the Dark Light Years (12 page)

"That applies to beings on the worlds of the Triple Suns. But these creatures of Grudgrodd, these thinlegs, may be part of another and conflicting pattern." At this point, the lifeform left them. As he disappeared, the light faded from their room. Quite uninterested in these minor phenomena, the Cosmopolitan continued to grope for words. "What I am saving is that in some ways these creatures may not have helpful intentions for us. There is a word from the Revolution Age that is useful here; these thinlegs may be bad. Do you know this word from your studies?”

"It's a sort of sickness, isn't it?" the Politan asked, recalling the years when he had wallowed through the mazes of mindsuckle in the epoch of Welcome White.

"Well, a special sort of sickness. I feel that these thin-legs are bad in a more healthy way.”

"Is that why you have not wished us to communicate with them?”

"Certainly not. I am no more prepared to converse with strangers bereft of my wallow than they would probably be prepared to converse with me bereft of the body materials that cover them. In the end, when they grasp that rudimentary fact, we may perhaps try to talk to them, though I suspect their brains may be quite as limited as their voice range suggests.
But we shall certainly get no-where until they realize we have certain basic requirements; once they have grasped that, talk may be worth while.”

"
This ... this business of bad. I'm alarmed you should think like this.”

"Son, the more I consider what has happened, the more I am forced to do so.”

Blug Lugug. who had been known for a hundred and eighty years as a third Politan, lapsed into a troubled silence.

He was recalling more and more about bad. In the Revolution Age, there had been bad. Even though the utods lived up to eleven hundred years, the Revolution Age was over three thousand generations ago; yet its effects still lingered in everyday life on Dapdrof.

At the beginning of that amazing age was born Manna Warun.
It was significant that he had been hatched during a particularly cataclysmic entropic solar orbital disestablishment, the very esod, in fact, during which Dapdrof, changing from Saffron Smiler to Yellow Scowler, had lost its little moon, Woback, which now pursued its own eccentric course alone.

Manna Warun had collected disciples and left the traditional wallows and salads of his people. His band had moved to the wastes, there to spend many years refining and developing the ancient and traditional skills of the utods. Some of his group left him; more joined. There they stayed for one hundred and seventy-five years, according to the old priestly histories.

During that time, they created what Manna Warun called "an industrial revolution". They learnt to make many more metals than their contemporaries knew of: hard metals, metals that could stretch thin and convey new forms of power along their lengths. The
revolutionaries
scorned to walk on their own six feet any more.
Now they rode in various sorts of car that boasted a multitude of tumbling feet, or they flew in the air in other cars with wings.
So said the old legends, though there was no doubt that they liked to lay it on a bit thick.

But when the revolutionaries came back to their people to try and convert them to new doctrines, one feature of their lives in particular seemed strange. For the
revolutionaries
preached - and dramatically
practiced
- what they called "cleanliness".

The mass of the people (if the old reports were to be believed) were well disposed towards most of the proposed innovations.
They were particularly pleased with the notion that terms of motherhood might be eased by introducing one or more systems that would abolish mind-suckle; because for most of the fifty years of a utod's childhood a mother was committed to mindsuckling her child on the complicated law and lore that was racial history and habit; and the revolutionaries taught that this function might be handled by mechanism. But "cleanliness" was something different altogether - a real revolution.

Cleanliness was a difficult thing to grasp, if only because it attacked the very roots of being. It suggested that the warm mud banks in which the utod had evolved might now be abandoned, that the wallows and middensteads and middens which were effective mud-substitutes be abandoned, that the little parasite-devouring grorgs which were the traditional utodian companions be also abandoned.

Manna and his disciples demonstrated that it was possible to live without all this needless luxury ("dirt" was another term they used for it).
The cleanliness was evidence of progress. That in the modern revolutionary age, mud was bad.

In this way, the revolutionaries had turned necessity into virtue. Working in the wastes, far away from the wallows and their sheltering ammps, mud and liquid had been scarce. In that austerity had been born their austere creed.

They went further. Once he had started. Manna Warun developed his theme, and attacked the established beliefs of the utods. In this he was aided by his chief disciple, Creezeazs. Creezeazs denied that the spirits of utods were born into their infant bodies from the ammps; he denied that a carrion stage followed the corporeal stage. Or rather, he could not gainsay that the bodily elements of the corporeal stage were absorbed into the mud and so drawn up again into the ammps, but he claimed that there was no similar transference for a spirit. He had no proof of this. It was just an emotional statement obviously aimed at getting the utod away from their natural habit; yet he found those who believed him.

Strange moral laws, prohibitions, inhibitions, began to grow up among the believers. But it could not be denied that they had power. The cities of the wastes to which they withdrew blazed with light in the dark. They cultivated the lands by strange methods, and drew strange fruit from them. They took to covering their casspu orifices. They changed from male to female at unprecedented rates, indulging themselves without breeding. All this and more they did. Yet it was not noticeable that they were exactly happier - not that they preached happiness, for their talk was more of duty and rights and of what was considered good or bad.

One great thing that the revolutionaries achieved in their cities stirred everyone's imagination.

The utods had many poetic qualities, as their vast fund of tales, epics, songs, chants, and
were whispers
show. This side of them was touched when the revolutionaries built some of their machinery into an ancient ammp seed and drove it into and far beyond the skies. Manna Warun went in it Since pre-memory days, before mindsuckle had made the races of utod what they were, the ammp seeds had been used for boats with which to sail to less crowded parts of Dapdrof. To sail to less crowded worlds had a sort of crazy appropriateness in it. Down in the wallows, the complicated nexi of old families began to feel that per-haps after all cleanliness had something. The fifteen worlds that circled about the six planets of the Home Cluster were all visible at various times to the naked eye, and hence were known and admired. To experience the thrill of visiting them might even be worth renouncing "dirt".

