Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Oooh, it’s like being back in civilization again,” Towin said, rubbing his wife’s buttocks. “How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn’t you say? Look, they’ve even got a pub! Let’s all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn’t you say?”

  He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.

  “I’m only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we’ll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five percent’s my rate, lads.”

  They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.

  Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had indeed escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half-century it would be rolled up and put away; but till then there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.

  An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party. They were celebrating their wedding. The man’s previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lopsided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.

  “You aren’t from the town?” one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.

  “I don’t know what town you mean,” Greybeard said.

  “Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets, where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn’t have us in this year. That’s why we’re camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us — no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won’t come this far. That’s why business is so bad.”

  Although he looked like a riven oak, he was a gentle enough man. He introduced himself as Pete Potsluck, and talked with Greybeard between servings.

  Greybeard began to tell him about Sparcot; bored by the subject, Becky and Towin and Charley, the latter with Isaac in his arms, moved away and joined in conversation with the wedding party. Potsluck said he reckoned there were many communities like Sparcot buried in the wilderness. “Get a bad winter, such as we’ve not had for a year or two, and some of them will be wiped out entirely. That’ll be the eventual end of all of us, I suppose.”

  “Is there fighting anywhere? Do you hear rumours of an invasion from Scotland?”

  “They say the Scots are doing very well, in the Highlands anyhow. There was so few of them in the first place; down here, population was so high it took some years for plagues and famines to shake us down to a sort of workable minimum. The Scots probably dodged all that trouble. But why should they bother us? We’re all getting too long in the tooth for fighting.”

  “There are some wild-looking sparks at this fair.”

  Potsluck laughed. “I don’t deny that. Senile delinquents, I call them. Funny thing, without any youngsters to set the pace, the old ones get up to their tricks — as well as they’re able.”

  “What has happened to people like Croucher, then?”

  “Croucher? Oh, this Cowley bloke you mentioned! The dictator class are all dead and buried, and a good job too. No, it’s getting too late for that sort of strong-arm thing. I mean, you just find laws in the towns, but outside of them, there is no law.”

  “I didn’t so much mean law as force.”

  “Well now, you can’t have law without force, can you? There’s a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it’s a positive blessing.”

  “You are probably right.”

  “I’d have thought you would have known that. You look the kind who carries a bit of law about with him, with those big fists and that bushy great beard.”

  Greybeard grinned. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to judge what one’s own character is in unprecedented times like ours.”

  “You haven’t made up your mind about yourself? Perhaps that’s what’s keeping you looking so young.”

  Changing the subject, Greybeard changed his drink, and got himself a big glass of fortified parsnip wine, buying one for Potsluck also. Behind him, the wedding party became tuneful, singing the ephemeral songs of a century back, which had oddly developed a power to stick — and to stick in the gullet, Greybeard thought — as they launched into

  “ ‘If you were the only girl in the world,

  And I were the only boy…’ ”

  “It may come to that yet,” he said, half laughing, to Potsluck. “Have you seen any children around? I mean, are any being born in these parts?”

  “They’ve got a freak show here. You want to go and look in at that,” Potsluck said. Sudden bleakness eclipsed his good humour, and he turned sharply away to arrange the bottles behind him. In a little while, as if feeling he had been discourteous, he turned back and began to talk on a new tack.

  “I used to be a hairdresser, back before the Accident and until that blinking Coalition government closed my shop. Seems years ago now, but then so it is — long years, I mean. I was trained up in my trade by my dad, who had the shop before me; and I always used to say when we first heard about this radiation scare that as long as there were people around they’d still want their hair cut — as long as it didn’t all fall out, naturally. I still do a bit of cutting for the other travelling men. There are those that still care for their appearance, I’m glad to say.”

  Greybeard did not speak. He recognized a man in the grip of reminiscence. Potsluck had lost some of his semi-rustic way of speech; with a genteel phrase like “those that still care for their appearance,” he revealed how he had slipped back half a century to that vanished world of toilet perquisites, hair creams, before- and after-shave lotions, and the disguising of odours and blemishes.

