Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Ian Watson's latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished stone carvings without apparently having the tools to do so ('The Moon and Michelangelo'); people fighting their way through the various levels of what appears to be a real-life version of a computer adventure game ('Jewels in an Angel's Wing'); and a zoo in which are caged the extensions into our universe of four-dimensional hyberbeings ('Hyperzoo'). And that is only the beginning: there are fifteen stories in all, each one a state-of-the-art example of short science fiction at its finest.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 252

Sample

Tim and Rosy had cleared out their spare room ruthlessly. They had almost emptied it of the various categories of things that haunt spare rooms: surplus things, fatigued things, souvenir things, exiled things, scraps of things, things that might conceivably be repaired or cannibalized, things that might one day come in handy -all the time vault of twenty years.

Trouble with being poor,’ Rosy said while they were loading the car, ‘is the way you store rubbish like treasure.’ As if she blamed him for the accumulation.

‘We aren’t exactly poor,’ Tim said awkwardly. ‘Compared with, say, someone in Africa, we’re well-off. We get by.’

Yes, they got by, on the income from the grocery shop. They were able to pay the interest on their debts, which lodged with them like a greedy, infirm uncle; like a senile, crippled mother who stopped them from ever going on holiday. Tim’s poetry earned a bit of extra money. His short, fierce lyrics could be roughed out during slack half-hours – jotted down like customers’ grocery lists – then polished before bed. Two small collections had been published and well-received. And of course he was working on his sustained mock-epic set in an imaginary Central European country, forever adding ten lines, crossing out five. The country in question needed to be imaginary since he and Rosy couldn’t afford to travel abroad.

‘Modern life is rubbish,’ said Rosy. ‘I saw that sprayed on the front of the cinema. It’s perfectly true.’

‘It’s the fault of the recession,’ he replied.

‘It always costs more to be poor, doesn’t it? We buy the cheapest, so it’s trash. We wear clothes from charity shops, so we look like paupers and people try to swindle us. The poor always rob the poor. This car’s a heap of junk; it costs more to keep on the road than a Rolls.’

Their car was over ten years old, and rust was eating the bottoms of the doors. The hydraulics of the hatchback had failed; thus the hatch had to be propped up with a broom handle when open. The erratic engine guzzled oil.

When the car, with its rear seats lowered, had been crammed with off-cuts of carpet, underfelt, old curtains and coats, bags of lank sweaters and sad shoes, tatty toys, a sick television set, and such, Tim felt oddly refreshed and clean. Whenever he scraped out the last smears of marmalade or pickle from a jar, whenever he emptied out a cereal box, he would feel a similar minor surge of satisfaction, as though now something new and different might happen. Freud might explain this as a babyish pleasure in the expulsion of faeces. True, Freud also spoke about anal retention. Next to nothing had been retained in the spare room.

The clear-out coincided with daughter Emma’s departure to college. Her choice of geography to study wasn’t so much a poignant comment on her parents’ immobility as due to geography being regarded academically as an easy option. Emma would probably become an underpaid teacher in a mediocre school; she might marry another teacher. Emma didn’t know this yet. Kids were as bouncy as bunnies, before the fox ate them or the winter froze them. Nature pumped the hormone of optimism into each generation. In recent years, Tim had reconciled himself at last to dwelling in the geography of the imagination.

So the house above the shop was doubly empty. It was empty of accumulated clutter; and empty of Emma. Sadly, yet somehow refreshingly empty, like the late-autumn Sunday itself. The sun shone brightly on the empty street. People were still in bed, sleeping in. But the public dump five miles away would be open. Dawn till dusk.

‘Junk,’ repeated Rosy. Tim hoped she wasn’t going to turn bitter when it came time to throw their past away.

He removed the broom handle, let the hatchback slam itself, and patted it reassuringly. ‘Don’t discourage the old thing.’

Rosy plucked at a loop in her saggy sweater and eyed a box of Emma’s childhood toys inside.

‘Well, we’ve got rid of her at last,’ she said, apparently changing the subject. ‘Now we can start living, I suppose. If we still know how. Before we’re too old.’

Automatically, Tim smoothed his hair around the tonsure of his bald patch. They climbed into the car, which started without too much fuss.

As they drove off, Rosy said, ‘If we won a fortune, I shouldn’t be able to spend it, you know. I could never bring myself to buy a coat at new prices. Or a meal in a restaurant. Or a proper hairdo. It would seem obscene. I’ve been trained.’

