The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us.

  I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men’s efforts be devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once.

  I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women.

  I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched – fast, before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils!

  Lambeth Blossom

  One evening in the Three Hundred and First Year of the Second Millenium of Universal Goodness, Lob Inson Mik bowed low to his employer, Commissar of Legal Courts Bur Ton, slipped on his Walking-Out mask, and strolled into the sunlight of Piccadilly Circus.

  Nobody would guess to look at him that he nursed a deadly secret. He was in many respects an average clerk of the capital city of the Chinese Republic of Britain, slimly built, with dark almond eyes, a smooth round face, and a shock of curly brown hair. Among the jostling crowds of the Circus, he did not stand out.

  Nor did Lob Inson behave in any way but his accustomed one. On the comer, he stopped at the news stall, where the usual ancient lady was selling newspapers, cigarettes, prints, contraceptives, and flowers. Smiling at her, he selected a woodcut of an old-fashioned monorail, of the sort that had ceased running a century ago, with Mount Snowdon and giant waterfalls behind it. As the ancient lady wrapped it for him in a sheet of old newspaper, he said, ‘It’s for my wife because today is the anniversary of the birth of our eldest son.’

  Carrying his roll, he pushed through the dense crowds. Before he caught his street car, he paused to look up, as many others were doing, to the great screen covering part of one building, where the news was showing. Across the screen rolled great war wagons, discharged from giant submarines onto the beaches of North Africa, many of them with the troops of the Glorious Universal Republic following. The war against United Africa, the only other major power bloc left in the world, was now entering its tenth month, and there seemed little doubt who would win it. That fact may have accounted for the impassive air of the watchers.

  The scene changed to the counter-invasion, where the Africans were attacking in the Albanian Sector. This, as one of the oldest and loyalest sectors belonging to the Universal Republic, was heavily contested. There was a picture of a peasant’s cottage. A gigantic African soldier loomed onto the screen. He had caught a Chinese girl by one arm. With his other paw, he wrenched open the front of his trousers. The audience gasped. Close-up of his sweating face, nostrils dilated, girl screams. Her frock is wrenched off, breasts revealed. Negro rapes her. Detailed action shots.

  ‘Why doesn’t the photographer do something?’ asked a man in the crowd. Then he cast his glance about for the secret police and slipped away.

  As Lob Inson looked in the direction the man went, he saw a girl on the outside of the crowd, her gaze on the people rather than the news-screen. He eyed her steadily, and after a minute moved in her direction.

  She was a typical London girl, hair sleek and dark, blue-eyed, chubby, neatly dressed in a provocative ankle-length dress of midnight blue. As Lob Inson approached, she saw him. Her head went to one side, her little chin tilted slightly up, she shot him a demure but unmistakable look. She smiled slowly and widely to show her teeth were good.

  Lob Inson stopped before her and bowed politely without removing his Walking-Out mask, to show he considered she was of inferior status. This she accepted, as she acknowledged by bowing slightly lower than he.

  He liked her. His heart beat a little faster, but he showed nothing. Her movements were courtly and slow, inclined to the voluptuous. Nor was her skin coarse and fair like that of some of the girls of pleasure. She was as sexually exciting as he had first thought her to be.

  Gently, using the prescribed rules for the occasion, he asked her a few questions. She was a permitted girl, but had only been in London for a week, coming from the farming country beyond the city. She had been properly trained in pleasure-giving, with degrees in physical movement, position therapy, and psychology. Her charges were reasonable, her breath good. Her professional name was Lambeth Blossom.

  When they had made their arrangements under the giant rape, which was reported in as much detail as the African campaign, Lob Inson turned in the direction of the street car, and Lambeth Blossom followed close behind.

  To climb aboard the car was always a fight. The good manners of the crowd deserted them when boarding a vehicle, as if madness temporarily showed through the usual imposed calm. It was even worse down in the subway. Lob Inson pushed forward into the men’s compartment, while Lambeth Blossom stayed in the rear.

