Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 24

Mmm I.

First statement: I am I. I am everything. Everything, everywhere.

The universe is constructed of me, I am the whole of it. Am I? What is that throbbing that is not of me? That must be me too; after a while I shall understand it. All now is dim. Dim mmmm.

Even I am dim. In all this great strangeness and darkness of me, in all this universe of me, I am shadow. A memory of me. Could I be a memory of … not – me? Paradox: if I am everything, could there be a not-me?

Why am I having thoughts? Why am I not, as I was before, just mmmm?

Wake up! It’s urgent!

No! Deny it! I am the universe. If you can speak to me you must be me, so I command you to be still. There must be only the soothing mmmm.

… you are not the universe! Listen!

Louder?

Can you hear at last?

Non-comprehension. I must be everything. Can there be a part of me, like the throbbing, which is … separate?

Am I getting through? Answer!

Who … are you?

Do not be frightened.

Are you another … universe?

I am not a universe. You are not a universe. You are in danger and I must help you.

Mmmm. Must be mmmm …

… If only there were a psychofoetalist within light-years of here … Well, keep trying. Wake up! You must wake up to survive!

Who are you?

I am your father.

Non-comprehension. Are you the throbbing which is not me?

No. I am a long way from you. Light-years away.

You bring me feelings of … pain.

Don’t be afraid of it, but know there is much pain all about you. I am in constant pain.

Interest.

Good! First things first. You are most important.

I know that. All this is not happening. Somehow I catch these echoes, these dreams.

Try to concentrate. You are only one of millions like you. You and I are of the same species: human beings. I am born, you are unborn.

Meaningless.

Listen! Your ‘universe’ is inside another human being. Soon you will emerge into the real universe.

Still meaningless. Curious.

Keep alert. I will send you pictures to help you understand …

Uh …? Distance? Sight? Colour? Form? Definitely do not like this. Frightened. Frightened of falling, insecure … Must immediately retreat to safe mmmm. Mmmm.

Better let him rest! After all, he’s only six months; at the Pre-natal Academies they don’t begin rousing and education till seven and a half months. And then they’re trained to the job. If only I knew – my leg, you blue swine!

That picture …

Well done! I’m really sorry to rouse you so early, but it’s vital.

Praise for me, warm feelings. Good. Better than being alone in the universe.

That’s a great step forward, son. I can almost realise how the Creator felt, when you say that.

Non-comprehension.

Sorry, my fault; let the thought slip by. Must be careful. You were going to ask me about the picture I sent you. Shall I send again?

Only a little at once. Curious. Shape, colour, beauty. Is that the real universe?

That was just Earth I showed you, where I was born, where I hope you will be born.

Non-comprehension. Show again … shapes, tones, scents … Ah, this time not so strange. Different?

Yes, a different picture. Many pictures of Earth. Look.

Ah … Better than my darkness … I know only my darkness, sweet and warm, yet I seem to remember those – trees.

That’s a race memory, son. Your faculties are beginning to work, now.

More beautiful pictures please.

We cannot waste too long on the pictures. I’ve got a lot to tell you before you get out of range. These blue devils –

Why do you cease sending so abruptly? Hello? … Nothing. Father? … Nothing. Was there ever anything, or have I been alone and dreaming?

Nothing in all my universe but the throbbing. Is someone here with me? No, no answer. I must ask the voice, if the voice comes back. Now I must mmmm. Am no longer content as I was before. Strange feelings. … I want more pictures; I want … to …

Mmmm.

Dreaming myself to be a fish, fin-tailed, flickering through deep, still water. All is green and warm and without menace, and I swim forever with assurance … And then the water splits into lashing cords and plunges down, down, down a sunlit cliff. I fight to turn back, carried forward, fighting to return to the deep, sure dark –

– if you want to save yourself! Wake if you want to save yourself! I can’t hold out much longer. Another few days across these mountains –

Go away! Leave me to myself. I can have nothing to do with you.

You must try and understand! I know it’s agony for you, but you must stir yourself and take in what I say. It is imperative.

Nothing is imperative here. And now my mind seems to clear. Yes! I exist in the darkness where formerly there was nothing. Yes, there are imperatives; that I can recognise. Father?

What are you trying to say?

Confused. Understanding better, trying harder, but so confused.

Do not worry about that. It is your twin sister. The Pollux II hospital diagnosed twins, one boy and one girl.

So many concepts I cannot grasp. I should despair but for curiosity prodding me on. I’m one of a pair?

There you have it. That is a little girl lying next to you: you can hear her heart beating. Your mother –

Stop, Stop! Too much to understand at once. Must think to myself about this.

