by Brian Aldiss
This feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors, and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying aeroplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease.
Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (322). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now.
The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God's Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honour of their maker.
This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been amply dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in 450. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines, they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women, and to retire home in glory.
Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed.
It would be wrong to emphasize too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people were peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of him.
The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake; the next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash.
Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world had not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and the weapons of technology against the wishes of God.
With their faith strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears of the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some ceremonially eaten.
We of the Orthodox Universal faith applauded our brothers' whole-hearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixty-six wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith - and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of 482, under Jon the Chubby.
While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes.
In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the centre of what was then the North American continent, crossed the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the south Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagaska with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on Earth.
When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies, who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed.
In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed - the sanity of the Church. The Church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labour in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifices was stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (499).
Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till 900. In all this time, the Huge God never moved; it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it - a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of the Huge God's progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent; some legends claim that, before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west - the very opposite of the natural order of things we know.
Gradually, this peaceful period saw some re-establishment of order of the seasons, and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, year-long thunderstorms, lashing rains, and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy, well-calculated in its rigour of prayer and human burnt-offering to incite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one.
So the story comes almost to the present - to the year 900, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our earth!
Recall, if you will, that the First Departure in 89 lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back - we cannot live without him, as we should have realized Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts!
On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at midday, it is too dark to read without a rush light. Woe is us!
Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us.
I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men's efforts be devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once.
I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women.
I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched - fast, before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils!
The Circulation of the Blood.
Under the impact of sunlight, the ocean seemed to burn. Out of the confusion of its flames and its long breakers, an old motor vessel was emerging, engine thudding as it headed for the narrow channel among the coral reefs. Two or three pairs of eyes watched it from the shore, one pair protected behind dark glasses from the glare beyond.
The Kraken shut off its engines. As it slid between the pincers of coral, it let off a double blast from its siren. Minutes later, it lost all fo
rward momentum, and an anchor rattled down on to the collapsed coral bed, clearly visible under the water. Then it was rubbing its paintless hull against the landing stage.
The landing stage, running out from the shore over the shallow water, creaked and swayed. As it and the ship became one unit, and a Negro in a greasy nautical cap jumped down from the deck to secure the mooring lines, a woman detached herself from the shade of the coconut palms that formed a crest to the first rise of the beach. She came slowly forward, almost cautiously, dangling her sunglasses now from a hand held at shoulder level. She came down on to the landing stage, her sandals creaking and tapping over the slats.
The motor vessel had its faded green canopy up, protecting part of the fore-deck from the annihilating sun. A bearded man stuck his head out of the side of the rail, emerging suddenly from the shadow of the canvas. He wore nothing but a pair of old jeans, rolled high up his calf - jeans, and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles; his body was tanned brown. He was ambiguously in his mid-forties, a long-faced man called Clement Yale. He was coming home.
Smiling at the woman, he jumped down on to the landing stage. For a moment they stood regarding each other. He looked at the line that now divided her brow, at the slight wrinkles by the corners of her eyes, at the fold that increasingly encompassed her full mouth. He saw that she had applied lipstick and powder for this great event of his return. He was moved by what he saw; she was still beautiful - and in that phrase, 'still beautiful', was the melancholy echo of another thought. She tires, she tires, although her race is not half-run!
'Caterina!' he said.
As they went into each other's arms, he thought. But perhaps, perhaps it could now be arranged that she would live - well, let's be conservative and say ... say six or seven hundred years
After a minute, they broke apart. The sweat from his torso had marked her dress. He said, 'I must help them unload a few essentials, darling, then I'll be with you. Where's Philip? He's still here, isn't he?'
'He's somewhere around,' she said, making a vague gesture at the backdrop of palms, their house, and the scrub-clad cliff behind that - the only high ground on Kalpeni. She put the sunglasses on again, and Yale turned back to the ship.
She watched him move sparely, recalling that laconic and individual way he had of ordering both his sentences and his limbs. He set about directing the eight crew quietly, joking with Louis, the fat Creole cook from Mauritius, supervising the removal of his electron microscope. Gradually, a small pile of boxes and trunks appeared on the wooden quay. Once he looked round to see if Philip was about, but the boy was not to be seen.
She moved back to the shore as the men began to shoulder their loads. Without looking round, she climbed the board walk over the sand, and went into the house.
Most of the baggage from the ship was taken into the laboratory next door, or the store adjoining it. Yale brought up the rear, carrying a hutch made from old orange boxes. Between the bars of the hutch, two young Adelie penguins peered, croaking to each other.
He walked through into the house by the back door. It was a simple one-storey structure, built of chunks of coral and thatched in the native manner, or the native manner before the Madrassis had started importing corrugated iron to the atolls.
'You'd like a beer, darling,' she said, stroking his arm.
'Can't you rustle some up for the boys? Where's Philip?'
'I said I don't know.'
'He must have heard the ship's siren.'
'I'll get some beer.'
She went through into the kitchen where Joe, the boy, was" lounging at the door. Yale looked round the cool familiar living-room a,t the paperbacks propped up with seashells, the rug they had bought in Bombay on the way out here, the world map, and the oil portrait of Caterina hanging on the walls. It had been months since he had been home - well, it really was home, though in fact it was only a fisheries research station to which they had been posted. Caterina was here, so it must be home, but they could now think about getting back to the U.K. The research stint was over, the tour of duty done. It would be better for Philip if they went home to roost, at least temporarily, while he was still at university. Yale went to the front door and looked along the length of the island.
