Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015 Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications: Nova (1967), New Writings in SF (1967), New Worlds Science Fiction (1967, 1969), Titbits (1967), Orbit 2: The Best Science Fiction of the Year (1967), Impulse (1967), Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories, Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories (1967), Galaxy Magazine (1968, 1969), Solstice (1969). Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015 Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007482290 Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008148973 Version: 2015-07-31

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 A Difficult Age

2 A Taste for Dostoevsky

3 Auto-Ancestral Fracture

4 Confluence

5 The Dead Immortal

6 Down the Up Escalation

7 Full Sun

8 Just Passing Through

9 Multi-Value Motorway

10 The Night that All Time Broke Out

11 Randy’s Syndrome

12 Still Trajectories

13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction)

14 Wonder Weapon

15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart

16 Drake-Man Route

17 Dreamer, Schemer

18 Dream of Distance

19 Send her Victorious

20 The Serpent of Kundalini

21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine

22 Total Environment

23 The Village Swindler

24 When I Was Very Jung

25 The Worm that Flies

26 The Firmament Theorem

27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts

28 The Humming Heads

29 The Moment of Eclipse

30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn

31 Since the Assassination

32 So Far From Prague

33 The Soft Predicament

34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long

35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art…

36 Working in the Spaceship Yards

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

Should an author concern himself about who his readers are? Should he worry about what they think of his writings?

Is not the world full of better and more cogent concerns?

These questions I raise without, hardly surprisingly, being able to answer them.

I raise them because I have been so entirely a writer all my long life, forever concerned with what to say and why I choose – or why I have been chosen – to say it.

Hardly a year has passed without the publication of a slender book of verse, a translation of the poems of Makhtumkuli, a novel, SF, a travel book, a volume of social commentary, or a selection of short stories, as here and now.

The possible length of a tale has long been of interest. One of my inventions was the mini-saga. My mini-saga project was to confine a story within fifty words. Titles did not count within the bastions of that punitive fifty. The Daily Telegraph embraced my idea, and we ran mini-story competitions in the paper for six successive years.

My determination from the start was that a mini-saga should not be trivial; its spacial limitations drained narrative from the form; a moral aspect should remain.

Here is the example I offered my newspaper readers:

Happiness and suffering

The doors of the amber palace

closed behind the young king.

For twenty years he dallied with

his favourite courtesans. Outside,

the land fell into decay. Warlords

terrorised the population.

Famine and pestilence struck,

of which chronicles still tell.

The king emerged at last.

He had no history to relate.

Some years after this was published, I discovered that a beautiful and cultured lady of my acquaintance carried a cutting with her of this mini-saga in her purse. What is more enthralling than fame? Why, secrecy …

When I phoned The Telegraph with my suggestion, I was working at the other end of the narrative scale, on a long trilogy concerning a planet called Helliconia.

And now? A new year dawned and I suddenly determined to challenge myself, not with shortage of words but with shortage of time. In brief, I would write a short story every day in succession. This book contains some of the results.

To be honest (generally a foolish thing for a writer to do) a short story written on a Monday requires a Tuesday as well. On Tuesday, you edit, you correct, you knock out ungainly sentences, you amplify, you may suddenly discover a new meaning that had never occurred to you on the Monday. So you in effect rewrite. That’s what Tuesdays are for … the writing of tiny masterpieces …

Most of these stories are fairly dark, glowing with gloom. I like it that way. Such matters as this I discussed with a new friend. Whereas it had been my own firm decision as an ex-soldier to leave Devon for Oxford, my meeting with Anthony Storr was accidental. We became close. Where I was just a writer, Anthony was an important figure in the university, and the clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry.

He suffered from depression, but liked to be amused; he himself could be greatly amusing. More to the point – and the reason why he features in this introduction – is that Storr was the author – among other titles – of The Dynamics of Creation. It was that wonderful perceptive book which drew me to him. To read his volume was to understand better why and how and what I wrote.

As can be seen, I have written a generous amount. In the past at least, this was because of the times we lived in. And more recently we have the temperatures of our own mental climates to deal with. In the sixties, I was busy adjusting to life in England after many excitements in the tropics, coping with failing marriages, looking after children, struggling for recognition.

And in a writer’s life – as in other lives – curious accidents occur. Fearing my small children might be taken away from me for ever, I wrote a short story about it. Then I decided that was not enough. I launched out on a novel. As I wrote, I said to myself: ‘This is so miserable, no one is going to want to read it …’

But I continued to the end, christened the results Greybeard, and sent the bundle off to my publisher. Faber & Faber accepted it, as did Signet in New York. And they labelled it – to my surprise – science fiction. Under that flag, the novel sold promptly to Germany, Tokyo, Budapest, Milan, Verona, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Rio de Janeiro. Oh yes, and Amsterdam.

Never again was I to have such success with a novel. One often does not realise what one is writing or – fortunately – reading … Let’s hope it holds psychological truth.

Anthony Storr puts it this way: ‘A man may often be astonished to find the scarlet thread of his identity running through a series of works which appeared to him very different at the time they were conceived.’

In the end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end

A Difficult Age

Various rumours have been circulating about Imago, the first robot ever to commit suicide. I’m in a position to end those rumours. Imago was our family robot.

I remember clearly how he revealed the way his thoughts were tending. My wife and I had given a dinner for my father, to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday; our eighteen-year-old son Anthony was also present. As guests, we had invited father’s youngest brother, Eddy, who was fifty, and his daughter Vera. Imago waited on us during the meal and brought us drinks out on to the air-conditioned terrace afterwards.

Following an idle line of conversation, Eddy exclaimed, ‘Well, I wish I was thirty years younger, anyhow!’

‘Nonsense, uncle, you’d feel foolish being younger than your daughter!’ I said, and everyone laughed.

‘It’s a pity we can’t all stay at a favoured age,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know why you want to be younger, Eddy – I’d say fifty is the golden age. You have reached the pinnacle of your career – without going downhill, like me! You still have your health and your wits. Your career is stable, your prosperity is assured. You don t have the worry of growing children, like a younger man, or the vexation of grandchildren, like an older man.’

‘Nonsense, fifty’s the worst possible age,’ said Eddy. ‘You can’t yet sit back and enjoy a pension and delicate health as you do, nor can you still chase women like a man of forty.’ (He had the tact not to look at me, perhaps remembering I was thirty-nine.) ‘At fifty, you see all too clearly the things you hoped to do and now never will. No, for preference, I’d be – if not Anthony’s age – Vera’s age.’

Vera laughed. ‘Daddy, you’re an old misery! And I assure you that the mid-twenties are not as comfortable as you may sentimentally recollect they were.’

‘They sit very well on you, my dear,’ my wife said. ‘What do you find to object to? You have such a marvellous supply of adoring young men. What more do you want?’

Imago handed Vera a coffee. She took it, stared at it as if to hide her embarrassment, and said, ‘Well, take those young men. Honestly, you can’t imagine how silly they are, most of them. They either treat me as if I was still a little girl or as if I were already past it.’ At this, I noticed my son Anthony colour slightly. ‘And – I must admit – I do sometimes feel just a kid and at other times absolutely past it. The truth is, twenty-six is a very uncomfortable age. You don’t have the fun of being teenage or the pleasure of being regarded as a responsible person. If I could choose my ideal age, I’d be – oh, thirty-five, say!’

‘It’s not a bad age,’ I admitted. ‘At least, each succeeding year is worse. Every age has its snags. I remember feeling worst when I was twenty-nine and some idiot called me “sir.” At that moment, I knew youth had fled.’

‘Each age has its snags,’ agreed my wife, ‘and also its benefits.’

I could see she was going to say something more, but at that moment Anthony gave voice. He was at an awkward age, the poetry writing age, the age – as a friend of mine once said – when you have the hairs but not the airs of a man. He seemed always moody and generally silent, except when silence would have been the better policy. He was, in short, terrible company, and had my full sympathy, which I never dared express.

He said, ‘Some ages have no benefits! I notice all of you naturally want to be younger but none of you are fool enough to plump for eighteen. At eighteen no one likes your music, no one will publish your poetry, your clothes never suit your personality! You’re really a man but nobody believes it, not even yourself!’

‘Nonsense, Anthony, you’ve all life before you!’ exclaimed Eddy firmly.

‘But you don’t know what to do with it! At eighteen, you see every-thing with painful clarity before age starts its merciful task of dulling the brain. And you realise for the first time at eighteen how short life is, how much of it has scudded by without your having done a damned thing about it! By the time you’re twenty-five it’ll be too late – sorry, Vera! What is there but death and old age ahead?’

His grandfather said, ‘You express precisely why I was not foolish enough to say I wished I was eighteen again, Anthony. I agree that it is a very painful age. I too was obsessed with death – more so than I am now. We can only assure you that your perspectives will change in a very few years.’

‘It’s easy enough to talk!’ Anthony said, and walked out of the terrace, leaving his coffee untouched.

When the others had gone home, my wife and I sat chatting and gazing into the night. Imago was clearing away the coffee cups. Unexpectedly, he said, ‘Sir!’

‘What is it, Imago?’

‘Subject, evening’s discussion, sir. Discussion revealed clearly marvellous variety and complexity of human existence. My deduction is correct, sir?’

My wife and I looked at each other.

‘I don’t think any of us would have regarded it in that light, Imago,’ she said – I thought a little uneasily.

‘Every few years, madam, irrespective of other factors, for humans different quality of experience. Is so? Different view of self? Correct deduction?

Somehow, I didn’t want to admit as much. So I said, ‘Certainly, one experiences such things as the passage of time differently at different periods of one’s life.’

‘Of one’s human life, sir. Exactly. Not only different quality of experience, also different quality of time-enjoyment.’

‘Take the cups, Imago, please.’

He stood his ground, against all robotic programming. ‘Robots, sir. Imago just realises: their only source of pride, that they are made in man’s image. But is not so. Are too simple. Are more made in image of dumb things like elevators, traffic lights, automobiles, clockwork acrobats. No enjoyment of time’s passage at all.’

‘What follows?’ my wife asked in a whisper.

Imago dropped a cup. ‘The poetry I secretly write can be no good. Am just – machine!’

He ran from the room, out into the night. We stood and saw him go, speeding towards the river, his head-light flickering. Even as he flung himself in, we noticed Anthony standing moodily on the bank. Maybe he was thinking of doing the same thing.

He entered the room with a dull air of triumph, waving a hand. ‘Remember when you bought Imago, on the day I was born? If you check on his guarantee, you’ll see he was eighteen too. It’s a difficult age.’

So that’s the truth and the end to rumours. Now you tell me what the truth means.

A Taste for Dostoevsky

He was nearly at the spaceship now, had slithered down the crater wall and was staggering across the few feet of broken rock that separated him from safety. He moved with the manic action of someone compensating for light gravity, his gauntleted hands stretched out before him.

He blundered clumsily against the outcropping teeth of rock, and fell on them. The knee joint of his suit snagged first on the rock, bursting wide. Still tumbling, the man grasped at his knee, feebly trying to clamp in the escaping oxygen-nitrogen mixture.

But help was at hand. They had been tracking his progress through the ship’s viewer. The hatch was cycling open. Two men in spacesuits lowered themselves to the lunar surface and hurried over to the fallen figure.

Grasping him firmly, they pulled him back into the ship. The hatch closed on them. The audience applauded vigorously; they loved the old corn.

In the spaceship cabin, relaxing, the two rescuers lit mescahales and sat back. Eddie Moore sprawled on the floor, gasping. It had been a close one that time. He thought they were never coming for him. Slowly he sat up and removed his helmet. The others had gone by then; there were just a few technicians backstage, clearing up.

Still breathing heavily, Moore climbed to his feet and headed for the dressing room. The lunar gravity did not worry him at all – he had lived here ever since his mother died, three years ago.

When he had changed, tucking himself into his ordinary everyday one-piece, he made his way towards the players’ exit. Halfway there, he changed his mind and climbed down through the airlock of the mocked-up twentieth-century rocketship.

Most of the audience had left the big hall now; there were just a few of them at the gallery at the far end, admiring the cleverly recreated lunar landscape. Eddie trudged through the mock pumice, head down, hands in pockets.

Funny the way it wasn’t until the whole moon surface was built over and the artificial atmosphere working that people had recalled the terrific aesthetic pleasure they had derived from the old primeval landscape of the moon – and had been forced to recreate it here out of artificial materials. That was the way things went. They didn’t appreciate his once nightly performance as the dying spaceman; he so fully empathised with his role that he knew one day he would die of oxygen-failure even while breathing it – and then there might be those, the discerning ones, who would hold the name of Eddie Moore dear, and realise that they had once been in the presence of a great artist.

Looking up, he saw that a solitary figure stood on a ridge of rock, staring moodily up at the fake heavens. He identified it as Cat Vindaloo, the Pakistani director of their show, and called a greeting to him.

Cat nodded sourly and altered his position without actually coming any nearer to Moore.

‘We went over well tonight,’ Moore said.

‘They still pay to come and watch,’ Cat said.

‘Your trouble is, you’re obsessed with being a failure, Cat. Come on, snap out of it. If there’s anything wrong with the show, it is that it’s too realistic. I’d personally like to see less of a dying fall to end with – maybe a grand finale such as they’d have had at the end of last century, with all the crew parading outside the ship, taking a bow.’

As if the words were dragged out of him by compulsion, Cat said, ‘You’re beginning to over-act again, Eddie.’ Moore realised the director was not standing here purely by accident; he knew that Moore, alone of the troupe, often preferred to trudge home the hard way.

‘Let me tell you, I’m the only one of the whole damned batch who still throws himself into the part. You can have no idea of the sort of life I lead, Cat! I’m an obsessive, that’s what, like a character out of Dostoevsky. I live my parts. My life’s all parts. Sometimes I hardly know who I really am. …’ He saw the beginnings of a glazed expression on Cat’s face and grabbed his tunic in an effort to retain his attention. ‘I know I’ve told you that before, but it’s true! Listen, it gets so bad that sometimes – sometimes I’m you – I mean, I sort of take your role, because I worry about you so much. I mean, I suppose I am basically afraid – it’s silly, I know – afraid you may be going to sack me from the cast. I must tell you this, though of course it’s embarrassing for us both. I – don’t you sometimes feel I am being you?’

Cat did not seem particularly embarrassed, a fact that disconcerted Moore. ‘I was aware you were unbalanced, Eddie, of course. We all are in this game, and I suppose I may as well confess – since you are bound to forget every word I tell you – that my particularity is suffering any sort of insult people like to heap on me. So that’s why I attract your attentions, I suppose; it’s destiny. But I fail entirely to see how you mean you are being me.’

‘If you don’t understand, it’s no good explaining. What I mean to say is that sometimes for days at a time I think myself – though I’m pure English – to be an Indian like you, living in India!’

‘I am a Pakistani, Eddie, as I have told you many times. You are choosing your own way to insult me again, aren’t you, taking advantage of the fact that I fundamentally have this degrading urge to be insulted. How can you live like an Indian here? And why should I care if you do? Your life is your own to make a fool with if you care to!’

‘That I would dispute if you were capable of arguing properly. How far are any of our lives our own ? Where do we live? Who lives us? Which is us? But to pose such philosophical questions to you – pah, it’s laughable! I must be out of my mind!’

‘The very truest word I have heard from you for months! You’re mad!’

‘Don’t you call me mad!’ The two tiny human figures confronted each other in the vast grey reconstructed landscape. Suddenly, one of them flung himself on the other. For a moment, they struggled together and then fell, rolling over and grasping at each other’s throats, lost on the ill-lit and broken plain. They became quieter. Finally one of them rose. He staggered off in the direction of the exit, gaining control of his movements as he went, and then breaking into a run that took him as fast as possible from the scene of the struggle.

When he got back to his apartment, he went straight into the little washing cubicle behind the surgery and rinsed his face and hands. He stood there bent at the basin for a long while, soaking his cheeks in cool water. Life was such nonsense that the more serious it grew, the harder it became to take it seriously.

The more he thought about it, the more amused he became. By the time he was drying himself on a fluffy white towel, he was laughing aloud. The moon indeed! The twenty-second century! Funny though it was, this nonsense must be put a stop to, once and for all. Clearly, he must go and see Etienne.

He rolled down his sleeves, walked through the surgery, down the passage, and to the front door. Looking through the two panels of frosted glass, he could see that beyond lay a fine summer’s evening. Although it was almost past nineteen-fifteen, the sun was still shining brightly, and quite high in the sky. He paused. Just beyond the door he would see the brass plate that announced he was practising as a dentist; and the name on it would be – Vindaloo or Morré? He hesitated. He hoped, Morré.

He opened the door. On the brass panel, polished by the concierge that morning, appeared his name: Morré. He beamed with relief. Beside the panel was a little pasteboard card with his surgery hours and reminders to patients to present their health cards, all neatly written out in French and Flemish.

He strolled down the side street and on to the main road, where the quiet was instantly lost. The garish seaside street carried a lot of through traffic, often international traffic hurrying from France through to Holland or Germany. Taking the undercut, Morré crossed the road and walked a couple of blocks to Etienne’s place. On the way, he stopped at a little flower stall and bought her a posy of blue cornflowers; they would soften the blow of what he had to say.

Etienne lived over a magazine and paperback shop in a flat she shared with two other young Belgian ladies – both happily away on holiday at present. Her pleasant little living room looked over the low dunes and the wide beach to the sea.

‘You are very late this evening, Eddie,’ she said, smiling as she let him in.

‘Perhaps so, but why attack me for it? It’s my misfortune, isn’t it – or so I would have thought it if you had greeted me lovingly!’

‘Eddie, don’t be that way! I did not reproach you, my darling!’ She stood on tiptoe, as he had noticed she often did. She was short and very shapely, in a little blue dress that went well with the cornflowers. She looked very sexy standing like that.

‘Please come off your tiptoes,’ he said. ‘You are trying to fool me.’

‘Darling, I was not – and I swear to you, I did not even notice I was on my tiptoes. Does it disturb you to see me on my tiptoes? It’s not usually reckoned as an indecent posture, but if it offends you, I promise I won’t do it again.’

‘Now you are trying to humour me! You know nothing maddens me like being humoured! Why can’t you speak to me like a reasonable human being?’

She flung herself down rather prettily in the wide armchair. ‘Oh, believe me, if you were a reasonable human being, I’d make every effort to talk to you like one. You’re absolutely nuts, aren’t you, Eddie?’

He had a brilliant idea. It would scare the pants off her. ‘Yes, you have uncovered my secret: I am nuts.’ Without undue haste, he lifted up the cornflowers before him and ate them one by one. Then he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. ‘I am nuts and that is what I wished to talk to you about this evening.’

‘I have to go out almost at once, Eddie …’ She looked as if she would have liked to faint. When he sat down close to her on the straight-back chair with the tapestry seat that was an heirloom from her old Flemish grandmother, she became rather fixed in expression, and said nothing more.

‘What I was going to tell you, Etienne, darling, what I especially came over for, was to say that I feared our engagement must be broken off. It’s not so much that we are not suited, although that is a consideration; it is more that I don’t even seem to know what century I am living in – from which it follows, I suppose, that I don’t even know what country I am living in – which in turn means that I don’t know what language I am speaking, or what my name is. In fact I don’t even know what planet I’m on, whether it’s the Moon, or Earth, or Mars.’

Etienne gestured out of the window towards the beach, where two sand yachts were bowling merrily along.

‘Take a look for yourself. Does that look like Mars? You were born on this coast; you know the North Sea when you see it, don’t you?’

‘Don’t interrupt me! Of course I can see it’s the flaming North Sea –’

‘Well then, don’t talk so stupid! Look, Eddie, I’ve really had about enough of your nonsense! You come up here every Saturday night and break off our engagement –’

‘I do not! I’ve never broken it off before, often though I’ve been tempted to!’

‘You do, too! You don’t know what you do do! How do you think I like it? I’ve got my pride you know! I can take emotional scenes as well as the next girl – in fact sometimes I rather think I enjoy them in a kinky sort of way. Maybe I’m the kinky kind –’

He shook a fist under her nose. ‘No self-analysis, please, at least while I’m speaking! Have you any interest in me or haven’t you? And who am I? Who indeed? Man’s eternal quest for identity – pity I have to carry mine out with such rotten partners.’

‘If you’re going to be insulting, you can go, Eddie Morré! I know perfectly well what’s wrong with you, and don’t think I’m not sympathetic just because I don’t show it. You have built up that fine little dentist’s practice just so’s you will have enough money to support me comfortably when we get married, and the overwork has resulted in brain fatigue. Poor Eddie! All you need is a little rest – these fantasies about Mars and the Moon are just phantoms of escape filtering across your over-heated cerebellum, reminding you of the need for rest and quiet. You know how damned quiet it is on Mars.’

Tears filled his eyes. It seemed she really was sympathetic. And perhaps her explanation was correct. He threw his arms round her in perfect forgiveness and attempted to kiss her.

‘Do you mind! Your breath stinks of cornflowers!’

The two vast human figures confronted each other in the tiny artificial town-room. Sparked by sudden anger, he grasped her more closely. They struggled. Nobody was there to see a chair tipped over and they rolled on to the floor, arms round each other’s necks. After some while, they were both still. Then one of the figures rose and hurried out of the apartment, slamming the door in haste.

Plainly, he was in need of some form of purification. When it was dark, he changed into clean garments and walked down to the burning ghats. The usual crowds of beggars stood and lay in the temple doorway; he gave to them more generously than usual.

Inside the temple, it was stuffy, although a cool breeze moved near the floor, fluttering the tiny lights of the faithful – who were not many this evening, so that they formed only a small cluster of insects in the great dim hallowed interior of the hall.

E. V. Morilal prostrated himself for a long while, his forehead to the stone, allowing his senses to go out amid the generations who had pressed foreheads and feet to this slab in the solemn contortions of devotion. He felt no devotion, only isolation, the opposite of devotion, but the sense of other human beings was some sort of balm.

At last he rose and walked through the temple on to the ghats. Here the smells that lingered in the building took on definition: wood smoke, burning unguents, the mouldy Ganges slowly trundling by, bearing its immemorial burden of holiness, disease and filth. As ever, there were a few people, men and women, bathing in their clothes off the steps, calling on their gods as they sank into the brown flood. Morilal went tentatively to the edge of the water, scooping up a handful of the stuff and pouring it on his shaven crown, letting it run pleasurably down into his clothes.

It was all very noisy. There were boats plying on the river, and children and youths shouting on the bridge, some of them with transistor radios.

‘Hello! Back in the twentieth century now!’ Morilal thought sharply.

Restless, he shuffled back and forth among the funeral pyres, some of which were unlit, awaiting midnight, some of which were almost burnt out, the human freight reduced to drifting ash or a bit of recalcitrant femur. Mourners crouched by most of the biers, some silent, some maintaining an arbitrary wailing. He kept looking for his mother. She had been dead three years; she should have been immolated long ago.

His old friend Professor Chundaprassi was walking slowly up and down, helping himself along with a stick. He nodded to Morilal.

‘May I have the honour and pleasure of joining you, professor, if I do not interrupt a chain of meditation?’

‘You interrupt nothing, my friend. In fact, I was about to ask if you would delight me by joining me, but I feared you might be about to engage in a little mourning.’

‘No, no, I have only myself to mourn for. You possibly know I have been away for some while?’

‘Forgive me, but I was not aware. You recall I greeted you yesterday at the railway station. Have you been away since then?’

Morilal had fallen in with Chundaprassi, walking sedately through the puddles and wet ash; now he stopped in some confusion and gazed into the wrinkled face of his companion.

‘Professor – you are a professor, so you understand many things above the powers of ordinary men such as myself – though even as I say “ordinary men such as myself”, I am conscious of my own extraordinariness. I am a unique being –’

‘Of course, of course, and the point really cannot be too greatly emphasised. No two men are alike! There are a thousand characteristics, as I have always maintained –’

‘Quite so, but I’m hardly talking about a characteristic, if you will forgive my being so disagreeable as to interrupt you when you are plainly just embarking on an interesting if somewhat long lecture on human psychology. And forgive me, also, if I seem to be talking rather like a Dostoevsky character – it’s just that lately I’ve been obsessed –’

‘Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky?’ The professor scratched his head. ‘Naturally I am familiar with the major writing of the Russian novelist … But I fail momentarily to recall which of his novels is set, even partially, in Benares.’

‘You mistake my meaning – unintentionally, I’m sure, since a little sarcasm is positively beyond you. I happen to be in a spot, professor, and if you can’t help, then to hell with you! My trouble is that my ego, or my consciousness, or something, is not fixed in time or space. Can you believe me if I tell you that no more than a couple of hours ago, I was a Belgian dentist at a seaside resort?’

‘Allow me to wish you good night, sir!’ The professor was about to turn away when Morilal grasped him by one arm.

‘Professor Chundaprassi! Please tell me why you are going so suddenly!’

‘You believe you are a white man! A Belgian white man! Clearly you are victim of some dreadful hallucination brought about by reading too much in the newspapers about the colour bar. You’ll be a Negro, next, no doubt! Good night!’

He pulled himself free from Morilal’s grip and tottered hurriedly from the burning ghat.

‘I will be a Negro and be damned to you, if I so desire!’ Morilal exclaimed aloud.

‘Congratulations, sir! You are quite right to exercise your freedom of judgment in such matters!’ It was one of the bathers who spoke, a fat man now busily oiling his large and glistening breasts; Morilal had noticed that he was avidly listening to the conversation with the professor and had already taken a dislike to the man.

‘What do you know about it?’ he enquired.

‘More than you may think! There are many people like yourself, sir, who are able to move from character to character, like birds from flower to flower. I myself, but yesterday, was a beautiful young Japanese lady aged only twenty years with a tiny and beautifully-proportioned body, and a lover of twenty-two of amazing ardour.’

‘You are inventing filth, you fat old Bengali!’ So saying, he jumped at the man, who tripped him neatly but failed to stand back in time, so that Morilal took him with him as he fell, and they rolled together, hands at each other’s throat, down the slimy steps into the Ganges.

He dragged himself out of the river. For a while, as he lay on the bank with his head throbbing, he thought he had experienced another epileptic fit. Something of the chequered past came back to him, and he dragged himself up.

