The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Wonderful!’ I whispered.

  ‘We are happy to have succeeded so well,’ Glanville said.

  With a start, I looked up. For the moment I had forgotten him. At my invitation, he had brought the reports down personally, and was to stay with me over the weekend. He stood now, leaning forward with hands on the desk, watching me. An arrangement of marigolds in a bronze bowl reflected sunlight up the tight lines of his jaw. His eyes gleamed with what, for an instant, I read as triumph, and then he avoided my gaze and betrayed the true nature of his feelings.

  I had asked him down for a special purpose, and now, suddenly, I needed his friendship.

  ‘Geoff,’ I said gently, ‘please don’t be jealous.’

  Directly it was said, I regretted it, afraid it would draw his anger. If it did so, it drew the deep kind of anger that stays inside a man and matures like wine: that, at least, was how I judged it years later, yet at the time he seemed calmed by my directness and replied, lightly enough, ‘I’m jealous, aren’t I, for an entirely new motive!’

  Strolling over to a full-length mirror, he surveyed himself narrowly and said, ‘Yes, a new motive, Alec. Amazing, the by-products of science; every new invention leaves a new dent on the human soul – but why wax platitudinous? I expect in a few hundred years you’ll be pretty quick to spot a platitude … I can’t help my jealousy, Alec – Oh, I can control it, but that’s another matter. You see, no matter what misfortunes a man has had to face, handicaps of class, money or creed, he’s always been able to look at his fellows and say, “Whatever we may be now, we’ll die the same”. That’s not true any longer. There’s always you, Alec: permanent, perpetual. It somehow makes the world seem unfair …’

  Evidently this was something he had long been wanting to say to me, but his speech lost force towards the end. I knew why. He was consoled by his reflection in the mirror. At forty-two he still had the open air look I remembered in his undergraduate days. Wide-shouldered, deep-chested, virile – these would be the adjectives he was mentally applying to his mirrored self. The plastic surgery had fixed me at about thirty-five: no doubt he easily persuaded himself that the grey fringe growing along his black locks was more becoming on him.

  ‘You ought to get married, Geoff,’ I said.

  ‘I’m too sought after!’ he exclaimed, but surprisedly, as if I had guessed his thoughts. ‘That’s quite irrelevant,’ he added.

  ‘Not quite – for me,’ I said. ‘The agreement was that I should live among people who knew nothing of my – future, so as to avoid friction on either side; the idea being that every so many years, with assistance from the trust, I move off and set up again where I am unknown. It was also arranged that you folk who were in the know should have little contact with me between examinations. Right?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he said, meaning ‘Where’s this leading?’

  ‘I invited you down, Geoff,’ I continued, ‘because even an everlasting man has his worries. I want a bit of personal advice. I’ve wanted it for some time, but I had to wait for these results.’

  ‘You can afford to wait,’ he said.

  ‘Not in this case. No more than you could in the same position. I want to get married, Geoff.’

  ‘I hear they’ve founded a Chair of Mentography at Oxford,’ Lynette said to Glanville.

  She and Geoff, I was relieved to find, liked each other from the moment of meeting. ‘But then, simple country girl that I am, I always like Oxford men, don’t I, Alex?’ she had said, taking us both gently by the arm but giving mine a proprietary squeeze. She was far from being simple, although a straightforward manner might have been mistaken for simplicity. She was courageous; her husband had been one of the country’s leading test pilots until his death three years ago, which is to say that Lynette had been practically wedded to a nervous breakdown. It had given her a kind of crinkled look about the eyes which I worshipped.

  During the evening she did most of the talking, an unusual feat for Lynette. But Geoff sat and smoked and listened, and I sat and watched – watched not Lynette, for all her graceful bearing and magnificent sweep of hair, but Glanville himself. For he was forming a decision, and I had sworn to myself that I should abide by it. I could never be neutral, as Glanville could. Passion above all calls for ex cathedra judgment: ought I to enter a more intimate relationship with Lynette?

