by Brian Aldiss
It made no difference.
He was startled to find Herbert's face glaring out of the window at him. It had lost its flush and was ashen -- appeared even to have lost its shape. Bush realized that the man was not looking at him. He was seeing nothing, unless it was the mess of his life; and with one hand he was reaching up to the little shelf above the sink on which he kept his washing and shaving tackle. He brought down his long cut-throat razor.
"Herbert, no, no!" Bush jumped in front of the window, tapped uselessly on the glass, which felt malleable to him. He waved, he shouted. And before his eyes Herbert Bush cut his throat, drawing the blade from his left ear almost to his right.
The next moment, he appeared at the back door, razor still grasped in hand. Blood cascaded over his shirt. He took three steps into the garden, knee-high in cow parsley, and collapsed among the creamy heads of the weeds, his body half-covering Bush's phantasmal tent. Bush was running away in terror.
It was as if the tragedy that occurred in the Bush family was an historical necessity. The whole village chipped in their pennies for a fund for the children, the whole village paraded to the cemetery behind the church. Even the lord of the manor sent one of his mine managers to represent him; possibly Herbert held a good position at the pit. Some of the men spoke to the manager afterwards; the union was brought in; discussions were restarted. The ghastly deaths had jolted everyone from their sullen apathy. They were prepared to negotiate again. An agreement was reached.
Only four days after Amy and Herbert Bush were buried, the men were streaming down the hill in their working clothes again, they were being carried down in the primitive cage into the earth, they were hewing away at the fossil trees that had themselves been above the ground in distant days.
Bush stayed in Breedale, to see Joan take to her job as assistant in the shop, working under a man employed by the wholesalers who had bought the business, a man who rode in on a bike every morning from another village down the valley, a scrubbed, efficient, smiling man in an uncomfortable collar, a promising young man. A neighbor looked after the Bush boys during the day. Grandmother fended for herself. Now that the weather was fine, she was able to sit outside her back door in a hard chair -- which she evidently resented, since neighboring grannies not cursed with grocer's shops could sit outside their front doors, thus viewing the street and its activities.
It was Bush's main concern to watch over Joan. In a year or so she would be old enough to marry the boy who still courted her -- the boy who was now working down the pit for the first time. Bush could discover no indication that she ever thought of her parents. He wondered if it ever entered her head that her father killed himself in a moment of unbalance, not from sorrow but from guilt -- but if it did, she and he would be the only ones to think it.
So Bush seemed to have reached a dead end, and gradually he was forced to revert to his own predicament -- only to find, somewhat to his surprise, that his ego had repaired itself. He accepted that the shock of finding his mother dead, followed by the grueling military training, had temporarily occulted his reason.
At the same time, shreds of moral discipline, surviving buried but unharmed from an earlier period of his life, prompted him to think that he must in the future be more a force for positive good. He believed he had been through enough bad to recognize its opposite.
Which led him to understand that he must do what he could to upset the Action regime, for how far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?
He used this question to stiffen his good resolutions, so overcome by the beauty and universality of it, for it embodied truths, he felt, which he had come on in Breedale, that it was some while before he recognized it as kin to an old Biblical saying his art master had often jocularly applied to his pupils' still-life studies of apples and pears, "By their fruits ye shall know them." All the same, he had worked round to the perception for himself, which was a promising sign.
Bush's soul had broken away from its little mud hut. It moved now in a mighty crystal palace. He felt the godlike qualities in himself.
This merciful interlude in Breedale, away from the real world, had given him the opportunity to find himself. It was his forty days in the wilderness. Much of the days when he discovered this transformation of soul he spent praying; but the prayers changed shape and tone, and came winging back to him. It was the god-quality in himself he needed to reveal -- and to reveal to others as well as to himself.
During that long day in another garden, when his mother had proved how she had turned against him, he had become aware of a flaw in the moral structure of the universe. Now he felt strong enough to take a patch to that flaw, to rise upon a course of positive action, to make over the world again!
He starved, himself. He had visions. Away from the world, he could see it glinting at his fingertips, ready to be fashioned. It was a complex work of art, on which he had the largest -- purest! -- ambitions. He would show his mother that he could be a god, quite beyond her petty scheme of rewards and punishments.
He got ready to mind-travel again. He knew what he had to do. The lesser things before the greater, material before transcendental. There was one more hesitation first of all, easily dismissed: he wondered if he should remain in 1930, not in Breedale, but in some other place -- notably in London, for it was common knowledge (he seemed to remember), and something of a joke, that intellectuals who mind-traveled made for Buckingham Palace, enjoying its snob appeal, its comforts, its discomforts, and its convenience as a rendezvous. But this close to the present, the palace would be deserted by all but the royal House of Windsor and their entourage.
No, his quarry might well be there . . . but farther back in time, at a time more easily available to all except mavericks like Bush. He thought he could divine the exact date, and prepared to mind there.
