Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

Unreality touched her. Pauline was crying.

A coolness swept her limbs. She trembled involuntarily. A personal alarm now, terror because something unknown was at her blood. She raised a hand to her eyes. It loomed away from her. Her arm extended. She was growing.

She knew then that the giants were no enemy troops; they were victims. You get everyone out of their houses. One type of VM levels the houses. Another inflates the people, blowing them up like grotesque rubber dummies. Simple. Scientific. Civilised.

Mrs. Snowden swayed like a pole. She took a clumsy step to keep her balance. Dizzily, she peered at her blank bedroom window, staggering away to avoid falling into the house. No pain. The circuits were disrupted. Only numbness: numbness and maniac growth.

She could still crazily see the dancing giants. Now she understood why they danced. They were trying to adapt. Before they could do so, their metabolism burnt out. They sprawled into the desert, giant dusty corpses, full of sound and silence.

She thought: It’s the first excitement for years, amusedly, before her heart failed under its giant load.

She toppled; the DON’T card fluttered gaily from her bosom, spinning and filtering to the ground.

Pauline had already overtopped her grandmother. The young system was greedy for growth. She uttered a cry of wonder as her head rocked up to the dark sky. She saw her grandmother fall. She saw the tiny fan of sonic light from their tiny front door. She trod into the desert to keep her balance. She started to run. She saw the ground dwindle. She felt the warmth of the stars, the curvature of the earth.

In her brain, the delighted thoughts were wasps in a honey pot, bees in a hive, flies in a chapel, gnats in a factory, midges in a Sahara, sparks up an everlasting flue, a comet falling for ever in a noiseless void, a voice singing in a new universe.

‘It’s too crowded here!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘It’s too crowded! It’s too CROWDED!’

He swung around, his mouth open, his face contorted like a squeezed lemon, nearly knocking a passer-by off the pavement. The passer-by bowed, smiled forgivingly and passed on, his eyes clearly saying: ‘Let him be – it’s one of the poor devils off the ship.’

‘It’s too crowded,’ Surrey Edmark said again at the retreating back. It was night. He stood hatless under the glare of the New Orchard Road lights, bewildered by the flowing cosmopolitan life of Singapore about him. People: thousands of ’em, touchable; put out a hand gently, feel alpaca, silk, nylon, satin, plain, patterned, or crazily flowered; thousands within screaming distance. If you screamed, just how many of those dirty, clean, pink, brown, desirable or offensive convoluted ears would scoop up your decibels?

No, he told himself, no screaming, please. These people who swarm like phantoms about you are real; they wouldn’t like it. And your doctor, who did not consider you fit to leave the observation ward – he’s real enough; he wouldn’t like it if he learned you had been screaming in a main street. And you yourself – how real were you? How real was anything when you had recently had perfect proof that all was finished? Really finished: rolled up and done with and discarded and forgotten.

That dusty line of thought must be avoided. He needed somewhere quiet, a place to sit and breathe deeply. Everyone must be deceived; he must hide the fused, dead feeling inside; then he could go back home. But he had also to try and hide the deadness from himself, and that needed more cunning. Like alpha particles, a sense of futility had riddled him, and he was mortally sick.

Surrey noticed a turning just ahead. Thankfully he went to it and branched out of the crowds into a dim, narrow thoroughfare. He passed three women in short dresses smoking together; farther on a fellow was being sick into a privet hedge. And there was a café with a sign saying ‘The Iceberg’. Deserted chairs and tables stood outside on an ill-lit veranda; Surrey climbed the two steps and sat wearily down. This was luxury.

The light was poor. Surrey sat alone. Inside the café several people were eating, and a girl sang, accompanying herself on a stringed, lute-like instrument. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was simple and nostalgic, her voice conveying more than the music; he closed his eyes, letting the top spin within him, the top of his emotions. The girl stopped her singing suddenly, as if tired, and walked onto the veranda to stare into the night. Surrey opened his eyes and looked at her.

‘Come and talk to me,’ he called.

She turned her head haughtily to the shadows where he sat, and then turned it back. Evidently, she had met with that sort of invitation before. Surrey clenched his fists in frustration; here he sat, isolated in space and time, needing comfort, needing … oh, nothing could heal him, but salves existed … The loneliness welled up inside, forcing him to speak again.

‘I’m from the ship,’ he said, unable to hold back a note of pleading.

At that, she came over and took a seat facing him. She was Chinese, and wore the timeless slit dress of her race, big daisies chasing themselves over the gentle contours of her body.

‘Of course I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can see in your eyes … that you are from the ship.’ She trembled slightly and asked: ‘May I get you a drink?’

Surrey shook his head. ‘Just to have you sitting there …’

He was feeling better. Irrationally, a voice inside said: ‘Well, you’ve been through a harsh experience, but now that you’re back again you can recover, can’t you, go back to what you were?’ The voice frequently asked that, but the answer was always No; the experience was still spreading inside, like cancer.

‘I heard your ship come in,’ the Chinese girl said. ‘I live just near here – Bukit Timah Road, if you know it, and I was at my window, talking with a friend.’

He thought of the amazing sunshine and the eternal smell of cooking fats and the robshaws clacking by and this girl and her friend chattering in a little attic – and the orchestral crash as the ship arrived, making them forget their sentences; but all remote, centuries ago.

‘It’s a funny noise it makes,’ he said. ‘The sound of a time ship breaking out of the time barrier.’

‘It scares the chickens,’ she said.

Silence. Surrey wanted to produce something else to say, to keep the girl sitting with him, but nothing would dissolve into words. He neglected the factor of her own human curiosity, which made her keen to stay; she inquired again if he would like a drink, and then said: ‘Would it be good for you if you told me something about it?’

‘I’d call that a leading question.’

‘It’s very – bad ahead, isn’t it? I mean, the papers say …’ She hesitated nervously.

‘What do they say?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know, they say that it’s bad. But they don’t really explain; they don’t seem to understand.’

‘That’s the whole key to it,’ he told her. ‘We don’t seem to understand. If I talked to you all night, you still wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand …’

She was beautiful, sitting there with her little lute in her hand. And he had traveled far away beyond her lute and her beauty, far beyond nationality or even music; it had all gone into the dreary dust of the planet, all gone – final – nothing left – except degradation. And puzzlement.

‘I’ll try and tell you,’ he said. ‘What was that tune you were just singing? Chinese song?’

‘No, it was Malayan. It’s an old song, very old, called “Terang Boelan”. It’s about – oh, moonlight, you know, that kind of thing. It’s sentimental.’