The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  When they looked at you their eyes held no meaning; they were blanked with a surfeit of experience, as though they had now regained a horrible sort of innocence. When they spoke to you, their voices were hollow and their sentences as short and painful as a child’s toothache. We could not understand their language, except through the electronic translator banks given us by the Paulls.

  They looked a mournful sight, but at first we were not too disturbed; we didn’t, you see, quite grasp the nature of the problem. Also, we were very busy, reclaiming more Failed Men from the ground.

  Four great aid centres had been established on the earth. Of the other four races in the IRC, two managed sanatoria construction and equipment; another, nursing, feeding and staffing; and the fourth, communication, rehabilitation and liaison between centres. And we – ‘the Children’! – our job was to exhume the Failed Men and bring them to the centres: a job for the simple group! Between us we all had to get the race of man started again – back into harness.

  All told, I suppose there are only about six million Failed Men spread over the earth. We had to go out and dig them up. We had specially made tractors with multiple blades on the front which dug slowly and gently into the soil.

  The Failed Men had ‘cemetery areas’; we called them that, although they had not been designed as cemeteries. It was like a bad dream. Working day and night, we trundled forward, furrowing up the earth as you strip back a soiled bed. In the mould, a face would appear, an arm with the long fingers, a pair of legs, tumbling into the light. We would stop the machine and get down to the body, digging with trowels around it. So we would exhume another man or woman – it was hard to tell which they were.

  They would be in coma. Their eyes would open, staring like peek-a-boo dolls, then close again with a click. We’d patch them up with an injection, stack them on stretchers and send them back in a load to base. It was a harrowing job, and no pun intended.

  When the corpses had had some attention and care, they revived. Within a month they would be up and walking, trundling about the hospital grounds in that round-shouldered way, their great boat-heads nodding at every step. And then it was I talked to them and tried to understand.

  The translator banks, being Paull-made, were the best possible. But their limitations were the limitations of our own language. If the Failed Men said their word for ‘sun’, the machine said ‘sun’ to us, and we understood by that the same thing the Failed Men intended. But away from the few concrete, common facts of our experience, the business was less easy. Less synonyms, more overtones; it was the old linguistic problem, but magnified here by the ages which lay between us.

  I remember tackling one old woman on our first spell back at the centre. I say old, but for all I know she was sweet sixteen; they just looked ancient.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind being dug – er, rescued?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ the banks said for her. Polite stereotypes. No real meaning in any language, but the best machine in the world makes them sound sillier than they are.

  ‘Would you mind if we discussed this whole thing?’

  ‘What object?’ the banks asked for her.

  I’d asked the wrong question. I did not mean thing-object, but thing-matter. That sort of trip-up kept getting in the way of our discussion; the translator spoke better English than I.

  ‘Can we talk about your problem?’ I asked her, trying again.

  ‘I have no problem. My problem has been resolved.’

  ‘I should be interested to hear about it.’

  ‘What do you require to know about it? I will tell you anything.’

  That at least was promising. Willing if not co-operative; they had long ago forgotten the principle of co-operation.

  ‘You know I come from the distant past to help you?’ The banks translated me undramatically.

  ‘Yes. It is noble of you all to interrupt your lives for us,’ she said.

  ‘Oh no; we want to see the race of man starting off again on a right track. We believe it should not die away. We are glad to help, and are sorry you took the wrong track.’

  ‘When we started, we were on a track others before us – you – had made.’ It was not defiant, just a fact being stated.

  ‘But the deviation was yours. You made it by an act of will. I’m not condemning; obviously you would not have taken that way had you known it would end in failure.’

  She answered. I gathered she was just faintly angry, probably burning all the emotion in her. Her hollow voice spanged and doomed away, and the translator banks gave out simultaneously in fluent English. Only it didn’t make sense.

  It went something like this: ‘Ah, but what you do not realise, because your realising is completely undeveloped and unstarted, is how to fail. Failing is not failing unless it is defeat, and this defeat of ours – if you realise it is a failing – is only a failure. A final failure. But as such, it is only a matter of a result, because in time this realisation tends to breed only the realisation of the result of failure; whereas the resolution of our failure, as opposed to the failure – ’

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘No! Save the modern poetry or the philosophical treatise for later. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry. We’ll take it for granted there was some sort of a failure. Are you going to be able to make a success of this new start we’re giving you?’

  ‘It is not a new start,’ she said, beginning reasonably enough. ‘Once you have had the result, a start is no longer a result. It is merely in the result of failing and all that is in the case is the start or the failure – depending, for us, on the start, for you on the failure. And you can surely see that even here failure depends abnormally on the beginning of the result, which concerns us more than the failure, simply because it is the result. What you don’t see is the failure of the result of the result’s failure to start a result – ’

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted again.

  I went to the Paull commander. I told him the thing was beginning to become an obsession with me.

