Loe raamatut: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Faceless Card

2 Neanderthal Planet

3 Old Hundredth

4 Original Sinner

5 Sector Grey

6 Stage-Struck!

7 Under an English Heaven

8 Hen’s Eyes

9 Sector Azure

10 A Pleasure Shared

11 Basis for Negotiation

12 Conversation Piece

13 Danger: Religion!

14 The Green Leaves of Space

15 Sector Green

16 Sector Vermilion

17 Tyrants’ Territory

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

DARKNESS IN THE DORMITORY

Much of my training in the telling of short stories comes from uncomfortable, even painful, circumstances.

In my tender years, my parents despatched me to a large public school in the county of Suffolk. I found that many of the arrangements in that place of incarceration had been devised to make our juvenile lives as uncomfortable as possible.

Our dormitory, for instance, was as large and echoing as it could be. It contained about thirty iron beds. A strict rule ordered:

NO TALKING AFTER LIGHTS OUT.

However, past boys had devised a form of entertainment for those dark hours. Boys could compete in the telling of stories, one by one, while the other twenty-nine listened and judged. I went in for this competition, to find myself competing against, for instance, such boys as a friend, B.B. Gingell. Gingell was a stylish storyteller, able to relate with complete assurance the quiet events in the life of a water vole.

How should I put this? My competing tales in that dark dorm were of great and desperate events, of terrible creatures emerging armed from the Sargasso Sea, of invisible white psychopaths transforming African tribes into robots, of wicked dictators plunging the world into darkness … Such was the tortured nature of my audience, huddled there in pokey beds, that my tales drove the innocuous water vole into oblivion. I became the dormitory’s undisputed top storyteller.

Moreover, I found myself to be skilled in sadism. When something really alarming in my story was about to happen, I would stop. ‘I shall have to tell you tomorrow what happens next.’

Frustrated cries arose from a dozen mattresses. ‘Go on, you bastard! Tell us now!’

‘Sorry, I have not yet made up my mind what happens next.’

Oh dear, the power of the professionals …

But, there was a fly in this ointment. Our hated housemaster had a spyhole set in the landing outside the dormitory. Howells was his name. Sticking his ear to the hole, he could detect a juvenile voice breaking the enforced silence within.

Flinging open the door, in he stormed! On went the lights, swish went the cane in his fist.

‘Who was talking?’ he demanded.

My hand went up. I was summoned to the middle of the room. And there, in my flimsy pyjamas, I was given six of the best on my behind. (Later, everyone wanted to see my scars).

Howells slammed in. The trick was not to make a sound. Endure! – This is what life is going to be about. Then return with dignity to your bed. Without looking back.

So what can Howells do next? Well … actually nothing. So off he clears. Putting out the lights and slamming the door behind him.

And I? You must have guessed. I am the Champion Storyteller of the Junior Dorm.

Faceless Card

As soon as Paul Stoneward saw Nigel Alexander come into Darwin’s Dive, the killing instinct blossomed in him like a wonderful flower. I can just imagine how it was inside Paul: every little cell waking, growing teeth, turning into sharks yawning.

Even in the most static society like ours, men divide off into hunters and hunted, wolves and sheep. Paul Stoneward was a hunter born, with a way of his own about stalking the prey.

Mr Nigel Alexander was prey. He had it stamped all over him. Ordinary citizen. Safety first. Ideas keep out. He came into the Dive at a slow trot, moving on his heels as if his toes had corns. He foamed a little from a mouth as wide as a ditch with unaccustomed exertion. Brushing past Stoneward, he sat down at his table and peered anxiously through the net-curtained window.

‘Someone you don’t want to see?’ Stoneward asked.

Nigel Alexander looked at his table companion for the first time and then back out of the window.

‘Just a business acquaintance,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

His nerves all alert, Paul Stoneward looked him over, heard him absently order an old-fashioned bromo when the waiter came. Alexander was neatly dressed; Stoneward placed him as a man with money who had no notion how to spend it. A man with half his life ahead who had no notion how to use it. Prey: Handle with Cruelty.

