by Brian Aldiss
"Ann -- I'd like another cup of coffee!" Howes repeated sharply.
She was sitting with her knees drawn up, her rations lying beside her, staring into the grey rock ahead of her, a totally blank expression on her face. In alarm, Bush leaned over and shook her shoulder gently.
"Are you all right, Ann?"
By dragging degrees, her head came round and she stared at him.
"Are you going to point your gun at me again, Eddie, and demonstrate the new system? I think you're all in a dream -- this awful place has hypnotized you. Can't you realize that what you are saying is just tearing human life up by the roots and -- and laughing at it? Well, I don't want to hear a word more! I've heard enough, and I want to go back -- back to the Jurassic or anywhere , rather than hear you men talk this frightening stuff in this frightening dump! It's like a terrible dream! I'm going back -- or forward -- or wherever the hell you think it is!"
"No!" Silverstone jumped up. He could see she was on the verge of hysterics. Anxiously, he took her hands.
"Ann, I can't let you leave! I need -- we all need a woman's common sense on this. Don't you see? We're -- sort of disciples, a band of disciples. We must go back to 2093 when we've got things clear and explain to other people -- "
"Well, you won't catch me explaining, Norman! I'm not your kind and you know it -- I'm just an ordinary person."
"We are all ordinary persons, and all ordinary persons are going to have to face the truth."
"Why? I've passed thirty-two years happy enough with a lie!"
"Happy, Ann? Really happy? Not frightened at heart, aware as several generations ahead to the twentieth century have been that some immense and awful revelation was about to burst? People have to know the truth!"
"Leave her to me, Professor," Bush said. He put his arm round her.
"Please stay and listen, Ann! We do need you here. You'll be okay. I know how tough you are. You can take all this."
She almost managed to smile at him. "I'm tough, am I? You men are all the same, whichever way round things are! You so love something new, theories, all that stuff! Look, all this that you were saying about bolts going back into guns, all explained in six scenes -- "
"Roger made that pretty clear."
"God, clear!" She laughed scornfully. "Do you realize what you were talking about? You were talking about the dead coming to life again -- lying bleeding on the ground, perhaps, and the blood sucking back into the veins, and then the chap getting up and walking away as if nothing had happened!"
"Christ!" Bush and Borrow said together.
The girl jumped up. "Okay, then -- take Christ! You're talking about him hanging on the cross, getting the spear through his side, coming to life, having the Romans pulling -- hammering -- the nails from his hands, getting him down, letting him go back to his disciples. . . . Aren't you?"
Silverstone clapped his hands.
"She's got it! She's got it first! I was going to postpone the new concept of animal and human existence until later but -- "
"To hell with that!" she said. She stood there with her back to the grey rocks, defying them all. "To hell with new concepts! You were talking about dead men coming alive and you didn't even realize it, you were so wrapped up in theories! I tell you, you're mad!"
"In that sense, perhaps we are," Silverstone admitted, pulling his self-mocking-bird face. "Ann, I apologize. We have tried to remain detached. It's a man's way of going about things: The shooting was just an example Captain Howes gave us. Let's deal with human life now and I promise you it will not be too terrible when you understand fully."
"The dead walk!" She folded her arms and stared at him as if she had never seen a man before. "Okay, Professor Norman Silverstone, go ahead and scare me!"
"As Ann realizes -- as I realize -- with the collapse of the overmind, the naked and true undermind's view of life is somewhat startling, even horrifying, at first sight," Silverstone said.
"The sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It acts like the governor of all organic and mortal life that, with their circadian rhythms, come under its sway. Shortly after the beginning of the year, the dead leaves stir, turn gold, rise from the ground in shoals, and coat the beech trees; the beeches then turn them green and by the eighth month suck them back into themselves in the form of buds; all this time, the trees have been pouring out nourishment into the soil; now they stand bare throughout March, February, January, and December, until their next ingestion ot leaves gives them strength to grow smaller again. As with the beech, so of course with the other trees. Acorns from giant oak trees grow.
"And as with the trees, so with animals and humankind. Some of the major religions of the world -- which after all obtain their power from the undermind -- must have guessed the true way of things; their claim that we shall all rise again from the grave is nothing less than the literal truth. At the same time, the medieval notion of spontaneous generation is also fulfilled. In the moldering bones of the grave, organization stirs; worms put flesh onto bones; something more and more like a human is built; the coffin is filled, needing only the mourners to come and haul it from the ground, take it home, absorb the moisture from their handkerchiefs, and clutch each other just before the first breath enters the body. Or, if the body was cremated, then flames will reconstitute the ashes into flesh.