Kalpeni was shaped like an old-fashioned beer bottle opener, the top bar of which had been broken by sea action to admit small boats into the lagoon. Along the shaft of the island grew palms. Right at the far end lay the tiny native settlement, a few ugly huts, not visible from here because of intervening higher ground.
'Yes, I'm home,' he said to himself. Along with his happiness ran a thread of worry, as he wondered how he'd ever face the gloom of the Northern European climate.
He saw his wife through the window talking to the crew of the trawler, watched their faces and drew pleasure from their pleasure in looking at and talking to a pretty woman again. Joe trotted behind her with a tray full of beers. He went out and joined them, sat on the bench beside them and enjoyed the beer.
When he had the chance, he said to Caterina, 'Let's go and find Philip.'
'You go, darling. I'll stay and talk to the men.'
'Come with me.'
'Philip will turn up. There's no hurry.'
'I've something terribly important to tell you.'
She looked anxious. 'What sort of thing?'
'I'll tell you this evening.'
'About Philip?'
'No, of course not. Is anything the matter with Philip?"
'He wants to be a writer.'
Yale laughed. 'It isn't long since he wanted to be a moon pilot, is it? Has he grown very much?'
'He's practically an adult. He's serious about being a writer.'
'How've you been, darling? You haven't been too bored? Where's Fraulein Reise, by the way?'
Caterina retreated behind her dark glasses and looked towards the low horizon. 'She got bored. She went home. I'll tell you later.' She laughed awkwardly. 'We've got so much to tell each other, Clem. How was the Antarctic?'
'Oh - marvellous! You should have been with us, Cat! Here it's a world of coral and sea - there it's ice and sea. You can't imagine it. It's clean. All the time I was there, I was in a state of excitement. It's like Kalpeni - it will always belong to itself, never to man.'
When the crew were moving back to the ship, he put on a pair of canvas shoes and strolled out towards the native huts to look for his son Philip.
Among the shanties, nothing moved. Just clear of the long breakers, a row of fishing boats lay on the sand. An old woman sat against the elephant-grey bole of a palm, watching an array of jewfish drying before her, too idle to brush the flies away from her eyelids. Nothing stirred but the unending Indian Ocean. Even the cloud over distant Karavatti was anchored there. From the largest hut, which served also as a store, came the thin music of a radio and a woman singing. Happiness, oh Happiness, It's what you are, it's not Progress.
The same, Yale thought to himself dryly, applied to laziness, These people had the good life here, or their version of it. They wanted to do nothing, and their wish was almost entirely fulfilled. Caterina also liked the life. She could enjoy looking at the vacant horizon day after day; he had always to be doing. You had to accept that people differed - but he had always accepted that, taken pleasure in it.
He ducked his head and went into the big hut. A genial and plump young Madrassi, all oiled and black and shining, sat behind his counter picking his teeth. His name was over the door, painted painfully on a board in English and Sanscrit, 'V. K. Vandranasis'. He rose and shook hands with Yale.
'You are glad to get back from the South Pole, I presume?'
'Pretty glad, Vandranasis.'
'Without doubt the South Pole is cold even in this warm weather?'
'Yes, but we've been on the move, you know - covered practically ten thousand nautical miles. We didn't simply sit on the Pole and freeze! How's life with you? Making your fortune?'
'Now, now, Mr. Yale, on Kalpeni are no
fortunes to be made. That you surely know!' He beamed with pleasure at Yale's joke. 'But life is not too bad here. Suddenly you know we got a swarm of fish here, more than the men can catch. Kalpeni never before got so many fish!'
'What sort of fish? Jewfish?'
'Yes, yes, many many jewfish. Other fish not so plenty, but the jewfish are now in their millions.'
'And the whales still come?'
'Yes, yes, when it is full moon the big whales are coming.'
'I thought I saw their carcasses up by the old fort.'
'That is perfectly correct. Five carcasses. The last one last month and one the month before at the time of the full moon. I think maybe they come to eat the jewfish.'
'That can't be. The whales started visiting the Laccadives before we had a glut of jewfish. In any case, blue whales don't eat jewfish.'
V. K. Vandranasis put his head cutely on one side and said, 'Many strange things happen you science-wallahs and learned men don't know. There's always plenty change happening in the old world, don't you know? Maybe this year the blue whales newly are learning to appreciate eating the jewfish. At least, that is my theory.'
Just to keep the man in business, Yale bought a bottle of raspberryade and drank the warm scarlet liquid as they chatted. The storekeeper was happy to give him the gossip of the island, which had about as much flavour to it as the sugary mess Yale was drinking. In the end, Yale had to cut him short by asking if he had seen Philip; but Philip had not been down this end of the island for a day or two, it appeared. Yale thanked him, and started back along the strip of beach, past the old woman still motionless before her drying fish.
He wanted to get back and think about the jewfish. The months-long survey of ocean currents he had just completed, which had been backed by the British Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture and the Smithsonian Oceanic Research Institute under the aegis of the World Waters Organization, had been inspired by a glut of fish - in this case a superabundance of herring in the over-fished waters of the Baltic, which had begun ten years ago and continued ever since. That superabundance was spreading slowly to the herring banks of the North Sea; in the last two years, those once-vast reservoirs of fish had been yielding and even surpassing their old abundance. He knew, too, from his Antarctic expedition, that the Adelie penguins were also greatly on the increase. And there would be other creatures, also proliferating, unrecorded as yet.