the Dark Light Years

by Brian W Aldiss

"Now I get to my next point. The learning time of any species is in its early days, its babydays, and wherever we go in the galaxy we can expect to find the same rule applying. Children on Earth who through some misadventure learn no language are at twelve or thirteen too old to learn one. This has been proved many times with babies, for instance, in India, who have been tended by monkeys or wolves. Once the time of childhood is past, they are past acquiring the gift of speech.

  "So I have reasoned, Mr. Melmoth, that the only time that the aliens might be able to learn our tongue would be during their early years. It will be your job to live as close as you possibly can to one such infant alien.

  "It may be - we don't deny it - that it will prove impossible to communicate with these creatures. But the proof must be conclusive. After we have left you, we shall go to investigate the other planets in the cluster; no doubt we shall capture a group of the aliens and take them back to Earth, or even establish a base on one of the other planets, but that will have to wait on local conditions. Meanwhile, you will be my Number One project.”

  For a moment, Aylmer said nothing. He was thinking, in fact, about the winds of chance, and how wildly they blew. Only a brief while ago he was so stickily involved in the web of personal relationships formed by his father, his mother, his girl, and, to a lesser degree, his uncle Mihaly. Now that he was miraculously free, there was one question in particular he wanted to ask: "How long will you be leaving me on this planet?”

  "Well, it will be for no longer than a year, that I promise," Mrs. Warhoon told him, and was relieved to see his frown dissolve. They all smiled at each other again, though both men looked ill at ease.

  "How does all that sound to you?" Mrs. Warhoon asked Aylmer Ainson sympathetically.

  For heck sake tell her that you realize you have stuck your neck out too far to stomach, thought Lattimore, toying with a metaphor he had mixed some days earlier. Tell her that you can't afford to pay such a high price for the catharsis you need. Or look at me for assistance and I'll put in a word for you.

  The boy did look at Lattimore, but there were pride and excitement rather than appeal in the glance.

  Okay, Lattimore thought, so my diagnosis was a complete cock-up. So he's a hero rather than a couch case. A man is his own responsibility.

  "I feel very honored to be given such an assignment," Aylmer Ainson said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Like a dog that has been harshly spoken to. the universe had resumed its customary position. No longer did it cause the Gansas to surround it Instead, it surrounded the big ship, and the big ship sat on the planet with its nose in the air.

  In honor of the ship's captain, the planet had been christened Pestalozzi - though as Navigator Gleet had pointed out there were more pleasant names.

  Everything on Pestalozzi was fine.

  Its air contained the right admixture of oxygen at ground level, and lacked any vapors that might offend terrestrial lungs. Even better, it harbored - and they had Med Section's word for it - no bacterium or virus that Med Section could not cope with if necessary.

  The Gansas had landed near the equator. The midday temperature had not risen above twenty degrees Celsius, but at night it had not sunk below nine degrees.

  The period of axial revolution corresponded conveniently with Earth's, taking a notch over twenty-four hours and nine minutes. Which meant that a point on the equator would be travelling faster than an equivalent point on Earth, for one great disadvantage about Pestalozzi was that it was a world with considerable mass.

  Rest periods had been ordered after midday mess. Most of the crew had voluntarily started slimming.

  For seven stone weaklings on Pestalozzi weighed twenty-one stones at the equator.

  There were compensations for this crippling tripling, chief among which was the discovery of the aliens.

  When it had sat on its haunches smelling the air, observing solar emissions, ground radioactivity.

  Diagnostic bathytherms, and other phenomena, for two days, the Gansas emitted small snooper craft. As well as having an exploratory function, these flights were calculated to relieve cosmophobia.

  Honeybunch sat at the controls of one of these craft, flying according to Lattimore's instructions.

  Lattimore was in a state of great excitement, which communicated itself to the rating sitting next to him.

  Hank Quilter. They both gripped the rail and stared at the tawny lands rippling beneath them like the flank of a vast and vastly galloping beast....

