the Dark Light Years

by Brian W Aldiss

  "I enjoyed your animal imitations, Mr. Brebner," Lattimore said good-humouredly. "But frankly, I converse more readily with my cat than you do with those two hogs.”

  Ainson spoke for the first time. He spoke sharply, annoyed that a mere interloper should be belittling his discovery.

  "This is all very well, Mr. Lattimore, but you are dismissing too much too easily. We know the ETA's have certain habits that are unpleasant by our standards. But they don't behave together like animus; they provide companionship for each other. They converse. And the space-ship is there, whatever you may say.”

  "Maybe the spaceship is there. But what is the connection between the hogs and it? We don't know.

  They may well be just the livestock that the real space travelers took along for food. I don't know; but you don't know either, and you are avoiding the obvious explanation. Frankly, if I were in charge of this operation, I'd pass a hefty vote of censure on the captain of the Mariestopes and more particularly on his Master Explorer for carrying out such a sloppy piece of investigation on the spot”

  At this, there was a sort of ominous and uneasy ground-swell about the room. Only the reporters began to look a little happier. Sir Mihaly leant forward and explained to Lattimore who Ainson was.

  Lattimore pulled a long face.

  "Mr. Explorer Ainson, I fear I owe you an apology for having failed to recognize you. If you'd been here before the meeting began, we could have been introduced.”

  "Unfortunately, this morning my wife -”

  "But I must absolutely stick to what I said. The report on what happened on Clementina is pathetic in its amateurishness. Your stipulated week's reconnoiter of the planet was expired when you found these animals beside the spaceship, and rather than depart from schedule you just shot up the majority of them, took a few technishots of the scene, and blasted off. This ship, for all you know, may have been the equivalent of a cattle truck, with the cattle out to wallow, while two miles away in another valley was the real ship, with real bipeds like us, people -just like Mrs. Warhoon says - that we'd give our eyes and eye teeth to communicate with, and vice versa, you can be sure.

  "No, I'm sorry. Mr. Ainson. but your committees here are more bogged down than they care to admit, simply because of bad field work on your part.”

  Ainson had grown very red. Something ghastly had happened in the room. The feeling had gone against him. Everyone - he knew it without looking at them - everyone was sitting in silent approval of what Lattimore said.

  "Any idiot can be wise after the event," he said. "You seem to fail to realize how unprecedented it all was. I -”

  "I do realize how unprecedented it all was. I'm saying that it was unprecedented, and that therefore you should have been more thorough. Believe me. Mr. Ainson, I've read photostats of the report on the expedition and I've scrutinized the photographs that were taken, and I have the impression that the whole thing was conducted more like a big game hunt than an official expedition paid for with public money.”

  "I was not responsible for the shooting of the six ETA's. A patrol ran into them, coming back to the ship late. It went to investigate the aliens, they attacked and were shot in self-defense. You should re-read the reports.”

  "These hogs show no sign of being vicious. I don't believe that they attacked the patrol. I think they were trying to run away.”

  Ainson looked about for help.

  "I appeal to you, Mrs. Warhoon, is it reasonable to try and guess how these aliens behaved in their free state from a glance at their apathetic behavior in captivity?”

  Mrs. Warboon had formed an immediate admiration for Bryant Lattimore; she liked a strong man.

  "What other means have we for judging their behavior?" she asked.

  "You have the reports, that's what. There is a full account there for you to study.”

  Lattimore returned to the attack.

  "What we have in the reports, Mr. Ainson, is a summary of what the leader of the patrol told you. Is he a reliable man?”

  "Reliable? Yes, he is reliable enough. There is a war on in this country, you know, Mr. Lattimore, and we can't always choose the men we want”

  "I see. And what was this man's name?”

  And indeed what was his name? Young, beefy, rather sullen. Not a bad fellow. Horton? Halter? In a calmer atmosphere he would remember at once. Controlling his voice, Ainson said, "You will find his name in the written report.”

  "All right, all right, Mr. Ainson. Obviously you have your answers. What I'm saying is that you should have returned with a lot more answers. You see you are some-thing of a keyman here, aren't you?

