The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘I don’t care!’ he said. ‘I’d be free to write, to suffer as a writer should.…’

  The old vision was back with renewed strength. Only he could not quite get it in focus. It wasn’t fiction exactly he wanted to write – the characters were too difficult in fiction. It was … it was …

  Well, he could settle that later. Meanwhile, he could settle the hash of his beloved boss, Darkling, if he played his cards right.

  Darkling’s moustache twitched as Stone entered.

  ‘I won’t detain you a minute, sir. A little matter has just arisen that I’m sure you can deal with.’

  His tone was so unusually pleasant that Darkling knew something horrible was about to emerge.

  ‘I’m expecting a call from the Extrapolation Board at any second, so you’d better be brief.’

  ‘Oh, I will be brief. You were telling me this morning, sir – I was very interested in what you said – about how you disapproved of the policy of the board of governors of this project.’

  ‘I hardly think I am likely to make such a comment to my subordinates, Stone.’

  ‘Oh, but you did, sir. I mean, we all know how the project exists to milk the immortals of their strange ideas and turn them into practical applications for the benefit of mankind. Only it also happens to benefit the governors as well, and so although the immortals began as free men here, the project merely providing an ideal environment, they’ve come to be no more than prisoners.’

  ‘I said –’

  ‘And you said that if one of them escaped, you’d back him against the governors.’

  ‘Well, yes, maybe I did say something like that.’

  ‘Sir, I wish to report that one of the immortals has just escaped.’

  Darkling was on his feet in an instant, his fingers on the nearest buzzer.

  ‘You fool, Stone, why shilly-shally? We must get him back at once! Think of the publicity.…’ His face was white. He faltered to a stop.

  ‘But, sir, you just said –’

  Darkling cut him off. ‘Circumstances alter cases.’

  ‘Then this is a prison, sir.’

  Darkling rushed at him, arms waving. ‘You crafty little bastard, Stone, get out of my office! You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? I know your kind –’

  ‘It was just what we were saying about hypocrisy –’

  ‘Get out! Get out at once and never come in here again!’

  He slammed the door after Stone’s retreating back. Then he leaned on the door, trembling, and rubbed the palm of his hand over his forehead. He knew the Gods were looking down on him; he knew that they, in their infinite cunning, had sent Stone to him for a scourge. This was his time of testing. For once he would have to stand by what he had represented to be his own true feelings, or else be forever damned in his own eyes.

  If he let the immy go, the governors would surely have his blood. If he hauled the immy back – and the matter was urgent, or he would be lost in the city – Stone would see he was morally discredited, perhaps even with the governors. Either way, he was in trouble; his only policy was to stand by what he had said – said more than once, he recalled faintly.

  From somewhere came an unwonted memory of someone jokingly defending hypocrisy in his presence by saying, ‘Hypocrites may be scoundrels, but by their nature they sometimes have to live up to the fine feelings to which they pretend.’ Darkling had wanted to tell the idiot that he failed to understand the essential thing about a hypocrite: that their nature was genuinely mixed, that the fine feelings were there all right, that it was the will that was weak … well, now the will was trapped by circumstance.

  He would have to let the immy go.

  ‘You win, Gods!’ he cried. ‘I’ve been a better man today, and it’ll probably ruin me!’

  Shakily, he went around to his desk. As he sat down, a bright idea came to him. A smile that Stone might have recognised as sly and dangerous played on his face. There was, after all, a way in which he could defend himself from the wrath of the governors – by enlisting the big battalions on his side.

  His eyes went momentarily upwards, in silent thanks for the hope of release.

  Pressing the secretarial button on his desk, he said crisply, ‘Get me World Press on the line. I wish to tell them why I have seen fit to release an immortal from this institution.’

  He occupied the time pleasantly, while waiting for the call to come through, in summoning the doorman, Cusak, to make financial arrangements with him for his cooperation, and in dropping Stone a note demanding his resignation.

  By the side of the old swimming pool, a crowd gathered. A few women sprawled among the men, their hair as lank and uncombed as their mates’. Such garments as were worn were nondescript; some of the younger men went naked. Everyone moved in a gentle, bemused manner.

