The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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      ‘Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying Colin? You’re not bloody mad, are you? You killed my husband and I want to know what you’re going to do about it!’

      ‘Take you home.’ They were moving now. Although his face ached, he felt in a rare joking mood as after wine in the deep home forests.

      ‘I don’t live out this direction.’

      ‘Take you to my home. My place. Where I build a sort of project from. I’ve started making a new model for thought. You came once, didn’t you, with Brasher in some untidy evening? It’s not town, not country. You can’t say which it is; that’s why I like it – it stands for all I stand for. In the mundane world and France, things like art and science have just spewed forth and swallowed up everything else. There’s nothing now left that’s non-art or non-science. A lot of things just gone. My place is neither urban nor non-urban. Fuzzy set, its own non categorisable catasgory. Look outwards, Angeline! Wonderful!’ He gave a sort of half-laugh by a wall, his beard growing in its own silence.

      ‘You Serbian bastard! There may have been a war, the country may be ruined, but you can’t get away with murder! Justice doesn’t just fuzz off! You’ll die, they’ll shoot you!’ There was no conviction in her voice; his sainthood was drowning her old self, or whatever he had behind eyes.

      ‘No, I shall live, be justice. I haven’t fulfilled any purpose yet, a sailor but the ocean’s still ahead, hey?’ The car was easing on to the Inner Relief. Behind them, ambulances and a fire engine and police cars and breakdown vans were nuzzling the debris. ‘I’ve seen reality, Angeline – Kragujevac, Metz, Frankfurt – it’s lying everywhere. And I myself have materialised into the inorganic, and so am indestructible, auto-destruct!’

      The words stoned him. Since he had reached England, the psychedelic effect had gained on him daily in gusts. Cities had speaking patterns, worlds, rooms. He had ceased to think what he was saying; the result was he surprised himself, and this elation fed back into the system. Every thought multiplied into a thousand. Words, roads, all fossil tracks of thinking. He pursued them into the amonight, struggling with them as they propagated in their deep burrows away from the surface. Another poem: On the Spontaneous Generation of Ideas During Conversation. Spontagions Ideal Convertagion. The Conflation of Spongation in Idations. Agenbite of Auschwitz.

      ‘Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That’s how I materialised, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here – we are in my brain, if s all me. The nomad’s open to the city. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine, in a culmination going.’ It was true. Other people, he hardly saw them, caught in bursts, crossflare, at last shared their bombardment of images.

      ‘Don’t be daft – it’s raining again! Don’t go daft. Talk proper.’ But she sounded frightened.

      They swerved past factories, long drab walls, filling stations, long ochre terraces, yards, many genera of concrete.

      Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World, Guinness. Grey stucco urinal. Coal yard, Esso Blue. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. More rows of terrace houses, dentured, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his book; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis, suburbanal. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage, out onto the motorway, endless roads crossing over it on primitive pillars. Railways, some closed, canals, some sedge-filled, a poor sod pushing a sack of potatoes on the handlebars of his bike across a drowning allotment, footpaths, cycle-paths, catwalks, nettlebeds, waste dumps, scrap-pits, shortcuts, fences.

      Geology. Strata of different man-times. Tempology. Each decade of the past still preserved in some gaunt monument. Even the motorway itself yielding clues to the enormous epochs of pre-psychedelic time: bridges cruder, more massive in earliest epoch, becoming almost graceful later, less sick-orange; later still, metal; different abutment planes, different patterns of drainage in the under-flyover bank, bifurcated like enormous Jurassic fern-trees Here we distinguish by the characteristics of this medium-weight aggregate the Wimpey stratum; while, a little further along, in the shade of these cantilevers, we distinguish the beginning of the McAlpine seam. The layout of that service area, of course, belongs characteristically to the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. Further was an early electric generating station with a mock-turkish dome, desolate in a field. All art, assuaging. Pylons, endlessly, too ornate for the cumbersome land, assuaging. Multiplacation.

      The skies were lumped and flaky with cloud, Loughborough skies. Squirting rain and diffused lighting. No green yet in the hedges. The brown nearest black. Beautiful. …

      ‘We will abolish that word beautiful. It carries implications of ugliness in an Aristotelian way. There are only gradations in between the two. They pair. No ugliness.’

      ‘There’s the word “ugliness”, so there must be something to attach it to, mustn’t there? And don’t drive so fast.’

      ‘Stop quoting Lewis Carroll at me!’

      ‘I’m not!’

      ‘You should have allowed me to give you the benefit of the doubt.’

      ‘Well, steer properly! You lost your loot or something?’

      He flicked away back onto his own side of the motorway, narrowly missing an op-art Jag, its driver screaming over the wheel. I also drive by fuzzy sets, he thought admiringly. The two cars had actually brushed; between hitting and not-hitting were many degrees. He had sampled most of them. The lookout to keep was a soft watch. It was impossible to be safe – watering your potted plant, which was really doing well, impossible. A Christmas cactus it could be, you were so proud of it. The Cortina, Consortina, buckling against – you’d not even seen it, back turned, blazing in a moment’s sun, Christ, just sweeping the poor woman and her pathetic little porch right away in limbo!

      ‘Never live on Inner Relief.’ Suddenly light-hearted and joking.

      ‘Stop getting at me! You’re really rather cruel, aren’t you?’

      ‘Jebem te sunce! Look, Natrina – I mean, Angelina, I love you, I dream you.’

      ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

      ‘So? I’m not omniscient yet. I don’t have to know what it is to do it, do I? I’m just beginning, the thing’s just beginning in me, all to come. I’ll speak, preach! Burton’s group, Escalation Limited, I’ll write songs for them. How about Truth lies in Static Instants? Or When We’re Intimate in the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. No, no – Accidents and Aerodynamics Accrete into Art. No, no! How about … Ha, I Do My Personal Thinking In Pounds Sterling? Or Ouspenski Has It All Ways Always. Or The Victim and the Wreckage Are The Same. The Lights Across the River. Good job I threw away my NUNSACS papers. Too busy. I’ll fill the world till my head bursts. Look – zbogom, missed him! What a driver! Maybe get him tomorrow! Must forget these trivialities, which others can perform. Kuwait was the beginning! I’m just so creative at present, look, Angelina –’

      ‘It’s Angeline. Rhymes with “mean”.’ She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

      ‘My lean angel mean, Meangeline. I’m so creative, feel my temple! And I sense a gift in you too as you struggle out of old modes towards creams of denser feeling. What’s it going to be we got to find together eh?’

      ‘I’ve СКАЧАТЬ