Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

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.

It was Siberia again, the dread reindeer sailing eternally their ships across the foggy ice lakes. They were munching things, fur and wood and bone, the saliva freezing into icicles as it ran from their jaws. Terrible noise, like the knocking of my heart.

I was laughing. Whoever died dreaming of reindeer – who but Lapps? Digging my fingers into the nameless carpet, I tried to sit up. It proved easier to open my eyes.

In the shady room, a woman was sitting. She had turned from the window to look at me. Gentle and reassuring lines and planes composed her face. It took a while to see it as a face; even as an arrangement against a window, I greatly liked it.

The woman came over to look closely at me. I realised I was in bed before I realised it was my wife. She touched my brow, making my nervous system set to work on discovering whether the signal was a pain or pleasure impulse, so that things in there were too busy for me to hear what she was saying. The sight of her speaking was pleasurable; it moved me to think that I should answer her.

‘How’s Aunt Laura?’

The messages were coming through, old old learning sorting out speech, hearing, vision, tactile sensations, and shunting them through the appropriate organs. The doctor had been; it had only been a slight one, but this time I really would have to rest up and take all the pills and do nothing foolish; she had already phoned the office and they were very understanding. One of my brothers was coming round, but she was not at all sure whether he should be allowed to see me. I felt entirely as she did about that.

‘I’ve forgotten what it was called.’

‘Your brother Bob?’

My speech was a little indistinct. I had a creepy feeling about whether I could move the limbs I knew were bundled with me in the bed. We’d tackle that challenge as and when necessary.

‘Not Bob. Not Bob. The…the …’

‘Just lie there quietly, darling. Don’t try to talk.’

‘The…carpet …’

She went on talking. The hand on the forehead was a good idea. Irritably, I wondered why she didn’t do it to me when I was well and better able to appreciate it. What the hell was it called? Roundabout?

‘Roundabout …’

‘Yes, darling. You’ve been here for several hours, you know. You aren’t quite awake yet, are you?’

‘Shampoo …’

‘Later, perhaps. Lie back now and have another little doze.’

‘Variety …’

‘Try and have another little doze.’

One of the difficulties of being a publisher is that one has to fend off so many manuscripts submitted by friends of friends. Friends always have friends with obsessions about writing. Life would be simple – it was the secret of a happy life, not to have friends of friends. Supposing you were cast away on a desert island disc, Mr Hartwell, what eight friends of friends would you take with you, provided you had an inexhaustible supply of manuscripts?