‘Me too. I wonder how we’d win a fortune.’ He spoke flatly, not asking. Most houses and gardens they passed were blank and lifeless, but one man was out washing a car with last year’s registration. Tim hardly knew what model it was. He failed to imagine himself driving it. He and Rosy had originally started the shop with help from parents, back in the days when he had dreamed of becoming an internationally regarded poet who travelled places. Parents were now all dead. Legacies had gone to assuage the upward-creeping debts.

‘Beautiful day.’

Rosy said nothing in reply. She pulled down the sun visor briefly and sought wrinkles in the mirror on the back.

‘My hair needs cutting,’ she said presently.

‘Go to a hairdresser’s,’ he murmured.

‘I’ll do it myself. As usual.’

Tim thought he needed a haircut, too. When you wore cheap old clothes, short hair was best.

‘The roots are showing,’ she said.

‘That’s fashionable nowadays. Look, you said we ought to start living. If you couldn’t ever splash out in a restaurant, how can we start living? A bit of a contradiction, isn’t it?’

‘An economic contradiction. Why should we have to own a shop? The state should own everything. There shouldn’t be private cars, either. There should be enough good buses and railways.’

‘True. But there aren’t. The services have been castrated.’

A poem occurred to him: about eunuchs in Arabian robes driving harems of passengers who peered not through windows but through intricate lattices.

The dump would be open today because the dump was a market, too. A bazaar of sorts. Just as charity shops sprouted like fungi in any temporarily empty commercial premises in town, selling the rags of richer people to poorer people to send aid to the totally poor in the Third World, so, with the deliberate decline of the economy, rubbish dumps had changed their nature. Concessionnaires bid for the salvage rights. Anything reusable was sold back to the public. Ecological recycling? Logic of poverty? One or the other.

Tim and Rosy had visited the dump outside town a year before and bought a washing machine for a song. The machine worked for three months before breaking down. Cheaper than renting with an option to buy. Now the carcass, with holes cut in, acted as a compost bin in their patch of back garden. According to gossips visiting the shop, the dump had since undergone a further metamorphosis. A hot-drink vending machine had been installed so that browsers could refresh themselves with a plastic cup of coffee. That summer an ice-cream van had visited the dump most weekends.

‘Next thing,’ he said, ‘people will be having picnics at the dump. There’ll be a play area for kids. Tours of the infill. Bulldozer rides. Déjeuner sur le dump.’

‘What?’

‘The Manet painting. Imagine that fellow and his naked mistress sitting on the dump drinking champagne. I presume she’d have to wear a bikini.’

A poem? ‘Manet at the Dump.’ Maybe. What word rhymed with ‘rubbish’?

Driving along the two-lane road between the first ploughed empty fields of the countryside, Tim spotted a cloud of gulls milling in the sky over the sprawling infill acres of the dump, like so many scraps of white paper. Rusty corrugated-iron sheets walled off the visitor’s zone.

Which they entered, in low gear, the suspension creaking ominously as the car humped itself over the sleeping-policeman ramp.

A large concrete yard was lined with bulky rubbish bins into which their car could probably have fitted. Down one side the high bins were already loaded with rubble. Those along the opposite side were empty; however, most were roped off with a notice prohibiting use. An arrow pointed to the far end, where several bins stood behind notice-boards indicating ‘glass’, ‘garden refuse’, ‘metal’. Those bins were already full; sunlight glared from a pile of windows.

A battered bulk-shipping container the size of a railway carriage blocked the view beyond, though another mounted wooden arrow pointed behind it.

Nearer to hand stood a black oil sump, and a bottle-bank painted camouflage green that resembled an armoured car, with slots for clear and coloured bottles reminiscent of muzzles from which howitzer shells could be fired. A score of ripped-off doors were stacked against one end.

Tim stopped the car by a truck trailer that was packed with a mound of old clothes and rags. Shirt sleeves hung down as if they had tried to climb out and failed, all the breath crushed out of them.

Beside this trailer, another huge shipping container, open at one end, was labelled ‘shop’. Within, Tim saw clothes on racks, shelves of paperback books, electrical goods. A fat, vacant-faced woman of indeterminate middle age, wearing a pink parka, occupied a deckchair outside. The shop forecourt displayed collections of tools, lamp bases and shades, mirrors, ambiguous metal paraphernalia, a cocktail cabinet with the veneer peeling.

