A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

It only remained to check into the Grand Hotel, explain about his luggage’s being on its way up from the port, and sit silent on the hotel terrace, growing faint with heat and hunger and expectation, until the afternoon post.

  The one aspect of the process Caspar had never been able to decide about was whether his eidolon’s residence in the fiction of the past would consume any ‘time’ in the fiction of the present. It did. When, at evening, with the letter held tight in his hand and pressed to his bosom, Caspar reappeared beardless beneath the plantain tree in the traffic-tormented and smoky suburb, the gaseous red sun was squatting on the horizon in the west, just as it had been in the same place in 1856.

  He would have his rum drink after all, he decided.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘do you think there might be anything valuable in those papers of your great-grandfather’s?’

  ‘What papers, dear? Oh – I remember. I couldn’t say. I thought once of donating them to a historical society. How do you mean, valuable?’

  ‘Well, old stamps, for one thing.’

  ‘You’re free to look, Caspar dear.’

  Caspar was not surprised (though he supposed the rest of the world was soon to be) that he found, among the faded, water-spotted diaries and papers, an envelope that bore a faint brown address – it had aged nicely in the next-to-no-time it had travelled ‘forward’ with Caspar – and that had in its upper right-hand corner a one-penny magenta stamp, quite undistinguished, issued for a brief time in 1856 by the Crown Colony of British Guiana.

  The asking price of the sole known example of this stamp, a ‘unique,’ owned by a consortium of wealthy men who preferred to remain anonymous, was a million dollars. Caspar Last had not decided whether it would be more profitable for him to sell the stamp itself, or to approach the owners of the unique one, who would certainly pay a large amount to have it destroyed, and thus preserve their unique’s uniqueness. It did seem a shame that the only artifact man had ever succeeded in extracting from the nonexistent past should go into the fire, but Caspar didn’t really care. His own bonfire – the notes and printouts, the conclusions about the nature and transversability of time and the orthogonal logic by which it was accomplished – would be only a little more painful.

  The excursion was over; the only one that remained to him was the brief but, to him, all-important one of his own mortal span. He was looking forward to doing it first class.

  II: AN APPOINTMENT IN KHARTOUM

  It might be begun very differently, though; and it might now be begun again, in a different time and place, like one of those romances by Stevenson, where different stories only gradually reveal themselves to be parts of a whole…

  The paradox is acute, so acute that the only possible stance for a chronicler is to ignore it altogether, and carry on. This, the Otherhood’s central resignation, required a habit of mind so contrary to ordinary cause-and-effect thinking as to be, literally, unimaginable. It would only have been in the changeless precincts of the Club they had established beyond all frames of reference, when deep in leather armchairs or seated all together around the long table whereon their names were carved, that they dared reflect on it at all.

  Take, for a single but not a random instance, the example of Denys Winterset, twenty-three years old, Winchester, Oriel College, younger son of a well-to-do doctor and in 1956 ending a first year as assistant district commissioner of police in Bechuanaland.

  He hadn’t done strikingly well in his post. Though on the surface he was exactly the sort of man who was chosen, or who chose himself, to serve the Empire in those years – a respectable second at Oxford, a cricketer more steady than showy, a reserved, sensible, presentable lad with sound principles and few beliefs – still there was an odd strain in him. Too imaginative, perhaps; given to fits of abstraction, even to what his commissioner called ‘tears, idle tears.’ Still, he was resourceful and hardworking; he hadn’t disgraced himself, and he was now on his way north on the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad, to take a month’s holiday in Cairo and England. His anticipation was marred somewhat by a sense that, after a year in the veldt, he would no longer fit into the comfortable old shoe of his childhood home; that he would feel as odd and exiled as he had in Africa. Home had become a dream, in Bechuanaland; if, at home, Bechuanaland became a dream, then he would have no place real at all to be at home in; he would be an exile for good.

