The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘That’s pretty negative, isn’t it?’ Devlin strolled over to the far corner and retrieved the pistol. Before he could slip it into his pocket, Yale stretched out his hand. ‘Until you leave, I’ll keep it for you. What were you planning to do with it, anyway?’

  ‘I ought to shoot you, Yale.’

  ‘Give it to me! Then you won’t be exposed to temptation. You want to keep your little secret, don’t you? How long do you think it will be before it becomes public property anyhow? A thing like that can’t be kept quiet indefinitely.’

  He showed no sign of giving up the gun. He said, ‘We’ve kept our secret for five years. There are fifty of us now, fifty-three, men with power – and some women. Before the secret comes into the open, we are going to be even more powerful: an Establishment. We only need a few years. Meanwhile, we make investments and alliances. Take a look at the way brilliant people have been attracted to Naples these last few years! It’s not been just to the WWO or the European Common Government Centre. It’s been to my clinic! In another five years, we’ll be able to step in and rule Europe – and from there it’s just a short step to America and Africa.’

  ‘You see,’ Caterina said, ‘he is mad, Clem, that sort of sane madness I told you about. But he daren’t shoot! He daren’t shoot, in case they locked him up for life – and that’s a long time for him!’

  Recognising the wild note in his wife’s voice, Yale told her to sit down and drink another beer. ‘I’m going to take Theo round to see the whales. Come on, Theo! I want to show you what you’re up against, with all your fruitless ambitions.’

  Theo gave him a sharp look, as if speculating whether he might yield useful information if humoured, evidently concluded that he would, and rose to follow Yale. As he went out, he looked back towards Caterina. She avoided his glance.

  It was dazzling to be out in the bright sun again. The crowd was still hanging about the helicopter, chatting intermittently with the pilot, Thomas. Ignoring them, Yale led Devlin past the machine and round the lagoon, blinding in the glare of noon. Devlin gritted his teeth and said nothing. He seemed diminished as they exposed themselves to a landscape almost as bare as an old bone, walking the narrow line between endless blue ocean and the green socket of lagoon.

  Without pausing, Yale led on to the north-west strip of beach. It sloped steeply, so that they could see nothing of the rest of the island except the old Portuguese fort, which terminated their view ahead. Grim, black, and ruinous, it might have been some meaningless tumescence erupted by marine forces. As the men tramped towards it, the fort was dwarfed by the intervening carcasses of whales.

  Five whales had died here, two of them recently. The giant bodies of the two recently dead still supported rotting flesh, though the skulls gleamed white where the islanders had stripped them for meat and cut out their tongues. The other three had evidently been cast up here at an earlier date, for they were no more than arching skeletons with here and there a fragment of parched skin flapping between rib bones like a curtain in the breeze.

  ‘What have you brought me here for?’ Theo was panting, his solid chest heaving.

  ‘To teach you humility and to make you sweat. Look on these works, ye mighty, and despair! These were blue whales, Theo, the largest mammal ever to inhabit this planet! Look at this skeleton! This chap weighed over a hundred tons for sure. He’s about eighty feet long.’ As he spoke, he stepped into the huge rib cage, which creaked like an old tree as he braced himself momentarily against it. ‘A heart beat right here, Theo, that weighed about eight hundredweight.’

  ‘You could have delivered Fifty Amazing Facts of Natural History, or whatever you call this lecture, in the shade.’

  ‘Ah, but this isn’t natural history, Theo. It’s highly unnatural. These five beasts rotting here once swallowed krill far away in Antarctic waters. They must have gulped down a few mouthfuls of copepod at the same time – copepods that had picked up the Baltic virus. The virus infected the whales. By your admission, that can only have been five years ago, eh? Yet it is long enough to ensure that more blue whales – they were practically extinct from over-fishing, as you know – survived the hazards of immaturity and bred. It would mean too that the breeding period of older specimens was extended. Yet five years is not enough to produce a glut in whales as it is in herrings.’

  ‘What are blue whales doing near the Laccadives in any case?’

