Foreign Constellations Read online

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

  Brunner, John, 1934-

  Foreign constellations.

  CONTENTS: The Berendt conversion.—The easy way out.—Out of mindshot.—Pond water, [etc.]

  1. Science fiction, English. I. Title.

  PZ4.B8gGal 1980 [PR6052.R8] 823‘914 79-92183

  ISBN: 0-89696-094-3

  Copyright © 1980 by Brunner Fact & Fiction Limited

  All Rights Reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Beaverbooks, Pickering, Ontario

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed by Joyce Cameron Weston

  First Edition FG

  Contents

  The Berendt Conversion

  The Easy Way Out

  Out of Mindshot

  Pond Water

  The Protocols of the Elders of Britain

  The Suicide of Man

  The Taste of the Dish and the Savour of the Day

  What Friends Are For

  Acknowledgments

  The Berendt Conversion first appeared in Ramparts, July 1975, Copyright © 1975 by Noah’s Ark Inc., and was included in Fireweed #9, June 1977.

  The Easy Way Out first appeared in If, June 1971, Copyright © 1971 by UPD Publishing Corp., and was included in Best Science Fiction for 1972, edited by Frederick Pohl (Ace Books).

  Out of Mindshot first appeared in Galaxy, June 1970, Copyright © 1970 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp., and was included in The Best from Galaxy, Volume 1 (Award Books).

  Pond Water first appeared in The Farthest Reaches, edited by Joseph Elder (Trident Press), Copyright © 1968 by Joseph Elder

  The Protocols of the Elders of Britain first appeared in Stopwatch, edited by George Hay (New English Library), Copyright © 1974 by John Brunner, and was included in The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (DAW Books).

  The Suicide of Man first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July-August 1978, Copyright © 1978 by Davis Publications.

  The Taste of the Dish and the Savour of the Day first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1977, Copyright © 1977 by Mercury Press Inc., and was included in The 1978 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (DAW Books).

  What Friends Are For first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars, edited by Terry Carr (Simon & Schuster), Copyright © 1974 by Terry Carr, and was included in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year #4, edited by Lester Del Rey (E.P. Dutton).

  Foreign Constellations

  The Berendt Conversion

  Under the cloud-dark sky that promised rain by sunset: the noise of an approaching engine. Heads were turned. The soup-tanker was of course what everybody was looking forward to, but it couldn’t possibly be here for at least another hour and would be later still if the crew had to beat off an attempted hijack. Anyhow, what was coming was a helicopter and those had been reserved since spring for moving people, not goods.

  It was a bad time for the unexpected. Five wars were in progress over food.

  Therefore soldiers’ knuckles paled on the hands that held their guns. Many of them had seen service during hunger riots last year and the year before. Workers trudging down from the hills with burdens of miscellaneous vegetation reflexively glanced around in search of cover. In the supermarket car-park the non-working refugees reacted also, bar the handful who were too weak. But those were mostly children. This operation had an admirable record. Some days nobody died here at all.

  The youngest of the five policemen whose job it was to keep order among the inhabitants of the car park was proud of his contribution to this exceptional achievement. Before permitting himself to look up he took time to survey his charges. Most were sheltered by abandoned cars and delivery trucks; even the least fortunate were protected from wind and rain, if not from cold, by tents improvised out of plastic sheet and aluminium pipe. Now and then someone in a tent noticed that someone in a more substantial home was weakening and took advantage of the police’s backs being turned to kick out the luckier neighbours. Once there had been an epidemic of such attacks and for a week more fatalities were due to murder than to hunger.

  Not presently, however. And the young policeman had no opinion, private or public, concerning the latrine rumour which claimed that the protein content of the soup had been cut to increase fatigue and forestall another similar outbreak.

  As soon as they realised the chopper was neither shooting nor being shot at, the refugees and workers slumped back in time to where they had been a moment earlier: the latter because payout was as distant as usual, the former—it could be read in their hostile eyes—because they feared more mouths were being brought, more empty bellies.

  The soldiers would have done likewise but that the sergeant in charge of the assessment detail ordered them to stand to. The earliest-returning of the workers were coming up to the perimeter gate with their day’s forages, demanding to be let pass along the barbed wire corridor into the supermarket, that horrible echoing cavern of a place where the only light came from holes blasted in the walls and meshed over against thieves, or cold refugees jealous that the soldiers and police should sleep under such solid cover.

  The young policeman had often wondered what it was like to run that gauntlet at the end of a hard day: to face the scales, then the sonic testers employed to determine how much usable greenery, how much woody matter, and how much dirt and gravel made up the weight of each bag and basket, then let his hand be stamped with a code indicating what food he was to be allotted when the tanker pulled in with its loaf-nets sagging on either side.

  Funny . . . As the summer wore to its end more and more of the workers seemed to be losing touch with reality, trying to deceive the assessors by hiding pebbles among the leaves and roots they could legitimately gain credit for, even though they must surely by now be aware that all such trickery was certain to be found out. Yesterday indeed a man who should have known better, being father of five children including a recent baby, had been fool enough to alter the 1 stamped on his hand to a 4 and in accordance with regulations had been refused any food at all.

