The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

The Sound Revolution had come at the dawn of this new century, following thirty years of peace. Progress had taken a new direction. It had all been simple and complete; you just flushed the right electrostatic stress through the right quartz plates and – bingo! You could do anything! The most spectacular result was a global conflict.

  The Powers warred under certain humane agreements: gas, fission and fusion weapons were forbidden. It was to be, indeed, a Civilised War. VM (vibratory motion) had the field to itself. It learnt to expand living vegetable cells a thousand-fold, so that a potato would last for two years’ dinners; it learnt to pulverize brick and metal, so that cities could comfortably be turned to a thin dust; it learnt to twist the human ear into an echoing, useless coil of gristle. There seemed no limit to its adaptability.

  Mrs. Snowden ate her blown-up yeast with dignity, and thought of other things. She thought – for lately she had been straining after wider horizons – of the course of human history, its paradoxical sameness and variety, and then something made her look up to the tube over the mantelpiece.

  The tube was a piece of standard equipment in every home. It was a crude ear, designed to announce when the local siren was giving a sound raid alarm.

  She glanced indifferently at it. The lycopodium seed was stirring sluggishly in its tube; damp must be getting in, it was not patterning properly. She went on eating, gloomily wondering about the future generations: how much of the vital essence of tradition would be lost through this blanket of deafness?

  Correct procedure would have been for her, at the stirring of the seed, to collect Pauline and stand out in the open. When the siren went, everyone else left their homes and stood patiently under the bare sky; then, if the sounds swept their buildings, they would be temporarily smothered by dust as the building vanished, but suffer no other harm. Mrs. Snowden could no longer be bothered with this nonsense.

  To her mind, it was undignified to stand in the chill air, meekly waiting. If enemy planes circled overhead, she would have had defiance to spur her out; but nowadays there was only the quiet sky, the eternal silence and the abrupt pulverization – or the anti-climax, when everyone filed sheepishly back to bed.

  She took her plate into the kitchen. As she came back into the living-room, a reproduction of Mellor’s ‘Egyptian Girl’ fell silently onto the floor, shattering frame and glass.

  Mrs. Snowden went and stared at it. Then, on impulse, she hurried over to the window and peered out. The encircling houses had gone.

  Letting the curtain fall back into place, she rushed from the room and up the stairs. She was shaking Pauline before she regained control of herself, and then could not tell whether panic or exultation had sent her scurrying.

  ‘The houses have gone! The houses have gone!’

  Silence, in which the little girl woke sluggishly.

  Mrs. Snowden hustled her downstairs and out on to the front lawn, letting a bright swathe of light cut across the empty flower-beds. Somewhere, high and silent overhead, a monitor might be hovering, but she was too excited to care.

  By a freak of chance, their house stood alone. Around them for miles stretched a new desert, undulant, still settling. The novelty, the difference, of it was something wonderful: not a catastrophe, a liberation.

  Then they saw the giants.

  Vague in the distance, they were nevertheless real enough, although incredible. They were tall – how tall? – ten, fifteen feet? More? With horror Mrs. Snowden thought they were enemy troops. This was the latest application of the sound: it enlarged the human cell now, as easily as it enlarged vegetable cells. She had the brief idea she had read that human giants could not survive, or were impossible or something, and then the thought was gone, swept away in fear.

  The giants were still growing. They were taller than a house now, thirty feet or more high. They began to mop and mow, like drunken dancers.

  Unreality touched her. Pauline was crying.

  A coolness swept her limbs. She trembled involuntarily. A personal alarm now, terror because something unknown was at her blood. She raised a hand to her eyes. It loomed away from her. Her arm extended. She was growing.

  She knew then that the giants were no enemy troops; they were victims. You get everyone out of their houses. One type of VM levels the houses. Another inflates the people, blowing them up like grotesque rubber dummies. Simple. Scientific. Civilised.

  Mrs. Snowden swayed like a pole. She took a clumsy step to keep her balance. Dizzily, she peered at her blank bedroom window, staggering away to avoid falling into the house. No pain. The circuits were disrupted. Only numbness: numbness and maniac growth.

