The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 1) (The Brian Aldiss Collection)

by Brian Aldiss

  They passed into the shadow of a Martian building like a small hill. It might have been, in its prime, a cathedral or a railway station. The race that had built it was long gone; now their monument bore warning notices BEWARE OF FALLING ROCK. Many of its ancient cloisters had been adapted into stalls or shops by terrestrials. In one of the darkest corners stood the Flingabout Tavern. The two Earthmen went in, into an atmosphere of neon and noise.

  Few customers were about. A juke-box blazed away in a corner; two couples danced in front of it. Girls in aprons bustled round, serving drinks and marsbergers. George eyed them appreciatively.

  ‘This is living!’ he exclaimed, rubbing his red hands. ‘Maybe we pick up a couple of these tarts at closing time, eh, Max?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Max said.

  They ordered Roinse Green wine in tankards.

  ‘Here’s to all those stinking, fruitless, useless months of our lives we wasted on Ganymede station!’ Max said, raising his tankard.

  Together they drank deep. George sighed with gratification, leaning back in his chair relaxedly, his fingers tapping on the table in time with the juke-box beat.

  ‘This is living,’ he repeated.

  ‘Think of those poor kids with their faces buried in comics,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bet this place gets pretty wild after dark,’ he said. He looked slightly bored.

  ‘We can go somewhere else after another drink or two, if you want,’ he said.

  ‘Really paint the town,’ he said.

  ‘Show ’em old soldiers never die,’ he said. Pause.

  ‘You’re quiet, Max,’ he said.

  Max drained off his tankard and stood up. His usually expressionless face puckered into a look of embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry, George,’ he said. ‘There’s someone I’ve got to go and see. I can’t just sit here and get stewed on our one night free.’

  ‘Now wait a minute!’ George said, plonking down his tankard and getting up belligerently. ‘Are you trying to walk out on me? Were we not going to make a day of it? Did we or didn’t we not plan this bloody binge ever since we left Neptune?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Max repeated. ‘I hate to let you down, George. There’s someone I’ve got to see; I thought I could stay away but I can’t.’

  ‘It’s Maggie, is it?’

  Max sighed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  George sat down again, rubbing his bald head. ‘Then you won’t be wanting me with you.’

  ‘Directly I leave this place, the women’ll see you’re alone and defenceless, and come swarming round you.’

  ‘You’re a swine,’ George said. As Max went through the door, he was calling savagely for more drink.

  Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, Max walked through the old part of Roinse. The sun and the false satellite sun together cast double shadows everywhere. It was mid-summer. Only the white dust underfoot looked like winter.

  I sometimes think that never blows so red

  The rose as where some buried Caesar bled.

  By the same token, the dust was white with the hopes and bodies of extinct Martians. An obvious thought, thought Max; but this was no age for subtlety. He walked rapidly until he came to an exchange store huddled against a mouldering pile of masonry. Over the door was one word only: DEACON. He entered without hesitation.

  Maggie Deacon sat behind the counter, thumbing through a catalogue. She was lean and hard and green-gold, a typical Martian colonist woman. Her eyes were grey: she was not beautiful, except to Max.

  As she stood up, he hardly recognised her. Her hair was red.

  ‘Max!’ she said. She pronounced it as if it was the sweetest word she ever spoke.

  At the sound of her voice they were back where they had been before, two years ago when Max was on leave on his way to Ganymede in the troopship. He had forgotten she was a mutant of a type becoming not uncommon on Mars. Her hair colour changed with the seasons. Last visit, he had seen it in winter, when it was black; in the spring, it acquired a green tinge. Now, through the summer, it was a golden red. A few white hairs streaked it, adding to its brilliance.

  The mutation was ugly, people said. Max felt otherwise. For him, it was a sign of the way she was different from all other women.

  ‘Your husband?’ Max asked, casting an eye towards the back of the shop. He was prompted to ask that first.

  ‘He died only a week after you left,’ she replied. ‘Don’t say anything about it. Just don’t mention it.’

