A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  Their kind, the President pro tem had learned, had been servants for uncounted ages, though the Magus his host had said that once they had been masters, and men and the other hominids their slaves. And they still had, the President pro tem observed, that studied reserve which upper servants had in the world from which the President pro tem had come, that reserve which says: Very well, I will do your bidding, better than you could do it for yourself; I will maintain the illusion of your superiority to me, as no other creature could.

  With a taper he lit at the fire, he lit the lamps along the walls and masked them with glass globes. Then he drew the drapes.

  ‘I’ll ring for supper,’ the Magus said, and the servant stopped at the sound of his voice. ‘Have it sent in.’ The servant moved again, crossing the room on narrow naked feet. At the doorway he turned to them, but only to draw the double doors closed together as he left.

  For a time the Magus stood regarding the doors the great lizard had closed. Then: ‘Outside the City,’ he said, ‘in the mountains, they have begun to combine. There are more stories every week. In the old forests whence they first emerged, they have begun to collect on appointed days, trying to remember – for they are not really as intelligent as they look – trying to remember what it is they have lost, and to think of gaining it again. In not too long a time we will begin to hear of massacres. Some remote place; a country house; a more than usually careless man; a deed of unfamiliar horridness. And a sign left, the first sign: a writing in blood, or something less obvious. And like a spot symptomatic of a fatal disease, it will begin to spread.’

  The President pro tem drank, then said softly: ‘We didn’t know, you know. We didn’t understand that this would be the result.’ The drawing of the drapes, the lighting of the lamps, had made the old library even more familiar to the President pro tem: the dark varnished wood, the old tobacco smoke, the hour between tea and dinner; the draught that whispered at the window’s edge, the bitter smell of the coal on the grate; the comfort of this velvet armchair’s napless arms, of this whisky. The President pro tem sat grasped by all this, almost unable to think of anything else. ‘We couldn’t know.’

  ‘Last knew,’ the Magus said. ‘All false, all imaginary, all generated by the wishes and fears of others: all that I am, my head, my heart, my house. Not the world’s doing, or time’s, but yours.’ The opacity of his eyes, turned on the President pro tem, was fearful. ‘You have made me; you must unmake me.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ the President pro tem said. ‘All that I can.’

  ‘For centuries we have studied,’ the Magus said. ‘We have spent lifetimes – lifetimes much longer than yours – searching for the flaw in this world, the flaw whose existence we suspected but could not prove. I say “centuries,” but those centuries have been illusory, have they not? We came, finally, to guess at you, down the defiles of time, working your changes, which we can but suffer.

  ‘We only guessed at you: no more than men or beasts can we Magi remember, once the universe has become different, that it was ever other than it is now. But I think the Sylphids can feel it change: can know when the changes are wrought. Imagine the pain for them.’

  That was a command: and indeed the President pro tem could imagine it, and did. He looked down into his glass.

  ‘That is why they are gathering. They know already of your appearance; they have expected you. The request is theirs to make, not mine: that you put this world out like a light.’

  He stabbed with the poker at the settling fire, and the coals gave up blue flames for a moment. The mage’s eyes caught the light, and then went out.

  ‘I long to die,’ he said.

  IV: CHRONICLES OF THE OTHERHOOD

  Once past the door, or what might be considered the door, or what Sir Geoffrey Davenant had told him was a club, Denys Winterset was greeted by the Fellow in Economic History, a gentle, academic-looking man called Platt.

  ‘Not many of the Fellows about, just now,’ he said. ‘Most of them fossicking about on one bit of business or another. I’m always here.’ He smiled, a vague, self-effacing smile. ‘Be no good out there. But they also serve, eh?’

  ‘Will Sir Geoffrey Davenant be here?’ Denys asked him. He followed Platt through what did seem to be a gentlemen’s club of the best kind: dark-panelled, smelling richly of leather upholstery and tobacco.

