John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

On her way past, Nestamay checked and stared at the enigmatic bulk of the inaccessible zone. It was changed, and yet unchanged. It had been part of her life since she was born, and still it retained its aura of alienness.

Twisted now and sagging, the arch of the dome spanned a good three miles of ground. Huge gashes, five or six times a man’s height, gave limited access to its interior. In the north was the least inhospitable section-some thousands of square yards were safe even for children, and it was there that the machinery on which the precarious life of the people depended was situated. There was food-ovens for bread, cauldrons for broth, vast hydroponic trays yielding fruit and vegetables from which spores of alien plants had to be scrupulously excluded. The north, too, was the side from which it was relatively safe to pillage scrap, to build or repair the miserable one-room shacks which served as their homes. Every now and again a working party managed to push back the limits of the safe area, either permanently-which was rare-or long enough at any rate to salvage some useful odds and ends.

Just what was hidden in the rank heart of the dome, no one could do more than guess.

Over the rusting structure creepers swarmed, bearing black sticky fruits that, if left to themselves, burst after a few months and sowed spores over everything-clinging spores, able to use anything organic as food. Nestamay had heard from Grandfather about unwary people who were struck by the spores in the old days, and who could not even be buried but had to be cremated with heatbeams lest another plant spring from the grave.

Pullulating fungi, a sickly orange in colour, grew on the branches of the creeper. Flowers, some of them of incredible beauty-and incredibly deadly, because the scent they gave off dulled the senses and laid one open to attack by swinging plant-tentacles-shone out here and there. Great toothed pseudo-leaves sprawled over the ground below, ready to close like a shroud on any trespasser …

Nestamay’s heart turned over, for at this very moment one of those pseudo-leaves opened in sight of her, with a grunting, scratching sound, exposing to view a disgustingly slimy object which at first she thought might be human remains.

A second look reassured her. It was only a thing which the plant had found indigestible after much trying. Now it was a shapeless jellied mass which the pseudo-leaf was attempting to displace over its edge, by humping up and forcing it to roll. The spectacle nauseated her. She went quickly on her way.

Every so often, the idea came from a hothead like jasper that what was needed was to march straight into the central area under the dome, heatbeams blazing, and clear out the entire fetid jungle. Every time, Grandfather or someone else vetoed the idea instantly.

In some incomprehensible way, their existence depended on leaving that central area alone-driving back the vegetation, killing any things that emerged from it, but otherwise enduring its hateful presence. Something was inside there, behind the sporulating fruits, the fungi and the pseudo-leaves, from which they derived their food, clothing, warmth and other basic necessities. Nestamay had pestered Grandfather over and over when she was a child with questions about this strange hidden master of their fate, and the answers had been confusing.

It wasn’t a person, but it could think. It wasn’t a machine, but it was out of order. It was practically everlasting, but a single touch from a heatbeam might destroy it. It provided their food, but it also hatched out things to plague them in the night. To Nestamay as a little girl it had seemed rather like Grandfather on a vaster scale-capricious, often bad-tempered for no discernible reason, but a kind of rock in the turmoil of their lives, to which one must turn for support because there was nothing else available.

Now she was nominally an adult, she recognised that Grandfather must one day die, and when that happened it would be up to her and others of her age-group to apply the knowledge Grandfather had passed on from his father and his father’s father. And that knowledge was designed to overcome the arbitrary power of the not-a-person thinking there in the stinking green swelter under the dome.

There was no stability in this life, except the bareness of the desert ringing the Station. That didn’t change. It was disturbed occasionally, by footprints. But the wind wiped them in the night, and the next day the desert was the same as before.

For that reason, when Nestamay turned from contemplating the hideous tangle of the miniature jungle beneath the dome, she looked long at the unalterable desert-just as inhospitable, but not actively hostile. It was there, and it was a fact, and it was.

Oddly comforted, she hurried to complete her rounds with the canister of broth and the bag of bread.

It was at the next call but one that she found Jasper, cursing and sweating over the removal of a large pile of scrap metal which the terrified thing had overset last night as it howled away from the torture of the electrofence. Tightening her lips, Nestamay left him till last of the party to receive his rations. He noticed the fact; he was meant to.

“Not looking very cheerful this morning, Nestamay!” he taunted. “Grandfather been scolding you-hey?”

“No,” Nestamay contradicted with a toss of her head. “As a matter of fact, he’s been praising me for a change. No thanks to you, you-!”

“Ho-o-o-o!” Jasper raised his eyebrows. “I suppose it’s my fault now, is it? I’m responsible for hatching out things, and I do it during your watch to make trouble for you!”

“You do your best to make trouble for me, and you can’t deny it!” Nestamay retorted. “Suppose I’d been taken in by your wheedling last night, and skipped my watch-what would have happened then?”

Jasper laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. He said, “You were the one supposed to be on watch, my dear, not me. I didn’t know. After all, you didn’t tell me that was where you were going!”

The barefaced audacity of the lie shocked Nestamay into paleness. Stamping her foot, she snapped, “Jasper, you make me sick to my guts!”

“Too bad,” Jasper said with a shrug, turning away. “A time will come when I make you literally sick for a much better reason-because my kid’s kicking you in the belly. And you don’t have much choice in the matter, do you? Not even if you go weeping to your precious grandfather. He doesn’t think tears are constructive.”

Unconstructive tears blurred Nestamay’s sight as she moved away. For, like it or not, what Jasper said was undeniable.

Yanderman ducked under the door flap of the Duke’s tent and saluted. The Duke leaned back so that his chair-as always-creaked with his weight, and smiled in the depths of his enormous beard.

“Well, Yan? What do you think of our progress so far?”

Yanderman ignored the question. He said curtly, “Ampier died in the night-did you know?”

“Of course. I was informed directly it happened; I’d given instructions.”

“Have you seen the body?”

“No.”

Yanderman shuddered. “I saw it. They were carrying it out for burning as I came by. He looked as though he’d simply rotted to death. He was completely covered in that filthy green mould.”

Duke Paul nodded. “So they told me. Obviously the beak of the thing he killed was infected, and poisoned his wound. The medics said they could find nothing that would stop the mould growing without killing the sufferer, so I ordered the burning of everything Ampier had touched-his bandages, the blanket he was wrapped in, his clothes, even the tent where he lay dying. And told all his attendants to burn their clothes and scrub themselves from head to foot with good strong soap. Does that answer what you were going to say?”