The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

  “Allah yisabbe’h Kum bil-Kher.”

  The holy man waved a dignified hand as he strolled down towards the corniche to find a calash.

  By now the muezzin was calling the mid-morning prayer. I had been away from my hotel longer than planned. I went back through the crowds to the green-and-white entrance of the Osiris and climbed slowly to my room. It was not in my nature to force my sister to leave and I felt considerably ashamed of my attempt to persuade Inspector el-Bayoumi to extradite her. I could only pray that, in the course of the night, she had come to her senses. My impulse was to seek her out but I still did not know her address.

  I spent the rest of the morning packing and making official notes until, at noon, she came through the archway, wearing a blue cotton dress and matching shawl. I hoped this was a sign she was preparing for the flight back to civilisation. “You haven’t eaten, have you?” she said.

  She had booked a table on the Mut, a floating restaurant moored just below the Cataract. We boarded a thing resembling an Ottoman pleasure barge, all dark green trellises, scarlet fretwork and brass ornament, while inside it was more luxurious than the Sufi’s “harem.” “It’s hardly used, of course, these days,” Bea said. “Not enough rich people wintering in Aswan any more. But the atmosphere’s nice still. You don’t mind? It’s not against your puritan nature, is it?”

  “Only a little.” I was disturbed by her apparent normality. We might never have ridden into the desert together, never have talked about aliens and spaceships and Ancient Egyptian universities. I wondered, now, if she were not seriously schizophrenic.

  “You do seem troubled, though.” She was interrupted by a large man in a dark yellow gelabea smelling wildly of garlic who embraced her with affectionate delight. “Beatrice! My Beatrice!” We were introduced. Mustafa shook hands with me as he led us ecstatically to a huge, low table looking over the Nile, where the feluccas and great sailing barges full of holidaymakers came close enough to touch. We sat on massive brocaded foam cushions.

  I could not overcome my depression. I was faced with a problem beyond my scope. “You’ve decided to stay, I take it?”

  The major-domo returned with two large glasses of Campari Soda. “Compliments of the house.” It was an extraordinary piece of generosity. We saluted him with our glasses, then toasted each other.

  “Yes.” She drew her hair over her collar and looked towards the water. “For a while, anyway. I won’t get into any more trouble, Paul, I promise. And I’m not the suicide type. That I’m absolutely sure about.”

  “Good.” I would have someone come out to her as soon as possible, a psychiatrist contact in MEDAC who could provide a professional opinion. “You’ll tell me your address?”

  “I’m moving. Tomorrow. I’ll stay with the Ropers if they’ll have me. Any mail care of them will be forwarded. I’m not being deliberately mysterious, dear, I promise. I’m going to write. And meanwhile, I’ve decided to tell you the whole of it. I want you to remember it, perhaps put it into some kind of shape that I can’t. It’s important to me that it’s recorded. Do you promise?”

  I could only promise that I would make all the notes possible.

  “Well, there’s actually not much else.”

  I was relieved to know I would not for long have to suffer those miserably banal inventions.

  “I fell in love, you see.”

  “Yes, you told me. With a spaceman.”

  “We knew it was absolutely forbidden to make love. But we couldn’t help ourselves. I mean, with all his self-discipline he was as attracted to me as I was to him. It was important, Paul.”

  I did my best to give her my full attention while she repeated much of what she had already told me in the desert. There was a kind of biblical rhythm to her voice. “So they threw me out. I never saw my lover again. I never saw his home again. They brought me back and left me where they had found me. Our tents were gone and everything was obviously abandoned. They let their engines blow more sand over the site. Well, I got to Aswan eventually. I found water and food and it wasn’t too hard. I’m not sure why I came here. I didn’t know then that I was pregnant. I don’t think I knew you could get pregnant. There isn’t a large literature on sexual congress with semi-males of the alien persuasion. You’d probably find him bizarre, but for me it was like making love to an angel. All the time. It was virtually our whole existence. Oh, Paul!” She pulled at her collar. She smoothed the table-cloth between her knife and fork. “Well, he was wonderful and he thought I was wonderful. Maybe that’s why they forbid it. The way they’d forbid a powerful habit-forming stimulant. Do you know I just this second thought of that?”