  ‘Davenant, oh, yes,’ said Platt. ‘Davenant will be here. All the executive committee will get here, if they can. The President – pro tem.’ He turned back to look at Denys over his half-glasses. ‘All our presidents are pro tem.’ He led on. ‘There’ll be dinner in the executive committee’s dining room. After dinner we’ll talk. You’ll likely have questions.’ At that Denys almost laughed. He felt made of questions, most of them unputtable in any verbal form.

  Platt stopped in the middle of the library. A lone Fellow in a corner by a green-shaded lamp was hidden by The Times held up before him. There was a fire burning placidly in the oak-framed fireplace; above it, a large and smoke-dimmed painting: a portrait of a chubby, placid man in a hard collar, thinning blond hair, eyes somehow vacant. Platt, seeing Deny’s look, said: ‘Cecil Rhodes.’

  Beneath the portrait, carved into the mantelpiece, were words; Denys took a step closer to read them:

  To Ruin the Great Work of Time

  & Cast the Kingdoms old

  Into another mould.

  ‘Marvell,’ Platt said. ‘That poem about Cromwell. Don’t know who chose it. It’s right, though. I look at it often, working here. Now. It’s down that corridor, if you want to wash your hands. Would you care for a drink? We have some time to kill. Ah, Davenant.’

  ‘Hullo, Denys,’ said Sir Geoffrey, who had lowered his Times. ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’

  ‘I think we all are,’ said Platt, taking Denys’s elbow in a gentle, almost tender grasp. ‘Glad you’ve come.’

  He had almost not come. If it had been merely an address, a telephone number he’d been given, he might well not have; but the metal card with its brown strip was like a string tied round his finger, making it impossible to forget he had been invited. Don’t lose it, Davenant had said. So it lay in his waistcoat pocket; he touched it whenever he reached for matches there; he tried shifting it to other pockets, but wherever it was on his person he felt it. In the end he decided to use it, as much to get rid of its importunity as for any other reason – so he told himself. On a wet afternoon he went to the place Davenant had told him of, the Orient Aid Society, and found it as described, a sooty French-Gothic building, one of those private houses turned to public use, with a discreet brass plaque by the door indicating that within some sort of business is done, one can’t imagine what; and inside the double doors, in the vestibule, three telephone boxes, looking identical, the first of which had the nearly invisible slit by the door. His heart for some reason beat slow and hard as he inserted the card within this slot – it was immediately snatched away, like a ticket on the Underground – and entered the box and closed the door behind him.

  Though nothing moved, he felt as though he had stepped onto a moving footpath, or onto one of those trick floors in a fun house that slide beneath one’s feet. He was going somewhere. The sensation was awful. Beginning to panic, he tried to get out, not knowing whether that might be dangerous, but the door would not open, and its glass could not be seen out of either. It had been transparent from outside but was somehow opaque from within. He shook the door handle fiercely. At that moment the nonmobile motion reversed itself sickeningly, and the door opened. Denys stepped out, not into the vestibule of the Orient Aid Society, but into the foyer of a club. A dim, old-fashioned foyer, with faded Turkey carpet on the stairs, and an aged porter to greet him; a desk, behind which pigeonholes held members’ mail; a stand of umbrellas. It was reassuring, almost absurdly so, the ‘then I woke up’ of a silly ghost story. But Denys didn’t feel reassured, or exactly awake either.

  ‘Evening, sir.’

  ‘Good evening.’r />
  ‘Still raining, sir? Take your things?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A member was coming towards him down the long corridor. Platt.

  ‘Sir?’

  Denys turned back to the porter. ‘Your key, sir,’ the man said, and gave him back the metal plate with the strip of brown ribbon on it.

  ‘Like a lift,’ Davenant told him as they sipped whisky in the bar. ‘Alarming, somewhat, I admit; but imagine using a lift for the first time, not knowing what its function was. Closed inside a box; sensation of movement; the doors open, and you are somewhere else. Might seem odd. Well, this is the same. Only you’re not somewhere else: not exactly.’

  ‘Hm,’ Denys said.

