The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER SEVEN

The sun, as its inalienable custom was, went to bed at sun-set. At the same time, Sir Mihaly Pasztor put on a dinner jacket and went to meet the guests he had invited to dine at his flat. This was a month after the dismal meeting at the zoo when Bruce Ainson had received the intellectual equivalent of a flea in his ear.

Since then, the situation could not be said to have unproved. Dr. Bodley Temple had accumulated an impressive hoard of alien phonemes, none of which had a certain English equivalent. Lattimore had amplified in print the views he had expressed at the meeting. Gerald Bone — traitorously, thought Pasztor — had done a malicious little skit on the meeting for Punch.

These were but pin-pricks. The fact was, there was no progress being made. There was no progress being made chiefly because the aliens, imprisoned in their hygienic cell, showed no interest in the humans, nor any wish to co-operate in any of the stunts the humans devised. This disobliging attitude had its effect on the research team trying to deal with them; their increasing moroseness became increasingly punctuated with bouts of self-pitying oration, as if, like a Communist millionaire, they felt impelled to explain a position of some delicacy.

The general public, too, reacted adversely to the alien cold shoulder. The intelligent man in the street could have appreciated an intelligent alien, no matter what his shape, as a new distraction to compete with the world series, the grim news from Charon, where Brazil seemed to be winning the war, or the leaping taxes that were a natural concomitant to both war and TP travel. Gradually the queues that stood all day to see the aliens in the afternoon dwindled away (after all, they didn’t move about much, and they looked not so very different from terrestrial hippos, and you weren’t allowed to throw nuts at them in case it turned out they really lived in skyscrapers back home) and went back to their old routine of watching instead the Pinfold III primaritals, which indulged in a form of group intercourse every hour on the hour.

Pasztor was, as it happened, thinking of intercourse as he ushered his guest, Mrs. Hilary Warhoon, into his modest dining-closet; or if not thinking of it, reviewing with a whimsical smile at his own weaknesses the fantasies with which he had indulged himself half an hour before Mrs. Warhoon’s arrival.

But no, she was not quite enchanting enough, and Mr. Warhoon by repute was too powerful and spiteful, and anyhow Sir Mihaly no longer had the zest necessary to carry off one of those illicit affairs — even though “illicit” was one of the more alluring words in the English language.

She sat down at the table and sighed.

“It’s wonderful to relax. I’ve had a vile day.”

“Busy?”

“I’ve made work. But I’ve accomplished nothing. And I’m oppressed by a sense of failure.”

“You, Hilary? You are far from being a failure.”

“I was thinking of it less in a personal than in a general or racial sense. Do you want me to elaborate?

I’d like to elaborate.”

He held up his hands in playful protest.

“My idea of civilized intercourse is not to repress but to bring forth, to elaborate. I have never been other than interested in what you have to say.”

There were three globular table ovens standing on the table. As she began to speak, he opened the refrigerated drawers on his right and began to put their contents into the ovens to cook: Fera de Travers, the salmon of Lake Geneva, to begin with, to be followed by eland steaks flown that morning from the farms of Kenya with, to add a touch of the exotic, fingertips, the Venusian asparagus.

“When I say I’m oppressed by a general failure,” Mrs. Warhoon said, attacking a dry sherry, “I’m fully aware that it sounds rather pretentious. ‘Who am I among so many?’, as Shaw once said in a different context. It’s the old problems of definitions, with which the aliens have confronted us in dramatic new guise. Perhaps we cannot converse with them until we have decided for ourselves what constitutes civilization. Don’t raise that suave eye-brow at me. Mihaly; I know civilization does not consist of lying indolent in one’s own droppings — though it’s possible that if we had a guru here he would tell us it did.

“When you take any one quality by which we measure civilization, you will find it missing from various cultures. Take the whole question of crime. For over a century, we have recognized crime as a symptom of sickness or unhappiness. Once we recognized that in practice as well as theory, crime statistics dropped dramatically for the first time. But in many periods of high civilization, life imprisonment was customary, heads fell like petals. Certainly kindness or understanding or mercy are not signs of civilization, any more than war and murder are signs of the lack of it.

“As for the arts that we rightly cherish, they were all practiced by prehistoric man.”

“This argument is familiar to me from my under-graduate days.” Sir Mihaly said, as he served the salmon. “Yet still we cook our food and eat according to rules with carefully wrought utensils.” He poured some wine. “Still we choose our vintages and exercise our judgments and our prejudices over that choice.” He offered her a basket full of warm crisp rolls. “Still we sit together, male and female, and merely converse.”

