Enemies of the System

by Brian W Aldiss

  Morits pressed himself against the tunnel wall, saying weakly, “Don’t attack me for what was a unanimous decision. There are unknown dangers here and the—uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-…”

  As his voice failed, his face went ashen. His body seemed to shrivel. He staggered but could not fall. A cry almost like a solid thing was torn from his throat.

  Rushing to take hold of him, Sygiek and Dulcifer saw sharp claws and leathery paws grasping the bureaucrat’s thighs, biting deep into his flesh until blood seeped across his clothes. Those terrible hands had struck at him through the wall of the tunnel from behind. Had Morits been sitting there, the claws would have struck his throat and he would already be dead.

  Calling loudly for assistance, the two Utopians seized Morits’s arms and tried to drag him forward. He uttered another desolate scream. As they pulled him slowly away, part of the tunnel wall behind him collapsed. Amid falling sand milled several of the mole-creatures. Their trap had been sprung and they were still clasping their prey. Their muzzles were bloodied. Morits was already being devoured.

  For a moment they crouched at the hole, as if contemplating an attack. Other faces appeared in the gap, sniffing.

  Dulcifer let go his hold on Morits and kicked out, catching a bristling flank with his boot.

  “Stand back!” Sygiek ordered. She pulled a small gun out of her tunic. Dulcifer barely had time to duck before she straightened her arm and fired two shots in a professional manner into the hole.

  The gun was hetrasonic. Even as two buzzing notes sounded, two of the mole-creatures fell forward, clutching their bellies as they went. Writhing, they dropped to the ground, but hardly were they there before their fellows had taken them, dragging them into the tunnel. Bellowing, Dulcifer rushed forward and grabbed one of the wounded creatures, wrenching it away from its fellows, kicking out to fend off another attack. The rabble had had enough. Holding the other wounded creature, they retreated into the hole and disappeared from view.

  Dulcifer and Sygiek turned and stared at each other. Both were pale. Dulcifer dashed sweat from his brow.

  “You are not permitted to carry a gun,” he panted. “System legality and so on.”

  She said, “I have a license.”

  He wiped at the sweat again and looked stupidly down at the ground. He required no more explanation. Millia Sygiek was a member of the dreaded USRP, and Reason Police were authorized to carry weapons and fire when necessary.

  “So you hunt with that pack,” he said heavily. “I’m sorry to hear it. I took you for a decent woman.”

  The tourist party on the embankment had heard the scuffle. Some of them were already hurrying down to help. Dulcifer stood back and let them. He retained his hold on the mole-creature which Sygiek had shot; it was now dead. He followed as the others tenderly carried Morits up to the road and into the shade of the overturned bus. A trail of blood dripped from the wounded bureaucrat.

  Kordan and the grey-haired hydraulics technician, Lao Fererer, had established themselves as provisional co-directors of the party. They cleared a space for the bodies and called for bandages.

  The guide, Rubyna Constanza, climbed into the bus, reappearing with bandages and medicaments. She set to work in a business-like way to tend Morits, kneeling by him and turning him gently over on his face. Then she cried aloud. Morits’s clothing, the small of his back, his buttocks, thighs, calves, part of one arm, had been eaten away as if by rats, exposing bone. Blood was seeping over the road. Mercifully, Morits was unconscious.

  Constanza looked up into the tense faces round her.

  “What can we do about his wounds here? He will surely die. In the Unity, at Peace City, the accident units could grow replacement arteries and flesh but here … Death’s certain.”

  Nobody spoke. It was the obscene word “death” which shocked them. At home, there was only a fulfilled Passing On, as the citizen moved into an all-embracing pallor which was in harmony with the system. Here on Lysenka II, you went out in crimson, the hue of rage and passion.

