My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows

Brian W. Aldiss

"The quality of life" naturally means different things to different people. If our resources dwindle to the point of being unable to support a technological society, no doubt many of us will scarcely miss it. But many will. This story suggests what might happen to a married couple with sharply divergent reactions to change.

Brian W. Aldiss is a widely accomplished writer who has dealt with apocalyptic futures in such novels as Greybeard and Earthworks He is also the author of the best book to date on the history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree.

GODDARD WORKED WITH the northern reindeer herds all that long winter. With the other skin-clad men, he followed the migratory pattern of the animals in their search for lichens through snow or shine. He slept by beggarly fires under pines or under the stars. His whole life was encompassed by the sad guilts in reindeer eyes, by clouds of reindeer breath hanging in the crisp air.

The herd consisted of some hundred thousand beasts. They moved in good mild order, with their attendant pest-army of mosquitoes and bloodsucking flies. Their antlers appeared like a moving forest.

For Goddard, it was a Pleistocene way of life. But when spring came he was paid off and began to walk south, back to Scally and the children, with his dog Gripp at his side.

He walked for sixteen days, steadily. The climate grew wanner. The steaks in his pack began to stink, but still he ate them. Every now and then, he came to villages or mills; always he avoided them.

At last, he was among the vales of the Gray Horse. He walked through sparse forests, where the beech, birch, and hazel bushes were putting forth green leaves. Through the trees, standing by the old highway, was his home. His father was working in the garden. Goddard called to him, and the guard dogs, Chase and Setter, started furious barking.

"How are the children?" Goddard asked his father, embracing the old man. His father was still upright, though the winter months seemed to have shrunk him.

"Come and see. They aren't half growing big!"

"You've made out?"

"Fine, Tom. And I've not heard of a case of plague all winter."

"Good."

"It'll mean that people will be coming back…"As they spoke, they walked together, close, to the rear of the house, where the windmill stood on the rise above their small stream. Gripp kept to God-dard's heel.

The children were there—Derek wading in the stream, June kneeling on the bank. Both were picking reeds. They dropped them and ran with cries of delight into their father's embrace. He rolled on the ground with them, all three of them laughing and crying.

"You don't half smell animal, Dad!"

"I've been an animal…" He was proud of them, both so big and strong, neither older than seven, their eyes clear, their glance candid—as their mother's once had been.

Granddad roasted one of the rotting steaks and they all ate, throwing gristle and bone to the dogs. After, Goddard slept in a downstairs room. He woke once. The sun had gone. His father and the children were in the other room, weaving hurdles from willow sticks by the light of two candles. They called to him affectionately; but when he had urinated outside, he staggered back to his cot and slept again.

In the morning they swarmed over him once more. He kissed and hugged them, and they screamed at his rough lips and beard.

"It's a holiday today. What shall we do?"

"Go and see Mother, of course. Let's feed the animals first."

The goat, the two sows, the chickens, the rabbits were fed. Leaving the dogs on guard, they all set out along the vale to see Mother. The children snatched up sticks from ditches, leaning heavily on them and saying in their clear voices, "Now we are old children." Their laughter seemed to settle about Goddard's heart.

A stramineous sun broke through the mists. Where the track turned, they saw the bulk of the planetoid ahead, and the children set up a muted cheer.

Goddard said to his father, turning from that shadow-shrouded form, "I don't reckon I could bear life without the kids and all their happiness. I dread when they'll turn into adults and go their way."

"It'll be different then. Don't look ahead." But the old man turned his head away sorrowfully.

"They seem to have a purpose, over and above keeping alive—just like the reindeer."

His father had no answer.

The planetoid was so immense that it blocked the valley. It had created its own ecoclimate. On this side, the northern side, dark hardy bushes had grown at its base, rock and stone had piled up, and a stream dashed from it. The top of the planetoid's shell showed serrated through thinning cloud.

Derek and June dropped back in awe. June took her father's hand. "Don't it look huge this morning! Tell us how it came here, Dad."

They always liked the drama of the old story. Goddard said, "As the reindeer roam in search of food, men used to roam in search of energy. When the local supplies ran out, they built a mass of little planets, like this one, called zeepees. The zeepees circled about in space, getting energy from the sun. But some of the planetoids got in trouble, just like people. This one—I think it was called Fragrance, or something fancy—it crashed here. Another one went into the sun. Another one drifted off toward the stars."

"Was that years and years ago, Dad?" Derek asked. He took up a stone and flung it, to show he was not scared.

