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

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘As far as that goes, I’m pretty startled by its conduct too. In my matrix, the Christian Church is a power for good. Though I don’t belong to it myself –’

  ‘Death to the Christian Church! It’s the Christian Church I fight against!’ He jumped to his feet. I leapt up too, my own anger woken by his words, and we stood glaring at each other.

  ‘You’re crazy, Mark. We may not agree with the church, but it has been the established church in Britain now for centuries. To start –’

  ‘Not in my Britain! It’s not established in my Britain. Christianity is the faith of dogs and underlings where I come from. When Rastell started to tell us his history, he talked about the Roman Empire being established in the East by Constantine the Great, and he said that Constantine, followed by an emperor he called Theodosius, established Christianity as the official creed of the Empire. Did it happen that way in your matrix?’

  ‘Yes, just as Rastell said.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t happen in mine. I know of this man you call Constantine; we call him Flavius Constantinus. Of Theodosius I have not heard. Constantinus was killed by his father-in-law, Maximian, and never became emperor. Maxentius the Great became emperor after Diocletian.’

  I was puzzled now, as well as angry. Gibbon no doubt would have been delighted to hear of this setback fox Christianity, but its implications left me baffled.

  ‘All this was seventeen centuries ago. What has it to do with us?’

  ‘Everything, my friend – everything. In your matrix and in this one Christianity was imposed on the West by two misguided emperors. In mine it was stamped out, though it still survives among the barbarians and slaves whom we rule in the East, and the True Religion was fostered, and grew.’

  ‘The True Religion?’

  ‘By my shrine, Sherry, have you never heard of the soldier’s god? Then bow down before the name of Mithras!’

  I saw it then, saw above all my criminal stupidity in thinking that because we seemed to have a common purpose we might have a common past. This man, with whom I had spent the fiercest hour of my life, was an enemy. How much of an enemy, I thought I saw before he did, and there lay my only advantage. He was less clear now about conditions in my matrix than I was about his. I saw that he would go back to his matrix and probably bring back a legion of warriors to tumble the unwarlike regime here. Though I wanted slavery abolished, I did not want that! The thought of inter-matricial war and conquest was horrifying; knowledge of the portals must never get back to his Mithraic world. The conclusion was obvious; I had to kill Mark Claud Gale!

  He saw it in my eyes before I reached him. He was quick, Mark! As he stopped to grasp his knife, I kicked it flying and caught his shoulder with my knee. He fell, taking me with him, his fingers digging into my calf. A personal wrestle was what I did not want; he was probably in better condition than I. A weapon was what I wanted. As his right hand came up to grasp me, I planted my free knee on his windpipe and wrenched his am down hard over it, at the same time pulling myself loose from his grasp. Jumping up, I ran into the artificial garden.

  Behind the café were rows of garden tools on display. He hurled a can at me before I reached them. The can struck my shoulder and bounced through the front of the café in a shower of glass. I turned; he was almost on me. I kicked one of the light tables between us and backed off to the racks. Feeling the shaft of one of the tools behind me, I brought it forward, flinging my weight with it as if it were a lance. I had hold of a rake. It struck Mark in the thigh as he jumped aside.

  I had time to make another lunge, but he had the other end of the rake. Next moment, we were struggling face against face. He brought his skull down hard against my nose. Pain and fury burst like a volcanic eruption over me. I had him by the throat, jabbing him in the groin with my knee. He hooked a leg round my other leg, jerked it. As I fell, I stamped on his toe. For a moment he doubled in pain and the back of his neck was unprotected. Even as I chopped the side of my hand down on it, I felt the weakness of my blow. I was dizzy from the pain in my nose.

  We broke apart. The rake lay between us. Gathering my strength, I turned, brought another tool from the rack behind, and swung it in a circle. He had stopped to grab the rake. Changing his mind, he backed away, and I ran at him with the tool upraised. It was a fool’s move. He ducked and let me have it in the stomach with a swinging left. I broke the shaft over his shoulders and we fell backwards into the ornamental pool.

