New Writings in SF 29 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Keith Bulmer

  However, there was one. Less a starting point than a pivot. A maypole around which the galactial maidens danced. It was located a few quintillian light years behind Barnard’s Star. Its distance however was immaterial, since the combined velocities of the solar system and Barnard’s Star itself in relation to it, plus the speed of the ship, was considerably above the theoretical speed of light in a static area.

  Not only did the ship slip over without bump or fuss into supra-space-time, it came out again within hailing distance of Barnard’s Star itself. All exactly in accordance with Karkov’s Law. If indeed the tiny twinkling light ahead of him was Barnard’s Star. At the very beginning, when the great, grey folds of space-time had opened like a dry womb and closed again with a flutter of its myriad shadowy planes, he had resigned himself to the double-cross. Icarus II was not the manned crew ship to Barnard’s Star. No space agency would have named anything other than an expendable probe after so unsuccessful a pioneer as Icarus. The state governments had brought pressure to bear to get rid of him, the anthropologists had pointed out that half the evils of all time had been due to the Prior strain. Only his hostage, hanging by his heels with a good down-town Cockney standing by to twist a pair of skewers up his nostrils, had got him a place on a ship of any sort. That perhaps and the general’s quite honest desire to keep at least some part of an officer’s word inviolate.

  He had no regrets. He, the last of the Priors, had left the world probably for ever, but in return, he had been given the honour of being the first man to pass through the time gap and out again. The first man to experience the indestructible, inviolability of time, stretched out from the beginning to the still unfolding present. To see and to know himself still in battle with the Warrior, still at his point of birth, his mother still on the Mapel Street dead cart. Ever. Ever. Ever. The witch burns eternally at the one moment in time of her burning. Christ hangs for ever on his cross. There and there and there. The great static scroll stretched across the cosmos eternally unchanging, the only movement at the old world’s present where the spool unwinds constantly against the stylus of the minds of men. The folds had pursed their lips and spewed him out. Descending the misty myth with only the time-foreshortened mistiness of a ship around him. Down. Down. Down.

  He was back again on the familiar hot, dry earth of the high Savannah. His old space-ship leaning wrecked and awry on the stony outcrop and his four companions dead and buried in a deep crevice opening at its foot. He sat in the shade of an old wild lemon tree whilst across the clearing a round-shouldered Zijanthropus nuzzled and probed at a dead log for wood lice and beetles. Ever. Ever. Ever. It was only a point static on the scroll of time like any other. But Zijanthropus was moving. Moving towards australopithecus. Time was unfolding as it only did in the conscious present of man’s understanding and awareness of it. He was man now and something was about to happen, to spin off the scroll and nothing that had been for 500,000,000 years would be the same again.

  Australopithecus dropped down from a nut-tree and smiled at him. Young and female, familiar and forgotten as a mother’s breast. Australopithecus himself bearing his teeth preparing to give battle for his mate. A good warrior a Prior must conquer and in due course tame. Cross with australopithecus perhaps. He raised an eyebrow at the female whilst throwing the charging male and pinning him to the ground with an armlock learned in childhood in that other place beyond the stars.

  ‘Hello, Sal!’ he said.

  <>

  * * * *

  A SPACE FOR REFLECTION

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Very much in the superior English tradition, Brian Aldiss presents us with a Stapledonian story of a philosophical quest that embraces the universe of the macrocosm and the universe of the microcosm within us all. Perhaps any young lad blessed with three successive letter f’s in his name would tend to a philosophic bent. It might also be that any energy-hungry society that dismissed a device for mass-producing suns would inevitably suffer from economic decline; but then, this apparent suicidal waywardness but in reality vision beyond materialism, is just what is reflected from that certain small dark corner of the universe...

  * * * *

  There once lived a man called Gordan Ivon Jefffris who achieved galaxy-wide fame at the age of five. This is his story.

  Gordan Ivon Jefffris was born in a period when the major cultures of the galaxy were suffering from a combination of economic depression and spiritual uncertainty. The achievements of man, as he diversified on a million planets, were many and various. And yet, and yet... among the thinking people everywhere - even among ordinary thoughtless people - grew the suspicion that achievement was somehow hollow, as if success were an apple that, once bitten, yielded no juice.

  In an attempt to combat the disillusion, a consortium of leading planets which dubbed itself The Re-Renaissance Worlds arranged a curious competition. The terms of this competition were deliberately left vague. The winner was to be the man or woman who presented something that would contribute most to a fresh direction for mankind. The nature of the submission was left to the ingenuity of the entrants. The prizes were enormous.

  This competition met with almost universal criticism. It was said that it would deflect useful endeavour into what was a dead end, that the idea of competition itself was one of the main concepts which required combating, that things philosophical were best left to philosophers, and so on.

  Those who launched the competition were not deterred. They set no particular store by the idea of one outright winner; their hope was that the whole body of entries might together contribute the sort of vital injection of innovation for which they sought; and they believed that the kinds of entries they got would provide some consensus of opinion as to which way galactic culture was moving, as diagnosed by the best brains.

