They talked the girls into going east. They couldn’t say what they were afraid was happening, they just told them, over and over, there was something badly wrong. They had a hard job convincing them, but they gave in finally. Stan left it that Judy would drive out in the morning, he’d follow on as soon as he could. Then they tried to get some rest. Rick was up at dawn. It was pretty early, but Stan had beaten him to it. The garage was empty, he’d already gone to Saskeega.
Rick drove up to his own place. Everything was quiet. He changed, hunted out an old cutthroat razor and had a shave. He didn’t fancy using his Remington. Then he went and stood outside where he could see the valley, the mountain beyond, the lines moving up there like cobwebs miles away. He kept thinking he ought to be packing, they all ought to be getting out. But it was still too crazy. It was like throwing away job and future and home and all the folk you knew because one night you’d had a bad dream. It was all so peaceful. The air smelled good, there just couldn’t be a Thing in the wires that was fixing to kill everybody on earth . . .
He drove down to Saskeega. There were troops on the road, everything was confused. Nobody knew for sure what was happening. He saw tanks, and there were guns pointed about. Nowhere to aim them. He heard somebody ask if they’d started another war.
Saskeega was empty. Deserted. It was crazy. Rick could hear the noise of the turbines, the roaring the place always made. The power was going out, but the station was running itself.
A siren was howling someplace, but even the siren sounded sort of lonely. Like there was nobody to shout to and it knew it. Rick went into Main Block, got to the old man’s office. The door was swinging open, his chair was overturned, there were papers scattered about the floor. Like he’d jumped up suddenly and run out like a mad thing. There was no help there. Rick drove across to West Power.
The sun was well up now, it was going to be a hot day. He got out of the car, ran across the macadam. His footsteps were the only thing there was. He got to the control room, Donnell was there on his own. Rick asked where the Hell were the shift staff, why hadn’t he yelled for help. He was sweating, looked half crazy. He’d tried, phones wouldn’t answer, he couldn’t leave the place on its own. Voltage had been jumping over the Black Horse, the trips hadn’t pulled the line. Mr Mainwaring had been in, Mr Mainwaring had driven up to High Eight. He’d said he would call from the pass. He hadn’t called yet . . .
Rick looked at the dials on the main panel, they were reading steady. The building was pulsing. Wasn’t what you could call a noise, it was the feeling of a dozen turbines threshing power into the lines, driving it up and away over the Black Horse. Donnell couldn’t keep still. The wires were bad, they’d gone bad again, something was far wrong. He’d buy his lot if he let the line burn out, he’d buy his lot if he pulled the plug without an authority. Would Rick authorize him, would he clear him to close the line?
Cameron swore at him. It was Donnell’s baby, not his. The engineer looked like he was going to burst out crying. He started patting panels and controls like he couldn’t believe anything was real any more. The phone rang.
Rick grabbed it. But it wasn’t Stan, it was Judy. Somehow the call had got through, they couldn’t have all been dead in the exchange . . . Judy on the line, wanted to know were things OK? She was packing, they were getting on the road, were things OK?
Donnell was yanking Rick’s arm. Muttering something about music. He knocked him off and he started to yell. “The music, Rick, it started again, was the music last time, I saw those dials move, we all did, couldn’t do a thing, just had to hear the music. Christ, Rick, the music . . .” He was down on his knees, groping about. Donnell was through.
Rick stood feeling the power through the soles of his shoes and there was Judy on the line and he didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think any more. The voltage was going to waltz again and he couldn’t think. He said, “Look, Judy, get this and get it good. Things aren’t OK, there’s something crazy happening. Just get out, Judy, make it fast. . . .” Then it hit him. She was packing, meant she was calling from home. They shouldn’t have gone back up there, he wanted them away and clear. He yelled at her. “Judy, get out of that house . . . !”
“What –.”
