A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  To this end, the Troxxt – the only important race which had steadfastly refused the complete surrender of armaments demanded of all members of the Federation – had been implored by a minor member of the Protoplasmic League to rescue it from the devastation which the Dendi intended to visit upon it, as punishment for an unlawful exploratory excursion outside the boundaries of the galaxy.

  Faced with the determination of the Troxxt to defend their cousins in organic chemistry, and the suddenly aroused hostility of at least two-thirds of the interstellar peoples, the Dendi had summoned a rump meeting of the Galactic Council; declared a state of revolt in being; and proceeded to cement their disintegrating rule with the blasted life-forces of a hundred worlds. The Troxxt, hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped, had been able to continue the struggle only because of the great ingenuity, and selflessness of other members of the Protoplasmic League, who had risked extinction to supply them with newly developed secret weapons.

  Hadn’t we guessed the nature of the beast from the enormous precautions it had taken to prevent the exposure of any part of its body to the intensely corrosive atmosphere of Earth? Surely the seamless, barely translucent suits which our recent visitors had worn for every moment of their stay on our world should have made us suspect a body chemistry developed from complex silicon compounds rather than those of carbon?

  Humanity hung its collective head and admitted that the suspicion had never occurred to it.

  Well, the Troxxt admitted generously, we were extremely inexperienced and possibly a little too trusting. Put it down to that. Our naïveté, however costly to them – our liberators – would not be allowed to deprive us of that complete citizenship which the Troxxt were claiming as the birthright of all.

  But as for our leaders, our probably corrupted, certainly irresponsible leaders…

  The first executions of UN officials, heads of states, and pre-Bengali interpreters as ‘Traitors to Protoplasm’– after some of the lengthiest and most nearly-perfectly-fair trials in the history of Earth – were held a week after G-J day, the inspiring occasion on which – amidst gorgeous ceremonies – Humanity was invited to join, first the Protoplasmic League and thence the New and Democratic Galactic Federation of All Species, All Races.

  Nor was that all. Whereas the Dendi had contemptuously shoved us to one side as they went about their business of making our planet safe for tyranny, and had – in all probability – built special devices which made the very touch of their weapons fatal for us, the Troxxt – with the sincere friendliness which had made their name a byword for democracy and decency wherever living creatures came together among the stars – our Second Liberators, as we lovingly called them, actually preferred to have us help them with the intensive, accelerating labour of planetary defence.

  So men’s intestines dissolved under the invisible glare of the forces used to assemble the new, incredibly complex weapons; men sickened and died, in scrabbling hordes, inside the mines which the Troxxt had made deeper than any we had dug hitherto; men’s bodies broke open and exploded in the undersea oil-drilling sites which the Troxxt had declared were essential.

  Children’s schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as ‘Platinum Scrap for Procyon’ and ‘Radioactive Debris for Deneb’. Housewives also were implored to save on salt whenever possible – this substance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible ways – and colourful posters reminded: ‘Don’t salinate – sugarfy!’

  And over all – courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent – were our mentors, taking their giant supervisory strides on metallic crutches, while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that swung from each paired length of shining leg.

  Truly, even in the midst of a complete economic paralysis caused by the concentration of all major productive facilities on other-worldly armaments, and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from peculiar industrial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all this mind-wracking disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our lawful place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for Democracy.

  But the Dendi returned to smash this idyll. They came in their huge, silvery space-ships and the Troxxt, barely warned in time, just managed to rally under the blow and fight back in kind. Even so, the Troxxt ship in the Ukraine was almost immediately forced to flee to its base in the depths of space. After three days, the only Troxxt on Earth were the devoted members of a little band guarding the ship in Australia. They proved, in three or more months, to be as difficult to remove from the face of our planet as the continent itself; and since there was now a state of close and hostile siege, with the Dendi on one side of the globe, and the Troxxt on the other, the battle assumed frightful proportions.

  Seas boiled; whole steppes burned away; the climate itself shifted and changed under the gruelling pressure of the cataclysm. By the time the Dendi solved the problem, the planet Venus had been blasted from the skies in the course of a complicated battle manoeuvre, the Earth had wobbled over as orbital substitute.

