Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  Surveying hirsute figures wantonly reclining, Burnell thought, “That one could have made Pope; he has the nose for it. And there’s Messalina, with the cruel and creamy thighs, and that one could be Theodora, her blue rinse beginning to run a little in the heat. The little rat is Iago to the life… Blanche would be amused.” It was Blake, it was Dore, it was also super-heating. He thought of Blanche’s nakedness, and was embarrassed to find an erection developing. He climbed from the sulphurous waters, wrapping himself with English discretion in a white towelling bathrobe.

  On the way back to his room, Burnell encountered a lean, bearded man clad only in a towel and hotel slippers. He was moving toward the baths, head forward in something between a slouch and a run, one eyebrow raised as if it were the proprioceptor by which he navigated. He and Burnell looked at each other. Burnell recognized the haggard lineaments, the eroded temples, the eyebrows. They belonged to a distant acquaintance from university days, Monty Butterworth.

  Monty, eyebrow swivelling, locked on to Burnell at once.

  “Roy, old chap! How jolly to see you.”

  “Hello, Monty.” Burnell knotted the bathrobe more tightly. Monty had been sacked from his post at the University of East Anglia some while ago. There had been a small scandal. Finances had gone missing. Burnell, not caring about the matter, had forgotten the details. “What are you doing in Budapest?”

  “Little private matter, old chum.” He had a dated way of addressing people, smiling and nodding as he did so, as if agreeing with something off-stage. “Helping out a bit at what they call the ‘Korszinhaz’, the round theatre in the park. Scenery, you know. Well, scene-shifting. To tell the truth, only been here four days. Wandered round in a daze at first. Didn’t know where I was…” He paused and then, seeing Burnell was about to speak, went on hastily, leaning a little nearer. “Between you and me, old boy, I’m here consulting a very clever chap, sort of a…well… a specialist. You see, something rather strange has happened to me. To say the least. I’d like to tell you about it, as an old friend. You still with WACH, I presume? Perhaps you’d care to buy us a drink? Fellow countryman and all that kind of stuff, compatriot… Excuse the towel.”

  They went up to Burnell’s room. After opening the mini-bar, Burnell slipped into a shell-suit. He handed Monty a sweater to wear.

  “Fits me to a T,” said his visitor. “You wouldn’t mind if I hung on to it, would you? Bit short of clothing, to tell the truth—here in Budapest, I mean. Some crook nicked all my luggage at the airport. You know what it’s like… They’re a dodgy lot.”

  Burnell poured two generous Smirnoffs on the rocks. They raised their glasses to each other.

  “That’s better.” Monty Butterworth sighed. He licked his lips. “I’ll come straight to the point, old pal. “Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory…” So says the poet. I expect you remember the quotation. But let’s suppose there’s no memory in which those soft voices can vibrate…”

  Burnell stood by the window, saying nothing, contemplating Monty with distrust.

  “I’m forty, or so I believe. Four days ago, I found myself in an unknown place. You’ll never credit this. I found myself in an unknown place—not a clue how I got there. Absolutely at a loss, mind blank. Turned out that I was here, in Budapest. Budapest! Never been here before in my natural.”

  He was already contradicting himself, Burnell thought. If he were lost, how had he known his luggage was stolen at the airport?

  “So now you’re staying in the Gellert?” Burnell spoke challengingly, determined not to be touched for Monty’s air fare to England. Knowing something of the man’s background, he felt no particular inclination to help.

  Monty leaned back in his chair so as to look as much the invalid as possible. “Terrible state poor old England’s in. Read the papers. To what do you ascribe it, Roy?”

  “Neglect of education, lack of statesmen. What’s your problem?”

  “Couldn’t agree more. I suppose that’s why someone like you has to scout round for a job abroad?”

  “No doubt. What’s your problem?”

  “It’s very serious. I know you’re a sympathetic chap. I’m attending the Antonescu Clinic. Mircea Antonescu is a foremost specialist, right at the cutting edge of psycho-technology. Well, he’s Romanian. They’re a clever race…” He gave Burnell a sidelong glance under the eyebrow before hurrying on. “I’m not staying at the Gellert. Couldn’t afford it. Too expensive for someone like me. I’m renting a cheap room in Pest—view of the gasworks, ha ha… You see, Roy, old pal, this is the bottom line: I’ve lost ten years of my memory. Just lost them. Wiped clean. Can’t remember a thing.”

