Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

They crossed the Via Milano dangerously. She turned an angry face on him.

She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices. He was blind to screaming traffic.

‘You, what are you doing? Trying some damned Freudian rubbish on me? You know I hate and despise it! Telling me that what I see clearly before me is all in my head! Fool, sentimentalist, bloody Freudian!’

On the pavement, she moved towards him with an attacking movement, then veered so that Pelli bumped into her. Pelli, with no idea what the row was about, tried to grasp her again. Ajdini smacked his hand and almost ran for the hotel door.

‘Selina, Marx is a dead duck — neither he nor his creed can help you. He’s a damned sight worse than Freud. It’s the miraculous — that’s what you need!’

She was already hastening through the revolving doors.

Squire turned and looked at the glowering Pelli.

‘Life’s a bugger, isn’t it, chum?’ he said.

The traffic screamed by him. What were the drivers all so mad about? Was all of Ermalpa a conspiracy by the Fiat Motor Company?

She fled. One of the displaced, the uprooted, one of the mourners… Branded just as surely as the concentration-camp victims.

The modern generation, the generation of his son John, didn’t know about that branded generation of which he himself was one in ways hardly less decisive than Ajdini. They might one day have to learn the bitter way.

What was that curious statement of Marcuse, uttered in One-Dimensional Man ? ‘Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man — the space flights, the rockets and missiles, the “labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar”…’

Just as the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War had paved the way for the second, so the nightmare induced by the second was building up shock waves which would culminate in the third. His inward response to Ajdini’s tale of the meshing of German and American pharmaceutical industries had been to exclaim, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how the evil gains,’ remembering William Burroughs’s comment that the paranoid is the man who has just discovered what’s going on. What real panacea, what escape, was there, except to advise people not to suffer, and to delight in what they could while they could?

That was no certain way. Pleasure was often the forerunner of trouble. It would be a pleasure to go to bed with Selina, if she was not just a tease, but the unhappy repercussions might be many, as had been the repercussions of his pleasure with Laura Nye in Singapore and elsewhere a year and a half ago. There was no Sure Way. The way of the mystic was not his.

As the civilized world, so called, expanded, driving out the animal kingdom, the labyrinthine chain of cause and effect grew more complex. People became so confused, not understanding the cause of their confusion, that any false prophet like Billy Graham or Karl Marx or von Daniken who came along offering them a thread through the labyrinth was received rapturously by millions. It was not so much the truth the millions cared about, but the thread itself. Something to hold on to.

Thinking his melancholy thoughts, Squire was more inclined to go in search of Ajdini — would she be lying weeping face down on her bed, or smoking a cool cigarette with d’Exiteuil? — rather than listen to Fittich; but a desire to support his German friend drove him into the hotel and towards the conference hall.

‘Squire, you’re useless. Too well-meaning. It’s weak to be well-intentioned. Why don’t I face up to how blackly corrupt the world is, and junk my pathetic the dansant optimism? Why not just go and screw Selina, never mind her troubles, get some joy myself, which is what I really want to do, and to hell with Laura and the rest. As for Tess…it’s just my fool optimism makes me think she cared in the first place…’

He went and sat down in his place, between d’Exiteuil and Vasili Rugorsky. The two men were laughing together. Rugorsky said, ‘Dr d’Exiteuil owes an apology to you, Thomas.’

D’Exiteuil said, ‘You were right about the miraculous, in saying that it can happen. I believe you did observe a UFO earlier today.’

He produced a copy of the local evening newspaper. It featured a photograph of rooftops and a blurred object in the sky. Black headlines proclaimed, ‘Flying Hardware over Ermalpa — Have they Come from Outer Space?’

‘You see,’ said d’Exiteuil, reading, ‘Hundreds of people leaving their offices and factories at midday saw bright objects in the sky over the centre of the city. An Alitalia DC-9 landing at the airport sighted a flight of three flying beneath the plane and heading along the coast in the direction of Palermo. The objects were capable of staying stationary and then of moving off at colossal speeds.

‘Some of the objects were cigar-shaped, others the more familiar saucer shape. There were similar previous sightings a month ago. The Air Force is correlating all reports and would be glad to receive any photographs of the flying hardware.’

Squire stared at the print and the photograph in silence.

‘It’s a form of madness,’ Rugorsky said. ‘You see, these people are well-meaning, but they want to make a drama, like all under-developed people. One child’s balloon floating in the sky and they can feel free to imagine an air force of extra-terrestrials. Theatre rules them, not reasoning.’

‘But Squire saw one. You didn’t want a drama, did you,

Tom? I don’t know, there were sightings over Paris recently. I begin to think there must be something in it after all. I mean, this has been going on for years…’

‘There are sightings everywhere. It’s a cargo cult merely.’

‘I think it’s good publicity for the conference. I shall phone the newspaper. Excuse me.’

As d’Exiteuil left, Squire told the Russian, ‘I know I saw something. Since I don’t know what I saw, it belongs in the category of You-Foe. But now that I see this report in the newspaper I confess I find my belief weakening. Perhaps, as you say, it was a child’s balloon — first hanging motionless, then swirled away in an updraught.’

‘Notice that all photos of flying saucers show them about the same size, whatever the text claims — and blurred. The cameramen think these things are at infinity, and so they focus their cameras at infinity. Maybe the objects could be only fifty feet away, just above the rooftops. Then if they move on a wind gust at forty miles an hour, they appear to move four thousand miles an hour because the mind believes them not near but at infinity.’

‘Modern cameras focus automatically, Vasili…I was immediately convinced that I saw a You-Foe. I didn’t want to see one.’

‘No, you didn’t want to see one. But you were typical in interpreting what you saw as a part of high-technology. The power of the imagination is to create images, and even science progresses by images, images of what is possible. So, the Greeks thought that the heart was a fire, because they knew fire. The heart could not be visualized as a pump until the Renaissance, when pumps were invented.’

‘But there are flying saucer visions in the Bible, or what sound like visions. Ezekiel and all that.’

‘Hindsight, Tom. You must not believe anything but cause and effect. Always cause and effect. That belief supports all of science and our culture. I may piss on a fire to put it out, but I cannot light it that way.’

This response silenced Squire.

Many candidates were still dawdling at the entrance to the conference hall, as if reluctant to enter. Squire decided on a quick tour of the ground floor, hoping to catch sight of Ajdini.