Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  Bush stared at him untrustingly. "Prove it."

  "You are my proof! As you know, my job was to send out assassins and agents to kill or bring back possible enemies of the regime. I sabotaged that pretty efficiently by using incompetent officers on the course -- as you yourself say, Stanhope was an idiot -- and by picking the wrong men for the jobs. You -- Silverstone's killer -- were my masterpiece!"

  Unexpectedly, they both laughed. Bush still did not entirely accept what the other said: he felt uneasily that there was some piece of evidence on which he should be able to seize to refute Howes: but he was reassured by something in Howes' expression.

  "Supposing I accept what you say? What happens next?"

  Howes relaxed and put his gun away, a little ostentatiously. He stuck out his hand. "Then we're on the same side. We have to get out of here -- with Silverstone, before the Popular Action thugs pick him off."

  "And Ann's body? I feel I'd like to get that back to 2093."

  "That'll have to wait. It's too dangerous just now. Silverstone first."

  He outlined the situation. The new government was tightening its grip on the country, closing down trade unions and universities alike, promulgating their own unjust laws, severely checking imports, instituting purges. A close contact of Howes' in the revolutionary movement had been caught. Howes saw it was time he disappeared -- and in any case, his presence at revolutionary centers in the past would be useful. He had minded from his own hideout, accompanied by Ann.

  They had taken some while to locate Silverstone. He had left the Jurassic at the time of the round-up of suspected people, and had hidden in various ages, finally reaching 1901, the upward limit of his minding ability.

  "But 1901 depressed him," Howes explained, half-smiling. "He was all alone -- the girl he lived with in the Jurassic could not mind that far -- but he decided to make Buckingham Palace his HQ. Unfortunately, he had chosen the month after the Queen died; everywhere was shrouded in black, everyone wore black. That and being unable to talk to anyone, hear anyone, or smell anything, was too much for Silverstone. After a while, he had to slip back here to find company, and we met him almost at once."

  "Now what happens?" Bush asked.

  "Who's your girl friend?" Howes asked. He pointed towards the bed.

  Bush gave a superstitious start. For a moment he believed in ghosts. A shadowy woman stood behind the bed, the Ornate floral wallpaper visible through her body. Then he recognized her as his Dark Woman.

  "We're not the only phantoms in this palace."

  "She's following us. Who is she?"

  "I just call her the Dark Woman. She's followed me on and off for years."

  "No privacy, eh?" Howes started across the room towards her. Bush made to stop him, thought it wiser not to start another argument, and followed.

  Howes confronted the woman. She was misty, little more than an outline painted in the air. Bush had never dared look at her like that; she had been almost like a part of his own character he dared not face -- escaped from the dungeons of his sadism.

  With that thought in mind, he was none too pleased when Howes said, "She looks like you."

  "Let's get on with business! Where's Silverstone now?"

  "She's spying on us."

  "What can you do about it?"

  "I suppose you're right." As Howes turned away, something made Bush ask, "Did Ann really love me?"

  Howes made a wry gesture. "I interpreted it that way." He shrugged his shoulders as if he would have said more, then said briskly, "We have to get Silverstone away to safety; this place is surrounded by -- and infiltrated by -- Action agents. Unfortunately, safety is hard to find. And unfortunately, too, Silverstone is proving tricky."

  "In what way?"

  "He enjoyed his romp through time with a gang of tershers. It has made him slightly -- wild. Then his knowledge -- he wants to pass it on to the right people . . ."

  "And?"

  The captain gave an awkward laugh. "He doesn't consider I'm one of the right people. He doesn't trust the military. Wait -- Bush, you'd be the right sort of person! You're an artist! He has some bee in his bonnet about art at present. Let's move -- and take your cue from me. We'll have to cooperate."

  They looked at each other in some doubt.

  "Go ahead," Bush said. "If I am going to have to believe your story, you are going to have to believe I shan't shoot you in the back!"

  Howes smiled. "I know you won't do that." Again Bush was vexed by the idea he, Bush, knew something his mind would not release. The situation was camouflaged as something else, as the fireplace was camouflaged as a virgin's tomb, as Howes was camouflaged as a Victorian gentleman. He could not work it out; his ratiocinative processes were obscured by the load of grief and guilt he felt over Ann's death.

  As they hesitated momentarily, the Dark Woman crossed before them and left the room.

  "You don't know who she is, Bush. She may be a government spy."

  "Or the ghost of one of the women you say I betrayed."

  Howes grunted. "Let's go," he said.

  As they came out on to the main corridor, Bush clutched his air-leaker and swallowed several times. He felt as if he were suffocating. Nemesis might well be after him, calling to collect the debt on Ann and Lenny -- nemesis in particularly nerve-racking form, for in this place the real occupants were ghosts and the ghosts were real people; under the false whiskers could be life or death -- and he was following a man he did not trust.