  The water was warm, but the shock of it helped me to keep my senses. It was about three feet deep. I floundered to my feet, beating off slimy lily stalks, still grasping one end of the tool. I was bellowing for breath like a hungry sea lion. Mark took longer to come up. From the way he moved, from the way his left arm hung limp and he clutched his left shoulder, I knew I had broken something useful. He turned away from me and headed for the opposite bank, where banana trees and tall grasses grew.

  Compassion rose in me. I had no heart to go on. Had he not been my ally? But in that moment of weakness, he turned and looked at me. I understood that look. We were enemies, and he was going for a weapon with which to kill me. There would be plenty about: pruning knives, shears, blades of all kinds. I could not let him get away.

  He dragged himself up onto the bank, using only one arm.

  The broken half of the garden tool in my hand was the business end of some sort of edging implement, with a sharp crescent shaped blade. I threw it hard.

  He staggered and grasped at the banana tree. He missed. He tried to reach the shaft in his back with his good hand, but failed. He fell back into the pool, disappearing among reeds. There was a good deal of threshing about in the water, but it stopped at last. I climbed out of the pool and headed drunkenly for the portals.

  It was useless to ask me how I got through the vanishing routine. I don’t know. Somehow I did all that was necessary, injected myself, tuned the portal. As I sat in the seat, I could hear noises outside, distant and meaningless, and the sound of a door being broken in, and the squeal of whistles. Then the Möbius effect overcame me and – I was sprawling on a crowded nightclub floor with three half-naked dancers shrieking their heads off. I was back home!

  To say the authorities were interested is seriously to understate. One thing I could not tell them and it saved a lot of trouble. I could not remember the classification number of the matrix from which I had escaped. There could be no going back there, except by accident. Rastell’s world was safe among a myriad others.

  This fortunate bit of ignorance saved me from a severe moral problem. Supposing we could have got back easily to Rastell’s world, had we any right to intervene on behalf of the slaves? In any one world, there’s enough trouble in circulation, without looking for it in others.

  Candida says we have moral obligations to all matrices. I say we have a moral obligation not to judge other people’s standards by our own. Royal refuses to believe my whole experience. We are still arguing. It’s a freedom not to be despised.

  The Green Leaves of Space

  The flowers of the geranium were bright red. Dr Robert Mays carried the plant out of the potting house and through into his conservatory, to place it on a bench in the sun. The bold tones of the flower contrasted richly with the foliage of the alien plants behind it.

  As Dr Mays set the geranium down, his house robot – always referred to as ‘Mrs Hooper’ – appeared at the door.

  ‘I have admitted two young humans to your living-room, sir. Their names are Harry and Ann Gillett. They have luggage with them, sir.’

  ‘I’ll come and see them, Mrs Hooper. The Gilletts will be on the spaceship with me when we start for Damonn tomorrow, so they will be staying the night. You’d better prepare a room for them.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  Dr Robert Mays straightened his back and brushed grains of soil out of his beard. He was a noted exobotanist, at thirty-four perhaps the most famous of the men who studied the wonders of plant life on other planets. In the last month or two,
he had also become the centre of a controversy about the future of Damonn. The resultant publicity had given him a wariness that was visible in his bearing as he walked into the living-room to meet the Gilletts.

  Harry and Ann Gillett were standing before the large window, gazing out of it at the vista of London. In this year of 2263, London was a spacious and clean city. From Dr Mays’s window, one caught a prospect of the glittering white cliff’s of Wembley, with the blocks of Ealing, Hendon and Willesden farther away, and beyond them again a multitude of other blocks, gold-tipped Acton and the tall spire of Pancras. The city units were separated by green parkland, and joined by a gleaming complex of bridges and aerial roads.

  ‘You can see the space station from here, if you know where to look,’ Dr Mays said, pointing south towards distant Richmond. ‘We take off from there in the John Russell tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘You have a splendid view, Dr Mays,’ Ann said, as she shook his hand.

  ‘The view’s better out in space – particularly as I’m not very popular on Earth just now.’

  She dropped her gaze and looked nervously at her husband. The gesture made Dr Mays feel uneasy; it would be difficult if these two, who would work with him on Damonn for six months, were opposed to his plans for the planet. Yet they looked reassuring – Harry, a stocky and keen-featured young man, Ann, very smart and pretty, and not more than twenty. Both of them obviously of the up-and-coming generation.

