by Brian Aldiss
The sun blazed; yet it was dark and blotched. It trailed streamers of fire. It was an augur of the final inferno to come.
"Well, we'll be getting back to 2093 now, Wygelia," Howes said, forcing a conversational officer's voice. "Just one thing I'd like to ask before we go. We're going back to trouble. How do I -- er, meet my -- birth?"
"You meet it triumphantly, Captain. Bravely and far from uselessly. That's all you should know. And you fully understand now?"
"Haven't any option, have I? And I know what I'm going to do when we return, what my strategy will be. I shall report to my own revolutionary force first, of course. Then I shall give myself up to the Action party. They'll take me before Gleason. And I'll tell him -- all this, about the overmind."
"Will you convert him?" Borrow asked.
"I'll see that I shake him. Or, given the chance, I'll kill him."
"I suppose after all this we'd better get in some action too," Ann said. "I won't know how to start explaining, though."
"Here's a bit of proof nobody has mentioned so far, Bush said. "Perhaps I take it from my own life, perhaps from Breedale -- more likely from everywhere. You and I talked about incest, Ann. That's the point where the join between overmind and undermind is weakest -- naturally, because it is the point where life and death, birth and death, become confused. The ban against incest -- we said no animal allows such a ban; it was invented to stop us looking back to our parents because the undermind knew all along that that way was death, not life. In the past, you don't have any ban against incest, do you, Wygelia?"
She shook her head. "No. Nor do we have incest, since we all return anyway to our parents."
Howes shook his head. "I think I'll stick to gunpoint for my conversions."
"I'm not a soldier," Borrow said firmly. "But I will certainly be happy to do what Silverstone charged me with. Give me a chance to collect Ver from The Amniote Egg and I will begin interpretive montages straight away. I can explain the situation in arty circles -- they'll soon disseminate it."
"Are you coming with us to 2093?" Bush asked Wygelia.
She shook her dark head, smiling sadly.
"I have done all Central Authority asked of me. My mission is done and I am not permitted to do more. But I shall see you and Ann again when I am a child. Before I leave you, the four men here and I will accompany you in mind-travel to the threshold of 2093."
They were mind-traveling again, drawing back from the end of the world that they had long regarded as the beginning.
Both Ann and Bush floated a question to Wygelia together.
Bush, a million spirals, mainly mauve rattling: "If -- the long past of the race -- humanity -- was so great, why remain on this one planet to die? Why not escape to other worlds?"
Ann, interlocking yellow circles: "Tell us -- give us just a glimpse of that great past."
Wygeia warned them she would answer both questions at once.
She released a great white castle. It floated at them and through, being transformed by their minds' touch as it went, and crossed a dizzying space. It had many rooms. Its walls interlocked and interpenetrated. It was an elaborate structuring of universe-history, a popularization which they might vaguely comprehend, formulated by a master-mind. It was also the supreme art-work. This, Bush and Borrow would spend the rest of their lives searching for, forgetting, trying to recreate, handing something of the paradoxical glory of it down to other artists such as Picasso and Turner.
Some of its meaning they grasped, as they swam like fish through its elucidations.
Long past, immeasurably long past, the human race had been born into creation at myriad points at once. It was as diffuse as gas. It was pure intellect. It was omnipotent.
It was God.
It had been God and it had created the universe. It had then been governed by its own laws. In the course of untold eons, it entered more fully into its own creation. It had become planet-bound and occupied many millions of planets. Gradually, over countless forgotten eons, it had drawn in upon itself, like a large family returning to the same roof in the afternoon, when work is done. To grow together had meant the shedding of abilities; that had not mattered. Other abilities remained. Soon the planets became drained of human life, whole galaxies were evacuated. But the galaxies were themselves gathering together, rushing closer.
The long long process. . . . Nothing now left in the race expressed it. Finally, all that remained of the shining multitude was congregated on Earth. The great symphony of creation was reached, a conclusion long since arranged.
"It's a consolation -- we have legends of the truth in our religions," Bush thought.
"Memories!" Wygelia corrected. From the tenor of her thoughts they took consolation for their fallen state.
The great castle had permeated them for longer than they had suspected. She was guiding them in to surface, she would set them miraculously in a safe place, close to one of the anti-Action strongholds.
They surfaced. Wygelia had gone, the four pall-bearers had gone. Howes was already looking alert and ready for action. Ann and Bush turned and looked at each other, softly, yet challengingly.
"You've still damned well got to persuade me!" she said.
"I'll persuade you," Bush said. "But first I'm going to find Wenlock and give him the word."
"Good idea," Howes said. "Come with me to the rebel hideout -- they'll give you the name of the mental institution where Wenlock's being held."
Turning, they followed him through the ruins of their own trans-Himalayan age.
