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

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever known you to be off work. Cheer up, you’ve only got a week to go before you’ll be making tracks for home,’ I said, removing my coat.

  My truck was outside. Though only half a mile away by hill paths, the unit to which I was attached was at least ten miles off by the circuitous track around the mountains.

  ‘Look how long the flaming journey back to Droxy takes when we do get off from Touchdown,’ he complained. ‘But with all my family I can’t afford to travel FTL.’

  He spoke as if the FTL ships were my responsibility, which in a sense they were.

  ‘Even STLs are fast enough to make the subjective time of the journey no more than three or four months.’

  ‘Don’t start explaining,’ he said. He waved his hand, dismissing the subject. ‘You know I’m only a simple farmer. I don’t grasp all the technical stuff about subjective time. I just want to get home.’

  The two girls Fay and Tes came in after finishing their CV lessons. Tes was preparing lunch; eyeing me warily – she was a mistrustful creature – she told me that her mother was out helping Murrag with the flocks. Both girls came over to the farmer to join in the discussion; I coaxed Fay up onto my knee.

  She wanted the whole business of how they would get home explained to her. ‘You’re a Flange maintenance officer, Captain Roge,’ she said. ‘Tell me all about it, and then I’ll tell Daddy so’s he can understand.’

  ‘You don’t have to understand,’ her father said. ‘We just take a ship that’ll get us there eventually. That’s all there is to it, thank God. The likes of us don’t need to bother our heads about the technicalities.’

  ‘I want to know,’ Fay replied.

  ‘It’s good for us to listen,’ Tes said, ‘though I understand it all already. A child could understand it.’

  ‘I’m a child and I don’t understand it,’ her sister said.

  ‘The universe is full of civilised planets, and in a week’s time you’re all going to hop from one such to another such,’ I began. And as I sought for simple words and vivid pictures to put my explanation across to them, the wonder of the universe overcame me as if for a moment I too was a child.

  For the galaxy has grown up into a great and predominantly peaceful unit. Crime survives, but does not flourish. Evil lives, but knowledge keeps pace with it and fights it. Man prospers and grows kindlier rather than otherwise. Certainly our old vices are as green as ever, but we have devised sociological systems that contain them better than was the case in earlier eras.

  Starships are our Starswarm’s main connecting links.

  Bridging all but the lesser distances are the FTL ships, travelling in super-universes at multiple-light velocities. Bridging the lesser distances go the STLs, the slower-than-light ships. The two sorts of travel are, like planetary economies, interdependent.

  The FTL ship, that ultimate miracle of technology, has one disadvantage: it moves – as far as the ‘normal’ universe is concerned – at only two speeds: faster than light and stationary.

  An FTL ship has to stop the moment it comes out of phase space and enters the quantitative fields of the normal universe. Hence the need for bodies such as Tandy Two, spread throughout the galaxy; they are the braking planets, or satellites.

  An FTL cannot ‘stop’ in space. Instead, its velocities are absorbed by the braking planets, or, more accurately, by the impetus-absorbers of the Flanges that girdle such planets. The FTLs burst in and are reduced to zero velocity within a time limit of about 200 milliseconds – in which time they have circuited the Flange, gone completely around the planet, one and a half times.

  STLs or mattermitters then disperse the passengers to local star systems much in the way that stratoliners land travellers who then disperse to nearby points by helicab.

  Though STLs are slow, relativistic time contractions shorten the subjective journeys in them to tolerable limits of weeks or days.

  So the universe ticks; not perfectly, but workably.

  And this was what I told Dourt and his daughters.

  ‘Well, I’d better go and finish getting your dinner, Daddy,’ Tes said, after a pause.

  He patted her bottom and chuckled with approval. ‘That’s it, girl,’ he said. ‘Food’s more in our line than all this relativistic stuff. Give me a lamb cutlet any day.’

  I had no answer. Nor had Fay, though I saw by her face that she was still thinking over what I had said, as she slid off my knee to go and help Tes. How much did it mean to her? How much does it all mean to any of us? Though Dourt had little time for theory, I also relished the thought of the lamb cutlet.

