A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

He was known, he understood, to this person. She, or he, stared unembarrassed at the President pro tem, with a gaze of the most intense and yet impersonal tenderness, of compassion and amusement and calm interest all mixed; and almost imperceptibly shook her head no and smiled again: and the President pro tem lowered his eyes, unable to meet that gaze. When he looked up again, the person was gone.

  Hesitantly the President pro tem walked to the end of the avenue of yews and looked in all directions. No one. A kind of fear flew over him, felt in his breast like the beat of departing wings. He seemed to know, for the first time, what those encounters with gods had been like, when there had been gods; encounters he had puzzled out of the Greek in school.

  Anyway he was alone now in the park: he was sure of that. At length he found his way out again into the twilight streets.

  By evening he had crossed the city and was climbing the steps of a tall town house, searching in his pockets for the key given him. Beside the varnished door was a small plaque, which said that within were the offices of the Orient Aid Society; but this was not in fact the case. Inside was a tall foyer; a glass-panelled door let him into a hallway wainscoted in dark wood. A pile of gumboots and rubber overshoes in a corner, macs and umbrellas on an ebony tree. Smells of tea, done with, and dinner cooking: a stew, an apple tart, a roast fowl. The tulip-shaped gas lamps along the hall were lit.

  He let himself into the library at the hall’s end; velvet armchairs regarded the coal fire, and on a drum table a tray of tea things consorted with the books and the papers. The President pro tem went to the low shelves that ran beneath the windows and drew out one volume of an old encyclopaedia, buckram-bound, with marbled fore-edges and illustrations in brownish photogravure.

  The Races. For some reason the major headings and certain other words were in the orthography he knew, but not the closely printed text. His fingers ran down the columns, which were broken into numbered sections headed by the names of species and subspecies. Hominidae, with three subspecies. Draconiidae, with four: here were etchings of skulls. And lastly Sylphidae, with an uncertain number of subspecies. Sylphidae, the Sylphids. Fairies.

  ‘Angels,’ said a voice behind him. The President pro tem turned to see the Magus whose guest he was, recently risen no doubt, in a voluminous dressing gown richly figured. His beard and hair were so long and fine they seemed to float on the currents of air in the room, like filaments of thistledown.

  ‘“Angels,” is that what you call them?’

  ‘What they would have themselves called,’ said the Magus. ‘What name they call themselves, among themselves, no one knows but they.’

  ‘I think I met with one this evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was no photogravure to accompany the subsection on Sylphidae in the encyclopaedia. ‘I’m sure I met with one.’

  ‘They are gathering, then.’

  ‘Not… not because of me?’

  ‘Because of you.’

  ‘How, though,’ said the President pro tem, feeling again within him the sense of loss, of beating wings departing, ‘how, how could they have known, how…’

  The Magus turned away from him to the fire, to the armchairs and the drum table. The President pro tem saw that beside one chair a glass of whisky had been placed, and an ashtray. ‘Come,’ said the Magus. ‘Sit, Continue your tale. It will perhaps become clear to you: perhaps not.’ He sat then himself, and without looking back at the President pro tem he said: ‘Shall we go on?’

  The President pro tem knew it was idle to dispute with his host. He did stand unmoving for the space of several heartbeats. Then he took his chair, drew the cigar case from his pocket, and considered where he had left off his tale in the dark of the morning.

  ‘Of course,’ he said then, ‘Last knew: he knew, without admitting it to himself, as a good orthogonist must never do, that the world he had returned to from his excursion was not the world he had left. The past he had passed through on his way back was not “behind” his present at all, but at a right angle to it; the future of that past, which he had to traverse in order to get back again, was not the same road, and “back” was not where he got. The frame house on Maple Street which, a little sunburned, he re-entered on his return was twice removed in reality from the one he had left a week before; the mother he kissed likewise.

