Somewhere East of Life Read online

  Somewhere East Of Life

  The Squire Quartet: Book Four

  Brian W. Aldiss

  With love

  to

  Felicity and Alex —

  Bearers of fruits

  from

  Kidlington and Osh

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude goes to Editor David S. Garnett, who has published portions of this novel in New Worlds: as “FOAM”, “Friendship Bridge” and “To the Krasnovodsk Station”, respectively in New Worlds I, New Worlds 3 and New Worlds 4. Another portion, “The Madonna of Futurity”, was published simultaneously by Editors Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber in Universe 3, and in Heyne Science Fiction Jahresband 1994, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke, in Germany, and also in 3ABTPA in Moscow.

  As a member of the Society of Makhtumkuli, I wish to thank Dr. Youssef Azemoun for his assistance in the matter of Turkmen poetry; his English translation of the works of the poet Makhtumkuli is in preparation.

  Thanks also go to Djumageldiev Tirkish in Ashkhabad for his advise—although this is an entire work of fiction, as readers may discover. (Amanda Schäfer is real.)

  Introduction to the E-Reads Edition

  The Squire Quartet:

  LIFE IN THE WEST

  FORGOTTEN LIFE

  REMEMBRANCE DAY

  and lastly

  SOMEWHERE EAST OF LIFE

  Time has moved on slightly. The EU has been established. And Roy Burnell is employed by WACH, the World Antiquities and Cutural Heritage organisation which looks after precious things liable to be lost—or which are already lost.

  We find Burnell in bed with a beautiful woman. But soon among those lost things is his memory. A thief has criminally but adroitly stolen a year of Burnell’s memory by an illegal electronic e-mnemonicvision operation.

  Burnell has lost twelve vital months of his past. He summons his wife, Stephanie; memory of Stephanie has gone, including all scenes of their love-making. She comes. So then Burnell learns they have been divorced...

  Among the many ‘visions’ generated by technology, there is now e-mnemonicvision, known as EMV. It deals with memory and Burnell finds that ten years of his recent memory store, located in the hippocampus and regions of the cortex, have been stolen.

  Tumors can be removed from the brain without old-fashioned surgery; it is now possible to remove selected memories. Such memories can be stored electronically and re-used; thieves use them to sell as pornography.

  A therapist shows him a copy of a learned book called ARCHITRAVE AND ARCHETYPE, written by Burnell in the near past. Of course he cannot remember writing it.

  Partly to escape imprisonment in the present, Burnell accepts a WACH assignment to document an ancient church in Georgia. The church reputedly contains an old and valuable ikon.

  So Burnell is in Georgia. Much of it has become a battlefield, “Moral emptiness. That’s what the world’s suffering from.” So claims one protagonist.

  Burnell eventually finds the ikon, eight centuries old, the Madonna of Futurity. It has been broken into three pieces, all carefully preserved.

  Well, so he is capable of continuing his work for WACH.

  He had two countries to visit on his new assignment, Georgia, which I had visited, and Turkmenistan, which I had not. I had hired a researcher, who turned up such interesting facts about this little-known country that I determined to go there,

  It happened that I had a learned friend, Dr. Youssef Azimun, who at one time had served as Cultural Director for the new Turkmenistan government; but he had proved so popular that the President—more about him in a moment—had dismissed Youssef. I flew with him and a BBC lady called Sue to Ashkhabad, the capital city, almost the only city, since much of Turkmenistan is kara kum—the Red Desert.

  The Soviets had ruled the five trans-Caspian states for seventy years. Now they had gone, leaving behind a strange legacy. After an earthquake in 1948, the Soviets had repaired much of the city of Ashkhabad. Some streets were rather pretty, with rows of small trees and little gutters of water running to cool the temperature. Curiously, the air was full of nostalgic cuckoo calls.

  Though the Turks were Muslim, after the long Russian stay they downed their vodka like true Muscovites.

  Unfortunately—or so I was told—the head of the KGB had stayed on, dubbing himself President, while the lads of the KGB re-christened themselves the People’s Popular Party. Plus ça change, etc….

