Earthworks

by Brian W Aldiss

  Listening to all the tiny noises of the ship, watching colours create themselves in the darkness of my head, my thoughts remained soggy with the complexities of soil manufacture, one of the sciences we heard so much about in the land-starved cities. Soil — dirt — dirty days as a landman on a farm — heavy beds, the Gas House — the poor land — working under the supreme rule of the Farmer. I still had nightmares about the Farmer — he pursued me almost as doggedly as did the Figure!

  Old childhood rhyme, learnt in the orphanage, never forgotten, hopping on one leg, counting out who was next to be Wolf:

  Farmer farmer eat your earth —

  Coffin cradle coffin berth

  Send us food or send us measles —

  You’re the — maimer — of— dis — eases

  And not only the Farmer, but the man I betrayed when I slipped away — got hauled away, I should say — from the farm to become a Traveller. We will get to that some time. Over and over, my mind roamed back to those times, if not when it was rational, then when it roared up the dark old mountains into nightmare and delusion.

  Moved by a compulsion, I rose from the bunk and slipped my feet into my sneakers. Feet, shoe, leg, bunk support, floor, shadows, made a mysterious pattern across my vision. What could I smell? Sometimes it was like onions, sometimes like violets. I seemed to remember it from a former time.

  Outside the cabin, the set was arranged as it ever was: cardboard deck, plastic sea. The sun lit it too badly, like overdone studio-lighting on a film set. Alarmed about it, I addressed myself.

  “I’m very near it again. Now I know the whole thing is an illusion. It’s a fake and I’m somewhere else — not on a ship at all. The props are wearing thin! The motion of the ship is incorrect, some of the shadows are misplaced. There must be a better world than this! Gradually, I’m working my way through to reality. And in Number Two Deckswab Locker... Is that where the truth lies? Can it be that truth lies?”

  I’d forgotten what lay or stood in Number Two Deckswab Locker. Nobody was on deck, nobody walked on the sea. I went over to the locker and opened it.

  He was laughing, a laugh more of power than mirth! I saw exactly the way his lips curled back, wrinkling up to bare the enamel of his teeth, the skin of his gums, in a yellow and terrible humour. It was — it was the Farmer!

  “Noland, No. 14759180! You knew I was on the ship all the time, didn’t you?” he said. I had not remembered he was so large.

  A jolly man, the way the fierce are jolly.

  “I knew there was something wrong.”

  “Not exactly wrong, Noland. It’s just that you aren’t real; you understand that?”

  I kept a sailor’s knife in my belt; but if I was not real, could I do him any damage?

  “You’ve come because I betrayed Jess, haven’t you?”

  “And for all your other sins.”

  Behind the Farmer was not the locker but something else. My eyes refused to tell me what I saw there. It was an emptiness, but a tainted and unlicensed emptiness, as if when you were talking to a friend, you suddenly realized that you could see straight through one of his eyes and out the back of his head. So supposing he was not real?

  With the thought, I launched myself forward, pulling out the knife. As we came together, I sank the knife into the Farmer’s ribs. That was real enough! But still he smiled, smiled as we fell together and rolled on the ground. Hugging him, intercorpse. But his smile — no, the world was spinning — his smile stank, and where his eyes had been... The peculiar clarity of vision drew me down into little ripe craters, where worms, white and so exquisitely built, threaded themselves through a dirty fabric. At once, I fell through the fabric of consciousness.

  When the fabric reknitted itself, I was lying on the deck. Before I opened my eyes, I felt its heat beneath me, and the power of the sun on the back of my neck. I struggled up and opened my eyes. Beside me, yawning horribly in its eternal slumber, was the corpse that Di Skumpsby and I had pushed into the locker, still attached to its anti-gravity unit. I must have switched off the power as I attacked it, believing it to be the Farmer. I thanked my stars that the hallucination had been so brief. Sometimes, when the migraines come on, I go into that underworld of the spirit for hours. I did go. I used to go. Your tenses get confused over so long.