He was lying half out of a shallow stream, under a stone bridge. As he got to his feet, he saw the stream cut through a small country town. The place seemed to be deserted: so empty and so still that it looked almost like an artificial place. Slowly, he walked forward, down the curving street, staring at the small stone houses with their gardens neat and unmoving in the thin sun.

By the time he reached the other end of the street, where the buildings stopped and the fields began again, he had seen nobody. The only movement had come from an old cat, stuffily walking down a garden path. As he looked back the way he had come, he saw that he had just passed an unpretentious building bearing the sign POLICE STATION. For several minutes, he stared at it, and then moved briskly towards it, opened the door and marched in.

A portly man with a grey moustache that drooped uncomfortably over his lips sat reading a newspaper behind a counter. He wore a green uniform. When the door opened, he looked up, nodded politely and put down his paper.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’

‘I want to report a murder. In fact, I want to report three murders.’

‘Three murders! Are you sure?’

‘Not really. I don’t know whether I killed the persons concerned or not, but it must be worth checking. There was a friend of mine, a producer, and my fiancée, and a poor black man in India. I can give you their names. At least, I think I can remember. Then there’s the time and place …’

His voice died. He could see it was going to be difficult. His impulse had been to enlist help; perhaps it had not been a wise impulse. And had he ever been anyone else, or had it all been the product of a fever?

The policeman slowly came round the counter, adjusting his face until it was absolutely without expression.

‘You seem to have some very interesting ideas, sir, if I may say so. You wouldn’t mind if I ask you a question before you go any further? Good. You say you don’t know whether you killed these unknown persons or not?’

‘I – I get blackouts. I am never myself. I seem to work through a lot of different people. You’d better assume I did kill them.’

‘As you like, sir. Which brings me to my next question. How do you mean, one of them was a black man from India?’

‘It was as I said. He was very black. No offence meant – it’s just a fact. Quite an amusing man, now I come to think of it, but black.’

‘His clothes were black, sir?’

‘His clothes were white. He was black. His skin. Good heavens, man, you stare at me – I suppose you know that the people of India are pretty dark?’

The policeman stared at him with blank astonishment. ‘Their skins are dark, you say?’

‘Am I offending you in some way? I didn’t invent the idea, don’t forget! As sure as the good Lord took it into his head to make you and me this rather unattractive pink-white-grey tone, he made the Indians more or less brown and the Negroes more or less black. You do know that Negroes are black, I suppose?’

The policeman banged his fist on the desk. ‘You are mad! By golly, you are mad! Negroes are as white as you are.’

‘You mean the Negroes in Africa?’

‘Negroes anywhere! Whoever heard of a black Negro?’

‘The very word means black. It’s from a Latin root or something.’

‘From a Greek root meaning tall!’

‘You liar!’

‘You simpleton!’ The policeman leant over and grabbed his newspaper, smoothed it out angrily with his fists. ‘Here, this will show you! I’ll make you admit your stupidity, coming in here and playing your pointless jokes on me! An intellectual, I can see!’

He ruffled through the paper. Moore caught a glimpse of its title The Alabama Star and stared up incredulously at the policeman. For the first time, he realised the man’s features were distinctly negroid, though his skin was white and his hair fair and straight. He emitted a groan of fright.

‘You a Negro?’

‘Course I am. And you look at this news item – FIRE IN NEGRO UNIVERSITY. See that picture. See any negro there with black skin? What’s got into you?’

‘You may well ask, and I wish you’d stop grasping my shirt like that – it feels as if you have some chest hair with it, thanks. I’m not trying to play a joke on you. I must be in – well, I must be in some sort of an alternate universe or something. Hey, perhaps you are kidding me! Do you really mean people in Africa and India and so on have skins the same colour as us?’

‘How else could they be any other colour? Ask yourself that!’

‘They were where I come from.’

‘Now, how could they be? Just how could they be?’

‘I don’t know! It’s a matter of history. Some races are white, some yellow, some brown, some black.’

‘Some idea! And you say this arrangement happened in history. When?’

‘I didn’t say that! It happened way back … well, I don’t know when.’

‘I suppose your men originated from different coloured apes, huh?’

‘No, I think it all happened later than that … Stone Age, maybe. … Honestly, now you confront me with it, I must admit I don’t exactly know when the arrangement came about or how. It does sound a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?’

‘Anyone who could dream up the idea of men all different colours – wow! You must be a real nut! I suppose like it’s allegorical, with the good people being white and the bad black?’

‘No, no, not at all – though I admit a few of the white saw it like that. Or did I invent it all, the whole colour question? Perhaps it’s all another facet of my guilt, an awful phantasm I have thrown up from the depths of my mind, where I did the murders. They can’t have any subjective reality, either. Wait! I remember! I’m nearly there! Fyodor Dostoevsky, I’m coming!’

Hurriedly, he punched the policeman in the chest and braced himself for the reciprocal blow. …

He was tramping through the sand, ankle deep even in the main street of this shabby town. In the side streets, the sand climbed almost to the eaves of the shoddy wooden houses. Among the houses were buildings that he identified after a moment’s thought as mosques; they were no more than huts with wooden minarets added. There were Tartars here, moving slowly in their costumes of skin, some leading the two-humped camels of Bactria behind them through the street.

The man with whiskers and a stoop was just ahead of him. Morovitch drew level and looked sideways. He recognised the beetling brow and the haunted eyes, set deep in their sockets.

‘Second Class Soldier of the Line Dostoevsky?’ he asked.

Dostoevsky stared back at him. ‘I’ve not seen you in Semiplatinsk before. Are you with the Seventh Siberian Battalion?’

‘The correct answer to that, operatively, is no. I – well, sir, if I could talk to you for a moment … the fact is …’

‘It’s not a message from Marya Dmitrievna, is it?’ Dostoevsky asked impatiently, his face pale.

‘No, no, nothing so banal. In fact, I have come from the future to speak to you. Please, cannot we go to your room?’

Dostoevsky led the way in a sort of daze, shaking his head and muttering. He was still serving out his exile in Siberia, no longer as a convict but as a humble soldier in the army. His present home, to which he led Morovitch, was of the simplest, a poor room in one of the small wooden houses, containing little more than a bed, a table and one chair, and a round iron stove that could scarcely heat the flimsy room when the cruel winter came round again.

Humbly, Dostoevsky offered the intruder the chair, sat down on the bed himself, and produced some tobacco so that he and the visitor might roll themselves cigarettes and smoke together.

He passed a hand wearily over his face. ‘Where do you say you come from? You’re not – not a Decembrist?’

‘I am from what to you is the future, sir. In my age, my race recognises you as one of the great novelists of the world, by virtue of your profound insight into the guilt always lingering in the human mind. You are one of the supreme artists of suffering.’

‘Alas, I can write no more! The old ability has gone!’

‘But even now you must be gathering together your notes on prison life for the book you will call The House of the Dead. Turgenev will say the bath-house scene is pure Danté. It will be read and remembered long after you are dead, and translated far beyond the bounds of your native Russia. And greater masterpieces of guilt and suffering will follow.’

Dostoevsky hid his face in his hands. ‘No more! You will silence me forever if you speak thus, whether I believe it or not. You talk like the voices inside me, when another attack is coming upon me.’

‘I travelled back to you from the far future through a series of epileptic hosts. Others of my kind travel back through other illnesses – it is a matter of what we specialise in. I plan to travel slowly back through the generations to Julius Caesar, and beyond that … but you are a very important landmark on my way, for you are integral to the whole philosophy of my race, honoured sir! Indeed, you might say you were one of the founders of our philosophy.’

The writer rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort and shuffled his rough boots on the floor, unable to look straight at Morovitch. ‘You keep saying “our race” and “our kind”, but what am I to understand by that? Are you not Morovitch?’

‘I have infested Morovitch. We are parasitic – I am merely distorting his life a little, as I have distorted the lives of those I infested on my way back to you. Ah, the emotions I have stirred! How you would relish them, Fyodor Mikhaylovich! I have been in all kinds of persons and in all kinds of worlds, even in those that lie close in the probability spectrum to Earth – to some where man never formed himself into nationalities, to one where he had never divided into races with different coloured skin, to one where he never managed to gain supremacy over his fellow animals! All, all those worlds, absolutely stuffed with suffering! If you could see them you might think you yourself had created them.’

‘Now you mock me! I can create nothing, unless I have created you. Forgive me if that sounds insulting, but I have a fever on me today, which induces me to doubt somewhat your reality. Perhaps you’re part of my fever.’

‘I’m real enough! My race – you see I use the term again, but I would find it difficult to define it to you. You see, there are more millions of years ahead than you could comprehend, and in those long periods man changes very radically. In my time, man is first dependent on a milk-meat animal he breeds – a sort of super-cow – and then entirely parasitic upon it. Over millennia, he develops an astounding freedom and can travel parasitically back through the generations, enjoying the suffering of all, like a silverfish boring back through the pages of a large and musty volume: a silverfish who can read, sir, if you follow my image. You see – I let you into the secret!’

Dostoevsky coughed and stubbed out his ragged cigarette. He sat uncomfortably on the narrow bed, crossing and recrossing his legs. ‘You know I cannot believe what you say … Yet, tell me no secrets! I already know enough for one man; I’m burdened with knowledge about which I often ask myself, What good is it? And if it is true, as you say, that I have understanding of some of the dark things in the human heart, that’s only because I have been forced – though often I myself was the forcer – to look into the dark things in my own heart. And I have tried to reach truth; you are admitting, aren’t you, that you distort the lives you – well, if I say “infest”, it is your own word, isn’t it?’

‘We get more fun … A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others – of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.’

There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. ‘You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticise by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope …’ He shook his head. ‘Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.’

Morovitch laughed. ‘How can millions of years of evolution be “wrong” in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.’ He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

‘I shall come back to see you tomorrow,’ Morovitch said. ‘And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest – well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view – I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.’

Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. ‘I see you are, as you claim, an illness.’

‘Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief – until tomorrow!’

He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Punishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

Auto-Ancestral Fracture

For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.

But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.

Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.

Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.

You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speed death up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.

There lifespendulum ticked upside down and the time was rape for legendermoan: for the hard heads and the business hearts found that their rhythms now worked only to a less punctilious clock and speculation had another tone. War had turned the metrognome off chime in general pixilation to a whole new countryslide upbraided.

What raised the threshold a bit was the Brussels haze. The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down. Life was newly neolithic, weird, and drab or glittering as the hypoglossal towers staggered. Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered. Occult lights still veiled the rooftops and aurora borealis clouded the corner of the eye. Jamming their stations signals of new bodies scarcely suspected before or different birds of intent It was a place for the news of New Saviour Charteris to nest.

Many came, some remained; many heard, some retained Food was short and disease plentiful, plague grunted in the backstreets of the mind, and cholera in the capital, but the goodfolk had thrown off the tiresome shades of Wesciv and unhoused cults of microbes and bacteria; this was the spontaneous generation and neutral Pasteur had been wrong. These circadian days, you could whistle along your own bones and the empty plate held roses. In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war’s aftermyth. Gristle though the breast was all were at it. So it was gregarious and who cared.

Of these the Escalation was foremost. Among the petering cars they made their music, Bill, black Phil, Ruby Dymond with his consolations and Featherstone-Haugh, plus Army and their technicians who saw that the more sparky sounds reached tape. This day they had escalated to a new format and a new name. They now hit the note as the Tonic Traffic and had infrasound, ground from Banjo’s grinder machine worked by Greta and Flo, who shacked with them and other musicniks.

Through mirror-sunglasses they peered at the oneway world, frisking it for telling dislocations in which to savour most possibility. The flat wind-smoke covered them part-coloured. They had a new number going needling into the new stations to really pierce wax called Famine Starting at the Head. Sometimes they talked round the lyric or with laughter sent it up.

On the Golden Coast cymbals start to sound some place like a magic garden I’m just a demon on the cello. Play the clarinet pretty good too man!

In his tent-cave Charteris with two women heard the noise and distant other flutes in flower-powdered falsetto, but had his own anguish to blow through the stops of strained relationship.

Stranding his pearl underseers to glaub the timeskip of Ange Old’s farce its tragictory of otherwhens and all plausticities made flesh in the mating. Like Him fashioned from parental lobotomy truncated by the mainspring glories of a rain shower slanting through the coral trees where greened the glowing white of landscape. Figures moving dragging dropping enduring in her glowworm eyes the candlesphere of hallucidity she’s the mouth and cheekbox of my hope’s facial tissure to come back like soft evening’s curtains. It’s what I see in her all all the peonies the blackbirds the white-thighs all and if not her all all I see of any voyaging.

Yet Marta has her own unopened chambers of possibility the locked door calling to my quay my coast Bohemian coast my reefs that decimate steamships. On the piston of this later Drake lost in spume rankest alternating

‘Do me a fervour! I try to work on this document of human destiny and you want to know whether or not I took in the slack with Marta last night Why not trip out of needling my alternatives? Get from me!’ The ceiling was only canvas billowing, standing in for plaster in a ruinous convent later old people’s home, which the autobahn-builders had half-nudged out of the way as they drove their wedges into the city-heart. Undemolished now almost self-demolished this wing flew the Charteris flag; here his disciples clustered elbows brick-coloured as plaster peppered down like the dust of crunched hourglasses. As starving Brussels besieged itself for a miracle domestic drama flourinched.

‘Oh entropise human detestiny!’ Angeline was washed and white like concentrate campallour, still calculating against the aftermaths of warcalculus, still by the chemicals not too treblinkered. ‘I don’t want to know if you slacked because I know if you slacked you slackered Marta tonight last night every night and I just damned won’t stand it, so you just damned fuzzy-settle for her or me! None of your either-whoring here!’

‘All that old anti-life stuff snuffed it with your wesciv world – from now it’s a multi-vulval state and the office blocks off.’

‘Your big pronounce! Hotair your views to others, stay off top of Marta, you grotnik!’

‘Meat injection and the life she needs, Angel, pumped in, like the big gymnastic sergeant you sing. She has no impact with frozen actions like long disuse now quickened with the fleetsin for her. If I poke some import all’s love in fair unwar and the sailor home from the seizure! Be pacific!’

‘Sea my Azov! And you messiah on a shemensplash as and when is it, eh? A matlottery! Over my bedboddy! Don’t you kindermarken me mate why how you can come it I don’t know – look at the consolation! Prize her legs a part you’d be licky! Caspian kid! – All dribbled-rabble and emuctory!’

‘I’ll baltic where my thighs thew my honey, I the upand-coming!’

‘You subserbiant Dalmatian! From now on you go adriantic up some mother tree – just don’t profligainst me! Didn’t I the one who moist you most with nakidity remembrane to mem-brainfever pudentically, or if not twot hot hand gambidexter pulping lipscrew bailing boat in prepucepeeling arbor of every obscene stance?’

She now had the big bosombeating act, buckaneering in the dusty half-room before his ambiguity, riding to master and be mastered, knowing he punched her husband in the traffic, gesturing with scatologic to the greyer girl, Marta on the master’s corner couch cuckoobird unsinging. Phantom nets of mauve and maureen joined them like three captured parrot fish, web of twain, chain of time.

‘Did I ever say you were not the sparkiest? Or the bell-ringing belle-blottomed? Sap out of it angelfish and don’t parrot membrain there’s suck a thing as polygam.’

Among the dark hair the branches of her face in tempest

‘Bombastard it’s to be she or me and now’s your moment of incision. Cut it out or cut your rigging!’

But he broadsided advanced grasping her by the united fronter so that when she tugged away the blouse torn buttons Ming like broken teeth and one escampaigning teeter. He laughed in lust and shrouds of anger. She slapped him across his molar plex he a quick one to her companion way and they cavorted in a tanglewords the nettingroll.

For first time Marta brought her unbending mind and body to attention scudded to his rescue from the bedspace where they had seemed and tuckered and with a dexterritory he landed them both judies with squirming gust for keel-whoring and his digit rigid as he had voided mannymoon to squire their accunts and cummerbendle in their scrubberies dualigned by real and pseudoprod tongs and clappers circumjascentedly. In out in out moonlight moonlight.

They lay repanting. Marta said, ‘Oh forgive me, Father, but you gnaw my need to bring me back where the circulation stammers.’

He said nothing in a fluid state. Around lay the pages and quires of the ream of his destinotionary tract Man the Driver in which he tried by shortcuttings from the sparky philosopher to prime mankindly on the better way of awareness.

Angelina said, ‘To think that all your thinking comes to this and you so big in the mind can’t see the world’s slippered across the plimsoll line with you just some damned wandering bump swelling with the warfallout’s megabreath doing two defeated dames in a dungy belgunmaden bad! What’s there of metavision ask?’

Momentarily the roseplink lining parted and he saw with her eyes lavatory life going downheeled all the way as he fledabout of madness and hiveless ones begged him to be for them and be for them the big beatal and endal to some bitter end. Scrambling back, he said to spark himself, ‘I am the grate I am where fools burn for greater light and from me shall come a new order beyond your comprehandling.’

Chance in that room sat also while the ceiling billowed the dark man Cass. He now managed as Charteris agent from the dark English Midlands all his life a self-punitive in a narrow way pinned behind a counterpain in drapershop where having broken out he now netted his advantages at fifty-nine eleven three a yard all right and gaudy as the smiling tout of Saviour Charteris flower-breasted plus other sidelines.

Many-monkeyed in his head he rose now saying, ‘Hail the great I am! Hail chaptered Charteris! All burn for greater light from you. You fisher us a greater net of possibilities and what you photograph is multi-photographed with all possible value.’ He sprawled at Charteris’s pedestal for his idol to claim him; but Charteris cooled: ‘You better go and fix the cascade down to the main Frankfurt route. Under my lid the sign still burns there in a precog frame.’

‘Sure, we’ll skim the menu of possibilities but first you have to speak in Brussels where life’s real looty for us and people know you miracled death’s aaltercation where the carcentinas buckled.’

Sweat dry on a skin of eagerness.

‘No growth that way, Cass, believe! In every in every no line no loot on Brussels my bombardment of images dries me out. Famine starting at the head tells me we take our bellies, away from the emptiness of a Bristles brushoff.’

Still he had no confidence in the meat of his glazed tongue.

From the corner of his eyes, the females under a flapping lid swung like two monkeys. Trees grew on beaches. New animals lurked. Wall angles hinged

‘You call the dance! You are the skipper of the new Ouspenski order beyond our compension and I ship with you the greatest.’ Thus Cass’s little horn piping.

So saying but Cass rode on the motorcade a prey to more than piety and thus in the cholera courts of the capital. The pitted music of the back streets was his quarry. These thousand rocketting disciples gathering quantity as they moved had a needle for some supply and just a cosy cosa nostra to keep them smoking along towards the profitable reefs in a parasitical pass. He came out from the ruined building gathering air and dragging in a sort of awareness before jetting off for the centre.

Waves of reality came and went, breaking over him, drenching him. Wall angles hinged. He was aware where he was going yet at moments the streets appeared a transparent rues; he imaged that this was just another mock-up of the quest he had follyed all his life, looking for some final authority perhaps: the central point of the quest never revealed itself, so that he was driving on the B route. He sang a line of Ouspenski’s: Men may torture themselves but these tortures will not make them awake. Also Charteris so worked in him that he said to himself: You see how I released more potentialities in you, Cass – you carry on several lives at once!

Men may torture themselves. He could write it for the Tonic Traffic or the Genosides or the Snowbeams to sing. Their numbers had taken over the nine-to-fives. They must make themselves awake. The magician hypnotised his sheep and they turned to mutton believing they were immortal. All flocks there to be preyed on, and this new kind no exemption. Soon to be cassoulet He always drove at more than one wheel, whoever took lead car.

In the centre of the city, people whistled along their own bones though the empty bowl held roses. The European dislocation had harvested no fields and canned no fish. In hospitals, nurses with prodromic eyes dreamed islands, doctors smiled in lunar orbits whistling down syringes or snubbed their scalpels abscessmindedly on submerged patient bones. Although it’s true the bakers ritually baked in massive factories, the formulas were scrambled and even what was edible did not all reach mouths, for the distributors so hot for truth drove their loads into amnesiac fields of wheat and lay there till they fecundated in the calendar of decay. The parliament still took its conclave but all the ceremony these last two months had brought were these laws passed: a law to stop the drinking of the good earth; a law to prohabit hats from becoming unseen when the sun set; a law to make Belgian hounds sing the night away like nightingales, with an amendment asking cats to try their best in that melodious direction too; a law to permit redness in traffic lights; a law to abolish the plague; a law against Arab invasion; a law to extend the hours of sunshine in cloudy winter months; and a far-sighted law to encourage all members of parliament to be more industrious by the granting of six months leave to them per annum.

Cass had the secret contacts. A drink in a bar, a ritual holding of the glass, a certain stance, a procedure of guarded phrases, and there was help for him and he smoking secretly with seven men. Who said to him at the end of an hour or so: ‘Sure, it’s for trade the maximum goodness that Charteris gets billed big and comes into town. Come he must. You go and see Nicholas Boreas the film director and put to him what we say.’

And Cass was given certain assurances and pay and moved along to see the mighty and highly-sung Boreas.

Under the tawning in the semi-house time buckled and they were still saddled by the sporadic barney with Him downtrodden in a multi-positional stance on a chaircase and Marta racked on the bunk-up while Angeline barn-stormed about the gesticulating room, rehorsing her old nightmares.

‘Face it, Colin, you’re now stuck on an escalation okay ride along but just don’t forget the old human loot like what you did to my husband or maybe that’s all gone overhead in your reeling skullways maybe maybe not?’

‘It was the Christmas cactus there blinding as the lorry swerved and I could never make you understand. Don’t go through all that again. It’s the velocity, girl –’

‘Verocity nothing you killed him and why should I pull down my knickers and open up my pealy gapes for you to come in beefs me oh the sheer sheer tears of every diving day and now I shape and rave at you and who knows through the encephallic centre you have shot some of that steamin’ add so I’m hipping too and like to flip oh meanin’ Christ Colin what and where the dung day dirt is done and you know how I itch I never dote a damned desire without my shift and all my upbringing undone!’

And Marta said, ‘You’re chattering your passion into threads Angel cause isn’t there enough I mean he can the carnal both twomescence and I don’t mound no moral membrane in a threesome and we sort of sisterly! Isn’t the organ-grinding the big thing?’

So she seemed to flip and like a seafouling man embarked on culling Marta for a frigid and bustless chick while egging her on with premaritimely oaths to reveal what a poultry little shrubby hen-penned canal awaited bushwanking or the semenship of motiongoing loiner under her counterplain and how those specious sulcal locks were just the antartickled coups of man’s ambit or if more trapical then merely multi-locked the vaginisthmus of panamama!

Thus spurred slim Marta unbuckled and pulled enragged away her entire and nylonvestments to kneel up flagrantly tightitted the slander ovals with an undividual stare took them like young imporktunny pigscheeks in lividinous palmystry squeezing to pot them smoothly at all rivels cried the heir erect command insprict the gawds meanwhile thirsting out her chubby plumdendumdum with its hennaed thatch of un-own feelds and throaty labyrings of kutch with cinnamons di-splayed.

The other sneered but he to her cheeky pasture lured advanced to graze and on her stirry eyepitch clove his spiced regarb as if his universion centered there his mace approaching friggerhuddle. She now as never evoluptuary bloomed in her showy exinbintion outward easily spread her cunative flower by rolling sternbawd rumpflexed to make him see the fissile smole of spicery fragiloquent of tongue almoist articulpate well-coming with spine archipelavis and her hands abreasted eagerly. He snared his bait engorged in cleft vessalage like a landlopped fissureman on the foreshawm groined.

‘So that’s the little spat that catches the bawdy muckerel the briney abasement where we scomber at our libertined gaol!’ So far all jackular but now a saltier infection. ‘I teened tined without embarkration down that slitway my jolly tarjack yearning for the fretdown of this narrow fineconment swished-for incunceration ounspeaking O where noughtical men wisely feast in silence a coop or lock-up maybe Angel but for the brightest cockalorys no lighthouse but a folderoloflesh espressionless no landmast certainly no buoy yet more than polestar to the marinader the milky wet itself the yin-and-yank by which life orients the loadstir that aweights all tonninch on the populocean incontinents awash the very auto-incestral fracturn between generoceans mother of emoceans gulf where the seacunning sextant steers and never more gladly lock we to that flocculent in carcerationen like sheep incult cumbency on the long combers O so furly I will my rompant chuck of gristle uncanvas to cell and serve as croptive to her in the shuckling socket and set soul for dungeoness!’

He launched himself to the briney swell with merry horn-poop in her focsle and cox’nd every vibrant stroke till her unfathom ablepuddle deigned and drained his saloot but her aglued mutions rollocked on.

Angeline walked impotiently outside and some of the tribe noted or did not note – caught in their own variable relationships – how her face was fleshcrumbled with folded eyes. So it was these days and no one had too much in mind of others though the mood was good – too wrapped in selfhood and even selfishness to aggress, no matter who aggrised, on alcohol or the needle. She was thrown to a sexual nadir and would not bed, not with Charteris, not with Ruby Dymond even when he folked up the blues for her, backed by infrasound and its bowelchurning effects. Even for her it was getting not for-real, as the war-showers still lingering acidly in the old alleyways, curled into her and she too dug the spectrums of thought made visible, leaping up exclaiming from a lonely blanket to see herself sometimes surrounded by the wavering igneous racks of baleful colour: or at gentle moments able to watch bushes and elms erupt in crusty outline singed by the glow of cerebral sundowns, in which climbed and chuckled a fresh unbeaten generation of mammalphibians, toads with sprightly wings and birds of lead and new animals generally that with feral stealth stayed always out of focus.

So it was also with Nicholas Boreas but more splendidly trumpets with icing oil He too had more inhabitants than reached consciousness and drank news of the motorcade miracle from Cass in his palatial bath. A mighty figure he was, bare without a hair, though with a poet’s eye he had schillered his breasts and pate by dint of a bronze lacquer to laid a sort of piebald distinction. His flower was water hyacinth and in the foetid warmth of his apartment the tuberous plants multiplied and festered. Having heard Cass’s spiel, he pushed his current nymph aside and slid under water, neptunelike, snorkel between crowned teeth. There submerged, he lay as in a trance, letting the feathery floating roots caress him; tickle his lax flesh, gazing up between the stiff fleshy leaves, nibbled by snails, nudged by carp and orfe bursting past his eyelids like coronary spasms.

Finally, he rose again, hyacinth-laurelled.