  Actually, President Niyazov was clearly dotty. Yet he seemed well enough liked. He gave the citizens free salt, later free electricity. He also had built a statue of himself, a gold-plated statue which rotated slowly so that it always faced the sun. There seemed to be no attempt to build up any infrastructure—no hospital, I was told. Instead, a row of five or six hotels, all very similar and all without telephones, vital instruments in the days before mobile phones came in.

  In my hotel room, I had an armour-plated radio. You could tune to two stations, Moscow 1 or Moscow 2.

  You had to be eccentric if you did not grow fond of Ashkhabad.

  And of course it was an ideal place in which Burnell had to operate.

  He fulfills his objectives, and so eventually returns to Europe. In Frankfurt, he meets Sir Thomas Squire, now British head of WACH, and Squire gives some good advice. It is his metier. There is something to be said for losing a year of your memory.

  But Burnell goes back to his old home in Diddisham, in Norfolk. And there he meets Stephanie again. So we end the Squire quartet on a note of uncertainty, as we began, with people on the move or disappearing. Just like real life.

  *

  One little item happening in Ashkhabad I found no place for in the Quartet. I have never forgotten it.

  The morning was so beautiful and I so young that I got dressed and came downstairs early. At the turn of the stair I met a cleaning woman brushing the steps.

  She was withered but she gave me a lovely smile and then uttered the few English nouns she had finally found a use for. Swinging the broom as indicator, she said,

  “The green. The Sky. The sun. The street. The music!”

  And that was it. A spirited attempt to communicate.

  As is the Squire Quartet.

  Brian W. Aldiss

  2012

  The Squire Quartet

  Summary

  Originally, these four novels had a curiously remote relationship. Their writing was scattered over fifteen years, while I wrote other books in between. I also spent much time putting together anthologies of other writers whose stories I admired and who I felt deserved a wider audience.

  The scene is set here and there, concluding mainly in two countries, Georgia and Turkmenistan.

  Georgia I had visited, and felt I knew pretty well. At that time, I had a researcher, who dug into the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. There she found that Turkmenistan had at its head as an image, a poet, Makhtumkuli. It was as if the column in London’s Trafalgar Square had at its summit, not Nelson but Philip Larkin!!

  My curiosity was awakened. I had the good fortune to find in the city of Reading the jovial Dr. Youssef Azimun, who had once been Minister for Culture in the Turkmen government. I also found that his wife was a wonderful cook. In no time, I accompanied Youssef to Ashkhabad.

  During that period, I was having problems with my literary agent; he worked in London, I in Oxford. Thus I had little opportunity to strangle him.

  This perhaps explains why the four Quartet volumes, in England at least, were published successively by four different publishers. They were for that reason never considered, never weighed up, as a Quartet. Yet they strive together to embrace the world in which we then lived.

  While it is clear that they cover a lot of groun
d and time and tone, such was my life then that this was partly by design, partly inadvertence.

  I did come to regret that Tom Squire did not play a greater role in the later volumes; possibly I felt this to be an echo of my own career.

  Eventually, I made what must pass for amends. In a volume I wrote later, which deals with the EU forty years on (it’s entitled SUPER STATE), there is a passage where, on a sad and rainy day, Squire’s body is buried, his coffin—it says here—choked with wreaths and flowers. A reception is held afterwards in Pippet Hall.

  Squire was a good liberal man. Maybe I under-estimated him.

  Brian W. Aldiss

  2012

  When you reach the point of no return there’s

  nothing for it but to go back

  Old Goklan saying

  1

  Friends in Sly Places

  It seemed right to take flowers. A gesture had to be made. A nurse accepted them from Burnell and stuck them in a glass vase. Burnell went and sat by his friend’s bedside.

  Peter Remenyi was still in a coma. He lay propped on pillows, looking the picture of health, his skin tanned, his jaw firm. So he had lain for two weeks, fed by drip, completely unaware of the outside world. Yesterday’s flowers drooped on a side table.