  The high veldt sped away as he was occupied with these thoughts, the rich farmlands of Southern Rhodesia. In the saloon car a young couple, very evidently on honeymoon, watched expectantly for the first glimpse of the eternal rainbow, visible miles off, that haloed Victoria Falls. Denys watched them and their excitement, feeling old and wise. Americans, doubtless: they had that shy, inoffensive air of all Americans abroad, that wondering quality as of children let out from a dark and oppressive school to play in the sun.

  ‘There!’ said the woman as the train took a bend. ‘Oh, look, how beautiful!’

  Even over the train’s sound they could hear the sound of the falls now, like distant cannon. The young man looked at his watch and smiled at Denys. ‘Right on time,’ he said, and Denys smiled too, amused to be complimented on his railroad’s efficiency. The Bulawayo Bridge – longest and highest span on the Cape-to-Cairo line – leapt out over the gorge. ‘My God, that’s something,’ the young man said. ‘Cecil Rhodes built this, right?’

  ‘No,’ Denys said. ‘He thought of it, but never lived to see it. It would have been far easier to build it a few miles up, but Rhodes pictured the train being washed in the spray of the falls as it passed. And so it was built here.’

  The noise of the falls was immense now, and weirdly various, a medley of cracks, thumps, and explosions playing over the constant bass roar, which was not so much like a noise at all as it was like an eternal deep-drawn breath. And as the train chugged out across the span, aimed at Cairo thousands of miles away, passing here the place so hard-sought-for a hundred years ago – the place where the Nile had its origin – the spray did fall on the train just as Cecil Rhodes had imagined it, flung spindrift hissing on the locomotive, drops speckling the window they looked out of and rainbowing in the white air. The young Americans were still with wonder, and Denys, too, felt a lifting of his heart.

  At Khartoum, Denys bid the honeymooners farewell: they were taking the Empire Airways flying boat from here to Gibraltar, and the Atlantic dirigible home. Denys, by now feeling quite proprietary about his Empire’s transportation services, assured them that both flights would also certainly be right on time, and would be as comfortable as the sleepers they were leaving, would serve the same excellent meals with the same white napery embossed with the same royal insignia. Denys himself was driven to the Grand Hotel. His Sudan Railways sleeper to Cairo left the next morning.

  After a bath in a tiled tub large enough almost to swim in, Denys changed into dinner clothes (which had been carefully laid out for him on the huge bed – for whom had these cavernous rooms been built, a race of Kitcheners?). He reserved a table for one in the grill room and went down to the bar. One thing he must do in London, he thought, shooting his cuffs, was to visit his tailor. Bechuanaland had sweated off his college baby fat, and the tropics seemed to have turned his satin lapels faintly green.

  The bar was comfortably filled, before the dinner hour, with men of several sorts and a few women, and with the low various murmur of their talk. Some of the men wore white dinner jackets – businessmen and tourists, Denys supposed – and a few even wore shorts with black shoes and stockings, a style Denys found inherently funny, as though a tailor had made a frightful error and cut evening clothes to the pattern of bush clothes. He ordered a whisky.

  Rarely in African kraals or in his bungalow or his whitewashed office did Denys think about his Empire: or if he did, it was in some local, even irritated way, of Imperial trivialities or Imperial red tape, the rain-rusted engines and stacks of tropic-mildewed paperwork that, collectively, Denys and his young associates called the White Man’s Burd
en. It seemed to require a certain remove from the immediacy of Empire before he could perceive it. Only here (beneath the fans’ ticking, amid the voices naming places – Kandahar, Durban, Singapore, Penang) did the larger Empire that Denys had never seen but had lived in in thought and feeling since childhood open in his mind. How odd, how far more odd really than admirable or deplorable that the small place which was his childhood, circumscribed and cozy – grey Westminster, chilly Trafalgar Square of the black umbrellas, London of the coal-smoked wallpaper and endless chimney pots – should have opened itself out so ceaselessly and for so long into huge hot places, subcontinents where rain never fell or never stopped, lush with vegetable growth or burdened with seas of sand or stone. Send forth the best ye breed: or at least large numbers of those ye breed. If one thought how odd it was – and if one thought then of what should have been natural empires, enormous spreads of restless real property like America or Russia turning in on themselves, making themselves into what seemed (to Denys, who had never seen them) to be very small places: then it did seem to be Destiny of a kind. Not a Destiny to be proud of, particularly, nor ashamed of either, but one whose compelling inner logic could only be marvelled at.

