The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 1) (The Brian Aldiss Collection)

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘I’d sit down if I were you, Meacher. You have nicomiotine in your veins, and if you are unused to it, any exertion may make you sick. Sit down, man.’

  My gaze fixed on his face, with its tall lines, and the extraordinarily sensible relationship between its various features. I saw that face, graven on to my sight, as a central point, a cardinal fact, a reference from which the whole universe might be mapped; for the influence of time and event lay in that face, until it in its turn influenced time and event, and in that linkage I saw symbolised the whole wheel of life that governs men. Yes, I knew – even at the time I knew – that already I was gliding under the influence of the drug Rastell had given me. It made no difference. Truth is truth, whether you find it or it finds you.

  When I sat down in the seat, it was with a motion that held the same magic dualism. For the act might have seemed a submission to Rastell’s will; yet I knew it was more vitally a demonstration of my will, as inside the universe of my body a part of me called my will had brought into play a thousand minute responses, as blood and tissue co-operated in the act. And at the same time that this dramatic and cosmic act was in process, I was hearing the voice of Rastell, booming at me from a distance.

  ‘In this matrix of yours, I understand you passed through what is now referred to as the Tobacco Age, when many people – this applied particularly to the first half of last century – were slaves to the tobacco habit. It was the age of the cigarette. Cigarettes were not the romantic objects portrayed by our historical novelists; they were killers, for the nicotine contained in them, though beneficial to the brain in small quantites, is death to the lungs when scattered over them in large quantities. However, before the cigarette finally went out of production towards the end of the sixties – how are you feeling, Meacher? – it won’t take long – before the downfall of the cigarette firms, they developed nicomiotine. Because the firms were in general bad odour, the new drug lay neglected for fifty years; in fact in this matrix of yours it is neglected still, as far as I can ascertain.’

  He took my wrist and felt my pulse, which laboured beneath my skin like a man struggling to free himself from imprisonment in a sack. Sunk in a whole ocean of feeling, I said nothing: I could see the benefit of remaining unconscious all one’s life. Then one could be free to pursue the real things.

  ‘You probably won’t know this, Meacher, but nicotine used to retard the passing of urine. It set in motion a chain of reactions which released a substance called vasopressin from the pituitary gland into the bloodstream; when the vasopressin reached the kidney, the excretion of water taken by the mouth was suppressed. Nicomiotine releases noradrenaline from the hypothalamus and from the tegmentum of the midbrain, which is the part of the brain that controls consciousness and the functions of the consciousness; at the same time, the drug builds up miodrenaline in the peripheral blood vessels. This results in what we call an “attention transfer”. The result – I’m simplifying here, Meacher, because you probably aren’t taking this in normally – the result is a dislocation of consciousness, necessary to switch over from one matrix to another. The flow of attention is, to revert to my former analogy, given a Möbius twist and tagged onto the next matrix.

  ‘The seat on which you sit is in a circuit which can be tuned to various vibratory levels, each of which corresponds to a matrix. I move this lever here, and you and the portal will slip easily through into the matrix from which I have come. Don’t think of it as going through a barrier; rather, you are avoiding a barrier.

  ‘The effects of this technique can also be achieved by long mental discipline; it was this that the yogi were unwittingly reaching out for when they – ah, you are sliding through now, Meacher. Don’t be alarmed.’

  I was not alarmed. I was standing outside my own shell and seeing that to all of us come moments of calm and detachment; that stillness might be the secret that only a handful of men in any generation stumbles on. And at the same long-drawn moment of time I was aware that my left foot had disintegrated.

  No dismay assailed me. For the right foot had disintegrated too, and the wisdom and symmetry of this event merely pleased me. Everything was disintegrating into mist – not that I took it seriously, although for a moment I was frightened by the basilisk stare of my jacket buttons, staring up unwinkingly at me, so that I was reminded of those lines of Rimbaud’s about ‘the coat buttons that are eyes of wild creatures glaring at you from the end of the corridors’. Then buttons and Rimbaud and I were gone into mist!

