Report on Probability A

by Brian W Aldiss

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  Report on Probability A

  Brian W. Aldiss

  For Mike Moorcock

  I think you were in the darkness of the garden

  If there was a voice I think you heard it

  And if neither knows what communication is

  We agree on the cost of garden produce

  Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.

  Goethe

  Part One

  G Who Waits

  1

  The Report begins:

  One afternoon early in a certain January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost or wind; the trees in the garden did not stir. There was no rain, although anybody accustomed to predicting rain might have forecast it with a fair expectation of being right before nightfall. Cloud lay thickly over the sky. The face of the sun was not visible. Consequently, shadows had no form.

  A single window on the north-west side of the house reflected the light back in a dull fashion, without movement, except once when the reflection of a pigeon, wheeling above the garden, splashed across it. No movement came from the house. No sound came from the house.

  G lived not in the house but in a wooden bungalow in the garden, overlooked by the window set high in the north-west side of the house. The bungalow, which contained only one room, measured about five by four metres, being longer than it was deep. It was raised above the ground on low pillars of brick. It was constructed of planks arranged vertically on the front and rear and horizontally on the sides. Its roof was also of planks, covered by asphalt; the asphalt was secured in place by large flat-headed nails which dug into the black material. Cracks ran round many of the nails.

  The wooden bungalow had two windows. These were fitted in its front wall, one on either side of a door. This was the only door. It did not fit well. The windows contained large single panes of glass. The window-frames and the door had been painted with white paint. Although dirt had greyed this paint, it was still in moderately good condition and not in particular need for repainting. The rest of the wooden bungalow, excluding of course the roof, had been painted yellow. This paint had proved less satisfactory than the white, peeling off in many places to reveal the bare wood underneath.

  Between the two windows was an ill-fitting door. A key remained in the lock of this door on the inside, although the lock would not function because the door hinges had sunk and the wood had swollen. G always shut this door with great force at night; he did not like to imagine that Mr. Mary might enter the wooden bungalow when he was inside it asleep. Sometimes when G shut the door with great force at night, the key would fall out of the lock onto the mat.

  Approximately two years had passed since G began living in the wooden bungalow. During that period, the key had fallen onto the mat inside the door on many occasions.

  When Mr. Mary had had men build the wooden bungalow in the garden, he said to his wife: “It is for you; you can call it your summer house.” The wooden bungalow had been constructed facing the north-west side of the house. It did not face it squarely, but at an angle of some twenty degrees, in the direction of east-south-east. It stood at a distance of some ten metres from the house. The house dominated the wooden bungalow.

  On the early January days when the sun shone, it never rose far enough above the roof of the house to illuminate more than the upper half of the two windows on the front of the bungalow. Even this ration of sunshine was further abbreviated while the shadow of a group of chimneys on the roof of the house made its passage across the front of the bungalow. Since the bungalow faced east-south-east, the sunshine that did reach the windows impinged obliquely into the one room. It shone onto a small section of mat that was stretched over the floorboards and over a portion of the couch on which G slept. G was never on the couch when the sun was.

  The couch stood along the northmost side of the room. At the other end of the room to the couch, G had a small stove of an antique pattern which burnt paraffin. By this stove was a chair on which G sat for a considerable period each day. One of the rear legs of this chair was slightly shorter than the others, so that it was possible to make the chair rock a little when one wished it to do so. The chair had once belonged in the house. The style of the chair was the style known to G as wheelback, because the spokes that formed the back of the chair radiated out from a centre in a fashion reminiscent of the hubs of a cart wheel. The back of the chair had once possessed five supports or spokes; one of these spokes had been missing for a long time. It was because this spoke was missing that Mr. Mary had ordered the chair to be placed in the wooden bungalow. The chair had been made shortly before the first world war; it bore on the underside of the round wooden seat the date 1912. G had seen this date and did not forget it.

  When G sat on the chair, he generally permitted his gaze to rest only on the objects inside the bungalow. These objects were few in number. He was familiar with all of them. Most of the objects were manufactured, as were a stove with a pattern of circular holes on its upper surface and a galvanized bucket that stood near the chair. Most of them had not been intended originally for the wooden bungalow, but had been brought over from the house by Mr. Mary; some had been brought over by his wife, before they had quarrelled. One or two belonged to G.

  Some of these objects were connected directly or in a more tenuous degree with the passage of time. G’s clock had been specifically designed to indicate the passage of time; it was his clock, for he had bought it with part of his wages in the days when Mr. Mary was paying him a weekly fee. On its face, which formed a circle, were the arabic numerals from one to twelve and a pair of hands. The smaller of the two hands pointed at the lower lobe of the figure eight, while the larger hand pointed at the space between the nine and the ten. These two hands had been at these positions, maintaining between them an angle of fifty degrees, for a period of something over eleven months. Although, when his attention encompassed the clock, G entertained the theory that the clock still worked, he was reluctant to test the theory by attempting to wind the clock mechanism.

