The Whispering Swarm (24 page)

I shook the abbot's hand. His huge purple veins ran like maps of mountain ranges under the thin, white skin of his wrist. His age and vulnerability were almost repulsive. How could Friar Isidore believe he was in better health? Smiling, the abbot took my young hand in both his frail ones. ‘I am gladdened you came at last, my boy. There is a growing urgency. You are so badly needed here. He will only trust one who resembles the silhouette whom he insists on calling Mercury. Fate alone has given you that role, even though you are now bearded. You are Mercury. I can see the resemblance to his poor brother.' He led me from the cloisters back through the low doorway into the little chapel itself.

His grip was far too strong.

I felt suddenly sick with anxiety. I worried how to retreat. I told him about my happy marriage and how much I loved my children, how I devoted so much of my spare time to them, how I loved to get up, cook them breakfast, take them to school on my bike—one on the handlebars, one on the saddle, while I pedaled between them—and how proud I was of them. I told him that this was not something I was prepared to jeopardise. I checked my watch. ‘They're expecting me home for tea.'

He nodded. ‘We thought you would visit us a week from today. The raven is one of our most reliable couriers.'

‘My fault,' I said. ‘I came in early. Needed the money.'

He released me, then reached out to touch my lips and I was suddenly, awkwardly silent. I said I was sorry. I got up to leave. Too much time had passed. The gorgeous light fell in shafts through the stained glass, fell on the altar where in the cool, rippling air suddenly a writhing living fish stood on its fluttering tail, as if straining to break out of its natural habitat, its body running with brilliant greens and blues and a dozen different shades of gold and red.

‘Ah—!' He sensed something I did not and reached for the goblet.

And then it was gone, popping out of existence and the light with it. ‘Radiant Time … Brother Armand's greatest discovery. Revealed to the prince. And now the dreadful Spaniard. The Inquisition. Radiant Time. And Cromwell. I wonder. Is he as savage, as cruel as they say? Their hatred of us is palpable. Yet we hold many of the same principles. Tom Paine was here. We sheltered him for weeks. Or will … Radiant Time. He said we practised what they only preached. Every branch in harmony. It can be achieved, I know.' He seemed to be finishing a sentence, not beginning one. ‘That is why it is so important you be here when the prince is also present.'

He bent to his left, to an ecclesiastical cupboard on the nearby table. The cupboard was of thick, simply hewn oak with long strap hinges of blackened iron. He put in a dull brass key and opened it. I blinked. The indigo light shivered from the box, changing to ghastly yellow then blue-green fluttering like living storm-shredded rags. How had he conjured it from one place to another? The fish stood upright again, flicking its tail, straining for the surface, changing colour as if to escape recognition when it tried to flee. I looked towards Father Grammaticus and Friar Isidore but the light was too white and bright for my eyes. I couldn't see their expressions. ‘Which prince do you mean?' I asked. I was growing uncomfortable.

I heard a great swelling noise that was discordant yet sublimely beautiful while distantly the abbot spoke of God's vast universe, worlds without end, and the significance of humanity, ‘
perhaps the only sentient creatures of our kind in the whole of material Creation! Can you believe that? We are creatures blessed with souls and advanced intellect! God's image. With material bodies. Alone to give God the praise He deserves for His wisdom and His Grace. Did God create the universe or did the universe make God? That was the only question in the end. In the name of the Creator and the created, created and Creator. Evolved man or God? Shall we ever know or cease to care which began the cycle? We live in a world of duality and paradox.'

These didn't sound very likely words for a Christian clergyman. So this, in spite of all the Christian trappings, actually was a cult.

I got up slowly. ‘I must go. I'm sorry.'

‘You will come back. We do not lie. We cannot swear, but we do not lie. The divine—the divine—' He bowed and led me to the door. He was babbling, a madman. ‘Those simpleminded Puritans want our Treasure. They will do anything they can to steal it. They think they can use it. They fear us. They fear the power of the old religions. Yet we pray for them, also. We cannot fight if we are not free. We would not harm them. Free will is at the heart of our—' Echoes, as if in a great, empty house. ‘We believe. Light is substance. Light is gravity and time. Next week. Same sun's ray—same moonbeam—same hour … the moment will be made. Each moment ordered in a state of linearity. It can be done.' That, when I wrote it down later, was the best I recalled.

