Cryptozoic!, page 7
Anxiety made him breathe fast and shallowly. The room was like a little box, and they were keeping him waiting a suspiciously long time.
He would be in trouble. If only they would not mention the year he had overstayed — if they could understand he had meant to come back, to work properly, to report. He was their star minder.
Or — his brain ran along another track — if it wasn’t old Howells but a new man, who did not know he had overstayed his allotted period. But a new man…a totalitarian…one of Bolt’s men…
Knowing absolutely nothing about the current political situation beyond the few words his father had dropped, Bush began to weave a terrible plot in his head, in which he was subject to brutality and in his turn inflicted humiliation on others. It was as if, with the passing of his mother, his mind had to find other complications to stuff itself with. Recent events, the brush with Lenny’s gang, the unexpected blow from Stein, the shock of finding how Borrow had so effortlessly achieved what he hoped to do, the news that his mother was dead for some months, were too much for him. He feared he could endure nothing more.
Sinking back on to a corner chair, Bush took his head in his hands and let the universe thump and rock about him.
Indescribable things rushed through him. As though galvanised by a shock, he jumped up rigid. The flimsy door was open and a messenger stood there. Something was the matter with Bush’s eyes; he could not make the man out clearly.
“Do you want me to make my report now?” Bush asked, jumping forward.
“Yes, if you’ll follow me.”
They took the elevator up to the second floor, where Bush usually went to report. A macabre terror gripped him, a premonition of great ill. It seemed to him that the very interior of the Institute had altered in some way, its perspectives and shadows grown more inhuman, its elevators more cruel, while the metal grill of the elevator closed over Bush like fangs. He was sweating when he leapt out into the upper corridor.
“Am I seeing Reggie Howells?”
“Howells? Who’s Howells? He doesn’t work here any more. I’ve never heard of him.”
The report room looked as he recalled it, except for the telebowl and one or two additional installations which gave it a sly and watchful atmosphere. There were chairs on either side of the table, report pads, the speech/picture humming idly in one corner. Bush was still standing there, clenching and unclenching his fists, when Franklin entered.
Franklin had been Howells’ deputy; he was a porky, pale man with goosey flesh and poor eyesight. His eyes swam behind little steel-rimmed glasses. Not at all prepossessing, and Bush recalled now that he had never much liked the man or tried to ingratiate himself with him. He greeted him rather effusively now — it was an unexpected relief to see anyone he knew, even Franklin. Franklin looked puffier, bigger — a foot taller.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable, Mr. Bush. Put your pack down.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t report at once, but my mother — ”
“Yes. The Institute is being run more efficiently than when you were last here. In future, you will report here directly you return to the present. As long as you obey the rules you can come to no harm. Get it?”
“Yes, quite, I see. I’ll remember. I hear Reggie Howells has left. So the messenger was telling me.”
Franklin looked at him and closed his eyes slightly. “Howells was shot, to tell you the truth.”
Bush could not exactly say why, but it was the phrase “to tell you the truth” that upset him; it was too colloquial to follow the content of the rest of the sentence. He decided it might be safer not to say anything more on the subject of Howells; at the same time, he concluded that the most ill-advised thing he could possibly do would be what he most desired: to bust Franklin one on his piggy nose.
To hide his confusion, he put his shabby old pack on the table and started to unzip it.
“I’ll open that,” Franklin said, pulling the pack towards him. He pushed it under a machine by his right hand, looked at a panel above it, grunted, and ripped it open, tipping its contents out between them. Together, they eyed the poor bric-a-brac that had accompanied Bush over such a great span of time.
Chilled by apprehension, Bush felt his bowels contract. His time sense was awry, too, as it had been when Stein hit him. Franklin was reaching out towards the rubbish on the table, his arm moving perfectly under control, a multi-dimensional figure for a series of intricate reactions between nervous and muscular systems and terrestrial gravitational forces, in which air pressure and optical judgements were also involved. It was a textbook case of anatomical mechanics; as Bush watched it, he could see the crude substructure of the gesture. As the humerus swung slightly forward, ulna and radius levered from it, wrist bent, finger bones extended like the maimed wings of a bird; under the blue serge sleeve, lymph chugged.
Disgusted, Bush looked up at the man. The little astigmatic eyes were still staring at him, isolated behind their glasses, but the face was a bare diagrammatic example of a skull, part of the flesh cut away to reveal teeth, palate, and the intricacies of the inner ear. A series of small red arrows sprayed from the gaping jaws into the air towards Bush, indicating the passage of the organism’s breath as it said, “Family Group”.
It was reading from a sheet of paper it had retrieved from the debris on the table. The paper had been screwed up. The organism had flattened it out and was examining it.
The paper bore a crude sketch in colour, showing a deserted landscape with a metal sea; from a sun, from a tree, faces protruded. Slowly, Bush realized it was something he had executed in the Devonian; he had scrawled on it the title the organism had read out.