  ‘You’d better come into the conservatory and look at the Damonnian plant life I brought back with me last trip,’ Dr Mays said.

  They both became excited.

  ‘We’ve heard a lot about the plant life of Damonn,’ Harry said. ‘From the telloid stories about Devil Vegetation to your own articles in Nature.’

  ‘Can the plants really think, Dr Mays?’ Ann asked.

  ‘That’s a very large question. I hope to give you a large answer on Damonn. Not all forms of plant life there are equally developed.’

  ‘But some of it is hostile to man?’

  ‘You’d better ask some of the plants themselves,’ Dr Mays said, pausing dramatically on the threshold of the conservatory and gesturing in. Then he uttered an exclamation and ran to where he had left the geranium.

  The geranium was no longer in its pot. The pot lay on the bench on its side, soil spilling from it. Behind it, towering above it, one of the alien plants was in motion.

  This particular plant was a species of Damonnian climber with broad and shield-shaped leaves. At rest, these leaves were almost black, but now they had begun to change colour. Superficially, the plant might have been mistaken for an earth species, until one saw that it was locked to its supporting stake, and that its long-fingered roots lowered themselves into or withdrew themselves from their nutrient solution at will.

  Dr Mays followed the motion of the leaves and saw his geranium. It was being passed upwards, tossed from one cupped leaf to the next. When it reached a leaf too light to hold it, it fell, tumbled on to the bench, and rolled off at Ann Gillett’s feet in a flutter of petals. Ann backed hastily away.

  Harry seized her arm and struck a defensive attitude.

  Without thinking, Dr Mays laughed.

  ‘It won’t hurt you! You’d better get used to a few vegetable tricks – we’re going to be surrounded by such things on Damonn.’

  Harry didn’t see the joke.

  ‘You seem over-confident about these plants, Dr Mays. Yet in your articles you admit that some have a terrific array of stings and barbs. Why should anyone expect anything but hostility from a sentient plant?’

  ‘That’s man-thinking. These are vegetables, not pygmies with blowguns. Watch this chap – he was only curious about the geranium.’

  The climber’s leaves were changing colour. Softly, swiftly, the dark green turned to red. Patchily, the whole plant turned into a hue that was a very good imitation of the geranium. Three other plants along the bench copied it. Harry and Ann stared at them fascinated. Dr Mays strode down to the other end of the conservatory, and through a door into a small hothouse.

  ‘Come and see my tropical varieties!’ he called.

  They spent an hour there, gathering some idea of the kind of plant they might meet in the equatorial zones of Damonn. The plant that particularly fascinated Ann and Harry was what Dr Mays called his ‘butterfly net’. It scuttled to the far end of its leash, trying to get away from them as they approached, a crablike plant, that used its thick roots as legs and concealed its body with smooth oval leaves.

  ‘This is an insect-eater. Watch it catch its prey,’ Dr Mays told them.

  Along one side of the hothouse ran various breeding boxes. Some cabbage white butterflies fluttered in one of them. Dipping into the box, Mays caught a butterfly in a pair of tongs, brought it close to his butterfly net plant, and released it.

  The top of the plant’s ‘body’ snapped open. White strands, each terminating in a sucker, sailed out and fastened on the butterfly as it circled towards the light. The insect was dragged into the body, and the lid closed on it.

  ‘A simple mechanism – but effective,’ Dr Mays said. ‘Now watch what happens when I put my face near.’

  He thrust his head towards the plant. Laboriously, it climbed the stick to which it was secured, in an effort to get away, but the head still moved nearer. Again the lid came open; the white strands sailed outwards and spread, each landing on the face of the exobotanist. Ann gasped, but Harry motioned her to be silent.

  The whole plant, except for its roots, underwent rapid colour changes. Then the strands were withdrawn into their hiding-place, and within a minute, the last tremulous hue had fled.

  ‘Surely it might have hurt you – poisoned you!’ Ann exclaimed.

  Dr Mays shook his head.

