The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘How can I tell you?’ Willitts demanded with sudden, mouselike fury. ‘I can’t tell you. I can’t I haven’t got the words. You’d have to be me – or my kind – before you’d understand.’

  In the end they gave it up and left Willitts panting, lying behind his counter in the dust.

  ‘I didn’t mean to lose control,’ Ars Staykr said, pressing his brow, licking his knuckles, as he emerged from the shop. He must have known the camera was on him, but was too preoccupied to care. ‘Something just went blank inside me. We’ve all got our hatreds far too ready, I guess. But I must find out …’

  His set face loomed larger and larger in the cube, eclipsing all else. One eyelid was flickering uncontrollably. He moved out of sight.

  Everyone was talking in the audience now, except the chief; they had all enjoyed the beating up.

  ‘Seriously,’ Ormolu 3 was saying, ‘that last scene had something. You’d resolidify, of course, with proper actors, have a few broken teeth. Maybe finish with the little guy getting knocked into the canal.’

  Timing his exits was a speciality with Rhapsody. He had them awake and now he’d show them no more. He came slowly down the few steps into the auditorium.

  ‘So there’s the story of a man called Ars Staykr,’ he said, as his right foot left the last step. ‘He couldn’t take it. After he beat up that little tailor, he dropped everything and disappeared into the stews of Nunion. He didn’t even stay to round off his picture, and Unit Two folded then and there. He was a quitter.’

  ‘How come we’ve had to wait twenty years to hear all this?’ came a shout from Rhapsody Double Seven.

  Carefully, Rhapsody 182 spread his hands wide and smiled.

  ‘Because Ars Staykr was a dirty word when he first quit,’ he said, aiming his voice at Big Cello, ‘and after that he was forgotten. Then, well, it happened I ran into Staykr a couple of days back, and that gave me the idea of working over the old Unit Two files.’

  He tried to move in front of Big Cello, to make it easier for the chief to compliment him on his sagacity if he felt so inclined.

  ‘You mean Ars is still alive?’ Double Seven persisted. ‘He must be quite an old man now. What’s he doing, for To’s sake?’

  ‘He’s a down-and-out, a bum,’ Rhapsody said. ‘I didn’t care to be seen talking to him, so I got away from him as soon as possible.’

  He now stood before the chief.

  ‘Well, B. C.,’ he said, as calmly as he could, ‘don’t tell me you don’t smell a solid there – something to sweep em off their feet and knock em into the aisles.’

  As if deliberately prolonging the suspense, Big Cello took another drag on his aphrohale, then removed it gently from his mouth.

  ‘We’d have to have a pair of young lovers in it,’ Big Cello said.

  ‘Sure,’ Rhapsody exclaimed, scowling to hide his elation. ‘Young lovers! There’s an idea! A great idea!’

  ‘I see it as a saga of the common man,’ Hurricane 304 suggested. ‘We could call it Our Fear City – if that title isn’t legally sequestered.’

  ‘It’s a vehicle for Edru Expusso!’ someone else suggested.

  They were playing with it. Harsch had won the day.

  He was hustling out of the little theatre when a hand touched his arm and Rhapsody Double Seven pulled him back.

  ‘How did you happen to find Ars Staykr again?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ Rhapsody said happily, ‘I happened to have a rendezvous a couple of nights back. I was looking for a helibubble afterwards when I happened to walk through Bosphorus Concourse. This old wreck hanging about in a doorway recognised me and called out.’

  ‘It was Ars?’

  ‘It was Ars. I kept on going, of course. But it put me on to the concept of this solid.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask Ars if he’d found out what was at the heart of the city? That was what he’d gone looking for, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What’s it matter? That quaint had nothing we’d want to buy. His clothes were in rags, I tell you; why, the crazy fool was shivering with viro! I was lucky that bubble came when it did!’

