A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Who’s our man in the Admiralty now? Carteret, isn’t it? Can he –’

  ‘Carteret,’ said the bronze-faced man, ‘was killed the last time around at Jutland.’ There was a silence; some of the Fellows seemed to be aware of this, and some taken by surprise. ‘Shows the foolishness of that kind of thinking,’ the man said. ‘Things have simply gone too far by then. That’s my opinion.’

  Other options were put forward. That moment in what the Fellows called the Original Situation was searched for into which a small intrusion might be made, like a surgical incision, the smallest possible intrusion that would have the proper effect; then the succeeding Situation was searched, and the Situation following that, the Fellows feeling with enormous patience and care into the workings of the past and its possibilities, like a blind man weaving. At length a decision seemed to be made, without fuss or a vote taken, about this place Gallipoli, and a Turkish soldier named Mustapha Kemal, who would be apprehended and sequestered in a quick action that took or would take place there; the sun-bronzed man would see, or had seen, to it; and the talk, after a reflective moment, turned again to anecdote and speculation.

  Denys listened to the stories, of desert treks and dangerous negotiations, men going into the wilderness of a past catastrophe with a precious load of penicillin or of knowledge, to save one man’s life or end another’s; to intercept one trivial telegram, get one bit of news through, deflect one column of troops – removing one card from the ever-building possible future of some past moment and seeing the whole of it collapse silently, unknowably, even as another was building, just as fragile but happier: he looked into the faces of the Fellows, knowing that no ruthless stratagem was beyond them, and yet knowing also that they were men of honour, with a great world’s peace and benefit in their trust, though the world couldn’t know it; and he felt an odd but deep thrill of privilege to be here now, wherever that was – the same sense of privilege that, as a boy, he had expected to feel (and as a man had laughed at himself for expecting to feel) upon being admitted to the ranks of those who – selflessly, though not without reward – had been chosen or had chosen themselves to serve the Empire. ‘The difference you make makes all the difference,’ his headmasterish commissioner was fond of telling Denys and his fellows; and it was a joke among them that, in their form-filling, their execution of tedious and sometimes absurd directives, they were following in the footsteps of Gordon and Milner, Warren Hastings and Raffles of Singapore. And yet – Denys perceived it with a kind of inward stillness, as though his heart flowed instead of beating – a difference could be made. Had been made. Went on being made, in many times and places, without fuss, without glory, with rewards for others that those others could not recognize or even imagine. He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and sat back slowly.

  ‘This 1914 business has its tricksome aspects,’ Platt said to him. ‘Speaking in large terms, not enough can really be done within our time frames. The Situation that issues in war was firmly established well before: in the founding of the German Empire under Prussian leadership. Bismarck. There’s the man to get to, or to his financiers, most of whom were Jewish – little did they know, and all that. Even Sedan is too late, and not enough seems to be able to be made, or unmade, out of the Dreyfus affair, though that does fall within our provenance. No,’ he said. ‘It’s all just too long ago. If only… Well, no use speculating, is there? Make the best of it, and shorten the war; make it less catastrophic at any rate, a short, sharp shaking-out – above all, win it quickly. We must do the best we can.’

  He seemed unreconciled.

  Denys said: ‘But I don’t understand. I mean, of course I wouldn’t expect to understand it as you do, but… well, you did do all that. I mean we studied 1914 in school – the guns of August and all that, the 1915 peace, the Monaco Conference. What I mean is…’ He became conscious that the Fellows had turned their attention to him. No one else spoke. ‘What I mean to say is that I know you solved the problem, and how you solved it, in a general way; and I don’t see why it remains to be solved. I don’t see why you’re worried.’ He laughed in embarrassment, looking around at the faces that looked at him.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Sir Geoffrey, ‘that you don’t understand.’ He said it smiling, and the others were, if not smiling, patient and not censorious. ‘The logic of it is orthogonal. I can present you with an even more paradoxical instance. In fact I intend to present you with it; it’s the reason you’re here.’

