A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  A babble of voices arose in the room and more of the Wesker mouths were open now as they tried to force their thoughts through the tangled skein of words and separate the thread of truth.

  ‘Can you tell us, Garth?’ Itin asked, and the sound of his voice quieted the hubbub.

  ‘I can tell you to use the scientific method which can examine all things – including itself – and give you answers that can prove the truth or falsity of any statement.’

  ‘That is what we must do,’ Itin said, ‘we had reached the same conclusion.’ He held a thick book before him and a ripple of nods ran across the watchers. ‘We have been studying the bible as Father Mark told us to do, and we have found the answer. God will make a miracle for us, there by proving that He is watching us. And by this sign we will know Him and go to Him.’

  ‘That is the sin of false pride,’ Father Mark said. ‘God needs no miracles to prove His existence.’

  ‘But we need a miracle!’ Itin shouted, and though he wasn’t human there was need in his voice. ‘We have read here of many smaller miracles, loaves, fishes, wine, snakes – many of them, for much smaller reasons. Now all He need do is make a miracle and He will bring us all to Him – the wonder of an entire new world worshipping at His throne, as you have told us, Father Mark. And you have told us how important this is. We have discussed this and find that there is only one miracle that is best for this kind of thing.’

  His boredom at the theological wrangling drained from Garth in an instant. He had not been really thinking or he would have realized where all this was leading. He could see the illustration in the bible where Itin held it open, and knew in advance what picture it was. He rose slowly from his chair, as if stretching, and turned to the priest behind him.

  ‘Get ready!’ he whispered. ‘Get out the back and get to the ship; I’ll keep them busy here. I don’t think they’ll harm me.’

  ‘What do you mean…?’ Father Mark asked, blinking in surprise.

  ‘Get out, you fool!’ Garth hissed. ‘What miracle do you think they mean? What miracle is supposed to have converted the world to Christianity?’

  ‘No!’ Father Mark said. ‘It cannot be. It just cannot be…!’

  ‘GET MOVING!’ Garth shouted, dragging the priest from the chair and hurling him towards the rear wall. Father Mark stumbled to a halt, turned back. Garth leaped for him, but it was already too late. The amphibians were small, but there was so many of them. Garth lashed out and his fist struck Itin, hurling him back into the crowd. The others came on as he fought his way towards the priest. He beat at them but it was like struggling against waves. The furry, musky bodies washed over and engulfed him. He fought until they tied him, and he still struggled until they beat on his head until they stopped. Then they pulled him outside where he could only lie in the rain and curse and watch.

  Of course the Weskers were marvellous craftsmen, and everything had been constructed down to the last detail, following the illustration in the bible. There was the cross, planted firmly on the top of a small hill, the gleaming metal spikes, the hammer. Father Mark was stripped and draped in a carefully pleated loincloth. They led him out of the church.

  At the sight of the cross he almost fainted. After that he held his head high and determined to die as he had lived, with faith.

  Yet this was hard. It was unbearable even for Garth, who only watched. It is one thing to talk of crucifixion and look at the gently carved bodies in the dim light of prayer. It is another to see a man naked, ropes cutting into his skin where he hangs from a bar of wood. And to see the needle-tipped spike raised and placed against the soft flesh of his palm, to see the hammer come back with the calm deliberation of an artisan’s measured stroke. To hear the thick sound of metal penetrating flesh.

  Then to hear the screams.

  Few are born to be martyrs; Father Mark was not one of them. With the first blows, the blood ran from his lips where his clenched teeth met. Then his mouth was wide and his head strained back and the guttural horror of his screams sliced through the susurration of the falling rain. It resounded as a silent echo from the masses of watching Weskers, for whatever emotion opened their mouths was now tearing at their bodies with all its force, and row after row of gaping jaws reflected the crucified priest’s agony.

  Mercifully he fainted as the last nail was driven home. Blood ran from the raw wounds, mixing with the rain to drip faintly pink from his feet as the life ran out of him. At this time, somewhere at this time, sobbing and tearing at his own bonds, numbed from the blows on the head, Garth lost consciousness.

  He awoke in his own warehouse and it was dark. Someone was cutting away the woven ropes they had bound him with. The rain still dripped and splashed outside.

  ‘Itin,’ he said. It could be no one else.

  ‘Yes,’ the alien voice whispered back. ‘The others are all talking in the church. Lin died after you struck his head, and Inon is very sick. There are some that say you should be crucified too, and I think that is what will happen. Or perhaps killed by stoning on the head. They have found in the bible where it says…’

  ‘I know.’ With infinite weariness. ‘An eye for an eye. You’ll find lots of things like that once you start looking. It’s a wonderful book.’ His head ached terribly.

  ‘You must go, you can get to your ship without anyone seeing you. There has been enough killing.’ Itin as well spoke with a new-found weariness.

  Garth experimented, pulling himself to his feet. He pressed his head to the rough wood of the wall until the nausea stopped. ‘He’s dead.’ He said it as a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes, some time ago. Or I could not have come away to see you.’

