Yale 01 - The Circulation Of The Blood Read online

  Brian W. Aldiss

  THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD…

  CONTENTS

  I, II, III, IV

  I

  Under the impact of sunlight, the ocean seemed to burn. Out of the confusion of its flames and its long breakers, an old motor vessel was emerging, engine thudding as it headed for the narrow channel among the coral reefs. Two or three pairs of eyes watched it from the shore, one pair protected behind dark glasses from the glare beyond.

  The Kraken shut off its engines. As it slid between the pincers of coral, it let off a double blast from its siren. Minutes later, it lost all forward momentum, and an anchor rattled down on to the collapsed coral bed, clearly visible under the water. Then it was rubbing its paintless hull against the landing stage.

  The landing stage, running out from the shore over the shallow water, creaked and swayed. As it and the ship became one unit, and a negro in a greasy nautical cap jumped down from the deck to secure the mooring lines, a woman detached herself from the shade of the coconut palms that formed a crest to the first rise of the beach.

  She came slowly forward, almost cautiously, dangling her sunglasses now from a hand held at shoulder level. She came down on to the landing stage, her sandals creaking and tapping over the slats.

  The motor vessel had its faded green canopy up, protecting part of the fore-deck from the annihilating sun. A bearded man stuck his head out of the side of the rail, emerging suddenly from the shadow of the canvas. He wore nothing but a pair of old jeans, rolled high up his calf - jeans, and a pair of steel rimmed spectacles; his body was tanned brown. He was ambiguously in his mid-forties, a long-faced man called Clement Yale. He was coming home.

  Smiling at the woman, he jumped down on to the landing stage. For a moment they stood regarding each other. He looked at the line that now divided her brow, at the slight wrinkles by the corners of her eyes, at the fold that increasingly encompassed her full mouth. He saw that she had applied lipstick and powder for this great event of his return. He was moved by what he saw; she was still beautiful - and in that phrase, 'still beautiful', was the melancholy echo of another thought. She tires, she tires, although her race is not half-run!

  'Caterina!' he said.

  As they went into each other's arms, he thought, but perhaps, perhaps it could now be arranged that she would live - well, let's be conservative and say… say six or seven hundred years…

  After a minute, they broke apart. The sweat from his torso had marked her dress. He said, 'I must help them unload a few essentials, darling, then I'll be with you. Where's Philip? He's still here, isn't he?'

  'He's somewhere around,' she said, making a vague gesture at the backdrop of palms, their house, and the scrub-clad cliff behind that - the only high ground on Kalpeni. She put the sunglasses on again, and Yale turned back to the ship.

  She watched him move sparely, recalling that laconic and individual way he had of ordering both his sentences and his limbs. He set about directing the eight crew quietly, joking with Louis, the fat creole cook from Mauritius, supervising the removal of his electron microscope. Gradually a small pile of boxes and trunks appeared on the wooden quay. Once she looked round to see if Philip was about, but the boy was not to be seen.

  She moved back to the shore as the men began to shoulder their loads. Without looking round, she climbed the board walk over the sand, and went into the house.

  Most of the baggage from the ship was taken into the laboratory next door, or the store adjoining it. Yale brought up the rear, carrying a hutch made from old orange boxes. Between the bars of the hutch, two young Adelie penguins peered, croaking to each other.

  He walked into the house by the back door. It was a simple one-storey structure, built of chunks of coral and thatched in the native manner, or the native manner before the Madrassis had started importing corrugated iron to the atolls.

  'You'd like a beer, darling,' she said, stroking his arm.

  'Can't you rustle up some for the boys? Where's Philip?'

  'I said I don't know.'

  'He must have heard the ship's siren.'

  'I'll get some beer.'