He gagged, but it had to be said. “Judy, the lines. Like you said, there’s something wrong with the lines. Judy, don’t go near any lines. Don’t try and cook, don’t use any lights, don’t take any more calls. Just get out. Tell Jeff that’s from Stan and me. Tell her we’ll come soon as we can, tell her I’ll bring Stan along, I’ll bring him if I have to carry him. But get out! You got that, Judy, you got that OK?”
“Ye-es . . .”
“Well, be a good girl, finish that packing and get out. Shoo, scat . . . I’ll see you soon as I can . . .”
He put the handset down, ran to the line phone. Donnell was yelling. “I heard it last time, Rick, couldn’t tell you, couldn’t lose my job, you’d have said I was crazy, couldn’t say what I heard . . .”
He said, “For Chrissake, get out of the way . . .” He got past him, got to the phone. He rang High Eight. Nobody there. The static on the line was horrible, it was wailing and gibbering at the same time, it was like hearing a mad army. He’d never heard static like that before. He yelled, “Anybody there? Come on, come on somebody, are you there . . . ?”
He thought he heard a handset being picked up. “Stan, that you? You up at High Eight?”
Something like a groan. It sounded like a groan. And a word, all threaded through and underlaid with static. Sounded like, “Can’t . . .” Then there was nothing.
Cameron banged the receiver rest. He yelled, “Stan? Stan, you there? West Power to High Eight, are you there . . . ?”
High Eight answered. They both saw it, saw every dial on the board kick its stops as the voltage jumped up there on the mountain . . .
Rick made a noise like a horse neighing. He jumped at the board and pulled the line, killed it stone dead. Then he ran for the car.
There was a shortcut onto the mountain, missing Freshet. A rough road, barely more than a track. He took the car on that and held her flat out, squealing her into bends, breaking off into the rough, smashing her chrome chops on boulders. He was trying to break her up like he was busting up inside. When he got to High Eight the lines were live again. Somebody had authorized Donnell to put them back in. Or they’d put themselves back in. It didn’t make any difference to Rick. Didn’t make any difference to the folk who had got there before him either.
All through the night they’d been coming, the poor folk, the first of the ragged armies . . . They were piled round the bars, the transformers were singing there shoulder deep. And there were black skeins round the walls like the bugs in the trap, and overhead in the wires like a crop of filthy fruit. There’d been a cordon of troopers round the hill. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the guards were mostly underneath.
Rick started to laugh. A thin noise, wild and high. Laughing at the people, at High Eight, at what he’d seen there, at what he’d promised Jeff. He’d said he’d bring Stan. If he had to carry him. But he couldn’t carry him. He couldn’t move him, he’d have broken, he was too brittle . . .
He went back down the mountain. He never knew how he reached the bottom. He had to run the last half mile. He’d busted the car, she was seized solid.
There was a big line store about a mile from Number Seven, they’d set it up when they did all the work on the hill. Rick was lucky; when he reached it one of the Company trucks was standing outside. There was nobody around. He broke the door open, loaded what he wanted in the back of the wagon. When she wouldn’t take any more he started up and went for Freshet like a bat from Hell. He couldn’t think any more. He just wanted to see Judy had got away, he wanted her clear.
He drove into trouble. A roadblock. It hadn’t been there when he’d come down. There were poles across the road, he could see the army moving about behind. He stopped the truck and a soldier came over. He had a
carbine in his hands and looked like he’d been told he could use it. Rick yelled at him he was Saskeega maintenance, he’d got an urgent job. He shoved his pass under his nose and the man fetched his sergeant.
Cameron felt he was going crazy. What he’d got wouldn’t keep and he knew it. The sergeant came across. He was scared. He had a big, pasty face and the fear was in his face, he smelled of fright. He wagged his thumb at the truck. “Down, bud . . .”
Just along the road Hell started breaking loose, shots and screams. A column of people was coming along. Soldiers firing over their heads, trying to turn them. It wasn’t making any difference, they were walking like they didn’t hear.
