New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘So Pat’s got to start from scratch!’ I said.

  ‘The whole film, all over again. He can’t just give it a different emphasis ... it’ll mean interviewing a whole new batch of people.’

  I smiled at her. ‘I can’t wait to see what he makes of it.’

  ‘I’d better go and talk to him,’ Tina said. ‘He’ll be taking it very badly. He doesn’t like having to be radical.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ I said.

  Inside the pub, Pat was sitting morosely at the bar drinking what appeared to be a tumblerful of whisky. He ignored us.

  I ordered a couple of drinks for Tina and myself, and we waited to see what was going to happen.

  At the far end of the bar, Frank was on the telephone. Under the circumstances he looked remarkably optimistic.

  ‘...Is Jeff there? he was saying. ‘...Jeff, Frank here. Listen, we’ve got a problem.... Oh, you’ve heard. I think we can handle it.... Yes, but we’ve got to start all over. Look, I want you to fix a few things for me ... Yes, by tomorrow. Have you got some paper there? I want you to make a list. ... Right. I want a full breakdown on who is behind this entertainments complex, and what the vested interests are. The angle on that’s going to be exploitation by labour, spread of capitalism, and that stuff. And see if you can get a spokesman from the National Trust to talk to us.... Fine. And the usual statistics on pollution-levels. ... Yes, and a few more things. We’ll be playing up the permissive stuff as usual, so get on to a model-agency and see if you can get half a dozen girls down here. Standard contract: nude bathing and orgy. OK? ... And we’ve found a sci-fi writer. Good value. See if you can turn something up on sci-fi. No one here knows what the hell he’s talking about.... Yes, and another thing ...’

  I swallowed the rest of my drink.

  ‘Count me out,’ I said to Tina. ‘I’ve done my bit for partiality.’

  ‘Frank will be terribly disappointed,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t think Pat will mind. You’ll be on the ferry tonight?’

  At least she knew what the hell I was talking about.

  ‘If Pat gets as drunk as I think he will,’ she said, ‘I’ll be on it this afternoon.’

  ‘Good.’

  I hurried from the bar before Frank could finish his phone-call.

  <>

  * * * *

  THREE COINS IN ENIGMATIC FOUNTAINS:

  Carefully Observed Women

  The Daffodil Returns the Smile

  The Year of the Quiet Computer

  THREE ENIGMAS: IV.

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Once again Brian Aldiss pushes wide magic casements for us to peer doubtfully upon a fevered landscape drenched with meanings, where, if we do not take care, our occular vibrissi will almost certainly touch the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall, where we shudder in terror at what the smile of the daffodil may reveal...

  * * * *

  X Carefully Observed Women

  From my position, her bed looks like a ruined countryside, covered with a miserable dapple of fields. Occasionally, fields heave, rise to a great height above sea level, or sink from view, as Harrion stirs in her agony.

  Much of the time, all I see of her is the old yellow of the roof of her mouth as she lies panting for breath. Sometimes, a great slack arm hangs down towards the floor, twisted and gritty like a stalactite in veined sandstone. Bits of her broken past come upon her; for days at a time, she labours among the fragments of a bygone year. She smells bad of nights, so that I lie as far from the bed as my chains will allow. I could have done better.

  Outside I hear the plash of enigmatic fountains. Toy fish swim there, learning to devour each other.

  Time streams by as always. Although now there is no one to check it at its source.

  The women come to see Harrion. Some are her regular friends, like Bettron, Citrate, and old Ma Kandle, unable to give up a lifetime’s habit of visiting. There are relations, like Mylene, Temple, Floret, Marriet, and the two aged sisters, Emilor and Chatelait, who are so fat they bump together as they walk, like buoys in a light swell. Neighbours appear, the blind Ma Audopar, little Pi, Cathwal, Eadie, Gaffrey with the port wine mark from next door. There are women with whom Harrion once quarrelled, now come to make their peace, sleek Perchince, Porly, and deaf Dame Caper. Many of these women are accompanied by their daughters.

  When they come from a distance, some even bring their men. I know when men are chained up outside, can hear them pulling restlessly at their rings or scuffling among each other. They do not enter the building. Only women and girls flock into the sick room, bringing little gifts with them, a flower or a carved stone. The shelves are full of needlework and knick-nacks, dolls and daffodils.

  In comes Perchince, smart as ever, with a loose-woven shawl over her long costume, ushering in before her Scally, the dark-eyed daughter, whose elegant legs show a flaking of dark hair over the calves. Perchince brings a tiny prayer embroidered on green cloth and set about with artificial sea shells. She gives it to Harrion, whose arm comes up yellow and stringy to grasp it.

  ‘You’re looking better than when I last saw you, my dear. I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you for so long, but we’ve had so much trouble.’

  ‘Recovery’s only one stall in the market place,’ says Harrion, speaking in her usual elusive and epigrammatic way.

