The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER TEN

Viewed from space on an accelerated time scale, Earth and its peoples might have been taken for one organism. Occasionally the organism would have a convulsion. Moving like microbes down arteries, the human specks would slide down their traffic lanes and converge on various points on the globe until those points began to look like sores on the cuticle of the sphere.

The inflammation would grow, would seem to be a mere diseased confusion, until a change took place. The specks would draw back from a central object, producing a semblance of orderliness. This central object would stand out like a pustule, a stormhead of infection. Then it would burst, or appear to burst, and fly outwards. As if some intolerable pressure had thus been relieved, the people that resembled specks to the cosmic observer would now disperse, possibly to reassemble later at another seat of infection. Meanwhile, the ejected blob of matter hurtled out-wards — making the cosmic eye duck out of the way and attend to its own business.

This particular blob of ejected matter bore the name 5.5. Gansas engraved in glucinated beryllium letters three yards tall on her bows. Once clear of the platter of the solar system, however, the name became scarcely legible even to the most hypothetical observer, for the ship entered TP flight.

Transponential is one of those ideas that have hung on the fringes of man’s mind since he first found tongue to express himself, and probably before; almost certainly before, since it is the least puissant who dream most fervently of omnipotence. For, expressed semantically, transponential flight reveals itself as the very opposite of travel; it causes the ship to stand still and the universe to move in the desired direction.

Or perhaps it was explained more accurately by Dr. Chosissy in his World Congress Lecture of 2033, when he said, “However surprising it may seem to those of us brought up in the cozy certainty of Einsteinian physics, the variable factor in the new Buzzardian equations proves to be the universe.

Distance may be said to be annihilated. We recognize at last that distance is only a mathematical concept having no real existence in the Buzzardian universe. During TP flight, it is no longer possible to say that the universe surrounds the starship. More accurately, we should say that the starship surrounds the universe.” The ancient dreams of power had been realized, and the mountain came obediently to Mahommet.

Cheerfully unaware of the unfair advantage he had over the universe, Hank Quilter was trading tales of his last leave with his new messmates.

“You certainly have all the luck, Hank,” said a man whose permanent sugary grin had earned him the name of Honeybunch. “I’d really envy you that girl if I didn’t think you were making up half those stories about her.”

“If you won’t take my word, I’m quite prepared to beat you up till you do,” Quilter said.

“Truth through violence!” someone laughed.

“Show me a better way,” Quilter said, grinning in turn. Since what he had told them contained very little exaggeration, he was content to have them doubt his word; had he been lying, it would have been a different matter.

“Tell you another funny thing happened to me,” he said. “Day before I got to the ship, I got a letter from a guy who messed with me on the Mariestopes, nice enough guy called Walthamstone, a Britisher.

His first night earth-side, he got drunk and did a spot of housebreaking. The cops caught him at it and sent him down for a term. The way he put it, it sounds he was a bit psychotic at the time.

Anyhow, in the jug he meets a pansy, and this pansy turns old Walthamstone the same way — works on him, you know, and turns him the same way! So when they’re released, Wal goes to live with this queen in Ghettoville. Now it seems they’re good as married!”

Quilter burst into laughter at the thought of it.

A bearded youngster who had not spoken yet, name of Samuel Melmoth, said quietly, “That doesn’t seem very funny to me. We all need love of some sort, as your earlier stories prove. I should have thought your friend deserved some pity.”

Quilter stopped laughing and looked at Melmoth. He wiped his mouth on his hand.

“What are you trying to give me, Mac? I’m only laughing at the odd things that happen to people. And why should Wally need your goddamned pity? He had a free choice, didn’t he? He could do what he liked when he came out of jug, couldn’t he?”

Melmoth began to look as stubborn and hurt as his father who bore a different name.

“By what you say, he was seduced.”

“Okay, okay, he was seduced. Now you tell me if we aren’t all seduced at some time or other in some way or other. That’s when our principles are betrayed, isn’t it? But if our principles were stronger, then we wouldn’t give in, would we? So what happens to Wal is his own look out.”

