Super-State

by By Brian Aldiss

  ‘Yes, king penguins.’

  ‘Seals.’

  ‘Walruses.’

  ‘The odd albatross . . .’

  ‘But this is space. There’s no atmosphere on Europa.’

  ‘You think we don’t know that? We’re not stupid, you know. We’re at the university.’

  ‘We’re joking, Lisa, dear. People have lost their sense of humour these days. Get a life!’

  ‘Thank you, ladies, and now — back to the studio.’

  * * * *

  A closely guarded base on Honolulu. In one chamber, diplomats from many states were arguing matters out, and throwing up a cloud of detail. In a smaller room nearby, surrounded by their interpreters, the Presidents of the EU and the USA, together with the Chairman of China, Cheng Hu, were discussing global matters.

  Glasses of French mineral water fizzed on their side tables.

  President Regan Bonzelli of the USA was speaking at length about the effect that the discovery of life on Europa would have on the world economy.

  ‘It can but draw the peoples of our world closer together. We now have this extraordinary new focus on which to concentrate. It is essential that we establish as rapidly as possible something like a colony on one of Jupiter’s satellites in the neighbourhood of Europa. Our people are already drawing up plans for Ganymede.

  ‘Our choice for base has to be Ganymede or Callisto. Ganymede is closer to Europa and offers a good prospect of water-ice availability. A recent fly-by indicates plenty of tholin deposits — that’s a mix of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. Probably dumped there by a comet, we suspect. All necessary elements for a military base.

  ‘Besides which, Ganymede is the biggest satellite in the solar system, so that’s kind of a recommendation.

  ‘Have no doubt, gentlemen, our cultures are about to be drawn out towards the gas giants. Such enterprise will require enormous investment. So my nation’s policy is that we should sink our corporate differences and go into this together. After all, the discovery of alien life serves to impress upon us that our cultures — American, European, Chinese—have many more similarities than differences. The profits will ultimately be enormous—not just in knowledge but in mineral wealth, engineering know-how, et cetera, et cetera.’

  The Chinese Chairman spoke. ‘You are proposing this in the name of profit, or in the name of common good? Which is it to be? To our way of thought, profit is ultimately less corrupting than the idealistic notion of common good. Or really, of good of any kind. Let me illustrate this to you by way of example, which I take from the history of Western science.

  ‘The ancient Greeks had a strong belief in beauty. The circle embodied their ideal of perfection. So the hypothesis was that the planets moved in circles. Plato in particular had this aesthetic idea, carried almost to madness. Aristarchus thought he had proof of the hypothesis, showing that all the planets went round the Sun in circular motions. This was proof positive of the good. But along came Aristotle and this perception was rejected for two thousand years. Of course, Chinese astronomers—’

  ‘Thanks, Cheng Hu, but we do not need this history lesson. What point are you making?’

  Unperturbed, the Chairman said, ’It is simply that what is regarded as good gets in the way of truth. Copernicus finally reinstated the belief in circular orbits round the Sun. But it needed a mathematician, your Johannes Kepler, to calculate that the orbits are elliptical and the Sun is not even central but merely at one focus of the system.

  ‘It is because Kepler was not some do-gooder but a pure mathematician that we have been able to progress to the point where we visit a moon of Jupiter and discover alien life there.

  ‘You see my point now? Mathematics has nothing to do with goodness. Plato and Aristotle killed off Greek science. It is hard to acknowledge this, but we must live our lives according to brutal facts and not rosy hopes.’

  The President of the EU said, ‘Er, so are you saying that you are supporting collaboration on a massive Jovian development enterprise or not?’

  ‘It is sufficiently clear what I have said, sir,’ replied Cheng Hu with dignity. He folded his hands in his lap.

  ‘I have another problem to put before you two gentlemen,’ said de Bourcey, after a pause in which he sipped his mineral water rather noisily. ‘Just at a time when the EU is putting in place a Utopian scheme based on the SAC formula, we are threatened by subversive forces from without. And not only without. My son’s new bride—the celebrated restaurateur, Esme Brackentoth—was spirited away, vanished off the face of the Earth. Clearly the work of Tebarou.

  ‘And then — this is most disconcerting — a pair of refugees committed a suicide pact in my palace at San Guinaire. Incredible! Horrific! Inexplicable! — and therefore extremely menacing. A warning, no doubt of that. Another reason why we have to strike against Tebarou.’

  ‘And not simply to justify your fleet of highly expensive new SS20 fighter-bombers?’ asked Bonzelli.

  ‘Oh, I shall send in ground troops,’ said de Bourcey, recklessly.

  ‘You shall have US backing — if you are agreeable to coming in on the Jupiter enterprise with major investment.’

  ‘I will come in on the Jupiter enterprise if you, Cheng Hu, will agree not to interfere in my dealings with Tebarou,’ de Bourcey suggested.

  Cheng Hu nodded his head, closed his eyes, and asked, ‘Why are you so eager for war with this small Eastern country on whom my people are bound to look benevolently? It seems they have done you only a very small amount of harm. They are claiming that you sank a ship with four thousand Tebarese aboard — which is quite a large harm, no?’

