Cryptozoic! (3 page)
Authors: Brian Aldiss
They stopped in a sheltered dell. They clung to each other. Eagerly,
they glared into each other's faces in the waning light. He could not
remember how long they stood like that, or what they said -- except for
one remark of hers: "We're millions of years from our birth -- we ought
to be free to do it, oughtn't we?"
What had he answered -- anything she might find valuable? Anything he
could give? He recalled only how he had thrown her down, pulled off
her swashbuckling boots, helped her drag off her trousers, torn his own
away from him. She behaved as if she had been switched on to overdrive,
was immediately absolutely and irresistibly ready for him, seized him
strongly.
He recalled after, obsessively, over and over, the particular gesture
with which she had raised one bent leg to admit him to her embrace,
and his surprise and his gratitude to find that up and down the howling
gulf of centuries there was this sweet hole to go to.
While they were resting, they heard the motor bikes roaring like distant
thwarted animals. It merely roused them to a repetition of love.
"You smell so damned sweet! You're beautiful!" His words reminded him
of how dressed they still were, so that he pushed her shirt and tunic
up in order to kiss her nipples.
"We should be as naked as savages. . . . We are savages, aren't we, Bush?"
"Thank God, yes. You've no idea how far from the savage I am usually.
Mother-dominated, full of doubts and fears. Not like your Lenny!"
"Him? He's a nut case! He's scared really -- scared of all this . . ."
"Of loving, you mean? Or of the space-time world?"
"That, yes. He's scared of everything underneath. His old man used to
beat him up."
Their faces were close together. They were fainter than the dusk gathering
about them, sinking forever into the complexities of their own minds.
"I'm afraid of him. Or I was when you lot first appeared. I thought
they'd beat me up! It's all very well -- what's the matter, Ann?"
She sat up and began to pull her tunic down. "Got a fag? I didn't come here
to hear how chicken you were. Bugger all that! You men are all the same --
all got something wrong with you!"
"We're not all the same, not by a long chalk! But now's a time to talk.
I haven't talked intimately to anyone for months. I've been locked up in
silence. And nothing to touch. . . . You get pursued by phantoms. I really
ought to get back to 2090 to see my mother, but I'll be in trouble when
I turn up. . . . It's so long since I screwed a girl honest, I began to
imagine I was going queer or something."
"What makes you say that?" she asked tartly.
"The desire to be honest while I can. That's a luxury, isn't it?"
"Well, lay off, if you don't mind! I don't go slobbering all over you,
do I, with a lot of nonsense? I didn't come with you for that."
A moment before, Bush had felt nothing but love for her. Now he was
overwhelmed by anger. He flung her garments at her.
"Put your pants on and hop off back to your yobbo boy friend if you feel
like that about it! Why did you follow me in the first place?"
She put a hand on his arm, immune from his anger. "I made a mistake.
I thought you might be a bit different." She blew smoke at him.
"Don't worry, I enjoyed the mistake. You're quite good at it, even if you
are queer!"
He jumped up, pulling on his trousers without dignity, raging -- against
himself more than against Ann. He turned, and Lenny was outlined against
the lemon sky. Mastering himself, he zipped himself up and stood his ground.
Lenny had also stopped. He turned his head and called to the other tershers,
"He's up here!"
"Come and get me if you want me!" Bush said. He was frightened; if they
broke his fingers he might never be able to work properly again. Or blinded
him. There weren't any police patrols here; they could do what they
liked with him; they had all the wide Devonian to bash him up in.
Then he recalled what Ann had said; Lenny was scared too.
He went slowly forward. Lenny had a tool of some kind, a spanner,
in his hand. "I'm going to get you, Bush!" he said, glancing over his
shoulder to see that the others were supporting him. Bush jumped on him,
got his arms round him, swung him savagely. The tersher was unexpectedly
light. He staggered as Bush let him go. As he brought up the spanner,
Bush hit him in the face, then stepped back as if to leave it at that.
"Hit him again!" Ann called.