  ‘It is with all of us,’ he replied.

  ‘But if only I could grasp a fraction of their problem! Look, we come out here all this way ahead to help them – and still we don’t know what we’re helping them from.’

  ‘We know why we’re helping them, Edmark. The burden of carrying on the race, of breeding a new and more stable generation, is on them. Keep your eye on that, if possible.’

  Perhaps his smile was a shade too placating; it made me remember that to him we were ‘the Children’.

  ‘Look,’ I said pugnaciously. ‘If those shambling failures can’t tell us what’s happened to them, you can. Either you tell me, or we pack up and go home. Our fellows have the creeps, I tell you! Now what – explicitly – is or was wrong with these Zombies?’

  The commander laughed.

  ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t know, and that’s all there is to it.’

  He stood up then, austere, tall. He went and looked out of the window, hands behind his back, and I could tell by his eyes he was looking at Failed Men, down there in the pale afternoon.

  He turned and said to me: ‘This sanatorium was designed for Failed Men. But we’re filling up with relief staff instead; they’ve let the problem get them by the throats.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I shall be there myself if I don’t get to the root of it, racing the others up the wall.’

  He held up his hand.

  ‘That’s what they all say. But there is no root of it to get at, or none we can comprehend, or else we are part of the root ourselves. If you could only categorise their failure it would be something: religious, spiritual, economic …’

  ‘So it’s got you too!’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You’ve got the time ships. Go back and see what the problem was!’

  The solution was so simple I couldn’t think how they had overlooked it; but of course they hadn’t overlooked it.

&nb
sp; ‘We’ve been,’ the commander said briefly. ‘A problem of the mind – presuming it was a mental problem – cannot be seen. All we saw was the six million of them singly burying themselves in these shallow graves. The process covered over a century; some of them had been under for three hundred years before we rescued them. No, it’s no good; the problem from our point of view is linguistic.’

  ‘The translator banks are no good,’ I said sweepingly. ‘It’s all too delicate a job for a machine. Could you lend me a human interpreter?’

  He came himself, in the end. He didn’t want to, but he wanted to. And how would a machine cope with that statement? Yet to you and me it’s perfectly comprehensible.

  A woman, one of the Failed Men, was walking slowly across the courtyard as we got outside. It might have been the one I had already spoken to, I don’t know. I didn’t recognise her and she gave no sign of recognising me. Anyhow, we stopped her and tried our luck.

  ‘Ask her why they buried themselves, for a start,’ I said.

  The Paull translated and she doomed briefly in reply.

  ‘She says it was considered necessary, as it aided the union before the beginning of the attempt,’ he told me.

  ‘Ask her what union.’

  Exchange of dooms.

  ‘The union of the union that they were attempting. Whatever that means.’

  ‘Did both “unions” sound the same to you?’

  ‘One was inflected, as it was in the possessive case,’ the Paull said. ‘Otherwise they seemed just alike.’

  ‘Ask her – ask her if they were all trying to change themselves into something other than human – you know, into spirits or fairies or ghosts.’

  ‘They’ve only got a word for spirit. Or rather, they’ve got four words for spirit: spirit of soul; spirit of place; spirit of a non-substantive, such as “spirit of adventure”; and another sort of spirit I cannot define – we haven’t an exact analogy for it.’

  ‘Hell’s bells! Well, try her with spirit of soul.’

  Again the melancholy rattle of exchange. Then the commander, with some surprise, said: ‘She says, Yes, they were striving to attain spirituality.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ I exclaimed, thinking smugly that it just needed persistence and a twenty-fifth-century brain.

  The old woman clanged again.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘She says they’re still striving after spirituality.’

  We both groaned. The lead was merely a dead end.

  ‘It’s no good,’ the Paull said gently. ‘Give up.’

  ‘One last question! Tell the old girl we cannot understand the nature of what has happened to her race. Was it a catastrophe and what was its nature?’

  ‘Can but try. Don’t imagine this hasn’t been done before, though – it’s purely for your benefit.’

  He spoke. She answered briefly.

  ‘She says it was an “antwerto”. That means it was a catastrophe to end all catastrophes.’

  ‘Well, at least we’re definite on that.’

  ‘Oh yes, they failed all right, whatever it was they were after,’ the Paull said sombrely.

  ‘The nature of the catastrophe?’

  ‘She just gives me an innocent little word, “struback”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it means.’

  ‘I see. Ask her if it has something to do with evolution.’

  ‘My dear man, this is all a waste of time! I know the answers, as far as they exist, without speaking to this woman at all.’

  ‘Ask her if “struback” means something to do with a possible way they were evolving or meaning to evolve,’ I persisted.

  He asked her. The ill-matched three of us stood there for a long time while the old woman moaned her reply. At last she was silent.