  ‘Don’t dismiss it, Sir Geoffrey,’ said Platt. ‘It is mighty odd.’ He said to Denys: ‘The paradox is acute: it is. Completely contrary to the usual cause-and-effect thinking we all do, can’t stop doing really, no matter how hard we try to adopt other habits of mind. Strictly speaking it is unthinkable: unimaginable. And yet there it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Davenant said. ‘To ignore, without ever forgetting, the heart of the matter: that’s the trick. I’ve met monks, Japanese, Tibetan, who know the techniques. They can be learned.’

  ‘We speak of the larger paradox,’ Platt said to Denys. ‘The door you came in by being only a small instance. The great instance being, of course, the Otherhood’s existence at all: we here now sitting and talking of it.’

  But Denys was not talking of it. He had nothing to say. To be told that in entering the telephone box in the Orient Aid Society he had effectively exited from time and entered a precinct outside it, revolving between the actual and the hypothetical, not quite existent despite the solidity of its parquet floor and the truthful bite of its whisky; to be told that in these changeless and atemporal halls there gathered a society –‘not quite a brotherhood,’ Davenant said; ‘that would be mawkish, and untrue of these chaps; we call it an Otherhood’– of men and women who by some means could insert themselves into the stream of the past, and with their foreknowledge alter it, and thus alter the future of that past, the future in which they themselves had their original being; that in effect the world Denys had come from, the world he knew, the year 1956, the whole course of things, the very cast and flavour of his memories, were dependent on the Fellows of this Society, and might change at any moment, though if they did he would know nothing of it; and that he was being asked to join them in their work – he heard the words, spoken to him with a frightening casualness; he felt his mind fill with the notions, though not able to do anything that might be called thinking about them; and he had nothing to say.

  ‘You can see,’ Sir Geoffrey said, looking not at Denys but into his whisky, ‘why I didn’t explain all this to you in Khartoum. The words don’t come easily. Here, in the Club, outside all frames of reference, it’s possible to explain. To describe, anyway. I suppose if we hadn’t a place like this, we should all go mad.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Platt, ‘whether we haven’t, despite it,’ He looked at no one. ‘Gone mad, I mean.’

  For a moment no one spoke further. The barman glanced at them, to see if their silence required anything of him. Then Platt spoke again. ‘Of course there are restrictions,’ he said. ‘The chap who discovered it was possible to change one’s place in time, an American, thought he had proved that it was only possible to displace oneself into the past. In a sense, he was correct….’

  ‘In a sense,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘Not quite correct. The possibilities are larger than he supposed. Or rather will suppose, all this from your viewpoint is still to happen – which widens the possibilities right there, you see, one man’s future being as it were another man’s past. (You’ll get used to it, dear boy, shall we have another of these?) The past, as it happens, is the only sphere of time we have any interest in; the only sphere in which we can do good. So you see there are natural limits: the time at which this process was made workable is the forward limit; and the rear limit we have made the time of the founding of the Otherhood itself. By Cecil Rhodes’s will, in 1893.’

  ‘Be pointless, you see, for the Fellows to go back before the Society existed,’ said Platt. ‘You can see that.’

  ‘One further restriction,’ said Sir Geoffrey. ‘A house rule, so to speak. We forbid a man to return to a time he has already visited, at least in the same part of the world. There is the danger – a moment’s thought will show you I’m right – of bumping into oneself on a previous, or successive, mission. Unnerving, let me tell you. Unnerving completely. The trick is hard enough to master as it is.’

  Denys found voice. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘And why me?’

  ‘Why,’ said Sir Geoffrey, ‘is spelled out in our founding charter: to preserve and extend the British Empire in all parts of the world, and to strengthen it against all dangers. Next, to keep peace in the world, insofar as this is compatible with the first; our experience has been that it usually is the same thing. And lastly to keep fellowship among ourselves, this also subject to the first, though any conflict is unimaginable, I should hope, bickering aside.’

  ‘The Society was founded to be secret,’ Platt said. ‘Rhodes liked that idea – a sort of Jesuits of the Empire. In fact there was no real need for secrecy, not until – well, not until the Society became the Otherhood. This jaunting about in other people’s histories would not be understood. So secrecy is important. Good thing on the whole that Rhodes insisted on it. And for sure he wouldn’t have been displeased at the Society’s scope. He wanted the world for England. And more. “The moon, too,” he used to say. “I often think of the moon.”’

