The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Un-noticed, silly chappie!

Poor A! Poor A! What sort of man is it

Who only wants to talk and he’s okay?

I tell you everyone’s like that –

They fill the world today.

I might say poor old A is rather better

Then some wild talkniks I have met, a

Chap who in his way knows what is what –

On military onions he knows quite a lot.

In a superficial public way he tries to find out Why:

And he’d hate to think he ever told a lie.

Poor A! Poor A! He is no longer young!

He said so much I think and was uncouth

To guard against an awful chance

To listen to the truth –

He led himself a merry dance –

He hid his head in circumstance –

To fight against the truth!

Disciples: Poor us! Poor us! We really felt his tongue!

He drank Khagetia and chattered without ruth

To guard against his only chance

To hear G give out truth –

He led us all a merry dance –

He leads himself a dreary prance –

To smite against the truth!

To fight against the truth!

The Unaimed Deadman Theme

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forgotten forbidden

Suicide’s revelation its sunnyside hidden

Death’s black-and-white checker is down on the table

Fugitive fustian funebral infinite formidable

Far down the runway the black sheds are standing

My love talks to me with a delicate air

I am the victim the assassin the wounder

Her face looks no larger as I stand close than

It simultaneously does in my telescope sights

But pleasant is walking where elmtrees paint shadow

If I fire I might as well hit me

I walked with her once where her elms brought their shadows

The dogrose dies now while the invalid car

Barks vainly and I the assassin the wounder

On the runways the markings are no longer valid

Hieroglyphs of a system now long obsolete

No this button first love yes that’s the idea

If I fire I might as well hit me

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forbidden forgotten

I sprinted a dozen times over where rotten

Things grew and she cried for a sweet-flavoured minute

Fugitive fustian funebral formidable infinite

Lament Of The Representatives Of The Old Order

(A silent dummy dirge)

We kept up our facade

The unworld showed the third world how

And prized its pretty inhibitions

They undressed us

And possessed us

And now that times are hard

The unworld holds its outward show

Too late for us to change positions

They have dressed us

And confessed us

The Shuttered Street Girl

(Love song for flutes)

Her face showed like a shuttered street

Under the mauve and maureen flash

From which iguanas might crawl

Golden gullets wide

She stood there in a wet shift breathing

And just a mental block away

A lane lay in old summer green

Behind her pregnant eyes

Where a young barefoot girl might drive

Her would-be-swans all day

Or night for night and day are both

They don’t apply

There’s always summer in the dreaming elms

Till your last shuttered white year

And while the small rain fills

The thoroughfares of love

So her face in blue fermentation

When she crouches seems

Like an ever-visiting miracle

As she pees by old brickheaps

There’s whole sparse countryside

Buckling up from far

Underground as she stoops there

And our small rain raining

The Infrasound Song

Where the goose drinks wait the wildmen

Wait the wildmen watching their reflections

When the damson fruits the wildmen

Wild Neanders dream their speckled sleep

They have their dances ochre-limbed to a stone’s tune

And their heavy hymns for the solstice dawn

Their dead go down into their offices berobed

With ceremony. Their virgins paint

Their cinnamon lips with juice of berry

They owned the world before us

Now their valleys fall echoing our footfall

In their shattered towns the smoke clings still

Down the autobahn arrows in the afternoon

As we drive them convert them or ride them

We are the strangers over the hilltop

Peace on our brows but our dreams are armoured

Fearsome in our feathers brutally flowered

Pushing the trip-time up faster and faster

Pre-psychedelic men know that extinction

Sits on their hilltops all drearily towered

As we cavalry in with the master

Cavalry in with the master

With the master

At The Starve-In

Met this girl at the starve-in

I met this girl at the starve-in

I said I met today’s girl at the starve-in

Protein deficiency’s good for the loins

She said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Yes she said there’s bad news from Deutschland

She lay there and said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Can you hear those little states marching