A youngster, slick and spick, drew up outside the bar and hesitated. He danced about, then entered. He noticed Alexander, pretended to be surprised, and came over to the table. His pale face shone with pleasure.

‘Hi, boss,’ he said eagerly. ‘I sure wasn’t sure I didn’t see that familiar back of yours ahead of me. What’s it to be? Mind if I sit down?’

‘I’ve already ordered, Johnny,’ Alexander said miserably. ‘I was just talking to my friend here …’

It did not dislodge the newcomer one bit. He sat down, put his elbows on the table top and nodded friendly fashion to Stoneward. ‘Howdy, I’m Johnny J. Flower, Mr Alexander’s chief clerk. Glad to know you.’

He was the up-and-creeping generation. No dandruff. No shyness. No doubts, no halitosis. No nothing. He began to chatter happily about ‘the business,’ how well they were doing, how good it was working for Mr Alexander. Mr Alexander tried to join in the choruses, bought the boy a pep-up and fizz, smiled, nodded like an old nag.

Business could have been better. ‘The N-Compass Co.’ had its troubles. The public just was not buying taped books like it used and that was a hard, gilt-edged fact nobody could buck. No matter how much publicity N-Compass put out for its clients, nobody could buck that gilt-edged fact. Even Mr Alexander with a smart head clerk like Johnny J. Flower could not buck that basic, gilt-edged fact. But they had done well to win the handling of the publicity for President da Silva’s Memoirs; that was a big consignment. Everyone present would surely agree President da Silva was a big guy.

‘Surely,’ agreed Stoneward, when their two pairs of cow eyes, hazel and green but so similar, turned to him, pleading with him to roll the ball along and say, ‘Surely.’

Why, da Silva was the guy who instigated the Amazon Basin scheme … billions of credits … da Silva was the guy who gave the big yes to the AAA, the Automated Agriculture Act … Yuh, a big guy … N-Compass ought to be made with da Silva’s book.

Finally Johnny said he should be getting along.

‘Off you go, boy; I’ll be along,’ Mr Alexander said, half tough, half cajoling. This obviously was not how Johnny wanted it played. He like the rest of the N-Compass staff to see him turn up with the boss, arm-in-arm, you-kiss-mine-etc. Still, he got up and went with grace, social to his clean, clean fingertips.

Paul Stoneward drank in every second of the session as if it were wine. If there was anything he loved, it was seeing the mentally dead pretend they were mentally alive. All the time that he was watching and hating Alexander and the clerk, I was sitting at the other end of the bar watching and hating Stoneward; it’s my profession.

‘Nice boy, Johnny. Don’t know how I’d manage without him,’ Alexander said, wiping under his collar with a silk handkerchief. He was getting flabby. His new collar made it clear he needed a new neck.

‘But you were trying to dodge him,’ Stoneward said lightly. He could prise this old fool open like a piggy-bank.

‘Oh, well, yes … That’s another thing. It’s just – well, never mind. I don’t think I even caught your name, sir. Paul Stoneward? Fine; never forget a name – doesn’t pay in my line of business, no sir. You see, Johnny is a very smart and bright young feller – well, you saw for yourself …’

‘You wouldn’t say Johnny was a bore?’ Paul Stoneward put the delicate point tentatively. You would not say Johnny was a smarm, a snide, a creeper, a dully without one inkling, an ostrich, a jerk who was galloping blind from cradle to grave (like you, Mr Alexander) – in short, an ideal, approve, integrated citizen of this approved and misbegotten Age of Content?

‘Why, Johnny’s a real live-wire, Mr Stoneward,’ Alexander said, with mild indignation. ‘I only said to my wife this morning, “Penelope, Johnny’s going places” and I’m not a man to make a mistake.’

