Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

‘We’ve been,’ the commander said briefly. ‘A problem of the mind – presuming it was a mental problem – cannot be seen. All we saw was the six million of them singly burying themselves in these shallow graves. The process covered over a century; some of them had been under for three hundred years before we rescued them. No, it’s no good; the problem from our point of view is linguistic.’

‘The translator banks are no good,’ I said sweepingly. ‘It’s all too delicate a job for a machine. Could you lend me a human interpreter?’

He came himself, in the end. He didn’t want to, but he wanted to. And how would a machine cope with that statement? Yet to you and me it’s perfectly comprehensible.

A woman, one of the Failed Men, was walking slowly across the courtyard as we got outside. It might have been the one I had already spoken to, I don’t know. I didn’t recognise her and she gave no sign of recognising me. Anyhow, we stopped her and tried our luck.

‘Ask her why they buried themselves, for a start,’ I said.

The Paull translated and she doomed briefly in reply.

‘She says it was considered necessary, as it aided the union before the beginning of the attempt,’ he told me.

‘Ask her what union.’

Exchange of dooms.

‘The union of the union that they were attempting. Whatever that means.’

‘Did both “unions” sound the same to you?’

‘One was inflected, as it was in the possessive case,’ the Paull said. ‘Otherwise they seemed just alike.’

‘Ask her – ask her if they were all trying to change themselves into something other than human – you know, into spirits or fairies or ghosts.’

‘They’ve only got a word for spirit. Or rather, they’ve got four words for spirit: spirit of soul; spirit of place; spirit of a non-substantive, such as “spirit of adventure”; and another sort of spirit I cannot define – we haven’t an exact analogy for it.’

‘Hell’s bells! Well, try her with spirit of soul.’

Again the melancholy rattle of exchange. Then the commander, with some surprise, said: ‘She says, Yes, they were striving to attain spirituality.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ I exclaimed, thinking smugly that it just needed persistence and a twenty-fifth-century brain.

The old woman clanged again.

‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

‘She says they’re still striving after spirituality.’

We both groaned. The lead was merely a dead end.

‘It’s no good,’ the Paull said gently. ‘Give up.’

‘One last question! Tell the old girl we cannot understand the nature of what has happened to her race. Was it a catastrophe and what was its nature?’

‘Can but try. Don’t imagine this hasn’t been done before, though – it’s purely for your benefit.’

He spoke. She answered briefly.

‘She says it was an “antwerto”. That means it was a catastrophe to end all catastrophes.’

‘Well, at least we’re definite on that.’

‘Oh yes, they failed all right, whatever it was they were after,’ the Paull said sombrely.

‘The nature of the catastrophe?’

‘She just gives me an innocent little word, “struback”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it means.’

‘I see. Ask her if it has something to do with evolution.’

‘My dear man, this is all a waste of time! I know the answers, as far as they exist, without speaking to this woman at all.’

‘Ask her if “struback” means something to do with a possible way they were evolving or meaning to evolve,’ I persisted.

He asked her. The ill-matched three of us stood there for a long time while the old woman moaned her reply. At last she was silent.

‘She says struback has some vague connection with evolution,’ the commander told me.

‘Is that all ?’

‘Far from it, but that’s what it boils down to! “Time impresses itself on man as evolution,” she says.’

‘Ask her if the nature of the catastrophe was at least partly religious.’

When she had replied, the commander laughed shortly and said: ‘She wants to know what “religious” means. And I’m sorry but I’m not going to stand here while you tell her.’

‘But just because she doesn’t know what it means doesn’t mean to say the failure, the catastrophe, wasn’t religious in essence.’

‘Nothing means to say anything here,’ the commander said angrily. Then he realised he was only talking to one of the Children; he went on more gently: ‘Suppose that instead of coming ahead, we had gone back in time. Suppose we met a prehistoric tribe of hunters. We learn their language. We want to use the word “luck”. In their superstitious minds the concept – and consequently the word – does not exist. We have to use a substitute they can accept: “accident”, or “good-happening”, or “bad-happening”, as the case may be. They understand that all right, but by it they mean something entirely different from our intention. We have not broken through the barrier at all, merely become further entangled in it. The same trap is operating here.

‘And now, please excuse me.’

Struback. A long, hollow syllable, followed by a short click. Night after night, I turned that word over in my tired mind. It became the symbol of the Failed Men, but never anything more.

Most of the others caught the worry. Some drifted away in a kind of trance, some went into the wards. The tractors became undermanned. Reinforcements, of course, were arriving from the present. The present! I could not think of it that way. The time of the Failed Men became my present, and my past and future, too.

I worked with the translator banks again, unable to accept defeat. I had this idea in my head that the Failed Men had been trying – and possibly involuntarily – to turn into something superior to man, a sort of super-being, and I was intensely curious about this.

‘Tell me,’ I demanded of an old man, speaking through the banks, ‘when you all first had this idea, or when it came to you, you were all glad then?’

His answer came: ‘Where there is failure there is only degradation. You cannot understand the degradation, because you are not of us. There is only degradation and misery and you do not comprehend – ’

‘Wait! I’m trying to comprehend! Help me, can’t you? Tell me why it was so degrading, why you failed, how you failed.’

‘The degradation was the failure,’ he said. ‘The failure was the struback, the struback was the misery.’

‘You mean there was just misery, even at the beginning of the experiment?’

‘There was no beginning, only a finish, and that was the result.’

I clutched my head.

‘Wasn’t burying yourself a beginning?’

‘No.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was only a part of the attempt.’

‘What attempt?’

‘You are so stupid. Can you not see? The attempt we were making for the resolution of the problematical problem in the result of our united resolve to solve the problem.’

‘Which problem?’

‘ The problem,’ he said wearily. ‘The problem of the resolution of this case into the start of failure. It does not matter how the resolution is accomplished provided all the cases are the same, but in a diversity of cases the start determines the resolution and the finish arbitrarily determines the beginning of the case. But the arbitrary factor is itself inherent in the beginning of the case, and of the case itself. Consequently our case is in the same case, and the failure was because of the start, the start being our resolution.’

It was hopeless. ‘You are really trying to explain?’ I asked weakly.

‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I am telling you about the failure. You are the struback.’