Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  “And the justifying of your accounts?”

  She buttoned her coat, every single button.

  * “Come on, Liz. Do you really think in an establishment this size I can’t absorb a dozen or two chairs, or a whole army of coffee pots?”

  “Then why that harangue when I first arrived?”

  “A matter of ascendancy, child. Simple ascendancy. . . .” He filled in a second indent. “Run along now. And never let me bully you again.”

  She took the piece of paper at arm’s length and retreated to the door. She noticed his comet standing on a microfilm cabinet. Bandmaster Daniel. She noticed the whole office, the things in it. The autosec console,

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  the stock control screens, the couch, the air conditioner, the row of geraniums in pots on the window sill . . . Groping behind her with one hand she found the doorknob and turned it.

  “Incidentally, Liza . . .” He pushed his chair away from the desk and leaned back, twitching a fine, neatly circumcised erection at her: she knew it well. . . Incidentally, it seems I could manage a sex now, Liza. If it’s not too late.”

  She fled. Inexplicably (within her series of acceptances), she turned and fled. She fled at a sedate walk, so as not to intrigue Sarah or the men in the workshop. But she fled.

  The elmwood chair, when she got it, was not heavy, and the roll of filter medium rested conveniently across its seat. She carried them down Fore Street, still not hurrying, simply breathing the uncomplicated unascendant air. Outside the Post Office she paused. There might be a letter waiting to be collected. The Post Office was a front for the Checking Department, and even this name was a euphemism. She accepted the need for censorship, as did everyone else in the Village: it was necessary to the running of any secret (and afraid) establishment. But some mornings the “checkers” had so much mail to cope with that it was not all ready in time for the postman’s early round. Any letters that were left stayed in the Post Office awaiting collection, for Paul Kronheimer did only the one round each day, getting back to his house in time for an eight o’clock breakfast. After that he removed his postman’s uniform—reproduction GPO—and took on his second occupation, Monday to Friday, of bank clerk. Since the Penheniot Bank employed no one else, he was presumably bank manager as well.

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  Penheniot was a dead-end economy, the end of the financial line. Manny Littlejohn’s money arrived in the form of cash wages, was paid out, and then returned (at least 80¾ of it) to accumulate in the bank’s considerable vaults. Nobody could possibly spend, on then- rare trips over to St. Kinnow, more than a tiny proportion of their considerable wages. And outside investment, the manipulation of columns of figures beyond the confines of Penheniot, was forbidden. One could not, the Founder argued, rely on share certificates being of any use when one finally made it into the future. Whereas hard cash might even have the added advantage of being antique. In this matter, as in every other, Manny Littlejohn exercised a rigid, if paternal and possibly well-meaning, control.

  So Paul Kronheimer was busy, five hours a day, Monday to Friday, weighing and listing ever-increasing deposits, for which simple task he was considerably cheaper to Manny Littlejohn than even the crudest computer. He clicked his tongue anxiously as he moved between the mounting stacks of coin-bags: if Professor Kravchen- sky didn’t find a way out into the future soon they’d have to build him some new vaults.

  Liza put the elmwood chair down by the wall of the Post Office and went in. A letter might be waiting, one from her parents perhaps. She hadn’t heard for weeks. . . . The door pinged behind her and the open sign swung on its piece of string. The interior was gloomy: a curranty flypaper (circa 1950) hung from the ceiling, and around the walls were ranged cards of vintage metal paper-clips, real wood pencils, and calendars depicting the old queen. The bell on the door had hardly quieted before the postmistress (Head Checker) emerged, chewing, wiping her hands on her floral pinny,

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  from her little back room. Liza leaned on the worn mahogany counter.

  “Anything for Simmons? Liza Simmons?"

  On the other side of the wire mesh screen Mrs. Kops ran her finger down the ranks of pigeonholes.

