Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”

  “ ’Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.”

  Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself, as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d ’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”

  “You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world — you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”

  “Such as?” Charley asked.

  “See this red and green necklace I got around my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn — phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”

  “What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lamp glow.

  Norsgrey laughed.

  “Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”

  “Where is this place, Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle — well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”

  “Them, who are them?”

  “Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed-up mouth coming out of his neck. They live forever because they’re immortals, see. And I’m like them, because I won’t ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I’ve just been back there now, on my way south.”

  “You mean this is your second call there?”

  “My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed.” He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent.

  Towin muttered, “You can’t be that old. It isn’t all that time since things fell apart and no more kids were born. Is it?”

  “You don’t know what time is. Aren’t you a bit confused in your mind? Mind you, I’m saying nothing. All I’m saying is I just come from there. There’s too many vagabonds wandering around like you lot, moving about the country. It’ll be better next time I go there, in another hundred years. There won’t be any vagabonds then. They’ll all be underground, growing toadstools. I shall have the whole world to myself, just me and Lita and those things that twitter and fry in the hedges. How I wish they’d stop that bloody old twittering and frying all the time. It’s going to be hell with all them in a few thousand years or so.” Suddenly he put his paws over his eyes; big senile tears came spurting through his fingers; his shoulders shook. “It’s a lonely life, friends,” he said.

  Greybeard laid a hand on his shoulder and offered to get him to bed. Norsgrey jumped up and cried that he could look after himself. Still snivelling, he turned into the gloom, scattering hens, and crawled behind the blue curtain. The others sat looking at each other.

  “Daft old fool!” Becky said uncomfortably.

  “He seems to know a lot of things,” Towin said to her. “In the morning, we’d better ask him about your baby.”

  She rounded angrily on him.

  “Towin, you useless clot you, letting our secrets out! Didn’t I tell you over and over you wasn’t to mention it till people saw the state I’m in? Your stupid old clacking tongue! You’re like an old woman — ”

  “Becky, is this true?” Greybeard asked. “Are you pregnant?”

  “Ah, she’s gravid as a rabbit,” Towin admitted, hanging his head. “Twins. I’d say it is, by the feel.”

  Martha looked at the plump little woman; phantom pregnancies were frequent in Sparcot, and she did not doubt this was another such. But people believed what they wanted to believe; Charley clasped his hands together and said earnestly, “If this be true, God’s name be praised! It’s a miracle, a sign from Heaven!”

  “Don’t give us any of that old rubbish,” Towin said angrily. “This was my doing and no one else’s.”

  “The Almighty works through the lowest among us, Towin Thomas,” Charley said. “If Becky is pregnant, then it is a token to us that He will after all come down in the eleventh hour and replenish the earth with His people. Let us all join in prayer — Martha, Algy, Becky — “

  “I don’t want any of that stuff,” Towin said. “Nobody’s praying for my offspring. We don’t owe your God a brass farthing, Charley boy. If He’s so blessed powerful, then He was the one that did all this damage in the first place. I reckon old Norsgrey was right — we don’t know how long ago it all happened. Don’t tell me it was only eleven years we was at Sparcot! It seemed like centuries to me. Perhaps we’re all a thousand years old, and — ”

  “Becky, may I put my hand on your stomach?” Martha asked.

  “Let’s all have a feel, Beck,” Pitt said, grinning, his interest momentarily roused.

  “You keep your hands to yourself,” Becky told him. But she allowed Martha to feel beneath her voluminous clothes, looking into space as the other woman gently kneaded the flesh of her stomach.

  “Your stomach is certainly swollen,” Martha said.

  “Ah ha! Told you!” Towin cried. “Four years gone, she is — I mean, four months. That’s why we didn’t want to leave that house where the sheep were. It would have made us a nice little home, only Clever Dick here would shove off down his beloved river!”

  He bared his stubbly wolf visage in a grin towards Greybeard.

  “We’ll go to Swifford Fair tomorrow, and see what we can fix up for you both,” Greybeard said. “There should be a doctor there who will examine Becky and give her advice. Meanwhile, let’s follow the ginger chap’s example and settle down for some sleep.”

  “You mind that old reindeer don’t eat Isaac during the night,” Becky told Charley. “I could tell you a thing or two about them animals, I could. They’re crafty beasts, reindeer.”

  “It wouldn’t eat a fox,” Charley said.

  “We had one ate our cat now, didn’t we, Tow? Tow used to trade in reindeer, whenever it was they first came over to this country — Greybeard’ll know, no doubt.”

  “Let’s see, the war ended in 2005, when the government was overthrown,” Greybeard said. “The Coalition was set up the year after, and I believe they were the people who first imported reindeer into Britain.”

