by Brian Aldiss
He took out a large pocket-handkerchief and mopped his face and his eyes; no doubt it was hot, but it seemed to me that he wept. Tears, idle tears.
‘I met Dr Jameson during the Matabele campaign,’ he continued. ‘Leander Starr Jameson. I think I have never met a man – and I have met many wicked and twisted ones – whom I have loathed so completely and so instantly. I had hardly heard of him, of course; he was already dead and unknown in this year as it had occurred in my former past, the only version of these events I knew. Jameson was a great lover of the Maxim; he took several along on the raid he made into the Transvaal in 1896, the raid that would eventually lead to war with the Boers, destroy Rhodes’s credit, and begin the end of Empire: so I have come to see it. The fool.
‘I took no part in that war, thank God. I went north to help put the railway through: Cape-to-Cairo.’ He smiled, seemed almost about to laugh, but did not; only mopped his face again. It was as though I were interrogating him, and he were telling me all this under the threat of the rubber truncheon or the rack. I wanted him to stop, frankly; only I dared say nothing.
‘I made up for a lack of engineering expertise by my very uncertain knowledge of where and how, one day, the road would run. The telegraph had already reached Uganda; next stop was Wadi Halfa. The rails would not go through so easily. I became a sort of scout, leading the advance parties, dealing with the chieftains. The Maxim went with me, of course. I learned the weapon well.’
Here there came another silence, another inward struggle to continue. I was left to picture what he did not say: That which I did I should not have done; that which I should have done I did not do.
‘Rhodes gave five thousand pounds to the Liberal party to persuade them not to abandon Egypt: for there his railway must be hooked to the sea. But then of course came the end of the whole scheme in German Tanganyika: no Cape-to-Cairo road. Germany was growing great in the world; the Germans wanted to have an Empire of their own. It finished Rhodes.
‘By that time I was a railway expert. The nonexistent Uganda Railway was happy to acquire my services: I had a reputation, among the blacks, you see… I think there was a death for every mile of that road as it went through the jungle to the coast: rinderpest, fever, Nanda raids. We would now and then hang a captured Nanda warrior from the telegraph poles, to discourage the others. By the time the rails reached Mombasa, I was an old man; and Cecil Rhodes was dead.’
He died of his old heart condition, the condition that had brought him out to Africa in the first place. He couldn’t breathe in the awful heat of that summer of 1902, the worst anyone could remember; he wandered from room to room at Groote Schuur, trying to catch his breath. He lay in the darkened drawing room and could not breathe. They took him down to his cottage by the sea, and put ice between the ceiling and the iron roof to cool it; all afternoon the punkahs spooned the air, Then, suddenly, he decided to go to England. April was there: April showers. A cold spring: it seemed that could heal him. So a cabin was fitted out for him aboard a P&O liner, with electric fans and refrigerating pipes and oxygen tanks.
He died on the day he was to sail. He was buried at that place on the Matopos, the place he had chosen himself; buried facing north.
‘He wanted the heroes of the Matabele campaign to be buried there with him. I could be one, if I chose; only I think my name would not be found among the register of those who fought. I think my name does not appear at all in history: not in the books of the Uganda Railway, not in the register of the Mount Nelson Hotel for 1893. I have never had the courage to look.’
I could not understand this, though it sent a cold shudder between my shoulder blades. The Original Situation, he explained, could not be returned to; but it could be restored, as those events that the Otherhood brought about were one by one come upon in time, and then not brought about. And as the Original Situation was second by second restored, the whole of his adventure in the past was continually worn away into nonbeing, and a new future replaced his old past ahead of him.
‘You must imagine how it has been for me,’ he said, his voice now a whisper from exertion and grief. ‘To everyone else it seemed only that time went on – history – the march of events. But to me it has been otherwise. It has been the reverse of the nightmare from which you wake in a sweat of relief to find that the awful disaster has not occurred, the fatal step was not taken: for I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real, until nothing in past or present is as I knew it to be; until I am like the servant in Job: I only am escaped to tell thee.’
March 8, 1983
I awoke again this morning from the dream of the forest in the sea: a dream without people or events in it, or anything whatever except the gigantic dendrites, vast masses of pale leaves, and the tideless waters, light and sunshot towards the surface, darkening to impenetrability down below. It seemed there were schools of fish, or flocks of birds, in the leaves, something that faintly disturbed them, now and then; otherwise, stillness.
No matter that orthogonal logic refutes it. I cannot help believing that my present succeeds in time the other presents and futures that have gone into making it. I believe that as I grow older I come to incorporate the experiences I have had as an older man in pasts (and futures) now obsolete: as though in absolute time I continually catch up with myself in the imaginary times that fluoresce from it, gathering dreamlike memories of the lives I have lived therein. Somewhere God (I have come to believe in God; there was simply no existing otherwise) is keeping these universes in a row, and sees to it that they happen in succession, the most recently generated one last – and so felt to be last, no matter where along it I stand.
