The Eighty Minute Hour
BRIAN ALDISS

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Also part of The Brian Aldiss Collection

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The opening paragraph of this space opera has frequently been quoted, if only by me:

Four things one particularly notices after wars of any respectable size: preparations for the next one, confidence that armed conflict is finished for ever, starvation, and feasting.

The text is operatic; I was attempting to write a space opera.

My original American publisher, Doubleday, explained everything clearly on their dust jacket, and I loved them for it: ‘Seldom has a novel been more crammed with crazy but plausible ideas, awful jokes, and nutty people. Oh, we forgot to mention the latest technological advance, the ecopicosystem. And total contraception. And all the singing and dancing. And the massive drinking scene. And the updated Adam and Eve bit … The Eighty Minute Hour is delightful entertainment – with a pinch of chilli and Attic salt added.’

I wrote the novel paragraph by paragraph while travelling with my friend Harry Harrison round the USA, pausing only to dine with Ray Bradbury, one evening by the coast.

That may account for the way the text is interspersed with songs – elaborate songs at that; songs far too elaborate to reach the charts.

Well, I was younger then.

Or, as my current publisher might put it, I’m older now.

I

Four things one particularly notices after wars of any respectable size: preparations for the next one, confidence that armed conflict is finished for ever, starvation, and feasting.

First, take a romantic setting.

In the stolid old castle of Slavonski Brod, on the night in which determinism forces me to open the story, feasting was the thing. Outside the grounds, over the walls, across the sea – all about – rumours of more terrible things were scudding like cloud. For a few hours, they had been shut out, fended away chiefly by dint of the personalities present at the roistering, by the languorous bravado and genial nature of Mike Surinat, whose castle it now was (his parents having died during the war); by the beauty and sweet perceptive nature of Becky Hornbeck, who now lived at the castle; by the cheeky dearness of my little sister, Choggles Chaplain; by the stolid capability of Mike’s C-in-C, Per Gilleleje; by the hard work behind scenes of such loyal friends as Devlin Carnate; and of course by the glamour of the many guests, at the castle to celebrate Mike’s simultaneous demobilisation from the army and appointment to diplomatic rank in the councils of the Dissident Nations.

Among those guests, I need mention only three. First and foremost is the peerless, glamorous figure of Glamis Fevertrees, about to embark on a perilous mission for the D.N. She is old enough to stand for me as at once sex-symbol and mother-figure. She dances with Per, and I wish I were able to glide across the great marble floor with her in my arms, out into the courtyard with its marble patterns, swirling among the pergolas and lanterns!

Mine are not the only eyes to fix on Glamis. A slight comedy goes among the other two most noted guests, the epicene genius of dream, Monty Zoomer, and his companion – who hastens to leave him – the stately and leather-skinned Sue Fox. Monty came with Sue and has eyes only for Glamis. Not that Sue cares – she is a woman who plainly hates sheep’s eyes.

Sue and Monty, of course, are not on our side. Yes, you might put it that way. They are not on our side of the political fence. They stand for the USA–USSR merger, the so-called Cap-Comm Treaty; we are against it. But as yet – or during this evening of festival – Sue and Monty are being nice to the minions of the D.N. Sue Fox can afford to be nice; she’s on the World Executive Council.

So much for the cast. Move nearer and hear what three of the groups are saying on this beautiful evening.

First, let’s go to the little pavilion perched at the end of the estate, on top of the wide stone wall, long ruined, now built up with a wooden ramp for this occasion. Go up the ramp! Observe that the pavilion has been repainted.

Inside, a little man in Hungarian gipsy costume plays a fiddle. He is a Hungarian gipsy. His melodies, gay but full of an irreparable loss, float out across the grounds. Only three people are in the pavilion, and they are not listening.

This first group consists of Becky Hornbeck, Sue Fox, and Choggles. Becky, like Mike, is in her late twenties and still somewhat mystical. Sue is older and a good deal grimmer, though not in a grim mood tonight. My dear Choggles is – herself. But I will stop talking so that they can be heard.

Sue Fox said, ‘As you say, the world is tightening up after the war. Dwight Castle and I were remarking the other day how work on the World Executive Council gets heavier week by week. And now the Computer Complex intends to introduce the concept of the eighty-minute hour …’

She caught the expression on Becky’s face.

‘I’m sorry, Becky – I shouldn’t be talking politics. Perhaps I only do it because – well, perhaps there is a little guilt there, especially when I find you and me on different sides of the fence, politically. Your mother and I were such great friends.’

Becky smiled. ‘We have always been great friends, Sue. We must not let politics alter that. I realise you hold your beliefs as honestly as we do ours.’

‘Of course. The world must unite, must forgo one single central government, and the Cap-Comm Treaty is a way of beginning … No, no, not a word more! I’m not propagandising, merely justifying myself!’

They both laughed, and the gipsy began a passionate lament to death, roses, Smederevo, red wine, white hands, and the passing of time.

More relaxedly, Sue Fox said, ‘They were telling me you found the Koh-i-Nor, Becky. How incredible!’

‘It was incredible,’ Becky agreed. ‘But I expect incredible things. In fact, it was an old associate of my father’s, a man called Youings, who found the jewel on a beach near Bordeaux, France, washed ashore. He posted it to me as a Christmas present, wrapped up in an old newspaper!’

Choggles, who had been sitting with them and gazing silently over the Pannonian Sea, said, ‘The newspaper was called the Trafalgar Square – I’ve still got it, Becky. Let me keep it as a souvenir.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘You’re going to keep the diamond?’ Sue asked Becky.

‘I regard it as a souvenir of England. It’s in my suite. You must come and have a look at it.’

‘What fantastic things do happen!’

‘They aren’t fantastic if you believe in determinism. Recent brain research has proved that free will does not exist –’

‘Becky, I am not of the generation to believe in determinism. I refuse to believe, and facts will not sway me. I prefer your mysticism. Tell me more about the Koh-i-Nor. It was in British hands?’

‘Yes, ever since the British conquered India in the nineteenth century. It was on display in the Tower of London for many years – before the war.’

‘Hard luck about Britain … What are you going to do with it? What’s it worth now?’

‘I thought I’d keep it. When it was first heard of in history, one of the Moghuls – Humayan, I believe – that was in the early sixteenth century – claimed that it was valuable enough to feed the whole world for two and a half days!’

Sue Fox smiled. ‘Now the population has gone down a bit, it might do so again!’

‘That stone – well, it’s an emblem with no precise financial value – it has woven in and out of history like a needle through fabric. At one time, it spent six weeks in the waistcoat of a Victorian politician!’

A second group, a larger group, all male except for a pregnant Miss Dinah Sorbutt, who sat unobtrusively in the background, sprawled over a dinner table smoking cigars and every now and again summoning a fresh bottle of brandy or Perrier water. There were six of them – Mike Surinat himself; two of his staff, Carnate and Per Gilleleje; two guests, the Brazilian Geraldo Correa da Perquista Mangista, and a Japanese politician, Sanko Hakamara; and Becky’s old frail father, George Wainscott Hornbeck, retired industrialist. They were talking politics. Oh – and Choggles was also there; she had already heard the history of the Koh-i-Nor, and moved on elsewhere to avoid hearing it again.

Da Perquista Mangista was laughing at something Mike had said. ‘You are just a romantic, Mike. You should have worked as I have, for many a long year, in São Paulo, and then you would see how hard people really work!’

‘I could say the same about Tokyo,’ Hakamara said.

‘I know, I know,’ Mike said, laughing also. ‘Europe is now more or less played out, and the Eastern seaboard of the United States the same. We have recently witnessed the establishment of a Pacific Community, with California, Japan, South Korea, China, all labouring away hammer-and-tongs. I’ve no real objection to work, except that it now means work-plus-deadly-monotony. With the establishment of a single world-state, work-plus-deadly-monotony is going to rule the roost, rammed home by computerised arguments about “efficiency”, such as C.C. is now using to ram in its Eighty-Minute Hour schedule. I’m for inefficiency, smaller nations, slack in the machine, chaos, and all the other things for which I founded the I.D.I., my own personal club!’

Da Perquista Mangista said, draining off another large brandy, ‘Mike, I love you, and I love the totally out-dated concept of I.D.I…. You are a gaudy figure and the beleaguered Dissident Nations will surely need you as we get more beleaguered in the years ahead. But do not use that argument of yours in public – not, for instant, at the Dissident Nations economic conference I’m organising in Friendship City. Because the world on the whole believes in order and efficiency, even the nations of the D.N.’

‘Them especially,’ Hakamara agreed. ‘Japan, Yugoslavia, and Brazil are cases in point. Recall the legend on the Brazilian flag – “Order and Progress”. Our nations have become great through work.’

‘If you’ll allow an old man to express his point of view,’ George Hornbeck said, ‘I believe that work is mankind’s worst vice and affliction, killing more people year after year than all your drugs and automobiles combined. Even worse, it exhausts the planet as well as mankind. Of course, that’s only my view. Order and Progress lead to war. But then – I was born in the First World War.’

Mike Surinat smiled warmly at the old man. Since the death of his own father, since he had invited the Hornbecks, father and daughter, to live in Slavonski Brod Grad, he had come more and more to love them both. The old man’s philosophy was particularly sympatico.

