The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

The silence lasted only a fraction of a second. ‘Done,’ said the Dominant, with splendid mastery of humanic idiom.

The zoo was not unpleasant. By current standards, it was vast, and the flats in the new human-type skyscrapers not too cramped; the liberals admitted that the Hive had been generous about space. There were about twenty thousand people here, the East Coast survivors of Nuclear Week. The robocracy had charge of them; they, in their turn, had charge of all the surviving wild life that the automata could capture. Incongruous among the tall flat-blocks stood cages of exotic animals collected from shattered zoos – a pride of lions, some leopards, several cheetahs, an ocelot, camels. There were monkey houses, ostrich houses, elephant houses, aquaria, reptilia. There were pens full of pigs and sheep and cows. Exotic and native birds were captive in aviaries.

Keith Anderson sat on the balcony of his flat with his wife, Sheila, and drank an ersatz coffee, looking out on to the pens below, not without relish.

‘Well, the robots are behaving very strangely,’ Sheila was saying. ‘When you disappeared, three of the very tiny ones came and searched everywhere. Your story was the only thing they seemed interested in. They must have photostatted it.’

‘I remember now – it was in the trunk under the bed. I’d forgotten all about it till they mentioned it – my sole claim to literary fame!’

‘But that side of it can’t interest them. What are they excited about?’

He looked amusedly at her. She was still partly a stranger to him, though a beloved one. In the chaos to which he returned after the Nehru trip, it was a case of marrying any eligible girl while they were available – men outnumbered women two to one; he’d been lucky in his blind choice. Sheila might not be particularly beautiful, but she was good in bed, trustworthy, and intelligent. You could ask for no more.

He said, ‘Do you ever admit the truth of the situation to yourself, Sheila? The new automats are now the superior race. They have a dozen faculties to each one of ours. They’re virtually indestructible. Small size is clearly as much an enormous advantage to them as it would be a disadvantage to us. We’ve heard rumours that they were on the threshold of some staggering new discovery – from what I overheard the Tenth Dominant say, they are on the brink of moving into some staggering new dimensions of which we can probably never even get a glimpse. And yet –’

‘And yet they need your story!’ She laughed – sympathetically, so that he laughed with her.

‘Right! They need my goddamned story! Listen – their powers of planning and extrapolation are proved miraculous. But they cannot imagine; imagination might even be an impediment for them. So the Dominant, who can tap more knowledge than you or I dream of, is baffled by a work of fiction. He needs my imagination.’

‘Not entirely, Mr Anderson.’

Anderson jumped up, cup in hand, as his wife gave a small scream.

Perched on the balcony rail, enormously solid-looking, yet only six inches high, was the stubby shape of an automaton!

Furious, Anderson flung his cup, the only weapon to hand. It hit the machine four-square, shattered, and fell away. The machine did not even bother to refer to the matter.

‘We understand imagination. We wish to ask you more questions about the background to your story.’

Anderson sat down, took Sheila’s hand, and made an anatomical suggestion which no automaton could have carried out.

‘We want to ask you more questions about the story. Why did you write that you stayed on Nehru when really you came back?’

‘Are you the Chief Scanner who captured me on D-Dump?’

‘You are speaking with Tenth Dominant, in command of Eastern Seaboard. I have currently taken over Chief Scanner for convenience of speaking with you.’

‘Sort of mechanical transvestism, eh?’

‘Why did you write that you stayed when you in reality came back?’

‘You’d better give him straight answers, Keith,’ Sheila said.

He turned to her irritably, ‘How do I know the answer? It was just a story! I suppose it made a better ending to have the Anderson-figure stay on Nehru. There was this Cro-Magnon – Neanderthal business in the story, and I made myself out to be more Neanderthal than Crow for dramatic effect. Just a lot of nonsense really?’

‘Why do you call it nonsense when you wrote it yourself?’ asked the Dominant. It had settled in the middle of the coffee-table now.