  A feeling of sickness preceded me into Rastell’s matrix.

  I sat up shivering in the seat, my head suddenly clear and my body temperature low. The drug had built up to a certain pitch and then abandoned me. It was as if a passionate love affair had been ended by an unexpected desertion, a betraying letter. In my misery, I looked about me and saw a room very like the room I had left. It was the same shape, it had the same doors and windows, with the same prospect out of the window; but the curtains were not drawn, and it was light outside. I fancied the furniture was slightly different, but had not taken in the other room clearly enough to be positive. One thing I was sure of: the other room had not contained a little ugly man dressed in a one-piece denim suit and standing motionless by the door, staring at me.

  Disappointment, anger, fear, ran through me. Uncertainty, too. How could I be sure that I had not roused from a long unconsciousness, that this was not a trick of some kind? Where was the wretched Rastell? I got to my feet and ran behind the screen at the other side of the room. Fortunately, there was a basin fitted to the wall. Nausea hit me as soon as I moved. When I had been sick, I felt a little better.

  As I emerged shakily from behind the screen, I found Rastell there.

  ‘You’ll soon feel better,’ he said. ‘The first time’s always the worst. Now we’ll have to get a move on. Can you walk all right? We’ll catch a cab in the street.’

  ‘Where are we, Rastell? This is still Edinburgh, isn’t it? What’s happened?’

  He snapped his fingers impatiently, but answered in a quiet voice.

  ‘You have left the Edinburgh of AA688, which is how we designate your home matrix. We are now in the Edinburgh of AA541. In many vital respects, it much resembles the matrix you have left. In some ways you will find it identical. Only the workings of chance have brought divergences from what you at first will think of as the norm. As you adjust to inter-matrix living, you’ll realise that the norm does not exist. Let’s move.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are saying. Are you saying that I may find my brother and his wife here?’

  ‘Why not? It’s quite possible that you may find yourself here – here and in a thousand other matrices. It seems to be a property of matter to imitate itself in all matrices and of chance to modify the imitations.’

  He said this as if repeating some sort of received idea, walking as he did so to the shabby fellow, who, all this time, had stood patiently unmoving by the door. Despite my confusion, I saw this fellow wore a bracelet over his denims below one knee; from the bracelet radiated four short arms that seemed to bite into his flesh, Rastell produced a key from his pocket and thrust it into a lock in the bracelet. The four arms fell outwards, and hung loosely from their hinges on the bracelet’s rim. The man rubbed his leg and hobbled round the room, restoring his circulation. He kept his eye on both Rastell and me, but especially on me, without looking at either of us directly, and without speaking.

  ‘Who is this man? What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘He might have tried to escape if I had not locked him still,’ Rastell said. He produced a bottle from under his tunic. ‘They still have whisky in this matrix, Meacher, you’ll be glad to hear; have a good pull – it will help you take control of yourself.’

  Gratefully, I drank the warming stuff down from the bottle.

  ‘I’m in control of myself, Rastell. But this talk of matter imitating itself in all matrices – it’s like a vision of hell. For God’s sake, how many matrices are
there?’

  ‘There is not time to go into all that now. You shall have the answers if you help us. As yet, in any case, we have uncovered more questions than answers. Verification of the existence of the multi-matrix universe was only made some twenty years ago; the Matrix Investigation Corps was only established fifteen years ago, in 2027, the year the Fourth World War broke out in your matrix. In this matrix, the war did not take place.’

  ‘Rastell, I’m sorry, you must return me to my old world. I want no part of this.’

  ‘You are a part of it. Dibbs, help Mr Meacher to the door.’

  Dibbs was the voiceless one. He came towards me, keeping his eyes to the ground, but looking nastily alert as he advanced. I backed towards the door. Rastell grabbed my arm and pulled me round, not unkindly.

  ‘You don’t want to be mauled by a slave. Pull yourself together and let’s get along. I know it’s a shock at first, but you are a man of intelligence; you’ll adjust.’