I raised my self kingly in the stony playsquare

Ground my elbow like a sapling in dirt

Looked through the stilled plantangents of smoke

Proclaimed that even the bad news was good

We’ve marched under banner headlines

Closed down the stone-aged universities

See ally fall upon ally

Oh Prague don’t dismember me please

It was all in the Wesciv work-out

Now we got some other disease

Met my fate in the work-out

Man, I met my fate in the work-out

No denying I met my fate in the work-out

And no one knows what’s clobbered me

Rainbows at starvation corner

There’s rainbows at starvation corner

I keep seeing rainbows at starvation corner

like they’re the spectrums at the feast

Met this girl at the starve-in

Yeah met this girl at the starve-in

Oh yeah I met this pussy at the starve-in

Ana we dreamed that we ruled Germany

We dreamed we ruled all Germany

It’s One of Those Times

It’s sim ply

One of those times

when you’re going to pot

one of those crimes

when you really should rot

one of those times you do not

It’s sim ply

one of those mornings

they’ve all got you taped

one of those dawnings

you hoped you’d escaped

one of those mornings you’re raped

The cities are falling like rain from the skies

The toadthings are leaving the ground as you watch

You’re laughing and dancing with joy and surprise

It helps with that pain in your crotch

So it’s just

one of those rages

that rupture and burn

one of those ages

you get what you earn

one of those pages

you wish you could turn

’Cos its none of your bloody concern

No it’s none of your bloody concern

It knocks you sideways

None of your bloody concern

The Poison that Powered Their Scrutinies

The poison that powered their inner scrutinies

Seeped into beetling baldbright Boreas

So he saw himself tumultaneously

Making the cripple still

Upon the cabbalistic asphalt

Making couch upon a lake of flames

Making love to a dummy vulva

Making Age Old Ina suffer him

His face cracked its banks

China thoughts depiggied

Boreas saw more of his borearsed self

Than he could dare or wish to see

He rocked with unreason on

The staggered balcony of insight

Manifolding in discardment

As his capital lost all loot

The Miraculous In Search Of Me

It could all have turned out differently.

Indeed, to other peeled-off I’s

The difference is an eternal recurrence:

And the stone trees that erupt along

My beaches, roots washed bone-clever

By the tow and rinse of change –

They shade one instance only of me,

For circumstance is more than character.

At this bare fence I once turned left

And became another person: laughed

Where else I cried and now sit lingering

Looking at Japanese prints;

Or in a restaurant decked with pine

Cones taste in company

Silver carp and damson tart.

Along the walls

Other I’s went, strangers in word and deed,

Alien photocopies, spooks

Closer than blood-brothers, more alarming

Than haggard face spectral in empty room,

Lonelier than stone age campfires, doppelgangers.

They are my possibilities. Their pasts were once

My past, but in the surging wheels

And cogs become distorted. So, this one –

On a far-distant spoke! – danced

All night and had splendid lovers,

Wrote love letters still kept locked

Treasured in a bureau-drawer, knew girls

The world now knows by name and voice.

But this I chose to wander down

My stony beach, my own rejection.

My past is like a fable. Truly,

Circumstance is more than character.

Whatever other peel-offs saw –

My I was on the stranded alien land,

The restlessness of broken cities,

Mute messages that only after years

Open, the crime of vulnerability,

Patched land of people never known to be

Known or knighted, wild bombed world,

World where I taste the flavour on

The tongue, knowing not if my other eyes

Would call it happiness or doom.

I am, but what I am –

Others may know, others may care. Only

The dear light goes in her hand

Away among the childhood trees.

In the perspectives of my mind

It never dwindles. I always live

With myself; and that’s too much.

I need

The overpowering circumstance

The nostalgia of

That eternal return

As if the unstructured hours

My uninstructed hours

Of day are pulped like

Newspaper

And used on us again

With the odd word

Here and there

Locked

Starting up out of context

Treasured

An old ghost

Haunting another

Discardment.

Indeed it is

Always eternally

Turning out

Different.

Confluence

The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably, perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.

As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, has been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Geldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.

Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words which follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanised phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr Rohan Prendernath, one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been compiled.

AB WE TEL MIN The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker

ARN TUTKHAN Having to rise early before anyone else is about; ­addressing a machine

BAGI RACK Apologising as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun

BAG RACK Needless and offensive apologies

BAMAN The span of a man’s consciousness

BI The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years

BI SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature

BIT SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a

blasphemous nature

BI TOSI A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes

BI TVAS A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes

BIUI TOSI A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair

BIUT TASH A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Ka themes (c.f.)

