Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  “Simeon!” the Swede begged. “This is more ridiculous than any of the guilty contortions Andrea performs.”

  The Englishwoman darted him a poison glance, moving closer to the Indian geneticist till her body was brushing his.

  “It was just a natural disaster, don’t you see?” soothed Gunnar. “As has happened before. As happened to the dinosaurs. Yet we can understand and mold our fate, unlike the great reptiles! That is our humanity.”

  Shaking his head, Simeon refused to understand.

  These petty scratchings in the earth’s devastation that the new plantings were . . . in a vale of dry bones, while the wretched and the meek had all been taken away into Heaven—to become those dancing ghostly veils of beauty high above the clouds. That symbol of Damnation planted in the crumbling soil: the gilded wooden cross with the breeze fluttering out from it, the white skull against the red of Hell’s spiritual fires which burn but consume not. . . And oh, the ragged, fervent survivors—these Crusaders!

  It was the last crusade of all: a crusade of total faith and total despair.

  Woltjer shook his head stupidly as though his ears were full of water. He brandished his rifle; he blustered. No one paid much attention.

  Andrea twined her arms round the Indian’s neck, kissing him furiously before the gaze of Africans and Afrikaners.

  Gunnar Marholm had retreated into a cold northern fastness of the mind, blankly gazing across the African soil at the glint of white bones.

  Above the clouds, danced a rainbow joy of colors.

  There was such silence, but for the faint sigh of wind. No birds or beasts anywhere.

  “Did not ought to have been Sirius,” blustered Major Woltjer, squinting round him, useless rifle at the ready, where no threat loomed. The silence gulped his words down as a cow a fly.

  The Church of the Abandonment squatted silently, eating or resting.

  Frensch and Ambola went back to their standard and rested by it.

  After a while Simeon walked over too, and sat under it.

  There was the wind.

  And the wild veils aflame in the sky, violet and green and rose.

  And the emptiness of the earth.

  A TIME-SPAN TO CONJURE WITH

  Disconcertingly, only one small township was visible on the entire planet’s surface, though forty years had passed since we first set down the colonists. Even this we had to hunt for by heat-scan for quite a long time before we could locate it optically, because—even more disconcertingly—it was situated defensively at the very heart of the largest continent, almost as though they expected ravenous beasts to crawl out of the sea, sending long tentacles squirming far inland.

  When the colony had been founded forty years earlier—eight years by our ship’s calendar—it had been set on the shore of a bland and fruitful ocean. We expected to find a thriving port and harbor on our return, with sea links through the chains of islands to the minor continents, and a rather slower opening up of the vast empty interior—sending out feelers around the indigenous primitives without disrupting them. Instead of which, the colony had crawled inland—as far inland as it could get . . .

  Yet it could hardly be tidal waves they feared, as the world was particularly unseismic: unmountain, unrifted, a world of gentle prairie where the merest pimple of a butte was a major landmark; nor tides either, as there were only two diminutive moons, each barely larger than our own starship.

  “Crawled is the word,” I remarked to Commander Marinetti, as we at last watched a telescope blow-up of the only town—while Resnick vainly tried to raise some kind of radio response from the colonists. “They must have dragged it here by hand!”

  There was the peculiar crawling over itself of the finished product, too. Various mini-suburbs seemed to be trying to arrive at the same central downtown spot, whilst still hugging the ground as closely as possible, rejecting the skyscraper or pyramid form as a solution. Low, flat buildings were plugged together (out of the original clip- together prefabricated modules of the once-neat harber township, apparently) in higgledy-piggledy “sheets” like a round plateful of jostling, overlapping sandwiches. The concentric chaos bore no relation whatever to the neat formal grid and broad avenues of the coastal town we’d helped them build.

  “I suppose it is a human town?” Marinetti hazarded. “The primitives couldn’t have supplanted our colonists, I don’t suppose?”