  ‘I never found a way to ask them. I only know that these creatures appeared off shore here at full moon, each in a different month. Caterina could tell you – she saw them and told me all about it in her letters. My son Philip was here with her when the last one arrived. Something drove the whales right across the Equator into these seas. Something drove them to cast themselves up on to this beach, raking their stomachs open on the reefs as they did so, to die where you see them lying now. Hang around for ten days, Theo, till the next full moon. You may see another cetaceous suicide.’

  There were crabs working in the sand among the barred shadows of the rib cage, burrowing and signalling to each other. When Devlin spoke, anger was back in his voice.

  ‘Okay, you clever trawlerman, tell me the answer to the riddle. It’s been revealed to you alone, I suppose, why they kill themselves?’

  ‘They were suffering from side effects, Theo. The side effects of the immortality disease. You know the Baltic virus seems to bring long life – but you haven’t had time to find out what else it brings. You’ve been in so much of a hurry you abandoned scientific method. You didn’t want to get any older before you infected yourself. You didn’t allow a proper trial period. You may be going to live a thousand years – but what else is going to happen to you? What happened to these poor creatures so awful that they could not bear their increase of years? Whatever it was, it was terrible, and soon it will be overtaking you, and all your conspirators sweating it out uneasily in Naples!’

  The silencer was extremely effective. The pistol made only a slight hiss, rather like a man blowing a strawberry pip from between his teeth. The bullet made a louder noise as it ricocheted off a bleached rib and sped over the ocean. Suddenly Yale was full of movement, moving faster than he had moved in years, lunging forward. He hit Devlin before he fired again. They fell into the sand, Yale on top. He got his foot over Devlin’s arm, grasped him with both hands by the windpipe, and bashed his head repeatedly in the sand. When the gun slid loose, he stopped what he was doing, picked up the weapon, and climbed to his feet. Puffing a little, he brushed the sand from his old jeans.

  ‘It wasn’t graceful,’ he said, glaring down at the purple-faced man rolling at his feet. ‘You’re a fool!’ With a last indignant slap at his legs, he turned and headed back for the coral-built house.

  Caterina ran out in terror at the sight of him. The natives surged towards him, thought better of it, and cleared a way for him to pass.

  ‘Clem, Clem, what have you done? You’ve not shot him?’

  ‘I want a glass of lemonade. It’s all right, Cat, my love… He isn’t really hurt.’

  When he was sitting down at the table in the cool and drinking the lemonade she mixed him, he began to shake. She had the sense not to say anything until he was ready to speak. She stood beside him, stroking his neck. Presently they saw through the window Devlin coming staggering over the dunes. Without looking in their direction, he made his way over to the helicopter. With Thomas’ aid, he climbed in, and in a few moments the engine started and the blades began to turn. The machine lifted, and they watched in silence as it whirled away over the water, eastwards towards the Indian sub-continent. The sound of it died and soon the sight of it was swallowed up in the gigantic sky.

  ‘He was another whale. He came to wreck himself here.’

  ‘You’ll have to send a signal to London and tell them everything, won’t you?’

  ‘You’re right. And tomorrow I must catch some jewfish. I suspect they may be picking up the infection.’

  He looked askance at his wife. She had pu
t on her dark glasses while he was gone. Now she took them off again and sat by him, regarding him anxiously.

  ‘I’m not a saint, Cat. Never suggest that again. I’m a bloody liar. I had to tell Theo an awful lie about why the whales ran themselves up our beach.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know! Whales have been beaching themselves for years and nobody knows why. Theo would have remembered that if he hadn’t been so scared.’

  ‘I meant, why lie to him! You should only lie to people you respect, my mother used to say.’

  He laughed. ‘Good for her! I lied to scare him. Everyone is going to know about the immortality virus in a few weeks, and I suspect they’re all going to want to be infected. I want them all scared. Then perhaps they’ll pause, and think what they’re asking for – the length of many lifetimes living with their first lifetime’s inadequacies.’

  ‘Theo’s taking your lie with him. You want that to circulate with the virus?’

