HARM

by Brian W Aldiss

  The injection made him at once giddy and exuberant. He signed the document without bothering to read it over again. I, Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali…

  Pushing the trolley aside, the janitor woman took his arm to propel him forward, as if he had shown some reluctance to leave, perhaps mistaking his feebleness for unwillingness. Or perhaps she thought he was feigning weakness. Certainly it seemed to him that everything was unfolding as dumb show. His walk toward the door of the room was a mere drift.

  “So you admit I’m not guilty,” he said in a dreamy fashion, mumbling.

  “If you were guilty, you’d be leaving as a heap of bones in a black sack.”

  “Black sack. Black sack, yes.”

  Then they were in a corridor, still drifting. He could hear neither his own footsteps nor hers. They stopped at a cubbyhole, where his watch and a few trifling belongings were handed over to him. The assistant there smiled at him, even shook his hand as if they were old friends and, smiling, said something Fremant did not hear.

  They were at the door, the door to the outside world. A guard hastened with great sloth to fling it open. The door swung back on its hinges without a sound. And there was the street, an ordinary street with pavements on either side of the road and railings on the opposite side. And beyond the railings a neat hedge, showing signs of autumn. Everything was orderly. There were lampposts. Double yellow lines. A car passed, and an old man in a hat was walking along slowly with a white dog on a lead. He knew—he knew with a burst of joy—this was not Syria, not Uzbekistan, but London.

  On the top step, the janitor woman turned, put her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips in farewell. He felt her rimless glasses touch his cheek.

  “Good luck, dearie!” she said.

  She retreated. The great door closed behind her. He was standing alone in the street, aware of the cool air on his face.

  He made no move. He could not believe he was free. Although he expected every moment that the door would reopen and they would drag him back into the prison, he made no attempt to leave the spot.

  A small car, a shabby Renault Clio, drove up and stopped close by. A young man got out and came briskly to Paul’s side. Paul did not recognize him.

  “I’m Ned,” he said. “Sorry I’m late, the traffic’s hell all down Marylebone Road. The government’s giving away ice creams to all immigrants. They phoned to say you could be collected at eleven a.m.” He glanced at his watch. “Gosh, it’s now twenty to twelve—sorry!”

  None of this did he understand. He muttered the words “twenty to twelve” over and over, puzzled by them.

  His faculties returned when Ned remarked, “Jump in, old chum. Doris is waiting for you.”

  “She’s dead,” he heard his own voice saying.

  “No, no, Doris is fine. Are you okay?”

  But before he could rejoin his wife, the whole scene faded away. He woke in the bed next to Bellamia in the New Hope Hotel, crying with dismay to be back.

  THEY PRESENTED THEMSELVES, with the dog, before the government offices. After a long delay, Safelkty arrived, apologizing briefly. At first his manner was lofty and abstracted. He gave lengthy orders to an attendant, taking no notice of his visitors.

  He looked with approval at the caged dog before greeting them in an amiable way.

  His carriage came immediately, a smart vehicle, its panels gleaming, pulled by two of the humped insect-horses, gaudily dressed with plumes.

  “We are working on horseless carriages,” Safelkty remarked as they all climbed in and were seated. “Motors are being designed. You’ll notice my carriage has the new rubber wheels?”

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked Bellamia. His manner was one of warm friendliness, which immediately won Fremant and Bellamia over. “How did you find the hotel?”

  Safelkty was one who behaved with good form when he remembered to do so. He looked upon himself as a good statesman and a good man. Whether his decisions were, in themselves, moral or immoral, whether good or ill would result from them, was a matter of indifference to him. It was for this reason that people regarded him, rightly, as decisive.

  He pointed out developments and improvements in Stygia City as they bowled along.

  “It is our Renaissance,” he said proudly.

  Fremant did not know the word but recognized its intent and felt delighted to know so great a man.

  “You see how clean everywhere is?”

