Earthworks

by Brian W Aldiss

  I landed almost on top of a gaunt Arab, knocked him sprawling as I sprawled, picked myself up, and doubled fast between two windowless houses still in the last stages of building. I passed a man in a fez. As he stood back, I snatched the hat from his head and rammed it on to my own; any sort of partial disguise might help against my enemies.

  Rounding two more corners, I had to drop panting into a slower pace. No sounds of pursuit came from behind, but I did not allow that to reassure me.

  I was in a strange area, a nondescript dumping-ground, covered with all sorts of scaffolds and building materials, paint, mortar, wood, plastic, brick, and clay. The area was bounded by what I took for a moment to be a sort of variegated wall; then I realized what it was: it was a line of false buildings and shops, and I was sandwiched between the two lines of their facades. An unease filled me — I mean an unease over and above the natural high state of apprehension into which the chase had thrown me.

  Once again I was made conscious of the thinness of reality. Life, in that moment, seemed to me something wafer thin, like a gaudy poster one might tear from a wall to reveal the true solid substance beneath. I paused, swaying, so that I had to put my hands out to prevent myself falling.

  A sweet and strange smell assailed my nostrils — was it violets or wallflowers, or was it onions cooking? I say strange, and strange it seemed, yet I knew I had smelt it before, without being able to recall where. Almost, I fell, but someone touched my fingertips. I turned and it was Justine.

  “This way, Knowle, let me show you,” she said.

  “I thought — ”

  “There’s no time to waste!”

  She ran forward. She opened one of the false doors, and we ran through into a false corridor. It looked like a corridor, but had no ceiling, and was open to the sky. Because it sloped at a strange angle, I could see the ocean. Underfoot was the beach. We ran down it to another building. At first I thought it was a cathedral, but it proved to be a sort of hotel. Inside, it was filled with unshaped chunks of plastics. Justine seemed tireless, running up flight after flight of stairs. At last she stopped before a door, and I caught up with her, gasping until I feared my lungs might burst out of my mouth.

  “Go in,” she said, opening the door,

  It was a sort of living-room, and crowded with plants and ornamental trees, some of which grew out of the floor.

  There were also machines, thin and spiky like old sculpture, with tiny vanes that rotated and bubbled, that moved behind perspex; these machines grew as certainly as did the plants. I was frightened, for the foliage obscured the farther wall, and I felt exposed to danger. When I turned to look at Justine, I saw how thin and pale she was; instinctively I move to her to take her into my arms. The Figure was there before me! He must have been hiding behind one of the trees, giving his ancient black gaunt look.

  Angrily, I seized him by the collar. I was aware of his blazing my breath on my cheek, then he was gone again.

  “Who was that?” I demanded of Justine, secretly testing to see if she had noticed him.

  “He only comes to see you when you are near death,” she told me.

  “Then why should he touch you?”

  Again that cruel smile that I knew by heart.

  “I am always near to death. I hate all human life, and death is my ally.”

  There was a couch among the trees, with a dim light burning over it. I suggested to her that she lie down and rest on it. She agreed, but said that first she must water her plants. She took up a can with a long spout, bright red in colour; she walked among the trees and machines with this, watering them at their roots. I lay down on another couch and watched her.

  When Justine had finished her task, she returned to her bed, placing the red can beside it. She lay down. I wished to go to her, but found myself unable to. It was as if the can prevented me; she had the can, I had not.

  Now I saw that something was happening to the trees. They were writhing in a disturbing fashion. I was frightened until I realized that they were dying, shivering as they did so in a vegetable death agony. In the air was the odour of Oxbenzide; I remembered it clearly from my years on the land. Justine had poisoned the plants, though whether by accident or intent I did not know. The leaves were turning brown, branches and stalks drooping and growing sickly.

  In despair, I went over to Justine. I could hardly see her. She looked very small and white and insignificant. I called her name, but she never moved. Her lips were slightly open. Sobbing, I threw myself on to the couch beside her.