Before he left the mining community, a surprise presented itself. The new manager of the little grocer's, who had been there no more than ten days, rolled down the blind over the door at eight o'clock one evening, bolted the door, and turned to propose marriage to Joan. So Bush interpreted it by her modest looks, her smiles, her moment of fear, his way of clasping her hand formally and tenderly. Next day, the fellow cycled to work as usual and presented Joan with a ring from his neat waistcoat pocket; as he slipped it on her finger, she smiled with misty eyes and suddenly put an arm about his neck, resting a cheek against his head.
Bush wondered at her, this ordinary girl! Was she just an opportunist? Did she care for the young man? Was she hardhearted or indifferent? Her external acts were capable of being read in conflicting ways.
"This is my story, being acted for me," he told himself. "When I have sorted out my affairs, I can return here and see what happens to her, if I so wish." They would always be here, perched on the edge of the great moor. For that matter, her father would always be running out dying into the cow parsley. Perhaps Bush would come back and change it all through his new divinity.
When he had folded up his tent, collected up his chattels, and was about to give himself a jab of CSD, he went to take leave of Joan. She was in the back room, checking over invoices, with the old granny sitting behind her, chewing her teeth with the horrid geniality of a medieval memento mori.
Bush raised his hand in salutation to all bitter-sweet things; he was already half delirious from the effects of the drug; he wondered that he had frequently felt so much more alone in his own epoch, among people he could touch and talk with, and presumably "understand" better than he "understood" this little faded underfed virgin. But understanding was a poor thing beside wonder.
Reluctant to disappear before her unseeing eyes, he moved outside. Overhead, a cuckoo hurtled in a parabola towards the bare line of moor as if fired from a great feathered gun. Bush vanished from the scene like a ghost.
Chapter 2
THE GREAT VICTORIAN PALACE
He stood under great elms and knew this was the place -- his Dark Woman was nearby, very sha
dowy, her form erased a thousand times by the passers-by. At the end of the line of elms stood a great crystal fountain, its waters pouring into a circular pool. Fountain, pool, and elms were enclosed in a mighty glass arcade and flanked by bizarre statuary.
Bush knew this place and time; the Victorian mania in his childhood ensured that. This was 1851, when the Great Exhibition was held to testify to the upsurge of British wealth and power. He went over and stood by one gigantic statue that caught his fancy almost as much as it did the crowd's. It was a German statue, fashioned out of zinc, depicting a mighty Amazon woman riding a stallion bare-back and bare-breasted. She was about to plunge her lance into a tigress which, prompted by reasons of its own, was climbing up and over the horse's shoulder.
The Victorians, in sculpture and painting, had been masters of 'What will happen next?,' freezing one second of time into a question; their skill had been both lost and derided with the onset of photography and cinema and television and lasoids -- all of which insisted on answering the question, rather than remaining content to pose it. Now he was faced with the same question in his own life, and must solve it with action. The Dark Woman was watching him. From her vantage point in time, she might well know what-happened-next-to-Eddie-Bush. It was not a comforting thought; he was pleased to think that she knew no more than he whether the Amazon or the tigress won their battle.
There were other what-wouId-happen-nexts involved with his personal equation; hanging about beneath the great zinc figure, he decided that the first one concerned Silverstone, alias Stein. He had been trained to assassinate Silverstone; clearly, the man had something that was dangerous to the Gleason regime -- which Bush in his new mood saw was something to cherish. It was his duty to get to Silverstone and warn him -- if Silverstone were still alive, for although Bush had personal reasons to know that Silverstone was well able to protect himself, he would probably have several of Gleason's agents on his trail by now. Popular Action mind-travelers would be stretching throughout time, searching for Silverstone and any other potential trouble-makers they could find: probably including Bush himself by now.
By such reasoning, his godlike Breedale thoughts came back to earth.
The obvious place to begin looking for Silverstone was Buckingham Palace.
He pushed invisibly through the crowds, even in this moment of pre-occupation finding space to delight in their diversity, eccentricity, and flamboyance, so different from the leveled-down masses of his own day. Outside, the people were even less subdued. Carriages stood here, both private and for public hire, together with leathery men holding horses, or gentlemen riding them, singly or in groups. Bush thought that the Victorians seemed most themselves when these dark ambiguous animals were about. He wished he could ride one, and save himself time.
The splendid glass and iron front of the Crystal Palace, flags flying on all tiers, fell away behind him as he crossed Hyde Park and made his way down Rotten Row. There were smart gigs dashing about here; he kept out of their way, although they could do him no harm.
Somewhere in this wilderness of humanity, Turner went about his business, the great Turner whose thoughts were all yellow and raw-red vortices of fire, an artist who was all Bush would be: consumer of himself and his age, and transcending both. Somewhere here, Turner was in his boozy old age -- this was the year of his death -- interesting himself in such traitorous new techniques as photography and, if he visited the Great Exhibition, no doubt smiling at the horse-riding lady in zinc.