  ‘And buried of course, or they wouldn’t be thinking about starting on me next.’

  ‘And buried!’ There was almost a ring of emotion in the alien’s voice, an echo of the dead priest’s. ‘He is buried and he will rise on High. It is written and that is the way it will happen. Father Mark will be so happy that it has happened like this.’ The voice ended in a sound like a human sob.

  Garth painfully worked his way towards the door, leaning against the wall so he wouldn’t fall.

  ‘We did the right thing, didn’t we?’ Itin asked. There was no answer. ‘He will rise up, Garth, won’t he rise?’

  Garth was at the door and enough light came from the brightly lit church to show his torn and bloody hands clutching at the frame. Itin’s face swam into sight close to his, and Garth felt the delicate, many fingered hands with the sharp nails catch at his clothes.

  ‘He will rise, won’t he, Garth?’

  ‘No,’ Garth said, ‘he is going to stay buried right where you put him. Nothing is going to happen because he is dead and he is going to stay dead.’

  The rain runnelled through Itin’s fur and his mouth was opened so wide that he seemed to be screaming into the night. Only with effort could he talk, squeezing out the alien thoughts in an alien language.

  ‘Then we will not be saved? We will not become pure?’

  ‘You were pure,’ Garth said, in a voice somewhere between a sob and a laugh. ‘That’s the horrible ugly dirty part of it. You were pure. Now you are…’

  ‘Murderers,’ Itin said, and the water ran down from his lowered head and streamed away into the darkness.

  Track 12

  J. G. BALLARD

  ‘Guess again,’ Sheringham said.

  Maxted clipped on the headphones, carefully settled them over his ears. He concentrated as the disc began to spin, trying to catch some echo of identity.

  The sound was a rapid metallic rustling, like iron filings splashing through a funnel. It ran for ten seconds, repeated itself a dozen times, then ended abruptly in a string of blips.

  ‘Well?’ Sheringham asked. ‘What is it?’

  Maxted pulled off his headphones, rubbed one of his ears. He had been listening to the records for hours and his ears felt bruised and numb.

  ‘Could be anything. An ice-cube melting?’


  Sheringham shook his head, his little beard wagging.

  Maxted shrugged. ‘A couple of galaxies colliding?’

  ‘No. Sound waves don’t travel through space. I’ll give you a clue. It’s one of those proverbial sounds.’ He seemed to be enjoying the catechism.

  Maxted lit a cigarette, threw the match on to the laboratory bench. The head melted a tiny pool of wax, froze, and left a shallow black scar. He watched it pleasurably, conscious of Sheringham fidgeting beside him.

  He pumped his brains for an obscene simile. ‘What about a fly –’

  ‘Time’s up,’ Sheringham cut in. ‘A pin dropping.’ He took the three-inch disc off the player, and angled it into its sleeve.

  ‘In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you’d get that one.’

  He reached for the last record, a twelve-inch LP, but Maxted stood up before he got it to the turntable. Through the french windows he could see the patio, a table, glasses and decanter gleaming in the darkness. Sheringham and his infantile games suddenly irritated him; he felt impatient with himself for tolerating the man so long.

  ‘Let’s get some air,’ he said brusquely, shouldering past one of the amplifier rigs: ‘My ears feel like gongs.’

  ‘By all means,’ Sheringham agreed promptly. He placed the record carefully on the turntable and switched off the player. ‘I want to save this one until later, anyway.’

  They went out into the warm evening air. Sheringham turned on the japanese lanterns and they stretched back in the wicker chairs under the open sky.

  ‘I hope you weren’t too bored,’ Sheringham said as he handled the decanter. ‘Microsonics is a fascinating hobby, but I’m afraid I may have let it become an obsession.’

  Maxted grunted noncommittally. ‘Some of the records are interesting,’ he admitted. ‘They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths’ faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can’t believe microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It’s just an elaborate laboratory toy.’

  Sheringham shook his head. ‘You’re completely wrong, of course. Remember the cell division series I played first of all? Amplified 100,000 times animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart – how did you put it? – a car smash in slow motion. On the other hand, plant cell division is an electronic poem, all soft chords and bubbling tones. Now there you have a perfect illustration of how microsonics can reveal the distinction between the animal and plant kingdoms.’

  ‘Seems a damned roundabout way of doing it,’ Maxted commented, helping himself to soda. ‘You might as well calculate the speed of your car from the apparent motion of the stars. Possible, but it’s easier to look at the speedometer.’

  Sheringham nodded, watching Maxted closely across the table. His interest in the conversation appeared to have exhausted itself, and the two men sat silently with their glasses. Strangely, the hostility between them, of so many years’ standing, now became less veiled, the contrast of personality, manner and physique more pronounced. Maxted, a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face, lounged back almost horizontally in his chair, thinking about Susan Sheringham. She was at the Turnbulls’ party, and but for the fact that it was no longer discreet of him to be seen at the Turnbulls’– for the all-too-familiar reason – he would have passed the evening with her, rather than with her grotesque little husband.