  The couch immediately changed into a rough white surface, as if it had died. Slowly, feebly, I looked up.

  I lay inside a concrete pipe of sufficient bore to allow me to turn my head and peer over my shoulder. In me grew that weary sense of lack of identity that was itself an identification. Non sum ergo sum. I lay inside a concrete pipe. By being nothing, I am in everything. Even concrete pipes. I could squirt through the sewers of the world unseen.

  Although the aim of this narrative is to preserve a picture of my times rather than myself, how could I present myself except as the scenes in which I was temporarily lodged? Perhaps my skeleton inside me lives a vivid life, seeing the universe in his terms. It gives a man little sense of responsibility to imagine his skeleton may enjoy, in its absurdity, grand thoughts of cosmology and first causes.

  So I lay inside my concrete pipe, gradually returning to within the confines of normality. Craning my neck over my shoulder, I saw outside the rear of the shop facades and the builders’ materials among which I had walked only a brief while ago. One more hallucination to the bad, I thought; how many to go before I fell completely into a world of unreality, as the doctors had warned me I might? Moreover, this latest dream left me with a disgust which I could not entirely explain, not even by the death of Justine.

  Shaking myself out of a fit of introspection, I realized that Israt and probably other pursuers were doubtless searching the area for me. It behoved me to get away as fast as I could.

  Courage had left me. To face going out into the open and possibly getting an incendiary bullet in the face was beyond me. After all, I had my skeleton to consider. Taking the line of least resistance, I crawled on down the pipe.

  It grew dark as I progressed, and the circle of light behind me dwindled. Faint intimations of claustrophobia came to me and grew stronger. Still I forced myself on, until I came to something solid. My exploring fingers found metal. I pushed, and a flap opened. Light poured in on me. Without taking any precautions to conceal myself, I climbed out.

  I was in a large and bare room, at the other end of which stood a telephone switchboard. It stood away from the wall and was not connected. Large drums of cable lay everywhere, and a clutter of line instruments. I assumed that I had come through a pipe that would eventually contain some of the cable.

  Nobody was about. I guessed that as it was midday everyone was resting until the heat grew less. A door was open on the other side of the room; I walked out of it and down a corridor. I passed a black woman in a white skirt who looked surprised to see me. “Good morning,” I said, and passed on. Unmolested, I walked out of a swing door into the street.

  As I went, looking for somewhere that offered something better than a temporary refuge, I discovered what an outlandish place Walvis Bay was.

  The city had been planned on the most grandiose scale, and executed on a meagre one. Masses of narrow streets, which were often cul-de-sacs looking rather like mews, clustered together, and then gave out on to a couple of squares with shops and cafes and places of entertainment. These units seemed part of larger units, with main avenues cutting them and a stretch of park and a pool with giant white buildings facing it. But so much was unfinished, the houses with no more than their foundations laid, the shops empty even of fittings, the pools innocent of water, the young trees dying as surely as the trees in my dream. Some buildings — the large ones in particular — seemed to have been built some while past, and these showed cracks across th
eir surface or were actually falling down. In some places, chunks of their facades lay in the street. The shadows lay heavy and black at the feet of these structures, and nobody moved in them.

  To me, a hunted man, it seemed like a citadel of death. I wished only to escape from it, and wondered how that could be done. Perhaps I might hire or steal a boat and sail down the coast. With this in mind, I tried to find my way back towards the sea-front. I had lost my direction, but since Walvis Bay was built on a symmetrical pattern, it was not long before I saw the ocean gleaming down the far end of an avenue.

  I made towards it, only to find that before I could reach it I would have to cross what was obviously a main square, a vast and potentially fine place with many grand buildings and, in the middle, a formal garden which had still to be laid out; huge marble plinths stood empty in it, waiting for statues yet to arrive. I saw that the name of this square was President’s Square. One of the flanking buildings was evidently a temple. It was finished, at least on the outside. Easily dominating the other buildings, it sent a tall spire up into the blazing sky.

