by Brian Aldiss
All the time he lay there, the wind jarred along the veins and supporters of his suit. Gradually it occurred to Derek that the vibration he felt from this constant motion was changed. It carried a new note and a new strength. He looked about, placed his gloved hand outstretched on the ground.
The wind was no longer vibrating. It was the earth that shook, Festi itself that trembled. The Cliff was moving!
When he looked back up at it with both his senses, he saw which way it headed. Jarring steadily, the Cliff bore down on him.
‘If it has intelligence, then it will reason – if it has detected me – that I am too small to offer it harm. So it will offer me none, and I have nothing to fear,’ Derek told himself. The logic did not reassure him.
An absorbent pseudopod, activated by a simple humidity gland in the brow of his helmet, slid across his forehead and removed the sweat that had formed there.
Visibility fluttered like a rag in a cellar. The forward surge of the Cliff was still something Derek sensed rather than saw. Now the masses of cloud blotted the thing’s crest, as it in its turn eclipsed the fountains of fire. To the jar of its approach even the marrow of Derek’s bones raised a response.
Something else also responded.
The legs of Derek’s suit began to move. The arms moved. The body wriggled.
Puzzled, Derek stiffened his legs. Irresistibly, the knees of the suit hinged, forcing his own to do likewise. And not only his knees, but his arms too, stiffly though he braced them on the ground before him, were made to bend to the whim of the suit. He could not keep still without breaking his bones.
Thoroughly alarmed, he lay there flexing contortedly to keep rhythm with his suit, performing the gestures of an idiot.
As if it had suddenly learned to crawl, the suit began to move forward. It shuffled over the ground; Derek inside went willy-nilly with it.
One ironic thought struck him. Not only was the mountain coming to Mohammed; Mohammed was perforce going to the mountain …
III
Nothing he did checked his progress; he was no longer master of his movements; his will was useless. With the realisation rode a sense of relief. His Mistress could hardly blame him for anything that happened now.
Through the darkness he went on hands and knees, blundering in the direction of the oncoming Cliff, prisoner in an animated prison.
The only constructive thought that came to him was that his suit had somehow become subject to the Cliff: how, he did not know or try to guess. He crawled. He was almost relaxed now, letting his limbs move limply with the suit movements.
Smoke furled him about. The vibrations ceased, telling him that the Cliff was stationary again. Raising his head, he could see nothing but smoke – produced perhaps by the Cliff’s mass as it scraped over the ground. When the blur parted, he glimpsed only darkness. The thing was directly ahead!
He blundered on. Abruptly he began to climb, still involuntarily aping the movements of his suit.
Beneath him was a doughy substance, tough yet yielding. The suit worked its way heavily upward at an angle of something like sixty-five degrees; the stiffeners creaked, the paragravs throbbed. He was ascending the Cliff.
By this time there was no doubt in Derek’s mind that the thing possessed what might be termed volition, if not consciousness. It also possessed a power no man could claim; it could impart that volition to an inanimate object like the suit. Helpless inside it, he carried his considerations a stage further. This power to impart volition seemed to have a limited range; otherwise the Cliff surely would not have bothered to move its gigantic mass at all, but would have forced the suit to traverse all the distance between them. If this reasoning were sound, then the lightpusher was safe from capture in orbit.
The movement of his arms distracted him. His suit was tunnelling. Giving it no aid, he lay and let his hands make swimming motions. If it was going to bore into the Cliff, then he could only conclude he was about to be digested: yet he stilled his impulse to struggle, knowing that struggle was fruitless.
Thrusting against the doughy stuff, the suit burrowed into it and made a sibilant little world of movement and friction that ceased the moment it stopped, leaving Derek embedded in the most solid kind of isolation.
To ward off growing claustrophobia, he attempted to switch on his headlight; his suit arms remained so stiff he could not bend them enough to reach the toggle. All he could do was lie there in his shell and stare into the featureless darkness of the Cliff.
