by Brian Aldiss
This was the way his wife's voice came to Tancred Frazer.
She visiphoned his world-code number from the cool hall in their country house situated in the depths of Hampshire, England. The vision and sound impulses were accepted by the local exchange and carried along co-axial cable to the Southampton main exchange, and from there broadcast to the transmitter at Goonhilly Down in Cornwall. From Goonhilly, the signal went up to Postbird III, the communications satellite, which promptly bounced it back to Earth again.
The signal was accepted at Calcutta. Here came the first delay - a wait of four and a half minutes before the call could be accepted by the Allahabad office, in the Province of Uttar Pradesh, in the heart of India. Finally, a relay clicked over on the automatic exchange, and the next link in the circuit was opened. After a brief delay, the call got as far as Faizabad, to the north of Allahabad.
At Faizabad, the automatic processes ceased. They were planned for installation there in 2001, the following year; but, since the official declaration of famine by the government, it looked as if the new exchange might have to wait. Meanwhile, the very pleasant operator on the board managed, after some minutes delay, to get the incoming call through to the village of Chan-danagar, twenty miles away.
Chandanagar was small, and had remained insignificant for some thousands of years until the UN Famine Abatement Wing had arrived and set up its establishments in the semi-desert thereabouts. Chandanagar, in fact, could accept only the sound signal; it did not boast a microphoto-diode bankage capable of handling vision calls. So Chandanagar shuttled the sound signal only forward to UNFAW HQ.
The very pleasant operator at UNFAW HQ read back the world-code number, checked with a list, and said, 'Oh, you want the British Detachment! Tancred Frazer is with the British Detachment. They are about five miles from here, but I have a land-line. Hang on!'
He had a temporary line available. Leaning dangerously over on his stool, he plugged in to an auxiliary board and cranked a handle with some vigour. A phone bell spluttered five miles away.
It rang in the front office of an air-conditioned building around which, for many miles in all directions, lay the heat-baked plain of the Ganges. Heavy on the plain lay the death that drought brought in its wake.
Tancred Frazer himself answered the phone when it splut-you suffer the malnutrition which brings all kinds of shadow-tered the third time, and so was able to hear his wife's voice as she spoke from the cool lounge of their house in Hampshire.
For all the glad noises they made at each other, their conversation went haltingly.
'The daffodils were over by the end of the first week in April.'
They seemed very soon to get down to unimportant things.
'Late for daffodils, wasn't it?' the flower shall die and also the seed thereof but some flowers
'No, darling, very early. There is something the matter, isn't there? Do please tell me if there is. You know I shall only worry. Is the sight of all those poor starving people getting you down?'
He held a hand to his brow and said, 'No, I'm fine. Kathie —' But he could not bring himself to make any declarations of affection; that would have been too false, even for him, in the circumstances.
'I'm going to ring off and worry if you don't tell me, you know.'
'I'm being bombarded by voices,' reluctantly.
'You're eating buns and what? This is a terrible line.'
'I said I'm being bombarded by voices in my head - your voice and all these pathetic people here.'
'Poor darling! It's the heat, I'm sure. Is it awfully hot in Chandanagar now?'
That was safer; they were getting back to the weather. But as he eventually put the phone down, Tancred thought miserably, Of course she knows, she heard the admission in my voice as surely as I heard the knowledge in hers. After all, she's been through it enough times. What a bastard I am! But underlying daffodils were over by the end of the first week in April and with it all he felt anger at Kathie, anger because she was innocent. He padded back into his improvised bedroom to Sushila, hitching the towel round his waist as he went.
Sushila Nayyer had covered herself with a sheet and reclined on his bed in the simple grandeur of her being. Sushila was now almost nineteen, a mature and strong-minded woman. She had stayed with Tancred and Kathie in England three years ago, when she was studying medicine at Guy's Hospital; he had draws in the comfort of her latest breath all dazzled with the conceived a violent desire to sleep with her then. When his period of UN service brought him the chance of going to famine-struck regions of India, he had at once set about tracking Sushila down, which accounted for his presence in this dusty camp. He still could only marvel at his luck.
