Brian Aldiss - Somewhere East of Life

Burnell believed evolutionary pressures determined that people exploited each other. Consequently, he tolerated being exploited unless he felt himself squeezed. In retrospect, even the trick Broadwell-Smith had played on him was amusing.

He looked again into his electronic diary for further details on Tartary which might have been lost with the extracted memories. There was nothing. Not even a phone number. They got in touch with him, not vice versa.

How deeply he was involved he did not know. However, if someone wanted an ikon which he might come across in Georgia, he was complaisant enough to oblige.

Flicking through the electronic index, he saw the name Remenyi. It was another unknown. He turned up the entry.

Peter Remenyi was thirty-two years old, a celebrated Hungarian ski-jumper. It appeared he was a close friend, and that he and Burnell had been in the Alps the previous summer, travelling on horseback. A home address in Budapest was given. Vexed to think he had been in Budapest and not called his friend, Burnell immediately phoned Remenyi’s number.

For a while, he listened to the phone ringing in Hungary. Nobody answered.

He switched off the processor, sitting back, trying to sort through the struggle of non-memory in his head. Whatever had happened in the recent past was a puzzle. The sections of the brain involved with memory retention contained many amacrine cells or microneurones. Yet non-localized storage of data also occurred; in consequence, ghost images rose up. Faceless men and women came and went. And was there not someone he knew, possibly this Peter Remenyi, lying somewhere in a coma?

The nightmare thought occurred to him that he might himself be Remenyi. But that was absurd. His colleagues in WACH had identified him as Roy Burnell.

As he was throwing some clothes into a pack, his doorbell buzzed. It was seven-thirty on the dot. Burnell went and opened the door.

A young woman entered his domain, self-possessed on her high heels. A man of unprepossessing aspect had accompanied her. He remained in the corridor, giving Burnell a hard look, not speaking. The woman was in her late twenties, well built, not quite plump. Her dyed blonde hair was cut short, bristly at the back of the head up to the occipital bone. Her eyes, fringed by long false lashes, were curiously masked by the application of shining scarlet make-up which curved to a point on the temples. Her lips were painted black. She wore a tight green plastic skin dress, buttoning up the front, which emphasized her generous bosom. The dress ceased just below the swell of her mons veneris.

He understood immediately.

‘You’ll have to tell me your name.’

She was looking about the apartment, very business-like. ‘That’s silly. You sounded strange on the phone. Not yourself.’

‘Maybe. I’ve been robbed. It’s the EMV craze. Someone has stolen my memory. The immediate past is a blank. I hoped perhaps you might help me.’

‘I don’t offer that kind of therapy. Sorry. You’re got ninety minutes of my time. You can still have erections? I guarantee I will leave you relaxed and happy. As always.’

‘It’s clear we’ve met before. Because of the theft – I just don’t remember you.’

‘Let me remind you.’ She was wearing nothing under the dress. It fell open like a chest of drawers spilling out its goodies.

‘Does this look familiar?’

Her pubic hair had been shaved off.

She insisted on checking his anti-AIDS status. The indicator on his watch showed green. She showed her indicator, also reading Safe. It was OK. They went briskly through into the bedroom. She led the way. Burnell followed, admiring the jaunty buttocks, smooth as machine parts.

He had always liked the Germans, not least because his father hated them. The neatness of German towns, where modernity sat comfortably with antiquity, had been achieved nowhere else in Europe. In the same way, a Teutonic drive towards success – success in all things – was moderated by an everyday courtesy. Earnestness was similarly moderated by a sense of humour. He found the Germans honest; or at least they retained a respect for honesty. They were good on respect. Wholeheartedness attracted him, perhaps because he had never possessed the quality: it formed an element in the life here which excited him, an intense secret eroticism buried under the surface of daily existence which foreigners rarely saw: an eroticism which differed from the flashiness of Italian, the polish of French, the bounciness of Scandinavian, and the salaciousness of English eroticism, in that particular culinary quality, Teutonic wholeheartedness. He understood well that national wholeheartedness had led Germany into disastrous follies in the past, just as it had led to leadership in Europe in the present; still he found that wholeheartedness admirable: not only in economic life, but in bed. He paid her before undressing.

German women brought to lovemaking the same kind of homely expertise they once brought to breadmaking, the sleeves of their blouses metaphorically rolled up, their hair piled out of the way, the smells of a warm hearth in the air, flour spreading up to their armpits, the dough kneaded into required shape under those dimpled practised hands.

After ninety minutes and three orgasms, Burnell was relaxed and happy.

As the woman was leaving, he said, perhaps trying to restore his reputation in her fringed eyes, ‘I won’t be here next week. I’m going to Georgia.’

‘I too shall visit the USA one day.’

The bruiser was waiting for her in the corridor.

The high-wing Yak 40 laboured towards the landing-strip like an aged pterosaur, fighting against a headwind which poured through the mountains. Below the snowline, the landscape was a faded green, patched here and there with livelier colour. It rose up to embrace the light aircraft. A river glinted, hastening down a valley, and was lost to view.

The airstrip was laid out on a plateau. The plateau was dominated by cliffs above and below, set in an extreme landscape, shiftless, unthriving, lying under puffs of cloud. This was a territory of religion, ideology, blood-letting, a land forever fought over, passionately disputed.

The Yak circled, coming in again, lower, still rocking, then into calmer air under the great slopes. Now buildings could be made out below, in particular a circular structure of some kind, with a cluster of vehicles round it like ticks round a wart. The plane burst through another puff of cloud, unexpectedly low, and tore it to shreds. Someone was firing at the craft. A way of saying Welcome to Transcaucasia.

The pilot shouted something to his two passengers which Colonel Irving interpreted. ‘We’re going down. As if we hadn’t guessed. He says to hold on. As if we weren’t.’

Then the twin-engine was no longer the aerial creature which had swanned over mountains, but a kind of mad car, bumping over grit. Burnell and Irving fought against the deceleration. The plane rolled to a halt.

A vehicle was jolting towards them as Burnell and Irving climbed down. Behind the Jeep came a truck. Two men jumped from the truck. They ran towards the plane, which carried supplies from Tbilisi, medical supplies, an intensive-care unit, flour, and sugar. All these items were more important to the fighters on the ground than Burnell or Irving.

Everyone moved at the double. Burnell and his companion, packs shouldered, were bundled into the Jeep, which made off at full speed. Above the roar of its engine, the crump of mortar shells could be heard.

The Jeep banged its way towards the building Burnell had seen from the air. It stood ruddy against a smear of shattered limestone hills in the distance. It was, or had been, a mosque, the minaret of which had been destroyed: only a stump remained. The mosque itself was a simple cube, capped by a dome resting on pendentives. Its open-arched porch supported three minor domes. Tiles on the main dome were missing.