The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  IV

  For the first part of the brief journey to the moon, Wyvern slept. Even when he felt himself again, he hardly left his tiny cabin.

  The ship was almost full, despite many reports of trouble in the British Republics Sector following the death of Our Beloved Leader, for most of the passengers were on official business, and so could not make cancellations even if they wished it. They had stood about uneasily at Thorpe Field before take-off, grey little people making small British jokes about having to get away from the rain at all costs; Wyvern avoided them, purposely arriving late and keeping to himself.

  A painful attempt at pre-Republican luxury had been aimed at aboard. There was a selection of drinks at the bar; perfumes were on sale; a bookstall sold something besides the eternal grey-paged numbers of On, the official magazine of the régime. Wyvern bought a modern Turkish novel. Turkey alone, neutral during two atomic wars, maintained something of an international culture. Haven of refugees from all over the globe, it produced a stream of literature and teleplays in all languages. Istanbul was again ‘the incomparable city’, as it had been over a thousand years ago.

  The novel cheered Wyvern. It was technically competent, humorous and absolutely superficial; its characters moved gaily through their paces in a non-political setting. It all served to restore Wyvern’s equilibrium, as it was meant to do. It also directed his thoughts to Eileen South.

  She did not know of Conrad Wyvern’s existence; he had never met her. Yet such were their natures that he felt he knew her better than an ordinary man might know his own wife. He had caught the essence of her as surely as a grape traps the essence of the sun.

  He would find her. In the circumscribed environments of the moon, and with his powers, that would not be too difficult. And then? Then they might perhaps escape together to the American Sector; thanks be to goodness there was nothing like an extradition order these days, with international law a thing of the past.

  It was possible that the New Police might have radioed ahead to have him arrested on landing; if they wished, they could have it done – lack of passport would be adequate reason, were one even needed. But they had, as far as Wyvern knew, nothing definite against him; the tearing up of the ticket had been no more than a spiteful gesture. No doubt, Wyvern thought ruefully, his Dufy probably hung on H’s secretary’s wall by now.

  A man called Head, from Government Warfare, greeted Wyvern when he left the Aqualung. He shook hands respectfully. Wyvern was still a free citizen, as far as the term ‘free’ applied at all these days. The Aqualung had landed on the chill expanse of field outside the huddled domes of the British Luna community. Through the ports, the strange city was visible, stewing in sunlight. They transferred from the ship straight into a buggy, which crawled into the vast maw of one of the airlocks. There they underwent the tedious process of decontamination: no infections were allowed to enter the closed system of the Sector, where they might circulate all too easily.

  Head apologised a hundred times for the lengthy delay.

  At last they were officially cleared and allowed to pass into the dome proper.

  They drove to a civil servant’s hotel on a laner, a small vehicle running on a monorail among the lanes, as the narrow avenues of the British Sector were called. The hotel accommodation was adequate, although utilitarian, like everything else up here. Head apologised for it all, taking the blame for the entire economic framework upon his own narrow shoulders.

  ‘And I shall call for you punctually tomorrow morning, Mr Wyvern,’ he said, smiling deferentially. ‘There will be a busy day ahead of us then, I dare surmise, so I will leave you now to get what I trust will be an excellent night’s rest. The bed looks at least comfortable, and no doubt you are fatigued by your journey. The water should be on at this time of the evening.’

  After more profuse expressions of solicitude for Wyvern’s comfort, Head left.

  His amiable talk of mornings and evenings had been a mere convention: it would be sunlight for the next week, and the cloche-like domes had up their polarscreens.

  As soon as he was alone, restlessness seized Wyvern. Eileen was somewhere near, perhaps within a mile. He shaved, changed his suit and went downstairs. There were few people about, mostly male and as grey and official-looking as the people on the ship. One brightly dressed woman walked elegantly into the bar; she was possibly Turkish. A synthetic orchestra was playing the ‘Atomics’ from Dinkuhl’s Managerial Suite.

