The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER FIVE

Pasztor, Director of the London Exozoo, was a fine willowy man without a grey hair on his head despite his fifty-two years. A Hungarian by birth, he had led an expedition into the submarine Antarctic by the time he was twenty-five, had gone on to set up the Tellus Zoological Dome on the asteroid Apollo in 2005. and had written the most viewed technidrama of 2014, An Iceberg for Icarus. Several years later he went on the First Charon Expedition, which charted and landed upon that then newly-discovered planet of the solar system; Charon refrigerates so unloveably some three thousand million miles beyond the orbit of Pluto that it earned itself the name of Deep Freeze Planet, Pasztor had given it that nickname.

After which triumph, Sir Mihaly Pasztor was appointed Director of the London Exozoo and was at present employed in offering Bruce Ainson a drink.

“You know I don’t, Mihaly,” Bruce said, shaking his long head in reproof.

“From now on you are a famous man; you should toast your own success, as we toast it. The drinks are all pure synthetics, you know — a de-alcoholized sinker will surely never hurt you.”

“You know me of old, Mihaly. I wish only to do my duty.”

“I know you of old, Bruce. I know that you care very little for the opinions or the applause of anyone else, so thirstily do you crave for the nod of approval from your own superego,” the Director said in a mild voice, while the bartender mixed him the cocktail known as a Transponential. They were at the reception being held in the hotel belonging to the Exozoo, where murals of exotic beasts stared down on a bracing mixture of bright uniforms and flowery dresses.

“I do not stand in need of tidbits from your well of wisdom,” Ainson said.

“You will not allow that you have need of anything from anybody,” said the Director. “I have meant to say this to you for a long while, Bruce — though this is neither the time nor the place, let me continue now I have begun.

You are a brave, learned, and formidable man. That you have proved not only to the world but to yourself. You can now afford to relax, to let down your guard. Not only can you now afford to do so; you ought to do so before it is too late. A man has to have an interior, Bruce, and yours is dying of suffocation—”

“For heavens’ sake, man!” Ainson exclaimed, breaking away half laughing, half angry. “You are talking like an impossibly romantic character in one of the plays of your nonage! I am what I am, and I am no different from what I have always been. Now here comes Enid, and it is high tune we changed the subject.”

Among the bright dresses, Enid Ainson’s hooded cobra costume looked as sunny as an eclipse. She smiled, how-ever, as she came up to her husband and Pasztor.

“This is a lovely party, Mihaly. How foolish I was not to have come to the last one, the last time Bruce came home. You have such a pretty room here to hold it in, too.”

“For wartime, Enid, we try to squeeze a little extra gaiety, and your appearance has done the trick.”

She laughed, obviously pleased, but compelled to protest.

“You’re flattering me, Mihaly, just as you always do.”

“Does your husband never flatter you?”

“Well, I don’t know…. I don’t know if Bruce — I mean—”

“You’re being silly, the pair of you,” Ainson said. “The noise in here is enough to make anyone senseless. Mihaly, I’ve had enough of all this frippery, and I’m surprised that you haven’t too, Enid. Let’s get down to business; I came here to hand the ETA’s over to you officially, and that’s what I want to do.

Can we discuss that in peace and quiet somewhere?”

Pasztor had trim eyebrows which rose towards his hair-line, descended, and then moved together in a frown.

“Are you trying to distract me from my duty to the bar-tender? Well, I suppose we can slip down to the new ETA enclosure, if you must. Your specimens should be installed by now, and the spaceport officials out of the way.”

Ainson turned to his wife, laying a hand on her arm.

“You come along too, Enid; the excitement up here isn’t good for you.”

“Nonsense, my dear, I’m enjoying myself.” She removed her arm from his grasp.

“Well really, you might show a little interest in the creatures we have brought back.”

“I’ve no doubt I shall hear about them for weeks!” She looked at the canyons of his face and said, in the same humorously resigned tone, “Very well, I’ll come along if you can’t bear to have me out of your sight. But you’ll have to go and get my wrap, because it is too cool to go outside without it.”

Not making a graceful thing of it, Ainson left them. Pasztor cocked an eyebrow at Enid, and secured them a drink apiece.

“I don’t know really whether I ought to have another, Mihaly. Wouldn’t it be terrible if I got tipsy!”

“People do, you know. Look at Mrs. Friar over there. Now I’ve got you alone, Enid, instead of flirting with you as I have a mind to do, I have to ask you about your son, Aylmer. What is he doing now?

Where is he?”