He hit Lenny again. Lenny kicked him on the kneecap. He fell, grabbed
Lenny's legs, and pulled him down too. Lenny raised the spanner again,
Bush grabbed his wrist, and they rolled over, struggling. At last
Bush got his knee in the other's crotch, and the tersher gave up the
fight. Panting, Bush got to his feet, clasping his kneecap. The other
four boys of the gang were lined up near him.
"Who's next?" he asked. When they showed no inclination to move, he pointed
at their leader. "Get him up! Get him out of here!"
Feebly, they moved to obey. One of them said sullenly, "You're just a bully!
We didn't do you no harm. Ann's Lenny's girl."
The wish to fight left him. From their point of view, they were perfectly
correct in looking at it that way. True, their manner from the start had
offended him, but possibly they were less responsible for that than he
had allowed.
"I'm off," he announced. "Lenny can keep his girl!"
It was time to mind again. He'd get to a safe place and then he would mind
to another time and space. He picked his way into the hills, looking
back frequently to see they were not following him. After a while,
he heard their motor bikes, was aware of the loneliness of the sound,
turned to watch their lasered lights vanish down the strand. The Dark
Woman was phantasmally there; he watched the disappearing lights through
her form. He had no doubt that she was on duty, and that she came from
some remote future of his own. Through the sockets of her eyes, the
stars of Boötes glistened.
There was a noise near at hand, indicating someone in his own continuum,
sandwiched with him between all the rest of time. The girl was following
him.
"Wouldn't your yobbo boy friend have you back?"
"Don't be like that, Bush! I want to talk to you."
"O God!" He took her arm, pulled her through the darkness. At least there
were no obstacles to trip over on a generalized floor. Without saying
a word more to each other, they climbed up to his tent and crawled in.
Chapter 2
UP THE ENTROPY SLOPE
When he woke, she was gone.
He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much
he cared. He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable
with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one.
He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of
noncommunication.
He washed and dressed and climbed outside. Of Ann there was no sign.
But of course in mind nobody left any tracks behind, so that the vivid
green vegetation on every side was untrampled, although Bush had walked
through it a dozen times on his way to doing sentry duty with the
lobe fins.
The sun shone. Its great untiring furnace poured down its warmth on a world
in which the coal deposits had yet to be laid in memory of a vintage period
of its combustion. Bush had a headache.
For a while, he stood there scratching himself, wondering what had caused it:
the excitements of the day before, or the relentless pressure of the empty
eons. He decided it was the latter. Nobody could be said really to live
in these vacant centuries; he and the tershers and the rest traveled back
here, but their relationship to the actual Devonian was merely tentative.
Man had conquered passing time; at least, the intellects at the Wenlock
Institute had -- but since passing time was no more than a tic (tick?)
of Homo sapiens, the universe remained unmoved by the accomplishment.
"Are you going to do a groupage of me?"
Bush turned. The girl was standing above him, some feet away. Because the
dimension change between them and the world filtered out light, she appeared
dark and wraith-like. He could hardly see her face; mind-travel had reduced
them all to spectres, even to each other.
"I thought you'd gone back to your friends!"
Ann came down to him. She was swinging her air-leaker carelessly. With
her tunic open and her hair uncombed, she looked more of a vagabond than
ever. Feeling his biceps, she said, "Did you
hope
I'd gone back
or
fear
I'd gone back?"
He frowned at her, trying to make out what she was really like. Human
relations exhausted him; perhaps that was why he had hung about here so
long, back in the vacuum of exhausted time.
"I can't make you out, girl. No offense. It's like looking through two
thicknesses of glass. Nobody ever turns out to be what they seem."
She dropped her sharp look and scrutinized him almost sympathetically.
"What's bugging you, sweetie? Something deep, isn't it?"
Her sympathy seemed to open up a wound. "I couldn't begin to tell you.
Things are so involved in my head. It's all a muddle."
"Tell, if it'll make you feel better. I've got all the Devonian in
the world!"
He shook his head. "What your girl friend Josie said yesterday. That this
should be the end of the world rather than the beginning. I could only get
myself disentangled if that would happen, if I could start my life again."
Ann laughed. "Back to the womb, eh?"
