The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  T was highly successful. The seventh planet was utterly obliterated. The other two machines did less brilliantly. One missed the Solar System entirely and went on into the depths of space, a speck with a patiently dying burden. The other was much nearer target. It swung in close to T and hit the sixth planet. Unfortunately, it detonated too high, and that planet, instead of being obliterated, was pounded into chunks of rock that took up erratic orbits between the orbits of the massive fifth planet and the eighth, which was a small body encircled by two tiny moons. The ninth planet, of course, was quite unharmed; it rolled serenely on, accompanied by its pale satellite and carrying its load of elementary life forms.

  The Koax achieved what they had set out to do. They had calculated for the seventh planet and hit it, annihilating it utterly. But that success, of course, was already recorded on the only chart they had had to go by. If they had read it aright, they would have seen … So, while the sixth was accidentally shattered, the seventh disappeared – Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, the Asteroid planet, T’s planet, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury – the seventh disappeared without trace.

  On the ninth planet, the molluscs moved gently in the bright, filtering sunlight.

  There is a Tide

  How infinitely soothing to the heart it was to be home. I began that evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself jellied down over Africa with a mild mother’s touch: so that even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any premonition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.

  My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and this was unusual, for I am a poet.

  ‘… because the new dam is now complete,’ he was saying, ‘and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly has been pressing me for it for some time; it’ll be serialised, and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of money, eh?’

  He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged him: this time I said: ‘Jubal, no man in Congo States, no man in the world possibly, has done more for people than you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but you – why, your good works lie about you.’

  I swept my hand out over the still bright land.

  Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake Tanganyika’s northern end. Before Jubal and his engineers came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what we persist in calling ‘Western civilisation’. If you were more hygienic and healthy – so ran the theory – you were happier.

  But I begin to sound sceptical. That is my error. I happen to have little love for my fellow men; the thought of the Massacre is always with me, even after all this time. I could not deny that the trend of things at Mokulgu and elsewhere, the constant urbanisation, was almost unavoidable. But as a man with some sensibility, I regretted that human advance should always be over the corpse of Nature. That a counterblast was being prepared even then did not occur to me.

  From where we sat over our southern wines, both lake and town were partially visible, the forests in the immediate area having been demolished long ago. The town was already blazing with light, the lake looked already dark, a thing preparing for night. And to our left, standing out with a clarity which suggested yet more rain to come, stretched the rolling jungles of the Congo tributaries.

  For at least three hundred miles in that direction, man had not invaded: there lived the pygmies, flourishing without despoiling. That area, the Congo Source land, would be the next to go; Jubal, indeed, was the spearhead of the attack. But for my generation at least that vast tract of primitive beauty would stand, and I was selfishly glad of it. I always gained more pleasure from a tree than population increase statistics.

  Jubal caught something of the expression on my face.

  ‘The power we are releasing here will last for ever,’ he said. ‘It’s already changing – improving – the entire economy of the area. At last, at long last, Africa is realising her potentialities.’

  His voice held almost a tremor, and I thought that this passion for Progress was the secret of his strength.

  ‘You cling too much to the past, Rog,’ he added.

  ‘Why all this digging and tunnelling and wrenching up of riverbeds?’ I asked. ‘Would not atomics have been a cheaper and easier answer?’

  ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘This system puts to use idle water; once in operation, everything is entirely self-servicing. Besides, uranium is none too plentiful, water is. Venus has no radioactive materials, I believe?’

  This sounded to me like an invitation to change the subject. I accepted it.

  ‘They’ve found none yet,’ I assented. ‘But I can speak with no authority. I went purely as a tourist – and a glorious trip it was.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to be so many million miles nearer the sun,’ he said. It was the sort of plain remark I had often heard him make. On others’ lips it might have sounded platitudinous; in his quiet tones I caught a note of sublimity.

  ‘I shall never get to Venus,’ he said. ‘There’s too much work to be done here. You must have seen some marvels there, Rog!’

  ‘Yes … Yet nothing so strange as an elephant.’

  ‘And they’ll have a breathable atmosphere in a decade, I hear?’

  ‘So they say. They certainly are doing wonders … You know, Jubal, I shall have to go back then. You see, there’s a feeling, er – something, a sort of expectancy. No, not quite that; it’s hard to explain – ’ I don’t converse well. I ramble and mumble when I have something real to say. I could say it to a woman, or I could write it on paper; but Jubal is a man of action, and when I did say it, I deliberately omitted emotional overtones and lost interest in what I said. ‘It’s like courting a woman in armour with the visor closed, on Venus now. You can see it, but you can’t touch or smell or breathe it. Always an airtight dome or a space suit between you and actuality. But in ten years’ time, you’ll be able to run your bare fingers through the sand, feel the breezes on your cheek … Well, you know what I mean, er – sort of feel her undressed.’

