by Brian Aldiss
‘There’s too much of that sort of incident,’ Rastell said. ‘This trouble flared up all at once a few years ago. They must have a leader.’
‘I’d guess they also had a cause. What will happen to the man who broke free from the cab and coshed the passenger?’
‘That sub?’ He looked at me, his lips curving in a smile not entirely free from malice. ‘He struck a churchgoer. I was not the only witness. He’ll be hanged at the castle next week. What else could we do with him? He’ll be granted last rites.’
The grand stretch of Princess Street, a street fit for any capital, was changed, although many of the buildings were as I knew them. Their rather commercial gaiety had gone. They presented a drab uniformity now. Their windows were unwashed; the goods displayed for sale in the shop windows looked uninviting. I peered eagerly at them as we thudded by at a stiff walking pace. The big car showrooms had gone, the shops were not piled with the gadgets I knew. On the pavements, greater variety was in evidence. Many people were about, looking cheerful as they shopped. Few slaves in sight, and I now observed that among the free some looked far less prosperous than others. Sedans, pedal-cabs, four-wheel bicycles and little electrically powered cars moved busily along. I was sorry when we halted before a large grey building and Rastell signalled me to alight.
‘This is the headquarters of my chapter,’ he said, as we pushed through the doors with Dibbs following.
‘I believe it’s a block of offices in my matrix.’
‘On the contrary, it is the Commission for Nuclear Rearmament. Are you forgetting already how war-oriented your matrix is?’ He relented then, and said in less ironic tones, ‘However, you’ll probably find us too religious. It’s a matter of viewpoint really.’
The place was bustling. The foyer reminded me of an old-fashioned hotel; its furniture was cumbrous and oddly designed, reminding me of the styles of Elizabeth II’s era, fifty years ago or more, except that everything was so colourless.
Rastell marched over to a noticeboard and scanned it
‘We have half-an-hour before the next history briefing for extra-matricials. I’ll see you are found a room where you can wash and rest. I have one or two people I ought to see. We’ll meet again, shortly, at the briefing.’
He signalled a passing servant, a girl dressed not in denims but in a curious black and white pantaloon. I felt anxious at leaving Rastell, my one contact with my own matrix. He interpreted my expression, and arched one of his eyebrows.
‘This sub girl will take good care of you, Meacher. Under the dispensation, she will serve you in any way you may require.’
As he disappeared, I thought, not an unlikeable devil, given better circumstances. I followed the sub girl, noting the yellow disc between her shoulder blades. She led me up one flight of stairs and along a corridor, and opened a door for me. When I was inside, she followed, locked the door, and handed me the key. Despite myself, I began to get ideas. In that awful dress, she looked foolish, and her face was pasty, but she was young and with good features.
‘What’s your name?’
She pointed to a button on her dress. On it was the name Ann.
‘You are Ann? Can’t you talk?’
She shook her head. A sensation like cold needles prickled in my chest; it occurred to me that I had not heard a word from Dibbs or from the slaves by the upturned cab. Moving towards her, I touched her chin.
‘Open your mouth, Ann.’
Meekly, she let her jaw hang. No, her tongue was there, as well as several teeth that needed stopping or pulling. The helplessness of the creature overwhelmed me.
‘Why can’t you speak, Ann?’
She closed her jaw and lifted up her chin. On the whiteness of her neck ran an ugly red scar. Uncheckably, the tears sprang to my eyes. I clasped her thin shoulders and let anger burn over me.
‘Is this done to all slaves?’ Shake of head. ‘To some – to most of them?’ Nod. ‘Some sort of punishment?’ Nod. ‘Hurt you?’ Nod. So remote! ‘Are there other men like me, from other matrices, along this corridor? Blank look. ‘I mean other strangers from other places like me?’ Nod. ‘Take me to one of them.’
I gave her the key. She unlocked the door and we went into the corridor. At the door of the room next to mine she stopped. Her key fitted that lock, and the door swung open.