'Was it your wife?' she asked. 'Phoning all the way from I don't think you often enjoy the luxury of hearing the real England?'
'Yes. Kathie. She was worrying about me. She always worries. It's all right.'
They looked at each other. He wondered just how much their inner selves understood from that glance.
'Do you want to come back on the bed with me?'
'You bet I do!'
She gave him her slow serious smile which never failed to disturb him.
As he took off the towel, so she turned back the sheet. Because she was a modest Muslim woman, the gesture was curiously modest, a confidence between them. Her body, the flesh built on O Babi Babi will the children remember me their mother like to fine Asiatic bones, was an oasis compared with the deserts of starved bodies outside, the famine-clad mothers who walked a hundred miles to find water for their children. Tancred tried to and in the well only a smell of old bones the rotted carcases of dismiss the tiresome voices and images that punctuated his being, and climbed beside that beautiful creature, prepared even before he touched her to possess her again. Kissing her belly, he whose sorrows lay more siege unto my soul that all my some-could almost ignore his disruptive and fragmentary thoughts. As he buried his face in her strange-smelling black hair, the phone convulsed itself into life again.
'Sod it!'he said, monsoon's breaking at last according to the weather station
This time, the interruption was more permanent. When he had put the phone down, he went back to Sushila.
'Sorry, lover-girl! I'll have to get dressed. That was Frank Young. There's an emergency call out. Bad floods at Bhagapur, and HQ want as much help as we can give. I have to go and see Young. Where the hell is Bhagapur, anyway?'
He was glad to see she was going to take this interruption without one of her displays of temper; there was only a slight trace of sulkiness in her voice as she said, 'It's a small town about fifty miles north of here, towards the Nepal border. They always have floods at Bhagapur! Will you have to go?'
'I hope not. It depends on Young. He says he is going with an aid unit as soon as possible.'
'It's always "as soon as possible" with that idiot Young! He is so British. Bhagapur can surely wait.'
'Postponement is an Indian virtue. In Europe, it's an admission of failure.'
He kissed her.
Dressing, Frazer went through the office and out into the road outside. As he lost the protection of the air-conditioning, he felt the monstrous heat of the plains engulf him. But the air-conditioning system had three vents, one on either side of the office block and one at the front, and it was possible to stand in the road so that one took advantage of the cooler air voided from the ugly front grill above the office door. Even so, he felt strangely ill, as he often did when standing here looking at the desolation about him.
The detachment had fenced itself off from the rest of the world; its several acres were surrounded by barbed wire. The hospital was the only considerable building in the encampment: a big square grey building down the road, already full to overflowing. All about it stood the wretched bivouacs of the refugees, a sagging village of bamboo poles and tattered sacking and plastic sheets.
The office block was nearer the gate. It was a new building, already showing signs of
decay. Next to it, a new storehouse had just been completed and was already having to be repaired -part of the wall looking on to the office block had collapsed.
Although this was the stifling afternoon hour when most to stare out through the window at the blackness of the garden people except adulterers rested, building women were at work repairing the wall, walking slowly with dignity, bare feet grey, loads of home-made bricks in baskets on their heads, up and down the scaffolding, hardly speaking, a fold of their saris over their heads as a marginal protection against the heat.
The road straggled in front of office block and store. On the other side of the road were the old lath-built warehouse, several times robbed and now almost empty, and the light huts used as living quarters by the UN medical team. Nearer the gate were the transport section, the guard house, and other offices. That was all. A poor little punctuation on the vast monotony of the plain.
Although Frazer took all this in, for he never lost his horrified fascination with the harshness of the view and the sight of the famine victims, some of whom now squatted or stood, as he did, outside the offices, his gaze was drawn chiefly to the sky.