  A beast we'll learn to tame and ride, thought Lattimore, trying to analyze the choking sensation in his breast. This is what that whole school of minor writers was fumbling to say last century before space travel even began, and, ye gods and little fishes, they had more than was acknowledged. Because this is the genuine and only thing, to feel the squeeze in your cells of a different gravity, to ride over a ground innocent of all thought of man, to be the first that ever burst.

  It was like getting your childhood back, a big savage childhood; once, long ago, you'd gone behind the lavender bushes at the bottom of the garden and had stepped into terra incognita. Here it was again, and every stalk of grass a lavender bush.

  He checked himself.

  "Hover." he ordered. "Alien life ahead.”

  They hovered, and beneath them a broad and lazy river was fringed with salad beds. In isolated groups the rhinomen worked or sheltered behind trees.

  Lattimore and Quilter looked at each other.

  "Set her down." Lattimore ordered.

  Honeybunch set her down more daintily than he had ever handled woman.

  "Better have your rifles in case there's trouble," Lattimore said.

  They picked up their rifles and climbed with care to the ground. Ankles were easily broken at current weights, despite the hastily devised supports that they all wore to thigh height under their trousers.

  A line of trees stood about eighty yards west of them. The three men headed for the trees, picking their way through rows of cultivated plants that resembled bolting lettuce, except that their leaves were as large and coarse as rhubarb leaves.

  The trees were enormous, but notable chiefly for what looked like malformation of their trunks. They swelled and spread, each of them double lobed; they approximated the shape of the aliens with their plump bodies and two sharp heads. From their crests, aerial roots tapered, many of them, like crude fingers. The foliage bristling on their topknots grew in a sort of stiff turbulence, so that again Lattimore felt the shiver of wonder; here was some-thing his weary intellect had not contemplated before.

  As the three moved towards these trees, rifles half-raised in traditional gesture, four-winged birds - butter-flies the size of eagles - clattered out of the tousled foliage, circled, and made away towards the low hills on the far side of the river. Beneath the trees, half a dozen rhinomen stood to watch the men approach. Their smell was familiar to Lattimore. He released the safety button of his rifle.

  "I didn't realize they were so big," Honeybunch said softly. "Are they going to charge us? We can't run -hadn't we better get back to the snooper?”

  "They're all ready to run," Quilter said. He wiped his wet lips with his hand.

  Lattimore had judged that the mildly swiveling heads of the aliens indicated no more than curiosity, but he welcomed this token that Quilter felt as much in control of the situation as he did.

  "Keep walking, Honeybunch," he said.

  But Honeybunch had glanced back over his shoulder at their craft. He let out a cry.

  "Hey, they're attacking from the rear!”

  Seven of the aliens, two of them big chaps with grey hides, approached the snooper from behind, were moving towards it inquisitively, were only a few yards from it. Honeybunch lugged the rifle up to his hips and fired.

  His first shot missed. The second found a target. The men heard the californium slug hit with a force equivalent to seventeen tons of T.N.T. One of the big grey fellows heeled over, a crater torn in the smooth ter
rain of his back.

  The other creatures moved to their companion as Honeybunch's rifle came up again.

  "Hold your fire!" Lattimore said.

  His voice was cut off by the roar of Quilter's rifle on his left Ahead, one of the smaller aliens burst, a head and shoulders blown away.

  Unknown tendons in Lattimore's neck and face tightened. He saw the rest of the stupid things standing there, nonplussed, but giving no appearance of fear or anger, certainly showing no inclination to run. They could feel nothing! If they had not sense enough to see the power of men, they should be taught it. There wasn't a species living that didn't know about man and his fire-power. What were they good for but to serve as targets?

  Lattimore brought his rifle up. It was a short mechanism with collapsible butt, semi-silenced, semi-recoilless, firing a 0'5 slug on single or automatic. It went off just as Quilter fired again.

  They stood there shoulder to shoulder, firing until the seven aliens were blown asunder. Now Honeybunch was crying for them to stop. Lattimore and Quilter recognized each other's expressions.