A fellow with a thatch of wispy yellow hair and stubble all round a great leg of jaw sat at a table eating. He ate with a spoon, furiously. Though he looked up as I came in, he did not interrupt the ladling of food into his mouth.
‘You’re an extra-matricial?’ I asked. He made noises of assent into his stew.
‘So am I. My name’s Sheridan Meacher. We can’t agree to give these people any help to bolster up their regime. Their entire system is evil, and must be destroyed. I’m trying to get people to help me.’
He put his spoon down. He stood up. He leant over the table.
‘What’s evil about the system here, jack?’
I showed him Ann’s scars, explaining what they were. He laughed.
‘You want to come and have a look at my home matrix,’ he said. ‘Ever since an unsuccessful revolution ten years ago, the Chinese have employed all scholars in chain gangs. They’re busy making roads across the Cairngorms.’
‘The Chinese? What have they to do with it?’
‘Didn’t they win the third world war in your matrix?’
‘Win it! They didn’t even fight it!’
‘Well, then, you’re just lucky, jack, and if I were you I’d be inclined to keep my trap shut.’
Before I had backed out of his room, he was again spooning stew into his mouth.
In the next room was a little plump man, red in the face and bald of head, who jumped quickly back from his sub girl as I entered.
‘I’m extra-matricial like you,’ I told him, ‘and I don’t like what I have seen here so far. I hope you feel that these people should not be encouraged in any way.’
‘We’ve rather got to make the best of things now we’re here, that’s my feeling,’ he said, coming forward to look at me. ‘What don’t you like about this place?’
‘I’ve only just arrived, but this system of slavery – it alone is enough to convince me that I can’t possibly support the ruling regime. You must feel the same.’
He scratched his bald head.
‘You could have worse than slavery, you know. At least slavery guarantees that a part of the population lives about the level of animals. In the Britain of my matrix – and I expect you have found the same – the standard of living has been declining ever since the beginning of the century, so much so that some people are beginning to whisper that communism may not after all be the solution we –’
‘Communism in Britain? Since when?’
‘You sound so surprised, anyone would have thought I said democracy. After the success of the General Strike of 1929, the first communist government was established under the leadership of Sir Harold Pollitt.’
‘All right, thanks very much. Just tell me this – will you back me in opposing this regime of slavery?’
‘Well, I don’t oppose you in opposing it, comrade, but first I’d want to know a little more –’
I slammed the door on him. I had backed out so hurriedly, I jumped into another man moving rapidly down the corridor. Brought up short, we regarded each other. He was young and dark, about my weight and height, with a high bridge to his nose, and I liked the look of him immediately.
‘You’re an extra-matricial?’
He smiled and held out his hand. When I held out mine, he grasped my elbow instead; so I grasped his elbow.
‘My name is Mark Claud Gale. I’m on an errand of revolt, and you look like a possible conscript. None of these spineless fellows will back me up, but I’m not going to give this government any help –’
‘Ah, count me with you all the way, Mart. Well met! I am Sherry Meacher, and I also am recruiting. If we stick together and defy the regime, others ma
y follow our example, and we will see that we are returned to our own matrix. And then perhaps the slaves –’
The brazen tongue of a bell interrupted me.
‘Time for the historical briefing,’ Mark said. ‘Let’s go and learn what we can, Sherry; the knowledge may be of use to us later. By my shrine, but this is an adventure!’
This aspect of the matter had not struck me before, but to have this dependable ally heartened me immensely, and I felt ready for anything. A heady and pleasurable excitement filled me. I could not wait to get to the briefing, and to hear, to listen, to be assaulted and insulted by a barrage of new facts that – only a day ago! – would have seemed the wildest fantasy.
