Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  The tershers laughed. One of them said, cheekily, "We thought you was lying there trying to evolve yourself. Look as if you could do with it!"

  Evidently he had appointed himself group humorist and was not much appreciated. The others ignored him and the leader said, "You're mad! You'll get swept away by the tide, you will!"

  "It's been going out for the last million years. Don't you read the newspapers?" As they laughed at that, he climbed to his feet and dusted himself down -- purely instinctively, for he had never touched the sand.

  They were in contact now. Looking at the leader, Bush said, "Got anything to eat you'd care to swap for food tablets?"

  The girl spoke for the first time. "A pity we can't grab some of your evolving fish and cook them. I still can't get used to that sort of thing -- the isolation."

  She had sound teeth, though they probably needed as good a scrub as the rest of her.

  "Been here long?" he said.

  "Only left 2090 last week."

  He nodded. "I've been here two years. At least, I haven't been back to -- the present for two years, two and a half years. Funny to think that by our time these walking fish will be asleep in the Old Red Sandstone!"

  "We're making our way up to the Jurassic," the leader said, elbowing the girl out of the way. "Been there?"

  "Sure. I hear it's getting more like a fair ground every year."

  "We'll find ourselves a place if we have to clear one."

  "There's forty-six million years of it," Bush said, shrugging.

  He walked with them back to the rest of the group, who stood motionless among the inflated tents.

  "I'd like to involve into one of them big Jurassic animals, with big teeth," the humorist said. "Tyrannosaurs or whatever they call 'em. I'd be as tough as you then, Lenny!"

  Lenny was the leader with the excoriated dimples. The funny one was called Pete. The girl's name was Ann; she belonged to Lenny. None of the group used names much, except Pete. Bush said his name was Bush and left it like that. There were six men, each with a bike, and four girls who had evidently blasted into the Devonian on the back of the men's bikes. None of the girls were attractive, except for Ann. They all settled by the bikes, lounging or standing; Bush was the only one who sat. He looked cautiously round for the Dark Woman; she had disappeared; just as well -- remote though she was, she might sense more clearly than anyone else here the reason why Bush had tagged along with the gang.

  The only other person in the group whom Bush marked out as interesting was an older man obviously not a tersher at all, although he wore the buckskin. His hair was a dead black, probably dyed, and under his long nose his mouth had settled into a wry expression that seemed worth a moment's curiosity. He said nothing, though his searching glance at Bush spoke of an alert mind.

  "Two years you been minding, you say?" Lenny said. "You a millionaire or something?"

  "Painter. Artist. Grouper. I do spatial-kinetic groupages, SKGs, if you know what they are. And I operate back here for Wenlock Institute. How do you all afford to get here?"

  Lenny scorned to answer the question. He said, challengingly, "You're lying, mate! You never work for the Institute! Look -- I ain't a fool! -- I know they only send recorders out into the past for eighteen months at a time at the most. Two and a half years: what are you on about? You can't kid me!"

  "I wouldn't bother to kid you! I do work for the Institute. It's true I came back for an eighteen-month term, but I've -- I've overstayed for an extra year, that's all."

  Lenny glared at him in contempt. "They'll have your guts for garters!"

  "They won't! If you must know, I'm one of their star minders. I can get nearer the present than anyone else on their books."

  "You aren't very near now, lounging about in the Devonian! Not that I believe your story anyway."

  "Believe or not, as you please," Bush said. He loathed cross-questioning and shook with anger as Lenny turned away.

  Unmoved by the argument, one of the other tershers said, "We had to work, get cash, take the CSD shot, come back here. Lot of money. Lot of work! Still don't believe we're really here."

  "We aren't. The universe is, but we aren't. Or rather, the universe may be and we aren't. They still aren't sure which way it is. There's a lot about mind-travel that still has to be understood." He was heavy and patronizing to cover his disturbance.

  "Would you paint us?" Ann asked him. It was the only reaction he got to his announcement that he was a painter.

  He looked her in the eye. He thought he understood the glance that passed involuntarily between them. One gratifying thing about growing older was that you misinterpreted such looks more rarely.

  "If you interested me I would."

  "Only we don't want to be painted, see," Lenny said.

  "I wasn't volunteering to do it. What sort of work did you do to earn the cash to get here?"

  Bush was not interested in their answer. He was looking at Ann, who had dropped her gaze. He thought that he could feel her -- nothing could be touched in the limbo of mind-travel, but she was from his time, so she would respond to touch.

  One of the anonymous tershers answered him. "Except for Ann here, and Josie, we all ganged on the new Bristol mind-station. We was some of the first to mind through when it was finished. Know it?"

  "I designed the SKG, the groupage in the foyer -- the synchronized-signal nodal re-entry symbol with the powered interlocking vanes. 'Progression,' it's called."

  "That bloody thing!" As he spoke, Lenny pulled the cigarlet from his mouth and sent it spinning towards the slow-motion sea. The end lay just above the waves, glowing, until lack of oxygen extinguished it.