  Quite suddenly, and with poignant vividness, Denys saw himself, or rather felt himself once more to be, before his nursery fire, looking into the small glow of it, with animal crackers and cocoa for tea, listening to Nana telling tales of her brother the sergeant, and the Afghan frontier, and the now-dead king he served – listening, and feeling the Empire ranged in widening circles around him: first Harley Street, outside the window, and then Buckingham Palace, where the king lived; and the country then into which the trains went, and then the cold sea, and the Possessions, and the Commonwealth, stretching ever farther outward, worldwide: but always with his small glowing fire and his comfort and wonder at the heart of it.

  So, there he is: a young man with the self-possessed air of an older man, in evening clothes aged prematurely in places where evening clothes had not been made to go; thinking, if it could be called thinking, of a nursery fire; and about to be spoken to by the man next down the bar. If his feelings could be summed up and spoken, they were that, however odd, there is nothing more real, more pinioned by acts great and small, more clinker-built of time and space and filled brimful of this and that, than is the real world in which his five senses and his memories had their being; and that this was deeply satisfying.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the man next down the bar.

  ‘Good evening,’ Denys said.

  ‘My name is Davenant,’ the man said. He held out a square, blunt-fingered hand, and Denys drew himself up and shook it. ‘You are, I believe, Denys Winterset?’

  ‘I am,’ Denys said, searching the smiling face before him and wondering from where he was known to him. It was a big, square, high-fronted head, a little like Bernard Shaw’s, with ice-blue eyes of that twinkle; it was crowned far back with a neat hank of white hair, and was crossed above the broad jaw with upright white moustaches.

  ‘You don’t mind the intrusion?’ the man said. ‘I wonder if you know whether the grub here is as good as once it was. It’s been some time since I last ate a meal in Khartoum.’

  ‘The last time I did so was a year ago this week,’ Denys said. ‘It was quite good.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Davenant, looking at Denys as though something about the young man amused him. ‘In that case, if you have no other engagement, may I ask your company?’

  ‘I have no other engagement,’ Denys said; in fact he had rather been looking forward to dining alone, but deference to his superiors (of whom this man Davenant was surely in some sense one) was strong in him. ‘Tell me, though, how you come to know my name.’

  ‘Oh, well, there it is,’ Davenant said. ‘One has dealings with the Colonial Office. One sees a face, a name is attached to it, one files it but doesn’t forget – that sort of thing. Part of one’s job.’

  A civil servant, an inspector of some kind. Denys felt the sinking one feels on running into one’s tutor in a wine bar: the evening not well begun. ‘They may well be crowded for dinner,’ he said.

  ‘I have reserved a quiet table,’ said the smiling man, lifting his glass to Denys.

  The grub was, in fact, superior. Sir Geoffrey Davenant was an able teller of tales, and he had many to tell. He was, apparently, no such dull thing as an inspector for the Colonial Office, though just what office he did fill Denys couldn’t determine. He seemed to have been ‘attached to’ or ‘had dealings with’ or ‘gone about for’ half the establishments of the Empire. He embodied, it seemed to Denys, the entire strange adventure about which Denys had been thinking when Sir Geoffrey had first spoken to him.

  ‘So,’ Sir Geoffrey said, filling their glasses from a bottle of South African claret – no harm in being patriotic, he’d said, for one bottle – ‘so, after some months of stumbling about Central Asia and making myself useful one way or another, I was to make my way back to Sadiya. I crossed the Tibetan frontier disguised as a monk –’

  ‘A monk?’

  ‘Yes. Having lost all my gear in Manchuria, I could do the poverty part quite well. I had a roll of rupees, the films, and a compass hidden inside my prayer wheel. Mine didn’t whiz around then with the same sanctity as the other fellows’, but no matter. After adventures too ordinary to describe – avalanches and so on – I managed to reach the monastery at Rangbok, on the old road up to Everest. Rather near collapse. I was recovering a bit and thinking how to proceed when there came a runner with a telegram. From my superior at Ch’eng-tu. WARN DAVENANT MASSACRE SADIYA, it said. The Old Man then was famously close-mouthed. But this was particularly unhelpful, as it did not say who had massacred whom – or why.’ He lifted the silver cover of a dish, and found it empty.