  Wyvern carefully studied a map of the British Sector framed in the foyer. The name ‘JJ Lane’ roused his heart excitedly: that was the name of the lane to which Eileen had been going. He went and ordered a dinner in better spirits.

  The meal was simple: soup, a choice of two main dishes, a sweet, ice cream and something labelled coffee which was obviously and unsuccessfully synthetic. The only touch of the exotic was a Martian sauce served with the creamed fish; the new colony had begun to export something other than fissionables. With the present state of world affairs, food was scarcer than uranium.

  Once he had eaten, Wyvern went determinedly to bed. But no sooner was the light out and the window polared, than restlessness seized him. Tomorrow might be too late, he thought. Suppose the New Police arrived in the night? He got up and dressed, his fingers suddenly frantic with haste.

  As far as Wyvern could tell, he left the hotel unobserved.

  The distance to JJ Lane was short, and he decided to walk there. The British Sector had been planned with mathematical precision even before the first lunar landings, in the days of the First H-War; the thoroughfares running East – West were called ‘Walks’, and numbered; the thoroughfares running North – South were called ‘Lanes’, and designated by the letters of the alphabet, which had to stand doubled after the first twenty-six Lanes, to adhere to the plan.

  Unfortunately, some British muddle-headedness had crept into the design. Where the German and American Sectors adhered with mathematical precision to their planners’ blueprints, the British had succumbed to a traditional love of crooked lanes. JJ, in fact, out on the periphery, actually cut Five Walk in two places. The plan had been further botched by additions on the wrong side of town, so that Wyvern’s hotel, for example, stood in Minus Nine. Despite these complications, it was only ten minutes before he turned into JJ.

  Eileen South had been going to follow someone to 108. As he too moved in that direction, Wyvern ran over in his mind all he knew of this business. To begin with, something must greatly have surprised her to break through her guard and make her radiate for a moment. There had been no hint in her thought of having met another telepath, which surely would have emerged if she had done. And that indicated that whoever she was going to follow – a non-telepath – had been radiating very strongly to get through. Whoever he was, Eileen’s thought showed he was a stranger to her, and something about him evoked in her mind that curious phrase: ‘the impossible smile’.

  Of a sudden, Wyvern found himself needing to know much more about this stranger to whose house he was going. The stranger was the only link with Eileen; and the stranger had a secret disturbing him powerfully enough to radiate to Eileen accidentally, although her power was shut down.

  Wyvern knew this feeling well. If he opened his own mind to become aware of the minds about him, those minds would be as aware of him as he of them; they would be wireless receivers picking up his broadcast. Yet when his mind was closed, he still retained an abnormal sensitivity which might be agitated by agitation about him. The troubledness would loom up to him like buildings swimming on oil in a dense fog: some town halls, most merely suburban villas, one perhaps a cathedral of worry.

  As he came into JJ, Wyvern met a growing mob of people. They were a rough-looking lot, although quiet enough at present, their attention fixed on a haggard man who was addressing them. Wyvern caught something of what he was saying.

  ‘… this skinflint régime. And things aren’t going to get any better, friends. No! They’re going to get worse – and th
ey’re going to go on getting worse. It was bad enough with Jim Bull in control. He was a black-hearted rogue! But he was an old spacer! You don’t need me to remind you he was with Wattleton on the third Venus expedition; it was Jim Bull coaxed the old Elizabeth home. He knew what it was like up here.

  ‘Now Jim Bull’s dead. And I tell you this for nothing, friends – if any of the Earthbound pack that is squabbling for his empty seat now gets a whip-hand over us, we may as well go straight round to the Bureau and draw our death certificates – and I’ll be in front of the queue!’

  There was a roar of approval, but on the whole they sounded peaceable enough.

  JJ was not a savoury quarter. It had lodgings and snuff palaces and a blue cinema, and even one of the gadarenes beloved by spacemen on the search for orgies, thriving among the many tiny shops. 108 was an ‘earth shop’, the lunar version of a pawnbroker’s, so called because here were stocked all the innumerable little articles in daily use but manufactured only on the home planet. Over the shop was a small flat. A descriptive word out of an ancient thriller crossed Wyvern’s mind: seedy. This shop, this flat, was seedy.