‘I’m in full agreement with your suggestion as long as I can make it my way. Pour all my genius in! It should be a great film: Charteris Auto-Trip or some such title. Maybe High Point Y? The first panorama of post-psychedelic man with the climax the emergence of this messiah-guy after the colossal smash-up on the motorway when he was killed then risen again unscathed. Ring my casting director on this number and we’ll start auditioning straight away for someone to play Charters. Also we’ll want smashees.’

Whitewhale-like he rose, brushing black ramshorns from his knotted sheepshanks and the band began to play. In his veined eye gleamed the real madness; again he could explore – now on the grandest mafiabacked scale – the fissured continent of death. His best-known film was The Unaimed Deadman, in which a white man wearing suitable garments slowly killed a negro on a deserted heliport. He had been inspired to find a negro willing to volunteer to give a real death to art; now his messianic power would transfix on a large scale the problem of the vigour-mortis intersurface.

Attended by the plushy nymph, Boreas began to issue his orders.

His organisation staggered into action.

The idea was that the film should be made with all speed to take advantage of topicality. Archives could be plundered for effective passages. Except for the climax, little footage need be newly shot Episodes from The Unaimed Deadman could be used again. In particular, there was a sequence showing the Optimistic Man doing his topological topology act which seemed applicable. The Optimistic Man walked along a wide white line with hands outstretched, his hands and head and the white line filling the whole screen against the ground. The camera slowly disengaged itself from his shoulder as the line became more intricate, rising upwards like a billowing roof, revealing that more made less sense for the Man now seemed to be doing the impossible and walking on the rim of a gigantic eye; but, with increase of altitude, the eye is seen as the eye of a horse carved from the flank of an enormous mountain. Slowly the whole horse comes into view and the Man is lost in distance; but as this anomaly clarifies another obtrudes itself for we see that the great downland on which the cabbalistic horse is etched is itself astir like a flank and itself cabaline. This mystery is never clarified, there is only the nervous indecision of the whole hill’s glimpsed movement – we cut back to the Man who now, in a white suit, stretches himself out wider and wider until he can saddle the horse. He has shed all humanity but bones; skeletally, he rides the charger, which is given motion by the rippling flank on which it is engraved.

There are sequences from old-fashioned wars, when the processes of corruption sometimes had a presynchronicity to moribundity, and a shot of a nuclear bomb detonated underground, with a whole sparse country rumpling upward into a gigantic ulcerated blister and rolling outwards at predatorial speed towards the fluttering camera. There are sequences in shuttered streets, where the dust lies heavy and onions rot in gutters; not a soul moves, though a kite flutters from an overhead wire; somewhere distantly, a radio utters old-fashioned dance music interspersed with static; sunshine burns down into the engraved street; finally a shutter opens, a window opens; an iguana pants out into the roadway, its golden gullet wide.

After this came the Gurdjieff Episode, taken from a coloured Ukrainian TV musical based on the life of Ouspenski and entitled Different Levels of the Centres.

A is a busy Moscow newspaper man, bustling here, bustling there, speaking publicly on this and that. A man of affairs whom people turn to; his opinion is worth having, his help worth seeking. Enter shabby old Ouspenski with an oriental smile, manages to buttonhole A, invites him along to meet the great philosopher Gurdjieff. A is interested, tells O he will certainly spare the time. G reclines on a sunny bedstead, derelict from the mundane world; he has a flowering moustache, already turning white. He holds onto one slippered foot. In his shabby room, it is not possible to lie: nonsense is talked but not lies – the very lines of the old dresser and the plaid cloth over the table and the empty bowl standing on the deep window sill declare it.

The window has double casements with a lever-fastener in the centre. The two halves of the window swing outwards. There are shutters, latched back to the wall outside. The woodwork has not been painted for many years; it rests comfortable in morning sunlight, faded but not rotten, seamed but not too sear. It wears an expression like G’s.

G gives what is a grand feast for this poor time of war. Fifteen of his disciples come, and some have an almost Indian unworldliness. They sit about the room and do not speak. With lying out of the way, presumably there is less to say. One of the disciples bears a resemblance to the actor who will play Colin Charteris.

In comes O, arm-in-arm with A, and introduces him with something of a flourish to G. G is very kind and with flowing gestures invites A to sit near him. The meal begins. There are zakuski, pies, shashlik, palachinke. It is a Caucasian feast, beginning on the stroke of noon and continuing until the evening. G smiles and does not speak. None of his people speak. A politely talks. Poor O is dismayed. We see that he realises that G has set this meal up as a test of A.

Under the spell of hospitality, soothed by the warm Khagetia wine, A sets himself out to be the public and entertaining man who can enliven even the dullest company. The chorus takes the words from his moving lips and tells us what A talks about

He spoke about the war; he was not vague at all; he knew what was happening on the Western Front.

He gave us word of all our allies, those we could trust, those we couldn’t, and had a bit of innocent fun about the Belgians.

He gave us word of Germany and how already there were signs of crumbling: but of course the real enemy was the Dual Monarchy.

And here he took more wine and smiled.

He communicated all the opinions of the public men in Moscow and St Petersburg upon all possible public subjects.

Then he talked about the desiccation of green vegetables for the Army: a cause with which he was involved, he said: and in particular the desiccation of onions, which did not keep as well as cabbages.

This led him on to discuss artificial manures and fertilisers, and agricultural chemistry, chemistry in general, and the great strides made by Russian industry.

And here he took more wine and smiled.

He then showed how well he was informed upon philosophy, perhaps in deference to his host

He spoke of melioration and told us all about spiritism, and went pretty thoroughly into what he called the materialisation of hands.

What else he said we don’t remember, save that once he touched on cosmogony, a subject he had somewhat studied.

He was the jolliest and certainly the happiest man-in the room. And then he took more wine and smiled and said he must be off.

Poor O had tried to interrupt this monologue but G had looked at him fiercely. Now O hung his head while A heartily shook hands with G and thanked him for a pleasant meal and a very interesting conversation. Glancing at the camera, G laughed slyly. His trap had worked.

Afterwards, G jumps up and sings his song, and the disciples join in. Gradually, the whole screen is choked with whirling bodies.

While the film was being pieced together, a French actor called Minstral was engaged to play Charteris. Because France had been neutral in the war, Minstral was one of the few prepsychedelic men left in Brussels. He played tough roles. When not filming, he kept himself apart, ate tinned food sent from Toulouse, meditated in a Sufic way, occasionally visited two young Greek sisters in the suburbs, and looked at volumes of beautiful photographs published by Gallimard.

Boreas’s script director, Jacques de Grand, made his way out to the motorcamp on the lunatic fringes of the city with a haircut full of gentian hairoil. He wanted to get some background for the messiah’s life, him and his success-drive both.

When de Grand arrived at the smokescream, the messiah was sitting on an old bedstead, picking his toes; from his two women he had only bad images; they would not yield to his healing power and he was feeling several things at once, that nothing could be done on any level unless women were involved in creative roles, that they were trapped in a history jelly, that he was a discarded I, and that the world was on the whole perched on the back of a radioactive tortoise.

‘We’re very fortunate to have you here at the early stages of your career, Mr Master, and witnessing the first miracles. How you like Belgium? Planning to stay long? Planning to resurrect anyone in the near future? My card!’

The card held a hand in it on a detachable body materialising in rubber smokelp.

‘It was the vision I had in Metz. That’s what betrayed me on my adjourney north up the web of photofailures, fleeing that Italian camp.’

‘I see.’ Quick application of more refreshing hairoil, head chest mouth. Nom, but the PCA was thick here and all hair growing whispers on it. ‘You say photofailures, I gather from reports you enlarge Ouspavski’s thought?’

‘Well like Ouspavski I dig the west got too hairy with everyone and so the Arabian nightmare was just a justice and on the ill-painted poser the near-nordic blonde grew a moustache like a shadow across her force. …

‘And so how about some more erections in the near future? Please speak clearly into the visiting card.’

The whole mesozoic mess-up of the best west pretensions going themselves with the buns turning to gutter and silence is golden but a Diners Club card gets you anywhere. It was the whole city of a ruined version I had, he told de Grand. ‘Now Europe’s bracken up from a basic oil-need-greed and beggars can ride so even Gelina and Marta and me can’t get along in a harness and all clapped out of the big ambushes of Westciv, eh?’

‘I see. You think the bill’s at last been paid?’

‘Yes, the treadbill, trodden back to low point X and the city open to the noman. My friend, that was a short round we trod, less than two hundred degenerations the flintnapping cave-sleepers first opened stareyes and we break down again with twentieth sensory perception of the circuit. …

‘I see. More hairoil quick, and you think we’re back where we squirted?’

‘… which bust be the time for real awakening from machinality and jump off the treads into a new race that I will lead.’ And the new animals falling out of new trees on the old beaches of stone.

‘Yes, I see, Master. So you have no definite pains to insurrect anyone in the near future?’

‘Angelina sees if she’s not by now hyacinth-hipped the waters of sickness wrys and where we might have been balsam only balsa on the flord but me urgenus impatiens spends on merely the unhealing womenwound that helotrope witch tows me with its bloodstone balmy fragrance unavailing nector’s womenwound me my ackilleaseheal.’

‘You motion the waters of sickness, so you don’t entirely rile out the possibility of insufflation in the near-flowering fuchsia?’

Taking back the visiting cod he filed his nail-dropping in a filing gabinetto.

‘I am a fugitive from that perfumarole yet all beneath our feet the quakeline blows and vulcanows which runway lies firm aground for all this ilyushine is a flight merely from other ilyushins and not from anything called real.’ The broken wind of his sail lay under the tall shrouds of offices.

‘I see. I see what you’re goating at. Like there’s been a disulcation. Hair owl? No? Tell me couldn’t you practise on a dead child if we brought you one?’

Charteris coughed his eyeblink a world gone then back in its imposture. Lies he could take, not disfigurements.

‘Perfect sample of what I’m trying to gut over with the prolapse of old stricture of christchen moralcold all pisserbill it is are phornographable smirch as childermastication to be hung by the necrophage until strange phagocyte of the crowd.’

‘So you deignt insufect anyone in the puncture?’

‘Lonly Angina and the flowerhip-syrup girls.’

He coughed. When world came back steadied, in the big carred-up arena, tyres were still burning. The smoke crawled and capered a black nearest brown; up the side of a ruinous housewall where wallpaper hung montaged, its shadow grew like wisteria in the palid sun. Over one side, some disciples in gaudy hats and ruby beards were making a sing-in on the torture song. Another, a guy stoked an old auto with its upholstery in flames by flinging on petrol arcing from a can. The flames flowered at him and he rolled over yelling. Several people looked across him and the unbelievable patterning of it all, life’s gaudy grey riches richer richness. The world of motion-in-stillness. All rested here today from the speed death but a migratory word and they would be away again, switched on to the signal the Master would unzip from his banana-brain. Right now, even as he proclaimed, all possibilities were open to them and under the crawling black tyresmog lay no menace that did not also swerve for poetry, so the tribe let all burn.

A strip of the motorway south of Brussels to Namur and Luxembourg had been closed to traffic Boreas’s men worked and sweated, hundreds of them, many skilled in electronics, to fake up the big smash-in.

Some got through their work by being cowboys. Yipping and yelping, they thundered down upon the frightened cars, which stampeded like mad steers along the course, tossing their horns and snorting and backfiring in the canyon of their cavalcade. Branding irons transfixed hot red figures.

Other men from Battersea treated the steeds as underwater wrecks. In mask and flippers, down they sank through the turbid air, securing limpet cameras to cabins and bows and battered sterns which would record the moment of the mighty metal storm, rigging their mikes unfathomably, helter-scootering.

Other men with mottled cheeks worked as if they were charge nurses in an old people’s home. Their patients were as smooth as they were stiff of limb, dummies with nude sexless faces, dummies without female fractures or male mizzenmasts, non-naval dummies, dummies lacking meatmuscle or temperature who pretended to be men, dummies with plaster hair and amenorrhoea who pretended to be women, dwarf dummies with a semblance to children, all staring ahead with blue eyes impevious, upholders all of the couth past wesciv world that could afford to buy its saudistruction, all terribly brave before their oncoming death, all as unspeaking O as G desired.

Rudely, the charge nurses pressed their patients into place, the backseat-drivers and the frontseat-sitters, twisted their heads to look ahead, to stare sideways out of the windows, to enjoy their speed deathride, to be mute and unhairy and non-drivnik.

It was an all-day labour, and to wire the cars. The crews revelled that night in Namur, shacking in an old hotel or sleeping in a big marquee tent pitched on the banks of the Meuse, with a beat trobbing like a temple. Boreas went belting back to Brussels and with a shivering sight stripped virgin bare, gripped tight the snorkel in his crowned teeth and sank beneath the feathery roots of his water hyacinths. The plants were spreading like a nylon nile, growing in the steamy atmosphere over the floor and up the black-tiled walls.

‘Escrape from these lootless psychedelics showing their barbed crutches round the eyes,’ he gruntled wallowing, ‘as if I don’t own all my own univorce!’

‘Don’t you believe in Charteris as new Christ, darling?’ the nymph asked, floating pasturised cowslips on the sumper surface. She was delicious to his sight and taste, good Flemish stock.

I believe in my film,’ he said and grasping her alligator-like in his jaws he looted her down into her depths.

Next day refreshed and bellyrolled, Boreas drove down towards the scene of the faked authentic speed death with his script director de Grand who gave golden speech about the Master between cranial embrocations.

‘Okay, so he was kinky about children and gone on flowers and didn’t seem to have plans about bringing anyone back from the deadly nightshade. Similar to thousand of people I know or don’t know as the case. Did you get a glimpse of his life story?’

‘You know those ruins out by Sacré Coeur, boss? They had a five gallow saturation bomb on them when the Arab air strike came down! You can’t hardly see out there. I was switched on myself and it seemed to me his logic was all logogriph and missing every fourth syllable of recorded time. That fabled bird, the logogrip, took wing, was really hippocrene in all his gutterance, where I way-did but could never plum.’

‘Cut out that jar-jargon, de Grand! A hell of a help you are! What about his bird?’ Chin belly and balls are jetting promontories.

‘I tell you the logogriph, the new pterospondee, roasts on his burning shoulder!’

‘His bird, his judy! Did you get to speak to her?’

‘He mentioned a part of her with some circumlocation.’

‘Godverdomme! Get her and bring her to me in my pallase tonight. Ask her to dinner! She’ll give me the low-down of this Master Man! Have you sot that straight in your adderplate?’

‘Is registered.’ And bennies quickly swigged down in oil.

‘Okay. And get some more snow delivered to Cass – some of the motorcaders need a harder ticket in the arterial lane. Comprenez?’

They march from each other together in the web.

His unit was already setting up the crash-in. Technicians swarmed about the location with cowherd and keelhaul cries. By somebody’s noon, the cars were all linked umbiliously with cables to the power control and the dummies sitting tight. They ran through the whole operation over and over, checking and rechecking acidulously to see if in their hippie state they had overlooked a technicolor time error. The four-lane motorway was transfilmed into a great racetrick where the outgoing species could stunt-in for its one and only one-way parade, a great tracerack in tombtime where sterile generations would last for many milliseconds and great progress appear to be made as at ever-accelerating speed they hurtled on, further from shiftless and forgotten origins the unknown target. This species on the vergin of extinction bore its role with detachment, waxed unsentimentality, was collected, chaste, impeccable, punctual, stiff upper lip, unwinking gaze. Remembered its offices and bungalows of iron sunset. Its lean servants, ragged even, not so; excitement raced among them; they all believed in this authentic moment of film-life, cared not for a fake-up, slaved for Boreas’s belief, harboured their dimensions.

And to Boreas when all was ready came his chief prop man, Ranceville, with shoulder-gestures and slime in his mouth’s corners.

‘We can’t just let them gadarine like this! It’s sadism! They are as human as you or me, in our different way. Couldn’t there be thought inside those china skulls – china thought? China feelings? China love and sincerity!’

‘Out my way, Ranceville!’

‘It isn’t right! Spare them, Nicholas, spare them! They got china hearts like you and me! Death will only make them realer! Real china death-in!’

‘Miljardenondedjuu! We want them to look real, be real. What’s real for if you can’t use it, I ask? Now, out my way!’

‘What have they ever done to you?’ The mouth all slaving lotion. ‘What have they ever done?’

Boreas gestured, brushing away a fly or snail from his barricaves.

‘I’ll tell you something deep deep down, Ranceville … I’ve always hated dummies ever since china shop-rows of them stared in contempt at me as a poor small boy in the ruptured alleys off Place Roup. That’s how I began you know! Me a dirty slum boy, son of a Flemish peasant! Weren’t they the privileged, I thought, all beautifully dresden every day by lackeys, growing no baggy genitals, working or spinning clean out the question, glazed with superiority behind glass, made in god’s image more than we? Dimmies I called them to belittle them, dimmies, prissy inhibitionists! Now these shop-haunting horrors shall die for the benefit of mankind.’

‘Your box-official verdict, so!’ Gesture of a gaudy cross. ‘Okay, Nicholas, then I ask to ride with them, to belt in boldly in the red Banshee beside these innocent chinahands. They’re sinless, guiltless, cool – I’ll bleed to death with them, that’s all I ask!’

Open mouths gathered all round turned their stained suspicious teeth to ogle gleaning Boreas, who waited only the splittest second before he bayed from his mountain top

‘Get looted, Ranceville! You’re hipped! You think you can’t die – you’re like a drunkard sleeping in the ditch, drowning for ever because he didn’t realise there was a stream running over his pillow!’

‘So what, if the drinking water has drunks in it, okay, that proves its proof. How can I die the death if those dimmies are not alive?’

‘You’ll see how real a phoney death is!’

Now on the waiting road was silence while they chewed on it. Like workers who joined a continent’s coasts by forging a new railway, the unit stood frozen by their finished work, awaiting perhaps a cascade of photographs to commemorate their achievement of new possibilities: while behind them fashionably the unlined pink faces ignored them from the cars. The mouths came forward now, to see what Boreas would say, to hear out the logic, to try once again to puzzle out how death differed from sleep and sleep from waking, or how the spring sunlight felt when you weren’t there to dig it and flesh and china all one to me.

Boreas again was sweating on the heliport, in his blood the hard ticket of harm as he filmed the climax of The Unaimed Deadman, had the negro, Cassius Clay Robertson, fight to start up the engine of his little glass-windowed invalid carriage. And then the longshot of the white man in his suitable garb running impossibly fast with big gloved hands from behind the far deserted sheds, the black sheds with tarred asphalt sides, running over for the kill with mirth on his mouth. Now he could have real death again, had it offered, because the occasional man was hepped enough on art to die for it.

‘Okay, Ranceville, as long as you see this is the big oneway ride, we’ll draw up a waiver contract.’

Ranceville drew himself up thin. ‘I shan’t waver! As the Master says, we have abolished the one-ways. I believe in all alternatives. If you massacre innocents, you massacre me! Long live Charteris!’

The watching mouths drew apart from him. One pair of lips patted him on the shoulder and then stared at the hand Some sighed, some whispered. Boreas stood alone, bronze of his bare head shining. The invalid car had fired at last and was slowly lurching on the move. The white man with the terrible anger had reached it and was hammering on the glass, rocking it with his blows. They’d had a hovercamera in the cab with Robertson then, with another leeched outside the misting glass, and used for the final print shots from these two cameras alternately, giving a rocking rhythm, bursting in and out of Robertson’s terror-trance.

‘Get yourself in focus of the cameras!’ Boreas called huskily.

With a sign to show he had heard, Ranceville climbed into the old Banshee, a scrapped blue model they found in a yard by the Gare du Nord and had hurriedly repainted. Ranceville had red on clothes and hands as he squeezed in with the dummies. Their heads nodded graciously like British royalty in an arctic Wind.

‘Okay, then we’re ready to go!’ Boreas said. ‘Stations, everyone!’

He watched all his mouths like a hawk, the only one sane, whistling under his breath the theme from The Unaimed Deadman. Things would fall apart this time from the dead centre.

Marta was sprawling on the bed practically in tears and said, ‘You don’t understand, Angelina, I’d no wish to pot your joint out, but my loaf was nothing, not the leanest slice, and I was just a baby doldrums until the Father came along and woke all my other I’s and freeked me from my awful husband and my awful prixon home and all the non-looty things I try now to put outside the windrums.’

Angelina sat on the side of the bed without touching Marta. Her head hung down. Beyond, Charteris was holding a starve-in.

‘Fine, I sympathise with you when you stop whining. We’ve all had subsistence-living lives in rich places. But the way things are, he belongs to me you’ve got to get yourself another mankind. There’ll be a group-grope tonight – any grotesque grot they grapple – now that’s for you instead of all this ruin-haunting here!’

‘And supposing I pick on your Ruby you so despise! My life’s a ruin and the light dwindles on the loving couple. The Master said to me Arise –’

‘Rupture all that, daisy! You just don’t spark! Look, I know how you feel, the big love-feelings heart-high, but it wasn’t like that so don’t try to hippie out of it. All he did was walk in and make an offer as you sat single in your little house! That doesn’t mean he’s yours!’

‘You don’t understand. … It’s a religious thing and mauve and maureen webworks come from him binding me! With his sweet rocket it’s a sacrament.’

The ceiling simmering like a saucepan lid and Angelina hit her with a welp of rage and called her all mangey mother-suppurating things. ‘You Early Christian whore! Go throw yoursylph to other loins! He’s my man and stays that way!’

In anger, she drove the Marta from this ruined arena out, and then herself collapsed on to the single bed. There she still was when de Grand riled in, slipping a little packet to Case before he sought her out. She lay and let time set over her not unpleasureably, idly listening as the raucous noise of a song and plucked strings filtered in the shadow, wondering if anything mattered. That was the crux of it; they were all escaping from a state where the wrong things had mattered; but they were now in a state where nothing matters to us. At least if I can still thing this way I’m sane – but how to put it over to them and that they should be building. … The possibility exists, and some days he does build: almost by accident like a weaver bird adding an extra room for teenage chicks to creep up at the back where it stark and on the stares a big woman all all naked bottoms and beasts. … Bum weaver yes Colin he still has the glimpse. … A sort of genius and might stage a build-on. … Pull this lot together must make him listen maybe if I put it in a song for the Tonic all get the message. The table you use the table you take immense suck cess likely me running naked through loveburrow. … Old Mumma Goostale. …

As she dozed he entered, not uncivil with untrimmed moustache, de Grand, of secret history in plenty parishes.

‘Excuse you saw me interviewing for the film the Master. Second time I’m pleasure of drivnik-visiting.’

‘I’m thinking. I know it’s extinct. Blow!’

‘What intelligence! I’m full of aspiration. I left my own child to come on this quest to film the lootest Masterpiece.’

‘Bloody typical. Go back to your child, Paddy, marry her, bear lots of lovely morechild, marry them off, live humble, avoid oil-shares, stay away from the excitements of master-peace, rumpling upwards and rolling at speed towards the fluttering artnik.’

‘The director needs your professional guy dance routine to insight the Master to him. Has a dinner cooking wed local indelicacies and you tenderly invited.’

She sat up and tugged down the flower-blue shirt and bongo beads she was wearing, her modernity unfit, forgot arrested flow, with an effort focused on him.

‘The director you say?’

‘Nick Boreas of The Overtaker and The Unaimed Dead now moving to High Point Y to film your husband’s life in compaint colour. The great Nick Boreas you must have heard.’

‘He wants the truth about Charteris? Is that what you are saying? My god, these stinking runes are so high I’m almost indechypreable – Boreas wants the truth?’ She fanned herself, he also, gasping like fishes in a mean lake.

‘You have me defused a moment. Excuse – some pomaid! We’re making a movie not a gospel we must want material like a sort of biogriffin job, right?’

‘The mythic bird what else is struth! A movie you say! You my opportunity I zip on my head boy and you take me to your leader now?’ With nails she tries to calm her wild dark hair.

‘My fiat awaits delighted.’ He with a byzantine bow.

She paused. ‘You driving? You’re so high, no?’

But he was in a studio car with hired driver and they yawed towards the fossil-pattern centre with moderate risk to life.

On the brittlements of the town auroras flattered in a proud mindflagging and old phantasms took trilobites at her. She was a guttered target for their technicolon pinctuated in a single frame as the assassin went home, feeling her face flatten and balloon as if centred in a whirling telescopular site. Tumultaneously, the broad Leopold II sloughed its pavements for grey sand and cliffs cascaded up where buildings were, unpocked by window or stratum. Turning her tormented head, she saw the ocean weakly flail the macadam margins of shore bearing in change, long, resounding, raw – and knew again as some tiresome visiting professor of microscopic sanity made clear to her that hear again repetitively iron mankind zinc was on the slide between two elements, beaten back to seawrack while he prepared to digest another evolutionary change and none the less stranded because motors roared for him up the hell and highwatershed.

Such sounds seemed sexplicable, nexplicable, inexplicable, plicable, lickable, ickable, able, sickable. She was able to differentiate the roar into eight different noises, all flittering towards her under the cover of each other. Things that slid and fused let out a particularly evil gargle, so that she grasped de Grand’s moustached arm and cried, ‘They won’t allow me to be the only one left sane, they won’t allow me!’

Wrapping a moist hand about her, the scar of his lips unhealing on the face pustule its genetic slide screaching, he said, ‘Baby, we all swing on the same astral plane and there’s a new thing now.’

And in the variable geometry of her mind, great wings retracted and the thin whine let in stratosfear.

Boreas rose black, deadly-electric, face masked and goggled, hyacinthine from his bathpool, beetling baldbright, not unmanly, a eunuch but with fullgorged appendages. A palatial meal was being prepared in the next room.

‘Let me feel you first.’

‘I’m in no feeling mood.’ Age-old Angeline. He invited her to swim; when she refused, he reluctantly came from the green water and swaddled himself in towels, quite prepared to wreck her.

‘After the meal, the rushes!’

‘I don’t swim, thanks.’

‘You’ll have a breast stroke when you see the dimmies caroom into their smash-in!’ Full of tittering good humour, he led her through, a heliogabbic figure eight of a man and she bedraggled with a little brave chin, saying, ‘I want to talk seriously with you about the lying-in-state of our old world.’

