Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  Then the dream vanished in a swirl of colour and scent; he was back in the dark, in the flood, in the crowded Met. hut, with the quogs whistling in anxiety and the Chief tugging his arm.

  ‘Okay!’ said Carlyle. ‘I see what’s wrong.”

  Rain was falling heavily again; the wind had become violent and ripped one of the panels out of the hut. The raft was bumping about in the water as the wind tore inside under the dome.

  ‘I’ll relax the panels,’ said Carlyle to the Chief. ‘I may need your team.’

  The Chief summoned them up in the eerie violet light of dawn, while the rest of the passengers cowered away from the driving rain.

  Carlyle went to work on the expanding ribs holding the panels. The hut began to fold down and the raft settled. Finally he grappled with the damaged panel, but he had the order wrong. He had been too busy providing shelter for the quogs—the torn panel should have been folded down first. He felt a thrill of warning, the eyes of the quogs glowed around him, he shot up a hand and turned sideways. The heavy strut holding one side of the panel broke with a rending crack and came down on his head. Carlyle’s last conscious thought was: ‘I am seeing stars…’

  He was out, but not out cold for very long. He groped upwards towards consciousness through a fog of nausea and pain. Words whirled through the aching sunburst Of his brain; he strove to move his legs, his hands, his fingers, to wrest open his leaded eyelids. He saw pictures… ragged scraps of film..: the island, the satellite, a house in a green field… where? He felt himself, flying, moving, uplifted… lifted by a hundred strong, blue hands. He could see them so clearly through his closed eyelids. Whoever had blue hands…? He remembered and laughed in his pain-fringed dream. ‘Their hands were blue… and they went to sea… they went to sea in a sieve.’

  Carlyle opened his eyes. He was on his bunk, the quogs all around him, their saucer eyes alight with concern.

  ‘Concussion,’ mumbled Carlyle. ‘Got to take—medication.’ He could not reach his head but the Chief guided his hand. There was a shallow two-inch cut on his scalp above the left ear and blood had soaked and matted his shaggy crop of hair, known in the service as the colonist’s cut or the Buffalo Bill.

  ‘Must take—antibiotic.’

  Carlyle was heavily conditioned to protect himself against alien bacteria. He fought to stay’conscious.

  ‘Hogan…’ he whispered to the Chief. ‘Hogan the Medic. Up there. He can tell me what to take…’

  He sank into a confused nightmare of purple microbes and the capsules in his medical pack.

  Carlyle’s head ached still and he began this comical dream. He was in a cabin on the satellite, lying just above the floor, floating. It was some guy’s bedroom, with his locker, pinups, a green video cassette. He heard startled voices and saw two people sitting up in the bunk, clutching the sheet around them.

  ‘Hi Mary!’ said Carlyle in his muffled dream voice. ‘No clothes again!’

  ‘Carlyle… what the hell!’

  It was Dick Hogan the Medic, naked too and for some reason frightened.

  ‘Hogan!’ cried Carlyle. ‘You’re just the guy I wanted to see.’

  ‘Carlyle?’ whispered Mary Long, the blonde anthropologist, ‘Is it you, Jim?’.

  ‘Sure,’ said Carlyle. ‘I’m dreaming. I do a lot of dreaming down here. I have a concussion, Dick. Little cut on my scalp…’

  The two lovers sat there petrified, unable to move. Carlyle laughed and could not make it out. He wasn’t about to report them for fraternizing.

  ‘Come on now!’ He laughed, weakly. ‘What do I take, Dick? Not functioning too well… what antibiotic… the label…?’

  ‘UCF,’ said Hogan automatically. ‘You know that. Orange capsules.’

  ‘Thanks…’

  Then Mary Long pointed and began to scream.

  ‘Quogs! I can see quogs!’

  And the dream swirled away taking Carlyle with it.

  ==========

  After he got the Chief to feed him the orange capsules he slept long and heavily while his head mended. He woke at night, out on deck, with the raft still moving steadily in the grip of the current. They passed islands—no, not islands, but the tops: of mee-haw trees, and on the raft the quogs danced, holding out their hands to the distance, to their brothers in the dripping branches. He woke in the hut and saw a patch of indigo sky with the Star shining down. Carlyle turned to the Chief; he was still lightheaded.

  ‘Far and Few…’ said Carlyle. ‘How does it go?’ He struggled drowsily on to one elbow.

