by Brian Aldiss
There were many matings of ships after that, and the being-Garrard pitched the harmonies of the beademungen, leaving his ship with the many gift-orifices in harmonic for the All-Devouring to love, while the beademungen made show of they-theirs.
He tried, also, to tell how he was out of love with the overdrive, which wooed only spaces and times, and made featurelings. The rodalent beademung wooed the overdrive, but it did not pitch he-them.
Then the being-Garrard knew that all the time was devoured, and he must hear Earth again.
‘I pitch you-them to fullest love,’ he told the beademungen, ‘I shall adore the radioceles of Alpha and Proxima Centauri, “on Earth as it is in Heaven”. Now the overdrive my-other must woo and win me, and make me adore a featureling much like silence.’
‘But you will be pitched again,’ the clinesterton beademung said. ‘After you have adored Earth. You are much loved by Time, the All-Devouring. We-they shall wait for this othering.’
Privately Garrard did not faith as much, but he said, ‘Yes, we-they will make a new wooing of the beademungen at some other radiant. With all of love.’
On this the beademungen made and pitched adorations, and in the midst the overdrive cut in. The ship with the many gift orifices and the being-Garrard him-other saw the twin radioceles sundered away.
Then, once more, came the pseudo-death.
IV
When the small candle lit in the endless cavern of Garrard’s pseudo-dead mind, the DFC-3 was well inside the orbit of Uranus. Since the sun was still very small and distant, it made no spectacular display through the nearby port, and nothing called him from the post-death sleep for nearly two days.
The computers waited patiently for him. They were no longer immune to his control; he could now tool the ship back to Earth himself if he so desired. But the computers were also designed to take into account the fact that he might be truly dead by the time the DFC-3 got back. After giving him a solid week, during which time he did nothing but sleep, they took over again. Radio signals began to go out, tuned to a special channel.
An hour later, a very weak signal came back. It was only a directional signal, and it made no sound inside the DFC-3 – but it was sufficient to put the big ship in motion again.
It was that which woke Garrard. His conscious mind was still glazed over with the icy spume of the pseudo-death; and as far as he could see the interior of the cabin had not changed one whit, except for the book on the deck –
The book. The clinesterton beademung had dropped it there. But what under God was a clinesterton beademung? And what was he, Garrard, crying about? It didn’t make sense. He remembered dimly some kind of experience out there by the Centauri twins –
– the twin radioceles–
There was another one of those words. It seemed to have Greek roots, but he knew no Greek – and besides, why would Centaurians speak Greek?
He leaned forward and actuated the switch which would roll the shutter off the front port, actually a telescope with a translucent viewingscreen. It showed a few stars, and a faint nimbus off on one edge which might be the Sun. At about one o’clock on the screen was a planet the size of a pea, which had tiny projections, like teacup handles, on each side. The DFC-3 hadn’t passed Saturn on its way out; at that time it had been on the other side of the Sun from the route the starship had had to follow. But the planet was certainly difficult to mistake.
Garrard was on his way home – and he was still alive and sane. Or was he still sane? These fantasies about Centaurians – which still seemed to have such a profound emotional effect upon him – did not argue very well for the stability of his mind.
But they were fading rapidly. When he discovered, clutching at the handiest fragments of the ‘memories’, that the plural of beademung was beademungen, he stopped taking the problem seriously. Obviously a race of Centaurians who spoke Greek wouldn’t also be forming weak German plurals. The whole business had obviously been thrown up by his unconscious.
But what had he found by the Centaurus stars?
There was no answer to that question but that incomprehensible garble about love, the All-Devouring, and beademungen. Possibly, he had never seen the Centaurus stars at all, but had been lying here, cold as a mackerel, for the entire twenty months.