"Not so long ago. Only, let's see, only six years ago. The zeepee was empty by then. All the people in it had come back to Earth, so nobody was hurt."

"Did Mother go to live there as soon as it crashed?"

"After a bit, yes."

They climbed up a steeply winding path to one side, where the soil had been flung back by the impact. Broom and nettles grew now. The enormous hull was plastic. Its fall through the atmosphere had caused blisters to erupt, so that its sides were warted and striped like a toad.

"I bet it came down with a great big CRASH!" June said.

"It split right open like an egg," her granddad told her.

Goddard led them in through the broken hatch, going cautiously. There had been looting at first. Now all was deserted.

The children fell silent as they walked. The amazing, jumbled maze which had once been a city, a world, was no longer lit, except by daylight filtering in through the ruptured hull. They walked not on floors and roads but on sides of tunnels and walls of corridors. The stress of impact had caused fractures and crazy distortions of the structure. Defunct lights and signs sprouted underfoot. Doorways had become hatches leading to dry wells. Once-busy intersections produced shafts leading up into nothingness. Dummies stared down at them from overhead tanks which had been shop windows. They tramped across the hitherto inaccessible, where stairways had become abstract bas-reliefs.

"It's cold—I shouldn't like to live here," June said. "Not unless I was a polar bear."

They waded through a riverlet. Cracked and broken, the planetoid lay open to the elements. The rains of autumn, the snows of winter, all blew in among Fragrance's complex structures, turning yesterday's apartments into today's reservoirs. Slowly the water leaked downward through the upturned city, draining at last into native ground. Plants and fungi were getting a grasp on the ruined precincts. Small animals had taken over the defunct sewage system. Sparrows and starlings built their nests in what had once been an underground railway several thousand miles above Earth. After the birds came smaller life forms. Flies and spiders and wasps and beetles and moths. Change worked at everything. What had been impregnable to the rigors of space fell to the ardors of a mild spring.

"Dad, why does Mother want to live here?" Derek asked.

"She liked the old times. She couldn't take to the new."

Goddard never forgot the way to the spot where Scally had settled in. She had indulged her sybaritic tastes and ensconced herself in what had been Fragrance's chief hotel, the Astral. Goddard had found only one way of entering the hotel, which had stood in a block on its own, and that was by way of a metal ladder which an early looter had propped up against a fire exit overhead. Goddard leading, the four of them climbed the ladder and worked their way into the foyer, whose elaborate reception area now projected from one wall. Loose debris had provided the wall on which they stood with a carpet.

Scally had barricaded herself into the old bar. They climbed up a pile of tumbled desks, calling her name through the shattered doors.

He remembered the dirty, tomblike smell of her lair. The smell of dead hope, he told himself.

In her first year there, Goddard had come up often from the Vale of the Gray Horse—for sex, for love, or for pity. Scally had not wanted the outside world and had slowly, almost against her own will, rejected him as a symbol of it. He had helped her make herself comfortable here. So she lived in aspic, in dowdy magnificence, the great cracked mirrors of her ceiling reflecting every torpid move she made.

As her husband and children appeared, she rose from a chair. In-stead of coming toward them, she retreated to the far wall. She was tall and soft; the last few indoor years had turned her all gray. As she smiled at them, a long pallid hand crept up to cover her lips.

"Mother, look, Dad's back from the North!" Derek said, running over and clutching her, making her bend over and kiss him and June. "He's been with reindeer."

"You're getting so big and rough," Scally said, letting go of them and backing away, until she could lean against a piano in a self-conscious attitude.

Conscious of his coarse skins, Goddard went over and took her in his arms. She was thinner and drier than previously, while all around her compartments bulged with the rich damps of decay. Her expression as she searched his face wounded him.

"It's spring again, Scally," he said. "Come out with us. Come home. We'll fix the roof, Dad and I, and get one of the upstairs rooms done specially for you."

"This is my place," she said.

"The children need you." But the children had lost interest in their mother, and were questing about the room and adjacent corridors. They had found two rods to walk with; June was laughing and calling, "Now we're a couple of old children again!"

"I'm a hundred years old."

"I'm a thousand and sixty hundred years old."

"I'm even older than Mum."

Goddard's father was embarrassed. He looked about and eventually left the room too, to follow the children.

"He hates me!" Scally said, pointing at the closing door.

"No, he doesn't. He just doesn't have anything to say. He hates this prison."

"He thinks I should come back and look after you and the children."

