The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘How’re you doing, Thora? Thought of anything?’

  ‘I have an idea or two. You?’

  ‘The odd thought.’ He was shuffling juke boxes on his desk, not looking up at her image in his screen. ‘Maybe this celebration should take the form of some great big memorial – like maybe rebuilding Stonehenge or something.’

  ‘Great idea, Fess! You put it up to Morgan?’

  ‘Nuh … Oh, I nearly forgot. I was wondering if, er, Morgan was trying this idea on, to catch us out or something. Do you think he has come up with something himself?’

  ‘You know Morgan! He pays us to have ideas. What put that notion in your head?’

  As if she had reminded him of his head, Fess scratched it and said, ‘When he called us, he was playing with something. Not the usual juke bones. I wondered if that was meant as a hint or something that we were supposed to cotton on to.’

  She laughed easily. She laughed now. ‘You cotton-socker, you! Those were IUDs he was shuffling. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one!’

  ‘Inter-uterine deterrents! Good gravy! You know, Thora, I never have seen one.’

  ‘Morgan must have got them as samples from the IUD Corporation account. They’re fitted in female children on birth, grow with them, stay in place until the Central Computers turn up her procreatory code call, if ever.’

  ‘IU deterrents! I thought they were mysterious letters Zadar was tossing about! Thanks for telling me, Thora – I hope your number’ll come up one day!’

  ‘I’m getting a bit long in the womb for that sort of thing.’

  She cut the connection. Sweet old Fess, always so innocent, didn’t know a deterrent when he saw one …

  The word drifted through her mind. Deterrent … It was an old-fashioned word, wholly connected with life now, for the IUDs had brought light to a world perched on the darkness of over-population. IUDs had become compulsory after the Italian-Spanish CC, before she was born. Or was it the Spanish-Jugoslav CC? Or had there been a Spanish-Jugoslav CC? …

  Deterrent … Once it had been connected with death rather than life. Words change their meanings mysteriously. Something to do with bombs, had it been?

  She dialled the satellibrary, switched to encyclopaedia, turned to BOMB. Her screen filled with yards of expository matter on the CM-Bomb, the Coherent Matter Bomb that only the Big Three, China, United Germany, and Americas possessed. She switched to a sub-heading of History, accelerated the pour-rate. When the word Deterrent flashed almost subliminally by, she hit the recall and then stopped the tumble altogether.

  ‘Nuclear Deterrent. A military theory of the Twentieth Century that certain pre-CM devices were more effective when used as threats than as missiles. See Twentieth Century, Military. Also, Atomic Bomb.’

  As she redialled, print scattered like synchroton emission across the screen. She found herself confronted with yards of copy on The Cold War. Baffled, she scanned on, trying to grasp what the facts presented had to do with the Contained Conflict between Australia and Antarctica. After a while, she gathered that they had nothing to do with it; this was a minor non-conflict of the pre-CM age she was confronted with, and not the famous Australia–Antarctica conflict of the same name. As she hit the tumbler to wipe the screen clear, a date caught her eye, and she frantically redialled. August, 1945.

  More references met her eye. She chased them down with increased éclat, and was finally confronted with the history of the Second World War, of which she had never even heard – but then it had been a smaller world in those days, and no one had even set foot on Mars and Venus and Mercury, not to mention the New Planets. After a few moments, she began skimming, bored by accounts of national groups of which she had never even heard, Estonians, Belgians, Croats. She tumbled on to Japan. That was more interesting. United Germany had a lot of trade with Japan; indeed, since the Japanese-Korean débâcle of ’39, the Japs were competing rather unpleasantly in world markets. In spaceware particularly, Jap ablation shields, LORs, star-gaffies, glitch baffles, space suits, and even Molabs were sweeping the market, and particularly squeezing MEi, whose spaceware department had emitted downfalling graphs every one of the last five accountancy years.

  Finally Thora caught up with the date again. August 6th, 1945. First nuclear device, a small atomic bomb, delivered by plane from an American airstrip on Tinian Island and dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. As a result of this, and a second bomb dropped later on Nagasaki, the Japanese emperor capitulated.