  They made the solid – one of Supernova’s big-budget productions for the year. It took in credits on every inhabited planet of the Federation, and Rhapsody 182 was a powerful, respected man thereafter. They called it Song of a Mighty City; it had three electronic orchestras, seventeen hit tunes and a regiment of pneuma-dancing girls. The solidisation was jelled in the studios using the pastel shades deemed most appropriate, and they finally selected a more suitable city than Nunion for backgrounds. Ars Staykr, of course, did not come into it at all.

  The Star Millennia

  How many times the whole history of a world is altered by one small-seeming event is, of course, beyond computation. Fortune has myriad hidden faces. Dael – and, through Dael, Earth – was fortunate. He found men who believed as he did, who also thought Ishrail should have another hearing. By their united pressures, Ishrail was made free. He was treated – though not by all – as a sane man, and his story believed. The account of his life, as he had delivered it, became one of the world’s most precious documents, and the five fat volumes a new gospel of hope.

  So wandering man returned to Earth. Ishrail, although he did not know it, was a remote descendant of those few explorers who had braved the journeys to the stars, long, long ago, in the time of the Robot Millennia.

  This is no place for the story of man’s gradual expansion into the Galaxy; we must confine ourselves to brief and occasional glimpses of Earth. Something must nevertheless be said of that expansion, if only to render the following fragment more readily understandable.

  Of the original interstellar ships, vast arklike vessels, an experimental one was launched in the twenty-third century; christened Big Dog, it set out for Procyon; its story was tragic. After that, no more such ships were launched until the eightieth century. These journeys were in some degree successful.

  On the new-found planets, themselves widely dispersed, the colonists established colonies and battled with environments they had never been intended to face. Inevitably, it was a stimulus. The colonies began to flourish; centuries passed; they in their turn put forth little tentacles into the unknown. World after world pullulated with vigorous bipeds.

  Consider the case of these worlds. Consider the case of Galcondar. Galcondar was colonised from Koramandel two thousand years after Koramandel’s first colonisation from Luggate III. The Galcondaran colonists attempted to establish themselves on the strange planet along a pleasant stretch of coast line in a savanna belt, but failed because of the activities of rapid-flying fish.

  This species of fish, the coastal assatassi, is equipped with a sharp, dartlike snout quite capable of piercing a man to the heart when the fish is in full flight. For most of the Galcondaran year, the coastal assatassi behave like an ordinary flying fish, using its wings merely for evasive action from marine predators. Towards the breeding season, a change in its habits becomes noticeable. The assatassi is hermaphrodite, capable of fertilising its own eggs; from the eggs hatch small worms that move into the intestine of the parent fish. Goaded by the irritation of this process, the assatassi assemble some five miles out to sea – the distance depending on the depth of the water – and execute the curious contortions known as ‘fettling’, both above and below the water. Such brood-maddened shoals may cover several acres of sea and contain several hundred thousand fish. Their antics attract various species of gull and cormorant, which wheel over the shoal, filling their bellies at leisure.

  When the density of the shoal reaches its peak, fettling ceases. Taking flight in their thousands, the assatassi wing their way shoreward, flying low over the water and achieving estimated velocities of over 1,850 yards per minute. At this speed, they hit the land and are killed.

  Far from being a morbid instinct, this behaviour is another example of nature’s versatility in perpetuating species. The piscicolous assatassi progeny can feed only on carrion. Embedded safely
in the parental intestine, this worm stage survives the impact which kills its carrier to feed upon the parental corpse as it decays. When the parent is devoured, the worms metamorphose into a legged larval stage, which crawls back to the sea; and so the assatassi cycle is reborn.

  This minor curiosity in galactic natural history had a disproportionately weighty effect upon the future of Galcondar. The colonists, arriving at last at their promised land, were bombarded by high-speed fish. By ill luck, they had chosen the suicide season in which to pitch camp. A fifth of their number was killed or wounded by the first death flights. The remainder split into two groups, one travelling inland north, one south, in search of a less lethal environment.

