New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology] Read online

  ‘I must go,’ I said, climbing to my feet, suddenly very embarrassed.

  ‘No,’ she said, a flicker of some unidentifiable emotion caressing the wrinkles of her shrunken face. I was turning to go when the sirens began.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said; the wrinkles of her face were momentarily ironed out, her voice deepened, and the nagas danced on her arms. She opened her mouth wide, exposing the rotten remains of her teeth, and screamed against the blare of the sirens. The scream changed abruptly into a death rattle; I had a moment of intense compassion as I slid to the floor, into a black maelstrom.

  * * * *

  Five

  ‘They don’t like it, I’m afraid,’ Han said. ‘Taking the slaves from Temple building for the High Dam on the Mekong. There was even some talk that it was impious; I soon put a stop to that, but I can’t stop them from thinking it.’

  ‘The peasants will be behind me when their crops thrive and their harvests are trebled because of better irrigation.’ the Devaraja said.

  ‘The Aristocracy and the Priesthood,’ Han said in low Khmer, indicating contempt. Caste had penetrated even the language, there being low, priestly and royal forms. The low Khmer words stood out from the flow of royal Khmer, so that the Jayavarman smiled at his friend’s loyalty.

  ‘The Aristocracy and the Priesthood,’ Han repeated, ‘are very unhappy that the new Royal School admits all, including slaves, who can pass the examinations, and teaches neither Pali nor Sanskrit.’

  ‘I am the Devaraja, the God-king. They shall abide by my decisions.’

  ‘But why is it so, sire, if not for the customs? And they feel you have broken with the customs.’

  ‘They will not act before the harvest, and by then it will be too late. I know this, Han, even as I feel the compulsion to do what I must do.’

  * * * *

  Six

  It was dusk; I was sitting in a deserted children’s playground before a slide made entirely of polished aluminium alloy, to a very functional design. Positioned around me were swings and roundabouts and various pieces of apparatus I had not met with before, all made from the same metal. The playground was bordered on one side by tall glass and aluminium buildings whose blank, austere surfaces were occasionally punctuated by dull, glowing lights; on the other sides were fields and the silhouettes of sugar palms. I realised that I was on the outskirts of a city, but which city I had no idea. I tried to get up, but could not. I felt drained of energy. I crawled to the base of the slide and pulled myself to my feet. The playground careened about me. I almost fell, then everything righted itself. I felt groggy and utterly exhausted, and the temptation to lie and sleep on the slide was almost too much for me, but I decided that it was imperative that I find out where I was and what had happened.

  I mounted the moving causeway just outside the playground. It moved quite slowly, and had a handrail: it was obviously designed for children. About one hundred yards ahead it met with the real causeway which I could see was divided into five lanes and was banked. On the highest lane I could see people moving at about thirty miles an hour. Something was very wrong, but tiredness and the utter silence of the city—I could hear my heart beating— helped me maintain a numbed calm. Even the design of the towering buildings suggested an all-pervading calm.

  I mounted the slowest of the lanes and began to move into the city. No one payed me the slightest attention. The other passengers were dressed in varicoloured coveralls for the most part, although some wore sarongs, and a very few what I took to be individual creations. No one talked, they all seemed to be travelling separately. I mounted the next lane; the city slid slowly past me, hard, austere, even beautiful. The architecture was odd, but I could not pinpoint the oddness. But that didn’t matter; only the calmness mattered.

  It was like a drug, I thought, and dismounted hurriedly: the calm was the stillness of a baited trap.

  I found myself facing a large, lighted window. I walked up to it and looked in. It was a bar. I looked about for a door, but saw none; then the glass of the window split down the middle and parted for me to enter. I went in and was greeted by the susurration of many voices, laughter and the clink of glasses. The bar occupied the whole length of the room, its unattended surface littered with full glasses of every conceivable concoction. I helped myself, sat down at an empty table and waited for someone to come around for the money; I was not very surprised when no one came.

  I must have dozed, for when I next looked up the bar was empty. I walked to the door-window and looked out; the buildings were huge moon-lit sepulchres surrounded by haloes of diamond-bright stars. I moved my hand in the direction of the window. It opened.

  Above the window, on the outside, there was a sign in small gold letters. Khmer letters.

  * * * *

  Seven

  I woke to the sound of a girl singing softly, unaccompanied. The song was sentimental, making great play with the image of moonlight on the rippling surface of the Mekong. It was several seconds before I realised the song was in Khmer. I opened my eyes and blinked at the room I was in. Walls, ceiling and door were a very pale blue, sunlight streamed in through the window on to the white linen of the bed, and on to a girl in a grey coverall who stood by it, watching me. She was tall, with white, close-cropped hair and startlingly pale green eyes set in a broad Khmer face.

  ‘Do you understand ?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I do.’ The words came easily.

  ‘I thought you’d take it first time. In case you’re wondering, you’ve been taught Khmer mechanically. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, mentally or physically, but you were exhausted.’