“But if he’d had some friends—”

“It’s got nothing to do with friends or seducers or enemies or anything else. That’s what I’m saying. It’s Wal’s own look out. Anything that happens to us is our own responsibility.”

“Ah, now, that’s a load of garbage,” Honeybunch protested.

“You’re all sick, that’s your trouble,” Quilter said.

“Honeybunch is right,” Melmoth said. “We all start out in life with more trouble than we can sort out all our days.”

“Look, feller, nobody asked your opinion in the first place. Speak for yourself,” Quilter said.

“I am.”

“Well, kindly refrain from opening your gob on my behalf. I bear my own woes on my own back, and further-more I believe man possesses free will. I do what I want to do, see?”

At that moment, the speaker system crunched into life: “Attention. Will Rating Hank Quilter, Mess No. 307. Hank Quilter. Mess No. 307, proceed at once to the Flight Advisor’s Office on the Scanning Deck, Flight Advisor’s Office on the Scanning Deck. That is all.”

Grumbling, Quilter moved to obey.

Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did not like his office on the Scanning Deck. It was decorated in the modern so. called Ur-Organic style, with walls, floor and ceiling continuously patterned with bas-relief plastic of varied tones. The pattern represented surface crystals of molybdenum oxide under a magnification of 75,000. It was designed to put him in harmony with the Buzzardian universe.

Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did like his job.

When the knock came at his door, and Rating Quilter entered, Lattimore nodded him amiably to a chair.

“Quilter, you know why we are hitting vacuum. We intend to discover the home planet of the aliens that I believe are popularly known as rhinomen. My particular task is to formulate in advance some of the lines of approach we can use when we have uncovered this planet. Now I happened to flip through the crew lists and came on your name. You were on the Mariestopes, were you not, when this first group of rhinomen was discovered?”

“Sir, I was in the Exploration Corps then, sir. I was one of the men who actually came across the creatures. I shot three or four of them as they charged me. You see—”

“This is very interesting, Quilter, but may we just have this a little more slowly?”

Quilter told his story in elaborate and elaborated detail, while Lattimore listened and gazed at the molybdenum crystals in which he was imprisoned and nodded his head and intermittently loosened a speck of dried mucas from inside one of his nostrils.

“You’re certain these creatures attacked you?” he asked, removing his spectacles to stare at Quilter.

Quilter hesitated, weighed Lattimore up, and decided on the truth as he saw it.

“Let’s say they came towards us, sir. So we let ’em have it without going into committee first.”

Lattimore smiled and resumed his spectacles.

When he had dismissed the rating, he pressed a bell and Mrs. Hilary Warhoon appeared. She looked very smart in a flared mock-male with recessed carnation paltroons; the glint in her eyes showed how delighted she was to be loose in the Buzzardian universe.

“Had Quilter anything of interest to say?” she asked, sitting down at the table next to Lattimore.

“Only inadvertently. He’s read his newscasts and his poppers, and on the surface his attitude is the civilized one: that we don’t know much about the rhinomen, as he calls them, and that we give them the benefit of the doubt until we find whether or not they are glorified hogs. Underneath, and not very far underneath, he knows the critters are just big game, and to be shot like big game, because he has shot them like big game. You know, even if it does turn out that they are brilliant thinkers and all that, our relationship with them is going to be precious damn difficult.”

“Yes. Because if they are brilliant thinkers, their thought is going to be remarkably different from our thought.”

“Check. And not that only. Philosophers who live in mud are not going to cut much ice with Earth; the masses have always been a deal more impressed by mud than by philosophers.”

“Fortunately, what the masses think won’t affect us out here.”

“You think not? Heck, you’re the cosmoclectic, Hilary, but I’ve been in TP before, and I know a strange psycho-logy rules on shipboard. It’s like an exaggerated version of Kipling’s ‘East of Suez…’, how’s it go now? ‘Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain’t no Ten Commandments….’ The best are very like the worst when you step on a planet lying under another sun, Hilary. And you feel that — well, it’s a sort of irresponsibility — you feel that you can do anything you like because nobody on Earth will judge you for it: while at the same tune, ‘just what you like’ is naturally part of what the masses of Earth would like to do, had they the license.”