  De Bourcey consulted in whispers with his aide before replying. ’Our information is that the Tebarese have developed a super-weapon, which they can deliver anywhere on the globe. Our information is that it was this super-weapon which struck the Greenland glacial shield, and not some vague meteorite from space.’

  The Chinese Chairman also consulted with a senior minister standing behind him, ’a man without lemonade’, as the local slang had it. When the whispering was done, Cheng Hu said, ‘Your hypothesis is both interesting and totally plausible, except that we understand the missile came in low at an angle of possibly thirty degrees. The debris from the blast clearly points eastwards, which is inconveniently contradictory for your government, since it proves the strike came from a westerly direction.’

  Not an eyelid batted on de Bourcey’s face. ‘After launch, the super-weapon travelled in an eastwards direction all round the globe before smashing into Greenland.’

  After a silence, Cheng Hu gave a smile and said, ‘Your statement bears out what I have said regarding the good and the mathematical. Therefore, my country will endeavour to withhold its sympathy towards Tebarou, and concentrate instead on making a success of the enterprise involving alien life in the Jupiter area, and governing it as expediently as possible.’

  The three men rose and shook hands with considerable warmth.

  After which, de Bourcey went to the nearest ambient terminal and called Air Vice Marshal Pedro Souto at the Toulouse Air Base.

  * * * *

 
  Reality is a human proposition. It represents something unfulfilled. It is a delusional system. The concept ‘north’ loses definition when we stand at the North Pole; we cannot then ‘go north’. Reality cannot be said to exist, not in the way that, say, the universe exists. Reality is a concept, a conspiracy. Concepts belong in that category where things cannot be said to exist or not to exist. What you and I indicate by the word ‘green’ may be to point to two different colours.

  Just as soldiers use the word ’defence’ to mean ’attack’.>

  * * * *

  General Gary Fairstepps rose early as usual. He noted as he stood in the shower that the hours of daylight
were growing shorter. He grumbled to himself about the behaviour of Jack Harrington.

  ‘Never thought much of that chap Harrington. Always dressed to the nines. Much preferred her. It’s true Rose writes absolute piffle but she’s a pretty woman. Almost as good-looking as Amy Haze — very high rating on the old shaggability scale. I was making some progress with Rose, till I put my foot in it.

  ‘She read me some weedy bit she had just written about a lord of somewhere-or-other walking in a wood, enjoying the snowdrops. This lord chap had a cat following him. Seemed to me pretty damned silly. I said to her, “Why not a dog? A labrador or maybe a mastiff?” So she said didn’t I think a cat was prettier? She said dogs were smelly things. That got my goat a bit. I’m afraid I told her her books were rubbish. Life was not like that.

  ‘So then her hanger-on, this dandy Jack Harrington, he defends her. “Maybe life is not like that,” he said, puffing himself up. “A novel does not have to be an imitation of life,” — and so on and so forth. I wasn’t going to be put right by the likes of him. I mean, I’m no literary critic. All the same. I told ‘em straight. I do a fair bit of reading. My dander was up by then. “Read truth, not pretty lies,” I said. “Truth takes many forms. Read the masterpiece of last century, Solzhenitsyn’sThe Gulag Archipelago. That dread book contains all of life, its misery and grandeur, its triumphs and its shit.”

  ‘By the way Rose’s mouth went all wizened and she said she did not use that rude word, I knew I was finished with her. I got my hat and came away, fuck it.’

  As he towelled himself dry, Fairstepps said to himself, ‘I’ll bloody well try my luck with old Amy.’

  Once he was perfumed and dressed, he walked briskly across the park, down the rue de la Madelaine, to the demure little house on the canal bank. When he rang the security phone, a voice asked who he was. He recognised the voice as Amygdella’s android. He said, ’I’m Gary. Tell her I am interested in her practice of amaroli and wish to learn more.’

  He stood watching a spider crawl out from a hole in the brickwork and lower itself to the ground. He reflected that a man from the past would not find this street much changed over the centuries. People in the past had tended to imagine the future with buildings all glass and concrete and tall; they had reckoned without all the excellent new applications which preserved ancient structures. Fairstepps had had his own modest house preserved, safe from everything bar earthquakes.

  The doorfone spoke with a woman’s voice. ‘It’s ever so early, Gary, dear. I’m only just out of bed. Was there something in particular you wanted?’

  ‘I’m off to war, Amy. Wanted to say goodbye. And I hope to learn more about your amaroli. Don’t you do that sort of thing early in the morning?’

  He felt himself getting excited as he waited for her response.

  ‘Come on, dear! I can’t stand here for ever. Let me in.’

  A pause before Amy spoke again.

  ‘We are civilians, you know, General. Not so good at taking orders . . .’

  The lock buzzed. He entered. A drowsy smell of coffee and pot lingered in the hallway. A decadent lot here. He sniffed it before taking the elevator up to the second floor. A young woman greeted him. Fairstepps recognised her from previous visits as Amy’s friend Tassti, the yakophrenia lady, very dark and statuesque. She wore nothing but a transparent nightie and a languid air. He had a good look.