  He started to clean his spectacles on his handkerchief.

  ‘I do. The world is about to undergo a drastic and radical change. The more slowly that change takes place, the more chance we – all living things, I mean, as well as you and I – have of living quiet and happy as well as lengthy lives. My lie may act as a sort of brake on change. People ought to think what a terrifying thing immortality is – it means sacrificing the mysteries of death. Now how about a bathe, just as if nothing revolutionary had happened?’

  As they changed into their swim things, as she stood divested of her clothes, Caterina said, ‘I’ve suddenly had a vision, Clem. Please, I’ve changed my mind – I want to, I want us both to live as long as we possibly can. I’ll sacrifice death for life. You know what I did with Philip? It was only because I suddenly felt my youth slipping from me. Time was against me. I got desperate. With more time…well, all our values would change, wouldn’t they?’

  He nodded and said simply, ‘You’re right, of course.’

  They both began to laugh, out of pleasure and excitement. Laughing, they ran down to the lapping ocean, and for a moment it was as if Yale had left all his hesitations behind with his clothes.

  As they sat on the edge of the water and snapped their flippers on, he said, ‘Sometimes I understand things about people. Theo came here to silence me. But he is an effective man and he was so ineffectual today. It must mean that at bottom he really came to see you, just as you guessed at the time – I reckon he wanted company in all that limitless future he opened up for himself.’ As they sliced out side by side into the warm water, she said without surprise, ‘We need time together, Clem, time to understand each other.’

  They dived together, down in a trail of bubbles below the sparkling surface, startling the fish. Flipping over on his side, Yale made for the channel that led out to the open sea. She followed, glad in her heart, as she was destined to do and be for the next score and a half of centuries.

  The Eyes of the Blind King

  All the night, there was coming and going in the tall and draughty palace on the Middle Street. Dim lights appeared and disappeared at windows as if they had been sucked out across the somnolent Bosphorus. At first light, Vukasan awoke and dressed himself at once in his travelling clothes.

  As he buckled on his belt, his old nurse Arake came unto him and said, ‘Prince, your sister Branka cries and vows she cannot leave Byzantium.’

  ‘Bid her get dressed and come to me! Tell her all Serbia leaves Byzantium this day, and she had better be with us.’

  ‘Let me buckle that belt for you!’ Impulsively, the old woman came forward, but Vukasan drew himself back, for he was seven now and needed no woman’s hand upon him. Arake saw the look in his eye and understood it. Sadness was on her mouth, for she had loved him and tended him all the five years of his father Jurosh’s exile.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Prince Vukasan, that I will! You’ve been a good boy, and, I must say, I don’t think it’s right that children like you and Branka should go back home with your father and get mixed up in wars at your age!’

  Vukasan stood there very tall and dark, wearing his seven years like armour and saying, ‘My father the king must needs fight to get back his throne wrongfully usurped from him by my Uncle Nikolas. So it is proper that I should be by his side. This you must understand, dear Arake.’

  Arake shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it at all, why you can’t all live under the peace of Byzantium, safe in Constantinople.’

  He knew well that she regarded Serbia as a savage place, although his mighty grandfather Orusan had been crowned Emperor with more glory than this decadent state could manage. For this reason, she had been coward and refused his father’s invitation to accompany them back to the Kingdom of Serbia and the palace of Prilep. Angrily, he answered, ‘Because you Greeks can provide no peace! Your strength has been bankrupt three hundred years and your rulers are decadent and the Ottomans laugh at you from across the water! We Serbs will make our own peace!’

  ‘I see, Prince Vukasan,’ said she, and withdrew from his chamber in such a manner that the boy regretted his speech, fearing he had been too boastful. But such was the fashion of his people – and the Greek fashion was no better, for as he looked for the last time round his room, he noticed that the carpetings were of Anatolian make, and probably his bed also, and through the window he could see people dressed in the Ottoman way, with baggy trousers, aping their foes from the East.

