Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  Climbing out of his pack, Bush stood up and surveyed himself in the mirror. Amid these sanitary surroundings, he looked scruffy and filthy. He fed his measurements into the clotheomat and dialed for a one-piece. It was delivered in thirty seconds flat; a metal drawer containing it sprang open and caught Bush painfully on the shin. He took the garment out, laid it on the bed, removed his wrist instruments, picked up a clean towel from a heated rail, and padded into the shower. As he soused himself in the warm water -- unimaginable luxury! he thought of Ann and her grubby flesh, lost somewhere back in a time that was now transmuted into layers of broken rock, buried underground. From now on, he would have to regard her as just another of his casual lays; there was no reason to suppose he would ever see her again.

  In ten minutes, he was fit to leave the cubicle. He rang the bell, and a male attendant came to unlock the door and present him with a bill for room and services. Bush stared at the amount and winced; but the Wenlock Institute would pay that. He would have to report there shortly, prove that he had been doing something in the last two and a half years. First, he would go home and be the dutiful son. Anything to delay the report a little.

  Slinging his pack over one shoulder, he walked down the spotless corridor -- behind whose locked doors so many other escapees foraged through their minds into the dark backward and abyss of time -- into the entrance hall. One of his groupages was there, one of the largest, bolted onto the ceiling. Bloody Borrow had superseded it. Forbidding himself to look up at it, he went over towards the heat baffles and stepped into the open.

  "Taxshaw, sir?"

  "Going-home present, sir? Lovely little dollies!"

  "Buy some flowers, mister -- daffs fresh picked today."

  "Taxshaw! Take you anywhere!"

  "Want a girl, squire? Take your mind off mind-travel?"

  "Spare a cent!"

  He remembered the cries of despair. This was home; 2090 or 2093, this was the time track he knew. He could make a textbook picture of it, the unfortunates ranged from left to right, like dinosaurs in the other diagram: male beggar first, then female, then taxshawman pulling his carriage, then toy-vendor, clouting away ragged kid, with flower-woman extreme right, under lamp post; and, in the background, the smart mind-station contrasted with the filthy ragged houses and broken roads. Jostling his way through the little knot of mendicants and hawkers, he started to walk, changed his mind, and went over to a taxshawman sitting sullenly in his carriage. Giving his father's address, he asked how much the ride would cost. The man told him.

  "It's far too much!"

  "Prices have gone up while you've been flitting round the past."

  They always said that. It was always true.

  Bush climbed into the vehicle, the man lifted the shafts, and they were off.

  The air tasted wonderful! It was a miracle that only this tiny sliver of time, the present, should seem to have the magical stuff in abundance, everywhere, even where there were no people. Clever devices though the air-leakers were, they always made one feel near to suffocation. And it was not only air -- there were a thousand sounds here, all striking blessedly on Bush's ear, even the harsh ones. Also, everything that could be seen had its individual tactile quality; everything that had been turned to rubbery glass in the past here possessed its own miraculous properties of texture.

  Although he knew he was thoroughly hooked on mind-travel, and would inevitably plunge back again, he loathed the abdication of the senses it entailed. Here was the world, the real world -- rattling, blazing, living: and probably a little too much for him, as it had proved before!

  Already, as he filled his lungs, as they rattled through the streets, he could see disturbing signs that 2093 was far from being a paradise, perhaps even farther from being a paradise than 2090. Maybe the adage was right that said you could stay away too long; perhaps already the mindless reptilian past was more familiar than this present. He knew he did not really belong here when he could not understand the slogans scrawled on the brick walls.

  At one point, a column of soldiers in double file marched down the road. The taxshawman gave them a wide berth.

  "Trouble in town?"

  "Not if you keep your nose clean."

  An ambiguous answer, Bush thought.

  He took some while to grasp exactly why the road in which his parents lived looked smaller, baser, altogether more drab. It was not just because several windows had been broken and boarded up; that he recalled from before, and the litter in the streets. It was only as he paid off the man and confronted his father's house that he realized all the trees in the road had been chopped down. In the dentist's neat little front garden, two ornamental cherries had grown -- James Bush had planted them himself when he first took over the practice -- they would have been coming into blossom about now. As he walked up the brick path, he saw their brown and decaying stumps sticking out of the ground like advertisements for his father's profession.

  Some things were the same. The brass plate still announced James Bush, L.D.S., Dental Surgeon. Tucked into a transparent plastic holder, the card still said "Please Ring and Walk In" in his mother's handwriting. As the practice went downhill, she had been forced for economic reasons to become her husband's receptionist, thus providing an unwitting example of time's turning full circle, since it was as his receptionist she had got to know him in the first place. He braced himself to hear a flood of examples of how things had gone further downhill since he left; his mother was always expert at providing tedious and repetitive examples of anything. Grasping the doorknob, he Walked In without Ringing.

  The hall, which was also the waiting room, was empty. Magazines and newspapers lay about on table and chairs, notices, diagrams, and certificates crowded the walls, rather as if this were a center for testing literacy.

