The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

OLD HUNDREDTH by Brian W. Aldiss

In November, last year, the oldest British science-fiction magazine celebrated its 100th issue with an Imposing array of stories contributed almost entirely by members of the group of young writers which has grown up around New Worlds and its sister magazine. Science Fantasy, under the editorial guidance of editor-agent-publisher-reviewer E. J. Cornell.

Some of the group now closely associated with the Nova publications were active in s-f before the emergence of New Worlds, and have been widely published in this country. These include such names as John Wyndham, J. T. Mcintosh, and John Christopher. Others have become familiar to American readers in the last few years, partly at least through Cornell’s energetic efforts to effect a mutual exchange of material. John Brunner, Kenneth Bulmer, and John Rackham are among these; as are Brian Aldiss, E. C. Tubb, and J. G. Ballard—all of whom appeared in earlier editions of this anthology when they were little or not at all known in this country. There are at least a half dozen more whose names-—I hope—we will be seeing more of here before long: writers of sustained quality, with ideas that are often fresher and more stimulating than most of what currently appears on the home scene. (Colin Kapp, , John Kippax, Philip E. High, Robert Presslie, James White, Clifford C. Reed ... for instance.)

“Old Hundredth” was written specifically for the anniversary issue of NW—a story of the remote future when “We” are all “Others,” and all “Others” are “We.”

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

All this region was called Ghinomon, for nobody lived here anymore, not even the odd hermit Impure. It was given over to grass and the weight of time. Only a few wild goats activated the musicolumn nowadays, or a scampering vole wrung a brief chord from it in passing.

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding down that dusty road on her baluchitherium, the column began to intone. It was just an indigo trace on 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 transubstantiospatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had de-materialized itself into music.

The baluchitherium whinnied, lowered its head, and sneezed on to 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 on to 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 the world away, but he was not listening. His mind closed to her thoughts, 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 a fearful 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 about, 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 Peterbroe 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 knew who composed it. An element here from a Spanish pavan, an influence here of a French psalm tune, a flavour here of early English carol, a savour there of later German chorals. 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 round Earth. Only the mentors had the power of being in another’s mind—which made them rather tiring on occasions like this, when they would not get out of it. For over seventy years, Dandi’s men­tor had been persuading her to die into a dirge of his choosing (and composing). Let her die, yes, let her transubstantiospatialize herself a thousand times! His quarrel was not with her decision but 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 kind of a 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 half a century and most of the globe.

Apart from the blind beauty of Oldorajo’s town lying to the west, there was only one landmark she recognized. That was the Involute. It seemed to hang iridial above the ground a few leagues on; just to look on it made her feel she must at once get 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 her old fool wise man would not share it. She could still feel his sulks floating like sediment through his mind.

‘Are you listening now, Mentor?’

‘Eh? An interesting point is that back in 1556 by the old pre-Involutary calendar 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 criticize 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 stuffy 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 dens; their most effective visions were 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, flicking 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 nattered and squeaked in her head as if she spoke herself. She felt his old chops work phantom-like 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 the great rhino-like 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. Lass reached Dandi. Lowering its great Oligocene head, it nuzzled its mistress’s hand. She climbed the ladder on to that ridged plateau of back.

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

Night was settling in now, steady as snow. 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 round the sun, a second Mercury. Even by that time Venus had been moved by gravitotraction 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 put 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 Impurse. 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 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.

‘Like you, I’m a vegetarian,’ Dandi said, climbing down to the ground. A grove of low fruit trees grew nearby; she reached up into the branches, gathered and ate, before turning to inspect the Involute. Already her spine tingled at the near­ness of it; awe, loathing and love made a part-pleasant sensa­tion near her heart.

The Involute was not beautiful. True, its colours changed with the changing light, yet the colours were fish-cold, for they belonged to another universe. Though they reacted to dusk and dawn, Earth had no stronger power over them; They pricked the eyes. Perhaps too they were painful because they were the last signs of materialist man. Even Lass moved un­easily before that ill-defined lattice, the upper limits of which were lost in thickening gloom.

‘Don’t fear,’ Dandi said. ‘There’s an explanation for this, old girl.’ She added sadly, ‘There’s an explanation for every­thing, if we can find it.’

She could feel all the personalities in the Involute. It was a frozen screen of personality. All over the old planet the struc­tures stood, to shed their awe on those who were left behind. They were the essence of man. They were man—all that remained of him.

When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he moulded and complicated his tools, so they moulded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern, the pattern is all the universe, creator and created. For the first time, it became possible to duplicate that pattern artificially; the transubstantiaspatializers were built.

All mankind left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire per­sonalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality.

It was a one-way passage.

They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, nobody left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over the Earth.

‘Your thoughts are heavy, Dandi Lashadusa. Get you home.’ Her mentor was back in her mind. She caught the feeling of his moving round and round in his coral-formed cell.

‘I must think of man,’ she said.

