Cryptozoic! (10 page)
Authors: Brian Aldiss
He did not believe the story about his mother's loss of faith, or whatever
it had been, at the age of six. Had such an event occurred, he would often
have heard about it from both his parents, who were not ones to tuck away
their woes.
"Better be getting back then, Dad, I suppose." He shuffled his feet.
James Bush did not move. He stood looking down at his wife's grave,
absently scratching one buttock. Observing him, Bush saw his father
put on one of his sanctimonious expressions, which was followed by
something perhaps more sincere, perhaps a general empty feeling of
puzzlement about what he and Ted and the rest of mankind and the whole
writhing bundle of animate things were supposed to be doing with life
anyway. Bush found that more alarming than the sanctimonious expression;
he was aware enough of where his own enervating self-questioning came from.
He hoped his father's years of flirtation with belief were dead and buried;
resurrection now would come inconveniently.
"Looks like rain."
"She just didn't know where she stood with God. But she wanted to be buried
here. 'Our reasons live their own existences,' as the poet Skellett puts it."
"Can we get a bus back?"
"Yes. You'd be surprised -- you can't get a headstone for love or money,
nowadays. See this one? I made it myself. How do you like it, Ted?
Reinforced concrete, and I did the lettering before it was dry."
"Very professional."
"You don't think it should just have been 'E. Lavinia'? She never used
the Elizabeth."
"It's fine as it is, Dad."
"I was pleased with it."
"Yes."
"Sorry you weren't here for it all. It didn't seem right without you.
So her life ended, not just under that mound where the trickle of water
down the hill had already commenced to erode one side of it, but in
the exchange of trivialities between her husband and son. As Bush told
himself that, he felt convinced that neither of them would come here
again. There was a limit to the pointlessness humans could endure.
"But isn't it all bloody pointless?" he said. "Who was she? I don't know,
and I doubt whether you do. Was there a point to her life -- and if so,
what? When she was six? If that tale's true, then the rest of her life
was anti-climax, and she'd have done better to live her days backwards,
with the cancer healing and she getting young again and eventually
gaining her baby faith!"
He checked himself on the verge of terror, and they began to move away
from the grave.
His father said, "We didn't ask that sort of question when we got married."
"I'm sorry, Father. Let's go home. I didn't mean what I said -- you always
had more sense than I did. It's just -- "
"You were the point of her life, just as much as me."
"That's all nonsense, unless you believe the whole purose of the human race
is simply to breed another generaon and another . . ."
His father began to walk rapidly downhill, towards the collapsing
lych gate.
It was a cold day. The dentist's house felt damp and they lunched poorly
on fried potatoes and salt. Food was short and appallingly dear. In the
afternoon, Bush read some of the old magazines down in the waiting room.
A patient miraculously appeared, hugging a suppurating gum-boil in a scarf,
and Bush scowled at the disturbance.
Through the distorting pages of the magazines, he gained a picture of
the factors that had gradually brought about the present situation. He
had traveled carelessly through life, quarreling, love-making, talking,
painting, without any stay to his appetites or reference to the currents
that moved through his generation. He saw now that one of the occasional
reactions against a high-powered industrial society had set in some years
earlier, expressing itself as a fad for the gas-lit glories of the long-dead
Victorian Age. Such reactions soon blew over when they had nothing to
feed themselves on and a new fad came to distract attention. But in the
twenty-seventies, the new thing was mind-travel, or its possibility,
which stoked rather than damped the public nostalgia. In a surprisingly
short time, certainly by the mid-eighties, the advanced civilizations of
the world had reoriented themselves towards the past -- the far distant
pre-historic past, since that was paradoxically the easiest to reach,
the second law of thermodynamics not extending itself to cover the lower
reaches of the human mind. A generation grew up which dedicated itself,
its energies and abilities, to escaping from their own time. Every
human activity was hit, from the tourist trade (Florida's sands, the
Mediterranean beaches, were as deserted as in Victorian times) to the
steel industry, from entertainment to philosophy.
Amid the brewing of a world slump, only the Wenlock Institutes prospered.