  “That’s why you were returned here?” I was still having difficulty following her narrative.

  “Didn’t I say? Yes. Well, I went to stay with the Ropers for a bit, then I stayed in the commune and then the medrassah, but I kept going out to the site. I was hoping they’d relent, you see. I’d have done almost anything to get taken back, Paul.”

  “To escape from here, you mean?”

  “To be with him. That’s all. I was—I am—so lonely. Nobody could describe the void.”

  I was silent, suddenly aware of her terrible vulnerability, still convinced she had been the victim of some terrible deception.

  “You’re wondering about the child,” she said. She put her hand on mine where I fingered the salt. “He was born too early. He lived for eight days. I had him at Lallah Zenobia’s. You see, I couldn’t tell what he would look like. She was better prepared, I thought. She even blessed him when he was born so that his soul might go to heaven. He was tiny and frail and beautiful. His father’s colouring and eyes. My face, I think, mostly. He would have been a wunderkind, I shouldn’t be surprised. Paul . . .” Her voice became a whisper. “It was like giving birth to the Messiah.”

  With great ceremony, our meal arrived. It was a traditional Egyptian meze and it was more and better food than either of us had seen in years. Yet we hardly ate.

  “I took him back to the site.” She looked out across the water again. “I’d got everything ready. I had some hope his father would come to see him. Nobody came. Perhaps it needed that third sex to give him the strength? I waited, but there was not, as the kids say, a Reen to be seen.” This attempt at humour was hideous. I took firm hold of her hands. The tears in her eyes were barely restrained.

  “He died.” She released her hands and looked for something in her bag. I thought for a frightening moment she was going to produce a photograph. “Eight days. He couldn’t seem to get enough nourishment from what I was feeding him. He needed that—whatever it was he should have had.” She took a piece of linen from her bag and wiped her hands and neck. “You’re thinking I should have taken him to the hospital. But this is Egypt, Paul, where people are still arrested for witchcraft and here was clear evidence of my having had congress with an ifrit. Who would believe my story? I was aware of what I was doing. I’d never expected the baby to live or, when he did live, to look the way he did. The torso was sort of pear-shaped and there were several embryonic limbs. He was astonishingly lovely. I think he belonged to his father’s world. I wish they had come for him. It wasn’t fair that he should die.”

  I turned my attention to the passing boats and controlled my own urge to weep. I was hoping she would stop, for she was, by continuing, hurting herself. But, obsessively, she went on. “Yes, Paul. I could have gone to Europe as soon as I knew I was pregnant and I would have done if I’d had a hint of what was coming, but my instincts told me he would not live or, if he did live, it would be because his father returned for him. I don’t think that was self-deception. Anyway, when he was dead I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t made any plans. Lallah Zenobia was wonderful to me. She said she would dispose of the body properly and with respect. I couldn’t bear to have some future archaeologist digging him up. You know, I’ve always hated that. Especially with children. So I went to her lean-to in Shantytown. I had him wrapped in a shawl—Mother
’s lovely old Persian shawl—and inside a beautiful inlaid box. I put the box in a leather bag and took it to her.”

  “That was the Cairene Purse? Or did you give her money, too?”

  “Money had nothing to do with it. Do the police still think I was paying her? I offered Zenobia money but she refused. ‘Just pray for us all,’ was what she said. I’ve been doing it every night since. The Lord’s prayer for everyone. It’s the only prayer I know. I learned it at one of my schools.”

  “Zenobia went to prison. Didn’t you try to tell them she was helping you?”

  “There was no point in mentioning the baby, Paul. That would have constituted another crime, I’m sure. She was as good as her word. He was never found. She made him safe somewhere. A little funeral boat on the river late at night, away from all the witnesses, maybe. And they would have found him if she had been deceiving me, Paul. She got him home somehow.”

  Dumb with sadness, I could only reach out and stroke her arms and hands, reach for her unhappy face.