He realized he did not feel well. That would have to be reported to the
Institute; you could lose your mind back in these damned silent mazes.
He could not reply to Ann, or face up to her revolting suggestion. Sighing
heavily, he went over to his tent and pulled the cord to let it deflate.
It collapsed in a series of shudders; he never cared to watch the process,
but now some chattering thing inside him gave a commentary on it, likening
it to a disappointed womb from which a lucky child had managed to escape.
Stoically, he folded up the tent and put it away. With the girl standing
watching him, he drew out his rations and made his simple preparations
for breakfast. Mind-travelers carried a basic food kit, frugal in the
extreme but easy to deal with. He had replenished his stores several times
from other minders who were surfacing -- returning to their present --
early because they could not stand the silences, and from a friend of
his who ran a small store in the Jurassic.
As his pan of beef essence steamed, he raised his eyes until they met
the girl's and spoke again to her.
"Care to join me before you clear off?"
"Since you ask me so graciously . . ." She sat down by him, sprawling with
legs apart, smiling at him -- grateful even for my miserable company,
Bush thought.
"I didn't mean to upset you, Bush! You're as touchy as Stein."
"Who's Stein?"
"The old guy -- the one with the gang. You know -- dyed hair -- you spoke
to him. He shook your hand."
"Oh, yes. Stein? How did he fall in with you and Lenny?"
"He was going to be beaten up or something and Lenny and the boys saved him.
He's terribly nervous. You know, when we first saw you, he said you might
be a spy. He's from 2093 and he says things are bad there."
Bush had no wish to think about the twenty-nineties and the dreary world
in which his parents lived. He said, "Lenny has his good side, then?"
She nodded, but was pursuing her own line of thought.
"Stein had me scared about mind-travel. Do you know, he said that Wenlock
might be all wrong about mind-travel, and that we might not really be here
at all, or something like that? He said there was something sinister about
the undermind, and nobody understood it yet, despite all the claims of the
Wenlock Institute."
"Well, it's all new as yet. The undermind was only first developed as a
concept in 2073, and the first mind-travel wasn't till two years later,
so there may be more to discover, although it's difficult to see what
it might be. What does Stein know about it, anyway?"
"Maybe he was just sounding off, trying to impress me."
"Did you let him -- I mean, did he lie with you?"
"Jealous?" She grinned challengingly.
"What do you want me to say?" They stared at each other. Through the dirty
pane of her face, he saw life shine. He reached forward and kissed her.
She lifted the boiling beef essence off his tiny stove and said, "I think
I've about had the Devonian Period. How about moving on to the Jurassic
with me?"
"Aren't Lenny and Co. going there?"
"So what? There's forty-six million years of it . . ."
"Touché. What do you want to do there? See the carnivores mate?"
She gave him a sly look. "We could watch 'em together." Instantly,
he was excited. He slid a hand across her buckskin thigh.
"I'll come with you." As they drank their essence, he was jeering at himself
for getting mixed up with the girl; she was confused and could only upset
his mental balance. It was true she was not unintelligent and a good lay,
but he had never been satisfied to accept anyone else by compartments;
her whole self did not seem accessible. And perhaps he was not the right
person to help her render all of her personality accessible.
She snuggled against him. "I need someone to mind-travel with. I'd be
frightened to let go on my own. My mother wouldn't mind-travel to save her
life! People of that generation will never take to it, I suppose. Wow,
I wish we could mind back just a little way -- you know, one generation
-- because I'd so like to see my old man courting my mother and making
love to her. I bet they made a proper muck-up of it, just as they did
of anything else!"
When he said nothing, she nudged him. "Well, go on, say something!
Wouldn't you like to see your parents at it? You aren't as stuffy as
you make out, Bush, are you? You'd love it!"
"Ann, you just don't realize the horror of what you are saying!"
"Come on, you'd like it too!"
Bush shook his head. "I have enough data on my parents without the need for
that sort of thing! But I suppose yours is the majority view. Dr. Wenlock
ran a questionnaire at the Institute about a decade ago -- I mean in 2080
-- which showed how strong incest-motivation is in mind-travelers. It's the
force behind the predisposition to look back. The findings coincide with
the old psychoanalytical view of human nature.
they glared into each other's faces in the waning light. He could not
remember how long they stood like that, or what they said -- except for
one remark of hers: "We're millions of years from our birth -- we ought
to be free to do it, oughtn't we?"
