Brian W. Aldiss
Brian Aldiss last appeared in New Writings in SF in 1964. His talents which have recently been so successfully displayed to a wider public here dazzlingly create a distorting mirror which reflects in an off-centre and out-of-focus reality the way things might have been had they not been as they are—and by things we are at liberty to imagine existence, life, causality, love and even science fiction.
* * * *
Introduction
Here are three of my Enigmas. Consider them as paintings, as Tiepolo’s engravings crossed with de Chirico’s canvases.
I have written other Enigmas and shall write more. When I have written fifty, the best of them can be collected and published as a book.
Consider that statement. Its author appears to operate securely within well-defined parameters; his chart of his known world plainly contains at least a portion of the future. One would not suspect from the statement that the world in which he operates is full of ambiguities, of alternatives that open and close like sliding doors.
Yet so it is. The author of the statement has chosen to make assumptions. He operates on the basis of those assumptions just as navigators of old operated on the assumption that the Pole Star was fixed. That assumption worked, although it was totally erroneous—the Pole Star travels millions of miles a year on its ineluctable errands. Which was something the ancient navigators could never guess.
So with these other assumptions. They are probably incorrect in ways we cannot attempt to understand. And that is the assumption which underlies the Enigmas: that the world is a stage on which we, the players, have no adequate means of determining the nature of the drama in which we enact our bit parts—despite various dogmatic assertions on the subject from Religion or Science.
* * * *
I. The Enigma of Her Voyage
As we sat there, bound and helpless, a music of unknown kind moved through the ship towards us. Captain Callard walked over to me and stood in the Aptorex position, smiling as required.
‘Your new planet is in sight, Lemmor,’ she said. ‘Soon we shall seek the answer to all your internal enigmas. How do you plead at this continuous moment of cerebral time?’
‘I have told you, I may now de-husband myself when you please,’ I answered. ‘Pleasuring is not the all of my life. Things have been achieved.’
‘We shall see,’ she said absently. Somewhere an alarm was pleading in a low and intense song, filling the cabin air with ultra-violet.
Callard moved over to the keyboards, depressing switches. Beyond the vision-screens swam my enigma planet which I had named Benecundria. Our ship had travelled across many sound years—385 million sound years—at many multiples of sound-speed per second, increasing mass as it accelerated, until our mass had been within 0.981 of the universe itself. What large thoughts we had thought then, galaxy-encompassed! Now, under deceleration, the flow of our consciousness returned to us, foaming back down the sound-years from their near infinite journey, chilling us with news of dusty epochs of our being, shrinking us. Soon we would be on Benecundria, human-sized once more, vulnerable to all that was.
We could never return. Experience was a barrier technology could never overcome. The conceptual universe had captured us.
‘Five minutes,’ Callard said, ‘In density, Lemmor!’
I obeyed. When I awoke, our great ship was down. All the Investigators were being released, prepared to walk out on Benecundria’s ‘surface’. Only I, as creator of the enigma, must remain aboard. As each Investigator passed me, she bowed and smiled.
They filed out on to Benecundria, to stand on that unending slope I had devised. Even the Husbands would be alert.
At one of the ports I stood, feeling a sadness that what had been private was now public, part of the endless domain of extending human sensuous experience. My time was short now, my mission accomplished.
The Investigators were now caught in the ultra-mundane perspectives of my conception. Some of them were gesticulating in an attempt to amplify body-image.
For me, only one thing was left. I strode to the interior of the ship along the moving walkway. I entered the room of the Husbands.
There were some ten thousand of them in our reservoir, swimming like young frogs, frog-sized in the vat of lubricants and nutrients. Lying on a couch, I released my personal Husband from the secret recesses of my body, cupping him in my hands.
I took him over to the reservoir, let him slip into the fluids, watched him flipping down into the depths until he was lost among the little crowding hairless bodies.
Faintness was overwhelming me. The song was back. Soon I would be part of it. And my enigma—part of the greater enigma of human existence.
* * * *
II. I Ching, Who You?
While the next day was still blank with the mists of dawn, Thwarn descended and entered the window of the room where dinner had been held on the previous night. He waited as contained in his assumptions.
The air of the room was rich and heavy with the aroma of prawn, flesh, and rice, spiced with a tang of rotting fruit left in the discarded wine bowls.
The only girl Thwarn remembered was resting in one corner, among the greys where eternity started edging in. The arrangements and precisions of her face startled him anew. They gazed at one another across the spoiled bowls and soiled cloths. She spoke first.
‘Procedures for a Webi Hexagram?’
That loved and dreaded warmth was stealing over him.
‘I have a demarcation in Wandrei. Could we agree on that?’
She hesitated, then came forward, nodding her head slightly.
Without touching, they cleared a space on the largest table. Thwarn drew feathers and laid them on the table. He was intensely aware of her gaze, fixed like his on the configuration of the feathers as they lay, light as breath, heavy as fate, this way and that, decreeing the day till daylight died.