  Max had met Maggie Deacon by chance. He had brought a ring into the shop to sell for drink money. They had looked at each other and recognised themselves for two of a kind: wary, hard, lonely, uncompromising, desperate. Deacon had lain in a back room issuing irate orders through the door, cursed with a spinal disease of long standing. Deacon had not mattered as Maggie and Max banished all that was barren in each other’s lives.

  Now Maggie came round the counter, wrapped her arms round Max’s ribs and kissed him deeply. Finally taking her lips from his, she regarded him with satisfaction.

  ‘The way you walk in so casually,’ she said.

  ‘You still remember me, Maggie,’ he said.

  Inside him, the luck and the love boiled up. Reaching out, he seized her roughly and drew her back into his arms, pressing his face into hers, devouring her.

  ‘I’ll close up the shop,’ she said, when he released her. Their eyes were alight; they both looked ten years younger.

  ‘There’ll be a bed free now,’ Max said.

  She bolted and locked the flimsy door.

  ‘We’re not staying here now we can choose,’ she said decisively. ‘We need proper surroundings – besides, I don’t get out enough.’

  He followed her into the rear room. It was poor, tidy, dusty. The idea of criticising it, even mentally, never occurred to him; it was her place and he accepted it.

  ‘How long?’ she asked, brushing her hair, stooping to look in a tiny mirror.

  ‘Till tomorrow, five in the afternoon.’

  Silently, they faced up to the appalling briefness of it. She said not a word more on the subject, and he thanked God for her sense.

  She bundled drink, food and a blanket into a basket. She straightened her skirt and was ready to go.

  ‘We can climb to the top of the Cropolade,’ she said. ‘It’ll be quiet there, and we’ll be alone. I’ve got something to lie on.’

  ‘Wherever you say, my love,’ he said.

  Flashingly, she smiled at him. Light-heartedness took them; they squeezed each other, excited as kids as she steered him to the back door.

  ‘I wish you’d come tomorrow instead of today,’ she said, as they emerged into a back alley, ‘I meant to have a bath tonight.’

  The Cropolade was another massive, meaningless, chunk of Martian architecture. The outskirts of the city ended round its feet; it was like a galleon aground on a reef. A large sand dune had worked against one side of it, forming a sweeping slope up which a track ran right onto the rocky shoulders of the Cropolade itself.

  Max and Maggie lay close together on the top, beside a length of ruinous wall. Lights spattered the darkness below, but they disregarded them. Lights flecked the dark sky above, but they ignored them. Night had come, bringing the image of peace to them both.

  She sat up and poured more wine.

  ‘I’m feeling half tight,’ he said, drinking avidly.

  ‘Tell me about the half-tight thoughts you’re thinking,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh, there are too many of them. I’m thinking how I was a kid raised in a slum, no breeding, no education … yet right now I’m the happiest, luckiest man alive. And I’m thinking of all the things I’ve done and experienced in the universe – and of all those I haven’t. And I know they’re all valuable and should not be denied. And I know that through you I can find the best of everything.’

  ‘I never would have guessed you had such a soft centre,’ she teased.

  He was annoyed. ‘You’
re wrong there, mighty wrong! I may think, but I’m like rock inside … All hard, Maggie, all hard.’

  She stroked his hair, asking him what else he was thinking.

  ‘I’m thinking that we’ll never find anybody better suited to each other than we are. That a day with you is better than a year anywhere else … That I ought to desert, skip the ship, and stay right here with you forever.’

  Maggie sat up.

  ‘You can’t do that, Max. Mars is a small place. You’d never get away. Besides, it’s wartime on Earth – they’d hunt you down and shoot you!’

  ‘I was only thinking, love, only thinking. Lie down again. After being with you, the thought of the other fellows drives me crazy. If you knew how damned gormlessly innocent they are. Adult innocence makes me want to be sick.’

  She had brought a small lamp. It hung above them on a stick, swaying slightly in a light breeze. The evening was chilly, and they snuggled closer.

  ‘We’ll stay here until it’s time for you to – get back,’ she said. ‘We’ll stay here till the very last moment.’

  Neither of them spoke about the future. When they parted, it would be for good. Army other ranks never do the Outer journey twice. Besides, there was a war on on Earth; wars killed people.