There one could enrol for moderately expensive courses to be taught the
Wenlock discipline that unlocked the ancient bars of the mind. There one
could purchase the moderately expensive drugs that helped one on one's way
to the plesiosaur-haunted seas. And at the mind-stations, Wenlock-owned,
one could keep a moderately expensive anchorage in the world of passing
time while one disappeared -- forever, if the cash held out.
Like other human systems, the Wenlock system, although as humanitarian
as its founder, was fallible. In many countries, it was denounced as a
dangerous monopoly; in others, it came at once under the direction of
the government. And, of course, less well-meaning persons ferreted out
the secrets of its disciplines and drugs, and put their own versions on
the market. Many a refrigerator in many an empty apaitment held dishes
of blood and tissue culture while the absconding family played hookey
in Gondwanaland.
Within the Wenlock empire, too, all was not well. An article in
Dental
World
for January of the previous year entitled "The Discipline and
Dental Pay" first brought the name of Norman Silverstone to Bush's
attention, and then he came across it again in one or two of the other
tattered magazines. As a commentator pointed out, the whole theory of
mind-travel rested on few facts and a mass of supposition, rather as
the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had, at the end of the
nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Silverstone
played Jung to Wenlock's Freud. Although nobody could deny the fact of
mind-travel, there were several who denied that Wenlock's was the correct
interpretation of what it was. Most powerful among these was Wenlock's
one-time friend and associate, Silverstone. Silverstone maintained that
the human mind could certainly be freed from the psychotic barrier behind
which it had built its time-locked supremacy over the rest of the animal
kingdom; but he claimed that there were yet more extraordinary powers
to be released, and that the limitations of mind-travel, debarring most
human travelers from most of historic time, were evidence of the fact
that the discipline was but a fragment -- probably a distorted fragment --
of a greater whole.
Silverstone was of a retiring disposition, a man who refused to be
interviewed or photographed, and his occasional contributions to the
dispute were so abstruse that it could hardly be said that he constituted
a too-formidable opposition to Wenlock. Nevertheless, he and his followers
provided an instrument that proved useful to governments wanting to have
a hand in the administration of the local institutes and mind-stations.
For obvious reasons, the supply of antique magazines stopped at the time
of the revolution, but Bush thought he could see clearly enough the ensuing
train of events. In most countries, the severe slump conditions would be
accentuated by stock market crashes; unemployed men would march on the
capital; the half-starved would riot; tougher governments would be called
for, by haves and have-nots alike, although for different reasons.
He sat in the untidy room, inventing discomforts.
The unsettled conditions, would not last. The nations would recover,
as they had recovered before. He already had a sign that General Bolt's
regime might be of limited duration -- almost a mystical sign, although
at the time it had gone almost unheeded. When he was standing in Room 3,
locked in a sort of fit and waiting for the summons before Franklin, the
Dark Woman had appeared. At the time, his mind had been too preoccupied
for this visitant from the future to register fully with him. But he
realized now that, shadowy as she was, she had glowed slightly, for
all the world like a phantom in the mock-Victorian pageants his mother
had taken him to as a boy. It could mean only one thing: that in her
age, she was standing in the open; in other words, the Institute was
demolished in her day; which argued that the General's protective wing
would not always be there. Not always, but his phantom watcher might
be five hundred years ahead, which was a long time. Well, there was
hope. The most dreadful things passed.
He looked round the waiting room. She was not with him at present. However
faithful she was, she had to have some time off duty. Then he thought:
Or is she a figment of my imagination, my anima? Aren't I radically
unbalanced, by turns cowardly and over-bold, under-sexed and sex-obsessed?
Maybe the Dark Woman is just a projection of my dissociated personality.
But she was more than that. She was the future, for its own reasons
keeping an eye on him. The future was everywhere in his age, as if they
would dam his generation in and repel its angry wave so that the flood
of discontent flowed away from it, leaving it Olympian and safe! They
had discovered a way of moving among the ages of man.
Bush tried to speculate about the future, gave up, and slipped out of
the house for a walk. He could not reason constructively since he had
been placed under Franklin's training orders. His life was about to be
turned upside down. Indeed, he hardly understood what was going on.
In the nights he thought he heard his mother's voice.
