The Big Book of Science Fiction
Page 80
“I’ll explain it when you get older,” says Chris, and oddly it doesn’t sound ridiculous.
Sato pours a giant-size dollop of wine in each tumbler.
“What’s the occasion?” I ask.
Sato studies the wine critically, holding the glass so the light from the door shines through.
“It’s Tuesday,” he says.
The Voices of Time
J. G. BALLARD
James Graham “J. G.” Ballard (1930–2009) was an iconic English writer born in Shanghai and a captive as a child in a Japanese World War II civilian POW camp for three years. Influenced by the Surrealist painters and early Pop painters, Ballard became a giant of world literature, his surreal, dystopian fiction even more relevant today. Ballard came out of the New Wave movement, writing brilliant apocalyptic novels that included The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ballard turned his attention to writing and publishing a staggering array of short stories and novellas. These groundbreaking works included his infamous “condensed novels” (possibly influenced by William S. Burroughs) and a number of fictions with ecological or postcapitalist themes; indeed, he could be said early on to have been engaging with what Jean Baudrillard would later call the Western “hegemony.” His controversial novel Crash (1973), about literal auto-eroticism, continued themes found in his more experimental short fiction and pushed the envelope once again.
Along with Kim Stanley Robinson, Ballard is still the most cited fiction writer in the context of climate change and other “hyperobjects,” a term coined by Timothy Morton to describe planet-level or planet-wide occurrences difficult to grok due to their omnipresence and diffusion. “Ballardian” is its own descriptor as well, the Collins English Dictionary defining the term as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” For these triumphs of clear vision, the wider world made Ballard iconic and ubiquitous, the threshold through which so much else is seen. The science fiction field, however, rewarded Ballard with…nothing…except for a British Science Fiction Association Award (1980) for his non-SF novel The Unlimited Dream Company.
Attention for Ballard’s mind-altering shorter works—which often compressed or expanded space and time—crystallized with early collections such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009), published with an introduction by Martin Amis, only confirmed Ballard’s relevance—and his mastery of the short form. His stories feature broken landscapes of sand dunes, concrete deserts, abandoned nightclubs, wrecked spacecraft, and junked military hardware.
As Amis wrote in his introduction: “This was his abiding question: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches—the motion sculptures of highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, the pervasiveness of pornography, and our dependence on ungrasped technologies? His tentative answer was perversity, which takes various forms, all of them (Ballard being Ballard) pathologically extreme.”
“The Voices of Time,” first published in New Worlds (1960), is a classic long story from Ballard. In this major early work, Ballardian elements like the breakdown of society and the inadequacy of science to save us from ourselves are on full display.
THE VOICES OF TIME
J. G. Ballard
ONE
Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons. Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket. After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half-filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution.
Initially, however, Powers was too preoccupied with completing his work at the Clinic and planning his own final withdrawal. After the first frantic weeks of panic he had managed to accept an uneasy compromise that allowed him to view his predicament with the detached fatalism he had previously reserved for his patients. Fortunately he was moving down the physical and mental gradients simultaneously—lethargy and inertia blunted his anxieties, a slackening metabolism made it necessary to concentrate to produce a connected thought-train. In fact, the lengthening intervals of dreamless sleep were almost restful. He found himself beginning to look forward to them, and made no effort to wake earlier than was essential.
At first he had kept an alarm clock by his bed, tried to compress as much activity as he could into the narrowing hours of consciousness, sorting out his library, driving over to Whitby’s laboratory every morning to examine the latest batch of X-ray plates, every minute and hour rationed like the last drops of water in a canteen.
Anderson, fortunately, had unwittingly made him realize the pointlessness of this course.
After Powers had resigned from the Clinic he still continued to drive in once a week for his checkup, now little more than a formality. On what turned out to be the last occasion Anderson had perfunctorily taken his blood-count, noting Powers’s slacker facial muscles, fading pupil reflexes, and unshaven cheeks.
He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him. Once he had put on a show of encouragement with the more intelligent patients, even tried to provide some sort of explanation. But Powers was too difficult to reach—neurosurgeon extraordinary, a man always out on the periphery, only at ease working with unfamiliar materials. To himself he thought: I’m sorry, Robert. What can I say—“Even the sun is growing cooler”? He watched Powers drum his fingers restlessly on the enamel desktop, his eyes glancing at the spinal level charts hung around the office. Despite his unkempt appearance—he had been wearing the same unironed shirt and dirty white plimsolls a week ago—Powers looked composed and self-possessed, like a Conradian beachcomber more or less reconciled to his own weaknesses.
“What are you doing with yourself, Robert?” he asked. “Are you still going over to Whitby’s lab?”
“As much as I can. It takes me half an hour to cross the lake, and I keep on sleeping through the alarm clock. I may leave my place and move in there permanently.”
