The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

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The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 36

by Aldiss, Brian


  With a little dry crumb of sound, Inald Uatt cleared his throat continuing his account as if he had not heard Davi.

  ‘For the past thirty-two days,’ he said, ‘Ishrail has been here on shipboard; he has been thoroughly examined from every possible viewpoint. The first thing was naturally a physiological check. It revealed nothing at all abnormal in the patient’s make-up. No bones out of place, not a spare ounce of cartilage, no extra lungs, not even’ – he allowed himself a modicum of amusement – ‘a concealed tentacle. In every respect, Ishrail is a physically normal man, born here on Earth, destined to die here on Earth. I think we might have indeed expected some trifling irregularity if he had been, as he claims to be, a – hm – specimen of galactic life.’

  ‘Why?’ Davi asked hotly. ‘Can’t evolution run the same course on two planets?’

  ‘He has a point there, Inald, you know,’ Shansfor murmured.

  ‘A point we did not overlook,’ the Arch-Brother agreed. ‘Which brings me to the next step in our investigation. We were, you see, impressed enough with the lack of logical flaws in Ishrail’s arguments to take a good deal of trouble in checking them. I personally called up the Astronomer Extraordinary and asked him about life on other planets.’

  He paused impressively. Davi just waited.

  ‘The Astronomer Extraordinary,’ Uatt said, ‘told me that the possibility of life on other worlds – apart perhaps from a few lowly fungi on Mars – is entirely unproved. Furthermore, he cautioned me that direct evidence of the existence of planetary systems other than our own is not yet forthcoming. He said that according to various ancient records, spaceships have been launched from Earth for other systems from time to time; there is no record of any of them having returned. And he finished by assuring me that space travel has no future.’

  Davi could restrain himself no longer. He jumped up.

  ‘You call that taking trouble?’ he exclaimed. ‘Heavens above, who am I to argue with the Astronomer Extraordinary, but what does he know about it? He’s no expert on space travel!’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Uatt, his voice a few degrees cooler. ‘There are no experts on space travel, just a few speculative companies who have set their paltry igloos on the moon, hoping to find minerals or such. Speculation! There, I suggest, you have the whole business in one word. Do please sit down again, Mr Dael.’

  Sitting was the last thing Davi felt like doing. He tried to appeal silently for help to Shansfor, but the latter was gazing into the fire. With bad grace, Davi plunked himself down on the chair.

  ‘Go on,’ he said testily. ‘What’s your next point?’

  Before speaking again, Uatt clearly speculated upon whether the effort would be worthwhile. ‘We now came to Ishrail with the next tests,’ he said at last. ‘I refer to the psychological ones; and that is a field in which I give you my word there are experts. We – if I may say so without transgressing the bounds of modesty – we are the experts, in this ship.

  ‘For our consideration, we had an unlikely document, the statement of Ishrail, elicited from him in numerous interviews. In brief, it relates the facts of Ishrail’s life, how he grew up, became what we would call an admiral in the interpenetrator fleets – to use his own extraordinary phrase – was defeated in some sort of battle, and finally landed on Earth stark naked and without a goatra to bless himself with.

  ‘I’m not going to waste your time, Mr Dael, or my own, in embarking on a detailed description of that fantastic farrago of autobiography. Transcribed from jell and divided into subjects, it fills five fat volumes; you will see we have been thorough. It contains, however, one or two cardinal points on which our diagnosis of Ishrail rests, and these I will bring to your attention. You may find their perfervid inventiveness more attractive than I do.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Davi said. ‘You’re telling me this, and I can see from every word you say your mind’s shut tighter than a Horby oyster. Was it like that before Ishrail came to you? Because, if so, the poor devil didn’t stand a candle’s chance in hell of proving his case.’

  ‘You’re talking with your tunic buttoned,’ Shansfor protested sharply. ‘That sort of stuff will get you nowhere. Try and –’

  ‘We’re getting nowhere as it is,’ Davi snapped. ‘I’m a countryman, and I like plain speaking.’