  The temple itself, and particularly its tower, were covered in elaborate mosaic. Some of this mosaic work, which at first glance I mistook for a cracked and sun-blistered surface, represented different peoples of Africa, looking out across the seas with proud eyes and nostrils. This elaboration was in such contrast with the severe white stone structures that formed the rest of the square, that I thought of Thunderpeck in his tub on the ship, the elaborate wrinkling of his face conflicting with the blank slopes of his body.

  As soon as I saw it, I felt sure that this was the spire I had seen first from the deck of the Trieste Star. Several men were working in the great square below it, laying an elaborate array of coloured blocks which would eventually form a pattern covering most of the centre of it.

  I could not cross here without exposing myself to danger. Even as I hesitated, the noise of a motor-car reached my ears, sounding from the direction in which I had come. I shrank into the shade of a colonnade that formed part of one of the buildings and looked that way.

  A black car radiator glided into sight. Someone was hanging out of the window, scanning side alleys as he moved slowly by. That would be Israt.

  The building whose colonnade I sheltered in was another of the monstrous hotels that formed so prominent a part of the city. Without hesitation, I turned and walked into it, working my way through a lounge and away from the windows. As I skirted the reception desk, avoiding the eye of the fellow dozing there, a notice caught my gaze. It drew me up sharp, and then I turned towards the lift, a new purpose in me.

  This was the South Atlantic Hotel, where Peter Mercator lived.

  Chapter Eight

  The psychology of the chase is a strange one. It rests on the assumption of a certain attitude of mind in the pursued. I was running because I ran. The sudden shock of finding myself in the very place I had run from brought me up with a jerk and made me realize that my attitude was a false one.

  For what in fact had I to fear from Peter Mercator, whoever he was, however mighty he was? I had only to explain to him my identity and how I had come by the letters which had been written to him by Justine. Even at the time, I realized that it might not be quite as easy as that, but certainly it was useless to run round a city where I was without resources. My best plan while I had the element of surprise in my hands, I decided, was to confront the man Mercator and see what I could do to better my and Justine’s position.

  As I formed this plan, so much at variance with what I had intended a few minutes before, something that my old rag-and-bone mentor and tormentor Jordill said came back to me: “Other people don’t decide what you are; they have to act on what you have decided you are.” It’s a half-truth, but as fruitful as many a whole truth.

  Stepping out of the lift on the top floor, I found myself opposite a sumptuous restaurant — or it would be sumptuous when it was completed; one end was a riot of gay murals and elegant tables laid with shining silver and white linen and lustrous heavy crimson roses — but they could not be real in these days! — while the other end showed naked plaster walls and objects shrouded in sheets. This I report now; at the time it was not the sight but the smell that hit me. I stood there realizing how hungry I was.

  Four men pushed arrogantly past me. One was half white, the rest black. The half-caste was a shrunken husk of a man, and wore an anti-gravity unit to support him like the one von Vanderhoot had worn. All four were finely dressed, with heavy rings on their fingers, and had about them an air of authority. They passed into the restaurant talking, and went through into a men’s room; when they emerged a minute later, the half-caste had removed his unit, and his friends their light coats and furled umbrellas; he was helped to a chair as they arranged themselves at a table. By their deference to him, he was someone of importance.

  I walked through the restaurant into the men’s room. It was deserted. On a row of hooks hung the old man’s anti-gravity unit, two light coats, and four furled umbrellas. Only the coats interested me. Hastily, I searched their pockets.

  They yielded a pair of dark glasses and a cloth wallet in which a stack of notes was rolled. An address written on the wallet indicated that its owner came from the Republic of Algeria and was of ministerial rank. I knew enough about the world situation to understand that Algeria and New Angola were at present hostile towards each other. Much I cared then, as I stuffed the money into my pocket and put the glasses on my nose. I had hoped to find a gun; but the money alone improved my morale.