  Hardly. The primitives had been a shy, and shying lot. Melting away into the merest dip of the prairies, behind a blade of grass almost, when we tried to contact them. We never saw much of them, no matter how long we flittered about the interior. Only traces, tracks, occasional fleeting ghosts in the corner of your eye, gone by the time you turned to stare. Difficult to describe them!

  Fey ghosts. Flitting fairies. Puckish “human” dragonflies. Any of these. All of these. They seemed insectoid with their (apparently) multifaceted eyes, flightless gossamer-winged thin arms, wasp-waists, thin banded furry legs—a provisional taxonomy pieced together with enough difficulty, almost entirely out of the corner of one's eye! Trip cameras invariably flashed their photos, and wasted them, just as the subject was stepping into view; just the moment before He/She/It appeared before the lens.

  The natives seemed closer to nature than culture; still at a level of pre-understanding. They made fire (somehow). We found the char marks. They cooked small game and birds that they (somehow) caught. We found the bones, sucked clean, though no traps or nets, unless some pieces of string wound from grass qualified. No arrows, darts or spears, certainly, though a few thorns stuck into pieces of stick. But on balance we felt they weren’t really advanced enough for us to disturb their fleeting, evasive way of life inside their continent, any more than a man camping on the edge of a huge field influences the moths and butterflies in it; unless he sprays them with insecticide, of course—and that certainly wasn’t the intention! So, for a plus, there would be no pathetic, broken aboriginals begging for crumbs from the technologically rich man’s table; no ruined native culture whose Gods had arrived and stolen their dreams away. For a minus, of course, they were simply uninteresting. We’d left it to the colonists themselves to find out more, eventually. It wasn’t a priority—then. We expected better things—more amazing, more assertive beings elsewhere.

  “A disease hit our people, and the natives inherited our bits and pieces?”

  ‘‘They couldn’t even lift the bits, never mind plug them together,” I pointed out.

  ‘‘Well, why’s it there, in the dead center of nothing? Instead of, oh, harbors, docks, islandhopping townships . . . ! They were going to leave the interior free. Just in case, for the natives. But that’s exactly where they expanded to! Only they haven’t even expanded, they’ve contracted there.”

  ‘‘Something unexpected in the sea? From the sea?”

  ‘‘Oh, come. You’d hardly need to put a thousand kilometers of land between yourself and it, whatever it was!”

  ‘‘Maybe the sea itself is alive, in some strange way, with algae as its nerve cells? Maybe after a while it realized and radiated hostility at the human intruders?” I romanced—almost hopefully.

  Marinetti laughed.

  ‘‘Like you, I’d love to meet the utterly exotic for once! I have the same hunger for it, my friend. But it was a fairly normal ocean—just somewhat saltier and distinctly richer in fishes than any ocean we’ve seen since.” A note of bitterness crept in.

  True, alas. In all our years of flight the stars had turned out to be rather ordinary; so far we were the most surprising feature. Of the five “live” worlds suitable for colonies, only this one, the first, bore anything at all complex: the Fairy Aboriginals.

  The other live worlds were at an early Paleozoic stage: ranging from a serene extreme to a wild, convulsive volcanic extreme. In one way this was delightful, for it meant we had the whole worlds to ourselves, with atmospheres and water, albeit somewhat deficient in humus and vegetation. (But that could be dealt with.) Each
could be developed—uniquely, wonderfully.

  In another way, this became increasingly depressing as the years went by, while colonists slept and we stayed awake, exploring, exploring. We found nothing, except what we had been sent out to discover: fresh worlds for human colonies. Nothing astounding, nothing special. Here we were, returning to Earth via the first world we had settled, with absolutely the dullest, emptiest landscape of all—-though it did have its birds and small beasts and “Fairies”, at any rate!—returning to see what humanity had brought in forty years activity; and perhaps, just perhaps, to find that something interesting had been gleaned—just a little would do—about those natives we had dismissed (though not derisively or destructively) as butterflies and moths, while we pressed on to greater things. Humanity would thrive and expand because of our efforts; but we were disappointed men and women.

