Greybeard

by Brian Aldiss

  Sometimes Jeff and Dicky played soldiers, using bits of stick for rifles. Sometimes they tried to capture lizards with their cupped hands; these were little brown lizards that generally escaped, leaving their wriggling bloody tails in the boys’ palms. Sometimes they wrestled.

  One day they wrestled with such absorption that they rolled down a bank and into a luxuriant bed of nettles. They were both badly stung. However much it hurt, Jeff would not cry before his friend. Dicky blubbered all the way home. Even a ride on Jeff’s bike could not silence him completely.

  The boys grew up. The steel-cowled factories swallowed young Jeff Pitt, as they had swallowed his brothers. Dicky obtained a job in an estate office. They found they had nothing in common and ceased to seek each other’s company.

  The war came. Pitt was conscripted into the air force. After some hazardous adventures in the Middle East, he deserted, together with several of his fellows. This was like a token to other units in the area, where dissatisfaction with the cause and course of the war was already rife. Mutiny broke out. Some of the mutineers seized a plane at the Teheran airport and flew it back to Britain. Pitt was on the plane.

  In Britain, revolution was gathering momentum. In a few months the government would collapse and a hastily established people’s government sue for peace with the enemy powers. Pitt found his way home and joined the local rebels. One moonlit night, a pro-government group attacked their headquarters, which was in a big Victorian house in the suburbs. Pitt found himself positioned behind a concrete bench, his heart hammering dreadfully, firing at the enemy.

  One of his mates in the house brought a searchlight into play. Its beam picked up Dicky, wearing the government flash and coming towards Pitt’s position at a run. Pitt shot him.

  He regretted the shot even before — as if by magic — a wound burst over Dicky’s shirt and he spun around and pitched onto the gravel. Pitt crawled forward to him, but the shot had been a true one; his friend was almost dead.

  Since that time, he could never nerve himself to kill anything much bigger than a beaver.

  Cramped in the tent, they ate well and slept well that night. Sailing throughout the next day, they saw no living person. Man had gone, and the great interlocking world of living species had already knitted over the space he once occupied. Moving without any clear sense of direction, they had to spend another two nights on islands in the lake; but since the weather continued mild and the food plentiful, they raised very little complaint, beyond the unspoken one that beneath their rags and wrinkles they regarded themselves still as modern man, and modern man was entitled to something better than wandering through a Pleistocene wilderness.

  The wilderness was punctuated now and again by memorials of former years, some of them looking all the grimmer and blacker for lingering on out of context. The dinghy bore them to a small railway station, which a board still announced as Yarnton Junction. Its two platforms stood above the flood, while the signal box, perched on its brick tower, served as a lookout across the meads.

  In the broken and ruined waiting room they found a reindeer and calf. In the lookout lived a hideously deformed old hermit, who kept them covered with a homemade bomb, held menacingly above his head, while he spoke to them. He told them that the lake was formed by a conflux of overflowing streams, among them the Oxford Canal and the Evenlode. Only too keen to get rid of them, the old fellow gave them their general direction, and once more the party moved forward, aided by a light and steady wind. After some two hours Charley stood up in the dinghy and pointed towards the southeast.

  “There they are!”

  Martha, Timberlane, and old Jeff Pitt rose too, peering where Charley pointed across the lake. Isaac the fox paced up and down the tiller seat. The reassuring spread of Oxford’s spires could be seen through the trees. They stood, as many of them had stood for centuries, beckoning towards the traditions of learning and piety, now broken at their feet, that had given them birth. The sun rolled from behind rain clouds and lit them. There was no one in the boat who did not feel his heart beat faster at the sight.

  “We could stay here, Algy — at least for the rest of the winter,” Martha said.

  He looked at her face, and was touched to find tears in her eyes. “I’m afraid it’s mainly an illusion,” he said. “Oxford too will have changed. We may find only deserted ruins.”

  She shook her head without speaking.