  Few and far, Far and few,

  Are the lands where the fumblies live,

  Their heads were green, and their hands were blue,

  And they went to sea in a sieve.

  Carlyle was laughing and the quogs waved their ringers.

  In his sleep he heard someone calling his name; he woke up and found the Chief, vocalizing through his hands.

  ‘Cah-lah-ee!’—

  ‘Good try,’ said Carlyle, flexing his limbs and feeling stronger.

  He pointed to the Chief, who slid across his nictitating eyelids in a show of quog bashfulness.

  ‘Tell me your name,’ urged Carlyle.

  The old quog boomed shyly: ‘Sheef.’

  Chief. The name Carlyle had given him, though he didn’t recall ever calling him that, unless in his delirium. He let it go, puzzled. Either the quogs had no names or they were like cats, who had special sounds they used to communicate with humans.

  Carlyle checked his instruments; the stormy conditions were abating. A mee-haw off to port showed a fraction of trunk. The flood waters were beginning to recede. His chronometer told him he had been out of action for three days. The Star hung low in a sky of aquamarine; he saw the plateau dead ahead with the black cliffs rising up sheer. The current was no more than a ripple and the mee-haw raft moved sluggishly through the purple water.

  He checked the plateau through his glasses, trying to make out a possible landing-place that he remembered where broken columns of black basalt had made an alien giant’s causeway. He saw a disturbance in the water, a line of foam. Before he could register it properly he sensed the anxiety of the quogs, growing into fear. Behind him they huddled and whistled, crowding into the ragged heap of the Met. hut. He stood on the raft, sandwiched between two shock waves… the low wedge of foam moving towards them and the almost palpable fear given off by the quogs.

  ‘What is it?’ cried Carlyle.

  The Chief, all of them, could give no answer, only this immense welling up of terror. Carlyle gazed at them blankly. A whale? A giant ray? The Great Horned Toad? He pushed through the crowd and took down a regulation magnum; then as an after-thought he reached down the new Fernlich, the automatic missile carbine. As he feathered its vents he heard the sound, a high vibrant scale of notes, swinging up and down on impossible frequencies. He might have heard it before, far out on the sea at night, so sweet and distant that it could be something he imagined. The quogs writhed in fear and pain, clasping their hands over their round ears, burrowing under the paraphernalia in the hut.

  Carlyle rushed out into the waves of strange music. The ripple had divided into ten, a dozen pink clumps of foam, approaching swiftly on all sides. He could almost see them now… not too large, dark shapes, swimming easily… like seals, maybe, or dolphins, slipping, weaving, gliding, just below the surface of the water. Carlyle squatted on the deck, fascinated. The music thrilled around him, his head sang, he felt dizzy. A young quog, crouched at the doorway of the hut, rolled over and died.

  Carlyle sprang up, gasping. With an audible pop something reared up out of a patch of foam. A smooth pink bubble… At first he thought incredulously of a child’s toy space helmet, then he saw that it was a bubble of foam. The bubble burst and a sleek black head appeared. It did look like a seal but the coat was scaly, black crystalline scales, dark mother-of-pearl, breaking the bluish light into an alien spectrum. The creature was dancing on its tail, waving sleek webs like
forepaws, only a few metres from the raft. Then, with a glissando of sound, infinitely sweet, like a peal of electronic bells, a single scale tentacle whipped out from a curled position below the head and seized the body of the dead quog. The seal-lizard flipped its catch into the air and caught it playfully. There was a flash of teeth, a minor chord, the quog’s head was bitten off. A whistle of anguish rose from the burrowing terrified quogs crammed inside the hut. Carlyle shouted at the top of his voice. The creatures has never heard a human voice. There was an excited humming, a swish of dark bodies passing around and under the raft. A colony of pink bubbles grew to starboard, at a safe distance. The seal-lizards repeated what he recognized vaguely as the tone and pitch of his own voice. They bloomed and cawed, bouncing about in the water. Carlyle accepted the invitation; he called again, telling them to clear off. The formation of bubbles began to move closer, tinkling, humming… testing… testing…

  With a ringing head Carlyle realized what they were trying to find. The raft was drifting closer to the plateau; he grasped the oar, still lying on deck, and. began to drive the clumsy craft along. He would never escape this way before the seal-lizard found his death frequency—the sound which would make this new creature with the harsh, loud voice fall down to be eaten. The seal-lizards moved alongside in formation. The noise was unbearable; Carlyle sang, groaned, shouted aloud. A tentacle, then another, flicked over the timbers of the raft, plucked at his boots, probed towards the quogs in the hut.