  On their way, Howes muttered a few words of advice. Bush nodded, unable to answer. The hour was approaching when the piles of dead birds and animals delivered to the kitchens would be served and devoured; there was life in the palace, and the corridor was comparatively full of people. If Bush were shot down now, they would see and know nothing of the incident, trampling through his body regardlessly.

  "Silverstone's in the West Reception Lounge, four doors down," Howes said over his shoulder.

  Braided frock coats with wide lapels, basquine bodices, embroidered waistcoats, skirts with multiple flounces, surrounded them, and for every other guest there was a footman in the livery of the royal household. Bush peered anxiously round the bare sloping shoulders and the side-whiskers for sight of an assassin.

  They reached the door of the reception lounge. The guests were moving farther along the richly carpeted corridor. Outside the door of the reception lounge stood a man in livery who appeared to be in deep shade. As Bush raised his gun, Howes signaled him down.

  "He's on our side." Turning to the guard, Howes asked, "All safe?"

  "Silverstone's inside. No sign of interference. The opposition must be waiting out in the open."

  Howes frowned. "Don't see how that would do them any good." He shrugged the matter off and began to press through the door, which stood half open. His mind filled with gloomy suspicions, Bush stared at the guard; he no longer knew -- perhaps he had never known -- the difference between friend and enemy. He only knew he did not wish to go into this room -- but to challenge a man Howes presumably knew well would only be a delaying tactic. Scarcely hesitating, promising himself a glorious nervous breakdown when he was free of this present trouble, laughing at himself for so doing, he pushed through the door directly behind Howes -- and was immediately seized and punched in the stomach.

  He had a vision of an ugly face showing its teeth, of legs, of his right hand convulsively firing the light-gun, and then of the floor coming up to meet him. It looked like an ornate Turkish carpet although it had the feel of the glassy-rubbery floor of mind-travel. Struggling to get his breath back, he pulled himself into a huddled posture -- remembered Lenny in just such an attitude -- and so into a sitting position. Someone came at once and jammed the point of a gun in the back of his neck. He sat there tensely, wondering what he would feel when it went off.

  "Who's this guy?" someone asked.

  "Friend of mine," Howes said.

  Cautiously, Bush looked round, swiveling his eyes and trying to keep his n
eck still.

  The traitor at the gate was just coming in. His allies inside numbered five. Four of them had been lined up inside the door and now stood over Howes and Bush. They were all disguised as Victorian gentlemen, although their ashen cast of face marked them off as minders from 2093 suffering light-shortage. They looked intelligent -- but then they could hardly be morons to get as near the present as 1851. One of them leaned down and ripped off Howes' false whiskers and wig. He looked naked and helpless lying on the floor with a gun pointing at him.

  "This is your fault -- I was too taken up with you to bother over proper precautions!" he said to Bush.

  Bush raised his eyebrows, saying nothing. Ever watchful to seize on such things, he recognized that Howes had some sort of compulsion that moved him to transfer guilt onto someone else. He had revealed something of it in their curious conversation after -- the accident with Ann.

  Howes started to curse the man on the door for betraying trust, but a blow in the face silenced him.

  The fifth member of the ambush -- sixth if the man on the door was included -- stood over by the curtains fringing one of the tall windows. There was an armchair beside him, and a man in the armchair gagged and bound. The dimness of the latter's face and the brightness of the light pouring in made him hard to identify, but Bush had no doubt it was Silverstone; by the noise he was making, he was having trouble in breathing through his air-leaker.

  "Right-ho! It was easier than we thought," said the man standing over Howes. He appeared to be the leader. He had a broad pale brow and a heavy mouth; he wore a grey silk coat and had placed to one side, out of harm's way, a pale fawn top hat, which he now put back on his head. It formed a striking contrast with his clever, almost brutal face.

  "I might have known you'd have fallen over yourself to join Action, Grazley!" Howes said contemptuously. The name Grazley sounded familiar to Bush: one of Bolt's lieutenants, he guessed, who had switched allegiances.

  "We are taking you and your side-kick back to 2093, Howes," he said, ignoring the other's remarks. "You will stand trial, both of you, for treason against the government I have the honor to serve. We shall give you paralysis drops, inject CSD, and mind you back, linked, with us. Silverstone is coming home by the same method."

  As he spoke, he holstered his gun and snapped his fingers at one of the other men, who immediately began to unload his pack.

  "Why don't you shoot us here and spare us the farce?"Howes said. He received a kick in the spine for answer.

  While the man was pulling a syringe from his pack, some livened servants entered the room. Grazley's party was instantly on the alert, but these flunkeys were obviously of their age, and walked through the mind-travelers without flickering an eyelid. The room had been empty till now. They moved ceremoniously across to the long windows to adjust the curtains against the glare of the sun; perhaps it was a routine visit.

  Everyone's attention was distracted by the intrusion. Bush calculated the time it would take to jump up and sprint out of the door. The attempt was not worth making under normal odds, but the situation was desperate enough for a try. The servants were hardly two paces into the room before he had weighed up the situation and was tensing his muscles for the bid. And then the future came in.

