The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  The awkward pause extended itself again, and then suddenly they all began talking at once. Mrs. Prouse’s voice overrode the others by sheer power of timbre, and even little Henrietta fell silent.

  ‘You seem unconversant with our customs,’ she said to Dora. ‘Have you come a long way? Where is your settlement?’

  ‘I must have been unconscious for some while before my horse carried me to your home,’ Dora said carefully. ‘I do live a long way away, on the other side of the mountains.’

  Eyebrows shot up all round the bedside like a row of cats’ backs arching.

  ‘I have heard that only wild people without Treatment live on the other side of the mountains!’ Mrs. Prouse exclaimed.

  ‘Do I look wild?’ Dora asked demurely.

  ‘You look dangerous,’ Jean said sotto voce.

  ‘Did your horse run away with you, Dora?’ Henrietta wanted to know. ‘Are you scared of it? What’s its name?’

  Relieved at this less dangerous trend in her interrogation, Dora said, ‘The sun was so strong it made me faint, because I had lost my hat. My horse is a stallion called Big Jim and he brought me here accidentally.’

  Henrietta screamed with delight and capered round the room.

  ‘Caught you! Caught you!’ she cried. ‘A stallion’s a male sex symbol. Everyone knows that! So you must be pretty wild!’

  The conversation remained at that prickly level for some while. With the exception of Jean’s, their intentions to Dora were kind, but the only talk of which they seemed capable was an infinite series of probes, so that to chat with them was as comfortable as bouncing up and down on a bed of nails.

  It was growing towards evening. Outside, the conference which had been steadily dwindling in numbers broke up. Doctor Saul went off in another direction, but Doctor Eileen came back into the house with two other men, one of them a stringy, harassed individual who kissed Mrs. Prouse.

  ‘Good news!’ Doctor Eileen cried to the room at large. ‘We have decided that Doctor Lloyd Akistar’s sense of inadequacy is only a temporary anxiety-dictated behaviourism. When this is explained to him he will feel better.’

  A babble of approval greeted this remark, which sounded totally irrelevant to Dora, now sitting on the edge of her couch. It evidently sounded the same to Gavin, for he said, with more edge to his voice than he generally used in addressing his Doctor, ‘And what did you decide about Dora?’

  Doctor Eileen frowned. ‘We decided we would discuss the matter again in the morning. Dora can stay here tonight. You can sleep in the living room, Gavin.’

  She nodded civilly to Dora, came over to the bedside and felt her pulse. She was a strong young woman of about thirty, without feminine grace. As she clutched Dora’s wrist, she began a discussion with Mrs. Prouse and an ancient woman who had just hobbled in – the place was certainly getting crowded. Discussion (meaning procrastination) and herding together, Dora decided tiredly, were endemic in the settlement. Meanwhile, she was unable to hear what Gavin’s group were saying, for Henrietta was importantly introducing her to the two men who had entered with Doctor Eileen.

  Dora had decided she wanted to meet nobody else that day, but her female curiosity was aroused to find that the stringy, harassed man was not only married to Mrs. Prouse but was her Doctor as well.

  ‘Sure, Doctor and patient often marry,’ Henrietta said, huffy at Dora’s surprise. ‘They have to have an affinity to start with, so naturally they’re drawn together. When I’m a Doctor and I’ve sucked all the secrets out of my patient’s libido – bingo! – I’m gonna marry him faster ’n that!’

  ‘Don’t you let your mother hear you speak like that!’ Doctor Prouse implored. He looked as if he spent his life imploring.

  Ignoring him, Henrietta introduced the other man as Doctor Joe – ‘Mother’s other Doctor. I suppose you know you got to have a second Doctor if you marry the first one, ’cos that makes him not impartial?’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Dora said. ‘And am I right in deducing that each Doctor has only one Patient at a time?’

  ‘No, wrong,’ Henrietta said. ‘You can have up to three. Doctor Joe does Peter Paring as well as Mother, for instance. And Doctor Betty who does Jean does old Ginger Bradball and Ronnie Spears. You’ll be telling me next you don’t have Doctors beyond the mountains! Of course, Doctor Saul is different – he’s a Coordinate Doctor.’