  I excused myself, slipping out into the darkness, oppressed by desire and the helplessness of desire. It was a sullen summer’s night, the sky like a heavy stomach full of thunder. And there was an international crisis on, Someone’s spies discovered, Someone’s ambassador withdrawn; war, like lightning, flickered below the horizon. And I stood there trying to guess what Glanville would say to me after Lynette had gone.

  ‘Yes, marry her! She’s the one woman in a thousand who could face such a situation,’ he might say. ‘She realises fully the dual nature of love, intellectual love and the love of the senses. She could bear stoically the pathos of seeing herself age and wither while you retained your youth. She alone …’

  Well, that was the kind of thing I hoped he would say; having anticipated it, I could bear it and bear to hear someone speak coolly of Lynette with her fires dying.

  It was after midnight when Lynette drove away, and a few heavy spots of rain hustled us back into the house. Glanville mixed himself another drink and downed it with his back towards me. By that I sensed things would not turn out as I had expected.

  ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’ I said flatly.

  ‘She’s very charming,’ he replied with equal lack of emphasis.

  ‘God!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t let’s be inhibited.’

  He looked slowly round the room, as if my silly remark might be found hanging on one of the walls. Then his eyes met mine; he flushed and said, ‘Can’t you see she had her share of hell when Archie’ (the test pilot) ‘was alive? Why ask her to undergo anything worse than that?’

  ‘When I’ve told her about me … she can decide for herself. I swear I shan’t try to persuade her.’

  ‘You swear you won’t try to persuade her! What’s your whole attitude to her but one of persuasion? Besides, catch a girl of that calibre in a situation like that and her answer’s a foregone conclusion. She’ll say “yes” out of pure defiance.’

  The rain suddenly redoubled its efforts and filled the room with sound, sibilant and oppressive. I walked over and closed a window with a shaking hand.

  ‘But if I told her –’ I began.

  ‘You should have told her long ago,’ he interrupted, ‘or – oh, warned her off or something – told her you had TB.’

  He spoke roughly, turning back to the drinks on the trolley.

  ‘You’ve had enough drink,’ I said. The anger in my throat made my voice thick. ‘What you suggest is – against human nature.’

  As if he had not heard me, he picked up a bottle and commenced to pour. He made the action as slow and deliberate as he could. I lost my grip and leapt at him. I seized him by the wrist, my other hand clutched at his tie, twisting it. The liquor spilt in an arc across the carpet.

  ‘Who said you were human any more?’ he asked savagely, and broke away from my grip. He staggered, lost his balance and fell onto a chair; it was a modern span type and the arm broke, sending him onto the floor. Without another word, he picked himself up and lurched out of the room.

  ‘Glanville!’ I called, ‘Glanville, come back here, we’re drunk, we don’t know what we’re saying to each other. Come back!’

  My resistance had gone. I was frightened of the future: that was the first time. Glanville paid no heed. He marched down the corridor and slammed his bedroom door in my face.

  Vainly, I hammered on it, making a useless fool of myself.

  ‘Don’t you see, I must marry someone of my own generation,’ I cried. ‘Next generation’ll be too late: I can’t love anyone born so much later than me. It wouldn’t feel right. Can’t you see I need the memory of Lynette to carry into the future with me? Can�
��t you see that, Geoffrey? It’ll be something to give me courage … Geoff, can you hear me? Are you listening, man?’

  But I banged on the smooth panel without effect: only the thunder answered me.

  That was a bad night. Once I went out to the garage, determined to drive over to Lynette and have it out with her there and then. But at the double doors I stopped, knowing that in my present state I should make a fool of myself. I cursed myself, letting the rain run in rivulets through my hair and down my neck. Then I went back and sprawled damply on the settee, smoking, drinking, muttering to myself. Light was sneaking spitefully round the curtains when I fell asleep.

  Glanville left without breakfast, without my seeing him again.

  The political crisis was at its worst that day. Speeches, angry crowds, marching feet, camouflaged tanks moving down the roads – an overdose of these causes a temporary eclipse of personality: probably that’s how dictators get their own way so easily. ‘Public faces in private places’ lose their anxious inner voices; I have seen it a score of times since.