“Tin not denying. Mihaly, that you keep a good table, or that you have failed as yet to throw me on the floor. But this meal — and I cast no aspersions — is now an anachronism, and strongly disapproved of by a government pushing the new poison-free man-made foods and drinks. Besides, this lovely meal is the end product of a number of factors that have only a nodding acquaintance with true civility. I mean the fishers crouching in their boats, the farmers sweating through their gracing land, the barb in the mouth, the shot in the head, the chains of middlemen less tolerable than farmers or fishers, the organizations that prepare or can or pack, the transport firms, the financiers — Mihaly, you’re laughing at me!”

“Ah, you’re talking of all this organization with such disapproval. I approve. Vive l’organisation! And let me remind you that the new synthetic food plants are triumphs of organization. Last century, as you say, they didn’t approve of prisons, but they had them, nevertheless; this century we have become organized, and we don’t have prisons. Last century, indeed, they didn’t approve of war. yet they had three bouncing big ones, in 1914, in 1939, and in 1969; this century we have become organized, and we hold our wars on .Charon, the farthest planet, out of harm’s way. If that’s not civilization, I accept it readily as a substitute.”

“So we all do. But it may only be a substitute, man’s substitute. Notice that whatever we do, it is at someone else’s or something else’s expense.”

“I gratefully accept their sacrifice. How will you have your steak, Hilary?”

“Oh, overdone, please. I can’t quite bear the thought of it being real blood and animal tissue. All I’m trying to say is that our civilization may be built not on our best, but on our worst: on fear — other people’s if not our own — or on greed. Can I pour you some more wine? And per-haps another species may have another idea of civilization, built on a sympathy for, an empathy with, all other living things. Perhaps these aliens—”

He pressed the spin stud in the oven pedestal. The porcelain and glass hemisphere slid into the bronze hemisphere. He retrieved the steaks. The aliens again! Ah, but Mrs. Warhoon was off form tonight! The platemaker coughed out two warm plates, and he served her moodily, without taking in what she was saying. Enlightened self-interest, he thought; that was the most you could or should expect from anyone; once you met an altruist, you had to beware a sick man or a scoundrel. Perhaps people like Mrs.

Warhoon, who wouldn’t face the fact, were sick too, and ought to be encouraged to enter mental therapy homes, like criminals and hot gospellers. Once you started questioning fundamentals, like a man’s right to eat good red meat if he could afford it, then you were in trouble, even if you cared to think of that trouble as enlightenment.

“By the standards of another species,” Mrs. Warhoon was saying, “our culture might merely seem like a sickness. It may be that sickness which prevents us from seeing how we ought to communicate with the aliens, rather than any shortcoming of theirs.”

“It’s an interesting theory, Hilary. You may have a chance to turn it into practice on a large scale shortly.”

“Oh, indeed? You don’t mean that some other ship has found more aliens at large in the universe, do you?”

“Nothing quite so fortunate as that. I received a long letter from Lattimore yesterday morning, which was partly why I invited you here this evening. The Americans, as you know, are very interested in our ETA’s. We have had a constant stream of them to the Exozoo over the last month. They are convinced, and I am sure Lattimore has convinced them, that things are not being run as efficiently as they might be.

Lattimore wrote to say that their new stellar exploration ship, Gansas, has been re-routed, though the re-routing is not official yet. Its investigation of the Crab Nebula is postponed. Instead, it will be heading for Clementina, to search for the home planet of the ETA’s.”

Mrs. Warhoon put her knife and fork together, raised her eyebrows, and said, “ What?”

“Lattimore will be on the flight in an advisory capacity. His meeting with you much impressed him and he earnestly hopes that you will come along on the flight as chief cosmoclectic. He asked me to put in a good word for him before he gets in touch with you direct.”

Mrs. Warhoon let her shoulders sag and leaned forward between the Scandinavian candelabras. “

Goodness,” she said. Her cheeks became red; in the candlelight she looked thirty again.

“He says you will not be the only woman on the flight. He also gives a rough indication of the salary, which will be fabulous. You ought to go. Hilary. It’s a splendid opportunity.”

She put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead on her hand. He thought it a theatrical gesture, even while seeing that she was genuinely moved and excited. His earlier fantasies returned to him.

“Space! You know I’ve been no farther abroad than Venus. You know it would wreck my marriage, Mihaly. Alfred would never forgive me.”

“I’m sorry. I understood your marriage was a marriage in name only.”

Her eyes rested blankly on a framed infra red photo-graph of Conquest Canyon. Pluto. She drained her wine-glass.