  ‘This must have been a good long time ago,’ Denys said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Davenant said, raising his ice-blue eyes to Denys. ‘A good long time ago. That was an excellent curry. Nearly as good as at Veeraswamy’s, in London – which is, strangely, the best in the world. Shall we have coffee?’

  Over this, and brandy and cigars, Sir Geoffrey’s stories modulated into reflections. Pleasant as his company was, Denys couldn’t overcome a sensation that everything Sir Geoffrey said to him was rehearsed, laid on for his entertainment, or perhaps his enlightenment, and yet with no clue in it as to why he had thus been singled out.

  ‘It amuses me,’ Sir Geoffrey said, ‘how constant it is in human nature to think that things might have gone on differently from the way they did. In a man’s own life, first of all: how he might have taken this or that very different route, except for this or that accident, this or that slight push – if he’d only known then, and so on. And then in history as well, we ruminate endlessly, if, what if, if only… The world seems always somehow malleable to our minds, or to our imaginations anyway.’

  ‘Strange you should say so,’ Denys said. ‘I was thinking, just before you spoke to me, about how very solid the world seems to me, how very – real. And – if you don’t mind my thrusting it into your thoughts – you never did tell me how it is you come to know my name; or why it is you thought good to invite me to that excellent dinner.’

  ‘My dear boy,’ Davenant said, holding up his cigar as though to defend his innocence.

  ‘I can’t think it was chance.’

  ‘My dear boy,’ Davenant said in a different tone, ‘if anything is, that was not. I will explain all. You were on that train of thought. If you will have patience while it trundles by.’

  Denys said nothing further. He sipped his coffee, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead.

  ‘History,’ said Sir Geoffrey. ‘Yes. Of course the possible worlds we make don’t compare to the real one we inhabit – not nearly so well furnished, or tricked out with details. And yet still somehow better. More satisfying. Perhaps the novelist is only a special case of a universal desire to reshape, to “take this sorry scheme of things entire,” smash it into
bits, and “remould it nearer to the heart’s desire” – as old Khayyám says. The egoist is continually doing it with his own life. To dream of doing it with history is no more useful a game, I suppose, but as a game, it shows more sport. There are rules. You can be more objective, if that’s an appropriate word.’ He seemed to grow pensive for a moment. He looked at the end of his cigar. It had gone out, but he didn’t relight it.

  ‘Take this Empire,’ he went on, drawing himself up somewhat to say it. ‘One doesn’t want to be mawkish, but one has served it. Extended it a bit, made it more secure; done one’s bit. You and I. Nothing more natural, then, if we have worked for its extension in the future, to imagine its extension in the past. We can put our finger on the occasional bungle, the missed chance, the wrong man in the wrong place, and so on, and we think: if I had only been there, seen to it that the news went through, got the guns there in time, forced the issue at a certain moment – well. But as long as one is dreaming, why stop? A favourite instance of mine is the American civil war. We came very close, you know, to entering that war on the Confederacy’s side.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘I think we did. Suppose we had. Suppose we had at first dabbled – sent arms – ignored Northern protests – then got deeper in; suppose the North declared war on us. It seems to me a near certainty that if we had entered the war fully, the South would have won. And I think a British presence would have mitigated the slaughter. There was a point, you know, late in that war, when a new draft call in the North was met with terrible riots. In New York several Negroes were hanged, just to show how little their cause was felt.’

  Denys had partly lost the thread of this story, unable to imagine himself in it. He thought of the Americans he had met on the train. ‘Is that so,’ he said.

  ‘Once having divided the States into two nations, and having helped the South to win, we would have been in place, you see. The fate of the West had not yet been decided. With the North much diminished in power – well, I imagine that by now we, the Empire, would have recouped much of what we lost in 1780.’