New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Jack. The bogies, gathering speed, severed his arm, ploughed crashing across his chest. The caisson took the water it had quitted with a thunderous splash. A tinkling; the headlight on the cabin roof swayed sideways, and was extinguished.

  * * * *

  The tunnel portal was set into a low, mounded hill. Beyond it the canal was fringed with low shrubs that blazed with smoky orange blossom. Above, saplings hung graceful and still, their sprays of rounded leaves catching the sunset light.

  To an observer stationed at the tunnel mouth, the twin lamps of the Kalti vessel would have appeared at first like dim brown stars. For some time, such are the curious optics of tunnels, the stars would have appeared to grow no closer; then, suddenly it seemed, they swam forward. Between them the outlines of the boat became visible; the knotted headropes of the prow, the tilted cabin with its ornamented ports. Behind, sliding into the light, came the long tented cargo space; the engine-house, hazed with blue; the stern deck with its grating, the Bar-Ko vaunting white and gold on the rounded black sides. The steersman, in once-white slacks and shirt, leaned wearily on the painted shaft of the oar. His face was fringed with a stubble of beard; from time to time he glanced down, frowning, at a bundle near his feet. In places the canvas of which it was composed was soaked and dark; and a runnel of fluid had escaped, staining the boat’s dull side.

  To Mathis, the transition from darkness to the light seemed curiously unreal. He smelled the sweetness of the grass, heard the wind rustle in the tops of trees and frowned again, shaking his head as if to clear it. His brain recorded, but sluggishly. Ahead and to the left, twin hills marked the position of Hy Antiel. This was the Summit Pound; five miles ahead the lock flight began that led to the city, stepping in green steps down a green and grassy hill. He’d walked beside it often enough, it seemed in some other life.

  He squinted up, at the high dusting of gold. To the right showed the pilings of a mooring place. Little bushes surrounded it, throwing their branch-shadows across the water. He turned the oar, unused as yet to the boat’s response, glided the long vessel to the bank.

  He was uncertain of the forms to be employed. He chose a spot finally; a grassy knoll beneath the branches of a broad, spreading tree. He had brought a spade and mattock from the boat; he wiped his forehead, and began to dig. Later he drove a stake into the grass at the head of the fresh-turned mound. To it he lashed a crosspiece for the Bar-Ko sign; then there was nothing more to do.

  He searched the Kalti’s few possessions. He found a breechcloth of silk, a scarf, a broad-brimmed, round-crowned hat; and a bolero crusted with pearly buttons, the sort of garment a Boatman would wear on a feast-day in Bran Gildo. In a bag closed by a drawstring were two brooches set with semi-precious stones, a nugget of what looked to be iron pyrites and a lock-key charm in gold. There were also a prayer-roll sealed with the Bar-Ko mark, and a much-thumbed packet of postcards showing bare-breasted Terran girls. These last he returned to the bag before tucking it carefully away.

  He didn’t wish to eat. Instead he brewed up the Kalti coffee, drinking several cups. Slightly alcoholic, the drink had a heady effect. He smoked a cigarette, saw to his mooring stakes and spread his sleeping-bag on the cabin roof. The spinning in his head was worse; he closed his eyes, and was quickly asleep.

  He woke some time before the Xerxian dawn. To planetary east, the first faint flush of green heralded the sun. The canal was a silver mirror, set between velvet trees; and Barbara watched him from the bank, her chin in her hand. The light gleamed palely from her hair.

  He pushed himself up on one elbow, and smiled. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Are you coming on board ?’

  She considered, smiling in her turn, before she slowly shook her head. ‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I think once was enough. I don’t think I could go through it all again.’

  He said, ‘I can’t say I blame you. You’re better off where you are.’

  She chuckled. ‘My word,’ she said, ‘you’ve certainly changed.’

  He said, ‘I suppose we all do.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said. ‘Not here. I thought I’d travelled much too far away.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you know me, John. I’m the little crab who always hangs on. Remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

  She was quiet a moment, watching along the canal. She said, ‘This is a lovely place.’