  At this stage, to Dora’s horror, some more people entered the house, including Doctor Saul. The babble was now intense, and still punctuated by note-taking. Dora felt like screaming – that should cause a few entries in their wretched little books. As she was considering this line of action, however, everyone began leaving the room; Mrs. Prouse was heard to announce that she would get supper, and at the words Dora realised how hungry she felt.

  Only Gavin, lingering by the door, Doctor Eileen and Doctor Saul remained. The place looked deserted.

  ‘Gavin’s had too exciting a day, Doctor,’ Eileen said. ‘I’ll take him into the other room and give him a Free Association; then I shall be ready for mine when you want me.’

  Doctor Saul nodded absently and came over to Dora’s bed as the others left. Big and capable, he looked more like a pioneer than a medical man. The smile on his large, dark face was full of understanding.

  ‘I see you think us very strange,’ he said. ‘If you settle among us, you must get used to our ways. Integration doesn’t necessarily imply surrender of spirit.’

  ‘I don’t want to settle. It was by accident I came here,’ she said. ‘As soon as I’m better I’ll be off.’

  ‘We have fugitives here from time to time. They find us purely by accident, but they are content to stay and adjust. Gavin’s grandfather, Mark, was a fugitive, I believe. When they see we hold the secret of health, they naturally wish to share it. Of course,’ he went on, ‘I am aware that the world is full of health settlements which think as we do, but these fugitives seem to find we manage the ethos of the Treatment just a little better than anyone else. How was it in your settlement?’

  His quiet superiority nettled her. Ignoring his last feeler, Dora said, ‘I am surprised you have such knowledge of the outside world, Doctor Saul. Your people obviously aren’t travellers, yet you appear to have no planes or radio or telephones or other forms of communication – not even a carrier pigeon.’

  Saul looked puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know what these things are you mention,’ he said. ‘The fugitives say the world is covered with health settlements like ours; it is obviously so, since the truth of the Treatment is universal. There is another settlement two days’ journey down the valley, and another three days’ beyond that. But we want nothing of them, nor they of us. They have their own notes to take.’

  It was growing dim in the room. Outside, cows and sheep were lying down to rest. Inside, the Doctor’s face in the afterglow took on a massive grandeur, Stonehenge made flesh.

  He rose and lit and pumped at a portable lamp until it burned steadily. It looked and smelt as if it ran on vegetable oil. While he bent over it, Dora said, ‘The life my people lead is different from yours. Can I ask you a basic question without being thought silly?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Just what is this Treatment of yours?’

  Now the glass walls were no longer transparent, the lamp making them shine like polished ebony and shuttering away the shadows of outdoors. Saul took a pace or two about the room, rubbing the back of his neck with his strong hands.

  ‘The answer is partly what we call history,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard of history – nobody goes much for it here – but it means anything that happened before grandfather’s time. Nowadays, the only diseases that exist are psychosomatic or purely mental. But in history there were purely physical diseases; there was one called cancer, I remember, and one called influenza, and a whole lot more we’ve forgotten ever existed. They were spread from person to person by tiny creatures called viruses. History must have be
en a horrible place in those days!’

  He paused and shuddered, and began to fiddle with the lamp unnecessarily as he spoke.

  ‘Fortunately for us, some of the doctors of those days – they weren’t real doctors – killed off all these diseases. Two of the most famous of these doctors were called Sydenham and Pasteur; their history lasted a long time, but it was only after that that real strides were made. Disinfectant is to health what birth is to a man: the mere beginning. Desplansi, in a bit of history called Twenty First Century, originated the Treatment, which takes over where disinfectant leaves off.

  ‘Desplansi went back to an idea originated a long while before – perhaps in the Nineteenth Century, I don’t know – by a Greek called Hippocrates. He showed once and for all that what we now call disease is merely non-treatment. His whole teaching was expressed in the slogan, “Doctor, Disease and Patient: the name of this trio is Health”.’

