A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘I have to go,’ she told herself. ‘I can’t stay in a house with… with that there.’

  She forced herself through the front door again, into the kitchen, not looking into the open bedroom doorway as she passed, in case he was visible from there. One by one she opened the cupboards. Incredibly, they were empty. The cupboards had been full of food. Where had it all gone? Searching frantically through the rest of the house, she even forced herself to go into the bathroom again, in case Xavier had for some reason taken all the provisions in there. Nothing. Not a crumb. Angry now, she used her foot to lever Xavier’s legs out of the way of the door and then closed it on him. Out of sight, out of mind, hopefully. One thing struck her, penetrated her foggy mind as she shut him inside: it seemed his corpse was undergoing a weird sort of chemical change. His legs had been very light and easy to move.

  But she was in no frame of mind to inspect dead bodies.

  She sat on the beach staring out to sea, trying to make sense of it all. Someone must have robbed her of her stores. Why would they take all her food? Why hadn’t they made their presence known? It was bewildering. Now she could not leave, even if she raised enough courage. How could she even attempt a walk through the forest without provisions? Even a short flight in a helio was a very long walk. The foliage was dense in that airless, lightless interior. She would be lucky to make a mile a day. And how would she navigate? Evelyn could picture herself walking round in circles, dying by degrees. And now she recalled that ridge of sharp volcanic mountains in the middle of the island. Could she attempt what seemed impossible?

  It was at this point she remembered, also, that there were deadly snakes in the rainforest. Cobras. Kraits. Giant reticulated pythons, who might or might not be dangerous. While she did not have a phobia about snakes, she naturally feared an encounter. Wild boar. She had been warned about the wild boars by Xavier. Sunbears, too, which could be vicious. And spiders. Large hairy-legged spiders. She shuddered, having already seen one arachnid as big as her hand the previous day.

  Where would she sleep? On the bare ground? The trees were immense things, with massive buttress roots, tall as cathedrals and lacking in lower branches. She could not envisage herself climbing a tree. It was hopeless. Evelyn realized she was trapped, until they came for her.

  It was still several days to the end of her holiday.

  That night she slept on the beach and was badly bitten by sandflies. The next morning she went in search of food, finding only small shellfish. There were no coconuts. She had expected to discover some, but the palms seemed bare of them. She cooked the shellfish, but they were not enough to take away an unnatural hunger which was gradually possessing her.

  After three days the craving in her belly blotted out all sense and reason. Evelyn tried eating roots and leaves, but they only cause her to vomit. Finally, she went back into the house and began rummaging through it again in search of anything edible. Anything at all. She ate a jar of cold cream which had accidentally rolled under a sideboard earlier in the holiday. There was nothing else. It failed to satisfy, of course, and the frenetic search continued.

  When she entered the bedroom, the smell hit her. Not rotting corpse. Nor anything like it. A sweet, enticing odour not unlike that of marzipan. She adored marzipan.

  Evelyn went to the bathroom, the source of the scent, to investigate further. The thing on the floor no longer resembled a body, having gone through some kind of metamorphosis. It now resembled the empty carapace of some giant insect and was the colour of golden syrup. It glistened like crystallized treacle. She bent down, broke a piece off with her fingers. Crisp. Sticky. And with that unmistakable essence. Somehow it went straight into her mouth, without any fuss. Delicious. Quite delicious.

  The horror of what she was doing suddenly hit her. She retched immediately, slamming the door on him. She only had one more day to go. Evelyn was determined to make it without deteriorating into some kind of cannibal. Determined even despite that terrible tearing pain in her belly. She wouldn’t be turned into an animal. There was a distinct sense of being manipulated and Evelyn had had enough of being used by others.

  That night she paced the sands, fighting the craving, the agony. When the blessed morning came she simply stood in the shade, watching anxiously, listening for the sound of the helio. Nothing. Later, much later in the day, Evelyn realized they were not coming. She burst into tears before going into a foul-mouthed rage, cursing men, aliens and God: screaming at the sky, spitting venom at the sea, tearing leaves from the forest trees. When she had spent her wrath, she went on one of her desperate wretched searches for food. She discovered a nest of termites just inside the forest, some way from the house, and ate the creatures live, in handfuls.

  A few days later she was no longer recognizable as Evelyn. She was a wild-eyed yet pathetic being: a filthy naked scavenger, claw-fingered, stinking, lank-haired. Anyone seeing her scraping away at earth mounds in the hope of finding insects or spiders would have winced in pity. Finally, in the middle of a moonlit night, she remembered what was in the house. Those who were watching saw a cunning look appear on her face, a sharp brightness come to her eyes. They knew that at last the abnormal hunger inside had told her exactly what was needed to satisfy the pangs.

  She entered the house again, went straight to the bathroom.

  Mantis-like, she crouched over the confectionery, devouring it slowly, piece by piece, satisfying the craving that plagued her belly.

  When she had finished him they came to collect her.