Mrs. Warhoon tapped four pliant fingers on the table.

“You make it sound very sinister.”

“Hell, the irrational drives of man are sinister! Don’t think I’m generalizing. I’ve seen this mood come over a man too often. It was probably that that undid Ainson. And I feel it in myself.”

“Now I’m afraid I don’t see what you mean.”

“Don’t look so offended. I could feel that your Quilter really enjoyed shooting our friends. The thrill of the chase! If I saw a bunch of ’em nipping over the veldt. I wouldn’t mind a shot myself.”

Mrs. Warhoon’s voice was slightly chilled.

“What do you intend to do if we find the ETA home planet?”

“You know what I intend to do: act according to logic and reason. This outfit is for business, not pleasure. But I’m also aware that there’s a part of me saying; Lattimore, these creatures don’t feel pain; how can anything have a spirit or a soul or be intelligent or appreciate some unimaginable equivalent of Byron’s poems or Borodin’s Second Symphony if it does not suffer? And I say to my-self, whatever gifts it has, if it has not pain, then it is for ever beyond the reach of my comprehension.”

“But that is just the challenge, that is why we are having to try to comprehend, that—” She looked attractive with her fists clenched.

“I know all that. But you are talking to me in the voice of intellect,” Lattimore said, leaning back in his chair. It was pleasurable shooting Hilary this all-male line. “I’m also hearing a sort of Quilter-voice, a vox populi, a cry not only from the heart but from the bowels. It says that whatever talents these critters may have, they are less than buffaloes or zebras or tigers, and the primitive urge comes up in me just as it did in Quilter, and I want to shoot them.”

She had eight ruby-tipped fingers drumming on the table now, but she managed to look into his face and laugh.

“You are playing an intellectual game with yourself, Bryant. I’m sure that even the base Quilter offered excuses for his actions. Therefore even he feels guilt for his actions; you, being more intelligent, can savor your guilt beforehand, and so control yourself.”

“East of Suez, an intelligent man can find more excuses for himself than a cretin can.”

Seeing vexation on her face, he relented.

“As you say, I’m probably playing a game with myself. Or with you.”

He placed a hand over her finger-tips as carelessly as if they were molybdenum crystals. She withdrew them.

“I wish to change the topic of conversation, Bryant I have a suggestion that I think may be fruitful. Do you think you could get me a volunteer?”

“For what?”

“To be marooned on a strange planet.”

Back on the strange planet called Earth, the third Politan called Blug Lugug was in a terrible state of mental confusion. He was strapped to a bench with a series of strong canvas straps that passed across what was left of his body. A number of wires and cables ran from machines that stood silent or gargled to themselves on one side of the room and climbed on to his body or into his various orifices. One cable in particular ran from one instrument in particular worked by one man in particular; the man was dressed in a white sort of clothing, and when he moved a lever with his hand, something without meaning happened in the third Politan’s brain. This meaningless thing was more awful than anything the third Politan had known existed. He saw now how right the Sacred Cosmopolitan had been when he used to term bad to describe these thinlegs. Here was bad bad bad: it reared up before him sturdy and strong and hygienic, and gnawed away his intelligence bit by bit.

The something without meaning came again. A gulf opened where there had been something growing, some-thing delightful, memories or promises, who knows?, but something never to be replaced.

One of the thinlegs spoke. Mainly, in gasps, the Politan imitated what had been said: “noneural response there/ either. He doesn’t have a pain response in his whole body!”

He still clung to the notion that when they realized he could imitate their speech, they would be intelligent enough to stop the things they were doing. Whatever they were doing, whatever inside their mad little minds they imagined they were doing, they were spoiling his chances of entering the carrion stage; for already they had removed two of his limbs with a saw — from the corner of his misting eyes he watched the bin in which they had been deposited — and since there were no ammp trees here, the possibility of his continuing the cycles of being was remote. Nothingness confronted him.