He paraded with her slowly round the grand room, already partly hyacinth-invaded as they foliaged intricoarsely across the wallpagan, he speaking here and there to the chattering mass of his invitees, all to Angeline maroonly macabre and flowing from the head as part of the mythology of the palapse and from their infested breath and words crawled the crystalagmites she dreamed of dreading in the coral city trees without window or stratum.

A speech was made by one of the gaudier figmies in a tapestry, beginning by praising Boreas, ascending on a brief description of the steel industry of a nearby un-named state, and working through references to Van Gogh and a woman called Marie Brashendorf or Bratzendorf who had brought forth live puppies after a nine-day confinement up the scales of madness to a high sea reference to Atlantic grails and the difficulty of making salami from same. Then the company sat or sprawled down, Boreas taking a firm hold of Angelina to guide her next to him, one great hand under her shirt grappling the life out of her left breast into multi-variable contour.

The first course of the banquet was presented, consisting only of hot water tainted by a shredded leaf, and all following courses and intercases showed similar liquididity in these hoard times, except for warm slices of bodding, and no silence settled like at the G mealtime he led us all a merry dance.

‘All the known world,’ she said sliding in, ‘loses its old staples and in only a few months everything will drop apart for lack of care. People who can must save the old order for better times before we’re all psychedelic salvages and you in your film can show them how to keep a grip until the bombeffect wears thin, do a preachment of the value of pre-acidity and the need to rebuild wesciv.’

‘No no no, cherie, concoursely, my High Point Y is an improachmen of the old technological odour, which was only built up by reprunsion and maintained by everyone’s anxiety, or dummied into inhabition. Okay, so it ill go and no worries. You husbind is a saviour man who lead us to a greater dustance away from old steerotypes and a new belief in the immaterial, So I picture him.’

‘Okay, I agree as everyone must that there were many greedy faults but put at its lowest wesciv maimtamed in reasonable comfort a high population which now must die badly by plague and starve off to its last wither.’

‘You talk to wrong guy, girlie, because I enormously like to see those ferretty technilogy people die off with all the maimtamed burrgeoisie and black in the ground slump in bulldozing massgraves in Mechelen and Manchester.’

‘You shock me, Boreas. And who then will watch your epix?’

Slices of Christmas cactus succulent and inedible were placed before them.

He took her with his roystering gaze she so thin and succulenten.

‘I will eye my films! To the ego egofruit. For me only is they made and to enjoy! For long since the sixties have I and many lesser I’s pouring clout our decompositional fluid medium preparing for this dessintegration of sorciety and now you want again the tripewaiters and oilgushers and the offices clattering?’ He sipped shallowly at the long sour gueuze-lambic as it came round. ‘Balls to the late phase we’ve been through.’

‘Some of the old evils maybe die but worse still live on.’ She would not sup. Her eyelids low.

‘We live authentic now and the new way which your husbond cries!’

Under her waif-thin lids she gauzed at the continuum mumbling guests all butterflies or hot rock without rest and each in an amber clockdrill of our mechanissmus that to new born retinal grasp showed in ever moo and ghestune.

‘And are these the authenticks as you mountain?’ Scorning.

Grinding his heavensgravelstone teeth, resting predirty ham on her pecked muscle, ‘Don’t perspine for the judge’s tone when you’re jabbed in the witless blox woman!’

So for the first time she muddled into revelation and the silent goose grass was again in motion that Colin grasped society went in autosleep his ennemas enemy and wanever jungle he battled in it lay only a March day’s march from her own plot. In even his sickmares might be more health than this fat man’s articles.

‘Why did you invite me here?’ And vonnegutsy whines in her visceration.

‘Not for the size of your bobbies mine are bigger you slim spratlady! Listen, I want the word on your man we know you have a thing or true against him and that’s for revelation.’

‘If I damned well don’t?’

Butterflies and hot rock flowed up the hyacynth panels to the bright openings of numerous beetel mouths of the tracery.

‘If you don’t theres multi-ways of setting an entire squeeze-in round the motorcave and such I warn you solo voce here and never!’

‘Are you threatening me?’ All round her the artichokers were unheard as her head’s mainline flowed more regularly in this duress and she viewed with clarity his mantled cheeks and eyes of menace.

‘If you don’t want your motorcod tempered with you’ll peach me the laydown with all loot on how your saviourboy committed a murder in the British traffic, didn’t he?’

And the whole sparse countryside unrolling to her camera, dodging – ‘Who’ll temper with us – you? Our little motorcade tries to ride in innosense but always an evil parashitting grip strangles it you know you know know what I mean the Mafia with their hard relief are maffiking?’

His jelly flesh was suddenly hard contracted and the mouth gash sealed and done. ‘Don’t say that name in here or you’ll be in a sidealley lying with the lovely lubrication gone and nothing swinging babe be warn!’

Now all jungular noises cease and the dusky rook hovers.

She was standing again in the ruined garden where sweet rocket sent its sprays among the grass and thistle and her mother screamed I’ll murder you if you come in again before you’re told! No flowers or fruit ever on the old entangled damson trees except the dripping mildew where their leaves curdled in brown knots perhaps she had seen them among the branches the new animal the fey dog with red tie and been inoculated with the wildered beauty of despair against this future moment’s recurrence.

Music now played and the vegetattles chattered on as two flower-decked seamen sang of black sheds down a runway. One last stormblown look, Boreas had dislocated and was seen away on the otherside where the mob was most like a market marakeshed with hippie hordes and de Grand in oil-welled mirth. Moving forward, this throng swept up Angeline and broke her into a adjoining private theatre. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘You don’t swing! They’re coming!’

The ceiling flew away the nightbox closed and glaring careyes filled the screen with coloured rattle 5 4 3 2 One buildings surged and broke along the autobahn at troglo-daybreak in grey unconvincing weather, autostrata punctuated by windows, their boxrooms stuffed with the comic strip of family bedroomdress as all rose crying ‘Master! Charteris!’ in braces and curling clips. Now paper familias folds and rises from his breakfast serially lifts the kids into the roaring garage monsters gentle monsters gentile masters one by one gliding and choking carring their human scarifice out along the dangerous beaches flashing in variable geography oriented against accident of the urban switchbank.

The film is as yet unedited. Again and a second time the mechanical riptide roars along the breach discontinuity of time and space armoured armoured green and grey and blue and red a race indeed and carried helpless in them the wheel born ones from their brickhills.

The dummies register percognitive impulses of the coming crash. Scenes of the resurrention flash like traffic controls in clarkeian universe, they view themselves disjointed in the rough joinery of impact amortised in the outstretchered ambulanes and finally in the sexton’s sinkingfung drowned by stink and stone in their own neutrifaction beneath the wave freeze. With unwinking blueness they view unwivering blackness and with waxen calm survey the chinalined vacuums in their dollyskulls of this annulity their last civil divorce.

Now from far above ravening like the aerosoiling arabs the eye takes in a checkerboard black-and-white of roads marked like a deserted heliport with the far black sheds of Brussels lying low plunges like a hypodetic to disgorge the main artery of shittlecock. Its plain lanes erupt into prefognotive shock as force lines fault lines seismographic lines demarcation lines lines of variable geolatry and least resistance lines of cronology besom out from the future impact point Towards this webpoint scudding come the motordollies. They still have several agelong microseconds before point of intersex and times abolution.

In the leading car from Namur rides fashionable cool Mrs Crack dressed to the nines for high point in a teetotal expatriate sun-and-fun commando suit in well-tailored casual style of almond green nylon gaberdine of a knockout simplicity deep patch pockets and ample vaginal versatility trimmed in petunia piping planned to contrast with a snazzy safari hat of saffron acrylan especially designed for crunch-occasions and scarlet patent slingback shoes in nubile moygashel. Her house is always cool and free from hairy guests of the nonconformist world because she uses new immaculate Plastic with the exciting new impeach-coloured plastic coating and a truculent egg-timer free with every canister so get in the egg-time today! Interviewed just before her death, Mrs Crack explained, ‘It’s fuzzy man. I so admire my lack of vitality.’ Laid her head back unspeaking on surrealistic pillow, applied Sun in the new egregious shade.

The interviewer riding bareback on the bonnet thrust the mike at her superbly tailored husband Mr Servo Crack sitting exstatically back not driving in the driving seat with no facial or racial hair painted bronze head and lips to match who said, ‘We both moddle many dapper uncreased outfits often in public windows of shops and such places where the elite meet to be neat this we enjoy very much on account of antiseptic lack of any form of marital relations you understand this is not my son in the back just a prefect smaller dummy and a real growing human called Ranceville because as you know my wife Mrs Crack Mrs Historecta Crack that is actually has no capillaceous growth upon her addendum in fact frankly no addendum so of course no capillary attraction since happily I have no gentians or testaments, in the manner of pre-psychedelic mankind so we are just goodly friends and able to constipate on the old middle-class virtues like dressing properly which escalated Europe since hanseatic times of course to the glory of god and his gentleman’s gentleman the pope of beloved memory.’

He was preparing to say more and the gonaddicts were chuckling and fumbling each other in the darkroom for counterevidence of non-dummiehood when the lemanster encasing Mr Crack flung itself armoured against a monster raving in the apposite direction. Mr and Mrs Crack suffered extinction. Their perfect boy also impeccably crunched. Unfortunately the camera focusing on Ranceville failed to work so that his final blood-letting gestures were not revealed to the celebrating eyes.

Now the whole cock-up took on the slobber-slob motionrhythm of orgasm sowards the climax of the film and the wetmouthed awedience watched expectorately. More terrible than humans, the dummies caroomed stiffly forward in the slow frames pressing towards point of impact in tethered flight stretching their belts as over towards the scarring windshields they bucketed eyes of blueness still and all around them gloves and maps and michelins and scattering chocolate boxes parabolaed like pigeons startled at the buckling of the sides and still the honest eggshell eyes and spumeless lips started into nanoseconds of futurity. Gravitidal waving limp arms swinging stiff shoulders unshrugging make-up staying put them swam their butterfly in the only saline solution to the deceleration problem.

All the other armoured lemmings rushed to be in on the destruction. Expressions blank of dismay the dummies had their heads cracked and chipped and knocked and shattered and ground and mashed and eggshelled and blown away with new miracle Crump aiming their last ricocheting nanocheek towards the impactpoint of speedeath the ipaccint of speeeth ipint seeth inteeth in i i i.

Time and again the cameras peeped on the unbleeding victims and on the cracking tin carcases that with rumptured wings in courtship dragging ground tupped one another beetle-bowed in the giddyup of the randabout, till the toms built up an audiction and their cheers were heard above the hubcab of metallurging grinderbiles. But Boreas wept because his film had frightened and to the mainshaft struck him.

His tears scattered. Once they had had a goose to fatten and in the long blight of summer where the damsons festered it made some company with its simple ways not unapproachable. Once her mother brought it out a bucket of water in the heat for it to duck over and over its long head and flail its pruned wings with pleasure scattering the drops across small Angeline. She heard the wings flail now as out she crept nostalgic for the gormless bird they later ate.

At last she came back wearily to where a broken Stella Art sign buzzed and burned in the desolation of their parking lot. She stood there in a wet shift breathing. Under the mauve and maureen flash her face showed like a shuttered street from which might crawl iguaneous things. But just a mental block away where she only blindly knew directions a lane stood in old summer green some place like a magic garden where a young barefoot girl might drive her would-be swans and never think of harsher either-ors.

A small rain filled the incommense thoroughfares of night but still among the guttering buggies stilled tangents of smoke and rib-roofed skeletombs a guitar string or flute fought loneliness with loneliness and a poppied light or naked carbulb gave the flowerdpeople nightpower. Oh Phil the small dogs howl don’t ask me what I’m doing on the health Col. She plashes the raddlepuddles in a dim blue fermentation. A round of vestal voices plays noughts and crosses her subterranean path with a whole sparse countryside rumpling the stone-trees. Such shadows in her way she brushes off knowing the nets that await her in the shallows of a nightsunk city. She crounches and pees by old brickhaps. Oh don’t be pregnant in this tupturned world!

Sickly still bedummied by the ill winds she staggered through her own grotesquely shatteredporch to find the blanket cold and stiff and Charteris not in. Groping with all menaces she unsandaled herself and beneath crawled heavily. Charteris not in not in the starve-in still? Small sound not rain not dogs reached her and immediate anxieties peopled the grotto with haggard dimmies half in flight with speed as closing in on her she propped and stared. Even hoping-fearing it might be Ruby Dymond?

In the corner Marta only sniffing on a broken chair, lumpkin in the fluttered darklight with her crushed appeal.

‘Get to bed girl!’

‘The toad is going to get me pushing up my thinghs.’

‘Go to sleep stop worrying till tomorrow. The holed world’s had enough tonight.’

‘But throbbing toadspower! It’s trying to force my skull up and climb into my barn my grain and then motor me away to some awful slimy pool of toadstales!’

‘You’re dreaming! Pack it in!’

Laying down her tawdry head she tucked her motherless eyelids on her cheeks and took herself far away from drivniks a goosegirl in an old summer lane drove her would-be-swans barefoot And cellos hit a seldom chord.

Every day Charteris like a bird of prayer spoke to new crowds finding new things to say giving outwards and never sleeping never tired sustained by his overiding fantasy. Two three days passed so at the big starve-in for Belgium’s famine or Germany’s bad news. He sat with a can of beans that Cass and Cass’s buddy Buddy Docre had brought him half-forking them into his mouth and smilingly half-listening to some disciples who parrited back at him a loose interpretation of what they had gleaned in all enthusiasm.

When he had filled his crop enough he rose slowly and began to walk slowly so as not to disturb the ripples of the talk from which he slowly wove his own designs half-hearing of the fishernet of feeling. In these famine days they all grew gaunt he especially captain on his scoured bridge his face clawed by multi-colour beard to startling angles and all of them in their walk angular stylised as if they viewed themselves from a crow’s nest distanced. Partly this walk was designed to keep their flapping shoes on their feet and to avoid the litter in the lands stirred by thin breezes breaking: for they had now camped here three unmoving days or weeks and were a circus for the citizens who brought them wine and clothes and sometimes cake.

Charteris kept his gaze steady as hair hid his eyes in the wind hover.

Cass said gently to him almost singing, ‘This evening is our great triumphal entry, Master, when we break at last from this poor rookery and the lights of Brussels will welcome you and show your film and turn the prized town over to you. We have prepared the ground well and your followers flock in by hundreds. There is no need to motor farther for here we have a fine feathered Jerusalem where you will be welcome for ever.’

Sometimes he did not say all that he thought. Privately he said to himself, ‘While under the lid the finger is still to Frankfurt how shall we do more than park overnight in Belgium? How can Cass be so blind he does not see that if there is no trip there is nothing? He must be eyeless with purpose.’

So he swooped down upon the field of truth that Cass and Buddy pushed and that Cass like Angeline had no habit in his dark draper suit. Behind his shutters he saw bright-lit Cro-Magnons fearful in feathers and brutally flowered hunt the ponderous Neanderthal through fleet bush and drive them off and decimate them: not for hatred or violence but because it was the natural order and he uttered, ‘Predelic man must leave our caves as we reach each valley.’

‘Caves! Here’s a whole hogging city ours for the carve-in!’ said blind Cass. But there were those present who dug the Master and soon this casually important word of His went round and new attitudes were born in the bombsites and a solitary zither taking up this hunting song was joined by other instruments. And the world sailed too amid the Master’s brainwaves.

Leaving the others aside, he stylised himself back to his ruined roost where Angeline sat with her back curved to the light unspeaking.

‘After the film tonight all possibilities say we flit,’ he told her.

She did not look up.

‘Leave the will open to all winds and the right one blows. This is the multi-valued choice that we should snarl on and no more middle here.’ Echoing his words the first engine broke air as crude maintenance started for the farther trek; soon blue smoke ripped farting across the acid perimeters as more and more switched on.

Still she had no face for him.

‘You’re escaping, Colin, why don’t you face the truth about yourself? It’s not a positive decision – you’re leaving because you know that what I say about Cass and the others is a whole sparky truth and you hope to shake them off, don’t you?’

‘After this film and the adulation we flit on a head-start. Maybe a preach-in.’ He fumbled and half-lit a half-smoked cigar with an old fouled furcoat over his shoulder.

She stood up facing him more haggard than he. ‘He pushes but you don’t care, Col! You have the word about the Mafia but you don’t care. It was through him Marta died but you don’t care. Whatever happens you don’t care if we all fall dead in our trips!’

He was looking through the cracked pane. Mostly now they sat around with a trance-in going even among the rolling cars. But the beer brigade could caper – one of their plump girls danced now in the steel engraving air of a Jew’s harp slow but sturdy.

‘This place has lost all its loot so we’ll take in my film and then we’ll give it a scan and we’ll blow. Open up another city. Why don’t you dance, Angelpants?’

‘Phil, Robbins, now Marta-oh, you really have lost all loot yourself, man! You wouldn’t care if you got cut dead yourself and to think I stood up for you!’

The cigar wasn’t working. His hand twitched it into a corner, he moved to the door’s gape.

‘You use the old fleshioned terms and feelings, Angle, all extinct with no potentiality. There’s a new thing you aren’t with but I begin to graveL Somewhere Marta got a wrong drug, somewhere she caught hipatitis or pushed herself over. So? It’s down-trip and she had a thing we’ll never know in her mind, a latent death. She was destined and that’s bad We did the best and can’t bind too much if she freaks out.’

Lying with the lovely lubrication gone and nothing swinging.

‘Well I bind, for God’s sake! I could have helped her when she mewed to me about a toad levering up her skull or whatever it was and instead I sogged back like the rest of them! It was the night of the filmrush and now tonight they let the complete epic roll – I see more death tonight – right here in the toadstool I see it!’ She rapped her brow as if for answer.

‘Flame,’ he said. ‘A light to see us off by I see but I don’t see you dance like that chubby girl her cheeks. Angey, you can’t motorcade – I want you to stay and shack in with the golden Boreas in Bruxelles who’ll care for you and is not wholly gone.’

She threw herself at him and clutched him, holding round his neck with one hand stroking his beard his hair his ears his pileum with the other. ‘No, no, I can’t stay a moment in this stone vortex. Besides, my place is with you. I give you loot, I need you! You know your seed is sealed in me! Have pity!’

‘Woman, you won’t stay silent at Ouspenski’s spread!’

‘I’ll switch on, I will, and be like you and all the others. I’ll dance!’

He side-stepped and the vague promises of a mind-closure near engine stutter.

‘You don’t take one pinch of loot to my sainthood!’

‘Darling, we don’t have to take that come-on straight!’

Half to one side he pushed her peering through his own murk and the broken-down air, muttering, ‘So let’s get powered!’

‘Colin – you need me! You need someone near you who isn’t – you know – hippie!’ Her eyes were soft again the wild goose-girl.

‘That was yesterday. Listen!’ He pointed among the buckling roadsters. Ruby Dymond’s voice – Ruby always so turned-on to a new vibration – lifted against a Tonic rhythm singing.

Fearsome in our feathers brutally flowered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

Fearsome in our feathers and brutally flowered

The Word gathered loot as gears kicked in.

And another voice came in shouting ‘There are strangers over the hill, wow wow, strangers over the hill.’ In the background noise of backfiring and general revving and the toothaching zither sound. More plump girls dancing.

‘I need only the many now,’ he said.

They required little to eat, clothes mattered not much to them, in the strengthening air was the gossamer and hard tack of webwork. What they were given they traded for the precious fluid and this stored in tanks or hidden in saucepans under car seats so that when they had to go they had plenty of go – those who ran out of golden gas got left behind sans loot sans end.

By evening, a rackety carqueue moved towards the blistered dome of Sacré Coeur and citycentre where every pinnacle concealed its iguana of night. First came the Master in the new red Banshee his Brussels disciples had brought him as tribute, saluting with Angelina huddled despairing in the back seat. Then his tribe in all gay tarnation.

From one shuttered day to the next his mindpower fluctuated and now wheelborn again he, finding the images came fast, tried to order them but what truth they looted seemed to lie in their random complexity. He radiated the net or web to all ends and to cut away strands was not to differentiate the holes. Clearly as the patterns turned in slow mindsbreeze he saw among them an upturned invalid car with wheels still spinning and by it lying a crippled negro on his back lashing out with metal crutches at a strangely dressed whiteman with machine qualities. Near at hand stood in separate frame a fat bare man with painted skull shouting encouragement by megavoice.

Simultaneously this fat bare man lay floating in a lake of flame.

Simultaneously this fat bare man lay in the throes of love with a bare bald female dolly of human scale.

Simultaneously this bare bald dolly was Angeline with her suffering shoulders.

Simultaneously the face was cracked. China griefs seeped from wounds.

Startled, he turned and looked back at her on the back seat. Catching his glance, she lifted her hand and took his reassuringly, mother to child.

She said, ‘This good moment is an interim in our long deline.’

He said, ‘Wear this moment then with it all baraka as if you had it comfortable on your feet for ever in the timeflow,’ and at the prompt unprompted words his whole ornate idea of reincarnation in endless cycles flooded his hindusty horizons with eternal recurrence.

Outside their moving windows faces dystered with hunger and hope.

She said, ‘They acclaim you in the streets as if you did not come with downfall for them,’ gazing at the action.

Cass said to him looking angrily at her, ‘They salute you and would keep you here for all the evers, bapu, as the wheel turns.’

Thin-cheeked children of Brussels ran like wolves uniting in a pack packing and howling about the car – not all acclaiming, many jeering and attempting to stop the progress. Scuffles broke out Fights kindled near the slowcade and spread like a bush fire among the stone forests. Half a mile from the Grand Place, the cars piled to a stop and crowds swarmed over them. Some of the drivniks in the cars wept but there was no help for them, the police force having dissolved to rustle cattle on the ignoble German border.

At last the Tonic Traffic managed to climb free and with other helping hands set the infrasound machine with its husky rasped throat extended towards the bobbing heads. Its low vibrations sent a grey shudder across the crowd and a vision of the sick daybreak across untilled land where an old canal dragged straight over the landscape for a hundred versts. With many hands raised to steady the terrible machine, it progressed and the crowds fell back and the other autos moved forward so they grated gradually to Grand Place, with the group bellowing song and all present taking it up as far as able, detonated underground with a whole sparse country rumpling upwards and rolling at predatorial speed towards the fluttering heart with every kind of looted image.

In the Grand Place, a huge screen structured of plastic cubes had been set up on the front of some of the old Guild houses. From the Hotel de Ville oposite, a platform was built perilously out. High resplendent equinoctial on this platform sat the golden Boreas with shadowy men behind him and amid cheering the Master also ascended to sit here among the hatcheteers.

Thus met the two great men and the Bapu knew this was the fat bare ego of megavoice who could radiate powerful drama-dreams and later a song was sung telling that they exchanged views on exitsence with particular reference to what was to be considered inside and what outside or where deautomation lay: but the truth was that the huobub in the square below was so great that both were forced to play Gurdjieff at their own feast and even the offering of Angeline as a dolly substitute which the Master intended had to be forgotten she shrinking nevertheless from him.

Chilled wind rose, petals sweetly scattering. The square had been given rough nautical ceiling by immense canvas sails stretched over it and secured to the stone pinnacles of the guilds encrusting the titled place like stalagmites. This ceiling kept off the seasonal rain that fell as well as supporting strings of multi-coloured lights that glowed in a square way. Now it all became more sparky as the bulbs swung and fluttered where the whole sky was one big switchedonstellation with Cassiopeia dancing and ton-weights of conserved water off-loaded with grotesque effect to the Tonic Traffic dirges. Then the circuits tailed and all milling place swung unlit except by torches and one randy probing searchlight until unknown warriors funeral-pyred a bright-burning black motor-hearse.

The night was maniac over self-sold Europe,

Fighting broke out again and counter-singing, a car was overturned converted into variable geometry and set alight to predatory slogans. It was a big loot-in with action all round.

A colour slide show beginning, the crowd settled slightly to watch and smells of reefers densed the choleric air. Glaring colours such as delft blue ornamental red dead grey tabby amber persian turquoise eyeball blue cunt pink avocado green bile yellow prepuce puce donkey topaz urine primrose body lichen man cream arctic white puss copper jasmine thatch Chinese black pekinese lavender jazz tangerine moss green gangrene green spitoon green slut green horsy olive bum blue erotic silver peyote pale and a faint civilised wedgwood mushroom that got the bird were squirted direct onto the projector lens and radiated across the place where the pinnacle cliffs of buildings ran spurted and squidged amazing hues until they came like great organic things pumping out spermatorrhoeic rainbows in some last vast chthonic spectral orgamashem of brute creogulation while the small-dogging sky howled downfalls and shattered coloured lightbulbs.

The junketing eferetted into every nanosecond, not all in many sparky spirits for those who wished to leave the square for illness or emergency unable to exculpate a limb in the milling mass. Some weaker and fainter Bruxellois fell beneath beating feet to be beaujolaised under the press. Cholera had to loot its victims standing as their bursting sweats ransacked to fertilise itself all round the strinkled garmen but bulging eyes not making much extinction in exprulsion between agony and ecstasy of a stockstill stampede sparked the harm beneath the harmony and many perished gaily unaware they burst at the gland and vein and head and vent and died swinging in the choke of its choleric fellation.

Only when morning slutted at its lucid shutters the last crazed chords and colours writhed away did the paint-spattered herd gather what their rituals had wrought. From the cattle-pensioners rattled a great and terrible exclamor! Several who had in delurium clambered to the prismatic pinnacles to lick the suppurating hues now cast themselves for a final fling down to the fast-varying-geometry of the groundwave. The rest with remouraing strength dancers horsevoiced singers drugees gaunt thieves true believers boozers and paletooled lovers crept away into clogged side alleys to coven their despair.

Only then as Boreas crawled off the platform to lie again in peace under the caressing feathers of his heated pond did the Master speak to him.

‘You are an artist – come with us along the multi-value mazes of our mission. Your film caught all the spirit of our cause my life my thought the unspeaking nature of spontagnous living in mystic state!’

Then Boreas turning his great bare head and naked tear-lined cheeks like udders grey with dawn: ‘You stupid godvetdomme acidheads and junkies all the same you live inside your crazy nuts and never see a thing beyond! So you mastered my masterpiece, was it? Pah! My fool man de Grand was supposed to bring the cans of film but in his stinking state forgot – and once caught here impossible to leave again the cattlepen. And so my masterpiece my High Point Y unseen and unshown this golden importunity!’

