The Moment of Eclipse

by Brian Aldiss

  For centuries, the likes of these people had been pouring into Calcutta from the dying hinterland. Nine months ago, when the government of the city had fallen and the Indian Congress had announced that the city would be abandoned, the stream had reversed its direction. The refugees became refugees again.

  Caterina behind her dark glasses took in the parched images. Mankind driven always drive the bare foot on the way the eternal road of earth and no real destination only the way to water and longer grass. Will we be able to get a drink there always the stone beneath the passing instep.

  She said, 'I suppose one shouldn't hope for a shower when we get there.'

  Ayub Khan said, 'The air-condition is not all it should be, lady. Hence the sensation of heat. There has not been proper servicing of the vehicle. I shall make some appropriate com­plaints when we arrive, never wonder!'

  Jerking to avoid a knot of refugees, the hover rounded a shoulder of hill. The endless deltaic plain of the Ganges stretched before them, fading in the far distance, annihilating itself in its own vision of sun.

  To one side of the track stood a grim building, the colour of mud, its walls rising silent and stark. Not a fortress, not a temple: the meaningless functionalism, now functionless, of some kind of factory. Beside it, one or two goats scampered and vanished.

  Ayub Khan uttered a command to the driver. The hover slid to one side. The road near at hand was temporarily deserted. Their machine bumped over the ditch and drifted towards the factory, raising dust high as it went. Its engines died, it sank to the ground. Ayub Khan was reaching behind him for the hol-stered rifle on the rack above their heads.

  'What's this place?' Yale asked, rousing himself.

  'A temporary diversion, Mr. Yale, that will not occupy us for more than the very moment. Maybe you and your lady will care to climb out with me for a moment and exercise? Go steadily remembering you were ill.'

  'I have no wish to climb out, Dr. Khan. We are urgently needed in Calcutta. What are we stopping for? What is this place?'

  The Pakistani doctor smiled and took down a box of car­tridges. As he loaded the rifle, he said, 'I forget you are not only recently sick but also immortal and must take the greatest care. But the desperate straits of Calcutta will wait for us for ten minutes' break, I assure you. Recall, the human condition goes on for ever.'

  The human condition goes on for ever sticks stones bows and arrows shotguns nuclear weapons quescharges and the foot and face going down into the dust the perfect place for death. She stirred and said, 'The human condition goes on for ever, Dr. Khan, but we are expected in Dalhousie Square today.'

  As he opened the door, he smiled. 'Expectancy is a pleasing part of our life, Mrs. Yale.'

  The Yales looked at each other. The driver was climbing down after Ayub Khan, and gesticulating excitedly. 'His relish of power likewise,' Yale said.

  'We cadged the ride.'

  'The ride - not the moralizing! Still, part of abrasion.'

  'Feeling right, Clem?'

  'Perfectly.' To show her, he climbed out of the vehicle with a display of energy. He was still angry with himself for contract­ing cholera in the middle of a job where every man's capacity was stretched to the utmost; the dying metropolis was a stewpot of disease.

  As he helped Cat down, they felt the heat of the plains upon them. It was the heat of a box, allowing no perspective but its own. The moisture in it stifled their lungs; with each breath, they felt their shoulders prickle and their bodies weep.

  Ayub Khan was striding forward, rifle ready for action, the driver chattering excitedly by him, carrying spare ammunition.

  Time, suffering from a slow wound, was little past midday, so that the derelict factory was barren of shadow. Nevertheless, the two English moved instinctively towards it, following the Paki­stanis, feeling as they went old heat rebuffed from the walls of the great fossil.

  'Old cement factory.'

  'Cementary.'

  'Mortarl remanies '

  'Yes, here's an acre stone indeed....'

  The rifle went off loudly.

  'Missed!' said Ayub Khan cheerfully, rubbing the top of his head with his free hand. He ran forward, the driver close behind him. Ramshackle remains of a metal outbuilding stood to one side of the factory facade; a powdered beam of it collapsed as the men trotted past and disappeared from view.

