The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

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      He had not finished speaking before Rhys-Barley had flung himself behind a shield and given the Emergency Destruction order. Nothing happened. Buttons, switches, valves, all were dead.

      ‘You merely waste your time,’ Little Light said, pointing at the Grand-Admiral and stepping through the dying R-rays. ‘The power has gone. Did I not explain that clearly enough?’

      ‘Where are you taking us?’ Deeping whispered.

      ‘You are taking us,’ Woebee corrected.

      ‘Not – not to Earth?’

      Woebee smiled. ‘I feel that the word ‘Earth’ has some emotional value for you.’

      ‘Why, yes, of course. Don’t you see, it’s the only planet we ever lost to the Boux, right at the beginning of our troubles with them. But Man came from there. Earth is Man’s birth planet, and when it fell – that was the end of the First Empire. Since then we’ve grown stronger – but all that old peripheral region of space is dead ground to us now.’

      Woebee nodded carelessly. ‘We learned that from our investigation of Main Base. The area is now abandoned by the Boux too.’

      ‘How awful to think of it stagnating all this time!’ Deeping said.

      ‘Really, you are as foolish as the rest,’ said the Preacher reprovingly. ‘The stagnation has been here. Why, you’re still clinging to machinery to support you.’ He led his four friends back toward the Regalia. ‘We’ll do the rest of the journey on our own,’ he told them. ‘These soldiers will want to go back to their duties. It’s really none of our concern to hinder them!’

      In the lock they paused. The personnel trapped in the Interrogation Bay looked bemused and helpless. Rhys-Barley sat on a step staring at the wall. The Captain bit his nails in an absorbed fashion.

      Aliens Officer came forward and said: ‘You have so much you could have taught us.’

      ‘There’s one piece of knowledge, unlike most of our kind of knowledge, that might be useful to you,’ Aprit said casually. ‘In Man’s hurry to leave Earth because one or two Boux had arrived, some few men and women were left behind. They had no defence against the Boux, so the Boux had no need to attack them. In other words, there was an opportunity for – intermarriage.’

      ‘Intermarriage!’ echoed Aliens Officer.

      ‘Yes,’ the Preacher said solemnly. ‘Neither you nor your machines seemed able to diagnose that. So you see our origins are a mixture of Man’s and Boux’s …’

      ‘That is a priceless piece of knowledge,’ Deeping reflected.

      Calurmo smiled a valedictory smile that included even the deflated Admiral.

      ‘I’m delighted if it proves so,’ he said, ‘but it is only a just return for Man’s priceless gift to the Boux who were our distant ancestors: the gift of rigid form. Fluidity has proved a curse to the Boux. Intermarriage has recommendations for both sides. May I suggest you arrange – a love-match?’

      This time he remembered to close the airlock doors. The Regalia slid, apparently of its own volition, into the great lock of the Pointer and out into space. By the time it was heading home, the flagship’s captain was busy roaring at his bridge officers and Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley was speaking apologetically to Base.

      Deeping was staring at something that had materialized in his hand: wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella. A flower from Earth.

       Outside

      They never went out of the house.

      The man whose name was Harley used to get up first. Sometimes he would take a stroll through the building in his sleeping suit – the temperature remained always mild, day after day. Then he would rouse Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one. He made as much company as Harley needed.

      Dapple, the girl with grey eyes and black hair, was a light sleeper. The sound of the two men talking would wake her. She would get up and go to rouse May; together they would go down and prepare a meal. While they were doing that, the other two members of the household, Jagger and Pief, would be rousing.

      That was how every ‘day’ began: not with the inkling of anything like dawn, but just when the six of them had slept themselves back into wakefulness. They never exerted themselves during the day, but somehow when they climbed back into their beds they slept soundly enough.

      The only excitement of the day occurred when they first opened the store. The store was a small room between the kitchen and the blue room. In the far wall was set a wide shelf, and upon this shelf their existence depended. Here, all their supplies ‘arrived’. They would lock the door of the bare room last thing, and when they returned in the morning their needs – food, linen, a new washing machine – would be awaiting them on the shelf. That was just an accepted feature of their existence; they never questioned it among themselves.

      On this morning, Dapple and May were ready with the meal before the four men came down. Dapple even had to go to the foot of the wide stairs and call before Pief appeared, so that the opening of the store had to be postponed till after they had eaten; for although the opening had in no way become a ceremony, the women were nervous about going in alone. It was one of those things …

      ‘I hope to get some tobacco,’ Harley said as he unlocked the door. ‘I’m nearly out of it.’

      They walked in and looked at the shelf. It was all but empty.

      ‘No food,’ observed May, hands on her aproned waist. ‘We shall be on short rations today.’

      It was not the first time this had happened. Once – how long ago now? – they kept little track of time – no food had appeared for three days and the shelf had remained empty. They had accepted the shortage placidly.

      ‘We shall eat you before we starve, May,’ Pief said, and they laughed briefly to acknowledge the joke, although Pief had cracked it last time too. Pief was an unobtrusive little man, not the sort one would notice in a crowd. His small jokes were his most precious possession.

      Two packets only lay on the ledge. One was Harley’s tobacco, one was a pack of cards. Harley pocketed the one with a grunt and displayed the other, slipping the pack from its wrapping and fanning it towards the others.

      ‘Anyone play?’ he asked.

      ‘Poker,’ Jagger said.

      ‘Canasta.’

      ‘Gin rummy.’

      ‘We’ll play later,’ Calvin said. ‘It’ll pass the time in the evening.’ The cards would be a challenge to them; they would have to sit together to play, around a table, facing each other.

      Nothing was in operation to separate them, but there seemed no strong force to keep them together, once the tiny business of opening the store was over. Jagger worked the vacuum cleaner down the hall, past the front door that did not open, and rode it up the stairs СКАЧАТЬ