  They had both fallen asleep when the bright light played on them. Max sat up, feeling for a gun he did not have, knowing something was wrong. A pallid dawn glow sickened in the sky. Someone was calling him by name.

  A vehicle had climbed the slope onto the top of the Cropolade. Its headlights seemed to souse them in blinding dry liquid.

  ‘Max! Max Fleet!’

  ‘Who is it?’ Maggie asked. In the cruel illumination, her face was white, drawn, old. Glancing at her, Max was suddenly angry, frightened, full of hate. He jumped to his feet and advanced pugnaciously, clenching his fists.

  ‘Who the ruddy hell are you?’ he called.

  ‘Max! It’s me!’

  He moved out of the beam and began to see again. A small duty truck stood there, its television antennae shimmering above it with reflected light. Young Wagner Hayes had jumped from the driver’s seat and was coming towards Max.

  Max told him to go away, using the strongest language he could muster.

  ‘Don’t muck about, Max,’ Wagner said sharply. ‘Get in the van, and we’ll drive you back to the ship.’

  ‘I’ll get back to the ship when I’m ready.’

  ‘You’ll breeding well get back now, Maxy Boy! An urgent call’s come through from Earth. There’s an enemy offensive along the Greenland-Iceland axis or somewhere, and we’re the joes who’ve got to go back and help squash it as soon as possible. Crisis on! Leave’s cancelled.’

  ‘Of all the dirty –’

  Max broke off. Padre Column was approaching from the other side of the truck.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble, Hayes?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Max here, padre –’

  ‘My leave doesn’t expire till five this afternoon!’ Max exclaimed furiously. He wondered what Maggie was doing.

  ‘On the contrary, it expired at midnight,’ the padre said. ‘Sorry, Fleet. The ship’s siren sounded the Recall signal. I wonder you did not hear it up here. You’re technically under arrest for overstaying leave.’

  ‘How the hell did you find I was up here?’

  The padre moved impatiently.

  ‘Several trucks are out searching for you. All the troops are back aboard ship bar you and Corporal George Walters. We picked Walters up from a gutter. He was completely intoxicated; he is fast asleep in the back of the truck now. Before he passed out, he gave us the name of the woman you are with. We got her address and found someone who saw you both come up here. Now please get into the truck without any further trouble or foul language.’

  He could see the weather-worn top-knot of the Cropolade all round and, further, the scattered lights of Roinse and, further still, the neutral and obnubilated blackness of Mars. He could see – yet it was as if he was blind. His senses rocked. He hardly felt the hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You’ll have to go, my dear; arguing will only make it worse,’ she said. ‘I know how it is. I understand.’

  Choking, he turned to Maggie.

  ‘Maggie, we’ll never –’

  ‘Leave that woman alone, Fleet, and come with us!’ the padre said. He spoke quietly, but his words were loaded with contempt. Max turned on him.

  ‘If you say one word against my Maggie, padre or no padre, you’re going to get the biggest –’

  ‘Haynes, get this man into the truck,’ Padre Column said, sharply. ‘If he is not intoxicated, his senses are besotted with something equally dangerous.’

  ‘Come on, Maxy!’ Wag said, advancing. He looked big. His baby face was screwed into the grimace of a man executing a painful duty. He put out a hand. Max hit him right on the mouth.

  Wag stopped in surprise.

  ‘Oh, well done!’ Maggie exclaimed.

  The padre and Wag charged together. Max put out a shower of blows. They seemed not to land. In a whirl of excitement – hardly any pain then – he realised he was being beaten. Wag was too big. He was being borne down, picked up … he was still struggling, but he was being dumped into the truck. Confusion …

  Handcuffs clicked on his wrists and at once his mind cleared again.

  ‘Maggie!’ he bellowed. The sound was lost in the angry revving of the truck. Max half climbed to his feet and then fell over the unconscious George; when he had picked himself up again, the vehicle was already bumping downhill. Max did not call out any more. He sat on the floor of the truck, breathing hard.

  When they reached the bottom of the long slope, Wag leant back and said, ‘Sorry I had to hit you like that, Max.’