  It wasn’t fair on the kids for him to have done that.

  His eyes strayed to the hillside. To left, to right and also at his back, the slopes were littered with what had been handsome expensive homes before the ghetto-ghouls began their rampage through this valley. He tried to picture it as it had been five years earlier; failed, because as a kid he had never lived in nor even visited such a wealthy suburb; then tried not to visualise it as it inevitably would be after the winter and failed again. But for the frequent rain this land would already be shedding dust this fall as once it had shed leaves.

  The helicopter settled on the patch where the soup-tanker ordinarily drew up, the most defensible spot. Alerted by radio, the commanding colonel and his adjutant were on hand. An armed private with the professionally paranoid air of a bodyguard jumped out, only condescending to salute after he had swept the vicinity with his suspicious gaze. Then an important passenger climbed down, encumbered with a bulging paunch, and shook the colonel’s hand and marched off with him to the supermarket.

  Among the refugees there had grown up a ritual to be performed on catching sight of anybody fat. Behind the wire a defiant old man demonstrated it, being himself as scrawny as a beanpole; he spat on the ground, trod on the spittle, turned his back with an over-shoulder scowl. To this the young policeman was directed to reply with a gesture towards his gun and a threatening glare, rehearsed again and again to render it maximally convincing and save the ammunition that would be wasted were he to have to shoot.

  But the landing of the chopper had saved him from—from something. He had been on the edge of—of—of. . . It wouldn’t come clear. He could, though, sense it would have been disastrous. (Maybe he himself would in a fit of craziness have spat on seeing how fat the visitor was?)

  He did not even drop his hand to his holster. He simply stood and shivered, more from the narrowness of his escape from— from whatever it was he had escaped, than from the chill that harbingered the rain.

  Who was this person, anyhow, who rated a slow, expensive, wasteful mode of transport like a chopper in times of planetary dearth? The machine’s pilot, a lean man with a close-trimmed dark beard, had got out and stood a few feet away, stretching himself limb by limb as he looked the scene over. The young policeman attempted to utter a greeting, pose a question . . . and abruptly couldn’t. His mouth was watering incredibly. He had caught a scent so indescribably delicious it dizzied him. It awoke hunger that seemed to cry out from his very cells.

  Hideously embarrassed, he gulped and gulped, hoping the bearded man would not notice. Seemingly he was more interested in the workers returning with their loads of greenstuff and the armed men lined up to receive them.

  After a few moments he said, “Get much trouble with thieves, do you?”

  The salivation was coming under control. (What could have triggered it?) “Not twice,” the policeman managed to quote.

  The pilot glanced at him as though surprised. “Hmm! It’s long since I heard that crack! Must have been when the cows went on their involuntary seven-year diet . . . Still, I guess granary guards are much alike wherever and whenever.”

  The policeman let that pass without bothering about its meaning. Now that he could speak normally again, he preferred to put the question he had originally intended about the passenger.
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  “Government food chemist,” the pilot answered.

  The policeman essayed a joke. “Looks as though he tests his products on himself, doesn’t it?”

  A merely polite smile. “If you knew him you couldn’t picture him being his own guinea pig . . . Oh-oh. Here it comes!”

  Like stabbing needles the first drops of rain. In the car-park the refugees ducked under cover; workers lining up to be shepherded into the supermarket made what use they could of their bundled twigs and leaves.

  “Inside, quickly!”

  The policeman started. The pilot had scrambled back into his seat; now he was patting the place next to him, which had been occupied by the bodyguard. There were two more seats in back. One, the passenger’s, was empty. In the other dozed a top sergeant, a man heavy-set without being fat, on whom the refugees would not have expended spittle, with great pouches under his eyes and sagging empty jowls that testified to his having lost much poundage since—since whenever. He snored occasionally.

  “Come on!” the pilot urged. “The rain’s doing half your work for you, isn’t it?”

  True, true. It dampened spirits as it wet the ground. He climbed three wide-spaced rungs and sat, pulling the door to behind him. At once his mouth flooded again. The same scent was in the air, far stronger.

  “It’s no fit way for a human being to end the day’s work,” the pilot muttered. He was staring as the workers formed a tidy line between the spikes of barbed wire and of bayonets. “To sweat from dawn to dusk, creep homeward folded double by your load, be told there’s too much dirt and grit in it, half rations for your family tonight . . . And it’s making more desert when we need less.”

  The policeman had heard that sort of talk before. But when people were starving by the tens of millions it was no time for fancy fits of conscience. Just so long as they were kept alive.

  “You got a patch of dirt on your face,” the pilot said after a pause. “Right cheekbone.”

  The policeman almost raised his hand to rub before he remembered. “Oh, that. No, it isn’t dirt. I guess I bruised it somehow.”

  “Ah-hah?” The pilot scrutinised him. “Bruise easily, do you? Yes? Do your joints hurt?”

  “Sometimes. Seems to be a thing going around.”