  You're the Master Explorer. You were trained up to just this situation. I'd say you have made it very difficult for all of us by producing inadequate or even conflicting data.”

  Lattimore sat down, leaving Ainson standing.

  "The nature of the data is to be conflicting," Ainson said. "Your job is to make sense of it, not to reject it. Nobody is to blame. If you have any complaints, then they must be forwarded to Captain Bargerone.

  Captain Bargerone was in charge of the whole thing, not I. Oh, and Quilter was the name of the fellow in charge of the patrol. I've just remembered.”

  Gerald Bone spoke without rising.

  "As you know, I'm a novelist, Mr. Ainson. Perhaps in this distinguished company I should say 'only a novelist'. But one thing has worried me about your part in this.

  "Mr. Lattimore says that you should have returned from Clementina with more answers than you did.

  How-ever that may be, it does seem to me that you have returned with a few assumptions which, because they have come from you, have been accepted all round without challenge as fact.”

  With dry mouth, Ainson waited for what was to come. Again he was aware that everyone was listening with a sort of predatory eagerness.

  "We know that these ETA's were found by a river on Clementina. Everyone also seems to accept that they are not natives of that planet As far as I can see, this notion began with you. Is that so?”

  The question was a relief. This Ainson could answer.

  "The notion did begin with me, Mr. Bone, though I would call it a conclusion rather than a notion. I can explain it easily, even to a layman. These ETA's belonged to the ship; be quite clear about that Their excreta was caked all over the inside of it - a computed thirty days' accumulation of it As additional evidence, the ship was clearly built in their image.”

  "The Mariestopes, you might say, is built in the image of the common dolphin. It proves nothing about the shape of the engineers who designed it.”

  "Please be courteous enough to hear me out. We found no other mammalian type life of 12B - Clementina, as it is now called. We found no animal life larger than a two-inch tail-less lizard and no insect life larger than a type of bee as big as a common shrew. In a week, with stratospheric surveys day and night you cover a planet pretty thoroughly from pole to equator. Excluding the fish in the seas, we discovered that Clementina had no animal life worth mentioning - except these big creatures that turn the scales at twenty Earth stones. And they were together in one group by the spaceship. Clearly it is an absurdity to suppose them to be natives.”

  "You found them beside a river. Why should they not be an aquatic animal, possibly one that spends most of its time at sea?”

  Ainson opened and shut his mouth. "Sir Mihaly, this discussion naturally raises points that a layman can hardly be expected... I mean, no purpose is served....”

  "Quite so," agreed Pasztor. "All the same, I think Gerald has an interesting point. Do you feel we can definitely rule out the possibility that these fellows are" aquatic?”

  "As I've said, they came from the spaceship. That was absolutely conclusive, you have my word for it as the man on the spot." As he spoke, Ainson's eye went belligerently over the group; when it met Lattimore's eye, Lattimore spoke.

  "I would say they had the lines of a marine animal -speaking purely as a layman, of course.”


  "Perhaps they are aquatic on their own planet, but that has no bearing on what they were doing on Clementina," Ainson said. "Whatever you say, their spaceship is a spaceship, and consequently we have intelligence on our hands.”

  Mihaly came to his rescue then, and called for the next report, but it was obvious that a vote of no confidence had been passed on Master Explorer Ainson.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The sun, as its inalienable custom was, went to bed at sun-set. At the same time, Sir Mihaly Pasztor put on a dinner jacket and went to meet the guests he had invited to dine at his flat. This was a month after the dismal meeting at the zoo when Bruce Ainson had received the intellectual equivalent of a flea in his ear.

  Since then, the situation could not be said to have unproved. Dr. Bodley Temple had accumulated an impressive hoard of alien phonemes, none of which had a certain English equivalent. Lattimore had amplified in print the views he had expressed at the meeting. Gerald Bone -traitorously, thought Pasztor - had done a malicious little skit on the meeting for Punch.

