The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (55 page)

“You could have the job yourself,” Jonathon said.

“But I don’t want it. How do you know all this? About Kelly and so on?”

“I listen to the stars,” Jonathon said in its high warbling voice.

“They are alive, aren’t they?” Reynolds said suddenly.

“Of course. We are permitted to see them for what they are. You do not. But you are young.”

“They are balls of ionized gas. Thermonuclear reactions.”

The alien moved, shifting its neck as though a joint lay in the middle of it. Reynolds did not understand the gesture. Nor would he ever. Time had run out at last.

Jonathon said, “When they come to you, they assume a disguise you can see. That is how they spend their time in this universe. Think of them as doorways.”

“Through which I cannot pass.”

“Yes.”

Reynolds smiled, nodded and passed into the lock. It contracted behind him, engulfing the image of his friend. A few moments of drifting silence, then the other end of the lock furled open.

The pilot was a stranger. Ignoring the man, Reynolds dressed, strapped himself down and thought about Jonathon. What was it that it had said? I listen to the stars. Yes, and the stars had told
it that Kelly had been fired?

He did not like that part. But the part he liked even less was this: when it said it, Jonathon had not blinked.

(1) It had been telling the truth. (2) It could lie without flicking a lash.

Choose one.

Reynolds did, and the tug fell toward the moon.

George Turner (1916– ) is the most influential Australian SF writer and critic. From the 1960s onward he was a leading contemporary Australian novelist
who also wrote SF criticism. It wasn’t until the mid 1970s that he turned to writing science fiction. His first SF novel,
Beloved Son
(1978), published when he was in his early
sixties, was recognized as an important debut, and he has gone on to write a number of first-rate SF novels, including
The Sea and Summer
(1987, published as
Drowning Towers
in the
U.S.), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Beloved Son
involves interstellar travel, a post-holocaust civilization in the 21st century, and genetic engineering – this last has
remained one of the principal concerns of his fiction, in recent works such as
Brain Child
(1991),
The Destiny Makers
(1993), and
Genetic Soldier
(1994).

Turner’s literary execution is contoured by deeply held moral convictions and his life as a contemporary novelist. “I prefer to maintain a low key in my own
work,” says Turner. “To this end I have concentrated on simple, staple SF ideas, mostly those which have become conventions in the genre, injected without background or discussion into
stories on the understanding that readers know all they need to know about such things. My SF method remains the same as for my mainstream novels – set characters in motion in speculative
situations and let them work out their destinies with a minimum of auctorial interference.”

His future societies have a satisfying complexity, portraying class conflict and economic disparities in a gritty, realistic fashion absent from most American science fiction.
While American science fiction generally sees space as simply the new frontier, Turner, the Australian, envisions it as an alien place with a strange and different culture, one with its own moral
imperatives and structures – as he envisions the future on Earth as operating under other moral structures different from ours today.

He has written comparatively few short SF stories, less than a dozen to date. This one is about the conflict of values between cultures in the future, and has intriguing
resonances with James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Beam Us Home.”

1

The complement of
Starfarer
had no idea, when they started out, of how long they might be gone. They searched the sky, the three hundred of them, men and women, black and
brown and white and yellow, and in thirty years landed on forty planets whose life-support parameters appeared – from distant observation – close to those of Earth.

Man, they discovered, might fit his own terrestrial niche perfectly, but those parameters for his existence were tight and inelastic. There were planets where they could have dwelt in sealed
environments, venturing out only in special suits, even one planet where they could have existed comfortably through half its year but been burned and suffocated in the other half. They found not
one where they could establish a colony of mankind.

In thirty years they achieved nothing but an expectable increase in their numbers and this was a factor in their decision to return home. The ship was becoming crowded and, in the way of crowded
tenements, something of a slum.

So they headed for Earth; and, at the end of the thirty-first year, took up a precessing north-south orbit allowing them a leisurely overview, day by day, of the entire planet.

This was wise. They had spent thirty years in space, travelling between solar systems at relativistic speeds, and reckoned that about six hundred local years had passed since they set out. They
did not know what manner of world they might find.

They found, with their instruments, that the greenhouse effect had subsided slowly during the centuries, aided by the first wisps of galactic cloud heralding the new ice age, but that the world
was still warmer than the interregnal norm. The ozone layer seemed to have healed itself, but the desert areas were still formidably large although the spread of new pasture and forest was
heartening.

What they did not see from orbit was the lights of cities by night and this did not greatly surprise them. The world they had left in a desperate search for new habitat, had been an ant heap of
ungovernable, unsupportable billions whose numbers were destined to shrink drastically if any were to survive at all. The absence of lights suggested that the population problem had solved itself
in grim fashion.

They dropped the ship into a lower orbit just outside the atmosphere and brought in the spy cameras.

There were people down there, all kinds of people. The northern hemisphere was home to nomadic tribes, in numbers like migratory nations; the northern temperate zone had become a corn belt,
heavily farmed and guarded by soldiers in dispersed forts, with a few towns and many villages; the equatorial jungles were, no doubt, home to hunter-gatherers but their traces were difficult to
see; there were signs of urban communities, probably trading centres, around the seacoasts but no evidence of transport networks or lighting by night and no sounds of electronic transmission.
Civilisation had regressed, not unexpectedly.

They chose to inspect Australia first because it was separated from the larger landmasses and because the cameras showed small farming communities and a few townlets. It was decided to send down
a Contact Officer to inspect and report back.

The ship could not land. It had been built in space and could live only in space; planetary gravity would have warped its huge but light-bodied structure beyond repair. Exploratory smallcraft
could have been despatched, but it was reasoned that a crew of obviously powerful supermen might create an untrusting reserve among the inhabitants, even an unhealthy regard for gods or demons from
the sky. A single person, powerfully but unobtrusively armed, would be a suitable ambassador.