  ‘He knew that, for it was predicated by orthogonal logic, and orthogonal logic was in fact what Last had discovered – the transversability of time was only an effect of that discovery. He knew it, and despite his glee over his triumph, he kept his eye open. Sooner or later he would come upon something, something that would betray the fact that this world was not his.

  ‘He could not have guessed it would be me.’

  The Magus did not look at the President pro tem as he was told this story; his pale grey eyes instead wandered from object to object around the great dark library but seemed to see none of them; what, the President pro tem wondered, did they see? He had at first supposed the race of Magi to be blind, from this habitual appearance of theirs; he now knew quite well that they were not blind, not blind at all.

  ‘Go on,’ the Magus said.

  ‘So,’ said the President pro tem, ‘Last returns from his excursion. A week passes uneventfully. Then one morning he hears his mother call: he has a visitor. Last, pretending annoyance at this interruption of his work (actually he was calculating various forms of compound interest on a half million dollars), comes to the door. There on the step is a figure in tweeds and a bowler hat, leaning on a furled umbrella: me.

  ‘“Mr Last,” I said. “I think we have business.”

  ‘You could see by his expression that he knew I should not have been there, should not have had business with him at all. He really ought to have refused to see me. A good deal of trouble might have been saved if he had. There was no way I could force him, after all. But he didn’t refuse; after a goggle-eyed moment he brought me in, up a flight of stairs (Mama waiting anxiously at the bottom), and into his study.

  ‘Geniuses are popularly supposed to live in an atmosphere of the greatest confusion and untidiness, but this wasn’t true of Last. The study – it was his bedroom, too – was of a monkish neatness. There was no sign that he worked there, except for a computer terminal, and even it was hidden beneath a cosy that Mama had made for it and Caspar had not dared to spurn.

  ‘He was trembling slightly, poor fellow, and had no idea of the social graces. He only turned to me – his eyeglasses were the kind that oddly diffract the eyes behind and make them unmeetable – and said, “What do you want?”’

  The President pro tem caressed the ashtray with the tip of his cigar. He had been offered no tea, and he felt the lack. ‘We engaged in some preliminary fencing,’ he continued. ‘I told him what I had come to acquire. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said I thought he did. He laughed and said there must be some mistake. I said, no mistake, Mr Last. At length he grew silent, and I could see even behind those absurd goggles that he had begun to try to account for me.

  ‘Thinking out the puzzles of orthogonal logic, you see, is not entirely unlike puzzling out moves in chess: theoretically chess can be played by patiently working out the likely consequences of each move, and the consequences of those consequences, and so on; but in fact it is not so played, certainly not by master players. Masters seem to have a more immediate apprehension of possibilities, an almost visceral understanding of the, however rigorously mathematical, logic of the board and pieces, an understanding that they can act on without being able necessarily to explain. Whatever sort of mendacious and feckless fool Caspar Last was in many ways, he was a genius in one or two, and orthogonal logic was one of them.

  ‘“From when,” he said, “have you come?”

  ‘“From not far on,” I answered. He sat then, resigned, stuck in a sort of check impossible to think one’s way out of, yet not mated. “Then,” he said, “go back the same way you came.”

  ‘“I cannot,�
�� I said, “until you explain to me how it is done.”

  ‘“You know how,” he said, “if you can come here to ask me.”

  ‘“Not until you have explained it to me. Now or later.”

  ‘“I never will,” he said.

  ‘“You will,” I said. “You will have done already, before I leave. Otherwise I would not be here now asking. Let us,” I said, and took a seat myself, “let us assume these preliminaries have been gone through, for they have been of course, and move ahead to the bargaining. My firm are prepared to make you a quite generous offer.”

  ‘That was what convinced him that he must, finally, give up to us the processes he had discovered, which he really had firmly intended to destroy forever: the fact that I had come there to ask for them. Which meant that he had already somehow, somewhen, already yielded them up to us.’

  The President pro tem paused again, and lifted his untouched whisky. ‘It was the same argument,’ he said, ‘the same incontrovertible argument, that was used to convince me once, too, to do a dreadful thing.’