  He let his mind drift from the thoughts of the girl to look at the ads round the walls. Apart from a few plugs for domestic goods, most of the ads were exhortations to hate – hate informers, hate rumour-mongers, hate profiteers, hate enemies. Although hating was the only way to preserve Universal Goodness, Lob Inson shivered when he recalled his secret knowledge.

  The Lob Inson home was in Erscort, a nest of little light rooms on the fifth floor of a dwelling block. As they rode up in the elevator, Lob Inson removed his Walking-Out mask and nodded to the girl, acknowledging that their roles might now become less impersonal.

  ‘Very pleasant area to live,’ she said. ‘Building seems very strong, and this elevator is the most silent I have ever travelled in. I would like to continue going up in it for ever, were it not that then I should miss the pleasure of seeing your home.’

  ‘It is, unfortunately, a somewhat ancient elevator, and I fear you may find my little home also out-of-date, but my family will welcome you, Lambeth Blossom.’

  ‘The thought of meeting your wife is dazzling, Lob Inson Mik.’

  The elevator stopped and they alighted. Lob Inson took out his house key as they walked along the passage, unlocked his front door, and bid Lambeth Blossom enter. They passed into the little living room. Presently Lob Inson Lu entered, clad in house clothes, and bowed to her husband.

  He presented her with the rolled-up print. Lu opened it and smiled. ‘It is a work of great beauty, Mik. Your perception does you great credit and sheds pleasure over all our lives.’

  ‘You allow too much praise for such a poor thing, my wife. Let me introduce to you Miss Lambeth Blossom, who will spend some of this evening with me. Miss Lambeth Blossom, this is my honoured wife.’

  Lambeth Blossom bowed very low.

  ‘Please rise that I may admire your face as well as your coiffure,’ Lu said.

  ‘It is a pleasure for me to bow before such august serenity and senior years as yours.’

  ‘But you have a pretty dress, Lambeth Blossom, and a rich one. You must have had to work hard and long for it.’

  ‘Not so, madam, for with my youth, short times earn high if unmerited rewards.’

  Not entirely at his ease with this conversation, Lob Inson was pleased when his favourite brother-in-law Claw Fod Jon entered, hung up his jacket and sat in a chair, while Lu went off to encourage the servant girl with the preparations for tea.

  ‘The war news is good, of course,’ Claw Fod said, looking at his newspaper and adding in a lower tone, ‘if it can be believed. There is a rumour today in my department among the heads that there is no war at all.’

  In the same low tone, Lob Inson said, ‘But we were bombed.’

  ‘Once, Brother-in-law, once. Perhaps it was a gesture toward realism. The Ministry of Propaganda are true artists. The rationing of food and shortage of houses in London may represent similar artistry. You and I, my friend, may be merely the audience on which our rulers project their neurotic fantasies of domination. What do you say to that?’

  ‘We should not be speaking like this, Claw Fod. Let me introduce you to my new little lady frien
d.’

  ‘You are welcome, and my words were foolish. She is of pleasant outward aspect.’

  ‘Claw Fod Jon, this is Miss Lambeth Blossom.’

  ‘My dear, are you a good performer in bed?’

  ‘Some men have been kind enough to tell me so, sir, but then exaggeration is a common fault, and the desire to be complimentary can overpower honesty.’

  ‘Can you perform the posture of the Runaway White Mare?’

  Dimples of uncanny charm chased themselves over Lambeth Blossom’s cheeks.

  ‘Despite my limitations, sir, of both age and experience – but not, I hope, of flexibility – I am accounted especially skilled in the Runaway White Mare position.’

  Claw Fod rubbed his hands, chuckling in congratulatory fashion at his brother-in-law.

  The tea came in then, and with it Mar Len the servant girl, Lu, and her eldest son, Lob Inson Piter, whose birthday this was, playing with a red ball. Over the fragrant cups, talk became general. The men talked to each other, the women talked to one another, and Piter talked to everyone. Other members of the family began to arrive from work, and soon the little room was crowded. Lambeth Blossom was introduced to each arrival in turn, and each time found something charming to say.