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t — or possibly will not — save it. To leave in the Gansas would make a clean break with the past. Thank goodness that in that sphere at least we are more civilized than our grandparents, and have no involved divorce laws. Should I go on the Gansas, Mihaly? I should, shouldn’t I? You know there are few men I would as readily take advice from as you.”

The curve of her wrist, the uncertain glimmer of candle-light in her hair, had helped him to make up his mind. He rose, went round the table, and placed his hands on her bare shoulders.

“You owe it to yourself, Hilary. You know it is not only a golden professional opportunity; these days, we are not adult humans until we have faced ourselves in deep space.”

“Nuh ah, Mihaly, I know your reputation, and on the techni you promised you would take me to the new play.

Oughtn’t we to be on our way?” She turned in her chair, away from him, so that he was forced to retreat. With as good a grace as he could muster, he suggested that they might walk, as the theatre was only just round the corner and it was impossible, in this war year, to catch taxis after dark.

“I’ll go and put a new face on and prepare myself for the street,” she said, retreating into the little toileteer that most expensive flats boasted these days. Secure behind the locked door, she surveyed her face in a mirror. She saw, not without satisfaction, that a slight flush spread over her cheeks. It was not the first time that Mihaly had tried something of this sort; she was not going to yield while it was well known that he had an Oriental mistress; because she was away on holiday at present was no reason to accept the post of substitute.

Men led enviable lives. They could pursue whims more easily than women. But here she had a chance to pursue something stronger than a whim: the desire to see distant planets. That that fascinating man Lattimore, Bryant Lattimore, would be on the Gansas too was an incidental, but one that made the prospect more exciting.

Daintily, she raised first her left arm, then her right, and sniffed. Okay there, but she gave it a burst of deodorant for luck.

Those little armpit glands were the only ones in the human body designed to produce smell, although a number of other glands and juices and secretions emitted it incidentally. The Japanese and some of the Chinese did not have that special gland; or if they did it was considered a pathological condition.

Strange; she must ask Mihaly about it — he should know; his mistress was reputed to be Japanese or Chinese.

As she let her thoughts ramble and applied powder, she watched the flush fade from her cheeks.

Perhaps it had been caused not by emotion but by the meat-of-animal she ad consumed. She inspected the little white teeth arranged behind her red lips, liking the savagery of her smile.

“Grr, you little carnivore!” she whispered. She treated herself to a suspicion of perfume, an exclusive perfume that contained ambergris which (she hastily censored the image) is the undigested remnant of squid and octopus found in the intestines of the spermaceti whale. She touched up her hair, clipped on her street mask, and whisked superbly out to greet Pasztor.

He had already clipped his mask on. Together, they went down into the street.

War had not improved the city. Whereas other cities in other nations had long ago banished — or at least brought in legislation to deal with — various metropolitan abuses, London suffered under a multiplication of them.

Ash and rubbish bins stood all along the pavement, while the gutters were full of litter. The shortage of unskilled labor was crippling the city. This shortage had caused some streets to be closed to traffic, for their surfaces had become impassable, and there was nobody to repair them. Many people saw little to regret in this, for to pedestrians any relief from the heaving hooting traffic was welcome. As Mihaly walked along with Mrs. War-boon, he sardonically said thanks for such gifts to civilization as their street masks, which alone guaranteed that they did not fall swooning from the waste gases pouring out of the cars snorting at their elbows.

Gigantic hoardings, covering a site where an office block had burnt down before a fire engine could crawl four blocks to save it. announced that Holidays At Home were Fun, as well as being in the national interest; that Death could be turned to Financial Account by bequeathing one’s body to Burgess’s Body Chemicals; and that Gonorrhea was Out of Control, with a graph to prove it, by courtesy of the World Gonorrhea Year. There was also a smaller poster issued by minigag, the Ministry of Gastronomy and Agriculture, proclaiming that animal foods caused premature ageing and that man-made foods contained no toxics; the point was rammed deftly home by two pictures, one of an old man having a heart attack, one of a young girl having a synthash.

Mercifully, most of this townscape was wrapped in a decent obscurity, since power cuts imposed semi-blackouts on the capital’s gaiety every night.

“Walking here, I can hardly think of walking on a different planet,” Mrs. Warhoon said.

“You certainly don’t get much sight of the universe here,” Pasztor said, speaking above the snarl of engines.

“In another two or three centuries, mankind will have a different outlook on life and the rules by which he lives. He will have digested the universe into his art, architecture, customs, everything. As yet we’re adolescents. The city’s our savage playground.” She gestured at a shop window exhibiting one enormous motor bike, shaped like a system-ship and glittering like El Dorado. “It’s a place where we undergo perpetual initiation rites, ordeals by fire, crowds, and gas. We aren’t mature enough to deal with your ETA’s.”