  There were four of them, the Dark Woman and three men. They seemed to hang insubstantially in the air, like legless people standing behind many layers of glass. And they carried slender rods which they now aimed.

  Bush's and the Dark Woman's gaze met. She gave him a small gesture, raising her empty hand to cover her nose and mouth, and then the four of them moved to cover Grazley and his men and opened fire with their weapons.

  Grazley was fast. He threw himself at his shadowy attacker -- and charged right through him, dropping his fawn topper in the process.

  The weapons of the future worked through the entropy barrier, giving off quick puffs of a clinging gas. Two of Grazley's men were firing back indiscriminately. The weapons turned on them, they staggered and fell. Bush caught an acrid smell that nearly lifted his head off. Picking himself up as he moved, he ran for the door.

  His head swam. The gas bit at his senses. His action was useless. He was never free. What was that about the nature of infinity? Action is . . . suffering is . . . God, yes, permanent, obscure, and dark . . . like Ann . . .

  He managed to hold on to some of his wits. He sprawled on the rich carpet in the corridor. The crowds had gone by now, had jostled in to the luncheon. Only two important figures coming towards him, the woman in full sail, bearing herself like a queen and placing her hand on the arm of her escort in such a way that he -- He! and She! No wonder the lackeys behind them bowed so obsequiously that their wigs almost fell off! Groaning, Bush made ineffectual efforts to roil out of the way as the Queen of England and the Prince Consort sailed through him and he drowned beneath her ample phantom skirts.

  The shock, the farce, the madness of it drew him properly to his senses. Wiping his eyes, he gasped fresh air through his leaker, stood up, and drew his gas-gun, the only weapon left to him. He peered cautiously into the room he had escaped from. All the minders sprawled unconscious on the floor. The Victorian servants turned serenely from the curtains, which they had drawn a precise distance apart, and marched out of the door, through Bush. The gas had not harmed them. The four from the future bowed to him and took shadowy leave of the room, the Dark Woman leading.

  Bush spared only a second to gape at them. He moved hurriedly about the room, disarming Grazley and his men; they did not stir. As an afterthought, he went round again, searching them, collecting up their supplies of CSD so as to delay their return to 2093 -- though they would be sure to appropriate the drug from others. He grabbed the senseless Howes under his armpits and dragged him into the corridor, his eyes burning with the lingering gas. Then he plunged in again and got Silverstone, unconscious in the armchair and still tied. As he lugged the man across the floor, he happened to kick his light-gun, which had fallen from his grasp when he first entered the room: and his mind, although muzzy from the gas, started to spark off revelations at him, so that he almost cried aloud in surprise and relief.

  He had a knife in his pack. Pulling it out, he cut the rope that bound Silverstone and tied up Howes instead, trussing his hands behind his feet and tying his ankles back towards his wrists.

  "You clever bastard!" he said.

  Then he started yelling down the palace corridors, "Ann! Ann!"

  Chapter 4

  A CASE OF INCOHERENT LIGHT

  A number of arbitrary points mark the mental frontiers of our lives. Stake out, say, a crooked leg, a line from Wordsworth, a day in an abandoned garden, a loving cheek on a shoulder, a bloody golf club, a drug, the long twilight of a Devonian beach, a light-gun, and you define within these factors one human existence. it is an unusual human being who is more than the multiple of his factors.

  Bush broke away now. So strong was his sudden perception that Ann lived that he forgot all he had been taught and started inventing new rules.

  After a berserk moment of running down the corridor shouting, he knew it was useless to try and track Ann down that way. Convinced she was alive, he realized she might have her own obscure purposes for being away from the palace. He had only a little while to act before Grazley and his men recovered consciousness. To find if Ann was still alive, he minded.

  He did it by flexing muscles he never knew existed within the dark territory of his undermind. The CSD still ran in his veins from his recent emergence into 1851, otherwise he could not have achieved what he did.

  Diving into the reception room, he sank himself back; space-time tilted, and then he surfaced in the palace again -- how much earlier? He did not know. There were other people in the lounge, genuine Victorians -- not Silverstone, not Howes, not Ann.

  He dived under again, kicking, in and out of mind. People. Times. 1847? '49? '50? He kept surfacing and diving, powered by emotion, like a dolphin speeding through water, glaring out of the
window, trying to feel the medium he was plunging through, seeing sunlight in the courtyard outside replaced by snow, leaves blowing across the pavements, night, day, grey light or daylight. He fought his way upstream.

  As he did so, he was concealing himself in one of the window bays. The heavy drapes helped his purpose. He needed to find the place in space-time immediately before Ann and Howes had come to him, when his earlier self was waiting in the little ante-chamber down the corridor. As his first frenzy cooled, the task of minding became harder. The dolphin stuck in the shallows. He stopped. Some damned anonymous day in 1851, unrecorded . . . although the Queen would be making an entry in her journal, careful and pedestrian, unobscured by any doubts of the universe of which she ruled so mighty a mote.