  Kordan spoke, mastering his voice. “Do what you can for him, Rubyna Constanza. Now we see why we are inevitably screened before we can visit an Extra-solar Planet. Instead of Eternal Security, we are faced with Eternal Anarchy. In the System, before the days of Biocom and the establishment of World Unity—”

  “We already have the speeches by heart,” Sygiek cut in. “It is not an hour since this vehicle crashed and already one of us is severely wounded. Danger surrounds us, and our first duty to the state is to triumph over that danger and survive. All of you make sure you now understand exactly the situation in which we find ourselves. Ecologically and ideologically, these creatures are our enemies.” Her arm swept round to cover the wilderness about them. “We are Number One Target for every living monster out there.”

  Dragging the dead mole-creature by its mane of hair, Dulcifer pushed his way into the center of the group. He dumped it beside the bleeding body of Georg Morits.

  “Sygiek is right. We don’t want speeches, we want action. We don’t want propaganda, we want information. We aren’t in Utopia now. You know what permits Utopia to flourish? I’ll tell you—protein. A plentiful supply of protein, eh? The one prime fact about Lysenka you’d better remember is that from the word go it suffered from protein-deficiency on a grand scale. Know what that means, comrades? We can be eaten. To the things that exist here, we are protein on the hoof, and we have to fight. Otherwise, we’ll be more thoroughly chewed up and gulped down something’s digestive tract than even poor Comrade Morits.”

  V

  A murmur of shock and protest rose from the stranded tourists, but Dulcifer pushed on through it.

  “We may be efficient in the System, but we have had no external enemies for countless centuries. Here, we are inefficient. On this dud, murderous world, we are just bait. Food, nothing more. We need knowledge and leadership to survive for even a few hours.”

  “Collective leadership,” said Lao Fererer, to a murmur of agreement. “We have lived by our principles—we are certainly not going to abandon them in a crisis.”

  “We adapt,” Dulcifer said firmly. “Lysenka II is just entering what corresponds with the start of Earth’s Carboniferous Age, hundreds of millions of years ago. We are as good as stuck in the past, long before Biocom was thought of. We need to understand that situation as clearly as possible. Rubyna Constanza, you’re the guide—give us a quick summary of planetary conditions as we have to face them in this Rift Valley.”

  Constanza had finished bandaging the badly wounded man. She rose to her feet and faced them. After a swift glance at Kordan, the Outourist girl spoke as if still delivering an address on her consigned vehicle.

  “The evidence for Lysenka’s having just emerged from a Devonian Age is complex, and has much to do with the state of the local sun. But geological and biobotanical evidence reinforce a general picture. Essentially, we have here a world of primitive life. In the oceans are fish some meters long with bony head armor. Also trilobites. System scientists have discovered bones of tetrapod amphibians in this valley which resemble a terrestrial rhipidistian order. That is to say, not fossil bones—the creatures existed recently but were all eaten by the invaders. In other parts of the planet, toward the tropics, they still exist, haunting the shores of the Borodinian Lakes.

  “The plant life is of a matching antiquity, as we would expect. You may see dragonflies of up to seventy centimeters’ wing span. They are becoming extinct because their larvae in the rivers are regarded by the animals as a delicacy. They lived particularly in the swamp region to the west of this road, where there are forests of giant-scale trees. Such forests are more frequent near the equator. Here you will mostly find cage trees, horsetails, calamites, maybe some gingkoes, and of course fern trees and fern, with no seed-bearing plants. There are no flowers on Lysenka II, a fact which some of our visitors have complained about. There are also giant sequoias, bearing their stiff wooden flowers or cones.

  “Thus we se
e that the only brains on the planet are dim and instinct-driven. No creature at all resembling mankind could possibly have emerged for millions of years, if it had not been for the capitalist ship which crash-landed in this region so long ago.”

  The tourists had listened attentively if anxiously to all this. Running a hand through his sandy hair, Takeido said, “Yes, I would like to amplify briefly what Rubyna Constanza has been saying. I am an exobotanist with five years’ field-work on the planet Sokolev. As Constanza implies, here on Lysenka nature has yet to invent the angiosperm. That’s seeds in an encased ovary, the opposite of gymnosperms. An angiosperm is a nutritious little food-package which supports seeds in the primary stage of their life. Spores or unpackaged seeds have no such advantage—they fend for themselves and their mortality rate is high. You can’t eat spores. But angiosperms—those little food-packages are what caused the first proliferation of mammals over the face of Earth. They can make a world get up and go. So this world is a non-starter—as yet, at least. Thank you.”

