The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 1) (The Brian Aldiss Collection)

by Brian Aldiss

  Copyright

  HarperVoyager an imprint of

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

  Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications:

  Science Fantasy (1960), Starswarm, Intangibles Inc. And Other Stories, Science Fiction Adventures, New Worlds Science Fiction, Amazing Stories (1961 & 1962), The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, Daily Express Science Annual (1962).

  Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

  Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007482290

  Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007482290

  Version: 2015-08-12

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1 Faceless Card

  2 Neanderthal Planet

  3 Old Hundredth

  4 Original Sinner

  5 Sector Grey

  6 Stage-Struck!

  7 Under an English Heaven

  8 Hen’s Eyes

  9 Sector Azure

  10 A Pleasure Shared

  11 Basis for Negotiation

  12 Conversation Piece

  13 Danger: Religion!

  14 The Green Leaves of Space

  15 Sector Green

  16 Sector Vermilion

  17 Tyrants’ Territory

  About the Author

  Also by Brian Aldiss

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  DARKNESS IN THE DORMITORY

  Much of my training in the telling of short stories comes from uncomfortable, even painful, circumstances.

  In my tender years, my parents despatched me to a large public school in the county of Suffolk. I found that many of the arrangements in that place of incarceration had been devised to make our juvenile lives as uncomfortable as possible.

  Our dormitory, for instance, was as large and echoing as it could be. It contained about thirty iron beds. A strict rule ordered:

  NO TALKING AFTER LIGHTS OUT.

  However, past boys had devised a form of entertainment for those dark hours. Boys could compete in the telling of stories, one by one, while the other twenty-nine listened and judged. I went in for this competition, to find myself competing against, for instance, such boys as a friend, B.B. Gingell. Gingell was a stylish storyteller, able to relate with complete assurance the quiet events in the life of a water vole.

  How should I put this? My competing tales in that dark dorm were of great and desperate events, of terrible creatures emerging armed from the Sargasso Sea, of invisible white psychopaths transforming African tribes into robots, of wicked dictators plunging the world into darkness … Such was the tortured nature of my audience, huddled there in pokey beds, that my tales drove the innocuous water vole into oblivion. I became the dormitory’s undisputed top storyteller.

  Moreover, I found myself to be skilled in sadism. When something really alarming in my story was about to happen, I would stop. ‘I shall have to tell you tomorrow what happens next.’

  Frustrated cries arose from a dozen mattresses. ‘Go on, you bastard! Tell us now!’

  ‘Sorry, I have not yet made up my mind what happens next.’

  Oh dear, the power of the professionals …

  But, there was a fly in this ointment. Our hated housemaster had a spyhole set in the landing outside the dormitory. Howells was his name. Sticking his ear to the hole, he could detect a juvenile voice breaking the enforced silence within.

  Flinging open the door, in he stormed! On went the lights, swish went the cane in his fist.

  ‘Who was talking?’ he demanded.

  My hand went up. I was summoned to the middle of the room. And there, in my flimsy pyjamas, I was given six of the best on my behind. (Later, everyone wanted to see my scars).

  Howells slammed in. The trick was not to make a sound. Endure! – This is what life is going to be about. Then return with dignity to your bed. Without looking back.

  So what can Howells do next? Well … actually nothing. So off he clears. Putting out the lights and slamming the door behind him.

  And I? You must have guessed. I am the Champion Storyteller of the Junior Dorm.

  Faceless Card

  As soon as Paul Stoneward saw Nigel Alexander come into Darwin’s Dive, the killing instinct blossomed in him like a wonderful flower. I can just imagine how it was inside Paul: every little cell waking, growing teeth, turning into sharks yawning.

  Even in the most static society like ours, men divide off into hunters and hunted, wolves and sheep. Paul Stoneward was a hunter born, with a way of his own about stalking the prey.

  Mr Nigel Alexander was prey. He had it stamped all over him. Ordinary citizen. Safety first. Ideas keep out. He came into the Dive at a slow trot, moving on his heels as if his toes had corns. He foamed a little from a mouth as wide as a ditch with unaccustomed exertion. Brushing past Stoneward, he sat down at his table and peered anxiously through the net-curtained window.

  ‘Someone you don’t want to see?’ Stoneward asked.

  Nigel Alexander looked at his table companion for the first time and then back out of the window.

  ‘Just a business acquaintance,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

  His nerves all alert, Paul Stoneward looked him over, heard him absently order an old-fashioned bromo when the waiter came. Alexander was neatly dressed; Stoneward placed him as a man with money who had no notion how to spend it. A man with half his life ahead who had no notion how to use it. Prey: Handle with Cruelty.

  A youngster, slick and spick, drew up outside the bar and hesitated. He danced about, then entered. He noticed Alexander, pretended to be surprised, and came over to the table. His pale face shone with pleasure.