Inside a makeshift pen, cobbled together from car roof-racks, an Alsatian guard bitch woke to life when Tim opened his door. The powerful animal reared, barking, raving.

‘Jilly!’ screamed the fat woman. She ignored Tim. The Alsatian slumped, and whined.

Apart from their car, the yard was deserted. Too early in the day, perhaps. By this afternoon the bazaar of rubbish might be buzzing; then the beast wouldn’t be on edge. Tim stepped nervously round to the hatchback, raised it, and inserted the broom handle. He carried the first plastic bag of clothes to the open trailer, and swung. The bag landed high up the hill of garments, jamming against the roof. He noticed a movement in the inner gloom. Some rags shifting, knocked off balance?

Rosy wound her window down. ‘Why can’t you save the bags?’

‘Oh,’ he said stupidly, measuring the height of the trailer floor, the incline of the clothes hill. Should he climb up and empty the bag? ‘There’s no space left at the front. Our stuff would fall out.’

Supposing you tried to repossess a coat you’d thrown away – having changed your mind about discarding it -would the Alsatian be within its right to rip your throat out? Because you no longer owned that coat? A sign fixed to the dog-pen forbade visitors from taking anything, except by way of the shop. Salvage rights had been granted. To a firm called Griffiths Scavenging. Associates of the fat woman in the deckchair.

‘Tim, come back here!’

He hurried to the car window.

‘Someone inside there,’ Rosy whispered.

In the dim interior of the trailer, almost hidden by the summit of fabrics, Tim spotted a skinny girl with ratty hair. As he watched, she ripped open the bag he had thrown, and tossed the contents this way and that, examining, sorting.

‘It’s obscene,’ said Rosy, ‘having your socks and knickers picked over before your very eyes.’

‘Maybe we should have washed all our old clothes before we threw them away?’

‘That isn’t funny. Find somewhere else, will you? Down there by those signs.’

Leaving the hatchback propped, Tim got in and started the engine. He drove down toward the other freight container and followed the arrow behind it.

Another arrow pointed the way down a long lane lined by bins. As Tim and Rosy entered the lane, shadow fell upon them from the high metal sides and suddenly the day was cold. The occasional freestanding notice announced ‘plastic’, ‘rubber & tyres’. As well as being inconveniently tall, the bins were mostly full.

Heeding a further arrow, he turned the car along a side-lane similarly walled with bins and intermittent notices.

‘Carpeting,’ he read. ‘Here we are. Get rid of that, at any rate.’

On his second attempt, he managed to raise their rolled threadbare carpet to head-height and tumble it over the metal lip. It fell dully within. From the car, he hauled the first bundle of heavy underfelt, which they had stored for years on the off-chance.

‘That isn’t exactly carpet,’ called Rosy.

‘Undercarpet. Same thing. What do they expect? We should sort out everything for them? Bother that. I’ll toss the lot in here, clothes and all. Who cares?’

Another plump, empty-faced woman, in raggy woollens and baggy trousers – an obvious sister of the deckchair occupant – squeezed her way from between two bins and stood watching. A boy of five or six in shorts and black zipper jacket followed her, clutching a torn picture book.

Tim walked over to the woman. ‘Is it all right if I throw underfelt in that one?’ Her skin oozed grease.

‘Wha’?’ she said after a while.

He repeated himself.

‘Uh,’ she said, which might have meant anything. He realized that the woman was stupid, moronic. Maybe she had no connection with Griffiths Scavenging, after all. She might just be wandering around.

‘Well, I will, then.’ So Tim disposed of all the underfelt, awkwardly heaving and hurling aloft while the woman stared silently at him.

He got back into the car. ‘There’ll be bins for clothes and stuff further on.’

True enough. The next arrow directed them into another long, narrow roadway of bins, all brimful of different categories of clothing. Signs were hardly necessary. Suits. Shirts. Skirts. Underwear. Boots and shoes. Buttons; there was even a bin full of buttons, a mountain height of multi-coloured shingle.

He cruised at walking pace. ‘Must be their storeroom, hmm? Maybe they export to poor countries. Or places hit by disaster. Cyclones, earthquakes. We oughtn’t to have come so far. We should have dumped the lot back in the yard.’

A pair of acne-scarred youths in jeans, heavy steel-tipped boots, and bomber jackets emerged. One slapped a hand on the front of the car, forcing Tim to brake. The other strolled grinning round to the open boot.

‘Help yer, mate?’ The youth tore a bag open and pulled out an old skirt of Rosy’s. He ran and tossed this up into a bin of skirts, returned and burrowed, while his companion joined him.

