The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Clem – it’s funny, generations of men have dreamed of immortality. But they never thought it would come to penguins… I suppose that’s what you’d call an irony! Is there any way we can infect ourselves from these birds?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s not as easy as picking up psittacosis from a parrot. But it may be that laboratory research will find a means of infecting human beings with this disease. Before that happens, there’s another question we ought to ask ourselves.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Isn’t there a moral question first? Are we capable, either as a species or as individuals, of living fruitfully for a thousand years? Do we deserve it?’

  ‘Do you think herrings deserve it more than we do?’

  ‘They cause less damage than man.’

  ‘Try telling that to your copepods!’

  This time he laughed with genuine pleasure, enjoying one of the rare occasions when he considered she answered him back wittily.

  ‘It’s interesting the way copepods carry the virus in a latent form all the way down from the Med to the Antarctic without becoming infected themselves. Of course, there must be a connecting link between the Baltic and the Med, but we haven’t found it yet.’

  ‘Could it be another current?’

  ‘Don’t think so. We just don’t know. Meanwhile, the ecology of Earth is slowly being turned upside down. Up till now, it has just meant a pleasant glut of food and the survival of whales that were on the threshold of extinction, but it may lead in time to famines and other unpleasant natural upheavals.’

  Caterina was less interested in that aspect. ‘Meanwhile, you are going to see if the virus can be implanted in us?’

  ‘That could be very dangerous. Besides, it’s not my field.’

  ‘You’re not just going to let it slide?’

  ‘No. I’ve kept the whole matter secret, even from the others on the Kraken. I’ve communicated the problem to only one other person. You’ll hate me for this, Cat, but this thing is far too important to let personalities enter the situation. I sent a coded report to Theo Devlin at the WWO in Naples. I shall drop in to see him on our way back to London.’

  Suddenly her face looked tired and aged. ‘You’re either a saint or you’re raving mad,’ she said.

  The penguins watched without moving as the two humans left the room. Long after lights went out, they shut their eyes and returned to sleep.

  Dawn next morning set the sky afire with a more than Wagnerian splendour, revealing the first sluggish activity on the Kraken, and mingling with the smell of preserved eggs frying in the galley. In four or five days, the crew would be back at their base in Aden, enjoying fresh and varied food again.

  Philip was also astir early. He had slept naked between the sheets and did nothing more in the way of dressing than slipping on a pair of swimming trunks. He walked round the back of the house and looked into his father’s bedroom window. Yale and Cat both slumbered peacefully together in her bed. He turned away, his face distorted, and made his way falteringly down to the lagoon for a last swim. A short while later, Joe, the Negrito house boy, was bustling round the house, getting the breakfast and singing a song about the coolness of the hour.

  As the day grew hotter, the bustle of preparation for departure increased. Yale and his wife were invited aboard the trawler for a farewell lunch, which was eaten under the deck canopy. Although Yale tried to talk to Philip, his son had retired behind his morose mood and would not be drawn; Yale comforted himself by reflecting that they would meet again in the UK in a very few days.

  The ship sailed shortly after noon, sounding its siren when it moved through the narrow mouth of the reef as it had done when it entered. Yale and Cat waved for a while from the shade of the palms, and then turned away.

  ‘Poor Philip! I hope his holiday did him good. That troubled adolescent phase is hard to deal with. I went through just the same thing, I remember!’

  ‘Did you, Clem? I doubt it.’ She looked about her desperately, at her husband’s gentle face, at the harsh sea on which the trawler was still clearly visible, up at the heavy leaves of palm above them. In none of these elements it seemed, could she find help. She burst out, ‘Clem, I can’t keep it a secret, I must tell you now, I don’t know what you’ll say or what it’ll do to you, but, these last few weeks, Philip and I have been lovers!’

  He looked at her in a puzzled way, eyes narrow behind his lenses, as if he could not understand the expression she had used.