‘Your thoughts mean nothing, do nothing.’

‘Man created us; I want to consider him in peace.’

‘He only shaped a stream of life that was always entirely out of his control. Forget him. Get on to your mare and ride home.’

‘Mentor-----’

‘Get home, woman. Moping does not become you. I want to hear no more of your swan song, for I’ve given you my final word on that. Use a theme of your own, not of man’s. I’ve said it a million times and I say it again.’

‘I wasn’t going to mention my music. I was only going to tell you that...’

‘What then?’ His thought was querulous. She felt his power­ful tail tremble, disturbing the quiet water of his cell.

‘I don’t know...’

‘Get home then.’

‘I’m lonely.’

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream­like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring under­ground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. It’s motiva­tions were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer’. Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occa­sional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!

She mounted the great baluchitherium mare and headed for home. Time and old monuments made glum company.

Twilight now, with just one streak of antique gold left in the sky, Venus sweetly bright, and stars peppering the purple. A fine night for being alive on, particularly with one’s last bedtime close at hand.

And yes, for all her mentor said, she was going to turn into that old little piece derived from one of the tunes in the 1540 Souter Liedekens, that splendid source of Netherlands folk music. For a moment, Dandi Lashadusa chuckled almost as eruditely as her mentor. The sixteenth-century Old Time, with the virtual death of plainsong and virtual birth of the violin, was most interesting to her. Ah, the richness of facts, the tex­ture of man’s brief history! Pure joy! Then she remembered herself.

After all, she was only a megatherium, a sloth as big as an elephant, whose kind had been extinct for millions of years until man reconstituted a few of them in the Venusian experi­ments. Her modifications in the way of fingers and enlarged brain gave her no real qualification to think up to man’s level.

Early next morning they arrived at the ramparts of the town Crotheria where Dandi lived. The ubiquitous goats thronged about them, some no bigger than hedgehogs, some almost as big as hippos—what madness in his last days pro­voked man to so many variations on one undistinguished caprine theme?—as Lass and her mistress moved up the last slope and under the archway.

It was good to be back, to push among the trails fringed with bracken, among the palms, oaks, and treeferns. Almost all the town was deeply green and private from the sun, cur­tained by swathes of Spanish moss. Here and there were houses—caves, pits, crude piles of boulders, or even genuine man-type buildings, grand in ruin. Dandi climbed down, walking ahead of her mount, her long hair curling in pleasure. The air was cool with the coo of doves or the occasional bleat of a merino.

As she explored familiar ways, though, disappointment overcame her. Her friends were all away, even the dreamy bison whose wallow lay at the corner of the street in which Dandi lived. Only pure animals were here, rooting happily and mindlessly in the lanes, beggars who owned the Earth. The Impures—-descendants of the Venusian experimental stock— were all absent from Crotheria.

That was understandable. For obvious reasons, man had increased the abilities of herbivores rather than carnivores. After the Involution, with man gone, these Impures had taken to his towns as they took to his ways, as far as this was pos­sible to their natures. Both Dandi and Lass, and many of the others, consumed massive amounts of vegetable matter every day. Gradually a wider and wider circle of desolation grew about each town (the greenery in the town itself was sacrosanct), forcing a semi-nomadic life on to its vegetarian inhabitants.

This thinning in its turn led to a decline in the birth rate. The travellers grew fewer, the towns greener and emptier; in time they had become little oases of forest studding the grass-less plains.

‘Rest here, Lass,’ Dandi said at last, pausing by a bank of brightly flowering cycads. ‘I’m going into my house.’

A giant beech grew before the stone façade of her home, so close that it was hard to determine whether it did not help support the ancient building. A crumbling balcony jutted from the first floor. Reaching up, Dandi seized the balustrade and hauled herself on to the balcony.

This was her normal way of entering her home, for the ground floor was taken over by goats and hogs, just as the second floor had been appropriated by doves and parakeets. Trampling over the greenery self-sown on the balcony, she moved into the front room. Dandi smiled. Here were her old things, the broken furniture on which she liked to sleep, the vision screens on which nothing could be seen, the heavy manuscript books in which, guided by her know-all mentor, she wrote down the outpourings of the musicolumns she had visited all over the world.

She ambled through to the next room.

She paused, her peace of mind suddenly shattered by danger.

A brown bear stood there. One of its heavy hands was clenched over the hilt of a knife.

‘I am no vulgar thief,’ it said, curling its thick black lips over the syllables: ‘I am an archaeologer. If this is your place, you must grant me permission to remove the man things. Obviously you have no idea of the worth of some of the equipment here. We bears require it. We must have it.’

It came towards her, panting doggy fashion with its jaws open. From under bristling eyebrows gleamed the lust to kill.

Dandi was frightened. Peaceful by nature, she feared the bears above all creatures for their fierceness and their ability to organize. The bears were few: they were the only creatures to show signs of wishing to emulate man’s old aggressiveness.

