Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

From shelter, Balank watched it glinting with a murderous dullness in the moonlight. He clutched a great shard of rock, knowing what he had to do. He had presented to him here the best – probably the only – chance he would get to destroy the machine. When it was hanging across the ravine, he would rush forward. The trundler would be momentarily too preoccupied to burn him down. He would hurl the boulder at it, knock the vile thing down into the river.

The machine was quick and clever. He would have only a split second in which to act. Already his muscles bulged over the rock, already he gritted his teeth in effort, already his eyes glared ahead at the hated enemy. His time would come at any second now. It was him or it…

Gondalug alertly stared down at the scene, involved with it and yet detached. He saw what was in the man’s mind, knew that he looked a scant second ahead to the encounter.

His own kind, man’s Dark Brother, worked differently. They looked farther ahead just as they had always done, in a fashion unimaginable to homo sapiens. To Gondalug, the outcome of this particular little struggle was immaterial. He knew that his kind had already won their battle against mankind. He knew that they still had to enter into their real battle against the machines.

But that time would come. And then they would defeat the machines. In the long days when the sun shone always over the blessed Earth like a full moon – in those days, his kind would finish their age of waiting and enter into their own savage kingdom.

Just Passing Through 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

Colin Charteris climbed out of his red Banshee, stood for a moment stretching by it. The machine creaked and snapped, the metal cooling after its long duel across the motorways of Europe. Charteris took off his inflatable padded lifesuit, flung it into the back of the car, turned up the temperature of his one-piece to compensate for what felt like near-nudity. Hero: he had covered the twenty-two hundred kilometres from Catanzaro down on the Ionian Sea to Metoz, France, in twenty-four hours’ driving, and had sustained no more than a metre-long gouge along the front outside fender.

Outside Milano, where the triple autostrada made of the Lombardy plain a geometrical diagram, he had narrowly avoided a multiple crash. They were all multiple crashes these days. The image continued to multiply itself over and over in his mind, like a series of cultures in their dishes: a wheel still madly spinning, crushed barriers, buckled metal, sunlight worn like thick make-up over the impossibly abandoned attitudes of death. Charteris had seen it happen, the fantastic speeds suddenly swallowed by car and human frames with the sloth of the super-quick, when anything too fast for retina register could spend forever spreading through the labyrinths of consciousness. By now, the bodies would all be packed neatly in hospital or mortuary, the autostrada gleaming in perfect action again, the death squads lolling at their wheels in the nearest rastplatz, reading paperbacks; but Charteris’s little clicker-shutter mechanisms were still busy re-running the actual blossoming moment of impact.

He shook his head, dislodging nothing. He had parked beside Metoz cathedral. It was several centuries old, but built of a coarse yellow stone that made it, now prematurely floodlit in the early evening, look like a Victorian copy of an earlier model.

The ground fell steeply at the other end of the square. Stone steps led down to a narrow street, all wall on one side and on the other prim little drab narrow façades closing all their shutters against the overwhelming statement of the cathedral.

Across one of the façades, a sign said, ‘Hotel des Invalides’.

‘Krankenhaus,’ Charteris said.

He pulled his suitcase out of the boot of the Banshee and dragged himself over to the hotel, walking like a warrior coming across a desert, a pilot walking over a runway after a mission. He emphasised the tragedy of it slightly, even grunting as he walked. The other cars parked in the square were a shabby bunch. Removing his gaze from his own egotistical landscapes, he saw this part of the cathedral square had been bought up as a used car lot. There were prices in francs painted to one side of each windscreen, as if denoting the worth of the driver rather than the vehicle.

The Hotel des Invalides had a brass handle to its door. Charteris dragged it down and stepped into the hall, into unmitigated shadow. A bell buzzed and burned insatiably until he closed the door behind him. He walked up the corridor, and only with that motion did the hall take on existence. There was a pot plant dying here beside an enormous piece of furniture – or it could be an over-elaborate doorway into a separate part of the establishment. On the walls, enormous pictures of blue-clad men being blown up among scattering sandbags. A small dense black square figure emerged at the end of the passage. He drew near and saw it had permed hair and was a woman, not young, not old, smiling.

‘Haben Sie eirt Zimmer? Ein persortn, eine Nacht?’

‘Jahr, jahr. Mil eine Dusche oder ohne?’

‘Ohne.’

‘Zimmer Nummer Zwanzig, Monsieur.’

German. The lingua franca of Europe.

The madame called for a dark-haired girl, who came hurrying and smiling with the key to room twenty. She led Charteris up three flights of stairs, the first flight marble, the second and third wooden, the third uncarpeted. Each landing was adorned with large pictures of Frenchmen dying or conquering Germans in the first world war.

‘This is where it all began,’ he said to the back of the girl.

She paused and looked down at him. ‘Je ne comprends pas, M’sieur.’

No windows had been opened for a long while. The air smelt of all the bottled lives that had suffered here. Constriction, miserliness, conservation over all. He saw the red limbs leaping again as if for joy within the bucketing autostrada cars. If there were only the two alternatives, he preferred the leaping death to the desiccating life. He knew how greatly he dreaded both, how his fantasy life shuttled between them. One more deadly mission: blast Peking, or spend ten years in the hotel in Metoz .

He was panting on the threshold of Zimmer Twenty. By opening his mouth, he did so without the girl hearing him. She was – he was getting to that age when he could no longer tell – eighteen, twenty, twenty-two? Pretty enough.

Motioning to her to stay, Charteris crossed to the first of two tall windows. He worked at the bar until it gave way and the two halves swung into the room.

Great drop on this, the back of the hotel. In the street below, two kids with a white dog on a lead. They looked up at him, becoming merely two faces with fat arms and hands. Thalidomites. He could not shut away the images of ruin and deformity.

Buildings the other side of the alley. A woman moving in a room, just discerned through curtains. A waste site, two cats stalking each other among litter. A dry canal bed, full of waste and old cans. Wasn’t there also a crushed automobile? A notice scrawled large on a ruined wall: NEUTRAL FRANCE THE ONLY FRANCE. Certainly, they had managed to preserve their neutrality to the bitter end; the French experience in the two previous world wars had encouraged that. Beyond the wall, a tree-lined street far wider than necessary, and the Prefecture. One policeman visible.