  And the termites too have their own empires and occasions and never over-extend their capacities they create and destroy on a major time-scale yet they have no aspirations. Man became sick when he discovered he lived on a planet when his world became finite his aspirations grew infinite and what the hell could those idiots be doing?

  Switching on his pocket fan, Yale walked up the gritty steps of the factory. The double wooden door, once barred, had long since been broken down. He paused on the threshold and looked back at his wife, standing indecisively in the heat.

  'Coming in?'

  She made an impatient gesture and followed. He watched her. He had watched that walk for almost four centuries now, still without tiring of it. It was her walk: independent, yet not entirely; selfconscious, yet, in a true sense, self-forgetting; a stride that did not hurry, that was neither old nor young; a woman's walk; Cat's walk; a cat-walk. It defined her as clearly as her voice. He realized that in the preoccupations of the last two months, in doomed Calcutta and in the hospital ward, he had often forgotten her, the living her.

  As she came up the steps level with him, he took her arm.

  'Feelings?'

  'Specifically, irritation with Khan foremost. Secondarily, knowledge we need our Khans....'

  'Yes, but how now to you?'

  'Our centuries - as ever. Limit gravely areas of non-predict­ability in human relations among Caucasian-Christian com­munity. Consequent accumulation of staleness abraded by un­known factors.'

  'Such as Khan?'

  'Sure. You similarly abraded, Clem?'

  'He has chafage value. Ditto all sub-continent.'

  His fingers released her arm. The brown flesh ever young left no sign of the ephemeral touch. But the Baltic virus would have quickly healed the harshest grip he could have bestowed.

  They looked into the old chaos of the factory, moved in over rubble. A corpse lay in a side office, open-mouthed, hollow, without stink; something slid away from under, afraid for its own death.

  From the passage beyond, noise, echoey and conflicting.

  'Back to the float?'

  'This old temple to India's failure —' He stopped. Two small goats, black of face and beardless, came at a smart clip from the back of the darkness ahead, eyes - in Ayub Khan't pet word -'satanic', came forward swerving and bleating.

  And from the far confusion of shadow, Ayub Khan stopped and raised his rifle. Yale lifted a hand as the shot came.

  Temples and the conflicting desires to make and destroy ascetic priests and fat ones my loving husband still had his tender core unspoilt for more years.

  The goats tumbling past them, Yale sagging to the ground, the noise of the shot with enormous power to extend itself far into the future, Cat transfixed, and somewhere a new ray of light searching down as if part of the roof had given way.

  Rushing forward, Ayub Khan gave Cat back her ability to move; she turned to Yale, who was already getting to his feet again. The Pakistani calling, his driver behind him.

  'My dear and foolish Mr. Yale! Have I not rifled you, I sincerely trust! What terrible disaster if you are dead! How did I know you crept secretly into this place? My godfathers! How you did scare me! Driver! Pani lao, jhaldi!'

  He fussed anxiously about Yale until the driver returned from the ambulance with a beaker of water. Yale drank it and said, 'Thank you, I'm perfectly well, Dr. Khan, and you missed me, fortunately.'

  'What do you imagine you were doing?' Cat asked.

  Hold your hands together so they will not shake and your thighs if he had been killed murder most dreaded of crimes even to short-livers and this idiot —

>   'Madam, you must surely see that I was shooting at the two goats. Though I hope thoroughly that I am a good Muslim, I was shooting at those two damned satanic goats. That action needs not any justification, surely?'

  She was still shaking and trying to recover her poise. High abrasion value okay! 'Goats? In here?'

  'Mrs. Yale, the driver, and I have seen these goats from the road and chase after them. Because the back of this factory is broken, they escape from us into here. We follow. Little do we know that you creep secretly in from the front! What a scare! My godfathers!'

  As he paused to light a mescahale, she saw his hand was shaking; the observation restored a measure of sympathy for the man. She further relaxed her pulse-count by a side-glance at Yale, for their glances by now, cryptic as their personal conver­sations, told them as much; certain the shot was careless, he was already more interested in the comedy of Ayub Khan's reactions than his own.