  She could still crazily see the dancing giants. Now she understood why they danced. They were trying to adapt. Before they could do so, their metabolism burnt out. They sprawled into the desert, giant dusty corpses, full of sound and silence.

  She thought: It’s the first excitement for years, amusedly, before her heart failed under its giant load.

  She toppled; the DON’T card fluttered gaily from her bosom, spinning and filtering to the ground.

  Pauline had already overtopped her grandmother. The young system was greedy for growth. She uttered a cry of wonder as her head rocked up to the dark sky. She saw her grandmother fall. She saw the tiny fan of sonic light from their tiny front door. She trod into the desert to keep her balance. She started to run. She saw the ground dwindle. She felt the warmth of the stars, the curvature of the earth.

  In her brain, the delighted thoughts were wasps in a honey pot, bees in a hive, flies in a chapel, gnats in a factory, midges in a Sahara, sparks up an everlasting flue, a comet falling for ever in a noiseless void, a voice singing in a new universe.

  The Failed Men

  ‘It’s too crowded here!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘It’s too crowded! It’s too CROWDED!’

  He swung around, his mouth open, his face contorted like a squeezed lemon, nearly knocking a passer-by off the pavement. The passer-by bowed, smiled forgivingly and passed on, his eyes clearly saying: ‘Let him be – it’s one of the poor devils off the ship.’

  ‘It’s too crowded,’ Surrey Edmark said again at the retreating back. It was night. He stood hatless under the glare of the New Orchard Road lights, bewildered by the flowing cosmopolitan life of Singapore about him. People: thousands of ’em, touchable; put out a hand gently, feel alpaca, silk, nylon, satin, plain, patterned, or crazily flowered; thousands within screaming distance. If you screamed, just how many of those dirty, clean, pink, brown, desirable or offensive convoluted ears would scoop up your decibels?

  No, he told himself, no screaming, please. These people who swarm like phantoms about you are real; they wouldn’t like it. And your doctor, who did not consider you fit to leave the observation ward – he’s real enough; he wouldn’t like it if he learned you had been screaming in a main street. And you yourself – how real were you? How real was anything when you had recently had perfect proof that all was finished? Really finished: rolled up and done with and discarded and forgotten.

  That dusty line of thought must be avoided. He needed somewhere quiet, a place to sit and breathe deeply. Everyone must be deceived; he must hide the fused, dead feeling inside; then he could go back home. But he had also to try and hide the deadness from himself, and that needed more cunning. Like alpha particles, a sense of futility had riddled him, and he was mortally sick.

  Surrey noticed a turning just ahead. Thankfully he went to it and branched out of the crowds into a dim, narrow thoroughfare. He passed three women in short dresses smoking together; farther on a fellow was being sick into a privet hedge. And there was a café with a sign saying ‘The Iceberg’. Deserted chairs and tables stood outside on an ill-lit veranda; Surrey climbed the two steps and sat wearily down. This was luxury.

  The light was poor. Surrey sat alone. Inside the café several people were eating, and a girl sang, accompanying herself on a stringed, lute-like instrument. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was simple and nostalgic,
her voice conveying more than the music; he closed his eyes, letting the top spin within him, the top of his emotions. The girl stopped her singing suddenly, as if tired, and walked onto the veranda to stare into the night. Surrey opened his eyes and looked at her.

  ‘Come and talk to me,’ he called.

  She turned her head haughtily to the shadows where he sat, and then turned it back. Evidently, she had met with that sort of invitation before. Surrey clenched his fists in frustration; here he sat, isolated in space and time, needing comfort, needing … oh, nothing could heal him, but salves existed … The loneliness welled up inside, forcing him to speak again.

  ‘I’m from the ship,’ he said, unable to hold back a note of pleading.

  At that, she came over and took a seat facing him. She was Chinese, and wore the timeless slit dress of her race, big daisies chasing themselves over the gentle contours of her body.

  ‘Of course I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can see in your eyes … that you are from the ship.’ She trembled slightly and asked: ‘May I get you a drink?’

