow it. Just as the crowd hid them, I saw a man join them too. A big man, expensively dressed, with something wrecked about his face.

  ‘Then the music started and I had to apologize to my furry friend. And the Sellice dancer came out and my personal introduction to hell began.’

  The red-haired man fell silent for a minute enduring self-pity. Something wrecked about the face, I thought; it fit.

  He pulled his face together.

  ‘First I’ll give you the only coherent observation of my entire evening. You can see it here at Big Junction, always the same. Outside of the Procya, it’s humans with aliens, right? Very seldom aliens with other aliens. Never aliens with humans. It’s the humans who want in.’

  I nodded, but he wasn’t talking to me. His voice had a druggy fluency.

  ‘Ah, yes, my Sellice. My first Sellice.

  ‘They aren’t really well-built, y’know, under those cloaks. No waist to speak of and short-legged. But they flow when they walk.

  ‘This one flowed out into the spotlight, cloaked to the ground in violet silk. You could only see a fall of black hair and tassels over a narrow face like a vole. She was a molegrey. They come in all colours, their fur is like a flexible velvet all over; only the colour changes startlingly around their eyes and lips and other places. Erogenous zones? Ah, man, with them it’s not zones.

  ‘She began to do what we’d call a dance, but it’s no dance, it’s their natural movement. Like smiling, say, with us. The music built up, and her arms undulated toward me, letting the cloak fall apart little by little. She was naked under it. The spotlight started to pick up her body markings moving in the slit of the cloak. Her arms floated apart and I saw more and more.