There is a Tide
THERE IS A TIDE
by Brian W. Aldiss
How SOOTHING to the heart it was to be home. I began that evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself jellied down over Africa with a mild mother’s touch: so that even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any premonition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.
My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and this was unusual, for I am a poet, and poets are generally articulate enough.
“… because the new dam is now complete,” he was say-ing, “and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly has been pressing me for it for some time; it’ll be serialized, and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of money, eh?”
He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged him; this time I said: “Jubal, no man in Congo States, no man in the world possibly, has done more for people than you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but youwhy, your good works lie about you.”
I swept my hand out over the still bright land.
Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake Tanganyika’s nothem end. Before Jubal and his engineers came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies, and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what we persist in calling “Western civilization”. If you were more hygienic and healthyso ran the theoryyou were happier.
But I begin to sound sceptical. That is my error. I happen to have little love for my fellow men; the thought of the Massacre is always with me, even after all this time. I could not deny that the trend of things at Mokulgu and elsewhere, the constant urbanization, was almost unavoidable. But as a man of sensibility, I regretted that human advance should always be over the corpse of Nature.
From where we sat over our southern wines, both lake and town were partially visible, the forests in the immediate area having been demolished long ago. The town was already blazing with light, the lake looked already dark, a thing preparing for night. And to our left, standing out with a clarity which suggested yet more rain to come, stretched the rolling jungles of the Congo tributaries.
For at least three hundred miles in that direction, man had not invaded: there lived the pygmies, flourishing without despoiling. That area, the Congo Source land, would be the next to go; Jubal, indeed, was the spearhead of the attack.
But for my generation at least that vast tract of primitive beauty would stand, and I was selfishly glad of it. I always gained more pleasure from trees than population increase statistics.
Jubal caught something of the expression on my face.
“The power we are releasing here will last for ever,” he said. “It’s already changingimprovingthe entire economy of the area. At last, at long last, Africa is realizing her potentialities.”
His voice held almost a tremor, and I thought that this passion for Progress was the secret of his strength.
“You cling too much to the past, Rog,” he added.
“Why all this digging and tunnelling and wrenching up of riverbeds?” I asked. “Would not atomics haye been a cheaper and easier answer?”
“No,” he said decisively. “This system puts to use idle water; once in operation, everything is entirely self-servicing.
Besides, uranium is none too plentiful, water is. Venus has no radioactive materials, I believe?”
This sounded to me like an invitation to change the sub-ject. I accepted it.