‘We saw it all! It sparked right over with total lootage!’

Sick with disgust salivating.

‘God knows what you thought you saw! God knows, I swear I’ll drown myself, shoot myself, harpoon myself to death, never film again! Not only is my masterpiece unshown but not one of your armada knows it or misses it. This is the nadirene anti-death of art!’

Bitter and acid, Angerme’s rank morning laughter bit them.

Charteris took in breezy semi-grasp Boreas’s coat and pointed at the emptying square of stood squampede grey in washed-out light but ambered by flames that now consumed the pinnacles recently putrescent in other taints.

‘You have no faith in transmutation or my well of the miraculous! Your oldtime art has caught a light at last! Everything you Boreas tried for broke fire materially and burns into our sounding chambers! You are my second blazer henchforth, Boreas, a black wind blowing off the old alternatives and hurricaning those who cling to what was, electric, electric, see the sign! What you making here in newchanced happens! Stellar art!’ He laughed and cried tired dregs leaping leaping.

Through his blandering tears stared electric Boreas, clutching at his bare brow, screaming, ‘You gurglingodfool – your rainbowheaded randyears have set fire to the place! It’s the last loot! My poor beloved city burning! Bruxelles, Bruxelles!’

The poison that powered their inner scrutinies seeped into beetling baldbright Boreas so he saw himself tumultaneously making the cripple still upon the cabbalistic asphalt making couch among a lake of flames making love to a dummivulva making Age old Ina suffer him. His face cracked its banks china thoughts depiggied. Boreas saw more of boreased self than he could dare or wish to see. He rocked with unreason on the staggered balcony of outsight.

Manifolding with discardment he cheek in hand into the dull inner chambers of shade past old banners toothed with black lions collided with the birdlike nervous drapery-deportment figure of a human cassowary to hiss shoulder lept unmoving and instantly with locking blubber arm seized him groaning and yowling for accompaniment.

‘I am ill – magisterially ill!’ Hollowly to his lackneed squir.

Thus the blind bleeding the blind and dankring leech to leech upon romaining leechions highways where this wesciv sinbiote first took its blindwheeling veinhold with the cohorts tormenta in hurling knowhow to the punchy vein and murk the scenariover evermorgue till savvy was a scavengers filiure of which this sciatic scattering long kuwaited just the last blood-strained curtain. After the legendary coherets among the dark-falling walls of oh my westering world the venomilk of progross gains its bright eclipse and suppurages from the drawbridge-heads of cleverknowing Charteris gold-pated Nicholas Boreas and black jack Cass.

Nothing for Cass but this supporting role uneasy-eyed or never rubicond to shuffer with the ruined borean bulk out down a lamenting grand stair and by tenuous tenebrous betelgrained deathsquared slipways to Boreas’ luxconapt

There with continuing running whines for succour, Boreas almost hauled him to his pool edge. But at the sight of those bulbous hyacinths the castaway squealed like a lifted root seeking too in the convex gilt eyes twin unaimed deadmen of himself!

‘Yes, die-by-drowning, Cass, you undreaming schemer of your hire-oglyphed runways! Wasn’t it you who brought this pyromanichee circus into city just for hope of trade, Cass, for hope of trade? You neo-Nero para-promethean primp, they’ve sacked our silver-breasted capital, haven’t they? Haven’t they? Under the gargling lilies with your scant scruballs!’

He wrenched and tugged in buttacking flapping angony but Cass was nimble and falling took the epicurer man off balance with one tricky twisting cast of leg. Together they struck and smacked among showering orfe and weed and tame piranhas glimpsing for a nanoment undersea eyes of each with sibyling hatred widely divinited beneath the parting roots. Then Cass was sourfacing and outkelping himself, evading Boreas’s doctopurulent grasp to snatch from his stocking nestling a slender beak of knife.

So they confronted, Boreas half-submanged with foliaged morses dotting his sunken suit. Then he recalled his anger with flecked lungs, leaped up brandishing his arm and in megavoice again on set bellowed in long bursting vein the terrors of his repudation!

Wilting Cass turned his tail before the wind and like a deflayded animal ran away somewhere into the smoking city-hive to hide.

That cityhive and what its singeing symbolled did cosmic Charteris survey from the shaking platform.

Angeline shook the Master’s arm. ‘Come on, Masterpiece, let’s shake this unaimed scenario before the whole action goes Vesuvius! Come on! Uncoil the Kundalini!’

He stood enwrapped staring as the centuries fevered to the edges and breathed and blew themselves to heat again and their stones ran in showers kill slate cracked down the long glacier of mansard roofs and hurtled into the extinct square below to be devoured with its old common order in the long morain of alienation.

He pushed her away.

‘Colin! Colin! I’m not flame-proof if you are! It’s the last loot-in else!’

Rich curtains at the windows of an old embroidery now released a noise like cheering and whistling swept the blaze and the crushed bodies in the square below burst into conflagration with amazing joy. One or two cars were still careening madly about to lie with black bellies uppermost lewdly burning tyres still rotating as their votaries dragged themselves away. The emptying bowls held ashes and a lascivious flute held court.

Angelina was having a mild hysteric fit, crying this was London burning and slapping Charteris wildly on the face. He in his eyes scribbled on the retinal wall saw the graffiti of her blazing hate and all behind her flames like Christmas cacti flowering with a lorry coming fast recalled her husband the white land as it rushes up but no impact and his blows and knew among the microseconds lay a terminal alternative to silence her and have no more inspector at his feast for she as much as any of the predelic enemies among the Neanders dream her speckled wake.

She in her turn was not too wild to see a redder shade of crimson leap up his retaining wall and with a lesser scream now our valleys fall echoing before them now in our shattered towns the smoke clings still as the ulcerated countryside rumpled outwards at predatomi speed to her fluttering chimera she did the sleight-of-hand and dodged him as he once more sprang and pushed clutching at his ancient blue coat of Inner Relief but now no Christmas innocence. Slipping he fell and at the rickety platform edge hung down to see bloodied cobbles under surflare. With instinct she on top of him flung her bony trunk loading him back and cosseted him and goosed and mewed and sat him up and like a mother made all kindliness but milk there though the sun novaed.

Half-stunned he sighed, ‘You are my all-ternatives,’ and she half-wept upon him at such grudged sign.

Their hair singed and Buddy Docre came in an illusory moment with Ruby who fancied her and Bill and Greta yelling murder. They together all but not in unison climbed tumbled down the foul inner chimney stair and ran among the Sailing lava of another Eurape to the battered cavalcade jarring to take off in another street with the nervewrecked bangwaggon.

‘Boreas!’ cast the whiteface Master. ‘We must save Boreas!’

And she glowed him amazed still in his headwound he had some human part that plugged for the schillerskulled director. But she was learning now and now stayed silent at his murderous feast with inward tremor knowing she would not break a single crust if Boreas loafed or died as maybe the Master minded: a gulf of more than language lay between them.

Vanquished she tottered against Ruby his face moonstrous in the setglow and he grasped to the smouldering pompous columns gasping ‘Change gear Ange your way doesn’t have to be his or my car in the Chartercade you know that you know how I skid for you even since before Phil’s day two rotten no good bums –’

But he gave up as through her frantic goosetears she began on tearawy note that she was not good enough for him was no good to any man deserved to die or could render to no man the true grips of loves clutchment till the others turned back calling and Charteris took her failing wrist abraptly.

For him the self was once again in its throne called back from the purged night’s exile and he commanded no more as he faced the lack of his own divinity in all its anarchic alternative. His pyre grew behind him as they barged off across the ruby pavements for as Buddy passed a reefer he flipped the photograph that he had godded himself because they had to crown some earthly king then had forgotten that he was their moulding not his make so tunnelling upwards through the sparce countryside the mole-truth set up its tiny hill that all was counterfate in a counterfeit kingdoom.

He had cried for Boreas because that artifacer could help blow blazes from his parky wavering nature with the bellows of his counterfaking craft

Before real miracles he had to dislocate the miraculous in himself. New dogs shagged along alleyways with ties of flame. A man ran blazing down a side street. Dischorded impages of choleranis sang along the bars of his perplextives. All were infected from him and in that pandemetic lay his power to make or sicken till nature itself couched underground.

A smoke pall canopiled overhead the new angrimals swimming powerfully in it or hopping along the crestfallen buildings. Shops stood plagened open entrailed on the echoing gravements as men noised abroad and struck at each other with fansticks more than one fire was buckling up its lootage as they acidheaded out towards the oceanic piracy of their motorways.

Famine Starting At The Head

She clad herself in nylon

Walked the flagstones by my side

The feathered eagle

To the skies

No more uprises

Instead a palm of dust grows

You know that earthly tree now bears no bread

A hand outstretched is trembling

The flagstaff has an ensign

Only madmen see

With famine starting at the head

Some judy delivers a punchline

In the breadbasket today

No fond embraces

Are afoot

Death puts a boot

Where the bounce was once

In among the listening lilies a silent tread

Bite the fruit to taste the stone

Throughout the Gobi seed awaits

The rain to stalk

Famine starting at the head

He only has to say one word

Roses grow from an empty bowl

In our shuttered streets

The cars roam

Don’t need a home

Or volume control

Wandering sizeless with the unaimed dead

We hear his voice cry ‘Paradise!’

On the Golden Coast the cymbals

Start to sound

Salvation starting at the head

Tortures

There’s no answer from the old exchange

I want to push inside you

The sensations you find in yourself

May just be within my range

Grimly sitting round a table

Fifteen men with life at stake

They may torture themselves but those tortures

Will not make them awake

The cards were somehow different

The board I had not seen before

Their iron maiden gleamed dimly cherry-red with sex

Down in the basement I reached Low Point X

Last year they stopped their playing

Phone just ceased to buzz

But if you find them there tomorrow

Better start in there praying

Reincarnation where the cobwebs

Are comes daily from your keep

We may torture ourselves but those tortures

Cannot break our sleep

Poor A!

(Gurdjieff’s Mocking Song)

Poor A! Poor A! Now there’s a clever man!

He only wants to talk and he is happy!

I could have pulled his trousers off

Un-noticed, silly chappie!

Poor A! Poor A! What sort of man is it

Who only wants to talk and he’s okay?

I tell you everyone’s like that –

They fill the world today.

I might say poor old A is rather better

Then some wild talkniks I have met, a

Chap who in his way knows what is what –

On military onions he knows quite a lot.

In a superficial public way he tries to find out Why:

And he’d hate to think he ever told a lie.

Poor A! Poor A! He is no longer young!

He said so much I think and was uncouth

To guard against an awful chance

To listen to the truth –

He led himself a merry dance –

He hid his head in circumstance –

To fight against the truth!

Disciples: Poor us! Poor us! We really felt his tongue!

He drank Khagetia and chattered without ruth

To guard against his only chance

To hear G give out truth –

He led us all a merry dance –

He leads himself a dreary prance –

To smite against the truth!

To fight against the truth!

The Unaimed Deadman Theme

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forgotten forbidden

Suicide’s revelation its sunnyside hidden

Death’s black-and-white checker is down on the table

Fugitive fustian funebral infinite formidable

Far down the runway the black sheds are standing

My love talks to me with a delicate air

I am the victim the assassin the wounder

Her face looks no larger as I stand close than

It simultaneously does in my telescope sights

But pleasant is walking where elmtrees paint shadow

If I fire I might as well hit me

I walked with her once where her elms brought their shadows

The dogrose dies now while the invalid car

Barks vainly and I the assassin the wounder

On the runways the markings are no longer valid

Hieroglyphs of a system now long obsolete

No this button first love yes that’s the idea

If I fire I might as well hit me

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forbidden forgotten

I sprinted a dozen times over where rotten

Things grew and she cried for a sweet-flavoured minute

Fugitive fustian funebral formidable infinite

Lament Of The Representatives Of The Old Order

(A silent dummy dirge)

We kept up our facade

The unworld showed the third world how

And prized its pretty inhibitions

They undressed us

And possessed us

And now that times are hard

The unworld holds its outward show

Too late for us to change positions

They have dressed us

And confessed us

The Shuttered Street Girl

(Love song for flutes)

Her face showed like a shuttered street

Under the mauve and maureen flash

From which iguanas might crawl

Golden gullets wide

She stood there in a wet shift breathing

And just a mental block away

A lane lay in old summer green

Behind her pregnant eyes

Where a young barefoot girl might drive

Her would-be-swans all day

Or night for night and day are both

They don’t apply

There’s always summer in the dreaming elms

Till your last shuttered white year

And while the small rain fills

The thoroughfares of love

So her face in blue fermentation

When she crouches seems

Like an ever-visiting miracle

As she pees by old brickheaps

There’s whole sparse countryside

Buckling up from far

Underground as she stoops there

And our small rain raining

The Infrasound Song

Where the goose drinks wait the wildmen

Wait the wildmen watching their reflections

When the damson fruits the wildmen

Wild Neanders dream their speckled sleep

They have their dances ochre-limbed to a stone’s tune

And their heavy hymns for the solstice dawn

Their dead go down into their offices berobed

With ceremony. Their virgins paint

Their cinnamon lips with juice of berry

They owned the world before us

Now their valleys fall echoing our footfall

In their shattered towns the smoke clings still

Down the autobahn arrows in the afternoon

As we drive them convert them or ride them

We are the strangers over the hilltop

Peace on our brows but our dreams are armoured

Fearsome in our feathers brutally flowered

Pushing the trip-time up faster and faster

Pre-psychedelic men know that extinction

Sits on their hilltops all drearily towered

As we cavalry in with the master

Cavalry in with the master

With the master

At The Starve-In

Met this girl at the starve-in

I met this girl at the starve-in

I said I met today’s girl at the starve-in

Protein deficiency’s good for the loins

She said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Yes she said there’s bad news from Deutschland

She lay there and said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Can you hear those little states marching

I raised my self kingly in the stony playsquare

Ground my elbow like a sapling in dirt

Looked through the stilled plantangents of smoke

Proclaimed that even the bad news was good

We’ve marched under banner headlines

Closed down the stone-aged universities

See ally fall upon ally

Oh Prague don’t dismember me please

It was all in the Wesciv work-out

Now we got some other disease

Met my fate in the work-out

Man, I met my fate in the work-out

No denying I met my fate in the work-out

And no one knows what’s clobbered me

Rainbows at starvation corner

There’s rainbows at starvation corner

I keep seeing rainbows at starvation corner

like they’re the spectrums at the feast

Met this girl at the starve-in

Yeah met this girl at the starve-in

Oh yeah I met this pussy at the starve-in

Ana we dreamed that we ruled Germany

We dreamed we ruled all Germany

It’s One of Those Times

It’s sim ply

One of those times

when you’re going to pot

one of those crimes

when you really should rot

one of those times you do not

It’s sim ply

one of those mornings

they’ve all got you taped

one of those dawnings

you hoped you’d escaped

one of those mornings you’re raped

The cities are falling like rain from the skies

The toadthings are leaving the ground as you watch

You’re laughing and dancing with joy and surprise

It helps with that pain in your crotch

So it’s just

one of those rages

that rupture and burn

one of those ages

you get what you earn

one of those pages

you wish you could turn

’Cos its none of your bloody concern

No it’s none of your bloody concern

It knocks you sideways

None of your bloody concern

The Poison that Powered Their Scrutinies

The poison that powered their inner scrutinies

Seeped into beetling baldbright Boreas

So he saw himself tumultaneously

Making the cripple still

Upon the cabbalistic asphalt

Making couch upon a lake of flames

Making love to a dummy vulva

Making Age Old Ina suffer him

His face cracked its banks

China thoughts depiggied

Boreas saw more of his borearsed self

Than he could dare or wish to see

He rocked with unreason on

The staggered balcony of insight

Manifolding in discardment

As his capital lost all loot

The Miraculous In Search Of Me

It could all have turned out differently.

Indeed, to other peeled-off I’s

The difference is an eternal recurrence:

And the stone trees that erupt along

My beaches, roots washed bone-clever

By the tow and rinse of change –

They shade one instance only of me,

For circumstance is more than character.

At this bare fence I once turned left

And became another person: laughed

Where else I cried and now sit lingering

Looking at Japanese prints;

Or in a restaurant decked with pine

Cones taste in company

Silver carp and damson tart.

Along the walls

Other I’s went, strangers in word and deed,

Alien photocopies, spooks

Closer than blood-brothers, more alarming

Than haggard face spectral in empty room,

Lonelier than stone age campfires, doppelgangers.

They are my possibilities. Their pasts were once

My past, but in the surging wheels

And cogs become distorted. So, this one –

On a far-distant spoke! – danced

All night and had splendid lovers,

Wrote love letters still kept locked

Treasured in a bureau-drawer, knew girls

The world now knows by name and voice.

But this I chose to wander down

My stony beach, my own rejection.

My past is like a fable. Truly,

Circumstance is more than character.

Whatever other peel-offs saw –

My I was on the stranded alien land,

The restlessness of broken cities,

Mute messages that only after years

Open, the crime of vulnerability,

Patched land of people never known to be

Known or knighted, wild bombed world,

World where I taste the flavour on

The tongue, knowing not if my other eyes

Would call it happiness or doom.

I am, but what I am –

Others may know, others may care. Only

The dear light goes in her hand

Away among the childhood trees.

In the perspectives of my mind

It never dwindles. I always live

With myself; and that’s too much.

I need

The overpowering circumstance

The nostalgia of

That eternal return

As if the unstructured hours

My uninstructed hours

Of day are pulped like

Newspaper

And used on us again

With the odd word

Here and there

Locked

Starting up out of context

Treasured

An old ghost

Haunting another

Discardment.

Indeed it is

Always eternally

Turning out

Different.

Confluence

The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably, perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.

As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, has been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Geldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.

Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words which follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanised phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr Rohan Prendernath, one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been compiled.

AB WE TEL MIN The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker

ARN TUTKHAN Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine

BAGI RACK Apologising as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun

BAG RACK Needless and offensive apologies

BAMAN The span of a man’s consciousness

BI The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years

BI SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature

BIT SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a

blasphemous nature

BI TOSI A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes

BI TVAS A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes

BIUI TOSI A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair

BIUT TASH A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Ka themes (c.f.)

CANO LEE MIN Things sensed out-of-sight that will return

CA PATA VATUZ The taste of a maternal grandfather

CHAM ON TH ZAM Being witty when nobody else appreciates it

DAR AYRHOH The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old

supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place

EN IO PLAY The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep

GEE KUTCH Solar empathy

GE NU The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead

GE NUP DIMU The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead

GOR A Ability to live for eight hundred years

HA ATUZ SHAK EAN Disgrace attending natural death of maternal grandfather

HAR DAR KA The complete understanding that all the soil of Myrin passes through the bodies of its earthworms every ten years

HAR DI DI KAL A small worm; the hypothetical creator of a

hypothetical sister planet of Myrin

HE YUP The first words the computers spoke, meaning, ‘The light will not be necessary’

HOLT CHA The feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

HOLT CHE The autonomous marshalling of the senses which produces the feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

HOZ STAP GURT A writer’s attitude to fellow writers

INK TH O Morality used as an offensive weapon

JILY JIP TUP A thinking machine that develops a stammer; the action of pulling up the trousers while running uphill

JIL JIPY TUP Any machine with something incurable about it; pleasant laughter that is nevertheless unwelcome; the action of pulling up the trousers while running downhill

KARNAD EES The enjoyment of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

KARNDAL CHESS The waste of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

KARNDOLI YON TOR Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal

KARNDOL KI REE The waste of a life by doing nothing; a type of fasting

KUNDULUM To be well and in bed with two pretty sisters

LAHAH SIP Tasting fresh air after one has worked several hours at one’s desk

LA YUN UN A struggle in which not a word is spoken; the underside of an inaccessible boulder; the part of one’s life unavailable to other people

LEE KE MIN Anything or anyone out-of-sight that one senses will never return; an apology offered for illness

LIKI INK TH KUTI The small engine that attends to one after the act of excretion

MAL A feeling of being watched from within

MAN NAIZ TH Being aware of electricity in wires concealed in the walls

MUR ON TIG WON The disagreeable experience of listening to oneself in the middle of a long speech and neither understanding what one is saying nor enjoying the manner in which it is being said; a foreign accent; a lion breaking wind after the evening repast

NAM ON A The remembrance, in bed, of camp fires

NO LEE LE MUN The love of a wife that becomes especially vivid when she is almost out-of-sight

NU CROW Dying before strangers

NU DI DIMU Dying in a low place, often of a low fever

NU HIN DER VLAK The invisible stars; forms of death

NUN MUM Dying before either of one’s parents; ceasing to fight just because one’s enemy is winning

NUT LAP ME Dying of laughing

NUT LA POM Dying laughing

NUT VATO Managing to die standing up

NUTVU BAG RACK TO be born dead

NU VALK Dying deliberately in a lonely (high) place

OBI DAKT An obstruction; three or more machines talking together

ORAN MUDA A change of government; an old peasant saying meaning, ‘The dirt in the river is different every day’

PAN WOL LE MUDA A certainty that tomorrow will much resemble today; a line of manufacturing machines

PAT O BANE BAN The ten heartbeats preceding the first heartbeat of orgasm

PI KI SKAB WE The parasite that afflicts man and Tig Gag in its various larval stages and, while burrowing in the brain of the Tig Gag, causes it to speak like a man

PI SHAK RACK CHANO The retrogressive dreams of autumn attributed to the presence in the bloodstream of Pi Ki Skab We

PIT HOR Pig’s cheeks, or the droppings of pigs; the act of name-

dropping

PLAY The heightening of consciousness that arises when one awakens in a strange room that one cannot momentarily identify

SHAK ALE MAN The struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping

SHAK LA MAN GRA When the urge to urinate takes precedence over the urge to continue sleeping

SHAK LO MUN GRAM When the urge to continue sleeping takes

precedence over all things

SHEAN DORL Gazing at one’s reflection for reasons other than vanity

SHE EAN MIK Performing prohibited postures before a mirror

SHEM A slight cold afflicting only one nostril; the thoughts that pass when one shakes hands with a politician

SHUK TACK The shortening in life-stature a man incurs from a

seemingly benevolent machine

SOBI A reverie lasting less than twenty years on cosmological themes; a nickel

SODI DORL One machine making way for another; decadence,

particularly in the Cold Continents

SODI IN PIT Any epithet which does not accurately convey what it

intends, such as ‘Sober as a judge’, ‘Silly nit’, ‘He swims like a fish’, ‘He’s only half-alive’, and so on

STAINI RACK NUSVIODON Experiencing Staini Rack Nuul and then realising that one must continue in the same outworn fashion because the alternatives are too frightening, or because one is too weak to change; wearing a suit of clothes at which one sees strangers looking askance

STAINI RACK NUUL Introspection (sometimes prompted by birthdays) that one is not living as one determined to live when one was very young; or, on the other hand, realising that one is living in a mode decided upon when one was very young and which is now no longer applicable or appropriate

STAIN TOK I The awareness that one is helplessly living a role

STA SODON The worst feelings which do not even lead to suicide

SU SODA VALKUS A sudden realisation that one’s spirit is not pure, overcoming one on Mount Rinvlak (in the Southern Continent)

TI Civilised aggression

TIG GAG The creature most like man in the Southern Continent which smiles as it sleeps

TIPY LAP KIN Laughter that one recognises though the laughter is

unseen; one’s own laughter in a crisis

TOK AN Suddenly divining the nature and imminence of old age in one’s thirty-first year

TUAN BOLO A class of people one only meets at weddings; the pleasure of feeling rather pale

TU KI TOK Moments of genuine joy captured in a play or charade about joy; the experience of youthful delight in old age

TUZ PAT MAIN (Obs.) The determination to eat one’s maternal

grandfather

U (Obs.) The amount of time it takes for a lizard to turn into a bird; love

UBI A girl who lifts her skirts at the very moment you wish she would

UDI KAL The clothes of the woman one loves

UDI UKAL The body of the woman one loves

UES WE TEL DA Love between a male and female politician

UGI SLO GU The love that needs a little coaxing

UMI RIN TOSIT The sensations a woman experiences when she does not know how she feels about a man

UMY RIN RU The new dimensions that take on illusory existence when the body of the loved woman is first revealed

UNIMGAG BU Love of oneself that passes understanding; a machine’s dream

UNK TAK An out-of-date guide book; the skin shed by the snake that predicts rain

UPANG PLA Consciousness that one’s agonised actions undertaken for love would look rather funny to one’s friends

UPANG PLAP Consciousness that while one’s agonised actions undertaken for love are on the whole rather funny to oneself, they might even look heroic to one’s friends; a play with a cast of three or less

U RI RHI Two lovers drunk together

USANA NUTO A novel all about love, written by a computer

USAN I NUT Dying for love

USAN I ZUN BI Living for love; a tropical hurricane arriving from over the sea, generally at dawn

UZ Two very large people marrying after the prime of life

UZ TO KARDIN The realisation in childhood that one is the issue of two very large people who married after the prime of life

WE FAAK A park or a college closed for seemingly good reasons; a city where one wishes one could live

YA GAG Too much education; a digestive upset during travel

YA GAG LEE Apologies offered by a hostess for a bad meal

YA GA TUZ Bad meat; (Obs.) dirty fingernails

YAG ORN A president

YATUZ PATI (Obs.) The ceremony of eating one’s maternal grandfather

YATUZ SHAK SHAK NAPANG HOLI NUN Lying with one’s maternal grandmother; when hens devour their young

YE FLIC TOT A group of men smiling and congratulating each other

YE FLU GAN Philosophical thoughts that don’t amount to much;

graffiti in a place of worship

YON TORN A paper tiger; two children with one toy

YON U SAN The hesitation a boy experiences before first kissing his first girl

YOR KIN BE A house; a circumlocution; a waterproof hat; the smile of a slightly imperfect wife

YUP PA A book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it

YUPPA GA Stomach ache masquerading as eyestrain; a book in which nothing is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it

YUTH MOD The assumed bonhomie of visitors and strangers

ZO ZO CON A woman in another field

The Dead Immortal

Mickie Houston was strikingly self-centred. But with his looks, his voice and his style – and his wife – he had gone far. And meant to go further.

Rickie Houston was strikingly beautiful. She looked even more lovely than usual as she said to her husband, ‘Don’t take the time-travel drug, darling. I have a terrible feeling it will kill you!’