‘Determinism saps our will not to work,’ he said. ‘The Cap-Comm merger merely gears everyone to work harder.’

Choggles piped up. ‘It will make the world like a police state, won’t it, Mike? Particularly with crooks like Attica Saigon Smix running the American end – he was involved with my father, and you know how awful Daddy was, introducing ZPG and everything.’ She glanced at Dinah Sorbutt’s greatly enlarged body. ‘Sorry, Dinah, old horse, almost ZPG – the human race has got to keep going somehow, hasn’t it?’

Dinah said, ‘Choggles, old horse, your zippy comments are rather out of place in a political discussion. Why don’t you buzz along, like a good girl?’

The Brazilian politician threw Dinah an admiring and grateful glance.

‘Suits me!’ Choggles said. ‘Politics isn’t as interesting as sex, is it?’

As she drifted off, Per Gilleleje laughed and said, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! She is correct, of course, about both Smix and her father, Auden. Auden Chaplain is dead now, but both he in scientific circles and Attica Saigon Smix in managerial circles showed genius. World-units have grown so large that we need genius, even when it is evil – that’s to say, against humanity. And it is this need for the anti-human which has led to the take-over of human affairs by the computer complex.’

‘Unfortunately, C.C. represents a genuine human desire to repress its humanity,’ Carnate said. ‘How else can you explain the atrocities of World War III, and all those poor wretches shipped out to Mars?’

‘My daughter among them,’ sighed Hakamara.

Let ‘atrocities’ be the key-word that allows us to slip away to the third group.

This is a more romantic group, although it numbers three, and three is not conventionally a romantic number. The group is sitting in the room generally known as the Green Tower Room. Most things in the room, human beings excepted, are green; and, to match the room, the articles in it are also round wherever possible. Spinet, radio, holocube – even the holocube contradicts its own terms and is round – chairs, sofa, chaise-lounge, all attempt rotundity; carpet, lampshades, footstools, occasional tables, precious vases – for them, conformation to circularity comes less oddly.

Monty Zoomer, the only one of the group of three to attempt even a perfunctory rotundity, was sitting on a pouffe. This pale young man, king of the pop world, whose holodreams had been shared with audiences all over the uncivilized world, wore velvet and directed a flow of velvet words at the second member of the trio. This was the slender, austere, still dazzling – though faded – figure of Glamis Fevertrees, a much-married American lady with a Persian style of beauty, a sallow smooth complexion, pale pink lips, and dark and lucid brows and eyes. It was with reference to these attributes that Zoomer was now reading a verse from a circular copy of Lalla Rookh which he had seized from a side-table.

‘And others mix the Kohol’s jetty dye

To give that long, dark languish to the eye –’

The third member of the trio, Choggles, who had just sneaked in, burst into laughter. ‘You can’t be serious, Monty! You ought to be reading that doggerel out to me – except I prefer Shelley – and anyhow I’m fair, not dark, a real little blonde –’

‘Nauseating child!’ Zoomer said.

‘Child! I’m nearer your age than Glamis is! She’s old enough to be your mother, Monty! You can’t really think she fancies you! You’re too fat to be any good as – help!’

She ran round the round room and out the door, laughing and screaming, hotly pursued by spherical cushions and a round of abuse.

Zoomer slammed the door and turned back to Glamis, adjusting his hair and the pendant that swung against his breast.

‘Glamis Fevertrees – now that that little pest has gone, let me declare my admiration! My heart yearns for you – it’s lonely enough being a real creative artist, see, I got the gift from my father, so I suppose it was predetermined, but you have to work at it, and my life – well, there’s a great big Glamis-shaped gap in it. I could design a whole hololife for us together – you know the power I wield, now that I supply holodreams to anyone who wants them, keep the millions of oppressed happy through their comp-terminals. Well, it’s the responsibility, to supply something clean, nursery-pure, but still entertaining, and –’

‘You see, Monty,’ Glamis said, interrupting rather desperately, ‘you’re very sweet, but I don’t go much for sex, to be frank, despite all my marriages. I met a man called Jack once, on the very eve of my first marriage. Well, that’s another story … As a result, I get hooked on men of action, not artists. Either they’re too mixed up or – no, it’s probably because I have no free will, which is what everyone seems to be saying nowadays. I have no free will to love you, Monty, please understand.’

She wondered if he would grab her and whether she would faintly enjoy that. After all, it would be a conquest for her, a defeat like that!

But she had his measure: a man of words, not of action. The words poured from him as sweat from a labouring man.

‘And another thing, Glamis, that I ought to draw your attention to. The world’s in a very troubled state, I think you’d agree. All those big nuclear bombs let off everywhere – mucking up space as well as this poor old earth of ours – conditions could deteriorate. Easily deteriorate. People need a bolt-hole. Well, perhaps I could find such a bolt-hole. Just for the two of us. Now that I’ve won this enormous contract with C.C., supplying everyone with holodreams, I’ve come in contact with Mr Attica Saigon Smix. He’s a very nice old man, not at all like the villain his enemies say he is – haven’t I designed a nice little set-up for him and his missus! Wow! Now, he’s got a bolt-hole nobody knows about, and maybe one day I can find out where it is, and then –’

She had been standing against one of the little round windows, knowing her slender lines showed up to best advantage there; but the spate of his eloquence caused her to sit on a little circular Marie Thérèse armchair. She took his hand.

‘Monty, dear, that’s another thing! You work for and with Attica Smix. He is married to Loomis, and Loomis is my sister. We are not at all good friends, not at all. Not by temperament, not by upbringing, not by political conviction. I know she and Attica think well of you. It would complicate things too much if you and I had any sort of a thing going between us. You’re awfully sweet – no, don’t protest, but I have to go away on a mission tomorrow – forget about me, Monty, stick to Loomis!’

He flung himself at her beautifully shod feet, reached up dramatically, clasped her hands in his.

‘With Loomis it’s just mother-fixation on my part, honest! You’re younger than her, a little bit, anyway! I can’t help these things! You said it yourself – determinism. All this recent work on the brain – the neurosciences have proved that we do what we must do, right? I can’t help feeling like this about you, Glamis. The moment I saw you, I knew I was in the shadow of destiny!’

‘Does destiny really cast a shadow?’ she asked softly.

‘Okay, it picked me out in its headlights, then. Look, Glamis, if you’re going, you’ll be back won’t you? Let me give you a memento of me, something to remind you of the pallid and lonely existence of that wayward and eccentric world-genius of the inner landscape, Monty Zoomer, okay?’

As he spoke, he was bending his neck, removing the pendant and chain from his neck. He rubbed it on his velvet shirt.

‘Here, slip it on while it’s still warm, Glamis! A keepsake from you to me!’

‘It’s beautiful!’ She took it and examined it. She had already admired it from a distance.

It was of silver, heavy to hold, and some eight centimetres across. Across one side of it were depicted two male figures, one of them bearded, staring at each other or across each other’s shoulders. The workmanship was rough but powerful.

‘It really is beautiful!’ Covetousness rose in her.

‘Yes, it is a replica of an old Martian design, from a pendant that actually came from Mars. Attica bought it at a fabulous price and had copies made.’

‘From Mars! But it depicts two humans!’

‘Well, that was the story I heard. I’m no connoisseur. It’s yours if you will accept it with my humble admiration.’

‘But Attica Smix gave it to you – or was it Loomis? You can’t give it to me.’

‘Yes, yes, have it with love!’

‘Let’s exchange pendants, then. I have one I always wear, though it doesn’t go with this dress. It’s in my bag …’ She put his pendant round her neck, and produced hers, a smaller one, with an image of two graceful people, male and female, engraved on it.

‘Ooh, Glamis, they’re naked!’

‘Put it on – it’s fair exchange. They’re Daphnis and Chloe, from an ancient Greek engraving. It was given me by the man I mentioned earlier, Jack Dagenfort.’

‘That’s the guy that made that old film The Heart Block! I’ll always wear it, Glamis, and always think of you!’

He summoned an oleaginous tear for the great occasion.

II

Through the barren castle of Slot Surinat went the conspirators. They laughed as they went, for the castle was theirs. Battles had been fought, hardship overcome, blood shed, money spent, and many a tear dropped in shuttered secret or down into an open grave – all for the moment when the War of Continuance would be won. Now few were left to mourn or cheer …

But there were other dimensions.

The ravaging weapons of war had revealed them, had so torn the fabric of the universe that now strange paths to otherwheres and otherwhens lay open to those who were knowledgeable – or courageous enough to tread those paths of madness.

The first of those conspirators, walking so forthrightly now through the long corridors, was Julliann of the Sharkskin. A small man he, booted, belted, buckskinned, broadsworded, to the hilt, his face like an old brown canvas sail, his hair whirling like smoke about his head. And flame seemed to crackle in that smoke as he flung open his mouth in a harsh laugh.

‘So Mad Mike Surinat is not here to meet us, my friends! So much the worse for him! He may rob us of a further triumph, but he yields us his castle!’

So saying, he clapped Harry the Hawk on his back. Harry laughed in response, and the goshawk riding hooded on his shoulder never fluttered.

