by Brian Aldiss
‘There is,’ said the Magus behind him, ‘one other you have not thought of.’
The President pro tem let fall the drape and turned from the window. The Magus stood in the doorway, a great ledger in his arms. His eyes did not meet the President pro tem’s, and yet seemed to regard him anyway, like the blind eyes of a statue.
One other… Yes, the President pro tem saw, there was one other who might have done this. One other, not so good at the work perhaps as others, as Davenant for example, but who nonetheless would have been, or would come to have been, in a position to take such steps. The President pro tem would not have credited himself with the skill, or the nerve, or the dreadnought power. But how else to account for the familiarity, the bottomless suitability to him of this world he had never before seen?
‘Between the time of your people’s decision to plumb our world,’ said the Magus, ‘and the time of your standing here within it, you must yourself have brought it into being. I see no likelier explanation.’
The President pro tem stood still with wonder at the efforts he was apparently to prove capable of making. A million years at least: a million years. How had he known where to begin? Where had he found, would he find, the time?
‘Shall I ring,’ the Magus said, ‘or will you let yourself out?’
Deng Fa-shen had always said it, and anyone who travelled in them knew it to be so: the imaginary futures and imaginary pasts of orthogony are imaginary only in the sense that imaginary numbers (which they very much resemble) are imaginary. To a man walking within one, it alone is real, no matter how strange; it is all the others, standing at angles to it, which exist only in imagination. Night-long the President pro tem walked the city, with a measured and unhurried step, but with a constant tremor winding round his rib cage, waiting for what would become of him, and observing the world he had made.
Of course it could not continue to exist. It should not ever have come into existence in the first place; his own sin (if it had been his) had summoned it out of nonbeing, and his repentance must expunge it. The Magus who had taken his confession (which the President pro tem had been unable to withhold from him) had drawn that conclusion: it must be put out, like a light. And yet how deeply the President pro tem wanted it to last forever; how deeply he believed it ought to last forever.
The numinous and inhuman angels, about whom nothing could be said, beings with no ascertainable business among the lesser races and yet beings without whom, the President pro tem was sure, this world could not go on functioning. They lived (endless?) lives unimaginable to men, and perhaps to Magi, too, who yet sought continually for knowledge of them: Magi, highest of the hominids, gentle and wise yet inflexible of purpose, living in simplicity and solitude (Were there females? Where? Doing what?) and yet from their shabby studies influencing, perhaps directing, the lives of mere men. The men, such as himself, clever and busy, with their inventions and their politics and their affairs. The lesser hominids, strong, sweet-natured, comic, like placid trolls. The draconics.
It was not simply a world inhabited by intelligent races of different kinds: it was a harder thing to grasp than that. The lives of the races constituted different universes of meaning, different constructions of reality; it was as though four or five different novels, novels of different kinds by different and differently limited writers, were to become interpenetrated and conflated: inside a gigantic Russian thing a stark and violent policier, and inside that something Dickensian, full of plot, humours, and eccentricity. Such an interlacing of mutually exclusive universes might be comical, like a sketch in Punch; it might be tragic, too. And it might be neither: it might simply be what is, the given against which all airy imaginings must finally be measured: reality.
Near dawn the President pro tem stood leaning on a parapet of worked stone that overlooked a tram roundabout. A tram had just ended its journey there, and the conductor and the motorman descended, squat hominids in great-coats and peaked caps. With their long strong arms they began to swing the tram around for its return journey. The President pro tem gazed down at this commonplace sight; his nose seemed to know the smell of that tram’s interior, his bottom to know the feel of its polished seats. But he knew also that yesterday there had not been trams in this city. Today they had been here for decades.
No, it was no good, the President pro tem knew: the fabric of this world he had made – if it had been he – was fatally weakened with irreality. It was a botched job: as though he were that god of the Gnostics who made the material world, a minor god unversed in putting time together with space. He had not worked well. And how could he have supposed it would be otherwise? What had got into him, that he had dared?
‘No,’ said the angel who stood beside him. ‘You should not think that it was you.’
‘If not me,’ said the President pro tem, ‘then who?’
‘Come,’ said the angel. She (I shall say ‘she’) slipped a small cool hand within his hand. ‘Let’s go over the tracks, and into the trees beyond that gate.’
A hard and painful stone had formed in the throat of the President pro tem. The angel beside him led him like a daughter, like the daughter of old blind Oedipus. Within the precincts of the park – which apparently had its entrance or its entrances where the angels needed them to be – he was led down an avenue of yew and dim towers of poplar towards the piled and sounding waters of a fountain. They sat together on the fountain’s marble lip.
‘The Magus told me,’ the President pro tem began, ‘that you can feel the alterations that we make, back then. Is that true?’
‘It’s like the snap of a whip infinitely long,’ the angel said. ‘The whole length of time snapped and laid out differently: not only the length of time backwards to the time of the change, but the length of the future forwards. We felt ourselves, come into being, oldest of the Old Races (though the last your changes brought into existence); we saw in that moment the aeons of our past, and we guessed our future, too.’