  Somewhere, Harrion finds the strength to pull herself up, wild-eyed and sweating, her lank fair hair raining down into the pits of her cheeks. Perchince helps adjust her pillows.

  While Harrion fights for breath, Perchince tells her things she would like to know—how the price of fish has gone up, the scarcity of benjamins, the dangers of going out at night, the afflictions of her family, and the alarmingly high tides in Gobblestone.

  To all this, Harrion listens after a fashion, her vacant and feverish eye rolling here and there. I watch her, but I also look at the visitors, Scally especially. Scally smells good and fresh. She has a small nose, wide dark-brown eyes, pleasant lips which sometimes purse together mischievously, and curly hair which clusters round her head in a lively way. I’d like to get her in my pad, I’d like to throw myself on her, I could eat her. She’s getting fat.

  She does not join in the conversation. She sits and is aware of my interest. She moved round slightly in her chair by the bedside, so that I can admire her knees. She opens her legs slightly, so that I can devour her thighs. She observes the effect of this on me.

  Harrion interrupts the spate of Perchince’s recital, saying, ‘Scally is getting fat.’

  ‘The trouble we have with her! We had just the same thing with her sister, seventy-five years ago. She’s not fat, she’s pregnant. Get up, Scally, show yourself.’

  Scally rises and stands there indifferently.

  ‘You naughty girl,’ Harrion says. ‘The taking of care never lost a friend yet. You’ve been in the ruins again, haven’t you?’

  Scally says nothing. I shake my chains but they take no notice.

  ‘It’ll be a cloud all the centuries of your life,’ Harrion says, vaguely. ‘And there’s no repeal before the bar of your own conscience.’

  ‘I don’t feel guilty about it. Aunt Harrion, if that’s what you mean,’ says Scally defiantly, with a little flounce of her body that sets the saliva squirting in my gums.

  ‘She’s still very proud,’ sleek Perchince says. ‘That’s the worst of it. And she would not confide in me until she was all of twenty-three months gone.’

  ‘Independence is of no merit where tears are,’ says Harrion.

  ‘Still, we shall make the best of things and see her through her trouble.’

  ‘Those who love their own creations too much fall into bondage,’ Harrion replies, shifting her position and glancing pointedly at me. She wants me to see where the remark really applies.

  Perchince arises, smiling frowningly at her daughter.

  ‘We must go,’ says she. ‘I’ve got to take her to the calibrator’s an
d have her oriented. Always more expense, Harrion.’

  ‘Folly’s three-quarters of circumstance,’ Harrion agrees. ‘Take care of yourself, and remember that compassion makes captives.’ Again a mean glance at me.

  Off goes Perchince, taking Scally with her. Scally looks cheerful. I miss it when her fresh smell no longer cuts the fats of the room.

  Harrion dies a little more in the night and, next day, while she drowses through the late afternoon, her cousin Temple appears. Temple’s man, who is left outside, whines and scratches at the door. With her eyes still shut and one hand pressed to her fevered forehead, Harrion gives an account of what passed between her and Perchince on the previous day. She clutches her cousin’s hand and elaborates their conversation endlessly, exhausted though she is.

  ‘I’m sorry for Scally,’ Temple says. I know she waits for her cousin to fall asleep; then she will occasionally slip over to me.

  ‘It’s all a mere dance of the ferret,’ says Harrion. ‘Scally is not really pregnant. She has a cushion under her clothes. They’re just doing it for me, to distract me from the notion of dying. Anything, to keep my mind off that.’

  ‘Oh, that would be wicked,’ Temple says. ‘Besides, you are not dying. You’re getting better.’

  ‘They no more deceive me than a bee a flower. Didn’t my mother make me play the same trick on old Ma Bonnitrude seven or more centuries ago? She used to say to me, ‘Now that even God’s fallen so low, we’ve each of us got to get out of life as best we can’ ‘. As she speaks, she struggles into a sitting position and opens her weary eyes.

  She sees then that Temple has one arm in a sling, and that blood-stained bandages cover her hand.

  ‘What have you done with yourself?’, she asks. And her cousin tells her a hair-raising story involving several coincidences, a rail journey, and a man who escaped from a travelling circus. Harrion tut-tuts all the way through the recital.

  When Temple has gone, she says to the room in general, ‘they don’t fool me with their tales. I never forget about death. I am dying, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re dying,’ I say. I can’t help panting and looking eager.

  She fixes me with a glowing stare. ‘And you know what happens to you when I go...’

  ‘You’ve often told me.’

  ‘You’ll be as solitary as a stone, just like you were when you started.’

  She revives. I watch her heave herself upward, reaching for the prod, which is just long enough to touch me. I scramble to the end of my chain, but she will get me again if she does not fall dead first.

  The last rays of sunset are red on the wall above the bed, like an old stain.

  Time still streams by. The fountain plays. But there is nothing to do; nothing can be done.