  He drank, thoughtfully, or at least (he supposed) appearing thoughtful; more and more often as he grew older it happened that in the midst of an anecdote, a relation, even one of supreme importance, he would begin to forget what it was he was telling; the terrifically improbable events would begin to seem not only improbable but fictitious, without insides, the incidents and characters as false as in any tawdry cinema story, even his own part in them unreal: as though they happened to someone made up – certainly not to him who told them. Often enough he forgot the plot.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘Last exited from a universe in which travel “through time” was, apparently, either not possible, or possible only under conditions that would allow such travel to go undetected. That was apparent from the fact that no one, so far as Last knew, up to the time of his own single excursion, had ever detected it going on. No one, from Last’s own future that is, had ever come “back” and disrupted his present, or the past of his present: never ever. Therefore, if his excursion could take place, and he could “return,” he would have to return to a different universe: a universe where time travel had taken place, a universe in which once-upon-a-time a man from 1983 had managed to insert himself into a minor colony of the British Crown one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier. What he couldn’t know in advance was whether the universe he “returned” to was one where time travel was a commonplace, an everyday occurrence, something, anyway, that could deprive his excursion of the value it had; or whether it was one in which one excursion only had taken place, his own. My appearance before him convinced him that it was, or was about to become, common enough: common enough to disturb his own peace and quiet, and alter in unforeseeable ways his comfortable present.

  ‘There was only one solution, or one dash at a solution anyway. I might, myself, be a singularity in Last’s new present. It was therefore possible that if he could get rid of me, I would take his process “away” with me into whatever future I had come out of to get it, and thereupon never be able to find my way again to his present and disturb it or him. Whatever worlds I altered, they would not be his, not his anyway who struck the bargain with me: if each of them also contained a Last, who would suffer or flourish in ways unimaginable to the Last to whom I spoke, then those eidolons would have to make terms for themselves, that’s all. The quantum angle obtruded by my coming, and then the one obtruded by my returning, divorced all those Lasts from him for all eternity: that is why, though the angle itself is virtually infinitesimal, it has always to be treated as a right angle.

  ‘Last showed me, on his computer, after our bargain was struck and he was turning over his data and plans to me. I told him I would not probably grasp the theoretical basis of the process, however well I had or would come to manage the practical paradoxes of it, but he liked to show me. He first summoned up x-y coordinates, quite ordinary, and began by showing me how some surprising results were obtained by plotting on such coordinates an imaginary number, specifically the square root of minus one. The only way to describe what happens, he said, is that the plotted figure, one unit high, one unit wide, generates a shadow square of the same measurements “behind” itself, in space undefined by the coordinates. It was with such tricks that he had begun; the orthogons he obtained had first started him thinking about the generation of inhabitable – if also somehow imaginary – pasts.

  ‘Then he showed me what became of the orthogons so constructed if the upright axis were set in motion. Suppose (he said) that this vertical coordinate were in fact revolving around the axle formed by the other, horizontal coordinate. If it were so revolving, like an aeroplane propeller, we could not apprehend it, edge on as it is to us, so to speak; but what would that motion do to the plots we were making? And of course it was quite simple, given the proper instructions to the computer, to find out. And his orthogons – always remaining at right angles to the original coordinates – began to turn in the prop wash of the whole system’s progress at one second per second out of the what-was and into the what-has-never-yet-been; and to generate, when one had come to see them, the paradoxes of orthogonal logic: the cyclonic storm of logic in which all travellers in that medium always stand; the one in which Last and I, I bending over his shoulder hat in hand, he with fat white fingers on his keys and eyeglasses slipping down his nose, stood even as we spoke: a storm as unfeelable as Last’s rotating axis was unseeable.’

  The President pro tem tossed his extinguished cigar into the fading fire and crossed his arms upon his breast, weary; weary of the tale.

  ‘I don’t yet understand,’ the other said. ‘If he had been so adamant, why would he give up his secrets to you?’