He cried an imitation of their words but, forgetting their limitations, pushed it high into his upper voice range. The sounds came distorted; his ockpu orifices were clogged with tiny instruments like leeches.

He needed comfort from the Sacred Cosmopolitan, his worshipped father-mother. But the Cosmopolitan had gone, no doubt to the same gradual dismemberment. The grorgs had gone; he caught their almost supersonic cries answering him in lament from a distant part of the room. Then the something without meaning burst over him again, so that he could no longer hear — but what was it that he had been able to… been able to what? Something else had gone.

In his dizziness, he saw that a new figure had joined the figures in white. In his dizziness, he thought he recognized the new figure. It was — or it was very like — the figure that had performed the dung ritual a brief time ago.

Now the figure cried something, and through the growing dizziness the Politan tried to cry the same thing back, to show it had recognized him: “I can’t bear to watch you’re doing something that should never be done!”

But the thinlegs, if it was that specific one, gave no sign of recognition. He covered the front part of his upper head with his hands and went fast from the room, almost as if— The something without meaning came again, and the white figures all looked eagerly at their instruments.

Tipped far back until his toes were level with his head, the Director of the Exozoo lay in his therapad and sucked a glucose mixture through a teat. He was being calmed by a young men. now a member of the Exploration Corps with an Explorer’s certificate, who had once trained under him at the zoo. Gussie Phipps, who had flown in from Macao, offered comfort.

“You’re not so tough as you used to be, Sir Mihaly. You ought to change to synthetic foods; they’re better for you. Fancy letting a vivisection upset you! How many vivisections have you performed yourself?”

“I know, I know, you needn’t remind me. It was just the sight of that particular poor creature there on the stone, slowly being chopped into little bits and not registering anything detectable as pain or fear.”

“Which should make it better rather than worse.”

“Heavens, I know it should! But it was so darned uneventful I had the feeling for a moment I was in at a preview of how man will treat any intelligent opposition it meets out there.” He gestured vaguely towards the patterned ceiling. “Or perhaps I mean that beneath the scientific etiquette of the vivisection bench I heard the savage drums of ancient man, still beating away like mad for a blood-letting session.

What is man up to, Gussie?”

“Such an outburst of pessimism is unlike you. We’re coming away from the mud, away from the primeval slime, away from the animal, towards the spiritual. We have a long way to go, but—”

“Yes, it’s an answer I’ve often used myself. We may not be very nice now but we’ll be nicer at some unspecified future time. But is it true? Oughtn’t we to have stayed in the mud? Mightn’t it be more healthy and sane down there? And are we just giving ourselves excuses to carry on as we always did?

Think how many primitive rites are still with us in a thin disguise: vivisection, giving in marriage, cosmetics, hunting, wars, circumcision — no, I don’t want to think of any more. When we do make an advance, it’s in a ghastly false direction — like the synth food fad, inspired by last century’s dietary madnesses and thrombosis scares. It’s time I retired, Gussie, got away while I’m not too aged, moved to some simpler clime where the sun shines. I’ve always believed that the amount of thought that goes on inside a man’s head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sunshine that goes on out-side it.”

The door globe chimed.

“I’m expecting nobody,” Pasztor said, with an irritability he rarely showed. “Go and see who it is for me, Gussie, and shoo them away. I want to hear all about Macao from you.”

Phipps disappeared, to return with Enid Ainson, weeping.

Nipping with momentary savagery on the end of his glucose teat, Pasztor jacked himself into a less relaxed position and stuck a leg out of the therapad.

“It’s Bruce, Mihaly!” Enid cried. “Bruce has disappeared. I’m sure he’s drowned himself. Oh Mihaly, he’s been so difficult! What can I do?”

“When did you last see him?”

“He couldn’t stand the disgrace of being turned down for the Gansas. I know he’s drowned himself.

He often threatened he would.”