  She broke contact with the satellibrary. For some minutes, she sat in concentrated thought. There was a small mystery here she wanted to clear up. She pressed a bell and her servant Karl appeared; he wore a shaggy neuter grey uniform and his head was shaven; he bowed as he entered.

  ‘Karl, somewhere in the city there must be a collection of the old books – cloth-bound things with paper pages, you know? Locate such a collection for me. Dial museums and so forth – old cultural centres, perhaps the College of Reversed Circumstance.’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  ‘I particularly require books of the period 1945–1960. Hurry!’

  He bowed again and left. His family had gone under in the commercial rat-race; he and his two sisters had been unable to pass the Means Test, and were chartered into personal service for a period of ten years; it was an enlightened and, above all, efficient form of slavery.

  Karl reported back in twenty minutes, just when Thora was growing impatient and thinking of getting the prod to his back.

  ‘A large collection of the books you desire is at the Museum of Pre-CM History.’

  ‘I didn’t know it survived. Can’t be state-owned … Who is the – what do you call him, man in charge, curator?’

  ‘Heinry Godsmith. Librarian.’

  ‘I will go and call on him in person. Take me there. Wait while I change my gown and panties.’

  Heinry Godsmith was flushed with excitement at coming face to face with a beautiful woman – hardly surprisingly, since Thora Peabright had switched on her tiny microwave adrenalin-stimulant, which set his blood in a certain state of confusion. But Thora also was slightly off her guard with the thrill of her discovery.

  ‘To think that here in these mouldy old boring rooms might lie a secret worth rediscovering!’ she exclaimed, glancing round the shelves, crammed with their ancient pre-electronic volumes.

  ‘We are not an age that looks at all to the past, Miss Peabright,’ Godsmith said. He was solidly built, smartly dressed, neat of movement. Though he spent most of his life underground with his books, he used canned sun and was almost as tanned as she. ‘Life is so exciting today, the many discoveries in space have distracted us from our own terrestrial past.’

  ‘But the so-called Second World War –’

  ‘We have so many conflicts these days, millions of people killed all the while, that anything that old is just old hat. A hundred years ago – pah! People didn’t know they were living then!’

  Somewhat surprised by his attitude, she said, ‘You must love these books in your care!’

  ‘Why? It’s just a job – probably not as interesting as your job. What do you do for a living, Miss Peabright, may I ask? Bet it’s more interesting than this post! Aren’t you something to do with advertising?’

  ‘I happen to be a senior executive with Zadar Smith World!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve opened my mouth too wide. What can I do for you? You wouldn’t care for a fornicatory bout, would you?’

  ‘I have work to do. So have you.’ Now she had established the upper hand, she could relax. ‘We are searching for ways in which to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the nuclear age. I must use your books for research – the satellibrary is very poor on history, and in any case contains no contemporary documents.’

  Godsmith looked down at his neat square finger-tips. ‘Our immediate ancestors were bores, don’t you think – crippled with guilt about sex and war and food and drugs and all the things we most enjoy. Good reason for
cutting ourselves off from their nonsense, wouldn’t you say?’

  She looked him over. ‘You’re quite intelligent. What are you doing in a feeble short-arsed job like this?’

  ‘Mainly talking to feeble short-arsed women. Change your mind about a bout?’

  ‘I’m working.’

  He looked at her judiciously. ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a lesbian.’

  ‘You’re not taking me for anything, Mr Godsmith. Now let’s get to work. I’ll buy all these books. Deliver them to my address.’

  ‘They’re not for sale.’

  ‘A million krauts!’

  ‘They’re not for sale. You’ll have to study them here, right under my nose.’

  ‘Your what?’

  She worked for a week, down in the cellar, often having to use her de-erector ray on Godsmith at full power. As her knowledge of the past grew, so did her horror and disgust of it. Even as the odious Godsmith had said, the denizens of the mid-twentieth century were a poor lot, reeking of a million guilts and repressions. Finally, she had all she wanted. She closed the last book, a biography of Major Eatherly, whom she regarded as an unmitigated idiot. Heinry Godsmith was not about, so she walked out, went straight home, and took a trace dose of head acid and a perfume bath, with Karl in soothing attendance.