  ‘It needed you,’ he said. ‘It was rather pointless before.’

  ‘Where were you going?’

  He said, ‘Hy Antiel.’ He gestured at the bank. ‘There were two of us. But...’

  She said, ‘I know.’ She shook her head. She said, ‘You haven’t altered all that much after all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Poor John,’ she said. ‘You never could understand, could you ? About other people,’

  He said, ‘I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t want him to be hurt.’

  She said, ‘You never wanted anybody to be hurt. But you always forgot.’

  He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She said, ‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’

  A little silence. Then he said, ‘Please come aboard.’

  She laughed. She said, ‘No, not now. But I will stay with you.’

  He said, ‘Thank you.’

  She said softly, ‘It’s more than you deserve.’

  He said, ‘You were always more than I deserved.’

  He let himself sink back. Later she too dozed, her head resting on her arm. For that he couldn’t blame her. It had been a long way, from Tuonela.

  * * * *

  Sunlight lay in hazy patches on the water when he opened his eyes. He sat up slowly, pushing back the fabric of the bag, and saw how clever she had been. The light patch of her skirt was bright grass seen through a triangle of lapping boughs. The smooth rootstock of a shrub had made her ankle; and she had used a glistening branch for the sheen of her hair. He moved, and she was gone. But there were many shadowed places on the canals, many quiet banks of grass; he found himself not without hope.

  The shaking in his legs and arms was bad, but his head felt fractionally clearer. He started the engine, poled the boat from the bank. The canal was wider here and deep, curving gracefully beneath the overhanging bushes. The diesel chugged steadily; the wash ran slapping against earth banks studded with moss-grown holes. The chikti made them, the little burrowing mammals of the tropics.

  Three miles before the flight a broad green arm of water opened to the left; the Coldstream branch, that once had served the villages to the south of Hy Antiel. He pushed the oar, leaning his weight steadily, watching as the bow began to swing. He had understood a final thing; that pain is life, and death is when the pain has gone away.

  Ahead, the lapping of blue and gold repeated itself into distance. Beyond, dimly glimpsed, were the low hills of the watershed through which the canal, broadening and meandering, lost itself once more in the marshlands of the south.

  <>

  * * * *

  WAGTAIL IN THE MORNING

  Grahame Leman

  One of the many valuable functions of sf is to point out dead ends and to examine ruthlessly the kinds of future no sane person would desire for himself or for his children. Grahame Leman has said he considers it an offence to be ideologically drunk in charge of spaceship Earth and the warning is too plain to be ignored. Only the fanatically blinkered and the rigidly misguided, surely, would condemn unpredictable liveware?

  * * * *

  The letter from the Ministry of Education was the first letter he had ever had in his forty-two years of struggle up the ladder. The envelope had been folded from a sheet of heavy, handmade rag paper and sealed with a wound of red wax at the meeting of the corners; his title and name, Dr. Hans Elberfeld, FBPS, had been written on the other side with a steel pen, apparently, in a free Italianate hand. The coarse texture of the paper between his fingertips, its weight, made his hold on it see
m extraordinarily solid, made him feel more real by a quantum jump.

  Dr. Elberfeld did not want luxury for himself: he knew too well that energy used at the sensuous periphery must be stolen from the watchful brain at the core, that his budget for his life could not allow such theft of energy; ever since his election to a fellowship of the British Psychological Society at the unusually early age of thirty-two had put him into the topstaff catchment area, he had been living in one room on beans and water. But this was a voluptuous moment, because he did very much want to be part of a circle that could afford, collectively, such contemptuous displays of the power and right to make waste: the waste of time, especially, involved in the preparation of a letter (from the laborious hand crafting of the paper and ink through to its delivery by a liveware courier, walking twelve miles across London in the rain, in his opulent livery), instead of having the words printed out on his home terminal in the ordinary way, shook him with a turbulent and delicious physical pleasure. It was almost an anticlimax to dismiss the courier, unseal the letter and read on the inside of the folded sheet that his security clearance and advancement to topstaff status had been confirmed, that he would be retained as a psychological consultant to the Minister sine die and that the Minister would see him in locus 324.2 at 15.30 that afternoon.