  “One from your uncle, I seem to remember. . . .” She found the letter but held it safe, not quite within Liza’s reach. “Bad news, girl. Your fathers in trouble with his students again. Your mother’s had another statutory abortion order slapped on her. Your brother’s been fined for being high and disorderly. And there’s a suspension order on the car, pending a roadspace reassessment.” She folded her arms reprovingly, rearranging her sack bust. “All in all, it’s the sort of letter we wouldn’t have let through if you hadn’t been one of our least anxiety- prone addressees.”

  “I gave up worrying about my parents years ago.” This was part of a conscious policy on Liza’s part, and she thought she meant it. Her father, after all the arguments to make her stay had failed, had thrown her suitcases out of the upstairs window. Being too young for such things to have their funny side, this act had been taken as a final severance. “They’re so idiotically blinkered. . . . They could quite well have come here with me. There was a vacancy in the school. Dad could quite well have taken it. He wouldn’t, of cornse. So . .

  Liza shrugged her shoulders, typically cool, typically enlightened, assiduous at both. Mrs. Kops observed her, and was fooled.

  “We all have loved ones on the outside, girl.” She sucked her genuine false teeth. Where Manny Litle- john had found her nobody knew. “But we are not all so ... so sensible about it.”

  The hesitation was the nearest she dared come to a reproof. Uninvolvement with the outside was what the

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  Founder looked for most of all. She hurried on, leaned

  forward, closer to Liza, curious to the point of salacity.

  “Your uncle Wal gives news also of another brother. In London too. Is that your Mortimer? Didn’t your Mort marry that girl, daughter of some architect, and go to Canada? And now he’s back in London? Marriage not in trouble, I hope. So easy come, easy go, these days.” “His marriage is fine, Mrs. Kops. He’s in London on a Fellowship, studying the Hebridian Development Scheme. Fish farming outside the main pollution areas. You may have read about it.”

  “Children too, I hope?” Mrs. Kops didn’t deal in happiness or success. “The Canadian government exercises no limitations, so they tell me.”

  “Fine children too, Mrs. Kops. Please may I have my letter?”

  “It’s a terrible world we live in, Liza.”

  “It’s a terrible world, Mrs. Kops.”

  “Thank God for the Founder, I say.”

  “Thank God indeed, Mrs. Kops.”

  The conversation ran down. The girl disquieted Mrs. Kops. There must be something to her—assistant to the great professor and still in her twenties—but what it was Mrs. Kops had never been able to discover.

  “You’ll be wanting your letter then.” She handed it over, her little hold. “But what’ll your father do, girl? Much more trouble and they’ll stop him working. Give him security housing. He won’t like that, will he?”

  Liza closed the Post Office door carefully, politely behind her. She stood for a moment, dazzled by the warmth and brightness.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said aloud. “I’ve no idea what my father will do.”

  Roses Varco was sitting on the edge of the quay, fishing. The string bag in which he would put fish as he

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  caught them was empty on the stones beside him. Liza saw him as she was about to turn into the path up to the laboratory steps. For a second time she put down the elmwood chair and the roll of filter medium. Calm and gentle and detached, he absorbed her entire attention. Attributes of wisdom, all three. She frowned—an unsound, sentimental notion, wisdom i
n the village idiot. But she walked to the edge of the quay, leaving her load by the wall of the laboratory garden, and sat down beside him. She sat down beside Roses as David Silber- stein had done before her, as others did in the Village, asking him questions he couldn’t answer, and he’d never know why. The unopened letter from her uncle rustled in her pocket.

  . “Is your father dead, Roses?”

  Formal preliminaries were unnecessary with Roses. “Ar.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Chopped hisself. Up in the woods.”

  “A long time ago?”

  It didn’t matter to either of them. But there had to be something she wanted to know.

  “A long time ago, Roses?”

  “Died like a fox in a trap. Never put down traps, me.

  Leastways, not the snappin’ sort.”

  “Were you a little boy at the time?”

  “Mind, a snare’s all right—if her’s laid proper. One jerk and her’s done with.” He remembered something she’d like to know and turned to face her. “Left me a calendar, my dad did. Buck’n’ham Palace.”