  ‘Shansfor,’ Uatt said, folding his hands and turning wearily to his colleague. ‘I suspect I may be unable to talk plainly enough for our country friend. Perhaps you will take over the explanations for a little while?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Shansfor said. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to pour us all some drinks first?’

  ‘Capital idea,’ the director said, softening. ‘I believe they are concealed in that rather ornate cupboard over there.’

  As Shansfor crossed the room, Inald Uatt said to Davi more humanly, ‘You know, Dael, we believe ourselves to be in effect doing you a favour in explaining all this to you; we are by no means obliged to explain. By the law, Ishrail is now a subject of Medical Hierarchy. You are not in any way related to Ishrail; we merely were somewhat touched by your loyalty to a very unfortunate case.’

  ‘I’ll endeavour to feel obliged to you when I’ve heard the rest of what you have to say,’ Davi said grimly. ‘What are these cardinal points you mentioned?’

  A distilled vintage was handed around, and scented sweets. Shansfor sat down by the fire, putting his thin hands out to the flames.

  ‘You’ll probably know,’ he began quietly, ‘that however elaborate and circumstantial the imaginings of a neurotic person are, they reveal certain basic emotions, such as fear, love, lust for power. Looking beyond the symbols that a disordered mind uses to camouflage these emotions from itself, we can generally see the emotive impulses quite clearly. In this respect, Ishrail differs not at all from any case we have ever handled, except that his imaginings reach the peak of inventiveness.

  ‘Note several points. This impressive civilisation to which Ishrail claims to belong spreads across ten thousand planets and five times as many light years – or it may be fifteen thousand planets and ten times as many light years: Ishrail doesn’t remember.’

  ‘Would you remember?’ Davi asked. ‘Tell me how many towns there are on Earth!’

  ‘That is not the point I’m making,’ Shansfor said. ‘I’m trying to show you how Ishrail strove to build up a pattern of complexity in his make-believe world. The war that he claims is being waged is also amazingly complicated, like enlarged 3D chess with obscure motivations and strict rules of chivalry. Ishrail seeks refuge behind this confusion, endeavouring to lose himself.’

  ‘But a galactic civilisation would be complicated!’ Davi wailed. ‘Why can’t you just take it that he’s telling the truth? He’s got no motive for lying.’

  ‘His motive is the usual one in such cases,’ Shansfor said. That is, as complete an escape from reality as possible. He cannot be telling the truth because what he says is too fantastic for a sane man to believe; and also you will notice that he has cleverly picked on a story which does not involve him in the awkward necessity of producing one shred of tangible proof!’

  Davi sunk his head into his hands.

  ‘You go round in circles,’ he said. ‘He told you why he arrived naked, without any possessions.’

  ‘That’s just what I’m complaining about,’ Shansfor said. ‘Ishrail can explain everything! The interpenetrators that brought him here came silently and left silently, and were invisible. We’ve not got a thing: no sight of ships, no tell-tale landing marks in a field, no scraps of cloth of an alien weave, no rings made of strange alloys, not even an Aldebaran corn plaster on his foot. Nothing. Only his wild and unsupported story. Not a shred of external evidence anywhere.’

  ‘And if you had anything, you’d explain it away,’ Davi said.

  ‘We’ll continue with the next point,’ Shansfor said, raising an aggrieved eyebrow at the Arch-Brother, who nodded sympathetically. ‘Notice that Ishrail joined the interpenetration fleets and worked
his way up to the rank of admiral.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Megalomania – and we shall find it recurs over and over again. Here it masquerades under the flaring sun of an admiral’s insignia. Yes, he even drew the insignia for us. He couldn’t be a ranker, could he, or a bondman, or whatever they have? He had to be an admiral, an admiral in a mighty space fleet. Such self-aggrandizement is a common feature of insanity.’

  Davi was silent, avoiding the challenge in the other’s voice. He felt his assurance fading and longed to speak to Ishrail again, to feel reinvigorated by that unquenchable nature. If these devils would only see it a man like Ishrail could be nothing less than admiral.

  ‘The next point,’ Shansfor continued, ‘is even more damning. You will remember that Ishrail claims to have been captured during this preposterous war by the enemy. They vanquished him. And did Ishrail happen to tell you the name of the race that vanquished him? It was Ishrail! Ishrail was conquered by Ishrail!’

