The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

      ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘No! Save the modern poetry or the philosophical treatise for later. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry. We’ll take it for granted there was some sort of a failure. Are you going to be able to make a success of this new start we’re giving you?’

      ‘It is not a new start,’ she said, beginning reasonably enough. ‘Once you have had the result, a start is no longer a result. It is merely in the result of failing and all that is in the case is the start or the failure – depending, for us, on the start, for you on the failure. And you can surely see that even here failure depends abnormally on the beginning of the result, which concerns us more than the failure, simply because it is the result. What you don’t see is the failure of the result of the result’s failure to start a result – ’

      ‘Stop!’ I shouted again.

      I went to the Paull commander. I told him the thing was beginning to become an obsession with me.

      ‘It is with all of us,’ he replied.

      ‘But if only I could grasp a fraction of their problem! Look, we come out here all this way ahead to help them – and still we don’t know what we’re helping them from.’

      ‘We know why we’re helping them, Edmark. The burden of carrying on the race, of breeding a new and more stable generation, is on them. Keep your eye on that, if possible.’

      Perhaps his smile was a shade too placating; it made me remember that to him we were ‘the Children’.

      ‘Look,’ I said pugnaciously. ‘If those shambling failures can’t tell us what’s happened to them, you can. Either you tell me, or we pack up and go home. Our fellows have the creeps, I tell you! Now what – explicitly – is or was wrong with these Zombies?’

      The commander laughed.

      ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t know, and that’s all there is to it.’

      He stood up then, austere, tall. He went and looked out of the window, hands behind his back, and I could tell by his eyes he was looking at Failed Men, down there in the pale afternoon.

      He turned and said to me: ‘This sanatorium was designed for Failed Men. But we’re filling up with relief staff instead; they’ve let the problem get them by the throats.’

      ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I shall be there myself if I don’t get to the root of it, racing the others up the wall.’

      He held up his hand.

      ‘That’s what they all say. But there is no root of it to get at, or none we can comprehend, or else we are part of the root ourselves. If you could only categorise their failure it would be something: religious, spiritual, economic …’

      ‘So it’s got you too!’ I said.

      ‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You’ve got the time ships. Go back and see what the problem was!’

      The solution was so simple I couldn’t think how they had overlooked it; but of course they hadn’t overlooked it.

      ‘We’ve been,’ the commander said briefly. ‘A problem of the mind – presuming it was a mental problem – cannot be seen. All we saw was the six million of them singly burying themselves in these shallow graves. The process covered over a century; some of them had been under for three hundred years before we rescued them. No, it’s no good; the problem from our point of view is linguistic.’

      ‘The translator banks are no good,’ I said sweepingly. ‘It’s all too delicate a job for a machine. Could you lend me a human interpreter?’

      He came himself, in the end. He didn’t want to, but he wanted to. And how would a machine cope with that statement? Yet to you and me it’s perfectly comprehensible.

      A woman, one of the Failed Men, was walking slowly across the courtyard as we got outside. It might have been the one I had already spoken to, I don’t know. I didn’t recognise her and she gave no sign of recognising me. Anyhow, we stopped her and tried our luck.

      ‘Ask her why they buried themselves, for a start,’ I said.

      The Paull translated and she doomed briefly in reply.

      ‘She says it was considered necessary, as it aided the union before the beginning of the attempt,’ he told me.

      ‘Ask her what union.’

      Exchange of dooms.

      ‘The union of the union that they were attempting. Whatever that means.’

      ‘Did both “unions” sound the same to you?’

      ‘One was inflected, as it was in the possessive case,’ the Paull said. ‘Otherwise they seemed just alike.’

      ‘Ask her – ask her if they were all trying to change themselves into something other than human – you know, into spirits or fairies or ghosts.’

      ‘They’ve only got a word for spirit. Or rather, they’ve got four words for spirit: spirit of soul; spirit of place; spirit of a non-substantive, such as “spirit of adventure”; and another sort of spirit I cannot define – we haven’t an exact analogy for it.’

      ‘Hell’s bells! Well, try her with spirit of soul.’

      Again the melancholy rattle of exchange. Then the commander, with some surprise, said: ‘She says, Yes, they were striving to attain spirituality.’

      ‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ I exclaimed, thinking smugly that it just needed persistence and a twenty-fifth-century brain.

      The old woman clanged again.

      ‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

      ‘She says they’re still striving after spirituality.’

      We both groaned. The lead was merely a dead end.

      ‘It’s no good,’ the Paull said gently. ‘Give up.’

      ‘One last question! Tell the old girl we cannot understand the nature of what has happened to her race. Was it a catastrophe and what was its nature?’

      ‘Can but try. Don’t imagine this hasn’t been done before, though – it’s purely for your benefit.’

      He spoke. She answered briefly.

      ‘She says it was an “antwerto”. That means it was a catastrophe to end all catastrophes.’

      ‘Well, at least we’re definite on that.’

      ‘Oh yes, they failed all right, whatever it was they were after,’ the Paull said sombrely.

      ‘The nature of the catastrophe?’

      ‘She just gives me an innocent little word, “struback”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it means.’

      ‘I see. Ask her if it has something to do with evolution.’

      ‘My dear man, this is all a waste of time! I know the answers, as far as they exist, without speaking to this woman at all.’

      ‘Ask her if “struback” means something to do with a possible way they were evolving or meaning to evolve,’ I persisted.

      He asked her. The ill-matched three of us stood there for a long time while the old woman moaned her reply. At last she was silent.

      ‘She says struback has some vague connection with evolution,’ the commander told me.

      ‘Is that all?’

      ‘Far from it, but that’s what it boils down to! “Time impresses itself on man as evolution,” she says.’

      ‘Ask her if the nature of the catastrophe was at least partly religious.’

      When she had replied, the commander