  "Mother!" he called, looking up the stairs. It was gloomy up on the landing. There was no movement.

  He did not call his mother again. Instead, he tapped on the surgery door and walked in.

  His father, Jimmy Bush, James Bush, L.D.S., sat in the dental chair gazing out into his back garden. He wore carpet slippers, and his white smock was unbuttoned, to reveal a ragged pullover underneath. He looked round slowly at his son, as though reluctant to regard one more human being.

  "Hello, Father! It's me again -- I've just got back."

  "Ted, my boy! We'd given you up! Fancy seeing you! So you've come back, have you?"

  "Yes, Father." For some situations, there were no rational forms of speech.

  Jimmy Bush climbed out of the chair and shook his son's hand, grinning as they muttered affectionately at each other. He was of the same build as his son, a rather untidy figure. Age and habit had endowed him with a slightly apologetic stoop, and the same hint of apology appeared in his smile. Jimmy Bush was not a man who claimed very much for himself.

  "I thought you were never coming back! This needs celebrating! I've got a little something over here. Scotch mouthwash -- dentist's ruin." He fumbled in a cupboard, shifted a sterilizer, and brought forth a half-empty half-bottle of whisky.

  "Know how much this costs now, Ted? Fifty pounds sixty cents, and that's just a half bottle. It went up again at the last budget. Oh, I don't know what things are coming to, really I don't! You know what Wordsworth said -- 'The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.' He'd have a fit if he were alive today!"

  Bush had forgotten his father's literary tags. He enjoyed them. Trying to infuse some life into himself, he said, "I only just got back, Dad. Haven't even reported to the Institute yet." As his father brought two glasses out, he asked, "Is Mother in?"

  Jimmy Bush hesitated, then busied himself pouring out the whisky. "Your mother died last June, Ted. June the tenth. She'd been ill several months. She often asked after you. Of course, we were very sorry you weren't here, but there was nothing we could do, was there?"

  "No. No, nothing. Dad, I'm sorry . . . I never . . . Was it anything bad?" Realizing
the idiocy of what he was saying, he corrected himself. "I mean, what was the trouble?"

  "The usual," Jimmy Bush said, as if his wife had often died before; his attention was straying to his glass, which he lifted eagerly. "Cancer, poor old girl. But it was in the bowels, and she never had a moment's pain with it, so we must be thankful. Well, cheers anyway -- good health!"

  Bush hardly knew how to respond. His mother had never been a happy woman, but memories of some of her happy hours crowded back on him now, most poignantly. He took a drink of the whisky. It was neat and tasted like some sort of disinfectant, but its course down his throat was gratifying. He accepted a mescahale when his father offered him one, and puffed dutifully.

  "I'll just have to let the news digest, Dad. I can hardly believe it!" he said very calmly -- he couldn't let his true feelings show.

  He left the drink and rushed past his father, through the little conservatory, out to the garden. His pre-fab studio stood on the other side of the lawn. Bush ran across to it and shut himself in.

  She was dead. . . . No, she couldn't be, not while there was still so much unfinished between them! If he'd come back punctually . . . But she was all right when he left. He just had not imagined she, his mother, could die. God, he'd change the damned natural laws if he could!

  He raised his fist, shook it, ground his teeth. There had been too many shocks to his ego. Dazedly, he glared about, fixing his gaze with loathing on the Goya, "Chronos Devouring His Children." A reproduction of Turner's "Rain, Steam and Speed" hung on another wall; that too, with its terrifying threat of dissolution, was unbearable. On a shelf stood one of Takis's electric sculptures, dating from the nineteen-sixties, dulled with dust, broken, a ruin that no longer illuminated. Worse were Bush's own attempts at expression, his canvases, sketches, montages, plastic web-sculptures, groupages, the last SKGs he had done. All were meaningless now, a progression without progress.

  Bush set about wrecking the studio, flailing his arms, hardly aware of his hoarse cries and sobs. The whole place seemed to fly apart.

  When he came back to consciousness, he was lying back in the dentist's chair. His father was sitting nearby, still abstractedly drinking whisky.

  "How did I get here?"

  "Are you okay now?"

  "How did I get here?"

  "You walked. Then you seemed to pass out. I hope it wasn't the whisky."

  Bush could not answer that foolishness. His father had never understood him; there was nobody to understand now.

  Slowly, he pulled himself together.

  "How've you managed, Father? Who's looking after you?"

  "Mrs. Annivale from next door. She's very good."

  "I don't remember Mrs. Annivale."

  "She moved in last year. She's a widow. Husband shot in the Revolution."

  "Revolution? What revolution?"

  His father looked uneasily over his shoulder. Viewed through the conservatory, the neglected garden lay empty in the April sun. Seeing no spies there, his father was encouraged to say, "The country went bankrupt, you know. All this expenditure on mind-travel, and no returns. . . . There were millions of unemployed. The armed forces went over on to their side, and the government was chucked out. It was hell here for a few months! You were best out of the country. I was glad your mother didn't live to see the worst of it."