  ‘What of it?’ Davi asked stupidly.

  This was too much for Inald Uatt. He leaned forward, glass in hand, his jaws almost snapping.

  ‘What of it, you dare ask?’ he said. ‘If you are attempting to insult us with stupidity, we may as well consider this talk closed. Ishrail is suffering – to couch the matter in terms you might comprehend – from split personality. He is himself; he is also his own worst enemy. Ishrail against Ishrail – a man divided against himself. It’s obvious even to a layman.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Davi said, trying to check his anger.

  ‘Well, it confounded well should be!’

  ‘Not at all!’ Davi bellowed. ‘Good God, Bergharra fought the Goraggs in the last war. One of our bravest men was a Field Captain Goragg, but we didn’t lock him in the nearest button-biter’s barge just because of his unfortunate name!’

  There was an icy silence.

  ‘I believe,’ Uatt said, ‘that the disgusting term for mental-health ships that you employed has ceased to be polite usage even in the low comedy halls.’

  ‘You cannot dismiss everything as coincidence, Mr Dael,’ Shansfor said hurriedly, waving his hands as if to hush his superior. ‘You must try to regard this from the viewpoint of mind-healing. We do not believe in coincidence. Let me proceed to the next and last point, on which the crux of the matter may be said to rest.

  ‘The etiquette of this incredible galactic squabble, Ishrail claims, renders an admiral or similar large fry liable to exile for life if he is captured by the enemy. As we might expect in this case, the exiling itself is a complicated business, a mixture of leniency and harshness. The exile concerned – by which we mean Ishrail – has his name struck off the rolls of civilisation and is left on a planet absolutely bare-handed and bare-backed. Before he is landed, he is taught by hypnotic means to be fluent in the language of the planet or country to which he is banished. Which neatly absolves Ishrail from the difficulty of having to pretend to speak a strange tongue.’

  ‘You make him sound such a liar!’ Davi said bitterly.

  ‘No,’ Shansfor contradicted. ‘That is a basic misconception. We are convinced he genuinely believes all he says. But remember – and this is another loophole for him – he cannot speak the galactic tongue because that was erased when his enemies forced our language down his throat.

  ‘Damning though that is, it is the lesser half of the exile edict. It was stipulated, according to Ishrail, that exiles should be landed only on planets outside the galactic federation, planets too primitive to have developed more than the rudiments of what he calls “mechanical” space travel; there they have to survive among hostile natives as best they can. In other words, Bergharra, and Earth, is Ishrail’s galactic idea of hell.’

  ‘Just why do you find that so damning?’ Davi asked.

  ‘Why? Because it is all too plainly the fabrication of a guilty mind trying to punish itself by inflicting eternal suffering on itself. It is a punishment pattern we meet with here time after time.’

  Before Davi could recover himself sufficiently to answer, Uatt got to his feet, smoothed an imaginary hair over his bald head, and spoke.

  ‘So there you have the Ishrail case, Dael,’ he said. ‘He is a sick creature, haunted by the spectre of persecution. I trust you appreciate, though I fear you don’t, the great pains we have been to in this matter, and the neat way in which we have tied up all the loose ends.’

  ‘Plausible though Ishrail is,’ Shansfor said, also standing and buttoning his tunic to conclude the meeting, ‘he is clearly revealed as hopelessly, even dangerously, unbalanced. Quite candidly, there’s hardly a disorder in the book that isn’t present in greater or lesser degree. And we’ve not unravelled them all yet. This sort of thing takes time and patience.’

  ‘Give the police a little longer to trace him,’ the Arch-Brother said with relish, ‘and we shall probably find he’s a common murderer with amnesia actuated by guilt.’

  Oh, Ishrail! You a common murderer! The hostile natives have indeed got you in their nets! You should have come fifty million years ago – the Neanderthals would have shown more understanding, more mercy!

  Davi screwed his eyes up and raised his fists slowly before his face. Blood swam and roared in his veins like a waterfall. For a moment, he thought of throwing himself at Inald Uatt. Then hopelessness dropped neatly over him. He lowered his hands.