  Burnell had escaped from the car crash with nothing more than a bruised arm. He visited the hospital every day. He had taken to reading aloud to Remenyi, from Montaigne or the poets, hoping that something might penetrate that deep silence into which his friend had fallen.

  He stayed for half an hour. Rising to leave, he patted the patient’s cheek.

  “You always were a mad bugger at the wheel, Peter,” he said, with some tenderness. “Stay put, old pal. Never give up the struggle. I’ll be back tomorrow. I have to go now. I have a date this evening with a beautiful lady, a star in the firmament of her sex.”

  It was the evening of all evenings. The sun went down in glory, the lights came up in competition. Budapest’s Hilton Hotel, installed in the ruins of a sacred site, piled on extra floodlighting. A reception was being held by World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which several important functionaries from several important countries were attending.

  Everything was on a lavish scale, slightly tatty only round the edges. Gipsy orchestras raced through their notes in every available space. Their violins swooped through czardas after czardas, just as drink poured down throat after throat. A Ukrainian dance group threw themselves about with abandon in the center of the main ballroom.

  Undeterred by wars in the Caucasus, the East, the Far East, and several points West, the guests paraded in finest array, embracing or snubbing one another. Powdered shoulders, jewels, and luxuriant moustaches were on display. Many smiled, some meant it. Suave waiters, Hungarian and Vietnamese, moved among the crowds, delivering messages, pouring Crimean champagne into ever ready glasses. Conversations surged and popped like the bubbles in the champagne. Some who talked looked over the shoulders of their partners, in search of escape; others moved in closer. Loving, lingering glances were exchanged. Formality increasingly gave way to something more physical. The most recent jokes circulated, political or scabrous in content. Gossip chased itself among the international guests, the potted palms.

  The air-conditioned atmosphere, as time wore on, became charged with alcoholic fumes, excitement, innuendo, enzymes, exaggeration, assignations, assassinations of character, and the most fragrant of sweats. Couples started to slip away. And Burnell looked deep into the green eyes of Blanche Bretesche, breathing faster while trying to keep his usual cool.

  He, she, and some of her friends, left the reception and went together into the warm night. Music came faintly to them. They climbed into taxis, to be whisked downhill and across the great glittering city of Budapest. Streets, shops, restaurants sped by. The extravagant elephantine Danubian city prospered, fat on arms sales and many wickednesses, as befitted the over-ripe heart of Europe.

  Burnell never quite learned the names of all his noisy new friends. His senses were alert to Blanche Bretesche, to her eyes, her lips, her breasts. Blanche was Director of the Spanish Section of WACH. One of her friends—the one in full evening dress—directed them to a restaurant he knew in Maijakovszki Street, near the opera house. Here were more crowds, more musics.

  The restaurant was neo-baroque, ornate inside and out. Though it was late, the place was crowded with a confusion of people, laughing, eating, drinking. Two inner courtyards were filled with tables. Burnell’s party found a free table in the second courtyard. Above them, along flower-draped balconies, a woman sang passionate Hungarian love songs. The man in evening dress, summoning a waiter, ordered wild game specialties, which were not available. Without argument, they settled for lecso all round, accompanied by mineral water and a red wine from Eger. Although the main point of the gathering was to enjoy each other’s company, the food was also excellent. The warm evening held its breath in the courtyard.

  Saying little as usual, Burnell allowed his gaze to alight on the flower of Blanche’s face as she talked. The quick wit of her replies always pleased him. Her contributions to subjects under discussion were shrewd, often dismissive. He liked that. She was as much a citizen of the talk as any of the men, though they did not defer to her. While the conversation grew wild and ribald, it remained magically on course, contributing, like all friendly talk, to a general understanding.

  When the question turned to a scientific paper of Blanche’s, he saw her quick look, sheltered under long dark lashes, turning more frequently to him, as if questioning. A signal flashed unspoken between them. Round the convivial table, between spates of talk, they applauded every song the resin-voiced woman sang, calling up to the balcony in acclamation, though they had scarcely listened to a note. And at two-thirty in the morning, Burnell summoned a taxi. The taxi carried him back through the scurrying town, with his right arm about Blanche Bretesche, to his hotel.

