A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  One-and-a-sevenhundredone, one-and-a-sevenhundredtwo, one-and-a-sevenhundredthree, one-and-a-sevenhundredfour…

  The ship was keeping ship-time, which was identical with observer-time. It would arrive at the Alpha Centauri system in ten months. But the pilot was keeping Garrard-time, and it was beginning to look as though he wasn’t going to arrive at all.

  It was impossible, but there it was. Something – almost certainly an unsuspected physiological side-effect of the overdrive field on human metabolism, an effect which naturally could not have been detected in the preliminary, robot-piloted tests of the overdrive – had speeded up Garrard’s subjective apprehension of time, and had done a thorough job of it.

  The second-hand began a slow, preliminary quivering as the calendar’s innards began to apply power to it. Seventy-hundred-forty-one, seventy-hundred-forty-two, seventy-hundred-forty-three…

  At the count of 7,058 the second-hand began the jump to the next graduation. It took it several apparent minutes to get across the tiny distance, and several more to come completely to rest. Later still, the sound came to him:

  Pock.

  In a fever of thought, but without any real physical agitation, his mind began to manipulate the figures. Since it took him longer to count an individual number as the number became larger, the interval between the two calendar-ticks probably was closer to 7,200 seconds than to 7,058. Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted.

  One second in ship-time was two hours in Garrard-time.

  Had he really been counting for what was, for him, two whole hours? There seemed to be no doubt about it. It looked like a long trip ahead.

  Just how long it was going to be struck him with stunning force. Time had been slowed for him by a factor of 7,200. He would get to Alpha Centauri in just 720,000 months.

  Which was –

  Six thousand years!

  II

  Garrard sat motionless for a long time after that, the Nessus-shirt of warm sweat swathing him persistently, refusing even to cool. There was, after all, no hurry.

  Six thousand years. There would be food and water and air for all that time, or for sixty or six hundred thousand years; the ship would synthesize his needs, as a matter of course, for as long as the fuel lasted, and the fuel bred itself. Even if Garrard ate a meal every three seconds of objective, or ship, time (which, he realized suddenly, he wouldn’t be able to do, for it took the ship several seconds of objective-time to prepare and serve up a meal once it was ordered; he’d be lucky if he ate once a day, Garrard-time), there would be no reason to fear any shortage of supplies. That had been one of the earliest of the possibilities for disaster that the Project engineers had ruled out in the design of the DFC-3.

  But nobody had thought of providing a mechanism which would indefinitely refurbish Garrard. After six thousand years, there would be nothing left of him but a faint film of dust on the DFC-3’s dully-gleaming horizontal surfaces. His corpse might outlast him a while, since the ship itself was sterile – but eventually, he would be consumed by the bacterium which he carried in his own digestive tract. He needed that bacterium to synthesize part of his B-vitamin needs while he lived, but it would consume him without compunction once he had ceased to be as complicated and delicately balanced a thing as a pilot – or as any other kind of life.

  Garrard was, in short, to die before the DFC-3 had gotten fairly away from Sol; and when, after 12,000 apparent-years, the DFC-3 returned to Earth, not even his mummy would be still aboard.

  The chill that went through him at that seemed almost unrelated to the way he thought he felt about the discovery; it lasted an enormously long time, and in so far as he could characterize it at all, it seemed to be a chill of urgency and excitement – not at all the kind of chill he should be feeling at a virtual death-sentence. Luckily it was not as intolerably violent as the last emotional convulsion; and when it was over, two clock-ticks later, it left behind a residuum of doubt.

  Suppose that this effect of time-stretching was only mental? The rest of his bodily processes might still be keeping ship-time; Garrard had no immediate reason to believe otherwise. If so, he would be able to move about only on ship-time, too; it would take many apparent months to complete the simplest task.

  But he would live, if that were the case. His mind would arrive at Alpha Centauri six thousand years older, and perhaps madder, than his body, but he would live.

  If, on the other hand, his bodily movements were going to be as fast as his mental processes, he would have to be enormously careful. He would have to move slowly and exert as little force as possible. The normal human hand movement, in such a task as lifting a pencil, took the pencil from a state of rest to another state of rest by imparting to it an acceleration of about two feet per second – and, of course, decelerated it by the same amount. If Garrard were to attempt to impart to a two-pound weight, which was keeping ship-time, an acceleration of 14,440 ft/sec2 in his time, he’d have to exert a force of 900 pounds on it.

  The point was not that it couldn’t be done – but that it would take as much effort as pushing a stalled jeep. He’d never be able to lift that pencil with his forearm muscles alone; he’d have to put his back into the task.

  And the human body wasn’t engineered to maintain stresses of that magnitude indefinitely. Not even the most powerful professional weightlifter is forced to show his prowess throughout every minute of every day.

  Pock.