  He pushed open the shop door and went in.

  The place was poky and ill-stocked. If you thumped your fist on the counter, you could crack the veneer – but some irate customer had thought of that already. In a cubicle at the back, the proprietor slouched over a telephone. He did not look up when Wyvern entered.

  Somewhere out of sight, a man in soft shoes ran heavily down a staircase, burst open a door and let it slam behind him.

  Still the proprietor did not move.

  ‘I want some service,’ Wyvern said sharply. ‘Are you asleep?’

  Still no movement.

  ‘Listen, I want to buy some informa –’ Wyvern’s voice died as he saw the deep stain on the man’s tunic in the region of his stomach. He pushed up the flap of the counter and went round.

  The fellow was dead, although still warm and still bleeding. He peered into eternity with a fixed, mercenary stare. His call to the exchange had never gone through, and he was beyond needing it now. The lunar ground had no worms; this stabbed body would keep for ever in its coffin.

  And did this mean the only link with Eileen South was broken? Wyvern’s thoughts twisted unhappily.

  Then he remembered hearing a man running downstairs; that could have been the murderer of the proprietor.

  He pulled open a flimsy side door and backstairs were revealed. After a second’s hesitation, he ran up them three at a time. At the top were two doors, one open. Wyvern entered at the double.

  A man lay on a bed dying. He was curled up clutching at dirty blankets, with a heavy knife in his ribs. In his agony, he rolled on to his back, driving the knife further home. He sighed wearily and seemed to relax.

  On his face, an impossible smile stretched from ear to ear.

  Wyvern knelt by the side of the bed. This man was no newcomer to violence. He looked every inch a thug. Old scars stretched from either end of his mouth right up his cheekbones, giving him, even in the midst of pain, that look of ghastly hilarity. He was clearly beyond help and fading fast. He rolled convulsively over again, burying his face in the bedding.

  Here was the link with Eileen South. There was only one thing Wyvern could do, loath as he was to do it. He opened up his mind and entered into ego-union with the dying man …

  *

  A garble of voices, beating like rain on a roof. A welter of regret, cruel as frightened fangs. Fear, foamlike. Anger. Vindictiveness, blasphemy, pain: shutters banging in December’s storm. Memory. Stupidity, the sparse lanterns going out in the mediaeval alleys of his mind. Warped ways. And, even now, even yet, hope.

  Hopes like bats, pain like a driving sleet seemed to batter against Wyvern’s face, blinding his psychic sense.

  On all sides of him, three-dimensionally as it appeared, crowded scenes from the man’s past life, scudding by, falling out of darkness into more darkness. The backgrounds were mainly of an appalling drabness, the faces in the foreground often twisted into hatred; here a girl’s countenance smiled like a lamp, there envy burned in a rival’s face; everywhere callousness, besottedness, a life run to see. Wyvern sank grimly through the sediment.

  He was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth, walled up in night while fifty movie projectors played fifty different films on him. And the projectors faltered and dimmed. He had to be quick: the man with the impossible smile was dying.

  The patterned mists cleared for a moment. Something came clearly through from the man, his identity and his latest crime:

  ‘I, George Dorgen, killed Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.’

  It came not in words but pictures, a cramped figure on a deadly mission, breaking through a bathroom wall, shooting a man in his shower. Then it all burst like a bubble and Dorgen was lying on this very bed; he had fled to the Moon, he thought himself safe, and then the man with the knife and the soft shoes entered the bedroom …

  Then that bubble of memory also burst, burst into the garish colour of pain. It flowed round, over, through Wyvern, drowning him, bearing him seven seas down in another’s futility. It bore him Everest-deep, changing its hues, fading and cooling. It carried him where no lungs could live, and then it was going, gargling away into a whirlpool down the hole in the universe where all life goes. It broke foaming over Wyvern’s head, pouring away like a mill-race, tearing to take him with it, sucking at his body, whipping about his legs, screaming as it slid over the bare nerve-ends of Dorgen’s ocean-mind-bed.

