The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  ‘… When I shall be going back to the hospital satellite,’ she said hollowly. She tried, but could not raise a farewell smile. She held the hand that he had briefly shaken, watching as he walked away, tall, independent, with that same suggestion of purpose. Then he was lost among the trees and the people clustering round the entrance to the subway.

  Five hours later, Norman Dall was again away from the thronging crowds of Luna, stalking through the desolation of Iri. On his left stood the ruins of one of the last thermonuclear power stations, relic of the age before cosmu energy. As Dall walked across its grounds, the old dome still stretched high above him, ghostly reflections here and there marring its transparency, but the lunar vacuum had long since seeped in, making his light seal-suit a necessity. Here it was that Alvira had had her accident – although he tried not to dwell on that thought.

  When he came to a great black ramp sloping steeply into the ground, Dall switched on his headlight and went in. The ramp dived down a long way. Once, it had borne radioactive waste into the bowels of the moon. Coming finally to a vertical gravity shaft, Dall activated it, stepping into nothing and falling controlledly down. He tried not to remember that his Partner, Alvira, had been with him on his last descent. Counting off the seconds, he decelerated, stopped, and climbed through a small air lock.

  Dall was some ten miles below the lunar surface, standing in a large cavern. Here the last load of radioactive matter had been vaulted. Here too, long after the plant had fallen into disuse, a collapse of part of the roof had revealed the ancient, unknown space vehicle which Dall had mentioned to Venice. The collapse had only been discovered by accident a year ago, when the local government had sent for Dall and Alvira to investigate the find.

  A temporary, light alloy hut stood by the fall. Dall went over to it, his foot-falls noiseless here, even to himself. They had used this hut for their quarters through many happy, engrossed months. Switching the lights on, Dall hesitated only for a second before going in.

  He worked methodically for a long while, sorting out papers, books, samples, photographs, tools and other paraphernalia, bundling things together to be taken up the gravity shaft. Once his personal radio called, but he worked on without so much as glancing at his wrist. At last he paused for a rest, strolling over to the door of the hut to gaze into the great cavern.

  Venice Rollands was running towards him, unzipping her seal-suit.

  He asked her no questions, perhaps because he guessed at once what she was going to say, perhaps because she hardly gave him a chance to speak.

  ‘Forgive me for following you!’ she exclaimed, before she had reached him. ‘I tried to return to my home in Copper, but I knew before I got there I should never rest. I had to come. I had to … I radioed you but got no answer, so I followed your footsteps in the dust. Oh, Norman, say you’re not angry!’

  ‘I don’t anger easily,’ he said, ‘but I wish you had not come here. There is nothing for you here.’

  ‘I hope you will soon feel differently!’ Venice exclaimed. She pressed past him into the hut, confronting him defiantly, looking at once excited and exciting. ‘I have come to ask you – humbly – ardently – to take me as your next Partner. I’ve loved you ever since I saw you, ten years ago. I’ll fit into your life, go wherever you want to go, cover the Twenty Systems with you, do whatever you want. I’m not a child, or a fool. Please accept me, Norman, you’ll not regret it.’

  Sighing, Dall half-turned away before answering, as if he could hardly face her.

  ‘No man could say “No” whole-heartedly to so splendid a – an offer,’ he said, colouring slightly. ‘You are very beautiful, Venice, and the feel of life flowing from you is perhaps the most precious thing in the universe. But I cannot have you for a Partner.’

  ‘I know you are an immortal!’ she flashed. ‘That makes no difference to me at all.’

  ‘I fear it makes all the difference to me.’

  Venice clutched his arm, bending to kiss his hand when he resisted.

  ‘I know you are over nine hundred years old,’ she said, ‘but I don’t care. I’d love you. I want you – and I’ll only stay with you for ten years, that’s all. Then I’ll be thirty-five, and I’ll leave you when my face starts to line. I’ll just vanish, Norman, I swear – I wouldn’t saddle your eternal youth with an old woman!’

  ‘No,’ he said definitely. He moved round the table that he had piled with equipment in an attempt to keep away from her. ‘Such a liaison is not possible between a mortal and an immortal.’