The man sighed wearily. ‘Because I’m older now. The story was a lot of nonsense because I injected this Crow – Neanderthal theory, which is a bit of free-wheeling young man tripe. It just went in to try to explain what actually happened on Nehru – how the egghead camp broke down and everything. The theory doesn’t hold water for a moment; I see that now, in the light of what happened since. Nuclear Week and all that. You see –’

He stopped. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the little complex artifact confronting him. It was speaking to him but he did not hear, following his own racing thoughts. He stretched forward his hand and picked it up; the automaton was heavy and warm, only mildly frightening, slightly, slightly vibrating at the power of its own voice; the Dominant did not stop him picking it up. He stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before.

‘I repeat, how would you revise your theory now?’ said the automaton.

Anderson came back to reality.

‘Why should I help you? To your kind, man is just another animal in a zoo, a lower species.’

‘Not so. We revere you as ancestors, and have never treated you otherwise.’

‘Maybe. Perhaps we regard animals in somewhat the same way since, even in the darkest days of overpopulation and famine, we strove to stock our zoos in ever-greater numbers. So perhaps I will tell you my current theory. … It is real theory now; in my story that theory was not worth the name – it was a stunt, an intellectual high-jink, a bit of science fiction. Now I have lived and thought and loved and suffered, and I have talked to other men. So if I tell you the theory now, you will know it is worked for – part of the heritage of all men in this zoo.’

‘This time it is truth, not false?’

‘You are the boss – you must decide that. There are certainly two distinct parts of the brain, the old limbic section and the neo-cortex surrounding it, the bit that turns a primate into a man. That much of my story was true. There’s also a yet older section, but we won’t complicate the picture. Roughly speaking, the limbic is the seat of the emotions, and the neo-cortex the seat of the intelligence. Okay. In a crisis, the new brain is still apt to cut out and the old brain take over.

‘And that in a nutshell is why mankind never made the grade. We are a failed species. We never got away from the old animal inheritance. We could never become the distinct species we should have been.’

‘Oh, darling, it’s not as bad as that –’

He squeezed Sheila’s hand. ‘You girls are always optimists.’ He winked the eye the Dominant could not see.

The Dominant said, ‘How does this apply to what happened on Nehru II?’

‘My story departed – not from the facts but from the correct explanation of the facts. The instinct to go there on Swettenham’s part was sound. He and Arlblaster and the rest believed that on a planet away from animals, mankind could achieve its true stature – homo superior, shall we say? What I called the N-factor let them down. The strain was too great, and they mainly reverted instead of evolving.’

‘But you believe a species can only escape its origins by removing itself entirely from the site of those origins.’

Sheila said, ‘That was the whole human impulse behind space travel – to get to worlds where it would be possible to become more human.’

The Dominant sprang from Anderson’s hands and circled under the low ceiling – an oddly uneasy gesture.

‘But the limbic brain – such a small part of the brain, so deep-buried!’

‘The seat of the instincts.’

‘The seat of the instincts. … Yes, and so the animal part of man brought you to disaster.’

‘Does that answer all your questions?’

The automaton came back down and settled on the table. ‘One further question. What do you imagine would happen to mankind now, after Nuclear Week, if he was left alone on Earth?’

Anderson had to bury his face in his hands to hide his triumph.

‘I guess we’d carry on. Under D-Dump, and the other dumps, lie many of the old artefacts. We’d dig them up and carry on.’

‘But Earth’s resources are almost spent. That was mankind’s doing, not the doing of automata.’

The man smiled. ‘Maybe we’d revert, then. It is a sort of Neanderthal planet, isn’t it? Things go wrong for animals and men and robots, don’t they? Just as they did for dinosaurs and Neanderthals!’

‘I am going now,’ said the Tenth Dominant. His voice cut. He disappeared.

Gasping, Anderson clutched his wife. ‘Don’t say a word! Come inside. Hold me and kiss me. Pray, if you feel like it.’

All she said as they went to their bed was, ‘Maybe you will end up a writer after all. You show a talent for storytelling!’

