Brian Aldiss - Three Enigmas 4, Three Coins in Enigmatic Fountains

THREE COINS IN ENIGMATIC FOUNTAINS:

Carefully Observed Women

The Daffodil Returns the Smile

The Year of the Quiet Computer

THREE ENIGMAS: IV - BRIAN W. ALDISS

Once again Brian Aldiss pushes wide magic casements for us to peer doubtfully upon a fevered landscape drenched with meanings, where, if we do not take care, our occular vibrissi will almost certainly touch the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall, where we shudder in terror at what the smile of the daffodil may reveal...

* * * *

X CAREFULLY OBSERVED WOMEN

FROM my position, her bed looks like a ruined countryside, covered with a miserable dapple of fields. Occasionally, fields heave, rise to a great height above sea level, or sink from view, as Harrion stirs in her agony.

Much of the time, all I see of her is the old yellow of the roof of her mouth as she lies panting for breath. Sometimes, a great slack arm hangs down towards the floor, twisted and gritty like a stalactite in veined sandstone. Bits of her broken past come upon her; for days at a time, she labours among the fragments of a bygone year. She smells bad of nights, so that I lie as far from the bed as my chains will allow. I could have done better.

Outside I hear the plash of enigmatic fountains. Toy fish swim there, learning to devour each other.

Time streams by as always. Although now there is no one to check it at its source.

The women come to see Harrion. Some are her regular friends, like Bettron, Citrate, and old Ma Kandle, unable to give up a lifetime's habit of visiting. There are relations, like Mylene, Temple, Floret, Marriet, and the two aged sisters, Emilor and Chatelait, who are so fat they bump together as they walk, like buoys in a light swell. Neighbours appear, the blind Ma Audopar, little Pi, Cathwal, Eadie, Gaffrey with the port wine mark from next door. There are women with whom Harrion once quarrelled, now come to make their peace, sleek Perchince, Porly, and deaf Dame Caper. Many of these women are accompanied by their daughters.

When they come from a distance, some even bring their men. I know when men are chained up outside, can hear them pulling restlessly at their rings or scuffling among each other. They do not enter the building. Only women and girls flock into the sick room, bringing little gifts with them, a flower or a carved stone. The shelves are full of needlework and knick-nacks, dolls and daffodils.

In comes Perchince, smart as ever, with a loose-woven shawl over her long costume, ushering in before her Scally, the dark-eyed daughter, whose elegant legs show a flaking of dark hair over the calves. Perchince brings a tiny prayer embroidered on green cloth and set about with artificial sea shells. She gives it to Harrion, whose arm comes up yellow and stringy to grasp it.

'You're looking better than when I last saw you, my dear. I'm sorry I've not been to see you for so long, but we've had so much trouble.'

'Recovery's only one stall in the market place,' says Harrion, speaking in her usual elusive and epigrammatic way.

Somewhere, Harrion finds the strength to pull herself up, wild-eyed and sweating, her lank fair hair raining down into the pits of her cheeks. Perchince helps adjust her pillows.

While Harrion fights for breath, Perchince tells her things she would like to know--how the price of fish has gone up, the scarcity of benjamins, the dangers of going out at night, the afflictions of her family, and the alarmingly high tides in Gobblestone.

To all this, Harrion listens after a fashion, her vacant and feverish eye rolling here and there. I watch her, but I also look at the visitors, Scally especially. Scally smells good and fresh. She has a small nose, wide dark-brown eyes, pleasant lips which sometimes purse together mischievously, and curly hair which clusters round her head in a lively way. I'd like to get her in my pad, I'd like to throw myself on her, I could eat her. She's getting fat.

She does not join in the conversation. She sits and is aware of my interest. She moved round slightly in her chair by the bedside, so that I can admire her knees. She opens her legs slightly, so that I can devour her thighs. She observes the effect of this on me.

Harrion interrupts the spate of Perchince's recital, saying, 'Scally is getting fat.'

'The trouble we have with her! We had just the same thing with her sister, seventy-five years ago. She's not fat, she's pregnant. Get up, Scally, show yourself.'

Scally rises and stands there indifferently.

'You naughty girl,' Harrion says. 'The taking of care never lost a friend yet. You've been in the ruins again, haven't you?'

Scally says nothing. I shake my chains but they take no notice.

