Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘No,’ Clovis said, helping himself to salad, for they sat now at the lunch table. ‘And I defy any human brain to devise any. The whole thing’s arbitrary.’

‘On the contrary, the very next happening — today’s when it comes — might reveal an unmistakable pattern.’

‘The one to concentrate on,’ Myri said, ‘is the approaching object. Why did it vanish before striking the sphere?’

Bruno stared at her. ‘It had to, if it was an illusion.’

‘Not at all. Why couldn’t we have had an illusion of the sphere being struck? And supposing it wasn’t an illusion?’

‘Next time there’s an object, perhaps it will strike,’ Lia said.

Clovis laughed. ‘That’s a good one. What would happen if it did, I wonder? And it wasn’t an illusion?’

They all looked at Bruno for an answer. After a moment or two, he said: ‘I presume the sphere would shatter and we’d all be thrown into space. I simply can’t imagine what that would be like. We should be… Never to see one another again, or anybody or anything else, to be nothing more than a senseless lump floating in space for ever. The chances of—’

‘It would be worth something to be rid of your conversation,’ Clovis said, amiable now that Bruno was discomfited. ‘Let’s be practical for a change. How long will it take you to run off your analyses this afternoon? There’s a lot of stuff to go out to Base and I shan’t be able to give you a hand.’

‘An hour, perhaps, after I’ve run the final tests.’

‘Why run tests at all? She was lined up perfectly when we finished this morning.’

‘Fortunately.’

‘Fortunately indeed. One more variable and we might have found it impossible.’

‘Yes,’ Bruno said abstractedly. Then he got to his feet so abruptly that the other three started. ‘But we didn’t, did we? There wasn’t one more variable, was there? It didn’t quite happen, you see, the thing we couldn’t handle.’

Nobody spoke.

‘Excuse me, I must be by myself.’

‘If Bruno keeps this up,’ Clovis said to the two women, ‘Base will send up a relief sooner than we think.’

Myri tried to drive the thought of Bruno’s unusual behaviour out of her head when, half an hour later, she sat down to work on her story. The expression on his face as he left the table had been one she could not name. Excitement? Dislike? Surprise? That was the nearest — a kind of persistent surprise. Well, he was certain, being Bruno, to set about explaining it at dinner. She wished he were more pleasant, because he did think well.

Finally expelling the image of Bruno’s face, she began rereading the page of manuscript she had been working on when the screams had interrupted her the previous afternoon. It was part of a difficult scene, one in which a woman met by chance a man who had been having her ten years earlier, with the complication that she was at the time in the company of the man who was currently having her. The scene was an eating alcove in a large city.

‘Go away,’ Volsci said, ‘or I’ll hit you.’

Norbu smiled in a not-pleasant way. ‘What good would that do? Irmy likes me better than she likes you. You are more pleasant, no doubt, but she likes me better. She remembers me having her ten years ago more clearly than she remembers you having her last night. I am good at thinking, which is better than any amount of being pleasant.’

‘She’s having her meal with me,’ Volsci said, pointing to the cold food and drinks in front of them. ‘Aren’t you, Irmy?’

‘Yes, Irmy,’ Norbu said. ‘You must choose. If you can’t let both of us have you, you must say which of us you like better.’

Irmy looked from one man to the other. There was so much difference between them that she could hardly begin to choose: the one more pleasant, the other better at thinking, the one slim, the other plump. She decided being pleasant was better. It was more important and more significant — better in every way that made a real difference. She said: ‘I’ll have Volsci.’

Norbu looked surprised and sorry. ‘I think you’re wrong.’

‘You might as well go now,’ Volsci said. ‘Ila will be waiting.’

‘Yes,’ Norbu said. He looked extremely sorry now.

Irmy felt quite sorry too. ‘Goodbye, Norbu,’ she said.

Myri smiled to herself. It was good, even better than she had remembered — there was no point in being modest inside one’s own mind. She must be a real writer in spite of Bruno’s scoffing, or how could she have invented these characters, who were so utterly unlike anybody she knew, and then put them into a situation that was so completely outside her experience? The only thing she was not sure about was whether she might not have overplayed the part about feeling or dwelt on it at too great length. Perhaps extremely sorry was a little heavy; she replaced it by sorrier than before . Excellent: now there was just the right touch of restraint in the middle of all the feeling. She decided she could finish off the scene in a few lines.

‘Probably see you at some cocktail hour,’ Volsci said , she wrote, then looked up with a frown as the buzzer sounded at her door. She crossed her tiny wedge-shaped room — its rear wall was part of the outer wall of the sphere, but it had no port — threw the lock and found Bruno on the threshold. He was breathing fast, as if he had been hurrying or lifting a heavy weight, and she saw with distaste that there were drops of sweat on his thick skin. He pushed past her and sat down on her bed, his mouth open.

‘What is it?’ she asked, displeased. The afternoon was a private time unless some other arrangement were made at lunch.

‘I don’t know what it is. I think I must be ill.’

‘Ill? But you can’t be. Only people on Earth get ill. Nobody on a station is ever ill: Base told us that. Illness is caused by—’

‘I don’t think I believe some of the things that Base says.’

‘But who can we believe if we don’t believe Base?’

Bruno evidently did not hear her question. He said: ‘I had to come to you — Lia’s no good for this. Please let me stay with you, I’ve got so much to say.’

‘It’s no use, Bruno. Clovis is the one who has me. I thought you understood that I didn’t—’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ he said impatiently. ‘Where I need you is in thinking. Though that’s connected with the other, the having. I don’t expect you to see that. I’ve only just begun to see it myself.’

Myri could make nothing of this last part. ‘Thinking? Thinking about what?’

He bit his lip and shut his eyes for a moment. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘It was the analyser that set my mind going. Almost every other day it breaks down. And the computer, the counters, the repellers, the scanners and the rest of them — they’re always breaking down too, and so are their power supplies. But not the purifier or the fluid-reconstitutor or the fruit and vegetable growers or the heaters or the main power source. Why not?’

‘Well, they’re less complicated. How can a fruit grower go wrong? A chemical tank and a water tank is all there is to it. You ask Lia about that.’

‘All right. Try answering this, then. The strange happenings. If they’re illusions, why are they always outside the sphere? Why are there never any inside?’

‘Perhaps there are,’ Myri said.

‘Don’t. I don’t want that. I shouldn’t like that. I want everything in here to be real. Are you real? I must believe you are.’

‘Of course I’m real.’ She was now thoroughly puzzled.

‘And it makes a difference, doesn’t it? It’s very important that you and everything else should be real, everything in the sphere. But tell me: whatever’s arranging these happenings must be pretty powerful if it can fool our instruments and our senses so completely and consistently, and yet it can’t do anything — anything we recognize as strange, that is — inside this puny little steel skin. Why not?’