  ‘That’s why he went off the way he did! He couldn’t bear to be around when you were. He begged me never to tell you… He… Clem, it was all my fault, I should have known better.’ She paused and then said, ‘I’m old enough to be his mother.’

  Yale stood very still, and expelled one long noisy gasp of breath.

  ‘You – you couldn’t, Caterina! He’s only a boy!’

  ‘He’s as adult as you are!’

  ‘He’s a boy! You seduced him!’

  ‘Clem, try to see. It was the fraulein originally. She did it to him – or he started it, I don’t know which way it was. But it’s a small island. I came on them one afternoon, both naked, inside the old fort. I sent her away but somehow the poison spread. I… After I’d seen him …’

  ‘Oh God, it’s incest!’

  ‘You use these stupid old-fashioned terms!’

  ‘You cow! How could you do it with him?’ He turned away. He started walking. She did not stop him. She could not stand still herself. Swinging about in misery, she burst weeping into the house and flung herself on to her unmade bed.

  For three hours, Yale stood on the north-west edge of the island, staring paralysed into the sea. In that time, he hardly moved, except once to unhook his spectacles and wipe his eyes. His heart laboured and he glared out at the immensity before him as if challenging it.

  She came up quietly behind him, bringing him a glass of water in which she had dissolved lemon crystals.

  He took the glass, thanked her quietly, and drank its contents, all without looking at her.

  ‘If it makes any difference, Clement, I love and admire you very much. I’m not fit to be your wife, I know, and I think you are a saint. Much as I hurt you, your hurt was all for what I might have done to Philip, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t be silly! I shouldn’t have left you all these months. I exposed you to temptation.’ He looked at her, his face stern. ‘I’m sorry for what I said – about incest. You are not related to Philip, except by marriage. In any case, man is the only creature that puts a ban on incest. Most other creatures, including the higher apes, find no harm in it. You can define man as the species that fears incest. Some psychoanalysts define all mental illnesses as incest-obsessions, you know. So I’m–’

  ‘Stop!’ It was almost a scream. For a moment she fought with herself, then she said, ‘Look, Clem, talk about us, for God’s sake, not about what the psychoanalysts say or what the higher apes do! Talk about us! Think about us!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m a pedant, I know, but what I meant–’

  ‘And don’t, don’t, don’t apologise to me! I should be apologising to you, kneeling, begging for forgiveness! Oh, I feel so awful, so guilty, so desperate! You have no idea what I’ve been through!’

  He seized her painfully and held her, looking for the moment very like his son. ‘You’re getting hysterical! I don’t want you kneeling to me, Cat, though thank heavens it has always been one of your dearest traits that you acknowledge your errors in a way I can never manage with mine. You can see what you’ve done was wrong. I’ve thought it all over, and I can see the fault was largely mine. I shouldn’t have left you isolated here on Kalpeni for so long. This won’t make any difference between us, once I’ve got over the shock. I’ve thought it over and I think I must write to Philip and tell him that you’ve told me everything, and that he is not to feel guilty.’

  ‘Clem – how can you – have you no feeling? How can you have forgiven me so easily?’

  �
��I didn’t say I’d forgiven you.’

  ‘You just said it!’

  ‘No, I said – Let’s not quibble over words. I must forgive you. I have forgiven you.’

  She clung to him. ‘Then tell me you’ve forgiven me!’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘Tell me! Please tell me!’

  In a sudden fury, he flung her away from him, crying, ‘Damn and blast you, I tell you I have forgiven you, you crazy slut! Why go on?’ She fell, sprawling in the sand. Penitently, he stooped to help her up, apologising for his violence, saying over and over that he had forgiven her. When she was on her feet, they made their way back to the coral-built house, leaving an empty glass lying in the sand. As they went, Caterina said, ‘Can you imagine the pain of having to live for a thousand years?’

  It was the day after she asked that question that Theodore Devlin arrived on the island.

  IV

  Almost the entire population of Kalpeni turned out to see the helicopter land on the round chopperport in the centre of the island. Even Vandranasis closed down his little store and followed the thin trickle of spectators northwards.

