The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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in Balank a tremendous hunger for more; he looked in whenever he could. Even on the trail of the werewolf, which absorbed almost all his faculties, he had dialled for every possible picture of that inaccessible and terrific reality that lay distantly on the same time stratum which contained his own world.
As the first transmissions took on cubic content, Balank heard a noise outside the hut, and was instantly on his feet. Grabbing the gun, he opened the door and peered out, his left hand on the door jamb, his wristset still working.
The trundler sat outside, its senses ever-functioning, fixing him with an indicator as if in unfriendly greeting. A leaf or two drifted down from the trees; it was never absolutely silent here, as it could be in the cities at night; there was always something living or dying in the unmapped woods. As he turned his gaze through the darkness – but of course the trundler – and the werewolf, it was said – saw much more clearly in this situation than he did – his vision was obscured by the representation of the future palely gleaming at his cuff. Two phases of the same world were in juxtaposition, one standing on its side, promising an environment where different senses would be needed to survive.
Satisfied, although still wary, Balank shut the door and went to sit down and study the transmission. When it was over, he dialled a repeat. Catching his absorption, Cyfal from his bunk dialled the same programme.
Above the icy deserts of Earth a blue sun shone, too small to show a disc, and from this chip of light came all terrestrial change. Its light was bright as full-moon’s light, and scarcely warmer. Only a few strange and stunted types of vegetation stretched up from the mountains toward it. All the old primitive kinds of flora had vanished long ago. Trees, for so many epochs one of the sovereign forms of Earth, had gone. Animals had gone. Birds had vanished from the skies. In the mountainous seas, very few life-forms protracted their existence.
New forces had inherited this later Earth. This was the time of the majestic auroras, of the near absolute-zero nights, of the years-long blizzards.
But there were cities still, their lights burning brighter than the chilly sun; and there were the machines.
The machines of this distant age were monstrous and complex things, slow and armoured, resembling most the dinosaurs that had filled one hour of the Earth’s dawn. They foraged over the bleak landscape on their own ineluctable errands. They climbed into space, building there monstrous webbed arms that stretched far from Earth’s orbit, to scoop in energy and confront the poor fish sun with a vast trawler net of magnetic force.
In the natural course of its evolution, the sun had developed into its white dwarf stage. Its phase as a yellow star, when it supported vertebrate life, was a brief one, now passed through. Now it moved toward its prime season, still far ahead, when it would enter the main period of its life and become a red dwarf star. Then it would be mature, then it would itself be invested with an awareness countless times greater than any minor consciousnesses it nourished now. As the machines clad in their horned exoskeletons climbed near it, the sun had entered a period of quiescence to be measured in billions of years, and cast over its third planet the light of a perpetual full moon.
The documentary presenting this image of postiquity carried a commentary that consisted mainly of a rundown of the technical difficulties confronting Platform One and the other machine civilisations at that time. It was too complex for Balank to understand. He looked up from his phone at last, and saw that Cyfal had dropped asleep in his bunk. By his wrist, against his tousled head, a shrunken sun still burned.
For some moments, Balank stood looking speculatively at the timber officer. The man’s criticism of the machines disturbed him. Naturally, people were always criticizing the machines, but, after all, mankind depended on them more and more, and most of the criticism was superficial. Cyfal seemed to doubt the whole role of machines.
It was extremely difficult to decide just how much truth lay in anything. The werewolves, for example. They were and always had been man’s enemy, and that was presumably why the machines hunted them with such ruthlessness – for man’s sake. But from what he had learnt at the patrol school, the creatures were on the increase. And had they really got magic powers? – Powers, that was to say, that were beyond man’s, enabled them to survive and flourish as man could not, even supported by all the forces of the cities. The Dark Brother: that was what they called the werewolf, because he was like the night side of man. But he was not man – and how exactly he differed, nobody could tell, except that he could survive when man had not.
Still frowning, Balank moved across to the door and looked out. The moon was climbing, casting a pallid and dappled light among the trees of the clearing, and across the trundler. Balank was reminded of that distant day when the sun would shine no more warmly.
The trundler was switched to transmission, and Balank wondered with whom it was in touch. With Headquarters, possibly, asking for fresh orders, sending in their report.
‘I’m taking an hour with my fresher,’ he said. ‘Okay by you?’
‘Go ahead. I shall stand guard,’ the trundler’s speech circuit said.
Balank went back inside, sat down at the table, and clipped the fresher across his forehead. He fell instantly into unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that force-fed him enough sleep and dream to refresh him for the next seventy-two hours. At the end of the timed hour, he awoke, annoyingly aware that there had been confusion in his skull.
Before he had lifted his head from the table, the thought came: we never saw any human beings in that chilly future.
He sat up straight. Of course, it had been an accidental omission from a brief programme. Humans were not so important as the machines, and that would apply even more in the distant time. But none of the news flashes had shown humans, not even in the immense cities. That was absurd; there would be lots of human beings. The machines had covenanted, at the time of the historic Emancipation, that they would always protect the human race.
Well, Balank told himself, he was talking nonsense. The subversive comments Cyfal had uttered had put a load of mischief into his head. Instinctively, he glanced over at the timber officer.
Cyfal was dead in his bunk. He lay contorted with his head lolling over the side of the mattress, his throat torn out. Blood still welled up from the wound, dripping very slowly from one shoulder onto the floor.
Forcing himself to do it, Balank went over to him. In one of Cyfal’s hands, a piece of grey fur was gripped.
The werewolf had called! Balank gripped his throat in terror. He had evidently roused in time to save his own life, and the creature had fled.
He stood for a long time staring down in pity and horror at the dead man, before prising the piece of fur from his grasp. He examined it with distaste. It was softer than he had imagined wolf fur to be. He turned the hairs over in his palm. A piece of skin had torn away with the hair. He looked at it more closely.
A letter was printed on the skin.
It was faint, but he definitely picked out an ‘S’ to one edge of the skin. No, it must be a bruise, a stain, anything but a printed letter. That would mean that this was synthetic, and had been left as a fragment of evidence to mislead Balank…
He ran over to the door, grabbing up the laser gun as he went, and dashed outside. The moon was high now. He saw the trundler moving across the clearing toward him.
‘Where have you been?’ he called.
‘Patrolling. I heard something among the trees and got a glimpse of a large grey wolf, but was not able to destroy it. Why are you frightened? I am registering surplus adrenalin in your veins.’
‘Come in and look. Something killed the timber man.’
He stood aside as the machine entered the hut and extended a couple of rods above the body on the bunk. As he watched, Balank pushed the piece of fur down into his pocket.
‘Cyfal is dead. His throat has been ripped out. It is the work of a large animal. Balank, if you are rested, we must now pursue the werewolf Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061. He committed this crime.’