"Why don't you? We need you. You could take some of this furniture."

"Huh! I'd only be a liability to you."

"Scally, you're my wife. I'd gladly have you back. This place is no good. Why do you stay here?"

She looked away, waved a hand in dismissal. "You ask such fool questions."

Angry, he grasped her wrist. "Come on, then, we take the trouble to come and see you! Tell me why you want to live in this muddy ruin, come on—tell me!"

Through the dim, upturned light, a glow crept into her features. "Because I can't take reality the way you can! You're so stupidly insensitive, you don't mind the beastly pig-reality of the present. But some of us live by myth, by legend. Just as the children do, until you turn them out of it and make them grow up before their time."

He said sullenly, "You only came here because you thought you'd be a bit more comfortable. It's nothing to do with myth."

"While I'm here, I'm in the remains of an age when men lived by their myths, when they created machines and looked outward, when they didn't wallow in every muddy season and grovel on the ground as you do! This room once sailed among the stars—and all you can imagine is that I'm after comfort."

She laughed bitterly.

Goddard scratched his head. "I know it's kind of uncomfortable back at home. But honest, if you can face up to it, life's better than it used to be in the old days. It's more real. Less of all that waffle, all those things we didn't really need."

She folded her arms, no longer looking as faded as she had five minutes earlier. "You were born to be a farmer, Tom, to walk behind cattle and reindeer, tramping through their droppings. Of course you rejoice at the death of the consumer society. But that wasn't all we had, was it? Remember the other things the Catastrophe killed off? The hope that we were moving toward a better world, the feeling that mankind might come to some sort of ethical maturity as he left his home planet? I resent being kicked back into the Dark Ages, if you don't."

He did not know what to say. He shook his head. "Resentment's no way to shape your life."

"There is no shape to life, Tom. Not any more. Style died along with everything else. Why, when I look at you…" She turned away. "To think you were a top sports-clothes designer! In six years, you've become nothing but a peasant."

The children were screaming with feigned terror in one of the upside-down corridors.

"I'll try and make you comfortable if you come home," Goddard said. She could always confuse him. Half aware that he was only infuriating her, he put out a hand pleadingly, but she turned away toward the table and chair at which she had been sitting when they entered.

"At least I can read here, at least my mind is free." She had picked a book up from the table.

He shook his head. "All that old world is dead and gone, my dear. Books are where you get your sick notions from. Throw it away and come into the light of day. The plague has gone and things'll be better."

The children were screaming with delight outside.

"Today or yesterday, I was reading about the scientific basis for the legend of the Golden Fleece," Scally told Goddard. "Did you ever hear of the Greek legend of the Golden Fleece, and how Jason and the

Argonauts went in search of it? The story has always related to the Black Sea area. When this book was published, researchers had analyzed pieces of cloth from the tomb of an old king of that area, Tumulus I, who lived in the fifth century B.C. That was the period of Jason and his crew. Do you know what the researchers found?"

He tried to escape from the conversation, but she went on remorselessly, although the children had come back hooting into the room.

"They found that the cloth from the tomb was composed of extremely fine fibers, with mean diameters of—I forget the exact measurements—about sixteen micrometers, I believe. That is the earliest appearance of true fine-wooled sheep by several centuries. So you see that all that golden legend was generated by Jason and his friends going in search of more comfortable underwear." She laughed.

The children had tied sticks around their heads with old fabric.

"Look, Dad, Mother! We're reindeer. We've gone wild! We're going to head north and we'll never let anyone milk us again!"

Puzzled by her story, Goddard said to her over the racket, "I don't understand you properly. Whatever happened to those Argonauts can't affect us, can it?"

She looked at him wearily, with her eyelids lowered. "Take these young reindeer away," she said. "One day soon their myths will break down. Don't you see, there's a prosaic reality to every legend, but people like you beat legends into prosaic reality."

"I never beat you!"

"Have you got remarkably thick in the head, or is that meant to be funny?"

"You're sick, Scally, really you are. Come away and let me look after you!"

"Never say that again! You oaf, if you didn't believe that I was sick, can't you see that I might come with you willingly?"

Goddard scratched his head. "Since you can always get the better of me in words, I can't think why you're afraid to come with me." Then he turned away.

The next day was mild and springlike. Goddard stripped to the waist and began to plant row after row of seed potatoes, which his father had carefully cherished throughout the winter. The two children played on the other side of the stream, building little planetoids in every bush, and pretending that Gripp was a monster from outer space.