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The Complete Short Stories

Page 25

by Brian Aldiss


  ‘I’m right as rain, love, but I’d be glad of your company.’

  ‘I warn you, you shall have too much of it from now on!’

  The door of the inn was locked, but a light burned inside, and in a moment the landlord himself opened to them, all eager to hear a bit of gossip he could pass on to his custom.

  ‘So happens as there’s a gentleman up in Number Three wishes to speak with you in the morning,’ he told Gregory. ‘Very nice gentleman came on the night train, only got in here an hour past, off the waggon.’

  Gregory made a wry face.

  ‘My father, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, no, sir. His name is a Mr Wills or Wells – his signature was a mite difficult to make out.’

  ‘Wells! Mr Wells! So he’s come!’ He caught Nancy’s hands, shaking them in his excitement. ‘Nancy, one of the greatest men in England is here! There’s no one more profitable for such a tale as ours! I’m going up to speak with him right away.’

  Kissing her lightly on the cheek, he hurried up the stairs and knocked on the door of Number Three.

  Scarfe’s World

  I

  Young Dyak and Utliff with the panting breath stood on the seamed brow of the hill. It was a fine hot day, with a million cicadas thrilling about them like the heat itself. Under the heat haze, the far mountains were scarcely visible, so that the river that wound its way down from them held a leaden grayness until it got close to the foot of their

  hill.

  At the foot of the hill, it flattened out into swamps, particularly on the far side where marshy land faded eventually into mist. The iguanodons were croaking and quacking by the water’s edge, their familiar lumpy shapes visible. They would not trouble the men.

  ‘How is it with you, Utliff? Are you coming down the hill with me?’ Dyak asked.

  He saw by Utliff’s face that there was something wrong with him. The lie of his features had altered. His expression was distorted, changed in a way Dyak did not like; even his bushy beard hung differently this morning. Utliff shrugged his thick shoulders.

  ‘I will not let you hunt alone, friend,’ he said.

  Determined to show his imperviousness to suffering, he started first down the sandy slope, sliding among the bushes as they had often done. He was pretending to be indifferent to an illness to which no man could be indifferent. With a flash of compassion, Dyak saw that Utliff was not long for this life.

  Glancing back, Utliff saw his friend’s expression.

  ‘One more runner for the pot, Dyak, before I go,’ he said, and he turned his eyes away from his friend.

  Living things scuttled out of the bush as they headed toward the river, the furred things that were too fast to catch, and a couple of the reptiles they called runners – little fleet lizards, waist high, which sped along on their hind legs.

  Utliff had a crude pouch full of stones at his side. He threw hard at the runners as they went, hitting one but not stopping it. Both men laughed. They were in no desperate need for food. There was always plenty; and besides, hunting runners was done more easily from the bottom of the hill, as they knew from experience.

  They pulled up in a cloud of dust at the bottom, still laughing. At this time of day, high noon, there was nothing to fear. In fact there were only the crunchers to fear at any time, and crunchers stayed supine in the shade at this period of heat. The quackers over in the swamp hurt nobody unless they were molested. It was a good life.

  True, there came silent moments of fear, moments – as when one looked at Utliff’s distorted face – when unease crawled like a little animal inside one’s skull. But then one could generally run off and hunt something, and do a little killing and feel good again.

  Dyak disliked thinking. The things that came from the head were bad, those from the body mainly good. With a whoop, he ran through the long grass and hurled himself in a dive over the steep bank and into the river. The river swallowed him, sweetly singing. He came to the surface gasping and shaking the water from his eyes. The water was deep under him, in a channel scoured by the river as it curved along its course, and it flowed warm and pure. It spoke to his body. On the opposite bank, where the quacker herd now plunged in confusion at his appearance, it was staled and too hot.

  Letting out a shriek of delight, Dyak fought the satin currents that wrapped his body and called to his friend. Utliff stood mutely on the miniature cliff, staring across at Dyak.