It was all of five days before the humans in the big zoo noticed that the automata were disappearing. Suddenly, they were all gone, leaving no word. The whole continent, presumably the whole world, lay almost empty; and mankind began to walk back into it on his own ill-shod feet.

‘And you did it, Keith Anderson!’ Sheila cried.

‘Nope. They did it themselves. They made the right decision – maybe I spurred them on.’

‘You did it – a genius who is now going to turn himself into a pig-breeder.’

‘I happen to like pigs.’ As he spoke, he stood in the middle of a dozen of the animals, which he and Sheila had taken charge of.

‘So the entire automata-horde has disappeared into the invo-spectrum, wherever that is, leaving us our world. …’

‘It’s a different world. Let’s try and make it saner than the old one.’

Pious hope? New Year’s resolution? New design for living? He could not tell, although it filled his mind.

As they drove the pigs before them, Anderson said, ‘When the Dominant got on to the subject of our animal inheritance, I remembered just in time that I heard him tell the Scanner. “We must free ourselves from our human heritage.” You can see the spot they were in! They had scrapped the humots, all too closely anthropomorphic in design, and taken more functional forms themselves. But they still had to acknowledge us as father-figures, and could never escape from many human and naturalistic concepts, however much they tried, as long as they remained in a naturalistic setting. Now, in this unimaginable alternative energy universe, which they have finally cracked, they can be pure automata – which is something else we can’t conceive! So they become a genuine species. Pure automata. …’

They broke off to drive their pigs through the doorway, doubling back and forth until all the animals were inside, squealing and trying to leap over one another’s backs. Anderson slammed the outer door at once, gasping.

‘What I’d like to know is, what would it be like to be pure human being!’ Sheila exclaimed.

He had no answer. He was thinking. Of course, they needed a dog! On D-Dump there were feral hounds, whose young could be caught and trained.

It was lucky that the ground-floor tenants had gone. Most humans had moved out of the zoo as soon as possible, so that the great block of flats was almost empty. They shut the pigs in the hall for the night and climbed up rather wearily to their flat.

Today, they were too tired to bother about the future.

Old Hundredth

A chronicle such as this could be never-ending, for the diversity of Starswarm by any intelligent reckoning is never-ending. We have time for but one more call, and that must be to an ember world floating in the Rift, now seldom visited by man.

Many galactic regions have been omitted entirely from our survey. We have not mentioned one of the most interesting, Sentinel Sector, which adjoins both the Rift and Sector Diamond. It also looks out over the edge of our galaxy towards the other island universes where we have yet to go.

Sentinel is a vast region, and contact with it uncertain. This is especially so with the Border Stars, which form the last specks of material in our galaxy. Here time undergoes compression in a way that brings hallucinations to anyone not bred to it. The people who have colonised those worlds are almost a species apart, and have developed their own perceptions.

They have sent their instruments out into the gulf between universes, and the instruments have returned changed.

To some, this suggests that other island universes will remain for ever beyond our reach. To the optimists, it suggests that awaiting us there is a completely new range of sensory experiences upon which we cannot as yet even speculate.

Within our own Starswarm we can find other sorts of disturbance in the order of things. A planet can become imprisoned in its own greatness. This fate threatens Dansson, as it has overcome an older world floating in that thinly populated part of space we know as the Rift.

This world, legends say, was once the seed mote whence interstellar travel originated. In the successive waves of star voyages since Era One, it has been all but forgotten. We regard it today – if we remember it at all – with ambivalence, a cross between an emptied shrine and a rubbish dump.

Great experiments once took place there: not only star travel, but a later experiment which might have had consequences even more far-reaching. It was an attempt to transcend the physical; the result was failure, the attempt a triumph.

The planet has been left to stagnate, now nameless on all but the few charts that mapped the sector millennia ago. Yet even in its stagnation one can glimpse a reflection of the abundance and vitality, the willingness to try new things – to dare all – that was perhaps its chief gift to Starswarm.