  “I wonder if old Croucher has still got a warrant out for our arrest,” Pitt said. “I wouldn’t want to get shot as soon as we stepped ashore.”

  “Croucher died of the cholera, and I don’t doubt that Cowley proceeded to turn itself first into a battleground and then a cemetery, leaving only the old city,” Greybeard said. “Let’s hope we get a friendly welcome from whoever’s left. A roof over our heads tonight would be a change for the better, wouldn’t it?”

  The scenery became less imposing as they drifted south towards the city. Rows of poor houses stood in the flood, their desolation only emphasized by the sunlight. Their roofs had caved in; they resembled the carcasses of enormous crustacea cast up on a primeval beach. Dwarfed by them, an ancient creature swathed in furs watered a couple of reindeer. Farther on, the stir they made on the water threw wavering reflections onto the roofs of empty timber yards. The heavy silence was broken a little later by the crunch of a vehicle. Two old women, as broad as they were long, bundled together to drag a cart behind them, its wheels grinding up the sunlight as they pulled it along a quayside. The quayside ended by a low bridge.

  “This I recognize,” Greybeard said, speaking in a hushed voice. “We can tie up here. This is Folly Bridge.”

  As they climbed ashore, the two old women came up and offered the hire of their cart. As always when they met strangers, Greybeard’s party had difficulty in understanding their accent. Pitt told the crones they had nothing worth carrying, and the crones told them they would find shelter for the night at Christ Church, “up the road.” Leaving Charley behind with Isaac to guard the boat, Martha, Greybeard, and Pitt set out along the broken track that led over the bridge.

  The fortresslike walls of the ancient college of Christ Church loomed over one of the southern approaches of the city. From the top of the walls a knot of bearded men watched the newcomers walk up the road. They approached warily, half expecting a challenge, but none came. When they reached the great wooden gates of the college, they paused. Untended, the college walls were crumbling. Several windows had fallen out or were boarded up, and the shattered stone lying at the foot of the walls spoke of the action of heat and frost and the elements. Greybeard shrugged his shoulders and marched under the tall archway.

  In contrast to the ruination through which they had passed, here was habitation, the bustle of people, the colour of market stalls, the smell of animals and foods. The newcomers’ spirits rose. They found themselves in a great quad, which had housed many past generations of undergraduates; wooden stalls had been set up, several of them forming small enclosed buildings from which a variety of goods was being sold. Another part of the quad was railed off, and here reindeer stood, surveying the scene from under their antlers with their customary look of morose humour.

  A bald-headed shred of manhood with a nose as thin as a needle skipped out of the lodge at the gate and asked them, as they were strangers, what they wanted. They had a deal of difficulty making him understand, but eventually he led them to a portly fossil of a man with three chins and a high complexion who said they could rent, for a modest fee, two small basement rooms in Killcanon. They entered their names in a register and showed the colour of their money.

  Killcanon turned out to be a small square within Christ Church, and their rooms a larger room subdivided. But the needle-nosed messenger told them they might burn firewood in their grates, and offered them fuel cheap. Mainly from weariness, they accepted the offer. The messenger lit the fires for them, while Jeff Pitt walked back to collect Charley and the fox and make arrangements for the boat.

>   Once the fire was burning cheerfully, the messenger showed signs of lingering, squatting by the flame and rubbing his nose, trying to listen to what Martha and Greybeard said to each other. Greybeard stirred him with a toe.

  “Before you go out, Chubby, tell me if this college is still used for learning as it used to be.”

  “Why, there’s nobody to learn anymore,” the man said. It was plain that he intended his verb to be transitive, whatever a legion of vanished grammar books might have said. “But the Fellows own the place, and they seem to learn each other a bit still. You’ll see them going about with books in their pockets, if you watch out. For a tip, I’d introduce you to one of them.”

  “We’ll see. There may be time for that tomorrow.”