  These were but pin-pricks. The fact was, there was no progress being made. There was no progress being made chiefly because the aliens, imprisoned in their hygienic cell, showed no interest in the humans, nor any wish to co-operate in any of the stunts the humans devised. This disobliging attitude had its effect on the research team trying to deal with them; their increasing moroseness became increasingly punctuated with bouts of self-pitying oration, as if, like a Communist millionaire, they felt impelled to explain a position of some delicacy.

  The general public, too, reacted adversely to the alien cold shoulder. The intelligent man in the street could have appreciated an intelligent alien, no matter what his shape, as a new distraction to compete with the world series, the grim news from Charon, where Brazil seemed to be winning the war, or the leaping taxes that were a natural concomitant to both war and TP travel. Gradually the queues that stood all day to see the aliens in the afternoon dwindled away (after all, they didn't move about much, and they looked not so very different from terrestrial hippos, and you weren't allowed to throw nuts at them in case it turned out they really lived in skyscrapers back home) and went back to their old routine of watching instead the Pinfold III primaritals, which indulged in a form of group intercourse every hour on the hour.

  Pasztor was, as it happened, thinking of intercourse as he ushered his guest, Mrs. Hilary Warhoon, into his modest dining-closet; or if not thinking of it, reviewing with a whimsical smile at his own weaknesses the fantasies with which he had indulged himself half an hour before Mrs. Warhoon's arrival.

  But no, she was not quite enchanting enough, and Mr. Warhoon by repute was too powerful and spiteful, and anyhow Sir Mihaly no longer had the zest necessary to carry off one of those illicit affairs - even though "illicit" was one of the more alluring words in the English language.

  She sat down at the table and sighed.

  "It's wonderful to relax. I've had a vile day.”

  "Busy?”

  "I've made work. But I've accomplished nothing. And I'm oppressed by a sense of failure.”

  "You, Hilary? You are far from being a failure.”

  "I was thinking of it less in a personal than in a general or racial sense. Do you want me to elaborate?

  I'd like to elaborate.”

  He held up his hands in playful protest.

  "My idea of civilized intercourse is not to repress but to bring forth, to elaborate. I have never been other than interested in what you have to say.”

  There were three globular table ovens standing on the table. As she began to speak, he opened the refrigerated drawers on his right and began to put their contents into the ovens to cook: Fera de Travers, the salmon of Lake Geneva, to begin with, to be followed by eland steaks flown that morning from the farms of Kenya with, to add a touch of the exotic, fingertips, the Venusian asparagus.

  "When I say I'm oppressed by a general failure," Mrs. Warhoon said, attacking a dry sherry, "I'm fully aware that it sounds rather pretentious. 'Who am I among so many?', as Shaw once said in a different context. It's the old problems of definitions, with which the aliens have confronted us in dramatic new guise. Perhaps we cannot converse with them until we have decided for ourselves what constitutes civilization. Don't raise that suave eye-brow at me. Mihaly; I know civilization does not consist of lying indolent in one's own droppings - though it's possible that if we had a guru here he would tell us it did.

  "When you take any one quality by which we measure civilization, you will find it missing from various cultures. Take the whole question of crime. For over a century, we have recognized crime as a symptom of sickness or un-happiness. Once we recognized that in practice as well as theory, crime statistics dropped dramatically for the first time. But in many periods of high civilization, life imprisonment was customary, heads fell like petals. Certainly kindness or understanding or mercy are not signs of civilization, any more than war and murder are signs of the lack of it.

  "As for the arts that we rightly cherish, they were all practiced by prehistoric man.”

  "This argument is familiar to me from my under-graduate days." Sir Mihaly said, as he served the salmon. "Yet still we cook our food and eat according to rules with carefully wrought utensils." He poured some wine. "Still we choose our vintages and exercise our judgments and our prejudices over that choice." He offered her a basket full of warm crisp rolls. "Still we sit together, male and female, and merely converse.”

