Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

Wide-eyed, hand on stomach, Simpson lurched from the kitchen to the accompaniment of good-natured jeers and shouts of encouragement. But he was not really ill. Once in the open he completed the circuit in the bracelet on his wrist and the TALISKER had him safe and sound.

Dr Khan was twitching with excitement. He shook Simpson’s hand a dozen times, almost snatched the vine cuttings from him and placed them in the field of his microscope. Its screen remained blank for nearly a minute while we all stared at it as if hypnotized. Then several rows of symbols flashed up together. Khan pressed buttons once, twice, got new answers and gave a great sigh. With a flourish he cleared the machine and, very much master of ceremonies, turned and faced his audience.

‘What Dr Simpson has brought us,’ Khan began, ‘is something altogether more interesting and shall I say more valuable than the result of any immunological experiment. We have in our possession not the latest of vines but the first, not a mutation but the rootstock, the Urrebe . As confirmed just now by archaeobotanical comparison, it is a living specimen of the extinct primeval vine-grape bearer, vitis vinifera pristina , of which more in a moment. First I have some explaining and apologizing to do, and first of all to you, sir.’

Here he bowed to the Director, who sent the rest of us a nervous smile.

‘While you were most lucidly explaining to me the tuning of your temporal transmitter I was impertinent enough to distract your attention and change the setting in a most radical way. Yes, as he must already have begun to suspect, Dr Simpson has visited not the future but the past, the late fourteenth century I should judge — I wasn’t too sure of the calibration. Dr Simpson, I do beg your pardon for my reckless and high-handed—’

The Director had turned the colour of a fine Travel rosé and was speechless, but Simpson had opened a transparent packet and taken out a small metal object which he passed up to Khan. ‘I didn’t only collect vines back there. That’s the salt-spoon I was handed by the steward — or perhaps I should say the seneschal.’

Khan reactivated his appliance, inserted the spoon and lowered a bar. ‘This may take a little longer. Er, as I say, I’m afraid I was really most rash.’

‘It was worth it,’ Simpson said. ‘One thing — I don’t understand why that monk reacted as he did. I see now he couldn’t have read a word of my papers, but it was as if he was afraid of them.’

Rabaiotti grinned. ‘Of course he was afraid of them. Documents in an unknown language produced by an unknown method? Think yourself lucky not to have been dragged out and burnt on the spot.’

‘If it had been anywhere else but a monastery…’

‘Everything one had ever thought about the Middle Ages, eh? Notably the horrid—’

A bleeper started up on the microscope and the screen illuminated itself. ‘Compounded — in other words put together, made — AD 1325 plus or minus five,’ Khan announced. ‘Apparent age 19 plus or minus one. A little earlier than I estimated.’

‘Nice to think it might have been 1346,’ I said. ‘Edward III and the Black Prince moving in to clobber the Frogs at Crécy. What if they’d been on the look-out for English spies?’

‘Burgundy wasn’t part of France then,’ Schneider put in.

‘Could we have some order, gentlemen?’ the Director called. ‘I’d like to hear more from Dr Khan about just how valuable this thing is.’

‘Thank you, sir. Our discovery, our prize is reproducible and fructifiable or will be within a short time. Soon we shall be enjoying the wine that Dr Simpson’s hosts found too feeble to drink unadulterated. And marketing the living vines that produce it.’

‘Splendid, but for how long?’ Rabaiotti asked. ‘Why should we imagine that this vitis pristina will be any more proof against phylloxera than the vines we know?’

‘Because of its natural defences,’ Khan said earnestly. ‘Those defences that human beings have almost as if deliberately destroyed with the very chemicals meant to improve them. Once, phylloxera vastatrix was an almost harmless little beast — almost, not quite. So he had to be sprayed out of existence and indeed he was ousted temporarily, only to return with greater strength against a weakened prey. And the next time was worse.

‘The dates will show you. First organized spraying of French vines, 1803, under Chaptal, Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior. First severe phylloxera damage, 1811–12. First toxic smoke attempts, 1859. New phylloxera penetration into Loire vineyards, 1865. And so on. That was my first clue. The medicine on which the disease flourished was progressively undermining the patient. And incidentally it seems the price the vines paid for sheer survival was loss of quality in the product. As always. There’s not much meat on a mountain goat.

‘So… soon, very soon, we here will collectively launch what will be nothing less than the wine of the century — the twenty-first century, that is, by courtesy of the fourteenth!’

It was quite soon, in 1997 to be exact, and I was there when the corks were pulled at the first tasting, and by universal consent the wine was absolutely horrible. It hadn’t travelled, so to speak. But by then we, the six of us, had all cleaned up.

The woman watched him and he made another sweep. There was nothing again but he knew one of them was around. It got so you always knew. After twenty years it got so you always knew when one of them was around.

‘Anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I thought you could tell just where to find these things,’ she said. ‘I thought we hired you because you could take us straight to one of these things. I thought that was why we hired you.’

‘Easy now, Martha,’ the young fellow said. ‘Nobody can find xeeb where there aren’t any xeeb, not even Mr Hardacre. We’ll come across one any minute now.’

She moved away from the three of them at the instrument panel and her thighs were arrogant under the tight space-jeans. You bitch, Philip Hardacre thought suddenly. You goddam, bored, boring, senseless bitch. He felt sorry for the young fellow. He was a pretty nice young fellow, and here he was married to this goddam senseless bitch, and it looked like he was too afraid of her to tell her to get the hell out, although you knew he wanted to.

‘I feel him near,’ the old Martian said, turning the bigger and more grizzled of his two heads towards Philip Hardacre. ‘We shall see him soon now.’

The woman leaned against the ship’s side and stared out the port. ‘I can’t think why you have to go hunting these monstrosities. Two days it’s been since we left, and we could have been in Venusport all that while instead of cooped up in this steel jalopy a couple of light years from civilization. What’s so good about getting a xeeb even if you do get one? What does it prove, getting a xeeb?’

‘The xeeb is the largest life-form in this part of the galaxy.’ The young fellow was a school professor or something like that, and you could tell it from the way he spoke. ‘More than that, it’s the only sentient creature living out here in free space, and it’s ferocious; it’s been known to take on a scout ship. It’s the toughest damn thing there is. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘That’s part of it,’ Philip Hardacre said. There was that, although there was much more, the freedom out there and the stars against the black and the men small in their suits and afraid and yet not afraid and even the xeeb small in the vastness and the cool joy if the xeeb was a good one.

‘He comes,’ the old Martian said in his whistling tones, his smaller head bent toward the screen. ‘See, lady.’