Worlds Apart

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

George Cringe is a middle-aged school-teacher, married with several children. His marriage, while not a failure, is hardly a great success, and he is somewhat drawn towards a fellow teacher, Jennifer Lawton, who is much younger than he is. For relaxation, George has taken to creating an endless SF saga set on the planet Agenor, where his hero and heroine, Zil Bryn and Orgypp, face various problems, their current one involving an outbreak of psychedelic mushrooms. Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, on the planet Chnas, life Zil Bryn and his wife Orgypp. Bryn is currently composing a long weird narrative called Shorge Gringe's Pilgrimage, set on a strange world called Urth . . .

Release date: November 5, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 224

Sample

ALTHOUGH OUR OWN history books have yet to record the fact it will be helpful to note right at the beginning that October 12th, 1978, as well as being the seventeenth day of the Power Workers’ strike, the eighth day of the Mineworkers’ strike and the third day of the Rail Workers’ strike, was also the first day of George Cringe’s very own personal strike against the intolerable indignity of being George Cringe, parent, breadwinner, and Junior Science teacher at Bagshot Road Comprehensive School.

The precise moment when George’s prolonged negotiations with himself finally broke down is not easy to pinpoint since, on his own admission, he had been carrying out a private work-to-rule campaign ever since Patrick (‘Creeper’) Maggerty had been promoted over his head some eighteen months earlier, but it cannot be denied that something very closely akin to a wave of revelation broke in foaming spume over the Cringe consciousness at 4.15 p.m. on that Friday afternoon when he elbowed the front door of No. 27 Laburnum Crescent shut behind him and discovered this scrawled message tucked into the frame of the hall-stand mirror—

‘Gone bingo with Gran. Give kids tea. Fish fings in fridge.

Marge.’

Perhaps it was that ‘fish fings’ which did it. Someone or something deep inside George gave a wild, silent scream of anguish. The pile of exercise books he was carrying spilled in a clattering cascade to the hall floor. He snatched the note down, crumpled it savagely into a tiny ball and hurled it at the stained glass panel of the front door. ‘God in Heaven!’ he wailed. ‘Angels of Mercy! Let me OUT!!’

The galaxy known to its inhabitants as ‘Chnas’ has two numbers in the National Geographic Star Catalogue. The reason for this is that Chnas I is Chnas II, only viewed from the other side. Since, linearly speaking, Chnas lies at the absolute limits of terrestrial telescopic observation, the minute speck of gaseous fuzz that has been photographed somewhere in the region of our northern heavens occupied by the constellation Sicyon minor has not yet been identified with that other miniscule speck of gaseous fuzz that appears in the diametrically opposite side of our heavens low down in the antipodean constellation Psylla major. No doubt some computer will get around to matching them up one of these days and will earn itself an overhaul in the process.

Chnassian astronomers are, of course, faced with a similar situation vis-à-vis our own galaxy, but their mental conditioning being somewhat different from our own they appear to find no great difficulty in accepting the notion that the cosmos and everything within it is one vast sensorial illusion. Thus a Chnassian astro-physicist having counted the number of Cepheid variables in a particular nebula would automatically assume that his result was ‘wrong’ simply because his eyes told him it was ‘right’. Similarly nothing is easier for the Chnassian to accept than concepts like ‘negative mass’, ‘reversed time’ or ‘black holes in the universe’—incidentally, their own term for these latter phenomena is ‘oscitations’. One famous Chnassian museum contains a large room in which a working model of the entire cosmos is said to exist. No one has ever seen it, but countless thousands of Chnassians have heard it. It consists of a quiet chuckle endlessly repeated in total darkness. Its texture, though admittedly indescribable, is rumoured to resemble that of a Gruyère cheese.

‘Chnas’ is also the name of a delightful planet which revolves about a 4th magnitude star in one of the spiral arms of its galaxy. The entire galaxy is also known as Chnas for the very simple reason that the Chnassians, having observed it, realize that in all probability it has only subjective validity. Hence they choose to regard it as an extension of Chnas itself. The same could be said for the rest of their observable cosmos. It is all Chnas. Come to think of it, to a Chnassian, our own galaxy too is Chnas. Both of it. The concept has a certain breathtaking simplicity that is not unattractive.