  ‘Hi, boss,’ he said eagerly. ‘I sure wasn’t sure I didn’t see that familiar back of yours ahead of me. What’s it to be? Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘I’ve already ordered, Johnny,’ Alexander said miserably. ‘I was just talking to my friend here …’

  It did not dislodge the newcomer one bit. He sat down, put his elbows on the table top and nodded friendly fashion to Stoneward. ‘Howdy, I’m Johnny J. Flower, Mr Alexander’s chief clerk. Glad to know you.’

  He was the up-and-creeping generation. No dandruff. No shyness. No doubts, no halitosis. No nothing. He began to chatter happily abou
t ‘the business,’ how well they were doing, how good it was working for Mr Alexander. Mr Alexander tried to join in the choruses, bought the boy a pep-up and fizz, smiled, nodded like an old nag.

  Business could have been better. ‘The N-Compass Co.’ had its troubles. The public just was not buying taped books like it used and that was a hard, gilt-edged fact nobody could buck. No matter how much publicity N-Compass put out for its clients, nobody could buck that gilt-edged fact. Even Mr Alexander with a smart head clerk like Johnny J. Flower could not buck that basic, gilt-edged fact. But they had done well to win the handling of the publicity for President da Silva’s Memoirs; that was a big consignment. Everyone present would surely agree President da Silva was a big guy.

  ‘Surely,’ agreed Stoneward, when their two pairs of cow eyes, hazel and green but so similar, turned to him, pleading with him to roll the ball along and say, ‘Surely.’

  Why, da Silva was the guy who instigated the Amazon Basin scheme … billions of credits … da Silva was the guy who gave the big yes to the AAA, the Automated Agriculture Act … Yuh, a big guy … N-Compass ought to be made with da Silva’s book.

  Finally Johnny said he should be getting along.

  ‘Off you go, boy; I’ll be along,’ Mr Alexander said, half tough, half cajoling. This obviously was not how Johnny wanted it played. He like the rest of the N-Compass staff to see him turn up with the boss, arm-in-arm, you-kiss-mine-etc. Still, he got up and went with grace, social to his clean, clean fingertips.

  Paul Stoneward drank in every second of the session as if it were wine. If there was anything he loved, it was seeing the mentally dead pretend they were mentally alive. All the time that he was watching and hating Alexander and the clerk, I was sitting at the other end of the bar watching and hating Stoneward; it’s my profession.

  ‘Nice boy, Johnny. Don’t know how I’d manage without him,’ Alexander said, wiping under his collar with a silk handkerchief. He was getting flabby. His new collar made it clear he needed a new neck.

  ‘But you were trying to dodge him,’ Stoneward said lightly. He could prise this old fool open like a piggy-bank.

  ‘Oh, well, yes … That’s another thing. It’s just – well, never mind. I don’t think I even caught your name, sir. Paul Stoneward? Fine; never forget a name – doesn’t pay in my line of business, no sir. You see, Johnny is a very smart and bright young feller – well, you saw for yourself …’

  ‘You wouldn’t say Johnny was a bore?’ Paul Stoneward put the delicate point tentatively. You would not say Johnny was a smarm, a snide, a creeper, a dully without one inkling, an ostrich, a jerk who was galloping blind from cradle to grave (like you, Mr Alexander) – in short, an ideal, approve, integrated citizen of this approved and misbegotten Age of Content?

  ‘Why, Johnny’s a real live-wire, Mr Stoneward,’ Alexander said, with mild indignation. ‘I only said to my wife this morning, “Penelope, Johnny’s going places” and I’m not a man to make a mistake.’

  Not much, you old blabbermouth. Of course you can’t see what Johnny is, just as the blind can’t see the blind. And what the hell places do you think Johnny could possibly be going to, when there are no longer any places worth going to? And what sort of romance do you and Penelope make when you are in your bed clothes? And if you knew I long – but long – to tear your typical existence apart from top to bottom …

  ‘It is of course a very great honour and pleasure to meet a man of your perspicacity and position,’ Stoneward said, crinkling his eyebrows into Mexican moustaches to increase the unction. ‘My place is only just round the corner from here. May I ask you up there with me now? I would be delighted to mix you another old-fashioned bromo.’

  At once, Alexander looked nervous. His face took on the puckered look it had worn when he first encountered the bar. Stoneward could not quite account for the expression. Goddam it, even these Normals had their little personal quirks; since it irritated him to feel he did not know every last grey inch of Alexander’s soul, he promptly forgot the thought.

  Alexander glanced at his watch.

  ‘The business …’ he said apologetically. ‘Most hospitable of you …’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Alexander,’ Stoneward said, lowering his eyes and easing huskiness into his voice. ‘I should have remembered what a busy man you are. It’s just – well, I’m lonely, let’s face it. There’s no Penelope for me … Just my little old self … Existence sometimes grows a wee bit … solitary.’

  Don’t ham it too much, kid, and don’t spoil it all by laughing in his face. You’ve got him now; look, his eyes are misting. Love in a mystery. These slobs are stuffed rotten with kindness – you just have to touch the right button and out it oozes.