  The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly based on the small continent to be driven away, the numerically superior Dendi brought up enough firepower to disintegrate all Australia into an ash that muddied the Pacific. This occurred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation. A day of reckoning for what remained of the human race, however.

  How could we have been so naïve, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic pro-protoplasm propaganda? Surely, if physical characteristics were to be the criteria of our racial empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chemical basis? The Dendi life-plasma was based on silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates – appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we and the Dendi – have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess an identical organic substance?

  As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy… Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all over the rubble of our planet. Had we ever seen a representative of these proto-plasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting? No, nor would we. For as soon as a race – animal, vegetable, or mineral – developed enough to constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civilization was systematically dismantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.

  Could we say we had learned a single useful piece of information about Troxxt technology – for all of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course not. We had merely contributed our mite to the enslavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.

  There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely – once the few surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hiding. But our collective onus was as nothing compared to that borne by ‘vermicular collaborationists’– those traitors who had supplanted our martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable human interpreters who had had linguistic traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace. Why, killing was almost too good for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.

  When the Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation – as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the Dendi – there were few humans found who were willing to accept with any real enthusiasm the responsibilities of newly opened and highly paid positions in language, science, and government.

  Of course, since the Troxxt, in order to reliberate Earth, had f
ound it necessary to blast a tremendous chunk out of the Northern Hemisphere, there were very few humans to be found in the first place… Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secretary-General of the United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This was the liberation, by the way, which swept, the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.

  Possibly it was at this time – possibly a liberation or so later – that the Troxxt and the Dendi discovered that the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zigzagged coruscatingly and murderously away in the direction of Aldebaran.

  That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my father I heard it as I ran with him from water puddle to distant water puddle, across the searing heat of yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration threatened to fling us into empty space.

  Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion – and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.

  Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

  The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy observation of our history!

  ‘Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be.’

  An Alien Agony

  HARRY HARRISON

  Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of Wesker’s World, a thunder rumbled and grew. Trader John Garth stopped when he heard it, his boots sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his good ear to catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick atmosphere, growing louder.

  ‘That noise is the same as the noise of your sky-ship,’ Itin said, with stolid Wesker logicality, slowly pulverizing the idea in his mind and turning over the bits one by one for closer examination. ‘But your ship is still sitting where you landed it. It must be, even though we cannot see it, because you are the only one who can operate it. And even if anyone else could operate it we would have heard it rising into the sky. Since we did not, and if this sound is a sky-ship sound, then it must mean…’

  ‘Yes, another ship,’ Garth said, too absorbed in his own thoughts to wait for the laborious Weskerian chains of logic to clank their way through to the end. Of course it was another spacer, it had been only a matter of time before one appeared, and undoubtedly this one was homing on the SS radar reflector as he had done. His own ship would show up clearly on the newcomer’s screen and they would probably set down as close to it as they could.

  ‘You better go ahead, Itin,’ he said. ‘Use the water so you can get to the village quickly. Tell everyone to get back into the swamps, well clear of the hard ground. That ship is landing on instruments and anyone underneath at touchdown is going to be cooked.’

  This immediate threat was clear enough to the little Wesker amphibian. Before Garth finished speaking Itin’s ribbed ears had folded like a bat’s wing and he slipped silently into the nearby canal. Garth squelched on through the mud, making as good time as he could over the clinging surface. He had just reached the fringes of the village clearing when the rumbling grew to a head-splitting roar and the spacer broke through the low-hanging layer of clouds above. Garth shielded his eyes from the down-reaching tongue of flame and examined the growing form of the grey-black ship with mixed feelings.

  After almost a standard year on Wesker’s World he had to fight down a longing for human companionship of any kind. While this buried fragment of herd-spirit chattered for the rest of the monkey tribe, his trader’s mind was busily drawing a line under a column of figures and adding up the total. This could very well be another trader’s ship, and if it were his monopoly of the Wesker trade was at an end. Then again, this might not be a trader at all, which was the reason he stayed in the shelter of the giant fern and loosened his gun in its holster.