  "Me, I liked it," Pete said. "Looked like a couple of record-breaking watches had run into each other on a dark night and were signaling for help!" He laughed vacuously.

  "You shouldn't laugh at yourself. You just gave us a pretty good description of all this." Bush swung his hand about to take in the visible and invisible universe.

  "Piss off!" Lenny said, heaving himself off his bike and moving over to Bush. "You are so smart and boring, Jack! You can just piss off!"

  Bush got up. But for the girl, he would have pissed off. He had no inclination to be beaten up by this mob. "If you don't care for my conversation, why don't you supply some?"

  "You talk rubbish, that's why. That business about the Old Red Sandstone . . ."

  "It's true! You may not like it, or care about it, but it's not rubbish." He pointed at the older man with dark dyed hair, standing slightly apart from the group. "Ask him! Ask your girl friend. Up in 2090, all that you see here is compressed into a few feet of rumpled red rock -- shingle, fish, plants, sunlight, moonlight, the very breeze, all solidified down into something the geologists hack out of the earth with pickaxes. If you don't know about that or you aren't moved by the poetry of it, why bother to blow ten years' savings to come back here?"

  "I'm not saying nothing about that, chum. I'm saying you bore me."

  "It's entirely mutual." He had gone as far as he was prepared to go, and it seemed that Lenny had too, for he backed away indifferently when Ann came in and shouted them both down.

  "He talks like an artist, doesn't he?" the plump little Josie said, mainly addressing the older man. "I think there's something in what he says. We aren't getting the best out of it here, really, I mean. It is a bit marvelous here, isn't it, long before there were any men or women on the globe?"

  "The capacity for wonder is available to everyone. But most people are afraid of it." The older man had spoken.

  Lenny gave a bark of contempt. "Don't you start in, Stein!"

  "I mean, there's the sea where it all started, and here we are. We can't touch it, of course." Josie was wrestling with concepts too awful and vague for her mental equipment, judging by the tranced look on her face. "Funny, I look at this sea and I can't help thinking we're at the end of the world, not the beginning."

  This chimed strangely with something Bush had been meditat
ing on earlier in the day; the girl had a beautiful idea, and for an instant he debated switching his attentions to her. The others looked glum; it was their way of registering profundity. Lenny slung himself onto his bike and kicked the starter, and the two air columns began to blow at once. It still looked like a defiance of a physical law that the sand lay under them undisturbed; and so it was. All round them was the invisible but unyielding wall of mind-travel. The four other tersher boys climbed on to their bikes, two of the girls jumping up behind. They snarled away down the darkening sand. Night was coming, the low bristles of vegetation stirred with an on-shore breeze; but in the mind dimension, all was still. Bush was left standing with the older man, Josie, and Ann.

  "So much for supper," he commented. "If I'm not wanted, I'll be off. I have a camp just up in the first series of hills." He gestured towards the sunset, looking all the while at Ann.

  "You mustn't mind Lenny," Ann said. "He's moody." She looked at him. She really had next to no figure, he told himself, and she was dirty and scruffy; it did not stop him trembling. The isolation of mind-travel could bring on complete disassociation of character; once in it, one could feel nothing, smell nothing, hear nothing, except one's fellow travelers. This girl -- she was like the prospect of a banquet! And there was more to it than that -- what he could not yet determine.

  "Now that those who do not wish to discuss vital subjects are away, you can sit and talk with us," said the older man. It could have been that wry expression, or maybe he was in some way mocking.

  "I've overstayed my welcome. I'm off."

  To his surprise, the older man came and shook his hand.

  "You keep the strangest company," Bush said. He was not interested in this fellow, whoever he was.

  He started back along the beach towards his own lonely camp, the uselessness of playing about with Lenny's girl uppermost in his mind. The dark thing out to sea had spread monstrous wings and was in flight for the land. He suddenly felt the utter senselessness of setting down Man in such a gigantic universe and then letting him challenge it -- or of giving him desires he could neither control nor fulfil.

  Ann said, "I can't get used to the way we can't touch anything of the real world. It really bugs me. I -- you know, I don't feel I exist."

  She was walking beside him. He could hear the sound of her boots slapping against her legs.

  "I've adapted. It's the smell of the place I miss. The air-leakers don't give you a whisper of what it smells like."

  "Life never gives you enough."

  He stopped. "Must you follow me? You're going to get me into trouble. Beat it back to your lover boy -- you can see I'm not your kind."

  "We haven't proved it yet."

  Momentarily, they looked desperately at each other, as if some enormous thing had to be resolved in silence.

  They trudged on. Bush had made up his mind now; or rather, he had no mind. It had gone from him, sunk under the ocean of his bloodstream, in the tides of which it seemed to him that direction was being born anew. They scrambled together into the river valley, hurrying upstream along the bank, clasping each other's hands. Only momentarily was he aware of what he was doing.

  "What's got into you?"

  "You're crazy!"

  "You're crazy!"

