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    Brothers of the Head

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      His right hand still clutched a big scallop shell. After knocking the other out, he had performed an operation of his own. The other’s naked chest had been cut to pieces by the scallop. Beside the frightful wound lay Barry’s artificial heart. Tom had ripped it out of place after laying the chest open.

      He must have died almost as soon as the other. The load on his heart would have been great. Now his frenzy was past. The lines of his face were relaxed. From his twisted position, one eye looked up into the morning sky.

      Laura squatted down in front of him and began to weep.

      These painful events have now receded into the past. How vividly I recall crouching by that mutilated double body, my knees painful on the cobbles, crying, and hearing the flies buzz.

      Finally, Laura and I gathered ourselves up and went back along the strand. I summoned father. Later, Bert returned with a police officer. Bert took me and Laura away from the Head. The bodies followed later in another boat.

      I never knowingly failed my two brothers. Perhaps I failed the other. Perhaps I could have helped him too.

      Although I sometimes dream of him, those dreams have now shed their terror. His lost life – what did he think, experience … ? Was his a dream or a life? I don’t know what to make of it, any more than I know what to make of anyone’s life, come to that.

      The days are full enough, now that I have children of my own. They too are making their journey through the forests of life. Sometimes when they are in bed, Bert and I play the old Bang-Bang LPs to ourselves. Then I look out of the window and across the waters, to where father still lives out his solitary life on L’Estrange Head. Everything vanishes in time, like the music when the record stops playing.

      R.S.

      Appendix

      Big Lover

      Go to my lover and say

      That Earth is nothing but a star,

      It’s just the merest light-point

      To even its nearest neighbours.

      Serenade her with the facts

      Concerning life on Earth,

      Its startling brevity of tenure

      Give her cosmology and music

      To show her she is my lens

      Through which I view the universe,

      My eye, my sun/My big lover

      My galactic one.

      Love is a Forest

      The animal and the sublime

      Make you so versatile,

      You keep three lovers happy

      Yet torture them meanwhile.

      In this world I’m love’s tourist

      And take a package tour of solitude

      Our love is a forest.

      Oh you are all things to me

      Victim and vampire,

      You keep three lovers happy

      A phoenix of their fire.

      In this world I’m love’s tourist

      Another head is dreaming of your beauty

      Our love is a forest.

      Your loveliness is legend,

      A statue I would carve,

      You keep three lovers happy

      And satisfied to starve.

      In this world I’m love’s tourist

      Our love is a forest.

      Bacterial Action

      Although the world fills up with men

      Their numbers do not match

      The numbers of the swarming swarms

      Of creatures living in our skin.

      They have their nations and domains,

      Pleasant jungles, deserts, streams.

      They live, beget, and leave no trace

      For eye to see or mind to judge.

      They’ve no Byzantium or Rome,

      Yet they were there, in smock and gown;

      Proud Caesar was their planet too,

      In time their old prolific line

      Will speed commensally with us

      And all unknowing win the stars –

      Yes, ultimately win the stars

      Unknowing

      Star-Time

      We – who had survived the journey

      To the forty-seventh millennium

      Where dark starlight grows on bushes

      And eyes house laughing kookaburra birds –

      We sat drinking xwaszha in a café

      With boys and beauties whose grandfathers

      Were in their cots when we set out.

      It was triumph

      It was triumph

      My happiness took me to loving hearts and couches

      Yet we who had survived the journey

      Knew that all the while our memory

      Stayed with those elegant grey seas

      Curling over what was Europe.

      Just for a Moment

      Just for a moment think about spun glass spinning

      Moving in a low December’s sun,

      Shining above rough dark secret meadows

      Lying where the leaf-choked marshes run.

      Just for a moment think about a perfect colour

      Fading on the margins of the sea,

      Lapping against a pallid shingle pathway

      Leading to a castle tall and free.

      Just for a moment think about pure silence

      Shining above a distant mountain peak,

      Looking towards the radiant eye of moonlight

      Falling upon the contours of your cheek.

      Just for a moment visualize time absolute

      Dwelling through a planet’s unlived years,

      Passing over far untravelled tundras

      Turning where the long-haired comet steers.

      Or just for a moment think about a moment

      Let movement colour silence time all flow,

      About your lovely waiting head unknowing –

      And then you’ll know my love’s bounds,

      Then you’ll know.

      I was Never Deaf or Blind to Her Music

      No, I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura

      I breathed more oxygen in her company,

      Reached higher speeds and a wider sort of skies

      And dredged for her secret salts and alkalis.

      It was just that the days closed in,

      A new motorway went up between her place and mine.

      We couldn’t agree on the merits of Stockhausen

      There were quarrels about my drinking habits

      We stopped going to gigs together

      And then there was that trouble with her employer

      Never properly explained

      I started breeding wire-haired terriers

      She said she lost her respect for me when

      I couldn’t give up smoking.

      But no, I was never impervious to her vistas

      Plunging into the lake of what she was

      She stormed me every day like valiant deeds

      And my head was as full of her as poppy seeds.

      It was just that the weather changed,

      My job took me up Sheffield every week.

      I felt a compulsion to join the scientologists

      She got mad on Dresden china pieces

      We became hooked on television

      She suddenly wanted to see the Sierra Nevadas

      And dance the true Flamenco

      With a bearded Dutchman studying zoology

      When I think of her driving round Granada

      I long for our time again.

      No, I was never deaf or blind to her music,

      Time was, her alchemy was all upon me.

      She packed every moment like a picnic box

      She was air and sea to my hills and rocks.

      I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura.

      Footnotes

      1 Two-Way Romeo by Paul Day. Copyright © 1981 Bedderwick Walker Entertainments Ltd. All rights reserved.

      2 ‘Year By Year the Evil Gains’ in New Writings in SF 27, edited by Kenneth Bulmer, 1976.

      3 Colwyn Thomas, ‘The Two Shots that were Heard Round the World’, Sunday Times, 23 May 1982.

      About the Author

      Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fi
    ction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

      Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.

      Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.

      Copyright

      The Friday Project

      An imprint of HarperCollins

      77–85 Fulham Palace Road

      Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

      www.thefridayproject.co.uk

      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Pierrot Publishing Ltd

      This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012

      Text copyright © Brian Aldiss 1977

      Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      Source ISBN: 9780007482047

      Ebook Edition © October 2012 ISBN: 9780007482054

      Version 1

      FIRST EDITION

      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 ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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.

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