Or had it been 12,000 years? After the tricks the overdrive had played with time, there was no way to tell what the objective date actually was. Frantically Garrard put the telescope into action. Where was the Earth? After 12,000 years –
The Earth was there. Which, he realized swiftly, proved nothing. The Earth had lasted for many millions of years; 12,000 years was nothing to a planet. The Moon was there, too; both were plainly visible, on the far side of the Sun – but not too far to pick them out clearly, with the telescope at highest power. Garrard could even see a clear sun-highlight on the Atlantic Ocean, not far east of Greenland; evidently the computers were bringing the DFC-3 in on the Earth from about 23 degrees north of the plane of the ecliptic.
The Moon, too, had not changed. He could even see on its face the huge splash of white, mimicking the sun-highlight on Earth’s ocean, which was the magnesium-hydroxide landing-beacon, which had been dusted over the Mare Vaporum in the earliest days of space flight, with a dark spot on its southern edge which could only be the crater Monilius.
But that again proved nothing. The Moon never changed. A film of dust laid down by modern man on its face would last for millennia – what, after all, existed on the Moon to blow it away. The Mare Vaporum beacon covered more than 4,000 square miles; age would not dim it, nor could man himself undo it – either accidentally, or on purpose – in anything under a century. When you dust an area that large on a world without atmosphere, it stays dusted.
He checked the stars against his charts. They hadn’t moved; why should they have, in only 12,000 years? The pointer-stars in the Dipper still pointed to Polaris. Draco, like a fantastic bit of tape, wound between the two Bears, and Cepheus and Cassiopeia, as it always had done. These constellations told him only that it was spring in the northern hemisphere of Earth.
But spring of what year?
Then, suddenly, it occurred to Garrard that he had a method of finding the answer. The Moon causes tides in the Earth, and action and reaction are always equal and opposite. The Moon cannot move things on Earth without itself being affected – and that effect shows up in the Moon’s angular momentum. The Moon’s distance from the Earth increases steadily by 0.6 inches every year. At the end of 12,000 years, it should be 600 feet farther away from the Earth than it had been when Garrard left it.
Was it possible to measure? Garrard doubted it, but he got out his ephemeris and his dividers anyhow, and took pictures. While he worked, the Earth grew nearer. By the time he had finished his first calculation – which was indecisive, because it allowed a margin for error greater than the distances he was trying to check – Earth and Moon were close enough in the telescope to permit much more accurate measurements.
Which were, he realized wryly, quite unnecessary. The computer had brought the DFC-3 back, not to an observed sun or planet, but simply to a calculated point. That Earth and Moon would not be near that point when the DFC-3 returned was not an assumption that the computer could make. That the Earth was visible from here was already good and sufficient proof that no more time had elapsed than had been calculated for from the beginning.
This was hardly new to Garrard; it had simply been retired to the back of his mind. Actually he had been doing all this figuring for one reason, and one reason only: because deep in his brain, set to work by himself, there was a mechanism that demanded counting. Long ago, while he was still trying to time the ship’s calendar, he had initiated compulsive counting – and it appeared that he had been counting ever since. That had been one of the known dangers of deliberately starting such a mental mechanism; and now it was bearing fruit in these perfectly useless astronomical exercises.
The insight was healing. He finished the
figures roughly, and that unheard moron deep inside his brain stopped counting at last. It had been pawing its abacus for twenty months now, and Garrard imagined that it was as glad to be retired as he was to feel it go.
His radio squawked, and said anxiously, ‘DFC-3, DFC-3. Garrard, do you hear me? Are you still alive? Everybody’s going wild down here. Garrard, if you hear me, call us!’
It was Haertel’s voice. Garrard closed the dividers so convulsively that one of the points nipped into the heel of his hand. ‘Haertel, I’m here. DFC-3 to the Project. This is Garrard.’ And then, without knowing quite why, he added: ‘With all of love.’
Haertel, after all the hoopla was over, was more than interested in the time-effects. ‘It certainly enlarges the manifold in which I was working,’ he said. ‘But I think we can account for it in the transformation. Perhaps even factor it out, which would eliminate it as far as the pilot is concerned. We’ll see, anyhow.’
