A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  Finally, having used up most of his nervous system as fuel, the professor collated enough of the language to make conversation possible. He – and, through him, the world – was thereupon told the following:

  The aliens were members of a highly advanced civilization which had spread its culture throughout the entire galaxy. Cognizant of the limitations of the as-yet-under-developed animals who had latterly become dominant upon Earth, they had placed us in a sort of benevolent ostracism. Until either we or our institutions had evolved to a level permitting, say, at least associate membership in the galactic federation (under the sponsoring tutelage, for the first few millennia, of one of the older, more widespread, and more important species in that federation) – until that time, all invasions of our privacy and ignorance – except for a few scientific expeditions conducted under conditions of great secrecy – had been strictly forbidden by universal agreement.

  Several individuals who had violated this ruling – at great cost to our racial sanity, and enormous profit to our reigning religions – had been so promptly and severely punished that no known infringements had occurred for some time. Our recent growth-curve had been satisfactory enough to cause hopes that a bare thirty or forty centuries more would suffice to place us on applicant status with the federation.

  Unfortunately, the peoples of this stellar community were many, and varied as greatly in their ethical outlook as their biological composition. Quite a few species lagged a considerable social distance behind the Dendi, as our visitors called themselves. One of these, a race of horrible, worm-like organisms known as the Troxxt – almost as advanced technologically as they were retarded in moral development – had suddenly volunteered for the position of sole and absolute ruler of the galaxy. They had seized control of several key suns, with their attendant planetary systems, and, after a calculated decimation of the races thus captured, had announced their intention of punishing with a merciless extinction all species unable to appreciate from these object-lessons the value of unconditional surrender.

  In despair, the galactic federation had turned to the Dendi, one of the oldest, most selfless, and yet most powerful of races in civilized space, and commissioned them – as the military arm of the federation – to hunt down the Troxxt, defeat them wherever they had gained illegal suzerainty, and destroy for ever their power to wage war.

  This order had come almost too late. Everywhere the Troxxt had gained so much the advantage of attack, that the Dendi were able to contain them only by enormous sacrifice. For centuries now, the conflict had careened across our vast island universe. In the course of it, densely populated planets had been disintegrated; suns had been blasted into novae; and whole groups of stars ground into swirling cosmic dust.

  A temporary stalemate had been reached a short while ago, and – reeling and breathless – both sides were using the lull to strengthen weak spots in their perimeter.

  Thus, the Troxxt had finally moved into the till-then peaceful section of space that contained our solar system – among others. They were thoroughly uninterested in our tiny planet with its meagre resources; nor did they care much for such celestial neighbours as Mars or Jupiter. They established their headquarters on a planet of Proxima Centaurus – the star nearest our own sun – and proceeded to consolidate their offensive-defensive network between Rigel and Aldebaran. At this point in their explanation, the Dendi pointed out, the exigencies of interstellar strategy tended to become too complicated for anything but three dimensional maps; let us here accept the simple statement, they suggested that it became immediately vital for them to strike rapidly, and make the Troxxt position on Proxima Centaurus untenable – to establish a base inside their lines of communication.

  The most likely spot for such a base was Earth.

  *

  The Dendi apologized profusely for intruding on our development, an intrusion which might cost us dear in our delicate developmental state. But, as they explained – in impeccable pre-Bengali – before their arrival we had, in effect, become (all unknowingly) a satrapy of the awful Troxxt. We could now consider ourselves liberated.

  We thanked them much for that.

  Besides, their leader pointed out proudly, the Dendi were engaged in a war for the sake of civilization itself, against an enemy so horrible, so obscene in its nature, and so utterly filthy in its practices, that it was unworthy of the label of intelligent life. They were fighting, not only for themselves, but for every loyal member of the galactic federation; for every small and helpless species; for every obscure race too weak to defend itself against a ravaging conqueror. Would humanity stand aloof from such a conflict?

  There was just a slight bit of hesitation as the information was digested. Then –‘No!’ humanity roared back through such mass-communication media as television, newspapers, reverberating jungle drums, and mule-mounted backwoods messenger. ‘We will not stand aloof. We will help you destroy this menace to the very fabric of civilization. Just tell us what you want us to do.’

  Well, nothing in particular, the aliens replied with some embarrassment. Possibly in a little while there might be something – several little things, in fact – which could be quite useful; but, for the moment, if we would concentrate on not getting in their way when they serviced their gun-mounts, they would be very grateful, really…

  This reply tended to create a large amount of uncertainty among the two billion of Earth’s human population. For several days afterwards, there was a planet-wide tendency – the legend has come down to us – of people failing to meet each other’s eyes.

