Читать книгу The Monster Trilogy - Brian Aldiss - Страница 20

The little Brazilian-made plane, a vintage Bandierante, winged high above the eroded Utah landscape, and released its passenger from a rear door, like some hypothetical bird of prey launching an embryo into the wind.

Mina floated away from the plane, arms outstretched, knees bent, riding the invisible steed of air, controlling it with her pubic bone, steering it with the muscles of her thighs. This was her element, here was her power, to soar above the mist-stricken earth.

No sell-by dates existed up here. It was neutral territory. Even her snug green cover-all she chose to regard as her skin, making her an alien visitor to the planet.

And if there were aliens on other planets in the galaxy, let them stride their own skies. Let them not discover Earth; let them not, she thought, disclose themselves to the peoples of Earth. It was difficult enough to find meaning to life in a non-religious age; how much more difficult if you knew that there were a myriad other planets choked with living creatures like humans, facing the same day-to-day struggles to survive – to what end?

The image came back to her, as it often did when she steered her way through the atmosphere by her pubis, of herself as a small straggly girl, oldest daughter of a poor family in Montana, when she had gone out at her mother’s behest to hang freshly washed sheets on a clothes line. The wind blew, the sheets tugged, she struggled. At a sudden freak gust, a still wet sheet curled itself round her thin body and carried her, half-sailing, down the hill. Was that when she had first yearned for an accidental freedom?

For her, the zing of high altitude could wash away even memories, including more recent ones. The hollowness she felt encroaching on her life could not reach her here. Nor could thoughts of how things were with Joe.

Now the sheets of the wind were snug about her again. She knew no harm. But Utah was coming closer, tan, intricate, neat. There was no putting off for long the demands of gravity, the human condition.

As he laid Clift’s body down in the cab, Bodenland felt utterly detached from his own body. The conscious part of him floated, as a goldfish might watch from its bowl the activities in the room to which it was confined, while his body went about setting his dead friend out straight, pretending that comfort was a matter of reverent attention to a corpse. The death, the apparition which had attacked him, not to mention the horrific novelty of the vehicle in which he was trapped, had brought about the detachment. The shock of fear had temporarily disembodied him.

He straightened in slow motion and turned towards the driver. The driver stood tense against a wall, hands by his side. His riven face, grey and dusty, trained itself watchfully on Bodenland. He made no attempt to attack or escape. Only his eyes were other than passive. Molten zinc, thought Bodenland, a part of his mind reverting to laboratory experiments.

‘You know me? You recognize me?’

‘No, no.’ The man spoke without moving his head. His jaw hung open after uttering the two syllables, revealing long canines in his upper jaw and a white-coated tongue.

‘You said I was the man with the bomb. What did you mean by that?’

‘No, nothing. Please …’

Bodenland saw his right hand come up and grab the man by his throat. When the hand began to shake him, the driver almost rattled. He put his hands up feebly to protect himself. His skin appeared made of some frowsty old material, as if he were a cunningly stitched rag doll.

‘Tell me what this train is we’re on. Where are we? Who are you?’

When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.

‘The Undead – the Undead, sir. I won’t harm you …’

‘You sure won’t.’ He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was an airline pilot in life,’ said the driver faintly. ‘You will become like us. You are travelling on the train of the Undead and our Lord will get you sure enough.’

‘We’ll see about that. Get up and stop this train.’ He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him towards the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.

‘Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we? When are we?’

The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength and turned to face Bodenland.

He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?’

In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.

‘You can still feel pain? Fear? You’re human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.’

Holding his face, the driver said, ‘The next programmed stop is in what you call 2599 AD, the Silent Empire. I’m unable to alter the programming.’

‘You slowed in Utah.’

‘Utah? Oh, Point 656, yes … That’s a sacred site to the Undead. We had to let agents off the train.’

‘Okay, you can let me off there. That’s where I need to be. How many time trains are there?’

‘One, sir, just this one.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘There’s just one.’ He spoke without emphasis, leaning lightly against the control panels, holding his face, letting the faint illumination turn his body into a seemingly abandoned carcass. ‘This train shuttles back and forth on scheduled time routes. All programmed. I’m not much more than a supervisor. It’s not like piloting an airliner.’

‘There must be other trains.’

‘There’s just the one. To ride time quanta you gobble vast amounts of energy. Solar energy. Very extravagant. Reverse relativism. Trains can’t be seen by the outside world – not unless we’re slowing to let agents off.’

The driver smiled, showing the canines more fully. No humour warmed the smile. The lips simply peeled back in memory of something that might once have amused.

‘The sheep asks the wolf what it does …’

The detached part of Bodenland watched as he attacked the driver and fell to the floor with him. In their struggle, they kicked Clift’s body, making it roll on to its face.

And Bodenland was demanding who had invented this cursed train. The answer was that, as far as the driver knew, the train was the invention of the Fleet Ones.

‘The Fleet Ones, sir, are the Undead – the vampires – who rule the world in its last days. This is their train, sir, you’ve ventured on.’

‘I’m borrowing it, and it’s going to get me back home to 1999. You’re going to show me how.’

The detached viewpoint saw how the creature made to bite Bodenland in the upper arm. But Bodenland took a firm grip of his throat and dragged him to the controls.

‘Start explaining,’ he said.

‘Ummmm ummmm ummmmmmmm. Moon and Mercury, Moon and Mercury, Romance and Remedy … Ummmm.’

The madman Renfield rocked himself in a tight bundle and hummed as if he were full of bluebottles.