  Dora looked unenthusiastic. Saul came quickly over to her and took her hands.

  ‘You must see it,’ he said. ‘It’s so beautifully simple: right living reduced to an equation. That’s why everyone took it up. A doctor cannot treat diseases properly without full knowledge of his patient’s mental composition. For that they have to be with them all the time. Hence your trio: Doctor, disease and patient. It has banished the family as a basic unit of society. Medicine is, as it always should have been, a study of personality. The seat of disease is the mind – but the mind is perpetually under observation!’

  His look of triumph was so intense that Dora hated to puncture it, but she could not resist one pin prick.

  ‘I see now,’ she said. ‘It means that your society is divided roughly half and half into doctor and patient. In other words, you’ve not got very far towards banishing disease, have you?’

  Saul threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘Say rather we are only part way to Utopia,’ he replied. ‘Don’t forget the Treatment took over a world one hundred percent sick; everyone was neurotic in history. We’ve cut that figure by half.’

  Despite his show of confidence, he seemed keen to avoid further discussion now he had said his piece. He patted Dora’s shoulder in a paternal way and turned towards the door.

  ‘No more talk tonight. You have years of interesting analysis ahead if you stay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your supper brought in.’

  ‘Wait!’ she said, coming towards him, forgetting in her anxiety that she was supposed to be suffering from the effects of the sun. ‘I want to tell you about myself. I – need help. Don’t you want to hear – ’

  ‘Not now,’ he said sternly. ‘In the morning we’ll elect a Doctor for you – I may even take on your case myself, as Doctor Eileen is my only Patient at present. But till then you must wait; if you are to be integrated, an analysis must be made of all your self-revelations.’

  ‘I don’t want to be integrated – ’ she began angrily. But Doctor Saul had gone. For a big man he had a good turn of speed.

  She plonked her behind furiously down on the bed. God! What a crowd they were! Even reasonable specimens like Saul were too smug to breathe. They cared nothing about her; why, they’d hardly asked her a single question about herself. They’d been too busy introducing each other and displaying themselves!

  Her anger scarcely abated when Mrs. Prouse entered with her supper, for trailing behind her came her husband and her other doctor and his other patient, Peter Paring, whom Dora had not met and refused to meet now, and several other strangers all obviously linked in the glorious fellowship of disease. Happily they all trailed out again when Mrs. Prouse left. Happily, also, the food was good, if plain.

  After she had eaten, she lay for a long while looking at the rough, unpainted ceiling. Then, abruptly, she blew the light out and tried to sleep. In the house, an endless mutter of talk went on. Her anger returned at the sound of it. Outside, bright moonlight was punctuated by the yellow oblongs of other houses. What sort of a community could so shun privacy? Dora could watch the people endlessly talking and writing. She got up, remembering something, and peered into the cabinet she had noticed earlier. In the moonlight she could see it was, as she had suspected, a filing cabinet. Several of its drawers were full of notes. Here was Gavin’s life history! Dearly she wished she had a match to put to it all, to set him free. There was something very likeable about him, if it was only his unhappiness! She closed the top drawer with a slam and returned to bed.

  The talk in the house died away; the lights in the other houses dimmed one by one. All was silent. Dora’s anger turned to loneliness: never had she been so isolated. Now the cenobitic rays of the moon looked too cruel to bear. She began to weep into her pillow.

  ‘Oh, Dora …’ It was a whisper by her side

  She could not answer. Gavin sat by her, and began helplessly to stroke her hair and her arms. Nestling against her, he muttered foolish words of comfort, until finally her tears died and she turned towards him. He was smiling now; his air of uncertainty had vanished.

  ‘This is an awfully significant situation for you,’ Dora whispered, but without malice.

  Next morning, Dora woke early, though not before most of the settlement was up. A cock had been crowing outside her window half the night. Nevertheless, she felt capable of dealing with anything. For a start, she refused to remain in her room; they were not going to stop her seeing what went on.