A nurse was walking along the grey corridor. James Bush, L.D.S., jerked his head up and came fully awake. Looking at his watch, he saw that he had been sitting waiting on the uncomfortable metal seat for twenty minutes.
The nurse came up to him and said, "The supervisor is still engaged, Mr. Bush. The deputy supervisor, Mr. Frankland, will see you, if you will follow me."
She turned about and marched off in the direction she had come, so that the dentist had to rise hastily and follow. At the far end of the corridor, they climbed a flight of stairs, and the nurse showed him through a door on which the name ALBERT FRANKLAND was painted.
A plump, untidy man with rimless spectacles and a fussy manner rose from behind his desk and came forward to offer James a chair.
"I'm Mr. Frankland, the deputy supervisor of Carlfield Advanced Mental Disturbances Institution, Mr. Bush. We're very pleased to see you here, and of course if there is anything we can do to help, you have only to ask."
The words released the sense of grievance that had been building up in James. "I want to see my son! That's all! It's simple enough, isn't it? Yet this is the fourth time I've come here in two weeks, only to be sent away each time without any satisfaction! It costs money, you know, getting up here, and the traveling isn't easy nowadays."
Frankland was beaming and nodding and tapping a finger approvingly on the desk edge, as if he understood exactly what James was getting at. "You're implying an oblique criticism of the party when you condemn public transport like that, I expect," he said conspiratorially.
His smile, from the other side of the desk, suddenly looked ugly. James drew back. More calmly, he said, "I'm asking to see my son Ted, that's all."
Looking hard at him, Frankland bit his lower lip. Finally, he said, "You know your son's suffering from a dangerous delusory madness, don't you?"
"I don't know anything. I can't learn anything! Why can't I even see him?"
Frankland started picking his nails, looked down to see what his hands were doing, and then shot a glance at James under his brows. "To tell you the truth, he's under sedation. That's why you can't see him. The last time you came to this institution, he had escaped from his cell on the previous day and ran about the corridors causing quite a bit of damage and attacking a female nurse and a male orderly. In his delusory state, he believed he was in Buckingham Palace."
"Buckingham Palace!"
"Buckingham Palace. What do you make of that? T
oo much mind-travel, that's the basic trouble, coming on top of, er -- hereditary weaknesses. He spent too long in mind-travel, Of course, we're still in the early days of mind-travel, but we are beginning to understand that the peculiar anosmic conditions pertaining to it can help to fragment the mind. Anosmic, meaning without sense of smell -- the olfactory centers of the brain are the most ancient ones. Your son started to believe he could mind into human-inhabited ages, and a long series of delusions followed which we are hoping to record and study, to help with future cases."
"Look, Mr. Frankland I don't want to hear about future cases -- I just want to hear about Ted! You say mind-travel upset him? He seemed all right to me when he came home after being two-and-a-half years away, after his mother died."
"We aren't always good judges of another's mental health, Mr. Bush. Your son at that time was ready to be pushed into madness by any sudden shock. He was already suffering from an aggravated form of anomia."
"No sense of smell?"
"That's anosmia, Mr. Bush. I'm speaking now of a far more serious state, anomia. It looks like being the great mental disease that is going to dog mind-travelers. An anomic individual is quite isolated; he feels cut off from society and all its broad social values; he becomes normless and disgusted with life as it is. In mind-travel, seeing a world about him he is powerless to influence in any way, the anomic individual thinks of life as being without goal or meaning. He tends to turn back into his own past, to turn back the clock, to regress into a catatonic womb-state."
"You're blinding me by science, Mr. Frankland," said James, aggrievedly. "As I say, Ted seemed okay when he came home that time."
"And the outside world conspired to give your son that requisite extra push." Frankland continued, nodding slightly to James as an indication that he reckoned it kinder to ignore his interruption. "That push, of course, was the death of his mother. We know he had an incestuous fixation for her, and the discovery that she had finally eluded his desires sent your son off on a startling manic trajectory that was a masked attempt to turn back to the womb."
"It doesn't sound like Ted at all."
Frankland rose. "Since you don't seem disposed to believe me, I will give you a little proof."
He walked over to a portable tape-recorder, selected a tape from a nearby rack, set it on the spindle, and switched on.
"We have recorded a great deal of what your son has said in his hallucinatory periods. Here's a fragment from very early in his treatment, when he was first brought here. I should explain that he collapsed while waiting to be interviewed by Mr. Howells, his superior at the Wenlock Institute. For reasons we do not yet understand, he was convinced that our great Head of State, General Peregrine Bolt, was imposing an evil regime on the country. This sort of case always regards itself as persecuted. Later, in his mind, he supplanted General Bolt by a figure he could more satisfactorily regard as evil, an Admiral Gleason; but at the time of this recording, he was not too deeply sunk in his delusions. At least he still believed himself to be in this age, and had some sort of conversation with his doctor and some students, as you'll hear."