He closed his eyes and moved his head from side to side. When he looked again, Franklin appeared normal once more, his anatomy decently covered by his suit. He had crumpled up the drawing again and thrown it aside in disgust. Now he was examining more sketches, a series Bush had made on a pad. These sketches were of cryptic forms that never entirely transmuted into any recognizable shape. Bush had piled them up on the page, trying to make them ungraspable, defying unidirectional sense, violating all durations.
“What are these?” Franklin asked.
Perhaps I will just clear my throat, Bush thought. He experienced a certain tension there. This was all very unpleasant. No point, of course, in explaining… He cleared his throat, enjoyed some relief as the mucus ceased its tiny pressure. It was erroneous to assume that events in space-time could be rendered by symbols on to paper — a cardinal error that had stood mankind in good stead ever since the first cave paintings. Perhaps you could invent a way to translate into space-time. But that was constantly done. A piece of music…
“My notebooks…”
Nodding, Franklin accepted this as an adequate answer. He put the pad carefully on a side tray, a deliberate gesture. For a moment, he threatened to dissolve into a motor-energy diagram, and Bush fought the feeling back.
“I — my notebooks.
The illusion, whatever it was, was over. Time snapped back to normal. He could smell the dull atmosphere of the room again, hear noises, the slight sound of Franklin scuffling about in his equipment.
Franklin picked out the notebooks and the wrist camera, sweeping the rest of the stuff into a side tray, a woman’s photograph among it.
“Your personal possessions will be returned to you later.”
He clipped the first book into the miniscanner on the wall and let it run. Bush’s taped voice filled the room, and the recorder behind Franklin redigested it.
Franklin sat where he was without expression, listening.
Bush began to drum with his fingers on the table, then pulled them onto his knees. The books took twenty-five minutes each to play and there were four and a half of them full of his reports, spaced over his long months away. When one book was emptied, Franklin inserted the next without comment. He had been trained to make people uneasy; two or three years ago, he would have coughed and twitched in the unpleasant atmosphere, now Bush did it for him.
The reports had been designed for Howells’ ears, genial Howells who welcomed any chit-chat. They contained little new information about the past, although there was a reassuringly solid bit on the phragmoceras, and Bush had genuinely researched into the length of earlier years, which increased the farther one progressed back in time, through the decreased effect of the moon’s breaking effect on the Earth by tidal friction. He had confirmed that in the early Cambrian Period, a year consisted of about 428 days. He had also carefully noted the psychological effects of CSD and mind-travel. But too much of the report now seemed like idle chatter about the people he had met on his wanderings through time, interspersed with artistic notes. When the last book drew to its end, after almost two hours of playback, he could hardly bring himself to look at Franklin, who seemed to have been expanding all this time, as Bush himself was shrinking.
Franklin spoke mildly enough. “What would you conceive the objectives of this Institute to be, Bush?”
“Well… It began as a research centre for mental analysis, enlarging the discovery of the undermind — the theory of it. I’m not scientifically trained, I’m afraid I can’t phrase it too precisely. But Anthony Wenlock and his researchers discovered the uses of CSD and opened up the new avenues of the mind that have enabled us to overcome the barriers our ancient ancestors put up to protect themselves from space-time, and so mind-travel was developed. That’s simplified. I mean, I understand there are still paradoxes to be unravelled, but… Well, anyhow, now the Institute is the HQ of mind-travel, devoted to a greater scientific understanding of…well, of the past. As I say, I — ”
“How would you say you served that ‘devotion to a greater scientific understanding’, as you put it?”
The recorder was still growling away, holding on for posterity to the insincerity in his voice. He knew he was being trapped. Making an effort he said, “I’ve never pretended to be a scientist. I’m an artist. Dr Wenlock himself interviewed me. He believed artistic insights were needed as well as strictly — well, scientific ones. Also, they found that I was a particularly good subject for mind-travel. I can go farther and faster than most travellers, and get closer to the present. You know all this. It’s on my cards.”
“But how would you say you serve the ‘devotion to greater scientific understanding’ you talk so much about?”
“I suppose you think not very well. I’ve said, I’m not a scientist. I’m more interested — well, I’ve done my best but I’m more interested in people. Damn it, I’ve done the job I was paid for. In fact, there’s quite a bit of back-pay owing.”
Franklin blinked somewhat, as if it were a hobby he was taking up. “I’d say by the evidence of these reports of yours that you had almost utterly neglected the scientific side of things. You wasted your time skylarking about. You didn’t even stick to the era you were consigned to.”
Privately, Bush felt the truth of what Franklin said. This — perhaps fortunately — prevented him from saying anything. He cleared his throat instead; the fist in the teeth, the boot in the testicles, were advancing again.
“On the other hand, you pick up a lot of stuff about people.”
Bush nodded. He had spotted that Franklin did not care much for his failure to reply, and felt a little better.
Franklin leaned across the desk and pointed a finger at Bush’s face as if suddenly detecting something strange in the room. “The objectives of this Institute have changed since your day, Bush. You’re out of date — we have more important things to worry about now than your ‘greater scientific understanding’. You’d better get that idea out of your mind. But it was never in very firm, was it? Well, we’re on your side now.”