  And now, what price our colonizing effort even—and Earth’s huge outlay—if forty years had only served to produce this puny settlement in the middle of undeveloped nowhere?

  “Maybe the boredom of the landscape . . . unstimulating?”

  “Maybe the absence of tides—?” Marinetti and I had the same idea at once. Different ends of the same idea.

  “A bad prognosis for the other worlds?” he hinted.

  “Those volcanos on Hekla should keep our people on their toes,” said Resnick brightly. We’d named our newfound worlds Cambria, Hekla, Livingstone and Zoe. The one now below us was called Haven, betokening the hope of a sea-borne culture, as well as our first port of call. Properly we should have called some world “New Earth”. It was expected; we knew that. However, it had turned out that the only world we could honestly have used the name for was Haven; and by then we had passed up the chance, as Haven seemed altogether too monotonous and blank for such an honor. So now we were taking the name back with us, unused. And our colonists, likewise had hardly used their Haven at all; but only taken refuge deep inside it. Against no visible storm whatever.

  The next day we detached the smaller survey craft from the bedstead-like assemblage of Starseeder (progressively dismantled and disencumbered of its luggage sufficient to furnish five worlds, till it was a mere stargoing gridwork returning home) and dropped down towards the town, Laura Philipson piloting, to land a hundred meters from its outskirts (crawling over its inner skirts rather like flattened tortoises attempting glacial copulation).

  It was indeed built from exactly the same per- maplastic modules which had once been set out so neatly by the shore. Some embarrassingly primative mud and wattle additions had been made round the extremities. Very little indeed achieved, beyond the huge ridiculous endeavor of hauling the whole settlement a thousand kilometers inland . . .

  Fields of Earth vegetables grew around the town. There were irrigation ponds and ditches. All looked well enough tended outside the town perimeter. On the other hand, otherwise they would have starved. Puny agriculture, though! Puny.

  Maybe you couldn’t give a proper head start to a colony on an alien world if it was ever really to be their own world? Maybe a colony had to sink down to the lowest cultural level before it could start to climb, of its own accord, to “civilization”? Some unknown social law? Was this what had moved them to haul everything as far away from their starting point as possible?

  Fairies were flitting in the fields. Now-you- see-them-now-you-don’ts.

  However, there were humans too. Twenty dr thirty people appeared from a narrow alleyway between the modules.

  They hardly swarmed out to mob us. They just stood waiting patiently by the buildings. And so we walked between a field of cabbages and a field of beet, to greet them instead. (While a fairy appeared and disappeared behind a monstrous, healthy cabbage.)

  I recognized the original leader of the settlement, considerably aged, not surprisingly. A man named . . . Greenberg, yes. Greenberg had been a tough stallion once; now he looked a tired workhorse . . . My God, what had happened to their animals? Their horses, sheep and cattle? That original stock of embryos, brought starward frozen in rabbits' wombs, should have multiplied a hundredfold by now; where were they?

  And their children?

  Where were their children? I saw two or three men and women in their early forties who must have been born during the first year or so of settlement. No one any younger though. And a huge age gap between these few “youngsters" and all the other oldsters.

  Bad. Dreadful. The worst.

  Their fertility had been blocked. And the fertility of their animals. What by? By the sea breeze? By some undetected chemical which took several years to reach a critical level . . .

  “No children or animals."

  Marinetti nodded. To the small reception party, he announced:

  “Well, we've come back. We've settled four other worlds successfully—" He talked a little while, a little floridly and formally, trying to make theirs seem a dignified defeat, I suppose. Greenberg and the others only stared at us, as though from the other side of aquarium glass. When they finally responded, it was shiftily, awkwardly, irrelevantly; impatiently, as though there was something we really needed to know, and dismissively, as though they cared not a hoot. More “Fairies" flickered in the fields. For the first time I caught a proper glimpse of one, and was surprised to see that the diaphanous insect-being—and others, and others!—seemed to be actively tending the crops, here and there, in a sort of erratic, fanciful Brownian-movement way. The creatures were almost perfectly camouflaged by their neartransparency, presenting bodies as a kind of thin, vibrating grid over the scenery, which one tended not to notice head on, only picking up their movements laterally.

