Brothers of the Head by Brian Aldiss Page A

so great that I began to cry in my sleep. I rolled, yet I could not roll over, for now another great lumbering beast was beside me. It was more like a giant sort of maggot or mummy – something corpse-like. Despite that, it was as if we were both galloping forward at a great pace. I could not out-distance the mummy. It was being ridden by a chimpanzee.
    â€˜Describing it like this, the dream sounds like a silly collection of wonders. It was all one situation – immediately understood, going on for ever. Suppose there is a life after death – if we were called on to describe our lives, we might be forced back on similar recital. I mean, we might not be able to describe it except as a list of its events. Like a fisherman who sees a river just in terms of its fish. Yet my dream was about the river – it wasn’t about any of the events I’ve described at all, but about something else entirely. No. I’m telling it wrong.’
    Tom gulped down some tea, then started again.
    â€˜I was aware that, whatever I was doing, I was actually doing something else. Oh, I know it sounds confused, but sometimes in dreams a state of confusion comes over as marvellous clarity.’
    â€˜Perhaps you were only half asleep,’ I suggested.
    â€˜Perhaps we are never more than half awake … Anyhow, it now seemed as if I was no longer the horse, and had never been one. I was being carried on the back of one. It was a beautiful milk-white mare, and its rocking movement through the forest was sweet to me. But I still had to carry the great swaddled maggot with me. The trees were still flashing by, and it was dangerous to remain among them. Their trunks, I saw, were carved with elaborate carvings.
    â€˜Now the trees became more widely spaced. I gained courage. As we broke free of them altogether, I raised up the great maggot, lifted it above my head, and cast it away.
    â€˜Until the very second of parting with it, I had no interest in its nature. As I threw it, I became overwhelmingly curious as to what it was. Have you ever had the experience of being with a friend and finding nothing whatsoever to say to him; and then, as soon as he was gone, you think of a dozen important things you wanted to say? I met an old man when we were on tour in the North who told me he had married a girl he was madly in love with. Their marriage went all wrong right from the start. He hated her, he wanted to kill her because she disappointed all his hopes and broke his heart, and they got divorced. And immediately, he said, immediately he was free again, all the hate fell away, and he just longed for the girl, loved her more even than before, and could never look at another girl.
    â€˜A similar abrupt change of feeling came over me as I threw the maggot, or whatever it was, away from me. The bundle opened as it fell and I saw a small child’s – a baby’s – face looking up at me, rosy-cheeked, smiling, and absolutely innocent of any expectation of disaster. Then it hit the mud and at once sank into it, still smiling and trusting. To the last moment when its face was sucked under, it smiled up at me uncloudedly.
    â€˜Again there was division of feeling. Part of me rode on, haughty and glad to be free. Another part was overcome by grief. Great sobs rose up in me and cascaded from my mouth and nose and eyes. They fell in the form of diamonds, which rained to the ground and clattered there as previously my blood had done. My own noise woke me.’
    He sat there for a while, head between his hands, so that three bowed heads confronted me.
    â€˜It was as if all that was good and valuable in my body was going from me,’ he said. I clutched his hand, and we sat there in silence. Slowly the ashen light of dawn seeped in.
    When Bert brought the first lot of tourists and birdwatchers to Cockle Bight, I was there waiting for him. He ferried me over to the mainland, where I borrowed his bike and cycled over to Dr