  “Don’t leave it too long, sir. There’s a local legend that Oxford is sinking into the river, and when it’s gone under, a whole lot of little naked people what now live under the water will come swimming up like eels and live here instead.”

  Greybeard contemplated the ruin of a man. “I see. And do you give this tale much credence?”

  “What you say, sir?”

  “Do you believe this tale?”

  The old man laughed, casting a shuffling side glance at Martha. “I ain’t saying I believe it and I ain’t saying I don’t believe it, but I know what I’ve heard, and they do say that for every woman as dies, one more of these little naked people is born under water. And this I do know because I saw it with my own eyes last Michaelmas — no, the Michaelmas before last, because I was behind with my rent this Michaelmas. There was an old woman of ninety-nine died down at Grandpont, and very next day a little two-headed creature all naked floated up at the bridge.”

  “Which was it you saw?” Martha asked. “The old lady dying or the two-headed thing?”

  “Well, I’m often down that way,” the messenger said confusedly. “It was the funeral and the bridge I mainly saw, but many men told me about all the rest and I have no cause to doubt ’em. It’s common talk.”

  When he had gone, Martha said, “It’s strange how everyone believes in something different.”

  “They’re all a bit mad.”

  “No, I don’t think they’re mad — except that other people’s beliefs always seem mad, just as their passions do. In the old days, before the Accident, people were more inclined to keep their beliefs to themselves, or else confide only in doctors and psychiatrists. Or else the belief was widespread, and lost its air of absurdity. Think of all the people who believed in astrology, long after it was proved to be a pack of nonsense.”

  “Illogical, and therefore a mild form of madness,” Greybeard said.

  “No, I don’t think so. A form of consolation, rather. This old fellow with a nose like a knitting needle nurses this crazy dream about little naked things taking over Oxford; it in some way consoles him for the dearth of babies. Charley’s religion is the same sort of consolation. Your recent drinking companion, Bunny Jingadangelow, had retreated into a world of pretence.”

  She sank wearily down onto the bed of blankets and stretched. Slowly she removed her battered shoes, massaged her feet, and then stretched full length, with her hands under her head. She regarded Greybeard, whose bald pate glowed as he crouched by the fire.

  “What are you thinking, my venerable love?” she asked.

  “I was wondering if the world might not slip — if it hasn’t already — into a sort of insanity, now that everyone left is over fifty. Is a touch of childhood and youth necessary to sanity?”

  “I don’t think so. We’re really amazingly adaptable, more than we give ourselves credit for.”

  “Yes, but suppose a man lost his memory of everything that happened to him before he was fifty, so that he was utterly cut off from his roots, from all his early achievement — wouldn’t you classify him as insane?”

  “It’s only an analogy.”

  He turned to her and grinned. “You’re a bugger for arguing, Martha Timberlane.”

  “After all these years we can still tolerate each other’s fatheaded opinions. It’s a miracle!”

  He went over to her, sitting on the bed beside her and stroking her thigh.

  “Perhaps that’s our bit of madness or consolation or whatever — each other. Martha, have you ever thought...” He paused, and then went on, screwing his face into a frown of concentration. “Have you ever thought that that ghastly catastrophe fifty years ago was, well, was lucky for us? I know it sounds blasphemous; but mightn’t it be that we’ve led more interesting lives than the perhaps rather pointless existence we would otherwise have been brought up to accept as life? We can see now that the values of the twentieth century were invalid; otherwise they wouldn’t have wrecked the world. Don’t you think that the Accident has made us more appreciative of the vital things, like life itself, and like each other?”

  “No,” Martha said steadily. “No, I don’t. We would have had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”

  Next morning, they were roused by the sound of animals, the crowing of cocks, the pad of reindeer hoofs, even the bray of a donkey. Leaving Martha in the warm bed, Greybeard rose and dressed. It was cold. Drafts flapped the rug on the floor and had spread the ashes of the fire far and wide during the night.