‘The Surinats are too decadent for these warlike times, Julliann,’ Harry said. He was large and heavy. He held himself, physique and psyche, under tight control, like a bear on a greyhound’s leash. As he moved, he flashed his torch from side to side, scanning every doorway as a matter of rote, in case they were surprised.

The third conspirator never spoke. He also was built tall and solid, but in his bulk was something animal and ungainly. Something animal lurked in his silence too. The lick of the torch revealed a mighty face with a small expression, tiny eyes set in dark sockets, a minor fortress of a nose, and a great immobile mouth plastered across the lower half of the face. This was Gururn, fugitive from the Smix-Smith world, slayer of life, the secrets of his own life as mute as granite.

They moved now through a floor of the castle newly painted, its surfaces smothered in a prismatic white reflectant paint, so that everywhere the opened colours of the spectrum, newly released, leapt at them and assaulted their vision. To walk down a corridor was to be battered to death by the plumage of courting peacocks.

Growling, Gururn flung open the shutters of a tall window and peered out. Only the perspectives of the façade of the castle met his gaze, near, distant, remote, winding over hill and valley, punctuated insanely by courtyard and tower and minaret – a vision by some crazed Gustave Moreau compiled of Henri Christophe’s Sans Souci, Pandua, Hambi, Polonnaruwa, Amber, Alcatraz, Blenheim, and the terrifying repetitions of the Escorial and Ramesvaram. Its fretted surfaces were like a myriad dead moths, pinned recklessly one atop the other by a frenetic lepidopterist in his cups.

Slam! The shutters went shut again. The three conspirators moved among the ruinous glory of peacock light. Now there was no laughter between them.

They came to an elevator. The elevator lifted them ten storeys. So elaborately had the Surinats built that none but they and their nearest allies could locate the jet-powered elevators that sped in one continuing movement from bottom to top of their warrening house.

They were walking through suite after suite of interconnecting rooms, each bigger than the previous one, until the ultimate room of the series encompassed all the others and they were forced to turn about and seek another way. Julliann’s legs ached. Now the elaborate heterochromatic effects were lost. The three companions found themselves tramping a forlorn corner of this building men had once called the Ultimate Structure. The basic crain, that man-made stone which nothing could corrupt, stood naked; doors and casements had been but casually slotted into it. Nothing had been dressed. Every perspective had a perspective encased within it, like the receding oily pools of death within a basilisk’s eye.

‘I knew this castle as a lad,’ said Julliann.

The others said nothing, merely marched.

‘Spent my entire adolescence trying to find my way out of it,’ said Julliann.

The others said nothing, continuing to march.

‘Have I ever been free of it?’ said Julliann.

The others said nothing, still marching forward.

But Julliann reeled sideways, clutching at his brow, gasping, and struck his temple against a crain pillar. He managed to stand, rocking, supporting himself with one hand, staring ahead in fear as if he gazed into one of those dimensions so lately and so unpleasantly revealed to man.

Then did Harry the Hawk and Gurum halt, and turn, and go uneasily towards him.

‘What ails you, Julliann of the Sharkskin?’

He closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he looked less curiously.

‘You see me clearly enough, don’t you?’

‘Clearly enough,’ said Harry, and Gurum nodded.

‘Come near and touch me, touch my clothes.’

Wondering, they did as he bid them.

‘You feel me, don’t you?’

‘You know we did.’ A nod.

‘You can smell me, can’t you?’

Two nods.

‘For all that, I could be an hallucination. Or we three could be caught in some kind of illusion. Death in a basilisk’s eye, sort of thing.’

Harry clouted him on the arm and set him moving again. In his harsh and rapid voice, he said, ‘You recall when the fight was on between our friend Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback? We stood up to our knees in that muck like mud which vanished even as the Hunchback fell? You recall that time?’

‘I had forgotten. Now I recall. The sky ran with suns until it resembled a pin-table machine. What of it? It was far enough from this castle!’

‘Would we were there, then,’ mumbled Gururn.

‘In that place and that hour, Julliann, you clutched your head and cried that life was an illusion, even as you did just now. And a further time. We sat and drank the poisons with the Spider General. You won’t forget that in a hurry!’

‘I had forgotten the Spider General … Did he not turn into a woman? Was there not also a Queen of All Questions? But the poisons I remember – two of them, taken by turns, to serve as an antidote to the other. It’s long past. What of it?’

‘In that hour, Julliann, when I swear my soul was snow-white with fear, you clutched your heart and vowed you were no more than a puppet in another’s dream, even as you did just now.’

Julliann strode down the corridor, eyes on the floor.

‘If I did –’

‘Just this, my friend – that you have no business to let your mind feast itself on such fancies, for you are the realest man I know … And if the day ever comes when I am truly tested by the Powers Above, then I pray you will be by my side!’

Julliann looked sideways at his companion – mutely, but with his storm-dark eyes speaking volumes. Then his gaze slid away again, as will the gaze of men who are burdened with things of which they will not or cannot speak.

The passage down which they strode met another, a meaner one. They took it. A row of small shops stood here. The blank eyes of their shutters were presented to the world, like the eyelids of sleeping merchants. No man could guess what lay behind them.

After the last shop stood a swing door. Julliann pushed through. A stairway lay beyond; it had a window on it, but the window only showed further rooms and corridors, all desolate. They mounted the stairs.

The stairs rose straight, then reached a landing, then turned and went up again. There were more landings, more turns, more and more stairs.

At last, exhausted, they came to a landing where they were forced to stop. They leaned on the balustrade and breathed deep. The unrelenting windows showed the same unrelenting views.

Julliann was suffering great pain from both legs, though he forebore to show it.

Gururn lifted his great paw of a hand. They listened, knowing how sharp his hearing was. A sound of irregular crying came to them.

Turning his shaggy head, Gururn looked at Julliann in silent question.

Julliann nodded.

They moved silently forward, down a corridor carpeted in some kind of wickerwork. This time, Gururn led.

Without hesitation, he headed for an elaborately carved door. In his posture, in his tread, in his eagerness, was a bestial thing hitherto half unexpressed. As he pushed open the door, Julliann peered under his mighty arm.

A woman sat at a small pattern-organ, which threw out a yellow and black helix unregarded, for her delicate hands were over her face.

She wore a dress, simple in its authority, which revealed the sweep of her shoulders and thus emphasised her vulnerability.

The slight sound of the door opening jerked her from her tearful reverie. Slowly, lowering her hands as she did so, she turned to face the intruders. Julliann, with a gasp, recognised her as Strawn Fidel, the betrothed of Fletcher Surinat.

As her eyes lit on Gururn, the latter moved into the room. With one sweep of a paw, he dragged the mouth-mask from the lower half of his face, revealing the unhuman jaw, the powerful yellow teeth, the blond hair growing in twists from his gums. Her first screams set him bounding forward at her with a cry of hungry expectation.

III

Space had a floor. It stretched below the hurtling sunship as the ship’s transverters dragged the vessel from cupro-space to the ordinary dimensions of the X-World.

The floor looked like nothing more than a sheet of typing paper floating down towards the bottom of some translucent and undisturbed pool. But it grew. It grew as the Micromegas burst towards it; it came upwards, upwards from its translucent and ripple-innocent pool, upwards, spread far beyond the confines of any pool, until it threatened to dwarf the limitless spread of starlight above and round it.

The sunship was decelerating, tearing down through the resonating G’s in one grand orchestral crash as if ripping the rivets out of nature itself.

Unstirring and unstirred, Attica Saigon Smix sat with his wife Loomis watching the mighty floor of space rise to meet them. They were comfortable in their embracing chairs before the visiscreen, with Captain Ladore standing immaculate behind them.

Loomis’s unchanging beauty was of a Persian kind, her face as smooth and beautiful as an Isfahan dome of cerulean china, her hair sable and coiling, uncurled, about her neck with an intent of its own. She had rested one hand on the wrist of her husband.

He – he whose least word to the computer pentagons of earth was unrecognised in every last household of its numberless warrens – he – boss of all bosses, last overlord of all commercial overlords – he – great communist-capitalist of the united capitalist-communist empire – he – Attica Saigon Smix of Smix-Smith Inc – was a pale shadow of a man. The slight pulsations of his ivory skin revealed, not the normal circulations of a normal blood-stream, but the unfaltering beat of internal servo-mechanisms.

He turned his head and smiled at her, at her who was more precious to him than the unendingly complex financial parasystems over which he held sway. Ghastly though his smile might have seemed to others, it woke an answering smile of love from her.

‘Nearly there, my love.’

‘Nearly there!’

‘You weren’t bored by micro-space?’

‘Not at all, Attica!’

‘Nor I, with you beside me.’

He turned his thin skull half-way towards Captain Ladore. ‘See to it that we disembark immediately we land. I have no desire that we be kept waiting.’

‘Sir.’ The captain turned, barked briefly into the intercom by his side.

The orchestration had faded now into a depth beyond music or sound.

The great white floor, unshadowed by starlight, now stretched before them, magnificent, bleak, unbelievable, the logical extension of a zero-infinity nightmare topology, undiminished by distance, unfamiliarised by any proximity.