  Palmer Pommy did not move. He lay on a couch erected in the shallow end of the pool so that his striped body was awash. Some of the shower equipment had been reassembled so that he was perpetually sprayed with warm water. He was laughing as he had not done for many decades.

  ‘You bangers are on my wavelength,’ he said. ‘We immies can’t take the thoughts of ordinary short-span people – they’re too banal. But you lot think as daft as me.’

  ‘We take a shot of immortality occasionally,’ one of the crowd said. ‘But you’re as good as a dose, Palmer – the impact of meeting you lops me double, like a miracle.’

  ‘Gods sure sent him,’ another said.

  ‘Hey, what do you mean, Gods sent him? I brought him,’ Otto said. He was lounging by the poolside in an old chair while one of the more repellent girls stroked his neck. ‘Besides, Palmer don’t believe in Gods, do you, Father?’

  ‘I invented them.’

  They all laughed. A blonde girl said, ‘I invented sex.’ They turned it into a game.

  ‘I invented feet.’

  ‘I invented kneecaps.’

  ‘I invented Pommy Palmer.’

  ‘I invented inventions.’

  ‘I invented me.’

  ‘I invented dreams.’

  ‘I invented you all – now I disinvent you!’

  ‘I invented the Gods,’ Palmer repeated. He was smiling but serious now. ‘Before any of you were alive, or your parents. That’s what we immies are for, thinking up crazy ideas because our minds aren’t lumbering with ordinary thoughts, else they’d kill us off because the immortality project didn’t turn out as they hoped – it wasn’t fit for all and sundry.

  ‘The Gods were more or less in existence. Vast computers were running everything, comsats supplied instantaneous communication, beamed power was possible, psychology was a strict science. Mankind had always regarded computers half prayerfully, right from their inception. All I did was think of hooking them all up, giving everyone a free communicator or shrine, and there was a new power in the world: the Gods. It worked at once, thanks to the ancient human need for gods – which never died even in scientific societies like ours.’

  ‘Not mine, dad-o!’ one of the men cried. ‘I’m no robot-bugger! And say, if you invented the Gods, who invented the theology to go with them? Did you serve that too?’

  ‘No. That came naturally. When the computers spoke, each of the old religions fell into step and adapted their forms. They had to survive: like none of them ever could stand up against personalised answer to prayers. Cranky notion … but war’s died since the Gods ruled.’

  ‘Who’s Waugh?’ someone asked.

  ‘That was a miracle. There’ve been others. Ask Otto. He claims that getting me out of the project was a miracle.’

  Otto wriggled and removed his nose from the repellent girl’s navel.

  ‘I don’t know about that. I mean I’m not so sure,’ he said, scratching his chest. ‘It was just that old fool doorman was bluffed into letting us out. No, I did it – I’m the miracle worker.’

  ‘You told me different,’ Palmer said, looking searchingly from the pool.

  ‘You think I’m
being arrogant. You could be right. But I reckon what I really feel, Father, is that there isn’t any such thing as a miracle – just favourable conjunctions of circumstances, that’s all.’

  There was a scraggy girl in the crowd who leaned forward anxiously and tapped Palmer’s zebra arm.

  ‘If you’ve really handed us over into the power of the machines, isn’t there a danger they will end by ruling us completely?’

  Palmer looked slowly about the echoing chamber before deciding what to reply. He loked at the lounging group about him, most of whom had already recovered from the novelty of his presence and were interesting themselves in each other. He looked long at Otto, who had unstrapped his old shrine for comfort and was now cuddling the repellent girl in a purposeful way. Then his face crinkled into a grin.

  ‘Don’t worry, girlies! Men always cheat their gods,’ he said.

  Another Little Boy

  The main content of this story occurred to me when reading J. G. Ballard’s Assassination Weapon in a recent New Worlds. Ballard deals powerfully with various myth-names of our age, such as Kennedy and Malcolm X; then I came on a name upon which others before Ballard have seized: Major Eatherly.