  Unhappily, the best brains considered themselves above such a competition, and forebore to enter. Submissions were nevertheless almost countless, pouring in from every civilized planet. Some were works of art conceived to inspire; some were technical ingenuities designed to improve the daily lot of ordinary citizens; some were vast works of analysis; some were computerized plans for changing whole societies; some were projects for novel transmutations, for instance for transmuting light into food directly; some were syntheses of different disciplines, expressing gravity as music, or whatever; new languages, new media, new symbolic systems, were put forward; und so weiter.

  In short, the organizers of the competition, and their committees and computers, were provided with much material over which to scratch their heads, much muddle from which they never, ultimately, achieved any significant order.

  They bestowed first prize on a child of five, Gordan Ivon Jefffris, who presented the briefest entry of all. That entry was a sheet of plakin on which the boy had written in a childish hand, ‘The universe has a dark corner, the human soul, which is its reflection.’

  A fresh storm of almost universal criticism greeted the award. It was said that the thought was banal, that the concept of human souls was obsolete by about a million years, that the idea expressed was so pessimistic that it had no place in a competition designed to generate fresh directions, that there was no practical application, that in any case Ching Pin Jones’s prospectus for mass-producing suns was a thousand times more brilliant, und so weiter.

  The organizers stuck to their guns. (They were old and stubborn, and in any case had nothing else to stick to.) They held that one of the things which had brought near-stagnation on a galactic scale was an insane optimism which lent a cloak to exploitation and tyranny in all their forms; that they were on the side of youth, even extreme youth; and that they admired the way in which the boy Jefffris had linked macrocosm and microcosm. Und so weiter.

  Both competition and controversy ensured that livgrams of the five-year-old, his fair hair tousled and becoming, his round face smiling, were flashed to every planet in the galaxy. Fame had never been so universal.

  Gordan Ivon Jefffris
was brought from his backwoods planet and his parents’ cloned-clatbuck farm and installed in the Institute for Creative Research on Dynderkranz, in the Minervan Empire at the heart of the galaxy. There, for twelve years, he specialized in non-specialization, learning randomly from computers, superputers, and parent-figures.

  The teaching was liberal (it was generally agreed that liberalism contributed to the decay of the Minervan Empire), and Jefffris was allowed to some extent to follow his natural bent. He was a perfectly normal child - a fact greeted with delight by half his teachers and dismay by the other half - while manifesting a tendency, evidenced in his prize-winning dictum, to regard man as a vital manifestation of the universe. He divided his study time between the phenomena of the external world and the phenomena of man and his culture.

  The long training was only the preliminary part of Jefffris’ prize. As his days at the Institute drew to a close, the superputer Birth Star, which now administered all his affairs, revealed that unlimited funds were at his disposal for the rest of his days, as long as he maintained an inquiring mind, moved about the galaxy, and reported reflections and findings back to the superputer.

  There was no conflict between superputer’s intentions and boy’s ambitions. Jefffris’ intellectual curiosity had been whetted. He longed to set out into the universe and experience its conditions for himself; the odyssey could last ten lifetimes for all he cared. With a male friend and two girls, competition-winners all, he set out in a superbly equipped flittership to travel whatever distances could be travelled.

  * * * *

  ‘The universe has a dark corner, the human soul, which is its reflection’. The words had travelled round the known galaxy, together with the livgrams of the five-year-old face. The face had been forgotten for almost as long as Jefffris had outlived it; yet the words had not been forgotten. It could not be said that they changed anything, for a general decline continued. But it could be said that people discovered some mystery in them (if only the mystery in what is familiar) and were perhaps reminded that, for all the vastness of the humanized galaxy, it still rested upon the power of words to transmute formlessness into design. So it might be argued that the decline would have been faster had it not been for Jefffris’ dictum.

  However that might be, Jefffris and his companions travelled the civilized worlds without being recognized -fortified by the knowledge that he had lit a light, however tiny, in the skulls of almost everyone he ever met.

  Everywhere, he talked and listened, building up a picture of the spectre that had laid its spell over the galaxy.

  ‘What is wrong with humanity is an ancient wrong,’ said an ancient lady living on a core of a burnt-out sun. She had been an organizer in her day, and understood so much that most people became bemused just by gazing on her face. Consequently, she wore a mask; but she removed it to speak with Jefffris.

  ‘What is wrong with humanity is not what philosophers of this world commonly suppose,’ she said. ‘I mean, that man’s involvement with technology, with its consequent divorce from what is called Nature, impoverishes him. True, that may be the case, but if so it is merely a reflection of a deeper division between intellect and the passions. The Babylonian invention of a written language, back on Earth so long ago, institutionalized a division that was already latent in the psyche of humanity. Writing departmentalizes, detaches. It bestows upon the ratiocinative faculties a dominance they should not have over the play of human emotions. The passions become feared, mistrusted.’