The President pro tem took out his pocket handkerchief and pressed it to his face. He must weep, yet no tears came.
‘We love this world – this only world – just as you do,’ she said. ‘We love it, and we cannot bear to feel it sicken and fail. Better that it not have been than that it die.’
‘I shall do all I can,’ said the President pro tem. ‘I shall find who has done this – I suppose I know who it was, if it wasn’t me – and dissuade him. Teach him, teach him what I’ve learned, make him see…’
‘You don’t yet understand,’ the angel said with careful kindness but at the same time glancing at her wristwatch. ‘There is no one to tell. There is no one who went beyond the rules.’
‘There must have been,’ said the President pro tem. ‘You, your time, it just isn’t that far along from ours, from mine! To make this world, this city, these races…’
‘Not far along in time,’ said the angel, ‘but many times removed. You know it to be so: whenever you, your Otherhood, set out across the timelines, your passage generated random variation in the worlds you arrived in. Perhaps you didn’t understand how those variations accumulate, here at the sum end of your journeyings.’
‘But the changes were so minute!’ said the President pro tem. ‘Deng Fa-shen explained it. A molecule here and there, no more; the position of a distant star; some trivial thing, the name of a flower or a village. Too few, too small even to notice.’
‘They increase exponentially with every alteration – and your Otherhood has been busy since you last presided over them. Through the days random changes accumulate, tiny errors silting up like the blown sand that fills the streets of a desert city, that buries it at last.’
‘But why these changes?’ asked the President pro tem desperately. ‘It can’t have been chance that a world like this was the sum of those histories, it can’t be. A world like this…’
‘Chance, perhaps. Or it may be that as time grows softer the world grows more malleable by wishes. There is no reason to belie
ve this, yet that is what we believe. You – all of you – could not have known that you were bringing this world into being; and yet this is the world you wanted.’
She reached out to let the tossed foam of the fountain fall into her hand. The President pro tem thought of the bridge over the Zambezi, far away; the tossed foam of the Falls. It was true: this is what they had striven for: a world of perfect hierarchies, of no change forever. God, how they must have longed for it! The loneliness of continual change – no outback, no bundas so lonely. He had heard how men can be unsettled for days, for weeks, who have lived through earthquakes and felt the earth to be uncertain: what of his Fellows, who had felt time and space picked apart, never to be rewoven that way again, and not once but a hundred times? What of himself?
‘I shall tell you what I see at the end of all your wishings,’ said the angel softly. ‘At the far end of the last changed world, after there is nothing left that can change. There is then only a forest, growing in the sea. I say “forest” and I say “sea,” though whether they are of the kind I know, or some other sort of thing, I cannot say. The sea is still and the forest is thick; it grows upward from the black bottom, and its topmost branches reach into the sunlight, which penetrates a little into the warm upper waters. That’s all. There is nothing else anywhere forever. Your wishes have come true: the Empire is quiet. There is not, nor will there be, change anymore; never will one thing be confused again with another; higher for lower, better for lesser, master for servant. Perpetual Peace.’
The President pro tem was weeping now, painful sobs drawn up from an interior he had long kept shut and bolted. Tears ran down his cheeks, into the corners of his mouth, under his hard collar. He knew what he must do, but not how to do it.
‘The Otherhood cannot be dissuaded from this,’ the angel said, putting a hand on the wrist of the President pro tem. ‘For all of it, including our sitting here now, all of it – and the forest in the sea – is implicit in the very creation of the Otherhood itself.’
‘But then…’
‘Then the Otherhood must be uncreated.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘You must.’
‘No, no, I can’t.’ He had withdrawn from her pellucid gaze, horrified. ‘I mean it isn’t because… if it must be done, it must be. But not by me.’
‘Why?’
‘It would be against the rules given me. I don’t know what the result would be. I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine.’
‘Rules?’
‘The Otherhood came into being,’ said the President pro tem, ‘when a British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, was shot and killed by a young man called Denys Winterset.’
‘Then you must return and stop that killing.’
‘But you don’t see!’ said the President pro tem in great distress. ‘The rules given the Otherhood forbid a Fellow from returning to a time and place that he formerly altered by his presence…’
‘And…’
‘And I am myself that same Denys Winterset.’
The angel regarded the President pro tem – the Honourable Denys Winterset, fourteenth President pro tem of the Otherhood – and her translucent face registered a sweet surprise, as though the learning of something she had not known gave her pleasure. She laughed, and her laughter was not different from the plashing of the fountain by which they sat. She laughed and laughed, as the old man in his black coat and hat sat silent beside her, bewildered and afraid.
VI: THE BOY DAVID OF HYDE PARK CORNER
There are days when I seem genuinely to remember, and days when I do not remember at all: days when I remember only that sometimes I remember. There are days on which I think I recognize another like myself: someone walking smartly along the Strand or Bond Street, holding The Times under one arm and walking a furled umbrella with the other – a sort of military bearing, moustaches white (older than when I seem to have known him, but then so am I, of course), and cheeks permanently tanned by some faraway sun. I do not catch his eye, nor he mine, though I am tempted to stop him, to ask him… Later on I wonder – if I can remember to wonder – whether he, too, is making a chronicle, in his evenings, writing up the story: a story that can be told in any direction, starting from anywhen, leading on to a forest in the sea.