  Then she started worrying. Too many days had elapsed; her five colleagues might well have stolen a lead on her in the centenary stakes. How were they planning to celebrate August 6th, 2045?

  One by one, she dialled them. All five were cagey, but all let something of their plans leak out under Thora’s spell as they saw her on their panels, sprawling appetisingly naked in her bath.

  When the last one had rung off, she wrote a note with her finger on the EL slate by the tub, to see how they rated.

  ‘Saul. Televised mass orgy with all heads of state participating.

  ‘Jerry. Auroral display in ionosphere visible everywhere spelling BLESS OUR EARTH.

  ‘Fess. Rebuilding Stonehenge and placing enlarged plastic reproduction of same on Moon.

  ‘Mazda. Setting fire to Jupiter with super-CM-bomb to provide new mini-sun.

  ‘Dave. Great Orbitual Electronic Worlds Fair.’

  Thora didn’t personally like any of the ideas, except maybe Saul’s, and that was old stuff. The Jupiter idea might be fun, but the colonies on Jupiter’s moons were going to be hard to convince on that score. Besides, none of the ideas had the bone-cracking relevance of hers. She had to see Morgan Zadar and put it over personally. The dreary days in Godsmith’s cellars had not been in vain.

  Zadar’s private apartments were in Monterey. He greeted Thora in a room where naked homosexual male slaves disported in wall tanks, forming grotesque and jerkily moving friezes dedicated to the arts of fellatio and pedicatio and other lively inventions.

  She kissed his hand and greeted him formally. He was a magnificent and ugly man, panting heavily as if he had just emerged from one of the tanks. Over a sumptuous meal, she brought up the main subject.

  ‘The other executives have already made suggestions for ways of commemorating next year’s centenary. I gather?’

  ‘I have had various suggestions.’

  ‘I wish to offer you mine. It is a wow! Everyone will be amused.’

  She worked up to her suggestion carefully, filling in background first.

  She explained to Zadar how, in 1945, the North Americans had been fighting the Japanese and, by appropriating British ideas, had developed an atomic bomb. It was large in comparison with the button-sized CM bombs of 2044 – fourteen feet long by about five in diameter, and weighing about ten thousand tons. This bomb was loaded into an old-fashioned aircraft called, according to some reports, B-29 and, according to others, Enola Gay. The bomb was called Little Boy. The plane carried it over to the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped it. Little Boy generated a fireball some eighteen hundred feet across and a temperature of one hundred million degrees. If it had been an advertising campaign, it could not have been more successful. Some eighty thousand people were killed immediately, with one hundred and forty thousand more dying within the next year, mainly from radiation sickness. Quite an impressive score. The time was 8.16 in the morning of August 6th, 1945, and the great new age of nuclear power was born there and then.

  ‘The bomb stopped the war,’ Thora said, ‘and paved the way for all the better bombs, like the Coherent Matter bomb, and the quickie contained conflicts with which we are now familiar. It certainly was progress. Yet our queer old ancestors went crazy with guilt about it, wanted to ban it, made a martyr out of Eatherly, wrote books and sick novels and dislocated prose and gonnows-what about it.’

  ‘It was a sick age,’ Zadar said dismissively. ‘They didn’t know how to be happy. You shouldn’t have dug into those old relics, Thora – do you no good.’

  ‘That’s the way I got my idea! Listen, here’s what we do to celebrate next year! We get a replica of the Enola Gay and find if one of the minor nations don’t still have an atom bomb, and we fly it over with a blaze of publicity and we drop it on Hiroshima again smack on 8.16 in the morning! How do you like that, Morgan?’

  He looked a little restive and scratched his nose.

  ‘It’s a fine idea right enough. But you aren’t the first to put it over to me.’

  She gasped. The room, the young males in their tanks, swam. ‘No! Saul … Not Fess … But who? Dave?’

