Earthworks

Brian Aldiss

While life reached evilly through empty faces

While space flowed slowly o’er idle bodies

And stars flowed evilly upon vast men

No passion smiled...

RCA 301 COMPUTER

Chapter One

The dead man drifted along in the breeze. He walked upright on his hind legs like a performing nanny goat, as he had in life, nothing improper, farther beyond the reach of ideology, nationality, hardship, inspiration, than he had ever been in life. A few flies of ripe dimension stayed with him, although he was far from land, travelling light above the surface of the complacent South Atlantic. The tasselled fringe of his white sylk trousers — he had been a rich man, while riches counted — occasionally catching a spray from the waves.

He was coming out from Africa, moving steadily for me.

With the dead I’m on fair terms. Though there is no room for them in the ground any more, as was the old custom, in my head I hold several of them — in my memory, I mean. Mercator is there, and old Thunderpeck, and Jess, who lives on outside my skull as a brave legend, and of course my beloved March Jordill. In this book I’ll rebury them.

On the day of this new dead man, things were ill with me. My ship, the
Trieste Star
, was approaching our destination on Africa’s Skeleton Coast but, as it happened on the last days of those long voyages, the few human crew had shaken into a sort of jelly of relationships, and we were busy suffocating each other, in love and nerves, in sickness and familiarity, Oh, it’s an age ago, and like thinking myself into a coal cellar to go back and describe it how. I suffered from my hallucinations in those days.

My eyes throbbed, my vision was cloudy, my mouth was dry, my tongue was coated. I felt no sympathy when the doctor told me that Alan Bator was confined to his bunk with his allergy.

“I’m so damn tired of that mans allergy, doc,” I said, resting my head between my hands. “Why don’t you just load him up with anti-histamine and send him back to work?”

“I’ve loaded him up, but it makes no difference. Come and look at him. He’s just not fit to be about.”

“Why do these invalids ever go to sea? You say it’s the salinity of the ocean he may be allergic to?”

Doctor Thunderpeck spread his hands. “That was my old theory; now I am contemplating something different. I am beginning seriously to think that he may be allergic to antihistamines.”

Slowly and heavily, I rose. I would listen no more. The doctor is a strange and fascinating man to look at; he is a small stocky square man; big though his face is, there hardly seems room on it for all his features. Eyebrows, ears, eyes with attendant bags, mouth, nose — perhaps especially that mighty blob of nose — are all of the largest size; and what small facial area is not taken up by these features is covered by an ancient acne like a half-obliterated sculpture on a temple. All the same, I’d seen enough of him at this point to last the whole voyage. Giving him a curt nod, I went below.

Since it was the time for the morning inspection and Thunderpeck never took offence, he tailed along behind me.

His footsteps phased in and out with mine as I took the companion-way stairs down to the lowest deck, to the holds. On each deck, lights blinked on and off at the supervisory switchboard; I would check with the robot deck chief before moving on. Old Thunderpeck would follow behind me, docile as a dog.

“They could have built these ships without noise,” he said, in an abstracted way suggesting he expected no answer. “Only the designers thought that the silence might prove unpleasant for the crew.”

He got no answer.

We walked between the big holds. The all-clear signal on number three was slow in coming up; I marked down the fact on my scratch pad for attention, and looked in to see that everything was all right.

Number three hold was empty. I always liked the look of an empty hold. All that spare space made me feel good; Thunderpeck was just the other way inclined; it made him, in fact, extremely sick. But I had been conditioned to a bit of space. Doc, before he took this simple job on the
Trieste Star
because he was too old for the hurly-burly of the city, had known only city life. With my long spell of penal servitude on the land, I had grown accustomed to the idea of man-made space. Not that I ever grew nostalgic for the misery of those poison-filled fields: the hold was what I liked, of manageable size, and fairly clean, and under my jurisdiction.

I took care to look round all the hold; I met the Figure down there once, and the pulses still race at the thought of it; you find a pleasure in ignoring the stammer of your pulse, especially on the days when you are feeling not too ill.

“Come out when you’re ready,” Thunderpeck said from the gangway. He suffers from agoraphobia; that’s one of the diseases among many that you are liable to pick up in the terribly crowded cities. The tale went — I never checked on how true it was because I liked the tale so much — that he had once found himself in the middle of an empty hold like number three and had heeled over in a swoon.

As we started down the gangway again, I said: “It’s a dirty shame, Doc, all these holds empty, the whole ship obsolescent — beautiful ship, not worth a penny.” That was my line; he came back with his.

“That’s progress for you, Knowle.”

Already this account is getting out of hand. Let’s start again. The imprisonment words bring! They get all through you, you live in them and out of them, and they make rings round the universe. I suppose they were invented to be a help. All I can say, I was freer when I was imprisoned on the land. The nip of winter. The heaviness of bed those dark nights, with everything you owned on or round you. The stink of the tractor smoke, almost unseen in the blue dawn compound. It’s not the words that don’t click with the things, it’s more that when you write them down they become a different sort of reality of their own. But who am I to say?