  Yes many would find him a negative man not seeing that the truth is he has the ability to add to his own depths other people's. He stands there while others talk saintly later he will deliver the nub of the matter. My faith of which he would disapprove indeed I have an obligation not to be all faith must also fill my abrasion quota for him!

  'You know, I really hate these little satanic goats! In Pakistan and India they cause the chief damage to territory and the land will never revive while goats are upon it. In my own province, I watch them climb the trees to eat up new tender shoots. So the latest laws to execute goats, reinforced with rewards of two new- rupees per hoof, are so much to my thinking, more than you Europeans can understand '

  'That is certainly true. Dr. Khan,' Yale said. 'I fully share your dislike of the destructive power of the goat. Unfortunately, such animals are a part and parcel of our somewhat patchy history. The hogs that ensured that the early forests, once felled by stone axes, did not grow again, and the sheep and goats that formed man's traditional food supplies, have left as indelible a mark on Europe as on Asia and elsewhere. The eroded shores of the Mediterranean and the barren lands all round that sea are their doing, in league with man.'

  Does the pressure of my thought make him speak of early mankind now? Through these centuries glad and stern I have come to see man's progress as a blind attempt to escape from those hopeful buffoons so exposed to chance yet chance beats down like weather whatever you cover your back with we know who live a long while that the heart stagnates without abrasion and the great abrader is chance.

  Now Ayub Khan had perked up and was smiling over the fumes of his mescahale, gesturing with one hand.

  'Now, now, don't be bitter, Mr. Yale - nobody denies that the Europeans have their share of minor troubles! But let's admit while we are being really frank that they also have all the luck, don't they? I mean to say, to give one example, the Baltic virus happened in their part of the world, didn't it?, just like the Industrial Revolution many hundreds of years ago.'

  'Your part of the world, Doctor, has enough to contend with without longevity as well!'

  'Precisely so! What is an advantage to you Europeans, and to the Americans behind their long disgraceful isolationism, is a disadvantage entirely to the unlucky Asiatic nations, that is what I am saying. That is precisely why our governments have made longevity illegal - as you well know, a Pakistani suffers capital punishment if he is found to be a long-liver, just because we do not solve our satanic population problem so very easily as Europe. So we are condemned to our life-expectancy of merely forty-seven years average, against your thousands! How can that be fair, Mr. Yale? We are all human beings, wherever we live on the planet of Earth, Equator or Pole, my godfathers!'

  Yale shrugged. 'I don't pretend to call it fair. Nobody calls it fair. It just happens that "fairness" is not a built-in natural law. Man invented the concept of justice - it's one of his better ideas - but the rest of the universe, unfortunately, doesn't give a damn for it.'

  'It's very easy for you to be smug.'

  He looks so angry and hurt his skin almost purple his eyeballs yellow rather like a goat himself not a good representative of his race. But the antipathy can never be overcome the haves and the have-nots the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon the rich and the poor we can never give what we have. We should get back into the float and drive on. I'd like to wash my hair. The goats moved endlessly across the plain with every step they took the great enchanted ruin behind them crumbled into a material like straw and as they went and multiplied long grasses sprang out of the human corpses littering the plain and the goats capered forward and ate.

  'Smugness does not enter the matter. There are the facts and—'

  'Facts! Facts! Oh, your satanic British factualism! I sup­pose you call the many goats facts? How does it come about, ask yourself, how does it come about that these goats can live forever and I cannot, for all my superior reasoning powers?'

  Yale said, 'I fear I can only answer you with more factualism. We know now, as for many years we did not, that the Baltic virus is extraterrestrial in origin, most probably arriving on this planet by tektite. To exist in a living organism, the virus needs a certain rare dynamic condition in the mitochondria of cells known as rubmissicn - the Red Vibrations of the popular press - and this it finds in only a handful of terrestrial types, among which are such disparate creatures as copepods, Adelie pen­guins, herring, man, and goats and sheep.'

  'We have enough trouble with this satanic drought without immortal goats!'

