The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian AldissЧитать онлайн книгу.
and found out later they were werewolves. They never harmed me.’
Balank said, ‘But you’re afraid of them?’
The half-question broke down Cyfal’s reserve. ‘Of course I’m afraid of them. They’re not human – not real men. They’re enemies of men. They are, aren’t they? They have powers greater than ours.’
‘They can be killed. They haven’t machines, as we have. They’re not a serious menace.’
‘You talk like a city man! How long have you been hunting after this one?’
‘Eight days. I had a shot at him once with the laser, but he was gone. He’s a grey man, very hairy, sharp features.’
‘You’ll stay and have supper with me? Please. I need someone to talk to.’
For supper, Cyfal ate part of a dead wild animal he had cooked. Privately revolted, Balank ate his own rations out of the trundler. In this and other ways, Cyfal was an anachronism. Hardly any timber was needed nowadays in the cities, or had been for millions of years. There remained some marginal uses for wood, necessitating a handful of timber officers, whose main job was to fix signals on old trees that had fallen dangerously, so that machines could fly over later and extract them like rotten teeth from the jaws of the forest. The post of timber officer was being filled more and more by machines, as fewer men were to be found each generation who would take on such a dangerous and lonely job far from the cities.
Over the eons of recorded history, mankind had raised machines that made his cities places of delight. Machines had replaced man’s early inefficient machines; machines had replanned forms of transport; machines had come to replan man’s life for him. The old stone jungles of man’s brief adolescence were buried as deep in memory as the coal jungles of the Carboniferous.
Far away in the pile of discarded yesterdays, man and machines had found how to create life. New foods were produced, neither meat nor vegetable, and the ancient wheel of the past was broken forever, for now the link between man and the land was severed: agriculture, the task of Adam, was as dead as steamships.
Mental attitudes were moulded by physical change. As the cities became self-supporting, so mankind needed only cities and the resources of cities. Communications between city and city became so good that physical travel was no longer necessary; city was separated from city by unchecked vegetation as surely as planet is cut off from planet. Few of the hairless denizens of the cities ever thought of outside; those who went physically outside invariably had some element of the abnormal in them.
‘The werewolves grow up in cities as we do,’ Balank said. ‘It’s only in adolescence they break away and seek the wilds. You knew that, I suppose?’
Cyfal’s overhead light was unsteady, flickering in an irritating way. ‘Let’s not talk of werewolves after sunset,’ he said.
‘The machines will hunt them all down in time.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that. They’re worse at detecting a werewolf than a man is.’
‘I suppose you realise that’s social criticism, Cyfal?’
Cyfal pulled a long sour face and discourteously switched on his wristphone. After a moment, Balank did the same. The operator came up at once, and he asked to be switched to the news satellite.
He wanted to see something fresh on the current time exploration project, but there was nothing new on the files. He was advised to dial back in an hour. Looking over at Cyfal, he saw the timber officer had tuned to a dance show of some sort; the cavorting figures in the little projection were badly disorted from this angle. He rose and went to the door of the hut.
The trundler stood outside, ever alert, ignoring him. An untrustworthy light lay over the clearing. Deep twilight reigned, shot through by the rays of the newly risen moon; he was surprised how fast the day had drained away.
Suddenly, he was conscious of himself as an entity, living, with a limited span of life, much of which had already drained away unregarded. The moment of introspection was so uncharacteristic of him that he was frightened. He told himself it was high time he traced down the werewolf and got back to the city: too much solitude was making him morbid.
As he stood there, he heard Cyfal come up behind. The man said, ‘I’m sorry if I was surly when I was so genuinely glad to see you. It’s just that I’m not used to the way city people think. You mustn’t take offence – I’m afraid you might even think I’m a werewolf myself.’
‘That’s foolish! We took a blood spec on you as soon as you were within sighting distance.’ For all that, he realised that Cyfal made him uneasy. Going to where the trundler guarded the door, he took up his laser gun and slipped it under his arm. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
‘Of course. You think he’s around – Gondalug, the werewolf? Maybe following you instead of you following him?’
‘As you said, it’s full moon. Besides, he hasn’t eaten in days. They won’t touch synthfoods once the lycanthropic gene asserts itself, you know.’
‘That’s why they eat humans occasionally?’ Cyfal stood silent for a moment, then added, ‘But they are a part of the human race – that is, if you regard them as men who change into wolves rather than wolves who change into men. I mean, they’re nearer relations to us than animals or machines are.’
‘Not than machines!’ Balank said in a shocked voice. ‘How could we survive without the machines?’
Ignoring that, Cyfal said, ‘To my mind, humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.’
Somewhere in the trees, a cry of pain sounded and was repeated.
‘Night owl,’ Cyfal said. The sound brought him back to the present, and he begged Balank to come in and shut the door. He brought out some wine, which they warmed, salted, and drank together.
‘The sun’s my clock,’ he said, when they had been chatting for a while. ‘I shall turn in soon. You’ll sleep too?’
‘I don’t sleep – I’ve a fresher.’
‘I never had the operation. Are you moving on? Look, are you planning to leave me here all alone, the night of the full moon?’ He grabbed Balank’s sleeve and then withdrew his hand.
‘If Gondalug’s about, I want to kill him tonight. I must get back to the city.’ But he saw that Cyfal was frightened and took pity on the little man. ‘But in fact I could manage an hour’s freshing – I’ve had none for three days.’
‘You’ll take it here?’
‘Sure, get your head down – but you’re armed, aren’t you?’
‘It doesn’t always do you any good.’
While the little man prepared his bunk, Balank switched on his phone again. The news feature was ready and came up almost at once. Again Balank was plunged into a remote and terrible future.
The machines had managed to push their time exploration some eight million years ahead, and there a deviation in the quanta of the electromagnetic spectrum had halted their advance. The reason for this was so far obscure and lay in the changing nature of the sun, which strongly influenced the time structure of its own minute corner of the galaxy.
Balank was curious to find if the machines had resolved the problem. It appeared that they had not, for the main news of the day was that. Platform One had decided that operations should now be confined to the span of time already opened up. Platform One was the name of the machine civilisation, many hundreds of centuries ahead in time, which had first pushed through the time barrier and contacted all machine-ruled civilisations before its own epoch.
What a disappointment that only the electronic senses of machines could shuttle in time! Balank would greatly have liked to visit one of the giant cities of the remote future.
The compensation was that the explorers sent back video pictures