Cryptozoic! Read online

  AVON/V2295/75c

  EDWARD BUSH MOVES THROUGH THE PAST LIKE A PHANTOM

  -- BUT CANNOT ESCAPE THE GHOST OF HIS OWN FUTURE

  CRYPTOZOIC!

  A BREATHTAKING ADVENTURE IN MIND TRAVEL BY

  BRIAN W. ALDISS

  Brian W. Aldiss's

  CRYPTOZOIC!

  ". . . concerns itself with power structures

  on several Levels, including the psychiatric

  and political; but its main speculative pre-

  occupation is with man's orientation in

  time. . . .

  "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 fright-

  ening avatar of Truth. . . . Read it."

  Judith Merril,

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

  CRYPTOZOIC!

  Brian W. Aldiss

  An Avon Book

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1967 by Brian W. Aldiss.

  Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-10576.

  All rights reserved, which includes the right

  to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

  any form whatsoever. For information address

  Doubleday & Co., Inc., 277 Park Avenue, New York,

  New York 10017.

  First Avon Printing, June, 1969

  Cover illustration by Don Punchatz

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND

  FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK --

  MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  All of the characters in this book

  are fictitious, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  for

  JAMES BLISH

  whose cities fly

  words too

  In te, anime meus, tempora metior.

  St. Augustine, Confessions , Book II

  "It's a poor sort of memory that only works

  backwards," the Queen remarked.

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

  FOREWORD

  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, suggestions 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. . . .

  CONTENTS

  Book One

  1. A Bed in the Old Red Sandstone 15

  2. Up the Entropy Slope 30

  3. At the Sign of The Amniote Egg 37

  4. It Takes More than Death 53

  5. A New Man at the Institute 64

  6. The Clock Analogy 74

  7. The Squad 82

  8. A Word from William Wordsworth 93

  Book Two

  1. In Another Garden 101

  2. The Great Victorian Palace 117

  3. Under the Queen's Skirts 127

  4. A Case of Incoherent Light 137

  5. On the Decrepit Margins of Time 144

  6. The Himalayan Generation 152

  7. When the Dead Come to Life 161

  8. Walkers of the Cryptozoic 172

  9. God of Galaxies 180

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  A BED IN THE OLD RED SANDSTONE

  The sea level had been slowly sinking for the last few thousand years. It lay so 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 barring 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 of some forty-five elapsed years. 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 cross-roads. 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 motor bikes 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 color 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 maste
rly, 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 river bed, where runty little leafless psilophyton grew in the shade of primitive lycopods. Bush cast no shadow.

  The distant sound of motor bikes, 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 armored heads lifting 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 veridian armored heads for one of his most successful works.

  The noise of the bikes ceased. He scrutinized the landscape, climbing onto 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 over-burdened brain.

  "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 be 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 quarreled 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 group age, 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 motorcycles 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 color that conspired towards an elusive statement on time. Monet had never been saddled with the Devonian, or the Paleozoic 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 cognizance 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 center 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 motor bikes.

  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 10 per cent of the light. The ten riders showed up rather like cut-outs 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 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 makeup. Her features were sharp but at the same time indeterminate, her gaze somewhat unfocused. Her figure was slight. It must be her damned boots, he jeered at 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 two 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 armored 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."