He watched to see the effect this reprieve had on Bush, a sneer on his face. Bush hung his head, disgraced to find such base support for his betrayal of science. Regarding himself as an artist, he had loftily thought of himself as in some measure opposed to science, a supporter of the particular against the general; he saw suddenly how faint, how wishy-washy the notion was; his sort of nonsense had helped this other sort of opposition to science, which he recognized — perhaps from the very smell of this bullying room — as altogether antithetical to human values. He’d gone badly wrong if Franklin could say, even as a sour joke, that they were both on the same side.
His courage came back. He got up. “You’re right. I’m out of date! I’m a flop! Okay, I resign from the Institute. I’ll hand in my notice right away.”
The other man permitted himself one blink. “Sit down, Bush, I haven’t finished yet. You are out of date as you say. Under the present system of employment, and for the duration of the emergency — I suppose you have grasped there is an emergency? — no man can leave his job.”
“I could leave. I’d just refuse to mind-travel!”
“Then you would be imprisoned, or perhaps worse. Sit down, or shall I call some of our new staff? Better! Look, Bush, I’ll give it you straight — the economy is being wrecked because people are all mind-travelling, going by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands! They’re getting hold of bootleg CSD; it comes in from abroad. They’re disaffected elements, and they represent a threat to the régime — to you and me, Bush. We want men to go back there in mind and check on what’s happening, trained men. You’d do a good job there with your talents — and it is a good job — well paid, too — the general sees to that. A month’s intensive training, and we are going to send you back with proper status, provided you’re sensible.”
Trying to sort through what the man said, Bush asked, “Sensible? How do you mean, sensible?”
“Useful. A functioning part of the community. You’ve got to give up this idea of chasing your own personality down the ages.”
When he had let that sink in, Franklin added, “Forget all that business about wanting to be an artist. That’s all finished, washed up! There’s no market or opportunity for works of art any more, and anyhow, you’ve lost the knack now, haven’t you? Borrow proved that to you, surely!”
Bush bowed his head. Then he forced his eyes to meet the slippery ones behind the little lenses watching him from the other side of the table.
“Okay,” he managed to say. It was a complete submission to Franklin’s argument, an acceptance of everything he had said, an admission that he was useless in any role but that of spy or snoop or informer, or whatever they would call it: but even as he delivered himself over to what he recognized instinctively as the enemy, he was born anew in courage and determination, for he saw that his one chance as an artist was to move again as a mind-traveller — saw, moreover, that he was less an artist than a mind-traveller, the first of a new breed whose entire métier was mind-travel, that he would rather die than lose this weird liberty of the mind; and as a corollary to that discovery, he saw that by understanding his personality on this new basis he might eventually come to deliver a new form of art expressing the changed world-view, the new and schizophrenic zeitgeist.
Just momentarily, as he glared at Franklin, great joy broke upon Bush; he saw he still had the chance to speak to the world (or the few) of his vision, his unique vision; and then he thought how insignificant he would make the mock-ups of Roger Borrow look; and by that petty step, he came back to reality, and the hum of the recorder, and Franklin’s nose and spectacles.
It was Franklin’s turn to rise. “If you wait downstairs, they will bring your personal belongings down to you.”
“And my pay?”
“And your pay. Some of it. The rest will be issued as post-emergency credits. You can go home then. The next course starts Monday; you’re on leave till then — don’t do anything silly, of course. A truck will pick you up Monday morning early. Be ready! Understood?”
Malice made Bush say, “Well, it’s been nice seeing you again Franklin. And what does Dr Wenlock think of all the changes?”
Franklin gave one of his blinks. “You’ve been away too long, Bush. Wenlock went out of his mind some while ago. To tell you the truth, he’s in a mental institution.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE CLOCK ANALOGY
It was beginning to rain as he walked past the carious tree stumps and the wall by which rapist and raped had lain together; he climbed the steps to find his father had locked the door. Only after much ringing and knocking and shouting through the letter-box did he persuade his father to come down and open up.
His father had absorbed most of the rest of the whisky. With Bush’s back pay, they bought more that evening, and were drunk that night and the next day. The drunkenness was a reliable substitute for the friendship they could not quite establish. It also helped to blot out the terror in Bush’s mind.
On the next day, the Thursday, James Bush took his son to inspect his mother’s grave. They were both sober and heavy then, needing a dose of melancholy. The cemetery was ancient and abandoned, pitched on such a steep and windy hill that grass would grow only on one side of the mound. It seemed an uncharacteristic place for Elizabeth Lavinia, Beloved Wife of James Bush, to lie. Bush wondered for the first time how she had felt indoors that long day when he was locked out in the garden. Now she was locked out for good, her soul cast on to a steeper, longer beach than any known to Earth’s history.
“Her parents were Catholic. She gave up all belief at the age of six.”
Six? It seemed a curious time to give up any belief; his father might as well have said “six in the morning”.
“Something happened to her when she was six that convinced her there was no God. She’d never tell me what it was.”
Bush said nothing. His father had kept off the subject of religion since he had returned from the interview with Franklin. Now he teetered on the brink again; the moment was abominably favourable. Bush began to whistle annoyingly under his breath to counteract his father’s advantage. Even the thought of religion irritated him.