I remember, being now well past the age that he was then, the Uganda Railway, the Nanda arrows, all the death.
I remember the shabby library and the coal fire, the encyclopaedia in another orthography; the servant at the double doors.
I think that in the end, should I live long enough, I shall remember nothing but the forest in the sea. That is the terminus: complete strangeness that is at the same time utterly changeless; what cannot be becoming all that has ever been.
I took him out myself, in the end, abandoning my commission to do so, for there was no way that he could have crossed the border by himself, without papers, a nonexistent man. And it was just at that moment, as we motored up through the Sudan past Wadi Halfa, that the Anglo-French expeditionary force took Port Said. The Suez incident, that last hopeless spasm of Empire, was taking its inevitable course. Inevitable: I have not used the word before.
When we reached the Canal, the Israelis had already occupied the east bank. The airport at Ismailia was a shambles, the greater part of the Egyptian Air Force shot up, planes scattered in twisted attitudes like dead birds after a storm. We could find no plane to take us. He had gone desperately broody, wide-eyed and speechless, useless for anything. I felt as though in a dream where one is somehow saddled with an idiot brother one had not had before.
And yet it was only the confusion and mess that made my task possible at all, I suppose. There were so many semiofficial and unofficial British scurrying or loafing around Port Said when we entered the city that our passage was unremarked. We went through the smoke and dust of that famously squalid port like two ghosts – two ghosts progressing through a ghost city at the retreating edge of a ghost of empire. And the crunch of broken glass continually underfoot.
We went out on an old oiler attached to the retreating invasion fleet, which had been ordered home having accomplished nothing except, I suppose, the end of the British Empire in Africa. He stood on the oiler’s boat deck and watched the city grow smaller and said nothing. But once he laughed, his dry, light laugh: it made me think of the noise that Homer says the dead make. I asked the reason.
‘I was remembering the last time I went out of Africa,’ he said. ‘On a day much like this. Very much like this. This calm weather; this sea. Nothing else the same, though. Nothi
ng else.’ He turned to me smiling, and toasted me with an imaginary glass. ‘The end of an era,’ he said.
March 10
My chronicle seems to be degenerating into a diary.
I note in The Times this morning the sale of the single known example of the 1856 magenta British Guiana, for a sum far smaller than was supposed to be its worth. Neither the names of the consortium that sold it nor the names of the buyers were made public. I see in my mind’s eye a small, momentary fire.
I see now that there is no reason why this story should come last, no matter my feeling, no matter that in Africa he hoped it would. Indeed there is no reason why it should even fall last in this chronicling, nor why the world, the sad world in which it occurs, should be described as succeeding all others – it does not, any more than it precedes them. For the sake of a narrative only, perhaps; perhaps, like God, we cannot live without narrative.
I used to see him, infrequently, in the years after we both came back from Africa: he didn’t die as quickly as we both supposed he would. He used to seek me out, in part to borrow a little money – he was living on the dole and on what he brought out of Africa, which was little enough. I stood him tea now and then and listened to his stories. He’d appear at our appointed place in a napless British Warm, ill-fitting, as his eyeglasses and National Health false teeth were also. I imagine he was terribly lonely. I know he was.
I remember the last time we met, at a Lyons teashop near Marble Arch. I’d left the Colonial Service, of course, under a cloud, and taken a position teaching at a crammer’s in Holborn until something better came along (nothing ever did; I recently inherited the headmaster’s chair at the same school; little has changed there over the decades but the general coloration of the students).
‘This curious fancy haunts me,’ he said to me on that occasion. ‘I picture the Fellows, all seated around the great table in the executive committee’s dining room; only it is rather like Miss Havisham’s, you know, in Dickens: the roast beef has long since gone foul, and the silver tarnished, and the draperies rotten; and the Fellows dead in their chairs, or mad, dust on their evening clothes, the port dried up in their glasses. Huntington. Davenant. The President pro tem.’
He stirred sugar in his tea (he liked it horribly sweet; so, of course, do I). ‘It’s not true, you know, that the Club stood somehow at a nexus of possibilities, amid multiplying realities. If that were so, then what the Fellows did would be trivial or monstrous or both: generating endless new universes just to see if they could get one to their liking. No: it is we, out here, who live in but one of innumerable possible worlds. In there, they were like a man standing at the north pole, whose only view, wherever he looks, is south: they looked out upon a single encompassing reality, which it was their opportunity – no, their duty, as they saw it – to make as happy as possible, as free from the calamities they knew of as they could make it.
‘Well, they were limited people, more limited than their means to work good or evil. That which they did they should not have done. And yet what they hoped for us was not despicable. The calamities they saw were real. Anyone who could would try to save us from them: as a mother would pull her child, her foolish child, from the fire. They ought to be forgiven; they ought.’
