Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Yes. You’re off to the year 2003 as soon as we can arrange it. You’ll bring back reports on all five of the experimental vineyards. Cuttings too if possible.’

  ‘Against Temporal Regs, sir,’ I objected. ‘Inter-sectoral transfers are out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Baker, we’ll have to overlook that. This whole thing is – well, not very official anyway, or even legal. But just consider. Frankly, I’m not a rich man. I doubt whether any of you are either – one doesn’t get rich in this business. But anyone who knows the result of those long-term trials now, in 1993, is going to know something very valuable. Do you – if I may so express myself – read me?’

  There was a new stir of interest. ‘But how would anyone get there, sir?’ I demurred. ‘All the hardware was broken up ages ago.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. At least not all of it has proved impossible to reassemble. With a little goodwill. If all goes well we could share the cost, eh?’

  ‘I’m ten years out of touch, sir.’ This was Rabaiotti, my senior assistant.

  ‘We’re all getting on a bit, sir,’ said Schneider, our former MO.

  Which was when the Director came out with the appeal I quoted earlier, and after that it was just a question of detail. When, the following week, we assembled in a sort of dungeon off Whitehall we found waiting for us the good old modified TALISKER (Temporal Accelerator with Latent-Indeterminacy Suppressor and Kinetic-Energy Recompensator) that had served us so well in the past – or should I say, in bygone futures? Rabaiotti fed the power, took a long look, ran his hands over the relay banks, nodded slowly at me and started punching co-ordinates. Schneider was passing his hand-scanner over Simpson. The Director called me over to meet a tall swarthy man whom he introduced as a friend of his, a Dr Hanif Khan.

  I didn’t know why, but I immediately felt there was something odd about Dr Khan, not suspect exactly, just odd, something too that was unknown to the Director. Before speaking Khan produced what looked like a small old-fashioned television set with attachments but which I recognized as one of the new boson microscopes.

  ‘‘I’m a botanist specializing in vines,’ Khan said. His manner was disarming enough. ‘Used to be quite a tough job, you know. Not any more, thanks to this jigger. Quite frightening, what it can see. In fact nobody seems quite sure what it can’t see. Anyway, one thing it will certainly be able to see is whatever we may want to know about what your chap brings back from, er, over the way. No problem.’

  I nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Well, Hanif,’ the Director said, ‘would you like to run your eye over our baby here? If you have any questions I’ll no doubt prove incompetent to answer them.’

  True enough. I made to go along but Khan politely held up his hand.

  ‘You’ve plenty to see to, Dr Baker. I mustn’t interfere with any of that.’

  So I let them get on with it while I checked and rechecked the settings with Rabaiotti, sat Simpson on the stool and pressed the SEND/RETURN strap, a feature of the TALISKER that caused him to vanish and reappear in no time at all, though subjectively he had spent over four hours away. There was some dirt on his face and rather more on his clothes; otherwise he seemed none the worse. Schneider forbade contact until he had scanned him out, micro-scoured him and handed him a large Scotch and water. Then we crowded round and listened to his story.

  The date keyed into the TALISKER was 15 July 2003, selected on the reasoning that after celebrating Bastille Day the day before many Frenchmen would be in a state of reduced curiosity and vigilance when Simpson turned up in their midst. As it happened nobody saw him arrive in a secluded hollow in the hills above Beaune. At once aware of the great surrounding silence, he checked his position and surveyed his route.

  It was 4 p.m. and the sun was shining. The special vineyards lay grouped round a central research station seven kilometres to the south-west. He had plenty of time to make his way to that station and, in the character of a visiting oenologist from New South Wales, fix himself a brief tour of the vineyards. If unable to secure cuttings or in any other difficulty he was to conceal himself and operate after dark.

  His journey would be made on foot. Temporal Regulations strongly disfavoured the use of futural transport and, after an encounter with a subway escalator in 2062, he had been happy to abide by them. With a last check of map and compass (stereomap and lumen-compass, naturally) he set off in good spirits down the grassy slopes. Once or twice he took a deep breath. The air was strikingly pure, even for such a very remote spot as this appeared, though the bird population was plentiful and busy enough.