  But then Man rallied from this substantial blow to his pride. He would be useful, be it ever so humbly, to the race which had liberated him from potential subjugation by the ineffably ugly Troxxt. For this, let us remember well our ancestors! Let us hymn their sincere efforts amid their ignorance!

  All standing armies, all air and sea fleets, were reorganized into guard-patrols around the Dendi weapons: no human might approach within two miles of the murmuring machinery without a pass countersigned by the Dendi. Since they were never known to sign such a pass during the entire period of their stay on this planet, however, this loophole-provision was never exercised as far as is known; and the immediate neighbourhood of the extraterrestrial weapons became and remained henceforth wholesomely free of two-legged creatures.

  Cooperation with our liberators took precedence over all other human activites. The order of the day was a slogan first given voice by a Harvard professor of government in a querulous radio round table on ‘Man’s Place in a Somewhat Over-Civilized Universe’.

  ‘Let us forget our individual egos and collective conceits!’ the professor cried at one point. ‘Let us subordinate everything – to the end that the freedom of the solar system in general, and Earth in particular, must and shall be preserved!’

  Despite the mouth-filling qualities, this slogan was repeated everywhere. Still, it was difficult sometimes to know exactly what the Dendi wanted – partly because of the limited number of interpreters available to the heads of the various sovereign states, and partly because of their leader’s tendency to vanish into his ship after ambiguous and equivocal statements – such as the curt admonition to ‘Evacuate Washington!’

  On that occasion, both the Secretary of State and the American President perspired fearfully through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people. They waited and wilted beneath the enormous ship – which no human had ever been invited to enter, despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers – they waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the State of Washington or Washington, DC.

  The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The Capitol building was taken apart in a few days, and set up almost intact in the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains; the missing Archives, that were later to turn up in the Children’s Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around the President’s mansion (from which unfortunately it was to evaporate within a week because of the relatively low humidity of the region) – all these are proud moments in the galactic history of our species, from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gunsite on the spot, nor even an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of our determined cooperation and most willing sacrifice.

  There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the course of a routine journalistic interview, that the aliens totalled no more powerful a group than a squad; and that their leader, instead of the great scientist and key military strategist that we might justifiably have expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar equivalent of a buck sergeant.

  That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere non-commissioned officer was hard for us to swallow; but that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol action was impossibly humiliating.

  And then there was the matter of ‘lendi’.

  The aliens, while installing or servicing their planet-wide weapon system, would occasionally fling aside an evidently unusable fragment of the talking metal. Separated from the machine of which it had been a component, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were deleterious to mankind and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material was attached to any terrestrial metal – and insulated carefully from contact with other substances – it would, in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold, or pure uranium.

  This stuff – ‘lendi’, men have heard the aliens call it – was shortly in frantic demand in an economy ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial centres.

  Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon sites, hordes of ragged humans stood chanting – well outside the two-mile limit – ‘Any lendi, Dendi?’ All attempts by law-enforcement agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless – especially since the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to the scrabbling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling murderous dash to the corner of the meadows wherein had fallen the highly versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave up.

  Mankind also began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fanatically conservative among our ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.

  They did, children; they did. Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one’s back on progress.

  Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected activity upon one of the moons of Saturn. The Troxxt were evidently threading their treacherous way inward through the solar system. Considering their vicious and deceitful propensities, the Dendi warned, an attack from these worm-like monstrosities might be expected at any moment.

  Few humans went to sleep as the night rolled up to and past the meridian on which they dwelt. Almost all eyes were lifted to a sky carefully denuded of clouds by watchful Dendi. There was a brisk trade in cheap telescopes and bits of smoked glass in some sections of the planet; while other portions experienced a substantial boom in spells and charms of the all-inclusive, or omnibus, variety.

  The Troxxt attacked in three cylindrical black ships simultaneously; one in the Southern Hemisphere, and two in the Northern. Great gouts of green flame roared out of their tiny craft; and everything touched by these gouts imploded into a translucent, glass-like sand. No Dendi was hurt by these, however, and from each of the now-writhing gun-mounts there bubbled forth a series of scarlet clouds which pursued the Troxxt hungrily, until forced by a dwindling velocity to fall back upon Earth.

  Here they had an unhappy after-effect. Any populated area into which these pale pink cloudlets chanced to fall was rapidly transformed into a cemetery – a cemetery, if the truth be told as it has been handed down to us, that had more the odour of the kitchen than the grave. The inhabitants of these unfortunate localities were subjected to enormous increases of temperature. Their skin reddened, then blackened; their hair and nails shrivelled; their very flesh turned into liquid and boiled off their bones. Altogether a disagreeable way for one-tenth of the human race to die.