  Burnell uttered a word of condolence. Monty looked slightly annoyed.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand. The last thing I can really remember is, I was thirty. Ten and a bit years have passed since then and I’ve absolutely no notion what I was doing all that time. No notion at all.”

  “How terrible.” Burnell suspected a catch was coming, and was loath to commit himself.

  “FOAM. That’s Antonescu’s term. FOAM—Free Of All Memory. He sees it as a kind of, well, liberty. There I beg to differ. You know what it feels like to lose your memory?”

  Despite himself, Burnell was interested.

  “It’s like an ocean, old chum. A wide, wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have disappeared, sunk without trace. I suppose I couldn’t have a top-up of vodka, could I?” He held out his glass.

  As he poured, Burnell admitted he had seen Monty once or twice during the previous ten years, before his sacking; perhaps he could help to fill the gaps in his memory. Monty Butterworth made moderately grateful noises. There was no one else he could turn to in Budapest.

  When asked if his memory-loss was caused by a virus, Monty professed ignorance. “No one knows—as yet at least. Could have been a car crash, causing amnesia. No bones broken if so. Lucky to be alive, I suppose you might say. But what’s going to happen to me, I’ve no idea.”

  “Your wife isn’t with you?”

  Monty slapped his forehead with his free hand. A look of amazement crossed his face. “Oh my sainted aunt! Don’t say I was married!”

  He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater, he shook Burnell’s hand. The next morning, Burnell went round to the Antonescu Clinic as he had promised. Monty wanted one of the specialists at the clinic to question Burnell, in order to construct a few points of identification. Monty suggested that this would help towards a restoration of his memory.

  Burnell had agreed. He felt ashamed that he had so grudgingly given his old sweater to a friend in distress.

  2

  Murder in a Cathedral

  “Nothing to worry about, old chum,” Monty Butterworth had said. “They’re masters of the healing art.”

  The Antonescu Clinic was not as Burnell had imagined it. Cumbersome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, built of stone expressly quarried to grind the faces of the poor, lined a section of Fo Street. Secretive Hungarian lives were lived among heavy furniture in these blocks. They parted at one point to permit entrance to a small nameless square.

  The buildings in the square huddled against each other, like teeth in a too-crowded mouth. Instead of dentistry, they had suffered the exhalations from lignite still burnt in the city. A nicotiney taint gave the facades an ancient aspect, as if they had been retrieved from a period long before the Dual Monarchy.

  The exception to this antiquity was a leprous concrete structure, a contribution from the Communist era which announced itself as the Ministry of Light Industry. Next to it was wedged a small shop hoping to sell used computers. Above the shop, when Burnell ascended a narrow stair, he found a huddle of rooms partitioned out of a loft. A dated modernity had been achieved with track-lighting and interior glass. Tinkling Muzak proved the Age of the Foxtrot was not entirely dead.

  Burnell sat in a windowless waiting-room, looking at a post-Rothko poster which dis
played a large black cross with wavery edges on a dark gray background.

  A man with a thin cigar in his mouth looked round the door, sketched a salute in greeting and said, “Antonescu not here. Business elsewhere. Meet Dr. Maté. Maté Joszef, Joszef Maté.”

  He then entered the cubicle and proffered a long wiry hand.

  In jerky English, Dr. Maté explained that he was Mircea Antonescu’s second-in-command. They could get to work immediately. The best procedure would be for Burnell to ascend to a room where a series of questions concerning the forgotten years of Monty Butterworth could be put to him and the answers recorded electronically.

  “You understand me, Dr. Burnell? Here using most modern proprietary methods. Dealing extensively with brain-injury cases. Exclusive. Special to our clinic. To produce best results in Europe, satisfied customers…” Maté’s thick furry voice was as chewed as his cigar. As he bustled Burnell from the room, his haste almost precluded the use of finite verbs.

  Burnell was shown up a spiral stair to a room with a skylight and technical equipment. Here stood a uniformed nurse with gray hair and eyes. She came forward, shaking Burnell’s hand in a friendly manner, requesting him in good German to remove his anorak.