  Peering round the green-painted deck equipment, I saw Di Skumpsby up for’ard. He stood by the rail, staring out across the waters. Maybe he was looking out for another corpse to come into his arms.

  Ignoring the pulse in my head, I turned to the thing beside me. It looked as if Thunderpeck’s diagnosis of the matter was correct; the man was old and wore a fine ring on one veined hand. His clothes were good. I wondered who he had been, this poor old bundle who had chosen an offshore wind to breathe his last sigh into. Averting my eyes from his face, I slid a hand into his jacket and felt into his inside pocket. There was a wallet there, and a thin bundle of letters, secured together by a rubber band. I transferred them to my pocket.

  Under the corpse’s right arm, a red knob protruded forward from the anti-gravity unit’s casing. I eased this gently upward. A steady hum, almost noiseless beneath the sounds of the ship, came into being; at the same time, the corpse began to stir and rise. Keeping a firm hold of it, I manoeuvred it back into the locker and shut the door on it. Then I went back to my bunk to look at the letters.

  Chapter Two

  At chow time, I was still under the spell of the letters. The food was the usual highly flavoured stuff; the flavour was artificial and the foods were packed with preservatives. Since they had been chemically grown in the first place, the whole meal, like every meal, was artificial, and I swallowed a couple of vitamin pills afterwards, just to humour my metabolism. My metabolism still felt somewhat shaky; despite the sedative Thunderpeck had given me, I had not slept, so engrossed was I in the letters I had found on the dead man.

  There were only six of them, six letters and a telegram. They were all from a girl who signed herself Justine. They were love letters.

  Well, they weren’t entirely love letters. Much of them was taken up with political matters, and about the various nations of Africa. I have never understood any politics, much less the complex African variety. I skipped those bits.

  The world and its nations were at peace at that time. Many harsh things could be said against our bleak social system, but to have peace was worth a great deal; that I often said. For some years, we had been hearing about the threat of war among the nations of Africa, the virile young peoples whose technologies often surpassed those of Europe and America; but a strong man, Sayid Abdul el Mahasset, had become President of Africa and temporarily brought about an uneasy peace among the nations under him.

  This I mention here because it will be relevant enough later. But at the time of reading those strange letters, I skipped whenever anything about African affairs was mentioned, in my feverish little search for something personal about Justine.

  Of course, the letters were far too brief. Two of them covered only a page. They revealed a warm and complex personality — no, not revealed, hinted at. Yet in some sentences I seemed to be so close to Justine. Perhaps this was because the letters, like all the best love letters, were slightly improper, or seemed so to my interpretation.

  It took me a long while to decipher them. Obviously, Justine was a rare and cultured person, or she would never have been able to read and write in the first place. I had taught myself as a child, with the help of March Jordill. His teeth clicked, timing the syllables. I had been glad of my ability during those years on the farm, when I came on a cache of antique books. Since then, at sea, there had been no need for literacy beyond the making of simple marks on pads, and there probably was no book within a thousand miles of us; my talent had grown rusty. Now the struggle with the primitive art form made Justine’s letters all the more tantalizing.

  They were addressed to a man called Peter. “I am perfectly in earnest,” she wrote at one point, “and will do what mu
st be done — on that score, my darling, my ability matches yours. You would know that would be my way of yielding to you, as in my heart I really do.” Evidently she and Peter belonged to some sort of religion — in the cities, a thousand differing beliefs flourished, many of them little better than superstitions. In the same letter, she said: “Even when we are together, what we believe keeps us separated; yet when we are apart, we are still together! I gather strength from the world’s weakness and ask: Which is it sweeter to do for you, Peter, to live for you or to die for you?”

  Much of this was obscure. Its very obscurity, the sense of this woman so near but veiled from me, fanned the warmth in me.