‘Of course.' I pretended to agree. I was holding down my panic. Maybe this
was
an asylum as I'd first thought, and the loonies really had taken over the bin? Or maybe we were experiencing some sort of social experiment? I chose to take what he said as a question. With Friar Isidore beside me and the blue-green flames still fluttering before my eyes, I said goodbye to the abbot, left the abbey and Alsacia, waved farewell to Father Grammaticus and caught a 15 bus all the way home. I felt guilty.

I was home much earlier than Helena had expected. She was pleased, full of curiosity. ‘You've got a telegram from New York,' she said. ‘Your agent. I'll make some tea.'

 

17

THE TEMPTATIONS

The telegram was from my agent, Bob Cornfield, in America. I was invited to attend a big SF convention in New York and Doubleday, who were enthusiastic about the ‘historical fantasies' I was publishing with them, had offered to pay my fare while ‘an anonymous donor' would pay my expenses. I had a good idea who my benefactor was. Doubleday were now her publisher and she had recommended Allard, Fisch, Bayley and me, among others. Judy Merril saw me as an ally in her one-woman crusade to improve the quality and critical reception of science fiction. After the Labor Day convention another conference would be held and Rex had been invited, too. Most Americans had not seen
New Worlds
and very few had any idea of what we were really about. Helena thought I should go. I was reluctant to make the journey without her. She deserved the break more than me. She laughed. My being away would be a break for her, not to worry. Get her a nice dress at Saks Fifth Avenue, something for the kids at FAO Schwarz.

Aboard a cheap flight via Dublin, I arrived in New York with a babbling, crazed Rex Fisch in August 1967. Rex was going home on some personal matter but would meet up at the writers' conference in Milford, Pennsylvania, a relatively short ride from New York. The Vietnam War was the big issue of the day and the Aer Lingus jet was packed with priests and nuns divided on the rights and wrongs of the conflict. While the Catholic-born Rex sat purse lipped beside me a bunch of Irish priests argued furiously up and down the aisle of the 727. We arrived a lot more tired than when we had left and New York was almost overwhelming, but Doubleday had booked me into the Park Plaza, looking over Central Park, and I began to feel a touch of euphoria. There were twin beds. I offered Rex the other and was glad that he only stayed in New York a couple of days. The big convention was coming up. In those days the smells of coffee and strong tobacco made up the distinctive scent of the city. Brilliant neon reminded me of the wonder of my childhood after the war when streets had come alive again. And Central Park was beautiful. Early russet among the green. I was entranced!

Labor Day is when Americans rather reluctantly celebrate the dignity of manual work, though a red flag hasn't been seen flying in Union Square since 1945. Yankees still had a puritanical reluctance to give ordinary people the day off. Joe McCarthy continued to be a vivid memory and the anticommunist hysteria was only just starting to die down while in the South things were just better than intolerable. Primed by TV and movies I had come prepared for violence and found only goodwill. I fell in love with New York, of course. And I met people with whom I'd previously only corresponded. Rex disappeared off to Minnesota.

Four days later and thoroughly corrupted, I visited my publisher on his beautiful farm in the rolling foothills of the Poconos and I fell in love again. At last I understood the American dream! There was only good to say of it! I had never been nor never ever would've or whatever it was they wanted you to say in re communism, the Red Menace, and had no problem with that, but I didn't necessarily swallow the right-wing view of the engine of Western prosperity and how it had arrived at its current levels of success. I knew how much American wealth had been built on the backs of dead natives, illegal immigrants, slaves and destitute refugees from starving Europe. But the people I met now lived only in a happier present. The future was an optimistic dream. Infectious stuff. I cheered up instantly. The depressed habits we identified as virtuous in England were considered doom-laded nightmares in the US. New Yorkers seemed as intolerant of historical analysis as they were forgiving of psychoanalysis and self-regard.