  Fremant had not noticed.

  “Haven is a filthy hole.” Safelkty waved out of the window at a bystander as he spoke.

  “Not really…”

  “I have my reports.” He stuck his thumbs into the top of his jeans. “It’s a filthy hole thanks to religion. The religious believe they will die and go to a cleaner world, so they don’t mind filth in this one.”

  “I wasn’t aware that was the case.”

  “It is the case. I’m telling you. Some fools think that when you die you go to a place called Heaven, full of hymns and clouds—or that you get fifty virgins all to yourself. Well, let me tell you, that’s all a load of garbage. When you die, your body starts stinking and decaying into a vile mess, okay? It’s a scientific fact.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “I’m telling you, your body decays into a vile mess. No Heaven, no Paradise. See? Do I make myself clear?”

  “But it’s claimed that the spirit—”

  Safelkty’s jaw set. “I don’t need any argument. I’m telling you.”

  Bellamia nudged Fremant to keep quiet.

  They reached the great bulk of the New Worlds within minutes. It towered over a new addition, a domed building attached to the ship. “We have new workshops here,” Safelkty explained as they entered the smoky confines.

  Men were at work constructing engines and engine parts. A great roaring came from their benches. Safelkty explained briefly that they worked on what he called “treejuice.” He said that Stygia had once, in the days before the Disaster, millions of years back, been heavily forested. With the pressure of the soil and rock on them, those dead forests had been turned into a combustible liquid; this treejuice was now being harnessed to work for them.

  They passed into the interior of the ship itself. As they took an elevator, Safelkty again had a word of explanation, saying that his scientists believed the ship had functioned by something he called “gravedy.”

  Finally they came to a chamber where several men and women were working. However absorbed they were in their work, all snapped to attention when Safelkty entered. Jovially he insisted they continue with their valuable work. He then summoned an old man, by name Tolsteem, to explain their objectives to his visitors.

  “Well, this is Operation Cereb, so called,” Tolsteem began nervously. “Under our leader, Lord Safelkty, we have forged ahead. We now have good motive power, which before we lacked. And, by the way, I think we did meet once before.”

  He glanced anxiously at the leader before continuing. “The question of consciousness was a mystery throughout the ages on Earth, finally solved only recently. We now know that consciousness is at least in part a chemical reaction—or interaction, I should say—which occurs in the cerebral cortex, where are sited those chemicals which drive its functioning. Even small creatures, even insects, lacking a cerebral cortex, nevertheless have a certain similar neural resource and marginal awareness—”

  “Keep it short, Tolsteem,” said Safelkty. “I do not have all day.”

  Tolsteem began to wring his hands nervously as he continued.

  “To cut an interesting story too short, then, we have developed the original mind-evaluator, and can now focus on any conscious activity in any mind by replication of the chemical responses, agitated by a small electrical current, such that the process can be reproduced, externally, on a screen—”

  “As we are about to demonstrate,” said Safelkty, snapping his fingers with impatience. Other assistants had removed the captive dog from its cage and strapped it into the Cereb apparatus. The dog, i
n its anxiety, was projecting faint little mothlike signals which seemed to smolder, then writhe into nonexistence almost as soon as they emerged.

  “It can’t speak, having no vocal cords,” said Safelkty. “Instead, it gives forth these imagoes. I do not believe it will have anything useful to convey to us regarding the Dogover culture.”

  Once switched on, the machine produced a steady hum. Various overhead lights were turned off, but the screen remained blank. An operator worked a variety of knobs, watching dials, listening carefully to slight alterations in tone.

  The screen finally lit. A scatter of symbols crossed it, resembling falling leaves. Next moment a coherent picture emerged.

  The audience was looking at something resembling a dance. Naked humans, male and female, were prancing about in a glade. Their movements were clumsy. They appeared joyless. Seated in a crescent on chairs were five of the doglike beings, watching the performance. After a while, their tail-appendages moved, the little fingers of which twiddled together—probably a form of applause, as the dancers then stopped and bowed to their audience.