  Simpson was a claret man and had often visited the Bordeaux villages and vineyards, and if he had known those of Burgundy even one-quarter as well he might have started to ask himself questions sooner than he did. As it was he went happily on until a glance at the map showed he should be near the main Beaune–Pommard road – no, wait: should have crossed it a hundred metres back. There was no such road on the ground, no road at all anywhere that he could see, though he had passed close to more than one earth track. What was to be seen of the work of man? From higher up he had spotted a couple of churches, a large house with towers at each end, the roofs of a small village, a windmill. From here a rutted path led past a crude wooden hut and out of sight. Poor crops of some unfamiliar cereal – millet, perhaps, or rye – covered part of the hillside. Nothing else.

  He had decided that he must have crossed that road after all, that the mud-slide he remembered picking his way over had surely buried a long section of it, when he heard voices approaching round the bend of the path he was standing on. Without hesitation he ran for the shelter of a low bank topped with bushes and peered out from there. He could not have said what had induced him to hide.

  In a moment a farm-cart of sorts drawn by a skinny horse rattled and jolted into view. A lank-haired fellow of about thirty held the reins and plied a whip, an older man sat beside him, another man and a woman lolled in the body of the cart among a load of swedes or other root-crop. The four were calling out roughly to one another in what Simpson, with his goodish but limited French, identified as an uncouth local dialect. All were deeply tanned, none wore anything much better than rags, and a strong animal odour drifted across as they went by. The impression they gave of brutal debasement was overpowering.

  Before they were out of sight a dreadful suspicion from the back of Simpson’s mind had hardened into certainty. Twice in 1991 the world had come near to war, first over the Khvoy incident, then again during the siege of Durban. The third crisis must have come and this time not gone away. What he had just been looking at was a group of the survivors, the pitiful remnants of humanity after the great catastrophe. But was such thoroughgoing degeneration possible in ten years or less? Had the TALISKER taken him further into the future than intended? Firmly he thrust away such futile guessing-games and concentrated his mind first on the Temporal Regulation requiring every mission to be carried out to the fullest extent possible, and then on what could still be in it for him. After a short rest and ten mg of paracynomyl he was on his way to the research station, or whatever might remain of it.

  Nothing remained of it – at least, nothing he could discern under the thicket of brambles and briers that covered the site – but there were remnants of the surrounding vineyards, if the sickly stunted plants now growing there were truly such. But part of his task was to take cuttings and he proceeded to do so. Absorbed in this, he failed to heed the approach of the watchman. There was a struggle; he took a blow on the head and perhaps lost consciousness for a time. Anyhow he remembered nothing clearly till he was sitting on the bare stone floor of a large antiquated kitchen with an upper servant of some kind, as it might have been a steward, demanding to know who he was. (These and some later inferences were reached by Simpson or one or other of his audience as he told his tale.)

  As soon as the steward saw Simpson’s credentials his manner changed from irate suspicion to caution if not respect. He bustled off
, returning with a man in his fifties who could be positively identified from his dress and tonsure as an ecclesiastic, a monk. But any hopes Simpson might have had of understanding treatment from a man of learning were soon dashed. The cleric studied the typewritten documents briefly and uneasily, darting similar glances at Simpson and his no doubt strange-seeming get-up. Finally he thrust the papers back at him, snapped an order to the steward in his odd sibilant patois and unceremoniously withdrew.

  It was not much, but it was toleration. Simpson was placed near one end of a long oak table, brought water in response to his mimings and left free to take stock of his surroundings. Light came from a few stubby candles and a vast open fire above which joints of meat sizzled. The air was hot, smoky and heavy with cooking and other smells. Hams and other preserved eatables hung from the ceiling. There was a great coming and going of attendants with serving-dishes and general carry-on until the main business of getting the meal up to the monks’ dining-hall was accomplished. At this stage of the game the steward, now seen as a likeable character in a fine embroidered jacket, no doubt a relic of happier times, settled himself next to Simpson and genially indicated that he should help himself to food and drink.