  'Immortality - as you call longevity - is not proof against famine. Although the goats' reproductive period is in theory infinitely extended, they are still dying for lack of nourishment.'

  'Not so fast as the humans!'

  'Vigilance will certainly be needed when the rains come.'

  'You immortals can afford to wait that long!'

  'We are long-livers, Dr. Khan.'

  'My godfathers, define for me the difference between longev­ity and immortality in a way that makes sense to a short-lived Pakistan man!'

  'Immortality can afford to forget death and, in consequence, the obligations of life. Longevity can't.'

  'Let's get on to Calcutta,' Cat said. Vultures perched on the top of the stained facade: she found herself vulnerable to their presence. She walked across to the doorway. The driver had already slipped out at the back of the factory.

  On the long road the humble figures. When did that woman last have a bath to have to bear children in such conditions. This is what life is all about this is why we left the stainless towers of our cooler countries their comforts and compromises in the broken down parts of the world there is no pretence about what life is really like Clem and I and the other long-livers are merely clever western artefacts of suspended decay everyday we know that one day we shall have to tumble into slag each our own Calcutta oh for God's sake satanically can it!

  The men were following her. She saw now that Ayub Khan had laid a hand on Yale's arm and was talking in more friendly fashion.

  The hover's door had been left open. It would be abominably hot in there.

  Two skeletal goats cross the road, ears lop, parading before two refugees. The refugees were men walking barefoot with sticks, bags of belongings slung on their backs. For them, the goats would represent not only food but the reward the gov­ernment offered for hooves. Breaking from their trance, they waved their arms and wielded their sticks. One of the goats was struck across its serrated backbone. It broke into a trot. Ayub Khan raised his rifle and fired at the other goat from almost point-blank range.

  He hit it in the stomach. The creature's back legs collapsed. Piddling blood, it attempted to drag itself off the road, away from Ayub Khan. The two refugees fell on it, jostling each other with scarecrow gestures. With an angry shout, Ayub Khan ran forward and prodded them out of the way with the rifle barrel. He called to the driver, who came at a trot, pulling out a knife; squatting, he chopped at the goat's legs repeatedly until the hooves were severed; by that time, the animal appeared to be dead.
r />   The government will pay. Like all Indian legislation this bounty favours the rich and the strong at the expense of the poor and weak. Like everything else cool Delhi justice melts in the heat.

  Above the factory entrance, the vultures shuffled and nodded in understanding.

  Straightening, Ayub Khan gestured to the two refugees, invit­ing them to drag the body off. They stood stupidly, not coming forward, perhaps fearing attack. Clapping his hands once, Ayub Khan dismissed them and turned away, circling the goat's car­cass.

  To Caterina he said, 'Just allow me one further moment, madam, while I shoot down this second goat. It is my public duty.'

  To sit in the shade of the ambulance or go and watch him carry out his public duty. No choice really he shall not think us squeamish we don't need his uncouth exhibition to tell us that even we are in the general league with death. Remember after Clem and I returned from the bullfight in Seville Philip no more than seven years old I suppose asked Who won? and cried when we laughed. We must be brave bulls toros bravos who live on something less prone to eclipse than hope.

  Yale said, 'Follow and these can at least claim what's left.'

  'Sure, and we attend caprine execution.'

  'Gory caprice!'

  'Goat kaputt.'

  'You over-hot?'

  'Just delay. Thanks.' Smiles in the general blindness.

  'Delay produce of no goal within fulfilment.'

  'Vice versa too, suppose.'

  'Suppose. Eastern thing. Hence Industrial Rev never took here.'

  'Factory example, Clem.'

  'So, quite. Wrongly situated regards supply, power, con­sumers, distribution."

  Calcutta itself a similar example on enormous satanic scale. Situated on Hooghli, river now almost entirely silted up despite dramatic attempts. And the centuries-old division between India and Pakistan like a severed limb the refugees breaking down all attempts at organization finally the water-table under the city hopelessly poisoned by sewage mass eruptions of dis­ease scampering mesolithic men crouching in their cave ex­changing illnesses viruses use mankind as walking cities.