But the darkness was not entirely featureless. His ears detected a constant slither along the outside surfaces of his suit. His warmsight discerned a meaningless pattern beyond his helmet. Though he focused his boscises, he could make no sense of the pattern; it had neither symmetry nor meaning for him …
Yet for his body it seemed to have some meaning. Derek felt his limbs tremble, was aware of pulses and phantom impressions within himself that he had not known before. The realisation percolated through to him that he was in touch with powers of which he had no cognisance; conversely, that something was in touch with him that had no cognisance of his powers.
An immense heaviness overcame him. The forces of life laboured within him. He sensed more vividly than before the vast bulk of the Cliff. Though it was dwarfed by the mass of Festi XV, it was as large as a good-sized asteroid … He could picture an asteroid, formed from a jetting explosion of gas on the face of Festi the sun. Half-solid, half-molten, the matter swung about its parent in an eccentric orbit. Cooling under an interplay of pressures, its interior crystallised into a unique form. Thus, with its surface semi-plastic, it existed for many millions of years, gradually accumulating an electrostatic charge that poised … and waited … and brewed the life acids about its crystalline heart.
Festi was a stable system, but once in every so many thousands of millions of years the giant first, second, and third planets achieved perihelion with the sun and with each other simultaneously. This happened coincidentally with the asteroid’s nearest approach; it was wrenched from its orbit and all but grazed the three lined-up planets. Vast electrical and gravitational forces were unleashed. The asteroid glowed: and woke to consciousness. Life was not born on it: it was born to life, born in one cataclysmic clash!
Before it had more than savoured the sad-sharp-sweet sensation of consciousness, it was in trouble. Plunging away from the sun on its new course, it found itself snared in the gravitational pull of the 4G planet, Festi XV. It knew no shaping force but gravity; gravity was to it all that oxygen was to cellular life on Abrogun; though it had no wish to exchange its flight for captivity, it was too puny to resist. For the first time, the asteroid recognised that its consciousness had a use, for it could to some extent control the environment outside itself. Rather than risk being broken up in Festi’s orbit, it sped inward, and by retarding its own fall performed its first act of volition, an act that brought it down shaken but entire on the surface of the planet.
For an immeasurable period, this asteroid – the Cliff – lay in the shallow crater formed by its impact, speculating without thought. It knew nothing except the inorganic scene about it, and could visualise nothing else but that scene it knew well. Gradually it came to some kind of terms with the scene. Formed by gravity, it used gravity as unconsciously as a man uses breath; it began to move other things, and it began to move itself.
That it should be other than alone in the universe had never occurred to the Cliff. Now that it knew there was other life, it accepted the fact. The other life was not as it was; that it accepted. The other life had its own requirements; that it accepted. Of questions, of doubt, it did not know. It had a need; so did the other life; they should both be accommodated, for accommodation was the adjustment to pressure, and that response was one it comprehended.
Derek Ende’s suit began to move again under external volition. Carefully it worked its way backward. It was ejected from the Cliff. It lay still.
Derek himself lay still. He was barely conscious
. In a half-daze, he pieced together what had happened.
The Cliff had communicated with him; if he ever doubted that, the evidence of it lay clutched in the crook of his left arm.
‘Yet it did not – yet it could not communicate with me!’ he murmured. But it had communicated: he was still faint with the burden of it.
The Cliff had nothing like a brain. It had not ‘recognised’ Derek’s brain. Instead, it had communicated with the only part of him it could recognise; it had communicated directly to his cell organisation, and in particular probably to those cytoplasmic structures, the mitochondria, the power sources of the cell. His brain had been bypassed, but his own cells had taken in the information offered.
He recognised his feeling of weakness. The Cliff had drained him of power. Even that could not drain his feeling of triumph; for the Cliff had taken information even as it gave it. The Cliff had learned that other life existed in other parts of the universe.
