Buch lesen: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 A Difficult Age

2 A Taste for Dostoevsky

3 Auto-Ancestral Fracture

4 Confluence

5 The Dead Immortal

6 Down the Up Escalation

7 Full Sun

8 Just Passing Through

9 Multi-Value Motorway

10 The Night that All Time Broke Out

11 Randy’s Syndrome

12 Still Trajectories

13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction)

14 Wonder Weapon

15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart

16 Drake-Man Route

17 Dreamer, Schemer

18 Dream of Distance

19 Send her Victorious

20 The Serpent of Kundalini

21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine

22 Total Environment

23 The Village Swindler

24 When I Was Very Jung

25 The Worm that Flies

26 The Firmament Theorem

27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts

28 The Humming Heads

29 The Moment of Eclipse

30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn

31 Since the Assassination

32 So Far From Prague

33 The Soft Predicament

34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long

35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art…

36 Working in the Spaceship Yards

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

Should an author concern himself about who his readers are? Should he worry about what they think of his writings?

Is not the world full of better and more cogent concerns?

These questions I raise without, hardly surprisingly, being able to answer them.

I raise them because I have been so entirely a writer all my long life, forever concerned with what to say and why I choose – or why I have been chosen – to say it.

Hardly a year has passed without the publication of a slender book of verse, a translation of the poems of Makhtumkuli, a novel, SF, a travel book, a volume of social commentary, or a selection of short stories, as here and now.

The possible length of a tale has long been of interest. One of my inventions was the mini-saga. My mini-saga project was to confine a story within fifty words. Titles did not count within the bastions of that punitive fifty. The Daily Telegraph embraced my idea, and we ran mini-story competitions in the paper for six successive years.

My determination from the start was that a mini-saga should not be trivial; its spacial limitations drained narrative from the form; a moral aspect should remain.

Here is the example I offered my newspaper readers:

Happiness and suffering

The doors of the amber palace

closed behind the young king.

For twenty years he dallied with

his favourite courtesans. Outside,

the land fell into decay. Warlords

terrorised the population.

Famine and pestilence struck,

of which chronicles still tell.

The king emerged at last.

He had no history to relate.

Some years after this was published, I discovered that a beautiful and cultured lady of my acquaintance carried a cutting with her of this mini-saga in her purse. What is more enthralling than fame? Why, secrecy …

When I phoned The Telegraph with my suggestion, I was working at the other end of the narrative scale, on a long trilogy concerning a planet called Helliconia.

And now? A new year dawned and I suddenly determined to challenge myself, not with shortage of words but with shortage of time. In brief, I would write a short story every day in succession. This book contains some of the results.

To be honest (generally a foolish thing for a writer to do) a short story written on a Monday requires a Tuesday as well. On Tuesday, you edit, you correct, you knock out ungainly sentences, you amplify, you may suddenly discover a new meaning that had never occurred to you on the Monday. So you in effect rewrite. That’s what Tuesdays are for … the writing of tiny masterpieces …

Most of these stories are fairly dark, glowing with gloom. I like it that way. Such matters as this I discussed with a new friend. Whereas it had been my own firm decision as an ex-soldier to leave Devon for Oxford, my meeting with Anthony Storr was accidental. We became close. Where I was just a writer, Anthony was an important figure in the university, and the clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry.

He suffered from depression, but liked to be amused; he himself could be greatly amusing. More to the point – and the reason why he features in this introduction – is that Storr was the author – among other titles – of The Dynamics of Creation. It was that wonderful perceptive book which drew me to him. To read his volume was to understand better why and how and what I wrote.

As can be seen, I have written a generous amount. In the past at least, this was because of the times we lived in. And more recently we have the temperatures of our own mental climates to deal with. In the sixties, I was busy adjusting to life in England after many excitements in the tropics, coping with failing marriages, looking after children, struggling for recognition.

