The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ poised on the brink of the last second of eternal time, Mickie stood transfixed in his bubble.

      And with his lips still pursed in the moment of that long-gone kiss, he asked himself the final question, ‘Am I dead or am I immortal?’

       Down the Up Escalation

      Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese rôle in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura’s manuscript.

      She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book – ‘a sort of autobiography’, she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.

      On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals – you couldn’t see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.

      A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.

      There was a ship embedded in the ice. You’d hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice.

      Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day’s load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin’s time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.

      The ship was free of ice, sailing along in a sea of mist. It was no longer a pleasure ship but a research ship. Men were singing. They sang that they sailed on a lake as big as Australia.

      ‘They aren’t men. They are horses!’ My aunt.

      ‘There are horses aboard.’

      ‘I certainly don’t see any men.’

      ‘Funny-looking horses.’

      ‘Did you see a wolf then?’

      ‘I mean, more like ponies. Shaggy. Small and shaggy. Is that gun loaded?’

      ‘Naturally. They’re forest ponies – I mean to say, not ponies but reindeer. “The curse of the devil”, they call them.’

      ‘It’s the bloody rotten light! They do look like reindeer. But they must be men.’

      ‘Ever looked one in the eye? They are the most frightening animals.’

      My father was talking to me again, speaking over the phone. It had been so long. I had forgotten how I loved him, how I missed him. All I remembered was that I had gone with my two brothers to his funeral; but that must have been someone else’s funeral, someone else’s father. So many people, good people, were dying.

      I poured my smiles down the telephone, heart full of delight, easy. He was embarking on one of his marvellous stories. I gulped down his sentences.

      ‘That burial business was all a joke – a swindle. I collected two thousand pounds for that, you know, Bruce. No, I’m lying! Two and a half. It was chicken feed, of course, compared with some of the swindles I’ve been in. Did I ever tell you how Ginger Robbins and I got demobbed in Singapore at the end of the war, 1945? We bought a defunct trawler off a couple of Chinese business men – very nice old fatties called Pee – marvellous name! Ginger and I had both kept our uniforms, and we marched into a transit camp and got a detail of men organised – young rookies, all saluting us like mad – you’d have laughed! We got them to load a big LCT engine into a five-tonner, and we all drove out of camp without a question being asked, and – wham! – straight down to the docks and our old tub. It was boiling bloody hot, and you should have seen those squaddies sweat as they unloaded the engine and man-handled –’

      ‘Shit, Dad, this is all very funny and all that,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got some work to do, you know. Don’t think I’m not enjoying a great reminiscence, but I have to damned work, see? Okay?’

      I rang off.

      I put my head between my hands and – no, I could not manage weeping. I just put my head between my hands and wondered why I did what I did. Subconscious working, of course. I tried to plan out a science fiction story about a race of men who had only subconsciousnesses. Their consciousnesses had been painlessly removed by surgery.

      They moved faster without their burdening consciousnesses, wearing lunatic smiles or lunatic frowns. Directly after the operation, scars still moist, they had restarted World War II, some assuming the roles of Nazis or Japanese or Jugoslav partisans or British fighter pilots in kinky boots. Many even chose to be Italians, the role of Mussolini being so keenly desired that at one time there were a dozen Duces striding about, keeping company with the droves of Hitlers.

      Some of these Hitlers later volunteered to fly with the Kamikazes.

      Many women volunteered to be raped by the Wehrmacht and turned nasty when the requirements were filled. When a concentration camp was set up, it was rapidly filled; people have a talent for suffering. The history of the war was rewritten a bit. They had Passchendaele and the Somme in; a certain President Johnson led the British forces.

      The war petered out in a win for Germany. Few people were left alive. They voted themselves second-class citizens, mostly becoming Jewish Negroes or Vietnamese. There was birching between consenting adults. These good folk voted unanimously to have their subconsciousnesses removed, leaving only their ids.

      I was on the floor. My study. The name of the vinolay was – it had a name, that rather odious pattern of little wooden chocks. I had it on the tip of my tongue. When I sat up, I realised how cold I was, cold and trembling, not working very well.

      My body was rather destructive to society, as the Top Clergy would say. I had used it for all sorts of things; nobody knew where it had been. I had used it in an unjust war. Festival. It was called Festival. Terrible name, surely impeded sales.

      I could not get up. I crawled across the floor towards the drink cupboard in the next room. Vision blurry. As I looked up, I saw my old aunt’s manuscript on the table. One sheet had fluttered down on to the Festival. I crawled out into the dining-room, through the door, banging myself as I went. Neither mind nor body was the precision ballistic missile it once had been.

      The bottle. I got it open before I saw it was Sweet Martini, and dropped it. It seeped into the carpet; no doubt that had a name too. Weary, I rested my head in the mess.

      ‘If I die now, I shall never read Aunt Laura’s life …’

      Head on carpet, bottom in air, I reached and grasped the whisky bottle. Why did they make the stuff so hard to get at? Then I drank. It made me very ill indeed.

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