He detected her brief flush. She looked away from him as she spoke.

“Don’t please, don’t spoil the evening, Mihaly. It’s so nice to have Bruce back. I know you think he’s a terrible old monster, but he isn’t really, not underneath.”

“How is Aylmer?”

“He’s in London. Apart from that, I don’t know.”

“You are too harsh with him.”

“Please, Mihaly!”

“Bruce is too harsh with him. You know I say that as an old friend, as well as Aylmer’s godfather.”

“He did something disgraceful, and his father turned “him out of the house. They have never got on well together, as you know, and although I am terribly sorry about the boy, it is much more peaceful without having both of them to cope with.” She looked up at him to add. “And don’t go thinking I always take the line of least resistance, because I don’t. For years I had a real battle with them.”

“I never saw a face look less embattled. What did Aylmer do to bring this terrible edict down upon his head?”

“You must ask Bruce, if you’re so keen to know.”

“There was a girl involved?”

“Yes. it was over a girl. And here comes Bruce.”

When the Master Explorer had settled the wrap about his wife’s shoulders, Mihaly led them out of the hall by a side door. They walked along a carpeted corridor, down-stairs, and out into the dusk. The zoo lay quiet, though one or two London starlings moved belatedly to bed among the trees, and from its heated pool a Rungsted’s sauropod raised its neck to gaze in a dun wonder at their passage. Turning before they reached the Methane Mammal House, Pasztor led his companions to a new block constructed in the modern manner of sanded reinforced plastic blocks and strawed concrete with lead verticals. As they entered by a side door, lights came on.

Reinforced curving glass separated them from the two ETA’s. The creatures turned about as the lights came on, to watch the humans. Ainson made a half-hearted gesture of recognition towards them; it produced no perceptible reaction.

“At least they have spacious accommodation,” he said. “Does the public have to throng here all day, pressing its beastly noses to the glass?”

“The public will only be admitted to this block between 2.30 and 4 in the afternoon,” Pasztor said, “In the mornings, experts will be here studying our visitors.”

The visitors had an ample double cage, the two parts separated by a low door. At the back of one room was a wide low bed padded with a plastic foam. Troughs filled with food and water lined one of the other walls. The ETA’s stood in the centre of the floor; they had already amassed a fair amount of dirt about them.

Three lizard-like animals scuttled across the floor and flung themselves on to the massive bodies of the ETA’s, They scuttled for a fold of skin and disappeared. Ainson pointed towards them.

“You see that? Then they are still there. They look very like lizards. I believe there are four of them all together; they keep close to the extra-terrestrials. There were two of them accompanying the dying ETA we took aboard the Mariestopes. Probably they are synoecists or even symbionts. The fool of a captain heard of them from my reports and wanted them destroyed — said they might be dangerous parasites — but I stood out against him.”

“Who was that? Edgar Bargerone?” Pasztor asked. “A brave man. not brilliant; he probably still clings to the geocentric conception of the universe.”

“He wanted me to be communicating with these fellows before we touched Earth! He has no conception of the problems confronting us.”

Enid, who had been watching the captives intently, looked up and asked, “Are you going to be able to communicate with them?”

“The question is not as simple as it would appear to a layman, my dear. I’ll tell you all about it another time.”

“For God’s sake. Bruce, I’m not a child. Are you or aren’t you going to be able to communicate with them?”

The Master Explorer tucked his hands into the hip flounces of his uniform and regarded his wife. When he spoke, it was smoulderingly, as a preacher from the elevation of a pulpit.

“With a quarter of a century’s stellar exploration behind us, Enid, the nations of Earth — despite the fact that the total number of operational starships at any one time rarely exceeds a dozen — have managed to survey about three hundred roughly Earth-type planets. On those three hundred planets, Enid, they have sometimes found sentient life and sometimes not. But they have never found beings that could be regarded as having any more brain than a chimpanzee. Now we have discovered these creatures on Clementina, and we have our reasons for suspecting that they may possess an intelligence equivalent to man’s — the main circumstantial reason being that they have an — er, machine capable of travelling between planets.”

“Why make such a mystery of it, then?” Enid asked. “There are fairly simple tests devised for this situation; why not apply them? Do these creatures have a written script? Do they talk with each other?

Do they observe a code between themselves? Are they able to repeat a simple demonstration or a set of gestures? Do they respond to simple mathematical concepts? What is their attitude to-wards human artifacts — and, of course, have they artifacts of their own? How do—”

“Yes. yes, my dear, we entirely take your point: there are tests to be applied. I was not idle on the voyage home; I applied the tests.”

