The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘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 onto it.

This was her normal way of entering her home, for the ground floor was taken over by goats and hogs, just as the third 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 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 broken.

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, 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 organise. 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 sent this mentor into sharklike 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 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 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.

The mentor screamed. 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 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 a 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 also missed those other wards of his she would glimpse no more: the mole creature tunnelling 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 small 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 transubstantiate 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 giganic mount stopped obediently. Lovingly, she patted its neck. It was young; it would be free.

Following the dusty trail, she went ahead, alone. Somewhere afar a 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 human 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 do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could change 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 …

For a long while Lass 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 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 ancient as the landscape itself, and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: ‘All creatures that on Earth do dwell s …’

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

This was the order in which the A.S. Intractible’s hatches opened, after landing at Army Base, South City, Roinse, Mars. Firstly, the Second Aft Hatch, to emit a Leading Hand who ran in his suit across to the Control Bunker to collect Contact Assurances. Secondly (fifteen minutes later), Aft Hatch ‘Q,’ to emit three engineers who made a cursory survey of the jets before retiring to chat with the uniformed ground crew now appearing. Thirdly and fourthly, simultaneously, the Lower Midships Hatch (Personnel) to emit the Catering Officer who wanted to secure a supply of fresh bacon before the A.S. Intractible left again, and the Upper Midship Hatch (Cargo) to emit a heavy duty gangplank, from which Neptunian sulphosphates were trundled in covered trucks.

Fifthly, the Fore Control Hatch, to emit the pilot, who had brought the Army ship in from Orbit Epsilon, and the Captain, who was going to have a drink with the pilot. Sixthly, Warrant Officers’ Hatch, from which a group of three officers emerged in civilian dress. Seventhly, the Personnel Duty Hatch (Personnel) to emit a platoon of Outer Planets Commando, who marched off the Army Base field in threes. Eighthly, the Personnel Duty Hatch (Stores), to emit a small vehicle carrying the equipment of the Commando platoon. Ninethly, the captain’s Hatch, to emit the Trooping Officer and his A.D.C., heading in the direction of Roinse, the old city. Tenthly, the Heavy Cargo Hatch, amidships, from which various duty technicians in fatigue kit straggled, to climb over the ship and check its hull for faults.

Lastly, General Hatch (Ratings) swung open. By this time, two and a half hours had elapsed since landing.

‘Isn’t it just typical of the bleeding Army!’ Wagner Hayes exclaimed, clattering down the gangplank. ‘We’ve only got twenty-four hours here before we bat off for Earth again, and then they keep us mucking about with an FFI when we arrive. What did they think we could have picked up on that lousy hole Ganymede?’

‘Don’t forget we had a pay parade, too, Wag,’ Dusty Miller said, chinking the credits in his pocket.

‘They could have had that when we were space-borne if the ruddy RSM had been half sharp,’ Wagner growled.

Leaving the ship with him were, besides Dusty, two slightly older men, Max Fleet and their bald unsmiling corporal, George Walters. The four came down onto the landing pad with a knot of other servicemen, all looking forward to a few hours’ leave and a change from the rigorous confinement of the Intractible.