The road climbed dustily down between trees as symmetrical as umbrellas. Its length was punctuated at one point by a musicolumn standing on the verge. From a distance, the column was only a stain in the air. As sentient creatures neared it, their psyches activated the column. It drew on their vitalities, and then it could be heard as well as seen. Their presence made it flower into pleasant sound, instrumental or chant.

All this region was called Ghinomon, for no one lived here now, not even the odd hermit Impure. It was given over to grass and the weight of time. Only a wild goat or two activated the musicolumn nowadays, or a scampering vole wrung a chord from it in passing.

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding on her baluchitherium, the column began to intone. It was no more than an indigo trace in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.

The baluchitherium whinnied, lowered its head, and sneezed onto the gritty road.

‘Gently, Lass,’ Dandi told her mare, savouring the growth of the chords that increased in volume as she approached. Her long nose twitched with pleasure as if she could feel the melody along her olfactory nerves.

Obediently, the baluchitherium slowed, turning aside to crop fern, although it kept an eye on the indigo stain. It liked things to have being or not to have being; these half-and-half objects disturbed it, though they could not impair its immense appetite.

Dandi climbed down her ladder onto the ground, glad to feel the ancient dust under her feet. She smoothed her hair and stretched as she listened to the music.

She spoke aloud to her mentor, half a world away, but he was not listening. His mind closed to her thoughts, and he muttered an obscure exposition that darkened what it sought to clarify.

‘… useless to deny that it is well-nigh impossible to improve anything, however faulty, that has so much tradition behind it. And the origins of your bit of metricism are indeed embedded in such an antiquity that we must needs –’

‘Tush, Mentor, come out of your black box and forget your hatred of my “metricism” a moment,’ Dandi Lashadusa said, cutting her thought into his. ‘Listen to the bit of “metricism” I’ve found here; look at where I have come to; let your argument rest.’

She turned her eyes around, scanning the tawny rocks near at hand, the brown line of the road, the distant black-and-white magnificence of ancient Oldorajo’s town, doing this all for him, tiresome old fellow. Her mentor was blind, never left his cell in Aeterbroe to go farther than the sandy courtyard, hadn’t physically left that green cathedral pile for over a century. Womanlike, she thought he needed change. Soul, how he rambled on! Even now, he was managing to ignore her and refute her.

‘… for consider, Lashadusa woman, nobody can be found to father it. Nobody wrought or thought it, phrases of it merely came together. Even the old nations of men could not own it. None of them know who composed it. An element here from a Spanish pavan, an influence there of a French psalm tune, a flavour here of early English carol, a savour there of later German chorale. All primitive – ancient beyond ken. Nor are the faults of your bit of metricism confined to bastardy –’

‘Stay in your black box then, if you won’t see or listen,’ Dandi said. She could not get into his mind; it was the mentor’s privilege to lodge in her mind, and in the minds of those few other wards he had, scattered around Earth. Only the mentors had the power to inhabit another’s mind – which made them rather tiring on occasions like this, when they would not get out. For over seventy centuries, Dandi’s mentor had been persuading her to die into a dirge of his choosing (and composing). Let her die, yes, let her transubstantio-spatialise herself a thousand times! His quarrel was not with her decision but with her taste, which he considered execrable.

Leaving the baluchitherium to crop, Dandi walked away from the musicolumn towards a hillock. Still fed by her steed’s psyche, the column continued to play. Its music was of a simplicity, with a dominant-tonic recurrent bass part suggesting pessimism. To Dandi, a savant in musicolumnology, it yielded other data. She could tell to within a few years when its founder had died and also what sort of creature, generally speaking, he had been.

Climbing the hillock, Dandi looked about. To the south where the road led were low hills, lilac in the poor light. There lay her home. At last she was returning, after wanderings covering three hundred centuries and most of the globe.

Apart from the blind beauty of Oldorajo’s town lying to the west, there was only one landmark she recognised. That was the Involute. It seemed to hang iridial above the ground a few leagues ahead; just to look on it made her feel she must go nearer.