  Bush thought of The Amniote Egg, prospering. "The new government can't stop mind-travel, can it?"

  "Too late! Everybne's hooked on it. It's like drink, knits up the raveled sleeve of care and all that. We've got a military government now, runs exports and imports and so on, but the Wenlock Institute has a large share in the government -- or so they say. I don't take any notice. I don't take any notice of anything any more. They came to me and ordered me to work at the barracks, looking after the soldiers' oral hygiene. I told 'em, I've got my practice here. If your soldiers want to, they can come down here to me, but I'm not going up there to them, and you can shoot me before I do! They haven't bothered me again."

  "What happened to the cherry trees in the front?"

  "Last winter was terrible. Worst one I can ever remember! I had to chop them down for firewood. Just out of pity, I had Mrs. Annivale in here to live with me. She had no heating. Purely altruistic, Ted. I prefer the bottle to sex these days, like a baby. I'm an old man, you know, seventy-two last birthday. Besides, I'm faithful to the memory of your mother."

  "I'm sure you miss her very much."

  "You know what Shelley said, 'When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot.' All nonsense! Many things you take no notice of till they're long past, many actions you don't even understand until years after they are performed. By golly, your mother could be a bitch to me at times. She made me suffer! You don't know!"

  Bush admitted nothing.

  His father continued without pause, as if following a rational train of thought, "And one afternoon when the times were at their worst, the troops were rioting through the city. They burnt down most of Neasden. Mrs. Annivale came in here for protection: she was crying. Two soldiers caught a girl up the road. I didn't know her name -- the people have changed so much here these last few years -- I don't keep up with them any more -- either they've got marvelous teeth or jaws full of rotten ones, because they don't bother me much. Anyhow, she was a pretty girl, only about twenty, and one of these soldiers dragged her up here, into the front garden -- my front garden! -- and got her down by the wall. It was a nice summer day and the trees were still there then. He was terribly brutal! She struggled so, you see. He practically tore every shred of clothes off her. Mrs. Annivale and I watched it all from the waiting room window."

  His eyes were glowing; there seemed to be new life in him. Bush wondered what had passed between Mrs. Annivale and him on that occasion.

  Here were the images of violence and hate again, from which he was never free. What had this rape to do with his father's recollections of his mother? Was it all a fantasy his father had invented to express his lusts, his aggressiveness, his hatred of women, his fear? It was all a puzzle he never wanted to solve; nor was the ancient tabu against talking sex with his father resolved just because his father was already partly drunk; but he saw that perhaps he had not been the only person to have been shut out from his mother's love. He wanted to hear nothing more, longed for the claustrophobic silences of the long past.

  When he got up, his father recollected himself.

  "Men are like animals," he said. "Bloody animals!"

  Once there had been a tabu against arguing with his father. That at least had died where the lobe fins crawled, or some dim place where he had been in retreat from his own life.

  "I never heard of an animal commiting rape, Father. That's man's prerogative! Reproduction was a neutral act, like eating or sleeping or peeing, when it was left to the animals. But in man's hands he's twisted it to mean anything he wants -- an instrument of love, an instrument of hate . . ."

  His father drained his glass, set it down, and said coldly, "You are afraid of it, aren't you? Sex, I mean. You always were, weren't you?"

  "Not at all. You're projecting your fears onto me. But would it be strange if I was, considering the way you used to scoff at me as a kid whenever I brought a girl home?"

  "Good old Ted, never forget a grudge, just like your mother!"

  "And you must have been pretty afraid of it too, eh, or wouldn't you have chanced your arm and given me some brothers and sisters?"

  "You should have asked your mother about that side of things."

  "Ha! Those loved accents are not soon forgot, are they? Christ, what a trio we are!"

  "Twosome -- only you and me now, and you'll have to be patient with me."

  "No, a trio still! It takes more than death to get rid of memories, doesn't it?"

  "Memories are all I possess now, son -- I'm no mind-traveler, able to live in the past. . . . I've got another bottle upstairs, just for emergencies." James
Bush rose and shuffled out of the room. His son followed helplessly. They went up through the dark at the top of the stairs into the tiny sitting room, which smelled rather damp.

  The dentist switched on the electric fire. "We've got a hole in the roof. Don't touch the ceiling or the plaster may come down. It'll dry off in the summer, and I'll try and fix it. Things are very difficult. Perhaps you'll lend a hand if you're still around."

  He brought out a whole bottle of whisky, more than three-quarters full. They had carried their glasses upstairs with them. They sat down on moldering chairs and grinned at each other. James Bush winked. "To the ruddy old human race!" he said. "A man's a man for a' that!" They drank up.

  "We're ruled by a man called General Peregrine Bolt. It seems he's not a bad man as dictators go. Got a lot of popular support. At least he keeps the streets quiet at night."