Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

His voice died. He could see it was going to be difficult. His impulse had been to enlist help; perhaps it had not been a wise impulse. And had he ever been anyone else, or had it all been the product of a fever?

The policeman slowly came round the counter, adjusting his face until it was absolutely without expression.

‘You seem to have some very interesting ideas, sir, if I may say so. You wouldn’t mind if I ask you a question before you go any further? Good. You say you don’t know whether you killed these unknown persons or not?’

‘I – I get blackouts. I am never myself. I seem to work through a lot of different people. You’d better assume I did kill them.’

‘As you like, sir. Which brings me to my next question. How do you mean, one of them was a black man from India?’

‘It was as I said. He was very black. No offence meant – it’s just a fact. Quite an amusing man, now I come to think of it, but black.’

‘His clothes were black, sir?’

‘His clothes were white. He was black. His skin. Good heavens, man, you stare at me – I suppose you know that the people of India are pretty dark?’

The policeman stared at him with blank astonishment. ‘Their skins are dark, you say?’

‘Am I offending you in some way? I didn’t invent the idea, don’t forget! As sure as the good Lord took it into his head to make you and me this rather unattractive pink-white-grey tone, he made the Indians more or less brown and the Negroes more or less black. You do know that Negroes are black, I suppose?’

The policeman banged his fist on the desk. ‘You are mad! By golly, you are mad! Negroes are as white as you are.’

‘You mean the Negroes in Africa?’

‘Negroes anywhere! Whoever heard of a black Negro?’

‘The very word means black. It’s from a Latin root or something.’

‘From a Greek root meaning tall!’

‘You liar!’

‘You simpleton!’ The policeman leant over and grabbed his newspaper, smoothed it out angrily with his fists. ‘Here, this will show you! I’ll make you admit your stupidity, coming in here and playing your pointless jokes on me! An intellectual, I can see!’

He ruffled through the paper. Moore caught a glimpse of its title The Alabama Star and stared up incredulously at the policeman. For the first time, he realised the man’s features were distinctly negroid, though his skin was white and his hair fair and straight. He emitted a groan of fright.

‘You a Negro?’

‘Course I am. And you look at this news item – FIRE IN NEGRO UNIVERSITY. See that picture. See any negro there with black skin? What’s got into you?’

‘You may well ask, and I wish you’d stop grasping my shirt like that – it feels as if you have some chest hair with it, thanks. I’m not trying to play a joke on you. I must be in – well, I must be in some sort of an alternate universe or something. Hey, perhaps you are kidding me! Do you really mean people in Africa and India and so on have skins the same colour as us?’

‘How else could they be any other colour? Ask yourself that!’

‘They were where I come from.’

‘Now, how could they be? Just how could they be?’

‘I don’t know! It’s a matter of history. Some races are white, some yellow, some brown, some black.’

‘Some idea! And you say this arrangement happened in history. When?’

‘I didn’t say that! It happened way back … well, I don’t know when.’

‘I suppose your men originated from different coloured apes, huh?’

‘No, I think it all happened later than that … Stone Age, maybe. … Honestly, now you confront me with it, I must admit I don’t exactly know when the arrangement came about or how. It does sound a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?’

‘Anyone who could dream up the idea of men all different colours – wow! You must be a real nut! I suppose like it’s allegorical, with the good people being white and the bad black?’

‘No, no, not at all – though I admit a few of the white saw it like that. Or did I invent it all, the whole colour question? Perhaps it’s all another facet of my guilt, an awful phantasm I have thrown up from the depths of my mind, where I did the murders. They can’t have any subjective reality, either. Wait! I remember! I’m nearly there! Fyodor Dostoevsky, I’m coming!’

Hurriedly, he punched the policeman in the chest and braced himself for the reciprocal blow. …

He was tramping through the sand, ankle deep even in the main street of this shabby town. In the side streets, the sand climbed almost to the eaves of the shoddy wooden houses. Among the houses were buildings that he identified after a moment’s thought as mosques; they were no more than huts with wooden minarets added. There were Tartars here, moving slowly in their costumes of skin, some leading the two-humped camels of Bactria behind them through the street.

The man with whiskers and a stoop was just ahead of him. Morovitch drew level and looked sideways. He recognised the beetling brow and the haunted eyes, set deep in their sockets.

‘Second Class Soldier of the Line Dostoevsky?’ he asked.

Dostoevsky stared back at him. ‘I’ve not seen you in Semiplatinsk before. Are you with the Seventh Siberian Battalion?’

‘The correct answer to that, operatively, is no. I – well, sir, if I could talk to you for a moment … the fact is …’

‘It’s not a message from Marya Dmitrievna, is it?’ Dostoevsky asked impatiently, his face pale.

‘No, no, nothing so banal. In fact, I have come from the future to speak to you. Please, cannot we go to your room?’

Dostoevsky led the way in a sort of daze, shaking his head and muttering. He was still serving out his exile in Siberia, no longer as a convict but as a humble soldier in the army. His present home, to which he led Morovitch, was of the simplest, a poor room in one of the small wooden houses, containing little more than a bed, a table and one chair, and a round iron stove that could scarcely heat the flimsy room when the cruel winter came round again.

Humbly, Dostoevsky offered the intruder the chair, sat down on the bed himself, and produced some tobacco so that he and the visitor might roll themselves cigarettes and smoke together.

He passed a hand wearily over his face. ‘Where do you say you come from? You’re not – not a Decembrist?’

‘I am from what to you is the future, sir. In my age, my race recognises you as one of the great novelists of the world, by virtue of your profound insight into the guilt always lingering in the human mind. You are one of the supreme artists of suffering.’

‘Alas, I can write no more! The old ability has gone!’

‘But even now you must be gathering together your notes on prison life for the book you will call The House of the Dead. Turgenev will say the bath-house scene is pure Danté. It will be read and remembered long after you are dead, and translated far beyond the bounds of your native Russia. And greater masterpieces of guilt and suffering will follow.’

Dostoevsky hid his face in his hands. ‘No more! You will silence me forever if you speak thus, whether I believe it or not. You talk like the voices inside me, when another attack is coming upon me.’

‘I travelled back to you from the far future through a series of epileptic hosts. Others of my kind travel back through other illnesses – it is a matter of what we specialise in. I plan to travel slowly back through the generations to Julius Caesar, and beyond that … but you are a very important landmark on my way, for you are integral to the whole philosophy of my race, honoured sir! Indeed, you might say you were one of the founders of our philosophy.’

The writer rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort and shuffled his rough boots on the floor, unable to look straight at Morovitch. ‘You keep saying “our race” and “our kind”, but what am I to understand by that? Are you not Morovitch?’