And in a writer’s life – as in other lives – curious accidents occur. Fearing my small children might be taken away from me for ever, I wrote a short story about it. Then I decided that was not enough. I launched out on a novel. As I wrote, I said to myself: ‘This is so miserable, no one is going to want to read it …’

But I continued to the end, christened the results Greybeard, and sent the bundle off to my publisher. Faber & Faber accepted it, as did Signet in New York. And they labelled it – to my surprise – science fiction. Under that flag, the novel sold promptly to Germany, Tokyo, Budapest, Milan, Verona, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Rio de Janeiro. Oh yes, and Amsterdam.

Never again was I to have such success with a novel. One often does not realise what one is writing or – fortunately – reading … Let’s hope it holds psychological truth.

Anthony Storr puts it this way: ‘A man may often be astonished to find the scarlet thread of his identity running through a series of works which appeared to him very different at the time they were conceived.’

In the end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end

A Difficult Age

Various rumours have been circulating about Imago, the first robot ever to commit suicide. I’m in a position to end those rumours. Imago was our family robot.

I remember clearly how he revealed the way his thoughts were tending. My wife and I had given a dinner for my father, to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday; our eighteen-year-old son Anthony was also present. As guests, we had invited father’s youngest brother, Eddy, who was fifty, and his daughter Vera. Imago waited on us during the meal and brought us drinks out on to the air-conditioned terrace afterwards.

Following an idle line of conversation, Eddy exclaimed, ‘Well, I wish I was thirty years younger, anyhow!’

‘Nonsense, uncle, you’d feel foolish being younger than your daughter!’ I said, and everyone laughed.

‘It’s a pity we can’t all stay at a favoured age,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know why you want to be younger, Eddy – I’d say fifty is the golden age. You have reached the pinnacle of your career – without going downhill, like me! You still have your health and your wits. Your career is stable, your prosperity is assured. You don t have the worry of growing children, like a younger man, or the vexation of grandchildren, like an older man.’

‘Nonsense, fifty’s the worst possible age,’ said Eddy. ‘You can’t yet sit back and enjoy a pension and delicate health as you do, nor can you still chase women like a man of forty.’ (He had the tact not to look at me, perhaps remembering I was thirty-nine.) ‘At fifty, you see all too clearly the things you hoped to do and now never will. No, for preference, I’d be – if not Anthony’s age – Vera’s age.’

Vera laughed. ‘Daddy, you’re an old misery! And I assure you that the mid-twenties are not as comfortable as you may sentimentally recollect they were.’

‘They sit very well on you, my dear,’ my wife said. ‘What do you find to object to? You have such a marvellous supply of adoring young men. What more do you want?’

Imago handed Vera a coffee. She took it, stared at it as if to hide her embarrassment, and said, ‘Well, take those young men. Honestly, you can’t imagine how silly they are, most of them. They either treat me as if I was still a little girl or as if I were already past it.’ At this, I noticed my son Anthony colour slightly. ‘And – I must admit – I do sometimes feel just a kid and at other times absolutely past it. The truth is, twenty-six is a very uncomfortable age. You don’t have the fun of being teenage or the pleasure of being regarded as a responsible person. If I could choose my ideal age, I’d be – oh, thirty-five, say!’

‘It’s not a bad age,’ I admitted. ‘At least, each succeeding year is worse. Every age has its snags. I remember feeling worst when I was twenty-nine and some idiot called me “sir.” At that moment, I knew youth had fled.’

‘Each age has its snags,’ agreed my wife, ‘and also its benefits.’

I could see she was going to say something more, but at that moment Anthony gave voice. He was at an awkward age, the poetry writing age, the age – as a friend of mine once said – when you have the hairs but not the airs of a man. He seemed always moody and generally silent, except when silence would have been the better policy. He was, in short, terrible company, and had my full sympathy, which I never dared express.