  Confused images followed. Then another picture came clear. Small humans were at work, building a kind of hut, triangular in shape, of a type Fremant recognized. They built rapidly, as if trained, while other humans brought sticks and straw for the building. Two dog-beings looked on from a bank nearby. When the hut was thatched and finished, the humans adorned it with flowers, yellow and blue. They stood back and fell silent. A large dog-being, its body decorated with similar yellow and blue flowers, approached. It nodded to the right and to the left, sending out a string of elaborate signals, while the humans bowed. It entered the hut.

  “Stop!” ordered Safelkty, in a loud voice. “Stop this nonsense. It’s a fake!”

  Tolsteem, who had appeared so nervous and submissive only moments earlier, now spoke up sharply.

  “Of course it’s not a fake! Allow us to continue, Master. This is most interesting.”

  “I order you to switch off the Cereb!”

  Tolsteem stood up to confront his leader. “No, sir, you must see this. You are a scientist. You must respect the truth!”

  “I do not respect this rubbish!”

  “This ‘rubbish,’ sir—as you call it—clearly indicates that Stygia once had a culture where the pygmies were inferior to the species we have mistakenly called ‘dogs.’ We have to face up to the fact.”

  “You’re being confused by one wretched dog’s imagining.”

  “No, sir. We are viewing a record from its memory of times that were. You forget that we seem to have been cast upon a planet where the insects have dominance and have adopted many intelligent and semi-intelligent forms.

  “The human-like forms here had no such good fortune. The ‘insects,’ as we must call them, may well have had many million years’ head start on them. Why should we have assumed that the great impulse toward life would always take the same pathways across the universe? Watch on, I say! Truth is a bitter herb, a cure for illusion—and pride!”

  Safelkty seemed almost to burst with suppressed anger but said nothing in response. He gestured abruptly as a sign that the evaluator should continue.

  Other scenes played. Each indicated that Tolsteem’s analysis was correct. The dog-beings kept the small humans as slaves and playthings. In one scene, a group of six humanoids were judged by their masters to have committed a crime. They stood in a circle, linking arms around shoulders, looking inward and down. And then they died, killing themselves by voluntary stoppage of their hearts. The viewers watched this strange act in silence, disconcerted.

  Happier scenes followed. Newborn dogs, their tails waving freely, played among the humans. Humans cuddled and ran about with the baby dogs in their arms. Again, dogs and humans splashed about freely in a river. So secure was the dog-species in its supremacy that the supremacy was not insisted upon. Such episodes of frolic touched the watchers greatly.

  In yet another scene, again there was a celebration of some kind. Dogs joined with the humans, frisking with them, enveloping the scene with ribbons of bright symbols in many fascinating shapes—“Oh, it must be their sort of music!” Bellamia exclaimed—when some giants appeared. The giants were not clearly seen, so that their forms were distorted; but all who watched realized who these monsters were. The monsters advanced in a furious wave, killing every living being indiscriminately. Only a few of the dogs, running for safety, managed to escape the slaughter.

  “How cruel!” Fremant exclaimed.

  “Yes, we have much to answer for,” said Tolsteem, and he switched off the machine.

  Safelkty turned on his heels and left.

  OLD TOLSTEEM AND HIS COLLEAGUES began an eager discussion of what they had seen. “One can completely understand how an insect might evolve over generations into full consciousness. The fact that it somewhat resembles a terrestrial dog is neither here nor there. The brain waves we have registered are uncommonly like those we see in the human brain,” said one old fellow.

  “Having no lungs per se, these giant insects couldn’t speak,” another said in response. “So they developed a mode of visual signal response.”

  “Yes, very elegant in many aspects,” another agreed.

  “A necessary response to the environment,” said the youth who had operated the machine. “Their mix of superimposed frequences seldom varies from between about twenty to forty hertz.”