  ‘Come on in! You’ll feel better!’

  Before Utliff obediently jumped, Dyak took in the whole panorama. Afterwards, it remained stamped on his mind.

  *

  Behind his friend stood the hill-side that none of them had ever climbed, though their dwelling caves tunnelled into the lower slopes. He noted that three women from the settlement stood there, clutching each other in the way women always did and laughing. On the heavy air, their sounds were just audible, in the evening, they would come down to the river and bathe and splash each other, laughing because they had forgotten (or because they remembered?) that the dark was coming on. Dyak felt a mild pleasure at their laughter. It meant that their stomachs were full and their heads empty. They were content.

  Behind Utliff to the other side, Dyak saw Semary appear and stand unobtrusively in a position where she could watch the two men from behind a tree. Semary was smiling, although she did not laugh as frequently as the other women. No doubt the noise had attracted her from her own settlement. Though Dyak and Utliff knew little about her, they knew this girl was for some reason something of an outcast from her own people, the three men and three women who lived toward the place where the cruncher had its current den.

  Dyak stopped smiling when he saw her. It hurt him to look at Semary.

  She was less corpulent and bowed than any other women he had seen. On her face was not even an incipient moustache, such as sometimes blossomed on the lips of other women; nor was there hair between her breasts. Though all this was strange, it was the strangeness that attracted. And yet – to be with her hurt. He knew this from the times when Utliff and he had stayed with her; and from that time, he knew too that she was passive, and did not fight and bite and laugh as the other women did when they had hold of you.

  The being with her and the passivity hurt in his head.

  As he looked at these things and thought these things hearing the heat calls of the cicadas and soaking in the heavy green of the world, Utliff jumped into the river.

  It was far from being his usual flashing crashing dive. When his head appeared above the surface, he was crying for help.

  ‘Dyak, Dy! Help me, I’m a goner!’

  Alarmed, Dyak was with him in three strokes, although still half expecting this might be a ruse that would earn him a ducking as soon as he reached his friend. But Utliff’s body was limp and heavy. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and groaned.

  Grasping him firmly under the arm with one hand, Dyak slid beneath him until they were both on their backs, and kicked out for the nearest tree, a gnarled old broken pine that overhung the water so conveniently that they often used it to climb out on. Struggling only feebly, Utliff groaned again, and choked as water slopped into his mouth. With his free hand, Dyak reached up and seized a projecting limb of

  the tree.

  He hauled himself far enough out of the water so that he could wrap his left leg round the tree trunk for leverage. It was still a terrible job to hook Utliff out of the water. As he leaned over, head almost in the river, panting and tugging, another pair of hands reached out to help him. Semary had run along the tree trunk and was beside him. With a grunt of thanks, he was able to let her support Utliff in the water while he released his friend and took a better purchase on him. Holding the tree trunk tightly between his knees, he hauled Utliff up beside him.

  He and Semary rested the body along the trunk for a moment and then dragged it to the bank between them.

  Utliff was dead.

  Just for a moment, he shuddered violently. His eyes came open an
d his knees jerked up. Then he slumped back.

  Almost at once, he began the horrible process of disintegration.

  The limbs writhed as their muscles curled up. The flesh fell away. The flesh took on a greenish tinge. There came a frightening foetid smell as the insides revealed themselves; from them came a popping bubbling sound such as was never heard in the bowels of the living. In fear, Dyak and Semary rose and crept away, hand in hand. Utliff was not their kind any more. He had ceased to be Utliff.

  They moved away from the river bank, hiding themselves among low trees and eventually sitting side by side on a large smooth boulder. Dyak was still dripping water, but the warmth of the rock helped to dry him and stop his shivering. Semary began to pluck leaves from an overhanging tree and stick them on his damp chest. She smiled as she did so, so sweetly that he was forced to smile back though it hurt him.