  “As for the question of grass,” began Regentop, but Dulcifer cut her off.

  “That’s the essence of it. There are no grasses on this world, no cereals, no high-energy packets for animals to eat—no basic requisite for the support of a grazer-predator system such as grew up on Earth and Sokolev and elsewhere. Lysenka has not yet reached a stage where it can naturally support anything called animal life.”

  “You talk a great deal, Utopianist Dulcifer,” said Fererer, and pointed to the dead mole-creature, “but this animal you brought here—”

  “You should not lead even a sedentary committee,” said Dulcifer, pointing a finger at Fererer, “if you have not grasped the salient point that there was reason for our being screened before we were allowed on Lysenka II. This is not an animal. There are no real animals on Lysenka II. The whole grazer-predator system is human in origin.”

  With his toecap, he rolled the mud-covered tunneler over until it sprawled on its back with its wound visible, one arm stretched across the road, one limp across its chest.

  “Look at it, Fererer, and you others. Look and feel pity. See its retractable genitals, its joints, its anatomical structure. It is made what it is by harsh conditioning. It is just a poor savage misfit. This is what it has been reduced to, generation by generation. But its ancestors were our ancestors. They were human, homo sapiens, a poor confused race that blundered around until it found the stars. Same goes for every damned animal we are likely to encounter in this valley. They’re ex-human stock. That’s the danger we have to understand. We are up against—not instinct, but cunning.”

  It was the statement, “Its ancestors were our ancestors,” which provoked the biggest murmur. Sygiek’s voice cut through their comments.

  “Utopianist Dulcifer, I hereby give you notice that you will be reported for deviationism on our return to Unity. You waste valuable time, and you discuss Classified information before someone who is not a member of the élite.”

  “But the guide knows,” exclaimed a ferrous metal analyst called Che Burek. “She knows, she lives here, she’s been indoctrinated.”

  “She is still only a guide, a worker,” said Sygiek. “No offense, Comrade Constanza. Except for Fererer, we did not need reminding that all Lysenkan animals claim descent from the capitalists who crashed here. Of course there are dangers; but the fact that the animals are semi-human will enable us to use the system’s most powerful weapon—reason!”

  Dulcifer uttered a dry laugh and kicked the corpse so that it rolled against the chassis of the bus.

  “That comes well from you, Sygiek! You should know better. You shot this thing.”

  “Retract, Sygiek,” called Che Burek.

  “Enough. No indulging in personalities,” said Kordan, stepping forward. “More than one of us is capable of making reports. We understand our position, don’t we? The bus log tells us that we are approximately two hundred and fifty kilometers out from the Unity Hotel. Six hours of daylight remain. We have emergency flares and torches and other equipment in the vehicle, also a trolley which will carry supplies. We are now going to march in a body back to the safety of our hotel. The likelihood of attack on the road is remote.”

  Usla Denning, a woman from the Cupran State who was accompanying Che Burek, said, “Such a walk will take us over two E-days, without allowing for rest periods. That means a Lysenkan day and a half. And by the way, I’m one of the System’s leading seasons technicians, and I believe a storm is brewing.”

  “We have made our decision,” said Kordan and Fererer together.

  “May I put forward an alternative, although I am only a worker?” asked Constanza. She was a slight, trim figure, and she regarded them almost with an amused air. “Unity is a stiff uphill march, and I presume none of you is used to walking far. There is a nearer refuge, and it lies downhill. At the Gorge itself is a comfortable restaurant with plenty of restrooms, saunas, and so on, plus a swimming pool in part of the lake especially for your convenience.”

  “How far away is the Gorge?” asked a dozen voices.

  “Under an hour’s LDB travel. Say one hundred and eighty, one hundred and eighty-five kilometers. We shall be safe at the Gorge.”

  They held an impromptu discussion.

  While they were talking, a distant note of a horn was heard.

