Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

I leaned across the desk and said, ‘But this is worse than ever. You aren’t even a friend of a friend of a friend, auntie.’

‘And what am I if I’m not a friend of a friend?’

‘Well, you’re an aunt of a nephew, you see, and after all, as an old-established firm, we have to adhere to certain rules of – etiquette, shall we call it, by which –’

It was difficult to see how offended she was. The pile of manuscript hid most of her face from view. I could not remove it, partly because there was a certain awareness that this was really the sheets. Finally I got them open.

‘It’s your life, Bruce. I’ve written your life. It could be a bestseller.’

‘Variety… No, Show Business …’

‘I thought of calling it “By Any Other Name” …’

‘We have to adhere to certain rules …’

It was better when I woke again. I had the name I had been searching for: Festival. Now I could not remember what it was the name of.

The bedroom had changed. There were flowers about. The portable TV set stood on the dressing-table. The curtains were drawn back and I could see into the garden. My wife was still there, coming over, smiling. Several times she walked across to me, smiling. The light came and went, the flowers changed position, colour, the doctor got in her way. Finally she reached me.

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

‘ You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

No more trouble after that. We had the TV on and watched the war escalate in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Returning health made me philosophical. ‘That’s what made me ill. Nothing I did…under-exercise, over-eating…too much booze…too many fags…just the refugees.’

‘I’ll turn it off if it upsets you.’

‘No. I’m adapting. They won’t get me again. It’s the misery the TV sets beam out from Vietnam all over the world. That’s what gives people heart attacks. Look at lung cancer – think how it has been on the increase since the war started out there. They aren’t real illnesses in the old sense, they’re sort of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world’s going to escalate into a Vietnam.’

She jumped up, alarmed. ‘I’ll switch it off!’

‘The war?’

‘The set.’

The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.

They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat – nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stony eyes that twinkled.

My angel came in hotfoot and said, ‘Can you get a few friends of friends together? The refugees are waiting on the beach.’ There were four of us in the hospital beds. We scrambled up immediately, dragging bandages and sputum cups and bed pans. The guy next to me came trailing a plasma bottle. We climbed into the helicopter.

We prayed en route. ‘Bet the Chinese and Russian volunteers don’t pray on the trip,’ I insinuated to the angel.

‘The Chinese and Russians don’t volunteer.’

‘So you make a silly insinuation, you get a silly innuendo,’ the plasma man said.

God’s hand powered the chopper. Faster than engines but maybe less reliable. We landed on the beach beside a foaming river. Heat pouring down and up the sideways. The refugees were forlorn and dirty. A small boy stood hatless with a babe hatless on his back. Both ageless, eyes like reindeer’s, dark, moist, cursed.

‘I’ll die for those two,’ I said, pointing.

‘One for one. Which one do you choose?’

‘Hell, come on now, angel, isn’t my soul as good as any two god-damned Viet kid souls?’

‘No discounts here, bud. Yours is shop-soiled, anyway.’

‘Okay, the bigger kid.’

He was whisked instantly into the helicopter. I saw his dirty and forlorn face at the window. The baby sprawled screaming on the sand. It was naked, scabs on both knees. It yelled in slow motion, piddling, trying to burrow into the sand. I reached slowly out to it, but the exchange had been made, the angel turned the napalm on to me. As I fell, the baby went black in my shadow.

‘Let me switch the fire down, if you’re too hot, darling.’

‘Yuh. And a drink …’

She helped me struggle into a sitting position, put her arm round my shoulders. Glass to lips, teeth, cool water in throat.

‘God, I love you, Ellen, thank God you’re not …’

‘What? Another nightmare?’

‘Not Vietnamese …’

It was better then, and she sat and talked about what had been going on, who had called, my brother, my secretary, the Roaches…‘the Roaches have called’…‘any Earwigs’?…the neighbours, the doctor. Then we were quiet a while.

‘I’m better now, much better. The older generation’s safe from all this, honey. They were born as civilians. We weren’t. Get me auntie’s manuscript, will you?’

‘You’re not starting work this week.’

‘It won’t hurt me. She’ll be writing about her past, before the war and all that. The past’s safe. It’ll do me good. The prose style doesn’t matter.’

I settled back as she left the room. Flowers stood before the TV, making it like a little shrine.

Full Sun 7 Full Sun 8 Just Passing Through 9 Multi-Value Motorway 10 The Night that All Time Broke Out 11 Randy’s Syndrome 12 Still Trajectories 13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction) 14 Wonder Weapon 15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart 16 Drake-Man Route 17 Dreamer, Schemer 18 Dream of Distance 19 Send her Victorious 20 The Serpent of Kundalini 21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine 22 Total Environment 23 The Village Swindler 24 When I Was Very Jung 25 The Worm that Flies 26 The Firmament Theorem 27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts 28 The Humming Heads 29 The Moment of Eclipse 30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn 31 Since the Assassination 32 So Far From Prague 33 The Soft Predicament 34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long 35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art… 36 Working in the Spaceship Yards About the Author Also by Brian Aldiss About the Publisher

The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.

The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.

During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest – or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.

He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.