Cryptozoic!, page 24
Cryptozoic!
Brian W. Aldiss
For James Blish whose cities
fly words too
Introduction to the E-Reads Edition
It was almost half a century since CRYPTOZOIC! was first published. I had my doubts about it, despite an encouraging quote from a famed critic of the time, Judith Merrill, who had this to say about the novel: “What he has hold of, I think, is a concept so right intuitionally that the very attempt at analysis shatters it…. What does matter is the excitement, long gone from most of the genre, of snatching at, and sometimes seizing on, a strange, alluring, and frightening avatar of Truth…”
Well, there are certainly avatars of the truth lurking here and there, and an adventure across aeons of time, to time still in these days uncreated.
Here is a passage from Chapter 3: At the Sign of the Amniote Egg:
“Where the crude tents of his own day finished, the shadowy structures belonging to future invaders of the past continued. Bush lurched through them, through the shadows that inhabited them, finally got beyond them and pushed through a green thicket of gymnosperms. A little coelurosaur, no bigger than a hen, scuttling on its hind legs, ran out from under his feet.
“Emerging from the thicket, he found himself on the banks of a river, the one he and Ann had seen before she left him. There was jungle close by, the heavy, almost flowerless jungle of mid-Jurassic times…”
Disorientation: isn’t disorientation one of the prime motifs and delights of science fiction? And of course, we come in time to the Dark Woman, ‘standing some distance away, looking on, inaccessible’. CRYPTOZOIC! is strong on disorientation, I am glad to say.
In particular when we discover...well, if I spill the beans here and now, then it would not be a discovery. You the readers must suffer the disclosure for yourselves.
Just remember, it might change your lives! Just remember, too, that the very attempt at analysis may shatter it!
Brian W. Aldiss
2012
In te, anime meus, tempora metior.
ST. AUGUSTINE: Confessions, Bk. II
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,” the Queen remarked.
LEWIS CARROLL: Through the Looking Glass
They lay heaped about meaninglessly, and yet with a terrible meaning that hinted of the force which had flung them here. They seemed to be something between the inorganic and the organic. They proliferated on the margins of time, embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry; the earth was having a nightmare of stone about the progeny that would swarm over it.
These copromorphic forms suggested, elephants, seals, diplodoci, strange squamata and sauropods, beetles, bats, octopoidal fragments, penguins, woodlice, hippos, living or dying.
Ungainly reminders of the human physique also appeared: torsos, thighs, groins lightly hollowed, backbones, breasts, suggestion of hands and fingers, massive shoulders, phallic shapes: all distinct and yet all merged with the stranger anatomies about them in this forlorn agony of nature — and all moulded mindlessly out of the grey putty without thought turned out, without thought to be obliterated.
They stretched as far as the eye could see, piled on top of each other, as if they filled the entire Cryptozoic…or as if they were the sinister fore-shadowings of what was to come as well as the after-images of what was long past…
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE
A BED IN THE OLD RED SANDSTONE
The sea level had been slowly sinking for the last few thousand years. It lay so nearly motionless that one could hardly tell whether its small waves broke from it against the shore or were in some way formed at the shoreline and cast back into the deep. The river disgorging into the sea had built up bars of red mud and shingle, thus often hindering its own way with gravel banks or casting off wide pools which stagnated in the sunshine. A man appeared to be sitting by one of these pools. Although he seemed to be surrounded by green growth, behind him the beach was as bare as a dried bone.
The man was tall and loose-limbed. He was fair-haired, pale-skinned, and his expression in repose held something morose and watchful in it. He wore a one-piece garment and carried a knapsack strapped to his back, in which were his pressurized water ration, food substitutes, some artist’s materials and two notebooks. About his neck he wore a device popularly known as an air-leaker, which consisted of a loose-fitting hoop that had a small motor attachment at the back and in front, under the chin, a small nozzle that breathed fresh air into the man’s face.
The man’s name was Edward Bush. He was a solitary man some forty-five elapsed years old. As far as he could be said to be thinking at all, he was brooding about his mother.
At this phase of his life, he found himself becalmed, without direction. His temporary job for the Institute did nothing to alleviate this inward feeling that he had come to an uncharted crossroads. It was as though all his psychic mechanisms had petered out, or stood idling, undecided whether to venture this way or that under the force of some vast prodromic unease.
Resting his chin on his knee, Bush stared out over the dull expanse of sea. Somewhere, he could hear motorbikes revving.
He did not want anyone to see what he was doing. He jumped up and hurried across to his easel. He had walked away from it in disgust; it was farther away than he remembered. The painting was no damned good, of course; he was finished as an artist. Maybe that was why he could not face going back to the present.
Howells would be waiting for his report at the Institute. Bush had drawn Howells into the picture. He had tried to express emptiness, staring out at the sea, working with flooded paper and aquarelles — in mind-travel, such primitive equipment was all one could manage to carry.
The heavy colour came flooding off the ends of the pencils. Bush had gone berserk. Over the sullen sea, a red-faced sun with Howells’ features had risen.