  *

  She had questions. There were honest answers. There were also assurances from both sides that no one would ever say anything about the incident. They had their reasons for secrecy and she was certainly not going to tell anyone she had eaten her dead lover. And she now knew what Xavier had meant by her time. That had puzzled her at first and she had thought he must have meant something else. It was why he had waited, of course, to make love to her, knowing it could only be done once. On the flight home, her hands rested on her abdomen. She had made love with Tony many, many times without becoming pregnant, but the aliens of course had a different chemistry. The males could only do it once: it had to be a sure thing. What was essential to ensure conception, they had since told her, were the ingredients in the afterfood. She should feel no shame. Her baby depended upon it.

  Her baby. How wonderful. Her baby.

  She stared around her, trying not to feel smug. There were several other single women on board. Evelyn felt only slightly less special when she saw how rosy-cheeked and fulfilled one or two of them looked, just like the person she had seen in the mirror this morning.

  Great Work of Time

  JOHN CROWLEY

  I: THE SINGLE EXCURSION OF CASPAR LAST

  If what I am to set down is a chronicle, then it must differ from any other chronicle whatever, for it begins, not in one time or place, but everywhere at once – or perhaps everywhen is the better word. It might be begun at any point along the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of time.

  It might even begin within the forest in the sea: huge trees like American redwoods, with their roots in the black benthos, and their leaves moving slowly in the blue currents overhead. There it might end as well.

  It might begin in 1893 – or in 1983. Yes: it might be as well to begin with Last, in an American sort of voice (for we are all Americans now, aren’t we?). Yes, Last shall be first: pale, fattish Caspar Last, on excursion in the springtime of 1983 to a far, far part of the Empire.

  The tropical heat clothed Caspar Last like a suit as he disembarked from the plane. It was nearly as claustrophobic as the hours he had spent in the middle seat of a three-across, economy-class pew between two other cut-rate, one-week-excursion, plane-fare-and-hotel-room holiday-makers in monstrous good spirits. Like them, Caspar had taken the excursion because it was the cheapest possible way to get to and from this equatorial backwater. Unlike them, he hadn’t come to soak up sun and molasses-dark rum. He didn’t inte
nd to spend all his time at the beach, or even within the twentieth century.

  It had come down, in the end, to a matter of money. Caspar Last had never had money, though he certainly hadn’t lacked the means to make it; with any application he could have made good money as a consultant to any of a dozen research firms, but that would have required a certain subjection of his time and thought to others, and Caspar was incapable of that. It’s often said that genius can live in happy disregard of material circumstances, dress in rags, not notice its nourishment, and serve only its own abstract imperatives. This was Caspar’s case, except that he wasn’t happy about it: he was bothered, bitter, and rageful at his poverty. Fame he cared nothing for, success was meaningless except when defined as the solution to abstract problems. A great fortune would have been burdensome and useless. All he wanted was a nice bit of change.

  He had decided, therefore, to use his ‘time machine’ once only, before it and the principles that animated it were destroyed, for good he hoped. (Caspar always thought of his ‘time machine’ thus, with scare-quotes around it, since it was not really a machine, and Caspar did not believe in time.) He would use it, he decided, to make money. Somehow.

  The one brief annihilation of ‘time’ that Caspar intended to allow himself was in no sense a test run. He knew that his ‘machine’ would function as predicted. If he hadn’t needed the money, he wouldn’t use it at all. As far as he was concerned, the principles once discovered, the task was completed; like a completed jigsaw puzzle, it had no further interest; there was really nothing to do with it except gloat over it briefly and then sweep all the pieces randomly back into the box.

  It was a mark of Caspar’s odd genius that figuring out a scheme with which to make money out of the past (which was the only ‘direction’ his ‘machine’ would take him) proved almost as hard, given the limitations of his process, as arriving at the process itself.

  He had gone through all the standard wish fulfilments and rejected them. He couldn’t, armed with today’s race results, return to yesterday and hit the daily double. For one thing it would take a couple of thousand in betting money to make it worth it, and Caspar didn’t have a couple of thousand. More importantly, Caspar had calculated the results of his present self appearing at any point within the compass of his own biological existence, and those results made him shudder.

  Similar difficulties attended any scheme that involved using money to make money. If he returned to 1940 and bought, say, two hundred shares of IBM for next to nothing: in the first place there would be the difficulty of leaving those shares somehow in escrow for his unborn self; there would be the problem of the alteration this growing fortune would have on the linear life he had actually lived; and where was he to acquire the five hundred dollars or whatever was needed in the currency of 1940? The same problem obtained if he wanted to return to 1623 and pick up a First Folio of Shakespeare, or to 1460 and a Gutenberg Bible: the cost of the currency he would need rose in relation to the antiquity, thus the rarity and value, of the object to be bought with it. There was also the problem of walking into a bookseller’s and plunking down a First Folio he had just happened to stumble on while cleaning out the attic. In any case, Caspar doubted that anything as large as a book could be successfully transported ‘through time.’ He’d be lucky if he could go and return in his clothes.

