The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

‘The man with the permanent wrong end of the stick!’ Tim added, laughing. ‘He will see out his days selling signed picture postcards of himself to colonists and tourists.’

  They emerged from the trees. Before them was a cliff, steep and bush-studded. The ecologists went to its edge and looked down.

  A fine panorama stretched out before them. In the distance, a range of snow-covered mountains seemed to hang suspended in the blue air. Nearer, winding between stretches of jungle, ran the cold river. On its banks, the ecologists could see cayman-heads basking in the sun; in the water, others swam and dived.

  ‘Look at them!’ Craig exclaimed. ‘They are really aquatic creatures. They’ve hardly had time to adapt to land life. The dominating factor of their lives remains – fish!’

  ‘They’ve already forgotten us,’ Barney said.

  They could see that the crude settlement was deserted. The overlander was discernible through trees, but it took them an hour of scrambling down hazardous paths before they reached it.

  Craig went around to look at the severed cry gas hose. It had been neatly chopped, as if by a knife. This was Dangerfield’s work – he had expected to trap them in the temple! There was no sign of the old man anywhere. Except for the melancholy captives, sitting at the end of their tethers, the clearing was deserted.

  ‘Before we go, I’m setting these creatures free,’ Barney said.

  He ran among the shelters, slashing at the thongs with a knife, liberating pekes and bears. As they found themselves free, they banded together and trotted off into the jungle without further ado.

  ‘Two more generations,’ Barney said regretfully, ‘and there probably won’t be a bear or a peke on Kakakakaxo alive outside a zoo; the colonists will make shorter work of them than the cayman-heads have. As for the cayman-heads, I don’t doubt they’ll only survive by taking to the rivers again.’

  ‘There’s another contradiction,’ Tim remarked thoughtfully, as they climbed into the overlander and Barney backed her through the trees. ‘Dangerfield said the peke and bear fought with each other if they had the chance, yet they went off peacefully enough together – and they ruled together once, as the tomb proves. Where does the fighting come in?’

  ‘As you say, Dangerfield always managed to grab the wrong end of the stick,’ Craig answered. ‘If you take the opposite of what he told us, that’s likely to be the truth. He has always been too afraid of his subjects to go out and look for the facts.’

  Barney laughed. ‘Here it comes,’ he said. ‘I warn you, Tim, the oracle is about to speak! In some ways you’re very transparent, Craig; I’ve known ever since we left the tomb of the old kings that you had something up your sleeve and were waiting for an appropriate moment before you produced it.’

  ‘What is it, Craig?’ Tim asked curiously.

  Barney let Fido out of the overlander; the little creature ran off across the clearing without a backward glance.

  ‘You were careless when you cut open those three pygmies in the lab, Tim,’ Craig said. ‘I know that you were looking for something else, but if you had been less excited, you would have observed that the cayman-heads are parthenogenic. They have only one sex, reproducing by means of self-fertilised eggs.’

  ‘I see. Does this make any difference to the situation?’ Tim asked.

  Barney smote his forehead in savage surprise.

  ‘Ah, I should have seen it myself! Parthenogenic, of course! Self-fertilising! It explains the lack of vanity or sexual inhibition we noticed. I swear I would have hit on the answer myself, if I hadn’t been so occupied with Fido.’

  He climbed heavily into the driver’s seat, slamming the door. The air conditioning sucked away the invading smell of fish at once.

  ‘Yes, you have an interesting situation on Kakakakaxo,’ Craig continued. ‘Try and think how difficult it would be for such a parthenogenic species to visualise a bisexual species like man. Nevertheless, the cayman-heads grasped one weakness inherent in the bisexual system: if you keep the two sexes apart, the race cannot breed and dies out.

  ‘And that is just what they were doing – separating male and female. That is how they manage to hold this place. Of course, no scheme is perfect, and quite a few of both sexes escaped into the forest to breed.’

  Barney revved the engine, moving the overlander forward and leaving Tim to ask the obvious question.

  ‘Yes,’ Craig said. ‘As Fido tried to explain to us with his drawing, the “bears” are the males and the “pekes” the females of one species.