He tried to think about Ann, but she seemed as remote as the Devonian in
which he had found her. He tried to think about his father, but there
was nothing new to think. He thought about Mrs. Annivale, whom he had
now met, but that made him uncomfortable. Mrs. Annivale was not half as
horrible as he had pictured her. She was, he judged, no more than his own
age and still had something of youth about her. She smiled pleasantly,
was friendly and natural, seemed genuinely to like his father, and her
mind did not seem too entirely banal. But she was no business of his.
He turned back. There was nowhere he wanted to go to, and the dirty, empty
streets repelled him. He recalled that in his wrecked studio there was a
box of clay he used for modeling; perhaps he could interest himself with
that, although every spark of inspiration felt dead.
When the lump he was molding into shape began to resemble Franklin's head,
he gave up and went indoors.
"Had a pleasant day?" Mrs. Annivale asked, coming downstairs.
"Just great! We went over to see Mother's grave this morning and this
afternoon I've had a good read of some two-year-old magazines."
She looked at him and grinned. "You talk quite a bit like your dad.
He's asleep, by the way -- I shouldn't wake him. I'm just going round to
my place to get my grater; I'm going to make you a cheese pud tonight.
Why don't you come round with me? You haven't seen my place yet."
Moodily, he went with her. Her house was bright and clean and seemed to
contain very little furniture. In the kitchen, Bush asked, "Why don't you
move in with Father and save rent and everything, Mrs. Annivale?"
"Why don't you call me Judy?"
"Because I didn't know it was your name. Father always calls you
Mrs. Annivale to me."
"Formal! I hope you and I don't have to be formal, do we?" She was
standing idly near him, looirng at him, showing her teeth a little.
"I asked you why you didn't move in with my father."
"Suppose I said I fancied younger men?" There was no mistaking the tone
in her voice or the look in her eye. Everything was convenient, he told
himself. Her bed would be clean, his father was asleep next door, she knew
he was off next week. Unbidden, his betraying body told him it liked
the idea.
Hastily, he turned from her. "Then that's jolly sweet of you to look after
him, Judy."
"Look, Ted -- "
"Got the cheese grater? We'd better go and see if he's okay." He led
the way back, feeling a fool; so evidently did she, judging by the way
she chattered. But after all . . . well, it would have been like incest.
There were some things you had to draw the line at, however much of a
moral wreck you were!
Although such was not the case, Judy Annivale seemed to imagine she had
offended Bush and was tiringly pleasant to him. Once or twice, he had to
take refuge in his studio with the half-formed bust of Franklin. And on
the day the truck was due to come for him, she followed him down into
the studio.
"Beat it!" he said. He saw death in the lines round her mouth.
"Don't be unsociable, Ted! I wanted to see what you were doing in the
art line. I used to think I was artistic once."
"If you want to play with my clay, go ahead, but just don't follow me
around! Are you trying to be a mother to me or something?"
"Do you really think I've been showing you signs of motherliness, Ted?"
He shrugged his shoulders. He had no morals. Maybe he was passing up a
good opportunity that tomorrow would see lost forever.
James Bush thrust his head inside the shed.
"So this is where you've both got to?"
"I was just saying how much I admired Ted's artistic talents, Jim.
I used to be a bit artistic myself once, as a girl. I'm sure all the wide
perspectives of the past that you've traveled must have helped a lot."
Perhaps a whisper of suspicion passed over James Bush's brain. In irritation,
he said, "Nonsense, the boy's seen next to nothing! You're like most folk --
you don't seem to realize how ancient the Earth is and how little of its past
is accessible even to mind-travelers."
"Oh, not that clock analogy, Father!" Bush had heard this set-piece before.
But his father was covering the exit. Painstakingly, he explained a standard
textbook diagram to Judy, a diagram in which it was supposed that the Earth
was created at midnight. Then followed long hours of darkness with no life,
the time of fire and an alien atmosphere and long rains, the Pre-Cambrian
times or Cryptozoic Era, of which little was known or could be known.
The Cambrian Period marked the beginning of the fossil record and did not
arrive till ten o'clock on the clock face. The reptiles and amphibians put
in an appearance with the Carboniferous Period at about eleven o'clock,
and were gone by quarter to twelve. Mankind's appearance was made at
twelve seconds to noon, and the time since the Stone Age was a fraction
of a second.
it had been, at the age of six. Had such an event occurred, he would often
have heard about it from both his parents, who were not ones to tuck away
their woes.