  Before the food was ready, I took a turn outside with the farmer, who used his stick as support.

  ‘You’ll miss this view,’ I said, gazing over the great mysterious body of Tandy whose contours were clad in green, freckled here and there with sheep. I must admit it, I am fonder of the beauties of women than of landscape; for all that, the prospect was fine. In the voluptuous downward curve between two hills, Tandy the primary was setting. Even by daylight the banded and beautiful reds swirling over its oblate surface were impressive.

  Dourt looked about him, sniffing, admitting nothing. He appeared not to have heard what I said.

  ‘Rain coming up from somewhere,’ he observed.

  In my turn I ignored him.

  ‘You’ll miss this view back on Earth,’ I repeated.

  ‘The view!’ Dourt exclaimed and laughed. ‘I’m not a clever man like you and young Murrag, Captain; I get simple satisfaction out of simple things, like being in the place where I was born.’

  Although I happened to know he was born eight layers under the skyport in Burning, a Droxian manufacturing city, where they still metered your ration of fresh air, I made no answer. All he meant was that he valued his personal illusions, and there I was with him all the way. Convictions or illusions: what matter if all conviction is illusion, so long as we hang onto it? You would never shift Dourt from his, fool though he was in many ways.

  I could never get under his skin as surely as I could with some people – Murrag, for instance, a more complicated creature altogether; but often the simplest person has a sort of characterless opacity about him. So it seemed with Dourt, and if I have drawn him flat and lumpy here, that was how I experienced him then.

  To make talk between us, for his silence made me uneasy, I asked after Murrag.

  Dourt had little to say. Instead he pointed with his stick to a tracked vehicle bumping towards us.

  ‘That’ll be Murrag with Bes now, coming home for a bit of grub,’ he said.

  He was mistaken. When the tractor drew nearer, we saw that only Bes was inside it.

  As we strolled forward, she drove around the covered pens and pulled up beside us. Her face was flushed, and, I thought, angry looking, but she smiled when she saw me.

  ‘Hullo, Captain Roge!’ She climbed down and clasped my hand briefly. ‘I was forgetting we’d be having your company today. Nice to see a strange face, though I’d hardly call yours that.’ She turned straight to her husband and said, ‘We got trouble on Pike’s Brow. Two autocollies plunged straight down a crevasse. Murrag’s up there with them now trying to get them out.’

  ‘What were you doing up on Pike’s Brow?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to keep number three flock over the other side while I was off work – you know it’s tricky on Pike’s with all that faulting, you silly woman. Why didn’t you do as I told you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened if my throat mike hadn’t jammed. I couldn’t call the autocollies off before they went down the hole.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses. I can’t take a day off without something going wrong. I –’

  ‘You’ve had six days off already, Col Dourt, so shut your mouth –’

  ‘How’s Harri managing?’ I asked, thinking an interruption was necessary.

  Mrs Dourt flashed me a look of gratitude. ‘He’s trying to get down the crevasse after the autocollies. Trouble is,
they’re still going and won’t answer to orders, so they’re working themselves down deeper and deeper. That’s why I came back here, to switch off the juice; they work on maser-beamed power, you know.’

  I heard Dourt’s teeth grind. ‘Then buck up and switch off, woman, before the creatures ruin themselves! You know they cost money. What’re you waiting for?’

  ‘What? For some old fool to stop arguing with me, of course. Let me by.’

  She marched past us, an aggressive woman, rather plain, and yet to my taste pleasing, as though the thickness of her body bore some direct if mysterious relationship to the adversities of life. Going into the control shed, she killed the power and then came back to where we stood.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Mrs Dourt, and see what I can do to help,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to get back to my outfit for another hour.’

  A look of understanding moved across her face, and I climbed onto the tractor with her after a brief nod to Dourt.

  There was some justification for this. If the situation was as she said it was, then the matter was one of urgency – the next FTL ship was due in under four hours, and forty thousand sheep had to be herded under lock and key before that. Had to be: or darkness would be on them, they would stampede and kill or injure themselves on the rocky slopes, and Dourt’s hard-earned savings would be wiped out … that is, if the situation was as Bes said it was.