'It'll be a cloud all the centuries of your life,' Harrion says, vaguely. 'And there's no repeal before the bar of your own conscience.'

'I don't feel guilty about it. Aunt Harrion, if that's what you mean,' says Scally defiantly, with a little flounce of her body that sets the saliva squirting in my gums.

'She's still very proud,' sleek Perchince says. 'That's the worst of it. And she would not confide in me until she was all of twenty-three months gone.'

'Independence is of no merit where tears are,' says Harrion.

'Still, we shall make the best of things and see her through her trouble.'

'Those who love their own creations too much fall into bondage,' Harrion replies, shifting her position and glancing pointedly at me. She wants me to see where the remark really applies.

Perchince arises, smiling frowningly at her daughter.

'We must go,' says she. 'I've got to take her to the calibrator's and have her oriented. Always more expense, Harrion.'

'Folly's three-quarters of circumstance,' Harrion agrees. 'Take care of yourself, and remember that compassion makes captives.' Again a mean glance at me.

Off goes Perchince, taking Scally with her. Scally looks cheerful. I miss it when her fresh smell no longer cuts the fats of the room.

Harrion dies a little more in the night and, next day, while she drowses through the late afternoon, her cousin Temple appears. Temple's man, who is left outside, whines and scratches at the door. With her eyes still shut and one hand pressed to her fevered forehead, Harrion gives an account of what passed between her and Perchince on the previous day. She clutches her cousin's hand and elaborates their conversation endlessly, exhausted though she is.

'I'm sorry for Scally,' Temple says. I know she waits for her cousin to fall asleep; then she will occasionally slip over to me.

'It's all a mere dance of the ferret,' says Harrion. 'Scally is not really pregnant. She has a cushion under her clothes. They're just doing it for me, to distract me from the notion of dying. Anything, to keep my mind off that.'

'Oh, that would be wicked,' Temple says. 'Besides, you are not dying. You're getting better.'

'They no more deceive me than a bee a flower. Didn't my mother make me play the same trick on old Ma Bonnitrude seven or more centuries ago? She used to say to me, 'Now that even God's fallen so low, we've each of us got to get out of life as best we can' '. As she speaks, she struggles into a sitting position and opens her weary eyes.

She sees then that Temple has one arm in a sling, and that blood-stained bandages cover her hand.

'What have you done with yourself?', she asks. And her cousin tells her a hair-raising story involving several coincidences, a rail journey, and a man who escaped from a travelling circus. Harrion tut-tuts all the way through the recital.

When Temple has gone, she says to the room in general, 'they don't fool me with their tales. I never forget about death. I am dying, aren't I?'

'You're dying,' I say. I can't help panting and looking eager.

She fixes me with a glowing stare. 'And you know what happens to you when I go...'

'You've often told me.'

'You'll be as solitary as a stone, just like you were when you started.'

She revives. I watch her heave herself upward, reaching for the prod, which is just long enough to touch me. I scramble to the end of my chain, but she will get me again if she does not fall dead first.

The last rays of sunset are red on the wall above the bed, like an old stain.

Time still streams by. The fountain plays. But there is nothing to do; nothing can be done.

I try to recall those happy seven days when I created the universe.

* * * *

XI THE DAFFODIL RETURNS THE SMILE

NEECE and Reneece will drink no ichor from Moolab tonight, since he has to hunt and kill a kimarsun. He will need all his energy against the intense cold of the Rind and the might of those beings.

Neece and Reneece dress their warrior, singing to him as they do so, being careful to hold always to the old forms. Moolab stands between them in a trance, all his mailed hands extended and slowly vibrating. They saved the last of his sloughs against this occasion; the chitinous armours have been beaten with prescribed bronze mallets, and carefully lined with the ordained coatings of claysyrup and boccarrd-fleece. Now the females clamp on the armour.

Beyond their broodhaven, chirplings set up the agonizing Sun-Slayer chorus.

By the time he is prepared, at the prescribed hour, Moolab is in the warrior's trance. They are ready to leave. Both females pause at the door. They encompass his neck with their mailed jaws, tenderly kissing the scars there. Then they move into the tunnels of the Great Warren.

Through the haze of smoke and gas, they see the buildings all about them. They disregard them. They disregard the crowds.

'The Rind!' cry the crowds. 'Moolab goes to the colds of the Rind to slay one of the eternal kimarsuns! He will bring us the night as a present!'