  Outside the airport, Caspar boarded a bus with his fellow excursionists, already hard at work with their cameras and index fingers as they rode through a sweltering lowland out of which concrete-block light industry was struggling to be born. The hotel in the capital was, as he expected, shoddy-American and intermittently refrigerated. He ceased to notice it, forwent the complimentary rum concoction promised with his tour, and after asking that his case be put in the hotel safe – extra charge for that, he noted bitterly – he went immediately to the Hall of Records in the government complex. The collection of old survey maps of the city and environs were more extensive than he had hoped. He spent most of that day among them searching for a blank place on the 1856 map, a place as naked as possible of buildings, brush, water, and that remained thus through the years. He discovered one, visited it by unmuffled taxi, found it suitable. It would save him from the awful inconvenience of ‘arriving’ in the ‘past’ and finding himself inserted into some local’s wattle-and-daub wall. Next morning, then, he would be ‘on his way.’ If he had believed in time, he would have said that the whole process would take less than a day’s time.

  Before settling on this present plan, Caspar had toyed with the idea of bringing back from the past something immaterial: some knowledge, some secret that would allow him to make himself rich in his own present. Ships have gone down with millions in bullion: he could learn exactly where. Captain Kidd’s treasure. Inca gold. Archaeological rarities buried in China. Leaving aside the obvious physical difficulties of these schemes, he couldn’t be sure that their location wouldn’t shift in the centuries between his glimpse of them and his ‘real’ life span; and even if he could be certain, no one else would have much reason to believe him, and he didn’t have the wherewithal to raise expeditions himself. So all that was out.

  He had a more general, theoretical problem to deal with. Of course the very presence of his eidolon in the past would alter, in however inconsequential a way, the succeeding history of the world. The comical paradoxes of shooting one’s own grandfather and the like neither amused nor intrigued him, and the chance he took of altering the world he lived in out of all recognition was constantly present to him. Statistically, of course, the chance of this present plan of his altering anything significantly, except his own personal fortunes, was remote to a high power. But his scruples had caused him to reject anything such as, say, discovering the Koh-i-noor diamond before its historical discoverers. No: what he needed to abstract from the past was something immensely trivial, something common, something the past wouldn’t miss but that the present held in the highest regard; something that would take the briefest possible time and the least irruption of himself into the past to acquire; something he could reasonably be believed to possess through simple historical chance; and something tiny enough to survive the cross-time ‘journey’ on his person.

  It had come to him quite suddenly – all his ideas did, as though handed to him – when he learned that his great-great-grandfather had been a commercial traveller in the tropics, and that in the attic of his mother’s house (which Caspar had never had the wherewithal to move out of) some old journals and papers of his still mouldered. They were, when he inspected them, completely without interest. But the dates were right.

  Caspar had left a wake-up call at the desk for before dawn the next morning. There was some difficulty about getting his case out of the safe, and more difficulty about getting a substantial breakfast served at that hour (Caspar expected not to eat during his excursion), but he did arrive at his chosen site before the horrendous tropical dawn broke, and after paying the taxi, he had darkness enough left in which to make his preparations and change into his costume. The costume – a linen suit, a shirt, hat, boots – had cost him twenty dollars in rental from a the atrical costumer, and he could only hope it was accurate enough not to cause alarm in 1856. The last item he took from his case was the copper coin, which had cost him quite a bit, as he needed one unworn and of the proper date. He turned it in his fingers for a moment, thinking that if, unthinkably, his calculations were wrong and he didn’t survive this journey, it would make an interesting obol for Charon.

  Out of the unimaginable chaos of its interminable stochastic fiction, Time thrust only one unforeseen oddity on Caspar Last as he, or something like him, appeared beneath a plantain tree in 1856: he had grown a beard almost down to his waist. It was abominably hot.

  The suburbs of the city had of course vanished. The road he stood by was a muddy track down which a cart was being driven by a tiny and close-faced Indian in calico. He followed the cart, and his costume boots were caked with mud when at last he
came into the centre of town, trying to appear nonchalant and to remember the layout of the city as he had studied it in the maps. He wanted to speak to no one if possible, and he did manage to find the post office without affecting, however minutely, the heterogeneous crowd of blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the filthy streets. Having absolutely no sense of humour and very little imagination other than the most rigidly abstract helped to keep him strictly about his business and not to faint, as another might have, with wonder and astonishment at his translation, the first, last, and only of its kind a man would ever make.

  ‘I would like,’ he said to the mulatto inside the brass and mahogany cage, ‘an envelope, please.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘How long will it take for a letter mailed now to arrive locally?’

  ‘Within the city? It would arrive in the afternoon post.’

  ‘Very good.’

  Caspar went to a long, ink-stained table, and with one of the steel pens provided, he addressed the envelope to Georg von Humboldt Last, Esq., Grand Hotel, City, in the approximation of an antique round hand that he had been practising for weeks. There was a moment’s doubt as he tried to figure how to fold up and seal the cumbersome envelope, but he did it, and gave this empty missive to the incurious mulatto. He slipped his precious coin across the marble to him. For the only moment of his adventure, Caspar’s heart beat fast as he watched the long, slow brown fingers affix a stamp, cancel and date it with a pen-stroke, and drop it into a brass slot like a hungry mouth behind him.