The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 2) by Brian Aldiss

Author:Brian Aldiss [Aldiss, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-09-23T21:00:00+00:00

fifteen

When the coast of England loomed up, bells sounded, and the crew began to cheer. I gave her a touch of additional speed; she responded like a woman; and we climbed up a steep launching ramp and ashore without difficulty. Until that minute, I had not realised that I captained an amphibious craft.

In no time, we arrived at the biggest city. It sat on top of its miles-wide platform, with starved land stretching all round it – I saw tiny withered things tending rows and rows of wilting plants before we launched ourselves up on to the platform. Moving more slowly now, I steered the ship down one of the streets.

All the ratings were leaning over the rail, cheering and waving. In my heart too surged an enormous relief that we were back home. But in the streets I saw things that I did not wish to see.

First I saw how the city was constructed. I saw how the service ways that ran below the base platform had eliminated the need for all the distributive and supply and administrative vehicles that might once have crowded such a street; they were all automated, and ran below ground. All private vehicles, too, had long ago been eliminated in deference to an efficient public transport of bus and tube. As a result, the traffic was negligible and the streets were narrow.

On either side of the streets ran the homes of the citizens, the plebs. They were more like barracks than flats. They spread all over the city, were the city, for the city had decentralised itself; divided into districts, no one district took precedence over another. All government and public offices were indistinguishable from the plebeian buildings in which the workers lived.

It was only here and there that the brute form of a factory or distributive broke the drab uniformity.

One of the factories we passed, tall and black and windowless, was a soil manufactory, where synthetic micro-organisms were injected into the sand we brought home from Africa’s arid coast.

But the people, the people from whom I had sprung! Eagerly I turned to them, to realise for the first time how brutalised they had become. More and more the faculties of the city were being taken over by machines, and more and more the people were looking like machines. A starved body shows its joints and tendons and stanchions in a manner hardly distinguishable from an ordinary robot.

But robots do not break out with those awful skin diseases. Robots do not develop enormous stomachs, distended by beri beri. They never have running sores or scurvy. They are unable to walk with a hang-dog look. Their fabrics do not atrophy or their hearts break. I had forgotten, I had forgotten!

Many of these tragic people carried magic charms to ward off illness. Most of them had developed weird cults and religions. Among the more simple-minded, orgies formed a vital if occasional part of their lives; the shedding of seed was strongly linked with the vital fertility of the soil from which they were for ever cut off.

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