  She went through into the kitchen where Joe, the boy, was lounging at the door. Yale looked round the cool familiar living-room, at the paperbacks propped up with seashells, the rug they had bought in Bombay on the way out here, the world map and the oil portrait of Caterina hanging on the walls. It had been months since he had been home - well, it really was home, though it was in fact only a fisheries research station to which they had been posted. Caterina was here, so it must be home, but they could now think about getting back to the U.K. The research stint was over, the tour of duty done. It would be better for Philip if they went home to roost, at least temporarily, while he was still at university. Yale went to the front door and looked along the length of the island.

  Kalpeni was shaped like an old-fashioned beer bottle opener, the top bar of which had been broken by sea action to admit small boats into the lagoon. Along the shaft of the island grew palms. Right at the far end lay the tiny native settlement, a few ugly huts, not visible from here because of intervening higher ground.

  'Yes, I'm home,' he said to himself. Along with his happiness ran a thread of worry, as he wondered how he'd ever face the gloom of the Northern European climate.

  He saw his wife through the window talking to the crew of the trawler, watched their faces and drew pleasure from their pleasure in looking at and talking to a pretty woman again. Joe trotted behind her with a tray full of beers. He went out and joined them, sat on the bench beside them and enjoyed the beer.

  When he had the chance, he said to Caterina, 'Let's go and find Philip.'

  'You go, darling. I'll stay and talk to the men.'

  'Come with me.'

  'Philip will turn up. There's no hurry.'

  'I've something terribly important to tell you.'

  She looked anxious. 'What sort of thing?'

  'I'll tell you this evening.'

  'About Philip?'

  'No, of course not. Is anything the matter with Philip?'

  'He wants to be a writer.'

  Yale laughed. 'It isn't long since he wanted to be a moon pilot, is it? Has he grown very much?'

  'He's practically an adult. He's serious about being a writer.'

  'How've you been, darling? You haven't been too bored? Where's Fräulein Reise, by the way?'

  Caterina retreated behind her dark glasses and looked towards the low horizon. 'She's got bored. She went home. I'll tell you later.' She laughed awkwardly. 'We've got much to tell each other, Clem. How was the Antarctic?'

  'Oh, marvellous! You should have been with us, Cat! Here it's a world of coral and sea - there it's ice and sea. You can't imagine it. It's clean. All the time I was there, I was in a state of excitement. It's like Kalpeni - it will always belong to itself, never to man.'

  When the crew were moving back to the ship, he put on a pair of canvas shoes and strolled out towards the native huts to look for his son, Philip.

  Among the shanties, nothing moved. Just clear of the long breakers, a row of fishing boats lay on the sand. An old woman sat against the elephant-grey bole of a palm, watching an array of jewfish drying before her, too idle to brush the flies away from her eyelids. Nothing stirred but the unending Indian Ocean. Even the cloud over distant Karavatti was anchored there. From the largest hut, which served also as a store, came the thin music of a radio and a woman singing.

  Happiness, oh Happiness,

  It's what you are, it's not Progress.

  The same, Yale thought to himself dryly, applied to laziness. These people had the good life here, or their versio
n of it. They wanted to do nothing, and their wish was almost entirely fulfilled. Caterina also liked the life. She could enjoy looking at the vacant horizon day after day. He had always to be doing. You had to accept that people differed - but he had always accepted that, taken pleasure in it.

  He ducked his head and went into the big hut. A genial and plump young Madrassi, all oiled and black and shining, sat behind his counter picking his teeth. His name was over the door, painted painfully on a board in English and Sanskrit, 'V. K. Vandranasis'. He rose and shook hands with Yale.

  'You are glad to get back from the South Pole, I presume?'

  'Pretty glad, Vandranasis.'

  'Without doubt the South Pole is cold even in this warm weather?'

  'Yes, but we've been on the move, you know - covered practically ten thousand nautical miles. We didn't simply sit on the Pole and freeze! How's life with you? Making your fortune?'

  'Now, now, Mr Yale, on Kalpeni are no fortunes to be made. That you surely know!' He beamed with pleasure at Yale's joke. 'But life is not too bad here. Suddenly you know we got a swarm of fish here, more than the men can catch. Kalpeni never before got so many fish!'

