The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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should consult a psychoanalyst. That was not what she wanted. What she wanted was more from Joe, to whom she felt she had given so much.
She discovered she was singing in the shower.
‘Well, what did I do wrong
To make you stay away so long?’
The song had selected itself. To hell with it. She cut it off. Joe had let her down. What she really needed was a passionate affair. Fairly passionate. Men were so tiresome in so many ways. In her experience, they all complained. Except Joe, and that showed his lack of communication …
With similar non-productive thoughts, she climbed from the shower and stood under the infra-red lamp.
Later, in a towelling robe, she made herself a margarita out of the mini-bar, sat down, and began to write a letter to Joe on the Moonlite Motel notepaper. ‘Joe you bastard —’ she began. She sat there, thinking back down the years.
Finishing the drink, she got a second and began to ring around.
She phoned home, got her own voice on the answerphone, slammed off. Rang through to Bodenland Enterprises, spoke to Waldgrave. No one had heard from Joe. Rang Larry’s number. No answer. In boredom, she rang her sister Carrie in Paris, France.
‘We’re in bed, for God’s sake. What do you want?’ came Carrie’s shrill voice, a voice remembered from childhood.
Mina explained.
‘Joe always was crazy,’ Carrie said. ‘Junk him like I told you, Minnie. Take my advice. He’s worth his weight in alimony. This is one more suicidal episode you can do without.’
Hearing from her sister the very words she had just been formulating herself, Mina fell into a rage.
‘I guess I know Joe light years better than you, Carrie, and suicidal he is not. Brave, yes, suicidal, no. He just believes he leads an enchanted life and nothing can harm him.’
‘Try divorce and see what that does.’
‘He was unwanted and rejected as a small kid. He needs me and I’m not prepared to do the dirty on him now. His whole career is dedicated to the pursuit of power and adventure and notoriety – well, it’s an antidote to the early misery he went through. I understand that.’
The distant voice said, ‘Sounds like you have been talking to his shrink.’
Mina looked up, momentarily distracted by something fluttering at the window. It was late for a bird. The dark was closing swiftly in.
‘His new shrink is real good. Joe is basically a depressive, like many famous men in history, Goethe, Luther, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill – I forget who else. He has enormous vitality, and he fends off a basic melancholia with constant activity. I have to live with it, he classifies out as a depressive.’
‘Sounds like you should chuck Joe and marry the shrink. A real smart talker.’
Mina thought of Carrie’s empty-headed woman-chasing husband, Adolphe. She decided to make no comment on that score.
‘One thing Joe has which I have, and I like. A little fantasy-world of mixed omnipotence and powerlessness which is very hard to crack, even for a smart shrink. I have the same component, God help me.’
‘For Pete’s sake, Mina, Adolphe says all American woman are the same. They believe —’
‘Oh, God, sorry, Carrie, I’ve got a bat in my room. I can’t take bats.’
She put the phone down and stood up, suddenly aware of how dark it was in the room. The Moonlite sign flashed outside in puce neon. And the bat hovered inside the window.
Something unnatural in its movements transfixed her. She stood there unmoving as the pallid outline of a man formed in the dusky air. The bat was gone and, in its place, a suave-looking man with black hair brushed back from his forehead, standing immaculate in evening dress.
Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement. ‘Did I live this moment before? Didn’t I see it in a movie? A dream … ?’
She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.
Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger’s eyes were fixed upon her – not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.
Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it.
This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.
‘Hi,’ she said.
He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.
‘Like a drink?’ she asked. ‘I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.’
‘Thanks, no,’ he said, advancing. ‘Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.’
‘I always knew it,’ Mina said.
Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence.
‘More goddamned trees,’ Bodenland exclaimed.
At least there was no swamp this time.
He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin,and slid open the door. After a moment, he stepped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.
These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. 1896, near London, England, according to the driver and the co-ordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought, Oh yes, Queen Victoria …
Well, the old Queen had a pretty little wood here. It seemed to represent all the normal things the time train, with its hideous freight, was not. He savoured the clear air with its scent of living things. He listened to the buzz of a bee and was pleased.
Seen from outside, the train when stationary was small, almost inconsiderable, no longer than a railroad boxcar. Its outside was studded and patterned with metal reinforcers; nothing was to be seen of the windows he knew existed inside. Somehow, the whole thing expanded in the relativism of the time quanta and contracted when stationary. He stared at it with admiration and curiosity, saying to himself, ‘I’m going to get this box of tricks back to my own time and figure it all out. There’s power beyond the dreams of avarice here.’
As he stood there in a reverie, it seemed to him that a shrouded female figure drifted like a leaf from the train and disappeared. Immediately, the wood seemed a less friendly place, darker too.
He shivered. Strange anxieties passed through his mind. The isolation in which, through his own reckless actions, he found himself, closed in about him. Although he had always believed himself to have a firm grip on sanity – was not the world of science sanity’s loftiest bastion? – the nightmare events on the train caused him to wonder. Had that creature pinned to the torture-bench been merely a disordered phase of sadistic imagining?
He forced himself to get back into the train and to search it.
It had contracted like a concertina. In no way was it possible to enter any of the compartments, now squeezed shut like closed eyes. He listened for crying but heard nothing. The very stillness was a substance, lowering to the spirits.
‘Shit,’ he said, and stared out into the wood. They had come millions of years to be in this place and he strained his ears as if to listen to the sound of centuries. ‘We’d better find out where the hell we are,’ he said aloud. ‘And I need to eat. Not one bite did I have through the whole Cretaceous …’
He shook himself into action.
Hoisting