Not much, you old blabbermouth. Of course you can’t see what Johnny is, just as the blind can’t see the blind. And what the hell places do you think Johnny could possibly be going to, when there are no longer any places worth going to? And what sort of romance do you and Penelope make when you are in your bed clothes? And if you knew I long – but long – to tear your typical existence apart from top to bottom …

‘It is of course a very great honour and pleasure to meet a man of your perspicacity and position,’ Stoneward said, crinkling his eyebrows into Mexican moustaches to increase the unction. ‘My place is only just round the corner from here. May I ask you up there with me now? I would be delighted to mix you another old-fashioned bromo.’

At once, Alexander looked nervous. His face took on the puckered look it had worn when he first encountered the bar. Stoneward could not quite account for the expression. Goddam it, even these Normals had their little personal quirks; since it irritated him to feel he did not know every last grey inch of Alexander’s soul, he promptly forgot the thought.

Alexander glanced at his watch.

‘The business …’ he said apologetically. ‘Most hospitable of you …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Alexander,’ Stoneward said, lowering his eyes and easing huskiness into his voice. ‘I should have remembered what a busy man you are. It’s just – well, I’m lonely, let’s face it. There’s no Penelope for me … Just my little old self … Existence sometimes grows a wee bit … solitary.’

Don’t ham it too much, kid, and don’t spoil it all by laughing in his face. You’ve got him now; look, his eyes are misting. Love in a mystery. These slobs are stuffed rotten with kindness – you just have to touch the right button and out it oozes.

‘I’m genuinely sorry to learn that, Mr Stoneward,’ the boss of N-Compass was saying. ‘Say, call me Nigel, why don’t you, and I’ll call you Paul. I like to be friends with folk. I guess we all get lonely at times – even a happy-married man like myself. Like I always say, Paul, life is just a big question mark. Sometimes at night, when your corns are playing you up …’

‘You mean – you mean you will come on round to my place?’ Stoneward said, brightening convulsively. He could not bother even to put on a genuine act – this Alexander was too rancid to smell a stink. Subtlety is wasted on suckers.

‘Well, I didn’t say that …’

‘Ah, come on – Nigel. You’d like my room. Besides … well, I’ve come to regard you as a friend, I guess.’

‘Don’t like to say no,’ Alexander murmured, rising obediently to his feet when Stoneward did. For all his smart suiting, he looked baggy, like a fat sheep off to a ritzy abattoir, as Stoneward took his arm and led him into the sedate streets.

I left shortly after but did not follow them. Instead, I took a taxi to H.Q. Man, was I mad!

Mr Nigel Alexander was really uneasy. He chewed a toothpick to splinters. He plucked at the armpits of his shirt to ease the damp patches off his skin. When he spoke, standing in the middle of Stoneward’s room, he gazed unhappily down at the squared toes of his shoes.

‘Er … you aren’t an artist, by any chance, Paul, are you? No offence, I mean, and you’ll have guessed by now that I’m a pretty liberal man, but I mean I just have to ask the once. These pictures on your walls … And that naked statue …’

Stoneward perched himself on the edge of his desk, swung his neat legs, folded his competent hands, smiled dagger-fashion, looked artistic.

‘Why now, Nigel,’ he said with sham surprise, ‘you know as well as I do that such things as artists don’t exist any more! This is the Age of Content, when all maladjusted and non-functional groups like artists or fictioneers or drunkards have melted away. Everyone is adjusted, normal, happy.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Alexander said hurriedly, nodding rather too much. ‘I just thought … these pictures … I mean, don’t they rather look back to the old decadent pre-Content set-up? I mean, I know you are unmarried …’

Stoneward walked over to the drug cabinet and began to mix two old-fashioneds, saying casually as he did so, ‘You could say I was an artist in a way. There’s something else that has died out and is now forgotten or forbidden: I’m an artist in the art of life.’

This floored Alexander. He adjusted his damp shirt again and wiped his fingertips on the silk handkerchief. He tried a laugh.