  Outside, it was barely daylight and the puddingy Midland sky rendered the quad in cold tones. But there were torches burning, and people on the move, and their voices sounding — cheerful sounds, even where their owners were toothless and bent double with years. The main gates had been opened, and many of the animals were going forth, some pulling carts. Greybeard saw not only a donkey but a couple of horses that looked like the descendants of hunters, both fine young beasts and pulling carts. They were the first he had seen or heard of in over a quarter century. One sector of the country was now so effectively insulated from another that widely different conditions prevailed.

  The people were on the whole well clad, many of them wearing fur coats. Up on the battlements a pair of sentries clouted their ribs for warmth and looked down at the bustle below.

  Going to the lodge, where candles burned, Greybeard found the treble-chinned man off duty. His place was taken by a plump fellow of Greybeard’s age, who proved to be a son of the triple chins; he was as amiable as his father was fossilized, and when Greybeard asked if it would be possible to get a job for the winter months, he became talkative.

  They sat over a small fire, huddled against the chill blowing in through the big gate from the street. Speaking against the rumble and clatter of the traffic passing his cabin, the plump fellow chatted of Oxford.

  For some years the city had possessed no central governing body. The colleges had divided it up and ruled it indifferently. Such crime as there was, was treated harshly; but there had been no shootings at Carfax for over a twelvemonth.

  Christ Church and several of the other colleges now served as a cross between a castle, a hostel, and a manor house. They provided shelter and defence when defence was needed, as it had been in the past. The bigger colleges owned most of the town about them. They remained prosperous, and for the past ten years had lived peaceably together, developing agriculture and rearing livestock. They did what they could to provide drainage to fight the nearby floods, which rose higher every spring. And in one of the colleges at the other end of the town, Balliol by name, the Master was looking after three children who were shown ceremonially to the population twice a year.

  “What age are these children? Have you seen them?” Greybeard asked,

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen them all right. Everyone’s seen the Balliol children. I wouldn’t miss them. The girl’s a little beauty. She’s about ten, and was born of an imbecile woman living at Kidlington, which is a village away in the woods to the north. The two boys, I don’t know where they come from, but one had a hard time before he got here, and was displayed by a showman in Reading, I heard tell.”

  “These are genuine, normal children?”
>
  “One of the boys has got a withered arm, a little arm that finishes off with three fingers at his elbow, but you wouldn’t call that a proper disfigurement, and the girl has no hair and something a bit funny with her ear, but nothing really wrong, and she waves very pretty to the crowd.”

  “And you’ve actually seen them?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen them in The Broad, where they parade. The boys don’t wave so much, because they’re older, but they’re nice fresh young chaps, and it’s certainly good to see a bit of smooth flesh.”

  “You’re sure they’re real? Not old men disguised, or anything like that?”

  “Oh no, no, no, nothing like that. They’re small, just like children in old pictures, and you can’t mistake young skin, can you?

  “Well, you have horses here. Perhaps you have children.”

  They changed the topic then, and after some discussion, the porter’s son advised Greybeard to go and speak to one of the college Fellows, Mr Norman Morton, who was responsible for employing people in the college.

  Martha and he made a frugal meal of some tough cold beaver and a hunk of bread that Martha had bought from one of the stalls the previous evening; then she and Greybeard told Charley and Pitt where they were going, and headed for Norman Morton’s rooms.

  In Peck, the farthest quadrangle of the college, a fine two-storey stable had been built, with room to house beasts and carts. Morton had his suite of rooms facing this stable. In some of these rooms he lived; in others he kept animals.

  He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and stooped, with a nervous nod to his head and a countenance so lined it looked as if it had been patiently assembled from bits of string. Greybeard judged him to be well into his eighties, but he showed no sign of intending to give up good living yet awhile. When a servant ushered Martha and Greybeard into his presence, Mr Norman Morton was engaged with two cronies in sipping a hot spiced wine and demolishing what looked like a leg of mutton.