Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  He soon found that the village was called Breedale. A Darlington newspaper, blowing fitfully downhill in the wind gave him the date: March 1930. He had mind-traveled to within 163 years of the time he found it convenient to refer to as "the present." Here he would be unlikely to find Silverstone; equally, he would never be found by any Gleason agents, should they come looking for him. So there was safety here, but he wondered again at what sort of direction-finding device had brought him here. It was the aspect of mind-travel that most baffled him; something equivalent to the migratory instinct in birds had delivered him to 1930, and he had yet to fathom its function.

  The over-riding preoccupation of his mind was neither this purpose nor his safety, but something to which it reverted continually without Bush's being able to contain it. This preoccupation was like an eddy in a stream, to which everything passing by is attracted and eventually becomes trapped there. Whatever he thought, whatever scene in Breedale he mingled with, his attention was drawn back to the brutal way in which he had beaten Lenny up with the golf clubs. That white room in the barracks was always with him. He saw the high blind window, heard the thud-crack as his iron connected with the rib cage, felt the impact of Lenny's heel on his shin as the tersher rolled over in agony, saw the blood souse over the floor. He recalled the over-heated look on Stanhope's face, as well as the look of disdain on Howes' as the latter left him at the door of the torture room. He knew he was degraded; although he had never thought in theological terms, he saw himself being in a state of sin. Breedale was self-exile.

  This state remained with him over the ensuing weeks like a dirty taste in the mouth. He would have been an outcast in Breedale because of it, even had he not been isolated behind the entropy barrier.

  He made no attempt to redeem himself from his own beastliness. It was like a tangible thing. He could carry it about like a hump and be satisfied that it was a burden. What he had done had been the worst act of his life -- and he preferred, in his present self-condemnatory mood, to regard it as the climax of his life rather than an aberration following his bout of military training -- as something that really deserved the day of exile in the garden, when the red-hot pokers had overtopped him and his mother had proved she did not love him. That punishment fitted this crime. Typical that they should be reversed in order, as if he symbolically lived his life backwards, muddled in spirit from start to finish! In his tent in the 1930 garden, he sometimes tried to weep; but a sense that to offer any token of softness would be spurious in someone who so gladly had beaten up his victim checked the tears, leaving his eyes dry and hard like a window pane.

  In front of that pane, the inhabitants of Breedale performed their own individual dramas. He thought it as well he could see only the outside of them.

  For some while, in an incurious way, Bush was baffled to know what the people did by way of a living; they seemed as much divorced from reality as he was. He drew out his answer like the dole, by bits.

  Only after he had mooned about the village for several days did he realize the function of the grim collection of buildings on the other side of the railway lines. It was a revelation to realize that this was a coal mine. In his own day, coal mines still operated in various corners of the world, but they bore little superficial resemblance to this crude site.

  A path wound behind the mine. One day when the spring came, Bush followed young Joan along it. She had a boy with her, a youngster almost as pale as she, who held her hand when they were out of sight of the railway station. They walked past the gaunt and silent mine, in which no one left or came, and a few sparrows round the pithead quarreled over the shortage of nesting materials.

  The path led to a river; the scenery became beautiful. Trees grew here, putting out their greenest leaves; one hung over a stone bridge, a grey bridge that carried the path across the river to fairer banks beyond. Here Joan suffered her boy to kiss her. They remained for a moment in time, staring with hope and love into each other's eyes. Bush thought with longing hunger of the Permian, where the early amphibians crawled about like wounded things, so free from the love and hope and hurt that clogged human centuries.

  Overcome with shyness at their daring, the boy and girl walked on. They spoke with some animation; their observer was pleased he did not hear what they said. The path led to a stone wall and meandered along beside it. Joan and the boy stopped here, leaning on the wall and smiling at each other. After five minutes, they turned back the way they had come. Bush remained where he was; he did not wish to see them kiss again, as if kisses were golden pledges. He was, after all, at an age when the certainties of youth had left him.

  He looked over the stone wall at a fine house set amid park and garden, well situated in the valley. The wall had stood for so long that he had to climb it to get into the grounds. He walked through ample and well-tended vegetable gardens, and arrived at the rear of the house.

  So he came to the local manor, and discovered the Winslade family which, at this period of its history, was almost as subdued in its manner as the inhabitants of the village. Wandering like a phantom about their grandly appointed house, he gradually realized that they owned the mine. The knowledge affronted his common sense, since he was badly read in human history and could not understand how one man or family could possess such a natural product of the Earth as coal.

  The days fell away. Bedeviled by his own guilt, Bush was slow to realize that the whole neighborhood was crippled by a strike of long-standing. The rust on the padlock of the main gate of the mine was a symbol of the general paralysis. Although life moved, making more pronounced the bulge under Amy Bush's apron and softening the winds across the moors, the affairs of men were at a complete standstill. Now Bush thought he knew why he had arrived here; it was a case of empathy.

