by Brian Aldiss
His right hand still clutched a big scallop shell. After knocking the other out, he had performed an operation of his own. The other’s naked chest had been cut to pieces by the scallop. Beside the frightful wound lay Barry’s artificial heart. Tom had ripped it out of place after laying the chest open.
He must have died almost as soon as the other. The load on his heart would have been great. Now his frenzy was past. The lines of his face were relaxed. From his twisted position, one eye looked up into the morning sky.
Laura squatted down in front of him and began to weep.
These painful events have now receded into the past. How vividly I recall crouching by that mutilated double body, my knees painful on the cobbles, crying, and hearing the flies buzz.
Finally, Laura and I gathered ourselves up and went back along the strand. I summoned father. Later, Bert returned with a police officer. Bert took me and Laura away from the Head. The bodies followed later in another boat.
I never knowingly failed my two brothers. Perhaps I failed the other. Perhaps I could have helped him too.
Although I sometimes dream of him, those dreams have now shed their terror. His lost life – what did he think, experience … ? Was his a dream or a life? I don’t know what to make of it, any more than I know what to make of anyone’s life, come to that.
The days are full enough, now that I have children of my own. They too are making their journey through the forests of life. Sometimes when they are in bed, Bert and I play the old Bang-Bang LPs to ourselves. Then I look out of the window and across the waters, to where father still lives out his solitary life on L’Estrange Head. Everything vanishes in time, like the music when the record stops playing.
R.S.
Appendix
Big Lover
Go to my lover and say
That Earth is nothing but a star,
It’s just the merest light-point
To even its nearest neighbours.
Serenade her with the facts
Concerning life on Earth,
Its startling brevity of tenure
Give her cosmology and music
To show her she is my lens
Through which I view the universe,
My eye, my sun/My big lover
My galactic one.
Love is a Forest
The animal and the sublime
Make you so versatile,
You keep three lovers happy
Yet torture them meanwhile.
In this world I’m love’s tourist
And take a package tour of solitude
Our love is a forest.
Oh you are all things to me
Victim and vampire,
You keep three lovers happy
A phoenix of their fire.
In this world I’m love’s tourist
Another head is dreaming of your beauty
Our love is a forest.
Your loveliness is legend,
A statue I would carve,
You keep three lovers happy
And satisfied to starve.
In this world I’m love’s tourist
Our love is a forest.
Bacterial Action
Although the world fills up with men
Their numbers do not match
The numbers of the swarming swarms
Of creatures living in our skin.
They have their nations and domains,
Pleasant jungles, deserts, streams.
They live, beget, and leave no trace
For eye to see or mind to judge.
They’ve no Byzantium or Rome,
Yet they were there, in smock and gown;
Proud Caesar was their planet too,
In time their old prolific line
Will speed commensally with us
And all unknowing win the stars –
Yes, ultimately win the stars
Unknowing
Star-Time
We – who had survived the journey
To the forty-seventh millennium
Where dark starlight grows on bushes
And eyes house laughing kookaburra birds –
We sat drinking xwaszha in a café
With boys and beauties whose grandfathers
Were in their cots when we set out.
It was triumph
It was triumph
My happiness took me to loving hearts and couches
Yet we who had survived the journey
Knew that all the while our memory
Stayed with those elegant grey seas
Curling over what was Europe.
Just for a Moment
Just for a moment think about spun glass spinning
Moving in a low December’s sun,
Shining above rough dark secret meadows
Lying where the leaf-choked marshes run.
Just for a moment think about a perfect colour
Fading on the margins of the sea,
Lapping against a pallid shingle pathway
Leading to a castle tall and free.
Just for a moment think about pure silence
Shining above a distant mountain peak,
Looking towards the radiant eye of moonlight
Falling upon the contours of your cheek.
Just for a moment visualize time absolute
Dwelling through a planet’s unlived years,
Passing over far untravelled tundras
Turning where the long-haired comet steers.
Or just for a moment think about a moment
Let movement colour silence time all flow,
About your lovely waiting head unknowing –
And then you’ll know my love’s bounds,
Then you’ll know.
I was Never Deaf or Blind to Her Music
No, I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura
I breathed more oxygen in her company,
Reached higher speeds and a wider sort of skies
And dredged for her secret salts and alkalis.
It was just that the days closed in,
A new motorway went up between her place and mine.
We couldn’t agree on the merits of Stockhausen
There were quarrels about my drinking habits
We stopped going to gigs together
And then there was that trouble with her employer
Never properly explained
I started breeding wire-haired terriers
She said she lost her respect for me when
I couldn’t give up smoking.
But no, I was never impervious to her vistas
Plunging into the lake of what she was
She stormed me every day like valiant deeds
And my head was as full of her as poppy seeds.
It was just that the weather changed,
My job took me up Sheffield every week.
I felt a compulsion to join the scientologists
She got mad on Dresden china pieces
We became hooked on television
She suddenly wanted to see the Sierra Nevadas
And dance the true Flamenco
With a bearded Dutchman studying zoology
When I think of her driving round Granada
I long for our time again.
No, I was never deaf or blind to her music,
Time was, her alchemy was all upon me.
She packed every moment like a picnic box
She was air and sea to my hills and rocks.
I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura.
Footnotes
1 Two-Way Romeo by Paul Day. Copyright © 1981 Bedderwick Walker Entertainments Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 ‘Year By Year the Evil Gains’ in New Writings in SF 27, edited by Kenneth Bulmer, 1976.
3 Colwyn Thomas, ‘The Two Shots that were Heard Round the World’, Sunday Times, 23 May 1982.
About the Author
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fi
ction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.
Copyright
The Friday Project
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First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Pierrot Publishing Ltd
This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012
Text copyright © Brian Aldiss 1977
Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Source ISBN: 9780007482047
Ebook Edition © October 2012 ISBN: 9780007482054
Version 1
FIRST EDITION
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