"Better be getting back then, Dad, I suppose." He shuffled his feet.
James Bush did not move. He stood looking down at his wife's grave,
absently scratching one buttock. Observing him, Bush saw his father
put on one of his sanctimonious expressions, which was followed by
something perhaps more sincere, perhaps a general empty feeling of
puzzlement about what he and Ted and the rest of mankind and the whole
writhing bundle of animate things were supposed to be doing with life
anyway. Bush found that more alarming than the sanctimonious expression;
he was aware enough of where his own enervating self-questioning came from.
He hoped his father's years of flirtation with belief were dead and buried;
resurrection now would come inconveniently.
"Looks like rain."
"She just didn't know where she stood with God. But she wanted to be buried
here. 'Our reasons live their own existences,' as the poet Skellett puts it."
"Can we get a bus back?"
"Yes. You'd be surprised -- you can't get a headstone for love or money,
nowadays. See this one? I made it myself. How do you like it, Ted?
Reinforced concrete, and I did the lettering before it was dry."
"Very professional."
"You don't think it should just have been 'E. Lavinia'? She never used
the Elizabeth."
"It's fine as it is, Dad."
"I was pleased with it."
"Yes."
"Sorry you weren't here for it all. It didn't seem right without you.
So her life ended, not just under that mound where the trickle of water
down the hill had already commenced to erode one side of it, but in
the exchange of trivialities between her husband and son. As Bush told
himself that, he felt convinced that neither of them would come here
again. There was a limit to the pointlessness humans could endure.
"But isn't it all bloody pointless?" he said. "Who was she? I don't know,
and I doubt whether you do. Was there a point to her life -- and if so,
what? When she was six? If that tale's true, then the rest of her life
was anti-climax, and she'd have done better to live her days backwards,
with the cancer healing and she getting young again and eventually
gaining her baby faith!"
He checked himself on the verge of terror, and they began to move away
from the grave.
His father said, "We didn't ask that sort of question when we got married."
"I'm sorry, Father. Let's go home. I didn't mean what I said -- you always
had more sense than I did. It's just -- "
"You were the point of her life, just as much as me."
"That's all nonsense, unless you believe the whole purose of the human race
is simply to breed another generaon and another . . ."
His father began to walk rapidly downhill, towards the collapsing
lych gate.
It was a cold day. The dentist's house felt damp and they lunched poorly
on fried potatoes and salt. Food was short and appallingly dear. In the
afternoon, Bush read some of the old magazines down in the waiting room.
A patient miraculously appeared, hugging a suppurating gum-boil in a scarf,
and Bush scowled at the disturbance.
Through the distorting pages of the magazines, he gained a picture of
the factors that had gradually brought about the present situation. He
had traveled carelessly through life, quarreling, love-making, talking,
painting, without any stay to his appetites or reference to the currents
that moved through his generation. He saw now that one of the occasional
reactions against a high-powered industrial society had set in some years
earlier, expressing itself as a fad for the gas-lit glories of the long-dead
Victorian Age. Such reactions soon blew over when they had nothing to
feed themselves on and a new fad came to distract attention. But in the
twenty-seventies, the new thing was mind-travel, or its possibility,
which stoked rather than damped the public nostalgia. In a surprisingly
short time, certainly by the mid-eighties, the advanced civilizations of
the world had reoriented themselves towards the past -- the far distant
pre-historic past, since that was paradoxically the easiest to reach,
the second law of thermodynamics not extending itself to cover the lower
reaches of the human mind. A generation grew up which dedicated itself,
its energies and abilities, to escaping from their own time. Every
human activity was hit, from the tourist trade (Florida's sands, the
Mediterranean beaches, were as deserted as in Victorian times) to the
steel industry, from entertainment to philosophy.
Amid the brewing of a world slump, only the Wenlock Institutes prospered.
