The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world’s going to escalate into a Vietnam.’
She jumped up, alarmed. ‘I’ll switch it off!’
‘The war?’
‘The set.’
The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.
They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat – nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stony eyes that twinkled.
My angel came in hotfoot and said, ‘Can you get a few friends of friends together? The refugees are waiting on the beach.’ There were four of us in the hospital beds. We scrambled up immediately, dragging bandages and sputum cups and bed pans. The guy next to me came trailing a plasma bottle. We climbed into the helicopter.
We prayed en route. ‘Bet the Chinese and Russian volunteers don’t pray on the trip,’ I insinuated to the angel.
‘The Chinese and Russians don’t volunteer.’
‘So you make a silly insinuation, you get a silly innuendo,’ the plasma man said.
God’s hand powered the chopper. Faster than engines but maybe less reliable. We landed on the beach beside a foaming river. Heat pouring down and up the sideways. The refugees were forlorn and dirty. A small boy stood hatless with a babe hatless on his back. Both ageless, eyes like reindeer’s, dark, moist, cursed.
‘I’ll die for those two,’ I said, pointing.
‘One for one. Which one do you choose?’
‘Hell, come on now, angel, isn’t my soul as good as any two god-damned Viet kid souls?’
‘No discounts here, bud. Yours is shop-soiled, anyway.’
‘Okay, the bigger kid.’
He was whisked instantly into the helicopter. I saw his dirty and forlorn face at the window. The baby sprawled screaming on the sand. It was naked, scabs on both knees. It yelled in slow motion, piddling, trying to burrow into the sand. I reached slowly out to it, but the exchange had been made, the angel turned the napalm on to me. As I fell, the baby went black in my shadow.
‘Let me switch the fire down, if you’re too hot, darling.’
‘Yuh. And a drink …’
She helped me struggle into a sitting position, put her arm round my shoulders. Glass to lips, teeth, cool water in throat.
‘God, I love you, Ellen, thank God you’re not …’
‘What? Another nightmare?’
‘Not Vietnamese …’
It was better then, and she sat and talked about what had been going on, who had called, my brother, my secretary, the Roaches…‘the Roaches have called’…‘any Earwigs’?…the neighbours, the doctor. Then we were quiet a while.
‘I’m better now, much better. The older generation’s safe from all this, honey. They were born as civilians. We weren’t. Get me auntie’s manuscript, will you?’
‘You’re not starting work this week.’
‘It won’t hurt me. She’ll be writing about her past, before the war and all that. The past’s safe. It’ll do me good. The prose style doesn’t matter.’
I settled back as she left the room. Flowers stood before the TV, making it like a little shrine.
The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.
The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.
During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest – or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.
He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.
The stranger was standing half-concealed behind the trunk of a tree, gazing uncertainly at the trundler and Balank. When Balank raised a hand in tentative greeting, the stranger responded hesitantly. When Balank called out his identification number, the man came cautiously into the open, replying with his own number. The trundler searched in its files, issued an okay, and they moved forward.
As they got level with the man, they saw he had a small mobile hut pitched behind him. He shook hands with Balank, exchanging personal signals, and gave his name as Cyfal.
Balank was a tall slender man, almost hairless, with the closed expression on his face that might be regarded as characteristic of his epoch. Cyfal, on the other hand, was as slender but much shorter, so that he appeared stockier; his thatch of hair covered all his skull and obtruded slightly onto his face. Something in his manner, or perhaps the expression around his eyes, spoke of the rare type of man whose existence was chiefly spent outside the city.
‘I am the timber officer for this region,’ he said, and indicated his wristcaster as he added, ‘I was notified you might be in this area, Balank.’
‘Then you’ll know I’m after the werewolf.’
‘The werewolf? There are plenty of them moving through this region, now that the human population is concentrated almost entirely in the cities.’
Something in the tone of the remark sounded like social criticism to Balank; he glanced at the trundler without replying.
‘Anyhow, you’ve got a good night to go hunting him,’ Cyfal said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Full moon.’
Balank gave no answer. He knew better than Cyfal, he thought, that when the moon was at full, the werewolves reached their time of greatest power.
The trundler was ranging about nearby, an antenna slowly spinning. It made Balank uneasy. He followed it. Man and machine stood together on the edge of a little cliff behind the mobile hut. The cliff was like the curl of foam on the peak of a giant Pacific comber, for here the great wave of earth that was this hill reached its highest point. Beyond, in broken magnificence, it fell down into fresh valleys. The way down was clothed in beeches, just as the way up had been in oaks.
‘That’s the valley of the Pracha. You can’t see the river from here.’ Cyfal had come up behind them.
‘Have you seen anyone who might have been the werewolf? His real name is Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061, City Zagrad.’
Cyfal said, ‘I saw someone this way this morning. There was more than one of them, I believe.’ Something in his manner made Balank