  The great palm leaves clapped together as the machine descended, its WWO insignia gleaming on its black hull. As the blades stopped rotating, Devlin jumped down, followed by his pilot.

  Devlin was two or three years Yale’s senior, a stocky man in his late forties, well-preserved, and as trim in his appearance as Yale was straggling and untidy. He was a man sharp of face and brain, respected by many, loved by few. Yale, who was wearing nothing but jeans and canvas shoes, strolled over and shook hands with him.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here, Theo! Kalpeni is honoured.’

  ‘Kalpeni is bloody hot! For God’s sake, get me in the shade, Clement, before I fry. How you stick it here, I don’t know!’

  ‘Gone native, I guess. It’s a home from home for me. See my two penguins swimming in the lagoon?’

  ‘Uh.’ Devlin was in no mood for small talk. He walked briskly along in a neat light suit, a head shorter than Yale, his muscular movements tight and controlled even over the shifting sand.

  At the door of his house, Yale stood aside to let his guest and the pilot, a lanky Indian, enter. Caterina stood inside the room, her face unsmiling. If Devlin was embarrassed at meeting his ex-wife, he gave no sign of it.

  ‘I thought Naples got hot enough. You’re living in a damned oven here. How are you, Caterina? You look well. Haven’t seen you since you were weeping in the witness box. How does Clement treat you? Not in the style to which you were once accustomed, I hope?’

  ‘You’ve obviously not come to make yourself pleasant, Theo. Perhaps you and your pilot would care for a drink. Perhaps you were going to introduce him to us?’

  After this initial shot across his bows, Devlin pursed his mouth and behaved less pugnaciously. His next remark might even have been construed as an apology. ‘Those natives out there annoy me, plastering their fingerprints all over the copter. They haven’t taken one elementary step forward since mankind began. They’re parasites in every sense of the word! They owe their little all to the fish and the wonderful coconut, both brought to their doorstep by the courtesy of the tides – even their damned island was built for them by countless coral insects!’

  ‘Our culture owes the same sort of debt to other plants and animals, and to the earthworm.’

  ‘At least we pay out debts. However, that’s neither here nor there. I just don’t share your sentimental attachment to desert islands.’

  ‘We didn’t invite you to come here, Theo,’ Caterina said. She was still suppressing surprise and anger at seeing him.

  Joe appeared and served beer to them all. The pilot stood by the open door to drink his, nervously watching his boss. Devlin, Yale, and Caterina sat down facing each other.

  ‘I gather you got my report?’ Yale said. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re blackmailing me, Clement. That’s why I’m here. What do you want?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re blackmailing me. Thomas!’ Devlin snapped his fingers as he spoke, and his pilot produced a pistol fitted with what Yale recognised as a silencer; it was the first time he had ever seen one in real life. The pilot stood holding his beer glass in his left hand, sipping casually, but his glance was far from casual. Yale stood up.

  ‘Sit down!’ Devlin said, pointing at him. ‘Sit down and listen to me, or it will appear later that you had a misunderstanding with a shark while out swimming. You’re up against a tough organisation, Clement, but you may come to no harm if you behave. What are you after?’

  Yale shook his head. ‘You’re in trouble, Theo, not I. You’d better explain this whole situation.’

  ‘You’re always so innocent, aren’t you? I’m well aware that that report you sent me, with your assurance that you had let nobody else know the facts, was a thinly camouflaged piece of blackmail. Tell me how I buy your silence.’

  Yale looked at his wife; he read in her face the same bafflement he himself felt. Anger with himself grew in him to think that he could not understand Devlin. What was the fellow after? His report had been merely a scientific summary of the cycle by which the Baltic virus had been carried from the Tyrrhenian Sea down to the Antarctic. Dumbly, he shook his head and dropped his eyes to his folded hands. ‘I’m sorry, Theo; you know how terribly naive I am. I just don’t get what you

  are talking about, or why you should think it necessary to point a gun at us.’