  He put his arm about her and rubbed his nose in her armpit. She chuckled, and they slid down until their backs were against the boulder. Dyak began to peel the damp leaves off his chest and stick them on to her body. In his head, he was conscious of an affection for Semary. More than an affection. He had felt this thing with women of his own group, and he had felt it for Semary before this. The disturbance was at once pleasant and immeasurably sad. He did not know how to drive it away.

  Semary too seemed full of the same feeling. Suddenly she said to him, ‘People wear out.’ It was as if she wanted to hide the subject in her head.

  As always when they spoke, Dyak was aware of a great gulf that could not be bridged by words. Words were so much feebler than the things they were meant to represent. He answered, feeling the inadequacy of what he said, ‘All people are made to wear out.’

  ‘How do you mean? How are people made?’

  ‘They are made to wear out. They come down new from the hills. Being new does not last … Their faces get strange. Then they wear out, like Utliff.’

  With an effort, the girl said, ‘Did you come from the hills long after Utliff?’

  ‘Many, many days. And you, dear Semary?’

  ‘Only a few days ago did I come from the hills. I came … I came from by the smooth thing – that black barrier by the hill.’

  He did not know what barrier she meant. Under his skin, he felt a sort of strangeness, fear and excitement and other things for which he had no name. Her eyes stared, as if both of them were near to something they had not dared to allow inside their heads.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘tell me what it was like, the coming into being.’

  Her lashes fell over her eyes. ‘I was on the hillside,’ she said. ‘By the smooth black barrier.’

  To kill the long silence, he took her by the waist and settled into a horizontal position. So they lay, with their faces close together, sharing the same breath, as they had done before, and as Utliff had done with her in the days before he wore out.

  He felt there was something else he should do. But in his head no prompting occurred, and his body seemed inhabited only by dreams without a name, dreams either hopelessly happy or hopelessly sad. Semary’s eyes were closed. But something told him that strange though she was, she felt the same turmoil as he.

  Utliff had felt it too. When they had both lain against Semary before, Dyak had been so startled by the things in his head, he had talked about it to Utliff. He was afraid that he alone felt that strange uncertain sweetness; but Utliff admitted that he had been filled with the same things, head and body. When they tried lying close to the women of their own group, the feeling had persisted. Keen to experiment, they had lain close to each other, but then the feeling had not been there, and instead they had only laughed.

  The long silence closed over them again. Semary’s smell was sweet.

  Dyak lay and looked up at the trees. He saw a cicada on a branch nearby, a gigantic beast that almost bent double the bough it rested on, its body at least as long as a man’s arm. They made good food, but he was full of a hunger beyond hunger just now. The sound and feel of his world cradled him and ran through him.

  Unexpectedly, she said, her voice warm in his ear, ‘Two people have become worn out today, in different ways. Utliff was one, Artet the other. Artet is a girl of my group. The cruncher got her. You know we are near the lair of the cruncher. He dragged Artet there, but her blood was already let.’

  ‘Did you forget to tell me before now?’

  ‘I was coming to tell you when the foul thing overcame Utliff. Then your warmth near me made me forget.’

  Sulkily, Dyak said, ‘The cruncher got across the river where the waters run shallow. It used to eat the quackers, for I watched it often from our hill. Now that it has come across to this side, it is too stupid to go back. Soon it will starve to death. Then we shall all be safe.’

  ‘It will not starve until it has eaten all of us. We cannot be safe with it, Dyak. You must let its blood and wear it out.’

  He sat up, and then crouched beside her, angry. ‘Get your men to do the work. Why me? Our group is safe up on the hill in our deep caves. The cruncher is no bother to me. Why do you say this to me, Semary?’

  She too sat up and stared at him. She brushed a remaining leaf from her breast. ‘I want you to do the thing because I want most to lie by you. I will always lie by you and not by our stinking men, if you shed the blood of the cruncher. If you will not do this for me, I swear I will go with the other stinking men and lie by them.’

  He grasped her wrist roughly. ‘You shall be with no men but me, Semary! You think I am afraid to let the blood of the cruncher? Of course I am not!’

