Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.) Read online

  ‘It’s not a question of lack of patriotism,’ whined the official, on the other end of the phone. ‘We have certain restrictions, pertaining to our insurance premiums . . .’

  ‘I undertake to cover you for any loss incurred in collecting us,’ said Polystom grandly, hoping devoutly that no such expense would be necessary. ‘I expect the boat to land on the flat ground behind my house the day after tomorrow.’

  They held a passing out parade two days later: a grand business, all uniforms clean and all buttons polished, the troop presenting arms and marching round and round the house. There was nobody to see it but a gaggle of ooh-ing and aah-ing servants, but Polystom felt a certain pride swell in his chest nonetheless. He had the lieutenants assemble the men behind the house, standing to attention, whilst they waited for the balloon-boat to come down. The [? (so)?] . . . [eleven characters missing] . . . from the clear sky. Snow lay in uneven stripes over the lawn, where . . . [six characters missing] . . . in the fragile patterning of its decay. When . . .

  . . . [never]

  . . . [surely, with]

  . . . [eyes upwards]

  . . .

  [Even]tually the balloon-boat was visible in the sky. It swelled, slowly, as it sank through the atmosphere. It was a passenger liner, not one of the super-carriers that ferried cargo along with the people, and . . . [eleven characters missing] . . . [B]ut despite this, it was a huge thing. It lowered itself down until the curve of its green-cloth belly blotted out the moon and filled the sky over the back of the house. Its whirring props growled enormously; their turrets angled down, sucking the buoyant body down through the air. It came down steadily, swelling, growing, the house-sized compartment underneath the balloon coming close enough for people to be visible at the portholes, the whole mass of the craft sinking sinking slowly, slowly, until the props were level with the assembled people throwing their hair back in the force of wind they threw off, pushing their clothes back against their bodies so that the contours of their legs, torsos, arms were sculpted. Then the bottom of the great ship kissed the turf, wobbled, and settled; and the propellers died away.

  The enormous balloon roofed the garden. Everybody was in shade.

  Traps opened and crewmen leapt out with tether ropes. But there was no ceremony, no carpet laid out. Instead a crewman hurried over to the assembled soldiers, stopped at Sof, was directed onwards, and came at last to Polystom. ‘Sir?’ he called. ‘Can we get everybody aboard as quickly as possible. Our captain is eager to get on.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Polystom.

  He walked, a little stiffly, over to the opened hatch and clambered inside. One of the men, once a fisherman called Hath, followed with his luggage. Then came the men themselves, stepping smartly through and in, with Sof and Stet following behind, shouting at them to hurry themselves along. The crewman showed Polystom his quarters. ‘I want a view of the take-off,’ Stom said. ‘This way, colonel,’ said the crewman. Stom didn’t bother correcting him.

  He came through little metal corridors to a more spacious bar at the front of the capsule; one hundred and eighty degrees of window, glazed in a chevron bulge, gave panoramic views. A carpeted expanse of floor, dotted with tables and settees, lead back to a broad bar. A dozen or so passengers, all in mufti, were lounging, drinking, chatting. Two or three were standing at the rail by the window, looking out at Stom’s house. There were rails on the ceiling too.

  The lower array of propellers could be seen, idle, on either side of this viewport, but the great green-canvas ceiling that bellied out above hid the upper array. It was these props, angled upward, that now ticked and roared to life, their blades whirring to grey dials, the pitch of the engine noise rising to a scream, then a whistle. With a barely perceptible wobble the balloon-boat left the ground.

  Polystom collected a drink, a large blackberry whisky, and went over to the rail at the fore of the bar. Already his house was toy-like below him. The ruffled cloth of the Middenstead. The individual strands of trees still visible in the carpet of the forest. One swig of the burning drink, and the woodland shrank to a smooth uninterrupted green, and the Middenstead contracted, as if a speeded-up drought were pulling the shoreline in and in like a tightening noose of cord.

  ‘Sir,’ said Stetrus, appearing at his right hand as if from nowhere. The lieutenant was holding a glass of wine.

  ‘Stetrus,’ said Polystom. ‘The men settled in?’

  Sophanes was at the bar, fussing over his drink. His voice, boomingly insistent. ‘I specifically said I didn’t want ice. Pour it again.’

  ‘We dished out the battle ranks yesterday, sir,’ Stet was saying. ‘Your man, the Orchard-Gardner, Crius. He’s going to be sergeant. He’s a good sort. Reliable. And Droy, he’ll be corporal. Your batman you already know; Sof and I chose our batmen weeks ago. That’s everybody, I think.’

  ‘Medic?’ asked Polystom, only half his mind on the conversation, his eye snagged by the diminishing scene below him. The curve of the horizon was visible now, and the purple-blue sky beyond.

  ‘That’s not a ranking position,’ said Stet. When Polystom looked at him, he smiled. ‘Faba’s picked up a few tricks during training. He can stay as platoon medic.’

  Sof joined them. ‘Here’s to your lovely planet, Captain,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘And to your hospitality, putting us up for all those weeks.’

  ‘Not at all,’ murmured Polystom.

