Life in the West tsq-1

by Brian W Aldiss

  ‘Yes, accordingly, on the present problems before us — facing us, I should say — I can bear in mind the remark of Delegate Thomas Squire that we in fact explore the familiar, so to say. That’s the hope to come up to — with a different picture than the one that we had before.

  ‘We must look ahead concisely, and without being merciful. It’s enough to know that many things will not be, where for instance people are exploited with bare bread. They stand in rows now. We can’t decide. We have decided. Only the collapse awaits. Leading countries are condemned.

  ‘Many new things will be born. We must decide. We must deal with optimism and only with optimism. I could criticize what has gone previously in this respect, but want only to shed light on the matter, and so refrain in a rather brotherly or fraternal spirit, like a blow on the right place. Shoulder.

  ‘We must not, we should not accuse the pessimism piled in literature whose function is in respect of human problems conveyed in past times, since we now understand better. For instance, I must state in the sociology and political sphere were economics. From all these comes the evolvement of new literature and tokens beyond the word printed. Even to the personality of affairs. Such we may presume to call nowadays in a sense scientific.

  ‘People who are among us and live with us influence the course of events, of course, which is not far in the future. We must not go to bed with them tonight. Orthodoxy of the state can guide us. So we’re not able to take a bus to anywhere which is not painted on a card. Sorry, printed in the map. I’m sorry, but that means to concern all of us. The chairs in this hall are, in a sense, filled right up with all human beings.

  ‘Nor should we be very overturned. If experiments of this kind or type, I should say, confirm to literature, if we will have experiments made purely for the sakes of experiments, then we will have no result. There has to be inspiration to confirm, an example being the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who has a remarkable development which can be seen. It touches men and women alike, not always from behind. We can so be concerned with something fresh coming.’

  As Kchevov paused and took a swallow of mineral water from his glass, Squire ran his gaze round the table, looking in particular at the other English-speaking delegates, the Americans, Canadians, and Australians. All appeared perfectly serious.

  ‘In such circumstances, I must add,’ said Kchevov, reading from his papers again, ‘that we should not take misleading impressions which without optimism makes this huge thing seem not to be real, especially for those of us who had the news in the past, or sometimes a flavour. You don’t understand this.

  ‘Only and only if this will certainly give results, confirming to the organic in political spheres can we go to a head. I have nerves about such evaluations when values are discussed on roles of revelation, knowing a musician with a violin, for example, cannot play the drum, when critics speak only of one commitment or something of this work.’

  The interpreter’s voice ran on in this vein for some while.

  Squire scribbled a note to d’Exiteuil complaining that the translation was incomprehensible. D’Exiteuil leant sideways and whispered, ‘It must be vexing, but follow the general drift — prescriptive stuff but deeply perceptive.’

  ‘Good.’ He concentrated again on what the female voice was saying in his ear.

  ‘…according to his word. It is a move forward, declaredly, one we can take without a trip. Why bow to a single person? In a marriage of disciplines, science is not good and bad but neutral.

  ‘What is the way of transposing the over-human values that we have? Sorry, superman. How can everyone unite with us? Doesn’t all political science suggest a role? There is a necessity in history which you may all be aware, with the overwhelming rational aspect. That’s a question of control when we’re talking about science and technology. I don’t have to hold this rat in my hand. It’s exaggerated in any case because we recently had in our country recent developmental problems now solved, which is a mistaken aspect some took deliberately without to speak their names, since it applies to this century only and after all many others follow it, in what order we shall see presently, with glimpses already if you get out of bed at dawn and dare to look stark. The past will prove less utopian, the future more so. The belief is not a religious one, so to speak, though confused. Some fish we can eat.

  ‘It is not an obsolete thing to speak about the miracle. The individual cannot be completed and put away without any fantasies of hope. I don’t qualify for being put away. What I mean here is combining the elements of subconsciousness with political geology to make a reinforcement such is unknown. If the comparison is fair, we could complete it according to the schema existing today, rational for not rational, till someone gets the prize for their body.’

  At this there was a murmur of general agreement from the delegates. Kchevov looked up from his papers — rather in astonishment, Squire thought. As the man got going again, Squire wrote a note to Frenza stating that Comrade Kchevov had now been speaking for half-an-hour and should be interrupted, since it was the turn of the next delegate to speak. He pushed it across d’Exiteuil’s space to the secretary.

  Frenza stared at it, pushed it back interrogatively to d’Exiteuil.

  The two men started whispering together. Finally, Frenza rose furtively from his seat, came round d’Exiteuil’s seat and put his arm about Squire’s shoulder in a fraternal embrace. He spoke rapidly in Italian.

  ‘He says that it’s agreed that we should never interrupt a delegate if he is obviously delivering something of major importance,’ translated d’Exiteuil. ‘Particularly in this case where he is clearly building on much of your own work, under the keynote of exploring the familiar.’

  ‘His half-hour is up. You must interrupt him according to the rules, whatever he is saying. Ring your little bell and warn him that he has two minutes left. You’ve been to these sessions before. You know what to do.’