  Semary smiled at him, as if she enjoyed his roughness.

  II

  Dr Ian Swanwick was growing increasingly bored, and growing increasingly less reluctant to show it. Several times, he lifted his face from his scanner and looked at the grey head of Graham Scarfe, with its ears and face enveloped in the next scanner. He coughed once or twice, with increasing emphasis, until Scarfe looked up.

  ‘Oh, Dr Swanwick. I forgot – you have a jet to catch back to Washington. Forgive me! Once I look into the scanner, I become so engrossed in their problems.’

  ‘I’m sure it must be engrossing if you can understand their language,’ Swanwick said.

  ‘Oh, it’s an easy leaguage to understand. Simple. Few words, you know. Few tenses, few conjugations. Not that I’m any sort of a language specialist. We have several of them dropping in on us, including the great Professor Reardon, the etymologist … I’m just – well. I’m just a model maker at heart. Not a professional man at all. I started as a child of eight, making a model of the old American Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe steam-railway, as it would have been in the early years of last century.’

  Chiefly because he was none too anxious to hear about that, Dr Swanwick said, ‘Well, you have done a remarkable job on this tridiorama.’

  Nodding, Scarfe took the theologian’s arm and led him away from the bank of scanners with their hand controls to the rail that fringed the platform on which they stood. They were high here, so high that the distant spires of New Brasilia could be seen framed between two mountain ranges. In the other direction stretched the South American continent, leaden with a heat that the air-conditioning did not entirely keep from their tower.

  ‘If I have done a remarkable job,’ Scarfe said, gazing over the rail, ‘I copied it from a more remarkable one. From Nature itself.’

  Scarfe’s gentle old voice, and his woolly gesture as he pointed out at the landscape before them, contrasted with the urban manner and clothes and the brisk voice of Dr Swanwick. But Swanwick was silent for a moment as he stared over the country through which a river wound. That river flowed from distant mountains now shrouded in heat and curved below the hill on which they stood. Over on the opposite bank lay a region of swamp.

  ‘You’ve made a good copy,’ he said. ‘The tridiorama is amazingly like the real thing.’

  ‘I thought you would approve, Dr Swanwick. You especially,’ Scarfe said with an affection
ate chuckle.

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  ‘Come now, the Maker’s handiwork, you know … As a theologian, I thought that angle would especially appeal to you. Mine’s a poor copy compared with His, I know.’ He chuckled again, a little confused that he was not winning a responding chuckle from Swanwick.

  ‘Theology does not necessarily imply a sentimental fondness for the Almighty. Laymen never understand that theology is simply a science that treats of the phenomena and facts of religion. As I say, I admire the skill of your modelling, and the way you have copied a real landscape; but that is not to say that I approve of it.’

  Nodding his head in an old man’s fashion, Scarfe appeared to listen to the cicadas for a minute.

  Then he said, ‘When I said I thought you would approve, perhaps you got me wrong. What I meant was that the tridiorama could present you people at the St Benedict’s Theological College with a chance to study a controlled experiment in your own line, as it has done to anthropologists and paleontologists and zoologists and pre-historians and I don’t know who else. I mean …’ He was a simple man, and confused by the superiority of this man who, as he began to perceive, did not greatly like him. In consequence he slipped into a more lax way of talk. ‘What I mean is, that the goings-on down in the tri-di are surely something to do with you people, aren’t they?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t get your meaning, Mr Scarfe.’

  ‘Like we said in the letter to you, inviting you here. These stone age people we’ve got – don’t you want to see how they get along with religion? I admit that as yet they don’t appear to have formed any – not even myths – but that in itself may be significant.’

  Turning his back on the hills, Swanwick said, ‘Since your little people are synthetic, their feelings are not of interest to St Benedict’s. We study the relationship between God and man, not between men and models. That, I’m afraid, will probably be our ultimate verdict, when I give my report to the board. We may even add a rider to the effect that the experiment is unethical.’

 

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