‘Oh, you are mistaken there, Paul. Your concept, if you’ll pardon me, is awry. Life is not an art. It’s – well, it’s natural. I don’t intend any rudeness when I say you are mistaken. But life, well, it’s just something you live, I guess. I know Penelope would see it like that. You just live life; it doesn’t need any thought. Not the way business needs thought, for instance. I can’t see what you mean. I mean, I just don’t see it.’

Carrying the two glasses carefully, Stoneward brought them over to the low oval table and set them down. He produced a box of mescahales and a lighter and set those down. He waved his hand to the chairs, sitting in one when his guest dubiously did and curling his long legs under him.

‘Penelope is a very attractive name,’ he said ingratiatingly.

‘Oh yes, a very attractive name. My favourite name, in fact,’ Alexander said, grateful as a dog for the abrupt change of subject.

‘Well,’ Stoneward said, raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the widow of bashful fifteen and to the cadaver of forty, to the clean little woman who’s slightly unclean and the sports girl who’s out-and-out sporty.’

‘I hadn’t heard that one before,’ Alexander said, with glum embarrassment, again examining his toe-caps. He leant well forward and pursed his thick mauve lips to drink.

‘Let’s talk intimately,’ Stoneward said, as if struck by this sudden good idea. ‘Just you and I, Mr Nigel Alexander, with no souls barred. In every age, in every clime, a man’s or a woman’s breast harbour secrets – nothing bad, just little sensitive things to be kept away from the common gaze. Clouds of immortality and suchlike lush things. Let’s have ours out now, right here, confidentially, and see how intimate we can get. What say?’

A driblet went down the plumpening chin and plopped on the table top. The hankie appeared and mopped the plop. The plump hand waved away a proffered mescahale.

‘Frankly, I don’t follow your meaning, Paul. I have no secrets. Well – business secrets, naturally … But I think you are presuming just a little on our acquaintanceship, if I may be allowed to put it that way. Secrets? Why should a normal man have secrets?’

‘Penelope,’ Stoneward barked, shooting out his legs, dropping his voice and repeating, ‘Penelope: no secrets from her? Not even teeny, weeny ones?’

‘No, no, not even – er, teeny, weeny ones. I can say that quite honestly. I love my wife very dearly, Mr Stoneward, the way a decent citizen should, please believe me. Any secrets we may have are very properly shared. Furthermore, as a property owner, I feel I have every right … every right to say … the gosh … every right …’

He had drained his glass and now he was asleep. He rolled over like a bullock on clover, beginning to snore as the knockout drops took firmer hold of him. The lines of his face grew relaxed and generous.

‘Every right!’ Stoneward echoed, standing over him. ‘Yes, you’ve every right to be caught like a porker in a trap. You didn’t want to come here, yet you had to, because you scented loneliness, sniffed it right up your old nostrils. You thought it was like calling to like, you pomaded porker, because inside – though you don’t know it! – you’re just as miserable as all the other Normals. No, that’s foisting my diagnosis onto him. He hasn’t enough know-how to be miserable; that takes talent. He’s just a bucket of lard.’

Bending, he felt distastefully inside the breast pocket of the sleeping man, drawing out his wallet. In it was a red identity card stamped NORMAL. Sure it was normal – it was so normal, only one man in a million was anything else these days. On the back cover of the folder, under the bovinely solemn reproduction of Mr Nigel Hamilton Alexander’s physiognomy, were his home and his business addresses.

‘Good.’ Stoneward said. He picked the lighter from the table, ignited it, and extinguished it against the grey spread of Alexander’s underjowl. The sleeping man never stirred.

Saying ‘Good’ again, Stoneward went over to the phone and dialled. He had thought of an artistic touch. Switching off the vision, he waited for a female voice to coo ‘N-Compass Co. Coverage and Publicity,’ and then asked for Johnny Flower.

‘The boss won’t be in today, Johnny,’ he said apologetically, when the clerk’s dime-a-dozen purr replied. ‘I wouldn’t like this bit of news to get around, but Nigel Alexander is off on a benzedrine bust with a busty junkie called Jean. She’ll toss him right back at you when she’s finished with him.’