  ‘Why not?’ she challenged. ‘I know it is possible! Mentally and physically possible. Kiss me, make love to me here, you will see!’

  She stopped abruptly, putting one hand up to her face, letting tears well from under her closed eyelids.

  ‘I’m not really the shameless creature I sound,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, Norman, I want you; try to understand …’

  ‘It is because I understand I say “no”,’ he replied. ‘This situation is unpleasant and embarrassing for us both. Do not make me say more.’

  ‘You must say more! Why should you not? You have enough time … centuries … always young! Norman, I know the statistics about the immortals; there’s only one born to every ten million of the population. Alvira was immortal, but when we had to graft an ordinary human lung into her, to save her life, her gift was destroyed – she now has only a mortal life span left to her. You may be a long while before you find another Partner.’

  ‘And you call that saving Alvira’s life,’ Dall said. ‘Can’t you see, my dear girl, that this miracle of surgery you have performed will only seem like a ten minute reprieve to Alvira? She was looking forward to millennia of work and investigation – and now she hasn’t half a century … What you people have done to her is only a mockery, devoid of understanding.’

  Silence fell between them. Venice just stood looking across the table at him, staring, hit for the first time by a real intimation of what immortality must feel like.

  ‘Let me explain a few facts to you,’ Dall said, keeping his tone cool so that she should not become excited again. ‘Immortality is the next stage in man’s eternal development – we immortals are born of mortal stock. At present, as you say, we number only one in every ten million; but in a few more of your prolific generations, it will be one in seven million, one in a million, one in a hundred thousand. The day will dawn, eventually, when no man is mortal.

  ‘This is the evolutionary trend. Contrary to all that has been speculated about it, it is painful for no-one. We are useful to mortals, we enjoy our own lives.

  ‘We enjoy them simply because the temper of our emotions modifies itself to fit our condition, just as with mortal man. I do not anger nor cry; I make no excesses into lust – as you invite me to do – nor do I deviate from what I conceive to be the truth. Within me you would find no greed, envy or impatience, for these are the natural follies of three score years and ten. Everything for me comes, in Spinoza’s noble phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, for I am the eternal species. I relish every day and week, but I relish it slowly. I can afford to be bored! But you would find me dull.’

  The words were provoking. At once, Venice was stirred into action again. She came round the table, clasping Dall’s hands in hers; his were slightly cold.

  ‘I would never find you dull, my dear,’ she said.

  ‘But I should find you dull!’ he declared. ‘A true, rich life needs a couple of thousand years in which to develop. There are so many kinks and complications of character to be aired and exercised, so many worlds and thoughts and experiences to be sampled … I could not begin to tell you, Venice. Can’t you see that if you lived all your brief life with me, it would still appear so short to me as to be meaningless. That is why we immortals never stay among one group of mortals for long. To me – I do not say it to hurt you – you are as unreachable as a two-dimensional image. If we met every day of your existence, I could still have of you only the sight of a silhouette.’


  ‘Are not silhouettes sometimes beautiful?’ she cried, lost, floundering. She no longer touched him, and he moved away. Without looking at her, he picked the first lot of kit off the table, carrying it outside and over to the gravity shaft.

  He had gone to and fro, and was leaving the hut with the third load before Venice spoke again.

  ‘You’re dead inside!’ she exclaimed. ‘You never die because all the while you are dead inside! All you care about is a buried, million-year-old space ship. You have no human feelings!’

  ‘No mortal feelings,’ he corrected, politely turning back to address her. ‘As you say, I do care intensely about the riddle of the Ganymede-Atara-Iri ships; what’s more, I have the time to solve that riddle eventually, though I know it will only lead to other riddles. But I care about other things also. I love my Partners, for instance, and shall find another some year. We shall probably produce a child – but we are not geared to propagate like rabbits, as mortals do, because evolution has this admirable way of dealing with things, cutting the suit to fit the cloth.’

  Bending down, Dall picked up his equipment and continued walking across to the gravity shaft.

