by Brian Aldiss
For your information, you have the tale all wrong at several crucial points, despite all your prying. Just in case you intend to blab my private business all over Callisto, let me tell you that when Ida Cassilis beamed me at Kasai, she proposed to me. I didn’t propose to her: I turned her down, if you must know.
I turned her down because I thought she was a maladjusted monster. She had none of the qualities I look for in a woman. I preferred the peace and sweetness of being with my poor little Gerenuk. Ida was a hateful creature, gross, unspiritual, and only attracted to me because of my unfortunate lapse into violence …
Anyhow, what’s all this to you?
You ask me that? Kellylarge, if we could remove our deportee chains and masks you’d know. Up to last week, I was World President Soepoena.
Danger: Religion!
The four of us must have made a strange group, plodding manfully through nowhere.
Royal Meacher, my brother, led the way. His long arms and bony hands fought the wind for possession of his cloak, the shabby mantle that stayed about him no more certainly than his authority.
Next the breeze from the north plucked at the figure of Turton, our man Turton, poor old Turton, the mutant whose third arm and all but useless third leg combined with his black coat to give him from behind something of the appearance of a beetle. Over his shoulder, Turton carried Candida in an attitude of maximum discomfort
Candida still dripped. Her hair hung down like frayed ribbon. Her left ear jogged up and down the central seam of Turton’s coat; her right eye seemed to peep sightlessly back at me. Candida is Royal’s fourth wife.
I am Royal’s younger brother, Sheridan. I felt defeated by Candida’s stare. I kept hoping that the jig-jog of Turton’s walk would jog the eye shut; and so I supposed it might have done had her head not been hanging upside down.
We walked towards the north, into the molars of the wind.
The road on which we walked was narrow and absolutely straight. It appeared to lead nowhere, for despite the wind a miasmal mist rose from the damp about us. The road ran along a dyke, the sides of which, being but newly constructed, were of bare earth. This dyke divided a stretch of sea. We had sea on both sides of us.
On our right, the water was appreciably less placid than the water on our left, for it was still the sea proper. On the left, that body of water had already been cut from its parent by a mole which lay ahead of us. Soon the water on our right would undergo the same fate.
Beyond it, almost as far as our vision extended in that direction, we could see another dyke extending parallel with ours. The sea was being parcelled into squares. In time, as the work of reclamation proceeded, the squares would be drained; the sea would dwindle into puddles; the puddles would become mud; the mud would become soil; the soil would become vegetables; and the vegetables – oh, yes! – the vegetables would be eaten and become flesh; ghosts of future people grew in the two halves of sea, the one with ripples and one with waves.
Treading steadily on in the drips from Candida’s hair and clothes, I looked back over my shoulder.
The vast funeral pyre we had left had shrunk now: the kiln was a tiny black pipe topped by flame. No more did we feel its heat or smell the smell of ignited bodies, but the effluvia lingered in our memories, Royal still spoke of it, rambling in and out of quotation as his habit was, addressing the wind.
‘You note how the parsimonious Dutch reclaim both their land and their dead in one operation. And those grisly corpses, maligned by sea and radiation, will make excellent fertiliser from their ashes. How convenient, how concise! Occam’s razor cuts precious fine, friends: the obscene fag-ends of one chemical reaction go to start another. “Marvellous is the plan by which this best of worlds is wisely planned.” Forty thousand dead Dutchmen should guarantee us a good cabbage crop in five years, eh Turton?’
The bent old man, with Candida’s head nodding idiot agreement, said, ‘Back before the last two wars, they used to grow tulips and flowers here, according to the stoker at the kiln.’
Dark was coming in now, the mist thickening, the sulky captive sea falling motionless as the wind died Beyond the outline of my brother’s back I could see a light; with gratitude I mouthed its ugly name: Noordoostburg-op-Langedijk.