He began to laugh. A stunted tree to one side of the canvas: he applied the pencil to it.
“Mother-figure!” he said. “It’s you, Mother! Just to show I haven’t forgotten you.”
His mother’s features stared out of the foliage. He gave her a diamond crown; his father often called her Queen — half in love, half in irony. So his father was in the picture too, suffusing it.
Bush stood looking down at the canvas.
“It’s masterly, you know!” he said to the shadowy woman who stood behind him, some distance away, not regarding him. He seized up an aquarelle and scrawled a title to it: FAMILY GROUP. After all, he was in it too. It was all him.
Then he pulled the paper block from the clamp, tore off the daub, and screwed it up.
He folded the easel small and stuck it into his pack.
The sun shone behind Bush, over low hills, preparing to set. The hills were bare except along the riverbed, where runty little leafless psilophyton grew in the shade of primitive lycopods. Bush cast no shadow.
The distant sound of motorbikes, the only sound in the great Devonian silence, made him nervous. At the fringe of his vision, a movement on the ground made him jump. Four lobe fins jostled in a shallow pool, thrashing into the shallows. They struggled over the red mud, their curiously armoured heads lifted off the ground as they peered ahead with comic eagerness. Bush made as if to photograph them with his wrist camera, and then thought better of it; he had photographed lobe fins before.
The legged fish snapped at insects crawling on the mud banks or nosed eagerly in rotting vegetation. In the days of his genius, he had used an abstraction of their viridian armoured heads for one of his most successful works.
The noise of the bikes ceased. He scrutinized the landscape, climbing on to a bank of shingle to get a better view; there might or might not be a cluster of people far down the beach. The ocean was almost still. The phantom dark-haired woman was still. In one sense, she was company; in another, she was just one of the irritating ghosts of his overburdened brains.
“It’s like a bloody textbook!” he called to her mockingly. “This beach… Evolution… Lack of oxygen in the dying sea… Fish getting out. Their adventure into space… And of course my father would read religion into it all.” Cheered by the sound of his own voice, he began to recite (his father was a great quoter of poetry): “Spring… Too long… Gongula…” Too bloody long.
Ah well, you had to have your fun, or you’d go mad here. He breathed in air through the air-leaker, looking askance at his custodian. The dark-haired woman was still there, dim and insubstantial as always. She was doing some sort of guard duty he decided. He held out a hand to her, but could no more touch her than he could the lobe fins or the red sand.
Lust, that was his trouble. He needed this isolation while his inward clocks stood still, but was also bored by it. Lust would get him stirring again; yet the Dark Woman was as unattainable as the improper women of his imagination.
It was no pleasure to him to see the bare hills through her body. He lay down on the gravel, his body resting more or less on the configurations of its slope. Rather than wrestle with the problem of her identity, he turned back to the moody sea, staring at it as if he hoped to see some insatiable monster break from the surface and shatter the quiescence with which he was inundated.
All beaches were connected. Time was nothing to beaches. This one led straight to the beach he had known one miserable childhood holiday, when his parents quarrelled with suppressed violence, and he had trembled behind a hut with grit in his shoes, eavesdropping on their hatred. If only he could forget his childhood, he could begin creative life anew! Perhaps an arrangement of hut-like objects… Enshrined by time…
Characteristic of him that he should lie here meditating his next spatial-kinetic groupage, rather than actually tackling it; but his art (ha!) had brought him easy rewards too early — more because he was one of the first artists to mind-travel, he suspected, than because the public was particularly struck by his solitary genius, or by his austere and increasingly monochromatic arrangements of movable blocks and traps expressing those obscure spatial relationships and time synchronizations which for Bush constituted the world.
In any case, he was finished with the purely photic-signal-type groupages that had brought him such success five years ago. Instead of dragging that load of externals inward, he would push the internals outward, related to macro-cosmic time. He would if he knew how to begin.
Bush could hear the motorbikes again, thudding along the deserted beach. He pushed them away, indulging further his train of thought, his head full of angles and leverages that would not resolve into anything that could move him to expression. He had plunged into mind-travel at the Institute s encouragement, deliberately to disrupt his circadian rhythms, so that he could grapple with the new and fundamental problems of time perception with which his age was confronted — and had found nothing that would resolve into expression. Hence his dereliction on this shore.
Old Claude Monet had pursued the right sort of path, considering his period, sitting there patiently at Giverny, transforming water lilies and pools into formations of colour that conspired towards an elusive statement on time. Monet had never been saddled with the Devonian, or the Palaeozoic Era.
The human consciousness had now widened so alarmingly, was so busy transforming everything on Earth into its own peculiar tones, that no art could exist that did not take proper cognisance of the fact. Something entirely new had to be forged; even the bio-electro-kinetic sculpture of the previous decade was old hat.
He had the seeds of that new art in his life, which, as he had long ago recognized, followed the scheme of a vortex, his emotions pouring down into a warped centre of being, always on the move, pressing forward like a storm, but always coming back to the same point. The painter who stirred him most was old Joseph Mallord William Turner; his life, set in another period when technology was altering ideas of time, had also moved in vortices, just as his later canvases had been dominated by that pattern.