  The memory came back like a blurred newspaper photo. The Swedes had discovered that, alone among the large ruminants, the reindeer could still breed normally and produce living fawns. It was claimed that these animals had acquired some immunity against radiation because the lichen they ate contained a high degree of fallout contamination. In the nineteen-sixties, before Greybeard was born, the contamination in their bones was on the order of a hundred to two hundred strontium units — between six and twelve times above the safety limit for humans.

  Since reindeer made efficient transport animals as well as providing good meat and milk, there was a great demand for them throughout Europe. In Canada the caribou became equally popular. Herds of Swedish and Lapp stock were imported into Britain at various times.

  “It must have been a
bout ‘06,” Towin confirmed. “ ’Cause it was then my brother Evan died. Went just like that he did, as he was supping his beer.”

  “About this reindeer,” Becky said. “We made a bit of cash out of it. We had to have a license for the beast — Daffid, we called it. Used to hire it out for work at so much a day.

  “We had a shed out the back of our little shop. Daffid was kept in there. Very cosy it was, with hay and all. Also we had our old cat, Billy. Billy was real old and very intelligent. Not a better cat anywhere, but of course we wasn’t supposed to keep it. They got strict after the war, if you remember, and Billy was supposed to go for food. As if we’d give Billy up!

  “Sometimes that Coalition would send police around and they’d come right in — not knock or nothing, you know. Then they’d search the house. It’s ungodly times we’ve lived through, friends!

  “Anyhow, this night, Tow here comes running in — been down the boozer, he had — and he says the police are coming around to make a search.”

  “So they were!” Towin said, showing signs of an old discomfiture.

  “So he says,” Becky repeated. “So we has to hide poor old Billy or we’d all be in the cart. So I run with her out into the shed, where old Daffid’s lying down just like this ugly beast here, and tucks Billy under the straw for safety.

  “Then I goes back into our parlour. But no police come, and Tow goes off fast asleep, and I nod off too, and at midnight I know the old fool has been imagining things.”

  “They passed us by!” Towin cried.

  “So out I went into the shed, and there’s Daffid standing there chewing, and no sign of Billy. I get Towin and we both have a search, but no Billy. Then we see his tail hanging out bloody old Daffid’s mouth.”

  “Another time, he ate one of my gloves,” Towin said.

  As Greybeard settled to sleep by a solitary lantern, the last thing he saw was the gloomy countenance of Norsgrey’s reindeer. These animals had been hunted by Paleolithic man; they had only to wait a short while now and all the hunters would be gone.

  In Greybeard’s dream, there was a situation that could not happen. He was in a chromium-plated restaurant dining with several people he did not know. They, their manners, their dress, were all very elaborate, even artificial; they ate ornate dishes with involved utensils. Everyone present was extremely old — centenarians to a man — yet they were sprightly, even childlike. One of the women there was saying that she had solved the whole problem: that just as adults grew from children, so children would eventually grow from adults, if they waited long enough.

  And then everyone was laughing to think the solution had not been reached before. Greybeard explained to them that it was as if they were all actors performing their parts against a lead curtain that cut off forever every second as it passed — yet as he spoke he was concealing from them, for reasons of compassion, the harsher truth that the curtain was also barring them from the seconds and all time before them. There were young children all around them (though looking strangely grown-up), dancing and throwing some sticky substance to each other.

  He was trying to seize a strand of this stuff when he woke. In the ancient dawn light Norsgrey was harnessing his reindeer. The animal held its head low, puffing into the stale cold. Huddled under their wrappings, the rest of Greybeard’s party bore as much resemblance to human forms as a newly made grave.

  Wrapping one of his blankets around him, Greybeard got up, stretched, and went over to the old man. The draft he had been lying in had stiffened his limbs, making him limp.

  “You’re on your way early, Norsgrey.”

  “I’m always an early mover. Lita wants to be off.”

  “Is she well this morning?”

  “Never mind about her. She’s tucked safe under the canopy of the cart. She won’t speak to strangers in the mornings.”

  “Are we not going to see her?”

  “No.” Over the cart, a tatty brown canvas was stretched, and tied with leather thongs back and front so that nobody could see within. The cockerel crowed from beneath it. Norsgrey had already gathered up his chickens. Greybeard wondered what of their own equipment might not be missing, seeing that the old fellow worked so quietly.

  “I’ll open the door for you,” he said. Weary hinges creaked as he pushed the door forward. He stood there scratching his beard, taking in the frost-becalmed scene before him. His company stirred as cold air entered the barn. Isaac sat up and licked his sharp muzzle. Towin squinted at his defunct watch. The reindeer started forward and dragged the cart into the open.

  “I’m cold and stiff. I’ll walk with you a minute or two to see you on your way,” Greybeard said, wrapping his blanket more tightly about him.

  “As you will. I’d be glad of your company as long as you don’t talk too much. I like to make an early start when the frying’s not so bad. By midday, it makes such a noise you’d think the hedges were burning.”