  We ate so as not to offend our host, but without appetite. Above the river the sun was at its zenith and Aswan experienced the familiar, unrelenting light of an African afternoon.

  She looked out at the river with its day’s flow of débris, the plastic jars, the used sanitary towels, the paper and filth left behind by tourists and residents alike.

  With a deep, uneven sigh, she shook her head, folded her arms under her breasts and leaned back in the engulfing foam.

  All the fhouls and the marinated salads, the ruqaq and the meats lay cold before us as, from his shadows, the proprietor observed us with discreet concern.

  There came a cry from outside. A boy perched high on the single mast of his boat, his white gelabea tangling with his sail so that he seemed all of a piece with the vessel, waved to friends on the shore and pointed into the sky. One of our last herons circled overhead for a moment and then flew steadily south, into what had been the Sudan.

  My sister’s slender body was moved for a moment by some small, profound anguish.

  “He could not have lived here.”

  Chapter Quotes: 1 Hood; 2 Khayyám FitzGerald; 3 AE; 4 Dylan Thomas;

  5 Wheldrake; 6 Yokum; 7 Aeschylus MacNeice; 8 Vachel Lindsay; 9

  F. Thompson; 10 Peake; 11 Treece; 12 Duffy; 13 Nye; 14 C. D. Lewis; 15 E. St. V. Millay; 16 Nye.

  A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club (2001)

  “A Slow Saturday Night . . .” is the second of two homages Moorcock has written to Maurice Richardson’s famous creation, Engelbrecht the surrealist boxer, immortalised in Richardson’s 1950 book (and its recent reprint), The Exploits of Engelbrecht.

  The story was originally published in 2001, in an anthology, Redshift (Roc), edited by Al Sarrantonio.

  Being a Further Account of Engelbrecht the

  Boxing Dwarf and His Fellow Members

  After Maurice Richardson

  I happened to be sitting in the snug of the Strangers’ Bar at the Surrealist Sporting Club on a rainy Saturday night, enjoying a well mixed Existential Fizz (2 pts Vortex Water to 1 pt Sweet Gin) and desperate to meet a diverting visitor, when Death slipped unostentatiously into the big chair opposite, warming his bones at the fire and remarking on the unseasonable weather. There was sure to be a lot of flu about. It made you hate to get the tube but the buses were worse and had I seen what cabs were charging, these days? He began to drone on as usual about the ozone layer and the melting pole, how we were poisoning ourselves on G.M. foods and feeding cows to cows and getting all that pollution and cigarette smoke in our lungs and those other gloomy topics he seems to relish, which I suppose makes you appreciate it when he puts you out of your misery.

  I had to choose between nodding off or changing the subject. The evening being what it was, I made the effort and changed the subject. Or at least, had a stab at it.

  “So what’s new?” It was feeble, I admit. But, as it happened, it stopped him in mid-moan.

  “Thanks for reminding me,” he said, and glanced at one of his many watches. “God’s dropping in—oh, in about twelve minutes, twenty-five seconds. He doesn’t have a lot of time, but if you’ve any questions to ask him, I suggest you canvass the other members present and think up some good ones in a hurry. And he’s not very fond of jokers, if you know what I mean. So stick to substantial questions or he won’t be pleased.”

  “I thought he usually sent a seraphim ahead for this sort of visit?” I queried mildly. “Are you all having to double up or something? Is it overpopulation?” I didn’t like this drift, either. It suggested a finite universe, for a start.

  Our Ever-Present Friend rose smoothly. He looked around the room with a distressed sigh, as if suspecting the whole structure to be infected with dry rot and carpenter ants. He couldn’t as much as produce a grim brotherly smile for the deathwatch beetle which had come out especially to greet him. “Well, once more into the breach. Have you noticed what it’s like out there? Worst on record, they say. Mind you, they don’t remember the megalithic. Those were the days, eh? See you later.”

  “Be sure of it.” I knew a moment of existential angst.

  Sensitively, Death hesitated, seemed about to apologise, then thought better of it. He shrugged. “See you in a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to look out for God in the foyer and sign him in. You know.” He had the air of one who had given up worrying about minor embarrassments and was sticking to the protocol, come hell or high water. He was certainly more laconic than he had been. I wondered if the extra work, and doubling as a seraphim, had changed his character.