  ‘It just happens to be a dimorphous species, the sexes varying in size and configuration, or we would have guessed the truth at once. The cayman-heads, in their dim way, knew. They tackled the whole business of conquest in a way only a parthenogenic race would – they segregated the sexes.’

  Tim whistled.

  ‘So when Dangerfield thought the pekes and bears were fighting,’ he said, ‘they were really copulating! And of course the similar cestodes you found in their entrails would have put you on the right track; I ought to have guessed it myself!’

  ‘It must be odd to play god in a world about which you really know or care so little,’ Barney commented, swinging the vehicle down the track in the direction of their space ship. ‘I wonder if the Creator is as indifferent to us?’

  The old man hid behind a tree, watching the overlander leave. He shook his head, braced himself, hobbled back to his hut. His servants would have to hunt in the jungles before he got today’s offering of entrails. He shivered as he thought of those two symbolic and steaming bowls. He shivered for a long time. He was old; from the sky he had come; to the sky he would one day return. But before that, he was going to tell everyone what he really thought of them.

  How he despised them.

  How he needed them.

  Sight of a Silhouette

  Sister Venice Rollands looked fascinatedly over the top of the journal she was reading. A man approached her down the long hospital corridor. As he drew nearer, her journal sank lower until it lay unregarded before her on the desk. When he got to her open door, he paused politely on the threshold, looking in, his face agreeable but unsmiling.

  ‘Sister Rollands?’ he asked. ‘May I enter?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, gathering her wits. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. Please come in. I am Sister Rollands.’

  She stood as he came towards her. The tone and intonation of the few syllables they had exchanged sufficed for them to identify each other as members of the Upper Layer. He stood before her, perhaps quietly appraising her dark good looks and the expression of surprise still apparent on her face. Abstractedly, she smoothed down her stiff skirt.

  ‘I have come to see Alvira Hurdlestone, who is under your charge,’ he said.

  He was slender, tall, tanned, with striking grey eyes. He carried himself with neither self-assurance nor diffidence, but – purpose. His air was neither grim nor gay, but – serene. Sister Rollands felt something open up inside her like a rose.

  ‘You are Norman Dall, the explorer,’ she said.

  If he was surprised, he gave no sign of it, merely nodding his head affirmatively. Normally poised, Sister Rollands suddenly felt unsure of herself; she had a terrifying idea that nothing she could say would adequately express what she meant to say. Above all, she was afraid he would imagine she was suffering from a foolish attack of hero-worship.

  ‘It’s not just because you’re an explorer, and your name is known throughout the Twenty Systems,’ she blurted out hurriedly, and then stopped.

  ‘What’s not, sister?’ Dall asked gently.

  She dropped her eyes. She had been on the dizzy verge of saying, ‘… that I loved you the second I saw you coming down the corridor.’ She smoothed her stiff skirt again, realised what she was doing, and put her hands behind her back.

  ‘I mean I met you once before, long ago,’ she said. She knew she was blushing; she was a poised woman, cool, reserved, reckoned rather hard by the nurses under her; she never behaved like this
. ‘It was on Atara, ten years ago,’ she added.

  Norman Dall appeared to ignore all the nuances of the encounter, concentrating mercifully on her words alone. There was pleasure in his voice as he said, ‘I am very fond of Atara. It’s a most interesting planet. But I regret that I don’t remember you; I hope that’s not too unforgivable.’

  ‘Oh, no, just the opposite,’ she said hazily. She was back for a second at that reception her mother had taken her to. Miss Venice Rollands was then sixteen, and still inclined to use too much powder. She had never got near to, or spoken to, Norman Dall, so timid was she, so surrounded by eager guests was he. But she still remembered how she had felt at the sight of his profile: the pain was as pleasurable and true now as it had been then.

  ‘We met at a party,’ she said. Laughing shakily, she added, ‘I couldn’t tell you who gave it. All I remember is that you were there, and I wore a green dress.’

  ‘It’s quite a coincidence that we should meet again,’ he replied, ‘we must talk about Atara after I have seen Alvira Hurdlestone.’