With a shock. Mihaly thought, “My God, she’s tight! We drank real wine and she’s probably used to synthwine….” She went on talking, even when he clutched her arm so that she would not trip over the old newspapers blowing about their feet “We started wrongly with those creatures, Mihaly, by making them adhere to our rules instead of studying theirs. Perhaps the Gansas will find more of them and we will have another chance to make contact, on their terms.”

“As yet we don’t know what their terms are. Should we respect their inclination to live in their own waste pro-ducts? We could let them accumulate this — er, matter, as they seem disposed to do. You know I suggested that. But it is — well, it’s malodorous, and poor old Bodley and his staff have to work in there with them….”

He was glad to get her to the theatre.

The play was a jolly send-up of the Cold War era. a non-musical version of West Side Story, played in quaint pre-World War III costume. Both Pasztor and Mrs. War-boon enjoyed it; but her mind kept drifting back to the prospect of making vacuum with the Gansas, so that in the interval Pasztor threw himself into the free-for-all struggle round the theatre bar rather than let her start another discussion. As they came out of the theatre at the end of the play, she insisted she must go home, and he competed with evening dresses and uniforms to cram into one of the sinkers that rose to connect with the district shuttle. It had rained during their incarceration, clearing the city air somewhat Drops of oily water splashed on them from the overhead rail; still Mrs. Warhoon stuck bravely to her subject “Do you remember Wittgenbacher’s saying that our intelligence might merely be an instinct for space?”

“I have thought about it,” he said, elbowing forward.

“Do you think I’ll be following my instinct if I join the Gansas?”

He looked at her, tall and still fairly slender, her eyes attractive over her mask.

“What’s wrong with you this evening. Hilary? What do you want me to say to you?”

“You could tell me for instance whether I am going into deep space to integrate myself — to become matured away from my womb world and all that sort of thing — or whether I am doing it to flee from an unsatisfactory marriage I would be better employed mending.”

A man in astrogator’s uniform wedged behind her looked at her in sudden interest as he caught part of this remark.

“I don’t know you well enough to answer that,” Mihaly said.

“Nobody does.” She spoke the words dismissively, smiling, for he had finally got her to the doors of the sinker. She touched his fingers and passed in. Pasztor had to fight not to be carried in as well.

The doors closed, the pellet was sucked up its tube. He watched its lights rise up to the level of the monobus rail. A globule of water splashed into his left eye. He turned and made his way home through emptying streets.

Back in his flat over the Exozoo, he walked about aimlessly, thinking. Clearing the remains of their meal away, he swept cutlery and dishes from the dining-table into the disposer, watching soft flame rise as they disintegrated. Then he resumed his pacing.

Hilary had a grain of truth among her chaff, though earlier in the evening he had mentally labeled it sickness. Wasn’t truth a sickness man spent a lifetime seeking, just as a dog seeks the coarse grass that makes it vomit? What was that epigram that he had trotted forth too often, about civilization being the distance man placed between himself and his excreta? But it was nearer the truth to say that civilization was the distance man had placed between him-self and everything else, for cradled deep in the concept of culture was the need for privacy. Once away from the hurly-burly of camp fires, man invented rooms, barriers, behind which he developed his most characteristic practices. Meditation arose from mere abstraction, the individual arts arose from folk crafts, love arose from sex. the concept of the individual arose from the tribe.

But were the barriers valuable when one faced another culture? And again, mightn’t one of the difficulties with coming to grips with ETA’s be that you hardly realized how strong a hold the mores of your own culture had on you?

It was, Pasztor thought, what might be called a Good Question, and damn it, he would act on it now.

He took the lift down to the ground floor. The Exozoo was dark about him; only the simultaneously shrill and deep chuckle of a stone-cracker in the High-G House sent a shiver through the darkness. Man, shut in his culture, so anxious to imprison other animals with him….

The two ETA’s were seemingly asleep as he entered and the pallid lights came on. One of the lizard creatures took a flying leap back into the arm socket of its protector, but the big bulk did not stir.

Pasztor moved through the side door and so came into the back of the cage. He unlocked the low barrier and walked up to the ETA’s. They opened their eyes with what looked like infinite weariness.

“Don’t worry, fellows. I’m sorry to trouble you, but a certain lady who has your interests at heart has given me. all unwittingly, a new line of approach. Look, fellows. I’m trying to be friendly, see. I do want to reach across, if it can be done.”

Removing his trousers, squatting close to them, speaking gently, the director of the Exozoo defecated on to the plastic floor.