  With Death gone, the Strangers’ was warming up rapidly again and I enjoyed a quiet moment with my fizz before rising to amble through the usual warped and shrieking corridors to the Members’ Bar, which appeared empty.

  “Are you thinking of dinner?” Lizard Bayliss, looking like an undisinfected dishrag, strolled over from where he had been hanging up his obnoxious cape. Never far behind, out of the W.C., bustled Engelbrecht the Dwarf Clock Boxer, who had gone ten rounds with the Greenwich Atom before that over-refined chronometer went down to an iffy punch in the eleventh. His great, mad eyes flashed from under a simian hedge of eyebrow. As usual he wore a three-piece suit a size too small for him, in the belief it made him seem taller. He was effing and blinding about some imagined insult offered by the taxi-driver who had brought them back from the not altogether successful Endangered Sea Monsters angling contest in which, I was to learn later, Engelbrecht had caught his hook in a tangle of timeweed and wound up dragging down the Titanic, which explained that mystery. Mind you, he still had to come clean about the R101. There was some feeling in the club concerning the airship, since he’d clearly taken bets against himself. Challenged, he’d muttered some conventional nonsense about the Maelstrom and the Inner World, but we’d heard that one too often to be convinced. He also resented our recent rule limiting all aerial angling to firedrakes and larger species of pterodactyls.

  Lizard Bayliss had oddly coloured bags under his eyes, giving an even more downcast appearance to his normally dissolute features. He was a little drained from dragging the Dwarf in by his collar. It appeared that, seeing the big rods, the driver had asked Bayliss if that was his bait on the seat beside him. The irony was, of course, that the Dwarf had been known to use himself as bait more than once and there was still some argument over interpretation of the rules in that area, too. The Dwarf had taken the cabby’s remark to be specific not because of his diminutive stockiness, but because of his sensitivity over the rules issue. He stood to lose a few months, even years, if they reversed the result.

  He was still spitting on about “nit-picking fascist anoraks with severe anal-retention problems” when I raised my glass and yelled: “If you’ve an important question for God, you’d better work out how to phrase it. He’s due in any second now. And he’s only got a few minutes. At the Strangers’ Bar. We could invite him in here, but that would involve a lot of time-consuming ritual and so for
th. Any objection to meeting him back there?”

  The Dwarf wasn’t sure he had anything to say that wouldn’t get taken the wrong way. Then, noticing how low the fire was, opined that the Strangers’ was bound to offer better hospitality. “I can face my maker any time,” he pointed out, “but I’d rather do it with a substantial drink in my hand and a good blaze warming my bum.” He seemed unusually oblivious to any symbolism, given that the air was writhing with it. I think the Titanic was still on his mind. He was trying to work out how to get his hook back.

  By the time we had collected up Oneway Ballard and Taffy Sinclair from the dining room and returned to the Strangers’, God had already arrived. Any plans the Dwarf had instantly went out of the window, because God was standing with his back to the fire, blocking everyone’s heat. With a word to Taffy not to overtax the Lord of Creation, Death hurried off on some urgent business and disappeared back through the swing doors.

  “I am thy One True God,” said Jehovah, making the glasses and bottles rattle. He cleared his throat and dropped his tone to what must for him have been a whisper. But it was unnatural, almost false, like a TV presenter trying to express concern while keeping full attention on the autoprompt. Still, there was something totally convincing about God as a presence. You knew you were in his aura and you knew you had Grace, even if you weren’t too impressed by his stereotypical form. God added: “I am Jehovah, the Almighty. Ask of me what ye will.”

  Lizard knew sudden inspiration. “Do you plan to send Jesus back to Earth and have you any thoughts about the 2:30 at Aintree tomorrow?”

  “He is back,” said God, “and I wouldn’t touch those races, these days. Believe me, they’re all bent, one way or another. If you like the horses, do the National . . . Take a chance. Have a gamble. It’s anybody’s race, the National.”