“Well, then, the results?”

“Conflicting. Conflicting in a way that suggests that the tests we applied were inefficient and insufficient — in a word, too steeped in anthropomorphism. And that is the point I was trying to make. Until we can define intelligence more nearly, we are not going to find it easy to begin communicating.”

“At the same time,” Pasztor supplemented, “you are going to find it hard to define intelligence until you have succeeded in communicating.”

Ainson brushed this aside with the gesture of a practical man cutting through sophisms.

“First we define intelligence. Is the little spider, argyroneta aquatica, intelligent because she can build a diving bell and thus live underwater? No. Very well, then these lumbering creatures may be no more intelligent because they can construct a spaceship. On the other hand, these creatures may be so highly intelligent, and the end-products of a civilization so ancient, that all the reasoning we conduct in our conscious minds, they conduct in their hereditary or subconscious minds leaving their conscious minds free for cogitation on matters — and indeed for forms of cogitation — beyond our understanding. If that is so, communication between our species may be for ever out of the question. Remember that one dictionary definition of intelligence is simply ‘information received’; if we receive no information from them, and they none from us, then we are entitled to say these ETA’s are unintelligent.”

“This is all very puzzling to me,” Enid said. “You make it sound so difficult now, yet in your letters you made it sound so simple. You said these creatures had come up and attempted to communicate with you in a series of grunts and whistles; you said they each possessed six excellent hands; you said they had arrived on what’s it — on Clementina, by spaceship. Surely the situation is clear. They are intelligent; not simply with the limited intelligence of an animal, but intelligent enough to have produced a civilization and a language. The only problem is to translate their noises and whistles into English.”

Ainson turned to the Director.

“You understand why it isn’t so easy, don’t you, Mihaly?”

“Well, I have read most of your reports, Bruce. I know these are mammals with respiratory systems and digestive tracts much like ours, that they have brains with a similar weight ratio to our own, that possessing hands they would approach the universe with the same basic feeling we have that matter is there to be manipulated — no, frankly, Bruce, I can see that to learn their language or to get them to learn ours may be a difficult task, but I do feel you are overestimating the hazards of the case.”

“Do you? You wait till you’ve observed these fellows for a while. You’ll feel differently. I tell you, Mihaly, I try to put myself in their place, and despite their disgusting habits I have managed to preserve sympathy towards them. But the only feeling I get — amid an ocean of frustration — is that they must, if they are intelligent at all, have a very different point of view to the universe from ours. Really, you’d imagine they were — they were—” he gestured at them, calm behind the glass — “holding themselves aloof from me.”

“We shall have to see how the linguists get on,” Pasztor said. “And Bryant Lattimore of USGN Flight Advice — he’s a very forceful man — I think you’ll like him — arrives from the States tomorrow. His views will be worth having.” It was not the remark to please Bruce Ainson. He decided he had had enough of the subject.

“It’s ten o’clock,” he said. “Time Enid and I were shuttling home; you know I keep regular hours when I’m on Earth. We’ve enjoyed the celebrations, Mihaly. We shall see you at the end of the week.”

They shook hands with returning cordiality. Provoked by one of the bursts of mischief that ensured he would never rise higher than his present sinecure, Sir Mihaly asked, “By the way, my friend, what was it Aylmer and the girl did that so conflicted with your point of view that you threw him out of your home?”

A tinge as of dusty brick mottled Bruce Ainson’s throat and jowls.

“You’d better ask him yourself; he may see fit to gratify your curiosity; I don’t see him any more,” he said stiffly. “We’ll find our own way out.

The shuttle on the district line climbed upwards through a night punctuated by the city’s orchestra of lights. It clung dizzily to its thread of rail. Enid closed her eyes and wished she had swallowed an Antivom before they boarded; she was not a good traveler.

“A tubby for your thoughts,” her husband said.

“I wasn’t thinking, Bruce.”

After a silence, Ainson said. “What were you and Mihaly talking about while I went to get your wrap?”

“I don’t remember. Trivialities. Why do you ask that?”

“How much did you see of him while I was away?”

She sighed, and the noise of the air flowing past the cab drowned the small sound she made.

“You always ask me that, Bruce, after each trip. Now stop being jealous or you’ll give me ideas; Mihaly is very sweet but he means nothing to me.”