Anderson frowned. “Is there much point? As far as I could make out Whitby’s work was pretty speculative—” He broke off, realizing the implied criticism of Powers’s own disastrous work at the Clinic, but Powers seemed to ignore this, was examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling. “Anyway, wouldn’t it be better to stay where you are, among your own things, read through Toynbee and Spengler again?”
Powers laughed shortly. “That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to forget Toynbee and Spengler, not try to remember them. In fact, Paul, I’d like to forget everything. I don’t know whether I’ve got enough time, though. How much can you forget in three months?”
“Everything, I suppose, if you want to. But don’t try to race the clock.”
Powers nodded quietly, repeating this last remark to himself. Racing the clock was exactly what he had been doing. As he stood up and said good-bye to Anderson he suddenly decided to throw away his alarm clock, escape from his futile obsession with time. To remind himself he unfastened his wristwatch and scrambled the setting, then slipped it into his pocket. Making his way out to the car park he reflected on the freedom this simple act gave him. He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time. Three months could be an eternity.
96,688,365,498,721
Looking over his shoulder, he recognized the white Packard parked next to him, peered inside, and saw a lean-faced young man with blond sun-bleached hair and a high cerebrotonic forehead watching him behind dark glasses. Sitting beside him at the wheel was a raven-haired girl whom he had often seen around the psychology department. She had intelligent but somehow rather oblique eyes, and Powers remembered that the younger doctors called her “the girl from Mars.”
“Hello, Kaldren,” Powers said to the young man. “Still following me around?”
Kaldren nodded. “Most of the time, doctor.” He sized Powers up shrewdly. “We haven’t seen very much of you recently, as a matter of fact. Anderson said you’d resigned, and we noticed your laboratory was closed.”
Powers shrugged. “I felt I needed a rest. As you’ll understand, there’s a good deal that needs rethinking.”
Kaldren frowned half-mockingly. “Sorry to hear that, doctor. But don’t let these temporary setbacks depress you.” He noticed the girl watching Powers with interest. “Coma’s a fan of yours. I gave her your papers from American Journal of Psychiatry, and she’s read through the whole file.”
The girl smiled pleasantly at Powers, for a moment dispelling the hostility between the two men. When Powers nodded to her she leaned across Kaldren and said: “Actually I’ve just finished Noguchi’s autobiography—the great Japanese doctor who discovered the spirochaete. Somehow you remind me of him—there’s so much of yourself in all the patients you worked on.”
Powers smiled wanly at her, then his eyes turned and locked involuntarily on Kaldren’s. They stared at each other sombrely for a moment, and a small tic in Kaldren’s right cheek began to flicker irritatingly. He flexed his facial muscles, after a few seconds mastered it with an effort, obviously annoyed that Powers should have witnessed this brief embarrassment.
“How did the clinic go today?” Powers asked. “Have you had any more…headaches?”
Kaldren’s mouth snapped shut, he looked suddenly irritable. “Whose care am I in, doctor? Yours or Anderson’s? Is that the sort of question you should be asking now?”
Powers gestured deprecatingly. “Perhaps not.” He cleared his throat; the heat was ebbing the blood from his head and he felt tired and eager to get away from them. He turned towards his car, then realized that Kaldren would probably follow, either try to crowd him into the ditch or block the road and make Powers sit in his dust all the way back to the lake. Kaldren was capable of any madness.
“Well, I’ve got to go and collect something,” he said, adding in a firmer voice: “Get in touch with me, though, if you can’t reach Anderson.”
He waved and walked off behind the line of cars. From the reflection in the windows he could see Kaldren looking back and watching him closely.
He entered the Neurology wing, paused thankfully in the cool foyer, nodding to the two nurses and the armed guard at the reception desk. For some reason the terminals sleeping in the adjacent dormitory block attracted hordes of would-be sightseers, most of them cranks with some magical anti-narcoma remedy, or merely the idly curious, but a good number of quite normal people, many of whom had travelled thousands of miles, impelled towards the Clinic by some strange instinct, like animals migrating to a preview of their racial graveyards.
He walked along the corridor to the supervisor’s office overlooking the recreation deck, borrowed the key, and made his way out through the tennis courts and calisthenics rigs to the enclosed swimming pool at the far end. It had been disused for months, and only Powers’s visits kept the lock free. Stepping through, he closed it behind him and walked past the peeling wooden stands to the deep end.
Putting a foot up on the diving board, he looked down at Whitby’s ideogram. Damp leaves and bits of paper obscured it, but the outlines were just distinguishable. It covered almost the entire floor of the pool and at first glance appeared to represent a huge solar disc, with four radiating diamond-shaped arms, a crude Jungian mandala.