Moolab glances neither to right nor to left. He heads straight for the Fate Gate of the city, where the Hive Lord awaits him.

The Hive Lord stands with the Arch Priest, a tremendous broadpsanned being, every one of whose eight legs bears a plutonium ring on every claw. At sight of him, Neece and Reneece fall behind, adopting the shrivel stance.

But Moolab approaches the Hive Lord with no decrease in pace, only stopping abruptly when nil-distance separates them. The two beings lock jaws, black clashing on black. That's over in a trice. Without hesitation, Moolab side-steps, offering his occular vibrissi into the gaping mandibles of the Arch Priest. The pose is held to the count of ten, accompanied by a shrill chant from the sanctified chirplings. Then Moolab slides back one pace, to stay confronting the Priest as the other snaps shut his mandibles, otherwise remaining immobile.

'Do you, Moolab, accept your sacred duty to slay a kimarsun and render night to us?', demanded the Hive Lord in a singing tone.

'I accept my sacred duty and I will slay a kimarsun and render night to our kind until the purse is filled.'

Now the Arch Priest begins to speak in a singing tone. Each of his phrases, Moolab echoes after him. 'By the nine beggared cripples. By the fragrance of the Old Pursuer. By the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall. By the fifteen hundred generations underground. By the scales of the mother and the leavings of the dreaded brood. By the colds and unmentionable voices that infest the Rind. By the spawn claw. By the things themselves. Above all, by the stars that blaze above the world, and the Wheel of Evil. Till ichor festers.'

Despite his clumsy caparisons, Moolab throws himself flat before the Priest.

'I will take notice of the hated constellations, of the Bat, the Devil Bull, the Boulder, the Night Worm and the Queen's Scar. This night shall see a report here of my death or my success. I will return with eye of kimarsun or my own eyes shall roll for ever down the crippled glaciers of the outside.'

'Take success with you, Moolab of the Core, bring back fire for our fire.'

The simple ritual is over. Lord and Priest both raise their prows high. Moolab rises and scuttles off at high speed through Fate Gate without a backward look. Whistling, the two brood-sisters, Neece and Reneece, rush after him, kicking dirt. The great gate slams behind them.

With unpausing ferocity, Moolab hurled himself forward, through the dreary and smouldering tunnels of the mantle. The brood-sisters gallop behind. Crevasses, molten rock, roof-falls--nothing can halt them. Moolab is going to slay a kimarsun.

Sometimes the tunnels divide. One way leads to the Rind, one to another hive. Kicking cinders, they gallop ever upwards.

At one junction, a Mother is crossing their path. She is in the huge serated softness of Metamorphosis I. At the sound of their terrible progress, the Mother turns, flicking her sepia head, opening her mandibles. She is unhesitatingly ready to fight.

Moolab tears into and through her soft body. He does not pause.

Following, Neece and Reneece plunge through the pulped remains, covering themselves with a viscid cream as they go. The still-chattering head of the Mother is flung aside by Reneece's shoulder as she passes.

They scent cooler parts of the world. The walls are more opaque. Movements about them have a duller grind. They know the world lives, just as they live.

Because of the increasing cold, the three beings move more slowly.

Moolab sniffs the terrible world ahead, where solids cease and emptiness comes down to the Rind. That is the region of the kimarsunss. He recites the Oath of Death or Success.

By the nine beggared cripples.

By the fragrance of the Old Pursuer.

By the cyclic stains that burn against a closing wall.

By the fifteen hundred generations underground.

By the scales of the mother and the leavings of the dreaded brood.

By the colds and unmentionable voices that fill the Rind ...

They come up to a trapdoor. Without pausing in his stride, Moolab goes at it full tilt, stopping dead with his occular vibrlssi almost touching the solid stone.

He moves forward slowly. He presses himself against the stone. He heaves. Hind pairs of legs drum in the tunnel for additional purchase. The stone rolls aside.

Moolab climbs out on to the Rind, beneath the awful emptiness. The brood-sisters follow, bellies flat to the ground. The antennae swivel in dread.

They feel the colds, hear the unmentionable voices.

Overhead, the Wheel of Evil grinds.

The warrior Moolab feels the living Rind beneath him. He clings to the great carcass with all claws, knowing that this body now forms part of the division between Good and Evil. Below is all Good--the farther below, the more good, until the deep hives are reached, nestled forever among the greatest good. Above is all Evil--the farther above the greater evil until the high stars are reached.