  Meetings, speeches and communiqués were exchanged, threats and promises about the hydrogen bomb were made, and then – at the eleventh hour – someone climbed down.

  A few square miles of Europe changed hands almost surreptitiously and the great pot of war went off the boil again.

  Lynette came to see me.

  ‘I have received a very frightening letter from Geoffrey Glanville,’ she said. Like me, she could be direct when necessary, however much hesitation might have attacked her before.

  ‘He had no need to write to you,’ I said.

  ‘I fear he acted for the best.’ Perhaps even at that early point I knew that she was finished with me. But it took me a long and painful while to look the fact in the eye. Lynette was as reasonable as anyone would have been under the circumstances: it was the fact that I had not told her personally which really beat me, added to an indefinable lack of morale engendered by my stupid behaviour with Glanville.

  ‘Please don’t make things worse, Alex,’ she begged. She always called me Alex; everyone else made it Alec. There was that indefinable timbre in her voice which reveals unexpectedly that women are more sensitive than men. Hearing it, I folded up, apologised, smiled, clasped hands, apologised again and said good-bye to her.

  ‘Good-bye, Alex,’ she said. And that was all.

  Time will heal. In my case the hackneyed old saw took on a toothsome flavour. I repeated it without believing it, but of course in time it came to be true, in a feeble sort of way.

  For some reason, during the early, worst months, I did not blame Glanville. I just reckoned he had been doing what he thought best. Then it occurred to me he had acted out of spite, even hatred. I remembered what he said about my making the world seem unfair. A cold little fear haunted me for some while to think a member of the trust should feel like that about me. Then I forgot him, preoccupied with the memory of Lynette.

  After eleven years, there was a letter from A. E. Peters. It was to tell me that Sir Dennis Wheadon had died and to send me a parcel that the old dean had bequeathed me. I found some books by which Sir Dennis had set great store, some government shares and a rambling letter of some forty thousand words written to me over several years and containing disquisitions on the philosophical significance of a life span.

  The death of this old man affected me more deeply than I had expected. He had spent his life buried in a scholarly milieu, hardly knowing the outer world; yet in his small way, cheek by jowl with his old maidish manners, he had exhibited courage and integrity, afraid neither of life nor the death that had now overtaken him.

  I wrote back to A. E. Peters expressing my sympathy, but had no reply. When answer came, a month later, it was from Eric Bardon. Peters himself had died suddenly the day after writing to me. Bardon and Dr Heynes were busy electing new members for my committee. No mention was made of Glanville.

  These events should have prepared me for change at Oxford when, after the due span of years had passed, I returned for my next examination. But I was busy, concerned with so many things that even the emptiness Lynette had left inside me was seldom felt, and – I was preoccupied with the nightmare which descended on me that last night at home.

  I dreamed I was back in those corridors under the Antarctic, before they exploded the bomb that was to release me from time. Once more the cumbrous paraphernalia was strapped about me, the leads and filters pricking down through my flesh, the shields pressing against me, the clamps forcing every joint into the necessary angles. I was pushed, like food that is to have its bacteria purged by nuclear radiation, into an oven. Over me lay so many calculated tons of lead, rock, ice … I was the one tiny fragment of life in a vast, waiting expanse. And then, above ground, the bomb was activated.

  But in the dream I had to endure it all in a state of full awareness, instead of in that deep unconsciousness that was the only possible course in reality. And in the dream they could not get to me afterwards … not for a millennium …

  Dr Eric Bardon met me. He was now grey-haired but immaculate as ever.

  ‘Marvellous, marvellous!’ he said, peering hard at me as we shook hands. ‘Not a wrinkle!’

  ‘They’re heaping up inside,’ I said lightly.