"Human life bursts in upon the world in countless ways! Bodies rise again from the sea bed during storms and are washed back onto ships that also emerge from the waves. Before road accidents, you will see ambulances rush backwards with broken limbs that are strewn over the road to join themselves into a living being, jerking into a car that deconcertinas away from another car. Wreckage that has possibly rusted for years on a remote mountainside will grow gleaming, lurch abruptly into form, and roar flaming backwards into the sky, its passengers suddenly snapping into frenzied life; they will suffer apprehensions, but all will be well, for the fire will die out and the plane take itself back to a civilized airfield.
"In these and many other ways, population increases. But the special ceremony whereby human life is increased is war. From wrecked buildings, from bomb craters, from splintered forests, from gutted tanks and sunken subs and muddy batflefields, the dead rise up and live and their wounds heal, and they grow younger. War is the great harvester of birth over the planet.
"So much for birth. What of death? We know the future, that the human race is dwindling towards its union with animal kind, that the end of the Earth is so near, geologically speaking, that everything is tending towards the less and the mindless. So marvelously is everything planned, that humanity follows that same pattern, in the general and in the individual. Every human being -- and of course this applies to the animals as well -- grows younger and smaller, with most of his faculties reaching maturity just before he loses the abilities of puberty. He then grows through boyhood, probably attending school to forget the knowledge he will no longer need. The decline into helplessness is comparatively swift and merciful; it is possible that at the age called twelve -- twelve years to the womb, that is -- the human is probably as mentally alert as he will ever be: and he needs all his alertness, for there is the complicated business of unlearning the language to go through. For most, this is a happy period to which they gladly surrender at the end of their life. They can lie back in their mothers' arms and babble without care. They hardly know it when the time comes for them to return to the womb, that grave of the human race.
"Perhaps I should add here -- you'll forgive me, Ann -- that the mother often experiences first pain and then discomfort over this process; it is a month or two before the child's struggles die away completely and he merges fully with the life of her body. But things do improve for her, and when the child has dwindled to a speck, her husband or lover penetrates her and syphons off the residual matter. The process is complete and they often fall in love before parting forever.
"Any questions?"
Bush, Howes, and Borrow all looked at Ann. She was still standi
ng against one of the monstrous grey Cryptozoic boulders, staring at Silverstone. They had taken the retrograde progression of the universe with some aplomb; the backward flow of human life had knocked them cold.
"You dress it up to sound almost pretty," she said. "You steered away from the nasty side, didn't you. What about being sick, and eating -- and all that?"
"You can think through the process for yourself," Silverstone said steadily. "Eating and elimination are merely the reverse of what the overmind has assured us was the case. It may seem revolting, but that is because it is new -- "
"Yes, but -- you're saying the food comes out of our mouths onto our plates, and is eventually decooked and sent back to the butcher and the slaughterer to be made into animals -- aren't you?"
"I am. And I'm also saying that when you have lived with the idea for a year or two, as I have, you will find it no more objectionable than the idea of chopping up animals and cooking and eating them."
Gesturing impatiently, as if she found his argument mere sophistry, she turned to Bush, who was standing next to her. He noted how their every movement was followed by the shadowy throng round about them, and hated the audience heartily.
"You can take all this, Eddie, can't you?"
"Yes. Yes, I can take it -- perhaps because I'm partly anesthetized by the beauty of the strange effects: waterfalls shooting uphill, milkers squirting milk into a cow's udders, a cup of cold coffee heating itself to boiling. It's like being a child again, when a cup of milk working its way from boiling to cold, and the skin forming, held the same fascination. Which way is a waterfall more magical, or more subject to natural law -- with its waters flowing up or down? What I don't understand -- you can tell us, Professor -- is when we can sheer off our overminds and see things for ourselves with time flowing in the opposite direction -- see instead of talking."
Silverstone shook his head. "I don't think that moment will come. Not for us, the Himalayan generation. I hoped it would come to me but it hasn't. Our brains are too loaded with what we must call the inhibitions of the future. But the next generation, your sons, will be free of the overmind, if we put over the message to everyone clearly and soon enough."
For a long while, Howes had been standing moodily apart from them, almost as if he were not listening. Now he turned and said, "You explain well, Silverstone, but you have not given us one concrete shred of proof for all this."
"On the contrary, I have quoted proof from the arts and sciences. When we have overturned our enemies, and astronomers can resume their studies, they will soon give you proof that the Doppler effect is in fact evidence for a shrinking universe. Proofs will soon surround you. Proof does surround you, but you will not take these dreary rocks for evidence that the end of the world is at hand."
Howes shook his head. "I don't want to believe! Supposing I manage to confront Gleason and kill him? He then lives again?"
"Think it out, man! We hope you have reached Gleason and killed him! Now, in 2093, he has his moment of power -- but we know he will be out of power, the economic disorders will vanish, and soon nobody will have heard of him -- he will be an insignificant major soldiering in Mongolia. And if you mind back to, say, the year 2000, not one whisper of his name would remain."
"If I have killed him, why don't I remember doing so?"