He fixes his multiplex vision now upon the high stars. He must reach the place of the kimarsunss. To get there, he must use the directions pointed by the high stars; in this way. Evil is used for Good; that is part of the pattern.

Above him in the emptiness, he makes out the constellations, the Bat, the Devil Bull, the Boulder, the Night Worm, the queen's Scar, and others.

The Night Worm is in the ascendant. Its hated length spirals up from horizon to zenith, marked by stars whose names Moolab recites to himself: Boylat, Crabarty, Pros-shing, Hrozne, Ramarkkan. Ramarkkan burns in the fangs of the mouth of the Night Worm. It is a baleful orange star.

And Moolab knows it threatens his life. He sees that it is tonight's enemy.

He uses Ramarkkan to betray itself. Taking it as a bearing, he sets off in the direction of the plateau where the kimarsunss are.

Neece and Reneece are left behind. They stay by the trap. They will die if he does not return. They will never move again if he does not return. Their bodies will be possessed by the kimarsunss and the high stars, and they will stride the empty plains of the Rind on rear legs whenever Ramarkkan rises in the clotted west.

Moolab travels in an intense wave motion best suited to the undulating terrain. He is without fear. In him live the fifteen hundred generations underground.

The ground slopes upward in an antique and unbroken geometry, its euclidean symmetries taking it towards the pleateau of the mighty kimarsunss. Nothing changes. Even the light that falls becomes permanent with time.

When everything withers, the stones retain their life.

He flows over the step separating the incline from the plateau. He stops.

Here are the monstrous creatures. The radiance of the high stars falls on the sine curves of their flanks. Their shoulders are dwarfed by distance. Their skulls are lighthouses, blinking from a far headland. Their colossal size makes them abstract. The night upon their carcasses makes them legendary.

Low rumblings of hatred start somewhere amid the joints of Moolab's abdomen and work forward towards his thorax. He channels the rumbling through his glands, so that its help ferments the poisons he will soon need. He rejoices to feel his own chemistries at work, knowing their cyclic stains will aid him against evil. Until they are ready, he waits.

As he waits, he observes the monstrous kimarsunss. They have stayed on this starlit plateau for ever. Although Moolab has never been here before, he has a folk-memory of the beings. He knows their very positions on the plateau. None of them have ever moved.

When the season comes about in the core, when the axis grinds round on the impulse, when the desire falls on the hive, then comes the Swarming. Then the hives go forth, breaking through the Rind, soaring aloft in the emptiness between Good and Evil. The Swarming flies over the plateau of the kimarsunss and those that survive will recall the dispositions of the enemy. But most will fall, dying, their wings bursting into flame as they plunge down to dust. One kimarsun can bring about twenty thousand deaths.

Moolab will revenge the deaths. As he waits, he turns some eyes again at the high stars. The Mottled Egg, the Queen's Scar, they are to his left shoulder. The Night Worm still burns overhead, the orange tooth of Ramarkkan still flaring in the fanged mouth.

The stars, revolving on the great Wheel of Evil, have more motion than their guards down below. No Swarming has ever reported the movement of a single kimarsun. Moolab sees that they are still with an immeasureable stillness.

That terrible immobility is because the kimarsunss work on a different time scale to the rest of the living things in the universe. For there is no doubt that the kimarsunss are alive. They can be killed.

Occasionally, dull internal glowing overtakes one of the colossi. Moolab is fortunate. As he waits for his chemistries to become effective, he sees that one of the more distant kimarsunss is undergoing this colour-change.

To the oblique concave surfaces of the colossus comes a dull crimson flush. It travels like a wave across the bulk of the being, over the abstractions which serve for limbs, abdomen, shoulders. The wave is like a signal of anger. Anger is communicated to Moolab; he raises his belly from the ground and flexes his rear segments over his head, preparing to charge.

The eyes of the kimarsunss watch him. They will turn him to stone if he entertains a moment's doubt. Doubt is defeat in a moral war.

The flushing colossus is now a dull red all over, but the colour seems to fade slightly. Then, a sudden shock. The creature emits a helium flash. The blaze of white light extends all over its bulk, bursts outwards, illuminating the plateau for an instant.