Keep calm. There is something you must do for me – for us all. If you do that, there is no danger.

Tell me quickly.

As yet it is too difficult. In a few days you will be ready – if I can hang on that long.

Why is it difficult?

Only because you are small.

Where are you?

I am on a world like Earth which is ninety light-years from Earth and getting farther from you even as we communicate together.

Why? How? Don’t understand. So much is now beyond my understanding; before you came everything was peaceful and dim.

Lie quiet and don’t fret, son. You’re doing well; you take the points quickly, you’ll reach Earth yet. You are travelling toward Earth in a spaceship which left Mirone, planet where I am, sixteen days ago.

Send that picture of a spaceship again.

Coming up …

It is a kind of enclosure for us all. That idea I can more or less grasp, but you don’t explain distances to me satisfactorily.

These are big distances, what we call light-years. I can’t explain them for you properly because a human mind ever really grasps them.

Then they don’t exist.

Unfortunately they exist all right. But they are only comprehensible as mathematical concepts. OHHH! My leg …

Why are you stopping? I remember you suddenly stopped before. You send a horrible pain thought, then you are gone. Answer.

Wait a minute.

I can hardly hear you. Now I am interested, why do you not continue? Are you there?

… this is all beyond me. We’re all finished. Judy, my love, if only I could reach you …

Who are you talking to? This is frustrating. You are so faint and your message so blurred.

Call you when I can …

Fear and pain. Only symbols from his mind to mine, yet they have an uncomfortable meaning of their own – something elusive. Perhaps another race memory.

My own memory is not good. Unused. I must train it. Something he said eludes me; I must try and remember it. Yet why should I bother? None of it really concerns me, I am safe here, safe forever in this darkness. This whole thing is imagination. I am talking to myself. Wait! I can feel projections coming back again. Do not trouble to listen. Curious.

… gangrene, without doubt. Shall be dead before these blue devils get me to their village. So much Judy and I planned to do …

Are you listening, son?

No, no.

Listen carefully while I give you instructions.

Have something to ask you.

Please save it. The connection between us is growing attenuated; soon we will be out of mind range.

Indifferent.

My dear child, how could you be other than indifferent! I am truly sorry to have broken so early into your foetal sleep.

An unnamable sensation, half-pleasant; gratitude, love? No doubt a race memory.

It may be so. Try to remember me – later. Now, business. Your mother and I were on our way back to Earth when we stopped on this world Mirone, where I now am. It was an unnecessary luxury to break our journey. How bitterly now I wish we had never stopped.

Why did you?

Well, it was chiefly to please Judy – your mother. This is a beautiful world, around the North Pole, anyhow. We had wandered some way from the ship when a group of natives burst out upon us.

Natives?

People who live here. They are sub-human, blue-skinned and hairless – not pretty to look at.

Picture!

I think you’d be better without one. Judy and I ran for the ship. We were nearly up to it when a rock caught me behind the knee – they were pitching rocks at us – and I went down. Judy never noticed until she was in the airlock, and then the savages were on me. My leg was hurt; I couldn’t even put up a fight.

Please tell me no more of this. I want mmmm.

Listen, son! That’s all the frightening part. The savages are taking me over the mountains to their village. I don’t think they mean to harm me; I’m just a … curiosity to them.

Please let me mmmm.

You can go comatose as soon as I’ve explained how these little spacecraft work. Astrogating, the business of getting from one planet to another, is far too intricate a task for anyone but an expert to master. I’m not an expert; I’m a geohistorian. So the whole thing is done by a robot pilot. You feed it details like payload, gravities and destination, and it juggles them with the data in its memory banks and works out all the course for you – carries you home safely, in fact. Do you get all that?

This sounds complicated.

Now you’re talking like your mother, boy. She’s never bothered, but actually it’s all simple; the complications take place under the steel panelling where you don’t worry about them. The point I’m trying to make is that steering is all automatic once you’ve punched in a few co-ordinates.

I’m tired.

So am I. Fortunately, before we left the ship that last time, I had set up the figures for Earth. OK?

If you had not, she would not have been able to get home?

Exactly it. Keep trying! She left Mirone safely and you are now heading for Earth – but you’ll never make it. When I set the figures up, they were right; but my not being aboard made them wrong. Every split second of thrust the ship makes is calculated for an extra weight that isn’t there. It’s here with me, being hauled along a mountain.

Is this bad? Does it mean we reach Earth too fast?