  ‘It would be better to attend to your driving,’ the padre said gently.

  This was enough to rouse Max again. He knelt up on the bumping floor.

  ‘You’re a fine one to say what’s best!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘You and Wag and everyone – you’re all the same! You say my senses are besotted; well, that’s the way I like it. To suffer, to feel … What’s it matter, whether it feels good or it hurts, if you’re alive? You preach your bloody sermons against the snares of the senses. You must be mad! Everyone’s senses are being starved, not surfeited. A race of fools, dullards, bores, is being raised – by you and your damned creed of the starvation of any natural urge. Why do you think George is lying here drunk? It’s because he’s reacting against your sort of living death!’

  Sector Grey

  Originality is far to seek in Era 124. Diversity is everywhere; originality nowhere. As a humorist put it, ‘Every day someone somewhere is inventing gunpowder.’

  All this chimes well with the Theory of Multigrade Superannuation, which allows for identical events occurring on different worlds at different times. Men evolve, family characteristics alter; the ancient mythic Adam remains unregenerate. Hence the persistence of aggression patterns that lead to war.

  A volume such as this, which tries to scan Starswarm at one particular moment in time, must allow latitude for at least a campaign, if it is to be representative.

  There are many conflicts to choose from.

  Perhaps one of the most notable is now being waged in the strange formation known as the Alpha Wheel, beyond the Rift in Sector Grey. We have not the time, nor the sensory ability, to describe war on the largest scale it is ever likely to attain, fought bitterly between two races of telesensual beings.

  We understand much more today about the Alpha Wheel than we did. The Wheel, quite simply, failed to develop. It remains a region only a light year and a half across, retaining within its borders many strange materials and even its own physical laws.

  One instance of this: The disproportion in this embryo universe’s chemical composition has resulted in an enormous quantity of free oxygen. Its abundance is so great that it fills what we would call interplanetary space, held there by the high gravitational and centrifugal force
s of the system. Thus, the eight hundred planets that comprise the Wheel share one common atmosphere.

  It is hard not to see a parallel between this oddity and the fact that the Jakkapic races, alone in Starswarm, are telesensual. As they share their ambient air, so they share certain sensory perceptions. And they have been at war, one planet with another, ever since man first made contact with them.

  We know many men who are divided against themselves, for all that psyche-healing can do. The Jakkapic races suffer in the same way. Their wars are the more terrible because every blow struck against the enemy hurts the friend and the self equally.

  The movements of Jakkapic machines are as predictable to an enemy as the movements of their troops. Their minds are shared; thus, their machines, being in essence but extensions of their minds, can never be secret. Deadlock in this murderous chess game would have been reached aeons ago, were it not for the element of mortality. Hearts and engines alike undergo failures. At the moment of failure, which is unpredictable, disorganisation occurs. Then the enemy strikes. The vast search systems that blink out across the blizzards of the Wheel are looking not for success but failure.

  The hearts and engines that concern us here must be human ones. If we want a war in human terms, we have not far to go from the Wheel. The planet Drallab in the Eot system is also in Grey Sector.

  There, a war has been raging for ten standard years. It is a mere tiff on a galactic scale, and is chiefly of interest because such is the rigid code of honour of the military juntas which rule Drallab that, although they are well launched into their Early Technological Age, they allow no weapon that cannot be carried by one man. Nation after Drallabian nation has exerted itself not to breaking the rule but to breeding stronger men to carry larger weapons. We shall see how the rule is circumvented in a different way, by the use of drugs.

  Some of these drugs were superseded in Starswarm Central a thousand millennia ago. On Drallab, they are new, revolutionary. Every day someone somewhere is inventing gunpowder.

  Sergeant Taylor lay in a hospital bed and dreamed a dream.

  He was a certain colonel. He had inherited the rank from his father and his father’s father. He had spent the first tender night of his life lying in the swamps of As-A-Merekass. Since he had survived being eaten by hydro-monitors and alligators, he was allowed to begin the military upbringing suitable to his family status. The parade ground had never been distant from his adolescence. All the women who had care of his earlier years possessed iron breasts and faces like army boots. The pulpy fruit of success would one day be his.