Rick jabbed the throttle and let the clutch go. He heard the smack as the shoulder of the truck shoved the sergeant’s face out of the way then he was through the block, bouncing and skidding on the timbers and poles and scattering men every which way. Something rattled behind him; blue sky opened up over the windshield, then he was clear. They never came after him. It looked as if they had their hands too full.
Rick got to his place, Jeff’s car was still in the drive. He rammed the truck in alongside and got out. Something made him look across to the garage. The port was up, his wife’s old Pontiac was gone. He tried to tell himself, it’s OK, they took the Pontiac instead, it’s OK, but it wasn’t any good. He felt fear. It was like a hand round his heart squeezing it until it could get no smaller, no colder. He walked slowly into the house. He called, “Judy . . . ?”
Nothing. No answer. Water running somewhere and another noise. He followed it. Came from the lounge. He walked in. There was a hairdryer lying buzzing on the carpet, a cord up to the wallplug.
Jeff was in the kitchen, of all the crazy places. Sitting over the sink with her head down. Cameron lifted her. Blood was all down the side of the sink, spattered, red and pink, a pink fan spreading to the plug. Her face was gouged, hair to chin. Like she’d been clawed by a mountain cat. She’d gone to the sink to try to stop the blood but she couldn’t, she was hurt too bad. He let go of her, wasn’t anything he could do. He stood there and knew he couldn’t go crazy, not just for a while.
He knew what had happened, he could see it so clearly. Judy did what she said, she kept off all electric things, but she forgot the drier. She bathed and changed and then she started the drier and let High Eight talk, held the motor right up by her face so she could hear it clear. He should have remembered, he should have told her about the drier . . .
Jeff tried to stop her. When she heard . . . whatever it was you heard, she went out and got the Pontiac and Jeff tried to hold her and she beat and beat and tore her face apart . . . But it wasn’t Judy that had done that, it wasn’t his Judy, it was a Thing that already belonged to High Eight . . . And that was where she went, she left Jeff on the ground and drove up the road, and God can you hear me, she drove to High Eight . . .
He should have done what she said. He should have taken her away, she was always so scared of the lines, she knew one day she’d have to go to the lines.
It had taken Stan and it had taken Judy, it had taken everything he had. It had to take him. It knew he hated it, it knew he could kill it. It was up there sulking, deep in the windings, it was full and lazy, but it knew it had to move because he was coming to kill.
Rick tried to hold his mind on what he had to do. On his back he had a box of caps, the truck outside was loaded with blasting sticks. Linked charges on the tower heads each side of High Eight, blow the lines and pin it. Then flatten High Eight, burst its foul blue heart . . . But he wasn’t going to make it. He had the caps ready, he was checking them, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t want to make it because he’d have to go inside, he’d have to pick Judy off the wires . . .
It hit him, on the dot.
High Eight calling . . .
He reeled, hand to his head. It was like all the sound there ever was. Like music but not like music. Like the wind in trees. Like voices. Like Mom and Pop. Lovely and lovely and ugghh . . .
Ugghh . . .
Like Judy . . .
It didn’t take him all at once. It tried, but it couldn’t. It had to rack up and down, and slide, move and slide, look for him, pinpoint . . .
He was moving again, draggingly. The caps in his hand, blasting sticks in the truck, and the wind in the trees soughing, Judy calling and not to let go of the caps don’t ever forget . . . and up ahead on the hill, movement. A shifting and crawling. A motion that was no motion. Molecules that were not molecules forming and dissolving, bubbling, frothing . . .
And for the first time, fear . . .
Shards
Brian W. Aldiss
Brian Aldiss (b. 1925) has been one of Britain’s leading sf writers since the 1950s and has also long established himself as one of the field’s critics and historians with his study The Trillion-Year Spree (1986) and other works. He won his first sf award with the series of stories which made up Hothouse (1962) set on a far-future Earth and has won many awards since including ones for his story “The Saliva Tree” (F&SF, September 1965) and the first of his Helliconia trilogy Helliconia Spring (1982). What has always struck me about Aldiss’s work is that he does not follow trends. He pursues his own thoughts and ideas whether he’s in step or out. He managed to champion the New-Wave movement of the sixties with such profound works as Report on Probability A (1968) – which remained unpublished for six years – without wholly being associated with it. He has weaved in and out of the mainstream with a number of books and has done more than any other British sf writer, to bring sf to the attention of the literary establishment. The following story is an example of Aldiss’s experimentalism. You won’t have a clue what this story is about until you finish it, and then you’ll never forget it.
