Nova 4

BRIAN W. ALDISS The monsters or Ingratitude IV

The nice thing about Brian Aldiss is that he never rests on his laurels. He is always pushing forward, tantalizing and satisfying the readers who, naturally, lust for more. This story is the first to be published in a connected series that he is now writing. The background for all the stories is the mad states of mind that might be regarded as normal in the future, where living on Earth has become so expensive that many people, including the most creative, have been forced out to the artificial worlds that circle the Earth in orbits set 180 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Only Aldiss could make that statement and handle this fascinating material!

The day was so beautiful that I left the teleceptual studios during the lunch hour and walked along Terrazza Terrace. One delight about being on Ingratitude, of all the Zodiacal Planets, was that the Shield was faulty, giving superb solar distortions. Tourists came from parsecs around just to see the effect of supersonic peacocks plunging in and out of the sun, like javelins growing foliage before they burst into fire.

There on the terrace I turned suddenly and saw a man who stared at me through kookaburra glasses before coming forward and extending his hand. I recognized him by his handprint. "Lurido Ponds!" I said, "after all these years!" Where had I seen him last?

"Hazelgard Nef, incarnate and aglow . . . How are you, Nef?"

"In a state of rapture, dear boy. Let's have a nostril of striped aframosta, shall we?"

I sensed immediately that Ponds was going to be important to me; the wiring in the ulna of my left arm was signaling. As we sat down in the nearest afrohale bar, I tried him out with some trivial conversation. "I suppose you've heard about the new cult spreading through the Zodiacals? It claims that human beings are merely corpses, or revenants of foetuses, that what we think of as unborn children are in fact the dominant and adult stage of the human life cycle, and that what we have always called life is actually an Afterlife."

"What's the name of this cult?"

"I forget. Their leader calls himself Mister Queen Elizabeth."

"I don't doubt it. It has a sort of inevitability about it."

"Wombud, it's calied. Wombud. And what are you doing in this phase of your Afterlife?" I still could not recall when we had last met.

As we sat and sniffed and watched the lovely lacerating peacocks overhead, Ponds told me about the clinic he was running with the aid of a man called Karmon. Since Experimental Experience had caught on, people ran through psychotic phases very much faster than ever before, sometimes in a matter of hours or even minutes. The Ponds-Karmon clinic catered for these dramatic and often terrifying occasions. The name of the clinic was vaguely familiar to me.

"I may have to call on you myself."

"You said you were in a state of rapture."

"Look, here we sit, Lurido, our limbs disposed as we will. We talk, we communicate, our senses flow like silent water and our nails grow. We experience sound and sight and touch. Isn't that rapture? Is anything more harmonious than being yourself? Also I have a lovely wife at home, sweet of breath and nature. But still I'm being driven mad."

I told him how I'd come to Ingratitude IV to set up my studio and escape the colossal rentals charged in the cities of Earth. But my theories of painting were not popular and I had been forced into designing sets for telecepts. Currently—there seemed no point in withholding the news from Ponds—we were involved in making a musical version of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

"What are you going to call it?"

"We're thinking of calling it 'Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'. It has novelty. Or maybe just 'Stein-track'."

" 'Startrek'?"

" 'Steintrack'. No doubt that sort of thing is much too frivolous for you. You were always an intellectual."

"I enjoy telecepts when they are complex, as I'm sure yours will be. They become something like waking dreams, which can transport you to a different level of reality. The entire spiritual history of this century has lain in the pioneering of new LORs. That's the line of mental health in which I specialize."

I remembered then something he had said to me years back, before my marriage, about the colonization of cislunar space so expanding mental horizons that mankind had propelled itself into an age of neocortical evolution. Such talk always depressed me; besides which, Ponds had been better at getting girls than I had.

Something of my thought evidently got through to him, for he said, "You okay? Coordination rating down?"

"No, dear boy. Just a touch of ecliptic allergy."

We parted. He headed back to his clinic. As he went, I noticed for the first time a monstrous thing rolling and sprawling after him, moaning as it moved and dragging its genitals along the ziberline mothproof grass.

I went back to the studios, sneezing. Something throbbed under my zygomatic arch.

My wife awaited me that evening when I staggered home, exhausted by the nonsense of 'Steintrack'. Millimeter music was playing and she had on an entire frontal. We embraced passionately, matching respiratory rates and interlocking toes.

"Teresa, my darling!"

"Ally, my love!"