  For the benefit of those who are happily unversed in the matter, Major Eatherly was marginally concerned with the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan and later underwent mental care. It occurred to me that he represented one of the false legends of our time, the legend that nuclear weapons could somehow be renounced while retaining all the other ingredients of the civilisation that had brought them into being and rendered them to some extent necessary. To think otherwise is like supposing that WWII could have been avoided if the Allies had not gone to help Poland in 1939.

  (But you see I am trailing my coat, since I happen to owe my continued existence to the atomic bomb.)

  However, be the facts what they may, undoubtedly a rather romantic feeling of guilt has grown up about ‘The Bomb’, to which I suspect the generation now in its teens is immune; it has ‘The Pill’ instead, which introduces questions of life and death entirely as interesting as The Bomb ever did. I hope this generation will not enjoy the guilts of its predecessors.

  Which brings us to my small story. It is specifically about these two rival inventions, and how the attitude to the one may change the attitude to the other. Anyone who was alive when The Bomb was dropped risks looking as comically old-fashioned in his attitudes in another eighty years as do those of our ancestors who, eighty years ago, opposed the opening of the St Gotthard Tunnel on the grounds that since God had put the mountains there, he meant us to go over them and not through them, by gum! ‘Another Little Boy’ is a light-hearted warning about how idiotic our favourite scruples are going to look, three generations from now!

  B.W.A.

  The head of Zadar Smith World collected the dozen little plastic shapes off his desk in both hands, lifted them, and poured them back on to the desk top again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Okay. Whatever we do will be the greatest.’

  He snapped off contact and the seamed countenance of the President of United States Both Americas faded from view on the big screen across from him. The electronic impulses that had carried a representation of him still swarmed like spermatozoa on a slide; the screen remained live; in their time, the busy spermatozoa had delineated many famous faces, Jack Gascadden of Gasgasms, Java the Clown, and a score of heads of state. The head of Zadar Smith World had never given any of them such an enthusiastic yes before; Morgan Zadar had not built up his agency by being unexclusive.

  The little plastic shapes formed S’s and X’s and Z’s and 8’s and 3’s and other abstract wriggles that belonged to an unknown pre-uterine alphabet. Some of them had interlocked. As Zadar picked at them, he called the six members of his executive.

  They came up from their various offices across the world: Saul Betatrom from New York, Dave Li Tok from Peking, Jerry Peran from Singapore, Fess Reed from Antarctic City, Mazda Onakwa from Ibadan, Thora Peabright from Bonn. Thora was the only woman to hold one of these key jobs set in the key cities of the world.

  They nodded at each other, momentarily a little comsat community in one room and full colour.

  ‘J. J. Spillaine just on the solid,’ Zadar told them. ‘Our biggest assignment yet.’

  ‘Not another festival!’ Jerry Peran said.

  ‘It could be. That’s up to Zadar Smith World to decide. We have a date to celebrate. Spillaine says all nations will be celebrating it and he wants the USBA to put on the biggest most appropriate show.’

  ‘What are we celebrating that’s that big?’

  ‘Think! You all know the date.’

  They chorused it: ‘September 7th.’

  ‘I meant the year. 2044. Mean anything to you?’

  They all looked blank. Thora Peabright said hopefully, ‘Abe Lincoln’s bicentenary or something?’

  ‘No, but you’re getting colder.’ Zadar could be very biting, especially with women. ‘Next year on August 6th, we are going to have to hold the biggest firework display ever. I leave it to the six of you to figure out why and how. Call me when you have something valid to contribute. Right?’

  He went back to playing moodily with the IUDs.

  Thora Peabright put on a Mondrian sack which divided her into four unequal but appetising segments. She called Saul Betatrom.

  ‘I’m coming over to New York to see you.’

  ‘What? In person?’

  ‘Why not? The new age of prudery hasn’t started yet. We should get together on this project.’

  ‘Project X! Thora, what did happen on August 6th, 1945? It was before my time.’

  ‘Search me. Was it the date President Forstein was born?’

  ‘Discovery of radio?’

  ‘First rocketship landed on the moon?’

  ‘Birth of Arthur C. Clarke?’

  ‘Foundation of Scandinavian Republic?’