A pair of dark-clothed church police appeared at the head of the stairs and began ushering us down. The bald man from communist Britain (but for all I knew there were a million communist Britains) tagged on with us, but did not speak. Ann disappeared as we pressed downstairs. Counting heads, I noted there were twenty-two of us. As we filed into a hall at the back of the foyer, we found another thirty-odd people awaiting us; from the variety of clothes they were wearing, it was apparent that they were also extra-matricials.
We sat at long tables on benches, and looked at the head table, which stood on a dais and contained three men, each with a secretary, and church police standing behind them. One of the three men was Rastell; he gave no sign of having noticed me, and I wondered if I should even have occasion to speak to him again.
A bell sounded, and one of the men on the dais, a white-haired man of good bearing, rose to his feet.
‘Gentlemen and sinners, you are welcome in this peaceful matrix. We thank you for coming here to offer us help and wisdom. I am the Lieutenant Deacon Administered Bligh, and with me are two members of my committee. Captain Apostolic Rastell is now going to give you a brief history of this matrix, so that you may have a correct perspective. A sub will come round distributing pens and paper to all who wish to make notes.’
Rastell rose, bowed slightly to Bligh and went straight into his talk.
He spoke for almost two hours. From the body of the hall, hardly a whisper came. We listened fascinated to the history of a world like ours, and yet so hauntingly unlike. Rastell’s version was heavily trimmed by propaganda, yet the man’s own personality enlivened even the heaviest passage of dialectic.
A few instances of the strange things Rastell told us must suffice. In this matrix, the concept of nationality has not risen (AA688 Rastell had called it, and I had committed the number to memory), German and Italian nationality had not been achieved until the second half of the nineteenth century, but the other great European countries had achieved unity several centuries earlier. In this matrix in which I now found myself, the kings of England and France had been less successful in their struggle against the feudal lords; one reason for this was, I gathered, that the church had looked less favourably on the concept of earthly kingdoms.
England had only become a united kingdom in 1914, at the time of the French-German war, in which Britain was neutral and the United States of America sold armaments to both sides. In the first world war of 1939, the alignment of power was as I knew it, with a Nazi Germany fighting against Britain and France and, later, America and Russia entering as their allies, while Japan fought on the same side as Germany. Japan, however, had been Christianised. The Americans, having been less attracted to a less heavily industrialised Europe, had turned their attention and their missionaries to Japan earlier than they had done in my matrix.
This led to a crisis in the conduct of the war. American and British scientists developed an atomic bomb. Before using this weapon against the Japanese and German enemy, the forty-fifth president of the United States, Benedict H. Denning, consulted with the Convocation of Churches. The Convocation was a powerful group. It not only forbade the use of such a weapon against nominally Christian countries; it gradually took over jurisdiction of the weapon. The war lasted until 1948, by which time the Church was completely in control of all nuclear power development.
A long and hard war had vitiated both the US and her allies. At the end of the conflict, weak governments fell and a strong church rose as a challenging power. Its rule had spread to other countries, particularly to Europe, which was occupied after the war, not by armed forces but by battalions of churchmen.
Since that date, almost a century ago, mother church had kept the fruits and the secrets of nuclear power under her voluminous skirts. The exhaustion of natural resources had necessitated the employment of subject populations, but there had been no war since 1948. The rule of religion poured out its benefits on to all mankind. What Rastell did not mention were any negative or suppressive results of this rule.
Some of these suppressions were obvious enough. With an autocratic central control and the lack of incentives that wars provide, scientific and technological developments had dropped away. World populations, on the other hand, had risen steeply – Rastell mentioned at one point that, after the amalgamation of the Grand Christian Church of 1979, methods of contraception were universally discouraged. The new populations were born into slavery.
‘We have been able to turn away from materialism because we have a large subject population to perform the menial tasks of the world for us,’ Rastell said. It struck me at the time that this was a neat way of saying that almost every nation without mechanical labour is forced to use slaves.