  Surrey shook his head. ‘Just to have you sitting there …’

  He was feeling better. Irrationally, a voice inside said: ‘Well, you’ve been through a harsh experience, but now that you’re back again you can recover, can’t you, go back to what you were?’ The voice frequently asked that, but the answer was always No; the experience was still spreading inside, like cancer.

  ‘I heard your ship come in,’ the Chinese girl said. ‘I live just near here – Bukit Timah Road, if you know it, and I was at my window, talking with a friend.’

  He thought of the amazing sunshine and the eternal smell of cooking fats and the robshaws clacking by and this girl and her friend chattering in a little attic – and the orchestral crash as the ship arrived, making them forget their sentences; but all remote, centuries ago.

  ‘It’s a funny noise it makes,’ he said. ‘The sound of a time ship breaking out of the time barrier.’

  ‘It scares the chickens,’ she said.

  Silence. Surrey wanted to produce something else to say, to keep the girl sitting with him, but nothing would dissolve into words. He neglected the factor of her own human curiosity, which made her keen to stay; she inquired again if he would like a drink, and then said: ‘Would it be good for you if you told me something about it?’

  ‘I’d call that a leading question.’

  ‘It’s very – bad ahead, isn’t it? I mean, the papers say …’ She hesitated nervously.

  ‘What do they say?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, they say that it’s bad. But they don’t really explain; they don’t seem to understand.’

  ‘That’s the whole key to it,’ he told her. ‘We don’t seem to understand. If I talked to you all night, you still wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand …’

  She was beautiful, sitting there with her little lute in her hand. And he had traveled far away beyond her lute and her beauty, far beyond nationality or even music; it had all gone into the dreary dust of the planet, all gone – final – nothing left – except degradation. And puzzlement.

  ‘I’ll try and tell you,’ he said. ‘What was that tune you were just singing? Chinese song?’

  ‘No, it was Malayan. It’s an old song, very old, called “Terang Boelan”. It’s about – oh, moonlight, you know, that kind of thing. It’s sentimental.’

  ‘I didn’t even know what language it was in, but perhaps in a way I understood it.’

  ‘You said you were going to tell me about the future,’ she told him gently.

  ‘Yes. Of course. It’s a sort of tremendous relief work we’re doing. You know what they call it: The Intertemporal Red Cross. It’s accurate, but when you’ve actually been … ahead, it seems a silly, flashy title. I don’t know, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything any more.’

  He stared out at the darkness; it was going to rain. When he began to speak again, his voice was firmer.

  The IRC is really organized by the Paulls (he said to the Chinese girl). They call themselves the Paulls; we should call them the technological élite of the Three Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Century. That’s a terribly long way ahead – we, with our twenty-four centuries since Christ, can hardly visualise it. Our ship stopped there, in their time. It was very austere: the Paulls are austere people. They live only on mountains overlooking the oceans, and have moved mountains to every coast for their own edification.

  The Paulls are unlike us, yet they are brothers compared with the men we are helping, the Failed Men.

  Time travel had been invented long before the age of the Paulls, but it is they who perfected it, they who accidentally discovered the plight of the Failed Men, and they who manage the terrific business of relief. For the world of the Paulls, rich as it is – will be – has insufficient resources to cope with the task without vitiating its strength. So it organised the fleet of time ships, the IRC, to collect supplies from different ages and bear them out ahead to the Failed Men.

  Five different ages are co-operating on the project, under the Paull leadership. There are the Middle People, as the Paulls call them. They are a race of philosophers, mainly pastoral, and we found them haughty; they live about twenty thousand centuries ahead of the Paulls. Oh, it’s a long time … And there are – but never mind that! They had little to do with us, or we with them.

  We – this present day, was the only age without time travel of the five. The Paulls chose us because we happen to have peace and plenty. And do you know what they call us? The Children. The Children! We, with all our weary sophistication … Perhaps they’re right; they have a method of Gestalt reasoning absolutely beyond our wildest pretensions.