  The only consolation was the capture of a black cylinder by one of the red clouds. When, as a result of this, it had turned white-hot and poured its substance down in the form of a metallic rainstorm, the two ships assaulting the Northern Hemisphere abruptly retreated to the asteroids into which the Dendi – because of severely limited numbers – steadfastly refused to pursue them.

  In the next twenty-four hours the aliens – resident aliens, let us say – held conferences, made repairs to their weapons and commiserated with us. Humanity buried its dead. This last was a custom of our forefathers that was most worthy of note; and one that has not, of course, survived into modern times.

  By the time the Troxxt returned, Man was ready for them. He could not, unfortunately, stand to arms as he most ardently desired to do; but he could and did stand to optical instrument and conjurer’s oration.

  Once more the little red clouds burst joyfully into the upper reaches of the stratosphere; once more the green flames wailed and tore at the chattering spires of lendi; once more men died by the thousands in the boiling backwash of war. But this time, there was a slight difference: the green flames of the Troxxt abruptly changed colour after the engagement had lasted three hours; they became darker, more bluish. And, as they did so, Dendi after Dendi collapsed at his station and died in convulsions.

  The call for retreat was evidently sounded. The survivors fought their way to the tremendous ship in which they had come. With an explosion from her stern jets that blasted a red-hot furrow southward through France, and kicked Marseilles into the Mediterranean, the ship roared into space and fled home ignominiously.

  Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.

  They were truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported by long and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship – one in Australia and one in the Ukraine – captured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing-sites, and disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes.

  While some men drilled about nervously in the ancient military patterns, others pored anxiously over scientific texts and records, pertaining to the visit of the Dendi – in the desperate hope of finding a way of preserving terrestrial independence against this ravening conqueror of the star-spattered galaxy.

  And yet all this time, the human captives inside the artificially darkened space-ships (the Troxxt, having no eyes, not only had little use for light, but the more sedentary individuals among them actually found such radiation disagreeable to their sensitive, unpigmented skins) were not being tortured for information – nor vivisected in the earnest quest of knowledge on a slightly higher level – but educated.

  Educated in the Troxxtian language, that is.

  True it was that a large number found themselves utterly inadequate for the task which the Troxxt had set them, and temporarily became servants to the more successful
students. And another, albeit smaller, group developed various forms of frustration hysteria, ranging from mild unhappiness to complete catatonic depression, over the difficulties presented by a language whose every verb was irregular, and whose myriads of prepositions were formed by noun-adjective combinations derived from the subject of the previous sentence. But, eventually, eleven human beings were released, to blink madly in the sunlight as certified interpreters of Troxxt.

  These liberators, it seemed, had never visited Bengal in the heyday of its millennia-past civilization.

  Yes, these liberators. For the Troxxt had landed on the sixth day of the ancient, almost mythical month of October. And October the Sixth is, of course, the Holy Day of the Second Liberation. Let us remember, let us revere. (If only we could figure out which day it is on our calendar!)

  The tale the interpreters told caused men to hang their heads in shame and gnash their teeth at the deception they had allowed the Dendi to practise upon them.

  True, the Dendi had been commissioned by the Galactic Federation to hunt the Troxxt down and destroy them. This was largely because the Dendi were the Galactic Federation. One of the first intelligent arrivals on the interstellar scene, the huge creatures had organized a vast police force to protect them and their power against any contingency of revolt that might arise in the future. This police force was ostensibly a congress of all thinking life forms throughout the galaxy; actually, it was an efficient means of keeping them under rigid control.

  Most species thus-far discovered were docile and tractable, however; the Dendi had been ruling from time immemorial, said they – very well, then, let the Dendi continue to rule. Did it make that much difference?

  But, throughout the centuries, opposition to the Dendi grew – and the nuclei of the opposition were the protoplasm-based creatures. What, in fact, had come to be known as the Protoplasmic League.

  Though small in number, the creatures whose life cycles were derived from the chemical and physical properties of protoplasm varied greatly in size, structure, and specialization. A galactic community deriving the main wells of its power from them would be a dynamic instead of a static place, where extra-galactic travel would be encouraged, instead of being inhibited, as it was at present because of Dendi fears of meeting a superior civilization. It would be a true democracy of species – a real biological republic – where all creatures of adequate intelligence and cultural development would enjoy a control of their destinies at present experienced by the silicon-based Dendi alone.