  He settled in the garden behind the grocer's, living frugally on his food concentrates, and the weeds grew high, unhindered by the shadowy substance of his tent. The grocer's shop was well situated for custom. Neighbors from the stone-built houses came here, while it attracted the custom of all the flimsier houses over the ridge above it, whose occupants preferred not to bother to walk down to the larger shop near the pub at the foot of the hill. But there was little custom now; the customers were increasingly short of money as the strike dragged on, and the Bushes were more and more unable to extend credit; they had to pay their wholesalers. Bush understood that Herbert was a miner in better times; Amy ran the shop on her own. When he first came on Herbert, the man went cheerily into the shop, helped clean it, whiled away long strike hours talking to his wife's customers. In a few weeks, however, the customers became less talkative and clearly vexed at being allowed to have nothing on account. Herbert began to smile less, and took to staying away from the shop. He induced his daughter to go on long walks over the moor with him; once Bush followed them some of the way, watching their two silhouettes on the bare skyline, the girl's tagging farther and farther behind; but Joan clearly did not relish these walks. When she gave them up, Herbert gave his up as well, and took to standing about in the sloping street with the other men in creased trousers, saying little, doing nothing.

  One morning, there was a meeting outside the church, and the owner of the manor came and spoke, standing with half a dozen officials on the raised walk by the church while the men crowded in the road. Bush had no way of knowing what was said, but the men did not go back to work. He was cut off from his surroundings. Yet in his growing emotional evolvement with them, he saw something to be preferred to the situation that had prevailed in his own time, when he had been in touch with events, able to influence them, and yet had felt emotionally isolated from all that went on.

  Amy was growing nearer her time. She spent most of her day in the shop, which was barer now, and dusty. She seemed to have abdicated from the family; Joan was left to look after grandmother and children. Nor did she pay any attention to her husband, who in turn stayed more and more away from the house. They were strangers to each other.

  Only in the
evenings did Herbert return, when Joan was there. Although she worked harder now, the girl carried a little of spring in her cheeks, inspired perhaps by her boy friend. Now that his wife was so unresponsive, Herbert seemed to need more and more attention from Joan. He helped her wash the children and undertook to get the daily breakfast of tea and bread and jam. Amy retired to bed early, before the old creaking grandmother went, and then Herbert would put his arm round his daughter's waist and draw her down to look at the ailing accounts of the shop; sometimes he gave the figures up altogether, sitting clutching the girl's hand and staring into her eyes. Once on these occasions, Joan said something in protest and pulled herself away as if she would leave the room. Herbert jumped up and caught her and kissed her as if to placate her, but when he got his arms about her, she slipped déxtrously away and ran upstairs. Herbert stood where he was a long while, at one point staring about him with an expression of fear on his face so ghastly that Bush also took fright, alarmed for a moment that he might through some magical agency have become visible to the man; but it was in Herbert Bush's own mind that the object of his fright lay.

  The boys grew more neglected, fishing in the stream or playing with other little hooligans in the gutter. Amy lived in her shop, often regarding her husband as if she had never seen him before. Prompted by Herbert's interest in his daughter, Bush recalled what someone had said long ago about incest: that the tabu on it which began primitive man's isolation from his fellow hominids had led to the growth of individual consciousness, from whence sprang all civilization. If endogamy had been still the rule in 1930, Amy and Herbert might have been first cousins, or perhaps even brother and sister, in which case a lifelong acquaintanceship might have made them less strangers to each other now.

  One outward cause of their trouble revealed itself on a day when Bush had been down at the lower end of Breedale. He now knew everyone by sight, and was interested enough in their affairs to spend much of the day moving in and out of their dwelling places, absorbing with equal relish both that which had a period and that which had an eternal flavor. Returning to the little grocer's, he saw the weekly wholesale delivery van standing outside it; by now he had been here long enough to recognize the name of the Darlington firm on its battered side. Entering the shop by the front door, Bush found nobody inside. He walked through to the back -- by now his identification with the era was so close that he no longer went through objects if he could avoid doing so -- and found Amy and Herbert closeted with a stranger, a plump man in a smart suit who was rising from the table, hat in hand, tucking some documents into an inside pocket. Bush did not care for the look of him, and noted that he was smiling in a strained way, whereas Amy had broken down on her side of the table and was weeping. Herbert stood helplessly behind his wife, clutching her shoulder.

  A legal document lay on the table. Bush glanced at it before Amy took it up. From the little he saw of it, he gathered that she had had to sell her business to the larger firm. Presumably they had grown too much in debt for her to take any other course. He looked down at Amy, feeling the shock and sorrow of it.

  The plump man found his own way out. Amy sat at the table and stifled her tears while Herbert paced about, two paces one way, two the other.

  Amy recovered herself and stood up, saying something to Herbert in a brusque manner. He replied, gesturing. At once, they were in the midst of a mighty row, perhaps the grimmest they had ever had. By her gestures, which included a lot of pointing down the hill, Bush gathered she was in some way including the mine in her abuse -- the mine that with its dark, closed alleys underground bulked large in all their lives.

  The row grew more violent. Amy snatched up a lesson book from the table and flung it at Herbert. She was too close in the tiny room to miss; it hit him in the corner of the mouth. He leaped at her, grasped her with both hands about the throat. Bush threw himself forward, fell through them with his hands waving, and struck his head a blow on the chimney breast. As he staggered to one side, Herbert threw Amy to the floor. Then he ran out of the back door, slamming it behind him.