  He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever. None, certainly, at a casual glance, though it required some courage and pride to have invited him round that evening. His motives, however, would be typically eccentric.

  The pretext, Maxted reflected, had been slight enough – Sheringham, professor of biochemistry at the university, maintained a lavish home laboratory; Maxted, run-down athlete with a bad degree, acted as torpedo-man for a company manufacturing electron microscopes; a visit, Sheringham had suggested over the phone, might be to the profit of both.

  Of course, nothing of this had in fact been mentioned. But nor, as yet, had he referred to Susan, the real subject of the evening’s charade. Maxted speculated upon the possible routes Sheringham might take towards the inevitable confrontation scene; not for him the nervous circular pacing, the well-thumbed photostat, or the thug at the shoulder. There was a vicious adolescent streak running through Sheringham –

  Maxted broke out of his reverie abruptly. The air in the patio had become suddenly cooler, almost as if a powerful refrigerating unit had been switched on. A rash of gooseflesh raced up his thighs and down the back of his neck, and he reached forward and finished what was left of his whisky.

  ‘Cold out here,’ he commented.

  Sheringham glanced at his watch. ‘Is it?’ he said. There was a hint of indecision in his voice; for a moment he seemed to be waiting for a signal. Then he pulled himself together and, with an odd half-smile, said: ‘Time for the last record.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Maxted asked.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Sheringham said. He stood up. ‘I’ll put it on.’ He pointed to a loudspeaker screwed to the wall above Maxted’s head, grinned, and ducked out.

  Shivering uncomfortably, Maxted peered up into the silent evening sky, hoping that the vertical current of cold air that had sliced down into the patio would soon dissipate itself.

  A low noise crackled from the speaker, multiplied by a circle of other speakers which he noticed for the first time had been slung among the trellis-work around the patio.

  Shaking his head sadly at Sheringham’s antics, he decided to help himself to more whisky. As he stretched across the table he swayed and rolled back uncontrollably into his chair. His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold, and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the glass edge of the table and felt his head fall on to his wrists.

  When he looked up again Sheringham was standing in front of him, smiling sympathetically.

  ‘Not too good, eh?’ he said.

  Breathing with difficulty, Maxted managed to lean back. He tried to speak to Sheringham, but he could no longer remember any words. His heart switchbacked, and he grimaced at the pain.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sheringham assured him. ‘The fibrillation is only a side effect. Disconcerting, perhaps, but it will soon pass.’

  He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. ‘Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body’s fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn’t distract you.’

  He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.

  ‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Sheringham said. Twirling the siphon by its neck he stepped over Maxted’s legs and adjusted the tone control under one of the speaker boxes. He looked blithe and spruce, almost ten years younger. ‘These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsones, amplification one thousand. I admit I’ve edited the track a little, but it’s still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You’ll never guess what this was.’

  Maxted stirred sluggishly. The lake of mercury in his stomach was as cold and bottomless as an oceanic trench, and his arms and legs had become enormous, like the bloated appendages of a drowned giant. He could just see Sheringham bobbing ab
out in front of him, and hear the slow beating of the sea in the distance. Nearer now, it pounded with a dull insistent rhythm, the great waves ballooning and bursting like bubbles in a lava sea.

  ‘I’ll tell you, Maxted, it took me a year to get that recording,’ Sheringham was saying. He straddled Maxted, gesturing with the siphon. ‘A year. Do you know how ugly a year can be?’ For a moment he paused, then tore himself from the memory. ‘Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. You know, Maxted, there are audio-probes everywhere here. Slim as pencils, with a six-inch focus. I had four in that headrest alone.’ He added, as a footnote: ‘The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.’

  Maxted drifted in a wash of sound.

  Some while later Sheringham’s face filled his eyes, beard wagging, mouth working wildly.

  ‘Maxted! You’ve only two more guesses, so for God’s sake concentrate,’ he shouted irritably, his voice almost lost among the thunder rolling from the sea. ‘Come on, man, what is it? Maxted!’ he bellowed. He leapt for the nearest loudspeaker and drove up the volume. The sound boomed out of the patio, reverberating into the night.

  Maxted had almost gone now, his fading identity a small featureless island nearly eroded by the waves beating across it.

  Sheringham knelt down and shouted into his ear.

  ‘Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you’re drowning?’

  A succession of gigantic flaccid waves, each more lumbering and enveloping than the last, rode down upon them.

  ‘In a kiss!’ Sheringham screamed. ‘A kiss!’

  The island slipped and slid away into the molten shelf of the sea.

  Sexual Dimorphism

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  The potential for hallucination in paleogenomics was high. There was not only the omnipresent role of instrumentation in the envisioning of the ultramicroscopic fossil material, but also the metamorphosis over time of the material itself, both the DNA and its matrices, so that the data were invariably incomplete, and often shattered. Thus the possibility of psychological projection of patterns onto the rorschacherie of what in the end might be purely mineral processes had to be admitted.