High above outer London, the district shuttle decanted them on to the great curled lip of the Outflank Ring. Their section of the newly-built structure was crowded, so that they preserved silence as they whirled towards the non-stop lane that would take them home. But once on the monobus, their silence continued to cling. Neither felt comfortable in the other’s lack of speech, fearing unknown thought. Enid spoke first.

“Well, I’m glad success has come to you at last, Bruce. We must have a party. I’m very proud of you, you know!”

He patted her hand and smiled at her forgivingly, as one might to a child.

“There won’t be time for parties, I’m afraid. This is when the real work begins. I shall have to be round at the zoo every day, advising the research teams. They can’t very well do without me, you know.”

She stared ahead of her. She was not really disappointed; she should have expected the answer she got. And even then, instead of showing anger, she found herself trying to be friendly with him, asking one of her silly little searched-for questions.

“I suppose you are hoping very much that we can learn to talk to these creatures?”

“The government seems less excited than I had hoped. Of course I know there is this wretched war on…. Eventually there may be points emerging that prove of more importance than the language factor.”

She recognized a vagueness in his phraseology he used when there was something he was unsure of.

“What sort of points?”

He stared into the rushing night.

“The wounded ETA showed a great resistance to dying. When they dissected it on the Mariestopes, they cut it almost into chunks before it died. These things have a phenomenal resistance to pain. They don’t feel pain. They don’t… feel pain! Think of it. It’s all in the reports, buried in tables and written up technically — I’ve no patience with it any longer. But one day someone’s going to see the importance of those facts.”

Again she felt his silence fall like a stone from his lips as he looked past her through the window.

“You saw this creature being cut up?”

“Of course I did.”

She thought about all the things that men did and bore with apparent ease.

“Can you imagine it?” Ainson said. “Never to feel any pain, physical or mental….”

They were sinking down to the local traffic level. His melancholy gaze rested on the darkness that concealed their home.

“What a boon to mankind!” he exclaimed.

After the Ainsons had gone. Sir Mihaly Pasztor stood where he was, in a vacuity that occasionally merged into thought. He began to pace up and down, watched by the eyes of the two alien beings beyond the glass. Their glance finally slowed him; he came to rest on the balls of his feet, balancing, swaying gently, regarding them with folded arms, and finally addressing them.

“My dear charges, I understand the problem, and with-out having met you before, I do to a certain limited extent also understand you. Above all I understand that up until now you have only been faced with a limited type of human mind. I know spacemen, my bag-bellied friends, for I was a spaceman myself, and I know how the long dark years attract and mould an inflexible mind. You have been faced with men without the human touch, men without finer perceptions, men without the gift of empathy, men who do not readily excuse and understand because they have no knowledge of the diversity of human habits, men who because they have no insight into themselves are denied insight into others.

“In short, my dear and dung-stained charges, if you are civilized, then you need to be confronted by a properly civilized man. If you are more than animal, then it should not be too long before we understand each other. After that will be time for words to grow between us.”

One of the ETA’s deretracted his limbs, rose, and came over to the glass. Sir Mihaly Pasztor took it as an omen.

Going round to the back of the enclosure, he entered a small anteroom to the actual cage. Pressing a button, he activated the part of the floor on which he stood; it moved forward into the cage, carrying before it a low barrier, so that the Director looked rather like a prisoner entering court in a knee-high dock. The mechanism stopped. He and the ETA’s were now face to face, although a button by Pasztor’s right hand ensured that he could withdraw himself immediately, should danger threaten.

The ETA’s made thin whistles and huddled together.

Their smell, while far from being as repugnant as might have been expected, was certainly very noticeable. Mihaly wrinkled his nose.

“To our way of thought,” he said, “civilization is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.”

One of the ETA’s extended a limb and scratched itself.

“We have no civilizations on Earth that are not firmly founded on an alphabet. Even the aborigine sketches his fears and hopes on the rocks. But do you have fears and hopes?”

The limb, having scratched, retracted, leaving the palm of the hand merely as a six-pointed pattern in the flesh.

“It is impossible to imagine a creature larger than a flea without fears and hopes, or some such equivalent structure based on pain stimuli. Good feelings and bad feelings: they get us through life, they are our experiences of the external world. Yet if I understand the report on the autopsy of one of your late friends, you experience no pain. How radically that must modify your experience of the external world.”

One of the lizard creatures appeared. It scuttled along its host’s back and applied its little twinkling nose to a fold of skin. It became motionless, and all but invisible.