People, converts and perverts, began to trickle into the cities of the wastes.

Then something odd happened.

The word began to get about that Manna Warun was not all he had made himself out to be. It was said that he had often slid away to indulge himself in a secret wallow, for instance. Rumours spread thick and fast, and of course Manna was not there to deny them.

As the ugly rumours grew, people wondered when Creezeazs would step forward and clear his leader's name.

At last, Creezeazs did step forward. Heavily, with tears in his eyes, speaking through his ockpu orifices only, he admitted that the stories circulating were true. Manna was a sinner, a tyrant, a mud-bather. He had none of the
virtues
he demanded from others. In fact, though others - his friend and true disciple Creezeazs in particular - had done all in their power to stop him. Manna had gone to the bad. Now that the sad tale had emerged, there was nothing for it. Manna Warun must go. It was in the public interest. Nobody, of course, would be happy about it; but there was such a thing as duty.
People had a right to be protected, otherwise the good would be destroyed with the bad.

Hardly a utod liked all this, although they saw Creezeazs' point of view; Manna must be expelled.

When the prophet returned from the stars, there was a reception committee waiting for him on the star-realm-ark field.

Before the ark landed, trouble broke out A young utod, whose shining but alarmingly cracked skin showed him to be a thorough-going Hygienic (as the Corps of the
Revolution
were currently calling themselves), jumped up on to a box. He deretracted all his limbs and cried in a voice like a steam whistle that Creezeazs had been lying about Manna to serve his own ends. All who followed Creezeazs were traitors.

At this moment, an unprecedented event occurred, occurred even as the star-realm-ark floated down from the sides: fighting broke out, and a utod with a sharp metal rod hastened Creezeazs on to the next stage of his utod-ammp cycle.

"Creezeazs!" gasped the third Politan.

"What make you mention that unfortunate name?" inquired the Cosmopolitan.

"I was thinking about the Revolution Age. Creezeazs is the first utod in our history to be propelled along the utod-ammp cycle without goodwill," Blug Lugug said, coming back to the present.

"That was a bad time. But perhaps because these thin-legs also seem to enjoy cleanliness, they also hasten people round the cycle without goodwill. As I say, they are bad in a healthy way. And we are their random victims.”

Blug Lugug withdrew his limbs as much as possible. He shut his eyes, closed his orifices, and stretched himself until his external appearance was that of an enormous
terrestrial
sausage. This was his way of expressing priestly alarm.

There was nothing in their situation to warrant the cosmopolitan's extreme language. True, it might become rather dull if they were kept here for any length of time -one needed a change of scenery every five years or so. And it was thoughtless the way the lifeforms removed the signs of their fertility. But the lifeforms showed evidence of goodwill: they supplied food, and soon learned not to bring items that were unwelcome. With time and patience, they might learn other useful things.

On the other hand, there was this question of bad. It was indeed possible that the lifeforms had the same sort of madness that existed in the Revolution Age of Dapdrof.
Yet it was absurd to pretend that, however alien they might be, these thinlegs did not have an equivalent evolutionary cycle to the utodammp cycle; and this, being so fundamental, could only be something for which they would have a profound respect - in their own peculiar way, naturally.

And there was this: the Revolution Age was a freak, a mere flash in the pan, lasting only for five hundred years -half a lifespan - out of the hundreds of millions of years of utodammp memory. It would seem rather a tall co-incidence if the thinlegs happened to be undergoing the same trouble at this moment.

It was notorious that people who used violent words like bad and random victim, the very words of madness, were themselves verging on madness.
So the Sacred Cosmopolitan.
...

At the very thought, the Politan quivered. His fondness for the Cosmopolitan was deepened by the fact that the older utod, during one of his female phases, had mothered him. Now he stood in need of consolation by the other members of his wallow; clearly, it was time they were get-ting back to Dapdrof.

That implied that they should speak with these aliens and hasten their return.
The Cosmopolitan forbad communication - and quite rightly - on a point of etiquette; but it began to look more and more as if something should be done.
Perhaps, Blug Lugug thought, he could get one of the aliens on his own and try to convey some sense to it. It shouldn't be difficult; he had memorized every sentence they had spoken in his presence since their arrival in the metal thing; although it made no sense to him, it should be useful somehow.

Pursing one of his ockpu orifices, he said, "Wilfred, you don't happen to have a screwdriver in your pocket, do you?”

"What's that?" asked the Cosmopolitan.

"Nothing. Thinlegs-talk.”

Sinking into a silence that held less cheer than usual, the third Politan began to think about the Revolution Age, in case it had any useful parallels with the present case to offer.

With the death of Creezeazs and the return home of Manna Warun, more trouble had begun. This was when bad had flourished at its grandest. Quite a number of utods were thrust without goodwill into the next phase of their cycle. Manna, of course, returned from his flight in the star-realm-ark very vexed to find how things had turned against him in the Cities of the Wastes.

He became more extreme than before. His people were to forswear mud-bathing entirely; instead, water would be supplied to every dwelling. They were to keep their casspu orifices covered. Skin oils were forbidden. Greater industry was required. And so on.

But the seeds of dissatisfaction had been well sown by Creezeazs and his followers, and more blood-shedding ensued. Many people returned to their ancestral wallows, leaving the Cities of the Wastes slowly to fall into ruin while the inhabitants fought each other. Everyone regretted this, since there existed a genuine admiration for Manna which nothing could quench.