  They hurried over a bed of large and broken shells. He could have cut his hand on one. He'd looked them up in the guide book earlier. Phragmoceras. At first he had thought they were some animal's teeth, not the deserted home of an early cephalopod. Silurian, maybe, sharpened by the sea to draw his Quaternary blood, had not mind-travel built that impenetrable barrier between what-had-been and what-was. The shells did not even crunch as he and the girl climbed over them. Glancing down in his fever, he saw their feet were under the level of the shells, treading on the spongy floor that belonged to their dimension rather than the Devonian period -- a sort of lowest common denominator of floors.

  They stopped in a sheltered dell. They clung to each other. Eagerly, they glared into each other's faces in the waning light. He could not remember how long they stood like that, or what they said -- except for one remark of hers: "We're millions of years from our birth -- we ought to be free to do it, oughtn't we?"

  What had he answered -- anything she might find valuable? Anything he could give? He recalled only how he had thrown her down, pulled off her swashbuckling boots, helped her drag off her trousers, torn his own away from him. She behaved as if she had been switched on to overdrive, was immediately absolutely and irresistibly ready for him, seized him strongly.

  He recalled after, obsessively, over and over, the particular gesture with which she had raised one bent leg to admit him to her embrace, and his surprise and his gratitude to find that up and down the howling gulf of centuries there was this sweet hole to go to.

  While they were resting, they heard the motor bikes roaring like distant thwarted animals. It merely roused them to a repetition of love.

  "You smell so damned sweet! You're beautiful!" His words reminded him of how dressed they still were, so that he pushed her shirt and tunic up in order to kiss her nipples.

  "We should be as naked as savages. . . . We are savages, aren't we, Bush?"

  "Thank God, yes. You've no idea how far from the savage I am usually. Mother-dominated, full of doubts and fears. Not like your Lenny!"

  "Him? He's a nut case! He's scared really -- scared of all this . . ."

  "Of loving, you mean? Or of the space-time world?"

  "That, yes. He's scared of everything underneath. His old man used to beat him up."

  Their faces were close together. They were fainter than the dusk gathering about them, sinking forever into the complexities of their own minds.

  "I'm afraid of him. Or I was when you lot first appeared. I thought they'd beat me up! It's all very well -- what's the matter, Ann?"

  She sat up and began to pull her tunic down. "Got a fag? I didn't come here to hear how chicken you were. Bugger all that! You men are all the same -- all got something wrong with you!"

  "We're not all the same, not by a long chalk! But now's a time to talk. I haven't talked intimately to anyone for months. I've been locked up in silence. And nothing to touch. . . . You get pursued by phantoms. I really ought to get back to 2090 to see my mother, but I'll be in trouble when I turn up. . . . It's so long since I screwed a girl honest, I began to imagine I was going queer or something."

  "What makes you say that?" she asked tartly.

  "The desire to be honest while I can. That's a luxury, isn't it?"

  "Well, lay off, if you don't mind! I don't go slobbering all over you, do I, with a lot of nonsense? I didn't come with you for that."

  A moment before, Bush had felt nothing but love for her. Now he was overwhelmed by anger. He flung her garments at her.

  "Put your pants on and hop off back to your yobbo boy friend if you feel like that about it! Why did you follow me in the first place?"

  She put a hand on his arm, immune from his anger. "I made a mistake. I thought you might be a bit different." She blew smoke at him. "Don't worry, I enjoyed the mistake. You're quite good at it, even if you are queer!"

  He jumped up, pulling on his trousers without dignity, raging -- against himself more than against Ann. He turned, and Lenny was outlined against the lemon sky. Mastering himself, he zipped himself up and stood his ground.

  Lenny had also stopped. He turned his head and called to the other tershers, "He's up here!"

  "Come and get me if you want me!" Bush said. He was frightened; if they broke his fingers he might never be able to work properly again. Or blinded him. There weren't any police patrols here; they could do what they liked with him; they had all the wide Devonian to bash him up in. Then he recalled what Ann had said; Lenny was scared too.

  He went slowly forward. Lenny had a tool of some kind, a spanner, in his hand. "I'm going to get you, Bush!" he said, glancing over his shoulder to see that the others were supporting him. Bush jumped on him, got his arms round h
im, swung him savagely. The tersher was unexpectedly light. He staggered as Bush let him go. As he brought up the spanner, Bush hit him in the face, then stepped back as if to leave it at that.

  "Hit him again!" Ann called.

  He hit Lenny again. Lenny kicked him on the kneecap. He fell, grabbed Lenny's legs, and pulled him down too. Lenny raised the spanner again, Bush grabbed his wrist, and they rolled over, struggling. At last Bush got his knee in the other's crotch, and the tersher gave up the fight. Panting, Bush got to his feet, clasping his kneecap. The other four boys of the gang were lined up near him.

  "Who's next?" he asked. When they showed no inclination to move, he pointed at their leader. "Get him up! Get him out of here!"

  Feebly, they moved to obey. One of them said sullenly, "You're just a bully! We didn't do you no harm. Ann's Lenny's girl."