Brian Aldiss - The Male Response

BRIAN ALDISS

Harper Voyager an imprint of

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2015

First published in Great Britain by Dennis Dobson 1963

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007482382

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780007482399

Version: 2015-08-28

Contents

Cover

Title Page BRIAN ALDISS

Copyright

Introduction

PART ONE: Dark

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

PART TWO: Darker

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

PART THREE: Darkest Africa

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

‘To travel is to discover everyone is wrong’

Aldous Huxley

I should like to thank the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose invaluable articles on ‘Africa’, ‘Computing Machines’ and ‘Sex’ I consulted before daring to attempt this story. My chapter headings are quotations from the ‘Ode to Autumn’, by John Keats, to whom I would also have liked to offer thanks.

For advice on the contents of this novel I communicated with celebrated author Aldous Huxley, then living on the western shores of the U.S.A., whose responses proved very helpful.

Brian W. Aldiss

Oxford, 2015

‘… borne aloft or sinking …’

‘Of course, if they had had any sense they’d have routed us via Cairo,’ the engineer from Birmingham said.

This is the miracle of our age: that one may be borne swiftly and smoothly along in winged luxury, constantly fed and reassured, while underneath one unrolls the great viridian mat of central Africa, that territory to be flown over but never conquered, whose mysteries deepen as the rest of the world grows shallower, whose beasts and peoples breathe a secret, greener air, whose prodigality seems to make of the continent a very planet, subject to its laws and psychologies – this, I say, is the miracle, that one may be borne over all this superbity to the tune of turbo-props and notice nothing of it because of the vacuous gossip of an engineer from Birmingham.

‘I mean, Dakar just doesn’t compare with Cairo in any way,’ he added, ‘as regards amenities or anything else.’

Soames Noyes did not remember the chatty man’s name. They had been introduced rather hurriedly by Sir Roger at the Southampton airfield. Soames never remembered names upon introduction; although his thirtieth birthday was creeping up on him as surely as a tide, he was still paralysed on all meetings with people. For an instant, he would be back at his kindergarten, Miss Munnings would be conducting the Deportment Class and saying, ‘Now, when you are introduced to somebody, you stand with your feet so, left hand resting gently on the hip so, right hand extended so, and you say “How do you do?” Now, Soames, will you come out here and give the other boys and girls a demonstration?’; and little Soames would go sacrificially before them all and stick out his rump and hand in such a way that the class burst at once into derisory laughter. And in the moment it took for this splinter of memory to flush through his brain, Soames would have missed the name of the new face, even when the new face was saying, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Noyes. Of course, managing the Midland branch of Unilateral, I’ve never come in contact with you, but we’ve all heard of you, even up in the wilds of Birmingham.’

‘How are they all in Birmingham?’ Soames asked facetiously, mainly because he guessed that this plump, grey-faced engineer would be what in the lower echelons of the firm was called ‘a good, solid Unilateral man’.

‘Fine, fine. And a lot of them a fair bit envious of your and my little trip to Darkest Africa, Mr Noyes, I don’t mind telling you.’

There were four Unilateral men on the ‘little trip’. In the seat opposite Soames and the nameless Birmingham man were two more engineers, one a cheerful type called Wally Brewer, one a quiet, wiry man called Ted Timpleton who was now white round the jaws and sat looking steadfastly away from the plane window. Soames was not a technical man; he belonged to what was spoken of as the Unilateral façade. His job was to talk charmingly and not too intelligently to Unilateral clients, to soothe away their little worries over expense-account dinners, to reassure them that Unilateral electronic computers were the best in the world, to ingratiate.

The plane contained a fifth passenger: Deal Jimpo Landor. He looked the typical African, clad in magnificent tribal costume, with one black, almost purple, arm resting nonchalantly over the back of the seat in front of him. In fact, he was an eighteen-year-old ex-public schoolboy with a manner, as Soames had already discovered, more reminiscent of a Teutonic philosopher than of the Uele warrior stock from which he came. The playing fields of Eton had made him frightfully earnest. His deep eyes were abstracted now, as if his thoughts ran ahead to his own country of Goya, which the aircraft was rapidly nearing. His father was head of Goya and would have a suitable welcome awaiting his firstborn.

The most valuable part of the pay-load lay not in the five passengers nor the pilot but in the storage compartments of the plane. There, carefully packed, crated, stencilled and numbered were the component parts of an Apostle Mk II, Unilateral’s newest, most svelte electronic computer, bound for the palace at Umbalathorp, Goya.

Six weeks had passed since Unilateral received the order for this machine. Deal Jimpo Landor had come in person to the glossy showrooms in Regent Street. To give his visit an additional touch of unreality, he was dressed in the full official regalia of a Princeling Son of the President of the Republic of Goya. Awed Regent Street assistants ushered him into the manager, Waypole’s, office, where Soames, as it happened, had dropped in for a gossip.