Without hesitation, without debate, it had given a fragment of itself to be taken to those other parts of the universe. Derek’s mission was completed.
In the Cliff’s gesture, Derek read one of the deepest urges of living things: the urge to make an impression on another living thing. Smiling wryly, he pulled himself to his feet.
Derek was alone in the Region of Fire. An infrequent mournful flame still confronted its surrounding dark, but the Cliff had disappeared. He had lain on the threshold of consciousness longer than he thought. He looked at his chronometer and found that it was time he moved towards his rendezvous with the lightpusher. Stepping up his suit temperature to combat the cold beginning to seep through his bones, he revved up the paragrav unit and rose. The noisome clouds came down and engulfed him; Festi was lost to view. Soon he had risen beyond cloud or atmosphere.
Under Jon’s direction, the space craft homed onto Derek’s radio beacon. After a few tricky minutes, they matched velocities and Derek climbed aboard.
‘Are you all right?’ the partheno asked, as his master staggered into a flight seat.
‘Yes – just weak. I’ll tell you all about it as I do a report on spool for Pyrylyn. They’ll be pleased with us.’
He produced a yellow-grey blob of matter that had expanded to the size of a large turkey and held it out to Jon.
‘Don’t touch this with uncovered hands. Put it in one of the low-temperature lockers under 4Gs. It’s a little souvenir from Festi XV.’
IV
The Eyebright in Pynnati, one of the planet Pyrylyn’s capital cities, was where you went to enjoy yourself on the most lavish scale possible. This was where Derek Ende’s hosts took him, with Jon in self-effacing attendance.
They lay in a nest of couches that slowly revolved, giving them a full view of other dance and couch parties. The room itself moved. Its walls were transparent; through them could be seen an ever-changing view as the room slid up and down and about the great metal framework of the Eyebright. First they were on the outside of the structure, with the brilliant night lights of Pynnati winking up at them as if intimately involved in their delight. Then they slipped inward in the slow evagination of the building, to be surrounded by other pleasure rooms, their revellers clearly visible as they moved grandly up or down or along.
Uneasily, Derek lay on his couch. A vision of his Mistress’s face was before him; he could imagine how she would treat all this harmless festivity: with cool contempt. His own pleasure was consequently reduced to ashes.
‘I suppose you’ll be moving back to Abrogun as soon as possible?’
‘Eh?’ Derek grunted.
‘I said, I suppose you would soon be going home again.’ The speaker was Belix Ix Sappose, Chief Administrator of Star One; as Derek’s host of the evening, he lay next to him.
‘I’m sorry, Belix, yes – I shall have to.’
‘No “have to” about it. You have discovered an entirely new life form, as I have already reported to Starswarm Central; we can now attempt communication with the Festi XV entity, with goodness knows what extension of knowledge. The government can easily show its gratitude by awarding you any post here you care to name; I am not without influence in that respect, as you are aware. I don’t imagine that Abrogun in its present state of political paralysis has much to offer a man of your calibre. Your matriarchal system is much to blame.’
Derek thought of what Abrogun had to offer; he was bound to it. These decadent people did not understand how a human contract could be binding.
‘Well, what do you say, Ende? I do not speak idly.’ Belix Ix Sappose tapped his antler system impatiently.
‘Er … Oh, they will discover a great deal from the Cliff. That doesn’t concern me. My part of the work is over. I’m a field worker, not an intellectual.’
‘You don’t reply to my suggestion.’
He looked at Belix with only slight vexation. Belix was an unglaat, one of a species that had done as much as any to bring about the peaceful concourse of the galaxy. His backbone branched into an elaborate antler system, from which six sloe-dark eyes surveyed Derek with unblinking irritation. Other members of the party, including Jupkey, Belix’s female, were also looking at him.
‘I must return,’ Derek said. What had Belix said? Offered some sort of post? Restlessly he shifted on his couch, under pressure as always when surrounded by people he knew none too well.