  “You still find roads you can travel?”

  “Ah, lots of roads still open between necessary points. There’s more travelling being done again lately; people are getting restless. Why they can’t sit where they are and die off in peace, I don’t know.”

  “This place you were telling us about last night...”

  “I never said nothing last night; I was drunk.”

  “Mockweagles, you called it. What sort of treatment did they give you when you were there?”

  Norsgrey’s little eyes almost disappeared between folds of his fibrous red and mauve skin. He jerked his thumb into the bushes through which they were pushing their way. “They’re in there waiting for you, my bearded friend. You can hear them twittering and frying, can’t you? They get up earlier than us and they go to bed later than us, and they’ll get you in the end.”

  “But not you?”

  “I go and have this injection and these beads every hundred years...”

  “So that’s what they give you... You get an injection as well as those things around your neck. You know what those beads are, don’t you? They’re vitamin pills.”

  “I’m saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any case, you mortals would do best to hold your tongues. Here’s the road, and I’m off.”

  They had come out at a sort of crossroads, where their track crossed a road that still boasted traces of tarmac on its rutted surface. Norsgrey beat at his reindeer with a stick, goading it into a less dilatory walk.

  He looked over his shoulder at Greybeard, his misty breath entangled with the bright hairs of his cheeks. “Tell you one thing — if you get to Swifford Fair, ask for Bunny Jingadangelow.”

  “Who’s he?” Greybeard asked.

  “I’m telling you, he’s the man you should ask for at Swifford Fair. Remember the name — Bunny Jingadangelow.”

  Wrapped in his blanket, Greybeard stood looking at the disappearing cart. He thought the canvas at the back stirred, and that he glimpsed — no, perhaps it was not a hand but his imagination. He stood there until the winding track carried Norsgrey and his conveyance out of sight.

  As he turned away, he saw in the bushes close by a broken-necked corpse pinned to a post. It had the cocky, grinning appearance achieved only by those successfully long dead. Its skull was patched with flesh like dead leaves. Thin though the corpse’s jacket was, its flesh had worn still thinner, had shrivelled and parted like moisture drying off a stretch of sand, leaving the bars of rib salt beneath.

  “Left dead at the crossroads as a warning to wrongdoers... Like the Middle Ages...the old-aged Middle Ages...” Greybeard muttered to himself. The eye sockets stared back at him. He was overtaken less by disgust than by a pang of longing for the DOUCH(E) truck he had parted with years ago. How people had underestimated the worth of mechanical gadgetry! The urge to record was on him; someone should leave behind a summary of earth’s decline, if only for visiting archaeologists from other possible worlds. He trotted heavily back down the track towards the barn, saying to himself as he went, “Bunny
Jingadangelow, Bunny Jingadangelow...”

  Nightfall came that day to the sound of music. They could see the lights of Swifford across the low flood. They rowed through a section of the Thames that had burst its banks and spread over the adjoining land, making water plants of the vegetation. Soon there were other boats near them, and people calling to them; their accents were difficult to understand, as Norsgrey’s had been at first.

  “Why don’t they speak English the way they used?” Charley asked angrily. “It makes everything so much harder.”

  “P’raps it isn’t only the time that’s gone funny,” Towin suggested. “P’raps distances have gone wrong too. P’raps this is France or China, eh, Charley? I’d believe anything, I would.”

  “More fool you,” Becky said.

  They came to where a raised dike or levee had been built. Behind it were dwellings of various kinds, huts and stalls, most of them of a temporary nature. Here was a stone bridge built in imposing fashion, with a portly stone balustrade, some of which had tumbled away. Through its span they saw lanterns bobbing, and two men walked among a small herd of reindeer, tending them and seeing they were watered for the night.

  “We shall have to guard the boats and the sheep,” Martha said, as they moored against the bridge. “We don’t know how trustworthy these people are. Jeff Pitt, stay with me while the others go to look about.”

  “I suppose I’d better,” Pitt said. “At least we’ll be out of trouble here. Perhaps you and I might split a cold lamb cutlet between us while the others are gone.”

  Greybeard touched his wife’s hand.

  “I’ll see how much the sheep will fetch while I’m about it,” he said.

  They smiled at each other and he stepped up the bank, into the activity of the fair, with Charley, Towin, and Becky following. The ground squelched beneath their feet; smoke rolled across it from the little fires that burned everywhere. A heartening savour of food being cooked hung in the air. By most of the fires were little knots of people and a smooth talker, a vendor offering something for sale, whether a variety of nuts or fruits — one slab-cheeked fellow offered a fruit whose name Greybeard recalled only with difficulty from another world: peaches — or watches or kettles or rejuvenation elixirs. The customers were handing over coin for their acquisitions. In Sparcot currency had almost disappeared; the community had been small enough for a simple exchange of work and goods to be effective.