  He left his room in South London for Whitehall a clear hour before he really needed to leave, to be twice sure he would not keep the Minister waiting: he might be inside the periphery of the inner circle now, but he was still a very long way from the Ministers at its deep centre; although they are not formally marked in any way, there are as many rungs of standing inside the topstaff subset as there are labelled rungs outside.

  With the letter crackling in his pocket, he went confidently through the free travel gate reserved for topstaff at the entrance to the tube station and straight to the marked stretch of the rapid transit platform which showed where the topstaff car of the train would stand, enjoying the new feeling of space around him.

  The barefoot girl was in the crowd on the liveware section of the platform: at least, although he couldn’t see her face or her bare feet, he thought it was her, because not many girls are so tall and red-haired as to look like an angry boil standing out of the skin of heads. She was usually on the train when he took the rapid to the West End, occasionally in the same car, and she interested him a little: perhaps because of his professional interest in the minor deviancies of comportment that were allowed to liveware as a sort of lightning conductor for their charges of frustration; perhaps in a rather more worrying way, since her bare feet (dirty, with broken nails, calluses, corns) disturbed him in a way he couldn’t quite pin down, like the shop talk of his medical colleagues or speculation about strange forms of life on other planets of the galaxy. But there could, after all, be nothing wrong with him: he had his weekly preventive appointment at the council sporting house, and of course anything wrong with his conditioning would surely have glared from the Ministry’s screening test results and blocked his security clearance and topstaff rating. He scratched the problem and, as the rapid drew away, began to think about a chapter of his book on the topology of nervous nets in the brain, which he was going to have to rewrite in proof to accommodate some anomalous experimental results from an obscure team of experimenters in Chile, already confirmed in Oxford.

  Locus 324.2 was a confidential interview room in the social centre of the Min Ed complex. Since he had plenty of time in hand, he went to the luxurious topstaff washrooms, with their liveware attendants, showered, changed his underclothes, washed his used underclothes and put them in a plastic bag in his briefcase, brushed his teeth, used anal, underarm and oral deodorants, rubbed scented spirits into his scalp from the free bottle over the wash-basin, groomed himself and took advantage of the liveware manicurist. Although he did not need to use it, he was interested in the paper in the dispensers in the sit-down cubicles, which was certainly very thick and soft, and pleasantly scented: he was reminded of the sardonic remarks made by undergraduates, when they were undergoing their routine immunising exposure to subversive ideas, about administrative ability being inheritable in the germ plasm and invariably linked to inheritable sensitivity of the skin around the anus; he had often thought there might be something in that, since what the layman calls ‘sensitivity’ and ‘a thin skin’, which could well be inheritable properties of the nervous system, arguably predispose a man to a withdrawn attitude and to the life of the mind, favourable to success, while the more robust tend to get too involved with the world and with other people to be able to keep their cool and their concentration on what matters.

  The Minister was a little drunk, or had perhaps taken barbiturates in rather more than the normal sedative dose. Elberfeld knew, had reconstructed from scattered indiscreet hints in the conversation of his clinical colleagues, that the so-called Berzelius syndrome was not uncommon in topstaff circles, and that its incidence was high enough to worry the topstaffers who didn’t show it: Berzelius had been a systems analyst, who had cracked up spectacularly while running a USAF think tank in the 1980s and then written a maudlin, best-selling autobiography; in the book, he explained that he had done his clear thinking in the mornings while sober and had got drunk to do his own dirty work in the afternoons, so that his alcoholism was really a side-effect of his inability to delegate.