This I’ll say. In this thundering year, I must be the only one in this part of the world who is attempting to write down any account of anything.

Now I see why things like writing and civilization, I mean chiefly culture and the limits it imposes, were given up; they were too difficult.

My name is Knowle Noland; at the time I am trying to look back to and write about, I was young, sick, womanless, and captain, as they called it, of the 80,000-ton freighter
Trieste Star,
jewel of the Star Line. At the time I write — my now, though who knows who, where or when
you
may be — I am Noland still, lean of cheek, stiff as a board in the mornings, but reasonably clear of mind, with a loving woman, without kin, proud, diffident — both those I was on the
Trieste Star,
but now there’s reasons for them, and I know the reasons. Much I know, and may it help me through this history.

(Sometimes the old books have this sort of editorial aside.)

So Thunderpeck and I were parading through the ship on the day of the dead man, as we did every day, and perhaps I do not have to be too particular in remembering what we said. Mostly, we said the same thing.

“That’s progress for you, Knowle,” he said. He often said that, I know, for he disliked progress, and anything else he disliked he ascribed to progress. At first, when I had not realized how thorough was his aversion, I thought how penetrating of him this was; but by this stage of the voyage I had got to think of him as a fool. I mean, when you analyse the idea of progress, it is only what men do generation after generation; and how can you blame on progress what is man, or blame man if you are one yourself? Which isn’t to say that I did not value the doctor’s company.

“That’s progress for you, Knowle,” he said.

You have to say something, make the effort of appearing human, when you are working your way through the entrails of a massive automated ship that can and does stay at sea for two years without needing refuel or refit. We had been nineteen months at sea, calling in at most ports only for a day, begging for cargo.

In the picturesque old days, ports had not been so efficient as they were now. There had been all sorts of regulations, and human dock labour with all their strange cult-like trades unions and the rest of it, and refuelling and all the rest of the paraphernalia that’s gone; and then you could spend up to a week in a port, going ashore and getting drunk and the other things that sailors did. I know about these things; unlike Doc and the others, I can read. Now: nuclear freighters are island universes, moving on their predestined courses, and the few men needed aboard them come to have minds that run in little worn grooves like machines. No wonder I had migraine coming on.

We took in the engine-room, and on the way up again I looked in at crew’s quarters in the fo’c’sle. Sure enough, there was Alan Bator, lying on his bunk and staring moodily at the canvas on the bunk above him. We nodded to each other. Alan looked puffy and ruined; I felt like congratulating him on a good performance. And like screaming. Sometimes I get nerve flutter, though I am not one of these sensitive people.

I left the doctor to minister to Alan and climbed on to the poop. On the way up, the world took on a rich dark brown colour, shot with fancy lights in colours that have no name: colours found in old Celtic manuscripts, or embedded in caves. There are aesthetic consolations in being sick; how many times have I thought of the words of our greatest contemporary thinker, computer-programmer Epkre: “Illness is our century’s contribution to the good things of civilization.”

In the poop I thought for one dreadful second I saw that Figure. Then the shapes resolved themselves into the partly dismantled framework of the autonavigator. Patiently following its working circuit by circuit was one of the robot repairmen. Sitting supervising him was Abdul Demone, a cartoon scanner fixed over his eyes. He flipped it up and nodded to me.

“Morning, Captain.”

A civil, silent little man, Abdul. He was a spastic, and never put his bad foot down off the stool as he spoke to me.

“Can you fix it?” I asked.

“The autonav should be working in a couple of hours.”

“It better be. We reach the coast by afternoon.”

Again my nerves throbbed and fluttered. On a ship, more strain is placed on a man than in the cities. In the cities everything is arranged so that you can spend your whole life without thought; which is a fine arrangement, for a sick man hardly wants to be troubled with responsibilities. Many a time on shipboard I’ve longed to cut off the autocaptain and drive the ship on to the rocks, destroy it, destroy everything!

On deck, a cool breeze blew. I looked over the neat but cluttered yards of deck; almost uninhabited the deck looked, and naked under the tropical sun. Di Skumpsby was fighting with someone at the rail.

I gave a convulsive start. There was nobody for him to fight with. Apart from the doctor, my human crew numbered only three — Di, Alan, and Abdul. And I knew the others were below. Again the thought of the Figure crossed my mind; I wondered if I were not undergoing one of my hallucinations. Then I mastered my emotions and went forward to help him.

Di was not fighting, He was trying to pull the other person over the rail. As I got nearer, I saw the face of the stranger. It was black and baggy and its mouth gaped horribly,

“Give me a hand, Cap, the fellow s dead,” Di called.