The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  Please let me mmmm.

  You can go comatose as soon as I’ve explained how these little spacecraft work. Astrogating, the business of getting from one planet to another, is far too intricate a task for anyone but an expert to master. I’m not an expert; I’m a geohistorian. So the whole thing is done by a robot pilot. You feed it details like payload, gravities and destination, and it juggles them with the data in its memory banks and works out all the course for you – carries you home safely, in fact. Do you get all that?

  This sounds complicated.

  Now you’re talking like your mother, boy. She’s never bothered, but actually it’s all simple; the complications take place under the steel panelling where you don’t worry about them. The point I’m trying to make is that steering is all automatic once you’ve punched in a few co-ordinates.

  I’m tired.

  So am I. Fortunately, before we left the ship that last time, I had set up the figures for Earth. OK?

  If you had not, she would not have been able to get home?

  Exactly it. Keep trying! She left Mirone safely and you are now heading for Earth – but you’ll never make it. When I set the figures up, they were right; but my not being aboard made them wrong. Every split second of thrust the ship makes is calculated for an extra weight that isn’t there. It’s here with me, being hauled along a mountain.

  Is this bad? Does it mean we reach Earth too fast?

  No, son. IT MEANS YOU’LL NEVER REACH EARTH AT ALL. The ship moves in a hyperbola, and although my weight is only about one eight-thousandth of total ship’s mass, that tiny fraction of error will have multiplied itself into a couple of light-years by the time you get adjacent to the solar system.

  I’m trying, but this talk of distance means nothing to me. Explain it again.

  Where you are there is neither light nor space; how do I make you feel what a light-year is? No, you’ll just have to take it from me that the crucial point is, you’ll shoot right past the Earth.

  Can’t we go on?

  You will – if nothing is done about it. But landfall will be delayed some thousands of years.

  You are growing fainter. Strain too much. Must mmmm

  The fish again, and the water. No peace in the pool now. Cool pool, cruel pool, pool … The waters whirl toward the brink.

  I am the fish-foetus. Have I dreamed? Was there a voice talking to me? It seems unlikely. Something I had to ask it, one gigantic fact which made nonsense of everything; something – cannot remember.

  Perhaps there was no voice. Perhaps in this darkness I have taken a wrong choice between sanity and non-sanity.

  … thank heavens for hot spring water …

  Hello! Father?

  How long will they let me lie here in this pool? They must realize I’m not long for this world, or any other.

  I’m awake and answering!

  Just let me lie here. Son, it’s man’s first pleasure and his last to lie and swill in hot water. Wish I could live to know you … However. Here’s what you have to do.

  Am powerless here. Unable to do anything.

  Don’t get frightened. There’s something you already do very expertly – telemit.

  Non-comprehension.

  We talk to each other over this growing distance by what is called telepathy. It’s part gift, part skill. It happens to be the only contact between distant planets, except spaceships. But whereas spaceships take time to get anywhere, thought is instantaneous.

  Understood.

  Good. Unfortunately, whereas spaceships get anywhere in time, thought has a definite limited range. Its span is as strictly governed as – well, as the size of a plant, for instance. When you are fifty light-years from Mirone, contact between us will abruptly cease.

  How far apart are we now?

  At the most we have forty-eight hours more in contact.

  Don’t leave me. I shall be lonely!

  I’ll be lonely too – but not for long. But you, son, you are already halfway to Earth, or as near as I can estimate it you are. As soon as contact between us ceases, you must call TRE.

  Which means?

  Telepath Radial Earth. It’s a general control and information centre, permanently beamed for any sort of emergency. You can raise them. I can’t.

  They won’t know me.

  I’ll give you their call pattern. They’ll soon know you when you telemit. You can give them my pattern for identification if you like. You must explain what is happening.

  Will they believe?

  Of course.

  Are they real?

  Of course. Tell TRE what the trouble is; they’ll send out a fast ship to pick Judy and you up before you are out of range.