  ‘Complete outsider. Young feller called Heinry Godsmith. Clever little guy! I put him on the executive straight away.’

  The idea went to the President of the USBA, who took it to the Universal Board. Rocking with enthusiasm, the Board passed it to a man. Stage coaches, steam engines, automobiles, they had had in one jolly international circus after another. Atomic bombs they had not had. Only the Japanese delegate voted against; he was shouted down; most of the nations present had suffered too much unfair trade competition to listen to him.

  Zadar had a rule about people who turned in ideas he had heard before. Thora Peabright was demoted.

  She got a job on the design staff, working under Heinry Godsmith, who proved to be insatiable.

  They could not discover an Enola Gay or a B-29, but in an old museum in the District of Tunis, they found a Dakota, an antique engined airplane which would do as it was more or less contemporary with the Enola Gay.

  The atomic bomb was more difficult. At one stage, Thora found herself attending a person-to-person meeting of the minor nations, which were not allowed by law to use CM-Bombs. They called themselves the Uncommitted nations, and still employed simple nuclear devices in their conflicts.

  Finland, Ireland, Cyprus, Britain, Rhodesia, Lichtenstein, Yemen, Venezuela, Falkland Isles, and Hong Kong were present at the meeting. Thora managed to get the delegate for Britain to one side and make her offer. The minister, an aged man called Terry Spalding-Woad, promised to see what he could do. Not content with that, Thora accompanied him back to Britain. It was her first visit to the little tourist island; Zadar Smith World would pay.

  They pushed their way through the hawkers and beggars and entered the Houses of Parliament. Long and boring whispered discussions now followed in many a pokey council chamber, in which they were often interrupted by inquisitive visitors. But at last they were on to something definite. The Prime Minister himself appeared, and accepted the payment Thora offered.

  As he pocketed it, he said, ‘I must tell you, Miss Peabright, that this isn’t actually an atomic bomb but an H-bomb. H for hydrogen, you know. You’re very welcome to it. We’ve kept it for eighty years – it formed our nuclear deterrent in the sixties of last century, so I gather. I hope it still works.’

  The preparations were completed in time for August 6th, 2045. On that day, watched by the comsats of the world, the shaky old Tunisian Dakota carried the rusty old British H-Bomb over to Hiroshima. It fell through the bright morning air. It blossomed. A gigantic fireball spread out, brighter than a thousand suns, rising rapidly, engulfing the
old plane, much to the delight of the onlookers. The Japanese, those that survived, howled with rage. Everyone else agreed it was truly an historic occasion.

  Everyone declared, with a touch of sentiment that would not have been out of place a century before, that such great events should always be commemorated, and demanded an encore. Over in Nagasaki, the fly boys started packing their bags.

  Burning Question

  Captain Zachary Tebbutt came slowly down the alien street. Although he was in a hurry to get back to base, he had picked up enough alien savvy to know that for the cardards, slowness meant dignity – and a man needed dignity on Turek, where the smallest adult cardard topped a spindly six feet six.

  Many of the cardards stared at Tebbutt, although, the Earth base having been established nearby for two years, they could hardly find him strange any more. Their little round eyes, fringed with facial fur, told him nothing. More than their stares, he was interested in the burdens of wood many of them carried, going in his direction.

  The village ran downhill from an afforested mountain, stopping abruptly where the plain began, with a neatness characteristic of the cardards. In the last two years, the village had grown enormously, as aliens from all over Turek came here to look at and study the Earthmen, but no shanty towns had arisen: just more neat spindly houses.

  Confronting the village, standing foursquare on the edge of the plain, was the base. Its main block, the administrative building, was massive, uncompromising, built of prefabcrete sections, the only example of terrestrial architecture on the planet. In front of it, the cardards were building a pile of logs and sticks.

  Avoiding the activity around the pile, Tebbutt marched slowly to the barrier and showed his pass. As the sergeant signalled for the boom to raise, he asked Tebbutt, ‘They aren’t going to try anything stupid like an attack on us, are they?