  'What sort of fish? Jewfish?'

  'Yes, yes, many many jewfish. Other fish not so plenty, but the jewfish are now in their millions.'

  'And the whales still come?'

  'Yes, yes, when it is full moon the big whales are coming.'

  'I thought I saw their carcasses up by the old fort.'

  'That is perfectly correct. Five carcasses. The last one last month and one the month before at the time of the full moon. I think maybe they come to eat the jewfish.'

  'That can't be. The whales started visiting the Laccadives before we had a glut of jewfish. In any case, blue whales don't eat jewfish.'

  V. K. Vandranasis put his head cutely on one side and said, 'Many strange things happen you science wallahs and learned men don't know. There's always plenty change happening in the old world, don't you know? Maybe this year the blue whales newly are learning to appreciate eating the jewfish. At least, that is my theory.'

  Just to keep the man in business, Yale bought a bottle of raspberryade and drank the warm scarlet liquid as they chatted. The storekeeper was happy to give him the gossip of the island, which had about as much flavour to it as the sugary mess Yale was drinking. In the end, Yale had to cut him short by asking if he had seen Philip; but Philip had not been down this end of the island for a day or two it appeared. Yale thanked him, and started back along the strip of beach, past the old woman still motionless before her drying fish.

  He wanted to get back and think about the jewfish. The months-long survey of ocean currents he had just completed, which had been backed by the British Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture and the Smithsonian Oceanic Research Institute under the aegis of the World Waters Organization, had been inspired by a glut of fish - in this case, a super-abundance of herring in the over-fished waters of the Baltic, which had begun ten years ago and continued ever since. That superabundance was spreading slowly to the herring banks of the North Sea; in the last two years, those once-vast reservoirs of fish had been yielding and even surpassing their old abundance. He knew, too, from his Antarctic expedition, that the Adelie penguins were also greatly on the increase. And there would be other creatures, also proliferating, unrecorded as yet.

  All these apparently random increases in animal population seemed not be have been made at the expense of any other animal - though obviously that state of affairs would not be maintained if the numbers multiplied to really abnormal proportions.

  It was a coincidence that these increases came at a time when the human population explosion had tailed off. Indeed, the explosion had been more of a dread myth than an actuality; now it had turned into a phantom of might-have-been, rather like the danger of uncontained nuclear war, which had also vanished in this last decade of the old twentieth century. Man had not been able to voluntarily curtail his reproductive rate to any statistically significant extent, but the mere fact of overcrowding with all its attendant physical discomforts and anti-familial pressures, and with its psychic pressures of neurosis, sexual aberration, and sterility operating exactly in the areas previously most fecund, had proved dynamic enough to level off the accelerating birth spiral in the dense population centres. One result of this was a time of tranquillity in international affairs such as the world had hardly known throughout the rest of the century.

  It was curious to think of such matters on Kalpeni. The Laccadives lay awash in ocean and sun; their lazy peoples lived on a diet of dry fish and coconut, exporting nothing but dry fish and copra; they were remote from the grave issues of the century - of any century. And yet, Yale reminded himself, misquoting Donne, no island is an island. Already these shores were lapped by the waves of a new and mysterious change that was flooding the world for better or worse - a change over which man had absolutely no command, any more than he could command the flight of the lonely albatross through the air above the southern oceans.

  II

  Caterina came out of the coral-built house to meet her husband.

  'Phil's home, Clem!' she said, taking his hand.

  'Why the anxiety?' he asked, then saw his son emerge from the shade, ducking slightly to avoid the lintel of the door. He came forward and put his hand out to his father. As they shook hands, Philip smiling and blushing, Yale saw he had indeed grown adult.

  This son by his first marriage - Yale had married Caterina only three and a half years ago - looked much as Yale himself had done at seventeen, with his fair hair clipped short and a long mobile face that too easily expressed the state of mind of its owner.