  I want to ask you –

  Wait a minute, son … You’re getting faint … Can you smell the gangrene over all those light-years? … These blue horrors are lifting me out of the spring, and I’ll probably pass out. Not much time …

  Pain. Pain and silence. All like a dream.

  … distance …

  Father! Louder!

  … too feeble … Done all I could …

  Why did you rouse me and not communicate with my mother?

  The village! We’re nearly there. Just down the valley and then it’s journey’s end … Human race only developing telepathic powers gradually … Steady, you fellows!

  The question, answer the question.

  That is the answer. Easy down the slope, boys, don’t burst this big leg, eh? Ah … I have telepathic ability but Judy hasn’t; I couldn’t call her a yard away. But you have the ability … Easy there! All the matter in the universe is in my leg …

  You sound so muddled. Has my sister this power?

  Good old Mendelian theory … You and your sister, one sensitive, one not. Two eyes of the giant and only one can see properly … the path’s too steep to – whoa, Cyclops, steady, boy, or you’ll put out that other eye.

  Cannot understand!

  Understand? My leg’s a flaming torch – Steady, steady! Gently down the steep blue hill.

  Father!

  What’s the matter?

  I can’t understand. Are you talking of real things?

  Sorry, boy. Steady now. Touch of delirium; it’s the pain. You’ll be OK if you get in contact with TRE. Remember?

  Yes, I remember. If only I could … I don’t know. Mother is real then?

  Yes. You must look after her.

  And is the giant real?

  The giant? What giant? You mean the giant hill. The people are climbing up the giant hill. Up to my giant leg. Goodbye, son. I’ve got to see a blue man about a … a leg …

  Father! Wait, wait, look, see, I can move. I’ve just discovered I can turn. Father!

  No answer now. Just a stream of silence. I have got to call TRE.

  Plenty of time. Perhaps if I turn first … Easy. I’m only six months, he said. Maybe I could call more easily if I was outside, in the real universe. If I turn again.

  Now if I kick …

  Ah, easy now. Kick again. Good. Wonder if my legs are blue.

  Kick.

  Something yielding.

  Kick …

  T

  By the time T was ten years old, his machine was already on the fringes of that galaxy. T was not his name – the laboratory never considered christening him – but it was the symbol on the hull of his machine and it will suffice for a name. And again, it was not his machine; rather, he belonged to it. He could not claim the honourable role of pilot, nor even the humbler one of passenger; he was a chattel whose seconds of utility lay two hundred years ahead.

  He lay like a maggot in the heart of an apple at the centre of the machine, as it fled through space and time. He never moved; the impulse to move did not present itself to him, nor would he have been able to obey if it had. For one thing, T had been created legless – his single limb was an arm. For another, the machine hemmed him in on all sides. It nourished him by means of pipes which fed into his body a thin stream of vita
mins and proteins. It circulated his blood by a tiny motor that throbbed in the starboard bulkhead like a heart. It removed his waste products by a steady siphoning process. It produced his supply of oxygen. It regulated T so that he neither grew nor wasted. It saw that he would be alive in two hundred years.

  T had one reciprocal duty. His ears were filled perpetually with an even droning note and before his lidless eyes there was a screen on which a dull red band travelled forever down a fixed green line. The drone represented (although not to T) a direction through space, while the red band indicated (although not to T) a direction in time. Occasionally, perhaps only once a decade, the drone changed pitch or the band faltered from its green line. These variations registered in T’s consciousness as acute discomforts, and accordingly he would adjust one of the two small wheels by his hand, until conditions returned to normal and the even tenor of monotony was resumed.

  Although T was aware of his own life, loneliness was one of the innumerable concepts that his creators arranged he should never sense. He lay passive, in an artificial contentment. His time was divided not by night or day, or waking or sleeping, or by feeding periods, but by silence or speaking. Part of the machine spoke to him at intervals, short monologues on duty and reward, instructions as to the working of a simple apparatus that would be required two centuries ahead. The speaker presented T with a carefully distorted picture of his environs. It made no reference to the inter-galactic night outside, nor to the fast backward seepage of time. The idea of motion was not a factor to trouble an entombed thing like T. But it did refer to the Koax in reverent terms, speaking also – but in words filled with loathing – of that inevitable enemy of the Koax, Man. The machine informed T that he would be responsible for the complete destruction of Man.