In a brief while, they touched down upon it, light as daylight on a snow-crowned peak. From the porcine bulk of the ship, gangways rolled out on all sides, gangways and the snouts of immense weapons, tender as the noses of blind moles.

Attica Saigon Smix’s chair animated itself, curling about its master. It brought him to the vertical. He was on his feet. He proceeded forward, his wife by his side, ever watchful with her eyes of lapis lazuli. They moved to the nearest porter-shaft, sank languidly down it, emerged at a gangway, and were carried, whirringly, gently, speedily, down on to the surface of the immense floor of space.

She flinched and held more tightly to his arm. The all-recording cameras, perpetuating every moment of Attica Saigon Smix’s life-event-continuum, caught her gesture, and the Smix Carollers added a lyric for the re-showing.

‘She flinched and held more tightly to his arm

Magnificent in fright, brave in alarm ….’

From other gangways, minions were hastening down, their subordinate positions rendering them impervious to the impossibly grandiose exposure of their situation. By reason of their power, naked to the majesty of it, Attica Saigon Smix and his wife stood on infinity, stood on the immovable object, while the infinitely irresistible force of space flew over them. The floor felt warm, worn, hydroptic, apical, pinnate, like the flesh of a vulpine and voluptuous courtesan erotogenically dying.

‘Alone at last, my love.’

‘Alone with you, dear Attica!’

‘You like it here?’

‘Well, it is kind of novel … Is it – you know – science or art?’

‘Both, my love. Science and art. The two disciplines, once parallel, here unite. There’s been nothing like it before.’

She gave a small laugh. ‘I’d think not! Does it need much – well, power?’

His chair trembled slightly about him. ‘Power? Until the War, there wasn’t this much power available. Only the prolapse of other dimensions, other universes, into ours allowed us to broach entire new energy-systems. You explain to her, Benchiffer …’

His voice was trailing away, amplification fading. But the faithful Benchiffer, perspex-encased, was already at hand, scooping up his master’s wilting sentence like some sensitive plant, applying to it the unction of his own calcareous personality. ‘Yes, madam, this aponeurotic floor is maintained in stasis by a power-drain from some of the newly opened-up universes. The energy quotients appear to be roughly in equipoise, so that one year of the floor’s existence probably drains one year from the entropaic-output store of an entire universe.’

‘I see … You mean we actually shorten people’s lives by us being here?’

‘Well, lives do tend to shorten anyway, ma’am, even with no one there meddling.’

Benchiffer fell back, more pallid than ever, aware he had transgressed beyond his brief – to expound science – into dealing with matters coming within the domain of ontology and philosophy. Not that there was much to choose between any of them nowadays …

But Attica Saigon Smix seemed unaware of the transgression. His eye-like lenses took in the synclastic horizons all about him, and were refreshed by them. Here was peace from the rabid systems he nominally controlled, peace and a hideout the like of which had never before been devised.

He watched, chair-supported, as henchmen brought out holoscillators. In as much as he was capable of deriving pleasure through the intricate man-mechanism interfaces of his receptors, he derived pleasure from seeing the holoscillators come on.

They came on now, warmed, as the henchmen hurried out of the way. A lithoponic mist formed, bodied forth, boiled as if cupellation were in process, and objects took shape within the uneasy cloak of it – trees, flowers, benches, marrow plants male and female, forts and little fortresses, music boxes and barrel-organs, roundabouts, homes for cows and doggies.

‘Benchiffer!’

‘Sir!’ Benchiffer twinkled as he moved, toes rotating like casters in the perspex.

‘That passage from that poet …’

Benchiffer remembered. A constant threat of instant demolition proved an ideal mnemonic in all situations.

‘Shakespeare, sir … “The great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind …”’

‘As this lot appears, I guess their equivalent is sort of disappearing in some other universe,’ said Loomis. Her husband patted her for her cleverness. Also, he liked the poem, even if it didn’t rhyme.

The pageant was growing rapidly substantial. Suddenly, it was there. The cow homes and the cows, the trees, the little gay buildings, the huge butterflies, all in motion, bright as a lip in a dream, covering – yeah, covering the whole scab-devouring floor of space.

‘Want to walk, my love?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ She wanted to walk when he did. Always. She was nice. So this was the paradise he had invented for her. Loomis. Love.

The cameras followed them, silent as hepatitis, drinking it all in, recording for posterity and their own delectation the slow stroll among these objects of Attica Saigon Smix’s invention. The trees were not trees, the butterflies not butterflies, the cows not cows, the buildings not buildings. They were delicate simplifications, pastiches of trees, butterflies, cows, and buildings, done in simplified shapes, executed in primary colours. The melons and flowers lying at their careless feet were detachable, embodied extracts of abstracts based on elementary pictures in nursery frescoes. Peace and infantilism met, with a smacking but pure kiss.

‘It’s nice here …’

‘Good for you to get away from business.’

‘Aren’t the cows cute?’

‘I just love their pretty little dangling bells and – uh, udders. You’re a clever old thing, Attica, did I ever tell you that?’

Every day she told him that. It was the secret of both their successes.

A cow was waddling by them, hat on head, gaudy melon-flower in chops, rocking quaintly from side to side. Three-dimensional and entirely touchable – rideable, even. Hygienic, too, of course. No defecations, no monstrous eructations of vile wind. Just a holobject, conjured by machines invented in the technological computer-laboratories of one of Smix-Smith’s subsidiaries.

And the yokel figure also waddling towards them was no more than a holman, also three-dimensional, entirely touchable, hygienic. Man, hat, comic smock, pipe, clogs, all of one inorganic substance, a projection as tangible, as much of the physical world as oak, and far less unmanoeuverable. It touched its comic floppy hat, blew a little chugging pasteboard smoke-ring from its corncob, and produced a message from its daisy-embroidered smock.

‘Benchiffer, read it.’

Benchiffer took the wafer, held it in photoelectric hand, and intoned: ‘Gall-bladder to Rupture Six. Regret Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero became nondetectable time-refererents 03071255T. Jupiter Police Five-Star Alert and Exo-Systems Search in Code Areas Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, and Conquest. Full Emergency. Possible coordinates follow message. Suggest Red Rupture despatch dopple repeat dopple subiter Gall-Bladder Suite Beta. All parameters Bilious repeat Bilious advised. War footing. Transcendent. Jupiter Five-Star Alert. Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, Conquest. Red Rupture. Reddleman. QLLTX5973328764983AA448. Four-second destruct. Reddleman. Gabbice. Gall-Bladder Rupture Six.’

‘Is it important, darling?’ Loomis asked.

The four seconds was up. The holman was blanked for a moment as the wafer destructed.

‘I’m Red Rupture,’ Attica Saigon Smix said, fingering certain keys on his chair. He turned slowly round, beginning to perambulate back through the tent-shaped trees towards Micromegas. He signalled to Captain Ladore, watchful at the gangway.

‘What’s it mean, darling?’ asked Loomis. She was all female; in her adolescence, she had liked to shower in company with her male cousins, and with her sister, Glamis. It had proved the beginning of a very cleanly way of life.

‘It’s that scab-devouring spy-bell near Jupiter that we’ve been keeping tabs on. It could do us no harm – we just didn’t know who owned it. How does it vanish just like that? When I get to Gall-Bladder – Oh, Ladore! Is it possible to project a dopple of me to Gall-Bladder from this location?’

Immaculate Ladore was a projection himself, one of the multiple embodiments of Computer Complex detached to serve – and survey – the master of the Smix-Smith universe.

‘It means double transcendence,’ Ladore replied. ‘Micromegas carries the necessary equipment. We could perform the operation in ordinary space. Here, in this continuum, we lack energy. We shall have to tap the floor – it’s pure energy ready to hand.’

‘Get with it.’ But the companalog had anticipated the order; as the boss rolled up the gangway, syphon cables were snaking down, taking a bite into the space-floor.

He looked back. She fluttered a hand. Ever the loving wife.

Another companalog was waiting inside, guiding him down to Trexmissions Bay. Orderly movement, high-level activity, low-order sounds, non-smells – the entire synthetic, synapse-speeding gestalt of a multi-space sunship. Pent with emotion, null-emotion, and the fastest static known to man. Hyperthyroid, hythritic, the perfect kinematics of non-perceivable mobility in n dimensions. Real men, fake men – holmans, companalogs, cyborgs, androids, robots, down to espergdummies – all with a purpose not entirely or entirely not their own – even the real men, so far as ‘real’ was a term any more with coordinates in any actual world, drugged or gutted in some way or hooked to electroidal reflex. Eyes everywhere, and some anxious eye-movement. But never gaze meeting gaze. Never eye-contact. Deflection saved reflection.

They brought him reverently to an intolerable prone position and swung the massive dopplegangster ovens round about his frame.

A technician said, and a slight tendency to hairiness along the side of the neck suggested he was a real man, however controlled, ‘You know, sir, that you will have to rest here in lightly comative condition while your dopple is away? The life-death interface could be somewhat critical over the proposed distance.’

‘Understood.’ No baby-talk for these men. ‘Can you peel off an extra dopple to keep my wife happy, keep her company?’