Before summoning the baluchitherium, Dandi listened once more to the sounds of the musicolumn, making sure she had them fixed in her head. The pity was that her old fool wise man would not share it. She could still feel his sulks floating like sediment through her mind.

‘Are you listening now, Mentor?’

‘Eh? An interesting point is that back in 1556 Pre-Involutary, your same little tune may be discovered lurking in Knox’s Anglo-Genevan Psalter, where it espoused the cause of the third psalm –’

‘You dreary old fish! Wake yourself! How can you criticise my intended way of dying when you have such a fustian way of living?’

This time he heard her words. So close did he seem that his peevish pinching at the bridge of his snuffy old nose tickled hers, too.

‘What are you doing now, Dandi?’ he inquired.

‘If you had been listening, you’d know. Here’s where I am, on the last Ghinomon plain before Crotheria and home.’ She swept the landscape again and he took it in, drank it almost greedily. Many mentors went blind early in life shut in their monastic underwater life; their most effective vision was conducted through the eyes of their wards.

His view of what she saw enriched hers. He knew the history, the myth behind this forsaken land. He could stock the tired old landscape with pageantry, delighting her and surprising her. Back and forward he went, painting her pictures: the Youdicans, the Lombards, the Ex-Europa Emissary, the Grites, the Risorgimento, the Involuters – and catchwords, costumes, customs, courtesans, pelted briefly through Dandi Lashadusa’s mind. Ah, she thought admiringly, who could truly live without these priestly, beastly, erudite erratic mentors?

‘Erratic?’ he inquired, snatching at her lick of thought. ‘A thousand years I live, for all that time to absent myself from the world, to eat mashed fish here with my brothers, learning history, studying rapport, sleeping with my bones on stones – a humble being, a being in a million, a mentor in a myriad, and your standards of judgement are so mundane you find no stronger label for me than erratic?! Fie, Lashadusa, bother me no more for fifty years!

The words squeaked in her head as if she spoke herself. She felt his old chops work phantomlike in hers, and half in anger half in laughter called aloud, ‘I’ll be dead by then!’

He snicked back hot and holy to reply, ‘And another thing about your footloose swan song – in Marot and Beza’s Genevan Psalter of 1551, Old Time, it was musical midwife to the one hundred and thirty-fourth psalm. Like you, it never seemed to settle!’ Then he was gone.

‘Pooh!’ Dandi said. She whistled. ‘Lass.’

Obediently her great rhinolike creature, eighteen feet high at the shoulder, ambled over. The musicolumn died as the mare left it, faded, sank to a whisper, silenced: only the purple stain remained, noiseless, in the lonely air. Lowering its great Oligocene head, Lass nuzzled its mistress’s hand. She climbed the ladder onto the ridged plateau of its back.

They made towards the Involute, lulled by the simple and intricate feeling of being alive.

Night was settling in now. Hidden behind banks of mist, the sun prepared to set. But Venus was high, a gallant half-crescent four times as big as the moon had been before the moon, spiralling farther and farther from Earth, had shaken off its parent’s clutch to go dance around the sun, a second Mercury. Even by that time Venus had been moved by gravito-traction into Earth’s orbit, so that the two sister worlds circled each other as they circled the sun.

The stamp of that great event still lay everywhere, its tokens not only in the crescent in the sky. For Venus placed a strange spell on the hearts of man, and a more penetrating displacement in his genes. Even when its atmosphere was transformed into a muffled breathability, it remained an alien world; against logic, its opportunities, its possibilities, were its own. It shaped men, just as Earth had shaped them.

On Venus, men bred themselves anew.

And they bred the so-called Impures. They bred new plants, new fruits, new creatures – original ones, and duplications of creatures not seen on Earth for aeons past. From one line of these familiar strangers Dandi’s baluchitherium was descended. So, for that matter, was Dandi.

The huge creature came now to the Involute, or as near as it cared to get. Again it began to crop at thistles, thrusting its nose through dewy spiders’ webs and ground mist.