  “I remember once, when I was a very young man, having to go around to a private house — I can picture the place now, though I daresay it has fallen down long since. It was very dark going up the stairs, and I had to take the young lady’s arm. Yes, that’s right, and I went there after the shop had shut, I remember. My old dad sent me; I can’t have been more than seventeen, if that.

  “And there was this dead gentleman laid out upstairs in his coffin, in the bedroom. Very calm and prosperous he looked. He’d been a good customer, too, in his lifetime. His wife insisted that his hair was cut before the funeral. He was always a very tidy gentleman, she told me. I spoke to her downstairs afterwards — a thin lady with earrings. She gave me five shillings. No, I don’t remember — perhaps it was ten shillings. Anyhow, sir, it was a generous sum in those days — before all this dreadful business.

  “So I cut the dead gentleman’s hair. You know how the hair and the fingernails keep on growing on a man after death, and his had got rather straggly. Only a trim it needed really, but I cut it as reverently as I could. I was a churchgoer in those days, believe it or not.
And this young lady that showed me upstairs, she had to hold his head up under the neck so that I could get at it with my scissors; and in the middle of it she got the giggles and dropped the dead gentleman. She said she wanted me to give her a kiss. I was a bit shocked at the time, seeing that the gentleman was her father... I don’t know why I should be telling you this. Memory’s a rare, funny thing. I suppose if I’d had any sense in those days, I’d have screwed the silly little hussy on the spot, but I wasn’t too familiar with life then — never mind death! Have another drink on me?”

  “Thanks, I may come back later,” Greybeard said. “I want to have a look around at the fair now. Do you know of anyone called Bunny Jingadangelow?”

  “Jingadangelow? Yes, I know of him. What do you want with him? Go over the bridge and up the road towards Ensham, and you’ll come to his stall; it’s got the words ‘Eternal Life’ above it. You can’t mistake it. Okay?”

  Looking around at the party of singers, Greybeard caught Charley’s eye. Charley rose, and they walked out together, leaving Towin and Becky singing “Any Old Iron” with the wedding party.

  “The fellow who’s just got married again is a reindeer breeder,” Charley said. “It seems they’re still the only big mammal unaffected by the radiation. Do you remember how people said they’d never do over here when they were first imported, because the climate was too wet for their coats?”

  “It’s too wet for my coat too, Charley. It’s less cold than it was, and by the look of the clouds there’s rain about. What sort of shelter are we going to find ourselves for the night?”

  “One of the women back in the bar said we might get lodgings up this way, in the town. We’ll look out. It’s early yet.”

  They walked up the road, taking in the bustle at the various pitches.

  Isaac yipped and snuffled as they passed a cage of foxes, and next to it a run full of weasels. There were also hens for sale, and a woman wrapped in furs tried to sell them powdered reindeer antler as a charm against impotence and ill health. Two rival quacks sold purges and clysters, charms against rheumatism, and nostrums for the cramps of age; the few people who stood listening to them seemed sceptical. Trade was dropping off at this time of evening; people were now after entertainment rather than business, and a juggler drew appreciative crowds. So did a fortune-teller — though that must be a limited art now, Greybeard thought, with all dark strangers turned to grey and no possible patter of tiny feet.

  They came to the next stall, which was little more than a wooden platform; above it fluttered a banner with the words ETERNAL LIFE on it.

  “This must be Jingadangelow’s pitch,” Greybeard said.

  Several people were here; some were listening to the man speaking from the platform, while others jostled about a fallen figure that was propped against the platform edge, with two aged crones weeping and croaking over it. To see what was happening was difficult in the flapping light of unguarded torches, but the words of the man on the platform made things clearer.

  This speaker was a tall raven figure with wild hair and a face absolutely white except for quarries of slatey grey under his eyes. He spoke in the voice of a cultured man, with a vigour his frame seemed scarcely able to sustain, conducting time to his phrases with a pair of fine wild hands.

