Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

‘I have infested Morovitch. We are parasitic – I am merely distorting his life a little, as I have distorted the lives of those I infested on my way back to you. Ah, the emotions I have stirred! How you would relish them, Fyodor Mikhaylovich! I have been in all kinds of persons and in all kinds of worlds, even in those that lie close in the probability spectrum to Earth – to some where man never formed himself into nationalities, to one where he had never divided into races with different coloured skin, to one where he never managed to gain supremacy over his fellow animals! All, all those worlds, absolutely stuffed with suffering! If you could see them you might think you yourself had created them.’

‘Now you mock me! I can create nothing, unless I have created you. Forgive me if that sounds insulting, but I have a fever on me today, which induces me to doubt somewhat your reality. Perhaps you’re part of my fever.’

‘I’m real enough! My race – you see I use the term again, but I would find it difficult to define it to you. You see, there are more millions of years ahead than you could comprehend, and in those long periods man changes very radically. In my time, man is first dependent on a milk-meat animal he breeds – a sort of super-cow – and then entirely parasitic upon it. Over millennia, he develops an astounding freedom and can travel parasitically back through the generations, enjoying the suffering of all, like a silverfish boring back through the pages of a large and musty volume: a silverfish who can read, sir, if you follow my image. You see – I let you into the secret!’

Dostoevsky coughed and stubbed out his ragged cigarette. He sat uncomfortably on the narrow bed, crossing and recrossing his legs. ‘You know I cannot believe what you say … Yet, tell me no secrets! I already know enough for one man; I’m burdened with knowledge about which I often ask myself, What good is it? And if it is true, as you say, that I have understanding of some of the dark things in the human heart, that’s only because I have been forced – though often I myself was the forcer – to look into the dark things in my own heart. And I have tried to reach truth; you are admitting, aren’t you, that you distort the lives you – well, if I say “infest”, it is your own word, isn’t it?’

‘We get more fun … A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others – of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.’

There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. ‘You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticise by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope …’ He shook his head. ‘Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.’

Morovitch laughed. ‘How can millions of years of evolution be “wrong” in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.’ He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

‘I shall come back to see you tomorrow,’ Morovitch said. ‘And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest – well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view – I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.’

Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. ‘I see you are, as you claim, an illness.’

‘Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief – until tomorrow!’

He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Punishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

Auto-Ancestral Fracture Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction 1 A Difficult Age 2 A Taste for Dostoevsky 3 Auto-Ancestral Fracture 4 Confluence 5 The Dead Immortal 6 Down the Up Escalation 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

For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.

But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.

Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.

Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.

You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speed death up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.