He cut off the incoherent noises at the other end of the line, smiled affectionately to himself and dialled through to Civilian Sanctions. He tuned the vision circuits in again in time to see the girl at the main desk switch him right through to the Commissioner.

‘Beynon?’ Stoneward said. He was always clipped staccato, every inch the operative with Commissioner Beynon, because that was how he responded to Beynon’s personality. ‘I’m on a new consignment from date. Target: Citizen BIOX 95005, Alexander, N.H. Usual objective: to awaken the man’s dormant powers of life-awareness. Strictly off the record, I don’t think Alexander has any to awaken.’

‘Don’t make this job too expensive,’ Beynon warned. ‘The Peace Department are having a stiff enough job as it is convincing the Police that you have Congress backing. I advise you to go easy, Stoneward.’

‘Message received and understood,’ Stoneward said. ‘Everything fine and formal, Normal.’

Beynon cut contact, turning to me. ‘How I’d like to see that louse behind bars!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can quite grasp that ultimately he may be doing good, but I don’t like to see nice, honest citizens suffer; and I don’t like the obvious pleasure he gets out of it all. What do you think he’s up to, Kelly?’

‘He’ll be after Alexander’s wife now,’ I told the Commissioner, ‘because that’s the way his nasty little mind works.’

She stood with a vase full of cactus dahlias in one hand. She wore a little apron over a fawn and white dress. She had curly chestnut hair and surprising grey eyes. She was slenderly tenderly shaped. She was some years younger than her husband. She smiled rather helplessly, entirely charmingly.

‘I was just doing the flowers,’ she said.

‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Alexander – Penelope,’ Stoneward said; he had changed into a dark, dapper suit and looked ceaseless, creaseless. He put a calculated amount of warmth into his voice and added, ‘I’ve so often heard your husband call you Penelope, it seems more natural for me to call you that too. Would you mind?’

‘How long have you known my husband, Mr Stoneward?’ she asked, smiling but ignoring his question.

‘We’ve been friends for years, really close friends,’ Stoneward said, clasping his hands ingeniously to suggest ingenuousness. ‘I’m just so surprised he never mentioned me to you. I mean … why should he have secrets from you?’

The little jab did not appear to sink in. Perhaps Penelope also would prove to be insensitive – but he found himself hoping not. That gentle exterior, it should not be hard to wound.

‘Why indeed?’ she said. ‘How long did you say you have known my husband?’

‘I’ve known Ni since … let’s see … Oh, since seven years or more. We met when he was blowing the fanfares for my book on Human Sex, and that was in twenty fifteen. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s why he never mentions me; sex isn’t always considered respectable. What sort of a reception does it get in this house, Penelope?’

She set the vase with a bump on the window ledge and turned smartly. This girl’s legs consisted of an infinite number of points it was imperative to kiss. Steady, Stoneward, the outward display of her might look lively, but the vital grey matter would be dead: how else explain her marriage to N.H.A.?

‘If you have anything important to say, Mr Stoneward, would you please say it and leave? I am rather busy morning.’

‘Yes, I’ve something to say,’ he told her, sitting on the arm of a chair and stretching his legs. He laughed ruefully. ‘Trouble is, I’m not keen to say it. I’m afraid you will be shocked.’

‘If you will tell me, I will tell you if I am shocked,’ she said, attempting to humour him.

‘Okay. Penelope, sweet though you are, Nigel has left you for another woman, the cad.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ she said.

‘I am speaking the truth. He has tired of you at last, the old dog. Every man his own Romeo.’

‘You are talking nonsense. I don’t believe you have even met my husband,’ she said sharply.

‘He has gone off with a blonde double-breasted girl called Jean with hep hips and sigh-size thighs who is old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his father,’ he lied.

She picked up the vase of dahlias again, in case a weapon were needed. All the interlocking softnesses of her face had frozen hard.