"Think it out for yourself, Captain! Until now, you believed you had a good memory but next to no precognitive faculty. Now you see the reverse is true, and there seems a logical reason for it. Beyond the Himalayan divide we have spoken of, human life wifl be organized towards forgetting; a bad memory will be a positive asset; while I think you will agree an ability to see clearly into the future would be useful at any time."
Howes looked at the others and said, as if trying to win their support, "See how the professor fancies himself as the prophet, bringing great things to his people!"
"Wrong! Utterly wrong, Captain!" Silverstone said. "I see only that we are the end of a great era when people saw the truth. For some reason, we and those that come after us all the way to the Stone Age will be utterly deluded. I -- I am merely the last man ever to remember the truth, for me there is the special terror of knowing that I shall be outcast and persecuted until I forget what everyone else has forgotten, that I shall be reduced to agreeing to Wenlock's false theory of mind, and spend my young manhood partly believing poor old Freud and his camp-followers!"
For a moment, he did indeed look a tragic figure, suddenly overcome with the magnitude of what he was saying, so that he could say no more. It was clear now where the look of the sell-mocking-bird came from.
Ann and Bush tried to cheer him up. Howes took the chance to speak to Borrow.
"It's getting dark. We ought to be away from this damned horror spot -- if I have much more of these riddles and these phantom people looking on, I really shall be a nut case! What do you make of all this, Borrow? You started by riding with it, I know, but you have been a bit silent lately -- I thought that possibly you had bad second thoughts."
"Not exactly that. I think I accept what Norman says, though it's going to take living with for full acceptance, obviously. My thought is 'Why?' Why did this overmind come down over the true brain like a pair of dark glasses and obscure everything? Why?"
"Ha! Silverstone hasn't managed to explain that! Silverstone!"
They turned to Norman Silverstone. Behind him, the great circle of shades they were learning to think of as minders from the past was unbroken, overlapping like the countless images in a crazy photograph. But in front of them -- Bush caught a movement that did not belong among the ghosts. A figure was emerging from the corner of one of the elephantine rocks.
He recognized it. Wildly incongruous in the Cryptozoic, if incongruity existed any more, the man stepping from the rock still wore the grey silk coat and fawn topper he had sported as disguise in Buckingham Palace. Bush identified him at once. It was Grazley, the skilled assassin.
Grazley was at his trade now. His heavy mouth was set, he had a gun raised.
Bush still had ready the gun he had taken from Howes' pack, in case any sort of trouble occurred. He swung it up reflexively.
"Down!" he yelled.
He fired. Even as he did so, he knew he was too late. The air beyond his left cheek was briefly livid as the lasered beam pulsed from Grazley's gun.
He had missed Grazley. He fired again. The killer was fading, minding, clearly still under the influence of CSD. Bush's pulse of light burned into his left shoulder. Grazley spun slowly and fell, not changing his rigid attitude; but, before he could hit the floor, he had vanished, presumably to drift unconscious like a derelict ship throughout the eons of mind-travel, sliding down the entropy slope through the unplumbed geochrons of the Cryptozoic towards the dissolution of the Earth.
Dismissing Grazley from his mind, Bush turned, to see Silverstone dying in Ann's care. His jacket still smoldered, and a charred patch spread across his chest. There was no hope for him.
Howes was raving like a madman. "I'll be shot for this! You idiots! Bush, this is your fault, you stole my gun -- how could I guard Silverstone properly? Now what'll we do? To think Grazley got back here! In one way, it was the logical place to look -- Silverstone ought to have seen that! He signed his own death warrant!"
"You let Grazley live in the Palace -- you alone are to blame, Howes!" Bush said.
He stood looking down at Silverstone and reflected on what a wonderful man he had been, wonderful and unknown. The professor's eyes were staring now, and be had ceased to breathe, although Ann still helplessly held his shoulders. Borrow tugged at Bush's sleeve.
"Eddie, we've got another visitor!"
"Huh?" He looked up heavily, unwilling to face anything more.
The Dark Woman had stepped from the vast shadowy crowd. Now she was close to them, standing next to Borrow. She raised her hand with an imperious gesture, and quickly took on substance, until she was as real and solid as they. The look that she cast on Bush was both loving and se
arching, so that he shied from its intimacy.
"You can materialize into our continuum?" he said. "Then why didn't you stop Grazley? There must be thousands of you here -- why the hell didn't you intervene if you could?"
She spoke, gesturing down at the still body of Silverstone. "We assembled here to attend the birth of a great man."
Chapter 8
WALKERS OF THE CRYPTOZOIC
She was a fine woman, seen close to. Bush estimated her to be no more than twenty-five, with blemishless brown skin, clear grey-blue eyes, and midnight black hair. Her figure and carriage were good, while her sumptuous long legs were well displayed by her short tunic-skirt. But it was her commanding presence that particularly impressed, even subdued, them.