  ‘I’m sorry …,’ she said, dismayed at her own behaviour. He was perfectly right to snub her – if it was a snub. ‘Will you please follow me, Mr. Dall. Of course I will take you to Miss Hurdlestone at once.’

  Turning, she led him down a side passage which sound-absorbers rendered absolutely noiseless. At Room 6 she paused, opening the door to let Dall enter first. The artificial gravity was off in the room, but he drifted in with practised grace. The tele-watch blinked, acknowledged their presence.

  Floating in the middle of the ward, linen stays holding her in position, was Alvira Hurdlestone. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks grey; she was voluminously bandaged. The occasional cluck of a plasma feed was the only sound in the room.

  ‘I expect you saw Dr Carstain before he sent you up to me,’ Sister Rollands said quietly. ‘He will have given you a full report on the case …’

  ‘The case.’ Again she felt she had said the wrong thing, making herself sound hard and indifferent. Glancing shyly at Dall, she found no pain in his face as he gazed at his unconscious Partner, but she was impelled to go on talking.

  ‘It was so unfortunate that Miss Hurdlestone was alone on the Iri site when the accident occurred,’ she said. ‘Space suit punctures are always serious matters, despite all modern safeguards. The tissue of Miss Hurdlestone’s left lung was destroyed; I expect Dr Carstain told you that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dall said, not lifting his eyes from his Partner’s face. Alvira, wan and unconscious, no longer held any beauty; but beauty is only a gimmick, the archaeologist thought; I shall love her … always. For him it was a very big word.

  ‘He was really splendid – Dr Carstain, I mean,’ the sister continued. ‘He had a living lung brought up here from Luna-Medic within an hour, and operated on Miss Hurdlestone at once. I was in the theatre with him. It was a wonderful transference job; the new lung is already functioning smoothly and integratedly. Your Par – Miss Hurdlestone will feel no different when she wakes tomorrow.’

  Dall did not even blink his eyes to the pain brought by the unconscious irony of Sister Rollands’ last words. He knew what the lung graft meant: Alvira would live out a normal human life span, but he had lost his Partner. Remotely, he was grateful to this uniformed woman who was trying to tell him the truth as gently as possible. Making an effort, he turned and thanked her.

  Sister Rollands took the words like a rebuff, merely because she read his distance from her in his face.

  ‘What else did you expect, you idiot, speaking to him like that?’ she asked herself, as she hurried away from Room 6, back to her office. She had to hide a temporary urge to lose control of herself.

  For a long while after Sister Rollands had gone, Norman Dall continued to look at Alvira, watching her quiet breathing. Then he turned away to the round window, rotated the polarised glass, and looked out. A vast, curving segment of Luna was visible below. Over this glittering world of six billion people, another night was falling, so that darkness was pulled up like a blanket with a red hem over a restless child. But in the darkness, a thousand shapes and sizes of domes sparkled with the quenchless lights of man.

  From the hospital satellite, four hundred and fifty miles up, it all looked remote, toylike. But Dall’s eye, searching expertly, picked out a ragged patch of terrain where no domes were. That was Iri. There Alvira’s accident had occurred. There his life had been wrenched once more away from its needed roots.

  Without sigh or shrug, Dall turned back to the figure in the linen cocoon. He stood there for an hour – but Dall did not compute time like that – before producing stylus and plate from his pocket. Scribbling her a brief note of farewell, he folded it over, moodily watching the sides fuse themselves together. Even now, he refused to let himself think how long he and Alvira had been Partners; he concentrated on the knowledge that this was how she would want him to leave: before their eyes could meet again.

  Tucking the note into her harness, he drifted from the room. When he returned to Sister Rollands’ office, she started nervously.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. She guessed what he had been doing.

  By the look on his face, she was tempted to fling her arms round his neck, kiss him, comfort him. Instead, she asked timidly, ‘I suppose you will be going now, Mr. Dall?’

  He seemed to come back only gradually to this world. His wandering eye fixed on the multiple Luna-Earth-Solar-Celestial timekeeper on her wall.