There one could enrol for moderately expensive courses to be taught the
Wenlock discipline that unlocked the ancient bars of the mind. There one
could purchase the moderately expensive drugs that helped one on one's way
to the plesiosaur-haunted seas. And at the mind-stations, Wenlock-owned,
one could keep a moderately expensive anchorage in the world of passing
time while one disappeared -- forever, if the cash held out.
Like other human systems, the Wenlock system, although as humanitarian
as its founder, was fallible. In many countries, it was denounced as a
dangerous monopoly; in others, it came at once under the direction of
the government. And, of course, less well-meaning persons ferreted out
the secrets of its disciplines and drugs, and put their own versions on
the market. Many a refrigerator in many an empty apaitment held dishes
of blood and tissue culture while the absconding family played hookey
in Gondwanaland.
Within the Wenlock empire, too, all was not well. An article in
Dental
World
for January of the previous year entitled "The Discipline and
Dental Pay" first brought the name of Norman Silverstone to Bush's
attention, and then he came across it again in one or two of the other
tattered magazines. As a commentator pointed out, the whole theory of
mind-travel rested on few facts and a mass of supposition, rather as
the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had, at the end of the
nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Silverstone
played Jung to Wenlock's Freud. Although nobody could deny the fact of
mind-travel, there were several who denied that Wenlock's was the correct
interpretation of what it was. Most powerful among these was Wenlock's
one-time friend and associate, Silverstone. Silverstone maintained that
the human mind could certainly be freed from the psychotic barrier behind
which it had built its time-locked supremacy over the rest of the animal
kingdom; but he claimed that there were yet more extraordinary powers
to be released, and that the limitations of mind-travel, debarring most
human travelers from most of historic time, were evidence of the fact
that the discipline was but a fragment -- probably a distorted fragment --
of a greater whole.
Silverstone was of a retiring disposition, a man who refused to be
interviewed or photographed, and his occasional contributions to the
dispute were so abstruse that it could hardly be said that he constituted
a too-formidable opposition to Wenlock. Nevertheless, he and his followers
provided an instrument that proved useful to governments wanting to have
a hand in the administration of the local institutes and mind-stations.
For obvious reasons, the supply of antique magazines stopped at the time
of the revolution, but Bush thought he could see clearly enough the ensuing
train of events. In most countries, the severe slump conditions would be
accentuated by stock market crashes; unemployed men would march on the
capital; the half-starved would riot; tougher governments would be called
for, by haves and have-nots alike, although for different reasons.
He sat in the untidy room, inventing discomforts.
The unsettled conditions, would not last. The nations would recover,
as they had recovered before. He already had a sign that General Bolt's
regime might be of limited duration -- almost a mystical sign, although
at the time it had gone almost unheeded. When he was standing in Room 3,
locked in a sort of fit and waiting for the summons before Franklin, the
Dark Woman had appeared. At the time, his mind had been too preoccupied
for this visitant from the future to register fully with him. But he
realized now that, shadowy as she was, she had glowed slightly, for
all the world like a phantom in the mock-Victorian pageants his mother
had taken him to as a boy. It could mean only one thing: that in her
age, she was standing in the open; in other words, the Institute was
demolished in her day; which argued that the General's protective wing
would not always be there. Not always, but his phantom watcher might
be five hundred years ahead, which was a long time. Well, there was
hope. The most dreadful things passed.
He looked round the waiting room. She was not with him at present. However
faithful she was, she had to have some time off duty. Then he thought:
Or is she a figment of my imagination, my anima? Aren't I radically
unbalanced, by turns cowardly and over-bold, under-sexed and sex-obsessed?
Maybe the Dark Woman is just a projection of my dissociated personality.
But she was more than that. She was the future, for its own reasons
keeping an eye on him. The future was everywhere in his age, as if they
would dam his generation in and repel its angry wave so that the flood
of discontent flowed away from it, leaving it Olympian and safe! They
had discovered a way of moving among the ages of man.
Bush tried to speculate about the future, gave up, and slipped out of
the house for a walk. He could not reason constructively since he had
been placed under Franklin's training orders. His life was about to be
turned upside down. Indeed, he hardly understood what was going on.
In the nights he thought he heard his mother's voice.