  It took a little time to get acclimatised to the microgravity of interplanetary flight. The balloon-boat interior was designed with handholds on all surfaces, and food and drink was served in containers to prevent unnecessary mess. If left alone, objects tended to drift in the direction of Enting, the direction they were leaving behind; but it took almost no effort to leap and sail through the air. At exactly the neutral point on the way to Berthing, they were told, the planetary microgravity would cancel itself out; but there was always the slight tug of the sun, which meant that genuine weightlessness would be experienced sooner than that. The experience of most travellers was that they adapted extremely quickly to the weightlessness. ‘After all,’ said the captain, in the middle of a conversation halfway into the flight, ‘we were all mostly weightless once – in our maternal wombs!’

  Polystom smiled, nodded. He did not feel comfortable.

  The captain introduced himself the second day of travel, a smooth-mannered man with an oily, shiny face. ‘Delighted and honoured,’ he said. ‘Captain, lieutenant, lieutenant. Dine with me? Later this evening? Excellent, excellent.’ He bowed, slightly. ‘I must say it’s a proud voyage. Multi Planet Line is honoured to be doing our bit for the war. A small bit, I know.’

  ‘And one,’ said Sof, who was quite drunk, ‘for which you’re being well paid.’

  The captain smiled, ignored the comment. ‘I was in the Flying Corps, myself,’ he said. ‘Before taking up this civilian posting.’ He laughed, as if he had said something funny.

  The two lieutenants’ manner towards him changed at once. ‘Really?’ said Stet, leaning forward. ‘Flying Corps?’

  They were all of them in the bar, seat-belted round a low table. Polystom had been trying to reread a volume of Phanicles until his lieutenants had joined him. Now the captain lowered himself gingerly onto the settee, making the party four. A barman appeared almost at once, with a sealed-lid glass of white wine. Evidently his crew knew what their captain liked to drink without having to be told.

  ‘Second biplane command,’ murmured the captain.

  ‘The second,’ said Sof, and whistled. ‘You were at the Sink?’

  ‘I was,’ said the captain.

  There was a short silence. Polystom cursed himself silently that he didn’t know which campaign, of the many there had been on the Mudworld, the Sink related to. He couldn’t think of a way of asking.

  ‘I crashed there, actually. That was one time,’ and the captain laughed his strange, forced-jollity laugh again, ‘one time when I was grateful for the mud. Cushioned the blow, thoug
h I did break both my shins.’

  ‘Ouch!’ sang Sof, raising his glass. ‘Ouch ouch!’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the captain.

  The three men fell to reminiscing about the Sink, about the tactics, about the casualty rate, about the knack the insurgents had of burying themselves into the mud to emerge at inconvenient moments. They laughed. They clicked glasses together as smartly as an officer might click heels.

  Polystom smiled, and nodded, and interjected comments once or twice, but as always he felt almost entirely excluded. After ten minutes or so he excused himself, and went to the lavartoire, even though he felt no physical need to go. He belted himself onto the commode, pressing his forehead against the wall where the thrum and vibration passed into his skull, into the depths of his brain. It was soothing. It was like the sound on the other side of silence.

  Eventually he returned to the bar, but instead of joining the guffawing, shoulder-slapping party of three around their table he ordered another drink from the bar and pulled himself along by hand-holds to the rail by the observation window. They didn’t seem to miss him. Outside it was the eternal day of interplanetary space. The violet shade of the all-encompassing sky. Away to his left and right the lower array of props carved out their moon-like silver circles. Steep-jacks had fitted high-sky propellers, and now they hauled the boat sunward. Polystom’s homeworld seemed to have rushed away behind them, visible now only from the extreme left of the observation rail as a distinct half-circle. Before the boat was only sky, and the sun glowing white, like a beacon. They were not aimed directly at the sun, and in fact their passage was taking them almost forty degrees away from it, so that it gleamed well over to the right of the panoramic window. They were to dock at Kaspian, and then to fly on to Berthing, where Polystom would disembark his men and liase with military transport. Only the military flew to the Mudworld now. Or flew from it. Although, of course, the assassins somehow made their way from it as well. Polystom still marvelled that two men had been able to make their way off that world and through space to his uncle’s moon. Human ingenuity was a wonderful thing.

  The balloon-boat captain insisted on giving the party of three officers the grand tour. They trailed through the metal corridors, and rode up in a rectangular elevator for an awkward two minutes, as the four men stood inches from one another, in silence. Then the lift settled, and the doors opened. ‘Here is the main cabin,’ said the captain, holding his arm straight out before him.

  ‘Marvellous,’ murmured Stet, lighting a cigarette.

  The cabin was as large as the bar, and with more extensive windows. In the middle of the space were several consoles, metal sheets pimpled with bolts, levers and dials, a blue-uniformed crewman belted to each, monitoring it intently. A phonebox-sized case stood, unattended, in the dead centre of the room. But the captain was more interested in the view, leading his guests over to the front.

  The cabin was in the middle of the top tiers, perched above the enormous belly of green. Like the billowing skirt of a giantess green cloth stretched away in all directions below them, and to their left and right the banks of huge propellers were clearly visible. Where . . .

  [. . . violet-mauve, and]

  [. . . nevertheless (?dialogue?)]

