A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  After an hour, I searched through Vergil’s kitchen and found bleach, ammonia, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I returned to the bathroom, keeping the center of my gaze away from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me.

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

  I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after –

  Committing genocide?

  That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh.

  It was not at all hard to believe I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

  Vergil.

  I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

  I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girlfriend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty – a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation.

  Had I been thorough enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tomorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow. I didn’t even think of Bernard.

  When Gail came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me.

  ‘You feeling okay?’ she asked, perching on the edge of the couch. I nodded.

  ‘What are you planning for dinner?’ My mouth wasn’t working properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead.

  ‘Edward, you have a fever,’ she said. ‘A very high fever.’

  I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gail was close behind me. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days.

  ‘Damp palms,’ I said. So obvious.

  I think we nearly died. I struggled at first, but within minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour.

  I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged – hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited.

  There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me. A sound like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound or whatever became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally cancelling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats.

  The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart.

  First, they subdued our immune responses. The war – and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants – lasted perhaps two days.

  By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen.

  ‘What in hell was that?’ was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain, so I shook my head. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. ‘We should call a doctor,’ she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we had was illusory.

  The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment – a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable – and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods, and drink tap water, for the time being.

  With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on the floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye.

  Her arm was developing pronounced ridges.

  They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours – two hours in hell – before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their time scale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence which had once controlled their universe.

  They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them.

  With dawn the next day, we were allowed freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those – my urine was purple – and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. ‘Are they talking to you?’ she asked. I nodded. ‘Then I’m not crazy.’

  For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. During that time, I managed to pencil the majority of this manuscript. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gail was capable of our previous limited motion, but no more.

  When full control resumed, we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate.

  ‘Eddie…’ she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from outside.

  Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take in sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all corners of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture.

  By the next dawn, the transformation was complete.

  I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells – large, flat and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small.

  I have been asked to carry on recording, but soon that will not be possible. Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, our individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood.

  Soon there will be no need for centralization.

  I am informed that already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation.

  Within the old time frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force.

  I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality – what there is of it.

  New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their capacity for thought will be inconceivable.

  All my hatred and fear is gone now.

  I leave them – us – with only one question.

  How many times has this happened, elsewhere? Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.

  They had found universes in grains of sand.

  Answer

  FREDRIC BROWN

  Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore throughout the
universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

  He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

  Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, ‘Now, Dwar Ev.’

  Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

  Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. ‘The honour of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dwar Reyn. ‘It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.’

  He turned to face the machine. ‘Is there a God?’

  The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

  ‘Yes, NOW there is a God.’

  Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

  A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

  The Liberation of Earth

  WILLIAM TENN

  This, then, is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters! Heigh-ho, here is the tale!

  August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive ancestors, our unliberated, unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds. Still the tale must be told, with all of its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

  Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have water and weeds and lie in a valley of gusts. So rest, relax, and listen! And suck air, suck air!

  On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous silver cigar.

  The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they pointed!

  How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions there for hastily grouped scientists, with signalling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of it.

  All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.

  Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship and the first of the aliens stepped out in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

  Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about half-way up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.

  That night, the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say? That night, anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice hockey, televising, smashing atoms, Red-baiting, conducting give-away shows, and signing affidavits – all the incredible minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live – as compared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

  The big question, of course, was – what had the alien said? Had he called on the human race to surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he considered a reasonable offer – for, let us say, the north polar ice-cap – politely withdrawn so that we could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race – and would we please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?

  Not to know was quite maddening.

  Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations waited under the belly of the motionless star-ship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind’s friendly intentions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more than one atom-bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag – along with the UN banner and their own national emblem. Thus did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

  When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the three official languages of the United Nations – English, French, and Russian – asked him to consider this planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before – which was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely incomprehensible to the representatives of world government.

  Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a suspicious similarity between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this particular type, humanity’s most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to any subsequent exploring party.

  However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment! Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences for our kind!

  You, sir, now you sit back and listen! You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well enough do I remember, how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did; you will listen until too much high land between waterholes blocks me off from life.

  Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints, recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.

  Pursuant to the young Hindu’s suggestions, the one professor of comparative linguistics in the world capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar version of the dead dialect was summoned from an academic convention in New York where he was reading a paper he had been working on for eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in Ancient Sanscrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.

  Yea, verily, all these things – and more, many more – did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?

  The disgruntled scholar, minus – as he kept insisting bitterly – some of his most essential word lists, was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous black shadow of the alien space-ship.

  Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship carrying great quantities of immense, shimmering metal which they proceeded
to assemble into something that was obviously a machine – though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built, and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood courteously in the neighbourhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost forgotten when the cornerstone of the library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the UN would reply, each one hoping desperately to make up for the alien’s lack of familiarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand-gestures and facial expressions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out the difficulties of such physical, gestural communication with creatures possessing – as these aliens did – five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.

  The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the aliens, trying to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose peculiarities he could only extrapolate from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of foreign accents – these vexations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives of world government. They beheld the extraterrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those faraway factories which had given it birth.

  True, there was always the alien who would pause in his evidently supervisory labours to release the set little speech; but not even the excellent manners he displayed, in listening to upward of fifty-six replies in as many languages, helped dispel the panic caused whenever a human scientist, investigating the shimmering machines, touched a projecting edge and promptly shrank into a disappearing pinpoint. This, while not a frequent occurrence, happened often enough to cause chronic indigestion and insomnia among human administrators.