  The last drop drained. The little universe collapsed with one inexorable implosion. Dorgen was dead.

  For a long time, clutching his pebble of extraordinary information, Wyvern slumped against the rickety bed. He was vitiated. His body had no strength: his eyes would not open: his mind was dead. There was only the memory of a killer who slayed an innocent man downstairs to come up here and kill another killer; and that killer had killed Jim Bull, the killer.

  Kill, kill, kill. Wyvern feebly resolved never to use his mental power again, unless …

  Suddenly he remembered Eileen South. As far as he could tell in the chaos of Dorgen’s mind, the man had no knowledge of her at all, her identity or her whereabouts. But the mere thought of Eileen revived Wyvern. After a while, he picked himself up off the floor.

  It came to him decisively that he must get away from it all. Life was too foul, too complicated. He must get to the American Sector, or Turksdome, anywhere.

  He came weakly out on to the landing.

  Two men in the uniform of the New Police stood shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Revolvers were clasped in their fists.

  ‘Come on down quietly,’ said one of them, ‘or we’ll blow your guts out.’

  The stairs creaked one by one as he trod on them, obeying.

  The next three hours were full of uniforms and questions.

  After his first interrogation at Police Headquarters, Wyvern was put into an ordinary cell. That interrogation was made by a police sergeant with a man in plain clothes looking on. Then he was taken from the cell and questioned again, this time by a police captain and two men in plain clothes, after which he was taken to a special box-like cell.

  The back wall of this cell was fitted with a steel bench. When the door of the cell closed it was so shaped that the prisoner was forced to sit on the bench; there was no room to do anything else. The wall was of glass and Wyvern estimated, every bit of two feet thick. He sat in his pillory like a fish in an aquarium.

  He had been sitting there for about an hour when a man entered the bare room on the other side of the glass. The man was sleek and blank and neat and had a brown beard. He advanced to the glass and said, ‘Your cell is wired for sound so that we can talk comfortably. You will talk, I will listen. Your case is very serious.’

  His voice was clipped; he did indeed make it sound serious.

  Hell’s bells, it is serious, Wyvern thought. I’m spending all my time recently being br
owbeaten by big and little autocrats. If I ever get out of here, I shall suffer from persecution complex for the rest of my days.

  ‘I’ve told your people my story twice,’ he said aloud. ‘I omitted nothing. That fat police sergeant will give you a copy of my statement.’

  The beard made no comment.

  ‘A customer went into the earth shop and found the proprietor dead, stabbed,’ the beard said stonily. ‘Police were called. They heard a movement in the room above. You appeared. You were arrested. In the room you had just vacated, another body was found. Our weapon experts say the same blade did both jobs. Obviously, you are Number One suspect. I think it worth your while to tell your story again.’

  ‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Wyvern snapped. ‘Do I have to tell you people your business? Why haven’t you taken my fingerprints? Take them at once and compare them with the ones on the knife. You’ll find I never even touched it. I’ve told you who I am, I’ve told you what I’m doing on Luna – ring through and check with the government at once. I demand it!’

  The beard let this outburst die on the hot air.

  ‘I think it worth your while to tell your story again,’ he repeated.

  Wyvern sighed. Then he capitulated and said what he had said before. With certain simplifications, he told only truth. His motive for entering the shop he had altered, to avoid any mention of Eileen; he merely made himself out to be a tourist in search of local colour who had accidentally stumbled on a corpse, etc., etc. And another alteration had come at the end of the story.

  It became obvious to Wyvern as he recounted the discovery of Dorgen that he was getting entangled in a political murder; indeed, it was being pinned on him for reasons best known to the police. There was one obvious way to extricate himself, and he took it. He had to describe the real murderer, as he had been reflected in Dorgen’s dying mind. Once that murderer was caught, he, Wyvern, was cleared.