  Looking genuinely anguished when this was translated to him, Frenza began a fresh speech, whispering urgently, his eyes close to Squire’s. D’Exiteuil translated, saying, ‘What the secretary says is that we must make not only scholarly allowances, etcetera, etcetera, but also diplomatic allowances in the present case. If we interrupted now, the Soviet delegations would be offended and see it as a political move.’

  ‘They can’t possibly be offended, they know the rules. What’s political about it?’

  ‘Then why did you suggest it?’ d’Exiteuil asked. ‘It must be political. You get us all into trouble. By the way, Tom, you upset our Romanian friend at breakfast.’

  At that moment, another note was passed along. D’Exiteuil snatched it before Frenza could reach, and spread it out. It was in French, and suggested simply that, since the Soviet delegate had exceeded his time limit, he should be asked to sit down. It was signed with a flourish: Carlo Morabito.

  D’Exiteuil and Frenza had another hurried confabulation, at the end of which d’Exiteuil signed with two fingers to Squire. ‘We give him two minutes more, okay?’

  Frenza rang his bell and conveyed to Kchevov the news that he had five more minutes.

  Squire listened to the exchange over the headphones. Kchevov apparently said that he was sorry for the interruption and would wind things up immediately.

  He spoke on for some while. Frenza sat with his hand on the bell, but had become immobile, staring ahead, perhaps into the political future, like something on Easter Island. He stirred from his daze and invited questions only when Kchevov finally sat down.

  A young Italian, one of Ermalpa’s smart set and an under-professor in the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, rose and remarked, according to the translation, that he proposed there was now only the continuous present. History had expanded into everyday life as a strategy for fiction. Fiction was fulfilling its destiny and becoming generally all-pervasive. While the Pope died of laughing, the brows of intellectuals were lined with fatigue.

  Good-natured laughter and smart smiling fol
lowed these remarks.

  D’Exiteuil intervened to say that he accepted Kchevov’s interesting talk in the true spirit, although he was fortunate in speaking from a position where the traditional union of church and state versus the people had been alleviated. Nevertheless, he felt that utopianism should now be regarded with a rather large set of reservations in view of its limited temporal applications, though he did see that it had compatibility with their general subject for discussion in certain clearly designated areas. Squire wrote that bit down on his notepad.

  One of the Americans, Larry Clayton, rose to say that there was a concealed dilemma in what had been discussed so far during the morning, which was man’s inability to mature at a rate compatible with technological progress. There were small and large realisms and he believed that while what his Soviet colleague had had to say was revealing and significant, and a major contribution to the debate, it nevertheless fell under the category of a minor realism.

  At the risk of achieving a fascist posture, he believed that his own country, the USA, should pursue a projectory of high technology to the limit of productive capacity. Before the oil ran out — though that was and remained a hypothetical parameter entirely based on relative cost-accounting — it was a priority to establish space colonies on the Moon and on synthetic planets in equivalent orbits, where a whole new nul-g vacuum technology could be developed, using limitless solar energy and maybe demolished superfluous gas planets such as Jupiter, which would provide more power than mankind had so far managed to consume in its total history. Such objectives achieved essentiality.

  Concurrently with this admittedly somewhat lyrical scenario, he proposed that all aid to undeveloped countries be embargoed and even that the US become isolationist in intention and trade, the more effectively to gear itself outward to the universe in a receptivity attitude.

  If all this sounded like a new version of economic extortion and the Monro doctrine, he would remind delegates that even Karl Marx had admitted that there had always existed a struggle between city and countryside, and that that struggle had proved a fruitful one. Indeed, it was in many of its phases the history of man himself. Now that urbanization was practically global, and the realization of Doxiadis’s Ecumenopolis fast approaching, a massive US advancement into neighbouring space would restore that fruitful dichotomy. The urbanization of vacuum was a top priority target.

  Clayton admitted to a personal reservation to all this. He knew, none better, how desperately his country needed a new form of government, the present elite being entirely discredited, but he feared that access to new power areas would merely entrench the present elite, even in an altered environment, since those grabbed power who were nearest power. Almost all popular forms of entertainment, including TV and news media and present-day literatures like sci-fi — witness Asimov — were downright reactionary; the texts showed how greatly the masses were held in contempt, and he could not understand how the masses still ate up this stuff and made fortunes for those who so obviously despised them.

  Of course, education had been withheld them. They needed a government of the people in an energy-surplus requirement environment, and then maybe mankind would mature along the utopianist lines outlined by his Russian colleague.

  Frenza thanked everyone and called for the next paper.

  Dr Dwight G. Dobell of San Andreas Baptist University read a well-researched and innocuous paper on ‘Abba, Pop Musicals, and Youth Say-So’. The Sicilian morning went by.

  When the delegates moved out of the smoke-filled conference hall for lunch, only ten minutes behind timetable, Squire found Herman Fittich waiting for him in the marble gallery.

  ‘Well, that was all very instructive,’ the German said mildly. ‘Would you care just to take a stroll outside in the fresh air before lunch? I am keen to establish which you think was dottier, the Russian or the American.’

  Squire had seen Selina Ajdini in the crowd ahead, and agreed rather reluctantly to accompany the German into the sunshine.