  So the two great empires of Galdid and Gal-Dundar were founded. For nearly two hundred years they flourished without any intertraffic between them. When contact was re-established, it was to the great subsequent enrichment of their cultural life. In the renaissance that followed, many new art forms were born, and spaceships (the technological expression of what is frequently an aesthetic impulse) were launched for the nearer planets. On one of these planets a friendly race of humanoids, the Lapracants, were discovered.

  The congresses that took place between the wise men of Lapraca and the savants of Galdid and Gal-Dundar marked one of the turning points of the expanding interplanetary concourse. During these congresses were laid the foundations of the first cosmic language: Galingua.

  Many centuries later, a Galingua-speaking junta marooned Ishrail on Earth.

  The more one investigates this exiling of Ishrail, the more interesting the whole affair becomes.

  Two facets in particular need attention here: one, the galactic position vis-à-vis Earth, and the other, the curiously codified war maintained among the ‘new’ planets.

  Man’s civilisation spread outward from planet to planet; in the course of forty million years, some twenty thousand worlds came to foster human settlements of widely varying standards. Yet – at least at first – all had one salient feature in common: they were out of touch or barely in touch with each other. Communication over a multitude of light years was all but impossible. It was this factor, coupled with the variety of new environments, which bred such a diversity of cultures from one original Earth-type stock. And inevitably, under these conditions, the whereabouts of Earth became forgotten.

  Spreading outward at random, the progeny of Earth left their womb world far behind. As world after world grew to seniority, the idea of a mother planet was scorned, or distorted, or completely mislaid. On the other hand, some worlds – Droxy is a well-known instance – retained the idea of Earth as a kind of supermyth, building their main religion about the conception of a matriarchal figure. The Droxian articles of faith postulated a sort of pastoral female deity called Lady Earth, who had thrown away some bad apples which displeased her; if the apples grew into fine trees, Lady Earth would come to them and walk among them, forgiving and praising them.

  Such myths thrived, especially in the early days. Yet, however ardently man in his meditative periods might liken himself to maggots in an apple, in his everyday moods he continued to behave like a lord of creation. Though he abased himself, he continued to conquer.

  When the planets finally bound themselves together into a multiplanet federation, attempts were made, by rationalising the myths, to find one common source-planet for man. The movement failed, not least because there were more than a dozen score of worlds cheerfully calling themselves Earth, as well as others whose legends claimed for them the dubious glory of being source-planet.

  As the nonmaterial or interpenetrator type of travel was developed, communication between the federated planets greatly improved. Interplanetary relations correspondingly deteriorated. Man – it is at once his making and his undoing – is a competitive animal. Although, for various reasons – most of which are immediately obvious when one considers the distances involved – interstellar war was impossible, states of hostility sprang up all around. Intercourse between planets, both commercial and cultural, suffered in consequence. The federation was on the verge of falling back into an unrelated series of provincial outposts.

  From this crisis was evolved the Self-perpetuating Galactic War which, besides being no war at all in the orthodox sense, created a revolution in human understanding. The gerontocracy which devised this sagacious formula for interstellar communitism finally acknowledged the competitive nature of man, for which any international or interstellar culture must make full allowance or perish. The unstable history of every planet revealed mankind rebelling against its destiny by striving to live in peace-geared communities which eventually lapsed into barbarous wars. Now this situation was reversed. By establishing a perpetually warring culture, man would have both the stability and the stimulation needful for him to produce the fruits of peace.

  Such a war had to be severely conventionalised, its risks modified, its fatalities curtailed; its harshest penalties had to fall upon those most actively engaged, rather than those innocently involved. Above all, its methods had to be as socially valuable as was possible, and its end made unforeseeable and inaccessible.

  The gerontocracy planned well. The mock war began.