No, son. IT MEANS YOU’LL NEVER REACH EARTH AT ALL. The ship moves in a hyperbola, and although my weight is only about one eight-thousandth of total ship’s mass, that tiny fraction of error will have multiplied itself into a couple of light-years by the time you get adjacent to the solar system.

I’m trying, but this talk of distance means nothing to me. Explain it again.

Where you are there is neither light nor space; how do I make you feel what a light-year is? No, you’ll just have to take it from me that the crucial point is, you’ll shoot right past the Earth.

Can’t we go on?

You will – if nothing is done about it. But landfall will be delayed some thousands of years.

You are growing fainter. Strain too much. Must mmmm

The fish again, and the water. No peace in the pool now. Cool pool, cruel pool, pool … The waters whirl toward the brink.

I am the fish-foetus. Have I dreamed? Was there a voice talking to me? It seems unlikely. Something I had to ask it, one gigantic fact which made nonsense of everything; something – cannot remember.

Perhaps there was no voice. Perhaps in this darkness I have taken a wrong choice between sanity and non-sanity.

… thank heavens for hot spring water …

Hello! Father?

How long will they let me lie here in this pool? They must realize I’m not long for this world, or any other.

I’m awake and answering!

Just let me lie here. Son, it’s man’s first pleasure and his last to lie and swill in hot water. Wish I could live to know you … However. Here’s what you have to do.

Am powerless here. Unable to do anything.

Don’t get frightened. There’s something you already do very expertly – telemit.

Non-comprehension.

We talk to each other over this growing distance by what is called telepathy. It’s part gift, part skill. It happens to be the only contact between distant planets, except spaceships. But whereas spaceships take time to get anywhere, thought is instantaneous.

Understood.

Good. Unfortunately, whereas spaceships get anywhere in time, thought has a definite limited range. Its span is as strictly governed as – well, as the size of a plant, for instance. When you are fifty light-years from Mirone, contact between us will abruptly cease.

How far apart are we now?

At the most we have forty-eight hours more in contact.

Don’t leave me. I shall be lonely!

I’ll be lonely too – but not for long. But you, son, you are already halfway to Earth, or as near as I can estimate it you are. As soon as contact between us ceases, you must call TRE.

Which means?

Telepath Radial Earth. It’s a general control and information centre, permanently beamed for any sort of emergency. You can raise them. I can’t.

They won’t know me.

I’ll give you their call pattern. They’ll soon know you when you telemit. You can give them my pattern for identification if you like. You must explain what is happening.

Will they believe?

Of course.

Are they real?

Of course. Tell TRE what the trouble is; they’ll send out a fast ship to pick Judy and you up before you are out of range.

I want to ask you –

Wait a minute, son … You’re getting faint … Can you smell the gangrene over all those light-years? … These blue horrors are lifting me out of the spring, and I’ll probably pass out. Not much time …

Pain. Pain and silence. All like a dream.

… distance …

Father! Louder!

… too feeble … Done all I could …

Why did you rouse me and not communicate with my mother?

The village! We’re nearly there. Just down the valley and then it’s journey’s end … Human race only developing telepathic powers gradually … Steady, you fellows!

The question, answer the question.

That is the answer. Easy down the slope, boys, don’t burst this big leg, eh? Ah … I have telepathic ability but Judy hasn’t; I couldn’t call her a yard away. But you have the ability … Easy there! All the matter in the universe is in my leg …

You sound so muddled. Has my sister this power?

Good old Mendelian theory … You and your sister, one sensitive, one not. Two eyes of the giant and only one can see properly … the path’s too steep to – whoa, Cyclops, steady, boy, or you’ll put out that other eye.

Cannot understand!

Understand? My leg’s a flaming torch – Steady, steady! Gently down the steep blue hill.

Father!

What’s the matter?

I can’t understand. Are you talking of real things?

Sorry, boy. Steady now. Touch of delirium; it’s the pain. You’ll be OK if you get in contact with TRE. Remember?

Yes, I remember. If only I could … I don’t know. Mother is real then?

Yes. You must look after her.

And is the giant real?

The giant? What giant? You mean the giant hill. The people are climbing up the giant hill. Up to my giant leg. Goodbye, son. I’ve got to see a blue man about a … a leg …

Father! Wait, wait, look, see, I can move. I’ve just discovered I can turn. Father!

No answer now. Just a stream of silence. I have got to call TRE.

Plenty of time. Perhaps if I turn first … Easy. I’m only six months, he said. Maybe I could call more easily if I was outside, in the real universe. If I turn again.

Now if I kick …

Ah, easy now. Kick again. Good. Wonder if my legs are blue.

Kick.

Something yielding.

Kick …