  “Here before us you see evidence of what I am saying, my friends. In sight and hearing of us all, a brother has just departed this life. His soul burst out of his ragged coating and left us. Look at us — look at us, my dearly loved brethren, all dressed in our ragged coating on this cold and miserable night somewhere in the great universe. Can you say any one of you in your hearts that it would not be better to follow our friend?”

  “To hell with that for a lark!” a man called, clasping a bottle. He drew the speaker’s accusing finger.

  “For you it might not be better, I agree, my friend — for you would go as our brother here did, loaded before the Lord with liquor. The Lord’s stood enough of our dirty nonsense, brethren; that’s the plain truth. He’s had more than He can stand. He’s finished with us, but not with our souls. He’s cut us off, and manifestly He will disapprove if we persist till our graves in perpetuating the follies we should have left behind in our youth.”

  “How else are we to keep warm on these mucking winter nights?” the jolly man asked, and there was a murmur of approval about him. Charley tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Would you mind keeping quiet while this gentleman speaks?”

  The jolly man swung around on Charley. Though age had withered him like a prune, his mouth was spread red and large across his face as if it had been plastered there by a fist. He worked this ample mouth now, realized that Charley was stronger than he was, and relapsed into silence. Unmoved, the parson continued his oration.

  “We must bow before His will, my friends, that’s what we must do. Soon we shall all go down on our knees here and pray. It will be fitting for us all to go together into His presence, for we are the last of His generations, and it is meet that we should bear ourselves accordingly. What have we to fear if we are righteous, ask yourselves that? Once before He swept the earth clean with a flood because of the sins of man. This time He has taken from our generative organs the God-given power to procreate. If you think that to be a more terrible punishment than the flood, then the sins of our century, the twenty-first century, are more terrible sins. He can wipe the slate clean as many times as He will, and begin again.

  “So we do not weep for this earth we are to leave. We are born to vanish as the cattle we once tended have already vanished, leaving the earth clean and new for His further works. Let me recall to you, my brethren, before we sink upon our knees in prayer, the words of the Scriptures concerning this time.”

  He put his fluttering hands together and peered into the darkness to recite: “ ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them. As the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath. So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn again to dust. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in the Lord’s works, for that is his portion. And who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?’ ”

  “My old missus will be after me, if I don’t get home,” the jolly man said. “Good night to thee, parson.” He began to straggle up the road, supported by a crony. Greybeard shook Charley’s arm and said, “This man isn’t Bunny Jingadangelow, for all that he advertises eternal life. Let’s move on.”

  “No, let’s hear a bit more yet, Greybeard. Here’s a man speaking truth. In how many years have I heard someone so worth listening to?”

  “You stay here, then; I’ll go on.”

  “Stay and listen, Algy — it’ll do you good.”

  But Greybeard moved up the road. The parson was again using the dead man near his platform for his text. Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind — for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults — that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was not only a rainbow, a storm was a sign of celestial anger, and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought, because somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage, more systems of alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination — they copulated and they ate. But to the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service — and not only in medieval bestiaries, by any means.

  Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had
even been the beginning, back among those first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac. It had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the earth.

  Greybeard abandoned this line of thought as he came to the next pitch along the road. He found himself looking at another banner reading ETERNAL LIFE.

  The banner hung across the front of a garage standing drunkenly beside a dilapidated house. Its doors had fallen off but were propped inside to screen off the back half of the garage. A fire burned behind this screen, throwing the shadows of two people across the roof. In front of the screen, nursing a lantern in chilled hands, was a shrivel-gummed old girl perched on a box. She called to Greybeard in a routine fashion, “If you want Eternal Life, here’s the place to find it. Don’t listen to the parson! His asking price is too high. Here, you don’t have to give anything, you don’t have to give anything up. Our kind of eternal life can be bought by the syringe-full and paid for without any trouble over your soul. Walk in if you want to live forever!”

  “Shot in the arm or shot in the dark, I don’t know that I entirely trust you or the parson, old lady.”