  ‘Few know of us even now,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘The Foreign Office, sometimes. The PM. Depending on the nature of HM Government at any moment, we explain more, or less. Never the part about time. That is for us alone to know. Though some have guessed a little, over the years. It’s not even so much that we wish to act in secret – that was just Rhodes’s silly fantasy – but well, it’s just damned difficult to explain, don’t you see?’

  ‘And the Queen knows of us,’ Platt said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I flew back with her, from Africa, that day,’ Davenant said. ‘After her father had died. I happened to be among the party. I told her a little then. Didn’t want to intrude on her grief, but – it seemed the moment. In the air, over Africa. I explained more later. Plucky girl,’ he added. ‘Plucky.’ He drew his watch out. ‘And as for the second part of your question – why you? – I shall ask you to reserve that one, for a moment. We’ll dine upstairs… Good heavens, look at the time.’

  Platt swallowed his drink hastily. ‘I remember Lord Cromer’s words to us when I was a schoolboy at Leys,’ he said. ‘“Love your country,” he said, “tell the truth, and don’t dawdle.”’

  ‘Words to live by,’ Sir Geoffrey said, examining the bar chit doubtfully and fumbling for a pen.

  The drapes were drawn in the executive dining room; the members of the executive committee were just taking their seats around a long mahogany table, scarred around its edge with what seemed to be initials and dates. The members were of all ages; some sunburned, some pale, some in evening clothes of a cut unfamiliar to Denys; among them were two Indians and a Chinaman. When they were all seated, Denys beside Platt, there were several seats empty. A tall woman with severe grey hair but eyes somehow kind took the head of the table.

  ‘The President pro tem,’ she said as she sat, ‘is not returned, apparently, from his mission. I’ll preside, if there are no objections.’

  ‘Oh, balls,’ said a broad-faced man with the tan of a cinema actor. ‘Don’t give yourself airs, Huntington. Will we really need any presiding?’

  ‘Might be a swearing-in,’ Huntington said mildly, pressing the bell beside her and not glancing at Denys. ‘In any case, best to keep up the forms. First order of business – the soup.’

  It was a mulligatawny, saffrony and various; it was followed by a whiting, and that by a baron of claret-coloured
beef. Through the clashings of silverware and crystal Denys listened to the table’s talk, little enough of which he could understand: only now and then he felt – as though he were coming horribly in two – the import of the Fellows’ conversation: that history was malleable, time a fiction; that nothing was necessarily as he supposed it must be. How could they bear that knowledge? How could he?

  ‘Mr Deng Fa-shen, there,’ Platt said quietly to him, ‘is our physicist. Orthogonal physics – as opposed to orthogonal logic – is his invention. What makes this club possible. The mechanics of it. Don’t ask me to explain.’

  Deng Fa-shen was a fine-boned, parchment-coloured man with gentle fox’s eyes. Denys looked from him to the two Indians in silk. Platt said, as though reading Denys’s thought: ‘The most disagreeable thing about old Rhodes and the Empire of his day was its racialism, of course. Absolutely unworkable, too. Nothing more impossible to sustain than a world order based on some race’s supposed inherent superiority.’ He smiled. ‘It isn’t the only part of Rhodes’s scheme that’s proved unworkable.’

  The informal talk began to assemble itself, with small nudges from the woman at the head of the table (who did her presiding with no pomp and few words), around a single date: 1914. Denys knew something of this date, though several of the place names spoken of (the Somme, Jutland, Gallipoli – wherever that was) meant nothing to him. Somehow, in some possible universe, 1914 had changed everything; the Fellows seemed intent on changing 1914, drawing its teeth, teeth that Denys had not known it had – or might still have once had: he felt again the sensation of coming in two, and sipped wine.

  ‘Jutland,’ a Fellow was saying. ‘All that’s needed is a bit more knowledge, a bit more jump on events. Instead of a foolish stalemate, it could be a solid victory. Then, blockade; war over in six months…’