  That was the calendar again; another second had gone by. Or another two hours. It had certainly seemed longer than a second, but less than two hours, too. Evidently subjective-time was an intensively recomplicated measure. Even in this world of microtime – in which Garrard’s mind, at least, seemed to be operating – he could make the lapses between calendar-ticks seem a little shorter by becoming actively interested in some problem or other. That would help, during the waking hours, but it would help only if the rest of his body were not keeping the same time as his mind. If it were not, then he would lead an incredibly active, but perhaps not intolerable mental life during the many centuries of his awaketime, and would be mercifully asleep for nearly as long.

  Both problems – that of how much force he could exert with his body, and how long he could hope to be asleep in his mind – emerged simultaneously into the forefront of his consciousness while he still sat inertly on the hammock, their terms still much muddled together. After the single tick of the calendar, the ship – or the part of it that Garrard could see from here – settled back into complete rigidity. The sound of the engines too, did not seem to vary in frequency or amplitude, at least as far as his ears could tell. He was still not breathing. Nothing moved, nothing changed.

  It was the fact that he could still detect no motion of his diaphragm or his rib-cage that decided him at last. His body had to be keeping ship-time, otherwise he would have blacked out from oxygen-starvation long before now. That assumption explained, too, those two incredibly prolonged, seemingly sourceless saturnalias of emotion through which he had suffered: they had been nothing more nor less than the response of his endocrine glands to the purely intellectual reactions he had experienced earlier. He had discovered that he was not breathing, had felt a flash of panic and had tried to sit up. Long after his mind had forgotten those two impulses, they had inched their way from his brain down his nerves to the glands and muscles involved, and actual, physical panic had supervened. When that was over, he actually was sitting up, though the flood of adrenalin had prevented his noticing the motion as he had made it. The later chill – less violent, and apparently associated with the discovery that he might die long before the trip was completed – actually had been his body’s response to a much earlier mental command: the abstract fever of interest he had felt while computing the time-differential had been responsible for it.

  Obviously, he was going to have to be very careful with apparently cold and intellectual impulses of any kind – or he would pay for them later with a prolo
nged and agonizing glandular reaction. Nevertheless, the discovery gave him considerable satisfaction, and Garrard allowed it free play; it certainly could not hurt him to feel pleased for a few hours, and the glandular pleasure might even prove helpful if it caught him at a moment of mental depression. Six thousand years, after all, provided a considerable number of opportunities for feeling down in the mouth; so it would be best to encourage all pleasure-moments, and let the after-reaction last as long as it might. It would be the instants of panic, of fear, of gloom which he would have to regulate sternly the moment they came into his mind; it would be those which would otherwise plunge him into four, five, six, perhaps even ten Garrard-hours of emotional inferno.

  Pock.

  There now, that was very good; there had been two Garrard-hours which he had passed with virtually no difficulty of any kind, and without being especially conscious of their passage. If he could really settle down and become used to this kind of scheduling, the trip might not be as bad as he had at first feared. Sleep would take immense bites out of it; and during the waking periods he could put in one hell of a lot of creative thinking. During a single day of ship-time, Garrard could get in more thinking than any philosopher of Earth could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could, if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a century to running down the consequences of a single thought, down to the last detail, and still have millennia left to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up with the solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast and dinner of a single ship’s day, and in a ship’s month might put his finger on the First Cause!

  Pock.

  Not that Garrard was sanguine enough to expect that he would remain logical or even sane throughout the trip. The vista was still grim, in much of its detail. But the opportunities, too, were there. He felt a momentary regret that it hadn’t been Haertel, rather than himself, who had been given such an opportunity –

  Pock.

  – for the old man could certainly have made better use of it than Garrard could. The situation demanded someone trained in the highest rigours of mathematics to be put to the best conceivable use. Still and all Garrard began to feel –

  Pock.

  – that he would give a good account of himself, and it tickled him to realize that (as long as he held on to his essential sanity) he would return –

  Pock.

  – to Earth after ten Earth months with knowledge centuries advanced beyond anything –

  Pock.

  – that Haertel knew, or that anyone could know –

  Pock.

  – who had to work within a normal lifetime. Pck. The whole prospect tickled him. Pck. Even the clock-tick seemed more cheerful. Pck. He felt fairly safe now Pck in disregarding his drilled-in command Pck against moving Pck, since in any Pck event he Pck had already Pck moved Pck without Pck being Pck harmed Pck Pck Pck Pck Pck pckpckpckpckpckpck….

  He yawned, stretched, and got up. It wouldn’t do to be too pleased, after all. There were certainly many problems that still needed coping with, such as how to keep the impulse towards getting a ship-time task performed going, while his higher centres were following the ramifications of some purely philosophical point. And besides…

  And besides, he had just moved.

  More than that; he had just performed a complicated manoeuvre with his body in normal time!

  Before Garrard looked at the calendar itself, the message it had been ticking away at him had penetrated. While he had been enjoying the protracted, glandular backwash of his earlier feeling of satisfaction, he had failed to notice, at least consciously, that the calendar was accelerating.

  Good-bye, vast ethical systems which would dwarf the Greeks. Good-bye, calculi aeons advanced beyond the spinor-calculus of Dirac. Good-bye, cosmologies by Garrard which would allot the Almighty a job as third-assistant-waterboy in an n-dimensional backfield.