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked, careless of banality.

  ‘The Silver Palace, by the Tonle Sap, and the date is the 296th of the 2505 Buddhist Era. That is a.d. 1962.’

  ‘That’s the right date. I was beginning to think ...’

  ‘Beranger told us to tell you that. We no longer use that system of reckoning. Incidentally, I can talk to you in Swedish if you like. I learnt it while you were learning Khmer.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter. But who are you?’

  ‘My name is Yuu Li Quat, and I’m a me-phoum, which means literally a village headman. Really a welfare officer, or something like that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have mistaken you for a village headman; but for God’s sake tell me what I’m doing here.’

  ‘You might say Jean Beranger brought you.’

  She had used the name once before, but only now did it impinge on my consciousness, sweet with the promise of a return to sanity. I waited.

  ‘Beranger says that you both come from a parallel time-track,’ she said, carefully. ‘And although scientifically it’s nonsense, we can’t deny that you’re here. You’re world, he says, wasn’t conquered and industrialised by the Khmers before the end of the fifteenth century.’

  I could think of nothing to say.

  * * * *

  Eight

  It was the dry season, and the Tonle Sap was at low water. The tiny silver fish darted away from the pirogue’s path as we glided forward, flecking the mirror surface with our silver wake. I was sitting at the prow, looking backwards, shielding my eyes with my right arm. Yuu Li sat at the stern, immaculate in a cloth of gold coverall over which she had draped sarong-like a length of embroidered crimson silk. Her hand poised over the small grey box that powered the pirogue.

  ‘Do you think you could handle it?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I replied, and almost toppled into the water as we exchanged positions.

  ‘Don’t touch the power controls, will you? You don’t know enough about them yet.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m too frightened of going up in a mushroom cloud, however safe you say this little fusion plant is.’

  She laughed. ‘The worst that could happen would be that we had to paddle back to shore.’

  On the shore of the freshwater lake, the stilt-raised Silver Palace burned in the sun. It derived its name f
rom the fact that the stupa was entirely covered in superbly worked sheet silver. It had been begun in 2167 b.e., when the Khmer Empire had really been an Empire instead of the free association into which it had progressed, and for a century had been the private retreat of the Devaraja. I let my eyes dwell on the silver tower, and thought how the Silver Palace mirrored the general progression; now it served as a reorientation centre for two refugees from another world. Then Yuu Li gaily advised me that we were off course.

  ‘I was looking at the Palace,’ I said by way of excuse.

  ‘It’s quite pretty/ she said unenthusiastically. ‘We thought you might like it, and nobody else is keen on living in a palace.’

  I laughed, and was gently constrained to explain.

  ‘I wish Beranger was as well reorientated as you,’ she said. ‘If he would only let Dr. Srang help him ... In your old world you say he was very interested in psi, but here he is afraid of it. If we could only enter his mind!’

  ‘I talked to him, but he wouldn’t listen. Perhaps he’s frightened of telepathy because he wants to keep secret his method of crossing between timetracks?’

  ‘We think we know that.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said firmly. Too firmly. I knew she was lying, but I also knew I would get no more out of her. I noticed her tapping her fingers on the side of the pirogue, worried, as if she were frightened that she had already said too much.

  ‘I wonder how things are on the other timetrack?’ I said. ‘There was a war-scare on when I so unexpectedly left. It might be all cinders now.’

  I had intended it to shock her, knowing her whole culture’s destination of violence and made petulant by the denial of information, but it had no effect on her. We glided along in silence for several minutes.

  ‘Dr. Srang has arranged that we four visit Angkor tomorrow.’

  ‘For some kind of therapy?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘I’ll be pleased to go. I once visited it before, in my old world. The Thai had sacked it in 1431, but it was still one of the great monuments of the world. You’re really very lucky that Jayavarman VIII industrialised his Empire, and surfeited the world of violence and war by the fifteenth century. I wonder how many people are dying by violence in my old world at this moment?’

  She made no reply.

  * * * *

  Nine

  Jayavarman with his favourite Han beside him stood waiting on the Royal Platform, for the waters to turn, for the flooded Tonle Sap to disgorge her waters into the lowering Mekong.

  ‘You have ordered that the dams be opened, sire?’ Han asked.

  ‘Yes, you needn’t worry. The loyal crowd would probably have stoned us if I hadn’t, but we must do something about it next year. There’s a great deal of power in the waters and we waste it shamefully. Perhaps we could even pipe it to the fields?’

  ‘We have irrigation canals and shadoofs to irrigate the fields, sire.’

  ‘That’s inefficient. I have thought of a way to pipe it. It will mean a great deal of work; we’ll have to start a factory for making pipes and replacements, but the increased yield will justify it. I’ve also thought of something else, a way of getting power from the dams; it’s a kind of waterwheel, but it’s fixed at right angles to the flow of the water; I’ve coined the word “turbine” for it.’