  ‘Whole planets full of people have reverted to Nature, have abandoned literacy,’ said Jefffris. ‘The results have never been anything that responsible people would wish to copy. I visited one such planet, Bol-Rayoeo. Everyone’s every breath was ruled by a maniacal belief in astrology, the human instruments of which were an iron priesthood. That priesthood had control over a series of holy factories in which machines were made - elaborate but non-functional machines. The machines were sacrificed in specific dates at specific hours. A paranoid mathematics was their language, yet such was their fear of a written alphabet that a mere glimpse of the letter A scrawled on a rock could kill them at once.’

  ‘The first effect of a written literature,’ said the ancient dame, ‘is that it undermines the power of Continuers. In the Old World, Continuers were as vital to society as kings or slaves. They moved among all ranks and ages of society, conveying in their persons - in their gestures, their faces, their very breath - history, myth, story. Those elements which were alive, and lived through countless generations, became dead when impaled on a page, and the Continuers ceased. Records have been substituted for legend, the letter for life.

  ‘You yourself, Gordan Ivon, may through fortune regard yourself as a free agent. Yet you are a slave of history. You are gathering facts, a profession which superseded hunting, a dusty parody of it, sans blood. The search for knowledge is too highly lauded.’

  ‘You are yourself consulted as a repository of knowledge, madam.’

  ‘The search for knowledge is an artificial goal - and, even worse, an achievable one. Eventually, all knowledge in the universe will be garnered, reduced to recorded impulses. Which will mean the absorption of all that is real. Even our breathing will be codified. Classification will have supplanted diversification, all processes will terminate.’

  He laughed. ‘You speak as if it were a mystical process.’

  ‘It is a mystical process. The further we go, the closer we come to our origins.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I am sorry to find you so pessimistic.’

  ‘Operative in each of us is the blind optimism of biological process; but you will appreciate from what I have already said that words themselves, in my view, tend towards the pessimistic, since they represent an energy-sink from life to abstraction.’

  Jefffris was silent a while, picking his way among her statements. ‘Is it mere coincidence that you speak more than once of breathing, as if it holds a special symbolism for you?’

  ‘There is no “coincidence”,’ the ancient lady said, resuming her mask. ‘Consciousness is the breath of the universe.’

  * * * *

  Jefffris visited the system of Trilobundora, where the three central planets had been welded into one unit by means of transuranic metals. These enormous struts formed FTL roads for UMV traffic. Trilobundora was famed as one of the great industrial centres of the galaxy; in proof of this, all about it for many light years were impoverished planets, populated only by old and broken people. Trilobundora was a Mecca to which all went hoping to be turned into gold.

  He visited a great school on Primdora, where children were trained to be administrators from the age of two onwards. The children poured out after class, flocking at every level of the enormous tower to meet every sort of flying, leaping, and wheeled vehicle which came to bear them away.

  Plunging to the lowest level, Jefffris found a stooped man of middle age waiting at an entrance with his hands in his pockets. A gale blew, carrying rain with it, although the air was still and dry at higher levels.

  ‘It’s always like this here,’ said the man. ‘Something to do with the structure of the building, I guess. Creates its own storms.’ His voice was neutral, passive. He never looked directly at Jefffris.

  A small boy came running out of the entrance and stopped before he got to the stooped man. The man put out his hand, took the boy’s, and, with a word of encouragement, started to walk away with him. Jefffris fell in beside him.

  ‘Are you the only parent here who meets his child on foot?’

  ‘I have to watch every cent. Besides, public transport doesn’t run where we live. It’s a slum district. I’m not ashamed; it’s not my fault. You may have noticed I’m the oldest person to collect a child. I’m not this lad’s father. I’m his grandfather. His parents were killed on their holiday, so now I look after him.’

  The boy glanced up at Jefffris to see how he took this information but said nothing. Then he turned his pale face down again to his shoes
.

  ‘Is he a consolation?’ Jefffris asked.

  ‘He’s a good enough lad.’ The man had a listless way about him which seemed to have communicated itself to the boy. After a pause in which he appeared to weigh whether it was worth saying more, he went on, ‘You see the trouble is that the accident which killed my daughter and her man occurred on the V-lane of the FTLR between Primdora and Secdora. Their vehicle collided with a Secdora vehicle right at mid-point between planetary demarcations. Legislation could not decide which planetary government should pay compensation, Primdora or Secdora. The issue is still being heard in the courts. That’s been the situation for five years now.

  ‘Meanwhile, I couldn’t work because I had to look after the boy. So I’ve forfeited my state pension. Now he has started school, I have a small morning job, which helps. I could have got someone in to look after him and worked myself, but that would have brought legal complications, since I am still not officially his guardian, and they might have taken him away into care. I want to be his official guardian, but I’m separated from my woman and she is litigating to become his guardian. I think she’s only after the money which may accrue, so I fight back.’