The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘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 (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)

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.