by Brian Aldiss
‘Now you have entered what you may consider the great Afterwards, Stephen. This is really a true beginning, when you become an integral part of a, shall we say, multitude?’
‘Oh, an Afterlife? I’m in an – the Afterlife? Is that it?’
‘No. You still need a little orientation. This is life, the real existence. What you have been undergoing was an experiment. What you regarded as the Earth or, perhaps, the Universe, was our experiment on rather a modest scale. We wish to apologize to you for the discomfort and confusion you experienced.’
‘Wait! Let me try and take this in.’ So it seemed to him he said, although the nature of the transmission was obscure. It could be that he had sometimes had doubts about whether there were large elements of deception in his ‘life’ … ‘Are my parents here?’ An affirmative answer came. He wondered how drab had been his mother’s inner life.
‘Rich, rich. Enclosed, but extremely fertile. Some who cannot speak, or fulfil their natures, like your mother, enjoy whole meadows of monologues.’
He had no forehead to clutch. ‘This is real life! I thought I’d died. I simply can’t take it in.’
An eon passed like a solitary chord on a harp.
‘To help you truly “take it in”, I will tell, show, reprise for you, your entire projected existence. We will begin, if you are ready, when you are no more than three years old, when you first venture onto the beaches of Walcot.’
‘No, wait, please … I’m not yet prepared.’
So then there was another gulf of some kind. And then he was somehow prepared, and the block was projecting, ‘We will review your entire life, from when you play on Walcot beaches. And from there we will proceed throughout the “twentieth century” as you think of it, until your emergence here, freed from unreality. Do you understand?’
‘You put an emphasis on the twentieth century. Why do you do that?’
‘We set up the experiment on a time-limited basis for ease of study. There was only the time-stage you knew as “the twentieth century”. Nothing else.’
‘But my plesiosaur …’
‘All that you thought of as having gone before was a, well, let me call it a computer simulation, for ease of understanding. Your so-called past, the past centuries, have never happened.’
‘Steve’ was unable to feel faint. He merely stammered that he did not understand. ‘Explain about the fossilized Jurassic fish I discovered. Was that a simulation?’
‘It was another prop, simply, to make you, and everyone else, believe there had been a long past. All your hard-earned knowledge, I fear, as false as your “sister’s” film. In fact, your entire world – that “special effect”, you could call it – opened quite arbitrarily at a date we decided to code-name “The Twentieth Century”. Such matters may become clearer to you as we rerun your story.’
It was too much to comprehend. He was dazzled and deafened, fighting to adjust.
‘I can’t see you!’
Comprehending, the block projected, ‘You are contained in me. Your senses have yet to accommodate to your new specifications and forms. Be quiescent and we will reprise your whole story for you.’
‘…’
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘At high tide, the sea lapped close to the dunes, leaving little sand to be seen. The remaining sand above the high tide mark was as fine as sifted salt. Spikes of marram grass grew from it like quills from a porcupine. No stones were visible. The small waves, white and grey, seethed against their limits. How lonely it was, this wild coastline.’
The sand above the tidemark was as fine as sifted salt. The dwindling sea re-enacted its harmonies. It was once more August, that August. The August sky was once more blue overhead, without a cloud, the air was fresh. A small sun-tanned boy set out across the shore of Walcot to follow the retreating tide.
He was once more that little boy; once more without a care in the world. Once more totally happy on that beautiful beach. A happiness like homesickness.
He was to have his time again.
The whole story of this existence unfolded.
The Steve-being did indeed take it in, with all its length rolled into a tolerable format. He relived everything. He did – it seemed unavoidably – grasp the overall, ungraspable situation, which prompted a vast horizon to roll out before him, carpet-like, into a creditable imitation of eternity.
‘It was all an experiment. All my life. All everyone’s life. My parents’, Violet’s, Stalin’s, the cheetah’s. To what end?’
The block replied. ‘It is a thought experiment, perhaps flawed from the start. Your lifetime, or “timelife”, to employ a better word, was a kind of examination. Now is your, well, transcendence; your entry into the eternal life of what you may call “the spirit”, the “essence”.’
He could scarcely formulate the question. ‘Have I passed the examination?’
‘You mistake my meaning. We were under examination, not you. Now you have come through, the whole gravamen of timelife is that it is reviewed and rethought.’
Did Steve think before he responded? ‘So you really were the known unknown of which … my dear Verity spoke … But, now you can give me the answer, did my parents leave me to die, to drown, on the sands of Walcot when I was a small boy?’
‘You did not suspect that threat for some years. Then the possibility was brought to your attention and you commenced worrying about it. It was that suspicion which was your burden; it coloured your life.’
‘You don’t answer my question.’
‘But I have answered it. You were unable to deal with a problem you had yourself, in part, conjured up and sustained. I spoke of our flawed experiment – one flaw was in the construction of the human brain. These admittedly low-power perception-machines we installed sensed things, but could not always resolve them.
‘To give an example, in your churches you sang of God, “Help us to see, ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee”. A good guess at the truth. We were most entertained. So close, and yet so far! What you reckoned to be the all-pervasive light speeding through your universe, that light registered by your instruments, was in fact our thoughts of you; they were the background noise of our survey. Not light but thought.’
If there had been a function for sadness, Steve would have been sorrowful. He said, ‘It is dreadful to believe that all that glory, that amazing mixture of misery and joy, was just your … box of tricks. What of all the dreadful wars of the century? The bloodshed, the despotism, the famines? They were just for your entertainment?’