Towards the north, the plain died in purple haze. Above the haze, stormy rain clouds piled into the atmosphere, distorted, you see passion and violence are a very integral part of the compressed, angry, here black, there brilliant, as if atomic fires stirred within them. There rode the monsoon, bringing blessed rain. It looked as if it was going to fall on Chandanagar: but so it had looked for the last five nights. Instead, the rain had fallen to the north; while the wells in Chandanagar offered only a smell of old bones as the ground rotted in the three-year-old in the well only a smell of old bones as the rotted carcass of the drought, the river above Bhagapur flooded and washed away the inhabitants. In my pot only broken crumbs of water only broken crumbs
An old woman called to him, extending an arm like an old broken umbrella. He crossed to Young's hut.
Frank Young was already on the move. He was in his sixties, a slaggy choleric man with sparse hair covering his skull, as heavy-jowled as he was heavy-buttocked, but still a swift-moving man when action was required of him. He had brought this UNFAW detachment into being, seen it through numerous crises, including a cholera scare, and showed no sign of giving up yet. Equally, he showed little inclination to like Frazer, although his position of command inhibited him from making it too plain. His two under-officers, Garry Knowles and Dr. Kis-You had your orders you had no damned business leaving the ari Mafatlal, a plump Bengali, were with him. Knowles was moving out, saying, 'I'll get the hovers ready,' as Frazer entered.
Mafatlal gave Frazer an uneasy smile. He had thick well-oiled hair and beautiful manners, both of which attributes made him appear out of place beside Frank Young. 'I was trying to explain to Mr. Young what an unpredictable river our Ganges is, and always has been throughout the entire historical times, with one branch simply entirely dry while another branch may be —'
'Yes, never mind that now, Mafatlal,' Young said brusquely. He treated the long-winded little man as a figure of fun; under Young's influence, most of the other doctors did likewise. 'Frazer, you have the picture? Severe floods in the Bhagapur area. Galbraith at HQ has just radioed me asking for full support. Over a thousand believed drowned in Bhagapur itself, and a severe landslide threatening villages a few miles from Bhagapur. I'm going to take both hovercraft and all UNFAW personnel over there, except for the hospital staff and Mafatlal. Mafatlal and you will be in charge here. We'll radio you when we get to the other end. Okay?'
'I can hardly officially take charge, sir. I'm only a visitor here. If I came with you and Knowles —'
'I want Knowles with me. Garry knows this kind of work. You sit here and hold Mafatlal's hand - and that woman doctor's, of course, Miss Nayyer. It's all routine. Just remember we have valuable stocks of grain in the new store, and keep the guards up to their duties.'
'How long do you plan to be gone?'
Controlling his exasperation, Young drew tight the straps on his sleeping bag, which he then slipped into his pocket, and said, 'That depends on the monsoon, not me, doesn't it? Damned silly question to ask, Frazer, if you don't mind my saying so.'
'Just now, I am telling Mr. Young that we may also have the flooding here also within twenty-four hours—' Mafatlal said, but Young nodded curtly and ushered them out of the room.
'Pleasant fellow,' Frazer commented sarcastically, as he stood outside with Mafatlal and watched Young's baggy figure move among the huts, calling to the other members of the team.
'Yes, he is a very pleasant fellow at heart,' said Mafatlal. 'First, you have to see into his heart. Also, his heart responds to action and then he likes to assume a very authoritarian pattern of behaviour, perhaps ingested mentally from his father at some early age - I believe his father was a military man. Don't you find, Mr. Frazer, that on the whole the man of action is an easier psychological type to get along with in everyday pursuits?'
'I never considered it.' Christ, was he going to have to listen you try to hide that you are unsure of your own psychological to Mafat's philosophizing all the while the others were gone?
'You are a man who considers more than he cares to reveal, Mr. Frazer, are you not?'
Frazer screwed up his eyes and stared at Mafatlal. Perhaps he the flower shall die and the seed but some flowers never die should confide in the doctor, tell him about the voices; sometimes they seemed oddly precognitive; as if they might be more than the signs of an inner sickness.