CANO LEE MIN Things sensed out-of-sight that will return

CA PATA VATUZ The taste of a maternal grandfather

CHAM ON TH ZAM Being witty when nobody else appreciates it

DAR AYRHOH The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old

supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place

EN IO PLAY The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep

GEE KUTCH Solar empathy

GE NU The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead

GE NUP DIMU The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead

GOR A Ability to live for eight hundred years

HA ATUZ SHAK EAN Disgrace attending natural death of maternal grandfather

HAR DAR KA The complete understanding that all the soil of Myrin passes through the bodies of its earthworms every ten years

HAR DI DI KAL A small worm; the hypothetical creator of a

hypothetical sister planet of Myrin

HE YUP The first words the computers spoke, meaning, ‘The light will not be necessary’

HOLT CHA The feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

HOLT CHE The autonomous marshalling of the senses which produces the feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

HOZ STAP GURT A writer’s attitude to fellow writers

INK TH O Morality used as an offensive weapon

JILY JIP TUP A thinking machine that develops a stammer; the action of pulling up the trousers while running uphill

JIL JIPY TUP Any machine with something incurable about it; pleasant laughter that is nevertheless unwelcome; the action of pulling up the trousers while running downhill

KARNAD EES The enjoyment of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

KARNDAL CHESS The waste of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

KARNDOLI YON TOR Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal

KARNDOL KI REE The waste of a life by doing nothing; a type of fasting

KUNDULUM To be well and in bed with two pretty sisters

LAHAH SIP Tasting fresh air after one has worked several hours at one’s desk

LA YUN UN A struggle in which not a word is spoken; the underside of an inaccessible boulder; the part of one’s life unavailable to other people

LEE KE MIN Anything or anyone out-of-sight that one senses will never return; an apology offered for illness

LIKI INK TH KUTI The small engine that attends to one after the act of excretion

MAL A feeling of being watched from within

MAN NAIZ TH Being aware of electricity in wires concealed in the walls

MUR ON TIG WON The disagreeable experience of listening to oneself in the middle of a long speech and neither understanding what one is saying nor enjoying the manner in which it is being said; a foreign accent; a lion breaking wind after the evening repast

NAM ON A The remembrance, in bed, of camp fires

NO LEE LE MUN The love of a wife that becomes especially vivid when she is almost out-of-sight

NU CROW Dying before strangers

NU DI DIMU Dying in a low place, often of a low fever

NU HIN DER VLAK The invisible stars; forms of death

NUN MUM Dying before either of one’s parents; ceasing to fight just because one’s enemy is winning

NUT LAP ME Dying of laughing

NUT LA POM Dying laughing

NUT VATO Managing to die standing up

NUTVU BAG RACK TO be born dead

NU VALK Dying deliberately in a lonely (high) place

OBI DAKT An obstruction; three or more machines talking together

ORAN MUDA A change of government; an old peasant saying meaning, ‘The dirt in the river is different every day’

PAN WOL LE MUDA A certainty that tomorrow will much resemble today; a line of manufacturing machines

PAT O BANE BAN The ten heartbeats preceding the first heartbeat of orgasm

PI KI SKAB WE The parasite that afflicts man and Tig Gag in its various larval stages and, while burrowing in the brain of the Tig Gag, causes it to speak like a man

PI SHAK RACK CHANO The retrogressive dreams of autumn attributed to the presence in the bloodstream of Pi Ki Skab We

PIT HOR Pig’s cheeks, or the droppings of pigs; the act of name-

dropping

PLAY The heightening of consciousness that arises when one awakens in a strange room that one cannot momentarily identify

SHAK ALE MAN The struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping

SHAK LA MAN GRA When the urge to urinate takes precedence over the urge to continue sleeping

SHAK LO MUN GRAM When the urge to continue sleeping takes

precedence over all things

SHEAN DORL Gazing at one’s reflection for reasons other than vanity

SHE EAN MIK Performing prohibited postures before a mirror

SHEM A slight cold afflicting only one nostril; the thoughts that pass when one shakes hands with a politician

SHUK TACK The shortening in life-stature a man incurs from a

seemingly benevolent machine

SOBI A reverie lasting less than twenty years on cosmological themes; a nickel

SODI DORL One machine making way for another; decadence,

particularly in the Cold Continents

SODI IN PIT Any epithet which does not accurately convey what it

intends, such as ‘Sober as a judge’, ‘Silly nit’, ‘He swims like a fish’, ‘He’s only half-alive’, and so on