  T was utterly alone, but the machine which carried him had company on its flight. Eleven other identical machines – each occupied by beings similar to T – bore through the continuum. This continuum was empty and lightless and stood in the same relationship to the universe as a fold in a silk dress stands to the dress: when the sides of the fold touch, a funnel is formed by the surface of the material inside the surface of the dress. Or you may liken it to the negativity of the square root of minus two, which has a positive value. It was a vacuum inside a vacuum. The machines were undetectable, piercing the dark like light itself and sinking through the hovering millennia like stones.

  The twelve machines were built for an emergency by a nonhuman race so ancient that they had abandoned the construction of other machinery eons before. They had progressed beyond the need of material assistance – beyond the need of corporal bodies – beyond the need at least of planets with which to associate their tenuous egos. They had come finally, in their splendid maturity, to call themselves only by the name of their galaxy, Koax. In that safe island of several million stars they moved and had their being, and brooded over the coming end of the universe. But while they brooded, another race, in a galaxy far beyond the meaning of distance, grew to seniority. The new race, unlike the Koax, was extrovert and warlike; it tumbled out among the stars like an explosion, and its name was Man. There came a time when this race, spreading from one infinitesimal body, had multiplied and filled its own galaxy. For a while it paused, as if to catch its breath – the jump between stars is nothing to the gulf between the great star cities – and then the time/space equations were formulated; Man strode to the nearest galaxy armed with the greatest of all weapons, Stasis. The temporal mass/energy relationship that regulates the functioning of the universe, they found, might be upset in certain of the more sparsely starred galaxies by impeding their orbital revolution, causing, virtually, a fixation of the temporal factor – Stasis – whereby everything affected ceases to continue along the universal time-flow and ceases thereupon to exist. But Man had no need to use this devastating weapon, for as on its by-product, the Stasis drive, he swept from one galaxy to another, he found no rival, nor any ally. He seemed destined to be sole occupant of the universe. The innumerable planets revealed only that life was an accident. And then the Koax were reached.

  The Koax were aware of Man before he knew of their existence, and their immaterial substance cringed to think that soon it would be torn through by the thundering drives of the Supreme Fleet. They acted quickly. Materializing onto a black dwarf, a group of their finest minds prepared to combat the invader with every power possible. They had some useful abilities, of which being able to alter and decide the course of suns was not the least. And so nova after nova flared into the middle of the Supreme Fleet. But Man came invincibly on, driving into the Koax like a cataclysm. From a small, frightened tribe a few hundred strong, roaming a hostile earth, he had swelled into an unquenchable multitude, ruling the stars. But as the Koax wiped out more and more ships, it was decided that their home must be eliminated by Stasis, and ponderous preparations were begun. The forces of Man gathered themselves for a massive final blow.

  Unfortunately, a Fleet Library Ship was captured intact by the Koax, and from it something of the long, tangled history of Man was discovered. There was even a plan of the Solar System as it had been when Man first knew it. The Koax heard for the first time of Sol and its attendants. Sol at this time, far across the universe, was a faintly radiating smudge with a diameter twice the size of the planetary system that had long ago girdled it. One by one, as it had expanded into old age, the planets had been swallowed into its bulk; now even Pluto was gone to feed the dying fires. The Koax finally developed a plan that would rid them entirely of their foes. Since they were unable to cope in the present with the inexhaustible resources of Man, they evolved in their devious fashion a method of dealing with him in the far past, when he wasn’t even there. They built a dozen machines that would slip through time and space and annihilate Earth before Man appeared upon it; the missiles would strike, it was determined, during the Silurian Age and reduce the planet to its component atoms. So T was born.