  [. . . if]

  [. . .]

  [. . . (‘)that coin-sized object there?’ The captain was pointing. ‘That’s Kaspian. That’s our next destination.’

  ‘Extraordinary accuracy, really,’ said Sof. ‘Is it all your own judgment?’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Captain, turning and indicating the six-foot tall metal box in the middle of the control space. ‘We rely quite heavily on our Computational Device. This is its terminal.’

  ‘You carry a Computational Device aboard this balloon-boat?’ said Polystom. ‘How marvellous.’

  ‘All the larger boats carry one now. It’s amazing the difference it makes. And amazing how far these machines have come in the – what is it – fifty years, since they were first developed? The main body of our own CD is in a ballast section of the balloon itself, but it feeds through to this relay, and we can work out any amount of complex mathematical and other material upon it.’

  Polystom had half a mind to say my uncle invented this device you know, but that would have been mere bragging, and he resisted the urge.

  Talk of Computational Devices preoccupied the dinnertime conversation as well. The captain, over a plate of vinegarised eel-heads accompanied by split-roasted parsnips, expanded royally on the enormous benefits the devices had made to interplanetary transport. ‘Revolutionised it,’ he said, lifting his goblet of sour wine. ‘Simply revolutionised it. We can now calculate orbits, free-forms, trajectories, optimum fuel-use, everything – we can calculate it all in moments – literally moments. The sheer speed of computation is extraordinary.’

  ‘Jumped-up counting box,’ said Stet, who had eaten perhaps a quarter of his meal and was now smoking, despite Polystom’s polite coughs of annoyance. Stet had to keep the cigarette in constant motion, or the smoke accumulated around the top and extinguished it. This meant that he dispersed the smoke in a wide swathe around him.

  ‘Oh no, much more than that – much more,’ said the captain, earnestly. ‘In the early days, perhaps that’s all these devices could do. But now! Why, some of them are as smart as a human! As smart as a servant, certainly.’

  ‘This,’ said Sof, whose appetite was healthier than his lieutenant-comrade’s, and who was helping himself to a second portion of the eel, ‘this is what I don’t understand. These machines are clever as a servant, yes?’

  ‘At least.’

  ‘So why not just buy a servant? As I understand it, the Computational Devices are terribly expensive, and really quite large.’

  ‘Enormous,’ said Stet, smoke dribbling from his mouth like the ghost of vomit.

  ‘So they’re enormously expensive, and enormously large – which means, I daresay, unwieldy. So where’s the advantage? A servant is cheaper. Buy a very clever servant.’

  Polystom smiled weakly.

  ‘Oho,’ said the captain, jovially. ‘You’re being deliberately obtuse, I think! The things these Devices can do – no servant could achieve it! The speed and intricacy of calculation! More, they can be written to do all sorts of wonders.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Stet, a little over-loudly. ‘What?’

  ‘Written – it’s a technical term, lieutenant,’ said the captain, with fatuous patronage. ‘One of the things a modern balloon-boat captain must know about! Think of these Computational Devices as sheets of paper. This is how I explain it to my children . . . if you’ll excuse the impertinence of comparing you to children.’

  ‘Not at all,’ drawled Stet.

  ‘Rather accurate,’ agreed Sof.

  ‘Then we might think of the Computational Device as a sort of magic paper. In its raw state, each Device is simply valves and crystals, arranged in such as way as to be able to compute very rapidly. But when the Device is written, it becomes capable of coherent operation. What operation depends upon the form the writing takes: you’ve heard of the Master Machine, of course?’

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ said Sof.

  ‘Loafer,’ grumbled Stet.

  ‘Really? It’s been in the news a great deal. The biggest Computational Device ever assembled. Cleonicles . . .’

  ‘My uncle,’ said Polystom.

  The conversation stopped. Everybody looked at Polystom.

  ‘Cleonicles,’ he said. ‘He was my uncle.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the captain, earnestly, ‘I’m doubly honoured to have met you! You are the nephew to the great Cleonicles? Extraordinary!’

  ‘Had no idea,’ said Stet, dipping his head in a languid salute.

  ‘Go on with what you were saying,’ said Stom.

  The Captain chuckled, nodded, raised one hand. ‘It was nothing – I feel embarrassed to talk about it in front of the inventor’s own nephew!’

  ‘I know almost not
hing about Computational Devices,’ said Stom.

  ‘Well – well – I was only going to mention the Super Device.’

  ‘It was in the newsbooks,’ said Stom.

  ‘Exactly so! Exactly so. But the general newsbooks haven’t covered the detail. The things this machine is capable of! The incredible penetration of its computation.’

  ‘Large, is it?’ said Sof.

  ‘Very,’ said Stet. ‘Huge. Out in space somewhere, because it’s so big.’

  ‘No, no, gentlemen,’ said the captain. ‘I’m sorry to correct you.’

  ‘I could have sworn,’ said Stet, absently, examining the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  ‘The original plans were for a weightless construction,’ said the captain. ‘It would have been suspended in the sky, of course. But the problems were with power source. So the machine was built on Aelop.’

  Both lieutenants sat forward.