  When we were out of sight of old Dourt and the farm, Bes stopped the tractor. We looked at each other. My whole system changed gear as we saw the greed in each other’s eyes.

  ‘How much of this story is a lie to get me alone and at your mercy?’ I asked.

  She put her hard broad hand over mine. ‘None of it, Vasko. We’ll have to shift back to Murrag as soon as possible, if he hasn’t already broken his neck down the crevasse. But with Col hanging about the house, I couldn’t have seen you alone if this opportunity hadn’t turned up – and this’ll be our last meeting, won’t it?’

  ‘Unless you change your mind and don’t go to Droxy with him next week.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that, Vasko.’

  I did know. I was safe. Not to put too fine a point on it, she’d have been a nuisance if she had stayed for my sake. There were dozens of women like Bes Dourt – one on nearly every hill farm I visited, bored, lonely, willing, only too happy to indulge in an affair with a Flange maintenance official. It was not as if I loved her.

  ‘Then we’ll make it really good this last time,’ I said.

  And there was the greed again, plain and undisguised and sweet. We almost fell out onto the grass. That’s how these things should be: raw, unglamorised. That’s the way it must be for me. Bes and I never made love. We coupled.

  Afterwards, when we came to our senses, we were aware that we had been longer than we should have been. Scrambling back into the tractor, we headed fast and bumpy for Pike’s Brow.

  ‘I hope Murrag’s all right,’ I muttered, glancing at my arm watch.

  She neither liked nor understood my perpetual interest in Murrag Harri.

  ‘He’s queer!’ she sneered.

  I didn’t ask her to elaborate. I had heard it before, and the pattern behind it was obvious enough: Murrag disliked her hungry advances – and why not? She was plain, solid, coarse … No, I do myself no justice saying all this, for Bes had a pure peasant honesty that in my eyes excused everything – or so I told myself.

  At first when Murrag arrived at Dourt’s farm, I had been jealous, afraid that he would spoil my innocent little game. When it was clear he would do no such thing, I grew interested in him for his own involved sake. Sometimes this had caused trouble between Bes and me – but enough of this; I am trying to tell Murrag’s tale, not my own. If I digress, well, one life is very much tangled with the next.

  We must have created some sort of a speed record to the foot of Pike’s Brow. Then the terrain became so steep that we had to halt, leave the tractor, and go the rest of the way on foot.

  Bending our backs, we climbed. Sheep moved reluctantly out of our path, eyeing us with the asinine division of feature that marks a Tandy sheep’s face – all rabbity and timid about the eyes and nose, as arrogant as a camel about the lower lip.

  Rain came on us with the unexpectedness it reserves for Region Six, as if a giant over the hump of the mountains had suddenly emptied his largest bucket across our path. I remembered Dourt’s forecast as I turned up my collar. Still we climbed, watching little rivulets form among the short blades under our boots. I began to wish I hadn’t volunteered for this.

  At last we reached the crevasse. We scrambled along by its side towards the point where Murrag had climbed over into it, a point marked by the two live dogs, Hoc and Pedo, who sat patiently in the rain, barking at our approach.

  The downpour was lessening. We stood, pulled our backbones painfully upright, and breathed the damp air deep before bothering about Murrag.

  He was some twenty feet down into the crack, where it was so narrow that he could rest with his back on one side and his feet on the other. He was drenched from the water pouring over the edge; it splashed past him and gargled down into a ribbon of a stream about thirty feet beneath his boots.

  One of the autocollies was wedged beside him, covered by mud. The other lay a short distance away and a little lower down, overturned but seemingly unharmed.

  I noted the expression of Murrag’s face. It was blank; he seemed to gaze into nothing, ignoring the rivulets that splashed around him.

  ‘Murrag!’ Bes called sharply. ‘Wake up. We’re back.’