Feathers ruled the world.
‘Can you dispute it—fire-bird with tail immersed and two spaces in the wood?’
‘But the tiger appears in the field...’
‘Yes,’ he agreed with relief. His interpretation of a tiger in Wandrei was ambiguous, but a time to proceed was indicated. He put his arms about her and kissed her on the lips. What had been a momentary intention became prolonged as her strength and youth moved through to him.
‘The fire-bird seems to be leaping up, but is still in the, deep,’ she said breathlessly, when they broke away. ‘Try Redistribution!’
With one long nail, he swirled the feathers, the two black, the three brown. Again they studied the juxtaposition. The mists remained beyond the window.
‘Carrion!’ she said eagerly. ‘And there the trigram for trees and mountains.’
He stared lovingly at her, drinking her gaze. ‘You spoke of the Webi Hexagram—in conjunction, this trigram could lead to a consequent inferiority.’
She hopped eagerly on to the table.
‘You don’t understand. Yesterday, too, the tiger appeared in the field. So I am encouraged to try and cross the great stream.’
They stared into one another’s eyes, stared at life inscrutable, stared at all possible alternatives.
‘Perhaps the minor regulations will be controlled by authority,’ he said quietly. Given good assumptions, he should discover who she was in a few days.
Thwarn stretched his wings for flight, ruffling ribbons on the rice-entrenched carcasses. Then he launched himself through the open window. His girl followed, out into the currents of dawn.
The two vulturine figures headed for the mountains of their hexagrams.
* * * *
III. The Great Chain of Being What?
Three distinct things happened, but in no sequence; time was squeezed from them, leaving them flat. They happened apart, but were instantaneous within the honeycombed frozen expanse of Wartlinger’s mind.
The first thing was: he was opening the door, saying to himself as he did so, ‘I will always be alien here, never able to take for granted the way doors open in this distant place, for this one betraying detail alone grinds at me continually.’
The detail was a small one. The lock and handle of the door were on the same side of the door as the hinges. The lock simply rendered the hinges inoperative; the handle, when twisted, activated springs which forced the door open, so that no muscular exertion was required by whoever or whatever passed through there. All perfectly simple. And normal. Normal here.
The second thing was: he was through the door and looking beyond, saying to himself, ‘However strange these people seem, there is a place for me among them. My Options are to get along with them or not.’
There were many people. They stood on the wild shore, endlessly active, working in groups or pairs. Many could be seen far out in the shallow estuarine waters, still working. Some were alone, practising poses or executing sarabands with arms above their heads. Most of them were engaged in unpacking huge boxes from which, amid much straw and other waste, they withdrew smaller boxes. Most of the available space was taken up by boxes, giving it the appearance of a vast disorderly camp-site. Some of the boxes lay in the water, sinking by degrees.
Among the litter were notices, no calculating in public. it is inaccessible to warp on the glass, penury : no spots, questions being enacted: do not distribute. police do not bend. this side out.
Wartlinger was among the people. Most of them had arms and legs. Some of these limbs were in good supply, though often they were rudely fashioned from whatever material was easily available. Their bodies also appeared to be constructed of cannibalised spare parts. Their heads were generally shaped like lemons, the surfaces made from some plain material like calico. On the calico was painted or printed their expression. Most of the expressions were blank; others were smiles or frowns or moues of astonishment, determination or ferocity, crudely indicated.
The movements and gestures of the people appeared uncertain and hasty, though there was no sign that they were aware of any impediment. Most of them seemed positively to enjoy the proximity of their own kind.
Wartlinger observed that some of the boxes they were unpacking contained fresh people, who leaped to life as soon as they were uncovered. The boxes were arriving over the water, presumably washed in by a slight tide. The water had a hard unhealthy look to it, as if made of countless myriads of microscopic plastic balls.
The third thing was: the closure of the door in some fashion brought darkness everywhere. To Wartlinger this darkness seemed, like the water, artificial in a way not easily definable, as if it too were made from endless minute black balls. It felt gritty against his pupils. As he closed his eyes, he noticed that the beach was empty. All the people had gone. Only the old boxes remained, discarded on the shore or sinking in the sea.
These three distinct things happened not in any sequence but instantaneously, as if all in one picture. It was perfectly possible to say that the gritty darkness had fallen even before he opened the door, perfectly possible to say that boxes rose from the sea bed, perfectly possible to say that none of the busy people stirred from where they stood. Time was squeezed from the happenings. They occurred apart, but were coincidental within the expanse of Wartlinger’s mind.
He removed the brain cell slide from his head and switched off the projector. As he sat thinking about where he had been, he glanced at the title of the slide. It was called existence.
He took up the next slide. It was called hereafter. He switched on the projector and inserted the slide in his head...