They sent a woman, Nugan Johnson, not because she happened to be Australian but because she was a Contact Officer, and it was her rostered turn for duty.

They chose a point in the south of the continent because it was autumn in the hemisphere, and an average daily temperature of twenty-six C would be bearable, and dropped her by tractor beam on
the edge of a banana grove owned by Mrs Flighty Jones, who screamed and fled.

Flighty
, in the English of her day, meant something like
scatterbrained
. Her name was, in fact, Hallo-Mary (a rough – very rough – descendant of Ave
Maria), but she was a creature of fits and starts, so much so that the men at the bottling shed made some fun of her before they were convinced that she had seen
something
, and called the
Little Mother of the Bottles.

“There was I, counting banana bunches for squeeging into baby pap, when it goes hissss-bump behind me.”

“What went hiss-bump?”

“It did.”

“What was it?” Little Mother wondered if the question was unfair to Flighty wits.

“I don’t know.” Having no words, she took refuge in frustrated tears. She had inherited the orchard but not the self-control proper to a proprietary woman.

In front of the men!
Little Mother sighed and tried again. “What did it look like? What shape?”

Flighty tried hard. “Like a bag. With legs. And a glass bowl on top. And it bounced. That’s what made the bump. And it made a noise.”

“What sort of noise?”

“Just a noise.” She thought of something else. “You know the pictures on the library wall? In the holy stories part? The ones where the angels go up? Well, like the
angels.”

Little Mother knew that the pictures did not represent angels, whatever the congregation were told. Hiding trepidation, she sent the nearest man for Top Mother.

Top Mother came, and listened . . . and said, as though visitations were nothing out of the way, “We will examine the thing that hisses and bumps. The men may come with us in case their
strength is needed.” That provided at least a bodyguard.

The men were indeed a muscular lot, and also a superstitious lot, but they were expected to show courage when the women claimed protection. They picked up whatever knives and mashing clubs lay
to hand and tried to look grim. Man-to-man was a bloodwarming event but man-to-whatisit had queasy overtones. They agreed with Little Mother’s warning: “There could be
danger.”

“There might be greater danger later on if we do
not
investigate. Lead the way, Hallo-Mary.” A Top Mother did not use nicknames.

Flighty was now thoroughly terrified and no longer sure that she had seen anything, but Top Mother took her arm and pushed her forward. Perhaps it had gone away, perhaps it had bounced up and up
. . .

It had not gone anywhere. It had sat down and pushed back its glass bowl and revealed itself, by its cropped hair, as a man.

“A man,” murmured Top Mother, who knew that matriarchy was a historical development and not an evolutionary given. She began to think like the politician which at heart she was. A
man
from – from
outside –
could be a social problem.

The men, who were brought up to revere women but often resented them – except during the free-fathering festivals – grinned and winked at each other and wondered what the old girl
would do.

The old girl said, “Lukey! Walk up and observe him.”

Lukey started off unwillingly, then noticed that three cows grazed unconcernedly not far from the man in a bag and took heart to cross the patch of pasture at the orchard’s edge.

At a long arm’s length he stood, leaned forward and sniffed. He was forest bred and able to sort out the man in a bag’s scents from the norms about him and, being forest bred, his
pheromone sense was better than rudimentary. He came so close that Nugan could have touched him and said, “Just another bloody woman!” The stranger should have been a man, a sex
hero!

He called back to Top Mother, “It’s only a woman with her hair cut short.”

They all crowded forward across the pasture. Females were always peaceable – unless you really scratched their pride.

The hiss Flighty had heard had been the bootjets operating to break the force of a too-fast landing by an ineptly handled tractor beam, the bump had been the reality of a
contact that wrenched an ankle. Even the bounce was almost real as she hopped for a moment on one leg. The noise was Nugan’s voice through a speaker whose last user had left it tuned to
baritone range, a hearty, “Shit! Goddam shit!” before she sat down and became aware of a dumpy figure vanishing among columns of what she remembered vaguely as banana palms. Not much of
a start for good PR.

She thought first to strip the boot and bind her ankle, then that she should not be caught minus a boot if the runaway brought unfriendly reinforcements. She did not fear the village primitives;
though she carried no identifiable weapons, the thick gloves could spit a variety of deaths through levelled fingers. However, she had never killed a civilised organism and had no wish to do so;
her business was to prepare a welcome home.

The scents of the air were strange but pleasant, as the orbital analysis had affirmed; she folded the transparent
fishbowl
back into its neck slot. She became aware of animals nearby.
Cows. She recognised them from pictures though she had been wholly city bred in an era of gigantic cities. They took no notice of her. Fascinated and unafraid, she absorbed a landscape of grass and
tiny flowers in the grass, trees and shrubs and a few vaguely familiar crawling and hopping insects. The only strangeness was the spaciousness stretching infinitely on all sides, a thing that the
lush Ecological Decks of
Starfarer
could not mimic, together with the sky like a distant ceiling with wisps of cloud. Might it rain on her? She scarcely remembered rain.

Time passed. It was swelteringly hot but not as hot as autumn in the greenhouse streets.

They came at last, led by a tall woman in a black dress – rather, a robe cut to enhance dignity though it was trimmed off at the knees. She wore a white headdress like something starched
and folded in the way of the old nursing tradition and held together by a brooch. She was old, perhaps in her sixties, but she had presence and the dress suggested status.

She clutched another woman by the arm, urging her forward, and Nugan recognised the clothing, like grey denim jeans, that fled through the palms. Grey Denim Jeans pointed and planted herself
firmly in a determined no-further pose. Madam In Black gestured to the escort and spoke a few words.