  Good-bye, also, to a project he had once tried to undertake in college – to describe and count the positions of love, of which, according to under-the-counter myth, there were supposed to be at least forty-eight. Garrard had never been able to carry his tally beyond twenty, and he had just lost what was probably his last opportunity to try again.

  The micro-time in which he had been living had worn off, only a few objective-minutes after the ship had gone into overdrive and he had come out of the anaesthetic. The long intellectual agony, with its glandular counterpoint, had come to nothing. Garrard was now keeping ship-time.

  Garrard sat back down on the hammock, uncertain whether to be bitter or relieved. Neither emotion satisfied him in the end; he simply felt unsatisfied. Micro-time had been bad enough while it lasted; but now it was gone, and everything seemed normal. How could so transient a thing have killed Brown and Cellini? They were stable men, more stable, by his own private estimation, than Garrard himself. Yet he had come through it. Was there more to it than this?

  And if there was – what, conceivably, could it be?

  There was no answer. At his elbow, on the control-chassis which he had thrust aside during that first moment of infinitely-protracted panic, the calendar continued to tick. The engine-noise was gone. His breath came and went in natural rhythm. He felt light and strong. The ship was quiet, calm, unchanging.

  The calendar ticked, faster and faster. It reached and passed the first hour, ship-time, of flight in overdrive.

  Pock.

  Garrard looked up in surprise. The familiar noise, this time, had been the hour-hand jumping one unit. The minute-hand was already sweeping past the past half-hour. The second-hand was whirling like a propeller – and while he watched it, it speeded up to complete invisibility –

  Pock.

  Another hour. The half-hour already passed. Pock. Another hour. Pock. Another. Pock. Pock. Pock. Pock. Pock. Pock. pck-pck-pck-pckpckpckpck….

  The hands of the calendar swirled towards invisibility as time ran away with Garrard. Yet the ship did not change. It stayed there, rigid, inviolate, invulnerable. When the date-tumblers reached a speed at which Garrard could no longer read them, he discovered that once more he could not move – and that, although his whole body seemed to be aflutter like that of a humming-bird, nothing coherent was coming to him through his senses. The room was dimming, becoming redder; or no, it was…

  But he never saw the end of the process, never was allowed to look from the pinnacle of macro-time towards which the Haertel overdrive was taking him.

  The pseudo-death took him first.

  III

  That Garrard did not die completely, and within a comparatively short time after the DFC-3 had gone into overdrive, was due to the purest of accidents; but Garrard did not know that. In fact, he knew nothing at all for an indefinite period, sitting rigid and staring, his metabolism slowed down to next to nothing, his mind almost utterly inactive. From time to time, a single wave of low-level metabolic activity passed through him – what an electrician might have termed a ‘maintenance turnover’ – in response to the urgings of some occult survival-urge; but these were of so basic a nature as to reach his consciousness not at all. This was the pseudo-death.

  When the observer actually arrived, however, Garrard woke. He could make very little sense out of what he saw or felt even now; but one fact was clear: the overdrive was off – and with it the crazy alterations in time-rates – and there was strong light coming through one of the ports. The first leg of the trip was over. It had been these two changes in his environment which had restored him to life.

  The thing (or things) which had restored him to consciousness, however, was – it was what? It made no sense. It was a construction, a rather fragile one, which completely surrounded his hammock. No, it wasn’t a construction, but evidently something alive – a living being, organized horizontally, that had arranged itself in a circle about him. No, it was a number of beings. Or a comb
ination of all of these things.

  How it had gotten into the ship was a mystery, but there it was. Or there they were.

  ‘How do you hear?’ the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual.

  ‘I –’ he said. ‘Or we – we hear with our ears. Here.’

  His answer, with its unintentionally-long chain of open vowel-sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language.

  ‘We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,’ the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the desk beside the hammock. ‘We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.’

  ‘With all of love,’ Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.

  ‘Are-are you-they from Alpha Centauri?’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘Yes, we hear the twin radioceles, that show there beyond the gift-orifices. We-they pitched that the being-Garrard wooed with most adoration these twins and had mind to them, soft and loud alike. How do you hear?’

  This time the being-Garrard understood the question. ‘I hear Earth,’ he said. ‘But that is very soft, and does not show.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the beademung. ‘It is a harmony, not a first, as ours. The All-Devouring listens to lovers there, not on the radioceles. Let me-mine pitch you-yours so to have mind of the rodalent beademung and other brothers and lovers, along the channel which is fragrant to the being-Garrard.’

  Garrard found that he understood the speech without difficulty. The thought occurred to him that to understand a language on its own terms – without having to put it back into English in one’s own mind – is an ability that is won only with difficulty and long practice. Yet instantly, his mind said, ‘But it is English,’ which of course it was. The offer the clinesterton beademung had just made was enormously hearted, and he in turn was much minded and of love, to his own delighting as well as to the beademungen; that almost went without saying.