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, it’s true!’ Stoneward said, bursting into laughter despite himself. He had spoilt such dramatic scenes before merely because his sense of humour had run away with him – he kept thinking of funny details with which to adorn his theme. ‘It’s all true, Penelope! This wicked girl Jean is old enough to be Ni’s mother. How do I know, you ask? Because she’s my mother! She sure gets around! But this time she’s got a square.’

He rolled into the chair, laughing. Hell, what did it matter how you played your hand when you knew you couldn’t put a foot wrong? That’s what is known as a hand-to-foot existence. It didn’t matter if this chick believed him or not – he had Congress backing. And a free chuckle.

Penelope had moved out with those nicely hinged knees to the call booth in the hall. She dialled angrily and spoke to someone. Sobering, Stoneward sat up and listened. He guessed she was calling Johnny Flower, wanting to know if hubby was under control at the all-N-Compassing office. This was rich! By the shattered look on her face when she returned, slowly, lowly, he knew that he had guessed rightly and Johnny had passed on his little tittle-tattle.

‘I’m truly sorry, Mrs Alexander,’ he said, returning to seriousness to hand out a really corny line. ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t love you any more, it’s just that he fell into temptation. His spirit was willing and his flesh was weak. Try to take it bravely. I don’t think he’ll ever come back to you, but you can always find another man, you know. You’re man-shaped!’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said and burst into tears. With a gallant effort, she tried to check herself but failed; she settled herself in a chair to cry more comfortably. Stoneward went across to her on hands and knees, like a pious panther. When he smoothed her hair, she flicked her head away, continuing to cry

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Alex was always unfair to you. He left you here shut away. He kept secrets from you. He kept money from you. He never told you about me … I can’t bear to hear you cry. It sounds like termites in a tin beam.’

He put his arms round her, cuddling her. In a minute he was kissing her, her grief and his greed all mixed together in a bowl of tears.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Who are you? Why did you come and tell me this?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear, Penelope. Ni told me to come and tell you. He’s bored to death and he’s quitting – going to start life anew, a-nude.’

Though she had been crying, she had not really believed till now. Something Stoneward said seemed to have penetrated and made her accept the situation as he presented it.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, which is what all women say when they first begin to believe.

Stoneward neither contradicted nor accepted her statement. He just crouched by her, naked under his clothes.

‘Whatever am I going to do?’ Penelope asked aloud at last, speaking not to him but to herself.

‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘I always have. Every word your husband has told me about you has been music to my ears. I’ve treasured the smallest fact about you, Penelope. I know your vital measurements, the size of stocking you take, the make of soap you use, which breakfast cereal you prefer, the names of your favourite movie and phoney stars, how long you like to sleep nights. Unless you have secrets from Ni, I know everything about you, for you as a Normal are only the sum of these pretty facts. Come with me to my flat, I’ll take care of you – worshipping from afar all the time, have no fear! My research days for my magnum opus are over!’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I think that right now I want to get away out of here. I can’t think here at all. Will you kindly wait five minutes while I just go pack a bag, Mr Stoneward? Then I’ll be with you.’

‘Your eyes have spent their days drifting among the starry nights,’ he said dreamily.

Penelope laughed, got up a little jerkily and left the room. Paul Stoneward buried his face in the warm patch she had created in the chair, drumming his fists on the chair arm. People were all the same, all the same, even this golden girl, just a puppet … all pulp puppets. He nursed his terrible secret: once people ceased to have any power over you, they were absolutely in your power. He could almost have cried about it.

He rose, walked quietly into the hall and dialled Civilian Sanctions again. When he had given Beynon his orders, he returned to the living room to await Penelope. She appeared after a quarter of an hour, entirely composed, clutching a tan suitcase a little too tightly. Stoneward took her arm and led her out of the house, mincing exaggeratedly by her soft side.

As they walked down the drive, he looked back over his shoulder. Brick house with pink and pistachio trim, lawn with pink roses florabounding all over the place in each corner, mail box on its white post at the foot of the driveway down the slope. Stoneward laughed. This popsie was really leaving home.

‘Coffee?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What’s that?’