Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

They looked a mournful sight, but at first we were not too disturbed; we didn’t, you see, quite grasp the nature of the problem. Also, we were very busy, reclaiming more Failed Men from the ground.

Four great aid centres had been established on the earth. Of the other four races in the IRC, two managed sanatoria construction and equipment; another, nursing, feeding and staffing; and the fourth, communication, rehabilitation and liaison between centres. And we – ‘the Children’! – our job was to exhume the Failed Men and bring them to the centres: a job for the simple group! Between us we all had to get the race of man started again – back into harness.

All told, I suppose there are only about six million Failed Men spread over the earth. We had to go out and dig them up. We had specially made tractors with multiple blades on the front which dug slowly and gently into the soil.

The Failed Men had ‘cemetery areas’; we called them that, although they had not been designed as cemeteries. It was like a bad dream. Working day and night, we trundled forward, furrowing up the earth as you strip back a soiled bed. In the mould, a face would appear, an arm with the long fingers, a pair of legs, tumbling into the light. We would stop the machine and get down to the body, digging with trowels around it. So we would exhume another man or woman – it was hard to tell which they were.

They would be in coma. Their eyes would open, staring like peek-a-boo dolls, then close again with a click. We’d patch them up with an injection, stack them on stretchers and send them back in a load to base. It was a harrowing job, and no pun intended.

When the corpses had had some attention and care, they revived. Within a month they would be up and walking, trundling about the hospital grounds in that round-shouldered way, their great boat-heads nodding at every step. And then it was I talked to them and tried to understand.

The translator banks, being Paull-made, were the best possible. But their limitations were the limitations of our own language. If the Failed Men said their word for ‘sun’, the machine said ‘sun’ to us, and we understood by that the same thing the Failed Men intended. But away from the few concrete, common facts of our experience, the business was less easy. Less synonyms, more overtones; it was the old linguistic problem, but magnified here by the ages which lay between us.

I remember tackling one old woman on our first spell back at the centre. I say old, but for all I know she was sweet sixteen; they just looked ancient.

‘I hope you don’t mind being dug – er, rescued?’ I asked politely.

‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ the banks said for her. Polite stereotypes. No real meaning in any language, but the best machine in the world makes them sound sillier than they are.

‘Would you mind if we discussed this whole thing?’

‘What object?’ the banks asked for her.

I’d asked the wrong question. I did not mean thing-object, but thing-matter. That sort of trip-up kept getting in the way of our discussion; the translator spoke better English than I.

‘Can we talk about your problem?’ I asked her, trying again.

‘I have no problem. My problem has been resolved.’

‘I should be interested to hear about it.’

‘What do you require to know about it? I will tell you anything.’

That at least was promising. Willing if not co-operative; they had long ago forgotten the principle of co-operation.

‘You know I come from the distant past to help you?’ The banks translated me undramatically.

‘Yes. It is noble of you all to interrupt your lives for us,’ she said.

‘Oh no; we want to see the race of man starting off again on a right track. We believe it should not die away. We are glad to help, and are sorry you took the wrong track.’

‘When we started, we were on a track others before us – you – had made.’ It was not defiant, just a fact being stated.

‘But the deviation was yours. You made it by an act of will. I’m not condemning; obviously you would not have taken that way had you known it would end in failure.’

She answered. I gathered she was just faintly angry, probably burning all the emotion in her. Her hollow voice spanged and doomed away, and the translator banks gave out simultaneously in fluent English. Only it didn’t make sense.

It went something like this: ‘Ah, but what you do not realise, because your realising is completely undeveloped and unstarted, is how to fail. Failing is not failing unless it is defeat, and this defeat of ours – if you realise it is a failing – is only a failure. A final failure. But as such, it is only a matter of a result, because in time this realisation tends to breed only the realisation of the result of failure; whereas the resolution of our failure, as opposed to the failure – ’

‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘No! Save the modern poetry or the philosophical treatise for later. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry. We’ll take it for granted there was some sort of a failure. Are you going to be able to make a success of this new start we’re giving you?’

‘It is not a new start,’ she said, beginning reasonably enough. ‘Once you have had the result, a start is no longer a result. It is merely in the result of failing and all that is in the case is the start or the failure – depending, for us, on the start, for you on the failure. And you can surely see that even here failure depends abnormally on the beginning of the result, which concerns us more than the failure, simply because it is the result. What you don’t see is the failure of the result of the result’s failure to start a result – ’

‘Stop!’ I shouted again.

I went to the Paull commander. I told him the thing was beginning to become an obsession with me.

‘It is with all of us,’ he replied.

‘But if only I could grasp a fraction of their problem! Look, we come out here all this way ahead to help them – and still we don’t know what we’re helping them from .’

‘We know why we’re helping them, Edmark. The burden of carrying on the race, of breeding a new and more stable generation, is on them. Keep your eye on that, if possible.’

Perhaps his smile was a shade too placating; it made me remember that to him we were ‘the Children’.

‘Look,’ I said pugnaciously. ‘If those shambling failures can’t tell us what’s happened to them, you can. Either you tell me, or we pack up and go home. Our fellows have the creeps, I tell you! Now what – explicitly – is or was wrong with these Zombies?’

The commander laughed.

‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t know, and that’s all there is to it.’

He stood up then, austere, tall. He went and looked out of the window, hands behind his back, and I could tell by his eyes he was looking at Failed Men, down there in the pale afternoon.

He turned and said to me: ‘This sanatorium was designed for Failed Men. But we’re filling up with relief staff instead; they’ve let the problem get them by the throats.’

‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I shall be there myself if I don’t get to the root of it, racing the others up the wall.’

He held up his hand.

‘That’s what they all say. But there is no root of it to get at, or none we can comprehend, or else we are part of the root ourselves. If you could only categorise their failure it would be something: religious, spiritual, economic …’

‘So it’s got you too!’ I said.

‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You’ve got the time ships. Go back and see what the problem was!’

The solution was so simple I couldn’t think how they had overlooked it; but of course they hadn’t overlooked it.