  ‘Well,’ said the President pro tem, ‘there was, also, the matter of money. It came down to that, in the end. We were able to make him a very generous offer, as I said.’

  ‘But he didn’t need money. He had this stamp.’

  ‘Yes. So he did. Yes. We were able to pick up the stamp, too, from him, as part of the bargain. I think we offered him a hundred pounds. Perhaps it was more.’

  ‘I thought it was invaluable.’

  ‘Well, so did he, of course. And yet he was not really as surprised as one might have expected him to be, when he discovered it was not; when it turned out that the stamp he had gone to such trouble to acquire was in fact rather a common one. I seemed to see it in his face, the expectation of what he was likely to find, as soon as I directed him to look it up in his Scott’s, if he didn’t believe me. And there it was in Scott’s: the one-penny magenta 1856, a nice enough stamp, a stamp many collectors covet, and many also have in their albums. He had begun breathing stertorously, staring down at the page. I’m afraid he was suffering, rather, and I didn’t like to observe it.

  ‘“Come,” I said to him. “You knew it was possible.” And he did, of course. “Perhaps it was something you did,” I said. “Perhaps you bought the last one of a batch, and the postmaster subsequently reordered, a thing he had not before intended to do. Perhaps…”’ But I could see him think it: there needed to be no such explanation. He needed to have made no error, nor to have influenced the moment’s shape in any way by his presence. The very act of his coming and going was sufficient source of unpredictable, stochastic change: this world was not his, and minute changes from his were predicated. But this change, this of all possible changes…

  ‘His hand had begun to shake, holding the volume of Scott’s. I really wanted now to get through the business and be off, but it couldn’t be hurried. I knew that, for I’d done it all before. In the end we acquired the stamp. And then destroyed it, of course.’

  The President pro tem remembered: a tiny, momentary fire.

  ‘It’s often been observed,’ he said, ‘that the cleverest scientists are often the most easily taken in by charlatans. There is a famous instance, famous in some worlds, of a scientist who was brought to believe firmly in ghosts and ectoplasm, because the medium and her manifestations
passed all the tests the scientist could devise. The only thing he didn’t think to test for was conscious fraud. I suppose it’s because the phenomena of nature, or the entities of mathematics, however puzzling and elusive they may be, are not after all bent on fooling the observer; and so a motive that would be evident to the dullest of policemen does not occur to the genius.’

  ‘The stamp,’ said the Magus.

  ‘The stamp, yes. I’m not exactly proud of this part of the story. We were convinced, though, that two very small wrongs could go a long way towards making a very great right. And Last, who understood me and the “firm” I represented to be capable of handling – at least in a practical way – the awful paradoxes of orthogony, did not imagine us to be also skilled, if anything more skilled, at such things as burglary, uttering, fraud, and force. Of such contradictions is Empire made. It was easy enough for us to replace, while Last was off in the tropics, one volume of his Scott’s stamp catalog with another printed by ourselves, almost identical to his but containing one difference. It was harder waiting to see, once he had looked up his stamp in our bogus volume, if he would then search out some other source to confirm what he found there. He did not.’

  The Magus rose slowly from his chair with the articulated dignity, the wasteless lion’s motion, of his kind. He tugged the bell pull. He picked up the poker then, and stood with his hand upon the mantel, looking down into the ruby ash of the dying fire. ‘I would he had,’ he said.

  The dark double doors of the library opened, and the servant entered noiselessly.

  ‘Refresh the gentleman’s glass,’ the Magus said without turning from the fire, ‘and draw the drapes.’

  The President pro tem thought that no matter how long he lived in this world he would never grow accustomed to the presence of draconics. The servant’s dark hand lifted the decanter, poured an exact dram into the glass, and stoppered the bottle again; then his yellow eyes, irises slit like a cat’s or a snake’s, rose from that task towards the next, the drawing of the drapes. Unlike the eyes of the Magi, these draconic eyes seemed to see and weigh everything – though on a single scale, and from behind a veil of indifference.