STAINI RACK NUSVIODON Experiencing Staini Rack Nuul and then realising that one must continue in the same outworn fashion because the alternatives are too frightening, or because one is too weak to change; wearing a suit of clothes at which one sees strangers looking askance

STAINI RACK NUUL Introspection (sometimes prompted by birthdays) that one is not living as one determined to live when one was very young; or, on the other hand, realising that one is living in a mode decided upon when one was very young and which is now no longer applicable or appropriate

STAIN TOK I The awareness that one is helplessly living a role

STA SODON The worst feelings which do not even lead to suicide

SU SODA VALKUS A sudden realisation that one’s spirit is not pure, overcoming one on Mount Rinvlak (in the Southern Continent)

TI Civilised aggression

TIG GAG The creature most like man in the Southern Continent which smiles as it sleeps

TIPY LAP KIN Laughter that one recognises though the laughter is

unseen; one’s own laughter in a crisis

TOK AN Suddenly divining the nature and imminence of old age in one’s thirty-first year

TUAN BOLO A class of people one only meets at weddings; the pleasure of feeling rather pale

TU KI TOK Moments of genuine joy captured in a play or charade about joy; the experience of youthful delight in old age

TUZ PAT MAIN (Obs.) The determination to eat one’s maternal

grandfather

U (Obs.) The amount of time it takes for a lizard to turn into a bird; love

UBI A girl who lifts her skirts at the very moment you wish she would

UDI KAL The clothes of the woman one loves

UDI UKAL The body of the woman one loves

UES WE TEL DA Love between a male and female politician

UGI SLO GU The love that needs a little coaxing

UMI RIN TOSIT The sensations a woman experiences when she does not know how she feels about a man

UMY RIN RU The new dimensions that take on illusory existence when the body of the loved woman is first revealed

UNIMGAG BU Love of oneself that passes understanding; a machine’s dream

UNK TAK An out-of-date guide book; the skin shed by the snake that predicts rain

UPANG PLA Consciousness that one’s agonised actions undertaken for love would look rather funny to one’s friends

UPANG PLAP Consciousness that while one’s agonised actions undertaken for love are on the whole rather funny to oneself, they might even look heroic to one’s friends; a play with a cast of three or less

U RI RHI Two lovers drunk together

USANA NUTO A novel all about love, written by a computer

USAN I NUT Dying for love

USAN I ZUN BI Living for love; a tropical hurricane arriving from over the sea, generally at dawn

UZ Two very large people marrying after the prime of life

UZ TO KARDIN The realisation in childhood that one is the issue of two very large people who married after the prime of life

WE FAAK A park or a college closed for seemingly good reasons; a city where one wishes one could live

YA GAG Too much education; a digestive upset during travel

YA GAG LEE Apologies offered by a hostess for a bad meal

YA GA TUZ Bad meat; (Obs.) dirty fingernails

YAG ORN A president

YATUZ PATI (Obs.) The ceremony of eating one’s maternal grandfather

YATUZ SHAK SHAK NAPANG HOLI NUN Lying with one’s maternal grandmother; when hens devour their young

YE FLIC TOT A group of men smiling and congratulating each other

YE FLU GAN Philosophical thoughts that don’t amount to much;

graffiti in a place of worship

YON TORN A paper tiger; two children with one toy

YON U SAN The hesitation a boy experiences before first kissing his first girl

YOR KIN BE A house; a circumlocution; a waterproof hat; the smile of a slightly imperfect wife

YUP PA A book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it

YUPPA GA Stomach ache masquerading as eyestrain; a book in which nothing is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it

YUTH MOD The assumed bonhomie of visitors and strangers

ZO ZO CON A woman in another field

The Dead Immortal

Mickie Houston was strikingly self-centred. But with his looks, his voice and his style – and his wife – he had gone far. And meant to go further.

Rickie Houston was strikingly beautiful. She looked even more lovely than usual as she said to her husband, ‘Don’t take the time-travel drug, darling. I have a terrible feeling it will kill you!’

Mickie Houston kissed her and said, ‘And I have a terrific feeling it may make me immortal!’