The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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afternoon, during this confused walk, as he knew. Ahead a big blind wall. The damp smudged crowded city, matured to the brown nearest black, gave off this rich aura of possibilities, which Brasher clearly was not getting. Charteris had glimpsed the world-plan, the tides of the future, carried with them sailor-fashion, was not so much superior to as remote from the dogged Brasher and Brasher’s pale-thighed wife, Angelina, flocking on a parallel tide-race. Many alternatives; that was what he would say when next he addressed the crowds. Power was growing in him; he stood back modest and amazed to see it and recognise its sanctity like his father had. Brasher grabbed his wet coat and waved a fist in his face, an empty violent man saying ‘I ought to kill you!’ Traffic roared by them, vehicles driven by drivers seeing visions, on something called Inner Relief Road.
The irrelevant fist in his face; teeth in close detail; in his head, the next oration. You people – you midland people are special, chosen. I have come from the south of Italy from the Balkans to tell you so. The roads are built, we die on them and live by them, neural paths made actual. The Midlands of England is a special region; you must rise and lead Europe. Start a new probability. Less blankly put than that, but the ripeness of the moment would provide the right words, and there would be a song, Charteris we cry! He could hear it although it lay still coiled in an inner ear. Not lead but deliver Europe. Europe is laid low by the psychedelic bombs; even neutral France cannot help, because France clings to old nationalist values. I was an empty man, a materialist, failed Communist, waiting for this time. You have the alternatives now to wake yourselves and kill the old serpent.
You can think in new multi-value logics, because that is the pattern of your environment. The fist swung at him. The entire sluggish motion of man aiming it. Angeline’s face was taking in the future, traffic-framed, dark of hair, immanent, luminous, freight-ful. It seemed to me I was travelling aimlessly until I got here stone cold from hotter beds too young father I called you from that flooded damned bank.
‘I was just passing through on my way to Scotland, belting up the motorway in expedition. But I stopped here because of premonitions shy as goldfish thought. Think in fuzzy sets. There is no either-or black-white dichotomy any more. Only a spectrum of partiallys. Live by this, as I do – you will win. We have to think new. Find more directions make them. It’s easy in this partially country.’
But Brasher was hitting him. World of movement lymphatic bursting. He looked at the fist, saw all its highways powerlines and tensions as Brasher had never seen it, fist less human than many natural features of the man-formed landscape in this wonderful traffic-tormented area. A fist struck him on the jaw. Colliding systems shock lost all loot.
Even in this extreme situation, Charteris thought, multivalue logic is the Way. I am choosing something between being hit and not being hit; I am not being hit very much.
He heard Angeline screaming to her husband to stop. She seemed not to have been affected by the PCA Bombs, carrying her own neutrality through the brief nothing hours of the Acid Head War. But it was difficult to tell; bells rang even when classrooms looked empty or birds startled from cover. Charteris had a theory that women were less affected than men. Stridulations of low tone. He would be glad to measure Angeline’s rhythm but disliked her screaming now. Bombardment of images, linked to her scream – theory of recurrence? – especially toads and the new animal in the dead trees at home.
There was a way to stop her screaming without committing oneself to asking her to cease. Charteris clutched at Brasher’s ancient blue coat, just as the older wattled man was about to land another blow. The great wheeling scab of metropolis. Behind Brasher, on the other side of Inner Relief, lay an old building made of the drab ginger stone of Leicestershire, to which a modern glass-and-steel porch had been tacked. A woman was watering a potted plant in the porch. All was distinct to Charteris while he pulled Brasher forward and then heaved him backward into Inner Relief little watering can of copper she had.
The lorry coming from the north swerved out to avoid. The old Cortina blazing along towards it spun across the narrow verge, swept away lady’s glass-and-steel porch, copper can gone like that, and was itself hit by a post office van which had swerved to avoid the lorry. The lorry still bucking across the road hit another oncoming car which could not stop in time. The world’s noise on granite. Another vehicle its Brakes squealing ran into the wall within feet of where Charteris and Angeline stood, and crumpled to a prearranged device too quickly, cicatrices chirping open. A series of photographs, potentialities multiplying or cancelling, machines as bulls herded.
‘So many alternatives,’ Charteris said wonderingly. He was interested to see that Brasher had disappeared, bits of him distributed somewhere among the wreckage. He remembered the multiple crash on the autostrada near Milano. Or was it a true memory? Was the Milano crash merely a phantasm of a mind already on the swerge of delision or some kind of dream-play-back awry both the crashes the same crash or another his own predestination already in the furniture maybe wrong delivery wrong addrents from the dreamvelope where that stamping grind unsorted the commutations of the night’s post orifices or who knew who was in serge of what when on.
At least the illusion was strong on particularity with the photograves unblurred. If it happened or not or would or did it on this internal recurrence was a jolt, sparky as all algebra, and he saw a tremendous rightness in the blossom of the implact and shapes of wreckage; it was like a marvellous – he said it to the girl, ‘It is like a marvellous complex work of sculpture, where to the rigorous manformed shapes is added chance. Wider theory of numbers aids decimation. The art of the fortuitous.’
She was green and drab, swaying on her heels. He tried looking closely at the aesthetic effect of this colour-change, and recalled from somewhere in his being a sense of pity like a serpentstir. She was hurt, shocked, although he saw a better future for her. He must perform a definite action of some sort: remove her from the scene and the blood-metal steaming.
She went unprotestingly with him.
‘I think Charteris is a saint. He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,’ Army Burton said.
‘Wide to whatever comes along,’ Banjo Burton said. ‘Full of loot.’
‘He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,’ Robbins said, thinking it over. Robbins was a faded nineteen, the field of his hair unharvested; he was the eterminal art student; his psychedelic-disposed personality had disintegrated under the efflict of being surrandied by add heads, although not personally caught by the chemicals of Arab design.
They sat in an old room dark bodies curtains drawn tight and light a blur on the papered walls.
Outside in the Loughborough streets night and day kept to the dialogue. Small dogs ran between stone seams.
Army used his uniform as barracks. Banjo had been a third-yearer, had turned agent, ran the pop group, the Escalation, operated various happenings; he had run Robbins as a saint with some reward, until Robbins had deflated one morning into the role of disciple cold cracked lips on the blue doorstep. They all lived with a couple of moronic girls in old housing in the middle of tumbletown, overlooking the square high moronic rear of F. W. Woolworth’s. All round the town waited new buildings designed to cope with hypothetical fast-growing population; but conflicting eddies of society had sent people hearing echoes in each other’s rooms gravitating towards the old core. The straggle of universities and technical colleges stood in marshy fields. It was February.
‘Well, he spoke with great success in Leicester,’ Burton said, ‘made them believe in a sex-style.’
‘Ay, he did that. Mind you, I was a success in Leicester,’ Robbins said, ‘Apathy’s like bricks there to build yellow chapels on some fields you care to name.’
‘Don’t run down Leicester,’ Greta squeaked. ‘I came from there. At least, my uncle did the one with the dancing cat I told you about ate the goldfish. Did I ever tell you my Dad was a Risparian? An Early Risparian. My Mum would not join. She only likes things.’
Burton dismissed all reminiscence with a sweep of his hand. He lit a reefer and said, ‘We are going to have a crusade, burn trails, make a sparky party of our Charter-flightboy, really roll. Play the noise-game.’
‘Who’s