  ‘The point to remember,’ the woman called Huntington said (as though to the whole table, but obviously for Denys’s instruction), ‘is that here – in the Club – nothing has yet happened except the Original Situation. All is still to do: all that we have done, all still to do.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Geoffrey. ‘All still to do.’ He took from his waistcoat pocket an eyeglass, polished it with his napkin, and inserted it between cheek and eyebrow. ‘You had a question, in the bar. You asked why me, meaning, I suppose, why is it you should be nominated to this Fellowship, why you and not another.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Denys. He wanted to go on, list what he knew of his inadequacies, but kept silent.

  ‘Let me, before answering your question, ask you this,’ said Sir Geoffrey. ‘Supposing that you were chosen by good and sufficient standards – supposing that a list had been gone over carefully, and your name was weighed; supposing that a sort of competitive examination has been passed by you – would you then accept the nomination?’

  ‘I –’ said Denys. All eyes were on him, yet they were not somehow expectant; they awaited an answer they knew. Denys seemed to know it, too. He swallowed. ‘I hope I should,’ he said.

  ‘Very well,’ Sir Geoffrey said softly. ‘Very well.’ He took a breath. ‘Then I shall tell you that you have in fact been chosen by good and sufficient standards. Chosen, moreover, for a specific mission, a mission of the greatest importance; a mission on which the very existence of the Otherhood depends. No need to feel flattered; I’m sure you’re a brave lad, and all that, but the criteria were not entirely your sterling qualities, whatever they should later turn out to be.

  ‘To explain what I mean, I must further acquaint you with what the oldest, or rather earliest, of the Fellows call the Original Situation.

  ‘You recall our conversation in Khartoum. I told you no lie then; it is the case, in that very pleasant world we talked in, that good year 1956, fourth of a happy reign, on that wide veranda overlooking a world at peace – it is the case, I say, in that world and in most possible worlds like it, that Cecil Rhodes died young, and left the entire immense fortune he had won in the Scramble for the founding of a secret society, a society dedicated to the extension of that Empire which had his entire loyalty. The then Government’s extreme confusion over this bequest, their eventual forming of a society – not without some embarrassment and doubt – a society from which this present Otherhood descends; still working toward the same ends, though the British Empire is not now what Rhodes thought it to be, nor the world either in which it has its hegemony – well, one of the Fellows is working up or will work up that story, insofar as it can be told, and it is, as I say, a true one.

  ‘But there is a situation in which it is not true. In that situation which we call Original – the spine of time from which all other possibilities fluoresce – Cecil Rhodes, it appears, changed his mind.’

  Sir Geoffrey paused to light a cigar. The port was passed him. A cloud of smoke issued from his mouth. ‘Changed his mind, you see,’ he said, dispersing the smoke with a wave. ‘He did not die young, he lived on. His character mellowed, perhaps, as the years fell away; his fortune certainly diminished. It may be that Africa disappointed him, finally; his scheme to take over Tanganyika and join the Cape-to-Cairo with a single All-Red railway line had ended in failure…’

  Denys opened his mouth to speak; he had only a week before taken that line. He shut his mouth again.

  ‘Whatever it was,’ Sir Geoffrey said, ‘he cha
nged his mind. His last will left his fortune – what was left of it – to his old university, a scholarship fund to allow Americans and others of good character to study in England. No secret society. No Otherhood.’

  There was a deep silence at the table. No one had altered his casual position, yet there was a stillness of utter attention. Someone poured for Denys, and the liquid rattle of port into his glass was loud.

  ‘Thus the paradox,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘For it is only the persuasions of the Otherhood that alter this Original Situation. The Otherhood must reach its fingers into the past, once we have learned how to do so; we must send our agents down along the defiles of time and intercept our own grandfather there, at the very moment when he is about to turn away from the work of generating us.

  ‘And persuade him not to, you see; cause him – cause him not to turn away from that work of generation. Yes, cause him not to turn away. And thus ensure our own eventual existence.’