The ginger man squatted stolidly in his corner by the cell door, watching, nodding in time with the humming, alert to the fact that Renfield was rocking himself closer. Above them, against the square of window showing blue sky, a spider hung by a thread, well out of the madman’s way.

‘Ummmm, you’re one of us, kind sir, she said, one of the fallen. May I ask, do you believe in God?’

Having uttered the Almighty’s name, he fell into fits of laughter, as if the hallowed syllable contained all the world’s mirth.

‘Yes, I do believe,’ said the ginger man. ‘I think.’

‘Then you believe in Hell and Hellfire.’

‘That I certainly do believe in.’ He smiled wanly, and again the madman laughed.

‘I’m God. I’m God and I’m Hellfire. And where are these items contained? Why – in blood!’ He pronounced the word in savage relish, striking his skull violently as he did so. ‘In blood, in the head, the head, kind sir, the napper. The napper’s full of blood. There are things that peer in here of a night … things which cry and mew for the blood. You see, it’s scientific, kind sir, she said, because … because you need the blood to drown out the thought. You don’t need thought when you’re dead, or silver bells or cock-hole smells or pretty maids all in a row, because when you’re dead you can do anything. You can do anything, kind sir, I assure you. The dead travel fast. Ummmm.’

The ginger man sighed, as if in at least partial agreement with these crazed sentiments.

‘Can you tell me what these things look like which peer in at you at night?’

Renfield had rocked himself very close now.

He put a dirty finger against the wall, as if pointing to something unseen by others.

‘There, you see? They come from dead planets, kind sir. From the Moon and Mercury.’ He ground his teeth so violently that his intention might have been to eat his own face. ‘Ummmm, they’re a disease, wrapped in a plague, masquerading as life. Life – yes, that’s it, life ummmm. And we shall all become like them, us, by and by, if God so wills.’

On the last word, he sprang at the ginger man, screaming, ‘Give me a kiss of life, kind sir, she said!’

But the ginger man was alert, leaped to his feet in time, fended off the madman with his silver-headed cane.

‘Down, dog. Back to your kennel, beast, Caliban, or I’ll call in the warden and have you beaten black and blue.’

The madman retreated only a step and stood there raging or pretending rage, showing teeth, brandishing claws. When the ginger man caught him lightly over the shoulders with his cane, he desisted and crawled on hands and knees back to the far corner, by his mattress. There he sat, looking upward, innocent as a child, one finger stuck deep into his ear.

A rhombus of sunlight crept down the wall, making for the floor as noon approached, slow as time and as steady. The ginger man remained by the door, unmoving, in a less threatening attitude, though he still had his stick ready.

Almost as stealthily as the sunbeam, the madman began to roll on the stone floor. His movements became more exaggerated as he tried to tie himself into knots, groaning at the same time.

The normally genial face of Renfield’s visitor was grave with compassion.

‘Can I help in any way?’ he asked.

‘Why do you seek my company in this fortress?’

‘It’s a fair question, but I cannot deliver you the answer. Tell me if I can help you.’

Renfield stared at him from an upside-down viewpoint.

‘Bring me boxes of spiders to eat. Spiders and sparrows. I need the blood. It’s life, kind sir. Life’s paper. Seven old newspapers make a week in Fleet Street. The Fleet Ones can eat up a week with their little fingers, this little finger on the right.’

He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.

‘Talk sense, man,’ said the ginger man, sternly.

‘There soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can’t comprehend infinity, yet it’s in our heads.’

‘Together with the blood?’ He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.

As he rapped on the panel, the madman said, ‘Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You’ll see. It’s in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.’

He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.

The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, ‘So I suppose there’s no cure for dementia praecox, is that so?’

The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.

‘I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.’

‘You wretches live in the dark,’ Joe Bodenland said. ‘Don’t you hate your own sickness?’

He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he finger-tipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.

‘If you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.’

Bodenland watched the scattering figures in a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.

As the time train slowed, the grey light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.

‘Save me – I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. It would be the end —’

‘Wouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.’

Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.

The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.

Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.

‘What …’ Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.

They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.

The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.

As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.

A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet – a dragonfly with a five foot wingspan came dashing at him, its body armoured in iridiscent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t Louisiana.

Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.

The LCD co-ordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous Age.

The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.

‘You,’ he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. ‘I’m going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.’

‘It’s the secret over-ride. I forgot to tell you about it – I’ll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me …’

‘Okay, you remember now. What do we do?’

The dark water came washing in as the driver said, ‘The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons meddling with the time-controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the rest went into reverse.’

While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift’s body slid towards the door.

‘What do we do, apart from drown?’

‘The train is programmed for its next stop and I can’t change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the programme’s finished and the over-ride cuts out. So you just switch on, cancelling the previous co-ordinates you punched in.’

The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejewelled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland’s head.

‘Where’s this pre-programmed journey taking us?’

With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goitre in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.

The lipless frog mouth fastened on Clift’s body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.

Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressure-pads, heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.

The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to grey and down the colour spectrum, until zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.

Drained by the excitements of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.

Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.

He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.

‘You don’t have a great store of courage.’

‘I don’t need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.’

Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature, before overcoming the impulse.

‘Where are we programmed for?’ he asked, thinking that almost anywhere was preferable to the Carboniferous.

‘We have to visit Transylvania,’ said the driver. ‘But the programme is set only as far as London, in year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.’

‘Oh yes? And what’s she up to?’

‘She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.’