The only person on Earth who had stumbled upon the possibility of Chnas did not know that he had done so and certainly would not have believed it if anyone had told him. Nevertheless, when, in the second week of July 1978, George Cringe, having extracted three exercise books from the school stationery store, locked the door of his tiny study behind him, opened the first of the notebooks and penned the unlikely words: ‘Zil laced thrunngs with Orgypp and grokked her tenderly in the Agenorian twilight’, he tripped inadvertently into one of those metaphysical holes in the invisible Gruyere and caused a rictus of truly cosmic significance.

George’s spiritual bolt-hole was a planet which he had chosen to call ‘Agenor’. This world was his to do as he liked with—or so he believed. At the weekends, on the pretext of preparing lessons or marking schoolwork, it was his custom to retire to Agenor and become Zil Bryn, an inoffensive Agenorian pedagogue who nevertheless possessed mysterious though unspecified powers. Right now George was about to confront his hero with an unknown species of psychedelic toadstool which had appeared mysteriously in the littoral regions of Knyff and would soon be causing considerable perturbation in the metropolis.

Contemplation of the possible effects of this fungus had occupied George throughout his car ride from Bagshot Road and he had been savouring one or two particularly delectable descriptive phrases as he walked up the pathway to his front door. His cry of anguish on discovering Margery’s note could thus be interpreted either as the frustration of the creative artist or as the wail of the baby who has been promised and then denied its lawful stint at the breast.

Orgypp leant over Zil’s shoulder and read the words he had just transcribed. ‘Who is this Shennifer?’ she demanded.*

Zil scratched his nose thoughtfully. ‘An Urthling,’ he said.

‘She has hwyllth?’

‘Of course.’

‘Will Shorge grok with her?’

‘You think he should?’

‘Everyone should grok. Especially your Urthlings.’

‘But Urth isn’t Chnas, Orgypp.’

‘Everything is Chnas,’ she retorted.

‘Everything except Urth,’ he insisted gently.

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Are you writing this story or am I?’

‘We both are. Shall I help you with the grokking bit between Shorge and Shennifer?’

‘I haven’t got there yet.’

‘Well, hurry up.’

‘You can’t rush these things, Orgypp.’

‘Anyway I came up to tell you that supper’s ready.’

‘Very well. I’ll be down in a moment. What have you got for me?’

‘Mushrooms.’

‘Mushrooms? Where did you get them?’

‘Llylly gave them to me. She brought some back from Knyff. She says they’re out of this Chnas.’

George unbuttoned his burberry and at the second attempt succeeded in getting it to lodge on top of the pile of other garments that cluttered the peg on the stand. Then he stooped and began to collect the spilled exercise books. A folded sheet of notepaper had fallen from one of them. He opened it out and found inside a crude but vigorous sketch executed in green ball-point of a naked man and woman linked together by a rigid male sexual organ of truly Homeric dimensions. A balloon was issuing from the woman’s mouth. Inside the balloon were the words: ‘Your grate man’ and six exclamation marks.

George contemplated this edifying work for several seconds and wondered who the anonymous artist was. He suspected Sybil Bosset, a physically precocious but otherwise unremarkable thirteen year old. If he was right then her art was certainly streets ahead of her physics. He refolded the paper and noticed some lettering on the back. ‘G.H.C. + J.V.L. pass along.’

He opened the sheet again and regarded the features of the male figure more closely. That vivid grass-green scribble of moustache was indisputable. Strange that it hadn’t registered the first time. As he gazed at it the realization dawned on him that his reaction to the discovery was falling far short of what it should have been. Instead of anger and disgust he felt only a vague sense of shy pride that his young pupils could still visualize him in this most human of all human situations, limb-locked with a student teacher sixteen years his junior. It seemed to compensate in some undefined way for his disappointment in being temporarily denied the delights of Agenor.