I won’t look any longer into this chronicle I’ve compiled. I shall only complete it.
My name is Denys Winterset. I was born in London in 1933; I was the only son of a Harley Street physician, and my earliest memory is of coming upon my father in tears in his surgery: he had just heard the news that the R101 dirigible had crashed on its maiden flight, killing all those aboard.
We lived then above my father’s offices, in a little building whose nursery I remember distinctly, though I was taken to the country with the other children of London when I was only six, and that building was knocked down by a bomb in 1940. A falling wall killed my mother; my father was on ambulance duty in the East End and was spared.
He didn’t know quite what to do with me, nor I with myself; I have been torn all my life between the drive to discover what others whom I love and admire expect of me, and my discovery that then I don’t want to do it, really. After coming down from the University I decided, out of a certain perversity which my father could not sympathize with, to join the Colonial Service. He could not fathom why I would want to fasten myself to an enterprise that everyone save a few antediluvian colonels and letter writers to The Times could see was a dead animal. And I couldn’t explain. Psychoanalysis later suggested that it was quite simply because no one wanted me to do it. The explanation has since come to seem insufficient to me.
That was a strange late blooming of Empire in the decade after the war, when the Colonial Office took on factitious new life, and thousands of us went out to the Colonies. The Service became larger than it had been in years, swollen with ex-officers too accustomed to military life to do anything else, and with the innocent and the confused, like myself. I ended up a junior member of a transition team in a Central African country I shall not name, helping see to it that as much was given to the new native government as they could be persuaded to accept, in the way of a parliament, a well-disciplined army, a foreign service, a judiciary.
It was not after all very much. Those institutions that the British are sure no civilized nation can do without were, in the minds of many Africans who spoke freely to me, very like those exquisite japanned toffee-boxes from Fortnum & Mason that you used often to come across in native kraals, because the chieftains and shamans loved them so, to keep their juju in. Almost as soon as I arrived, it became evident that the commander in chief of the armed forces was impatient with the pace of things, and felt the need of no special transition to African, i.e., his own, control of the state. The most our Commission were likely to accomplish was to get the British population out without a bloodbath.
Even that would not be easy. We – we young men – were saddled with the duty of explaining to aged planters that there was no one left to defend their estates against confiscation, and that under the new constitution they hadn’t a leg to stand on, and that despite how dearly their overseers and house people loved them, they ought to begin seeing what they could pack into a few small trunks. On the other hand, we were to calm the fears of merchants and diamond factors, and tell them that if they all simply dashed for it, they could easily precipitate a closing of the frontiers, with incalculable results.
There came a night when, more than usually certain that not a single Brit under my care would leave the country alive, nor deserved to either, I stood at the bar of the Planters’ (just renamed the Republic) Club, drinking gin and Italian (tonic hadn’t been reordered in weeks) and listening to the clacking of the fans. A fellow I knew slightly as a regular here saluted me; I nodded and returned to my thoughts. A moment later I found him next to me.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if I might have your ear for a moment.’
The expression, in his mouth, was richly comic, or perhaps it
was my exhaustion. He waited for my laughter to subside before speaking. He was called Rossie, and he’d spent a good many years in Africa, doing whatever came to hand. He was one of those Englishmen whom the sun turns not brown but only grey and greasy; his eyes were always watery, the cups of his lids red and painful to look at.
‘I am,’ he said at last, ‘doing a favour for a chap who would like your help.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said.
‘This is a chap,’ he said, ‘who has been too long in this country, and would like to leave it.’
‘There are many in his situation.’
‘Not quite.’
‘What is his name?’ I said, taking out a memorandum book. ‘I’ll pass it on to the Commission.’
‘Just the point,’ Rossie said. He drew closer to me. At the other end of the bar loud laughter arose from a group consisting of a newly commissioned field marshal – an immense, glossy, nearly blue-black man – and his two colonels, both British, both small and lean. They laughed when the field marshal laughed, though their laugh was not so loud, nor their teeth so large and white.
‘He’ll want to tell you his name himself,’ Rossie said. ‘I’ve only brought the message. He wants to see you, to talk to you. I said I’d tell you. That’s all.’
‘To tell us…’
‘Not you, all of you. You: you.’
I drank. The warm, scented liquor was thick in my throat. ‘Me?’
‘What he asked me to ask you,’ Rossie said, growing impatient, ‘was would you come out to his place, and see him. It isn’t far. He wanted you, no one else. He said I was to insist. He said you were to come alone. He’ll send a boy of his. He said tell no one.’
There were many reasons why a man might want to do business with the Commission privately. I could think of none why it should be done with me alone. I agreed, with a shrug. Rossie seemed immediately to put the matter out of his mind, mopped his red face, and ordered drinks for both of us. By the time they were brought we were already discussing the Imperial groundnut scheme, which was to have kept this young republic self-sufficient, but which, it was now evident, would do no such thing.