We fled together into the amniotic room, floated in the semidark, swallowed the fiber-lights, eagerly chased down into each other's digestive systems, rating the fizzy bacterial jazz of the upper intestine with the somber melody of peristalsis. In rapture through the Y-rays I saw the rare rose of an ovary on the great labyrinthine shores of her circulatory epithelia raise its homoblastic head in bud, felt the event celebrated in a minute eustatic movement of hormones through every uterine dell and declivity.

Oh, the divine delight of that decrustating decubitus!

Later, we dressed; as I made my way to the sun room, I came across my son Chin Ping, flat out with a flickerbook.

"Lazing here again! Why don't you get some exercise, play with other boys, do something instead of just hanging about?"

"You say I'm rotten at games."

"That doesn't stop you playing them, does it? You might get a little better at them if you played more often."

"Equally I might get better at them if you didn't keep telling me I was no good at them."

"You are no good at them. The truth never hurt anybody."

"Don't give me that old uni-level crap, Pop. Truth's just the salt at the banquet, not the whole feast."

I began jumping slowly up and down. "Aphorisms in an eight-year-old I will not stand!"

"I make your life a misery, don't I? And I'm glad, because you make mine a misery. Do you know why lizards and reptiles remain so still? It's because they don't have what are called saccidic eye moverpents; so, when they become stationary, they adapt visually and their environment becomes uniformly gray. You must be all saccidic eye movement, Pop, because you're never bloody stationary and your environment is a permanent puce!"

"You little permanent puke!"

"Witty!"

"Repartee you might dig in your dumb child mind!" I snatched up his flickerbook and found it was Theodor Reik's The Unknown Murderer, with the paragraph showing about crocodiles eating people in Madagascar, where nobody believes in natural death, and the formula of condolence to a dead man's family is "Cursed be the magician who killed him!"

I switched the current off and flung the book at him, catching him just under his left eye.

"You stole this from my library, you little swine! Why are you reading such fantasy? Reality's too big for you, I suppose?"

"No, it's not big enough," he screamed. "It's just a rotten cage! There should be laws against reality."

He ran screaming to his mother, clutching his face. I stopped to retrieve the book, noticing there was blood on one corner. As I did so, something snapped in my back. I could not move, could not straighten up, could not sit down, could not kneel, could not cry out.

Teresa entered the room, saying in her gentle voice, "Ally, stand up, please, because you and I and little Chin Ping are going to see a friend of mine."

"Mmmmurrrr. . ." By pressing the small of my back with two fingers, I caused the pain to lessen and was able to straighten up. Immediately, I was myself again.

"I must tell you about the fun we had with 'Steintrack' today, Teresa. They have a new girl in to rewrite a lot of the lyrics, and she is first class."

She took my arm, leading me toward the sub-station, saying as she did so, "I remember when I was composing a choral—"

"Remember, remember! Christ, is that all the human race ever does? Why not forget for a change, or doesn't neocortical evolution stretch that far? What about the future? Doesn't that excite your intellectual curiosity just one tiny bit?"

She burst out laughing and I remembered that she had been fond of greyhounds before I knew her. Chin Ping came running to her side, his cheek badly inflamed, and hid his face in her dress.

"What did you do to your cheek?" I asked him.

He would not answer. Then you wonder why fathers get angry with sons.

We climbed into the first car that came; Teresa punched buttons and we dived into the heart of the urbstak. Somewhere a voice was calling.

"I'm worried about 'Steintrack', love," I confided, smacking Chin Ping across the head. "Perhaps the trouble is that it's not complex enough. I enjoy telecepts when they're complex, as I'm sure you know. They become something like waking dreams, which can transport you to a different level of reality. After all, the entire spiritual history of this century has lain in the pioneering of new LORs, compatible with the expanding horizons of neocortical evolution."

"That's what rethinking courses are for," she said vaguely. "You worry too much, Ally. Maybe we should move to Self-Indulgence VI—I've heard it's fun."

"It's the boy's future that bothers me."

We stopped at an intersection station high on the outer face. As we climbed out, a sign lit nearby and a glass door swung open. The sign said, in letters of self-assertive discretion:

Ponds-Karmon Clinic Accelerative Psychoses

"Hey!" I said.

"We have an appointment," Teresa said to a sweetly fragrant receptionist who met us in the foyer. She removed our masks and frontals.

In short time, we found ourselves confronting a slight man in a stiff suit of silver, who introduced himself as Aldo Karmon. His main eccentricity was, as he explained, that he was a fringillidaephile; cardinals fluttered round the room as he spoke, followed by buntings and greenfinches. As we were admiring them, Lurido Ponds entered the room by another door and nodded familiarly at me.

