Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

“They’re in there waiting for you, my bearded friend. You can hear them twittering and frying, can’t you? They get up earlier than us and they go to bed later than us, and they’ll get you in the end.”

“But not you?”

“I go and have this injection and these beads every hundred years—”

“So that’s what they give you… You get an injection as well as those things round your neck. You know what those beads are, don’t you? They’re vitamin pills.”

“I’m saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any case, you mortals would do best to hold your tongues. Here’s the road, and I’m off.”

They had come out at a sort of crossroads, where their track crossed a road that still boasted traces of tarmac on its rutted surface. Norsgrey beat at his reindeer with a stick, goading it into a less dilatory walk.

He looked over his shoulder at Greybeard, his misty breath entangled with the bright hairs of his cheeks. “Tell you one thing — if you get to Swifford Fair, ask for Bunny Jingadangelow.”

“Who’s he?” Greybeard asked.

“I’m telling you, he’s the man you should ask for at Swifford Fair. Remember the name — Bunny Jingadangelow.”

Wrapped in his blanket, Greybeard stood looking at the disappearing cart. He thought the canvas at the back stirred, and that he glimpsed — no, perhaps it was not a hand but his imagination. He stood there until the winding track carried Norsgrey and his conveyance out of sight.

As he turned away, he saw in the bushes close by a broken-necked corpse pinned to a post. It had the cocky, grinning expression achieved only by those successfully long dead. Its skull was patched with flesh like dead leaves. Thin though the corpse’s jacket was, its flesh had worn still thinner, had shrivelled and parted like moisture drying off a stretch of sand, leaving the bars of rib salt beneath.

“Left dead at the crossroads as a warning to wrongdoers… like the Middle Ages… The old-aged Middle Ages…” Greybeard muttered to himself. The eye sockets stared back at him. He was overtaken less by disgust than by a pang of longing for the DOUCH(E) truck he had parted with years ago. How people had underestimated the worth of mechanical gadgetry! The urge to record was on him; someone should leave behind a summary of Earth’s decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds. He trotted heavily back down the track towards the barn, saying to himself as he went, “Bunny Jingadangelow, Bunny Jingadangelow…”

Nightfall came that day to the sound of music. They could see the lights of Swifford across the low flood. They rowed through a section of the Thames that had burst its banks and spread over the adjoining land, making water plants of the vegetation. Soon there were other boats near them, and people calling to them; their accents were difficult to understand, as Norsgrey’s had been at first.

“Why don’t they speak English the way they used?” Charley asked angrily. “It makes everything so much harder.”

“P’raps it isn’t only the time that’s gone funny,” Towin suggested. “P’raps distances have gone wrong too. P’raps this is France or China, eh, Charley? I’d believe anything, I would.”

“More fool you,” Becky said.

They came to where a raised dyke or levee had been built. Behind it were dwellings of various kinds, huts and stalls, most of them of a temporary nature. Here was a stone bridge built in imposing fashion, with a portly stone balustrade, some of which had tumbled away. Through its span, they saw lanterns bobging, and two men walked among a small herd of reindeer, tending them and seeing they were watered for the night.

“We shall have to guard the boats and the sheep,” Martha said, as they moored against the bridge. “We don’t know how trustworthy these people are. Jeff Pitt, stay with me while the others go to look about.”

“I suppose I’d better,” Pitt said. “At least we’ll be out of trouble here. Perhaps you and I might split a cold lamb cutlet between us while the others are gone.”

Greybeard touched his wife’s hand.

“I’ll see how much the sheep will fetch while I’m about it,” he said.

They smiled at each other and he stepped up the bank, into the activity of the fair, with Charley, Towin and Becky following. The ground squelched beneath their feet; smoke rolled across it from the little fires that burned everywhere. A heartening savour of food being cooked hung in the air. By most of the fires were little knots of people and a smooth talker, a vendor offering something for sale, whether a variety of nuts or fruits — one slab-cheeked fellow offered a fruit whose name Greybeard recalled only with difficulty from another world: peaches — or watches or kettles or rejuvenation elixirs. The customers were handing over coin for their acquisitions. In Sparcot, currency had almost disappeared; the community had been small enough for a simple exchange of work and goods to be effective.

“Oooh, it’s like being back in civilization again,” Towin said, rubbing his wife’s buttocks. “How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn’t you say? Look, they’ve even got a pub! Let’s all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn’t you say?”

He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.

“I’m only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we’ll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five per cent’s my rate, lads.”

They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.

Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half century, it would be rolled up and put away; but till then, there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.

An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party. They were celebrating their wedding. The man’s previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lop-sided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy fallen optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.

“You aren’t from the town?” one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.

“I don’t know what town you mean,” Greybeard said.

“Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn’t have us in this year. That’s why we’re camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us — no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won’t come this far. That’s why business is so bad.”