‘You are bored, Ende.’
‘No, not at all. My apologies, Belix. I’m overcome as always by the luxury of Eyebright. I was watching the nude dancers.’
‘May I signal you a woman?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘A boy, perhaps?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Ever tried the flowering asexuals from the Cephids?’
‘Not at present, thank you.’
‘Then perhaps you will excuse us if Jupkey and I remove our clothes and join the dance,’ Belix said stiffly.
As they moved out onto the dance floor to greet the strepent trumpets, Derek heard Jupkey say something of which he caught only the words ‘arrogant Abrogunnan’. His eyes met Jon’s; he saw that the partheno had overheard the phrase, too.
To conceal his mortification, Derek rose and began to pace around the room. He shouldered his way through knots of naked dancers, ignoring their complaints.
At one of the doors, a staircase was floating by. He stepped onto it to escape from the crowds.
Four young women were passing down the stairs. They were gaily dressed, with sonant-stones pulsing on their costumes. Their faces were filled with happiness as they laughed and chattered. Derek stopped and beheld the girls. One of them he recognized. Instinctively he called her name: ‘Eva!’
She had already seen him. Waving her companions on, she came back to him, dancing up the intervening steps.
‘So the hero of Abrogun climbs once more the golden stairs of Pynnati! Well, Derek Ende, your eyes are as dark as ever, and your brow as high!’
As he looked at her, the trumpets were in tune for him for the first time that evening, and his delight rose up in his throat.
‘Eva! … Your eyes as bright as ever … and you have no man with you.’
‘The powers of coincidence work on your behalf.’ She laughed – yes, he remembered that sound! – and then said more seriously, ‘I heard you were here with Belix Sappose and his female; so I was making the grandly foolish gesture of coming to see you. You remember how devoted I am to grandly foolish gestures.’
‘So foolish?’
‘So devoted! But you have less ability to change, Derek Ende, than has the core of Pyrylyn. To suppose otherwise is foolish; to know how unalterable you are and still to see you is doubly foolish.’
He took her hand, beginning to lead her up the staircase; the rooms moving by them on either side were blurs to his eyes.
‘Must you still bring up that old charge, Eva?’
‘It lies between us; I do not have to touch it. I fear your unchangeability because I am a butterfly against your g
rey castle.’
‘You are beautiful, Eva, so beautiful! And may a butterfly not rest unharmed on a castle wall?’ He fitted into her allusive way of speech with difficulty.
‘Walls! I cannot bear your walls, Derek! Am I a bulldozer that I should want to come up against walls? To be either inside or outside them is to be a prisoner.’
‘Let us not quarrel until we have found some point of agreement,’ he said. ‘Here are the stars. Can’t we agree about them?’
‘If we are both indifferent to them,’ she said, looking out and impudently winding his arm about her. The staircase had attained the zenith of its travels and moved slowly sideways along the upper edge of Eyebright. They stood on the top step with night flashing their images back at them from the glass.
Eva Coll-Kennerley was a human, but not of any common stock. She was a velure, born of the dense y-cluster worlds in Vermilion Outer, and her skin was richly covered with the brown fur of her kind. Her mercurial talents were employed in the same research department that enjoyed Belix Sappose’s more sober ones; Derek had met her there on an earlier visit to Pyrylyn. Their love had been an affair of swords until her scabbard disarmed him.
He looked at her now and touched her and could say not one word. When she flashed a liquid eye at him, he essayed an awkward smile.
‘Because I am oriented like a compass towards strong men, my lavish offer to you still holds good. Is it not bait enough?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t think of you as a trap, Eva.’
‘Then for how many more centuries are you going to refrigerate your nature on Abrogun? You still remain faithful, if I recall your euphemism for slavery, to your Mistress, to her cold lips and locked heart?’
‘I have no choice!’
‘Ah yes, my debate on that motion was defeated – and more than once. Is she still pursuing her researches into the transmutability of species?’