  ‘I’m genuinely sorry to learn that, Mr Stoneward,’ the boss of N-Compass was saying. ‘Say, call me Nigel, why don’t you, and I’ll call you Paul. I like to be friends with folk. I guess we all get lonely at times – even a happy-married man like myself. Like I always say, Paul, life is just a big question mark. Sometimes at night, when your corns are playing you up …’

  ‘You mean – you mean you will come on round to my place?’ Stoneward said, brightening convulsively. He could not bother even to put on a genuine act – this Alexander was too rancid to smell a stink. Subtlety is wasted on suckers.

  ‘Well, I didn’t say that …’

  ‘Ah, come on – Nigel. You’d like my room. Besides … well, I’ve come to regard you as a friend, I guess.’

  ‘Don’t like to say no,’ Alexander murmured, rising obediently to his feet when Stoneward did. For all his smart suiting, he looked baggy, like a fat sheep off to a ritzy abattoir, as Stoneward took his arm and led him into the sedate streets.

  I left shortly after but did not follow them. Instead, I took a taxi to H.Q. Man, was I mad!

  Mr Nigel Alexander was really uneasy. He chewed a toothpick to splinters. He plucked at the armpits of his shirt to ease the damp patches off his skin. When he spoke, standing in the middle of Stoneward’s room, he gazed unhappily down at the squared toes of his shoes.

  ‘Er … you aren’t an artist, by any chance, Paul, are you? No offence, I mean, and you’ll have guessed by now that I’m a pretty liberal man, but I mean I just have to ask the once. These pictures on your walls … And that naked statue …’

  Stoneward perched himself on the edge of his desk, swung his neat legs, folded his competent hands, smiled dagger-fashion, looked artistic.

  ‘Why now, Nigel,’ he said with sham surprise, ‘you know as well as I do that such things as artists don’t exist any more! This is the Age of Content, when all maladjusted and non-functional groups like artists or fictioneers or drunkards have melted away. Everyone is adjusted, normal, happy.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Alexander said hurriedly, nodding rather too much. ‘I just thought … these pictures … I mean, don’t they rather look back to the old decadent pre-Content set-up? I mean, I know you are unmarried …’

  Stoneward walked over to the drug cabinet and began to mix two old-fashioneds, saying casually as he did so, ‘You could say I was an artist in a way. There’s something else that has died out and is now forgotten or forbidden: I’m an artist in the art of life.’

  This floored Alexander. He adjusted his damp shirt again and wiped his fingertips on the silk handkerchief. He tried a laugh.

  ‘Oh, you are mistaken there, Paul. Your concept, if you’ll pardon me, is awry. Life is not an art. It’s – well, it’s natural. I don’t intend any rudeness when I say you are mistaken. But life, well, it’s just something you live, I guess. I know Penelope would see it like that. You just live life; it doesn’t need any thought. Not the way business needs thought, for instance. I can’t see what you mean. I mean, I just don’t see it.’

  Carrying the two glasses carefully, Stoneward brought them over to the low oval table and set them down. He produced a box of mescahales and a lighter and set those down. He waved his hand to the chairs, sitting in one when his guest dubiousl
y did and curling his long legs under him.

  ‘Penelope is a very attractive name,’ he said ingratiatingly.

  ‘Oh yes, a very attractive name. My favourite name, in fact,’ Alexander said, grateful as a dog for the abrupt change of subject.

  ‘Well,’ Stoneward said, raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the widow of bashful fifteen and to the cadaver of forty, to the clean little woman who’s slightly unclean and the sports girl who’s out-and-out sporty.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard that one before,’ Alexander said, with glum embarrassment, again examining his toe-caps. He leant well forward and pursed his thick mauve lips to drink.

  ‘Let’s talk intimately,’ Stoneward said, as if struck by this sudden good idea. ‘Just you and I, Mr Nigel Alexander, with no souls barred. In every age, in every clime, a man’s or a woman’s breast harbour secrets – nothing bad, just little sensitive things to be kept away from the common gaze. Clouds of immortality and suchlike lush things. Let’s have ours out now, right here, confidentially, and see how intimate we can get. What say?’

  A driblet went down the plumpening chin and plopped on the table top. The hankie appeared and mopped the plop. The plump hand waved away a proffered mescahale.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t follow your meaning, Paul. I have no secrets. Well – business secrets, naturally … But I think you are presuming just a little on our acquaintanceship, if I may be allowed to put it that way. Secrets? Why should a normal man have secrets?’

  ‘Penelope,’ Stoneward barked, shooting out his legs, dropping his voice and repeating, ‘Penelope: no secrets from her? Not even teeny, weeny ones?’

  ‘No, no, not even – er, teeny, weeny ones. I can say that quite honestly. I love my wife very dearly, Mr Stoneward, the way a decent citizen should, please believe me. Any secrets we may have are very properly shared. Furthermore, as a property owner, I feel I have every right … every right to say … the gosh … every right …’

  He had drained his glass and now he was asleep. He rolled over like a bullock on clover, beginning to snore as the knockout drops took firmer hold of him. The lines of his face grew relaxed and generous.