  He strode from the room, and down the passage, and into the crowded hall on the ground floor, where some warmed smoked meats awaited him to break his fast. Some of the nobles who had stood by his father in exile were here, but he avoided them and, meat in hand, hurried away to seek his father on this momentous morning.

  The spring day was chill, with an icy wind blowing from the north across the Black Sea. It would be good to escape from here, back to the warmer valleys of Serbia!

  Against the palace stood the stable his father had had converted into a church; Vukasan entered it softly. A great circular chandelier hung in the middle of darkness, its twenty-four candles sending a dull brass gleam on to the pictures of saints. Under the chandelier, his head almost knocking its iron hoop, stood the exiled King Stefan Jurosh of the Nemanijas, a tall and unwarlike figure, for all that he was heavily accoutred for a long and warlike journey.

  Vukasan’s observation was quick. He saw that his father was not praying, nor even meditating; he stood indecisively, unsure whether he should go out and take command of the preparations for departure. And this uncertainty he covered up by speaking over-loudly to his son.

  He stooped to look down at Vukasan, and his great long wounded face was like an icon swinging in the darkness. Following the troubles attendant on his great father Orusan’s death, when his brother Nikolas had defeated and captured him on the bloody banks of the Struma, two men had been set on him to put out his eyes with burning irons, since a blind man can never rule. In exile, Jurosh’s sight had returned, but the tortured skin about his eyes still remained stamped and folded in the pattern of its first pain.

  The love and terror Vukasan felt for his father boiled within him and found no words.

  Jurosh said, ‘When we have recaptured Prilep and restored peace throughout the kingdom, I shall build a church dedicated to God in thanks for my victories, and it shall be my mausoleum, and we will set it safe in the hills, in some small dreaming valley among the tributaries of the Babuna, and artists shall journey from far away to decorate its walls.’

  Vukasan was not cheered by this speech. ‘First we must recapture Prilep, father.’

  At this, his father recollected his warlike aims, and drew himself up to his full height, so that he knocked the chandelier swinging with his head. Then he retrieved his sword belt which he had laid to one side, saying as he strapped them on. ‘Triumph will be ours. You will see, Vukasan! The people will witness I have my sight back and will know it for a miracle of God! Then they will all flock to my side, and Nikolas will have to go!’r />
  ‘We’ll have to kill him, father! You said we shall have to kill him ere we get peace!’

  ‘It is so, son; though he was once my dear brother, nevertheless I must slay him. But everyone will turn against him, especially when they see I come with support from Byzantium, and his heart will not be in the fight.’

  He took his boy’s hand in his old rough one, perhaps trying to disguise a weakness in his tone, and led him from the church.

  The support of which the king spoke was that guaranteed by the Palaeologan Emperor Andronicus, who had been a friend, though not always a reliable one, of Jurosh throughout his exile. By supporting Jurosh and maintaining an alliance with him when he got back his throne, Andronicus thought to ensure peace with the Serbs while he dealt with all the other tribes and nations threatening his crumbling empire.

  By mid-morning, the small Serbian garrison was ready to leave on its great journey homeward, but the Byzantine forces had not appeared. Although messengers posted back and forth between palace and palace and palace and garrison, not as much as a hoof of Greek cavalry arrived.

  Now there came to the king’s side Marko Sokolovic, his best and bravest general, who had fought against the infidel Bosnians. Marko was always cool and always polite, not at all a Serb by nature; he acknowledged both Jurosh and Vukasan and said, ‘My lord, the hour of noon is here and still we wait on Palaeologus! Let us set forth on our way – they will be better mounted and can overtake us, or else we can wait in Sophia for them. One thing we may not do is wait here!’

  Jurosh smote his fist on the table and said angrily. ‘These Roman eunuchs! Not a man of them can be trusted! We must wait. Once we are gone, Marko, the mangy bears will sleep on in their lairs.’

  ‘Are we to sleep too?’

  ‘Let us set out for Sophia as Marko says, father! – Show our purpose!’

  ‘Quiet, boy! No, Marko, I dare not risk leaving without the reinforcements. You take our party out of the city to wait beyond the gates, while I go in person to speak with Andronicus.’