  There was no shortage of either: mutton, cold fowl, sausage, coarse bread, butter, cheese, fresh berries, beer, red wine, all set out at once and indiscriminately. As he had begun to guess with the songbirds, Simpson saw while he piled his plate that whatever had assailed humanity had not affected other forms of life.

  Or had it? He was hungry and the ambient smells were so heavy that his jaws had closed on a lump of mutton before he was aware that it was putrid, turning rotten. The steward saw his distress, nodded cheerfully and passed him a crock of salt. Wary of giving offence, Simpson managed a couple of nauseating mouthfuls. The fowl was a little better, if only because the gamey reek seemed less incongruous; the seasoning of the sausage burnt his tongue. The fruit was sour, the cheese quite frightening. Pushing aside the rancid butter he tried the bread, but it was full of gritty residues. The watery beer at least offset some of the salt, until after a few swallows its mawkish flavour became too much. It was out of a pure sense of mission that he accepted a pot of wine.

  No use trying for the nose in this place. He took a sip, then more. Often since that evening in the bowels of Whitehall Simpson has tried to describe that wine of which perhaps 50 ml passed down his throat. It was not exactly that it was unlike any other wine he had ever tasted, nor yet that it was finer, nobler: it was greater in sheer size. If a Château Haut Brion at the top of its form could be compared with a fragrance of Cathay, then what he drank now was all the riches of the East. He lowered the cup and gazed at the steward, who took it from him with a grimace of apology and stirred into it watered honey and a spoonful of some herbal infusion. With admirable fortitude he sampled the result, and had some difficulty describing that too, though some of the phrases he used were most evocative.

  Wide-eyed, hand on stomach, Simpson lurched from the kitchen to the accompaniment of good-natured jeers and shouts of encouragement. But he was not really ill. Once in the open he completed the circuit in the bracelet on his wrist and the TALISKER had him safe and sound.

  Dr Khan was twitching with excitement. He shook Simpson’s hand a dozen times, almost snatched the vine cuttings from him and placed them in the field of his microscope. Its screen remained blank for nearly a minute while we all stared at it as if hypnotized. Then several rows of symbols flashed up together. Khan pressed buttons once, twice, got new answers and gave a great sigh. With a flourish he cleared the machine and, very much master of ceremonies, turned and faced his audience.

  ‘What Dr Simpson has brought us,’ Khan began, ‘is something altogether more interesting and shall I say more valuable than the result of any immunological experiment. We have in our possession not the latest of vines but the first, not a mutation but the rootstock, the Urrebe. As confirmed just now by archaeobotanical comparison, it is a living specimen of the extinct primeval vine-grape bearer, vitis vinifera pristina, of which more in a moment. First I have some explaining and apologizing to do, and first of all to you, sir.’

  Here he bowed to the Director, who sent the rest of us a nervous smile.

  ‘While you were most lucidly explaining to me the tuning of your temporal transmitter I was impertinent enough to distract your attention and change the setting in a most radical way. Yes, as he must already have begun to suspect, Dr Simpson has visited not the future but the past, the late fourteenth century I should judge – I wasn’t too sure of the calibration. Dr Simpson, I do beg your pardon for my reckless and high-handed—’

  The Director had turned the colour of a fine Travel rosé and was speechless, but Simpson had opened a transparent packet and taken out a small metal object which he passed up to Khan. ‘I didn’t only collect vines back there. That’s the salt-spoon I was handed by the steward – or perhaps I should say the seneschal.’

  Khan reactivated his appliance, inserted the spoon and lowered a bar. ‘This may take a little longer. Er, as I say, I’m afraid I was really most rash.’

  ‘It was worth it,’ Simpson said. ‘One thing – I don’t understand why that monk reacted as he did. I see now he couldn’t have read a word of my papers, but it was as if he was afraid of them.’

  Rabaiotti grinned. ‘Of course he was afraid of them. Documents in an unknown language produced by an unknown method? Think yourself lucky not to have been dragged out and burnt on the spot.’