  I fell to picturing her, and to devouring her with my imagination. Was she dark, fair, plump, thin, how did her lips look? All voluptuous possibilities fled before my inner eye — but nothing remotely as strange and sad as the truth!

  I had never known a woman like this. She belonged to a world that I did not; and the sense of doom hanging over her only made her the more attractive. I envied the man Peter. He seemed to occupy an important position in England; what, I could not tell. From one letter, I gathered he was staying in Africa, and that he had a dangerous decision to take. There were mentions of el Mahasset, the President of Africa. Although the political references meant little to me, I realized that Justine and Peter must be still involved in this enterprise they considered secret and important: the most recent letter was dated only two days ago.

  “Yes, you are right as ever,” one of the letters began precipitately. “We must regard our love only as a tiny thing — merely personal, as you might say. The Cause must be all; I try to say it and remain myself! To save the world we must lose it, but I tell you, sweet dedicated monster, that I cannot save it if I lose you. I have to have your presence as well as your purpose. Surely you can come here without incriminating yourself? I have bought myself a dress to wear for grand dinners! — All black, so it will serve for mourning as well as evening. I look irresistible in it — you will have to come and see if I am lying.”

  What they did, where they lived, what they looked like, I did not know. I deduced she lived in a hotel, but she never had an address on her paper. I tried a dozen faces on to my imagining of her, tried to conjure the tone of her voice, tried to touch her in that dress “for mourning as well as evening”.

  At last I fell asleep, the letters rustling with the rise and fall of my chest.

  The writing of this gets easier — or I’m glad to reach Justine. (What were those women I took when I was a landsman compared with her? They were gorse bushes you rolled away from as soon as possible.) I can see it is not just the remembering and ordering of the past, but a genuine creation as well, for the truth is this, and you — to yourself you must have an identity — you’d better remember this point all the rest of the way, in case I forget to slip in the warning again -1 really do not, with the best will in the world, recall for certain how it was back there on that damned ship twenty years ago. Twenty years is too long. I am different, I was different.

  But I still remember how that different man felt, reading those letters from Justine. I can hear their pages rustle on my chest, though I was asleep at the time.

  After that sleep, my head felt better, perhaps because it was full of the woman Justine. I told myself how foolish I was. But we had been almost continuously at sea for nineteen months, and the dramatic way in which the correspondence had come into my hands made a strong impression on me. The sun was westering over the sea as I climbed to the bridge to inspect the autocaptain, and the heat of the day was done.

  Already our speed was being checked. Over the horizon ahead lay broken water and reefs, the outermost fringes that guard the dreary stretch of South-West African coast where Atlantic Ocean meets Namib Desert. I rang through to the poop to see how the repair to the autonavigator was going. Abdul Demone answered in a little while.

  “Haven’t made much progress, I’m afraid, Captain,” he said. His face on the screen was utterly blank; he still wore the cartoon scanner, pushed up on his forehead. “The trouble is the repairman has seized up in the heat and I’m trying to work on him. I’m hoping to get him going at any time.”

  “God, man, never mind the robot — get on with the navigator yourself. We shall need it in before the watch is out. What are you thinking of? And take that scanner off and get down to some hard work, Demone.”

  “I’ve been stuck here all day.”

  “I don’t care where you’ve been — I’m saying get some results. Which repairman is it out of action?”

  “Main Deck.”

  “Well, get hold of the one on ‘A’ Deck. You should have reported this trouble before.”

  “I rang through to the bridge, sir, but nobody was there.”

  “Yes, well, buckle down to it now, Demone.”

  I flipped the screen off. The man had me there. I should have been on the bridge, or have got one of the others up on the bridge. As the freighters were growing obsolete, so men were almost obsolete on the automated ships; almost but not quite. The last step in automation had never quite been taken. Everyone had wanted to take it, but some deep thing in the human mentality had kept them back from that final logical step. The amount of work or good that I and my meagre crew did was marginal, and would have been more effectively carried out by cybos and robots. Perhaps there was something too eerie in the thought of those great grey ships sailing the seas and rarely touching land with no human figure standing, however helplessly, at her helm.