Mickie Houston kissed her and said, ‘And I have a terrific feeling it may make me immortal!’

The exchange was overheard by a gossip columnist, and soon became famous. Not only was the controversy over the new time-travel drug raging (for this was in 1969), but Rickie and Mickie were the toasts of the switched-on pop world, the duo who finally knocked the groups from the charts.

The extra publicity encouraged Mickie to go ahead with his idea. He went to the famous London clinic where the drug was being administered to the few who were reckless or rich enough to pay for the injection.

The specialist shook his head and said gravely, ‘The effects of LSKK, the so-called time-travel drug, are very strange, Mr Houston. It’s not an experience to be undertaken lightly. We have a duty to warn any potential time-travellers that they take their life in their hands when they undergo the injection.’

‘Yeah, I heard all that jazz from my wife.’

‘Really? What your wife may not have told you is that the effects of the drug are subjective, just like the effects of LSD. With LSKK, you find yourself travelling through the sort of time in which you believe.

‘Thus, a Hindu who took LSKK would find himself travelling through vast cycles of time, since that concept accords with his religion. A holy man who believes only in God’s time would find he travelled straight into God’s presence. But for the average Englishman, like yourself, who believes time and progress go on straight ahead for ever, well, he will find himself doing just that.’

‘Ha, but I’m not the average Englishman! I don’t believe in time-travel at all. It’s just a lot of mystical nonsense and you’re cashing in on the fashion for it.’

The specialist put on a ghastly genial smile.

‘You’re just doing this for publicity, eh?’

‘All I believe in is the present. I live for the living moment, that’s me!’

That’s what Mickie said as the needle sank into his arm and 250ccs of LSKK coursed through his veins. Cameramen were there to record the moment, and Rickie kissed him. Truth to tell, he was a little tired of her, so that even the prospect of never seeing her again did not worry him. Strewn throughout time, he visualised an endless line of pretty girls.

Even as Rickie’s lips touched his, Mickie Houston disappeared.

Powered by LSKK, he drifted into the future, the staggering future where the centuries are thicker than the cells in the bloodstream. For most time-travellers, the effect of LSKK soon wore off and they settled to rest one by one in a remote time at a certain hour of a certain day, as even the leaf that blows furthest from an autumn tree will eventually come to rest somewhere.

But because Mickie believed only in the present moment, he drifted on for ever, imprisoned in his bubble of time like a bubble in a glacier.

Fixed in the gesture of kissing Rickie, he watched the millennia float by. He never wearied, since none of his personal time passed. But outside time passed; the world wearied. The great concourse of the human race began to thin.

Generation after generation had looked on with admiration and amusement as the handsome young man in old-fashioned clothes drifted through their lives, standing always on the same spot in the same romantic attitude. Indeed, Mickie had become something of a world-myth. A small green park was created round him in the midst of the fantastic city. The thousand thousand generations came to look at him here. But the mighty stream dwindled to a trickle eventually. Fixed in his bubble, Mickie saw the trees of the park grown shaggy and old and seamed. Eventually they fell one by one, and the great building behind them. The city was dying, and the human race with it. Few people came to see the world-myth now.

Another race of beings had inherited Earth, phantasmal beings like comets, blazing in solitary beauty like comets that had grown to prefer forests to the deserts of space. The sun that shone upon their millions of centuries of peace and fruitfulness shrank to the apparent size of a grape; it emitted an intense white light like a magnesium flare. So it seemed there was always moonlight on earth.

Still an occasional human came, fur-clad, to the place where Mickie stood imprisoned on the plain. Finally, two humans came together, very small and silent, to look at him for the best part of a magnesium-white day.

They asked each other, ‘He will be the last of our kind; but is he dead or is he immortal?’ So they echoed the once-famous exchange that Mickie and Rickie had had, so very long ago.

No one else ever came again. Even the comet-people faded eventually. Eventually, even the sun faded. Even the stars burned dim and faded. The universe had grown old. Time itself faded and … slowly … came to a stop …

There, poised on the brink of the last second of eternal time, Mickie stood transfixed in his bubble.

And with his lips still pursed in the moment of that long-gone kiss, he asked himself the final question, ‘Am I dead or am I immortal?’

Down the Up Escalation

Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese rôle in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura’s manuscript.

She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book – ‘a sort of autobiography’, she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.

On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals – you couldn’t see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.

A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.

There was a ship embedded in the ice. You’d hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice.

Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day’s load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin’s time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.

The ship was free of ice, sailing along in a sea of mist. It was no longer a pleasure ship but a research ship. Men were singing. They sang that they sailed on a lake as big as Australia.

‘They aren’t men. They are horses!’ My aunt.

‘There are horses aboard.’

‘I certainly don’t see any men.’

‘Funny-looking horses.’

‘Did you see a wolf then?’

‘I mean, more like ponies. Shaggy. Small and shaggy. Is that gun loaded?’

‘Naturally. They’re forest ponies – I mean to say, not ponies but reindeer. “The curse of the devil”, they call them.’

‘It’s the bloody rotten light! They do look like reindeer. But they must be men.’

‘Ever looked one in the eye? They are the most frightening animals.’

My father was talking to me again, speaking over the phone. It had been so long. I had forgotten how I loved him, how I missed him. All I remembered was that I had gone with my two brothers to his funeral; but that must have been someone else’s funeral, someone else’s father. So many people, good people, were dying.

I poured my smiles down the telephone, heart full of delight, easy. He was embarking on one of his marvellous stories. I gulped down his sentences.

‘That burial business was all a joke – a swindle. I collected two thousand pounds for that, you know, Bruce. No, I’m lying! Two and a half. It was chicken feed, of course, compared with some of the swindles I’ve been in. Did I ever tell you how Ginger Robbins and I got demobbed in Singapore at the end of the war, 1945? We bought a defunct trawler off a couple of Chinese business men – very nice old fatties called Pee – marvellous name! Ginger and I had both kept our uniforms, and we marched into a transit camp and got a detail of men organised – young rookies, all saluting us like mad – you’d have laughed! We got them to load a big LCT engine into a five-tonner, and we all drove out of camp without a question being asked, and – wham! – straight down to the docks and our old tub. It was boiling bloody hot, and you should have seen those squaddies sweat as they unloaded the engine and man-handled –’

‘Shit, Dad, this is all very funny and all that,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got some work to do, you know. Don’t think I’m not enjoying a great reminiscence, but I have to damned work, see? Okay?’

I rang off.

I put my head between my hands and – no, I could not manage weeping. I just put my head between my hands and wondered why I did what I did. Subconscious working, of course. I tried to plan out a science fiction story about a race of men who had only subconsciousnesses. Their consciousnesses had been painlessly removed by surgery.

They moved faster without their burdening consciousnesses, wearing lunatic smiles or lunatic frowns. Directly after the operation, scars still moist, they had restarted World War II, some assuming the roles of Nazis or Japanese or Jugoslav partisans or British fighter pilots in kinky boots. Many even chose to be Italians, the role of Mussolini being so keenly desired that at one time there were a dozen Duces striding about, keeping company with the droves of Hitlers.

Some of these Hitlers later volunteered to fly with the Kamikazes.

Many women volunteered to be raped by the Wehrmacht and turned nasty when the requirements were filled. When a concentration camp was set up, it was rapidly filled; people have a talent for suffering. The history of the war was rewritten a bit. They had Passchendaele and the Somme in; a certain President Johnson led the British forces.

The war petered out in a win for Germany. Few people were left alive. They voted themselves second-class citizens, mostly becoming Jewish Negroes or Vietnamese. There was birching between consenting adults. These good folk voted unanimously to have their subconsciousnesses removed, leaving only their ids.

I was on the floor. My study. The name of the vinolay was – it had a name, that rather odious pattern of little wooden chocks. I had it on the tip of my tongue. When I sat up, I realised how cold I was, cold and trembling, not working very well.

My body was rather destructive to society, as the Top Clergy would say. I had used it for all sorts of things; nobody knew where it had been. I had used it in an unjust war. Festival. It was called Festival. Terrible name, surely impeded sales.

I could not get up. I crawled across the floor towards the drink cupboard in the next room. Vision blurry. As I looked up, I saw my old aunt’s manuscript on the table. One sheet had fluttered down on to the Festival. I crawled out into the dining-room, through the door, banging myself as I went. Neither mind nor body was the precision ballistic missile it once had been.

The bottle. I got it open before I saw it was Sweet Martini, and dropped it. It seeped into the carpet; no doubt that had a name too. Weary, I rested my head in the mess.

‘If I die now, I shall never read Aunt Laura’s life …’

Head on carpet, bottom in air, I reached and grasped the whisky bottle. Why did they make the stuff so hard to get at? Then I drank. It made me very ill indeed.

It was Siberia again, the dread reindeer sailing eternally their ships across the foggy ice lakes. They were munching things, fur and wood and bone, the saliva freezing into icicles as it ran from their jaws. Terrible noise, like the knocking of my heart.

I was laughing. Whoever died dreaming of reindeer – who but Lapps? Digging my fingers into the nameless carpet, I tried to sit up. It proved easier to open my eyes.

In the shady room, a woman was sitting. She had turned from the window to look at me. Gentle and reassuring lines and planes composed her face. It took a while to see it as a face; even as an arrangement against a window, I greatly liked it.

The woman came over to look closely at me. I realised I was in bed before I realised it was my wife. She touched my brow, making my nervous system set to work on discovering whether the signal was a pain or pleasure impulse, so that things in there were too busy for me to hear what she was saying. The sight of her speaking was pleasurable; it moved me to think that I should answer her.

‘How’s Aunt Laura?’

The messages were coming through, old old learning sorting out speech, hearing, vision, tactile sensations, and shunting them through the appropriate organs. The doctor had been; it had only been a slight one, but this time I really would have to rest up and take all the pills and do nothing foolish; she had already phoned the office and they were very understanding. One of my brothers was coming round, but she was not at all sure whether he should be allowed to see me. I felt entirely as she did about that.

‘I’ve forgotten what it was called.’

‘Your brother Bob?’

My speech was a little indistinct. I had a creepy feeling about whether I could move the limbs I knew were bundled with me in the bed. We’d tackle that challenge as and when necessary.

‘Not Bob. Not Bob. The…the …’

‘Just lie there quietly, darling. Don’t try to talk.’

‘The…carpet …’

She went on talking. The hand on the forehead was a good idea. Irritably, I wondered why she didn’t do it to me when I was well and better able to appreciate it. What the hell was it called? Roundabout?

‘Roundabout …’

‘Yes, darling. You’ve been here for several hours, you know. You aren’t quite awake yet, are you?’

‘Shampoo …’

‘Later, perhaps. Lie back now and have another little doze.’

‘Variety …’

‘Try and have another little doze.’

One of the difficulties of being a publisher is that one has to fend off so many manuscripts submitted by friends of friends. Friends always have friends with obsessions about writing. Life would be simple – it was the secret of a happy life, not to have friends of friends. Supposing you were cast away on a desert island disc, Mr Hartwell, what eight friends of friends would you take with you, provided you had an inexhaustible supply of manuscripts?

I leaned across the desk and said, ‘But this is worse than ever. You aren’t even a friend of a friend of a friend, auntie.’

‘And what am I if I’m not a friend of a friend?’

‘Well, you’re an aunt of a nephew, you see, and after all, as an old-established firm, we have to adhere to certain rules of – etiquette, shall we call it, by which –’

It was difficult to see how offended she was. The pile of manuscript hid most of her face from view. I could not remove it, partly because there was a certain awareness that this was really the sheets. Finally I got them open.

‘It’s your life, Bruce. I’ve written your life. It could be a bestseller.’

‘Variety… No, Show Business …’

‘I thought of calling it “By Any Other Name” …’

‘We have to adhere to certain rules …’

It was better when I woke again. I had the name I had been searching for: Festival. Now I could not remember what it was the name of.

The bedroom had changed. There were flowers about. The portable TV set stood on the dressing-table. The curtains were drawn back and I could see into the garden. My wife was still there, coming over, smiling. Several times she walked across to me, smiling. The light came and went, the flowers changed position, colour, the doctor got in her way. Finally she reached me.

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

No more trouble after that. We had the TV on and watched the war escalate in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Returning health made me philosophical. ‘That’s what made me ill. Nothing I did…under-exercise, over-eating…too much booze…too many fags…just the refugees.’

‘I’ll turn it off if it upsets you.’

‘No. I’m adapting. They won’t get me again. It’s the misery the TV sets beam out from Vietnam all over the world. That’s what gives people heart attacks. Look at lung cancer – think how it has been on the increase since the war started out there. They aren’t real illnesses in the old sense, they’re sort of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world’s going to escalate into a Vietnam.’

She jumped up, alarmed. ‘I’ll switch it off!’

‘The war?’

‘The set.’

The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.

They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat – nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stony eyes that twinkled.

My angel came in hotfoot and said, ‘Can you get a few friends of friends together? The refugees are waiting on the beach.’ There were four of us in the hospital beds. We scrambled up immediately, dragging bandages and sputum cups and bed pans. The guy next to me came trailing a plasma bottle. We climbed into the helicopter.

We prayed en route. ‘Bet the Chinese and Russian volunteers don’t pray on the trip,’ I insinuated to the angel.

‘The Chinese and Russians don’t volunteer.’

‘So you make a silly insinuation, you get a silly innuendo,’ the plasma man said.

God’s hand powered the chopper. Faster than engines but maybe less reliable. We landed on the beach beside a foaming river. Heat pouring down and up the sideways. The refugees were forlorn and dirty. A small boy stood hatless with a babe hatless on his back. Both ageless, eyes like reindeer’s, dark, moist, cursed.

‘I’ll die for those two,’ I said, pointing.

‘One for one. Which one do you choose?’

‘Hell, come on now, angel, isn’t my soul as good as any two god-damned Viet kid souls?’

‘No discounts here, bud. Yours is shop-soiled, anyway.’

‘Okay, the bigger kid.’

He was whisked instantly into the helicopter. I saw his dirty and forlorn face at the window. The baby sprawled screaming on the sand. It was naked, scabs on both knees. It yelled in slow motion, piddling, trying to burrow into the sand. I reached slowly out to it, but the exchange had been made, the angel turned the napalm on to me. As I fell, the baby went black in my shadow.

‘Let me switch the fire down, if you’re too hot, darling.’

‘Yuh. And a drink …’

She helped me struggle into a sitting position, put her arm round my shoulders. Glass to lips, teeth, cool water in throat.

‘God, I love you, Ellen, thank God you’re not …’

‘What? Another nightmare?’

‘Not Vietnamese …’

It was better then, and she sat and talked about what had been going on, who had called, my brother, my secretary, the Roaches…‘the Roaches have called’…‘any Earwigs’?…the neighbours, the doctor. Then we were quiet a while.

‘I’m better now, much better. The older generation’s safe from all this, honey. They were born as civilians. We weren’t. Get me auntie’s manuscript, will you?’

‘You’re not starting work this week.’

‘It won’t hurt me. She’ll be writing about her past, before the war and all that. The past’s safe. It’ll do me good. The prose style doesn’t matter.’

I settled back as she left the room. Flowers stood before the TV, making it like a little shrine.

Full Sun

The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.

The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.

During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest – or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.

He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.

The stranger was standing half-concealed behind the trunk of a tree, gazing uncertainly at the trundler and Balank. When Balank raised a hand in tentative greeting, the stranger responded hesitantly. When Balank called out his identification number, the man came cautiously into the open, replying with his own number. The trundler searched in its files, issued an okay, and they moved forward.

As they got level with the man, they saw he had a small mobile hut pitched behind him. He shook hands with Balank, exchanging personal signals, and gave his name as Cyfal.

Balank was a tall slender man, almost hairless, with the closed expression on his face that might be regarded as characteristic of his epoch. Cyfal, on the other hand, was as slender but much shorter, so that he appeared stockier; his thatch of hair covered all his skull and obtruded slightly onto his face. Something in his manner, or perhaps the expression around his eyes, spoke of the rare type of man whose existence was chiefly spent outside the city.

‘I am the timber officer for this region,’ he said, and indicated his wristcaster as he added, ‘I was notified you might be in this area, Balank.’

‘Then you’ll know I’m after the werewolf.’

‘The werewolf? There are plenty of them moving through this region, now that the human population is concentrated almost entirely in the cities.’

Something in the tone of the remark sounded like social criticism to Balank; he glanced at the trundler without replying.

‘Anyhow, you’ve got a good night to go hunting him,’ Cyfal said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Full moon.’

Balank gave no answer. He knew better than Cyfal, he thought, that when the moon was at full, the werewolves reached their time of greatest power.

The trundler was ranging about nearby, an antenna slowly spinning. It made Balank uneasy. He followed it. Man and machine stood together on the edge of a little cliff behind the mobile hut. The cliff was like the curl of foam on the peak of a giant Pacific comber, for here the great wave of earth that was this hill reached its highest point. Beyond, in broken magnificence, it fell down into fresh valleys. The way down was clothed in beeches, just as the way up had been in oaks.

‘That’s the valley of the Pracha. You can’t see the river from here.’ Cyfal had come up behind them.

‘Have you seen anyone who might have been the werewolf? His real name is Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061, City Zagrad.’

Cyfal said, ‘I saw someone this way this morning. There was more than one of them, I believe.’ Something in his manner made Balank look at him closely. ‘I didn’t speak to any of them, nor them to me.’

‘You know them?’

‘I’ve spoken to many men out here in the silent forests, and found out later they were werewolves. They never harmed me.’

Balank said, ‘But you’re afraid of them?’

The half-question broke down Cyfal’s reserve. ‘Of course I’m afraid of them. They’re not human – not real men. They’re enemies of men. They are, aren’t they? They have powers greater than ours.’

‘They can be killed. They haven’t machines, as we have. They’re not a serious menace.’

‘You talk like a city man! How long have you been hunting after this one?’

‘Eight days. I had a shot at him once with the laser, but he was gone. He’s a grey man, very hairy, sharp features.’

‘You’ll stay and have supper with me? Please. I need someone to talk to.’

For supper, Cyfal ate part of a dead wild animal he had cooked. Privately revolted, Balank ate his own rations out of the trundler. In this and other ways, Cyfal was an anachronism. Hardly any timber was needed nowadays in the cities, or had been for millions of years. There remained some marginal uses for wood, necessitating a handful of timber officers, whose main job was to fix signals on old trees that had fallen dangerously, so that machines could fly over later and extract them like rotten teeth from the jaws of the forest. The post of timber officer was being filled more and more by machines, as fewer men were to be found each generation who would take on such a dangerous and lonely job far from the cities.

Over the eons of recorded history, mankind had raised machines that made his cities places of delight. Machines had replaced man’s early inefficient machines; machines had replanned forms of transport; machines had come to replan man’s life for him. The old stone jungles of man’s brief adolescence were buried as deep in memory as the coal jungles of the Carboniferous.

Far away in the pile of discarded yesterdays, man and machines had found how to create life. New foods were produced, neither meat nor vegetable, and the ancient wheel of the past was broken forever, for now the link between man and the land was severed: agriculture, the task of Adam, was as dead as steamships.

Mental attitudes were moulded by physical change. As the cities became self-supporting, so mankind needed only cities and the resources of cities. Communications between city and city became so good that physical travel was no longer necessary; city was separated from city by unchecked vegetation as surely as planet is cut off from planet. Few of the hairless denizens of the cities ever thought of outside; those who went physically outside invariably had some element of the abnormal in them.

‘The werewolves grow up in cities as we do,’ Balank said. ‘It’s only in adolescence they break away and seek the wilds. You knew that, I suppose?’

Cyfal’s overhead light was unsteady, flickering in an irritating way. ‘Let’s not talk of werewolves after sunset,’ he said.

‘The machines will hunt them all down in time.’

‘Don’t be so sure of that. They’re worse at detecting a werewolf than a man is.’

‘I suppose you realise that’s social criticism, Cyfal?’

Cyfal pulled a long sour face and discourteously switched on his wristphone. After a moment, Balank did the same. The operator came up at once, and he asked to be switched to the news satellite.

He wanted to see something fresh on the current time exploration project, but there was nothing new on the files. He was advised to dial back in an hour. Looking over at Cyfal, he saw the timber officer had tuned to a dance show of some sort; the cavorting figures in the little projection were badly disorted from this angle. He rose and went to the door of the hut.

The trundler stood outside, ever alert, ignoring him. An untrustworthy light lay over the clearing. Deep twilight reigned, shot through by the rays of the newly risen moon; he was surprised how fast the day had drained away.

Suddenly, he was conscious of himself as an entity, living, with a limited span of life, much of which had already drained away unregarded. The moment of introspection was so uncharacteristic of him that he was frightened. He told himself it was high time he traced down the werewolf and got back to the city: too much solitude was making him morbid.

As he stood there, he heard Cyfal come up behind. The man said, ‘I’m sorry if I was surly when I was so genuinely glad to see you. It’s just that I’m not used to the way city people think. You mustn’t take offence – I’m afraid you might even think I’m a werewolf myself.’

‘That’s foolish! We took a blood spec on you as soon as you were within sighting distance.’ For all that, he realised that Cyfal made him uneasy. Going to where the trundler guarded the door, he took up his laser gun and slipped it under his arm. ‘Just in case,’ he said.

‘Of course. You think he’s around – Gondalug, the werewolf? Maybe following you instead of you following him?’

‘As you said, it’s full moon. Besides, he hasn’t eaten in days. They won’t touch synthfoods once the lycanthropic gene asserts itself, you know.’

‘That’s why they eat humans occasionally?’ Cyfal stood silent for a moment, then added, ‘But they are a part of the human race – that is, if you regard them as men who change into wolves rather than wolves who change into men. I mean, they’re nearer relations to us than animals or machines are.’

‘Not than machines!’ Balank said in a shocked voice. ‘How could we survive without the machines?’

Ignoring that, Cyfal said, ‘To my mind, humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.’

Somewhere in the trees, a cry of pain sounded and was repeated.

‘Night owl,’ Cyfal said. The sound brought him back to the present, and he begged Balank to come in and shut the door. He brought out some wine, which they warmed, salted, and drank together.

‘The sun’s my clock,’ he said, when they had been chatting for a while. ‘I shall turn in soon. You’ll sleep too?’

‘I don’t sleep – I’ve a fresher.’

‘I never had the operation. Are you moving on? Look, are you planning to leave me here all alone, the night of the full moon?’ He grabbed Balank’s sleeve and then withdrew his hand.

‘If Gondalug’s about, I want to kill him tonight. I must get back to the city.’ But he saw that Cyfal was frightened and took pity on the little man. ‘But in fact I could manage an hour’s freshing – I’ve had none for three days.’

‘You’ll take it here?’

‘Sure, get your head down – but you’re armed, aren’t you?’

‘It doesn’t always do you any good.’

While the little man prepared his bunk, Balank switched on his phone again. The news feature was ready and came up almost at once. Again Balank was plunged into a remote and terrible future.

The machines had managed to push their time exploration some eight million years ahead, and there a deviation in the quanta of the electromagnetic spectrum had halted their advance. The reason for this was so far obscure and lay in the changing nature of the sun, which strongly influenced the time structure of its own minute corner of the galaxy.

Balank was curious to find if the machines had resolved the problem. It appeared that they had not, for the main news of the day was that. Platform One had decided that operations should now be confined to the span of time already opened up. Platform One was the name of the machine civilisation, many hundreds of centuries ahead in time, which had first pushed through the time barrier and contacted all machine-ruled civilisations before its own epoch.

What a disappointment that only the electronic senses of machines could shuttle in time! Balank would greatly have liked to visit one of the giant cities of the remote future.

The compensation was that the explorers sent back video pictures of that world to their own day. These alien landscapes produced in Balank a tremendous hunger for more; he looked in whenever he could. Even on the trail of the werewolf, which absorbed almost all his faculties, he had dialled for every possible picture of that inaccessible and terrific reality that lay distantly on the same time stratum which contained his own world.

As the first transmissions took on cubic content, Balank heard a noise outside the hut, and was instantly on his feet. Grabbing the gun, he opened the door and peered out, his left hand on the door jamb, his wristset still working.

The trundler sat outside, its senses ever-functioning, fixing him with an indicator as if in unfriendly greeting. A leaf or two drifted down from the trees; it was never absolutely silent here, as it could be in the cities at night; there was always something living or dying in the unmapped woods. As he turned his gaze through the darkness – but of course the trundler – and the werewolf, it was said – saw much more clearly in this situation than he did – his vision was obscured by the representation of the future palely gleaming at his cuff. Two phases of the same world were in juxtaposition, one standing on its side, promising an environment where different senses would be needed to survive.

Satisfied, although still wary, Balank shut the door and went to sit down and study the transmission. When it was over, he dialled a repeat. Catching his absorption, Cyfal from his bunk dialled the same programme.

Above the icy deserts of Earth a blue sun shone, too small to show a disc, and from this chip of light came all terrestrial change. Its light was bright as full-moon’s light, and scarcely warmer. Only a few strange and stunted types of vegetation stretched up from the mountains toward it. All the old primitive kinds of flora had vanished long ago. Trees, for so many epochs one of the sovereign forms of Earth, had gone. Animals had gone. Birds had vanished from the skies. In the mountainous seas, very few life-forms protracted their existence.

New forces had inherited this later Earth. This was the time of the majestic auroras, of the near absolute-zero nights, of the years-long blizzards.

But there were cities still, their lights burning brighter than the chilly sun; and there were the machines.

The machines of this distant age were monstrous and complex things, slow and armoured, resembling most the dinosaurs that had filled one hour of the Earth’s dawn. They foraged over the bleak landscape on their own ineluctable errands. They climbed into space, building there monstrous webbed arms that stretched far from Earth’s orbit, to scoop in energy and confront the poor fish sun with a vast trawler net of magnetic force.

In the natural course of its evolution, the sun had developed into its white dwarf stage. Its phase as a yellow star, when it supported vertebrate life, was a brief one, now passed through. Now it moved toward its prime season, still far ahead, when it would enter the main period of its life and become a red dwarf star. Then it would be mature, then it would itself be invested with an awareness countless times greater than any minor consciousnesses it nourished now. As the machines clad in their horned exoskeletons climbed near it, the sun had entered a period of quiescence to be measured in billions of years, and cast over its third planet the light of a perpetual full moon.