  ‘We will have them,’ one of the greatest Koax announced in triumph when the matter was thrashed out. ‘Unless these ancient Earth records lie, and there is no reason why they should, Sol originally supported nine planets, before its degenerate stage set in. Working inwards, in the logical order, these were – I have the names here, thanks to Man’s sentimentality – Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. Earth, you see, is the seventh planet in, or the third that was drawn into Sol in its decline. That is our target, gentlemen, a speck remote in time and space. See that your calculations are accurate – that seventh planet must be destroyed.’

  There was no error. The seventh planet was destroyed. Man never had any chance of detecting and blasting T and his eleven dark companions, for he had never discovered the mingled continuum in which they travelled. Their faint possibility of interception varied inversely with the distance they covered, for as they neared Man’s first galaxy, time was rolled back to when he had first spiralled tentatively up to the Milky Way. The machines bore in and back. It was growing early. The Koax by now was a young race without the secret of deep space travel, dwindling away across the other side of the universe. Man himself had only a few old-type fluid fuel ships patrolling half a hundred systems. T still lay in his fixed position, waiting. His two centuries of existence – the long wait – were almost ended. Somewhere in his cold brain was a knowledge that the climax lay close now. Not all of his few companions were as fortunate, for the machines, perfect when they set out, developed flaws over the long journey (the two hundred years represented a distance in space/time of some ninety-five hundred million light-years). The Koax were natural mathematical philosophers, but they had long ago given up as mechanics – otherwise they would have devised relay systems to manage the job that T had to do.

  The nutrition feed in one machine slowly developed an increasing rate of supply, and the being died not so much from overeating as from growing pains – which were very painful indeed as he swelled against a steel bulkhead and finally sealed off the a
ir vents with his own bulging flesh. In another machine, a valve blew, shorting the temporal drive; it broke through into real space and buried itself in an M-type variable sun. In a third, the guide system came adrift and the missile hurtled on at an increasing acceleration until it burned itself out and fried its occupant. In a fourth, the occupant went quietly and unpredictably mad, and pulled a little lever that was not then due to be pulled for another hundred years. His machine erupted into fiery, radioactive particles and destroyed two other machines as well.

  When the Solar System was only a few light-years away, the remaining machines switched off their main drive and appeared in normal space/time. Only three of them had completed the journey, T and two others. They found themselves in a galaxy now devoid of life. Only the great stars shone on their new planets, fresh, comparatively speaking, from the womb of creation. Man had long before sunk back into the primeval mud, and the suns and planets were nameless again. Over Earth, the mists of the early Silurian Age hovered, and in the shallows of its waters molluscs and trilobites were the only expression of life. Meanwhile T concentrated on the seventh planet. He had performed the few simple movements necessary to switch his machine back into the normal universe; now all that was left for him to do was to watch a small pressure dial. When the machine entered the atmospheric fringes of the seventh planet, the tiny hand on the pressure dial would begin to climb. When it reached a clearly indicated line on the dial, T would turn a small wheel (this would release the dampers – but T needed to know the How, not the Why). Then two more gauges would begin to register. When they both read the same, T had to pull down the little lever. The speaker had explained it all to him regularly. What it did not explain was what happened after; but T knew very well that then Man would be destroyed, and that that would be good.

  The seventh planet swung into position ahead of the blunt bows of T’s machine, and grew in apparent magnitude. It was a young world, with a future that was about to be wiped forever off the slate of probability. As T entered its atmosphere, the hand began to climb the pressure dial. For the first time in his existence, something like excitement stirred in the fluid of T’s brain. He neither saw nor cared for the panorama spreading below him, for the machine had not been constructed with ports. The dim instrument dials were all his eyes had ever rested on. He behaved exactly as the Koax had intended. When the hand reached the top, he turned the damper wheel, and his other two gauges started to creep. By now he was plunging down through the stratosphere of the seventh planet. The load was planned to explode before impact, for as the Koax had no details about the planet’s composition they had made certain that it went off before the machine struck and T was killed. The safety factor had been well devised. T pulled his last little lever twenty miles up. In the holocaust that immediately followed, he went out in a sullen joy.