Back in New York, Rex had copies of
New Worlds
containing his serial and although he wasn't in the best mental shape for it he planned to offer it to Random House. He hoped they would be impressed. He did not want a publisher even remotely associated with genre fiction.

Leaving it with an editor he knew there, he set off for Milford, Pennsylvania with me and a bunch of women SF writers including Judy, Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Russ. The Science Fiction Writers of America was only about a year old and we had all been invited to attend a conference at the rambling Victorian house of Damon Knight, an intelligent and ambitious writer and editor determined to raise the genre's writing standards. As well as more established writers, Knight had also invited Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, James Sallis, Norman Spinrad and a few others just making names for themselves who had sold to Knight's anthology
Orbit
and to
New Worlds
.

There was much interest in my magazine. Knight had worked for years to improve the literary standards of science fiction and was something of an ally, although I had no particular interest in the genre beyond what was useful to me. We enjoyed some heady arguments and I found another contributor. Highly argumentative, with no special background in SF, Spinrad had already published some fairly run-of-the mill titles but he brought part of his unpublished novel
Bug Jack Barron
with him to the Milford conference. I fell in love with the book and asked him to send me a copy in London. The language and subject matter, although not derivative, were the closest I'd found to Bill Burroughs. One of a number of friendships begun in Milford which would last a lifetime.

In the USA for the first time, I was witnessing the modern economic liberal state in all its glory. Most of the checks and balances with which I was familiar were gone. Big-buck euphoria. Big numbers. Big heads. Pierrot and the Politics of Plunder. The Panto of Faux Prosperity. Rapacity at Full Ahead. The Ego, astride its favourite mount, was coming into its own! Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future.

Within a week I was exuding confidence and self-worth. I shudder to think what an old friend, meeting me on the streets of downtown Manhattan, would have made of me. Mistaking bright American good manners for admiration of my genius I became thoroughly convinced of my literary superpowers. Here I was, bringing the future to America. The Innovator! What would have got me jeered off the planet as a prig and wanker and stuck-up all-'round bounder in Ladbroke Grove made me merely a man with a sense of his own worth on Broadway. This unbashful Brit, modest in tone but arrogant in content, sat across the dinner table from editor Larry Ashfield, charismatic bullshitter of his golden cage, feeding him anecdotes Larry could make his own, and talked up a planned book which would use the tropes and methods of popular fiction with the structural ambition of modernism and would bring the great British novel and the great American novel back together.

I write, I told him, for money. The better the money, the better the book.

‘So what would you give me for a million bucks?' asked Larry, flying high on my spiel.

‘
War and Peace,'
I said.

‘You got it,' he said. I was thinking of Jerry Cornelius, whom I was just reviving in short stories. I made some notes and typed them up on my agent's machine.

Two days later I sat with Bob in Larry's office and signed the contract in the middle of a press conference, going instantly from work-for-hire hack to literary novelist. Jerry Cornelius was a character Mick Jagger felt was too freaky to play in the movie; a smart aleck, eccentric, working-class, dandy, rock-and-roll-scientist, an urban role-player who understood he was several Commedia characters, as familiar with the languages of science as with arts and politics. A man of the New Renaissance, he was entangled in absurd stories conceived against the background of Vietnam and an ex-Imperial Britain reimagining herself as part of Europe. His career would last through a dozen books and various spin-offs, comics, a movie and more. He was as much a technique as a character. The nearest nineteenth-century character I could think of for comparison was Vautrin/Jacques Collin, Balzac's wonderful villain.

Balzac was one of my heroes because he did reams of hackwork before doing reams of ambitious, innovative fiction. Why shouldn't I identify with him? My uncles wanted me to emulate Disraeli, the legendary ancestor. Meg Midnight was the nearest I got to
Sybil.
I planned nothing in conscious imitation. Those linked stories came naturally to me. Theme echoes theme. Image sparks phrase. Phrase strikes theme. Image carries narrative. Anthony Powell's comic
Dance to the Music of Time
wasn't Proust but it was the nearest he could get to tell his story. He lacked a method for our postwar age. We do our best with the techniques and ideas that come to us. But only so much can be done with the retrospective tone before it becomes sentimental and nostalgic.