  “But haven’t you any children?” Marinetti was repeating for the third or fourth time. Greenberg gestured at the fields.

  “Children?” he smirked. “Children have to be taught their lessons.”

  “Do you mean they’re in school? Where are they, man? Why are you all living here out among the natives?”

  “Taught, for instance,” proclaimed Greenberg, “that the sun draws light into itself; or that a pebble draws ripples to itself from across a pond. Taught to see such things.”

  They hadn’t merely gone infertile, they had gone crazy—with grief at the absence of children . . . ?

  Marinetti let our small party be led—hand in hand with the colonists, as though otherwise we might stumble or walk into walls!—down that poky alley between the clipped-together modules with their mud and wattle additions—which I $ I suddenly fancied were not for the human beings i at all, but represented their idea of what Fairy folk s might like to roost in: a lure for Fairies, architec- il tural equivalent of a dish of milk set down to id gratify a household imp!

  They had deliberately come into their midst.

  None of the colonists bothered carrying any weapons. Had they taken the evanescent Fairies for the only “Children” they could ever have?

  We arrived where the outer “suburb” block made an effort to climb over the inner ring; from this point we had to walk over the roofs of the inner modules for a little way till a wooden ramp took us back down to ground level, along another alley debouching into a small “park” at the center of town, with a dirty village pond. A few more souls joined the little crowd escorting us: all in their early or late seventies. Hardly a dangerous or inclement world, I reflected. Just, that they had failed to breed. Just, that they had gone, collectively and pathetically, silly. Even the younger people, the very few in their forties, were just as “senile”: rambling, forgetful, assertive, fussy— their minds motheaten tape-loops. Quite a few other people didn’t even bother approaching us, though they must have known who we were. They just went about their own business, oblivious to us. Incredible.

  A bowl of pebbles stood beside the filthy pond. With a practised “ritual” gesture Greenberg picked out a pebble and tossed it into the pond. Plop. The ripples spread out, rebounding from the edge. Greenberg stood for a while, admiring the patterns, then urgently he rushed us inside a module w
ith the faded stencil legend, ADMINISTRATION, still on it. Just at the moment of going in, I glanced at the roof, attracted by a faint flurry of light. As though called by the “plop” of water, one of the Fairy folk had arrived, overhead, racing—flying?—over the rooftops. It flickered briefly then was gone again.

  Inside an empty room, on an otherwise bare table, stood a tumbler of clean water, with a black pebble floating incongruously just under the surface.

  The pebble dissolved. It began diffusing through the water, in coils and clouds of. . . no, it hadn't been a pebble, but a large blob of ink—a blob of ink which began to mix with the water but which certainly had not been mixing till we walked in! There had been no one else in the room before us. No other doors led from the room; the window and skylight were bolted shut.

  Marinetti stared at the tumbler, perplexed. Greenberg picked it up, shook it from side to side, emphasizing the inevitable mixing of ink and water, then set it down heavily.

  “Did you see that?” he leered.

  A blob of ink had “unmixed” back into the same blob it had once been—by chance, at random, the moment we walked in? Then started to mix again? Out of all the billions of molecules of ink, out of all the billions of molecules of water, out of all the positions they could be in, they had suddenly reverted to their original unmixed state? But it would take thousands of billions of years for such a thing to happen by chance, if indeed it could be encompassed within the lifespan of the universe. That we should walk in upon it—and Greenberg react as though he expected it? Didn’t the Second Law of Thermodynamics apply here? Were there supposed to be different natural laws for different worlds?

  “Oh, no” I protested quickly. “Somebody prepared that just before we got here! Or something did,” I added, remembering the flicker of light on the roof.

  “We thought of that explanation,” remarked Greenberg.