  Sir Geoffrey pushed back his chair and rose. He turned towards the sideboard, then back again to Denys. ‘Did I hear you say “That’s madness”?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Denys said.

  ‘Oh,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘I thought you spoke. Or thought I remembered you speaking.’ He turned again to the sideboard, and returned again to the table with his cigar clenched in his teeth and a small box in his hands. He put this on the table. ‘You do follow me thus far,’ he said, his hands on the box and his eyes regarding Denys from under their curling brows.

  ‘Follow you?’

  ‘The man had to die,’ Sir Geoffrey said. He unlatched the box. ‘It was his moment. The moment you will find in any biography of him you pick up. Young, or anyway not old; at the height of his triumphs. It would have been downhill for him from there anyway.’

  ‘How,’ Denys asked, and something in his throat intruded on the question; it was a moment before he could complete it: ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Oh, various ways,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘In the most useful version, he was shot to death by a young man he’d invited up to his house at Cape Town. Shot twice, in the heart, with a Webley .38-calibre revolver.’ He took from the box this weapon, and placed it with its handle towards Denys.

  ‘That’s madness,’ Denys said. His hands lay along the arms of his chair, drawing back from the gun. ‘You can’t mean to say you went back and shot him, you…’

  ‘Not we, dear boy,’ Sir Geoffrey said. ‘We, generally, yes; but specifically, not we. You.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t be alone – not initially, at least. I can explain why it must be you and not another; I can expound the really quite dreadful paradox of it further, if you think it would help, though it seems to me best if, for now, you simply take our word for it.’

  Denys felt the corners of his mouth draw down, involuntarily, tightly; his lower lip wanted to tremble. It was a sign he remembered from early childhood: what had usually followed it was a fit of truculent weeping. That could not follow, here, now: and yet he dared not allow himself to speak, for fear he would be unable. For some time, then, no one spoke.

  At the head of the table Huntington pushed her empty glass away.

  ‘Mr Winterset,’ she said gently. ‘I wonder if I might put in a word. Sit down, Davenant, will you, just for a moment, and stop looming over us. With your permission, Mr Winterset – Denys – I should like to describe to you a little more broadly that condition of the world we call the Original Situation.’

  She regarded Denys with her sad eyes, then closed her fingers together before her. She began to speak, in a low voice which more than once Denys had to lean forward to catch. She told about Rhodes’s last sad bad days; she told of Rhodes’s chum, the despicable Dr Jameson, and his infamous raid and the provocations that led to war with the Boers; of the shame of that war, the British defeats and the British atrocities, the brutal intransigence of both sides. She told how in those same years the European powers who confronted each other in Africa were also at work stockpiling arms and building mechanized armies of a size unheard of in the history of the world, to be finally let loose upon one another in August of 1914, unprepared for what was to become of them; armies officered by men who still lived in the previous century, but armed with weapons more dreadful than they could imagine. The machine gun: no one seemed to understand that the machine gun had changed war forever, and though the junior officers and Other Ranks soon learned it, the commanders never did. At the First Battle of the Somme wave after wave of British soldiers were sent against German machine guns, to be mown down like grain. There were a quarter of a million casualties in that battle. And yet the generals went on ordering massed attacks against machine guns for the four long years of the war.

  ‘But they knew,’ Denys could not help saying. ‘They did know. Machine guns had been used against massed native armies for years, all over the Empire. In Afghanistan. In the Sudan. Africa. They knew.’

  ‘Yes,’ Huntington said. ‘They knew. And yet, in the Original Situation, they paid no attention. They went blindly on and made their dreadful mistakes. Why? How could they be so stupid, those generals and statemen who in the world you knew behaved so wisely and so well? For one reason only: they lacked the help and knowledge of a group of men and women who had seen all those mistakes made, who could act in secret on what they knew, and who had the ear and the confidence of one of the governments – not the least stupid of them, either, mind you. And with all our help it was still a close-run thing.’

  ‘Damned close-run,’ Platt put in. ‘Still hangs in the balance, in fact.’