  Bush leaned against the wall on which he had struck himself. It felt at once glassy and rubbery, like any object through the entropy barrier. He clutched at his air-leaker, breathing painfully. His head rang, but already he was glad he had jumped instinctively to the woman's aid. He opened one eye and gazed down at her. She was doubled up with the pangs of birth.

  Forgetting his own woes, he hurried out to the street. Nobody was about. The hour was two in the afternoon, when everyone sat in their parlors pretending they had lunched adequately or in the pub forgetting they had lunched inadequately. The Bush children had disappeared; nor was there any sign of Herbert. Nor -- he realized it almost as soon as the emptiness stopped him -- could he attract anyone's attention if he did see them.

  He located Tommy and Derek playing with a couple of fellow hooligans in an old derelict railway truck standing on the edge of the sidings. The smallest boy was nowhere about. Granny was sitting in a garrulous neighbor's kitchen. It was an hour before he found Joan. As he might have guessed had he not been in such a distressed state of mind, she was sitting in a little back room talking with two girl friends. He stood and looked. She was so meek, so unassuming -- and so far from guessing that her mother lay at home in agony. She and her friends went on talking and talking, their pale lips moving all the while; sometimes they smiled or frowned, occasionally aiding the meaning of what they said with a small gesture. And what were they all saying, so long ago, so hopelessly embedded in time? He knew her life through and through, had watched her in her bath, had seen her asleep, had spied on her first kiss. She had nothing to talk about, nothing worth recording even on such a dead afternoon. What was it all about?

  The question extended itself until it embraced all human history. It seemed to Bush that throughout his life he had asked it too often, while nobody else had asked it enough. His damned memory -- he recalled an ancient day far in the backlog of his own days . . . or a young day, whichever it should be, for he could have been no more than four. . . . The dentist had built a little sandpit for his son to play in. Son had built a great castle and driven a tunnel through it. Son had flooded tunnel and moat with water from his (red, with yellow[?] handle) bucket. Conveniently, son had found beetle in nearby flower bed. Son had put beetle in toy boat with sail. With slight push, boat had ridden through great swirling cavern with beetle gallant in bows, looking every black inch a captain. Questions, then and now: What was beetle really? What was son really? What really determined their roles?

  And the "really"; evidence of some standard outside the consciousness? God in disguise? God like an all-consuming alien entity from another galaxy, digesting all beetles, flowers, worms, cats, Sons, mothers, so that it could greedily experience life through all their beings?

  Well, that was more or less the traditional answer to the question of the mystery of life in his part of the globe. Then there was the scientific answer, but after a while that too fetched up against the blank wall of God. There was the atheist answer, that it was all blind luck, or ill luck. And a hundred other answers. Perhaps they all had the problem back to front.

  For a second, a dizziness that had nothing to do with his bruised head overcame Bush. It was as if he had almost laid his hand on the key to the whole matter; but he thought he remembered feeling like that before; the confusion into which he could throw himself seemed the nearest he ever got to clarity.

  Empty-handed, he came away from the talking girls.

  Outside, the sun shone, although it did not reach him. Summer hovered on the threshold of Breedale. He was standing among the poor houses that abutted the moor. In one or two of their gardens, brave efforts had been made to create beds in which to grow a few flowers or vegetables to fill the hollow cookpots; but the moorland had stubbornly resisted such economy. He wandered over the crest of the hill, staring down at Breedale as he had often done before, and saw Herbert Bush.

  Herbert was tacking up the h
ill, almost home. Bush recognized at once that the man was drunk. He ran down the slope to meet him, ran beside him, but he was a ghost, nothing, and if Herbert was psychically disturbed by his presence he showed nothing. He was red in the face and blowing, muttering to himself. For most of the afternoon, he must have been down somewhere in the village, drinking with a crony. Now it looked as if he were returning to give his wife a bit more of his mind. He flung open the back door and discovered her sprawled on the tile floor.

  At once Herbert shut the door behind him, so suddenly that Bush, coming close behind him, jumped back and was shut outside. He could only peer through the tiny window over the kitchen sink, a helpless, exiled, Peeping Tom.

  Amy had moved. She had apparently heaved herself up onto a chair, and then fallen off again as her pains crippled her. Now she sprawled foreshortened, and the chair was pulled down over her face and chest, one arm entangled with its legs. At some point, she had torn her garments aside. Her dead baby lay between her legs, not fully born. Herbert flung himself on the floor beside her.

  "No!" Bush gasped. He pulled back from the window, leaned his throbbing head against the glassy wall. She could not be dead! You didn't die so simply. Oh, yes, you did, if you had suffered from long under-nourishment, if you struck yourself on the table as you fell, if you were trapped in a whole skein of adverse economic, historic, and emotional circumstances; you died fairly easily. But her life -- she couldn't have been born for this squalid end! The promise of her girlhood . . . her marriage even a few weeks ago she had seemed happy, despite everything.