HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015 Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications: The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, SF Horizons (1965), Science Fantasy (1965), New Worlds SF (1965), Worlds of Tomorrow (1965), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1966), SF Impulse, Knight (1966). Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015 Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007482290 Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008148959 Version: 2015-07-31
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
1 The Day of the Doomed King
2 The Girl and the Robot with Flowers
3 How are they All on Deneb IV?
4 The Impossible Smile
5 Man in his Time
6 Old Time’s Sake
7 The Saliva Tree
8 Scarfe’s World
9 The Small Betraying Detail
10 The Source
11 Amen and Out
12 Another Little Boy
13 Burning Question
14 The Circulation of the Blood…
15 The Eyes of the Blind King
16 Heresies of the Huge God
17 Lambeth Blossom
18 The Lonely Habit
19 The O in José
20 One Role with Relish
21 Paternal Care
22 The Plot Sickens
About the Author
Also by Brian Aldiss
About the Publisher
As might be expected, these stories resonate with occurrences in life both unfortunate and fortunate.
It seems I have an eloquence for stories, most of which I can see in retrospect as an impatience with ordinary life. And ‘ordinary life’, as many might agree, has its pains and pleasures, its omens and significances.
The ordinary (as I suppose, after my re-reading of this produce of long ago) can be appreciated only by acquaintance with its phantom partner – fiction! – where truth slinks about in disguise.
At the tender age of five, I was sent away from home to a preparatory school on the Norfolk coast. What did I take with me? We were allowed only two items for company – let’s say a teddy bear or a gollywog and a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I took along a microscope and a volume called The Treasury of Knowledge. A good start at an adverse time.
Then, later, considerably later, I am back from a long hazardous tenure – many alien years – abroad in the East, courtesy of HM Government. I am dog poor. Oxford University would not have me. I write a novel entitled Non-Stop featuring a man who does not recognise that he is lost from ordinary life.
This novel went to Faber and Faber. Faber had recently engaged a new director, Charles Monteith. Charles enjoyed many of the perks of life to which I could not aspire. We immediately became friends. Why? Because both Charles and I had served in the British Army in Burma.
Indeed, Charles had fought in the ghastly Arakan where he had been wounded in one leg – a wound that troubled him throughout life. I had been stuck in a nicer part of the jungle – where I shot dead (a disturbing fact I hid from my conscious self for many years) an attacking Japanese soldier. BURMA, with its enormous freight, was Charles’ and my watchword.
We never really spoke about it. But we knew.
So such facts and factors lie behind many of these stories, from ‘Comic Inferno’ to ‘Unauthorised Persons’.
I enjoyed writing them. How do you feel, I wonder?
Through his heavy lids, the church hardly appeared to grow nearer until they were upon it. The summer and the wound at his chest made him dizzy. As he stumbled from his horse, the great daisies in the long grass made it seem to him that he was walking across a starry sky, and his perspectives would not come right.
A priest with a rich mantle thrown over his black frock came hurrying to them. He heard Jovann say to the priest, ‘It is King Vukasan, and he is sore wounded. Make ready a couch for him to rest on.’
He muttered into his horse’s flank, ‘We must get to Sveti Andrej and warn them to arm themselves against the Turk,’ and then the daisies and the sky and dappled shade rippled like a banner, and he had a near view of his silver stirrup before blackness closed upon him.
When he roused again, things were better for him. He lay on a bunk in a cool cell, and his head was clearer. Propping himself on one elbow, he said, ‘Now I am able to go on to my kinsmen at Sveti Andrej.’
Jovann and the old black priest were at his side, smiling with anxiety. ‘My lord king,’ said the priest, ‘you have taken grievous harm, and must stay with us until you have strength for the rest of the journey.’
His mouth was stiff, but he said, ‘Priest, yesterday we fought a battle all daylight long against the scimitared muslim, until the River Babuna flowed with their blood and ours. Courage does not trifle with numbers, that I know, but we had only one blade to every six of theirs, and so in the end every one of my soldiers fell. My cousins at Andrej must be told to make ready to fight, and there are only my general Jovann and I surviving to tell them. Bind me up and let me go on.’
Then Jovann and the priest conferred together, first with Jovann’s moustache at the priest’s furry