  Under cover of the women’s chatter, Claw Fod said to Lob Inson, ‘Suppose what I say is true, Brother-in-law? Suppose there is no war with Africa?’

  Since Claw Fod had started work in one of the most junior departments of the Ministry of Propaganda, he was always asking such troublesome questions.

  ‘If we are told something, there is good reason for it,’ Lob Inson said.

  That was unanswerable. But Claw Fod merely said, ‘We ought to know what is going on. Did you learn anything fresh at your work today?’

  ‘I learned something which I will tell you later, when we are alone.’

  For the two men, the piecing together of information had become a sort of hobby, though Claw Fod was always the leader of the game. The restrictions on travel were so great, the rewriting of history so far advanced, the indoctrination of children so meticulous, that it was almost impossible to know where one was in the world.

  Sighing to think of their difficulties, Claw Fod said, ‘At least we seem to have some clear glimpses collected over the years. It is apparent that Greater China once existed only in Asia. Perhaps it sprang from the loins of Marx and Mao Tse Tung.’

  ‘I like to believe the other legend, that it existed before they did, but was a place eternally in darkness before they came along with the torch of communism to light it.’

  ‘That may be suitable, Brother-in-law. Your wisdom convinces me. Then the rest of the world grew enlightened enough to ask to come under her sagacious rule, and the first to accept such honour was the barbarous Russian tribe.’

  ‘Excuse one minute, Claw Fod. If this Russian tribe was so barbarous, then it should have been last to accept enlightened rule.’

  ‘Perhaps it was nearest.’

  ‘Perhaps the Russians also had communist beliefs.’

  ‘Then how could they be barbarians?’

  ‘Maybe there are two different tribes called Russians?’

  They were stuck again, as they so often were, in a maze of contradictions. But they argued without heat. It was only an intellectual sport; whatever the one truth was among the many with which they were surrounded, it would make no difference to their lives or their well-being. And some parts at least of the pattern were clear. It was generally known, for instance, that eventually the British, another barbarous tribe, had accepted the rule of China, following the example of her neighbors, and the first millenium of the Universal Glorious Republic had been established on earth.

  The British had behaved in the most civilised way of any of the tribes of foreign devils; they had been digested into the system not by annihilation but intermarriage, until now, with the superior reproductive powers of the Chinese people, they were obliterated. With the Americans it had been otherwise, and most of the efforts of the first Celestial Thousand Year Plan had been devoted to bringing forcible enlightment to the Americans. Finally in the Century of Wreaths and Radiation, their problems had been settled once and for all, to the great betterment of all mankind. So the two men believed from the legends.

  It was Lu who interrupted the pleasant tea-time chatter by saying that Piter must go and get undressed, for it was his bedtime.

  As if this were a signal for him too, Lob Inson also rose, bowed to various of his relations nearby, and went across to Lambeth Blossom.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to follow me into the bedroom now?’

  ‘It would give me exquisite pleasure.’

  She walked demurely into the bedroom after him.

  Opening her little handbag, she produced from it a joss stick, which she placed in the burner by the bedside, under the portrait of Lob Inson’s grandfather, and lit it. Lob Inson climbed onto the bed and watched her movements. Now that she was about to do what she did best, Lambeth Blossom was possessed by a hypnotic grace. Her every gesture seemed to be a conspiracy with the onlooker. Before she had divested herself of her midnight-blue gown, Lob Inson was smouldering with lust.

  She folded her garments unostentatiously as she removed them, putting them on a wicker chair, until she was completely naked. This was a modest whore. She walked toward the bed as unselfconsciously as if she were in the street fully clothed, not flaunting herself, complete in herself, smiling a little.

  She coiled herself against Lob Inson on the bed, and bent to kiss his feet, so that he had a chance to observe the target of his desires looking as fresh as a newly caught oyster. Eager to explore the pearls within he reached out with one hand and put forth one finger, which she captured, turning slightly on the bed so that she could see how greatly he enjoyed his success. Of this he was giving ample evidence.