Wondering what had prompted Whitby to carve the device before his death, Powers noticed something moving through the debris in the centre of the disc. A black, horny-shelled animal about a foot long was nosing about in the slush, heaving itself on tired legs. Its shell was articulated, and vaguely resembled an armadillo’s. Reaching the edge of the disc, it stopped and hesitated, then slowly backed away into the centre again, apparently unwilling or unable to cross the narrow groove.
Powers looked around, then stepped into one of the changing stalls and pulled a small wooden clothes locker off its rusty wall bracket. Carrying it under one arm, he climbed down the chromium ladder into the pool and walked carefully across the slithery floor towards the animal. As he approached it sidled away from him, but he trapped it easily, using the lid to lever it into the box.
The animal was heavy, at least the weight of a brick. Powers tapped its massive olive-black carapace with his knuckle, noting the triangular warty head jutting out below its rim like a turtle’s, the thickened pads beneath the first digits of the pentadactyl forelimbs.
He watched the three-lidded eyes blinking at him anxiously from the bottom of the box.
“Expecting some really hot weather?” he murmured. “That lead umbrella you’re carrying around should keep you cool.”
He closed the lid, climbed out of the pool, and made his way back to the supervisor’s office, then carried the box out to his car.
“…Kaldren continues to reproach me [Powers wrote in his diary]. For some reason he seems unwilling to accept his isolation, is elaborating a series of private rituals to replace the missing hours of sleep. Perhaps I should tell him of my own approaching zero, but he’d probably regard this as the final unbearable insult, that I should have in excess what he so desperately yearns for. God knows what might happen. Fortunately the nightmarish visions appear to have receded for the time being….”
Pushing the diary away, Powers leaned forward across the desk and stared out through the window at the white floor of the lake bed stretching towards the hills along the horizon. Three miles away, on the far shore, he could see the circular bowl of the radio telescope revolving slowly in the clear afternoon air, as Kaldren tirelessly trapped the sky, sluicing in millions of cubic parsecs of sterile ether, like the nomads who trapped the sea along the shores of the Persian Gulf.
Behind him the air conditioner murmured quietly, cooling the pale blue walls half-hidden in the dim light. Outside the air was bright and oppressive, the heat waves rippling up from the clumps of gold-tinted cacti below the Clinic blurring the sharp terraces of the twenty-storey Neurology block. There, in the silent dormitories behind the sealed shutters, the terminals slept their long dreamless sleep. There were now over five hundred of them in the Clinic, the vanguard of a vast somnambulist army massing for its last march. Only five years had elapsed since the first narcoma syndrome had been recognized, but already huge government hospitals in the east were being readied for intakes in the thousands, as more and more cases came to light.
Powers felt suddenly tired, and glanced at his wrist, wondering how long he had to eight o’clock, his bedtime for the next week or so. Already he missed the dusk, soon would wake to his last dawn.
His watch was in his hip pocket. He remembered his decision not to use his timepieces, and sat back and stared at the bookshelves beside the desk. There were rows of green-covered AEC publications he had removed from Whitby’s library, papers in which the biologist described his work out in the Pacific after the H-tests. Many of them Powers knew almost by heart, read a hundred times in an effort to grasp Whitby’s last conclusions. Toynbee would certainly be easier to forget.
His eyes dimmed momentarily, as the tall
black wall in the rear of his mind cast its great shadow over his brain. He reached for the diary, thinking of the girl in Kaldren’s car—Coma he had called her, another of his insane jokes—and her reference to Noguchi. Actually the comparison should have been made with Whitby, not himself; the monsters in the lab were nothing more than fragmented mirrors of Whitby’s mind, like the grotesque radio-shielded frog he had found that morning in the swimming pool.
Thinking of the girl Coma, and the heartening smile she had given him, he wrote:
Woke 6:33 a.m. Last session with Anderson. He made it plain he’s seen enough of me, and from now on I’m better alone. To sleep 8:00? (These countdowns terrify me.)
He paused, then added:
Good-bye, Eniwetok.
TWO
He saw the girl again the next day at Whitby’s laboratory. He had driven over after breakfast with the new specimen, eager to get it into a vivarium before it died. The only previous armoured mutant he had come across had nearly broken his neck. Speeding along the lake road a month or so earlier he had struck it with the offside front wheel, expecting the small creature to flatten instantly. Instead its hard lead-packed shell had remained rigid, even though the organism within it had been pulped, had flung the car heavily into the ditch. He had gone back for the shell, later weighed it at the laboratory, found it contained over six hundred grammes of lead.
Quite a number of plants and animals were building up heavy metals as radiological shields. In the hills behind the beach house a couple of old-time prospectors were renovating the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago. They had noticed the bright yellow tints of the cacti, run an analysis, and found that the plants were assimilating gold in extractable quantities, although the soil concentrations were unworkable. Oak Ridge was at last paying a dividend!!