‘We could peel off a half-dozen under normal circumstances.’ Dangerous talk to Smix of Smix-Smith, the normal circumstances being understood to refer to people in sound health, making their way along the mulcting trajectories of life unaided by excessive servos. ‘But we might find in the present case that doubling dopplers could lead to hyperemesis and actuality-decay. What we can do is take a soul-sliver and duplicate on the holoscope, to form a semi-project. Then we’d use companalog transjects to project speech transferences based on your recorded impulse-patterns.’

Faithful, detesticled Benchiffer was at the wizened elbow to render the technical jargon down into boss jargon.

‘You might find yourself in excess of critical, psyche-wise, if you projected more than one dopple. But they can take a still-moment-transfix and give it pseudo-life and speech by souping it up through computer-project channels, using your life-channels from the banks.’

‘Will that thing be any good for Loomis?’

‘It could repeat yourself – itself – a bit.’

‘It might keep her happy. Let’s go. Gall-Bladder.’

The ovens began to radiate. The old body they contained, yeah, and all which it inherited, began to dissolve and fade …

…Leaving behind on the floor-world a double which moved slowly out in the fake sunlight among the nursery properties to greet Loomis, tasty of hand and lip and gesture …

…And projecting through the incomprehensible mathematical intricacies (so complex that they were only marshalled in orderly impulses in one special maroon-red-coded section of computer-complex’s primal think-bank and in no human think-tank) separating a rather problematical here from a rather problematical there a capable and angry-alert dopple Attica Saigon Smix into the high (and highly fortified) chambers of a subterranean building in Easeaboard, N.A., otherwise known in the day’s code (leaving this special definition of ‘day’ to be unravelled by others) as Gall-Bladder.

The guys in Gall-Bladder were still sweating blood about the whereabouts of the mystery spy-bell.

That spy-bell – known to its occupants, with whom we have shortly to deal, as Doomwitch – marks with its disappearance the appearance of catastrophe in my narrative.

My job, as I see it, is to relate the events in some sort of order, to produce a linear continuance which I believe can be perceived in the haphazard-seeming flow of chance, motive, and encounter. The next generation, less wedded to ideas of causality and effect (‘liberated by the neuro-sciences’, as they would claim!) will have to reinterpret the whole damned tangled business for themselves.

At about this time, I was wheeling across the courtyard at Slavonski Brod Grad with old George Hornbeck, when he said something interesting on the subject.

It was mid-morning, everywhere was quiet. Most of the distinguished guests we met at the party were still recovering from the evening before. Becky was up and about, radiant as ever – but meditating at this hour, as was her habit. Only Dinah Sorbutt, comfortably and almost completely pregnant, sat on a teak bench with her feet up in the sun and had nothing to do.

‘Durrant, I was talking to Becky last night,’ George told me. ‘Profound girl, my daughter. We were talking about whether there was a pattern to life, and it was a fairly sober discussion. Becky said she could always console herself by seeing a pattern – wallpaper, she called it – so that, even when things were bad, she knew something better was coming.’

‘It’s a young girl’s view,’ I said. ‘But Becky has real sensibility – in that respect she takes after you.’

‘I don’t know about that. I’m old and I miss England. I can’t believe Britain’s gone. I’m more conscious of the awful rifts of life than of its pattern. England is one of the rifts. And, you, Durrant – do you mind my saying it?’

‘That I lost both legs in the war? How can I mind?’

‘You face up to it well, my boy. And you use your prosthetic wheels well. Becky and I were wondering … how far it indisposed you mentally for action …’

‘I manage better than Mike’s younger brother, give me that. You know, I suppose, that he stays alone in their place in California, on some drug or other? He’s about my age, he got both his legs shot off, too – part of a pattern, Becky might say. But I’m not like him, George – in circumstances, maybe, but not in reaction to them – I’m more like Mike, I’m going to do something with my life.’

George smiled and nodded, looking down at the path, glancing at his watch. Soon it would be time for us to work.

Slavonski Brod Grad was not always a place of merriment. The parties were growing fewer as the economic situation deteriorated.

George Hornbeck and I fought our own little battle against the monolithic state threatening to engulf the world once the Cap-Comm Treaty was really a going concern.

We published creative pornography. Much of the material, mainly in the form of comic strips, was supplied by our Brazilian ally, da Perquista Mangista. We were backed by Brazilian money as well.

Our one-room offices were in the castle. We called ourselves P.P.P., which stood for Pornography Permissive and Progressive. Strangely enough, the idea had come from Russia, where their samizdat, or do-it-yourself publishing, led the world.

Our puny blow against machine-culture was done by machines which mainly ran themselves. We could afford a few minutes more in the fresh air.

‘Let’s sit on a bench and sun ourselves,’ George said. ‘It’s a traditional old man’s occupation. We don’t have to talk to Dinah. She’s a foolish woman. I wonder why she will tell nobody who the father of her infant is?’

We sat down together, and he started to discuss paternity. He did ramble sometimes. Then he said, ‘Your other burden is the loss of your parents. I know your mother is doing good work on Mars, but she should be here with you and Choggles. Choggles is getting too precocious for her own boots … No, that wasn’t what I meant to ask you. Durrant, what are you intending to do with your life?’

Well, why not tell him?

‘I’m intending to write a novel. I’m not interested in holoplays, and pornography has its limitations. I want to write a good old-fashioned novel, with no more ambition in it than to reflect pleasure and disgust in what I see round me.’

At that time, I was not entirely serious. I did not entirely intend to write a novel, merely to keep old George, whom I regarded highly, content. Certainly, I did not intend to write this novel. But, the neuro-scientists declare, every human act can be analysed in chemical terms; so perhaps that conversation predetermined this book.

I hereby determine not to intervene in the narrative again – or not overtly. But, bereft of my own legs, I intend to play a long-legged God – the new kind of god, god of creation, slave of the creation it has created, as man has now become slave of the systems he created, according to the new neuro-philosophy. For – why not admit it – I’m vexed already with my task: by what scale of values is it more worthwhile to create or read a novel, even one with real people in it, than to opt for hallucinations provoked by root, as does my dark obverse, my brother, over in California? – Except in this: that drug-dreams cover old ground, and look back; I try to look forward, to encompass new thought.

Accordingly, I will travel with my characters all round space and time. If I do that, I will also travel into their thoughts. Why not? Mind is now proven an epiphenomenon of space and time! You see I write a story on deterministic principles.

The first flutter of this came to me as I sat in the sun with George Hornbeck, for I said, ‘I’d like to try and invent what others think. Thought has always seemed to me easier to understand than action.’ (And there I finish telling what I said.)

He gave his dry laugh. ‘Understanding is a relative expression. But we can all of us always do with a little more of it. Go ahead, Durrant, see what you can do for us – and yourself!’

He left me, walking quite strongly across the wide courtyard, an old man missing England.

IV

Orbiting the sun in a region of space somewhere (not to put too fine a point on it) between Mars and Jupiter, was the space vehicle known to its enemies as Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero. To the D.N., and to its occupants, it was known as Doomwitch.

The occupants numbered ten humans, plus a very efficient computer. The ship was built by the Dissident Nations – those who could not or would not enter the World Government umbrella offered by the Cap-Comm Treaty. Most of the structure was Japanese-made, except the computer, which was a Danish model, an IMRA40, and the engines, which were Yugo-Hungarian.

Most of the crew were American. Four of them were conscious, while the rest lay in semi-deep, just three degrees Kelvin above BAZ (Biochemical Activity Zero), conserving air, nutrients, and power.

Of the four who retained, to varying degrees, that peculiar state called by its possessors ‘full consciousness’, we have met one before – Dr Glamis Fevertrees, last seen with Zoomer arranged tastefully about her feet. She still wore his pendant round her neck.

Also conscious was the cool, dapper, and scholarly Professor Jules de l’Isle-Evens, once a high-ranking scientific adviser to the EEC in Brussels before the EEC signed on with Cap-Comm, whereupon de l’Isle-Evens, an independent man, had joined the D.N.

The other two aware crew-members were Guy Gisbone, who, like many other technical men, had been involved with the massive Operation Sex-Trigger under the aegis of Auden Chaplain, before WWIII; and the perky and spotty Dimittis, who was referred to – not always behind his back – as ‘the cabin-boy’.

All four were busy. None was happy.

Doomwitch was the first D.N. spy-bell to be launched, whereas the Cap-Comm powers had virtually the free run of space. Its appointed task was to maintain constant watch and chart of all Cap-Comm space-going operations and feed them back to Tokyo, the new D.N. capital. But it had been detected by enemy posts near Jupiter almost before taking up position.

The enmity between Cap-Comm and D.N. was not yet formalised by anything so crass as a war-footing – indeed, nations still remained embarrassed at finding themselves on the opposing side to nations with whom they had been allied in WWIII, only three years before. But a state of tension existed, which the unscrupulous para-combine of Smix-Smith took full advantage of.

Guy Gisbone and the glamorous Dr Glamis lay on couches on their stomachs – not the most comfortable of positions for Gisbone, a well-fleshed man with plenty of belly – surveying the trajectories of shipping in the region of Mars. They had six monitors to watch, most of them filled with blank space most of the time, any one of which could have its contents switched to one of two larger screens if the contents proved important enough.