The documentary presenting this image of postiquity carried a commentary that consisted mainly of a rundown of the technical difficulties confronting Platform One and the other machine civilisations at that time. It was too complex for Balank to understand. He looked up from his phone at last, and saw that Cyfal had dropped asleep in his bunk. By his wrist, against his tousled head, a shrunken sun still burned.

For some moments, Balank stood looking speculatively at the timber officer. The man’s criticism of the machines disturbed him. Naturally, people were always criticizing the machines, but, after all, mankind depended on them more and more, and most of the criticism was superficial. Cyfal seemed to doubt the whole role of machines.

It was extremely difficult to decide just how much truth lay in anything. The werewolves, for example. They were and always had been man’s enemy, and that was presumably why the machines hunted them with such ruthlessness – for man’s sake. But from what he had learnt at the patrol school, the creatures were on the increase. And had they really got magic powers? – Powers, that was to say, that were beyond man’s, enabled them to survive and flourish as man could not, even supported by all the forces of the cities. The Dark Brother: that was what they called the werewolf, because he was like the night side of man. But he was not man – and how exactly he differed, nobody could tell, except that he could survive when man had not.

Still frowning, Balank moved across to the door and looked out. The moon was climbing, casting a pallid and dappled light among the trees of the clearing, and across the trundler. Balank was reminded of that distant day when the sun would shine no more warmly.

The trundler was switched to transmission, and Balank wondered with whom it was in touch. With Headquarters, possibly, asking for fresh orders, sending in their report.

‘I’m taking an hour with my fresher,’ he said. ‘Okay by you?’

‘Go ahead. I shall stand guard,’ the trundler’s speech circuit said.

Balank went back inside, sat down at the table, and clipped the fresher across his forehead. He fell instantly into unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that force-fed him enough sleep and dream to refresh him for the next seventy-two hours. At the end of the timed hour, he awoke, annoyingly aware that there had been confusion in his skull.

Before he had lifted his head from the table, the thought came: we never saw any human beings in that chilly future.

He sat up straight. Of course, it had been an accidental omission from a brief programme. Humans were not so important as the machines, and that would apply even more in the distant time. But none of the news flashes had shown humans, not even in the immense cities. That was absurd; there would be lots of human beings. The machines had covenanted, at the time of the historic Emancipation, that they would always protect the human race.

Well, Balank told himself, he was talking nonsense. The subversive comments Cyfal had uttered had put a load of mischief into his head. Instinctively, he glanced over at the timber officer.

Cyfal was dead in his bunk. He lay contorted with his head lolling over the side of the mattress, his throat torn out. Blood still welled up from the wound, dripping very slowly from one shoulder onto the floor.

Forcing himself to do it, Balank went over to him. In one of Cyfal’s hands, a piece of grey fur was gripped.

The werewolf had called! Balank gripped his throat in terror. He had evidently roused in time to save his own life, and the creature had fled.

He stood for a long time staring down in pity and horror at the dead man, before prising the piece of fur from his grasp. He examined it with distaste. It was softer than he had imagined wolf fur to be. He turned the hairs over in his palm. A piece of skin had torn away with the hair. He looked at it more closely.

A letter was printed on the skin.

It was faint, but he definitely picked out an ‘S’ to one edge of the skin. No, it must be a bruise, a stain, anything but a printed letter. That would mean that this was synthetic, and had been left as a fragment of evidence to mislead Balank…

He ran over to the door, grabbing up the laser gun as he went, and dashed outside. The moon was high now. He saw the trundler moving across the clearing toward him.

‘Where have you been?’ he called.

‘Patrolling. I heard something among the trees and got a glimpse of a large grey wolf, but was not able to destroy it. Why are you frightened? I am registering surplus adrenalin in your veins.’

‘Come in and look. Something killed the timber man.’

He stood aside as the machine entered the hut and extended a couple of rods above the body on the bunk. As he watched, Balank pushed the piece of fur down into his pocket.

‘Cyfal is dead. His throat has been ripped out. It is the work of a large animal. Balank, if you are rested, we must now pursue the werewolf Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061. He committed this crime.’

They went outside. Balank found himself trembling. He said, ‘Shouldn’t we bury the poor fellow?’

‘If necessary, we can return by daylight.’

Argument was impossible with trundlers. This one was already off, and Balank was forced to follow.

They moved downhill toward the River Pracha. The difficulty of the descent soon drove everything else from Balank’s mind. They had followed Gondalug this far, and it seemed unlikely he would go much farther. Beyond here lay gaunt bleak uplands, lacking cover. In this broken tumbling valley, Gondalug would go to earth, hoping to hide from them. But their instruments would track him down, and then he could be destroyed. With good luck, he would lead them to caves where they would find and exterminate other men and women and maybe children who bore the deadly lycanthropic gene and refused to live in cities.

It took them two hours to get down to the lower part of the valley. Great slabs of the hill had fallen away, and now stood apart from their parent body, forming cubic hills in their own right, with great sandy cliffs towering up vertically, crowned with unruly foliage. The Pracha itself frequently disappeared down narrow crevices, and the whole area was broken with caves and fissures in the rock. It was ideal country in which to hide.

‘I must rest for a moment,’ Balank gasped. The trundler came immediately to a halt. It moved over any terrain, putting out short legs to help itself when tracks and wheels failed.

They stood together, ill-assorted in the pale night, surrounded by the noise of the little river as it battled over its rocky bed.

‘You’re sending again, aren’t you? Whom to?’

The machine asked, ‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur you found in the timber officer’s hand?’

Balank was running at once, diving for cover behind the nearest slab of rock. Sprawling in the dirt, he saw a beam of heat sizzle above him and slewed himself round the corner. The Pracha ran along here in a steep-sided crevasse. With fear lending him strength, Balank took a run and cleared the crevasse in a mighty jump, and fell among the shadows on the far side of the gulf. He crawled behind a great chunk of rock, the flat top of which was several feet above his head, crowned with a sagging pine tree.

The trundler called to him from the other side of the river.

‘Balank, Balank, you have gone wrong in your head!’

Staying firmly behind the rock, he shouted back, ‘Go home, trundler! You’ll never find me here!’

‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur from the timber officer’s hand?’

‘How did you know about the fur unless you put it there? You killed Cyfal because he knew things about machines I did not, didn’t you? You wanted me to believe the werewolf did it, didn’t you? The machines are gradually killing off the humans, aren’t they? There are no such things as werewolves, are there?’

‘You are mistaken, Balank. There are werewolves, all right. Because man would never really believe they existed, they have survived. But we believe they exist, and to us they are a greater menace than mankind can be now. So surrender and come back to me. We will continue looking for Gondalug.’

He did not answer. He crouched and listened to the machine growling on the other side of the river.

Crouching on the top of the rock above Balank’s head was a sinewy man with a flat skull. He took more than human advantage of every shade of cover as he drank in the scene below, his brain running through the possibilities of the situation as efficiently as his legs could take him through wild grass. He waited without stirring, and his face was grey and grave and alert.

The machine came to a decision. Getting no reply from the man, it came gingerly round the rock and approached the edge of the crevasse through which the river ran. Experimentally, it sent a blast of heat across to the opposite cliff, followed by a brief hail of armoured pellets.

‘Balank?’ it called.

Balank did not reply, but the trundler was convinced it had not killed the man. It had somehow to get across the brink Balank had jumped. It considered radioing for aid, but the nearest city, Zagrad, was a great distance away.

It stretched out its legs, extending them as far as possible. Its clawed feet could just reach the other side, but there the edge crumbled slightly and would not support its full weight. It shuffled slowly along the crevasse, seeking out the ideal place.

From shelter, Balank watched it glinting with a murderous dullness in the moonlight. He clutched a great shard of rock, knowing what he had to do. He had presented to him here the best – probably the only – chance he would get to destroy the machine. When it was hanging across the ravine, he would rush forward. The trundler would be momentarily too preoccupied to burn him down. He would hurl the boulder at it, knock the vile thing down into the river.

The machine was quick and clever. He would have only a split second in which to act. Already his muscles bulged over the rock, already he gritted his teeth in effort, already his eyes glared ahead at the hated enemy. His time would come at any second now. It was him or it…

Gondalug alertly stared down at the scene, involved with it and yet detached. He saw what was in the man’s mind, knew that he looked a scant second ahead to the encounter.

His own kind, man’s Dark Brother, worked differently. They looked farther ahead just as they had always done, in a fashion unimaginable to homo sapiens. To Gondalug, the outcome of this particular little struggle was immaterial. He knew that his kind had already won their battle against mankind. He knew that they still had to enter into their real battle against the machines.

But that time would come. And then they would defeat the machines. In the long days when the sun shone always over the blessed Earth like a full moon – in those days, his kind would finish their age of waiting and enter into their own savage kingdom.

Just Passing Through

Colin Charteris climbed out of his red Banshee, stood for a moment stretching by it. The machine creaked and snapped, the metal cooling after its long duel across the motorways of Europe. Charteris took off his inflatable padded lifesuit, flung it into the back of the car, turned up the temperature of his one-piece to compensate for what felt like near-nudity. Hero: he had covered the twenty-two hundred kilometres from Catanzaro down on the Ionian Sea to Metoz, France, in twenty-four hours’ driving, and had sustained no more than a metre-long gouge along the front outside fender.

Outside Milano, where the triple autostrada made of the Lombardy plain a geometrical diagram, he had narrowly avoided a multiple crash. They were all multiple crashes these days. The image continued to multiply itself over and over in his mind, like a series of cultures in their dishes: a wheel still madly spinning, crushed barriers, buckled metal, sunlight worn like thick make-up over the impossibly abandoned attitudes of death. Charteris had seen it happen, the fantastic speeds suddenly swallowed by car and human frames with the sloth of the super-quick, when anything too fast for retina register could spend forever spreading through the labyrinths of consciousness. By now, the bodies would all be packed neatly in hospital or mortuary, the autostrada gleaming in perfect action again, the death squads lolling at their wheels in the nearest rastplatz, reading paperbacks; but Charteris’s little clicker-shutter mechanisms were still busy re-running the actual blossoming moment of impact.

He shook his head, dislodging nothing. He had parked beside Metoz cathedral. It was several centuries old, but built of a coarse yellow stone that made it, now prematurely floodlit in the early evening, look like a Victorian copy of an earlier model.

The ground fell steeply at the other end of the square. Stone steps led down to a narrow street, all wall on one side and on the other prim little drab narrow façades closing all their shutters against the overwhelming statement of the cathedral.

Across one of the façades, a sign said, ‘Hotel des Invalides’.

‘Krankenhaus,’ Charteris said.

He pulled his suitcase out of the boot of the Banshee and dragged himself over to the hotel, walking like a warrior coming across a desert, a pilot walking over a runway after a mission. He emphasised the tragedy of it slightly, even grunting as he walked. The other cars parked in the square were a shabby bunch. Removing his gaze from his own egotistical landscapes, he saw this part of the cathedral square had been bought up as a used car lot. There were prices in francs painted to one side of each windscreen, as if denoting the worth of the driver rather than the vehicle.

The Hotel des Invalides had a brass handle to its door. Charteris dragged it down and stepped into the hall, into unmitigated shadow. A bell buzzed and burned insatiably until he closed the door behind him. He walked up the corridor, and only with that motion did the hall take on existence. There was a pot plant dying here beside an enormous piece of furniture – or it could be an over-elaborate doorway into a separate part of the establishment. On the walls, enormous pictures of blue-clad men being blown up among scattering sandbags. A small dense black square figure emerged at the end of the passage. He drew near and saw it had permed hair and was a woman, not young, not old, smiling.

‘Haben Sie eirt Zimmer? Ein persortn, eine Nacht?’

‘Jahr, jahr. Mil eine Dusche oder ohne?’

‘Ohne.’

‘Zimmer Nummer Zwanzig, Monsieur.’

German. The lingua franca of Europe.

The madame called for a dark-haired girl, who came hurrying and smiling with the key to room twenty. She led Charteris up three flights of stairs, the first flight marble, the second and third wooden, the third uncarpeted. Each landing was adorned with large pictures of Frenchmen dying or conquering Germans in the first world war.

‘This is where it all began,’ he said to the back of the girl.

She paused and looked down at him. ‘Je ne comprends pas, M’sieur.’

No windows had been opened for a long while. The air smelt of all the bottled lives that had suffered here. Constriction, miserliness, conservation over all. He saw the red limbs leaping again as if for joy within the bucketing autostrada cars. If there were only the two alternatives, he preferred the leaping death to the desiccating life. He knew how greatly he dreaded both, how his fantasy life shuttled between them. One more deadly mission: blast Peking, or spend ten years in the hotel in Metoz.

He was panting on the threshold of Zimmer Twenty. By opening his mouth, he did so without the girl hearing him. She was – he was getting to that age when he could no longer tell – eighteen, twenty, twenty-two? Pretty enough.

Motioning to her to stay, Charteris crossed to the first of two tall windows. He worked at the bar until it gave way and the two halves swung into the room.

Great drop on this, the back of the hotel. In the street below, two kids with a white dog on a lead. They looked up at him, becoming merely two faces with fat arms and hands. Thalidomites. He could not shut away the images of ruin and deformity.

Buildings the other side of the alley. A woman moving in a room, just discerned through curtains. A waste site, two cats stalking each other among litter. A dry canal bed, full of waste and old cans. Wasn’t there also a crushed automobile? A notice scrawled large on a ruined wall: NEUTRAL FRANCE THE ONLY FRANCE. Certainly, they had managed to preserve their neutrality to the bitter end; the French experience in the two previous world wars had encouraged that. Beyond the wall, a tree-lined street far wider than necessary, and the Prefecture. One policeman visible.

Turning back, Charteris cast a perfunctory eye over the furnishings of the room. They were all horrible. The bed was specially designed for chastity and early rising.

‘Combien?’

The girl told him. Two thousand six hundred and fifty francs. He had to have the figure repeated. His French was rusty and he was not used to the French government’s recent devaluation.

‘I’ll take it. Are you from Metoz?’

‘I’m Italian.’

Pleasure rose in him, a sudden feeling of gratitude that not all good things had been eroded. In this rotten stuffy room, it was as if he breathed again the air of the mountains.

‘I’ve been living in Italy since the war, right down in Catanzaro,’ he told her in Italian.

She smiled. ‘I am from the south, from Calabria, from a little village in the mountains that you won’t have heard of.’

‘Tell me. I might have done. I was doing NUNSACS work down there. I got about.’

She told him the name of the village and he had not heard of it. They laughed.

‘But I have not heard of NUNSACS,’ she said. ‘It is a Calabrian town? No?’

He laughed again, chiefly for the pleasure of doing it and seeing its effect on her. ‘NUNSACS is a New United Nations organisation for settling and if possible rehabilitating war victims. We have several large encampments down along the Ionian Sea.’

The girl was not listening to what he said. ‘You speak Italian well but you aren’t Italian. Are you German?’

‘I’m Montenegrin – a Jugoslav. Haven’t been home since I was a boy. Now I’m driving over to England.’

As he spoke, he heard Madame calling impatiently. The girl moved towards the door, smiled at him – a sweet and shadowy smile that seemed to explain her existence – and was gone.

Charteris put his case down on the table under the window. He stood looking out for a long while at the dry canal bed, the detritus in it making it look like an archaeological dig that had uncovered remains of an earlier industrial civilisation.

Madame was working in the bar when he went down. Several of the little tables in the room were occupied. He could tell at a glance they were all local people. The room was large and dispiriting, the big dark wood bar on one side being dwarfed and somehow divorced from the functions it was supposed to serve. A television set flickered in one corner, most of those present contriving to sit and drink so that they kept an eye on it, as if it were an enemy or at least an uncertain friend. The only exceptions to this were two old men at a table set apart, who talked industriously, resting their wrists on the table but using their hands to emphasise points in the conversation. One of these men, who grew a tiny puff of beard under his lower lip, soon revealed himself as M’sieur.

Behind M’sieur’s table, and set in one corner by a radiator, was a bigger table, a solemn table, spread with various articles of secretarial and other use. This was Madame’s table, and to this she retired to work with some figures when she was not serving her customers. Tied to the radiator was a large and mangy young dog, who whined at intervals and flopped continually into new positions, as though the floor had been painted with anti-dog powder. Madame occasionally spoke mildly to it, but her interests were clearly elsewhere.

All this Charteris took in as he sat at a table against the wall, sipping a pernod, waiting for the girl to appear. He saw these people as victims of an unworkable capitalistic system dying on its feet. The girl came after some while from an errand in the back regions, and he motioned her over to his table.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Angelina.’

‘Mine’s Charteris. That’s what I call myself. It’s an English name. I’d like to take you out for a meal.’

‘I don’t leave here till late – ten o’clock.’

‘Then you don’t sleep here?’

Some of the softness went out of her face as caution, even craftiness, overcame her, so that momentarily he thought, she’s just another lay, but there will be endless complications to it in this set-up, you can bet! She said, ‘Can you buy some cigarettes or something? I know they’re watching me.’

He shrugged. She walked across to the bar. Charteris watched the movement of her legs, the action of her buttocks, trying to estimate whether her knickers would be clean or not. He was a fastidious man. Angelina fetched down a packet of cigarettes, put them on a tray, and carried them across to him. He took them and paid without a word. All the while, the M’sieur’s eyes were on him.

Charteris forced himself to smoke one of the cigarettes. They were vile. Despite her neutrality in the Acid Head War, France had suffered from shortages like everyone else. Charteris was pampered, with illegal access to NUNSACS cigars, which he enjoyed.

He looked at the television. Faces swam in the green light, talking too fast for him to follow. There was some nonsense about a cycling champion, a protracted item about a military parade and inspection, shots of international film stars dining in Paris, something about a murder hunt somewhere. Not a mention of the two continents full of nut cases who no longer knew where reality began or ended. The French carried their neutrality into every facet of their lives.

When he had finished his pernod, he went over and paid Madame at her table and walked out in the square.

It was night, night in its early stages when the clouds still carried hints of daylight through the upper air. The floodlighting was gaining on the cathedral, chopping it into alternate vertical sections of void and glitter, so that it looked like a cage for some gigantic prehistoric bird. Beyond the cage, the traffic on the motorway snarled untiringly.

He went and sat in his car and smoked a cigar to remove the taste of the cigarette, although sitting in the Banshee when it was still made him oddly uneasy. He thought about Angelina and whether he wanted her, decided on the whole he did not. He wanted English girls. He had never even known one but, since his earliest days, he had longed for all things English, as another man he knew yearned for anything Chinese. He had dropped his Montenegrin name to christen himself with the surname of his favourite English writer.

About the present state of England, he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out between the US and China, Russia had come in on the Communist side. Canada and Australia had aligned themselves with America, and Britain – perhaps still nourishing dreams of a grander past – had backed into the war in such a way as to offend her allies while at the same time involving most of the other European nations, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia amongst them – and France always excluded. By an irony, Britain had been the first country to suffer the PCA Bomb – the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that spread hallucinatory mental states across the nation. As a NUNSACS official, Charteris was being posted to work in Britain on rehabilitation work; as a NUNSACS official, he knew the terrifying disorder he would find there. He had no qualms about it.

But first there was this evening to be got through … He had said that so often to himself. Life was so short, one treasured it so intensely, and yet it was also full of desolating boredom. The acid head victims all ever the world had no problems with boredom; their madnesses precluded it; they were always well occupied with terror or joy, whichever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one spent one’s life trying to save. The victims were never tired of themselves.

The cigar tasted good, extending its mildness all round him like a mist. Now he put it out and climbed from the car. He knew of only two ways to pass the evening before it was time to sleep; he could eat or he could find sexual companionship. Sex, he thought, the mysticism of materialism. It was true. He sometimes needed desperately the sense of a female life impinging on his with its unexplored avenues and possibilities, so stale, so explored, were his own few reactions. Back to his mind again came the riotous movements of the autostrada victims, fornicating with death.

On his way towards a lighted restaurant on the far side of the square, he saw another method by which to structure the congealing time of the French evening. The little cinema was showing a film called SEX ET BANG-BANG, forbidden to anyone under sixteen. He glanced up at the ill-painted poster, showing a near-naked blonde with an ugly shadow like a moustache across her face, and muttered, ‘Starring Petula Roualt as Al Capone,’ as he passed.

As he ate in the restaurant, he thought about Angelina and madness and war and neutrality; it seemed to him they were all products of different time-senses. Perhaps there were no human emotions, only a series of different synchronicity microstructures, so that one ‘had time for’ one thing or another. He suddenly stopped eating. He saw the world – Europe, that is, precious, hated Europe that was his stage – purely as a fabrication of time, no matter involved. Matter was an hallucinatory experience, merely a slow-motion perceptual experience of certain time/emotion nodes passing through the brain. No, that the brain seized on in turn as it moved round the perceptual web it had spun, would spin, from childhood on. Metoz, that he apparently perceived so clearly through all his senses, was there only because all his senses had reached a certain dynamic synchronicity in their obscure journey about the biochemical web. Tomorrow, responding to some obscure circadian rhythm, they would achieve another relationship, and he would appear to move on. Matter was an abstraction of the time syndrome, much as the television had enabled Charteris to deduce bicycle races and military parades which held, for him, even less substance than the flickering screen. Matter was hallucination.

Charteris sat unmoving. If it were so, then clearly he was not at this restaurant table. Clearly there was no plate of cooling veal before him. Clearly Metoz did not exist. The autostrada was a projection of temporal confluences within him, perhaps a riverine dualogue of his entire life. France? Earth? Where was he? What was he?

Terrible though the answer was, it seemed unassailable. The man he called Charteris was merely another manifestation of a time/emotion node with no more reality than the restaurant or the autostrada. Only the perceptual web itself was ‘real’. ‘He’ was the web in which Charteris. Metoz, tortured Europe, the stricken continents of Asia and America, could have their being, their doubtful being. He was God. …

Someone was speaking to him. Dimly, distantly, he became aware of a waiter asking if he could take his plate away. So the waiter must be the Dark One, trying to disrupt his Kingdom. He waved the man off, saying something vaguely – much later, he realised he had spoken in Serbian, his native tongue, which he never used.

The restaurant was closing. Flinging some francs down on the table, he staggered out into the night, and slowly came to himself in the open air.

He was shaking from the strength and terror of his vision. As he rested against a rotting stone wall, its texture patterning his fingers, he heard the cathedral clock begin to chime and counted automatically. It was ten o’clock by whatever time-level they used here. He had passed two hours in some sort of trance.

In the camp outside Catenzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from one small district of the USSR. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, which was in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

The ten thousand caused little trouble. Almost all of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs used by both sides were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

So the ten thousand crawled about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, as bemused with themselves and their fellows as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes.

The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected – in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their own actions – and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina …

I am going psychedelic. That vision must have come from the drug.

He had moved some way towards the Hotel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough faces of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

‘You were waiting for me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are deliberately waylaying me. You’d better go to your room before Madame locks up.’

‘I – I may be ill! You must help me.’

‘Speak Italian. I told you, I don’t understand German.’

‘Help me, Angelina. I must be ill.’

‘You were well enough before.’

‘I swear … I had a vision. I can’t face my room. I don’t want to be alone. Let me come back to your room!’

‘Oh no! You must think I am a fool, Signor!’

He pulled himself together.

‘Look, I’m ill, I think. Come and sit in my car with me for ten minutes. I need to get my strength back. If you don’t trust me, I’ll smoke a cigar all the time. You never knew a man kiss a pretty girl with a cigar in his mouth, did you?’

They sat in the car, she beside him looking at him rather anxiously. Charteris could see her eyes gleam in the thick orange light – the very hue of time congealed! – bouncing off the walls of the cathedral. He sucked the rich sharp smoke down into his being, trying to fumigate it against the terrible visions of his psyche.

‘I’m going back to Italy soon,’ she said. ‘Now the war’s over, I may work in Milano. My uncle writes that it’s booming there again now. Is that so?’

‘Booming.’ A very curious word. Not blooming, not booing. Booming.

‘Really, I’m not Italian. Not by ancestry. Everyone in our village is descended from Albanians. When the Turks invaded Albania five centuries ago, many Albanians fled in ships across to the south of Italy to start life anew. The old customs were preserved from generation to generation. Did you hear of such a thing in Catenzaro?’

‘No.’ In Catenzaro he had heard the legends and phobias of the Caucasus, chopped and distorted by the kaleidoscopes of hallucination. It was a Slav, and not a Latin, purgatory of alienation.

‘As a little girl, I was bilingual. We spoke Squiptar in the home and Italian everywhere else. Now I can hardly remember one word of Squiptar! My uncles have all forgotten too. Only my old aunt, who is also called Angelina, remembers. It’s sad, isn’t it, not to recall the language of your childhood? Like an exile?’

‘Oh, shut up! To hell with it!’

By that, she was reassured. Perhaps she believed that a man who took so little care to please could not want to rape her. Perhaps she was right. While Charteris nursed his head and tried to understand what was inside it, she chattered on a new tack.

‘I’ll go back to Milano in the autumn, in September when it’s not so hot. They’re not good Catholics here. Are you a good Catholic? The French priests – ugh, I don’t like them, the way they look at you! Sometimes I hardly seem to believe any more … Do you believe in God, Signor?’

He turned and looked painfully at her orange eyes, trying to see what she was really saying. She was a terrible bore, this girl.

‘If you are really interested, I believe we each have Gods within us, and we must follow those.’

‘That’s stupid! Those gods would just be reflections of ourselves and we should be indulging in egotism.’

He was surprised by her answer. Neither his Italian nor his theology was good enough for him to reply as he would have liked. He said briefly, ‘And your god – he is just an externalisation of egotism. Better to keep it inside!’

‘What terrible, wicked blasphemy for a Catholic to utter!’

‘You little idiot, I’m no Catholic! I’m a Communist. I’ve never seen any sign of your God marching about the world.’

‘Then you are indeed sick!’

Laughing angrily, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. As she struggled, he shouted, ‘Let’s make a little investigation!’

She brought her skull forward and struck him on the nose. His head seemed to turn cathedral-size on the instant, flood-lit with pain. He hardly realised she had broken from his grip and was running across the square, leaving the Banshee’s passenger door swinging open.