  By the time Ishrail was exiled on Earth, the war was as much a part of galactic life as was Galingua. It fitted like a light harness over everyman’s affairs, binding together the civilised universe as an ivy will cover a giant sequoia. And just as ivy will ruin the finest tree, so this humane and irresolvable war was destined eventually to pull down the most prodigious of all cultures.

  As yet, however, in its thousandth millenary, only the war’s advantages were observable. True, trade and invention had reached a lull which the Galactics believed to be temporary; true, too, that art had become a series of formalities, that politics had dwindled to a hobby, that theologies were again replacing natural piety, that salvation seemed a more valuable goal than self-knowledge; but by the rules of the war, the federation still expanded, and adventure at least was not dead. Though the cities slept, there was always a new jungle to explore. Though the arteries hardened, new blood flowed in them.

  For one of the most rewarding devices of the Self-perpetuating War was that system of exiling defeated warriors to which Ishrail fell victim. The exiles, stripped of all proof of their former way of life, were marooned on unfederated planets. There they had to battle with what the uninvestigated local life had to offer.

  After a decade, however, inspectors were dispatched to see what had become of the exile. Often they found him dead; often they found him lord of a local tribe. If the former, nothing was lost except obsequies; if the latter, much might be gained, for the natives were being helped towards a point where they might be deemed fit to join the federation. When the inspectors, after the statutory decade, came to look for Ishrail, they found him still surviving; indeed, the natives had by now impelled him into a top income bracket.

  Reports on the situation flashed back to Galactic HQ. Stipulations, specifications, recommendations circulated around the solemn tables of the Galactic Council. Motions were proposed, facts were tabulated, statistics were discussed, files were filed. The debate creaked to a conclusion. Ishrail was dead when Earth was voted into the Federation.

  If it could be said that a stale air lay over the heart of government, few would have ventured to detect it elsewhere. For most people, as ever, the past was no more than a time in which their grandfathers lived, the future meant the next few decades. Hope manifested itself everywhere, like phosphorescence in a dark sea; and why not?

  For it was – again, as ever – a time of miracles.

  The ocean seemed to be breathing shallowly, like a child asleep, when the first lemmings reached it. In all the wide sea, no hint of menace existed. Yet the first lemmings paused daintily on the very verge of the water, peering out to sea and looking about as though in indecision. Unavoidably, the pressure of the marching column behind pushed them into the tiny wavelets. When their paws became wet, it was a
s if they resigned themselves to what was to come. Swimming strongly, the leaders of the column set off from the shore. All the other lemmings followed, only their heads showing above water. A human observer would have said they swam bravely; and unavoidably he would have asked himself: To what goal do the lemmings imagine they are heading? For what illusion are they prepared to throw away their lives?

  All down the waterway, craft moved. Farro Westerby stood at the forward port of his aquataxi, staring ahead and ignoring the water traffic moving by him. His two fellow Isolationists stood slightly apart, not speaking. Farro’s eye was on the rising structure on the left bank ahead. When the aquataxi moored as near to this structure as possible, Farro stepped ashore; glancing back impatiently, he waited for one of his companions to pay the fare.

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ the taxi man said, nodding towards the strange building as he cast off. ‘I can’t ever see us putting up anything like it.’

  ‘No,’ Farro said flatly, walking away ahead of his friends.

  They had disembarked in that sector of the capital called Horby Clive Island. Located in the government centre of New Union, most of it had been ceded to the Galactics a year earlier. In that brief time, using Earth labour for the rough work, they had transformed the place. Six of their large, irregular buildings were already completed. The seventh was now going up, creating a new wonder for the world.

  ‘We will wait here for you, Farro,’ one of the two men said, extending his hand formally. ‘Good fortune with the Galactic Minister. As the only Isolationist with an extensive knowledge of the Galactic tongue, Galingua, you represent, as you know, our best chance of putting our case for Earth’s remaining outside the Multiplanet Federation.’

  As Farro thanked him and accepted the proffered hand, the other man, a stooping septuagenarian with a pale voice, gripped Farro’s arm.