Bush closed his thoughts down. One day, he promised himself, he would be wholly an artist; first, a few historical necessities had to be cleared out of the way.
His senses were alert to danger now. As he approached the palace, he was on the watch for anyone from his own time, knowing they would be noticeable even from some distance by their duller, dustier aspect, as if it were they rather than the scene about them that lacked a sufficient degree of reality.
Horse guards paraded before the ornate building; the animals on which they were mounted looked haughtily through Bush. He slipped past them, moving into the grounds of the palace, working his way cautiously to the rear, where a group of vans and carts were drawn up, with porters and menservants busy unloading them and carrying their contents into the palace kitchens. From one van, Bush noticed, game birds were being taken -- grouse, pheasant, partridge, and another bird he presumed to be ptarmigan. They came out on stretchers, huge blocks of ice melting at each end, the water from which stained the already impoverished plumes of the fowls. From another van, a pile of turkeys was being unloaded. Bush looked away; he was still in his innocent mood, and the sight of all this petty death disturbed him.
Buckingham Palace had stood for a long time. Even to mind-travelers, its walls were so substantial that they had to pass through the doors like ordinary mortals imprisoned in time. So the doors would be watched by the Action party, if it were here.
He ran his gaze over the men in livery and in aprons. As a stretcher piled with dead pheasants was carried inside, he saw another man go with it, carrying nothing, a man wearing a blue apron and sporting a curly moustache. He showed slightly grey against the background. Even as Bush looked, he disappeared into the building. Bush could tell from the man's tone that this was someone from within a year or two of his own present -- one of Gleason's agents, for certain.
Or one of Silverstone's? Bush had yet to find out how well organized Silverstone was. But he realized that whether he ran into Gleason's or Silverstone's men, they were not going to be friendly to Bush.
His best hope lay in hiding in the palace before the opposition was alert to his arrival.
Moving rapidly past the lackeys, Bush strode into the great building. He found himself in a maze of servants' quarters and sculleries -- the little woman who lived at the heart of this great warren and ruled it and the lands far beyond it probably visited India more frequently than she visited this region -- or was that right? Were airships in use at this time? He believed not, but his history was shaky on the point.
He came to servants' stairs, bare of carpet, and climbed awkwardly -- stairs were never easy in mind-travel. On the first floor, he emerged onto a rather spartan landing, stepping back hurriedly into an alcove as a party of women approached. Three maids were positively marching along in their stiff morning uniforms; beside them -- Bush remembered Sergeant Pond -- was a formidable woman, perhaps an under-housekeeper, resplendent in a severe purple dress that swirled about her feet. The maids stopped outside the doors along the corridor; at each door one of them detached herself from the file and opened the door for her superior, whereupon the two would enter the room, presumably to inspect its cleanliness. In the dull light, it was difficult to tell if the figures were of their own times.
Bush took a chance on it. He could not wait about while the bedrooms were inspected. He walked boldly out past them. They never looked in his direction; he was less than a ghost.
There were doors at the far end of the corridor. He went through them and found himself in a wider and grander corridor. The hour was still sufficiently early for the floor to be deserted except for servants. He recalled that the grand Victorian habit was to breakfast on until ten-thirty and after.
As he walked down the corridor, he saw great rooms of state on one side, heavy curtains at the windows, sumptuous carpets underfoot, heavily carved tables and chairs, immense potted plants. He moved through corridor after corridor, losing his way. He thought that the intellectuals pitched their tents in Albert's smoking lounge, but could not remember on which floor the room was.
By now, he was growing confused and anxious. Gleason's agents would have marked him down, surely. It was up to him to be as prepared as possible for any trouble, yet his gun was still in his pack. He turned back into a side passage, where the light was poor.
A maid was coming towards him. Nervous, he moved into the nearest open doorway. The maid followed. She took his arm.
"Eddie! Don't be surprised! It's me!"
&
nbsp; How long since he had heard any voice but his own? How long since he had felt a woman against him? How many hundreds of years?
He saw her air-leaker was camouflaged as a brooch pinned to her stiff dress-front. He saw her hair tucked under the maid's cap, her face as smeared as ever.
"Ann! Ann! Is it really you? You left me at The Amniote Egg, ages ago!"
He clutched her, uncertain how he felt about her; that would depend on how she felt about him. There was a glassy feel about her, her voice came to him with a slight thinness through the entropy barrier, but she had minded close enough from his time for her to seem completely real.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"What are you doing here?"
"I've had a terrible time!" She motioned to the nearest room and they passed in. It was a little over-furnished room with an over-ornate grate in which a coal fire crackled, burning in a cold morning fashion without the glowing coals underneath which would support it when it was less freshly laid. Her back to the blue-and-yellow flames, a plump woman with a bunch of keys chained round her waist sat at a little escritoire, writing out a list of articles.