He switched the recorder on. Muffled noises, a groan. An indistinct mutter, resolving itself into a name: Howes. A precise voice, neutral in tone, commenting, "The patient when reporting to the Institute believed his superior, Howells, to be a man named Franklin. Franklin is a distortion of my name, Frankland; the patient was brought before me when he collapsed. The name Howells occurs, again slightly distorted, as one of the participants -- a captain -- in the patient's military imaginings. Your son was caught in a distorted subjective world when we recorded this."
The muttering voice on the tape came suddenly to clarity and was recognizable as Eddie Bush's; he asked, "I'm not dying, am I?"
It sounded as if there were several students about him, talking to each other in low tones.
"He can't understand a thing you say."
"He's tuned only to his own needs."
"He imagines himself in another place, perhaps another time."
"Hasn't he committed incest?"
Again came Bush's voice, now very loud: "Where do you fellows think I am?"
And again the other voices, mainly admonitory.
"Quietly!"
"You'll wake the others in the ward up."
"You're suffering from anomia, with auditory hallucinations."
"But the window's open," Bush replied, as if the mysterious remark explained everything. "Where is this, anyway?"
"You're in Carlfield Mental Hospital."
"We're looking after you."
"We believe you are an anomia case."
"Your meeting's scrambled," Bush said.
Frankland switched off the recorder, pursing his lips, shaking his head.
"Very sad case, Mr. Bush. At the time of that recording, your son believed himself to be in some kind of a barracks room; he was unable to accept that he was in a hospital ward. From that time on, he retreated farther and farther from reality into his own imaginings. At one point, he became violent and attacked a specialist with a metal crutch. We had to place him in isolation for a while, in the new Motherbeer Wing here -- "
James broke in on the recital, crying, "Ted's all I have! Of course, he was never a religious boy, but he was a good boy! He'd never meant to be violent. . . . Never . . ."
"You have my sympathies. Of course, we are doing what we can for him. . . ."
"Poor old Ted! At least you can let me see him!"
"That would not be advisable. He believes you to be dead."
"Dead!"
"Yes, dead. He believes he entered into a deal with army authorities who agreed to supply you with drink, significantly called Black Wombat, with which you drank yourself to death. Your son thus managed -- mentally, of course -- to murder you and lay the guilt at someone else's door."
James shook his head, almost in imitation of Frankland. "Anomia . . . I don't understand at all, I really don't. Such a quiet boy, a good artist . . ."
"Yes, they're always the type who go, I'm afraid," Frankland said, looking at his wristwatch. "To tell you the truth, we hope art therapy may aid him a little. Art enters into his hallucinatory states. So do most strands of his life. I would not agree with you that your son is not religious. One aspect of his ease presents itself as what the layman would probably term religious mania. You see, the search for perfection, for an end to unhappiness, is very strong in him. At one time -- this was when he was in solitary confinement -- I mean, in Motherbeer -- he attempted to construct an ideal family unit in which he could find peace. We have the tapes of that period of his illness; they are very harrowing. In that hypothetical family unit, your son plays the father role, thus symbolically usurping your part. The father was, significantly, an out-of-work miner. Members of the nursing staff were pressed into other roles of his fantasy."
"What happened?"
"Your son was unable to sustain the illusion of peace for long; the pressure was on him to slip back to a state of more open terror, to a paradigm of hunters and hunted, kill or be killed. So the family unit construct was brutally dissolved in self-hate: he ended with a symbolic suicide, which heralded a complete abdication of reason and a return to the womb-state which is the ultimate goal of incest-fixated natures. He ceased to relate. You invited these details, Mr. Bush."
"Ceased to relate . . . But it doesn't sound like my boy. Of course, I know he was involved with women. . . ."
Frankland permitted himself a short growl of laughter.
"'Involved with women'! Yes. Your son, Mr. Bush -- your son knows only one woman, his mother, and all other females he meets are identified with her. Hence, he never seeks or finds permanence with any of them, for fear they might dominate him.
"His obsessive-compulsive tendencies have collapsed into schizophrenia oriented about this psychic disturbance. He experiences his anima -- his anima , or female actuating spirit, not to be confused with anomia or anosmia -- as detached from himself, as a sep
arate entity. This entity he called his Dark Woman. She originally fulfilled the classic function of animae by watching over him."
"Dark Woman? Never heard of her!"
"Now, in the later stages of your son's illness, the Dark Woman becomes transformed into yet another replication of the incest-figure, a female at once mother and daughter, this signifying the accelerating mental deterioration of the subject."
James Bush looked about the hateful room without particularly wishing to see it. The chilly words, which he did not fully understand or fully believe, drove him back into himself. He needed escape as much as he needed to see Ted; and of escapes, he could not say which he most needed, a good long prayer session or a good deep drink. Frankland's voice droned on, not always without a certain relish in its tone.