“And indeed, what is the external world? Since we can only know it through our senses, we can never know it undiluted; we can only know it as external-world-plus-senses. What is a street? To a small boy, a whole world of mystery. To a military strategist, a series of strong points and exposed positions: to a lover, his beloved’s dwelling place; to a prostitute, her place of business; to an urban historian, a series of watermarks in time; to an architect, a treaty drawn between art and necessity; to a painter, an adventure in perspective and tone; to a traveler, the location of drink and a warm bed; to the oldest inhabitant, a monument to his past follies, hopes, and hearts; to the motorist — “How then do our external worlds, yours and mine, my enigmatic kind, clash or chine? Are we not going to find that somewhat difficult to discover until we have succeeded in speaking to each other beyond a list of nouns and needs? Or do you, with our Master Explorer, prefer the proposition reversed: do we have to grasp the nature of at least your external environment before we can parley?

“And have I not suddenly deviated into sense, sows? For might it not be that you two forlorn creatures are merely hostages to the larger question. Perhaps we shall never communicate with either of the pair of you. But you are a sign that somewhere — perhaps not too many light years from Clementina — is a planet full of your kind. If we went there, if we caught you in your natural haunts, then we would understand so much more about you, would see far more precisely what we should be trying to parley about. We not only need linguists here; we need a couple of starships searching the worlds near Clementina. I must make the point to Lattimore.”

The ETA’s did nothing.

“I warn you, man is a very persistent creature. If the external world won’t come to him, he will go to the external world. If you have vocabularies to shed, prepare to shed them now.”

Their eyes had closed.

“Have you lapsed into unconsciousness or prayer? The latter would be wiser, now that you are in the hands of man.”

Philosophizing was not all that went on that first night that Mariestopes rested her terrigenous bulk on Earth; there was also house-breaking.

Not that Rodney Walthamstone could help it, as his defense explained when the case came up. It was a compulsion of a not unusual sort in these modern days, when every other month saw the return of ships which had probed into the very depths of the cosmos. Ordinary mortals sailed on those terrible — and he used the word without intending hyperbole — those terrible voyages; mortals, m’lud, like Rodney Walthamstone, upon whom space could not but have an overwhelming effect. This was well known, and had been designated Bestar’s Syndrome ten years ago (named after the celebrated psychodynamician, m’lud).

Out in the cosmos, all the fundamental symbols and furnishings of man’s minds were lacking, brutally lacking. One did not have to agree with the French philosopher Deutch that cosmos and mind were the two opposed poles of the magnet of entirety to realize that space travel imposed a great strain on any man, and that he might return to Earth with a hunger for normality that could not be satisfied through legal channels. Granted that be so. then it was this law and not the mind of man that should be altered; man had gone out into the infinite starry depths: it was up to the law to make itself somewhat less earthbound (laughter).

What symbol had more powerful hold over man’s mind than a house, that symbol of home, of shelter from the hostile world, of civilization itself? So in this case of housebreaking, unfortunate though it was that the house owner had been coshed, the court should see that the not unheroic accused had merely been searching for a symbol. Of course, he admitted freely to having been slightly under the influence of drink at the same time, but Bestar’s Syndrome allowed — The judge, allowing that the defense had a point, said he was nevertheless tired of space ratings who came back to Earth and treated England as if it were a bit of the undeveloped cosmos. Thirty days behind bars might convince the prisoner that there was a considerable difference between the two.

The court adjourned for lunch, and a Miss Florence Walthamstone was led weeping from the court into the nearest public house.

“Hank, honey, you aren’t really going to join the Space Corps, are you? You aren’t going off into space again, are you?”

“I told you. honey, just on a Flight-by-Flight arrangement, like I had in the Exploration Corps.”

“I’ll never understand you men, not if I live to be a thousand. What’s out there, that attracts you? What do you get out of it?”

“Hell, it’s a way of earning your living. Better than an office job, isn’t it? I’m a brainy guy, honey, you don’t seem to realize, passed all my exams, but there’s so much competition here in America.”

“But what do you get out of it, that’s what I want to know.”

“I told you, I may wind up captain. Now how about let-ting the subject rest for a bit, hey?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You didn’t? Well, who do you think did, then? Some-times I think you and me just don’t talk the same language.”

“Darling. Darling! Darling, don’t you think it’s time we got up now?”

“Mmm?”

“It’s ten o’clock, darling.”

“Mmm, Early yet.”

“I’m hungry.”

“I was dreaming about you, Gussie.”

“We were going to get the eleven o’clock ferry across to Hong Kong, remember? You were going to sketch today, remember?”

“Mmm. Kiss me again, darling.”

“Mmm. Darling.”