  Venice looked hopelessly round. All the stuff on the table had been cleared: Dall would not be coming back to the hut again. With a cry, she ran into the cavern, calling to him, till the heavy echoes pressed about her ears like ash.

  ‘Norman, Norman! Listen to me! Things can’t be as bad as you pretend. You’re only upset because of what happened to Alvira: you need someone to look after you. And I was talking nonsense when I said you were dead inside. That’s not how I think of you! I don’t think of you as a monster but as a god. Let me share that godliness with you for a year – there, I ask no more, just a year. A year, Norman – it wouldn’t seem like five minutes to you. And I’d love and serve you all that year.’

  ‘Stop it! Have you no – no dignity?’ he snapped. He drew himself up before the air lock, frowning at her, his body stiff, his alarming grey eyes narrowed.

  ‘You will not face the facts,’ he said, almost gently, ‘which means you are unbalanced. You see me as some sort of an eternal father figure; I dislike the notion intensely. I dislike the thought of your feverish cosseting. And you also seem not to realise that every silly young female mortal that discovers what I am goes through the same set of obscene, undignified antics. You are all exactly alike, prancing like puppets. You are as featureless – and as inviting – as a flock of sheep. Even for me, there is a limit to patience. Good-bye, Sister Rollands.’

  He turned into the air lock and was gone.

  The beautiful young man who would live for ever, who would be forever young, forever beautiful, forever ardent, had vanished. The girl stood where she was for many minutes, fists clenched, weeping at the injustice of life. Then she began planning how she would tell it all to Sister Argyre.

  They Shall Inherit

  The man from the Transfederation Health sat impatiently in the glossy waiting-room, his portcase lying beside him. Having got in from Koramandel only two days ago, he still bore flecks of vacuum tan on his face. He was a straggling, untidy man with an ill-fitting collar and floppy ankle-boots; his fingers drummed unceasingly on his bony knees.

  The discreetly masked blonde at the Enquiries desk ignored his occasional starts of movement, which suggested he might suddenly jump up and go. Occasionally he looked at her, but most often he looked away. Yinnisfarians did not attract him; he considered them corrupted by the power they wielded in the galaxy. He had been waiting here for twenty minutes, and that to him seemed a subtle insult. Through green hyaline panels he could see the lift of the EAMH, the Experimental Applied Mutation Hospital, moving, leaving him here isolated.

  Finally he rose, skirted the flowering dicathus on a low table; and said to the girl in a moderate voice, ‘This really is too bad, you know. Tedden Male was supposed to see me at bleep three and a third sharp. I made this appointment three weeks ago, before leaving Koramandel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Djjckett Male,’ the masked girl said, using the Yinnisfarian mode of address. ‘I’ll ring his office again, if you like. I can’t think what might be delaying him; he is usually so punctual.’

  She had scarcely laid one irreproachable hand on the vibroduct before a broad man in a black 1-swathe swept into the waiting-room, to pause by the desk with a certain theatrical flourish. He was bald. He smiled. He came forward with his hand extended palm upward in greeting. He was Moderator Senior Ophsr. IV Phi Tedden, co-ordinating Director of the EAMH.

  A flurry of boisterous apologies and irritable ‘quite-all-right’s’ enveloped the two men as Tedden led Djjckett up to his office on the next floor. Followed closely by his portcase, Djjckett found himself in a sumptuous room decorated with blown-up high-speed microacaths of fissioning chromosomes. He settled himself into an enveloper and jacked up his feet.

  ‘You know I would be the last male to keep Transfed Health waiting,’ Tedden protested, also enveloping. He proffered a box of affrohales. Djjckett refused; Tedden shut the box with a snap, not taking one himself. He had a powerful but curiously blank face, with small red veins patterning the sides of his nose; his mask was a perfunctory affair, covering little more than his ears, jaws and chin. Beneath his assumed heartiness was a distinct unease, which Djjckett noted with pleasure without comprehending. With nervous emphasis he added, ‘No, I wouldn’t keep you waiting for anything.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t inferring you kept me waiting for nothing,’ Djjckett said, smiling under his moustache.

  Looking away from the acid witticism, Tedden said, ‘A personal matter kept me. Again I apologise.’