She knew what the bears did. They hurled themselves through the Involutes to increase their power; by penetrating those patterns, they nourished their psychic drive, so the Men­tor said. It was forbidden. They were transgressors. They were killers.

‘Mentor!’ she screamed.

The bear hesitated. As far as he was concerned, the hulking creature before him was merely an obstacle in the way of pro­gress, something to be thrust aside without hate. Killing would be pleasant but irrelevant; more important items remained to be done. Much of the equipment housed here could be used in the rebuilding of the world, the world of which bears had such high haphazard dreams. Holding the knife threateningly, he moved forward.

The Mentor was in Dandi’s head, answering her cry, seeing through her eyes, though he had no sight of his own. He scanned the bear and took over her mind instantly, knifing himself into place like a guillotine.

No longer was he a blind old dolphin lurking in one cell of a cathedral pile of coral under tropical seas, a theologer, an inculcator of wisdom into feebler minded beings. He was a killer more savage than the bear, keen to kill anything that might covet the vacant throne once held by men. The mere thought of men could send this mentor into shark-like fury at times.

Caught up in his fury, Dandi found herself advancing. For all the bear’s strength, she could vanquish it. In the open, where she could have brought her heavy tail into action, it would have been an easy matter. Here, her weighty forearms must come into play. She felt them lift to her mentor’s com­mand as he planned for her to clout the bear to death.

The bear stepped back, awed by an opponent twice its size, suddenly unsure.

She advanced.

‘No! Stop!’ Dandi cried.

Instead of fighting the bear, she fought her Mentor, hating his hate. Her mind twisted, her dim mind full of that steely fishy one, as she blocked his resolution.

‘I’m for peace!’ she cried.

‘Then kill the bear!’

‘I’m for peace, not killing!’

She rocked back and forth. When she staggered into a wall, it shook; dust spread in the old room. The Mentor’s fury was terrible to feel.

‘Get out quickly!’ Dandi called to the bear.

Hesitating, it stared at her. Then it turned and made for the window. For a moment it hung with its shaggy shabby hind­quarters in the room. Momentarily she saw it for what it was, an old animal in an old world, without direction. It jumped. It was gone. Goats blared confusion on its retreat.

‘Bitch!’ screamed the Mentor. Insane with frustration, he hurled Dandi against the doorway with all the force of his mind.

Wood cracked and splintered. The lintel came crashing down. Brick and stone shifted, grumbled, fell. Powdered filth billowed up. With a great roar, one wall collapsed. Dandi struggled to get free. Her house was tumbling about her. It had never been intended to carry so much weight, so many centuries.

She reached the balcony and jumped clumsily to safety, just as the building avalanched in on itself, sending a great cloud of plaster and powdered mortar into the overhanging trees.

For a horribly long while the world was full of dust, goat bleats, and panic-stricken parakeets.

Heavily astride her baluchitherium once more, Dandi Lashadusa headed back to the empty region called Ghinomon. She fought her bitterness, trying to urge herself towards resigna­tion.

All she had was destroyed—not that she set store by posses­sions: that was man trait. Much more terrible was the know­ledge that her Mentor had left her for ever; she had trans­gressed too badly to be forgiven this time.

Suddenly she was lonely for his pernickety voice in her head, for the wisdom he fed her, for the scraps of dead know­ledge he tossed her—yes, even for the love he gave her. She had never seen him, never could: yet no two beings could have been more intimate.

She missed too those other wards of his she would glimpse no more: the mole creature tunneling in Earth’s depths, the seal family that barked with laughter on a desolate coast, a senile gorilla that endlessly collected and classified spiders, an aurochs—seen only once, but then unforgettably—that lived with smaller creatures in an Arctic city it had helped build in the ice.

She was excommunicated.

Well, it was time for her to change, to disintegrate, to transsubstantiate into a pattern not of flesh but music. That disci­pline at least the Mentor had taught and could not take away.

‘This will do, Lass,’ she said.

Her gigantic mount stopped obediently. Lovingly she patted its neck. It was young; it would be free.

Following the dusty trail, she went ahead, alone. Some­where far off one bird called. Coming to a mound of boulders, Dandi squatted among gorse, the points of which could not prick through her thick old coat.

Already her selected music poured through her head, already it seemed to loosen the chemical bonds of her being.

Why should she not choose an old hymn tune? She was an antiquarian. Things that were gone solaced her for things that were to come.

In her dim way, she had always stood out against her Mentor’s absolute hatred of men. The thing to hate was hatred. Men in their finer moments had risen above hate. Her death psalm was an instance of that—a multiple instance, for it had been fingered and changed over the ages, as the Mentor him­self insisted, by men of a variety of races, all with their minds directed to worship rather than hate.

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him to do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherium body ... but an indigo column, hardly visible. . . .

Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.

Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: ‘All creatures that on Earth do dwell. . . .’