He tried to think about Ann, but she seemed as remote as the Devonian in
which he had found her. He tried to think about his father, but there
was nothing new to think. He thought about Mrs. Annivale, whom he had
now met, but that made him uncomfortable. Mrs. Annivale was not half as
horrible as he had pictured her. She was, he judged, no more than his own
age and still had something of youth about her. She smiled pleasantly,
was friendly and natural, seemed genuinely to like his father, and her
mind did not seem too entirely banal. But she was no business of his.
He turned back. There was nowhere he wanted to go to, and the dirty, empty
streets repelled him. He recalled that in his wrecked studio there was a
box of clay he used for modeling; perhaps he could interest himself with
that, although every spark of inspiration felt dead.
When the lump he was molding into shape began to resemble Franklin's head,
he gave up and went indoors.
"Had a pleasant day?" Mrs. Annivale asked, coming downstairs.
"Just great! We went over to see Mother's grave this morning and this
afternoon I've had a good read of some two-year-old magazines."
She looked at him and grinned. "You talk quite a bit like your dad.
He's asleep, by the way -- I shouldn't wake him. I'm just going round to
my place to get my grater; I'm going to make you a cheese pud tonight.
Why don't you come round with me? You haven't seen my place yet."
Moodily, he went with her. Her house was bright and clean and seemed to
contain very little furniture. In the kitchen, Bush asked, "Why don't you
move in with Father and save rent and everything, Mrs. Annivale?"
"Why don't you call me Judy?"
"Because I didn't know it was your name. Father always calls you
Mrs. Annivale to me."
"Formal! I hope you and I don't have to be formal, do we?" She was
standing idly near him, looirng at him, showing her teeth a little.
"I asked you why you didn't move in with my father."
"Suppose I said I fancied younger men?" There was no mistaking the tone
in her voice or the look in her eye. Everything was convenient, he told
himself. Her bed would be clean, his father was asleep next door, she knew
he was off next week. Unbidden, his betraying body told him it liked
the idea.
Hastily, he turned from her. "Then that's jolly sweet of you to look after
him, Judy."
"Look, Ted -- "
"Got the cheese grater? We'd better go and see if he's okay." He led
the way back, feeling a fool; so evidently did she, judging by the way
she chattered. But after all . . . well, it would have been like incest.
There were some things you had to draw the line at, however much of a
moral wreck you were!
Although such was not the case, Judy Annivale seemed to imagine she had
offended Bush and was tiringly pleasant to him. Once or twice, he had to
take refuge in his studio with the half-formed bust of Franklin. And on
the day the truck was due to come for him, she followed him down into
the studio.
"Beat it!" he said. He saw death in the lines round her mouth.
"Don't be unsociable, Ted! I wanted to see what you were doing in the
art line. I used to think I was artistic once."
"If you want to play with my clay, go ahead, but just don't follow me
around! Are you trying to be a mother to me or something?"
"Do you really think I've been showing you signs of motherliness, Ted?"
He shrugged his shoulders. He had no morals. Maybe he was passing up a
good opportunity that tomorrow would see lost forever.
James Bush thrust his head inside the shed.
"So this is where you've both got to?"
"I was just saying how much I admired Ted's artistic talents, Jim.
I used to be a bit artistic myself once, as a girl. I'm sure all the wide
perspectives of the past that you've traveled must have helped a lot."
Perhaps a whisper of suspicion passed over James Bush's brain. In irritation,
he said, "Nonsense, the boy's seen next to nothing! You're like most folk --
you don't seem to realize how ancient the Earth is and how little of its past
is accessible even to mind-travelers."
"Oh, not that clock analogy, Father!" Bush had heard this set-piece before.
But his father was covering the exit. Painstakingly, he explained a standard
textbook diagram to Judy, a diagram in which it was supposed that the Earth
was created at midnight. Then followed long hours of darkness with no life,
the time of fire and an alien atmosphere and long rains, the Pre-Cambrian
times or Cryptozoic Era, of which little was known or could be known.
The Cambrian Period marked the beginning of the fossil record and did not
arrive till ten o'clock on the clock face. The reptiles and amphibians put
in an appearance with the Carboniferous Period at about eleven o'clock,
and were gone by quarter to twelve. Mankind's appearance was made at
twelve seconds to noon, and the time since the Stone Age was a fraction
of a second.
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