He slipped the cartoon into his inside pocket, finished stacking the scattered books and lifted them on to the ledge of the hall stand. Then he rose to his feet and eyed his image in the mirror, trying to see himself as Jennifer Lawlor must see him. The effort cost him what amounted to a severe mental squint.

*      *      *

Thirty-four years earlier Albert Cringe, railway signalman by profession, had stood cap in hand before a hare-lipped clerk in the Brighton Registrar’s office and announced that henceforth his infant son would confront a warring world as ‘George Herbert Cringe’. Albert had chosen the Christian names in honour of H. G. Wells, the only writer whose works had ever impressed him. Even so they had not apparently impressed him sufficiently for him to get the names in the right order.

By a curious genetic fluke George had grown up to bear a remarkable facial resemblance to his illustrious namesake. His eyes were blue and bright, his hair sandy, his face rather round and chubby. Welfare milk and orange juice would ensure that he eventually achieved his full physical potential and at eighteen years of age would stand at 5’8” while weighing just over 10 stone. Intellectually he was doomed to be classed as ‘average’ though there was some reason to believe that this assessment failed to do him justice. He succeeded in scraping through his ‘I I plus’ examination and entered the local grammar school where for five years he would occupy a place about two-thirds of the way down the form list. Now and again, when his interest was fully engaged, he was capable of surprising his teachers. This did not happen often enough for any of them to single him out as being anything except a middle-of-the-roader.

In his thirteenth year George discovered science fiction. It arrived in the form of a magazine called, apparently, ‘ASTO—’ (half the cover had been ripped off) which he extracted from behind a radiator in the school changing-room. Idly thumbing through it he found himself engrossed in a story in which a tiny meteorite had plunged to earth and been found to have an impossible physical density. Eventually it was dug up—there was a startling black and white illustration of an enormous crane hauling it up out of the ground—and it proved to be some sort of alien life form. George galloped through this story with his disbelief so firmly suspended that his toes barely touched the ground. For the first time in his life some of the so-called ‘facts’ of his science classes had been made imaginatively real for him.

Over the next year and a half his literary diet consisted almost entirely of s.f. He discovered two other addicts in his own form and the three of them used to swop magazines and paperbacks while indulging in learned pseudo-scientific discussions about ‘Psi’ and ‘Space/Time’ during break. Their conversation became increasingly peppered with erudite references to Capek, Heinlein, Van Vogt, Asimov, Aldiss and Wyndham. And then—George never quite knew how or why—the honeymoon was over. There was no divorce, just a gradual tapering off. He became absorbed in aero-modelling; in fishing; and in girls. In that order. By the time he eventually left the sixth form after two years’ study of Maths, Physics and Chemistry, he would have been hard pressed to tell you what it was that had decided him to opt for Sciences rather than Arts.

And yet … and yet …. Ever since the door of wonder had been opened for him in that damp and smelly changing-room it had never been truly closed. Some secret part of George Cringe would remain for ever haunted by memories of those enchanting vistas in which his youthful fancy had gambolled while his bored teachers droned dully on through interminable afternoons. Without recognizing it as such he had stumbled upon the holy honeydew of the imagination, and when an embittered and sarcastic English master pounced on a copy of Amazing Stories which George was reading beneath the desk and poured scorn and public ridicule upon it and upon him, George had been goaded into self-defence. Although he could not have known it, his sullen retort: ‘Well, what’s wrong with escapism, sir?’ had called into question all the dubious values upon which the English secondary education system is based.

Nevertheless it was within that same system that George was eventually to find his own humble niche. A succession of girls having come between himself and the examination results which might have ensured him a place at a university, he entered the local Teachers’ Training College where he found yet more girls and even two or three who seemed prepared to consider him as a permanent partner. In fact this appeared to be the very price they had chosen to put upon those physical intimacies George hungered for.

By the end of his second year the field had narrowed down to two—Violet Roper and Margery Phillips. Vi was training to teach Biology, and Marge was studying P.E. Vi was refreshingly forthright in her talk about sex but had a braying laugh which occasionally set George’s teeth on edge. She also smelt a bit strong. . .