‘That mouldy towerful of cadavers would seem to be less appropriately applied to tulips than cabbages, Turton,’ Royal said. ‘And what more suitable envoi to the indignity of their deaths? Recollect your Browne: “To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies –” how does it go? – “are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials.” Since Browne’s time, we’ve grown a lot more ingenious! Nuclear destruction and incineration need not be the end of our troubles. We can still be spread as mulch for the genus brassica …’
‘Cabbages it was, cabbages or tulips,’ old Turton said vaguely, but Royal was not to be deflected. He talked on as we trudged on. I was not listening. I wanted only to get off this eternal earthwork, safe into civilisation and warmth.
When we reached Noordoostburg-op-Langedijk, a mere platform joined by dyke and mole to the distant land, we went into its only café. Turton laid Candida down on a bench. He unbent his beetle back and stretched his arms (but the third never stretched straight) with groans of relief. The café manager came forward hurridly.
‘I regret I cannot introduce you properly to my wife. She is religious and has passed into a coma,’ Royal said, staring the man out.
‘Sir, this lady is not dead?’ the manager asked.
‘Merely religious.’
‘Sir, she is so wet!’ the manager said.
‘A property she shares with the confounded stretch of water into which she fell when the coma overtook her. Will you kindly bring us three soups; my wife, as you see, will not partake.’
Dubiously, the manager backed away.
Turton followed him to the counter.
‘You see, the lady’s very susceptible to anything religious. We came over with the party from Edinburgh specially to see the cremation down the road, and Mrs Meacher was overcome by the sight. Or perhaps it was the smell, I don’t know, or the sound of the bodies bubbling in the incinerator. Anyhow, before anyone could stop her, backwards she went – splash! – and –’
‘Turton!’ Royal called sharply.
‘I was just trying to borrow a towel,’ Turton said.
After that, we ate our soup in silence. A puddle collected under Candida’s clothing.
‘Say something, Sheridan,’ Royal demanded, rapping his spoon on the table at me.
‘I wonder if there were fish in those fields,’ I said.
He made his usual gesture of disgust and turned away. Fortunately I did not have to say anything more, for at that moment the rest of our party came in for soup; the incineration ceremony had finished just after we left; we had left only because of Candida.
Soup and rationed chocolate were all that the café offered. When the party had finished up their bowls, we went outside. I draped Candida over Turton’s shoulder and followed.
The weather was showing its talents. Since the wind had fallen, rain had begun to fall. It fell on the concrete, in the polder, into the sour sea. It fell on to the buzz-jet. We all packed into it, jostling and pushing. Somehow, Royal managed to get in away from the rain first. Turton and I were last aboard, but Turton had been wet already.
This buzz-jet was just a missile left over from the last war and converted. Perhaps it was uncomfortable, yet it could move; we headed north-west across the sea and over northern England, where not a light showed from the stricken lands; in a quarter of an hour the lights of Edinburgh showed blearily through the wet dark.
Our craft was a government one. Private transport of any variety was a thing of the past. Mainly it was fuel shortage that had brought the situation about; but when the last war ended at the beginning of 2041, the government passed laws forbidding the private ownership of transpor
t – not that they were not increasingly eager to hire their own vehicles out as production improved.
At Turnhouse airport we climbed out and made our way with the crowd to a bus shelter. A bus came after a few minutes; it was too full to take us; we waited and caught the next one; it crawled with us into town, while we stood like cattle in a truck.
That sort of thing takes the edge off what otherwise had been a very enjoyable day’s sightseeing. We had had several such excursions to celebrate my demobilisation from the army.
Since the war, Edinburgh had become the capital city of Europe, chiefly because the others had been obliterated or made uninhabitable by radiation or the after-effects of bacterial warfare. Some of the old Scottish families were proud of this promotion of their city; others felt that this greatness had been thrust upon them; but most of them took advantage of the shining hour by thrusting up rents to astronomical heights. The thousands of refugees, evacuated and displaced people who poured into the city found themselves held to ransom for living space.