From what he said, and from what he omitted, it became apparent that almost the only scientific development since the 1960s was the portals and transmatricial travel. The church had not encouraged space travel. No doubt they would have been shocked to learn of the Battle of Venus in the Fifth World War, in which I had taken part.
When Rastell had finished speaking, a stunned silence lay over the hall. It had grown dusk while he talked; now lights came reluctantly on as we returned to awareness of our own situation. I could see by the faces about me that to many of the extra-matricials, Rastell’s material had been more astonishing than I found it.
What amazed me most was the way the church had departed from what it represented in my matrix. Rather glibly, I decided that it was the possession of nuclear power that had worked the change. Such a possession would have needed strong men to control it, and obviously the strong men had ousted the meek. Another case of absolute power corrupting absolutely. So I said to myself, with the church cast as villain of the piece. Then Administered Bligh rose again, and made me doubt my own reasoning.
‘Now that you have a perspective with which to work,’ he said, ‘we can proceed to place before you the problem with which we are faced. As most of you will know, you were brought here to give us your help. All of you are students of history in some form or other. A meal is going to be served to you right away; afterwards, we shall explain the problem in detail and invite your advice; but now I will put it to you in general terms, so that you can consider it while you eat.
‘We try to instil into our subject population the eternal truth that life in this world is always accompanied by sorrow, alike for those that lead and those that are led, and that they must expect to find their rewards for virtue in the hereafter. But subs do not learn. Several times they have risen against their masters. Now – I will tell you frankly, gentlemen – we are faced with a much more serious revolt. The subs have captured the capital; London is in their hands. The question we are going to ask you with all its ramifications, is this: will leniency or harshness be the most effective way of dealing with them? In giving us your answers, you must bear in mind the parallels with your own times.’
He sat down. Already plates were clattering. Subs of both sexes poured forth from doors at the far end of the hall, bearing food.
The little bald man from communist Britain was sitting next to me.
‘An interesting poser, that,’ he said. ‘Leniency is always striking to the uninformed mind, if it is properly stage managed.’
‘These people are dogs, spineless hypocrites,’ Mark tol
d him. ‘And you must come from a nasty boot-licking culture if you can seriously give their problem a minute’s thought. Don’t you agree, Sherry?’
He had a merry, honest face. It banished my doubts.
‘It cheers me immensely to hear that they are having trouble in London. There are about fifty extra-matricials here, Mark. Quite a few of them must feel as we do and will refuse to help this regime. Let’s find them and get them together –’
Mark held up his hand
‘No, Sherry. Listen!’ He leant forward to speak confidentially. Bald Head also leant forward to catch his words. Mark put his palm over the man’s nose and pushed him away.
‘Go and play in the bushes, smoothpate,’ he said. To me he said, ‘Two’s never a crowd. An undisciplined bunch of men is nothing but a pain in the kilt. I know, I’ve had experience. In my own matrix, I’m History Instructor in one of our military schools. I’ve served all over the world – I only got back from legion duty in Kashmir a week before these people caught me. Believe me, these people are used to dealing with slaves, not free men; the two of us can get away with murder.’
‘What are you planning?’ I had a nasty feeling that I had let myself in for more trouble than I had bargained for.
‘First we test their resourcefulness. At the same time we get weapons. Can you fight, Sherry? You look to me like a warrior.’
‘I fought in World War V, on Earth and Venus.’
‘All these world wars! My matrix is completely different – we only have local campaigns. Much more sensible! When we have time, we must talk and talk – and listen, of course. Just now, we must get to the kitchens. Kitchens are always well stocked with weapons, even if these curs are vegetarians.’
He did not wait for my agreement. He had slipped from the bench and. was off, bent double so that he could not be seen from the dais. I did the only possible thing. Glad in my heart to be committed, I followed.
Double swing doors of heavy wood led into the kitchens. We barged in. It was a huge place, and gave an impression of darkness rather than dirt, but all the equipment looked to me incredibly old-fashioned.