  Lambeth Blossom dislodged his hand, turned to face him, and commenced to undress him as he lay there. With the movements he was forced to make to wriggle from his clothes, and the lascivious dexterity she showed at her task, this unrobing proved more erotic even than hers. Finally they were confronting each other without barriers.

  As they lay there, Lob Inson eagerly drinking in the succulent plumpness of the girl, Lu entered, bowed to her master, and asked, ‘May I have the pleasure of preparing you both a sherbet with which to refresh yourselves presently?’

  ‘Thank you, kindly wife. And bring a bowl of those green chilies, if you please.’

  Lu withdrew, while her husband prepared to do just the opposite. He sucked the cinnamon tips of Lambeth Blossom’s breasts, working his face round until he could press his nose into her armpit and inhale the delightful fragrance of her flesh. She was singing to him in a small voice like the cooing of doves; she let the sound die away so that she could whisper to him, ‘Shall we perform the Runaway White Mare together? I can tell that you will prove an able rider, needing neither saddle nor spur!’

  ‘Yes, yes, I will be your jockey, Lambeth Blossom, and together we will speed over the wilder plains of ecstasy!’

  She stuck a pointed tongue in his ear, and nibbled the lobe. ‘I warn you, I am a hard mount to tire.’

  The posture of the Runaway White Mare was not easy to assume, although Lambeth Blossom was as flexible as she claimed. Only as he felt the smooth underneath of her thighs against his hips, and her ankles locked behind his neck forcing his face to hers, could he claim to be ready for his amatory equestrianism, and at that moment little Piter came running into the room, stark naked.

  ‘You’re supposed to be getting into bed, young man,’ his father said. ‘Now, don’t interrupt me. Your papa is busy.’

  ‘But, Papa, I only want to watch to see how you do it! You’ve let me watch before.’

  ‘It is good for the boy to see his father’s pleasure,’ Lambeth Blossom said, gently, ‘so that when he grows up and imitates his father, he will have pleasure himself and bring it to women.’

  ‘You may watch, Piter
, as it is your birthday.’

  The ride commenced. The Runaway White Mare at first covered the ground at the most demure of trots, though not without showing that she had spirit and was in every way a thoroughbred. As yet she was only showing her form on level ground, but already there was promise of the uplands ahead, their summits wreathed in mist. Lob Inson, who had frequently taken his exercise this way, was absolutely in control.

  As they were extending themselves into a modest canter, Lu and Mar Len came into the bedroom with sherbet and chilies and a bowl of peaches soaked in honey.

  ‘So there you are, Piter, you rascal!’ Mar Len exclaimed. ‘Your bath is waiting for you!’

  Piter stood naked by the side of the bed, one hand resting tentatively on Lambeth Blossom’s shapely buttock. The little banner he waved before him showed not only that he understood what his father was about, but that he might one day be as gallant a cavalryman himself. Mar Len stroked this gratifying outward display, laughing and saying, ‘Come on, let’s go and cool that down in the bath!’

  As the servant girl bore Piter away protesting, Lu poured the contestants out two glasses of sherbet, inserted two straws into the glasses and handed them over. Lob Inson and his nubile steed interrupted their progress to sip at the refreshing drink. Nodding with gratification, Lu left the room.

  Once again Lob Inson took up the reins, Lambeth Blossom’s warm womanhood making it ever harder to restrain the sprint.

  ‘Slowly, my filly,’ he advised. ‘The finish is not yet in sight. First we must jockey for the ideal position before preparing for the final charge.’

  Dutifully, Lambeth Blossom returned to a slower rhythm.

  Ten minutes later, when they were pausing again, neither wishing too soon to reach the point where the canter became a last reckless gallop, Claw Fod Jon tiptoed apologetically in and sat by the bedside.

  ‘Very sorry to interrupt,’ he said. ‘I just wished to see how you were getting along, and to admire your splendid rhythms. Perhaps I also might later sample the delights of lovely Lambeth Blossom?’