The vortex: symbol of the way every phenomenon in the universe swirled round into the human eye, like water out of a basin.
So he had thought a thousand times. The thought also whirled round and round, getting nowhere.
Grunting to himself, Bush sat up to look for the motorbikes.
They were about half a mile away, stationary on the dull beach; he could see them clearly; objects in his own dimension showed much darker than they would have done if they existed in the world outside, the entropy barrier cutting down about ten per cent of the light. The ten riders showed up rather like cutouts against the exotic Devonian backdrop, all forces conspiring to admit that they did not and never would belong here.
The bikes were the light models their riders could carry back in mind-travel with them. They spun round in intricate movements, throwing up no sand where one might expect parabolas of it, splashing no wave when they appeared to drive through the waves. That which they had never affected, they had no power to affect now. As miraculously, they managed to avoid each other, finally coming to rest in a neat straight line, some facing one way, some the other, their horizontal discs hovering just above the sand.
Bush watched as the riders climbed off and set about inflating a tent. All of them wore the green buckskin which was virtually the uniform of their kind. One he saw, had long streaming yellow hair — a woman perhaps. Although he could not tell from this distance, his interest was aroused.
After a while, the riders spotted him sitting on the red gravel and four of them began to walk towards him. Bush felt self-conscious, but remained where he was, at first pretending he had not seen them.
They were tall. All wore high peel-down buckskin boots. They carried their air-leakers carelessly slung round their necks. One had a reptile skull painted on his helmet. As usual with such groups, they were all between thirty and forty — hence their other nickname, “Tershers” — since that was the youngest age group that could afford to hit mind-travel. One of them was a girl.
Although Bush was nervous to see them marching up, he felt an immediate attack of lust at the sight of the girl. She was the one with the long yellow hair. It looked untended and greasy, and her face was utterly without make-up. Her features were sharp but at the same time indeterminate, her gaze somewhat unfocused. Her figure was slight. It might be her damned boots, he jeered to himself, for she was not immediately attractive, but the feeling persisted.
“What are you doing here, chum?” one of the men asked, staring down at Bush.
Bush thought it was time he stood up, remaining where he was only because to stand up might look threatening.
“Resting, till you lot roared up.” He looked over the man who had spoken. A blunt-nosed fellow with deep creases under each cheek that nobody would dare or want to call dimples; nothing to recommend him: scrawny, scruffy, highly strung.
“You tired or something?”
Bush laughed; the pretence of concern in the tersher’s voice was pitched exactly right. Tension left him and he replied, “You could say that — cosmically tired, at a standstill. See these armoured fish here?” He put his foot through where the lobe fins appeared to be, gobbling in the sea-wrack. “I’ve been lying here all day watching them evolve.”
The tershers laughed. One of them said, cheekily, “We thought you was lying there trying to evolve yourself. Look as if you could do with it!”
Evidently he had appointed himself group humorist and was not much appreciated. The others ignored him and the leader said, “You’re mad! You’ll get swept away by the tide, you will!”
“It’s been going out for the last million years. Don’t you read the newspapers?” As they laughed at that, he climbed to his feet and dusted himself down — purely instinctively, for he had never touched the sand.
They were in contact now. Looking at the leader, Bush said, “Got anything to eat you’d care to swap for food tablets?”
The girl spoke for the first time. “A pity we can’t grab some of your evolving fish and cook them. I still can’t get used to that sort of thing — the isolation.”
She had sound teeth, though they probably needed as good a scrub as the rest of her.
“Been here long?” he said. “Only left 2090 last week.”
He nodded. “I’ve been here two years. At least, I haven’t been back to — the present for two years, two and a half years. Funny to think that by our time these walking fish will be asleep in the Old Red Sandstone!”
‘We’re making our way up to the Jurassic,” the leader said, elbowing the girl out of the way. “Been there?”
“Sure, I hear it’s getting more like a fairground every year.”
“We’ll find ourselves a place if we have to clear one.”
“There’s forty-six million years of it,” Bush said, shrugging.
He walked with them back to the rest of the group, who stood motionless among the inflated tents.
“I’d like to involve into one of them big Jurassic animals, with big teeth,” the humorist said. “Tyrannosaurs or whatever they call ’em. I’d be as tough as you then, Lenny!”
Lenny was the leader with the excoriated dimples. The funny one was called Pete. The girl’s name was Ann; she belonged to Lenny. None of the group used names much, except Pete. Bush said his name was Bush, and left it like that. There were six men, each with a bike, and four girls who had evidently blasted into the Devonian on the back of the men’s bikes. None of the girls was attractive, except for Ann. They all settled by the bikes, lounging or standing; Bush was the only one who sat. He looked cautiously round for the Dark Woman; she had disappeared; just as well — remote though she was, she might sense more clearly than anyone else here the reason why Bush had tagged along with the gang.