I walked with him up towards Hyde Park Corner. He walked now with agonizing slowness, as I will, too, one day; it was a rainy autumn Sunday, and his pains were severe. At Hyde Park Corner he stopped entirely, and I thought perhaps he could go no farther: but then I saw that he was studying the monument that stands there. He went closer to it, to read what was written on it.
I have myself more than once stopped before this neglected monument. It is a statue of the boy David, a memorial to the Machine Gun Corps, and was put up after the First World War. Some little thought must have gone into deciding how to memorialize that arm which had changed war forever; it seemed to require a religious sentiment, a quote from the Bible, and one was found. Beneath the naked boy are written words from Kings:
Saul has slain his thousands
But David his tens of thousands.
He stood in the rain, in his vast coat, looking down at these words, as though reading them over and over; and the faint rain that clung to his cheeks mingled with his tears:
Saul has slain his thousands
But David his tens of thousands.
I never saw him again after that day, and I did not seek for him: I think it unlikely he could have been found.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many other editors, in particular my old friend David Hartwell, and I have had welcome assistance and advice (not always accepted, alas) from Bernard Goodman, Darrell Schweitzer and Graham Sleight. Gratitude goes also to Adam Freudenheim at Penguin, who knows well the complex evolution of this volume.
Eric Frank Russell, SOLE SOLUTION, copyright 1956 by King-Size Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and Fantastic Universe.
Ward Moore, LOT, copyright 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Clifford Simak, SKIRMISH, copyright 1950 by Ziff-Davis. Reprinted by permission of the author and Amazing Stories.
James Tiptree, Jr., AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE, copyright 1971. Reprinted by permission of Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction.
Brian Aldiss, POOR LITTLE WARRIOR!, copyright 1958 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
James H. Schmitz, GRANDPA, copyright 1955 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. in the USA and Great Britain. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc. and Astounding Science Fact Fiction (now Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction).
Isaac Asimov, NIGHTFALL, copyright 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. in the USA and Great Britain. Reprinted by permission of the author and Astounding Science Fact Fiction (now Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction).
Katherine MacLean, THE SNOWBALL EFFECT, copyright 1952 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and Galaxy Science Fiction.
Bruce Sterling, SWARM, copyright 1982 by Mercury Press.
Greg Bear, BLOOD MUSIC, copyright 1983 by Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction.
Fredric Brown, ANSWER, copyright 1964. Reprinted by permission of the author’s executors.
William Tenn, THE LIBERATION OF EARTH, copyright 1953 by Columbia Publications, Inc., for Future Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of Philip Klass.
Harry Harrison, AN ALIEN AGONY, copyright 1962 by Nova Publications Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and his literary agent, E. J. Carnell, from New Worlds Science Fiction (original title ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’).
J. G. Ballard, TRACK 12, copyright 1958 by Nova Publications Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and New Worlds Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, SEXUAL DIMORPHISM, copyright 1999 by Year’s Best SF 5 (ed. David Hartwell).
Frederik Pohl, THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD, copyright 1954 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and his literary agent, E. J. Carnell, from Galaxy Science Fiction.
Eliza Blair, FRIENDS IN NEED, copyright 2006 by Bug-Eyed Magazine.
Robert Sheckley, THE STORE OF THE WORLDS, copyright 1959 by H. M. H. Publishing Co. Inc. First published in Playboy as ‘World of Heart’s Desire’.
Isaac Asimov, JOKESTER, copyright 1956 by Royal Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author from Infinity Science Fiction.
John Steinbeck, THE SHORT-SHORT STORY OF MANKIND, copyright 1958 by H. M. H. Publishing Co. Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, McIntosh and Otis. Originally appeared in Playboy.
James Inglis, NIGHT WATCH, copyright 1964. Reprinted by permission of the Maggie Noach Agency.
Ted Chiang, STORY OF YOUR LIFE, copyright 1998 by Starlight 2.
H. B. Fyfe, PROTECTED SPECIES
, copyright 1951 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Arthur Porges, THE RESCUER, copyright 1962 by Condé-Nast Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., I MADE YOU, copyright 1954 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction). Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, A. D. Peters.
Damon Knight, THE COUNTRY OF THE KIND, copyright 1956 by Mercury Press.
Bertram Chandler, THE CAGE, copyright 1957. Reprinted by permission of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the author.
A. E. van Vogt, FULFILMENT, copyright 1952. Reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger.
James Blish, COMMON TIME, copyright 1960 by Faber & Faber, in Galactic Cluster. Reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger.
Garry Kilworth, ALIEN EMBASSY, copyright 2006 by Humdrumming.
John Crowley, GREAT WORK OF TIME, copyright 1989. Reprinted by permission.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The editor and publisher will nevertheless be happy to correct any error of omission or commission at the earliest opportunity.