  ‘The way you get your ideas,’ Han said, ‘it almost makes me believe that there are Gods!’

  ‘Who knows?’ Jayavarman replied, ‘but I. ..’

  He was interrupted by a great shout from the crowd; the waters had turned.

  * * * *

  Ten

  In the old world the city and temple at Angkor, Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat respectively, had been discovered in the jungle by a French naturalist in the year 1860, whereupon France had stretched the Siamese/French-Cambodian border to include them; a high-handed action, but perhaps justified by the fact that the Siamese had no better use for them than as a stone quarry. The old Wat had been huge, but the one I saw now amazed me. It was in fact a succession of Wats surrounding the original moated one, all in different styles, but everyone recognisably Khmer, most of them Buddhist in inspiration unlike the Hindu inspired original. Khmer culture had spread the Buddhism of the Theravada, sometimes known as the Hina-yana, the lesser vehicle, throughout the world, no longer occupying its time with the way to Nirvana.

  ‘It’s damn big,’ Beranger said, his voice an unpleasant blend of lassitude and bitterness.

  ‘It’s a museum,’ Srang explained, ‘architecturally, as you can see; inside, the outer sections are devoted to Khmer Art; that is. World Art.’

  ‘And the inner section, the old Wat?’

  ‘That remains as it was, even to the bas-reliefs depicting war and slaughter; origins cannot be denied, even though they are appalling.’

  ‘No,’ Beranger agreed mildly, so mildly that Srang looked at him searchingly but said nothing, ‘No, you can’t deny them, however much they appal you.’

  I cannot imagine what therapeutic value Srang thought the museum could have for Beranger. We walked the long, glossy corridors, looking at exhibits that ranged from old Khmer heads smiling benignly and enigmatically down from glass cases that, explained Srang, protected them from the humidity and not the curious fingers of humanity, to pointilliste landscapes and tortured faces in a dark wood I could not identify.

  ‘I thought you had banished pain and misery. Doctor,’ Beranger said, sneeringly.

  ‘There is no avoidable pain or unhappiness. People still die, things remain unachieved, people still have to search for their own meaning. Not everyone finds it, but general telepathy destroys the need to hurt others. If you would only give me permission . . . You’ve quite a gift, but it’s erratic. We could teach you; we’re teaching your companion.’

  ‘I’m a willing, if not very able student,’ I said.

  ‘Goddamn moralist,’ Beranger muttered, sourly.

  ‘No,’ Yuu Li said. ‘He’s told you how things are, not how he desires them to be.’

  The corridors seemed interminable; the paintings and sculptures fused together in my mind, becoming a progression of styles, going beyond my understanding. I noticed the shadows lengthening on the glossy floor.

  ‘Now we eat,’ Yuu Li said at last, ‘and tonight we’ll see dancing in the old Wat. It has some kind of religious significance which Srang will explain over dinner; he enjoys that kind of nonsense.’

  Srang laughed. ‘I’ll never persuade you, will I?’ He turned to Beranger. ‘It interests me only as an anthropologist,’ he said, apologetically, ‘I wouldn’t want you to think . ..’

  ‘Of course,’ Beranger said wearily.

  * * * *

  Eleven

  ‘You want to go back,’ I told Beranger when we were alone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I feel as if I’ve wandered into Faery, and my only fear is that it is too good to be tree, that it must turn sour.’

  ‘It’s true, and it won’t turn sour; but it’s terrible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they pity me.’

  I was about to contradict him, and then I stopped myself. He was speaking the truth. They could not avoid pitying him, and even though their pity was not mixed with condescension and contempt, it was real enough.

  ‘Is there a world back there? It might be a radioactive ruin.’

  ‘You have never asked me anything about the transference, have you?’

  ‘Yuu Li said you wouldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Not to her, but to you ... What does she know about it? I take it you’ve asked her.’

  ‘She said something about parallel worlds, but didn’t seem to believe it.’

  ‘Neither would I. It was just some trash I had thought up for the occasion.’ He paused. ‘We must go back, you can’t imagine the guilt!’

  ‘No,’ I snapped.

  ‘You must.’

 
; I was about to reply when I saw Srang and Yuu Li approaching.

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ he said, ‘we can go to the Wat now. It’s one of my great pleasures, and you’ll probably become addicted.’

  * * * *

  Twelve

  The troupe consisted of fifty dancers, all arrayed in gold, red and green, with gilt helmets topped by towering, pagoda-like finials. Their faces were almost spectral, pale and controlled, as they danced in the moonlight between the huge bas-reliefs showing the bloody conquests of the Khmer Kings, interspersed with serene gargoyles of the Gods. Srang was enraptured, his pudgy hands clasped before him in wonderment, almost in prayer. Yuu Li seemed bored. I had little interest in the superbly conducted gyrations of the dancers; dancing is the one visual art that holds no appeal for me. I was also very frightened.