  ‘Death of Grace Metalious?’

  ‘Ho Chi Minh?’

  ‘Picasso?’

  ‘Walter Disney?’ She laughed. ‘We’re guessing! Look it up and I’ll see you.’

  She sauntered out of her apartment, took the elevator up to the sixty-second floor, stepped out on the roof. All of Bonn lay about her, the Rhine gleaming dully to one side. High in the sky, fluorescences read WELCOME TO UNITED GERMANY, home of MEi. MEi was one of the world’s largest micro-electronic firms; they made synthetic bladders and other humanpart replacements as well as major spaceware; Zadar Smith World handled their account. Dandled their account.

  A helijet took her out to the airport and she had to wait twenty minutes for the next supersonic to lift for the Americas. It bore Thora up through the fluorescent sign of her own devising, and two hours later the plane was cooling at Kennedy. She jetted to Betatrom’s on Fifth and Two Twenty-Fifth.

  Saul wore a transparent floral brocade two-piece. He was small and dark, like Thora, and almost hairless.

  ‘Can we make love before we get down to business?’ he asked. ‘This is the fifth time you and I have met person to person, but somehow we’ve never coupled.’

  ‘I’m not feeling receptive today, thanks, Saul. I had three orgasms yesterday and I’m supposed to be on a diet.’

  ‘Why come over in person, then? I thought that was what you meant.’

  He pouted and she lay a hand on his arm. ‘I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, Saul. Come on, then.’

  He kissed her. ‘You’re a honey, and I think you’re hairier than I, which always interests me. Couch, pool, or centrifuge? Which you fancy? They’re all right on the premises.’

  She settled for the pool. While they contorted gently together in the oily solution, he said, ‘Before you came, I was reading up on the Fert-Asia annual report – we handle them, as you know. The reports on poverty of orgasm for those countries are really shocking. Sexuologists now distinguish between ten kinds of orgasm, and just in India alone Fert-Asia estimate that eighty-four percent of the male p
opulation experience no better than a grade seven orgasm.’

  ‘The effects of the CM-bombs on Calcutta have something to do with it. That was – when did the Indonesian-Indian Contained Conflict end? – only two and a half years ago.’

  ‘But the figures for Cambodia are almost as bad, and the Cambodian-Malayan CC was at least five years back.’

  ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’

  ‘Fortunately, American org-progs for the coming year are very encouraging.’

  They fell noisily silent, and a few moments later were able to congratulate themselves happily on being comfortably above the org-rating for their age-class group.

  Over a smog fizz, they got down to business. Betatrom had dialled the satellibrary and was flashed excerpts from the world encyclopaedia. He spread his arms to convey size as he said, ‘This really is big, Thora. A hundred years ago next year sees the birth of the modern age, the age of nucleonics.’

  She frowned prettily. ‘I thought this was the Age of Sperm Husbandry.’

  ‘It’s that as well, but chiefly it’s the Age of Nuclear Power – and just about to come to an end, too, if the reports on superstellar discharges are true, and we can harness them.’

  ‘The Nuclear Age … Nothing immediately occurs to me, but it’s a big assignment, obviously, if Spillaine gets on to Morgan direct.’

  ‘Right. Whoever comes up with a valid way of celebrating this for Morgan is going to be Second-in-line at Zadar Smith World right enough. Let’s think this thing through together, Thora, pool ideas.’

  She looked at him old-fashioned. ‘See me look at you old-fashioned, Saul Betatrom? Who kids whom?’

  ‘You mean you’ve thought of something already?’

  She laughed. ‘Not a thing, uncle-o! But if I did, wow, I sure enough wouldn’t want to share it!’

  ‘You’re a mean German woman, and you aren’t even as hairy as I hoped for!’

  For the next two days, Thora Peabright worked hard at research, punching buttons like mad. Her five co-partners, each in their different capitals, also worked. On the third day, Fess Reed called her from Antarctic City. Thora knew Fess well; they had worked and orgied together in earlier days, and jointly handled the Hemisphere Hallucinogens account before the American-American dust of ’35. She saw at once that his wary manner meant Fess thought he was on to something.