  So we existed as parasites, impeding rather than helping the working of the ship. This feeling of uselessness was reinforced when we ran into harbour. In the old days — I’ve read about it — a harbour was a busy place, a dirty place perhaps, but a human one. Now a dock is a big metal mouth. You move into it and are swallowed by machinery. Machines unload you, machines spit out new instructions to you. Machines see that you get swiftly on your way again.

  There are few ports now. The big docks handle trade fast (and will do until the trade is no longer there). In the old days, thanks to human muddle and such institutions as trades unions, you lay in dock for a long while and had shore leave before you sailed again. It’s different now. The whole uncanny operation of automatic loading and unloading takes only a couple of hours. Then you’re off on your eternal exile again, often without having seen a human soul — though you know very well that the country is packed with them. It’s a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.

  Hunger was the force that stepped up the efficiency of ports, hunger more than automation. But to explain how even countries like America and the States of Europe became so ill-nourished is a more difficult matter.

  Often I’ve tried to puzzle it out, lying on my bunk and talking to Thunderpeck. We’re both educated men, but I can read, and have found things from books that he has not. Even so, I cannot imagine how our ancestors were so foolish as to waste their resources the way they did. Of course the whole mentality of the Prodigal Age from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first is foreign to us.

  And I used to parrot what March Jordill told me. Perhaps he was right, perhaps he was wrong; but up till that time, he was the only man I had met who stood the chance of being man enough to be either.

  “We can’t tell what the world used to be like, boy,” he said. “But it seems from books that the population rose steeply in the twentieth century. That brought acute crises in famine-struck areas like the East and the Middle East — that’s lands on the other side of Africa. They needed a fourfold increase in food production to cope with the extra mouths, and of course it couldn’t be done. Water was the limiting factor.”

  “Do you need water for food?”

  “Of course you do — water and food. One day, you may get the chance of seeing ground, then you’ll understand. Countries like America and Australia-Zealand overproduced to feed the other parts of the world, but they only got their own
lands into a mess by so doing. Once land gets in a state, once it begins to deteriorate, it is hard to reverse the process. Land falls sick just like people — that’s the whole tragedy of our time. Then came the big birth pill crisis, when the long-term effects of progestagen made themselves felt, and then the land wars that left the nations of Africa politically in the lead. History’s a funny thing, Knowle, and funniest because you always tend to think it’s finished, whereas it’s always got another kick coming.”

  Something like that March Jordill said. Through him I came to see why the rulers scrapped history, as best they could. I picked mine up by accident, and it only worried me.

  When I turned that reflection over in my mind, I felt sick and sought company. I went down to the ship’s recreation room. Thunderpeck was there with Di Skumpsby, playing cybilliards.

  I halted a yard away from them when I saw Di’s face.

  He scowled at my look of horror. “It’s just a temporary rash, that’s all, and it’s not infectious,” he said. His face was seething with little scarlet-tipped spots. He hunched up his shoulder, partially to hide it.

  “Just a mild dose of corpse allergy,” Thunderpeck said. “Di will be right as rain by morning.”

  “Corpse allergy!” I echoed. And there I had been entangled with the thing. Instinctively I felt my cheeks. As my hand went up, I saw the Figure, standing behind Di and the doctor.

  Oh, don’t tell me how clever that black-faced entity is! It stood in the far doorway absolutely still, its arms folded on its breast, with its profile to us, yet eyeing me over the sweep of its cheekbone. I said quietly to the two men: “You know we are being watched? That portent of death is with us.”

  “It’s simply a manifestation of guilt,” Thunderpeck said, slyly casting a glace over his shoulder. “You feel guilty because you betrayed Jess the Traveller.” He’s seen that spectre more than once, but always denies he can see it. That is his form of sickness. Even the doctors are ill.