The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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      All the territory about the Bastion was wrinkled and withered as aged skin. Low ground-hugging plants grew there, some with rudimentary intelligence, capable – like the creatures inhabiting the Bastion – of drinking human blood.

      Six men were walking in single file through this dangerous area, progressing towards the dark flanks of the Bastion. The men were shackled to each other by a metal chain clamped to their upper arms. In the heat of the perpetual evening, they were scantily clad. They went barefoot.

      They made no haste as they progressed forward, walking with heads and shoulders drooping, their dull gaze fixed on the ground. The stiffness of their movements owed less to the weight of their chains than to a prevailing despair, to which every limb of their bodies testified.

      Low above them flew the guardian of this human line. The flier exhibited a degree of majesty as his great wings beat their way slowly through the viscous air. He was as much a creature of custom as the six men below him, his duty being merely to see that they returned to the warrens of the Bastion.

      Before their fighting spirit was eroded, these six had often in the past plotted escape. It was rumoured that somewhere ruinous cities still stood, inhabited by tribes of men and women who had managed to hold out against the Fleet Ones as the centuries declined: that somewhere those virtues by which humans had once set great store were still preserved, against the onslaught of night.

      But no one incarcerated in the Bastion knew how to reach the legendary cities. Few had stamina enough to endure long journeys overland.

      All the six desired at present was to return to their prison. Their shift as cleaners in the Mechanism was over for the day. Soup and rest awaited them. The horror of their situation had long since dulled their senses. In the underground stabling, where humans and animals were indifferently herded together, the myrmidons of the Fleet Ones would bring round their rations. Then they could sleep.

      As for the weekly levy of blood to be paid while they slept … even that nightmare had become mere routine.

      So they negotiated the path through the bloodthirsty-plants and came with some relief to the stoma gaping at the base of the Bastion, waiting to swallow them. The guardian alighted, tucked away his wings, and directed them through the aperture. Hot and foetid air came up to meet them like a diseased breath.

      The concretion into which they disappeared rose high into the saffron-tinted atmosphere, dominating the landscape in which it stood. It resembled a huge anthill. No conceptions of symmetry or elegance of any kind had entered the limited minds of its architects. It had reared itself upwards on a random basis. Its highest central point resembled a rounded tower, reinforcing the impression that the whole structure was a kind of brute phallus which had thrust its way through the body of the planet.

      Here and there on the flanks of the Bastion, side features obtruded. Some resembled malformed limbs. Some twisted upwards, or sideways. Some turned down and burrowed again into the ravaged soil, serving as buttresses to the main structure.

      The main portions of the Bastion lay below ground, in its unending warrens, stables, and crypts. The structure above ground was blind. Not a window showed. The Fleet Ones were no friends of light.

      Yet on higher levels orifices showed, crudely shaped. Much coming and going was in evidence at these vents. Here the Fleet Ones could conveniently launch themselves into flight: as they had done at the beginning of time, so now at its end.

      Only the orifice at the top of the pile, larger than all the others, was free of sinister traffic. It was reserved for the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracula. This was his castle. He would launch himself from this great height whenever he was about to go on a mission into the world – as even now he was preparing to do.

      As the shift of six began its winding descent into underground levels, to rest in the joyless inanition of slaves, four other men of different calibre were preparing to leave the Mechanism.

      These four, in luckier days, had been scientists. Captive, they remained free of shackles, so that they could move without impediment in the building. The genetically non-scientific species who held them in captivity had abducted them from various epochs of past history. They were guarded. But because they were necessary for the maintenance of the Mechanism, their well-being within the Bastion was assured. They merely had to work until they died.

      The leader of the quartet came down from the observatory, checking the time on his watch.

      This leader, elected by common consent, was a tall man in his late thirties. The Fleet Ones had captured him from the Obsidianal Century. His brilliant mind and indomitable spirit were such that others took courage from him. Someone once claimed that his brain represented the flowering of the sapient Homo sapiens. The plan about to be transformed from theory to action was a product of his thought.

      ‘We have two minutes to go, friends,’ he said now, as they were closing down their instruments.

      The Mechanism – ignorantly so called by the Fleet Ones – was a combined solar observatory and power house. All space observatories had long been destroyed by the deteriorating sun.

      It was the power function which was all important. From the platforms of the Mechanism, shelving out like giant fungi, the solar satellites were controlled which drained the energies of the sun. These energies were redirected to meet the needs of the Fleet Ones. And in particular the needs of the Fleet Ones’ single innovatory form of transportation.

      The scientists were forced to work for their hated enemies. They ran everything as inefficiently as possible. Because the Mechanism was lighted brilliantly to allow the humans to work, the Fleet Ones would not enter. They posted their guardians outside, continually circling the immense structure.

      ‘Delay here,’ said the leader, sharply. The four of them were in the foyer, preparing to go off shift and be returned to the Bastion. He glanced again at his watch.

      ‘According to our predictions, there’s now a minute to go.’

      Beyond the glass doors, they could see the familiar tarnished landscape like a furrowed brow. In the distance, failed hills, shattered river beds, all lost in an origami of light and shade. Nearer at hand, the prodigious thrust of the Bastion, circled by leathery fliers. As a sudden stormy wind buffeted them, the fliers resembled dead leaves blowing at autumn’s call. Shunning the light, they had no knowledge of the phenomenon approaching from space.

      Just outside the doors, fluttering like a bat, the lead guardian on duty came down to an unsteady landing. He braced himself against the wind.

      Lifting a hand to shield his brow, he stared in at the scientists, his red eyes set amid the dark skin and fur of the sharp-fanged visage. He beckoned to them.

      They made some pretence of moving towards the doors, heading instead for a metal reception counter.

      Thirty seconds to go.

      The lower western sky was filled with a sun like an enormous blossom. It was the flower which had already destroyed all the flowers of Earth. Imperfectly round, its crimson heart crackled with stamens of lightning. The solar wind blew its malevolent pollens about the planets. Round it orbiced the four solar stations which were leaching it of its energies, sucking them down into the subterranean storehouses of the Mechanism. On the face of this great helium-burner moved vortices which could swallow worlds. They showed like rashes of a disease, as if they worked at the débridement of an immense bloated organ.

      In the midst of this solar СКАЧАТЬ