The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  Stung by this, Scarfe said, ‘We have plenty of other backers, you know, if you feel like that. People come here from all over the world. We’ve been able to synthesise life for twenty-odd years, but this is the first time the methods have been applied to this sort of environment. I’m surprised you take the attitude you do. In these enlightened days, you know. I suppose you understand how we create those Magdalenian men and women, and the iguanodons and little compsognathi and the allosaurs?’

  As he began to answer, Swanwick started to pace toward the line of elevators, one of which had carried them up to the observation platform. Scarfe was forced to follow.

  ‘After the Russo-American gamete-separation experiments in the 2070s,’ Swanwick said remotely, ‘it was only a short while before individual chromosomes and then individual genes and then the import of the lineal order of the genes were tagged and understood. Successful synthetic life was created a couple of decades earlier. It was possible to use these crude “synthlifes” to extract the desired genetic information. It then became possible to apply this information and form “synthlifes” of any required combination of genes. You see, I have read the literature.’

  ‘That I never doubted,’ Scarfe said humbly. As they stepped into the elevator, he added, ‘But it was Elroy’s discovery that gene analyses of defunct species could be made from their bones – even fossil bones – that set the tridiorama project into action. In was the gene formula of an iguanodon he got first. Within a year, he was selling real live iguanodons to the world’s zoos. Do you find that unethical, Dr Swanwick? I suppose you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t. It was only when Elroy brought back ancient men and women by the same method that the religious bodies became interested in the question.’

  *

  They had now travelled down the outside of the chamber that housed the tridiorama. When the elevator gates opened, they stepped out, both aware and glad in their different ways that they were about to part for good.

  They had started unhappily, with Swanwick teetotal, and none too good a lunch served in the canteen in his honour, and an antipathy between them that neither had quite the will to overcome.

  Standing, anxious to make a final pleasantry, Scarfe said, ‘Well, if an offence was committed, at least we lessened it here by insisting on a smaller scale. It solves so many problems, you know!’

  He chuckled again, the winning chuckle to which he knew few men failed to respond. He had learned his chuckle by heart. It was rich and fairly deep, intended to express appreciation of his own oddity as well as the wonder of the world. It never failed to disarm, but the theologian was not disarmed.

  ‘You see what I mean – size is controlled by genes like every other physical factor,’ Scarfe said, his sallow cheeks colouring slightly. ‘So we cut our specimens down to size. It solves a lot of problems and keeps things simple.’

  ‘I wonder if the Magdalenian men see it quite like that?’ Swanwick said. He put out a cold hand and thanked Scarfe for his hospitality. He turned and walked briskly out of the door toward the wingport where the St Benedict trimjet lay awaiting him. With a puzzled expression on his face, Graham Scarfe stood watching him. A cold, unlovable man, he thought.

  Tropez, his Chief Assistant, came up, and scanned his chief sympathetically.

  ‘Dr Swanwick was a tough nut,’ he said.

  Shaking his head, Scarfe came slowly out of his trance. ‘We must not speak ill of a man of God, Tropez,’ he said. ‘And I can see that we have yet to master some little details that may upset purists like Dr Swanwick.’

  ‘You know we add something new every year, sir,’ Tropez said. ‘You can’t do more than you are doing. I’ve got the attendance figures for the Open Gallery for last month and they’re up twelve point three per cent on the previous month. Though I still think we were perhaps mistaken to put in normal size cicadas. It does spoil the illusion for some people.’

  ‘We may have to think again about the cicadas,’ Scarfe said vaguely.

  ‘I’m sure whatever you choose will be best,’ Tropez said. Saying things like that, he imagined, kept him his job.

  Scarfe was not listening.

  They had come to the door of the Open Gallery and pushed in. The Gallery was packed with paying customers to the tridiorama, staring from their darkness through the polaroid glass at the brightly lit scene within. Though they had a more restricted view than the specialists who, for higher prices, looked down through adjustable lenses from the observation platform above, there was a certain unique fascination at viewing that mocked-up world from ground level.