  Even before he woke next morning, he was conscious of her warmth. He found himself lying on his stomach. Her arm was across his back. Turning his head cautiously, he was able to watch her sleeping. Happiness flooded him.

  He had always admired the look of her, from the alert walk—much like a stalk, he thought—to the well-shaped intellectual head. With those closed green eyes went a dark coloring particularly to his taste, though her hair was now cut fashionably shorter than when they had first met, some six years ago. She had been Stephanie’s friend, and was about Stephanie’s age, thirty-four or so. Now she was his friend—truly a friend, trusting and direct.

  Raising himself gently, he surveyed her sprawling body. Nothing was one quarter as beautiful as the female body, no sky, no landscape.

  Blanche was calm about her lovemaking, not stormy. The affirmatives she had uttered still sounded in his ears. There was another sound now, in their shared room. Not merely the distant hum of traffic as it crossed the bridge from Buda to Pest. A fly buzzed against one of the window panes.

  Cautiously, Burnell maneuvered himself out from under that arm with its lashes of dark hair chasing themselves from midforearm to elbow. Padding over to the window, he opened it. The bluebottle, after raging against the pane a minute longer, was caught by the breeze and made its escape into the open air.

  Perhaps it said to itself, “Ha, I figured my way out of that…” But flies had no hold on truth. For all their countless generations born since glass was invented, they had never comprehended its nature, and so remained continually trapped by it.

  When he turned back into the room, Blanche’s eyes were open.

  “All the time I was asleep, one of that woman’s songs was going through my brain. What do you think she was singing about? Did you understand a word of it?”

  “It would be the usual things,” he said, closing the window. “Love betrayed, a starry night, a white glove dropped in a garden…”

  She smiled. “I wonder what Neanderthals sang about, if they sang at all.”

  “Oh, I’d guess love
betrayed, a starry night, and a white mammoth tusk dumped in the cave. Why?”

  “Some Catalan archaeologists have found an undisturbed cave in the mountains near Burgos, the home of early man. I’m interested in the way primates turned into men and women. When did speech develop, when did simple simian games of tag become elaborate human games with rules, and aggression codified. That kind of thing.”

  He went toward the bed. “Who sang the first love song. Who invented the wheel. Why did the English invent marmalade from Seville oranges.”

  She reached out and took his hand. “Talking of the English, Roy, come and screw me again, please, just a little, will you?”

  “There’s no breakfast for you until you let me.”

  The breakfast was good too. They ate in the room, talking mainly of their work. WACH both brought them together and generally kept them apart. Burnell had recently been in Milan, documenting the restoration of the Duomo. He was due to report to his superior in Frankfurt, where WACH had its headquarters, in two days. Blanche was now mostly at her desk in Madrid, able to get out on field work infrequently. She had to catch a flight back to Spain the following day.

  “I speak German and Spanish—in fact, Castilian—more frequently than I do French. I don’t regard myself as particularly French any more. I belong to the Community.”

  “You’re an enlightened woman.”

  “Don’t be silly. I know you speak half a dozen languages, you footloose creature. Why didn’t you go back to England for your leave, instead of pottering about Europe? Do you like the German domination of the EU?”

  “I don’t mind it. It was inevitable. One reason I’m here and not in England is there’s something I want to check in the anthropological museum. No, whenever I go back to England…well, everything seems to come in quotes nowadays. It all seems old-fashioned. You know, things maintained for tourists, like ‘The Changing of the Guard.’ People still have, insist on, ‘toast and marmalade’ for breakfast. They ‘drive down to the coast.’ They go to ‘the RA private view’ and in ‘the season’ they attend what they still call ‘Royal Ascot,’ despite all that’s happened to the royal family. My father still likes his ‘cup of tea,’ and talks of Europe as ‘the Continent.’ That kind of thing.”