Nova 4
edited by Harry Harrison
A MANOR BOOK.....1975
Manor Books Inc.
432 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10016
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-79212
Copyright,©, 1974, by Harry Harrison.
All rights reserved.
Published by arrangement with Walker Publishing
Company, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.
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!"