  ‘This is more of your paranoia, Theo!’ Caterina said. She got up and walked towards Thomas with her hand out. He put the beer down hastily and levelled the pistol at her. ‘Give it to me!’ she said. He faltered, his gaze evaded hers, she seized the weapon by the barrel, took it from him, and flung it down in one corner of the room.

  ‘Now get out! Go and wait in your helicopter! Take your beer!’

  Devlin made a move towards the gun, then stopped. He sat down again, obviously nonplussed. Choosing to ignore Caterina as the only way of salving his dignity, he said, ‘Clement, are you serious? You really are such a fool that you don’t know what I’m talking about?’

  Caterina tapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’d better go home. We don’t like people to threaten us on this island.’

  ‘Leave him, Cat, let’s get out of him whatever extraordinary idea he is nursing. He comes here all the way from Naples, risking his reputation in order to threaten us as if he were a common crook …’ Words failed him.

  ‘What do you want, Theo? It’s some horrible thing about me, isn’t it?’

  That restored his humour and some of his confidence. ‘No, Caterina, it’s not! It’s nothing at all to do with you. I lost all interest in you a long long time ago, long before you ran off with this fisherman!’ He got up and crossed to the map of the world hanging, dry and fly-spotted, on the wall.

  ‘Clement, you’d better come and look at this. Here’s the Baltic. Here’s the Med. You tracked the immortality virus all the way from the Baltic right down to the Antarctic. I thought you’d had the wit to grasp how the missing link between Baltic and Mediterranean was forged; I assumed you were suggesting that your silence could be bought on that score. I over-estimated you! You still haven’t got it, have you?’

  Yale frowned and stroked his face. ‘Don’t be so superior, Theo. That area was right beyond my bailiwick. I only started in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Of course, if you know what the link is, I’d be tremendously interested… Presumably it’s brought from one sea to the other by a pelagic species. A bird seems a likely agent, but as far as I know nobody has established that the Baltic virus – the immortality virus, you call it – can survive in the body of a bird…except the Adelie penguin, of course, but there are none of those in the northern hemisphere.’

  Taking his arm, Caterina said, ‘Darling, he’s laughing at you!’

  ‘Ha, Clement, you are a true man of science! Never see what’s under your nose because you’re sunk up to your eyes i
n your own pet theories! You gangling fathead! The vital agent was human – me! I worked on that virus on a ship in the Baltic, I took it back with me to Naples to WWO HQ, I worked on it in my own private laboratory, I–’

  ‘I don’t see how I was supposed to know – Oh!… Theo, you’ve found it – you’ve found a way to infect human beings with the virus!’

  The expression on Devlin’s face was enough to confirm the truth of that. Yale turned to Caterina. ‘Darling, you’re right and he’s right, I really am a short-sighted idiot! I should have guessed. After all, Naples is situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea – it’s just that one never thinks of the term and speaks of it always as the Med.’

  ‘You got there at last!’ Devlin said. ‘That’s how the virus leaked into your Devlin Current. There is a small colony of us in Naples with the virus in our veins. It passes out through the body in inert form, and survives the sewage-processing, so that it is carried out to sea still living – to be digested by the copepods, as you managed to discover.’

  ‘The circulation of the blood!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No matter. A metaphor.’

  ‘Theo – Theo, so you are now…you have it, do you?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid to say it, woman. Yes, I have immortality flowing in my veins.’

  Tugging his beard, Yale went and sat down and took a long drink at his beer. He looked from one to the other of them for a long while. At last he said, ‘You are something of the true man of science yourself, Theo, aren’t you, as well as a career man? You couldn’t resist telling us what you know! But leaving that aside, we of course realised that an inoculation of man with the virus was theoretically possible. Cat and I were discussing it until late last night. Do you know what we decided? We decided that even if it were possible to acquire immortality, or shall we say longevity, we should refuse it. We should refuse it because neither of us feels mature enough to bear the responsibility of our emotional and sexual lives for a span of maybe several hundred years.’