  I try to recall those happy seven days when I created the universe.

  * * * *

  XI The Daffodil Returns The Smile

  Neece and Reneece will drink no ichor from Moolab tonight, since he has to hunt and kill a kimarsun. He will need all his energy against the intense cold of the Rind and the might of those beings.

  Neece and Reneece dress their warrior, singing to him as they do so, being careful to hold always to the old forms. Moolab stands between them in a trance, all his mailed hands extended and slowly vibrating. They saved the last of his sloughs against this occasion; the chitinous armours have been beaten with prescribed bronze mallets, and carefully lined with the ordained coatings of claysyrup and boccarrd-fleece. Now the females clamp on the armour.

  Beyond their broodhaven, chirplings set up the agonizing Sun-Slayer chorus.

  By the time he is prepared, at the prescribed hour, Moolab is in the warrior’s trance. They are ready to leave. Both females pause at the door. They encompass his neck with their mailed jaws, tenderly kissing the scars there. Then they move into the tunnels of the Great Warren.

  Through the haze of smoke and gas, they see the buildings all about them. They disregard them. They disregard the crowds.

  ‘The Rind!’ cry the crowds. ‘Moolab goes to the colds of the Rind to slay one of the eternal kimarsuns! He will bring us the night as a present!’

  Moolab glances neither to right nor to left. He heads straight for the Fate Gate of the city, where the Hive Lord awaits him.

  The Hive Lord stands with the Arch Priest, a tremendous broadpsanned being, every one of whose eight legs bears a plutonium ring on every claw. At sight of him, Neece and Reneece fall behind, adopting the shrivel stance.

  But Moolab approaches the Hive Lord with no decrease in pace, only stopping abruptly when nil-distance separates them. The two beings lock jaws, black clashing on black. That’s over in a trice. Without hesitation, Moolab side-steps, offering his occular vibrissi into the gaping mandibles of the Arch Priest. The pose is held to the count of ten, accompanied by a shrill chant from the sanctified chirplings. Then Moolab slides back one pace, to stay confronting the Priest as the other snaps shut his mandibles, otherwise remaining immobile.

  ‘Do you, Moolab, accept your sacred duty to slay a kimarsun and render night to us?’, demanded the Hive Lord in a singing tone.

  ‘I accept my sacred duty and I will slay a kimarsun and render night to our kind until the purse is filled.’

  Now the Arch Priest begins to speak in a singing tone. Each of his phrases, Moolab echoes after him. ‘By the nine beggared cripples. By the fragrance of the Old Pursuer. By the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall. By the fifteen hundred generations underground. By the scales of the mother and the leavings of the dreaded brood. By the colds and unmentionable voices that infest the Rind. By the spawn claw. By the things themselves. Above all, by the stars that blaze above the world, and the Wheel of Evil. Till ichor festers.’

  Despite his clumsy caparisons, Moolab throws himself flat before the Priest.

  ‘I will take notice of the hated constellations, of the Bat, the Devil Bull, the Boulder, the Night Worm and the Queen’s Scar. This night shall see a report here of my death or my success. I will return with eye of kimarsun or my own eyes shall roll for ever down the crippled glaciers of the outside.’

  ‘Take success with you, Moolab of the Core, bring back fire for our fire.’

  The simple ritual is over. Lord and Priest both raise their prows high. Moolab rises and scuttles off at high speed through Fate Gate without a backward look. Whistling, the two brood-sisters, Neece and Reneece, rush after him, kicking dirt. The great gate slams behind them.

  With unpausing ferocity, Moolab hurled himself forward, through the dreary and smouldering tunnels of the mantle. The brood-sisters gallop behind. Crevasses, molten rock, roof-falls—nothing can halt them. Moolab is going to slay a kimarsun.

  Sometimes the tunnels divide. One way leads to the Rind, one to another hive. Kicking cinders, they gallop ever upwards.

  At one junction, a Mother is crossing their path. She is in the huge serated softness of Metamorphosis I. At the sound of their terrible progress, the Mother turns, flicking her sepia head, opening her mandibles. She is unhesitatingly ready to fight.

  Moolab tears into and through her soft body. He does not pause.

  Following, Neece and Reneece plunge through the pulped remains, covering themselves with a viscid cream as they go. The still-chattering head of the Mother is flung aside by Reneece’s shoulder as she passes.

  They scent cooler parts of the world. The walls are more opaque. Movements about them have a duller grind. They know the world lives, just as they live.

  Because of the increasing cold, the three beings move more slowly.

  Moolab sniffs the terrible world ahead, where solids cease and emptiness comes down to the Rind. That is the region of the kimarsunss. He recites the Oath of Death or Success.

  By the nine beggared cripples.

  By the fragrance of the Old Pursuer.

  By the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall.

  By the fifteen hundred generations underground.

  By the scales o
f the mother and the leavings of the dreaded brood.