  ‘We’ve got too few species in there for it to be a credible reproduction of a past earth,’ Scarfe complained. ‘Only five species – the Magdalenians, the three sorts of dinosaur, the iguanodons, the compsognathi, and the allosaurs – and the mice. I don’t count those cicadas.’

  ‘Elroy Laboratories charge too much for their synthlifes,’ Tropez said. ‘We are building up as fast as we can. Besides, the Magdalenian people are the real attraction – that’s what the crowds come to see. We’ve got ten of them now; they cost money.’

  ‘Eight,’ Scarfe said firmly. ‘Two went today. One got eaten by the allosaur, the other disintegrated. You should keep in touch, Tropez. You spend too much time in the box office.’

  Having thus squashed his assistant, he nodded, turned and went slowly back to the elevator.

  It was the disintegrations of the little figures that worried him; he could not resist a suspicion that Elroy Laboratories limited their life span deliberately to improve their turnover. Of course, the method had to be perfected as yet. The synthlifes were created full grown and unable to age; they simply wore out suddenly, and fell into their original salts. That would no doubt be improved with time. But the Elroy people were not very cooperative about the matter, and slow to answer the letters he flashed them.

  The Elroy monopoly would have to be broken before real progress was made.

  Still shaking his grey head, Scarfe rode the elevator back to the peace of the observation platform. He liked to watch the scientific men at work over the scanners, taking notes or recording. They treated him with respect. All the same, life was complex, full of all sorts of knotty, nasty little problems that could never be discussed … like how one should really handle a man like Swanwick, the prickly idiot.

  Scarfe reflected, as he had so often done in the past, how much more simple it would be to be one of the synthetic Magdalenians imprisoned in the tridiorama. Why, they hadn’t even got any sex problems! Not that he had, he hurried to reassure himself, at his age. But there had been a time …

  Whereas the Magdalenians –

  With the complex modern processes, it was possible to create life, but not life that could perpetuate itself. One day, maybe. But not yet. So down in the chamber the little Magdalenians could never know anything about reproduction, would never have to worry at all about sex.

  ‘I suppose we’ve really created something like the garden of Eden here,’ Scarfe muttered to himself, peering into the nearest vacant scanner. In his crafty old mind, he began to devise a new and more alluring advertisement for his establishment, one that would not offend his scientific customers, but would rope in the sensation-loving public. ‘Lost Tribes in the Pocket-Size Garden of Eden … They’re All Together in the Altogether …’

  He adjusted the binocular vision, checking to see where the little girl was that he particularly fancied. Watching her through the lenses, picking up her tiny voice in the headphones, you would almost imagine …

  III

  The artificial sun was sinking over the tridiorama world.

  Dyak and Semary had eaten. They had come across one of the giant cicadas lumbering along the ground, and Dyak had cut its head off. When they had eaten enough, they jumped in the river to remove the stickiness from their bodies. Now they were on the move again, more quietly, for they were near the lair of the big cruncher.

  In the distance ahead of them, Dyak saw t
he barrier. That was the end of the world; tomorrow, the sun would rise from it. Now that the light was less intense, he could almost imagine that he saw giant human-like faces through the barrier.

  He scoffed at the silly things that his head let happen inside it.

  Their path was less easy now, and huge boulders towered above them, twice or three times their height. The fleet cruncher could easily pounce on them in such a situation. Dyak halted and took Semary’s hand.

  ‘Semary, you must wait here. I will go on. I will find the big cruncher and kill him with my knife. Then I will return to you.’

  ‘I am frightened, Dyak!’

  ‘Don’t be frightened. Hug yourself to keep happy. If the thing runs away in your direction, I will call, and you must crawl into the cleft between these two rocks where he cannot get you.’

  ‘I am frightened more for you than for me.’