  The ship baked dry a hundred square metres of mud, the roaring blast died, and the landing feet crunched down through the crackling crust. Metal creaked and settled into place while the cloud of smoke and steam slowly drifted lower in the humid air.

  ‘Garth – you native-cheating extortionist – where are you?’ the ship’s speaker boomed. The lines of the spacer had looked only slightly familiar, but there was no mistaking the rasping tones of that voice. Garth wore a smile when he stepped out into the open and whistled shrilly through two fingers. A directional microphone ground out of its casing on the ship’s fin and turned in his direction.

  ‘What are you doing here, Singh?’ he shouted towards the mike. ‘Too crooked to find a planet of your own and have to come here to steal an honest trader’s profits?’

  ‘Honest!’ the amplified voice roared. ‘This from the man who has been in more jails than cathouses – and that a goodly number in itself, I do declare. Sorry, friend of my youth, but I cannot join you in exploiting this aboriginal pesthole. I am on course to a more fairly atmosphered world where a fortune is waiting to be made. I only stopped here since an opportunity presented itself to turn an honest credit by running a taxi service. I bring you friendship, the perfect companionship, a man in a different line of business who might help you in yours. I’d come out and say hello myself, except I would have to decon for biologicals. I’m cycling the passenger through the lock so I hope you won’t mind helping with his luggage.’

  At least there would be no other trader on the planet now, that worry was gone. But Garth still wondered what sort of passenger would be taking one-way passage to an uninhabited world. And what was behind that concealed hint of merriment in Singh’s voice? He walked around to the far side of the spacer where the ramp had dropped, and looked up at the man in the cargo lock who was wrestling ineffectually with a large crate. The man turned towards him and Garth saw the clerical dog-collar and knew just what it was Singh had been chuckling about.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Garth asked; in spite of his attempt at self control he snapped the words. If the man noticed this he ignored it, because he was still smiling and putting out his hand as he came down the ramp.

  ‘Father Mark,’ he said. ‘Of the Missionary Society of Brothers. I’m very pleased to…’

  ‘I said what are you doing here.’ Garth’s voice was under control now, quiet and cold. He knew what had to be done, and it must be done quickly or not at all.

  ‘That should be obvious,’ Father Mark said, his good nature still unruffled. ‘Our missionary society has raised funds to send spiritual emissaries to alien worlds for the first time. I was lucky enough…’

  ‘Take your luggage and get back into the ship. You’re not wanted here and have no permission to land. You’ll be a liability and there is no one on Wesker to take care of you. Get back into the ship.’

  ‘I don’t know who you are sir, or why you are lying to me,’ the priest said. He was still calm but the smile was gone. ‘But I have studied galactic law and the history of this planet very well. There are no diseases or beasts here that I should have any particular fear of. It is also an open planet, and until the Space Survey changes that status I have as much right to be here as you do.’

  The man was of course right
, but Garth couldn’t let him know that. He had been bluffing, hoping the priest didn’t know his rights. But he did. There was only one distasteful course left for him, and he had better do it while there was still time.

  ‘Get back in that ship,’ he shouted, not hiding his anger now. With a smooth motion his gun was out of the holster and the pitted black muzzle only inches from the priest’s stomach. The man’s face turned white, but he did not move.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Garth!’ Singh’s shocked voice grated from the speaker. ‘The guy paid his fare and you have no rights at all to throw him off the planet.’

  ‘I have this right,’ Garth said, raising his gun and sighting between the priest’s eyes. ‘I give him thirty seconds to get back aboard the ship or I pull the trigger.’

  ‘Well I think you are either off your head or playing a joke,’ Singh’s exasperated voice rasped down at them. ‘If a joke, it is in bad taste, and either way you’re not getting away with it. Two can play at that game, only I can play it better.’

  There was the rumble of heavy bearings and the remote-controlled four-gun turret on the ship’s side rotated and pointed at Garth. ‘Now – down gun and give Father Mark a hand with the luggage,’ the speaker commanded, a trace of humour back in the voice now. ‘As much as I would like to help, Old Friend, I cannot. I feel it is time you had a chance to talk to the Father; after all, I have had the opportunity of speaking with him all the way from Earth.’