  Carlyle dropped his oar and fired the magnum in the air. The seal-lizards hesitated, then pressed forward. A new wave of sound broke over the raft; he screamed and rolled upon the deck, pressing his hands over his ears. Through the mists of agonizing sound he saw the seal-lizards at the very edge of the boat. A row of neat, scaly black heads; narrow oval eyes, a structure of nasal beak and leathery appendages like whiskers… even so close they looked amazingly like seals. He could not see how they made their music. Their comical mouths opened upon murderous fangs. A tentacle gripped his wrist and pulled gently.

  Roaring aloud to counteract their killing whine Carlyle put one hand to the missile carbine and fired point-blank along the deck. A seal-lizard was blasted into mush. The missile that destroyed it passed on across the sea, then struck and exploded, sending up a column of water, fifty metres away.

  There was a moment of utter silence, then the whole band of seal-lizards dived like one creature. It could have been the shock-wave that did it, or the sound of the carbine, or simply the death of one of their number. Rising to his knees Carlyle saw them emerge far beyond the raft swimming in formation, fast and low… a ripple bearing away to the south-west. He caught only a few notes of their music across the dark waters.

  The quogs crept out and surrounded him, helping him to stand. Everyone, Carlyle included, was partially deaf from the encounter. The quogs held their heads sideways and bounced on one leg, like a human bather with water in his ear. Carlyle shook hands with the Chief; it caught on. The whole party, dizzy with relief, shook hands promiscuously.

  They were already within the shadow of the plateau: Carlyle and his crew, working the oar, struck a rock or a shoal, then another. They were over the flooded causeway where he had embarked for the island three months ago. He levered the raft in towards a rock platform. The quogs had begun to stamp gently and hold out their hands to the plateau.

  One moment there was no sign of life, only the glittering planes of the great stone mesa; the next, every plane and slope was alive with quogs. They spilled over the edge of the plateau in waves, until the black rock was blanketed with brown and grey and tawny fur. A strange noise, stranger even than the music of the seal-lizards, began to rise up from the multitude. They vocalized all together, by tens and hundreds, their weak voices blending into a vast muffled shout, that echoed out over the purple flood tide and reverberated from the chasms of the plateau.

  ‘CAH-LAH-EE.’

  As his own quogs pressed round him proudly, in silence, Carlyle recognized his own name. Then as the shout redoubled: ‘CAH-LAH-EE,’ he saw himself as a new creature, as the quogs perceived him: the clumsy, loud-voiced, white-handed giant of a new species. The dogged Cah-lah-ee, who made a marvelous craft from the looted remains of a mee-haw tree, who overcame the flood, did battle with seal-lizards and brought a whole tribe to safety.

  The raft sidled into the platform and a nylon rope fell on the deck. The quogs were so thick that Carlyle had not seen the landing party, Garrett, Hogan and Weiss. The sight of these men, his own kind, affected him powerfully. His sense of proportion was restored; he smiled and choked up, just as they all did. He felt as if he had returned from some other dimension, not a routine stint on AC 14.

  ‘Hey there!’ cried Garrett. ‘Some welcome you got here, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Am I glad to see you!’ said Carlyle.

  They heaved him ashore; the quogs were whisked off the raft by hundreds of willing hands.

  Carlyle turned back to the Chief.

  ‘See the raft is made fast,’ he said.

  The men of the landing party turned back and watched as the Chief and his off-siders tied up to a pillar of rock.

  ‘Everything ship-shape!’ said Dick Hogan.

  ‘They know the ropes,’ said Carlyle.

  The party ascended through an aisle of quogs, still hooting his name; Carlyle acknowledged the applause as modestly as he could. He was looking ahead eagerly… Yes, there was the landing module on the plateau, among the bushes and the stony burrows of the upland quogs. He was going upstairs, back to the station. His limbs began to ache in anticipation of a steam bath and a bunk.

  ‘How’s the head?’ asked Hogan.

  ‘Oh fine,’ said Carlyle. ‘It was just a simple concussion.’

  Garrett turned to him.

  ‘You get it, don’t you, Jim? You understand what you’ve discovered.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Carlyle. ‘I guess I knew all along. Or when they called out my name… Did you know it was my name?’