  “Be damned,” the pilot said softly. “I knew the refugees were getting it, but I thought at least the guards. . . Here, boy.” He reached under the instrument panel and produced a lunchbox previously hidden in shadow. The instant he opened it the delicious scent became unbearable.

  “Boy?” the policeman bridled.

  “Hell, if you’re old enough to vote I’ll personally eat the shit you’ve passed since your birthday. . . .” Taking from the box something brown and white, something pink, something round and red. Also a knife.

  “Should give you an orange or a lemon,” the pilot said musingly. “Don’t have any by me, though. . . . What’s ‘going around’, as you call it, is something we’ve known the cure for since about the eighteenth century—scurvy. I recall at Alexandria it made the soldiers so listless they paid no attention when the enemy approached. Bad stuff. Here, eat this. Best be quick and not let any of the refugees see you with it.” He held out a swiftly-fashioned sandwich of bread and ham, and also a tomato.

  “Are they real?” the young policeman breathed.

  “I should live so long and grow so rich! Hell, no. These are berendtised.”

  “All made out of—of. . .?” With a gesture at the workers’ forage.

  “Sure, but don’t be put off. It’s not rat-meat I’m giving you. That’s officer-grade food, four hundred fifty bucks’ worth of power to every pound. You won’t taste the same again in a hurry . . . Mark you, when there’s nothing else even rat-meat can be tasty.”

  Taking the sandwich gingerly the policeman said, “I never got that far down. Seen plenty that did, of course. Uh—where were you reduced to rats?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing very special about rats. After the cats and dogs are all gone . . . In Paris, though: that was something else. We had some very strange meats when we cleared out the Zoo—elephant, giraffe, even python . . . Say, eat up, will you, instead of staring? It’s not poisoned!”

  The policeman opened his mouth and crammed it in, trying to savour each crumb and morsel, failing because his hunger was so deep, so keen.

  “Oh, God,” he said at length, and ran his tongue hopefully around his lips to trap a last elusive drop of tomato juice. In back, the sleeping sergeant shifted but didn’t open his eyes.

  The pilot closed the lunchbox and carefully put it away. There was a little silence, but for the sound of rain. At last the policeman said, “I heard a story about Berendt. Is it true he killed himself by jumping into his own food-converter?”

  “It’s true he killed himself. Whether he did it in that precise way is just about impossible to find out. They prefer people not to know they killed him.”

  “What? You just said he killed himself and now—”

  “Did you never wonder what decided him?”

  “Ah . . . Well, sure. It seems kind of odd he did it just when he’d succeeded in his life’s ambition, right?”

  “Ambition,” the pilot repeated thoughtfully. “Obsession may have been more like it. The story goes he never talked or thought about anything except his plan to save the world from famine.”

  “What—what drove him, do you think?”

  “Heaven knows. Some people say his father had been eaten. Things like that did happen. It was a vicious winter. Of course it was just a Little Hunger, and at that it was in wartime. The Big Hunger hadn’t more than started.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Leningrad.”

  There was another pause. Now dusk and denser rain had almost veiled the late-returning workers. The soldiers, as wet and cold as their charges, were beginning to raise their voices and threaten to cuff with gun-butts.

  “For whatever reason,” the pilot resumed unexpectedly, “Yakov Berendt made the food converter his personal crusade. He had no scientific talent, so the first thing he had to do was make a fortune so he could hire top chemists and engineers and dietitians. It cost every penny he had just to build one pilot model. But when he had that, he had proof it could be done. He was able to borrow. Altogether he borrowed over twenty million. Produced the machine he’d always dreamed of. Drop in any kind of vegetation, even the poisonous kind, even the useless kind like straw and twigs, fit the right master-tape, and out would come good nourishing food. How could there be any more starvation when there was one of his machines in every village?”

  “But there isn’t,” the policeman said, settling back comfortably in his seat and folding his hands on his stomach. It was amazing how full and sleepy that one sandwich had made him.

  “Right. There isn’t. With the Big Hunger looming larger by the day, the people who had loaned him the money to develop the converter branded him a crank and a lunatic and had him voted off his own company’s board. Once they were in control they made sure the price of a Berendt converter was the highest the market could bear. No, there £re not converters in every village. But there are in every smart restaurant and hotel. And some private homes, come to that. This guy I’m ferrying around: he has one.” The pilot scowled into the gathering dark.

  “But in any case,” he added, “he was completely wrong to think his machine could save us.”

  “How’s that again?” The policeman’s eyes threatened to drift shut; he forced the lids apart and forced himself to concentrate on what the pilot was saying.

  “Proof is all about us. Like I said, this project and those like it are making more desert when we need less. There’s nothing wonderful about being a villager, you know—what reason is there to think peasants would behave any differently from townsfolk? Just as your rich family in the big city buys dirt- cheap rubbish for the converter and puts on an expensive tape and eats the haute cuisine, so villagers would have been content to chuck in leaves and grass and the hell with actually planting anything. Who wants to break his back for corn and cabbages? Food from the converter is better than most of what you get from the ground; they choose only the very finest models to make up tapes from. Why, they’ve got to the stage now where they can duplicate vintage wines. The experts say they’re more consistent than the original.”