  I knocked his hand away.

  ‘It’s because I’m a man of intelligence that I reject all this. How many of these matrix worlds are there?’

  The Corps measures consciousness in dees. Spaced three dees apart from each other lies an infinity of matrices … Yes, an infinity, Meacher, and I see the word does little to reassure you. Only a few dozen worlds are known as yet. Some are so like this that only by a few details – the taste maybe of the whisky, or the name of a Sunday newspaper – do they differ at all; others – we found one, Meacher, where the earth was in an – an improperly created state, just a ball of turbulent rivers of mud, lying under permanent cloud.’

  He opened the door as he was speaking, and we went together down the winding stair, and out into the street by a grimy door.

  It had been evening when I went into that house, or a house like it. Now it was an iron grey day, with a daylight forged to match the stones of the city. Oh yes, this was Edinburgh all right, unmistakeably Edinburgh, and unmistakeably not the Edinburgh I knew.

  The buildings looked the same, though a slight strangeness in the pattern they presented made me think that some of them were altered in ways I did not recollect. The people looked different, and dressed differently.

  Gone were the shabby and talkative crowds among which Royal and I had travelled only a short while before. The streets were almost empty, and those that travelled on them were easily observed to fall into two classes. Some men and women there were who travelled the streets with their heads held high, who walked briskly, who smiled and saluted each other; they were well dressed, in what I thought of then as a ‘futuristic’ style, with wide plain collars and short cloaks of what looked like a stiff leather or plastic. Many of the men wore swords.

  There was another class of man. They did not greet each other; they moved through the streets with no grace in their carriage, for whether they walked or loped – as many of them did – they kept their heads down and looked about only furtively from under their brows. Like Dibbs, they all wore denims, like him they bore the bracelets below one knee, and like him they bore a yellow disc on their backs, between their shoulder blades.

  I had plenty of time to observe these people for Rastell, as he had promised, had got us a cab, and in this we set off in the direction of Waverley Station.

  The cab amazed me. It would have held four men at a pinch, and it was worked by manpower. Three denimed men – I was already, I think, referring to them mentally as the slave class – were chained to a seat behind the cab; Dibbs climbed up with them to make a fourth; together they worked away at foot pedals, and that was the way we moved, propelled by four sweating wretches!

  In the streets ran several similar cabs, and even sedan chairs, which are well suited to the uneven nature of Edinburgh’s topography. There were also men riding horseback, and the occasional conventional lorry. I saw no buses or private cars. Remembering how the latter class of vehicle had been forbidden in my own matrix, I asked Rastell about it.

  ‘We happen to have more manpower than we have fuels,’ he said. ‘And unlike your wretchedly proletarian matrix, here most free men have leisure and find no need to hurry everywhere.’

  ‘You impressed on me the need for hurry.’

  ‘We are hurrying because the balance of this matrix is in a state of crisis. Civilisation is threatened, and must be saved. You and others like you from other matrices are being brought here because we need the perspective that an extra-matricial can give. Because your culture is inferior to ours does not mean that your abilities may not be valuable.’

  ‘Inferior? What do you mean, inferior? You look to be a couple of centuries behind us, with your antiquated sedans and these anachronistic pedal cabs.’

  ‘You don’t measure progress just by materialist standards, Meacher, I hope?’ Up came his gothic eyebrows as he spoke.

  ‘Indeed I don’t. I measure it by personal liberty, and from the bare glimpse I have had of your culture – your matrix, you have here nothing better than a slave state.’

  ‘This is nothing better than a slave state. You are a historian aren’t you, a man capable of judging not simply by the parochial standards of his own time? What race became great without slave labour, including the British Empire? Was not classical Greece a community of slave states? Who but slaves left all the lasting monuments of the world? In any case, you are prejudging. We have here a subject population which is a different thing from slavery.’

  ‘Is it to the people concerned?’

  ‘Oh, for Church’s sake, be silent, Meacher! You do nothing but verbalise.’

  ‘Why invoke the church about it?’