  As he did so, and handed the garment to the woman, he caught her expression. She was still smiling, but the smile had become fixed; he read something between pity and contempt in her cold eye.

  At once, he felt premonitions of danger. They came on him like a stab of sorrow. He saw, seating himself as directed in an enveloping black chair, what clear-sighted men sometimes see. His life, until now modestly successful, was about to dip into a darkness beyond his control. In that moment there came to him a fear not for but of his own existence. He knew little about medical practice, but the operating table and anesthetic apparatus were familiar enough, with black tubes of gas waiting like torpedoes for launch. On the other side of the crowded room, e-mnemonicvision equipment stood like glum secretary birds, their crenellated helmets ready to be swung down and fixed to the cranium. These birds were tethered to computerized controls, already humming, showing their pimples of red light.

  Maté bustled about, muttering to the nurse, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray.

  “If you’re busy, I will come back tomorrow,” Burnell said. The nurse pushed him gently into the depths of the chair, telling him soothingly to relax.

  “Like wartime,” said Maté. “Still too many difficulties. Too many problems. Is not good, nicht gut. Many problems unknown.” Switching on a VDU, he biffed it with the heel of his left hand. “Large inflation rate problems, too high taxes… Too many gipsy in town. All time… The Germans of course… The Pole… Vietnamese minority… How we get all work done…”

  He swung abruptly into another mode, suddenly looming over Burnell. “Just some questions, Dr. Burnell. You are nervous, no?”

  As his long, stained fingers chased themselves through Burnell’s hair, he attempted reassurance. The clinic had developed a method of inserting memories into regions of the brains, to restore amnesiacs to health. The method was a development of e-mnemonicvision. First, those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on microchip, and then projected into the brain. While he gave a somewhat technical explanation, the nurse gave Burnell an injection in his arm. He felt it as little more than a bee sting.

  “But I don’t know Monty Butterworth well…”

  “Good, good, Dr. Burnell. Now we must append electrodes to the head… Obtain full data in response to my questioning… No dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading on sharp nights…”

  Burnell tried to struggle, as the words became confused with the heat.

  He could still hear Dr. Maté, but the man’s words had become mixed with a colorful ball, which bounced erratically away into the distance. Burnell tried to get out the word “discomfort,” but it was too mountainous.

  He was walking with Maté in a cathedral, huge and unlit. Their steps were ponderous, as if they waded up to their thighs in water. To confuse the issue further, Maté was smoking a cigar he referred to as “The Trial.”

  Offended, Burnell attempted a defence of Franz Kafka, distinguished Czech author of a novel of the same name.

  “As a psychologist, you must understand that there are men like

  Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, while for others—why, they sail through life like your torpedoes.”

  “These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more truthful than the other. For some people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.”

  “You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call ‘this doleful jeste of life.’ ”

  “I’ve just got to get a millimeter further in.”

  They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.

  “Anyhow, you’re good company,” Maté said, affectionately. “Is there anything I can do for you in return?”

  “More oxygen,” Burnell said. “It’s hot in this…” Uncertain between the words “chair” and “cathedral,” he came out with “chairch”. “As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe—Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims…”

  He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, “But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.”

  “I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call newral pathwise. Your friend Kafka—personally I’d have lobotomized him—he said that ‘all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology.’ Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.”

  Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, “In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.”

  Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of

  Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.

  Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Savior’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.

  “I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?” said Maté. “You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.”

  It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.

  The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns like fossil vertebrae reared up on every side, humming with the extreme messages they carried. In defiance of the laws of physics, they writhed like the vital parts of the chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.

  Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by
in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.

  “The devil’s about to appear,” he said. “Hold tight.”

  “The devil? But you hadn’t hear of the—”

  “Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends…”

  “But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?”

  At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.

  Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.

  For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.

  That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!

  It was unmistakable even to a layman.

  “The devil you know!” Burnell exclaimed.

  “I’d better shove off now,” said Maté.

  “Hey, what about those playing cods?” But the man had gone.

  Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.

  The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell—even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark—weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by?—it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.

  He advanced slowly up the ramp toward Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.