  Outside, Fittich said, ‘As a matter of fact there is a little modest restaurant round the next corner where we could have a beer. Would you care for that?’

  ‘For a beer, yes. For two beers, even more.’

  As they moved rapidly away from the front of the hotel, a voice called Squire’s name. He looked round.

  The animal behaviourist, Carlo Morabito, was waving a rolled newspaper to attract his attention. As the two men paused, Morabito hurried up.

  ‘Gentlemen, excuse, please, you look like two men possibly going in search of a drink. May I join you in it?’ Sensing their hesitation, he added, ‘If it is not an intrusion — as another sufferer from all that hot talk.’

  ‘What didn’t you enjoy about it, may I ask?’ Fittich inquired.

  ‘I did not enjoy anything,’ said Morabito. ‘Most of all I did not enjoy having red wool pulled over my eyes by the first speaker.’

  Fittich took his arm. ‘Come along, my dear fellow. You do need a beer.’

  The restaurant was little more than a bar. It was narrow and extremely high, and tiled from floor to ceiling in tiles of a sickly green. Gigantic wine barrels stood at the back. A radio played, a Sicilian family ate at a bare clean table, talking animatedly, the adults jocularly lecturing the children, as if they had been placed there deliberately by the padrone to advertise the homely virtues of his establishment.

  As soon as the three men entered, the patron emerged from behind the bar and showed them to a seat. He took their order for beer, and then asked them in German if they would like something to eat. He had some good fish, just delivered. He promised it would be delicious.

  They consented. It would be better than facing their colleagues in the dining room of the Grand Hotel Marittimo.

  On the tiles of the table before him, Morabito set a copy of Frankenstein a ‘la Bella Scuola’ which he had been carrying under his arm.

  ‘Perhaps you would be so kind to sign your work for me?’

  As he scribbled his name on the title page, Squire said, ‘I like the title of the Italian translation. It has a literary reference that the English title lacks. This is still the land of Dante.’

  Morabito gestured. ‘And also of Mussolini. It’s a reminder that the arts in my country still exist in a limbo.’

  ‘We’d say the same in the UK. Even people who regard themselves as reasonably cultivated pride themselves on disliking contemporary music or art or fiction, or all three.’

  ‘You say only “dislike”,’ Fittich exclaimed. ‘But let me assure you that the attitude to the arts in the Bundesrepublik is positively phobic. Arts get in the way of decent things like money-making.’ He gave them his mischievous smile. ‘It’s no good chaps from countries like Italy and Great Britain telling a German about the bad state of art. You remember, I suppose, that Hermann Goering summed up the typical German attitude to that little matter — “When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver.” Little has changed since dear Hermann’s day, believe me; nowadays we reach for our pocket calculators instead.’

  The beer arrived. They sighed heavily, raised their glasses, smiled, nodded at each other, drank.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Fittich said, ‘I’m glad of your company. Sometimes I feel I am the only man not believing all the lies such as our Russian friend Kchevov spoke. I’m humiliated by my silence so often. Yet if I speak, I’m kicked out. Better to hang on like a rat.’

  ‘ “I don’t have to hold this rat in my hand,” ’ Squire quoted. They all laughed.

  ‘You see, a curtain comes down on these matters,’ Morabito said. ‘I guess there are many delegates like me who think that the talk of that crook Kchevov was an insult, yet they will say nothing. So we conspire with the evil forces loose in the world to silence truth.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Squire said. ‘It’s as though an infection spreads, softening our defences. The power centred in the East paralyses people and year by year the evil gains. But why are you immune, Signor Morabito?’
>
  ‘Do you want I should tell you? Because I have Jewish blood. So simple. My mother was Venetian Jewish. Italy is beset with many, many ills, not least all various kinds of silences because there are deep divisions still among our society since the war. Here in Sicily, still you hear no one speak a bad word against Mussolini. There are many fascists about. Also communists, of course. In my country, I tell you, you can be fascist, communist, Catholic, all in one person. Myself, I tell you simply, I hate them all and I fear for my country. Now is very bad times for Italy. But I talk too much.’

  He bit his lips, smiled, gestured at the unavailingness of the word, drank from his glass.

  Squire regarded his notepad. ‘This chap Kchevov talked about historical necessity and all that. What did you two make of d’Exiteuil’s reply? I copied part of it down. He said that utopianism should now be regarded with a rather large set of reservations because — if I understood him rightly — it had shown itself of limited historical applicability. Was he referring to Marxism and attempting, in an oblique way, to put Kchevov down? Or was he trying to say nothing as learnedly as possible?’

  ‘He answered to a specific point made by our Soviet colleague, I believe,’ said Fittich. ‘It was a passage about imposing superhuman values through the intervention of the state, with a hint about conquering the rest of the world, or something similarly charming, I thought.’

  Morabito became excited. He had seated himself opposite Fittich and Squire, and now pointed his fingers at them almost as if about to fire six-guns. ‘No, no, such ambitions of conquest are I think out-of-date among Soviet thinking, except maybe on their Right wing. The possibility of a war with the United States is now really excluded. The West will anyhow fall of itself, as did Byzantium, in effect. China is the great enemy for the Soviets.