  ‘Bit early, dear, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling not especially broadly. ‘Would you care for a coffee now you’re here?’

  ‘No, no, thank you, dear! He glanced about restlessly. ‘Look, I’m an old friend of Amy’s. Is she up?’

  “Fraid we don’t do breakfast.’

  ‘I’m not after breakfast. I’m after Amy.’

  ‘You’re rather previous as yet. Amy’s not dressed. What do you expect at this hour? Sit down and watch the ambient.’

  He decided to shout. Calling Amy’s name produced results. She answered distantly. ‘I’m in the bathroom. Come in.’

  ‘There you go, then,’ Fairstepps said briskly to Tassti, giving her a military scowl. He marched through to the bathroom, tapped, and walked in.

  Amy too was in a negligee. Her face was made up, her hair was still down. She had draped herself by the handbasin, with one shapely leg showing provocatively. The general ground to a halt, saying admiringly, ’Heavens, Amy, how positively pornographic you look!’

  ‘How dare you! I am positively saintly. I have just been talking to my guru in India.’

  ‘Hm. So that remark didn’t go down too well. Sorry. I only meant I think you look a bit tempting to a man.’

  ‘Tempting? In what way?’ Her manner was cold and distant.

  ‘The usual way, of course, dammit.’ He noticed a glass standing on a side table, half filled with an amber liquid. ‘Look, please don’t be huffy, Amy, my dear. I just wished to bid you farewell before I leave for the East. How’s the amaroli going?’

  Amy went and lifted the glass up to the light. She smiled at him in a purely meretricious fashion. ‘Since you find me so tempting, perhaps you would like a sip?’

  The challenge brought out the soldier in him. He thought of all the poisonous liquors he had drunk in his time. Surely he could survive a sip of a girl’s piss. Particularly a girl as lovely as Amy. Besides, the honour of the Fairstepps was at stake. He was not going to back out and let a girl get the better of him. He reached for the glass.

  ‘Uh-uh!’ She lifted the glass out of reach. ‘Since you are going to war, you brave man, you shall have a special treat. Tell no one of this. You shall drink from source!’

  Setting the glass down, she slowly raised her garment, revealing to him her perfect thighs, her neatly brushed mons Veneris and her nether lips. She opened her legs.

  The general gave a gasp of admiration and experienced something akin to awe. He found himself sinking to his knees before this pleasurable sight. She smiled down on him.

  She made him place his lips on hers. She held his head there. He groaned with pleasure, as he buried his nose in her little bush.

  ‘Are you ready to drink, mon général?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She began to urinate. He began to drink. But supply exceeded demand by a great deal. He pressed his face closer, half drowning, gulping. The liquid went spurting in all directions.

  He fell back, red-faced and gasping. His suit was soaked.

  ‘So you weren’t so thirsty after all!’ she said, laughing. ‘Get up! Go home, you old sod!’

  He reached for a towel. ‘Lucky I wasn’t wearing my bloody uniform,’ he said.

  * * * *

  Archbishop Byron Arnold Jones-Simms was speaking in the great cathedral of Koln.

  ‘Now is the time for us to be proud and yet humble. Proud because we have the courage to face up to our enemies. Humble because we need to have God on our side or we are nothing. What do we really know about God? We know he is unknowable. He is incomprehensible and ineffable.

  ‘We might, without being in any way blasphemous, say the same about a newborn baby. It is unknowable, incomprehensible, and ineffable. But it will change. God never changes. We are humble before his immutability.

  ‘Babies are not immutable. Change is built in to their genes. They grow, they grow up. We hope they will find God’s grace. But to permit them to grow freely they need peace. It is a sad paradox that peace can come only through a time of war.

  ‘We cannot ever know how God feels about war. It may indeed be a part of his eternal all-encompassing plan. We do know, however, that he created the universe ex nihilo, and created it entire. So he looks down upon the alien life on Europa just as he looks down on us all here on Earth. And so we hope that God is on our side, as we believe we are on God’s side. Amen.’

  * * * *

  ‘Hi. Rick O’Brien calling. Conditions here are very bad. We are being constantly bombarded by intense radiation belts. Rations low, oxygen foul. But what you will want to know is about the life form we have nett
ed.

  ‘We definitely have a life form here. Maybe not dissimilar to early life on Earth before there was any free oxygen. We were going to call it Archaea, but it is no microbe. So we call it Eucarya. Its body is about the size of a snowball and is white in colour Its surface area is marked by two ridges, running from what we assume to be its front to its rear; where there are two rather meaty flagellants, extending for ten or eleven centimetres beyond the body. Of course it has no eyes, A delicate pipe protruding a centimetre from the front suggests the equivalent of a mouth.

  ‘We ran Eucarya through the geneoscope and what do you know? Its genes number in the ninety thousands. Human genes as you know number only thirty thousand. We have not yet figured out the How of this, or the Why. Maybe so far from the Sun you simply need more priming, but as yet it’s a mystery.