“When did you last see him, Enid?”

“Whatever shall I do? I must let poor Aylmer know!”

Pasztor climbed out of the pad. He gripped Phipps’ elbow as he moved towards the technivision.

“We’ll have to hear about Macao some other time, Gussie,” he said.

He began to technical the police, while Enid wept in a businesslike way behind him.

Bruce Ainson was already a fair distance beyond the reach of Earth police.

On the day after the Gansas was ejected into space, a much less publicized flight began. Blasting from a small operational spaceport on the east coast of England, a systemship started its long haul across the ecliptic. System-ships were an altogether different sort of spaceship from the starships. They carried no TP drive. They fuelled on ions, consuming most of their bulk as they travelled. They were built for duties within the solar system only, and most of them that left Britain nowadays were military craft.

The 7.5. Brunner was no exception. It was a trooper, packed to the hull with reinforcements for the Anglo-Brazilian war on Charon. Among those reinforcements was an ageing and troubled nonentity named B. Ainson, who had been mustered as a clerk.

That sullen outcast of the solar family, Charon, known generally to soldiers as the Deep Freeze Planet, had been discovered telescopically by the Wilkins-Pressman Lunar Observatory almost two decades before it was visited by man. The First Charon Expedition (on which was a brilliant young Hungarian dramatist and biologist named Mihaly Pasztor) discovered it to be the father of all billiard balls, a globe some three hundred miles in diameter (307’558 miles, according to the latest edition of the Brazilian Military Manual, 309’567 miles according to its British equivalent). This globe was without feature, its surface smooth in texture, white in color, slippery and almost without chemical properties. It was hard, but not extremely hard. It could be bored into with high-speed drills.

To say that Charon had no atmosphere was inaccurate. The smooth white surface was the atmosphere, frozen out over the long and unspeakably tedious eons during which Charon, a travelling morgue without benefit of bones, trundled its bulk about its orbit, connected by what hardly seemed more than coincidence with a first magnitude star called Sol. When the atmosphere was dug and analyzed, it was found to consist of a mixture of inert gasses packed together into a form unknown to, and unreproducible in, Earth’s laboratories. Somewhere below this surface, seismographic reports indicated, was the real Charon: a rocky and pulseless heart two hundred miles across.

The Deep Freeze Planet was an ideal place on which to hold wars.

Despite their excellent effect on trade, wars have a deleterious effect on the human body; so they became, during the second decade of the twenty-first century, codified, regulated, umpired, as much subject to skill as a baseball game or to law as a judge’s table talk. Because Earth was very crowded, wars were banished to Charon. There, the globe had been marked out with tremendous lines of latitude and longitude, like a celestial draughts board.

Earth was by no means peacefully inclined. In con-sequence, there were frequently waiting lists for space on Charon, the lists consisting mainly of belligerent nations who wished to book regions about the equator, where the light for fighting was slightly better. The Anglo-Brazilian war occupied Sectors 159-260, adjacent to the current Javanese-Guinean conflict, and had been dragging on since the year 1999. A Contained Conflict it was called.

The rules of Contained Conflict were many and involved. For instance, the weapons of destruction were rigidly defined. And certain highly qualified social ranks — who might bring their side unfair advantages — were for-bidden on Charon. Penalties for breaking such rules were very high. And, for all the precautions that were taken, casualties among combatants were also high.

In consequence, the flower of English youth, to say nothing of blooms of a blowsier age, were needed on Charon; Bruce Ainson had taken advantage of that fact to enlist as a man without social rank and to slip quietly out of the public eye. A century earlier, he would probably have joined the Foreign Legion.

As the little ion-driven trooper carried him now over the ten light hours that separated Earth and Charon, he might, had he known of it, have reflected with contempt on Sir Mihaly’s glib remark that the amount of thought in a man’s head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sun outside it. He might have so reflected, if only the Brunner permitted reflection among the men packed between its decks head to tail; but Ainson, together with all his companions, went out to the Deep Freeze Planet in deep freeze.