The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

of cigarettes, put them on a tray, and carried them across to him. He took them and paid without a word. All the while, the M’sieur’s eyes were on him.

      Charteris forced himself to smoke one of the cigarettes. They were vile. Despite her neutrality in the Acid Head War, France had suffered from shortages like everyone else. Charteris was pampered, with illegal access to NUNSACS cigars, which he enjoyed.

      He looked at the television. Faces swam in the green light, talking too fast for him to follow. There was some nonsense about a cycling champion, a protracted item about a military parade and inspection, shots of international film stars dining in Paris, something about a murder hunt somewhere. Not a mention of the two continents full of nut cases who no longer knew where reality began or ended. The French carried their neutrality into every facet of their lives.

      When he had finished his pernod, he went over and paid Madame at her table and walked out in the square.

      It was night, night in its early stages when the clouds still carried hints of daylight through the upper air. The floodlighting was gaining on the cathedral, chopping it into alternate vertical sections of void and glitter, so that it looked like a cage for some gigantic prehistoric bird. Beyond the cage, the traffic on the motorway snarled untiringly.

      He went and sat in his car and smoked a cigar to remove the taste of the cigarette, although sitting in the Banshee when it was still made him oddly uneasy. He thought about Angelina and whether he wanted her, decided on the whole he did not. He wanted English girls. He had never even known one but, since his earliest days, he had longed for all things English, as another man he knew yearned for anything Chinese. He had dropped his Montenegrin name to christen himself with the surname of his favourite English writer.

      About the present state of England, he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out between the US and China, Russia had come in on the Communist side. Canada and Australia had aligned themselves with America, and Britain – perhaps still nourishing dreams of a grander past – had backed into the war in such a way as to offend her allies while at the same time involving most of the other European nations, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia amongst them – and France always excluded. By an irony, Britain had been the first country to suffer the PCA Bomb – the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that spread hallucinatory mental states across the nation. As a NUNSACS official, Charteris was being posted to work in Britain on rehabilitation work; as a NUNSACS official, he knew the terrifying disorder he would find there. He had no qualms about it.

      But first there was this evening to be got through … He had said that so often to himself. Life was so short, one treasured it so intensely, and yet it was also full of desolating boredom. The acid head victims all ever the world had no problems with boredom; their madnesses precluded it; they were always well occupied with terror or joy, whichever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one spent one’s life trying to save. The victims were never tired of themselves.

      The cigar tasted good, extending its mildness all round him like a mist. Now he put it out and climbed from the car. He knew of only two ways to pass the evening before it was time to sleep; he could eat or he could find sexual companionship. Sex, he thought, the mysticism of materialism. It was true. He sometimes needed desperately the sense of a female life impinging on his with its unexplored avenues and possibilities, so stale, so explored, were his own few reactions. Back to his mind again came the riotous movements of the autostrada victims, fornicating with death.

      On his way towards a lighted restaurant on the far side of the square, he saw another method by which to structure the congealing time of the French evening. The little cinema was showing a film called SEX ET BANG-BANG, forbidden to anyone under sixteen. He glanced up at the ill-painted poster, showing a near-naked blonde with an ugly shadow like a moustache across her face, and muttered, ‘Starring Petula Roualt as Al Capone,’ as he passed.

      As he ate in the restaurant, he thought about Angelina and madness and war and neutrality; it seemed to him they were all products of different time-senses. Perhaps there were no human emotions, only a series of different synchronicity microstructures, so that one ‘had time for’ one thing or another. He suddenly stopped eating. He saw the world – Europe, that is, precious, hated Europe that was his stage – purely as a fabrication of time, no matter involved. Matter was an hallucinatory experience, merely a slow-motion perceptual experience of certain time/emotion nodes passing through the brain. No, that the brain seized on in turn as it moved round the perceptual web it had spun, would spin, from childhood on. Metoz, that he apparently perceived so clearly through all his senses, was there only because all his senses had reached a certain dynamic synchronicity in their obscure journey about the biochemical web. Tomorrow, responding to some obscure circadian rhythm, they would achieve another relationship, and he would appear to move on. Matter was an abstraction of the time syndrome, much as the television had enabled Charteris to deduce bicycle races and military parades which held, for him, even less substance than the flickering screen. Matter was hallucination.

      Charteris sat unmoving. If it were so, then clearly he was not at this restaurant table. Clearly there was no plate of cooling veal before him. Clearly Metoz did not exist. The autostrada was a projection of temporal confluences within him, perhaps a riverine dualogue of his entire life. France? Earth? Where was he? What was he?

      Terrible though the answer was, it seemed unassailable. The man he called Charteris was merely another manifestation of a time/emotion node with no more reality than the restaurant or the autostrada. Only the perceptual web itself was ‘real’. ‘He’ was the web in which Charteris. Metoz, tortured Europe, the stricken continents of Asia and America, could have their being, their doubtful being. He was God. …

      Someone was speaking to him. Dimly, distantly, he became aware of a waiter asking if he could take his plate away. So the waiter must be the Dark One, trying to disrupt his Kingdom. He waved the man off, saying something vaguely – much later, he realised he had spoken in Serbian, his native tongue, which he never used.

      The restaurant was closing. Flinging some francs down on the table, he staggered out into the night, and slowly came to himself in the open air.

      He was shaking from the strength and terror of his vision. As he rested against a rotting stone wall, its texture patterning his fingers, he heard the cathedral clock begin to chime and counted automatically. It was ten o’clock by whatever time-level they used here. He had passed two hours in some sort of trance.

      In the camp outside Catenzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from one small district of the USSR. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, which was in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

      The ten thousand caused little trouble. Almost all of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs used by both sides were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

      So the ten thousand crawled about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, as bemused with themselves and their fellows as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes.

      The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected – in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their own actions – and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

      And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina …

      I am going psychedelic. That vision must have come from the drug.

      He had moved some way towards the Hotel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough faces of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

      ‘You