  ‘I must see Ishrail,’ he said dully.

  ‘That will not be possible,’ Uatt said. ‘We have had to remove him to a quieter place; he threatened to get violent.’

  ‘Do you wonder?’ Davi said. With stiff, formal fingers he buttoned his tunic.

  The Arch-Brother and Shansfor remained side by side by the fire, waiting politely for him to leave. Davi stood defeated before them, the only man to believe in Ishrail, rocking unintelligently from one foot to another, his jaw slack. At last he sighed, turning to leave without a word of thanks. He caught sight of the tired buttercup pinned to his chest; how it must have amused these people! Yet Davi felt obscurely that it was his slender link with sanity and the Galaxy.

  Suddenly he saw the planned cruelty of Ishrail’s exile, the bitterness of being among a people without understanding.

  ‘I’m going to call the New Union newsjells to see if they will help me!’ he said resolutely.

  ‘An excellent idea! Emotionalism and sensationalism are just their meat,’ the Arch-Brother replied, but Davi had gone.

  Finding his way blindly down a gangplank, he headed for the city. A cold wind met him, and he recalled that he had left his fur cloak somewhere in the ship. Now it was too late to return for it. Overhead, through thinning cloud, galactic stars shone with terrible urgency.

  The Ultimate Millennia

  Again we must use the symbol: Time passed. Time is stretched to its limits, extended almost beyond meaning, for Time now rolls down a gentle decline of innumerable centuries towards the sunset of Yinnisfar and its Galaxy.

  It was a time of contrast. Those planets and systems which, while the Self-perpetuating War was in full spate, had once been linked by the bond of enmity had now not enough in common even to be rivals. It was a time of discovery and consolidation; of experiment and abdication; of hope and resignation; of the historian and the prophet. It was a time of the exploration of the inner resources of man; with his last frontiers tamed, man turned in towards the self. There he went on foot, alone, without that grey steed Science in which he had trusted for so long, alone into the labyrinth of his own devices.

  Humanity had multiplied. Every world bore a mighty crowd of people, but the crowd no longer jostled and shouted. Each individual remained by choice to himself, an island. It was the silver period of the Age of Splendour and Starlight. Soon only the starlight would remain.

  Towards the end of a great pageant, it may be, the stage is at its most crowded; a sea of faces, brightly lit, greets us even as the curtains begin their final downward sweep. Towards the end of a symphony, it may be, the whole orchestra puts forth its
full efforts only a minute before silence falls and the music becomes a memory.

  Throughout one vast arena, silence was falling, the last silence of all.

  1

  You never knew the beginning of that train of events which led you to Yinnisfar and a world of shadows.

  You never knew Shouter by name. He operated far from what most men reckoned as civilisation, right out on the rim of the Galaxy, so that on his frequent sweeps from one planet to another he rarely saw stars on both sides of his cabin. There they would be, a whole galaxyful on one side, burning bright and high, and, on the other – a cliff of emptiness that stretched from eternity to eternity, the distant island universes only accentuating the gulf.

  Shouter generally kept his eyes on the stars.

  But not on this trip. Shouter was a spool-seller by trade; his little star craft was packed with rack upon rack of microspools. He stocked all kinds, new and antiquarian; philosophical, sociological, mathematical; if you went through them systematically, you could almost piece together the eon-old history of the Galaxy. It was not, however, on these learned spools that Shouter made his best money; they paid for the fuel, but not the drinks. The spools that really brought in the profits dealt with a subject older than history, and with figures more ineluctable than any in the mathematician’s vocabulary; their subject was Desire. Erotic spools depicting the devices of lust formed Shouter’s stock in trade; and because such items were illegal, Shouter stood in perpetual fear of the customs officials of a hundred worlds.

  Now he was elated. He had just neatly outwitted the petty guardians of morality and sold about half his holdings under their very eyes.

  That he took too much drink in celebration was to influence your entire life. An empty merrit bottle rolled by his feet. It was hot in the small cabin of his ship, and he dozed off, sprawling over the controls …

 

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