The flash serves as a signal to Moolab. He waits no more, but launches himself savagely across the powdered plain. He hits top speed, his multitudinous feet pulverizing ground as he runs between the living mountains. The noise of his progress is such that it wakens echoes among the surrounding canyons of rib and flank. Avalanches of stardust roll down the ancient sides of the nearest kimarsunss.

But Moolab does not see. He directs all his vision at the target ahead, which appears to swell monstrously as he approaches, eclipsing the Twin Cinders, the Queen's Scar. It is still undergoing colour-change. Now a dusky red expands over its surface again, lit from inside with shots of brighter colour. The sight would be terrifying, petrifying, if Moolab did not close his mind with incantation.

Now it's near. He goes in for the kill. His antennae vibrate, his maxillae sweep back, his poisoned mandibles open wide. He directs his travelling bulk at one grotesque corner of the kimarsun. The sound of his charge is left to rattle far behind him. Noiseless, he bears in towards the motionless foot, the heel. Jaws wider still. He bites.

Without pause, he plunges on, bearing away with him part of the substance of the colossus. Then he halts, turning right around in one moment. The great clatter of his charge sweeps about him and is gone.

Silence falls.

The high stars shine.

The kimarsun begins to shed matter as Moolab's poisons take effect. It seems to grow, become unstable. Bits fall off it and die into the plateau. An eye tumbles down, to lie there, glowing and white. The whole process is pitiful, insignificant. In a few moments, there is nothing left but a little white eye. Evil is defeated. Good has triumphed.

Moolab goes back and picks up the eye. He will take it to the High Priest.

He is almost too tired to feel the stir of victory. But he looks up through the unmentionable piles of emptiness to the great revolving Wheel of Evil.

There he sees the high stars comprising the Night Worm. The Night Worm's hated length still spirals up from horizon to zenith. Boylat, Crabarty, Prosshing, Hrozne, still burn. But Ramarkkan no longer blazes in the Worm's fanged mouth. Ramarkkan has gone out.

In time, the forces of Good will eradicate all the high stars. The hive will possess everything.

* * * *

XII THE YEAR OF THE QUIET COMPUTER

WHISPERS of a faint boutique and the band playing its own tune, endlessly, on and on. Every now and then, someone takes a musician out to the beds of daffodils, brings him to orgasm, garottes him, and buries him among the spring flowers. The ground is wonderfully warm for the time of year.

Toy fish swim in enigmatic fountains. They are learning to devour each other.

Alphonse Didcot reclines on a self-invented chair, reading some tales from the quiet computer. He has his own music. The magic word Cathay hangs in shades of T'ang gold over the food-divider. And his great-great-grandfather, five foot two and the best potter of his day, smiles down mummified from above the fireplace; the teeth are rather yellow now, but the gums still shine with a redeeming blue.

Outside the tall flanks of the tower, the ceremony of Fluctuating Lanterns is still in progress. Children flounce in long lean grass.

'We will bear them away, we will bear them away. Transience will be banished, banished to the eternal hills,' chant the little holy orphans. Surely enough, the mists roll in about the gaunt building.

'Let us move to Gorica 57901,' Alphonse says. Already, he can feel the start of the multiple births. The great-great-grandfather nods, its backbone creaking comfortably, like a familiar board in a family house.

One man walking sniffs the familiar flavours of the sky. Despite the lanterns, the trains are still coming in, burrowing through inter-stellar gas in a fury of speed; their great broad firemen bend their backs, shovelling in the helium-coal. Some engines are black, some red. In their rattling trucks, they bear the last of the stars to the depot,

Betelgeuse, Procyon, Aldebaran, poor Vega, lying on its side. Already, the wreckers wait in the yard.

When the whistle blows, Alphonse is ready. He pulls back the heavy curtains. From the outside of the windows, things fall away, crying, crying. The mist is all about. Some trees appear, stifled by the mist, entangling it in their unkempt gestures. The musicians have all been finished now.

The mist clears. Gone is the old clutter of habitation, with its lockers and appearances. Instead, the castle stands on a flat unclothed plain. It stretches away into all distances. Only to one side stand the mountains. The mountains stand aloof. Strange lights of sunrises and sunsets, interplaying, confuse their contours. Something skips from peak to peak, looking for destiny.

Alphonse takes up a daffodil and smiles. The daffodil returns the smile.