What had he answered -- anything she might find valuable? Anything he
could give? He recalled only how he had thrown her down, pulled off
her swashbuckling boots, helped her drag off her trousers, torn his own
away from him. She behaved as if she had been switched on to overdrive,
was immediately absolutely and irresistibly ready for him, seized him
strongly.
He recalled after, obsessively, over and over, the particular gesture
with which she had raised one bent leg to admit him to her embrace,
and his surprise and his gratitude to find that up and down the howling
gulf of centuries there was this sweet hole to go to.
While they were resting, they heard the motor bikes roaring like distant
thwarted animals. It merely roused them to a repetition of love.
"You smell so damned sweet! You're beautiful!" His words reminded him
of how dressed they still were, so that he pushed her shirt and tunic
up in order to kiss her nipples.
"We should be as naked as savages. . . . We are savages, aren't we, Bush?"
"Thank God, yes. You've no idea how far from the savage I am usually.
Mother-dominated, full of doubts and fears. Not like your Lenny!"
"Him? He's a nut case! He's scared really -- scared of all this . . ."
"Of loving, you mean? Or of the space-time world?"
"That, yes. He's scared of everything underneath. His old man used to
beat him up."
Their faces were close together. They were fainter than the dusk gathering
about them, sinking forever into the complexities of their own minds.
"I'm afraid of him. Or I was when you lot first appeared. I thought
they'd beat me up! It's all very well -- what's the matter, Ann?"
She sat up and began to pull her tunic down. "Got a fag? I didn't come here
to hear how chicken you were. Bugger all that! You men are all the same --
all got something wrong with you!"
"We're not all the same, not by a long chalk! But now's a time to talk.
I haven't talked intimately to anyone for months. I've been locked up in
silence. And nothing to touch. . . . You get pursued by phantoms. I really
ought to get back to 2090 to see my mother, but I'll be in trouble when
I turn up. . . . It's so long since I screwed a girl honest, I began to
imagine I was going queer or something."
"What makes you say that?" she asked tartly.
"The desire to be honest while I can. That's a luxury, isn't it?"
"Well, lay off, if you don't mind! I don't go slobbering all over you,
do I, with a lot of nonsense? I didn't come with you for that."
A moment before, Bush had felt nothing but love for her. Now he was
overwhelmed by anger. He flung her garments at her.
"Put your pants on and hop off back to your yobbo boy friend if you feel
like that about it! Why did you follow me in the first place?"
She put a hand on his arm, immune from his anger. "I made a mistake.
I thought you might be a bit different." She blew smoke at him.
"Don't worry, I enjoyed the mistake. You're quite good at it, even if you
are queer!"
He jumped up, pulling on his trousers without dignity, raging -- against
himself more than against Ann. He turned, and Lenny was outlined against
the lemon sky. Mastering himself, he zipped himself up and stood his ground.
Lenny had also stopped. He turned his head and called to the other tershers,
"He's up here!"
"Come and get me if you want me!" Bush said. He was frightened; if they
broke his fingers he might never be able to work properly again. Or blinded
him. There weren't any police patrols here; they could do what they
liked with him; they had all the wide Devonian to bash him up in.
Then he recalled what Ann had said; Lenny was scared too.
He went slowly forward. Lenny had a tool of some kind, a spanner,
in his hand. "I'm going to get you, Bush!" he said, glancing over his
shoulder to see that the others were supporting him. Bush jumped on him,
got his arms round him, swung him savagely. The tersher was unexpectedly
light. He staggered as Bush let him go. As he brought up the spanner,
Bush hit him in the face, then stepped back as if to leave it at that.
"Hit him again!" Ann called.
