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      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Introduction

      1 The Day of the Doomed King

      2 The Girl and the Robot with Flowers

3 How are they All on Deneb IV?

4 The Impossible Smile

       5 Man in his Time

       6 Old Time’s Sake

       7 The Saliva Tree

       8 Scarfe’s World

       9 The Small Betraying Detail

       10 The Source

       11 Amen and Out

       12 Another Little Boy

       13 Burning Question

       14 The Circulation of the Blood…

       15 The Eyes of the Blind King

       16 Heresies of the Huge God

       17 Lambeth Blossom

       18 The Lonely Habit

       19 The O in José

       20 One Role with Relish

       21 Paternal Care

       22 The Plot Sickens

       About the Author

       Also by Brian Aldiss

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      As might be expected, these stories resonate with occurrences in life both unfortunate and fortunate.

      It seems I have an eloquence for stories, most of which I can see in retrospect as an impatience with ordinary life. And ‘ordinary life’, as many might agree, has its pains and pleasures, its omens and significances.

      The ordinary (as I suppose, after my re-reading of this produce of long ago) can be appreciated only by acquaintance with its phantom partner – fiction! – where truth slinks about in disguise.

      At the tender age of five, I was sent away from home to a preparatory school on the Norfolk coast. What did I take with me? We were allowed only two items for company – let’s say a teddy bear or a gollywog and a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I took along a microscope and a volume called The Treasury of Knowledge. A good start at an adverse time.

      Then, later, considerably later, I am back from a long hazardous tenure – many alien years – abroad in the East, courtesy of HM Government. I am dog poor. Oxford University would not have me. I write a novel entitled Non-Stop featuring a man who does not recognise that he is lost from ordinary life.

      This novel went to Faber and Faber. Faber had recently engaged a new director, Charles Monteith. Charles enjoyed many of the perks of life to which I could not aspire. We immediately became friends. Why? Because both Charles and I had served in the British Army in Burma.

      Indeed, Charles had fought in the ghastly Arakan where he had been wounded in one leg – a wound that troubled him throughout life. I had been stuck in a nicer part of the jungle – where I shot dead (a disturbing fact I hid from my conscious self for many years) an attacking Japanese soldier. BURMA, with its enormous freight, was Charles’ and my watchword.

      We never really spoke about it. But we knew.

      So such facts and factors lie behind many of these stories, from ‘Comic Inferno’ to ‘Unauthorised Persons’.

      I enjoyed writing them. How do you feel, I wonder?

       The Day of the Doomed King

      Through his heavy lids, the church hardly appeared to grow nearer until they were upon it. The summer and the wound at his chest made him dizzy. As he stumbled from his horse, the great daisies in the long grass made it seem to him that he was walking across a starry sky, and his perspectives would not come right.

      A priest with a rich mantle thrown over his black frock came hurrying to them. He heard Jovann say to the priest, ‘It is King Vukasan, and he is sore wounded. Make ready a couch for him to rest on.’

      He muttered into his horse’s flank, ‘We must get to Sveti Andrej and warn them to arm themselves against the Turk,’ and then the daisies and the sky and dappled shade rippled like a banner, and he had a near view of his silver stirrup before blackness closed upon him.

      When he roused again, things were better for him. He lay on a bunk in a cool cell, and his head was clearer. Propping himself on one elbow, he said, ‘Now I am able to go on to my kinsmen at Sveti Andrej.’

      Jovann and the old black priest were at his side, smiling with anxiety. ‘My lord king,’ said the priest, ‘you have taken grievous harm, and must stay with us until you have strength for the rest of the journey.’

      His mouth was stiff, but he said, ‘Priest, yesterday we fought a battle all daylight long against the scimitared muslim, until the River Babuna flowed with their blood and ours. Courage does not trifle with numbers, that I know, but we had only one blade to every six of theirs, and so in the end every one of my soldiers fell. My cousins at Andrej must be told to make ready to fight, and there are only my general Jovann and I surviving to tell them. Bind me up and let me go on.’

      Then Jovann and the priest conferred together, first with Jovann’s moustache at the priest’s furry

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