The Best of Science Fiction 12

" Comment va le bon Dieu ?"

"Ah?" The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humoured. Minutes elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.

The iguanodon insisted. "How are things in the supernatural?"

"The supernatural? I don't think that category exists in the new theology."

" N'est-ce pas? What does exist in the new theology?"

"Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith."

"Work? I had thought you had quit work."

"That's an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I've changed employers."

The iguanodon felt in the other's politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said, gnashing, "The Void pays wages?"

"Ah?"

"You mean there's a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense."

"Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I'm not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself."

"Yourself? That little thing? Cette petite chose ? That's all you're looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator. Permettez-moi ." The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialised and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound would have healed.

The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to him and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out.

The iguanodon told him to use the sweet. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophoden, tipsy, perched on a bannister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. He was drawn to them: amazed that his wife would presume to delay the much larger creature; to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife said to him, "The salad is running out." He murmured to the brontosaurus, "Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?"

Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. "I've been talking to your husband about religion," he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.

"I've given up," she said. "It's such a deprivation for me and the children."

"He says he's looking for himself."

"It's so selfish," she said. "The children are teased at school."

"Come live with me."

"Can you support me?"

"No, but I would gladly sink under you."

"You're sweet."

" "Je t'aime. "

"Don't. Not here."

"Somewhere, then?"

"No. Nowhere. Never." With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!

"But I," he said, "but I lo — "

"Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately."

"You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?"

She shrugged. "If they disappear, we will too."

"I'm not so sure. There's something about us that would survive. It's not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don't you feel it?"

"Let's stop. It's too painful."

"Stop dancing?"

"Stop being."

"That's a beautiful idea. Une belle idée . I will if you will."

"In time," she said;, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars, he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.

Few books today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social 'reality'. Around us are 'pseudo events', to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not ...

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

(R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise)

1954 was not a year of progress. A week before Christmas I walked into the bar of the Merrie Englande in Leicester Square, my guitar in its case, my hat in my hand. Two constables were sitting on wooden stools at the counter. Their helmets turned together as I walked in. The place was badly lit by candles, hiding the run-down look but not the run-down smell of homebrew and damp rot.

"Who's he?" said one of the PCs as I moved past.

"I work here," I said. Tired old dialogue for tired old people.

He grunted and sipped his drink. I didn't look at the barman. I didn't look at the cops. I just went into the room behind the bar and took off my coat. I went to the wash-basin, turned the taps. Nothing happened. I got my guitar out of its case, tested it, tuned it and went back into the bar with it.

"Water's off again," said Jon, the barman. He was a flimsy wisp in black with a thin white face. "Nothing's working today ... "

"Well, we've still got an efficient police force," I said. The cops turned to look at me again. I didn't care. I felt I could afford a little relaxation. One of them chewed the strap of his helmet and frowned. The other smiled.

"You work here do you, sir? How much does the boss pay you?" He continued to smile, speaking softly and politely. I sneered.

"Him?" I pointed with my thumb up to where the boss lived. "He wouldn't, even if it was legal." Then I began to worry. I'm like that — moody. "What are you doing here, anyway, officer?"

"Making enquiries, sir," said the frowning one.

"About a customer," said Jon. He leant back against an empty shelf, his arms folded.

"That's right," said the smiling one.

"Who?"

The cops' eyes shifted.

"Frenchy," said Jon.

"So Frenchy's in trouble. It couldn't be something she's done. Someone she knows?"

The cops turned back to the bar. The frowning one said: "Two more. Does he know her?"

"As much as I do," said Jon, pouring out the potheen. The white, cloudy stuff filled the tumblers to the brim. Jon must be worried to pour such heavy ones for nothing.

I got up on to the platform where I sang, flicking the mike which I knew would be dead as it had been since the middle of the war. I leaned my guitar against the driest part of the wall and struck a match. I lit the two candles in their wall-holders.

They didn't exactly fill the corner with a blaze of light, they smoked and guttered and stank and cast shadows. I wondered briefly who had supplied the fat. They weren't much good as heating either. It was almost as cold inside as out. I dusted off my stool and sat down, picked up my guitar and struck a few chords. I hardly realised I was playing Frenchy's Blues . It was one of those corny numbers that come easy to the fingers without you having to think about them.