  "If we went up in the snooper and flew low, we might throw a scare into them and get a moving target," Lattimore said. He polished up his spectacles, which had misted, on the front of his shirt.

  Quilter wiped his dry lips on the back of his hand.

  "Somebody ought to teach those slugs how to run," he agreed.

  Mrs. Warhoon, meanwhile, stood speechless before perfection. She had been invited aboard the captain's snooper, and they had descended to investigate what looked like an untidy cluster of ruins in the interior of the equatorial continent.

  There they had found proof of the aliens' intellectual status. There were the mines, the foundries, the refineries, the factories, the laboratories, the launching pads - all domesticated down to the level of a cottage industry. The entire industrial process had turned into a folk art; the spaceships were homespun.

  They knew then, as they walked unmolested among the snorting aliens, that they were in the midst of an immemorial race. Here was an antiquity beyond the imagining of man.

  Captain Pestalozzi had stopped and lit a mescahale.

  "Degenerate." he had said. "A race in decline, that's obvious.”

  "I don't think anything is obvious. We are too far from Earth for anything to be obvious." Mrs.

  Warhoon said.

  "You've only got to look at the things," the captain had replied. He had little sympathy for Mrs.

  Warhoon; she was too knowledgeable, and when she wandered away from his party, he felt nothing but a slight relief.

  It was then that she had stumbled on perfection.

  The few buildings were scattered, and informal rather than negligible architecturally. All walls sloped inwards towards curving roofs; they were built either of bricks or precision-shaped stones, both materials being wrought to interlock, so that no mortar, or cement was used. Whether this was a style dictated by the 3G gravity or by artistic whim, Mrs. Warhoon was content to leave undecided until later. She disliked the sort of uninformed conclusions jumped to by the captain. With the thought of him bearing on her mind, she entered one of the buildings no more elaborate than its neighbors, and there the statue stood.

  It was perfection.

  But perfection is a cold word. This had the warmth as well as the aloofness of achievement Her throat constricted, she walked round it God knew what it was doing standing in a stinking shack.

  It was a statue of one of the aliens. She did not need telling it had also been wrought by one of them.

  What she did need telling was whether the work had been done yesterday or thirty-six centuries ago.

  After a while, when this thought had made the circuit of her brain several times, it registered on her attention, and she realized why she had postulated thirty-six centuries. That would be the age of the Egyptian XVIIIth Dynasty statue of a seated figure she often went to contemplate in the British Museum.

  This work, carved like the other out of a dark granite, had some of the same qualities.

  The alien stood on his six limbs, in perfect balance, one of his pointed heads a shade more elevated than the other. Between the catenary curve of his spine and the parabola of his belly lay the great symmetrical boat of his body. She felt curiously humble to be in the room with him; for, this was beauty, and for the first time she held in the hollow of her understanding a knowledge of what beauty was: the reconciliation between humanity and geometry, between the personal and the impersonal, between the spirit and the body.

  Now Mrs. Warhoon shook inside her mock-male. She saw a lot of things which, because they were important, she did not wildly want to see.

  She saw that here was a civilized race that had come to its maturity by a very different path from man's. For this race from the start and continuously (or without more than a brief intermission) had never been in conflict with nature and the natural scene that sustained it. It had remained in rapport, undivorced.

  Consequently, its struggle towards the sort of abilities living in this shaped granite - ah. but the philosopher and the sculptor, the man of the spirit and the man with the instrument, had been one here! - was the struggle with its natural repose (torpor, many would have said); while man's struggle had in the main been an outward struggle, against forces that he saw as being in opposition to him.

  As surely and simply as Mrs. Warhoon saw all this, and before she embellished it for her report, she saw that mankind could not fail to misunderstand this lifeform: for here was an equipoise that would, could, neither oppose nor flee from him. As this was a race without pain, as it was a race without fear, it would remain alien to man.

  She had her arm about the flank of the statue, her temple resting on its polished side.