He said, ‘Some ages have no benefits! I notice all of you naturally want to be younger but none of you are fool enough to plump for eighteen. At eighteen no one likes your music, no one will publish your poetry, your clothes never suit your personality! You’re really a man but nobody believes it, not even yourself!’

‘Nonsense, Anthony, you’ve all life before you!’ exclaimed Eddy firmly.

‘But you don’t know what to do with it! At eighteen, you see every-thing with painful clarity before age starts its merciful task of dulling the brain. And you realise for the first time at eighteen how short life is, how much of it has scudded by without your having done a damned thing about it! By the time you’re twenty-five it’ll be too late – sorry, Vera! What is there but death and old age ahead?’

His grandfather said, ‘You express precisely why I was not foolish enough to say I wished I was eighteen again, Anthony. I agree that it is a very painful age. I too was obsessed with death – more so than I am now. We can only assure you that your perspectives will change in a very few years.’

‘It’s easy enough to talk!’ Anthony said, and walked out of the terrace, leaving his coffee untouched.

When the others had gone home, my wife and I sat chatting and gazing into the night. Imago was clearing away the coffee cups. Unexpectedly, he said, ‘Sir!’

‘What is it, Imago?’

‘Subject, evening’s discussion, sir. Discussion revealed clearly marvellous variety and complexity of human existence. My deduction is correct, sir?’

My wife and I looked at each other.

‘I don’t think any of us would have regarded it in that light, Imago,’ she said – I thought a little uneasily.

‘Every few years, madam, irrespective of other factors, for humans different quality of experience. Is so? Different view of self? Correct deduction?

Somehow, I didn’t want to admit as much. So I said, ‘Certainly, one experiences such things as the passage of time differently at different periods of one’s life.’

‘Of one’s human life, sir. Exactly. Not only different quality of experience, also different quality of time-enjoyment.’

‘Take the cups, Imago, please.’

He stood his ground, against all robotic programming. ‘Robots, sir. Imago just realises: their only source of pride, that they are made in man’s image. But is not so. Are too simple. Are more made in image of dumb things like elevators, traffic lights, automobiles, clockwork acrobats. No enjoyment of time’s passage at all.’

‘What follows?’ my wife asked in a whisper.

Imago dropped a cup. ‘The poetry I secretly write can be no good. Am just – machine!’

He ran from the room, out into the night. We stood and saw him go, speeding towards the river, his head-light flickering. Even as he flung himself in, we noticed Anthony standing moodily on the bank. Maybe he was thinking of doing the same thing.

He entered the room with a dull air of triumph, waving a hand. ‘Remember when you bought Imago, on the day I was born? If you check on his guarantee, you’ll see he was eighteen too. It’s a difficult age.’

So that’s the truth and the end to rumours. Now you tell me what the truth means.

A Taste for Dostoevsky

He was nearly at the spaceship now, had slithered down the crater wall and was staggering across the few feet of broken rock that separated him from safety. He moved with the manic action of someone compensating for light gravity, his gauntleted hands stretched out before him.

He blundered clumsily against the outcropping teeth of rock, and fell on them. The knee joint of his suit snagged first on the rock, bursting wide. Still tumbling, the man grasped at his knee, feebly trying to clamp in the escaping oxygen-nitrogen mixture.

But help was at hand. They had been tracking his progress through the ship’s viewer. The hatch was cycling open. Two men in spacesuits lowered themselves to the lunar surface and hurried over to the fallen figure.

Grasping him firmly, they pulled him back into the ship. The hatch closed on them. The audience applauded vigorously; they loved the old corn.

In the spaceship cabin, relaxing, the two rescuers lit mescahales and sat back. Eddie Moore sprawled on the floor, gasping. It had been a close one that time. He thought they were never coming for him. Slowly he sat up and removed his helmet. The others had gone by then; there were just a few technicians backstage, clearing up.

Still breathing heavily, Moore climbed to his feet and headed for the dressing room. The lunar gravity did not worry him at all – he had lived here ever since his mother died, three years ago.