When we climbed out of the bus at the city centre, I became separated from the others by the crowd, that cursed anonymous crowd speaking all the tongues of Europe. I brushed off a hand that clutched at my sleeve; it came again, detaining me more forcibly. Irritably, I looked round, and my eyes met the eyes of a square dark man; in that instance, I took in no more detail, beyond saying to myself that his was a great gothic cathedral of a face.
‘You are Sheridan Meacher, fellow of Edinburgh University, Lecturer in History?’ he asked.
I dislike being recognised at bus stops.
‘European History,’ I said.
The expression on his face was not readable; weary triumph, perhaps? He motioned to me to follow him. At that moment, the crowd surged forward, so that he and I were born out of it and into a side street.
‘I want you to come with me,’ he said.
‘I don’t know you. What do you want?’
He wore a black and white uniform. That did not endear him to me. I had seen enough of uniform in those weary war years underground.
‘Mr Meacher, you are in trouble. I have a room not five minutes away from here; will you please come with me to it and discuss the situation with me? I assure you I will offer you no personal harm, if that is why you hesitate.’
‘What sort of trouble? I know of no trouble?’
‘Let us go and discuss it.’
I could look after myself with this fellow; with that knowledge, I shrugged my shoulders and followed him. We went together down a couple of backstreets, towards the Grassmarket, and in at a grimy door. The man with the gothic face preceded me up a winding stair. At one point, a door opened, a dim-lit hag’s face peeped out at us, and then the door slammed again, leaving us in the gloom.
He paused on a landing and felt in his pocket. He said, ‘I shouldn’t think a house like this has changed much since Dr Johnson visited Edinburgh.’ Then in an altered tone, he added, ‘I mean – you did have a Dr Johnson, Samuel Johnson, didn’t you?’
Not understanding his phrasing – yet I had not taken him for other than an Englishman – I said, ‘Of course I know of Johnson: he visited this city to stay with his friend Boswell in – about 1773, I would say.’
In the dark he sighed with relief. Sliding a key into a lock, he said, ‘Of course, of course, I was just forgetting that the road from London to Edinburgh was open by that date. Forgive me.’
He opened a door, switched on a light and ushered me into his room. I went in a half daze, for his remark had shaken me. What could the man mean? Edinburgh and London had been connected – though often tenuously – for a long time before Johnson’s visit. I was beginning to form ideas about this gothic stranger – and all of them were later proved wrong.
His room was bare and nondescript, a typical lodging room with a combo toilet in one corner, in another a hand generator in case the main electricity supply failed, and a screen standing on the far side of the room with a bed behind it. He went across to the window to draw the curtains before turning to confront me.
‘I should introduce myself, Mr Meacher. My name is Apostolic Rastell, Captain Apostolic Rastell of the Matrix Investigation Corps.’
I inclined my head and waited; the world was full of sinister-sounding establishments these days, and although I had never heard of the Matrix Investigation Corps, I did not intend to put myself at a disadvantage by saying so. We stood looking at each other, summing one another up. Captain Rastell was a considerable man, untidy perhaps, but prepossessing, strongly built with being bulky, a man perhaps still in his twenties, and with that extraordinary face that looked as if it could have regarded the end of the world undismayed. He smiled and moved behind his screen, to emerge dragging an object like a trunk. This he stood on its end.
The trunk was locked with some sort of a combination lock. Rastell worked it, staring at me somewhat grimly as he listened to the tumblers click.
‘You had better look at the inside of this before I offer any explanation,’ he said.
He opened the trunk. What I saw there drew me impulsively forward. I took a good look, and a horrible faintness overcame me. I staggered and he caught me, holding me as I recovered.
Inside the trunk was a small chair, a stool with a backrest. It was fringed with various instruments that reminded me vaguely of the drills and other accessories that stand by a dentist’s chair. But it was what lay behind the chair that caught me off guard.