  I would dearly have loved to stop for a meal. The four Africans were settling down to a lengthy feed, by the look of it, but I kept on walking, out into the corridor.

  Not knowing where to find Mercator, I paused uncertainly outside.

  Down one end of the corridor, a robot plasterer was working. Sometimes these automatons are given communication circuits, sometimes not. This one had a large “Made in Egypt” stamped on its shoulder, so I was hopeful, for Egypt had become the most advanced African state in recent years and her machine products were supposed to be efficient. I asked the thing if it knew where Mercator’s suite was, but it did not reply; possibly it was wired for a language other than English.

  Near it hung a human decorator’s coat. On a sudden inspiration I took it up and put it on, for someone was coming along the adjoining corridor. I had lost my fez long ago, perhaps in the scramble through the concrete pipe. Picking up an empty bucket, I walked away. With the dark glasses on my nose, I felt well disguised. As I turned the corner, I saw that coming towards me was Israt; in front of him walked Doctor Thunderpeck.

  Two things were immediately clear: that my old friend was captive, and that he recognized me while Israt didn’t. And why should Israt look twice at me, in a building presumably swarming with decorators in white smocks?

  I walked past them, swinging my bucket. As soon as I was past Israt, I swung the bucket harder arid brought it down round the back of his head. Thunderpeck had the nearest door open, and we dragged him in there. It was a suite, the decoration finished but the furniture not yet in. We spread the tall man out, on the floor, and Thunderpeck stood over him with his gun, which Israt had conveniently dropped. He was not laid out cold, but was pretty groggy. I took the dark glasses off and wiped my face.

  “You certainly appeared at a convenient time,” Thunderpeck said. “How are you bearing under the strain? Let me feel your pulse rate.”

  I gave him my wrist. He took hold of it without removing his gaze from Israt.

  “You’ll survive. In fact you’ll make a fine corpse. When you left the convoy so promptly, they kept me covered and did an abortive tour of the city trying to pick you up again. They must be used to dealing with imbeciles, the way they let you get away.”

  “Where was Israt taking you?”

  “Why, to this chap Mercator, who seems to be the kingpin round here.”

  “Good. We’ll go and see him together. This matter can all be eas
ily sorted out. Where’s Justine?”

  “She’s somewhere in the building. She left me downstairs. Take my advice, forget her — she’s a dangerous woman, Knowle. Best thing we could do is to get out of here. I don’t want to meet Mercator. The way things have turned out, we’d have done better with the New Angolese. These are desperate men here.”

  “I must get this thing sorted out, Doc. For Justine, if not for me. If you want to go off on your own, that’s all right with me.”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  I slapped him on the shoulder and squatted down to speak to Israt, who was propping himself up on one elbow and staring muzzily at us.

  “Look, friend, the honours are even between us,” I told him. “You nearly killed me with an incendiary gun, I clobbered you with a bucket. So let’s have no evil thoughts about one another. Instead, how about some answers to some questions? First of all, whereabouts is your boss, Mercator? Is he up on this floor?”

  Israt was a sensible fellow. With his eyes on his own gun in Thunderpeck’s hand, he said: “We are going there. Mr Mercator’s suite is round the corner to the left.”

  “Opposite the restaurant?”

  “Yes. Next to the elevator.”

  “Good. Next question. Who was von Vanderhoot?”

  “Von Vanderhoot was Mr Mercator’s secretary. We discovered too late that he was in the pay of the Prime Minister of Algeria, General Ramayanner Kurdan, a very dangerous man. By then, von Vanderhoot had disappeared with some important documents — letters. This was yesterday. I was seeking for him in New Angola territory when I found you. You are von Vanderhoot’s agent.”

  “Leaving that aside, why should von Vanderhoot be thought to have disappeared into New Angola if he was an agent for Algeria, when Algeria is supposed to be an enemy of New Angola?”