  But the Minister’s blurred bonhomie was pleasant enough; Elberfeld relaxed and listened:

  ‘You’re being invited in on the ground floor of a big thing, Elberfeld. What it is ... well. Cabinet has decided that the hardware components of our society need no further development for the time being. As you must very well know, dear boy, from your colleagues in computer science, all the important bits are so small and cool-running now, that you can have as many of each whatnot as you need strapped in parallel to make quite sure they don’t all fail at once, and everything is really as reliable as it need be. So we can switch the bulk of our available Research and Development heft to the liveware problem: the liveware, of course, is still dreadfully unreliable and unpredictable, and it is difficult to get things done tidily.’

  ‘This is good news, indeed. Minister. We have been pressing for this for years, we psychologists, as you know. Why has it not been done before? The hardware, after all, has been on a high plateau for forty years!’

  ‘Well, everybody presses for everything, dear boy. Whatever they do for a living, they have a natural feeling that the country needs more of it, so we don’t pay much attention to that sort of pressure ... don’t worry, you’ll pick up top-staff thinking as you go along. And then, Elberfeld, the experts usually disagree with each other, and it’s not at all easy to know which one to believe: the fashionable ideas aren’t always good, are they? Nor are the un-fashionable ideas necessarily any better. So we don’t pay a lot of attention to expert advice either. The thing that usually decides us is news from abroad: we are very interested in what the big boys do. I sometimes think that we respect their experts more, simply because we don’t pay them and don’t get to meet them socially. Hah! Anyway, dear boy, we’re going to follow the big boys, in case they’re right, and switch the R&D heft to the liveware—after all, we should not survive economically for a year if they developed reliable and predictable liveware. Right?’

  ‘Indeed, Minister. Yes, I see where I come in.’

  ‘On the ground floor, dear boy, on the ground floor. You see, of course, that the power will come with the heft, across the river from Min Tech to Min Ed—because we run the liveware factories, the schools and colleges and so on. Within ten years, you could be the most powerful scientist in the country, Doctor Elberfeld, if you can prove yourself to us on the job.’

  ‘What job. Minister?’

  ‘You’re very direct. I like that. Now tell me, dear boy, what education is for. Quick!’

  ‘Bertrand Russell said it was a branch of the advertising business.’

  ‘In your own words, Doctor Elberfeld. Quick!’

  ‘
Education is for the prevention of learning.’

  The minister roared with laughter, slapping the table, sending gusts of chemically unpleasant breath into Elberfeld’s face, showing a furred tongue and a lot of dental work in gold as he gasped for rasping breath:

  ‘Excellent! You ... excuse me ... you can sweat a complex policy down to an epigram, which is a good topstaff talent. Now enlarge on it for me while I get my breath back.’

  ‘Well, Minister, it’s simple enough. No society can endure, or even work for a day at a time, if people can see what’s in front of their noses. What education is for—in the home, in the educational plant, at work—is to make sure that this won’t happen, that people won’t be able to see what is pushed into their faces. This is possible, simply because we “see” most of our environment, so to say, “through” language—to be exact, “through” such structures made of language as lexical fields, logics, grammars, myths, creeds, philosophies, scientific theories. When you come to think of it, it is obvious that we can have no knowledge of anything outside the range of our five senses in the passing instant, which is not mediated to us in this way by systems of symbols: almost all our knowledge is of this mediated kind, only a vanishingly small part immediately sensuous. So, by careful manipulation of symbol systems, it is possible so to adjust the “sight” of the minds of liveware that they “see” the world in the way we want them to see it, in a way which will make them do what we want of their own accord, instead of having to be wastefully whipped or bribed. This, incidentally, is why it takes so long to train the expert liveware needed on tap by real people in the line of command : a prolonged educational effort is required to make a man stupid enough to be safe in a sensitive staff position, such as a professorial chair or a permanent post in the civil service, a consultancy in psychopenology and so on. If education does not prevent learning, it has failed.’