The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

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