  ‘She says struback has some vague connection with evolution,’ the commander told me.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Far from it, but that’s what it boils down to! “Time impresses itself on man as evolution,” she says.’

  ‘Ask her if the nature of the catastrophe was at least partly religious.’

  When she had replied, the commander laughed shortly and said: ‘She wants to know what “religious” means. And I’m sorry but I’m not going to stand here while you tell her.’

  ‘But just because she doesn’t know what it means doesn’t mean to say the failure, the catastrophe, wasn’t religious in essence.’

  ‘Nothing means to say anything here,’ the commander said angrily. Then he realised he was only talking to one of the Children; he went on more gently: ‘Suppose that instead of coming ahead, we had gone back in time. Suppose we met a prehistoric tribe of hunters. We learn their language. We want to use the word “luck”. In their superstitious minds the concept – and consequently the word – does not exist. We have to use a substitute they can accept: “accident”, or “good-happening”, or “bad-happening”, as the case may be. They understand that all right, but by it they mean something entirely different from our intention. We have not broken through the barrier at all, merely become further entangled in it. The same trap is operating here.

  ‘And now, please excuse me.’

  Struback. A long, hollow syllable, followed by a short click. Night after night, I turned that word over in my tired mind. It became the symbol of the Failed Men, but never anything more.

  Most of the others caught the worry. Some drifted away in a kind of trance, some went into the wards. The tractors became undermanned. Reinforcements, of course, were arriving from the present. The present! I could not think of it that way. The time of the Failed Men became my present, and my past and future, too.

  I worked with the translator banks again, unable to accept defeat. I had this idea in my head that the Failed Men had been trying – and possibly involuntarily – to turn into something superior to man, a sort of super-being, and I was intensely curious about this.

  ‘Tell me,’ I demanded of an old man, speaking through the banks, ‘when you all first had this idea, or when it came to you, you were all glad then?’

  His answer came: ‘Where there is failure there is only degradation. You cannot understand the degradation, because you are not of us. There is only degradation and misery and you do not comprehend – ’

  ‘Wait! I’m trying to comprehend! Help me, can’t you? Tell me why it was so degrading, why you failed, how you failed.’

  ‘The degradation was the failure,’ he said. ‘The failure was the struback, the struback was the misery.’

  ‘You mean there was just misery, even at the beginning of the experiment?’

  ‘There was no beginning, only a finish, and that was the result.’

  I clutched my head.

  ‘Wasn’t burying yourself a beginning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘It was only a part of the attempt.’

  ‘What attempt?’

  ‘You are so stupid. Can you not see? The attempt we were making for the resolution of the problematical problem in the result of our united resolve to solve the problem.’

  ‘Which problem?’

  ‘The problem,’ he said wearily. ‘The problem of the resolution of this case into the start of failure. It does not matter how the resolution is accomplished provided all the cases are the same, but in a diversity of cases the start determines the resolution and the finish arbitrarily determines the beginning of the case. But the arbitrary factor is itself inherent in the beginning of the case, and of the case itself. Consequently our case is in the same case, and the failure was because of the start, the start being our resolution.’

  It was hopeless. ‘You are really trying to explain?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I am telling you about the failure. You are the struback.’

  And he walked away.

  Surrey looked hopelessly across at the Chinese girl. She tapped her fingers on the table.

  ‘
What did he mean, “You are the struback”?’ she asked.

  ‘Anything or nothing,’ he said wildly. ‘It would have been no good asking him to elucidate – I shouldn’t have understood the elucidation. You see it’s all either too complex or too simple for us to grasp.’

  ‘But surely – ’ she said, and then hesitated.

  ‘The Failed Men could only think in abstractions,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that was a factor involved in their failure – I don’t know. You see, language is the most intrinsic product of any culture; you can’t comprehend the language till you’ve understood the culture – and how do you understand a culture till you know its language?’

  Surrey looked helplessly at the girl’s little lute with its own trapped tongue. Suddenly, the hot silence of the night was shattered by a great orchestral crash half a mile away.

  ‘Another cartload of nervous wrecks coming home,’ he told her grimly. ‘You’d better go and see to your chickens.’

  Non-Stop

  I

  Brandyholm, eyes tensed into slits, peered down through the ceaselessly moving stalks before him. He lay on the edge of Sternstairs with Gwenny close behind him, his hand clutching the dazer: somewhere below them, a herd of pigs moved stealthily in search of food. He glanced back at the girl for a second, motioning her to stay where she was; that was the last time he saw her. Her bright eyes flashed an encouragement that, with the fever of the hunt upon him, he scarcely bothered to take notice of.

  Slowly he worked his way down the great slope, the ponics separating stiffly at his touch. A pig squeaked a short distance away. The hunter paused. This herd was approaching, he had only to wait for them. Crouching like a sprinter, he rested the dazer on one knee and watched.