  ‘Let me go on,’ Huntington said.

  She went on: long hands folded before her, eyes now cast down, she told how at the end a million men, a whole generation, lay dead on the European battlefield, among them men whom Denys might think the modern world could not have been made without. A grotesque tyranny calling itself Socialist had been imposed on a war-weakened Russian empire. Only the intervention of a fully mobilized United States had finally broken the awful deadlock – there by altering the further history of the world unrecognizably. She told how the vindictive settlement inflicted on a ruined Germany (so unlike the wise dispositions of the Monaco Conference, which had simply re-established the old pre-Bismarck patchwork of German states and princedoms) had rankled in the German spirit; how a madman had arisen and, almost unbelievably, had ridden a wave of resentment and anti-Jewish hysteria to dictatorship.

  ‘Yes,’ Denys said. ‘That we didn’t escape, did we? I remember that, or almost remember it; it was just before I can remember anything. Anti-Jewish riots all over Germany.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Huntington softly.

  ‘Yes. Terrible. These nice funny Germans, all lederhosen and cuckoo clocks, and suddenly they show a terrible dark side. Thousands of Jews, some of them very highly placed, had to leave Germany. They lost everything. Synagogues attacked, professors fired. Even Einstein, I think, had to leave Germany for a time.’

  Huntington let him speak. When Denys fell silent, unable to remember more and feeling the eyes of the Fellows on him, Huntington began again. But the things she began to tell of now simply could not have happened, Denys thought; no, they were part of a monstrous, foul dream, atrocities on a scale only a psychopath could conceive, and only the total resources of a strong and perverted science achieve. When Einstein came again into the tale, and the world Huntington described drifted ignorantly and inexorably into an icy and permanent stalemate that could be broken only by the end of civilization, perhaps of life itself, Denys found a loathsome surfeit rising in his throat; he covered his face, he would hear no more.

  ‘So you see,’ Huntington said, ‘why we think it possible that the life – nearly over, in any case – of one egotistical, racialist adventurer is worth the chance to alter that situation.’ She raised her eyes to Denys. ‘I don’t say you need agree. There is a sticky moral question, and I don’t mean to brush it aside. I only say you see how we might think so.’

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nbsp; Denys nodded slowly. He reached out and put his hand on the pistol that had been placed before him. He lifted his eyes and met those of Sir Geoffrey Davenant, which still smiled, though his mouth and his moustaches were grave.

  What they were all telling him was that he could help create a better world than the original, which Huntington had described; but that was not how Denys perceived it. What Denys perceived was that reality – reality, the world he had come from, reality sun-shot and whole – was somehow under threat from a disgusting nightmare of death, ignorance, and torture, which could invade and replace it forever unless he acted. He did not think himself capable of interfering with the world to make it better; but to defend the world he knew, the world that with all its shortcomings was life and sustenance and sense and cleanly wakefulness – yes, that he could do. Would do, with all his strength.

  Which is why, of course, it was he who had been chosen to do it.

  He saw that in Davenant’s eyes.

  And of course, if he refused, he could not then be brought here to be asked. If it was now possible for him to be asked to do this by the Otherhood, then he must have already consented, and done it. That, too, was in Davenant’s silence. Denys looked down. His hand was on the Webley; and beside it, carved by a penknife into the surface of the table, almost obscured by later waxings, were the neat initials D.W.

  ‘I always remember what Lord Milner said,’ Platt spoke into his ear. ‘Everyone can help.’

  V: THE TEARS OF THE PRESIDENT pro tem

  ‘I remember,’ the President pro tem of the Otherhood said, ‘the light: a very clear, very pure, very cool light that seemed somehow potent but reserved, as though it could do terrible blinding things, and give an unbearable heat, if it chose – well, I’m not quite sure what I mean.’

  There was a midnight fug in the air of the library where the President pro tem retold his tale. The Magus to whom he told it did not look at him; his pale grey eyes moved from object to object around the room in the aimless idiot wandering that had at first caused the President pro tem to believe him blind.