Garrard swirled his highball reflectively. In Haertel’s cramped old office, in the Project’s administration-shack, he felt both strange and as old, as compressed, constricted. He said, ‘I don’t think I’d do that, Adolph. I think it saved my life.’
‘How?’
‘I told you that I seemed to die after a while. Since I got home, I’ve been reading; and I’ve discovered that the psychologists take far less stock in the individuality of the human psyche than you and I do. You and I are physical scientists, so we think about the world as being all outside our skins – something which is to be observed, but which doesn’t alter the essential I. But evidently, that old solipsistic position isn’t quite true. Our very personalities, really, depend in large part upon all the things in our environment, large and small, that exist outside our skins. If by some means you could cut a human being off from every sense-impression that comes to him from outside, he would cease to exist as a personality within two or three minutes. Probably he would die.’
‘Unquote: Harry Stack Sullivan,’ Haertel said dryly. ‘So?’
‘So,’ Garrard said, ‘think of what a monotonous environment the inside of a spaceship is. In ordinary interplanetary flight, in such an environment, even the most hardened spaceman may go off his rocker now and then. You know the typical spaceman’s psychosis as well as I do, I suppose. The man’s personality goes rigid, just like his surroundings. Usually he recovers as soon as he makes port, and makes contact with a more or less normal world again.
‘But in the DFC-3, I was cut off from the world around me much more severely. I couldn’t look outside the ports – I was in overdrive, and there was nothing to see. I couldn’t communicate with home, because I was going faster than light. And then I found I couldn’t move, too, for an enormous long while; and that even the instruments that are in constant change for the usual spaceman wouldn’t be in motion for me. Even those were fixed.
‘After the time-rate began to pick up, I found myself in an even more impossible box. The instruments moved, all right, but then they moved too fast for me to read them. The whole situation was now utterly rigid – and, in effect, I died. I froze as solid as the ship around me, and stayed that way as long as the overdrive was on.’
‘By that showing,’ Haertel said dryly, ‘the time-effects were hardly your friends.’
‘But they were, Adolph. Look. Your engines act on subjective-time; they keep it varying along continuous curves – from far-too-slow to far-too-fast – and, I suppose, back down again. Now, this is a situation of continuous change. It wasn’t marked enough, in the long run, to keep me out of pseudo-death; but it was sufficient to protect me from being obliterated altogether, which I think is what happened to Brown and Cellini. Those men knew that they could shut down the overdrive if they could just get to it, and they killed themselves trying. But I knew that I just had to sit and take it – and, by my great good luck, your sine-curve time-variation made it possible for me to survive.’
‘Ah, ha,’ Haertel said. ‘A point worth considering – though I doubt that it will make interstellar travel very popular!’
He dropped back into silence, his thin mouth pursed. Garrard took a grateful pull at his drink. At last Haertel said: ‘Why are you in trouble over these Centaurians? It seems to me that you have done a good job. It was nothing that you were a hero – any fool can be brave – but I see also that you thought, where Brown and Cellini evidently only reacted. Is there some secret about what you found when you reached those two stars?’
Garrard said, ‘Yes, there is. But I’ve already told you what it is. When I came out of the pseudo-death, I was just a sort of plastic palimpsest upon which anybody could have made a mark. My own environment, my ordinary Earth environment, was a hell of a long way off. My present surroundings were nearly as rigid as they had ever been. When I met the Centaurians – if I did, and I’m not at all sure of that – they became the most important thing in my world, and my personality changed to accommodate and understand them. That was a change about which I couldn’t do a thing.
