The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ into the hatch with Malravin. The burly Siberian thumbed the sunken toggle switches on the panel, and the air lock sank to ground level, its atmosphere exhausting as it went.

      They unsealed the door and stepped out onto the rough surface of the planetoid Captain Dominguey had christened Erewhon. They stood with the doughnut shape of the Wilson on stilts behind them and tried to adjust to the prospect. If anything, they seemed to weigh slightly more than they had in. the ship’s artificially maintained ½G field, although the bulk of their suits made this hard to tell.

      At first it was difficult to see anything; it was always to remain difficult to see anything well.

      They stood on a tiny plain. The distance of the horizon was impossible to judge in the weird light. It seemed never more than a hundred yards away in any direction. It was distorted; this seemed to be because the plain was irregular. High banks, broken hollows, jagged lips of rock, formed the landscape, the features running higgledy-piggledy in a way that baffled sense. There was no sign of the atmosphere Baron had mentioned; the stars came down to the skyline and were sharply occulted by it.

      With the hand claws of their suits touching, the two men began to walk forward. They could see Baron’s instruments standing deserted a short way off, and instinctively moved towards them. There was no need for lights; the entire bowl of the sky was awash with stars.

      The Wilson was a deep penetration cartographic ship. With two sister ships, it was the first such vessel to venture into the heart of the Crab Nebula. There, weaving its way among the endless abysses of interstellar dust, it lost contact with the Brinkdale and the Grandon. The curtains of uncreated matter closed in on them, baffling even the subradio.

      They went on. As they went, the concepts of space they had once held were erased. This was a domain of light and matter, not of emptiness and dark. All about them were coils of smoke – smoke set with sequins! – and cliffs of shimmering dust the surface of which they could not have explored in two lifetimes. To begin with the four men were elated at the sheer magnificence of the new environment. Later, the magnificence seemed not of beauty but of annihilation. It was too big, they were too insignificant. The four men retreated into silence.

      But the ship continued on its course, for they had their orders and their honour, and their pay. According to plan, the Wilson sank into the heart of the nebula. The instrumentation had developed an increasing fault until it became folly to go farther, but fortunately they had then come to a region less tightly packed with stars and star matter. Beyond that was space, light years across, entirely free of physical bodies – except one.

      They found soon enough that it was no stroke of fortune to be here. Swilling in the middle of the gigantic hole in space was the phenomenon they christened Big Bertha.

      It was too big. It was impossible. But the instruments ceased to be reliable; without instruments, human senses were useless in such a region. Already bemused by travel, they were ill-equipped to deal with Big Bertha. To add to their troubles, the directional cyboscope that governed the jets in the ship’s equator broke down and became unreliable.

      They took the only course open to them: they landed on the nearest possible body, to rest there while they did a repair job and re-established contact with their sister ships. The nearest possible body happened to be Erewhon.

      Touchdown on Erewhon had been a little miracle, accomplished with few other instruments than human eyes, human hands, and a string of human blasphemies. The hammer of static radiated by Big Bertha rendered radio, radar, and radix all ineffective.

      Now the sky was a wonder painful to view. Everywhere were the glittering points of stars, everywhere the immense plumes and shawls of inchoate matter illuminated by star-shine. Yet it was all far away, glittering beyond the gravitational pull of Bertha. In her domain, only the wretched planetoid the Wilson rested on seemed to exist. It was like being a bone alone in an empty room with a starving dog.

      ‘Gravitation can be felt not only in the muscles but in the thalamus. It is a power of darkness, perhaps the ultimate power.’

      ‘What’s that?’ Malravin asked, startled.

      ‘I was thinking aloud.’ Embarrassed, Sharn added, ‘Bertha will rise in a minute, Ike. Are you ready for it?’

      They stopped by the pathetic cluster of instruments. They just stood there, rooted to the spot with a tension that could not be denied. Bertha had already begun to rise.

      Their eyes were bad judges of what happened next, even with the infra-red screens pulled down over their faceplates. But they partly saw – and partly they felt, for a tidal sensation crawled across their bodies.

      Above the eastern horizon, a section of the star field began to melt and sag. Star after star, cluster after cluster, uncountably stratified and then wavered and ran towards the horizon like ill-applied paint trickling down a wall. As if in sympathy, distortion also seized the bodies of Sharn and Malravin.

      ‘An illusion, an optical illusion,’ Malravin said, raising a hand to the melting lines of stars. ‘Gravity bending light. But I’ve – Eddy, I’ve got something in my suit with me. Let’s get back to the ship.’

      Sharn could not reply. He fought silently with something inside his own suit, something closer to him than his muscles.

      Where the stars flowed, something was lumbering up over the horizon, a great body sure of its strength, rising powerfully from its grave, thrusting up now a shoulder now a torso into the visible. It was Bertha. The two men sank clumsily to their knees.

      Whatever it was, it was gigantic. It occupied about twenty degrees of arc. It climbed above the horizon – but more and more of it kept coming, and it seemed to expand as it came – it rose tall, swallowing the sky as it rose. Its outline indicated that it was spherical, though the outline was not distinct, the wavering bands of starlight rendering it impossible to see properly.

      The sensation in Sharn’s body had changed. He felt lighter now, and more comfortable. The feeling that he was wearing someone else’s body had disappeared. In its place had come an odd lopsidedness. Drained, he could only peer up at the disturbance.

      Whatever it was, it ate the sky. It did not radiate light. Yet what could be seen of it was clearly not seen by reflected light. It darkled in the sky.

      ‘It – emits black light,’ Sharn said. ‘Is it alive, Ike?’

      ‘It’s going to crush us,’ Ike said. He turned to crawl back to the ship, but at that instant the atmosphere hit them.

      Sharn had drawn his gaze away from that awesome monster in space to see what Malravin was doing, so that he saw the atmosphere arrive. He put a claw up to shield his face as it hit.

      The atmosphere came up over the horizon after Bertha. It came in long strands, travelling fast. With it came sound, a whisper that grew to a shriek that shrilled inside their faceplates. At first the vapour was no more than a confusion in the gloom, but as it thickened it became visible as drab grey cloud. There were electrical side effects too; corposants glowed along the ridges of rock about them. The cloud rose rapidly, engulfing them like an intangible sea.

      Sharn found he was on his knees beside Malravin. They both had their headlights on now, and headed for the ship in a rapid shuffle. It was hard going. That lopsided effect spoilt their instinctive placing of their limbs.

      Once they were touching the metal of the Wilson’s airlock, some of the panic left them. Both men stood up, breathing heavily. СКАЧАТЬ