The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

laughed. ‘How can millions of years of evolution be “wrong” in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.’ He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

      ‘I shall come back to see you tomorrow,’ Morovitch said. ‘And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest – well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view – I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.’

      Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. ‘I see you are, as you claim, an illness.’

      ‘Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief – until tomorrow!’

      He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Punishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

      Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

       Auto-Ancestral Fracture

      For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.

      But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.

      Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.

      Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.

      You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speed death up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.

      There lifespendulum ticked upside down and the time was rape for legendermoan: for the hard heads and the business hearts found that their rhythms now worked only to a less punctilious clock and speculation had another tone. War had turned the metrognome off chime in general pixilation to a whole new countryslide upbraided.

      What raised the threshold a bit was the Brussels haze. The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down. Life was newly neolithic, weird, and drab or glittering as the hypoglossal towers staggered. Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered. Occult lights still veiled the rooftops and aurora borealis clouded the corner of the eye. Jamming their stations signals of new bodies scarcely suspected before or different birds of intent It was a place for the news of New Saviour Charteris to nest.

      Many came, some remained; many heard, some retained Food was short and disease plentiful, plague grunted in the backstreets of the mind, and cholera in the capital, but the goodfolk had thrown off the tiresome shades of Wesciv and unhoused cults of microbes and bacteria; this was the spontaneous generation and neutral Pasteur had been wrong. These circadian days, you could whistle along your own bones and the empty plate held roses. In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war’s aftermyth. Gristle though the breast was all were at it. So it was gregarious and who cared.

      Of these the Escalation was foremost. Among the petering cars they made their music, Bill, black Phil, Ruby Dymond with his consolations and Featherstone-Haugh, plus Army and their technicians who saw that the more sparky sounds reached tape. This day they had escalated to a new format and a new name. They now hit the note as the Tonic Traffic and had infrasound, ground from Banjo’s grinder machine worked by Greta and Flo, who shacked with them and other musicniks.

      Through mirror-sunglasses they peered at the oneway world, frisking it for telling dislocations in which to savour most possibility. The flat wind-smoke covered them part-coloured. They had a new number going needling into the new stations to really pierce wax called Famine Starting at the Head. Sometimes they talked round the lyric or with laughter sent it up.

      On the Golden Coast cymbals start to sound some place like a magic garden I’m just a demon on the cello. Play the clarinet pretty good too man!

      In his tent-cave Charteris with two women heard the noise and distant other flutes in flower-powdered falsetto, but had his own anguish to blow through the stops of strained relationship.

      Stranding his pearl underseers to glaub the timeskip of Ange Old’s farce its tragictory of otherwhens and all plausticities made flesh in the mating. Like Him fashioned from parental lobotomy truncated by the mainspring glories of a rain shower slanting through the coral trees where greened the glowing white of landscape. Figures moving dragging dropping enduring in her glowworm eyes the candlesphere of hallucidity she’s the mouth and cheekbox of my hope’s facial tissure to come back like soft evening’s curtains. It’s what I see in her all all the peonies the blackbirds the white-thighs all and if not her all all I see of any voyaging.

      Yet Marta has her own unopened chambers of possibility the locked door calling to my quay my coast Bohemian coast my reefs that decimate steamships. On the piston of this later Drake lost in spume rankest alternating

      ‘Do me a fervour! I try to work on this document of human destiny and you want to know whether or not I took in the slack with Marta last night Why not trip out of needling my alternatives? Get from me!’ The ceiling was only canvas billowing, standing in for plaster in a ruinous convent later old people’s home, which the autobahn-builders had half-nudged out of the way as they drove their wedges into the city-heart. Undemolished now almost self-demolished this wing flew the Charteris flag; here his disciples clustered elbows brick-coloured as plaster peppered down like the dust of crunched hourglasses. As starving Brussels besieged itself for a miracle domestic drama flourinched.

      ‘Oh entropise human detestiny!’ Angeline was washed and white like concentrate campallour, still calculating against the aftermaths of warcalculus, still by the chemicals not too treblinkered. ‘I don’t want to know if you slacked because I know if you slacked you slackered Marta tonight last night every night and I just damned won’t stand it, so you just damned fuzzy-settle for her or me! None of your either-whoring here!’

      ‘All that old anti-life stuff snuffed it with your wesciv world – from now it’s a multi-vulval state and the office blocks off.’

      ‘Your big pronounce! Hotair your views to