When he had changed, tucking himself into his ordinary everyday one-piece, he made his way towards the players’ exit. Halfway there, he changed his mind and climbed down through the airlock of the mocked-up twentieth-century rocketship.

Most of the audience had left the big hall now; there were just a few of them at the gallery at the far end, admiring the cleverly recreated lunar landscape. Eddie trudged through the mock pumice, head down, hands in pockets.

Funny the way it wasn’t until the whole moon surface was built over and the artificial atmosphere working that people had recalled the terrific aesthetic pleasure they had derived from the old primeval landscape of the moon – and had been forced to recreate it here out of artificial materials. That was the way things went. They didn’t appreciate his once nightly performance as the dying spaceman; he so fully empathised with his role that he knew one day he would die of oxygen-failure even while breathing it – and then there might be those, the discerning ones, who would hold the name of Eddie Moore dear, and realise that they had once been in the presence of a great artist.

Looking up, he saw that a solitary figure stood on a ridge of rock, staring moodily up at the fake heavens. He identified it as Cat Vindaloo, the Pakistani director of their show, and called a greeting to him.

Cat nodded sourly and altered his position without actually coming any nearer to Moore.

‘We went over well tonight,’ Moore said.

‘They still pay to come and watch,’ Cat said.

‘Your trouble is, you’re obsessed with being a failure, Cat. Come on, snap out of it. If there’s anything wrong with the show, it is that it’s too realistic. I’d personally like to see less of a dying fall to end with – maybe a grand finale such as they’d have had at the end of last century, with all the crew parading outside the ship, taking a bow.’

As if the words were dragged out of him by compulsion, Cat said, ‘You’re beginning to over-act again, Eddie.’ Moore realised the director was not standing here purely by accident; he knew that Moore, alone of the troupe, often preferred to trudge home the hard way.

‘Let me tell you, I’m the only one of the whole damned batch who still throws himself into the part. You can have no idea of the sort of life I lead, Cat! I’m an obsessive, that’s what, like a character out of Dostoevsky. I live my parts. My life’s all parts. Sometimes I hardly know who I really am. …’ He saw the beginnings of a glazed expression on Cat’s face and grabbed his tunic in an effort to retain his attention. ‘I know I’ve told you that before, but it’s true! Listen, it gets so bad that sometimes – sometimes I’m you – I mean, I sort of take your role, because I worry about you so much. I mean, I suppose I am basically afraid – it’s silly, I know – afraid you may be going to sack me from the cast. I must tell you this, though of course it’s embarrassing for us both. I – don’t you sometimes feel I am being you?’

Cat did not seem particularly embarrassed, a fact that disconcerted Moore. ‘I was aware you were unbalanced, Eddie, of course. We all are in this game, and I suppose I may as well confess – since you are bound to forget every word I tell you – that my particularity is suffering any sort of insult people like to heap on me. So that’s why I attract your attentions, I suppose; it’s destiny. But I fail entirely to see how you mean you are being me.’

‘If you don’t understand, it’s no good explaining. What I mean to say is that sometimes for days at a time I think myself – though I’m pure English – to be an Indian like you, living in India!’

‘I am a Pakistani, Eddie, as I have told you many times. You are choosing your own way to insult me again, aren’t you, taking advantage of the fact that I fundamentally have this degrading urge to be insulted. How can you live like an Indian here? And why should I care if you do? Your life is your own to make a fool with if you care to!’

‘That I would dispute if you were capable of arguing properly. How far are any of our lives our own ? Where do we live? Who lives us? Which is us? But to pose such philosophical questions to you – pah, it’s laughable! I must be out of my mind!’

‘The very truest word I have heard from you for months! You’re mad!’