  To this Liza had no answer. She smiled brightly. Was the calendar his ascendancy, the ascendancy Daniel had talked about? She decided not. Gloriously, that was a concept with which Roses would not be acquainted. A family of swans cruised around the bend in

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  the creek and moved slowly among the low-hanging branches of the oaks on the bank. Roses would take them for granted, but their lives were only made possible by a multi-million pound river purification scheme. The idea of wisdom, wholeness from the mouths of children was as foolish as it was sentimental. But she tried again, still not knowing what she wanted in return.

  “Suppose your father was still alive, Roses? Suppose he lived a long way from here, and suppose you knew he was in trouble. What would you do?”

  He was silent for so long she thought he’d forgotten the question. Not that his answer would be worth having. One of the swans, snow crisp, sailed out into open water and beat its wings noisily.

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. . . .” She wished she hadn’t asked. “Trouble with the law, perhaps.”

  “That’s easy, then. What’s the law, eh? Daft coppers. Load of old rummage.”

  “They might send him to prison, Roses.”

  “Ar . . .” The enormity of this quelled him. “Well now that be something altogether different.”

  He lapsed into silence on the subject, a silence that had apparently come to stay. So where was the widom? Certainly he was opaque. Her error had been to equate mystery with wisdom. Yet, even without wisdom, his mysteriousness was still intriguing. Especially intriguing—inevitably she thought in these patterns—was his maleness. Not because it was clothed. Not because it was reserved, or uneducated, or at thirty-eight still credibly virgin. No, his maleness was intriguing because of its . . . she hesitated at the word that presented itself, wondering at the apparent incongruity, the unavoidable rightness . . . because of its violence. Its violence. She sought explanations for her choice, but none came.

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  “Tell you what—them swans know a bob or two.” He put one hand on her arm, the other still holding his willow rod. He was dirty, but not repulsively so. “Just you see them swans. Reckon they’m a happy fambly, do you?”

  The birds were now all clear of the oak trees, dappled brown cygnets slushing their beaks in the weed around an outlying rock, the parent birds, in stays, watching for movement out across the water.

  “Happy fambly? That’s all you know. See ’em come next spring when there’s eggs hatching. Old ones going like battleships, beating this year’s lot away. No room, see? Food for one fambly. Not two. Reckon they know a bob or two, them swans.”

  Liza saw, surprised at his mental processes (what could she know of them?), that he was making an analogy.

  “We’re not swans, Roses. We’re people. We look after our children and then, when we’re old, they look after us. Or they make sure that the State does.” The cold proviso. And she remembered too late the father chopping himself up in the woods. There was a story there that should have been avoided. “I’m sorry, Roses. That was silly of me.”

  “Silly? Why silly?”

  She left it. As he had.

  “You were telling me about the swans.” Trying not to patronize. “You must know a lot about them.

  ‘1 watch them. Row after them, hours and hours. Where they roost. Where they make they’s nests. Where they go for food. . . .” He became excited. “Here—bet all you know is to think they’m nasty peevish things. Don’ you now? Nasty peevish things?”

  She smiled, admitting it.

  “Well, they’m not.” Triumphant. “They got their

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  places, that’s all. Same as you nor me. Sticks up for ’em." He took his hand off her arm and made squares, enclosures in the air. “I tell you, when they’m going some- wheres, won’ say boo to nobody. Not their place, see?” His hand remained in the air, forgotten, as it had been previously on her arm. “Look, I remember they up river, near Patton beach, and this little black moorhen come out. Weren’t no bigger’n tuppence. You should’v seen they go. Weren’t their place, see?”

  With something to tell her, he could talk. And she, with something to hear, could listen. He walked his buttocks sideways on the stones to be closer to her, more able to communicate. He was a person, a man, no longer Manny Littlejohn’s joke. He talked on into the morning, and she listened and watched. He wanted nothing else of her, nothing at all. Their contact was without overtones: it was sufficient for her to sit and listen and watch, and share the violence of his love. The love he had for his swans.