After a minute or two, Charteris locked the car door, climbed out, and made his way across to the hotel. The door was locked; Madame would be in bed, dreaming dreams of locked chests. Looking through the window into the bar, he saw that M’sieur still sat at his special table, drinking wine with a crony. Madame’s wretched dog sprawled by the radiator, still restlessly changing its position. Charteris tapped on the window.

After a minute or two, M’sieur unlocked the door from inside and appeared in his shirtsleeves. He stroked his tiny puff of beard and nodded to himself, as if something significant had been confirmed.

‘You were fortunate I was still up, M’sieur. Madame my wife does not like to be disturbed when once she has locked up the premises. My friend and I were just fighting some of our old campaigns before bed.’

‘Perhaps I have been doing the same thing.’

He went up to his room. It was filled with noise. As he walked over to the window and looked out, he saw that a lock on the dry canal had been opened. Now it was full of rushing water, coursing over the car body and other rubbish, slowly moving them downstream. All the long uncomfortable night, Charteris slept uneasily to the noise of the purging water.

In the morning, he rose early, drank Madame’s first indifferent coffee of the day, and paid his bill. His head was clear, but the world seemed less substantial than it had been. Carting his bag out to the car, he dressed himself in his lifesuit, inflated it, strapped himself in, and drove round the cathedral onto the motorway, which was already roaring with traffic. He headed towards the coast, leaving Metoz behind at a gradually increasing speed.

Multi-Value Motorway

She too was obsessed with pelting images. Phil Brasher, her husband, was growing more and more violent with Charteris, as if he knew the power was passing from him to the foreigner. Charteris had the certainty Phil lacked, the gestalt. Certainty, youth, handsome. He was himself. Also, perhaps, a saint. Also other people. But clearly a bit hipped, a heppo. Two weeks here, and he had spoken and the drugged Loughborough crowds had listened to him in a way they never did to her husband. She could not understand his message, but then she had not been sprayed. She understood his power.

The pelting images caught him sometimes naked.

Nerves on edge. Army Burton, played lead guitar, passed through her mind, saying, ‘We are going to have a crusade.’ Lamp posts flickered by, long trees, a prison gate, furry organs. She could not listen to the two men. As they walked over the withdrawn meaning of the wet and broken pavement, the hurtling traffic almost tore at their elbows. That other vision, too, held her near screaming pitch; she kept hearing the squeal of lorry wheels as it crashed into her husband’s body, could see it so clear she knew by its nameboards it was travelling from Glasgow down to Naples. Over and over again it hit him and he fell backwards, disintegrating, quite washing away his discussion, savage discussion of multi-value logic, with Charteris. Also, she was troubled because she thought she saw a dog scuttle by wearing a red and black tie. Bombardment of images. They stood in a web of alternatives.

Phil Brasher said, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’ Charteris was eating up his possible future at an enormous pace. Brasher saw himself spent, like that little rat Robbins, who had stood as saint and had not been elected. This new man, whom he had at first welcomed as a disciple, was as powerful as the rising sun, blanking Brasher’s mind. He no longer got the good images from the future. Sliced bread cold oven. It was dead, there was a dead area, all he saw was that damned Christmas cactus which he loathed for its meaninglessness, like flowers on a grave. So he generated hate and said powerfully and confusedly to Charteris, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’

‘Wait, first wait,’ said Colin Charteris, in his own English, brain cold and acid. ‘Think of Ouspenski’s personality photographs. There’s a high gloss. You have many alternatives. We are all rich in alternatives.’ He had been saying that all 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 gone off Brasher then?’

‘Stuff Brasher. You’ve seen our new boy. He’s a song!’

He could see it. Charteris was good. He was foreign and people were ready for foreigners and exotic toted even in a tuning eyeball. Foreigners were exotic. Charteris had this whole thing he believed in some sort of intellectual thing fitted the machine-scene. People could take it in or leave it and still grab the noise of his song. Charteris was writing a book too. You couldn’t tell he was real or phoney it didn’t matter so he couldn’t switch off.

The followers were already there. Brasher’s following. Charteris beat Brasher at any meeting. You’d have to watch for Brasher. Big munch little throat. The man thought he was Jesus Christ Even if he is Jesus Christ, my money’s on Charteris. He’s got loot! Colin Charteris. Funny name for a Jugoslav!

‘Let’s make a few notes about it,’ he said ‘Robbins, and you, Gloria.’

‘Greta.’

‘Greta, then. A sense of place is what people want – something to touch among all the metaphysics, big old jumbos in the long thin grass. Charteris actually likes this bloody dump its dogshitted lanes. I suppose it’s new to him. We’ll take him round the houses, tape-record him. Where’s the tape-recorder?’ He was troubled by images and a presentiment that they would soon be driving down the autobahns of Europe. He saw a sign to Frankfurt, rubbed hands over his Yorkskull pudding eyes.

‘I’ll show him my paintings,’ Robbins said. ‘And he’ll be interested about the birds all close local stuff.’

‘What about the birds in all areas?

‘A sense of place, you said with the jumbos in the long grapes. What they do, you know, like the city, the birds like the city.’ They liked the city, the birds. Took its bricks for leaves. He had watched, down where the tractor was bogged down in the muddy plough, stood himself bogged all day in content, the landscape the brown nearest black under the thick light. It was the sparrows and starlings, mainly. There were more of them in the towns. They nested behind neon signs, over the fish and chip shops, near the Chinese restaurants, by the big stores, furniture stores, redemption shops, filling stations, for warmth, and produced more babies than the ones in the country, learning a new language. More broods annually. The seagulls covered the ploughed field. They were always inland. You could watch them, and the lines of the grid pencilled on the sky. They were evolving, giving up the sea. Woodgulls. The Greater Mole Gull. Or maybe the sea had shrivelled up and gone. Shrunk like melted plastic God knows what the birds are up to, acid-headed like everything else. Doing the pattern-thing themselves. ‘City suits the birds. It has built-in pattern.’

‘What are you talking about?’ She loved him really, but you had to laugh. His dandy lion-yellow hair.

‘We aren’t the only ones with a population expulsion. The birds too. Remember that series of painting I did of birds, Banjo? Flowers and weeds, too. Like a tide. Pollination expulsion.’

‘Just keep it practical, sonny. Stick to buildings, eh?’ Maybe he could unzip his skull, remove the top like a wig, and pull that distracting Frankfurt sign dripping out of his brain batter.

‘The Pollination Explosion,’ Charteris said. ‘That’s a good title. I write a poem called The Pollination Explosion, about the deep pandemic of nature. The idea just came into my head. And the time will come when you try to betray me to leave me desolate between four walls.’

She said nothing.

‘There could be trees in our future if the brain holds up.’

Angeline was walking resting on his arm, saying nothing. He had forgotten where he had left the Banshee; it was pleasure padding through the wet, looking for it. They strolled through a new arcade, where one or two shops functioned on dwindling supplies. A chemist’s; Get Your Inner Relief Here; a handbill for the Escalation, Sensational and Smelly. Empty shells where the spec builder had not managed to sell shop frontage, all crude concrete, marked by the fossil-imprints of wooden battens. City pattern older than wood stamped by brainprint. Messages in pencil or blue crayon, YOUNG IVE SNOGGED HERE, BILL HOPKINS ONLY LOVES ME, LOVES LOST ITS LOOT, CUNT SCRUBBER. What was a cunt scrubber? Something like a loofah, or a person? Good opening for bright lad!

The Banshee waited in the rain by a portly group of dustbins exchanging hypergeometic forms, moduli of the cosmic rundown. It was not locked. They turned out an old man sheltering inside it.

‘You killed my husband,’ Angeline said, as the engine started. The filling station up the road gave you quintuple Green Shields on four gallons. Nothing ever changed except thought. Thought was new every generation, or they thought it was new, and she heard old wild music playing.

‘The future lies fainting in the arms of the present.’

‘Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying Colin? You’re not bloody mad, are you? You killed my husband and I want to know what you’re going to do about it!’

‘Take you home.’ They were moving now. Although his face ached, he felt in a rare joking mood as after wine in the deep home forests.

‘I don’t live out this direction.’

‘Take you to my home. My place. Where I build a sort of project from. I’ve started making a new model for thought. You came once, didn’t you, with Brasher in some untidy evening? It’s not town, not country. You can’t say which it is; that’s why I like it – it stands for all I stand for. In the mundane world and France, things like art and science have just spewed forth and swallowed up everything else. There’s nothing now left that’s non-art or non-science. A lot of things just gone. My place is neither urban nor non-urban. Fuzzy set, its own non categorisable catasgory. Look outwards, Angeline! Wonderful!’ He gave a sort of half-laugh by a wall, his beard growing in its own silence.

‘You Serbian bastard! There may have been a war, the country may be ruined, but you can’t get away with murder! Justice doesn’t just fuzz off! You’ll die, they’ll shoot you!’ There was no conviction in her voice; his sainthood was drowning her old self, or whatever he had behind eyes.

‘No, I shall live, be justice. I haven’t fulfilled any purpose yet, a sailor but the ocean’s still ahead, hey?’ The car was easing on to the Inner Relief. Behind them, ambulances and a fire engine and police cars and breakdown vans were nuzzling the debris. ‘I’ve seen reality, Angeline – Kragujevac, Metz, Frankfurt – it’s lying everywhere. And I myself have materialised into the inorganic, and so am indestructible, auto-destruct!’

The words stoned him. Since he had reached England, the psychedelic effect had gained on him daily in gusts. Cities had speaking patterns, worlds, rooms. He had ceased to think what he was saying; the result was he surprised himself, and this elation fed back into the system. Every thought multiplied into a thousand. Words, roads, all fossil tracks of thinking. He pursued them into the amonight, struggling with them as they propagated in their deep burrows away from the surface. Another poem: On the Spontaneous Generation of Ideas During Conversation. Spontagions Ideal Convertagion. The Conflation of Spongation in Idations. Agenbite of Auschwitz.

‘Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That’s how I materialised, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here – we are in my brain, if s all me. The nomad’s open to the city. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine, in a culmination going.’ It was true. Other people, he hardly saw them, caught in bursts, crossflare, at last shared their bombardment of images.

‘Don’t be daft – it’s raining again! Don’t go daft. Talk proper.’ But she sounded frightened.

They swerved past factories, long drab walls, filling stations, long ochre terraces, yards, many genera of concrete.

Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World, Guinness. Grey stucco urinal. Coal yard, Esso Blue. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. More rows of terrace houses, dentured, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his book; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis, suburbanal. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage, out onto the motorway, endless roads crossing over it on primitive pillars. Railways, some closed, canals, some sedge-filled, a poor sod pushing a sack of potatoes on the handlebars of his bike across a drowning allotment, footpaths, cycle-paths, catwalks, nettlebeds, waste dumps, scrap-pits, shortcuts, fences.

Geology. Strata of different man-times. Tempology. Each decade of the past still preserved in some gaunt monument. Even the motorway itself yielding clues to the enormous epochs of pre-psychedelic time: bridges cruder, more massive in earliest epoch, becoming almost graceful later, less sick-orange; later still, metal; different abutment planes, different patterns of drainage in the under-flyover bank, bifurcated like enormous Jurassic fern-trees Here we distinguish by the characteristics of this medium-weight aggregate the Wimpey stratum; while, a little further along, in the shade of these cantilevers, we distinguish the beginning of the McAlpine seam. The layout of that service area, of course, belongs characteristically to the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. Further was an early electric generating station with a mock-turkish dome, desolate in a field. All art, assuaging. Pylons, endlessly, too ornate for the cumbersome land, assuaging. Multiplacation.

The skies were lumped and flaky with cloud, Loughborough skies. Squirting rain and diffused lighting. No green yet in the hedges. The brown nearest black. Beautiful. …

‘We will abolish that word beautiful. It carries implications of ugliness in an Aristotelian way. There are only gradations in between the two. They pair. No ugliness.’

‘There’s the word “ugliness”, so there must be something to attach it to, mustn’t there? And don’t drive so fast.’

‘Stop quoting Lewis Carroll at me!’

‘I’m not!’

‘You should have allowed me to give you the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Well, steer properly! You lost your loot or something?’

He flicked away back onto his own side of the motorway, narrowly missing an op-art Jag, its driver screaming over the wheel. I also drive by fuzzy sets, he thought admiringly. The two cars had actually brushed; between hitting and not-hitting were many degrees. He had sampled most of them. The lookout to keep was a soft watch. It was impossible to be safe – watering your potted plant, which was really doing well, impossible. A Christmas cactus it could be, you were so proud of it. The Cortina, Consortina, buckling against – you’d not even seen it, back turned, blazing in a moment’s sun, Christ, just sweeping the poor woman and her pathetic little porch right away in limbo!

‘Never live on Inner Relief.’ Suddenly light-hearted and joking.

‘Stop getting at me! You’re really rather cruel, aren’t you?’

‘Jebem te sunce! Look, Natrina – I mean, Angelina, I love you, I dream you.’

‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

‘So? I’m not omniscient yet. I don’t have to know what it is to do it, do I? I’m just beginning, the thing’s just beginning in me, all to come. I’ll speak, preach! Burton’s group, Escalation Limited, I’ll write songs for them. How about Truth lies in Static Instants? Or When We’re Intimate in the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. No, no – Accidents and Aerodynamics Accrete into Art. No, no! How about … Ha, I Do My Personal Thinking In Pounds Sterling? Or Ouspenski Has It All Ways Always. Or The Victim and the Wreckage Are The Same. The Lights Across the River. Good job I threw away my NUNSACS papers. Too busy. I’ll fill the world till my head bursts. Look – zbogom, missed him! What a driver! Maybe get him tomorrow! Must forget these trivialities, which others can perform. Kuwait was the beginning! I’m just so creative at present, look, Angelina –’

‘It’s Angeline. Rhymes with “mean”.’ She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

‘My lean angel mean, Meangeline. I’m so creative, feel my temple! And I sense a gift in you too as you struggle out of old modes towards creams of denser feeling. What’s it going to be we got to find together eh?’

‘I’ve got no gins. My ma told me that.’

‘Anyhow, see that church of green stone? We’re there. Almost. Partially there. Fuzzy there. Kundalinically there. Etwas there.’

But this etwas country was neither inhabitable nor uninhabitable. It functioned chiefly as an area to move through a dimensional passage, scored, scarred, chopped by all the means the centuries had uncovered of annihilating the distance between Loughborough and the rest of Europe, rivers, roads, rails, canals, dykes, lanes, bridges, viaducts. The Banshee bumped over a hump-backed bridge, nosed along by a municipal dump, and rolled to a stop in front of a solitary skinned house.

Squadrons of diabolical lead birds sprang up to the roof of the house, from instant immobility to instant immobility on passage from wood to city. Slates were broken by wind and birds. Sheer blindness had built this worthy middle-class house here, very proper and some expense spared in the days before currency had gone decimal. It stood in its English exterior pluming as if in scaffolding. A land dispute perhaps. No one knew. The proud owner had gone, leaving the local council easy winners, to celebrate their triumph in a grand flurry of rubbish which now lapped into the front garden, eroded, rotting intricate under the creative powers of decay. Cans scuttled down paths. Caught by the fervour of it, the Snowcem had fallen off the brick, leaving a leprous dwelling, blowing like dandruff round the porch. And she looked up from the lovely cactus – he had admired it so much, bless him, a good husband – just in time to see the lorry sliding across the road towards her. And then, from behind, the glittering missile of the northbound car. …

Charteris leant against the porch, covering his eyes to escape the repetitive image. It had been, was ever coming in the repetitive web.

‘It was a conflux of alternatives in which I was trapped, all anti-flowered. I so love the British – you don’t understand! I wouldn’t hurt anyone. … I’m going to show the world how –’

‘You won’t bring him back by being sorry.’

‘Her, the woman with the cactus! Her! Her! Who was she?’

The Escalation had taken over an old Army Recruiting Office in Ashby Road. These surroundings with their old english wood and gymnast smells had influenced two of their most successful songs, ‘The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce’ and ‘A Platoon of One’ in the Dead Sea Sound days. There were four of them, four shabby young men, sensational and smelly, called, for professional purposes, Phil, Bill, Ruby and Featherstone-Haugh; also Barnaby, who worked the background tapes to make supplementary noise or chorus. They were doing the new one. They could hear the ambulances still squealing in the distance, and improvised a number embodying the noise called ‘Lost My Ring In the Ring Road’. Bill thought they should play it below, or preferably on top of, ‘Sanctions, Sanctions’; they decided to keep it for a flip side if they ever made the old circuit of recording.

They began to rehearse the new one.

Bank all my money in slot machines

These new coins are strictly for spending

Old sun goes on its rounds

Now since we got the metric currency

I do my personal thinking in pounds

We haven’t associated

Since twelve and a half new pence of money

Took over from the half-a-crowns

Life’s supposed to be negotiable, ain’t it?

But I do my personal thinking in pounds

Greta and Flo came in, with Robbins and the Burtons following. Army Burton had lost his lovely new tie, first one he ever had. He was arguing that Charteris should speak publicly as soon as possible – with the group at Nottingham on the following night; Robbins was arguing that there had been a girl at the art college called Hypothermia; Banjo was telling about London. Greta was saying she was going home.

‘Great, boys, great, break it up! You’ve escalated, like I mean you are now a choir, not just a group, okay, this secular stint? At Nottingham tomorrow night, you’re a choir, see? So we hitch our fortunes to Colin Charteris, tomorrow’s saint, the author of Fuzzy Sets.’

Oh, he’s on about sex again! I’m going home,’ said Greta, and went. Her mum lived only just down the road in a little house on the Inner Relief; Greta didn’t live there any more, but they had not quarrelled, just drifted gently apart on the life-death stream. Greta liked squalor and the arabesque decline. What she could not take were the rows of indoor plants with which her mother hedged herself.

Sister, they’ve decimalised us

All of the values are new

Bet you the five-penny piece in my hip

When I was a child on that old £.s.d.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

Sailing on every ha-penny …

They were used to Burton’s madness. He had got them the crowds, the high voices from the front aisles. They needed the faces there, the noise, the interference, the phalanx of decibels the audience threw back at them in self-defence, needed it all, and the stink and empathy, to give right out and tear a larynx. In the last verse, The goods you buy with this new coinage, they could have talkchant as counterpoint instead of instrument between lines. May be even Saint Charteris would go for that. Saint Loughborough? Some people said he was a Communist, but he could be all the things they needed, even become fodder for song. They looked back too much. The future and its thoughts they needed. Lips close, New pose, Truth lies in static instants. Well, it had possibilities.

With Charteris tranced, labouring at his masterwork, cutting, superimposing, annotating, Angeline wandered about the house. A tramp lived upstairs in the back room, old yellow mouth like an eye-socket. She avoided him. The front room upstairs was empty because it got so damp where the rain poured in. She stood on the bare frothy boards staring out at the sullen dead sea with shores of city rubbish, poor quality rubbish, becalming flocks of gulls, beaks as cynical as the smiles of reptiles from which they had originated. Land so wet, so dark, so brown nearest black, late February and the trains all running half-cocked with the poor add head drivers forgetting their duties, chasing their private cobwebs, hot for deeper stations. Nobody was human any more. She’d be better advised to take LSD and join the psychotomimjority, forget the old guilt theories, rub of old mother-sores. Charteris gave her hope, seemed he thought the situation was good and could be improved within fuzzy limits, pull all things from wreckage back.

Wait till you read ‘Man the Driver’, he told Phil Brasher. You will see. No more conflicts once everyone recognises that he always was a hunter, all time. The modern hunter has become a driver. His main efforts do not go towards improving his lot, but complicating ways of travel. It’s all in the big pattern of time-space-mind. In his head is a multi-value motorway. Now, after the Kuwait coup, he is free to drive down any lane he wants, any way. No external frictions or restrictions any more. Thus spake Charteris. She had felt compelled to listen, thus possibly accomplishing Phil’s death. There had been a rival group setting up in the cellars of Loughborough, the Mellow Bellows. They had taken one title out of thin air: There’s a fairy with an Areopagitica, No external frictions or restrictions, We don’t need law or war or comfort or that bourgeois stuff, No external frictions or restrictions. Of course, they did say he was a communist or something. What we needed was freedom to drive along our life lines where we would, give or take the odd Brasher. More irrational fragments of the future hit her: through him, of course; a weeping girl, a – a baked bean standing like a minute scruple in the way of self-fulfilment.

She wanted him to have her, if she could square her conscience about Phil. He was okay, but – yes, a change was so so welcome. Sex, too, yes, if he didn’t want too much of it. The waste always lay outside the window. He was clean-looking; good opening for bright lad – where had she overheard that? Well, it was self-defence. Wow that smash-up, still she trembled.

The gulls rose up from the mounds of rotting refuse, forming lines in the air. A dog down there, running, free, so free, companion of man, sly among the mountains. Perhaps now man was going to be as free as his companion. Trees in their future? Green? Bare?

Tears trickling down her cheek. Tears falling new from her sad speckled dreams. Even if it proved a better way of life, good things would be lost. Always the loss, the seepage. My sepia years. Sorry, Phil, I loved you all I could for six of them, but I’m going to bed with him if he wants me. The big gymnastic sergeant marching marching. It’s you I’m going to betray, not him, if I can make it, because he really has something, don’t know what. I don’t know if he’s what he says, but he is a sort of saint. And you did hit him first. You hit him first. You were always free with your fists. You were that.

She went downstairs. Either that running dog wore a tie or she was going acid head like the others.

‘It’s a bastard work, a mongrel,’ he said. He was eating something out of a can; that was now his way, no meals, only snacks, the fuzzy feeder. Kind of impersonal.

‘I’m a mongrel, aren’t I? Some Gurdjieff, more Ouspenski, time-obsessed passages from here and there, no zen or that – no Englishmen, but it’s going to spread from England out, we’ll all take it, unite all Europe at last. A gospel. Falling like PCA. America’s ready, too. The readiest place, always.’

‘If you’re happy.’ She touched him. He had dropped a baked bean on to the masterwork. It almost covered a word that might be ‘self-fulfilment’.

‘See those things crawling in the bare trees out there? Elms, are they? Birds as big as turkeys crawling in the trees, and toads, and that new animal. I often see it. There is an intention moving in them, as there is in us. They seem to keep their distance.’

‘Darling, you’re in ruins, your mind, you should rest!’

‘Yes. Happiness is a yesterday phase. Say, think, “tension-release”, maintain a sliding scale, and so you do away with sorrow. Get me, you just have a relief from tension, and that’s all you need. Nothing so time-consuming as happiness. Nothing personal. If you have sorrow, you are forced to seek its opposite, and vice versa, so you should try to abolish both. Wake, don’t live automatic, I’ll get it clear. Time … I must speak to people, address them. You have some gift I need. Come round with me, Angelina? Take me on, share my sack.’

She put her arms about him. The big gymnastic sergeant. There was some stale bread on the table, crumbs among the books he was breaking up and crayoning. Activity all the time, her windows, wind over the turning mounds. ‘When you love me, love, there’ll be something personal in it?’

‘It’s all evolving, angel, stacked with loot.’

When the Escalation came along, the two of them were half-lying on the camp-bed, limbs entangled, not actually copulating.

Greta wept, supported by two of the group. Featherstone-Haugh touched a chord on his balalaika and sang, ‘Her mother was killed by a sunlit Ford Cortina, and the road snapped shut’.

Ruby Dymond turned his cheeks into a poor grey.

‘Man the Driver,’ Chapter Three. Literature of the Future Affecting Feeling of the Future. Ouspenski’s concept of mental photographs postulates many photographs of the personality taken at characteristic moments; viewed together, these photographs will form a record by which man sees himself to be different from his common conception of himself – and truer. So, they will suggest the route of life without themselves having motion. The truth is in static instants; it is arrived at through motion. Motion of auto-crash, copulation, kinetic self-awakenings of any kind. There are many alternatives. Fiction to be mental photographs, motion to be supplied purely by reader. Music as harpoon to sleeping entrails, down out the howls of smaller dogs. Action a blemish as already in existence. Truth thus like a pile of photos, self-cancelling for self-fulfilment, multi-valued. Indecision multi-incisive and non-automatic Impurity of decision one of the drives towards such truth-piles; the Ouspenskian event of a multiple crash on a modern motorway an extreme example of such impurities.

Wish for truth involved here. Man and landscape interfuse, science presides. Machines predominate.

Charteris stood at the window listening to the noise of the group, looking out at the highly carved landscape. Hedges and trees had no hint of green, were cut from iron, their edges jagged, ungleaming with the brown nearest black, although the winds drove rain shining across the panorama. Middays reduced job-lots from Coventry. Vehicles scouring down the roads trailed spume. Roads like seas like fossilised thought, coproliths of ancestral loinage, father-frigger. The earlier nonsense about the terrors of the population explosion; one learned to live with it. But mistakes still being made. The unemployed were occupied, black midland figures of animated sacks, inplanting young trees along the grand synclines and barrows of the embankments and cuttings and underpasses, thereby destroying their geometry, mistakenly interfusing an abstract of nature back into the grand equation. Got to banish that dark pandemic nature. But the monstrous sky, squelching light out of its darkest corners, counteracted this regressive step towards out-dated reality moulds. The PCA bombs had squirted from the skies; it was their region. Science presided.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

Sailing every ha’penny.

The goods you buy with this new coinage

Weren’t made any place I heard of

They give out the meagerest sounds

But I don’t hear a thing any longer

Since I do my personal thinking in pounds

I had a good family life and a loving girl

But I had to trade them in for pounds

The damned birds were coming back, too, booking their saplings, grotesques from the pre-psychedelic twilife, ready to squirt eggs into the first nests at the first opportunity. They moved in squadrons, heavy as lead, settled over the mounds of rubbish, picking out the gaudy Omo packets. They had something planned, they were motion without truth, fugitive, to be hated. He had heard them calling to each other in nervous excitement, ‘Omo, Omo’. Down by the shores of the dead sea, down by the iron sunset, they were learning to read, a hostile art. And the new animal was among them by the dead elms.

Angeline was comforting Greta, Ruby watching her every fingertip, Burton was turning the pages of ‘Man the Driver’, thinking of a black and red tie he had worn, his only tie. Words conveyed truth, he had to admit, but that damned tie had really sent him. He thought he had tied it round the neck of a black dog proceeding down Ashby Road. Spread the message.

‘Greet, you didn’t hear of a dog involved in this pile-up?’

‘Leave her alone,’ Angeline said ‘Let her cry it out. It’s like a tide.’

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