Orbit 2

Brian Aldiss, who came to America in 1966 to receive a Nebula Award, turned out to be a living rebuttal to the myth of British reserve. If Aldiss can be taken as typical, Englishmen do not talk or behave like David Niven; they are irreverent, earthy, exuberant and outspoken.

None of this, however, goes into Aldiss" fiction, which is classical in tone, spitefully pessimistic, brilliantly polished and ingeniously horrid. Aldiss is one of the half-dozen writers I most wanted to bring you in Orbit. Here he is, with a disturbing and plausible glimpse into the remote future of Earth.

The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.

The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.

During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest — or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.

He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.

The stranger was standing half-concealed behind the trunk of a tree, gazing uncertainly at the trundler and Balank. When Balank raised a hand in tentative greeting, the stranger responded hesitantly. When Balank called out his identification number, the man came cautiously into the open, replying with his own number. The trundler searched in its files, issued an okay, and they moved forward.

As they got level with the man, they saw he had a small mobile hut pitched behind him. He shook hands with Balank, exchanging personal signals, and gave his name as Cyfal.

Balank was a tall slender man, almost hairless, with the closed expression on his face that might be regarded as characteristic of his epoch. Cyfal, on the other hand, was as slender but much shorter, so that he appeared stockier; his thatch of hair covered all his skull and obtruded slightly onto his face. Something in his manner, or perhaps the expression around his eyes, spoke of the rare type of man whose existence was chiefly spent outside the city.

“I am the timber officer for this region,” he said, and indicated his wristcaster as he added, “I was notified you might be in this area, Balank.”

“Then you’ll know I’m after the werewolf.”

“The werewolf? There are plenty of them moving through this region, now that the human population is concentrated almost entirely in the cities.”

Something in the tone of the remark sounded like social criticism to Balank; he glanced at the trundler without replying.

“Anyhow, you’ve got a good night to go hunting him,” Cyfal said.

“How do you mean?”

“Full moon.”

Balank gave no answer. He knew better than Cyfal, he thought, that when the moon was at full, the werewolves reached their time of greatest power.

The trundler was ranging about nearby, an antenna slowly spinning. It made Balank uneasy. He followed it. Man and machine stood together on the edge of a little cliff behind the mobile hut. The cliff was like the curl of foam on the peak of a giant Pacific comber, for here the great wave of earth that was this hill reached its highest point. Beyond, in broken magnificence, it fell down into fresh valleys. The way down was clothed in beeches, just as the way up had been in oaks.

“That’s the valley of the Pracha. You can’t see the river from here.” Cyfal had come up behind them.

“Have you seen anyone who might have been the werewolf? His real name is Gondalug, identity number YB-5921 stroke AS25061, City Zagrad.”

Cyfal said, “I saw someone this way this morning. There was more than one of them, I believe.” Something in his manner made Balank look at him closely. “I didn’t speak to any of them, nor them to me.”

“You know them?”

“I’ve spoken to many men out here in the silent forests, 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 gray 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 molded 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.