‘Don’t you call me mad!’ The two tiny human figures confronted each other in the vast grey reconstructed landscape. Suddenly, one of them flung himself on the other. For a moment, they struggled together and then fell, rolling over and grasping at each other’s throats, lost on the ill-lit and broken plain. They became quieter. Finally one of them rose. He staggered off in the direction of the exit, gaining control of his movements as he went, and then breaking into a run that took him as fast as possible from the scene of the struggle.

When he got back to his apartment, he went straight into the little washing cubicle behind the surgery and rinsed his face and hands. He stood there bent at the basin for a long while, soaking his cheeks in cool water. Life was such nonsense that the more serious it grew, the harder it became to take it seriously.

The more he thought about it, the more amused he became. By the time he was drying himself on a fluffy white towel, he was laughing aloud. The moon indeed! The twenty-second century! Funny though it was, this nonsense must be put a stop to, once and for all. Clearly, he must go and see Etienne.

He rolled down his sleeves, walked through the surgery, down the passage, and to the front door. Looking through the two panels of frosted glass, he could see that beyond lay a fine summer’s evening. Although it was almost past nineteen-fifteen, the sun was still shining brightly, and quite high in the sky. He paused. Just beyond the door he would see the brass plate that announced he was practising as a dentist; and the name on it would be – Vindaloo or Morré? He hesitated. He hoped, Morré.

He opened the door. On the brass panel, polished by the concierge that morning, appeared his name: Morré. He beamed with relief. Beside the panel was a little pasteboard card with his surgery hours and reminders to patients to present their health cards, all neatly written out in French and Flemish.

He strolled down the side street and on to the main road, where the quiet was instantly lost. The garish seaside street carried a lot of through traffic, often international traffic hurrying from France through to Holland or Germany. Taking the undercut, Morré crossed the road and walked a couple of blocks to Etienne’s place. On the way, he stopped at a little flower stall and bought her a posy of blue cornflowers; they would soften the blow of what he had to say.

Etienne lived over a magazine and paperback shop in a flat she shared with two other young Belgian ladies – both happily away on holiday at present. Her pleasant little living room looked over the low dunes and the wide beach to the sea.

‘You are very late this evening, Eddie,’ she said, smiling as she let him in.

‘Perhaps so, but why attack me for it? It’s my misfortune, isn’t it – or so I would have thought it if you had greeted me lovingly!’

‘Eddie, don’t be that way! I did not reproach you, my darling!’ She stood on tiptoe, as he had noticed she often did. She was short and very shapely, in a little blue dress that went well with the cornflowers. She looked very sexy standing like that.

‘Please come off your tiptoes,’ he said. ‘You are trying to fool me.’

‘Darling, I was not – and I swear to you, I did not even notice I was on my tiptoes. Does it disturb you to see me on my tiptoes? It’s not usually reckoned as an indecent posture, but if it offends you, I promise I won’t do it again.’

‘Now you are trying to humour me! You know nothing maddens me like being humoured! Why can’t you speak to me like a reasonable human being?’

She flung herself down rather prettily in the wide armchair. ‘Oh, believe me, if you were a reasonable human being, I’d make every effort to talk to you like one. You’re absolutely nuts, aren’t you, Eddie?’

He had a brilliant idea. It would scare the pants off her. ‘Yes, you have uncovered my secret: I am nuts.’ Without undue haste, he lifted up the cornflowers before him and ate them one by one. Then he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. ‘I am nuts and that is what I wished to talk to you about this evening.’

‘I have to go out almost at once, Eddie …’ She looked as if she would have liked to faint. When he sat down close to her on the straight-back chair with the tapestry seat that was an heirloom from her old Flemish grandmother, she became rather fixed in expression, and said nothing more.

‘What I was going to tell you, Etienne, darling, what I especially came over for, was to say that I feared our engagement must be broken off. It’s not so much that we are not suited, although that is a consideration; it is more that I don’t even seem to know what century I am living in – from which it follows, I suppose, that I don’t even know what country I am living in – which in turn means that I don’t know what language I am speaking, or what my name is. In fact I don’t even know what planet I’m on, whether it’s the Moon, or Earth, or Mars.’