The profusion of screens caused a certain amount of headache. In addition, Jupiter, as omnipresent to Doomwitch as a hunch on a hunchback’s shoulder, was causing a static storm – Jupiter IV being in transit – and distorting images.

In the lab behind the observation bay in which Glamis and Gisbone were working, Jules de l’Isle-Evens sat with lightbrush and screen, working on an arachnoid-like polygraph, the coordinates of which he was plotting from a notebook.

Dimittis was cooking flapjacks.

All four joined in their computer-song.

GLAMIS

The inter-reactions of the biosphere

Proceeding at their statutory pace

Produced an ocean-vat of amino-acid.

From there the stages, difficult but placid,

That led us upwards to the human race

Are now deterministically clear.

JULES

The next step onwards has an equal clarity.

Like ripples on a lake-face interlocking,

Each stage becomes more complex than the last,

Governed by mathematic law. Thus, fast,

We recognise the new scheme time is clocking;

Computers have with mankind now gained parity.

QUARTET

Yes, this is the riddle that peasants and commuters

Put to each other in Nineteen Nine Nine

As they dig up their fields or they drive in a line –

As they slump by their holocubes or go to dine out –

Yes, this is the riddle that peasants and commuters

Put to themselves in that terrible moment of doubt –

‘Are we compos mentis enough for computers?’

GISBONE

The biochemic interweaving force

That we call Nature, aeons back devised,

From cell and jell, computers light enough

To work effectively and fast, be tough,

And utilize a power-source micro-sized –

Computers called the human brain, of course.

DIMITTIS

Their brains began to take the world and mark it

For conquest by platoons of eager tools.

The latest tool – how clever can you get?! –

Thinks clearer, faster, than the brains do yet.

In truth, it makes them all look floundering fools:

They gone and priced themselves out of the market!

QUARTET

Yes, this is the riddle that girls, boys, and neuters

Put to each other in Nineteen Nine Nine

As they look to the future and try to divine

If it’s worth procreating or even mating this year –

Yes, this is the riddle that girls, boys, and neuters

Put to themselves in that terrible moment of fear –

‘Are we compos mentis enough for computers?’

Glamis restored a lock of hair to its correct position and turned again to her screens. Combinationist politician’s hostess during her first marriage, priestess in the Swinging Church of Jesus Christ’s Free Will during her second, subjective manipulationist in defiance mensiatry during her third, now she was a jill-of-all-trades in the expanding post-war world during her final divorce.

She looked good, younger than her sister Loomis, and with slightly less reptile ancestry under the eyes.

‘It appears to be a Smix-Smith tight-beam traveller on Six,’ she told Gisbone, rattling off coordinates and switching magnifications.

‘Got it,’ Gisbone said. A faint dotted trace arced across his screen, with blackness behind it. Then the whole picture broke and flared into colour. All the other screens before them did the same. They were confronted by a row of late Kandinskis.

‘Switch to L-Beam,’ said the computer calmly. Even on the alternate system, the Kandinskis remained, vibrating vigorously.

Gisbone had already hit the alarm button.

Glamis locked her monitor and switched to tape. She rolled over to Gisbone’s couch to watch, or help if necessary.

De l’Isle-Evens let the cobweb graph ride on into darkness and switched his own link through to the observation panel.

Dimittis allowed a flapjack to burn and, swallowing another, ran through from the galley.

‘Check chronology!’ Gisbone gasped.

‘Checking,’ de l’Isle-Evens said quietly.

They watched the battle on the screen – momentarily, until a metal mouth spat copy and spoke.

‘Chronology check. Space-time coordinates X on Alpha. Date line variant, dip minus zero zero eight three forty-one gaffs. Trace-subject now subjectivated at Western time 1999, March twenty, thirteen twenty-one hours.’

They didn’t even waste time looking at each other. De l’lsle-Evens was rattling on the master-terminal.

‘That’s it,’ he said, reading off the passing figures from his screen. ‘It’s another time-prolapse. The Smix-Smith tight-beam traveller we were tagging has disappeared, together with its surrounding continuum … minus 008341 gaffs … that’s – here it is –’

Dimittis had got there first, using his greasy fingers.

‘The ship prolapsed two years, eight months, and a bit,’ he read out. ‘The slip is on the increase.’

‘Two and two-thirds years! Okay, that’s it …’

The watchers rose from their couches, their faces sober. Behind them, disregarded, little encapsuled lives gestured under the glazed jelly surfaces of the monitors. The four of them moved into the lab. Glamis sucked her generous lower lip. Nobody spoke. Their life-forces flowed out, mingled with the banal hum of sophisticated machineries, spread to join the enveloping currencies of the universe.

‘Someone had better put it into words,’ Gisbone said. ‘This is the second time. We can’t write this off as some unaccountable electronic fault. We can’t blame this one on Jupiter playing up …’

He had to force himself to go on. ‘For reasons we have yet to discover, aberrations are developing in the universe time-flow. The hitherto uninterrupted, ceaseless, remorseless flow of time is disrupted …’

‘At least the disruption appears to be extremely localised,’ Dimittis said.

Glamis gave a laugh with a hint of hysteria in it. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not start adjusting to such a – an unutterable situation!’

‘Besides, this extreme localisation, if it goes on, may prove to be the most uncomfortable feature of the phenomenon,’ de l’Isle-Evens said, thoughtfully.

‘How come?’

‘Well, if we all – the entire solar system nexus – aberrated backwards on the time-scale, we’d experience little practical effect, surely? The star-fields would change if the backward shift were really enormous but, if the shift were slight – just a few years – why, then it might be extremely hard to detect any effect from such an aberration.’

‘Say, think of that, imagine the whole solar system slipping back in time to the beginning of the universe … And nobody even noticing … What a song you could make out of that idea!’

‘Dimittis, stick to the point,’ de l’Isle-Evens said severely. ‘Besides, there is evidence to suggest that the system would – were such an unlikely event to occur – the system would not long survive bombardments of proto-radiations.’

Brushing this idle speculation aside, Gisbone said, ‘In any event, we can’t stay here. We have the proof that this unprecedented event is happening; that a Smix-Smith ship got zocked back in time before our eyes. We must take the proof to earth and present it to the D.N. Congress – the forthcoming meeting at Friendship might be a useful opportunity. If anything can be done, it must be done before – Well, we don’t dare guess what sort of madness might seize people if this temporal deterioration continues.’

‘Agreed, we must try to get in touch with the right people,’ Glamis said. ‘But I can guess what has caused this time prolapse – as I suspect you can. World War III, of course. For five years, all the big powers shot holes in space and thought nothing of it. Their immense nuclear disturbances ruptured the fabric of space-time – not just space but interrelated time as well. This is the ultimate in pollution – mankind’s pollution of the whole continuum!’

It did not need a psychiatrist to understand why there was an odd ring of triumph in her voice. We feel good when our worst fears have been confirmed. Temporarily, at least.

The ruin of the space-time universe was enough to make every last right-thinking conservationist cheer, as they went, slipping, falling, plummeting back into their own histories, shrieking ‘I told you so-o-o-o-o …’

The crew of the Doomwitch stood around, each perhaps wishing that it had been his or her turn in semi-deep when this happened. They would have to go back to earth in the flesh to bear convincingly tidings of such weight, gloom, and eccentricity. Yet all of them on the station, stiffs included, were renegades – worse, neutrals – hunted by one feuding party or another of the thousand ragged-nerved splinter groups left bobbing in the wake of the Big War. The fun wasn’t going to be fun.

‘Well,’ said Guy Gisbone, hitching his trousers.

The alarm buzzed, raising vibrations along the sutures of their skulls.

Glamis was the first back to the screens.

‘Oh, the holy ruptured everlasting scab-devouring sainthoods!’ she exclaimed.

Every screen was showing Kandinski, continuous performance.

The terminals were mouthing babble.

Loudspeakers squeaked and gibbered.

Metallic mouths spat read-outs of unmitigated jabber-wocky.

‘This just has to mean –’ she said.

‘It can’t mean –’ Gisbone said.

‘Don’t say we’ve slipped back in time, too!’ Dimittis groaned.

De l’Isle-Evens was not usually a man of action. But the shuttered visual-observation ports were behind his terminal, above the serried comp-buffer-units and drum-memories. He was there in a couple of strides, and had his hand on the flip button.

He paused.

They watched him.

He flipped the button and the shutters folded back as quick as a child’s eyelids.

Jupiter had gone!

They were peering out into empty space.

The disoriented instrumentation chattered like rutting marmosets.

V

Mike Surinat said, ‘The apostles of apostasy are slaves of obedience to an iron whim.’

‘Obedience is for talent; only genius disobeys involuntarily.’

‘I disobey, thou disregardest, he revolts me.’

‘You’re out! You changed the person! It was “disobeys”, not “disobey”, right, Mike?’

‘Right, you’re out, Monty! Your turn, Dinah.’

‘Oh – “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking and giving pain in the neck.”’

‘The Infinite has reality only for immature minds.’

‘She who minds the baby rules the man.’ That was Choggles Chaplain, Mike’s ten-year-old niece. She spoke while looking at the swollen form of Dinah Sorbutt, so noticeably viviparous.