  ‘Not a chance – though that was something I only discovered by accident. It’s no more likely to attack me than a cat is to attack a cabbage. It’s a question of what constitutes its natural prey. Don’t forget that on Damonn there are many plants and many insects, but no mammals, no large animals of any kind. Evolution took a different path from its path on Earth. That’s why I say that the plant life can never be an enemy of man – only man of it.’

  ‘Yet it killed men from the first Damonn Exploratory Expedition,’ Harry said. ‘Wrapped stalks round their necks, thrust tendrils down their gullets.’

  ‘Perhaps that was an attempt to find how man speaks,’ Dr Mays said. ‘But we can talk of that tomorrow. After all, we shall have a whole week on the John Russell together, before we confront the Damonnian vegetation.’

  Next day, the John Russell rose from the launching-pad and headed into the heavens. Twenty hours later, clear of the plane of the solar system, the Overdrive engines came on, and the ship entered hyperspace. Through the viewports, the stars instantly became long bars of light split into their spectral colours; this optical illusion, caused by the ship’s acceleration beyond the speed of light, made the passengers feel that they journeyed through a cage with an infinity of bars.

  ‘How does Jhim like hyperspace?’ Ann asked Dr Mays.

  ‘Nothing worries Jhim, provided he gets his sugar ration,’ the exobotanist said, patting. Jhim, who sat stolidly on his shoulder, gazing at the spectacle beyond the ship.

  ‘Jhim’s certainly a remarkable creature,’ Harry said.

  ‘He’s only just come out of a fortnight’s hibernation,’ Dr Mays told them. ‘Every two months, Jhim takes a fortnight’s sleep, burrowing underground to do so. I brought him aboard in his earthbox. Isn’t that so, Jhim?’

  ‘That’s right, boss. Anything you say grows.’ The creature nodded sleepily.

  ‘He gets his words mixed up,’ Dr Mays said, as the other two laughed.

  Jhim was an old friend of Dr Mays. When the exobotanist discovered him, Jhim was one of the many life forms on Kakakakaxo, a world in the Crab Nebula. Kakakakaxo moved in an eccentric orbit round its sun; when it was nearest, at perihelion, its life forms became semi-animal, abl
e to move about and often to hunt prey; while at aphelion, when Kakakakaxo was farthest from its sun and the climate became severely cold, the life forms burrowed below ground and turned semi-plant, drawing nourishment direct from the soil.

  ‘In fact,’ Harry observed, when Dr Mays explained all this to them, ‘Jhim is a cross between a parrot and a carrot!’

  ‘Don’t be rude. People who live in grass houses shouldn’t throw stains,’ Jhim said, shaking a gaudy wing and waving one of its six paws at Harry.

  Laughing, they moved into Dr Mays’s cabin to talk of more serious things. First, Harry insisted on taking a phototec of Jhim. He set up his apparatus, and within five minutes presented Dr Mays with a translucent six-inch cube, in the middle of which glowed a 3D image of Jhim.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Dr Mays said. ‘Work of this standard is what we need on Damonn. If I didn’t know so before, I know now that the government sent me the right man.’

  Harry Gillett had risen to be head phototect at Commonwealth University. In the art of phototecture, he had few rivals anywhere in the galaxy. On the day that he married Ann, one of the leading young exopainters of her day, an unbeatable team had been created. On Damonn they would record as much as they could of the native life for the next edition of the Galactic Encyclopaedia, and for other works of reference.

  ‘I hope nobody will obstruct our work on Damonn,’ Dr Mays said, when they had seated themselves and the two men had lighted mescahales. ‘You may have heard that I have been making myself unpopular lately with the Galactic Council.’ When he saw they made no answer to that, he continued. ‘Although I am employed by the Council, I quarrel with its attitude towards the colonisation of newly discovered planets. It is far too ruthless. Any suitable Earth-type planet is immediately thrown open to colonists, who wreck the natural order in ten years or less.’

  ‘What else can the Council do, Dr Mays?’ Harry asked. ‘It was fixed over half a century ago that population density should not exceed four hundred people per square mile, and while the population continues to rise, the overspill must find homes on other planets.’