‘Possibly I did understand them. But the man who understood them wasn’t the same man you’re talking to now, Adolph. Now that I’m back on Earth, I don’t understand that man. He even spoke English in a way that’s gibberish to me. If I can’t understand myself during that period – and I can’t; I don’t even believe that that man was the Garrard I know – what hope have I of telling you or the Project about the Centaurians? They found me in a controlled environment, and they altered me by entering it. Now that they’re gone, nothing comes through; I don’t even understand why I think they spoke English!’
‘Did they have a name for themselves?’
‘Sure,’ Garrard said. ‘They were the beademungen.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘I never saw them.’
Haertel leaned forward. ‘Then –’
‘I heard them. I think.’ Garrard shrugged, and tasted his Scotch again. He was home, and on the whole he was pleased.
But in his malleable mind he heard someone say, ‘On Earth, as it is in Heaven,’ and then, in another voice, which might also have been his own (why had he thought ‘him-other’?), ‘It is later than you think.’
‘Adolph,’ he said, ‘is this all there is to it? Or are we going to go on with it from here? How long will it take to make a better starship, a DFC-4?’
‘Many years,’ Haertel said, smiling kindly. ‘Don’t be anxious, Garrard. You’ve come back, which is more than the others managed to do, and nobody will ask you to go out again. I really think that it’s hardly likely that we’ll get another ship built during your lifetime; and even if we do, we’ll be slow to launch it. We really have very little information about what kind of a playground you found out there.’
‘I’ll go,’ Garrard said. ‘I’m not afraid to go back – I’d like to go. Now that I know how the DFC-3 behaves, I could take it out again, bring you back proper maps, tapes, photos.’
‘Do you really think,’ Haertel said, his face suddenly serious, ‘that we could let the DFC-3 go out again? Garrard, we’re going to take that ship apart practically molecule by molecule; that’s preliminary to the building of any DFC-4. And no more can we let you go. I don’t mean to be cruel, but has it occurred to you that this desire to go back may be the result of some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion? If so, the more badly you want to go back, the more dangerous to us all you may be. We are going to have to examine you just as thoroughly as we do the ship. If these beademungen wanted you to come back, they must have had a reason – and we have to know that reason.’
Garrard nodded, but he knew that Haertel could see the slight movement of his eyebrows and the wrinkles forming in his forehead, the contractions of the small muscles which stop the flow of tears only to make grief patent on the rest of the face.
‘In short,’ he said, ‘don’t move.’
Haertel looked politely puzzled. Garrard, however, could say nothing more. He had returned to humanity’s common time, and would never leave it again.
Not even, for all his dimly-remembered promise, with all there was left in him of love.
Alien Embassy
GARRY KILWORTH
Evelyn hardly noticed the other passengers on the flight to the island. She was still desperately upset and wrapped in her own hurt. It was more like grief after a death than the pain at the end of an affair. It was unbearable. Images flooded her mind, washed out all awareness of the world around her. Vivid pictures of her and Tony sharing sweet moments, walking, laughing, talking together. Making love. Lying in each other’s arms afterwards, warm, secure, enfolded in a soft but impenetrable cocoon by his use of the word ‘forever’. Forever. A word which now carried painful parasites clinging to it. Agony. Oh, how… Evelyn checked a sob, suddenly conscious of the woman sitting next to her. She stared out of the window at the bumpy cloud-plain, wishing she could jump.
On landing she collected herself together a little. Rallied enough to be interested in her surroundings. Well, not so much the scenery as those who inhabited it. She was now in that place the rest of the world called the Alien Embassy. The tropical island given to the aliens thirty years ago. They had come, in peace, had negotiated, had given their word. No one had trusted them of course. The human race had watched them like hawks. Once or twice there had been minor alarms, which had been generated by misunderstandings, nothing really. The world leader at the time of the visitation – the benign but clever and firm Alicia Sergovia – had not been foolish enough to allow them an embassy building in the middle of one of Earth’s major cities. Oh no. An island, with natural walls to keep them contained. That had seemed to her to be the answer. Any talks were held at the embassy itself, the newcomers forbidden to travel in-world.