‘She who weeps least, weeps best.’

‘We are proverbial! “Least said, least mended!”’

‘“A waterproof cup is a wonder only if mended.” Not very bright, I’m afraid!’

‘Hm. I wonder whoever the troublemaker was who invented the idea of equality?’ Dinah.

There were now only three of them left in the game, so it was Mike’s turn again.

‘“Impossible! Wonderful! So what?” are the three cries uttered at the birth of anything ever invented.’

Dinah Sorbutt squealed with delight. ‘You’re out, Mike! You broke the rules! You took two words from my sentence, not one!’

‘Not at all. One of your words is always sufficient, Dinah. I took “Invented” merely.’

‘And “ever”! What about lousy old “ever”? You took “ever” too, so you’re out, and that just leaves Choggles and me.’

‘But, my darling bitch, you didn’t say “ever”. You said, did you not, “whoever”? And “whoever” is not “ever”, any more than “milestone” is “tone”. You are out for challenging incorrectly!’

‘Oh, your cruddy, non-sparking, complex, complicated word-games! How I loathe them! The world disintegrates and we play word-games!’

‘Had the whole world been innocently occupied playing my cruddy complex, complicated – whatever that is – word-games these last few years, it would not now be in its admitted state of disintegration.’

The vexed Miss Sorbutt, though heavily into the last days of her pregnancy, jumped to her feet and dived into the pool. The spray she sent up scattered itself in random but equable distribution over Mike Surinat and his niece.

‘Want to go on with the game, Choggles?’ he asked her.

‘No, thanks, Uncle. You’re always so shirty if I beat you. Isn’t he, Durrant?’ I was sitting with them and had been out of the running for some rounds.

‘If you beat me, it is because you cheat by introducing school slang into your jejeune sentences,’ Surinat told her. ‘I am “shirty” – to quote the latest example of what I mean – with your cheating, not your winning.’

‘So you say!’ She too jumped up. He was after her but she got away. She followed Dinah into the great octagonal pool.

Night like a great sea lay over their slice of the world. The pool itself, milky with underwater light, floated in the dark. Swimming in it was rather like being in a titanic womb. Perhaps Dinah Sorbutt found comfort in some such reflection. She drifted lazily and mountainously as Choggles butterflied up to her.

‘Can I feel the baby kicking again? Nobody’s looking, except perhaps my brother, and he won’t mind.’

‘Choggles, darling, please leave me alone. I’m not just a baby machine.’

‘I’m supposed to take an interest! Oh, please, Dinah! After all, I may have to go through the ghastly business myself one day. You’d think they’d dream up a less cumbersome way of carrying on the human race. I mean, you look ever so enormous …’

She duck-dived under Dinah, to come up panting on the other side.

‘You may only get one chance to bear a child,’ Dinah said, ‘now that the government controls fertility in both men and women.’

‘Well, that’s progress. Anyhow, it’s saved us from an overpopulated world, hasn’t it? That – and the millions slaughtered in the war.’

Dinah said primly, ‘Many people think the fertility-switch reduces humanity to the level of machines and animals.’

‘We can’t be both machines and animals,’ Choggles said, reasonably. ‘In any case, you needn’t lecture me about all that. People of ten really dislike being lectured, you know. And besides, it’s wasted on me. Don’t forget that the Schally-Chaplain switch is named after my father, though we don’t talk about him.’

‘I know all about that, child. I’m just tired of your following me. Go and follow your uncle Mike, if you’re so mad about him.’

‘Don’t be personal – I didn’t ever ask you who the father of your foetus was, did I? Though of course I’ve guessed! Are you going to have the child delivered in a state maternity home?’

‘Of course. It’s compulsory.’

‘You know why that is, don’t you? It’s so that they can fix the baby with the switch! Mike told me.’

‘Stop it!’

‘You could get it done privately at a private clinic, I should think – you know, like those gorgeous old abortion-clinics you sometimes see in holodramas.’

Dinah started to swim slowly away. ‘That would be illegal. When the computer opens the fertility-switch to allow you to conceive, the fact is recorded, and they check to see that you go to a proper maternity home.’

‘Does it hurt the baby – the insertion of the Schally-Chaplain switch, I mean? My father did the operation on me himself.’

‘Oh, go away! I don’t want to talk about it!’ Dinah started kicking and splashing.

‘You’d better not over-exert yourself, Dinah, or you might give birth in the pool! Do you think that’s possible? Perhaps it would grow up amphibious …’

In the end, Choggles swam disconsolately away. Communication was really only in its elementary stages. She would have to say that to Mike; he might laugh, but Mike’s laughter was always partly against himself.

As she thought about Mike, she saw he had been standing at one end of the pool. Now he was turning, disappearing into the darkness.

He also, at one remove, had been thinking of parturition and the processes of species-continuance which appeared to be mankind’s sole blind objective. Now that science had finally taken control of that objective, after centuries of blundering attempts to do so, the human race would be subtly and inevitably changed.

He walked away into the dark. Behind him, the pool was a drop of amniotic fluid and a beacon for moths – except that moths and similar night creatures were fended off by a bumper beam a few metres above ground level.

Above night level floated the sound of Slavonski Brod guests, their idle laughter, their carefully directed nothings. The mating game and the horrid struggle for existence were here brought to heel – reduced to flirtations and mild egocentricities.

Surinat avoided the crowd about the pool-side bar and turned among the trees. Darkness he loved. Darkness was more suited to the human condition than daylight. There would come a time when darkness was continual, unpunctuated by any little local lamps. The idea rested him.

Of course, that time was billions of years ahead. A lot of suffering had to be got through before that. But the human brain – the human brain was always enfolded, under its thick encompassing bone, in darkness.

If your brain started seeing flashes of light, it meant a tumour; the pressure of the tumour acted like light. Darkness was the relaxing of pressure, of the pain of being human.

He should be amusing Monty. Monty was his honoured (and famous) guest. Monty knew all about pain, too, being an artist, however phoney an artist. Perhaps the fakes felt that inner human hurt even more keenly than genuine artists. There was something so alien about being genuine …

He should be amusing Monty. But Monty was not to be trusted – he worked for the enemy. A deal made with Monty might give Mike, and through him the Dissident Nations, a line to Smix and the World Executive Council, the people who had pushed through the Cap-Comm Treaty.

As Mike walked along the neat cobbled path by the outer garden wall, his feet brushed straggling bushes of verbena encroaching the path. The pale diaphanous smell flooded his senses, carrying him back to – to where? As long as it was back, the senses accepted it as happiness. But he smelt something else in another pace or two.

Cigar smoke?

‘Who the pox are you?’ He had his eraser out, was balanced on his toes, felt ready for crisis, peered ahead at a stocky figure leaning against the garden wall.

‘Sorry if I startled you, guv.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m only having a quick puff, guv.’

‘You are trespassing, you savvy that?’

‘Don’t be like that, guv! I’m only having a quick puff!’

Surinat had a light on the fellow now. A small huddled man in coarse clothes. Local. A fisherman perhaps. Mild, but absolutely unshaken and still drawing on his cigar butt. A real dodgey smelly old man with the arse of his trousers hanging down.

‘How did you get in here? Leave at once before the guards throw you over the wall.’

‘Okay, guv.’ The man vanished.

A whiff of Balkan tobacco, daintily over-ridden by the pallid lemon of verbena.

Then Surinat understood. He gave a peremptory chuckle (just for the record), but he was shaken.

He walked along the path more slowly until he reached the promontory. There he sat, looking over the dark Pannonian Sea. Clusters of lights could be seen over on the Hungarian shore. And there were individual lights, bobbing above the boats that carried them.

It was a fine place in which to feel the old ache, and to worry about the broken people for whom the war would never properly be over: his fatherless brother, Julian, his fatherless niece, Choggles. And me, I suppose. And himself. I have no legs, but I can guess his thoughts!

He was not submerged in meditation too deeply to hear approaching footsteps and the murmur of voices. He recognised the girl’s tones first: Becky Hornbeck, who had come under his wing, and whom he increasingly loved.

And the man was Monty Zoomer.

Mike stood up and made himself known. If they wanted a touch of romance on the promontory, he would politely leave them alone. He knew from experience how well the promontory worked.

‘Don’t go,’ Monty said. ‘Let’s sit and talk. We can both cuddle Becky, can’t we?’

‘Just don’t be too grasping,’ she said.

In the darkness, the two men looked not unalike in stature. But Surinat was more fine-boned, would probably grow thinner as he approached middle-age, as had his father before him, and many of the long line of Surinats. Whereas Zoomer, of nondescript origins which included a Danish-Irish-Dutch mother and a Jewish father called Zomski, had put on meat lately, success adding stature to him.

Indifferently, Surinat settled on the short crisp grass; the grass was fed on salt spray and felt like yak fur. He put his arm round Becky. Even had she meant nothing to him, ah, the warmth, the precious fugitive human warmth of a female body – the one tolerable organisation in a universe of random heat-exchange!

Zoomer, kicking out his legs, was already talking. Subject, as usual, himself.

‘Black was the colour crayon I used to like using most when I was a kid. Guess it was yours too, eh, Surinat?’

‘Yellow.’