  ‘A taxi will be coming up from Luna for me in an hour,’ he said. ‘I shall collect my kit from Iri before leaving the system entirely.’

  Taking hope from the way he seemed to confide in her, Sister Rollands took the plunge. Rather breathlessly, she said, ‘I am going off duty at this very minute. I have a forty-eight hour home leave in Copper. Please let me give you a lift down in the station vehicle.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister,’ he said. ‘I should be grateful.’

  ‘Stay here!’ she said, almost running from the office down to her private room. There, stripping off her uniform, she opened the metal cyst on her wrist and dialled a personal number. When answer came, she whispered hurriedly into the radio.

  ‘Argyre, darling? Venice here. Are you in the recreation room? Listen, please do me a favour and come hot foot to take over Wing G right now? Will you do that, darling, burning trails all the way? Slip into your uniform as you come. It’s only thirty-five minutes before you were due to relieve me, and I promise I’ll make it up to you next shift. Never mind why – you’ll see when you get to the office. You should be there by now. Blessings!’

  Excitedly, she switched off, adjusted her hair, slipped into a white skirt, threw a few things hastily into a grip, and hurried back to Dall. Sister Argyre got there at the same time. Venice squeezed the Martian girl’s fingers gratefully.

  Then she turned to Dall, leading him down to the transport bay, where one of the duty gravs waited. A minute later, they were sinking through space alone together.

  Although he was restrained, although grief filled him, Dall possessed a quality which made him easy to talk to. Now she had gained her first objective, Venice was more self-assured.

  ‘You told me you will be leaving the system; shall you return to Atara?’ she asked.

  ‘I may do,’ he replied. ‘Fortunately, the spade work at Iri was all but finished, and certain clues there lead back to Atara. Also, my research is more easily carried out there.’

  He began to talk about his work. Some ten thousand years ago, roughly at the beginning of the Space Epoch, man had discovered a fragment of an unidentifiable building on Ganymede. Speculation on this had proved fruitless until, many centuries later, another and similar structure had been unearthed on Atara. This one was in a much better state of preservation, and proved to be a space craft of a hitherto unimagined kind. Modern dating methods showed both the Ganymede and the Atara objects to be some two thousand million years old.

  ‘And all this time, right under men’s
noses, another such object has been lying here on Luna, buried far below the surface at Iri,’ Dall said. ‘The evidence we have collected shows that this one is contemporary with the other two. You realise what this means, Venice?’

  She was thrilled to hear him lapse into her first name. It irked her that she could only respond to this question with a shake of her head. Cosmic archaeology meant nothing to her.

  ‘Two thousand million years ago,’ Dall said, ‘Earth, the cradle of mankind, was still hardly out of the molten state. Luna had not then been pulled from what is now the Pacific Desert – it was still part of the mother planet. In other words, the age-old Iri ship landed on Earth.’

  For the first time, he definitely showed emotion. He was full of wonder and speculation; his handsome face filled with a light Venice had not seen there before.

  ‘This ancient craft may have brought the first seeds of life to Earth,’ he said, ‘but as yet we know little about it. Where did it come from? What were its occupants like? Why did they land on Earth? … Every answer we get raises a dozen more questions. So it has always been; so it will always be, until life is extinct …’

  Venice was uncomfortable.

  ‘It sounds almost too big a problem to deal with,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the remark was facile. Every problem breeds men to tackle it; Norman Dall was such a man.

  He smiled at her, and she ached all over.

  Copper swam up to meet them, a city planned and equipped like a great palace. Once upon a time, forgotten generations ago, this had been the ashy crater Copernicus. A great sphincter yawned open in a roof of hyaline tungsten, and their craft floated inside; the hole closed behind them, a mouth swallowing a metal pill. The gravs set them lightly in a landing socket without any perceptible bump.

  ‘Here we are, and here we part,’ Dall said, briskly, standing up and smiling at Venice; his eyes were as grey as a neptunian sea. ‘Thank you for the ride. I can easily hire a transurfacer from here, pick up my kit at Iri, and catch a Twenty Systems ship for Atara and the Fringes within forty-eight hours.’