  Also connected with the passage of time was a calendar for the previous year, 19—. It indicated the day as being 9th February. G was aware that this date was incorrect. Above the functional part of the calendar (non-functioning though it was) hung a picture, stuck to the same piece of cardboard that bore the pack of dates. When G turned his attention to it, he saw that it bore a representation of two men in period dress standing on the edge of a gorge. One of these men wore a black beard and was pointing with a stick into the gorge; the other man held his hat in his hand and seemed to be gazing, not into the gorge, but at the end of the bearded man’s stick. In the foreground of the picture, the gorge was littered by broken trees and boughs and boulders of large dimension. In the distance, the gorge became purple; over this end of it, a bird with a large wingspan hovered. The scene, though grand, was not harsh, because a gentle afternoon light played across it. This light bathed the two men as if from the wings of a theatre, giving them an air of security although they stood so close to a precipice.

  A third object connected more remotely with the passage of time was the front page of a daily newspaper, The Daily——, for a day in April of the preceding year. G had fastened this sheet of newsprint and pictures to the wooden wall by two drawing pins, one at each of the two top corners of the paper; later he had added two more drawing pins at the bottom corners, because the damp emanating from the wall had caused the paper to curl upwards.

  G had kept this
sheet of newspaper because he found its contents more interesting than the contents of most newspapers. The main headline across the page said SERIOUS BLAZE DAMAGES WARSHIP IN SOUTHERN HARBOUR. The report of this fire, in which nobody was injured, was illustrated by an aerial photograph of the warship with smoke pouring from it. When G was a child of seven years, an uncle had taken him to see this ship. On the other side of the page, headlines announced ZEGENGAIS UNDER ARREST. In the last column was a notice of a strike in a car factory. Lower down the page were items of more domestic interest: MITZI TABORI WEDS FOURTH HUSBAND, FISH FAMINE CAUSES RECORD PRICES, and a report on a day of a big murder trial headed “IN LAUGHING FIT I KILLED HER.” An item which particularly interested G as a gardener was headed HOSE GOES!, and described how a man in the state of New York had watched in amazement while his fifty-feet-long garden hose had burrowed underground, resisting everyone’s attempt to pull it back; it had finally disappeared, only to reappear two days later outside the Baptist church in what was described as a dazed condition.

  Between the sheet of newspaper, which hung on one of the side walls, and the wheelback chair, stood a galvanized bucket and a paraffin stove of old-fashioned design. A small table made of bamboo stood on the other side of the wheelback chair, nearer the couch.

  Also in the room was a cupboard of unpainted wood, in which G kept several small toilet articles; a copy of Hugh Walpole’s “The Cathedral”; some neatly folded bandages; a crumpled handkerchief belonging to Mr. Mary’s wife; a bowl with a rose pattern in which lay rusting curtain hooks, a penknife, and a pair of spectacles that had belonged to an uncle of G’s; a candlestick; some candles; string; several strangely shaped stones found in the garden; a white china cat with the name of a seaside town printed on its stomach; some mending things; a round 1 oz. tobacco tin with holes punched in its lid, in which G had once intended to keep a lizard; and some groceries.

  To the left of the cupboard of unpainted wood was one of the two windows set in the front wall of the wooden bungalow. Attached to the left side of it, as G sat on his seat regarding it, was a mirror measuring some fifteen by thirty centimetres and framed in a veneered wood, such as might have belonged at some past period to a small version of a cheval-glass. This mirror or looking-glass was fixed to the window frame at such an angle that, as G sat on the wheelback chair, he could look at the mirror and see reflected in it a part of the garden not otherwise visible from where he sat.

  This was the part of the garden visible when one overlooked it in a southerly direction. The reflection showed the west corner of the house, with a concrete path leading round it; and certain limited sections of the garden, such as the vegetable garden, the fruit garden, and a narrow section of a long lawn on which trees grew, beyond which lay, hidden by the decline of the ground, a sunken garden; these sections were divided from each other by privet hedges running in various directions, chopped into pieces by the narrow dimensions of the looking-glass, so that the true relationship of the pieces to one another, the fact that they were often merely fragments of one hedge, would have been lost to a newcomer looking into the mirror.

  The hypothetical newcomer would also have seen a more distant hedge that divided the garden from the property of an elderly bachelor known to have an ancestor who had built a lighthouse in the southern hemisphere; part of an asparagus bed lying between the back of the house and an old brick outhouse; the old brick outhouse itself, on the roof of which strutted a homing pigeon; a round window set in the front of the brick building; and sundry other particulars that were regularly glimpsed by G when he directed his gaze to the mirror. Most of the time he sat looking directly out of the window, staring at the blank wall of the house some distance away or, for preference, staring down comfortably at the floor.

  On the floor lay two old fibre mats, the stripes of which had faded from their original oranges and greens under the long application of human feet. Because it was not raining, G took up one of these mats and carried it outside. As he began to shake it, he saw Mr. Mary’s wife come round the edge of the house. She was walking from the back door to the side gate, which meant that she had to traverse the length of path between G and the house, coming at her nearest point to within twenty metres of him; she saw him, and he knew she saw.