  We walked slowly down Broad Street, where Oxford’s first nylon building was going up. He talked of changes which would affect me. I might not like the new members of my trust. He and Dr Heynes had chief say, of course, but the others were ‘not scholars – business men’. When Sir Dennis and Peters had gone and Glanville had resigned –

  ‘Glanville –’ I started to say and then, by one of those coincidences that happen with curious frequency, we saw Glanville himself approaching us with a white-haired woman by his side.

  He was very bent. When he saw us, he stopped suddenly and drew himself up, looking confused.

  Bardon put a hand on my arm and we stopped too.

  With a curious look of shame and triumph mingled, Glanville said, ‘Hello, Alec. Fancy running into you. I’d like you to meet my wife.’

  ‘Hello, Alex!’ she said gravely.

  I had not recognised Lynette until she spoke to me.

  The Saliva Tree

  There is neither speech nor language:

  but their voices are heard among them.

  Psalm XIX.

  ‘You know, I’m really much exercised about the Fourth Dimension,’ said the fair-haired young man, with a suitable earnestness in his voice.

  ‘Um,’ said his companion, staring up at the night sky.

  ‘It seems very much in evidence these days. Do you not think you catch a glimpse of it in the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley?’

  ‘Um,’ said his companion.

  They stood together on a low rise to the east of the sleepy East Anglian town of Cottersall, watching the stars, shivering a little in the chill February air. They are both young men in their early twenties. The one who is occupied with the Fourth Dimension is called Bruce Fox; he is tall and fair, and works as junior clerk in the Norwich firm of lawyers, Prendergast and Tout. The other, who has so far vouchsafed us only an um or two, although he is to figure largely as the hero of our account, is by name Gregory Rolles. He is tall and dark, with grey eyes set in his handsome and intelligent face. He and Fox have sworn to Think Large, thus distinguishing themselves, at least in their own minds, from all the rest of the occupants of Cottersall in these last years of the nineteenth century.

  ‘There’s another!’ exclaimed Gregory, breaking at last from the realm of monosyllables. He pointed a gloved finger up at the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer. A meteor streaked across the sky like a runaway flake of the Milky Way, and died in mid-air.

  ‘Beautiful!’ they said together.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Fox said, prefacing his words with an oft-used phrase, ‘the stars and men’s minds are so linked together and always have been, even in the centuries of ignorance before Charles Darwin. They always seem to play an ill-de
fined role in man’s affairs. They help me think large too, don’t they you, Greg?’

  ‘You know what I think – I think that some of those stars may be occupied. By people, I mean.’ He breathed heavily, overcome by what he was saying. ‘People who – perhaps they are better than us, live in a just society, wonderful people. …’

  ‘I know, socialists to a man!’ Fox exclaimed. This was one point on which he did not share his friend’s advanced thinking. He had listened to Mr Tout talking in the office, and thought he knew better than his rich friend how these socialists, of which one heard so much these days, were undermining society. ‘Stars full of socialists!’

  ‘Better than stars full of Christians! Why, if the stars were full of Christians, no doubt they would already have sent missionaries down here to preach their Gospel.’

  ‘I wonder if there ever will be planetary journeys as predicted by Nunsowe Greene and Monsieur Jules Verne –’ Fox said, when the appearance of a fresh meteor stopped him in mid-sentence.

  Like the last, this meteor seemed to come from the general direction of Auriga. It travelled slowly, and it glowed red, and it sailed grandly towards them. They both exclaimed at once, and gripped each other by the arm. The magnificent spark burned in the sky, larger now, so that its red aura appeared to encase a brighter orange glow. It passed overhead (afterwards, they argued whether it had not made a slight noise as it passed) and disappeared below a clump of willow. They knew it had been near. For an instant, the land had shone with its light.

  Gregory was the first to break the silence.

  ‘Bruce, Bruce, did you see that? That was no ordinary fireball!’

  ‘It was so big! What was it?’

  ‘Perhaps our heavenly visitor has come at last!’

  ‘Hey, Greg, it must have landed by your friends’ farm – the Grendon place – mustn’t it?’

  ‘You’re right! I must pay old Mr Grendon a visit tomorrow and see if he or his family saw anything of this.’