‘Hey,’ objected Tim. ‘Get out of our car. Now.’

As though instinctively alert to the contents, the youths grabbed the other clothes bags out of the back and ripped them open to sort on the ground. Tim immediately drove on and soon rounded another corner. Yet another lane of bins – all apparently empty – stretched ahead, with an arrow indicating a turning halfway along.

‘Stop and reverse,’ said Rosy. ‘Go back the way we came.’

‘We still have the TV to dump, and the –’

‘Stop! Back up and turn. Unload the rest in the yard. Anywhere! Drive away. Home.’

Home. That house above a shop that fed them and imprisoned them. The house with an empty daughter’s room. And now with an empty spare room. Tim experienced an odd feeling of certainty that before leaving that morning they had emptied the entire house – of furniture, stove, refrigerator, everything – and that there was nothing left any longer to connect them to the place. As if they had cleared all the shelves in the shop, too, leaving bare boards. They were free; they had escaped – hadn’t they? Something new could begin.

Vacant shop, vacant house, vacant debts. As vacant as this street of empty bins; as vacant as the rear of the car was fast becoming. He wished he had closed the hatchback down. Otherwise something more precious than junk might escape, might be snatched or simply drift away into the chilly air here between these looming steel boxes that mockingly imitated a decrepit city street – from the future, perhaps, after a war.

He halted the car and shook his head to clear a cold fog of apprehension from his brains. Before he could engage reverse gear, he saw in the driving-mirror the high front of a truck loom around the corner behind. Piston arms, at attention, dangled chains embracing the steel bin on its flatbed back. Somehow the bintruck negotiated the turn. He wondered how it could ever manoeuvre to pick up or deposit any of the bins ranged on either side. Maybe there was a turntable built into the chassis. Standing in the bin as though navigating the vehicle was the moronic woman.

Suddenly the sight of her terrified him. The truck slowly approached, and honked.

It must be one-way-only, Rosy.’ Tim drove forward to the next intersection and swung down á lane of close-packed bins containing scrap metal. By the time they reached another arrow, and another turn, the bintruck had already entered the scrap metal street.

Tim took another turn, then another, losing the truck way behind, If it had been deliberately following, to begin with.

Arrow followed arrow. Turn followed turn. Lane of bins succeeded lane of bins. Once they turned into the street of clothing bins, yet this led to a street of scrap metal bins, not a street where the bins were empty. Unless his memory was deceiving him. No, it wasn’t. The clothes bins must have been different ones. They were lost in a maze.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he told Rosy. ‘There isn’t space for all these lanes.’

‘We’ve entered the world of rubbish,’ Rosy whispered back. ‘Where we’ve been heading for the past twenty years.’

The engine coughed and missed a couple of times. Tim pulled the choke half out, racing the engine, though of necessity still driving slowly.

‘It’s all this damn crawling in first gear. The plugs soot up.’

The very next lane opened into a long concrete yard walled in by bins. It wasn’t the yard that housed the shop. Slamming the choke back in, Tim gunned the car toward the arrow marking the exit at the far end, hoping to burn the plugs clean. He braked violently in time to enter the next narrow alley.

Six lanes later the engine quit. Tim couldn’t restart the car.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Rosy.

‘Walk. I’ll leave the keys in the ignition.’

The bins on either side stood shoulder to shoulder. They seemed twice as large as previously. You couldn’t even squeeze sideways between bins, though you might just manage to crawl on your belly. The only route was the concrete road.

‘I wonder if this was once an old airfield?’

Then Tim remembered the gulls flocking about the infill. But no gulls flapped in the sky now.

‘What’s in the bins, Tim?’

Not since that second yard had they passed a single sign announcing the contents. He peered up. Suddenly he understood the assorted shapes peering over the lips of the containers.

Car doors.

Further along … a forest of exhaust pipes like several church organs jumbled by a bomb blast.

‘Bits of cars,’ he said, opening his door.

Two lanes later they heard from somewhere behind them the whine of a power tool, then the clanging of metal. He felt sure that their stalled car was being broken up into parts. Taking Rosy’s hand, he hurried her onward and along another lane. Faintly, he heard a thump of boots and a silly, idiotic giggling.

Clothes bins again! Jackets, shirts, sandals, nightdresses looked over bin tops. Before they could reach the next corner, the moronic woman waddled out from it ahead of them. She was accompanied by a bi. . .