  'Good to see you again. Come on in and have a beer with me,' Yale said. 'I'm glad the Kraken got back here before you had to leave for England.'

  'Well, I wanted to speak to you about that, Father. I think I'd better go home on the Kraken - I mean, get a lift in it to Aden, and fly home from there.'

  'No! They sail tomorrow, Phil! I shall see so little of you. You don't have to leave so soon, surely?'

  Philip looked away, then said as he sat down at the table opposite his father, 'Nobody asked you to be away the best part of a year.'

  The answer caught Yale unexpectedly. He said, 'Don't think I haven't missed you and Cat.'

  'That doesn't answer the question, does it?'

  'Phil, you didn't ask me a question. I'm sorry I was away so long, but the job had to be done. I hoped you'd be able to stay here a bit longer, so that we could see more of each other. Why have you got to go all of a sudden?'

  The boy took the beer that Caterina had brought, raised his glass to her as she sat down between them, and took a long drink. Then he said, 'I have to work, Father. I take finals next year.'

  'You're going to stay with your mother in the U.K.?'

  'She's in Cannes or somewhere with one of her rich boyfriends. I'm going to stay in Oxford with a friend and study.'

  'A girl friend, Phil?'

  The attempt at teasing did not come off. He repeated sullenly, 'A friend.'

  Silence overcame them. Caterina saw they were both looking at her neat brown hands, which lay before her on the table. She drew them on to her lap and said, 'Well, let's all three of us go and have a swim in the lagoon, the way we used to.'

  The two men rose, but without enthusiasm, not liking to refuse.

  They changed into their swim things. Excitement and pleasure buoyed Yale as he saw his wife in a bikini again. Her body was as attractive as ever, and browner, her thighs not an ounce too heavy, her breasts firm. She grinned naughtily at him as if guessing his thoughts and took his hand in hers. As they went down to the landing stage, carrying flippers and goggles and snorkels, Yale said, 'Where were you hiding out when the Kraken arrived, Phil?'

  'I was in the fort, and I was not hiding.'

  'I was only asking. Cat says you're taking up writing?'

  'Oh, does she?'

  'What are you writing? Fic
tion? Poetry?'

  'I suppose you'd call it fiction.'

  'What would you call it?'

  'Oh, for Christ's sake, stop examining me, can't you? I'm not a bloody kid any more, you know!'

  'Sounds as if I came back on the wRong day!'

  'Yes, you did, if you want to know! You divorced Mother and then you went chasing after Cat and married her - why don't you look after her if you want her?'

  He flung his equipment down, took a run along the wooden platform, and made a fast shallow dive into the blue waters. Yale looked at Caterina, but she avoided his stare.

  'He sounds as if he's jealous! Have you been getting a lot of this sort of thing?'

  'He's at the moody stage. You must leave him alone. Don't annoy him.'

  'I've hardly spoken to him.'

  'Don't oppose his going away tomorrow if he's set on it.'

  'You two have been quarrelling over something, haven't you?'

  He was looking down at her. She was sitting on the platform, putting on her flippers. As he looked down at the well between her breasts, love overcame him again. They must go back to

  London, and Cat must start a baby, for her sake; you could sacrifice too much just for the sake of sunlight; civilized behaviour could be defined as a readiness to submit to increased doses of artificial light and heat; maybe there was a direct relationship between the ever-growing world demand for power and a bolstering of the social contract. His moment's speculation was checked by her reply.

  'On the contrary, we got on very well when you weren't here.'

  Something in her tone made him stand where he was, looking after her as she swam towards her stepson, sporting in the middle of the lagoon beyond the Kraken. Slowly, he pulled down his goggles and launched himself after her.

  The swim did them all good. After what Vandranasis had said, Yale was not surprised to find jewfish in the lagoon, although they generally stayed on the outer side of the atoll. There was one fat old fellow in particular, over six feet long and half-inclined to set up a leering and contemptuous friendship that made Yale wish he had brought the harpoon gun.