  He was thinking – I saw it in his eye: ‘Rog’s going to go all poetic on me.’ He said: ‘And you approve of that – the change over of atmospheres?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet you don’t approve of what we’re doing here, which is just the same sort of thing?’

  He had a point. ‘You’re upsetting a delicate balance here,’ I said gingerly. ‘A thousand ecological factors are swept by the board just so that you can grind these waters through your turbines. And the same thing’s happened at Owen Falls over on Lake Victoria … But on Venus there’s no such balance. It’s just a clean page waiting for man to write what he will on it. Under that CO2 blanket, there’s been no spark of life: the mountains are bare of moss, the valleys lie innocent of grass; in the geological strata, no fossils sleep; no amoebae move in the sea. But what you’re doing here …’

  ‘People!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve got people to consider. Babies need to be born, mouths must be fed. A man must live. Your sort of feelings are all very well – they make good poems – but I consider the people. I love the people. For them I work …’

  He waved his hands, overcome by his own grandiose visions. If the passion for Progress was his strength, the fallacy inherent in the idea was his secret weakness. I began to grow warm.

  ‘You get good conditions for these people, they procreate forthwith. Next generation, another benefactor will have to step forward and get good condi
tions for the children. That’s Progress, eh?’ I asked maliciously.

  ‘I see you so rarely, Rog; don’t let’s quarrel,’ he said meekly. ‘I just do what I can. I’m only an engineer.’

  That was how he always won an altercation. Before meekness I have no defence.

  The sun had finished another day. With the sudden darkness came chill. Jubal pressed a button, and glass slid round the veranda, enclosing us. Like Venus, I thought; but here you could still smell that spicy, bosomy scent which is the breath of dear Africa herself. On Venus, the smells are imported.

  We poured some more wine and talked of family matters. In a short while his wife, Sloe, joined us. I began to feel at home. The feeling was only partly psychological; my glands were now beginning to readjust fully to normal conditions after their long days in space travel.

  J-Casta also appeared. Him I was less pleased to see. He was the boss type, the strong arm man: as Jubal’s underling, he pandered wretchedly to him and bullied everyone else on the project. He (and there were many others like him, unfortunately) thought of the Massacre as man’s greatest achievement. This evening, in the presence of his superiors, after a preliminary burst of showing off, he was quiet enough.

  When they pressed me to, I talked of Venus. As I spoke, back rushed that humbling – but intoxicating – sense of awe to think I had actually lived to stand in full possession of my many faculties on that startling planet. The same feeling had often possessed me on Mars. And (as justifiably) on Earth.

  The vision chimed, and an amber light blinked drowsily off and on in Jubal’s tank. Even then, no premonition of catastrophe; since then, I can never see that amber heartbeat without anxiety.

  Jubal answered it, and a man’s face swam up in the tank to greet him. They talked; I could catch no words, but the sudden tension was apparent. Sloe went over and put her arm round Jubal’s shoulder.

  ‘Something up,’ J-Casta commented.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That’s Chief M-Shawn on the Vision – from Owenstown, over on Lake Victoria.’

  Then Jubal flashed off and came slowly back to where we were sitting.

  ‘That was M-Shawn,’ he said. ‘The level of Lake Victoria has just dropped three inches.’ He lit a cheroot with clumsy fingers, his eyes staring in mystification far beyond the flame.

  ‘Dam OK, boss?’ J-Casta asked.

  ‘Perfectly. They’re going to phone us if they find anything …’

  ‘Has this happened before?’ I asked, not quite able to understand their worried looks.

  ‘Of course not,’ my half-brother said scornfully. ‘Surely you must see the implications of it? Something highly unprecedented has occurred.’

  ‘But surely a mere three inches of water …’

  At that he laughed briefly. Even J-Casta permitted himself a snort.

  ‘Lake Victoria is an inland sea,’ Jubal said grimly. ‘It’s as big as Tasmania. Three inches all over that means many thousands of tons of water. Casta, I think we’ll get down to Mokulgu; it won’t do any harm to alert the first aid services, just in case they’re needed. Got your tracer?’

  ‘Yes, boss. I’m coming.’

  Jubal patted Sloe’s arm, nodded to me and left without relaxing his worried look. He and J-Casta shortly appeared outside. They bundled into a float, soared dangerously close to a giant walnut tree and vanished into the night.

  Nervously, Sloe put down her cheroot and did not resume it. She fingered a dial and the windows opaqued.

  ‘There’s an ominous waiting quality out there I don’t like,’ she said, to explain our sudden privacy.

  ‘Should I be feeling alarmed?’ I asked.