"Hope you didn't mind my following you this morning," he said.

After him crawled a strange creature, which I could hardly believe to be human, so grotesquely did it drag itself over the carpet, groaning as it came. Its eyes were blurred pools of phlegm. Teresa backed away from it in horror, but Chin Ping ran forward in delight and went down on his hands and knees to it, as if the monster had been a puppy.

"That's right! We shall have Geoffrey cured in no time," Ponds said. "He likes a friendly reception. There's never a cure without love, even in phase-schizophrenia."

I ran angrily across to my son, bending to grasp his collar and drag him away from the creature. My back snapped. I found myself stuck where I was, unable to stand erect again, unable to sit or kneel. A finch settled on my left ear.

My vision seemed to be going. As I toppled forward on to the monster, who made gestures of terror at my approach, I was able to see that the finch was in fact a woodpecker, and that its beak was digging cleverly into my ear, bringing out huge ripe maggots, which it gobbled. Its claws were sinking into my shoulder, pulling away loads of fluff and fur. Farther down the tree, a weaver bird was knitting the fur and fluff into a protective blanket. I fell into the blanket, but it gave way and I plunged into the undergrowth below, landing painfully on a shingley strip of beach.

Only the mewling cries beside me forced me to retain my senses, Still sprawling, I saw a baby seal rolling about beside me/fat and white and weepy-eyed. I struck out at it, trying to blind it, but at that moment an angry bark made me pause. Heaving herself out of the waves, all anger and open mouth, was a mother seal. I saw the salty drops of water on her whiskers and recognized Teresa. I tried to call her but could not, for the waves were reaching me.

They were waves of an unknown sea. They were not of water nor of flesh. They were of a substance like jellied flesh, a flesh that had not properly formed. Each wave, as it crawled to overwhelm me, took the shape of ferns, deformed fingers, organs of an outre anatomy, all obeying biochemistries untold.

In fighting to get away from them, I fell over white dead things on the beach, and the waves were upon me. My skin experienced scalding sensations. My ulna was picking up signals from Cygnus 61. Even as I fought with the wave-things my own flesh and blood were churning in metamorphosis—in them I was drowning, not in the waves, as my identity slipped down and down into blue depths of disorder, overwhelmed by acrocyanosis and the agar-agars of an extreme anguish.

Yet in the intensity of those fevered fathoms was a womblike impetus that drew together again all that had become dissolved. The separate elements of me remarried and became a working entity, even as the tides that had taken me left me, retching but renewed.

"Two minutes, fifty seconds flat!" said Karmon, pocketing a stopwatch and jotting a note genially on a pad. "Something of a record in the way of accelerative psychoses. Congratulations, Hazelgard, how do you feel?"

The unknown psychic sea had gone; Cygnus had rung off.

"My back feels great—Geoffrey looks better too," I said. My breakdown had triggered the monster through his crisis; he looked human again. I picked myself up from the floor and embraced Teresa and Chin Ping, kissing his bruised face. He smiled at me, all open and beautiful.

"Can we have a crocodile for a pet, Dad?"

I cupped his chin in my hand.

"The Afterlife is hard for you, son. You're only eight years past your death. But we shall slowly educate you to remember the timeless months of your real existence, experiencing the universe of life in your mother's womb. Do not despair—every year, we understand more of our mysteries."

Lurido Ponds said genially, "You sound so convinced about Wombud that you almost convince me, Mister Queen Elizabeth. It'll be interesting to see which of the two sides of your life eventually stabilize."

Teresa said, smiling, "You're a hell of a strain to live with as you are, darling, but I wouldn't change a thing. The more alternatives we can generate, the better. If only I could help more in your non-Wombud incarnation . . ."

"Everything's fine," I said, "and I'm hungry—aren't you, Chin Ping? Eat, then meet my disciples."

He began jumping slowly up and down.

I went over and shook Karmon and Pond's hands; then I adjusted my nose-mask.

"Goodbye, Hazelgard. See you tomorrow as usual," Ponds said.

As I left with Chin Ping, Teresa was beginning to go into her psychotic breakdown. Another hour, and her renewed personality would be writing some more 'Steintrack' songs for us.

Outside, overhead, high above the urbstak, diatoms and divers peacocks phantasmally nested in the sun itself. I sneezed. Something throbbed under my zygomatic arch.