Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

As soon as the latter closed the door, he said: ‘Rog, promise me something.’

‘Tell me what.’

‘If anything happens to me, I want you to marry Sloe. She’s your sort.’

Concealing my irritation, I said: ‘That’s hardly a reasonable request.’

‘You and she get on well together, don’t you?’

‘Certainly. But you see my outlook on life is … well, for one thing I like to stay detached . An observer, you know, observing. I just want to sample the landscapes and the food and the women of the solar system. I don’t want to marry , just move on at the right time. Sloe’s very nice but – ’

My ghastly inability to express the pressure of inner feeling was upon me. In women I like flamboyance, wit and a high spirit, but I tire quickly of it and then have to seek its manifestation elsewhere. Besides, Sloe frankly had had her sensibilities blunted from living with Jubal. He now chose to misunderstand my hesitations.

‘Are you standing there trying to tell me that you’ve already tired of whatever you’ve been doing behind my back?’ he demanded. ‘You – you – ’ He called me a dirty name; I forgot to make allowances for the strain he had been undergoing, and lost my temper.

‘Oh, calm down,’ I snapped. ‘You’re overtired and overwrought, and probably over-sexed too. I’ve not touched your little woman – I like to drink from pure streams. So you can put the entire notion out of your head.’

He rushed at me with his shoulders hunched and fists swinging. It was an embarrassing moment. I am against violence, and believe in the power of words, but I did the only possible thing: spring to one side and catch him a heavy blow over the heart.

Poor Jubal! No doubt, in his frustration against the forces of nature, he was using me only as a safety valve. But with shame, I will now confess what savage pleasure that blow gave me; I was filled with lust to strike him again. I can perceive dimly how atrocities such as the Massacre came about. As Jubal turned on me, I flung myself at him, breaking down, his defences, piling blows into his chest. It was, I suppose, a form of self-expression.

J-Casta stopped it, breaking in between us and thrusting his ugly face into mine, his hand like a clamp round my wrist.

‘Pack it up,’ he said. ‘I’d gladly do the job myself, but this is not the time.’

As he spoke, the hut trembled. We were hard pressed to keep our feet, staggering together like drunken men.

‘Now what – ’ Jubal said, and flung open the door. I caught a rectangular view of trees and mist, men running, and the emergency dam sailing away on a smooth black slide of escaping water. The banks were collapsing!

Glimpsing the scene, Jubal instantly attempted to slam the door shut again. He was too late. The wave struck us, battering the cabin off its flimsy foundations. Jubal cried sharply as he was tossed against a wall. Next moment we were floundering in a hell of flying furniture and water.

Swept along on a giant sluice, the cabin turned over and over like a dice. That I was preserved was a merest accident. Through a maze of foam, I saw a heavy bunk crashing towards me, and managed to flounder aside in time. It missed me by a finger’s width and broke straight through the boarding wall. I was swept helplessly after it.

When I surfaced, the cabin was out of sight and I was being borne along at a great rate; and the ugly scene in the cabin was something fruitless that happened a million years ago. Nearly wrenching my arm off in the process, I seized a tree which was still standing, and clung on. Once I had recovered my breath, I was able to climb out of the water entirely, wedge myself between two branches and regain my breath.

The scene was one of awesome desolation. I had what in less calamitous circumstances might have been called ‘a good view’ of it all.

A lake spread all round me, its surface moving smartly and with apparent purpose. Its forward line, already far away, was marked by a high yellow cascade. In its wake stretched a miscellany of objects, of which only the trees stood out clearly. Most of the trees were eucalyptus: this area had probably been reclaimed marsh.

To the north, the old shore-line of the lake still stood. The ground was higher there and solid rock jutted stolidly into the flood.

To the south, the shore-line was being joyously chewed away. Mokulgu had about half an hour left before it was swamped and obliterated. I wondered how the Mokulgu Town Council were coping with the situation.

Overhead, the sun now shining clear, bars of pink, wispy cloud flecked the blue sky. The pink and the blue were of the exact vulgar tints found in two-colour prints of the early twentieth century AD – that is, a hundred years before the Massacre. I was almost happy to see this lack of taste in the sky matching the lack of stability elsewhere. I was almost happy: but I was weeping.

‘They visioned me that one of the floats had picked you up – and not Jubal. Is there any hope for him, Rog, or is that a foolish question?’

‘I can’t give you a sensible answer. He was a strong swimmer. They may find him yet.’

I spoke to Sloe over the heads of a crowd of people. Mokulgu, surely enough, had been washed away. The survivors, homeless and bereaved, crowded on to high ground. Sloe had generously thrown open most of her house as a sort of rest-camp-cum-soup-kitchen. She superintended everything with a cool authority which suitably concealed her personal feelings. For that I was grateful: Sloe’s feelings must be no affair of mine.

She smiled at me before turning to address someone behind her. Already the light was taking on the intensity of early evening. Above the babble of voices round me came the deep song of speeding water. It would continue for months yet: Africa was ruptured at her very heart, beyond man’s mending.

Instead of flowing northward, fertilizing its old valley, Victoria crashed into our lake, adding its burden to the weight of water rolling west. While twenty-one million people perished of drought in Egypt, as many perished of flood and typhoid in the Congo.

I seemed to know what was coming as I stood in the crowded room, knowing Jubal dead, knowing the nation of Africa to be bleeding to death. We were dying of our own wounds.

The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.

Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history.

When it comes to human nature, there’s nobody to beat Henshaw. He has the humanest nature I have ever met: how he kept it intact working 33 years for old Sowerby, I don’t know. He once told me that his secret was that he suffered fools gladly; however that may be, we always get on splendidly together.

‘Nick your chin every morning to let him see you’ve shaved, say “Morning, sir” when he comes in, and you’ll be OK’, Henshaw told me, the day I started work at Sowerby’s. The ‘he’ he referred to was Sowerby; the way Henshaw pronounced it, it was a fitting epithet.

Apart from an almost faceless woman who came from ten till one each day, to add up figures in the ledgers, Henshaw and I were Sowerby’s only staff. Sowerby’s is a poky bookshop and stationers the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn. Its aspect is prim but seedy; it is surrounded by piles of masonry too loud to be called building and too lewd to be called architecture. (That’s what I once heard an intellectual say; we used to get them in from the insurance offices nearby.)

I stared at Henshaw; thin and dry, 54, with a poor head of hair that made him look like a shabby eagle. He wore dim, stately suits. He was a tradesman and a gentleman, but a tradesman first, and being a gent did not stop him being a good sort.