  You know, I remember once on the voyage out ahead, I asked one of the Paulls why they had never visited our age before; and he said: ‘But we have. We broke at the nineteenth century and again at the twenty-sixth. That’s pretty close spacing! And that’s how we knew so much about you.’

  They have so much experience, you see. They can walk around for a day in one century and tell you what’ll be happening the next six or seven. It’s a difference of outlook, I suppose; something as simple as that.

  I suppose you’ll remember better than I when the Paulls first broke here, as you are actually on the spot. I was at home then, doing a peaceful job; it hadn’t been so peaceful I might not have volunteered for the IRC What a storm it caused! A good deal of panic in with the excitement. Yes, we proved ourselves children then, and in the adulation we paid the Paulls while they toured the world’s capitals. During the three months they waited here while we organised supplies and men, they must have been in a fury of impatience to be off; yet they revealed nothing, giving their unsensational lectures on the plight of the Failed Men and smiling for the three-dee cameras.

  All the while money poured in for the cause, and the piles of canned food and medical supplies filled the holds of the big ship. We were like kids throwing credits to street beggars; all sorts of stuff of no earthly use went into that ship. What would a Failed Man do with a launderer or a cycloview machine? At last we were off, with all the world’s bands playing like mad and the ship breaking with noise enough to drown all bands and startle your chickens – off for the time of the Failed Men!

  ‘I think I’d like that drink you offered me now,’ Surrey said to the Chinese girl, breaking off his narrative.

  ‘Certainly.’ She snapped her fingers at arm’s length, her hand in the light from the restaurant, her face in the gloom, eyes fixed on his eyes.

  ‘The Paulls had told you it was going to be tough,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. We underwent pretty rough mental training from them before leaving the here and now. Many of the men were weeded out. But I got through. They elected me Steersman. I was top of their first class.’

  Surrey was silent a moment, surprised to hear pride in his own voice. Pride left, after that experience! Yet there was no pride in him; it was just the voice running in an
old channel, the naked soul crouching in an ancient husk of character.

  The drink arrived. The Chinese girl had one too, a long one in a misty glass; she put her lute down to drink it. Surrey took a sip of his and then resumed the story.

  We were travelling ahead! It was a schoolboy’s dream come true. Yet our excitement soon became blunted by monotony. There is nothing simultaneous in time travel, as people have imagined. It took us two ship’s months to reach the Paulls’ age, and there all but one of them left us to continue on alone into the future.

  They had the other ages to supervise, and many organisational problems to attend to; yet I sometimes wonder if they did not use those problems as an excuse, to save their having to visit the age of the Failed Men. Perhaps they thought us less sensitive, and therefore better fitted for the job.

  And so we went ahead again. The office of Steersman was almost honorary, entailing merely the switching off of power when the journey was automatically ended. We sat about and talked, we chosen few, reading or viewing in the excellent libraries the Paulls had installed. Time passed quickly enough, yet we were glad when we arrived.

  Glad!

  The age of the Failed Men is far in the future: many hundred millions of years ahead, or thousands of millions; the Paulls would never tell us the exact number. Does it matter? It was a long time … There’s plenty of time – too much – more than anyone will ever need.

  We stepped out onto that day’s Earth. I had childishly expected – oh, to see the sun stuck at the horizon, or turned purple, or the sky full of moons, or something equally dramatic; but there was not even a shadow over the fair land, and the earth had not aged a day. Only man had aged.

  The Failed Men differed from us anatomically and spiritually; it was the former quality which struck us first. They looked like a group of dejected oddities sitting among piles of supplies, and we wanted to laugh. The humorists among us called them ‘the Zombies’ at first – but in a few days there were no humorists left among us.

  The Failed Men had no real hands. From their wrists grew five long and prehensile fingers, and the middle digit touched the ground lightly when they walked, for their spines curved in an arc and their heads were thrust far forward. To counter this, their skulls had elongated into boat shapes, scaphocephalic fashion. They had no eyebrows, nor indeed a brow at all, nor any hair at all, although the pores of their skin stood out flakily, giving them a fluffy appearance from a distance.