I
The way of telling the time down here in Mudland was very ingenious. Double A had a row of sticks stuck in the mud in the blackness before his eyes. With his great spongy hands that sometimes would have nothing to do with him, he gripped the sticks one by one, counting as he went, sometimes in numbers, sometimes in such abstractions as lyre birds, rusty screws, pokers, or seaweed.
He would go on grimly, hand over fist against time, until the beastly old comfort of degradation fogged over his brain and he would forget what he was trying to do. The long liverish gouts of mental indigestion that were his thought processes would take over from his counting. And when later he came to think back to the moment when the takeover occurred, he would know that that had been the moment when it had been the present. Then he could guess how far ahead or behind of the present he was, and could give this factor a suitable name – though lately he had decided that all factors could be classified under the generic term Standard, and he named the present time Standard O’Clock.
Standard O’Clock he pictured as a big Irish guardsman with moustaches sweeping round the roseate blankness of his face. Every so often, say on pay day or on passing out parade, the Lance-Standard would chime, with pretty little cuckoos popping out of all orifices. As an additional touch of humour, Double A would make O’clock’s pendulum wag.
By this genial ruse, he was slowly abolishing time, turning himself into the first professor of a benighted quantum. As yet the experiments were not entirely successful, for ever and anon his groping would communicate itself to his hands, and back they’d come to him, slithering through the mud, tame as you please. Sometimes he bit them; they tasted unpleasant; nor did they respond.
“You are intellect,” he thought they said. “But we are the tools of intellect. Treat us well.”
II
Another experiment concerned the darkness.
Even sprawling in the mud with his legs amputated unfortunately represented a compromise. Double A had to admit there was nothing final in his degradation, since he had begun to – no, nobody would force him to use the term “enjoy the mud”, but on the other hand nobody could stop him using the term “ambivelling the finny claws (clause?)” with the understanding
that in certain contexts it might be interpreted as synonymous with “enjoying the mud”.
Anyhow, heretofore, and nutmeggaphonically, it remained to be continued that everywhere was compromise. The darkness compromised with itself and with him. The darkness was sweet and warm and wet.
When Double A realised that the darkness was not utter, that the abstraction utterness was beyond it, he became furious, drumming imaginary heels in the mud, urinating into it with some force and splendour, and calling loudly for dark glasses.
The dark glasses were a failure, for they became covered in mud, so that he could not see through them to observe whether or not the darkness increased. So They came and fitted him with a pair of ebony contact lenses, and with this splendid condescension on their part, Double A hoped he had at last reached a point of non-compromise.
Not so! He had eyelids that pressed on the lenses, drawing merry patterns on the night side of his eyeballs. Pattern and darkness cannot exist together, so again he was defeated by myopic little Lord Compromise, knee-high to a pin and stale as rats’ whiskers, but still Big Reeking Lord of Creation. Well, he was not defeated yet. He had filled Application No. Six Oh Five Bark Oomph Eight Eight Tate Potato Ten in sticks and sandbars and the old presumption factor for the privilege of Person Double A, sir, late of the Standard O’Clock Regiment, sir, to undergo total partial and complete Amputation of Two Vermicularform Appendages in the possession of the aforesaid Double A and known henceforth as his Eyelids.
Meanwhile until the application was accepted and the scalpels served, he tried his cruel experiments on the darkness.
He shouted, whispered, spoke, gave voice, uttered, named names, broke wind, cracked jokes, split infinitives, passed particles, and in short and in toto interminably talked, orated, chattered, chatted, and generally performed vocal circumbendibusses against the darkness.
The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 44