  She wept For all these perceptions - which came to her on the wing as she walked once round the figure - were mainly intellectual, and fled as they came. In their place grew a womanly perception she could less easily, afterwards, deny.

  She perceived the humanity in the statue. It was this humanity that had reminded her of the Egyptian statue. She saw that although this was an abstraction, yet it retained humanity, or the quality humans call humanity; and it was something that mankind had lost and might have retained. She wept for the loss: her loss, everyone's loss.

  It was then that the distant shouts broke in on her melancholy. Shots followed, and then the whistles and wails of aliens. Captain Pestalozzi was having or creating trouble.

  Wearily, she stood up and brushed her hair off her forehead. She told herself she was being silly.

  Without looking again at the figure, she went to the door of the building.

  Four ship's days later, the Gansas was ready to move on to the next planet.

  After the experiences of the first day, despite all that a rather hysterical Mrs. Warhoon could say, it was generally agreed that the aliens were a degenerate form of life, if anything rather worse than animals, and were therefore fair game for the natural high spirits of the men. For a day or two, a little hunting could hurt no one.

  True, it soon became obvious from planetary sweeps that Pestalozzi harbored only a few hundred thousand of the large sexipeds, congregating round wallows and artificially created swamps; and these began to show evidence that they resented the old Adam in their Eden. But several specimens were captured and penned aboard the Gansas; Mrs. Warhoon's statue was likewise collected, and a number of artifacts of a miscellaneous nature, and specimens of plant life.

  Disappointingly, there were few other lifeforms on the planet; several varieties of bird, six-legged rodents, lizards, armor plated flies, fish and Crustacea in the rivers and oceans, an interesting shrew discovered in the Arctic regions that seemed to be an exception to the rule that small warm-blooded animals could not survive in such conditions. Little else. Methodically, the Exo Section stocked up the ship.

  They were ready to embark on the next leg of their reconnaissance.

  Mrs. Warhoon went with the ship's padre
, the ship's adjutant, Lattimore. and Quilter (who had just been promoted to a new post as Lattimore's assistant) to say good-bye to Samuel Melmoth, alias Aylmer Ainson, in his stockade.

  "I just hope he's going to be all right," Mrs. Warhoon said.

  "Stop worrying. He's got enough ammunition here to shoot every living thing on the planet," Lattimore said. He was irritated by his new success with the woman. Ever since the first day of Pestalozzi when she had suddenly become chummy and climbed into his bed, Hilary had been weepy and unsettled.

  Lattimore reckoned he was easy-going enough where women were concerned, but he like some token that his attentions had a benevolent effect.

  He stood by the gate of the stockade, resting on his thigh crutches and feeling vaguely aggrieved with the universe. The others could say farewell to young Ainson. Speaking for himself, he had had enough of the Ainsons.

  The stockade was of reinforced wire net. It formed a wall eight feet high about two square acres of ground. A stream ran through the ground. Some damage had been done in the way of trampling down vegetation and shattering trees by the labor force detailed to erect the stockade, but apart from that the area represented a typical bit of Pestalozzi country. By the rivulet was a wallow which led to one of the low native houses. Salad and vegetable beds lay by the wallow, and the whole patch was sheltered rather delightfully by the outrageous trees.

  Beyond the trees stood the automatic observation post. its radio mast rising gracefully into the air. Next to it was the eight-roomed building designed from prefabricated parts for Ainson's residence. Two of the rooms constituted his living space; the others contained all the apparatus he would need for recording and interpreting the alien language, an armory, medical and other supplies, the power plant, and the food synthesizer, which could be fed water, soil. rock, anything, and would turn them into nourishment.

  Beyond the works of man, keeping apart and considerably abashed, sat an adult female alien and her off-spring. Both had all limbs retracted. Good luck to the lot of them. Lattimore thought, and let's get to hell out of here.

  "May you find peace here, my son." said the padre, taking Ainson's hand and jogging it up and down between his own. "Remember that in your year of isolation you will always be in God's presence.”