Etienne gestured out of the window towards the beach, where two sand yachts were bowling merrily along.

‘Take a look for yourself. Does that look like Mars? You were born on this coast; you know the North Sea when you see it, don’t you?’

‘Don’t interrupt me! Of course I can see it’s the flaming North Sea –’

‘Well then, don’t talk so stupid! Look, Eddie, I’ve really had about enough of your nonsense! You come up here every Saturday night and break off our engagement –’

‘I do not! I’ve never broken it off before, often though I’ve been tempted to!’

‘You do, too! You don’t know what you do do! How do you think I like it? I’ve got my pride you know! I can take emotional scenes as well as the next girl – in fact sometimes I rather think I enjoy them in a kinky sort of way. Maybe I’m the kinky kind –’

He shook a fist under her nose. ‘No self-analysis, please, at least while I’m speaking! Have you any interest in me or haven’t you? And who am I? Who indeed? Man’s eternal quest for identity – pity I have to carry mine out with such rotten partners.’

‘If you’re going to be insulting, you can go, Eddie Morré! I know perfectly well what’s wrong with you, and don’t think I’m not sympathetic just because I don’t show it. You have built up that fine little dentist’s practice just so’s you will have enough money to support me comfortably when we get married, and the overwork has resulted in brain fatigue. Poor Eddie! All you need is a little rest – these fantasies about Mars and the Moon are just phantoms of escape filtering across your over-heated cerebellum, reminding you of the need for rest and quiet. You know how damned quiet it is on Mars.’

Tears filled his eyes. It seemed she really was sympathetic. And perhaps her explanation was correct. He threw his arms round her in perfect forgiveness and attempted to kiss her.

‘Do you mind! Your breath stinks of cornflowers!’

The two vast human figures confronted each other in the tiny artificial town-room. Sparked by sudden anger, he grasped her more closely. They struggled. Nobody was there to see a chair tipped over and they rolled on to the floor, arms round each other’s necks. After some while, they were both still. Then one of the figures rose and hurried out of the apartment, slamming the door in haste.

Plainly, he was in need of some form of purification. When it was dark, he changed into clean garments and walked down to the burning ghats. The usual crowds of beggars stood and lay in the temple doorway; he gave to them more generously than usual.

Inside the temple, it was stuffy, although a cool breeze moved near the floor, fluttering the tiny lights of the faithful – who were not many this evening, so that they formed only a small cluster of insects in the great dim hallowed interior of the hall.

E. V. Morilal prostrated himself for a long while, his forehead to the stone, allowing his senses to go out amid the generations who had pressed foreheads and feet to this slab in the solemn contortions of devotion. He felt no devotion, only isolation, the opposite of devotion, but the sense of other human beings was some sort of balm.

At last he rose and walked through the temple on to the ghats. Here the smells that lingered in the building took on definition: wood smoke, burning unguents, the mouldy Ganges slowly trundling by, bearing its immemorial burden of holiness, disease and filth. As ever, there were a few people, men and women, bathing in their clothes off the steps, calling on their gods as they sank into the brown flood. Morilal went tentatively to the edge of the water, scooping up a handful of the stuff and pouring it on his shaven crown, letting it run pleasurably down into his clothes.

It was all very noisy. There were boats plying on the river, and children and youths shouting on the bridge, some of them with transistor radios.

‘Hello! Back in the twentieth century now!’ Morilal thought sharply.

Restless, he shuffled back and forth among the funeral pyres, some of which were unlit, awaiting midnight, some of which were almost burnt out, the human freight reduced to drifting ash or a bit of recalcitrant femur. Mourners crouched by most of the biers, some silent, some maintaining an arbitrary wailing. He kept looking for his mother. She had been dead three years; she should have been immolated long ago.