  He looked up at us. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hello, Vasko! I was just communing with the great earth mother. She’s really swallowed me … It’s funny, stuck down here in a fissure … like climbing between the lips of a whale.’

  And there would have been more like that! Generally I had patience with his curious fancies, enjoyed them even, but not at such a moment, not with Bes standing there sneering, and the water running down my back, and a stitch in my side, and the time against us.

  ‘It’s raining,’ I reminded him. ‘In case you didn’t notice, we’re all wet through. For God’s sake, stir yourself.’

  He seemed to pull himself together, dashing wet hair back from his face. Peering upward rather stupidly, as if he were a fish, he said, ‘Fine day for mountaineering, isn’t it? If we’re not careful, the earth under this autocollie will crumble and the machine may get wedged or damaged. As it is, it is still in working order. Fling me the rope down, Bes. You and Vasko can haul it up while I steady it.’

  She stared blankly into my face. ‘Damn it, I left the rope back in the tractor,’ she said.

  I remembered then. She unhooked it from her waist when we lay on the grass and in her haste had not bothered to tie it on again later, tossing it instead into the back of the vehicle.

  ‘For God’s sake go and get it then,’ Murrag shouted impatiently, suddenly realising how long he had waited. ‘I can’t stay down here much longer.’

  Again Bes looked at me. I gazed away down at the muddy boots.

  ‘Go and get it for me, Vasko,’ she urged.

  ‘I’m out of breath,’ I said, ‘I’ve got the stitch.’

  ‘Damn you!’ she said. She started off down the hillside again without another word.

  Murrag looked sharply at me; I did not return his stare.

  It took her twenty-five minutes to return with the rope. In that time, the rain cleared entirely. I squatted by Pedo and Hoc, gazing over the dull and tumbled terrain. Murrag and I did not speak to each other.

  The best part of another hour passed before we three bedraggled creatures managed to haul the autocollies up safely. We could have done the job in half the time, had we not been so careful to preserve them from harm; we all knew the balance of the Dourt finances, and the autocollie can cost anything from twenty percentages to five parapounds.

  Panting, I looked at my arm watch.

  In two hours less six minutes the next FTL was du
e for entry on Tandy Two. It was past the time I should have reported back to my unit for duty.

  I told Murrag and Bes that I must be going – told them curtly, for after missing my lunch, getting a soaking, and nearly wrenching my arms off rescuing the dogs, I was none too sweet-humoured.

  ‘You can’t leave us now, Vasko,’ Murrag said. ‘The whole flock’s in jeopardy, and not only this lot on the Brow. We’ve got to have every sheep under cover in two hours – and first of all someone must go back to the farm and switch the beam on again to get the dogs going. We need your help still.’

  His eyes were as appealing as Bes’s.

  God, I thought, the way some people need people! He has his emotional requirements just as she has her physical ones. Hers are crashingly simple, his I don’t understand; once these autocollie dogs were running again, they would see the sheep home in no time, without help.

  Right then, I could not think of two people I would less like to be stuck on a mountain with. But all I said was, ‘I’m a maintenance officer, Murrag, not a shepherd. I’ve made myself late for duty as it is. Since my truck’s at the farm, I’ll have to go back and collect it, so when I get there I’ll tell Col to beam the juice to you – but from then on you’re on your own.’

  As I turned to go, Bes put her hand on my wrist. When I swung around on her, I saw her flinch from my expression.

  ‘You can’t just ditch us like this, Vasko,’ she said.

  ‘I’m ditching no one. I helped you drag the ’collies out, didn’t I? I’ve got a job to do, and I’ll be listed for reporting back late as it is. Now let me go.’

  She dropped my hand.

  I made off down the slope at a slow trot, digging my heels as I went. Now and again I slipped, falling back on the wet grass. Before I got to the level, I saw another tractor approaching.

  Dourt was in it. He yelled to me as we drew nearer. ‘I came to see what you lot were doing all this time. You’ve been taking so long I thought you’d all fallen down the hole with the ’collies.’

  Briefly I told him what was happening, while he climbed slowly out of the tractor, clutching his back.