  ‘Well, I expect you know what I have come about, Moderator Tedden Male,’ Djjckett said, his voice assuming a more official tone. ‘Public opinion has forced Transfed to take some steps to allay certain rumours circulating about EAMH. As senior member of your old Koramandel Fraternity, I was deputed – ’

  ‘Yes, I have all the documents you people sent me,’ Tedden interrupted. ‘Fraternal Djjckett Male, let me put it to you like this. We – I don’t mean you and I personally – represent two opposed camps. Transfed Health, by its nature, is cautious, reactionary – it has to be; we at EAMH are bold, progressive – because we have to be. You are afraid of the effects on human beings of the gene-shifts with which we have been so successfully experimenting. Lay galactic opinion, if I may say so, has nothing to do with the matter; ultimately, it always goes wherever it is led, and in this case it is Transfed’s duty to lead it in our direction, just as it has won acceptance for its own recent gene-shift experiments on animals. I have made this quite clear in signals and vibros written to your people over the last couple of years.’

  ‘Humans and animals are two different things, and in this matter – ’ Djjckett began.

  ‘In this matter – forgive my taking the words from your mouth – in this matter, the whole material future of Yinnisfar is concerned. We are at the cross-roads; you must be aware that our economic position in the galaxy is unstable, and must constantly expand to remain stationary?’

  ‘Of that I am as aware as you are, Moderator. But I do not want to talk about galactic economics; I wish to discuss the mothers and new-born children placed under your care here.’

  Tedden put his big hands on the desk, palm down, and made a heavy face.

  ‘The two subjects are inseparably intertwined, Mr. Djjckett, let me assure you of that. But we shall get nowhere if we wrangle. Come, perhaps it would be best if you had to look into one of our wards, and see something of what we are achieving.’

  He rose. Djjckett reluctantly did the same. Tedden ushered him towards the door; Djjckett dodged under his shepherding arm and went back to his enveloper to look at his portcase. When he saw it remained quietly where it was, he returned to Tedden’s side, wearing the look of a man prepared to face the worst.

  They moved together down a soundless corridor, through two doors, and into an observation booth overlooking a ward c
ontaining six small cots. The cots were all occupied.

  ‘Pologlass; we see them, they do not see us,’ Tedden explained, glancing at his finger bleep.

  Djjckett stared through the windows, prepared for something horrible.

  The temperature inside the small ward was evidently high, for the six cots held infants who lay there without coverings. A nurbot moved efficiently from cot to cot, changing napkins with a rubbery deftness. Only three of the babies were awake; two of them stood shakily, supporting themselves by the bars and watching the attendant machine; the other, having just woken, was also anxious to see what was happening. With slow, tentative movements, it pulled itself up, feet wide apart, pink knees slightly bent, until it stood erect. Uttering an inarticulate cry, it staggered two steps forward, grabbed the cot side as if its life depended on it, and hung there gazing vaguely in the general direction of its nurse.

  ‘Splendid exhibition; might have done it especially for our benefit,’ Tedden said, with gratification and pride. He added quietly, ‘And all these six babies are under forty-eight hours old.’

  ‘You can surely see why we think this experiment is monstrous,’ Djjckett said, his lanky body shaking inside its rather loose suit, as he and Tedden walked back down the corridor. In his mind, the picture still burned of that tiny, wizened, red thing standing unaided in its cot; it made him feel as sick as if he had seen a woman thrashed or a criminal executed.

  ‘You are raising monsters,’ he added, indignantly, when Tedden did not at once reply. It was one of Djjckett’s characteristics that, caught on the wrong foot, he could be ruffled easily and then become unable (or so he feared) to express his irritation. He waved a hand and added, ‘as for the luckless and deluded mothers you have here in your power, they should never – ’

  Tedden showed real anger. Normally he was rather stolid and slow to anger; today his nerves were already on edge. Stopping so suddenly that Djjckett jumped, he said, ‘Just try and remember the facts, will you? People come to the EAMH voluntarily, men and women with an eye to the future, eager to take advantage of the discoveries we have made and are making. D’you think they prattle about monsters?’