  “Can we say, then, that the dog-beings acquired full consciousness?” asked Tolsteem. “That would imply that various regions of their brains interconnect, always alert for the—the, er, continuous conference command we call consciousness. Even terrestrial insects had the rudiments of such systems, we understand.

  “All told, this entails a staggering overturning of our previous ignorant convictions.” He chuckled. “One quite sees why our beloved leader marched out in a huff…

  “It will be interesting to dissect this creature’s brain.”

  He gestured to the dog still strapped into the machine, and now looking bedraggled.

  Fremant called out in alarm. “You must let him go, return him to the wild! You have just proved that he is our equal in intellect—and he’s the last of his race. You must let him go free!”

  “Oh, we can’t do that,” said Tolsteem, with a demure smile. “He’s much too precious to us. We are scientific people, my friend.”

  WHEN FREMANT AND BELLAMIA LEFT, to return to their hotel room, Bellamia clutched his arm.

  “Don’t fret. It had to happen. Had to. We killed ’em all off. What does one more matter? Don’t be upset. Let’s get something to eat.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that a whole little universe has been destroyed through man’s cruelty?”

  She made tut-tutting noises. “Men are like that, my dear. It’s useless to fret. Useless. I’ll find you something nice to eat.”

  Fremant emitted a wild laugh. “Jupers!—And women are like that!” But he went along with her.

  He recognized the good sense in what she said. Yet it did not touch him.

  He had to accept his limited capacities. Those stronger than he had controlled him. He knew from personal experience the mental powers of the dog-people; why had he allowed this individual to be caged? Why had he brought it unquestioningly to Stygia City, only to let it be experimented on? He hated himself for doing it.

  He thought he had only been doing “the right thing.” Instead he had denied what was good and true in his nature. It was this understanding that kept him awake in his bed that night.

  Toss and turn as he might, he could not escape the pain of a profound truth: that under the stresses of normal life, he who had once been—or had regarded himself as—an upright and honest young fellow, had allowed falsehood in. Falsehood had taken over, as dry rot takes over an old house, to its ultimate decay.

  Despite himself, he began thinking of Doris, the sweetly trusting woman he had married. With what disdain he had treated her; and all the while that disdain ha
d been a projection of his own disdain for himself. He had been so eager to demonstrate to the Western world that he was not a…not a Muslim. So he had betrayed himself, adopting Western manners, marrying a Western wife, even writing a Western-style novel.

  He sat up in startlement in the dark, seeing light. Those throwaway lines in his novel, about the British prime minister being assassinated—his torturers were right, in essence. They reflected his true secret hatred for what he had become, for suppressing his true nature under the pressure of “doing the right thing.”

  Fatigue freed him at last from his thoughts.

  NINE

  SOMEONE WAS SHAKING HIS SHOULDER and saying, gently, “Wake up.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

  “You’re free to go now. Your name has been cleared.”

  Yet nothing was clear. He moved in a mist. His jailers seemed cordial. One helped him on with his jacket. The woman he had encountered before put the document of clearance in front of him. He signed without thinking.

  “There’s a good boy,” she said, making off with the document with her broad-beamed, complacent walk.

  He had made no reference to the death of his wife. He was led along a familiar corridor. There a man in an apron was pasting posters to the corridor wall. One poster said WAKE UP! GOD DOES NOT EXIST. The poster currently being stuck up read ONLY FOOLS AND TURDS BELIEVE THAT ALLAH WAS NOT A FOOL AND A TURD.

  At a small kiosk at the end of the corridor his trifling possessions were restored to him, including his biometric ID card.

  “Good luck, sir!” said the man behind the counter. “Have a nice day.”

  Another guard led him through coded doors to a guarded outer door. As a man was unlocking it, Paul asked him, “What country are we in?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said the guard with a chuckle. He opened the door a foot or two and pushed the released prisoner out of prison. The door slammed behind him.