I saw myself reflected from a screen that covered the back of the trunk; the anonymous room was also reflected there, if reflected is the word, its dimensions cramped and twisted, so that it looked as if the figures of Rastell and myself stood on the outside rather than the inside of a cube. The effect was as if I peered into a distorting mirror; but this was no mirror – for I found myself staring distractedly at my own profile!
‘What is it?’
‘You are an intelligent man, Mr Meacher, and since I am in a hurry I hope that already this sight has suggested to you that there are departments of life which are a mystery to you, and into which you have not peered or cared to peer. There are other earths than this one of yours, Mr Meacher; I come from such a one, and I invite you to follow me back to it now.’
I backed away without dignity, sitting down on a chair and staring up at him. It would be tedious here, and a little shameful, to recount the terrors, hopes and suppositions that fled through my mind. After a moment, I calmed myself enough to listen to what he was saying. It went something like this:
‘You are not a philosopher, Mr Meacher, but perhaps you know nevertheless that many men spend large parts of their lives waiting for a challenge; they prepare themselves for it, though they may not guess what it is until the moment comes. I hope you are such a man, for I have neither the time nor the patience for lengthy explanation. In the matrix from which I come, we had a dramatist last century called Jean Paul Sartre; in one of his plays, a man says to another, “Do you mean to say that you would judge the whole of someone’s life by one single action?” and the other asks simply, “Why not?” So I ask you, Mr Meacher, will you come with me?’
‘Why should I?’
‘You must ask yourself that.’ In the circumstances, what monstrous assumptions behind that remark!
‘You will come? Excellent!’ he said, coming forward and taking my arm. Unthinkingly, I had risen, and he had taken my rising for assent. Perhaps it was.
What is the nature of the authority that one man can have over another? Unprotesting, I allowed myself to be led over to the seat in his – let me use his own term – his portal. He saw me settled there and said, ‘This is nothing that you are unprepared for; you may be astonished, but you are not surprised. It will be news for you, but probably nothing upon which you have not privately speculated, when I tell you that the earth as you know it is merely a three dimensional appearance – an outcrop, a geologist would call it – of a multi-dimensional universe. To comprehend the multi-dimensional universe
is beyond man’s power, and perhaps always will be; one impediment being that his senses register each of its dimensions as a three-dimensional reality.’
‘Rastell, for God’s sake, I don’t know what you are saying!’
‘The violence of your denial persuades me otherwise. Let me put it this way, with an analogy with which you may be familiar. A two-dimensional creature lives on a strip of paper. A bubble – that is, a three-dimensional object – passes through the paper. How does the two-dimensional creature perceive the bubble? First as a point, which expands to a circle that at its maximum is the circumference of the bubble; the bubble is then half-way through the paper; the circle then begins to contract until –’
‘Yes, yes, I understand all that, but you are trying to imply that this two-dimensional creature can climb onto the bubble, which is –’
‘Listen, all that stops the creature climbing onto the bubble is its attitude of mind, its system of logic. Its mind needs a twist through ninety degrees – and so does yours. Join the creature’s strip of paper up at both ends and you get a lively representation of your mind: a closed circle! Yon can’t perceive the other matrices. But I can make you perceive them. A twist of the paper gives you a Mobius strip, and you get a one-sided object. I’m going to give you an injection, now, Mr Meacher, that will have a roughly similar effect on your perceptions, only you will gain a dimension instead of losing it.’
It was crazy! He must somehow have hypnotised me – fascinated me certainly! – to make me go as far as that with him. I jumped up from the chair.
‘Leave me alone, Rastell! I don’t know what you are saying, and I don’t want to. I don’t want any part of it. I was mad to come here and listen to – Rastell!’
His name came from my lips as a shriek. He had put out his hand as if to steady me, and plunged the tip of a small hypodermic into the vein of my left wrist. A warm and prickly sensation began to course up my arm.
As I swung towards him, I brought my right fist up, aiming a blow instinctively at his face. He ducked, putting out a hand to steady me as, carried off balance, I staggered forward.