He hit Lenny again. Lenny kicked him on the kneecap. He fell, grabbed
Lenny's legs, and pulled him down too. Lenny raised the spanner again,
Bush grabbed his wrist, and they rolled over, struggling. At last
Bush got his knee in the other's crotch, and the tersher gave up the
fight. Panting, Bush got to his feet, clasping his kneecap. The other
four boys of the gang were lined up near him.
"Who's next?" he asked. When they showed no inclination to move, he pointed
at their leader. "Get him up! Get him out of here!"
Feebly, they moved to obey. One of them said sullenly, "You're just a bully!
We didn't do you no harm. Ann's Lenny's girl."
The wish to fight left him. From their point of view, they were perfectly
correct in looking at it that way. True, their manner from the start had
offended him, but possibly they were less responsible for that than he
had allowed.
"I'm off," he announced. "Lenny can keep his girl!"
It was time to mind again. He'd get to a safe place and then he would mind
to another time and space. He picked his way into the hills, looking
back frequently to see they were not following him. After a while,
he heard their motor bikes, was aware of the loneliness of the sound,
turned to watch their lasered lights vanish down the strand. The Dark
Woman was phantasmally there; he watched the disappearing lights through
her form. He had no doubt that she was on duty, and that she came from
some remote future of his own. Through the sockets of her eyes, the
stars of Boötes glistened.
There was a noise near at hand, indicating someone in his own continuum,
sandwiched with him between all the rest of time. The girl was following
him.
"Wouldn't your yobbo boy friend have you back?"
"Don't be like that, Bush! I want to talk to you."
"O God!" He took her arm, pulled her through the darkness. At least there
were no obstacles to trip over on a generalized floor. Without saying
a word more to each other, they climbed up to his tent and crawled in.
Chapter 2
UP THE ENTROPY SLOPE
When he woke, she was gone.
He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much
he cared. He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable
with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one.
He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of
noncommunication.
He washed and dressed and climbed outside. Of Ann there was no sign.
But of course in mind nobody left any tracks behind, so that the vivid
green vegetation on every side was untrampled, although Bush had walked
through it a dozen times on his way to doing sentry duty with the
lobe fins.
The sun shone. Its great untiring furnace poured down its warmth on a world
in which the coal deposits had yet to be laid in memory of a vintage period
of its combustion. Bush had a headache.
For a while, he stood there scratching himself, wondering what had caused it:
the excitements of the day before, or the relentless pressure of the empty
eons. He decided it was the latter. Nobody could be said really to live
in these vacant centuries; he and the tershers and the rest traveled back
here, but their relationship to the actual Devonian was merely tentative.
Man had conquered passing time; at least, the intellects at the Wenlock
Institute had -- but since passing time was no more than a tic (tick?)
of Homo sapiens, the universe remained unmoved by the accomplishment.
"Are you going to do a groupage of me?"
Bush turned. The girl was standing above him, some feet away. Because the
dimension change between them and the world filtered out light, she appeared
dark and wraith-like. He could hardly see her face; mind-travel had reduced
them all to spectres, even to each other.
"I thought you'd gone back to your friends!"
Ann came down to him. She was swinging her air-leaker carelessly. With
her tunic open and her hair uncombed, she looked more of a vagabond than
ever. Feeling his biceps, she said, "Did you
hope
I'd gone back
or
fear
I'd gone back?"
He frowned at her, trying to make out what she was really like. Human
relations exhausted him; perhaps that was why he had hung about here so
long, back in the vacuum of exhausted time.
"I can't make you out, girl. No offense. It's like looking through two
thicknesses of glass. Nobody ever turns out to be what they seem."
She dropped her sharp look and scrutinized him almost sympathetically.
"What's bugging you, sweetie? Something deep, isn't it?"
Her sympathy seemed to open up a wound. "I couldn't begin to tell you.
Things are so involved in my head. It's all a muddle."
"Tell, if it'll make you feel better. I've got all the Devonian in
the world!"
He shook his head. "What your girl friend Josie said yesterday. That this
should be the end of the world rather than the beginning. I could only get
myself disentangled if that would happen, if I could start my life again."
Ann laughed. "Back to the womb, eh?"
He realized he did not feel well. That would have to be reported to the
Institute; you could lose your mind back in these damned silent mazes.