‘Not so. Once the experiment was under way, we were unable to interfere.’
‘But those things happened. There must have been a major flaw in your original project.’
As usual, the block was answering without hesitation. ‘To put it briefly, a major flaw in our project was the way in which everything was designed to prey on everything else, up and down the food chain, in order to achieve adequate energy-input. The method encouraged callousness. When we close down this particular timelife experiment, we shall install a better system.’
‘What else will you change?’
‘We are rethinking the clumsy use of planets. Your planet, your Earth, if you could see it, that ball forever trailing its one eternal night behind it like a dark tail, round and round … So unaesthetic …’
The dumbfounding entity fell silent, as if in contemplation. Steve dared not speak.
‘Also, we are considering in our next experiment that it must be staged in a more stable element than time. We have something in mind.’
‘Steve’ grappled with the statement, finally asking what this other element, superior to time, could be.
The block replied without hesitation – it seemed even before the other’s sentence was completed – that even if it explained, Steve would be incapable of understanding, since he had been a creature of Time. ‘Suffice it to say, it is a nexus we are designing.’
As silence fell
between the two, the light began to change.
‘Can I have my beloved Verity back?’ But even as he asked, he knew that so great was the transformation that he had no need of her in this eternal Now, was indeed unable to need her.
The block was silent, at peace. It knew that ‘Steve’ now understood. Completion had been reached.
‘Steve’ then said, or possibly did not say, ‘The circumstances in which I lived, the images of them and of myself, were something I engaged, fondled with my senses, those precious senses. My salvation then was a kind of intoxication with life, with its pleasures and sorrows. The cleverly designed icon of my being – my soul, my psyche! – was always present in my mind, though distorted in representation by dreams. Am I right there?’
The response was immediate, superimposed on the question. ‘Although mainly pleasurable, those dreams were your flaw in our composition of your cerebral organization. Arbitrary though that entire scheme of timelife might be, it seemed logical at the time, as it was, I assume, intended to be.
‘All men and women were forced to confront something unresolved in their lives, some knot forever knotted, some element of puzzlement, unreality and dream, their glass forever darkened. They could not be permitted to realize the truth, or our experiment would have been spoiled.
‘As the light dies, they see clearly. And in that perception, in that moment when they gasp, “Oh, I see!” in a sigh of relief, the enigma of life is fulfilled.’
‘It is possible, I admit, to accept it in that aspect.’
And slowly, the light gathers up its mighty skirts, the light of understanding, of an intense cerebration. All timelife humanity would weep to see it happen.
The darkness divides into bars. At first there is only a silver bar, low, encircling the gigantic space like a ring; with it comes a kind of solemn music, like, but also unlike, a breath, unheard by human ear.
The brilliance sinks from silver to gold, and suddenly the dome overhead is suffused with a glorious scarlet that has about it a stirring finality, so that those elements reach up their imagined hands to it. Almost immediately, the scene changes. All has been digested and understood and forgiven. There exists now only a slender bar of light, of the most tender non-colour, along the supposed horizon.
And then the great eyelid of creation closes, leaving only darkness.
Virtuous thoughts of the day laye up good tresors for the night, whereby the impressions of imaginary formes arise into sober similitudes, acceptable unto our slumbering selves, and preparatory unto divine impressions: hereby Solomons sleep was happy. Thus prepared, Jacob might well dream of Angells upon a pillowe of stone, and the first sleep of Adam might bee the best of any after …
– Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich
On Dreams
Notes
Some of the books and texts mentioned in this novel have an existence in the real world. They include:
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, by Dubravka Ugrešic. Phoenix House 1998
The Duchess of Malfi, a play by John Webster. First published 1623
My Five Lives, by G. F. Stridsberg. William Heinemann 1963
The Old Red Sandstone, by Hugh Miller. 1841
Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence, by J. T. Fraser. Brazilier, New York 1975
Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. 1794
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1927
Miscellaneous Writings, by Sir Thomas Browne, edited by Geoffrey Keynes. Faber & Faber 1921
The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle. Penguin Classics, 1976
The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Picador 1995
Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold. 1867
Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss. The Friday Project 2014
The Oresteia, by Aeschylus. Oxford World’s Classics 2002
My thanks to Emily Gale for her good advice and encouragement.
About the Author
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.
Also by Brian Aldiss
The Brightfount Diaries
Interpreter
The Male Response
The Primal Urge
Report on Probability A
The Monster Trilogy
Frankenstein Unbound
Moreau’s Other Island
Dracula Unbound
The Eighty-Minute Hour
The Malacia Tapestry
Brothers of the Head
Enemies of the System
The Squire Quartet
Life in the West
Forgotten Life
Remembrance Day
Somewhere East of Life
Cretan Teat
Jocasta
Finches of Mars
Comfort Zone
The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part One: 1960-62
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Two: 1963-64
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Three: 1965-66
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Four: 1967-69
Poetry
Songs from the Steppes: The Poems of Makhtumkuli
Non-fiction
Bury my Heart at W. H. Smith’s
The Detached Retina
The Twinkling of an Eye
When the Feast is Finished
Essays
This World and Nearer Ones
The Pale Shadow of Science
The Collected Essays
And available exclusively as ebooks
The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy
50 x 50: The Mini-sagas
Supertoys Trilogy
About the Publisher
Australia
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HarperCollins Canada
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New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
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http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
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