  ‘If it had been anywhere else but a monastery . . .’

  ‘Everything one had ever thought about the Middle Ages, eh? Notably the horrid—’

  A bleeper started up on the microscope and the screen illuminated itself. ‘Compounded – in other words put together, made – AD 1325 plus or minus five,’ Khan announced. ‘Apparent age 19 plus or minus one. A little earlier than I estimated.’

  ‘Nice to think it might have been 1346,’ I said. ‘Edward III and the Black Prince moving in to clobber the Frogs at Crécy. What if they’d been on the look-out for English spies?’

  ‘Burgundy wasn’t part of France then,’ Schneider put in.

  ‘Could we have some order, gentlemen?’ the Director called. ‘I’d like to hear more from Dr Khan about just how valuable this thing is.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Our discovery, our prize is reproducible and fructifiable or will be within a short time. Soon we shall be enjoying the wine that Dr Simpson’s hosts found too feeble to drink unadulterated. And marketing the living vines that produce it.’

  ‘Splendid, but for how long?’ Rabaiotti asked. ‘Why should we imagine that this vitis pristina will be any more proof against phylloxera than the vines we know?’

  ‘Because of its natural defences,’ Khan said earnestly. ‘Those defences that human beings have almost as if deliberately destroyed with the very chemicals meant to improve them. Once, phylloxera vastatrix was an almost harmless little beast – almost, not quite. So he had to be sprayed out of existence and indeed he was ousted temporarily, only to return with greater strength against a weakened prey. And the next time was worse.

  ‘The dates will show you. First organized spraying of French vines, 1803, under Chaptal, Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior. First severe phylloxera damage, 1811–12. First toxic smoke attempts, 1859. New phylloxera penetration into Loire vineyards, 1865. And so on. That was my first clue. The medicine on which the disease flourished was progressively undermining the patient. And incidentally it seems the price the vines paid for sheer survival was loss of quality in the product. As always. There’s not much meat on a mountain goat.

  ‘So . . . soon, very soon, we here will collectively launch what will be nothing less than the wine of the century – the twenty-first century, that is, by courtesy of the fourteenth!’

  It was quite soon, in 1997 to be exact, and I was there when the corks were pulled at the first tasting, and by universal consent the wine was absolutely horrible. It hadn’t travelled,
so to speak. But by then we, the six of us, had all cleaned up.

  HEMINGWAY IN SPACE

  The woman watched him and he made another sweep. There was nothing again but he knew one of them was around. It got so you always knew. After twenty years it got so you always knew when one of them was around.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I thought you could tell just where to find these things,’ she said. ‘I thought we hired you because you could take us straight to one of these things. I thought that was why we hired you.’

  ‘Easy now, Martha,’ the young fellow said. ‘Nobody can find xeeb where there aren’t any xeeb, not even Mr Hardacre. We’ll come across one any minute now.’

  She moved away from the three of them at the instrument panel and her thighs were arrogant under the tight space-jeans. You bitch, Philip Hardacre thought suddenly. You goddam, bored, boring, senseless bitch. He felt sorry for the young fellow. He was a pretty nice young fellow, and here he was married to this goddam senseless bitch, and it looked like he was too afraid of her to tell her to get the hell out, although you knew he wanted to.

  ‘I feel him near,’ the old Martian said, turning the bigger and more grizzled of his two heads towards Philip Hardacre. ‘We shall see him soon now.’

  The woman leaned against the ship’s side and stared out the port. ‘I can’t think why you have to go hunting these monstrosities. Two days it’s been since we left, and we could have been in Venusport all that while instead of cooped up in this steel jalopy a couple of light years from civilization. What’s so good about getting a xeeb even if you do get one? What does it prove, getting a xeeb?’

  ‘The xeeb is the largest life-form in this part of the galaxy.’ The young fellow was a school professor or something like that, and you could tell it from the way he spoke. ‘More than that, it’s the only sentient creature living out here in free space, and it’s ferocious; it’s been known to take on a scout ship. It’s the toughest damn thing there is. That’s it, isn’t it?’