  He laughed. ‘When I come back, 1 will take hold of you and … and I will hug you very closely.’ He did it to her then in parting, clutching her naked body against his and feeling the warm missing thing that was at once there and lacking. Then he turned lightly and ran in among the big boulders.

  It took him only a few minutes to locate the dinosaur. Dyak knew the ways of the animals in his world. They were always restless at sunrise and in the evening.

  He heard the creature moving in the bush. When he caught a glimpse of its greenish hide, he climbed, toe and finger, up one of the large boulders, and peered over the top at it.

  The cruncher lay on an exposed slab of rock, moving its tail slowly back and forth. To Dyak, it seemed a vast beast, three times his length. Its head was large and cruel, built chiefly to accommodate its massive jaws. Its body, pressed now against the rock, was a beautiful functional shape. It had two pairs of legs, the great back legs on which it ran at speed, and the forelegs, which functioned as a pair of arms and ended in powerful talons. It was a formidable creature enough, even when its jaws were closed and you could not see its teeth!

  At present, the cruncher was not easy. It lay on one flank, its great legs hunched awkwardly, its yellow belly partly exposed to the rays of the sun. After a moment, it exposed its rump to the sun. Then it shuffled again and again lay supine. Its jaw opened and it began to pant, exposing its great fangs. Still uncomfortable, it finally moved into the shade and lay there absolutely still, only a pulse throbbing like an unswallowed boulder in its throat.

  Dyak knew it would not lie still for long. The creature was basking.

  Having spent most of the day getting its body heat down, it was now in the process of getting it up again, against the comparative coolness of the night. In the morning, it would bask to get its heat up again, coming slowly from torpor to full activity, and then setting out on the day’s hunt. Like all cold-blooded creatures, the allosaur’s metabolism was closely linked with external conditions; it was little more than a thermometer with legs and teeth. To Dyak, the matter appeared more simply: the thing got restless towards sunset.

  After a brief sprawl in the shade, the cruncher moved back onto its rock, into the heat. As it went, Dyak slid off his rock. He had seen what he wanted. The cruncher often grew kittenish and accidentally felled trees and branches with its tail. There was a good sturdy length of branch lying in the other side of the clearing. Using all cover, Dyak worked his way round toward it. He trimmed it with his knife. It was crude, but it was what he needed.

  He tucked it into the plaited belt he wore about his middle.

  Encumbered by his armoury, he now climbed a tree and crept along a branch that left him suspended almost directly over the cruncher. The only drawback with this position was that the sun was almost in his eyes.

  He had not reckoned for this factor. The sun was lower than he had thought, and he must hurry. Pulling out his knife, he looked down at the cruncher – to find it looking up at him.

  The big animal had finally manoeuvred itself into a position of comfort, and was huddled on the rock on its belly and its head resting on its forelegs. A sound in the tree had caught its attention, and it swivelled its gaze upwards, scanning the foliage with two baleful yellow eyes.

  Though it was fast on the run, Dyak knew that its reflexes in other respects were slow. Before it could move, he jumped down at it.

  He landed on the rock, on the balls of his feet, just by its neck. As it moved to get up, its head came forward and it opened its savage mouth. Dyak thrust forward with the broken branch, punching forward with all his weight, holding the branch out like a shield. He jammed it between the open jaws, hard.

  Instantly he ducked. The talons were coming up for him. And with the same movement, the cruncher was rising to its feet. Dyak slithered a couple of paces and jumped. He grabbed the creature’s neck and swung himself onto it. It began at once to rear and plunge, growling savagely deep in its throat, so that he could feel the vibration under his clenched hands. The world spun about him, but he clung tight hoping only that the wicked tail would not sweep him from his perch.

  For all the terror of those moments, when he knew that if he fell he was lost, Dyak had chance enough to see that his branch had done what it was intended to do. The cruncher’s jaws were wedged open; the branch was jammed behind its teeth, and half its efforts were devoted to removing the wedge. Its forelegs were clawing its face dreadfully, drawing blood.

