The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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and send a human-manned ship carrying two pilots in deep freeze. Unfortunately, this ship goes off course through a technical error, as does a second. But a third gets through, and the two pilots aboard, Graham and Josca, come out of cold storage in time to guide their ship in a long reconnaissance glide through Iksnivarts’ unbreathable atmosphere.
When their photographs are delivered back to Earth – after they have endured another eighty years in deep freeze – they show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.
But Earth is reassured. It seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescope lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth. It shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: ‘Robot with Flowers’.
Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.
‘Is that the end?’ Marion asked.
‘Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted – an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.’
Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.
She said, ‘That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.’
‘It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired – “Epilogue”, wasn’t it?’
‘Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one. It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his War With the Robots collection.’
‘“Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad”’, she said, quoting a private joke.
‘“Wish I’d written that,”’ I said, adding the punchline. ‘But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish “Robot With Flowers”. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.’
‘You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.’
The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake – it lacked emotional tone.
‘You were meant to ask why I was disappointed with the idea.’
‘Darling, if we are going to go and collect the Carrs, we ought to be moving. It’s two-forty already.’
‘I’m raring to go.’
‘I won’t be a moment.’ She kissed me as she went by.
Of course she was right, I thought. I had to work it out for myself, otherwise I would never be satisfied. I went and sat by the cat and watched the goldfish. The birds were busy round the church, feeding their young; they could enjoy so few summers.
In a way, what I wanted to say was not the sort of thing I wanted to say to Marion, and for a special reason that was very much part of me. I’d seen many loving summers with several loving girls, and now here was Marion, the sweetest of them all, the one with whom I could be most myself and most freely speak my thoughts; for that very reason, I did not wish to abuse the privilege and needed to keep some reserves in me.
So I was chary about telling her more than I had done. I was chary about telling her that in my present mood of happiness I felt only contempt for my robot story, and would do so however skilfully I wrote it. There was no war in my heart; how could I begin to believe in an interplanetary war with all its imponderables and impossibilities? When I was lapped about by such a soft and gentle person as Marion, why this wish to traffic in emotionless metal mockeries of human beings?
Further, was not science fiction a product of man’s divided and warring nature? I thought it was, for my own science fiction novels dealt mainly with dark things, a reflection of the personal unhappiness that had haunted my own life until Marion entered it. But this too was not a declaration lightly to be made.
The idea of robots gathering flowers, I suddenly thought, was a message from my psyche telling me to reverse the trend of my armed apprehensions, to turn about that line of Shakespeare’s:
‘And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armourers. …’
It was a time for me to bankrupt my fictional armourers and get out the dalliance. My psyche wanted to do away with armoured men – but my fearful ego had to complete the story by making the robots merely prepare for a harsher time to come. All fiction was a similar rationalisation of internal battles.
But suppose my time of trouble was over … even suppose it was only over temporarily … Ought I not to disarm while I could? Ought I not to offer some thanks to the gods and my patient regular readers by writing a cheerful story while I could, to reach out beyond my fortifications and show them for once a future it might be worth living in?
No, that was too involved to explain. And it made good enough sense for me not to need to explain it.
So I got up and left the cat sprawled by the pond, fishing with an occasional hope under the leaves. I walked through the kitchen into the study and started putting essentials into my pockets and taking inessentials out, my mind on the picnic. It was a lovely day, warm and almost cloudless. Charles Carr and I would need some cold beer. They were providing the picnic hamper, but I had a sound impulse to make sure of the beer.
As I took four cans out of the fridge, the motor started charging again. Poor old thing, it was getting old. Under ten years old, but you couldn’t expect a machine to last for ever. Only in fiction. You could send an animated machine out on a paper spaceship voyage over paper light years and it would never let you down. The psyche saw to that. Perhaps if you started writing up-beat stories, the psyche would be encouraged by them and start thinking in an upbeat way, as it had ten years and more ago.
‘Just getting some beer!’ I said, as Marion came back into the room from upstairs. She had changed her dress and put on fresh lipstick. She looked just the sort of girl without which no worthwhile picnic was complete. And I knew she would be good with the Carr kids too.
‘There’s a can opener in the car, I seem to remember,’ she said. ‘And what exactly struck you as so wrong with your story?’
I laughed. ‘Oh, never mind that! It’s just that it seemed so far divorced from real life.’ I picked up the cans and made towards the door, scooping one beer-laden arm about her and reciting, ‘“How can I live without thee, how forgo Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined?” Adam to Eve, me to you.’
‘You’ve been at the beer, my old Adam. Let me get my handbag. How do you mean, divorced from real life? We may not have robots yet, but we have a fridge with a mind of its own.’
‘Exactly. Then why can’t I get the fridge into an SF story, and this wonderful sunlight, and you, instead of just a bunch of artless robots? See that little furry cat outside, trying to scoop up goldfish? She has no idea that today isn’t going to run on forever, that the rest of life isn’t going