  'Tin not denying. Mihaly, that you keep a good table, or that you have failed as yet to throw me on the floor. But this meal - and I cast no aspersions - is now an anachronism, and strongly disapproved of by a government pushing the new poison-free man-made foods and drinks. Besides, this lovely meal is the end product of a number of factors that have only a nodding acquaintance with true civility. I mean the fishers crouching in their boats, the farmers sweating through their gracing land, the barb in the mouth, the shot in the head, the chains of middlemen less tolerable than farmers or fishers, the organizations that prepare or can or pack, the transport firms, the financiers - Mihaly, you're laughing at me!”

  "Ah, you're talking of all this organization with such disapproval. I approve. Vive l'organisation! And let me remind you that the new synthetic food plants are triumphs of organization. Last century, as you say, they didn't approve of prisons, but they had them, nevertheless; this century we have become organized, and we don't have prisons. Last century, indeed, they didn't approve of war. yet they had three bouncing big ones, in 1914, in 1939, and in 1969; this century we have become organized, and we hold our wars on .Charon, the farthest planet, out of harm's way. If that's not civilization, I accept it readily as a substitute.”

  "So we all do. But it may only be a substitute, man's substitute. Notice that whatever we do, it is at someone else's or something else's expense.”

  "I gratefully accept their sacrifice. How will you have your steak, Hilary?”

  "Oh, overdone, please. I can't quite bear the thought of it being real blood and animal tissue. All I'm trying to say is that our civilization may be built not on our best, but on our worst: on fear - other people's if not our own -or on greed. Can I pour you some more wine? And per-haps another species may have another idea of civilization, built on a sympathy for, an empathy with, all other living things. Perhaps these aliens -”

  He pressed the spin stud in the oven pedestal. The porcelain and glass hemisphere slid into the bronze hemisphere. He retrieved the steaks. The aliens again! Ah, but Mrs. Warhoon was off form tonight! The platemaker coughed out two warm plates, and he served her moodily, without taking in what she was saying. Enlightened self-interest, he thought; that was the most you could or should expect from anyone; once you met an altruist, you had to beware a sick man or a scoundrel. Perhaps people like Mrs.

  Warhoon, who wouldn't face the fact, were sick too, and ought to be encouraged to enter mental therapy homes, like criminals and hot gospellers. Once you started questi
oning fundamentals, like a man's right to eat good red meat if he could afford it, then you were in trouble, even if you cared to think of that trouble as enlightenment.

  "By the standards of another species," Mrs. Warhoon was saying, "our culture might merely seem like a sickness. It may be that sickness which prevents us from seeing how we ought to communicate with the aliens, rather than any shortcoming of theirs.”

  "It's an interesting theory, Hilary. You may have a chance to turn it into practice on a large scale shortly.”

  "Oh, indeed? You don't mean that some other ship has found more aliens at large in the universe, do you?”

  "Nothing quite so fortunate as that. I received a long letter from Lattimore yesterday morning, which was partly why I invited you here this evening. The Americans, as you know, are very interested in our ETA's. We have had a constant stream of them to the Exozoo over the last month. They are convinced, and I am sure Lattimore has convinced them, that things are not being run as efficiently as they might be.

  Lattimore wrote to say that their new stellar exploration ship, Gansas, has been re-routed, though the re-routing is not official yet. Its investigation of the Crab Nebula is postponed. Instead, it will be heading for Clementina, to search for the home planet of the ETA's.”

  Mrs. Warhoon put her knife and fork together, raised her eyebrows, and said, " What?”

  "Lattimore will be on the flight in an advisory capacity. His meeting with you much impressed him and he earnestly hopes that you will come along on the flight as chief cosmoclectic. He asked me to put in a good word for him before he gets in touch with you direct.”

  Mrs. Warhoon let her shoulders sag and leaned forward between the Scandinavian candelabras. “

  Goodness," she said. Her cheeks became red; in the candlelight she looked thirty again.

  "He says you will not be the only woman on the flight. He also gives a rough indication of the salary, which will be fabulous. You ought to go. Hilary. It's a splendid opportunity.”

  She put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead on her hand. He thought it a theatrical gesture, even while seeing that she was genuinely moved and excited. His earlier fantasies returned to him.