'I'm worried, Kisari, to tell you the truth. I just don't want to go into the matter.'
'Of course, I understand. It's good of you to tell me. But maybe I can be of more help to you than you think, because I my child child my child this poor old sack that is thy mother have always made it my business —'
'I don't want to go into it now.' He wanted to function well here, make himself useful. A little knot of refugees was closing in on him and Mafatlal. They were each given a bowl of rice gruel with vitamins every day; it was sufficient to keep them living but not properly alive. Their eyes were a torment to him. They sensed already that crisis stirred in the camp and feared it might threaten their shadowy existence. They were talking earnestly to Mafatlal in supplication; he was answering them curtly, to stare out through the window at the blackness of the as if he also had temporarily become the man of action. Between the well-fed and the starving was drawn the most rigid line of all.
Sushila appeared at the door of the office block, dressed in her neat authoritative dress. Glad to see her, Frazer crossed to her side and explained the situation.
'The people tell me that the rain will break here this evening,' she said quietly. 'If it does, the fit ones will" attempt to go back Divine Zenocrate fair is too foul an epithet for thee that in to their villages to see if the wells have water again. Shall you let them go?'
'We do not want to stop them. There's plenty of rice and flour in the new store, but we don't know when fresh supplies will arrive, so the fewer mouths to feed here the better.'
'But you will shut the camp tonight and double the guard?'
'Yes. But there can be no danger, surely?'
'Already in Allahabad they will know this camp is almost empty of UN personnel. There are unscrupulous people about during bad times.'
He smiled. 'You are so splendidly beautiful, my divine Zenocrate ! But you are over-anxious. How about getting back to the hospital to see that nobody gets jittery down there? I'll come and collect you for a drink at sundown.'
They looked at each other. He was aware that a slight breeze stirred about them. She appeared reassured by what he said, and smiled slightly.
'Perhaps if things go well I will take you on a little expedition tomorrow, Tancred,' she said, 'If you are a good boy.' She turned and walked in the direction of the hospital.
The two big hovercraft were revving their engines; dust eddied about their grey flanks. It streamed down past the w
omen my dust loud with the living dust singing like flies dear Siva now lethargically ceasing the day's work on their wall, blowing away towards the hospital and the ragged encampment. It streamed past the ten men of the UNFAW team as, packs on backs, they moved towards the air-cushion vehicles. They waved a salutation to Frazer and Mafatlal as they went, try to get back before my birthday Tancred you know it
Frazer and Mafatlal stood in the roadway until the machines moved off. They watched as they moved slowly across the stricken plain, two whirling pillars of dust blowing with them. By that time, the building women had climbed down from their wooden scaffolding and were trailing back towards their quarters. But the refugees still sat or lay listlessly in the shade, or stood where the grill of the inefficient air-conditioner poured a cooler wind out of the office block.
In the sky, the granite clouds puffed and flattened themselves, the roses need the rain although it's lovely to have the spell of denying rain. Cold and desolation took hold of Frazer; he es lieght der heisse Sommer while in my heart the winter is lying thought with melancholy of his betrayed wife. I can't damned help it, Kathie; I'm a victim of lust or something - maybe I never had enough breast-feeding as an infant. Probably Mafat could explain it to me....
He did not need explanations but he needed a drink. Desiring company, he asked Mafatlal in for one as well.
The little doctor would have only a small whisky, well-diluted, and with sugar in. He admitted he preferred it diluted with champagne, but only water was available. As he toyed with the drink, he made polite conversation, to which Frazer gave random answers. Finally, he said, 'Mr. Frazer, may I make a personal statement?'
'Go ahead.'
'I am always wondering why I find it very difficult to strike up a confidence with English and American men. Would you say that that might be because of certain possibly faulty qualities in my own character which repel them?'
'God, I don't know, Kisari! Speaking for myself, I find all these personal questions pretty embarrassing, and so do a lot of people.'