  Not that they had the slightest desire to stop her! On the contrary, directly she stepped into the fresh air, people made a point of showing her all they could.

  She met Gavin’s grandfather, Mark, sunning himself and sharpening a heavy saw. Dropping what he was doing, he greeted her eagerly. From then on, he was her official guide.

  The settlement covered a lot of ground, chiefly because there were always at least fifty yards between each house. Frequently the distance was more, and then it was apparently reckoned as a field, because animals cropped there. Although this was all the clear result of a system, the impression it produced was one of haphazardness – but not uncharmingly so, Dora thought.

  All the buildings but two were dwelling houses. The exceptions, fair-sized blocks, housed, in one, a paper factory and binder’s and, in the other, a sort of general factory where the chief manufactures were glass, pencils and carpenter’s tools. Dora inspected everything with interest. Everyone impressed upon her how self-sufficient the settlement was, and it was only later she realised with what drastic simplification this self-sufficiency had been achieved.

  Literature and music had died a natural death, although, according to Mark, they ‘sang sometimes’. Dora quizzed him on religion but got only the vaguest of answers: he clearly did not know what she was talking about. The doctrine of disease of the mind had entirely supplanted that of original sin.

  The whole system of technology had been scrapped. For instance, there was no canning of food; those foods which would not store naturally, or could not be pickled or salted, were just not available out of season. Communication, as Dora already knew, was out. There was no electricity. Schools, as such, had ceased to exist. Government seemed nebulous. The primitive economic system staggered along without money or banking.

  ‘How do you manage to pay your doctor’s bills?’ Dora asked old Mark Prouse, interrupting a learned discourse on pig-breeding upon which he had just launched.

  He ruffled his white hair in puzzlement, and then began an explanation which only slowly made sense to the girl. His historic sense was considerably less even than Saul’s, which meant he laid wrong emphasis on the points he made.

  One thing at least became clear. The Doctors came before the collapse of the old order, not vice versa. More and more people became Doctors; those that didn’t, became patients. Being a patient took up almost as much time as being a doctor, under the new regime. The two professions swallowed all the others.

  ‘They don’t let you be ill in peace until you’re fifty-five,’ Mark said, smiling. ‘Then you’re declared Incurable and they let yo
u finish your days in peace, and the Doctors finish their days training up another Doctor.’

  And that was the only system of schooling. At least it ensured that the teachers were experienced.

  Soon after the original cry for Doctors went up, insufficient talent was left for industry and commerce; those spheres dwindled to critical level and disappeared painlessly as the new world of Treatment emerged.

  ‘You see, everyone was so keen on making a success of it,’ Mark said. ‘For once the world united in a cause. The poor folk those now – had to the pale; but all the rest united for health.’

  So now there were no trades or professions left bar medicine. The patients were non-specialist, turning their hands to anything.

  ‘I’ve brought calves into the world many a time,’ Mark said. There was power in the sun’s rays now, and he opened his shirt collar and straightened his back – partly in memory of younger days, partly because he was conscious of the attractiveness of the girl by his side. ‘I’ve sawed down trees, and got ’em sized up into planks or pulped down into paper, and I’ve spun yarn and I’ve planted tree – and corn – and vegetables, and I built my own house when I was wed. Done everything round here, down to sweeping sheep’s droppings. So’s everyone else. It’s a pretty full life – talking apart.’

  ‘And the doctors?’ Dora wanted to know.

  ‘It’s about time we went to breakfast, young lady. You ask me so many questions I never knew I knew so many answers.’

  But as they walked along he explained that such maintenance of order as was required fell to the Doctors; in other words, they had to make all decisions in the settlements. The Doctors themselves had a sort of inner cabinet of five Coordinate Doctors, of whom Saul was one. It was this cabinet which decided whether a child at the age of sixteen should become a patient or a Doctor.

  This task of governing was evidently considered a hard job by the patients, as was diagnosing and writing shorthand, which also fell to the Doctors’ lot. In return for taking on these burdens – and of course for looking after their patients – the Doctors were absolved from other work.