  He continued to flap the mat before him, so that its faded orange and green stripes rose and fell before his vision, alternately revealing and concealing her; between each brief concealment she was a fraction further along the path.

  When she was at perihelion, and already only a few metres from the brown side gate, G let his arms drop and faced her through the cloud of dust that hung in the air between them.

  “When the fishing is poor, they say the price of fish rises.”

  “Fish are plentiful now.”

  “Are the fish eager to be caught?”

  “My fishmonger has satisfied customers all the year.”

  “Even in a time of plenty, are not some fish more satisfying than others?”

  “All fish contain vitamin, so says my fishmonger.”

  Although she slowed her pace as she spoke, Mr. Mary’s wife never entirely stopped walking towards the brown side gate; nor did she entirely turn her face towards G. She had now reached the brown side gate, and turned her attention to the bolt. Shedding a small flake of rust, it yielded, and she swung the gate open. She walked through it and closed it from the outside. The gate was set in a wall nearly two metres high; on the top of the wall were embedded a few shreds of bottle glass.

  Domoladossa looked up from the long report.

  “Mr. Mary’s wife,” he said. “We think she may be the key to the whole matter. I shall be interested to see what the report makes of her.”

  “The main object of the report is directed towards a different objective,” Midlakemela said. “Let us call this continuum we are studying—the one containing Mr. Mary and his wife—Probability A. We know it is closely related to our continuum, which I like to think of as Certainty X. Nevertheless, even superficially, Probability A reveals certain basic values that differ widely from our own. It is our first duty to examine those values.”

  Domoladossa sighed. He both admired and detested the slow, careful mind of the younger man.

  “Quite so. Probability A’s time-flow rate seems to differ from our own, for instance. Instrumentation is being devised so that we can have absolute scales by which to measure such discrepancies.” He looked askance at Midlakemela. “Has it occurred to you that our congruence with Probability A may be temporary? In a week it may have vanished again.”

  “And then?”

  “We may be left all alone in the uni-probable space-time universe familiar to our fathers. Or the faulting may occur again, and we may find ourselves congruent with Probability Z, where few factors indeed coincide with our own. We just don’t know.”

  “So perhaps we should continue to peruse the report.” Midlakemela was the sort who always got promotion.

  There was neither frost nor wind that afternoon. The trees in the garden did not stir. Behind the wooden bungalow was a long brick wall marking the north-west boundary of the garden; beech trees were planted beside it from the bottom of the garden to a point not far from the wooden hut, where an elder tree incongruously stood, its lax branches touching the back of the wooden bungalow; these trees did not stir. On the side of the house facing the wooden bungalow, only one window looked out, a high bow window, set near the east or street corner of the house; a curtain stirred at this window.

  G looked quickly up and caught the movement of the curtain. He could not see anybody at the window. The curtain was of a cream material. It did not move again. G covered his mouth momentarily with his hand and then rubbed it. He turned away and took the striped mat back into the wooden bungalow. He deposited the mat back on the floor of the bungalow. Then he emerged into the open once again, carrying the second mat. He commenced to shake this as thoroughly as he had shaken the first one. A cloud of dust rose in the air before him. As he
worked, he kept his eye on the bow window set high in the blank wall of the house.

  A black and white cat picked its way daintily through the stems of a privet bush that bounded the lawn to his left hand. It held its tail erect. It walked past a sundial that was supported by an almost naked boy cast in iron, rubbing against the boy’s legs as it went, heading towards G. G ceased to shake the rug. He called to the cat in an affectionate tone. The cat made a noise in reply.

  G retreated into the wooden bungalow, carrying a striped mat which he laid on the floor in a convenient position, next to a second and similar mat. Straightening his back, he moved over to a cupboard of unpainted wood, opened one of its doors, and extracted from its shelves a small white jug of the kind generally used for keeping milk in. G went to the door and showed this jug to the cat. The cat climbed up the step of the wooden bungalow and rubbed himself against the door.

  “You’re early for your rations today. The jug’s empty till I get some more, but you’d better come in.”

  The cat entered the wooden bungalow, crossed the floor, and jumped up onto the couch. G closed the door, pressing his shoulder to it to do so. He returned the white jug to the cupboard, leaving one of the cupboard doors open. Then he went over to the couch and picked up the cat round its chest, so that its paws hung down, black and white in varying proportions.

  “You’re a naughty pussy cat. What’s she been doing today? Where do you think she’s going, eh?”

  He carried the cat over to the wheelback chair and sat down facing the window that had a mirror attached to it. He arranged the cat on his lap; the cat settled itself. It purred. It had a white tip to its tail.

  “You’ll never tell me, will you? You never tell me a thing.”

  G stroked the cat. His hands were thick. He did not look at the cat. He looked out of the two windows, his gaze moving from the left one to the right one. Looking through the left one, he could see the front wall of the garden, but not the brown side gate that was set in it. Finally Mr. Mary’s wife appeared, visible through the left window, walking along the concrete path that ran from the side gate, round the back of the house, to the back door. She was looking straight ahead.