  She sat on the quay beside Roses till Professor Krav- chensky came out onto the landing at the top of the stairs up to the laboratory and saw her and called to her. She left Roses with sincere and unnecessary apologies: he was unsurprised by her going—people came and went in his life quite without apparent reason. She returned to the chair and the roll of filter medium, and carried them up to the laboratory. She returned almost with a shudder of dread to the Bohn and the take-out platform, the accelerators, the pulse generator, the random clock . . . and the professor. The professor who, an old man she respected, an old man she served, an old mail pathetically too old for the sexing at which they had worked so hard, would therefore treat her coldly, with hidden shame, for the rest of their working life together. She returned to her life, to work and sex, to

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  reality. She accepted them with careful, joyful sanity.

  And David Silberstein, passing the end of Fore Street and seeing distantly her hand on Roses Varco’s shoulder as she left, detected neither care nor joy nor sanity. All he saw—through a faint green haze—was a little girl called in from play. A little girl who had found an affable piece of detritus on the beach and had invested it, seaglass, with diamantine qualities. He observed the piece of detritus after it was left, how vulnerable it was, and told himself (with careful, joyful sanity) that he really didn’t have to worry.

  And what he told himself was true. For, of all the people in the Village, Roses Varco was by far the most vulnerable.

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  THREE

  Manny Littlejohn liked to travel by rail. He liked it so much that he had his own train, pink, pulled by his own pink locomotive. It was expensive, of course—clearing main lines at a few hours’ notice cost money—but Manny Littlejohn was never parsimonious where his own bad taste was concerned. Also it was slow, and the stations were far less conveniently situated than the equivalent helicopter pads. But Manny Littlejohn was rich enough no longer to regard time as money, but rather money as a convenient way of buying time. Furthermore, it was old-fashioned. But Manny Littlejohn himself was old-fashioned, and also old enough—in an ag
e when modernity was both vogue and anti-vogue—no longer to care either way.

  Understand Manny Littlejohn, understand his vigor, his genius for the fresh approach, his organizational ability, his style, understand above all his fear that—old as he was—the society around him might collapse before he did, and you understood the Penheniot Experimental Research Village. Most people understood neither. Yet it was perfectly logical. The Village, though bigger and better, was his pink train. In it, one day soon, he would travel.

  On this particular afternoon Manny Littlejohn’s non- metaphorical train had left the main line some five minutes before and was now on the single track that ran

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  close beside the St. Kinnow river. On the right the tree- covered hillside climbed steeply, broken by occasional tiny gorges where streams poured over mossy stone shelves between tangles of fern and brambles and wideleaved larks’ tongues. On the left lay the high tide river, bounded by further heavy, oak-green hillsides, not a house in sight, its surface disturbed only by a small flock of seagulls that rose in token anxiety as the train went by. It was the part of the journey that Manny liked best, and he rang through for the engine driver to go more slowly. The silenced mutter of the wheels altered slightly.

  Very gradually a group of houseboats came into view by the opposite bank, their weatherworn fiberglass dull and grubby in the afternoon sunlight. They were newly anchored, housing social deviants, and they spoiled the view. He nearly called his social psychologist in from the next carriage for a detailed assessment, but he decided he could do all the assessing he needed, and in shorter words. Wood-smoke rose from three or four chimneys, and washed clothes hung motionless on lines. Dinghies pottered around. The faint sound of voices came in through the open carriage window, men and children and women singing. Manny Littlejohn examined the scene, despising such community incompetence. The birds were few, and would soon be gone altogether. The. houseboats would hardly last longer. Two or three years at the most. Yet they’d cleared a patch of trees on the bank and were trying to grow vegetables. And, if he knew these communities,' there’d be an earnest little school, and earnest discussions, and mysticism, and hallucinogens, and a lot of earnest sex. Living off Assistance, inculcating standards into their illegal children, looking no further than the ends of their two or three year noses.