  “A vehicle!” someone exclaimed, and they all ran to look up and down the road. One or two of them climbed on the bus.

  The freeway lay empty in both directions, fading into dun-colored haze. They were completely isolated from civilization. To one side, perhaps a kilometer away, the plain ended and an old green forest began. A herd of creatures was issuing from the trees and coming at a brisk gait toward the embankment and the river that lay between forest and embankment. In the thick light, it was impossible to distinguish their characteristics clearly.

  Everyone stood and watched.

  “I’ll get those emergency flares,” said Che Burek, but he made no move.

  The herd comprised perhaps fifty individuals. They progressed with a lolloping gait, and seemingly on all fours. At the rear were three runners proceeding with a more upright stance. One of these three raised an instrument to his mouth and blew a ragged note. This was the horn they had heard.

  The sound of it—unpleasantly reminiscent of a huntsman’s horn—was enough to promote terror among the tourists. Without waiting to form a committee, they climbed into the bus, scrambling through doors and windows. Only Kordan, Takeido and Dulcifer were left standing on the road.

  “Assist me in getting Georg Morits into the coach,” said Kordan to Dulcifer, going over to the wounded man.

  Together the three of them heaved Morits up the slope of the cab, where other hands helped lift him inside as gently as possible.

  At this juncture, Morits roused from his coma, struggled and started feebly screaming. His bandages began to ooze. He waved his arm in pain, smearing blood everywhere. A convulsion seized his entire body, he arched himself backward, cried again, collapsed. Lech Czwartek, the doctor, was by his side; after examination, he shook his head and pronounced Morits dead.

  Hardly were the words out of his mouth than Hete Orlon went into an hysterical fit. She threw herself about, tore her hair, and struck at Lao Fererer as he tried to comfort her. Then she hurled herself weeping on the dead body, crying incoherently.

  “Mother, mother, what have I done to you? They have taken all your beads away. It’s not for me and not for you. No one’s to blame, mother, no one’s to blame, I swear—not me, not you! Why did you ever leave me? We’re both safe together, little mother!”

  Fererer put his arms round her heaving shoulders, trying to comfort her. Turning a red face to the others, he said, “I don’t know what she is saying. I can assure you she was an exobirth, like the rest of us. She had no mother. She was brought up in a crèche with her other siblings in Mali Zemlya.”

  While Orlon subsided into troubled gasps, the creatures from the forest were
drawing closer. They took their time, swinging along between the sparse green fronds, looking perpetually to left and to right.

  Their features were not more clearly distinguishable. They were brown-and-white striped. Their ears were remarkably large and round, and cupped forward almost as if they formed extensions to the lower jaw.

  “They look like zebras,” said Dennig, in a relieved voice. “Could they be grazers, rather than carnivores?”

  The herd slowed, skirting some mole tunnels. They approached the river with due caution. Occasionally they stopped entirely, raising their front feet off the ground to look round in a man-like stance. The tourists were fascinated.

  “To imagine that they were once human …” exclaimed Lydy Fracx.

  “To think that they were once capitalists,” said Kordan.

  “To think that they are born inside the female still,” said Takeido. “Only when Biocom delivered our kind from that burden could the familial societies be dismantled and a true global society established.”

  “Quiet!” said Sygiek.

  The striped herd had seen the bus. They looked at it for a long time and then moved toward the river. Wide stretches of sand on either side of the water showed how the river had shrunk from its original state; but it was still considerable and looked treacherous, with boulders rising above its rolling surface here and there, and a channel in the middle where the race was deep, sending up a mane of foam which seemed to run perpetually before a silent wind.

  The leaders of the zebras plunged into the water and the rest followed. One of the rear runners blew his horn again like a challenge. Females and younger members of the group were positioned protectively inside a circle of pressing bodies as they braved the flood. The leaders had reached the deeper water when they were attacked. A tough gray-maned male suddenly fell to his knees and almost disappeared beneath threshing water. Two of his companions grabbed him with their forefeet and pulled him up. A dark-bodied seal-creature came up with him, its fangs sunk into his belly. It was immediately attacked by the other zebra-people.