  Keeping his hands linked, Dyak wormed his way to a better position up the neck of his bucking mount. Roaring now with its fury, the cruncher reared up, lost its balance on the slippery rock and slipped sideways, falling on its haunches among bush.

  Dyak was almost flung clear, but he used the moment to grasp the creature’s throat tightly with one arm and draw his knife. He struck just as it leaped up and plunged anew into the undergrowth. The blade burst down through one of those glaring yellow eyes.

  He was at once thrown free, as all the muscles of the creature’s body were galvanised with pain. He lay half-stunned in the middle of a bush, all the wind knocked out of him. The cruncher screamed with agony and anger, and began thumping the wounded side of its head against a rock.

  Feeling that if he did not move at this movement, he would never be able to move again in his life, Dyak tore himself from the bush, dodged in past that murderous flailing tail and once more hurled himself at the monster’s skull. He mistrusted his ability to pierce the armoured flesh of the cruncher, but the eyes were a safe target.

  With something like a dive, he hurled himself at the cruncher’s good eye. Using all the strength in his right arm, he brought down the weapon, down, down, deep into the squelching eye, pushing in deep through pulp and blood with all the fury of his life behind the blow. Then the great tail came around and knocked him flying.

  When he regained consciousness, it was to find himself stuck head foremost in a rhododendron bush. It was a while before he could bring himself to move and drag himself out. He was scratched from head to foot, and soreness filled his left shoulder where the creature’s armoured tail had struck him. It was growing dark, and he was alive.

  The cruncher lay in the center of a wide area of broken vegetation and churned-up soil. Its tail still slapped the ground, but it was to all intents and purposes finished. He had pierced it to the brain.

  Slowly, he climbed to the top of a nearby boulder. The sky was stained red with sunset, just as it was every night, and the red was reflected in the river, so that the water looked like blood. He put his right hand to his mouth and began to call Semary.

  At first his call was quiet and directed to her. Then life began to return fully to his veins, and he looked down at the mighty creature that he – he, alone! – had destroyed. Triumph filled him. Ignoring the ache, he raised his left hand too to his open mouth, and began a series of whooping calls that spread out across the valley. Louder and louder they grew, and more piercing. His lungs were inspired.

  Nor did he stop when Semary ran into the clearing and stood to marvel at the defeated beast. The world should know his prowess
! It was a mighty tabletop victory.

  The Small Betraying Detail

  ‘It will be cold underground,’ Richmond said. ‘Are you sure you can face it, Arthur?’

  He and his brother turned to look gravely at me.

  ‘This is my last jaunt in the big world. Of course I can face it,’ I said.

  I spoke over-bravely. The cool bright Norfolk sunshine seemed to shine through me. I felt transparent, insubstantial, meet for the TB sanatorium to which Richmond Betts and his brother Walter were driving me. Although I wanted desperately to get to that place of quiet, to lie down and lie still, I humoured Walter in this urge of his to break our journey; he was an amateur archaeologist and had promised that this diversion would be brief and worth while.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Walter said. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  Flanked on either side by the brothers, I began stumbling across the sandy brecks. I was not dying, I told myself; six months and I’d be fit again. But the landscape had a quality far from reassuring. Under the lucid Dutch light, everything about us was the tawny colour I had always associated with menace: the colour of a lioness’s hide, the colour of calf on an old family recipe book at home (from which had come that recipe for mushroom pie that had killed my grandfather), the colour of new coffins. Here was that same shade again in the earth among spiky grass, even in the low pines, in the gorse flowers, in the sky, as if we had all been drowned in thin sauterne. Tawny everywhere as though I looked at the world with a retina of sand.

  Only the Ministry of Works ticket in my fingers was red. I clutched it tightly as Richmond and Walter escorted me towards Grimmer’s Graves. Trying to free myself from a sense of unreality, I struggled to make some casual remark.

  ‘It’s so deserted,’ I said. ‘As if we had found our way into another universe.’