  ‘We worked it out.’ They laughed and looked at Carlyle expectantly, waiting for him to bell the cat.

  ‘The quogs are able to transmit pictures,’ said Carlyle. ‘They are natural telesends.’

  ‘The first in the Universe,’ said Garrett.

  ‘There’s more to it than that; Max,’ said Carlyle. ‘Some kind of group intelligence…”

  “They had us on the hop upstairs!’ put in Weiss.—

  ‘What way?’ asked Carlyle.

  ‘Reports of hallucinations,’ said Garrett. ‘Weiss here saw you on the raft. Hogan…’

  ‘I saw Hogan,’ said Carlyle. ‘Spoke to him. I thought it was a dream.’

  He and Hogan exchanged glances, straight-faced; no one said a word about Mary Long. The quogs certainly had a trick of embarrassing that girl.

  ‘Communication can extend over vast distances,’ said Max Garrett.

  He was smiling in an odd way; the men were still watching Carlyle closely. He couldn’t read much in their faces, no pictures came to him; for a moment he wished they were quogs. Hogan dug him in the ribs.

  ‘You got the prize, boy,’ he said.

  Garrett cleared his throat.

  ‘We had word. Commander Eva Magnussen put in a report. She has also requested a P.I.C. with Lieutenant Carlyle.’ A Personal Interplanetary Communication: something flashed from Earth to Armstrong Base to a chain of a hundred satellites. It was the spaceman’s version of compassionate leave; marriages were contracted, births and deaths announced in this way. ‘She has requested a colonial posting.’

  Carlyle smiled foolishly and the men all shook him by the hand.

  They were anxious to get him upstairs to sick bay; but Carlyle excused himself and turned aside. He bent down to the nearest quog.

  ‘Where is my friend the Chief?’

  There was an immediate response in the scattered groups of quogs returning up the sides of the plateau. A strong impulse, stronger perhaps because of the numbers involve
d, directed him to a low cave some distance away. He’strode over and found the Chief, with his wives and children, being regaled with berries and limpets and sweet-bark. He realized that he had been aware for some time that the Chief was in fact a male; he found no difficulty in sexing quogs at a glance. The Chief knew that he was leaving.

  ‘I’ll come back after a few days,’ said Carlyle.

  The pair of them stood in a clear space, looking out from the height of the plateau. The three giant causeways in the rock were explained, three great chutes that drained off the deluge of rain from the high ground. The purple sea spread out beneath them; the mee-haw trees marked the submerged islands. In a series of quick superimpositions Carlyle saw the great day when the flood receded altogether; when the star approached its apogee and the islands became dry land again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back to see that.’

  As he turned to rejoin’-the landing party Carlyle took in the scene. The three men beside their vehicle, tall visitors in regulation silversuits, and a fourth man, unkempt and hairy, in ragged coveralls, communing at a distance with the members of a new species. The men looked curiously towards Carlyle; their anxiety did not quite diminish as he came closer. The distance between Carlyle and the landing party could not be taken up in a few small steps. They saw tomorrow’s man, who by some chance operation of goodwill, some accident of understanding, reached forward into new modes of being.

  Death has been likened to an ocean. A talented writer tells us what it feels like to be swept along—

  ON THE RIVER

  by Robert F. Young

  ==========

  Farrell was beginning to think that he had the River all to himself when he saw the girl. He had been traveling downstream for nearly two days now—River days, that is. He had no way of knowing for certain, but he was convinced that River time had very little to do with real time. There were days and nights here, yes, and twenty-four hours elapsed between each dawn. But there was a subtle difference between time as he had known it once and time as he knew it now.

  The girl was standing at the water’s edge, waving a diminutive handkerchief. It was obvious that she wanted him to pole over to the bank. He did so, forcing the raft out of the sluggish current and into the shallows. Several yards from shore it nudged bottom, and he leaned on the pole, holding the raft in position and looking questioningly at the girl. It surprised him to; discover that she was young and attractive, although it shouldn’t have, he supposed. Assuming that he had created her, it was only logical that he would have made her pleasing to the eye; and assuming that he had not, it was illogical to conclude that merely because he had reached the age of thirty it was necessary for someone else to reach the age of thirty in order not to want to go on living. Her hair was only a shade less bright than the splash of afternoon sunlight in which she stood, and she wore it very short, A scattering of freckles lightly dappled the bridge of her delicate nose and the immediate areas on either side. She was willowy, and rather tall, and she had blue eyes.