He could not reply to Ann, or face up to her revolting suggestion. Sighing
heavily, he went over to his tent and pulled the cord to let it deflate.
It collapsed in a series of shudders; he never cared to watch the process,
but now some chattering thing inside him gave a commentary on it, likening
it to a disappointed womb from which a lucky child had managed to escape.
Stoically, he folded up the tent and put it away. With the girl standing
watching him, he drew out his rations and made his simple preparations
for breakfast. Mind-travelers carried a basic food kit, frugal in the
extreme but easy to deal with. He had replenished his stores several times
from other minders who were surfacing -- returning to their present --
early because they could not stand the silences, and from a friend of
his who ran a small store in the Jurassic.
As his pan of beef essence steamed, he raised his eyes until they met
the girl's and spoke again to her.
"Care to join me before you clear off?"
"Since you ask me so graciously . . ." She sat down by him, sprawling with
legs apart, smiling at him -- grateful even for my miserable company,
Bush thought.
"I didn't mean to upset you, Bush! You're as touchy as Stein."
"Who's Stein?"
"The old guy -- the one with the gang. You know -- dyed hair -- you spoke
to him. He shook your hand."
"Oh, yes. Stein? How did he fall in with you and Lenny?"
"He was going to be beaten up or something and Lenny and the boys saved him.
He's terribly nervous. You know, when we first saw you, he said you might
be a spy. He's from 2093 and he says things are bad there."
Bush had no wish to think about the twenty-nineties and the dreary world
in which his parents lived. He said, "Lenny has his good side, then?"
She nodded, but was pursuing her own line of thought.
"Stein had me scared about mind-travel. Do you know, he said that Wenlock
might be all wrong about mind-travel, and that we might not really be here
at all, or something like that? He said there was something sinister about
the undermind, and nobody understood it yet, despite all the claims of the
Wenlock Institute."
"Well, it's all new as yet. The undermind was only first developed as a
concept in 2073, and the first mind-travel wasn't till two years later,
so there may be more to discover, although it's difficult to see what
it might be. What does Stein know about it, anyway?"
"Maybe he was just sounding off, trying to impress me."
"Did you let him -- I mean, did he lie with you?"
"Jealous?" She grinned challengingly.
"What do you want me to say?" They stared at each other. Through the dirty
pane of her face, he saw life shine. He reached forward and kissed her.
She lifted the boiling beef essence off his tiny stove and said, "I think
I've about had the Devonian Period. How about moving on to the Jurassic
with me?"
"Aren't Lenny and Co. going there?"
"So what? There's forty-six million years of it . . ."
"Touché. What do you want to do there? See the carnivores mate?"
She gave him a sly look. "We could watch 'em together." Instantly,
he was excited. He slid a hand across her buckskin thigh.
"I'll come with you." As they drank their essence, he was jeering at himself
for getting mixed up with the girl; she was confused and could only upset
his mental balance. It was true she was not unintelligent and a good lay,
but he had never been satisfied to accept anyone else by compartments;
her whole self did not seem accessible. And perhaps he was not the right
person to help her render all of her personality accessible.
She snuggled against him. "I need someone to mind-travel with. I'd be
frightened to let go on my own. My mother wouldn't mind-travel to save her
life! People of that generation will never take to it, I suppose. Wow,
I wish we could mind back just a little way -- you know, one generation
-- because I'd so like to see my old man courting my mother and making
love to her. I bet they made a proper muck-up of it, just as they did
of anything else!"
When he said nothing, she nudged him. "Well, go on, say something!
Wouldn't you like to see your parents at it? You aren't as stuffy as
you make out, Bush, are you? You'd love it!"
"Ann, you just don't realize the horror of what you are saying!"
"Come on, you'd like it too!"
Bush shook his head. "I have enough data on my parents without the need for
that sort of thing! But I suppose yours is the majority view. Dr. Wenlock
ran a questionnaire at the Institute about a decade ago -- I mean in 2080
-- which showed how strong incest-motivation is in mind-travelers. It's the
force behind the predisposition to look back. The findings coincide with
the old psychoanalytical view of human nature.
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