  ‘Because I am a member of the Church. Take care not to blaspheme, Meacher. During your stay here, you will naturally be subject to our laws, and the Church keeps a firmer hold over its rights than it does in your matrix.’

  I fell gloomily silent. We had laboured up onto George IV Bridge. Two of the slaves, working at the furthest extent of their chains, had jumped down from the back of the cab and pushed us over that stretch of the way. Having crossed the bridge, we began to go steeply down by The Mound, braking and freewheeling alternately, though a flywheel removed most of the unpleasant jerkiness from this method of progress. Edinburgh Castle, grandly high on our left, looked unchanged to me, but in the more modern part of the town before us I saw much change, without being able to identify any particular bit of it with certainty; for Royal, Candida and I had not lived very long in Edinburgh.

  Whistles sounded ahead. I took no notice, until Rastell stiffened and drew a revolver from his pocket. Ahead, by the steps of the Assembly Hall, a cab had crashed and turned over on to its side. The three slaves attached to it could be seen – we had them in sight just round the bend – wrenching at their chains, trying to detach them from the cab. A passenger had survived the crash. He had his head out of the window and was blowing a whistle.

  ‘The subs have allowed another crash – this is a favourite spot,’ Rastell said. ‘They get too negligent.’

  ‘It’s a difficult corner. How can you tell they allowed it to happen?’

  Giving me no answer, Rastell half opened the door of our cab and leant out to shout at our slaves.

  ‘Hey, you subs, stop this cab at once. I want to get out. Dibbs, jump down!’

  We squealed to a halt on the slope. When Rastell jumped out, I did the same. The air was cold. I was stiff and uneasy, very aware that I was so far from home that the distance could not be measured in miles. I looked about, and Dibbs and the three pedallers watched me with their eyebrows.

  ‘Better follow me, Meacher,’ Rastell called. He had begun to run towards the wrecked cab. One of the slaves there had wrenched his chain from its anchorage in the flimsy metal of the cab. Moving forward, he swung the loose end of the chain and brought it across the head of the passenger. The whistling stopped in mid-note. The passenger sagged to one side, and then slid out of our sight into the cab. By that time, the slave had jumped on to the top of the cab and turned to face Raste
ll. Other whistles began to shrill. A siren wailed.

  When the slave on the cab saw that Rastell carried a gun, his expression changed. I saw his look of dismay as he motioned to his fellows who were still captive and jumped down behind the cab. His fellows stood there trembling, no longer trying to get away.

  Rastell did not fire. A car came tearing up the hill with sirens wailing and bucked to a halt between Rastell and the upturned cab. Black and white uniformed men jumped out. They wore swords and carried guns. On the roof of the car was a winking sign that read CHURCH POLICE. Rastell hurried over to them. I stayed where I was, half in the shelter of our cab, undecided, not wanting any part of anything. Dibbs and his fellows subs stood where they were, not moving, not speaking.

  A crowd was collecting by the steps of the Assembly Hall, a crowd composed of the ruling class. The sub who had broken loose was kicked into the back of the police car. While the others indulged in argument I had time to look at the police car more carefully. It was an old vehicle, driven, I felt sure, by an internal combustion engine, a powerful beast, but without the streamlining that is characteristic of the cars I grew up with. It had a double door set in either side, and another, through which the wretched sub was pushed, at the back. Its windows were narrow, pointed, and grouped into pairs, in the style of windows in the Early English churches; even the windscreen had been divided into six in this way. The whole thing was elaborately painted in white and light blue and yellow. Why not, I thought, when you have plenty of time and slave labour is cheap?

  Rastell was returning, though the debate round the steps of the Assembly Hall was still on.

  ‘Let’s get on,’ Rastell said. He signalled curtly to Dibbs and the subs. We all climbed aboard and resumed our journey. I looked at the crowd about the church police car as we passed it. With a start, I thought I recognised one of the hangers-on in the crowd. He looked much like my brother Royal; then I told myself that my nerves were being irresponsible.