  She flashed me a smile. ‘Quite honestly, yes. You don’t live in our world, Rog, or you would guess at once what has happening at Lake Victoria. They’ve just finished raising the level again; for a long time they’ve been on about more pressure, and the recent heavy rains gave them their chance. It seems to have been the last straw.’

  ‘And what does this three-inch drop mean? Is there a breach in the dam somewhere?’

  ‘No. They’d have found that. I’m afraid it means the bed of the lake has collapsed somewhere. The water’s pouring into subterranean reservoirs.’

  The extreme seriousness of the matter was now obvious even to me. Lake Victoria is the source of the White Nile; if it ceased to feed the river, millions of people in Uganda and the Sudan would die of drought. And not only people: birds, beasts, fish, insects, plants.

  We both grew restless. We took a turn outside in the cool night air, and then decided we too would go down to the town. All the way there a picture filled my head: the image of that great dark lake emptying like a wash-basin. Did it drain in sinister silence, or did it gargle as it went? Men of action forget to tell you vital details like that.

  That night was an anticlimax, apart from the sight of the full moon sailing over Mount Kangosi. We joined Jubal and his henchman and hung about uneasily until midnight. As if an unknown god had been propitiated by an hour’s sleep sacrificed, we then felt easier and retired to bed.

  The news was bad next morning. Jubal was already back in town; Sloe and I breakfasted alone together. She told me they had been informed that Victoria had now dropped thirteen and a half inches; the rate of fall seemed to be increasing.

  I flew into Mokulgu and found Jubal without difficulty. He was just embarking on one of the Dam Authority’s survey floats with J-Casta.

  ‘You’d better come, too, Rog,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll probably enjoy the flight more than we shall.’

  I did enjoy the flight, despite the circumstances. A disturbance on Lake Tanganyika’s eastern fringes had been observed on an earlier survey, and we were going to investigate it

  ‘You’re not afraid the bed will collapse here, too, are you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Jubal said. ‘The two hundred miles between us and Victoria is a faulty region, geologically speaking. I’ll show you a map of the strata when we get back. It’s more than likely that all that runaway subterranean water may be heading in our direction; that’s what I’m afraid of. The possibility has been known for a long while.’

  ‘And no precautions taken?’

  ‘What could we do but cross our fingers? The possibility exists that the Moon will spiral to Earth, but we don’t all live in shelters because of it.’

  ‘Justifying yourself, Jubal?’

  ‘Possibly,’ he replied, looking away.

  We flew through a heavy rain shower, which dappled the grey surface of the lake. Then we were over the reported disturbance. A dull brown stain, a blot on a bright new garment, spread over the water, from the steep eastern shore to about half a mile out.

  ‘Put us down, pilot,’ Jubal ordered.

  We sank, and kissed the lake. Several hundred yards away rose the base of Mount Kangosi. I looked with admiration up the slope; great slabs of rock stood out from the verdure; crouching at the bottom of this colossus was a village, part of it forced by the steepness of the incline to stand out on piles into the lake.

  ‘Leave everything to me, boss,’ J-Casta said, grabbing a hand asdic from the port locker and climbing out on to the float. We followed. It seemed likely that the disturbance was due to a slight subsidence in the side of the lake basin. Such subsidences, Jubal said, were not uncommon, but in this case it might provide a link with Lake Victoria. If they could pin-point the position of the new fault, frogmen would be sent down to investigate.

  ‘We’re going to have company,’ Jubal remarked to me, waving a hand over the water.

  A dozen or so dugouts lay between us and the shore. Each bore two or three shining-skinned fishermen. The two canoes nearest us had swung round and were now being paddled towards our float.

  I watched them with more interest than I gave to the asdic sweep. Men like these sturdy fishermen had existed here for countless generations, unchanged: before white men had known of them, before Rome’s legions had destroyed the vin
eyards of Carthage, before – who knows if not before the heady uprush of civilisation elsewhere? – such men had fished quietly in this great lake. They seem not to have advanced at all, so rapidly does the world move; but perhaps when all other races have fallen away, burnt out and exhausted, these steady villages will come into a kingdom of their own. I would elect to live in that realm.

  A man in the leading canoe stood up, raising his hand in greeting. I replied, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain of green behind him. Something caught my eye.

  Above some yards of bare rock, a hundred feet up the slope, two magnificent Mvules – African teak trees – grew. A china blue bird dipped suddenly from one of the trees and sped far and fast away over the water, fighting to outpace its reflection. And the tree itself began to cant slowly from the vertical into a horizontal position.

  Jubal had binoculars round his neck. My curiosity aroused, I reached to borrow them. Even as I did so, I saw a spring of water start from the base of the Mvules. A rock was dislodged. I saw it hurtle down into bush below, starting in turn a trail of earth and stones which fell down almost on to the thatched roofs of the village. The spring began to spurt more freely now. It gleamed in the sun: it looked beautiful but I was alarmed.