‘Well, it means something, I guess. I used to sit out in the courtyard and draw and draw, while my dad was there, writing his endless television plays. See, we weren’t disgustingly rich like the Surinat family. “Nice blue sun” – remember that catch-line? It was famous for years, everyone said it, back before the war. My dad got it straight from me, working away on my crayoning. It was just something I said, aged two and a bit, sitting there out in the courtyard with Dad and my brother. “Nice blue sun!” He’d pass the crayons out the box to me one by one – trying to control my life even then!’

Zoomer laughed at his own recollections. ‘We didn’t like being out in the courtyard all that time, but it was so crowded in the house – the Zomskis used to take in boarders, you know … Humble beginnings, Surinat, humble beginnings! Big blokes from little acorns grow. My brother used to peep in on boarders making love.’

‘Was that your brother Dimittis?’ Becky asked.

‘Funny how he got that name. See, his real name’s Nanko, after his grandfather. But when I was little, all I could call him was Nunkie. The beginnings of creativity, in a way. Distortion and creation – you should know that, Surinat. Everyone called him Nunc, then, and so it went –’

‘Talking about creativity,’ Mike said, ‘can we do a deal on a new holoplay? You have the equipment, I can finance, we can both contribute ideas.’

‘I’m very busy at the moment, see. I’m something like a universal property. Frankly, I’ve got more money than I know how to do with, so your offer hasn’t all that attraction …’

‘I know you’re big time, Monty, but wouldn’t you say that your id-projects are getting – well …’

The night took the pause easily in its dark-throated wing.

‘Go ahead and say it, then, Surinat. How are my projects getting? You weren’t going to say debased, were you?’

Mike was staring through the dark at him. Zoomer was no more than human size, slightly underweight, in fact. Nothing monstrous. And intellect the size of a pinhead. How come he had such undeniable talent? – because it was talent as well as ego.

Yet there was so little to like or even notice about Zoomer, except for his wild hair and the pendant thumping against his plump little courtyard-bred chest.

‘No, I wasn’t going to say debased … What made you think that? I was going to say attenuated. As is only natural, you aren’t the creative force you were five years ago. You’ve given out so much, of course you need an infusion of fresh imagery. I saw one of your holomasques last –’

‘Look, friend, I give myself, right? I give myself! People want what I got. I keep the imagining popular. It’s for the masses, not for you in your precious secluded castles. You just pull in, I expand, I give out, I give the public what they want, okay?’

‘The argument of how many second-rate artists! A self-righteous way of saying that you pander to the lowest common denominator for as much cash as you can get!’

‘That’s the jealousy of an artist who’s never rated, right? And it’s the cruddy snooty toffee-nosed attitude of someone who has a lousy opinion of his fellow men. Why the suppurating sandbag shouldn’t I coin the copper while I can?’

Surinat laughed with at least a semblance of good nature. ‘Next you’ll be saying that commercial success is a proof of merit. Sorry, Zoomer, I’m only needling you!’

Zoomer was on his feet, jumping up and letting Becky collapse against Surinat.

‘What right do you get to needle me? Think you’re so good just because you’ve inherited this big fat ugly castle –’

‘Very different from your neat plastic dreams, isn’t it?’

‘– I tell you I serve the people. Better than all your word-games, your trifling. The times are all upset, who knows how much, and all you do is sit around all day and kipple about with words!’

‘My decadent view is, I fear, that words are the basic building blocks of man’s society. The universe could not begin to exist in any meaningful way until an intelligible word was spoken.’

‘Plasticine! Pictures were first, and popularity is too a test of merit. What other test is there?’

Becky said quietly, ‘You say you serve the people, Monty. I understood you served Computer Complex, and that they pay you?’

Zoomer said quietly, ‘So precisely what?’

‘So it’s not a question of popularity. The public accepts what C.C. dishes out.’

‘Aw; you’re all ganging up on me! You rich layabouts are all the same. You don’t know what it’s all about, you don’t know what it is to fight for existence. I’m going to get a drink. What’s so awful about working for the government, anyway?’ His dark figure merged with the dark.

Becky leaned more closely against Mike.

‘He likes blowing his top. And when he does, he’s even more lavish with his words than you are!’

They lay down side by side, hands soothing each other, lips gently nibbling, legs eventually intertwining.

‘By the far Pannonian Sea …,’ she quoted, and he took it up.

‘… that ocean

Born again from Mesozoic springs …’

They were both repeating it now as they lay embracing, while the sea came slobbering up to their feet.

‘We felt the quickening life of earth’s heart burst

As it had ever done, in change and motion,

From the great morning of the world when first

All baser things enjoyed life’s sacred thirst;

And dawning humans in the primal light

Ran to the shore and in the waves immersed

Bodies and minds. Then had they not won right

To build technologies against life’s true delight;

Simple and rough, they yet were flowering things –

But oh, the fruit, the tasteless fruit, man’s autumn brings!’

He had adapted it from verses of his favourite poet, hastily during the war, when the Pannonian Sea was still growing and there was some doubt whether the Grad would not disappear like a sword beneath its inundating waves. Now equipoise had been reached, as their two voices, furred by being kept low, reached in harmony the dorised cadence of the last line.

Becky had memorised the verse for her own pleasure, not to please him, not to please anyone but herself. Becky Hornbeck was a free person, containing within her the lack of stridence belonging to true independence. And she owned the Koh-i-Nor.

On the word ‘brings,’ their mouths came together with a sort of nimble precision which suggested both had been this way before and found in it a pleasure perhaps beyond the scope of words. Two independences merged to create a greater.

VI

A small wet thing, dripping uncontrollably into the depths of a Mexican dogwood, had been crouching near enough to overhear the conversation between Surinat and Monty Zoomer. When Zoomer turned and flounced from the scene, the crouching shape arose and followed damp feet almost noiseless on the path.

Lights, lanterns, the modest floodlit façade of Slavonski Brod Grad, broken fretwork of pampas and variegated laurel, acacias made cavernous by fireglow, silhouettes of special people, the ambience of the pool, massed blacks where cypresses made mirror of ground and sky, the blaze of windows, primitive glow of serried barbecues, turrets gloomy above it all – through the broken scenes, each companionable in its own tent of night, went Zoomer, daintily picking his way, alone.

And Choggles Chaplain shadowed him in her swimsuit. Suspicious, sinister, unsuspecting, prepubertal.

She was hardly likely to guess at the sophisticated equipment packed into a tooth-sized package and embedded just beside Zoomer’s fifth vertebra. It gave him eyes in his back. And he had already seen that he was followed.

He went through the oleander patio, up the shallow fountain-adorned steps, in at the side door. When Choggles, still dripping, slid around the portal, she saw him already starting up the wide sweep of staircase, his head eclipsed by chandelier. She lurked behind a potted palm.

When he reached the top step, she ran lightly up behind him, every limb shining from its internal spring.

The door of his suite slammed almost in her face.

‘I disobey, thou disregardest, he revolts me,’ she quoted to herself.

She had a cat’s sixth sense that there was something amiss with Monty. Without asking her adored uncle, she knew he felt the same. And she was determined to find out what the something was.

People were about. Their presence filled the absent rooms. The gloomy old Grad had been converted to a small pleasure-dome. Many of the guests – and Choggles knew which – belonged to Surinat’s I.D.I…. But she was not going to turn to them for help. While her uncle was cuddling that soppy Becky, she would solve his problems single-handed. Then she could marry him when she grew up.

She moved to the elevator, took it up half a floor, flipped a press-stud, and opened the secret entrance to Mike’s suite. A second door challenged her. She gave it her vocal pattern with a few off-key notes from the aria ‘Slander Is a Whispering Zephyr’ from The Marriage of Figaro, and it opened to her.

Mike Surinat’s silliest holman greeted her – a replica of himself, dressed in velvets and silken hose, with an emerald as big as a visiphone dial sulking on a ring on one finger. Surinat always said that this alter-ego dressed better than he did, thereby relieving him of the necessity of dressing at all.

‘You have come secretly to me at last, Choggles! At last you have perceived that a real man is too gross, too coarse, for an ethereal little creature like you! With me, you can taste forever the delights of a chaste and refined love!’

‘Oh, stop it, you know you’d hate me when I reached puberty, you little Lewis Carroll, you! Let me through to the watchroom. I want to view the occupant of Suite Fourteen.’

She swept imperiously past the holman with a penultimate drip from her swimsuit. The holman retired to his nook. To save power, he would switch himself off until a human presence activated him again.

Choggles was now in the heart of the castle. An elevator carried her down to its bowels in one great peristaltic rush.

Here were the old dungeons, where malefactor and innocent alike had once awaited the pleasure of the judiciary system of Austria-Hungary, while rotting off like autumn plums into their boots. Now, there was not so much as a trace of footrot; indeed the ranked machines, the grills, the blank panels, the gentle drip of time like plasma, gave the place an antiseptic if not cheerful air. Choggles went over to the console governing spy-views of all castle rooms, and switched on.

It was a day of holiday, or else there would have been at least a technician on duty down here. But Surinat had gone off technicians. He now preferred to live quietly here; she had faith in everything her uncle did, and so did not question his preference, adoring the colossal fantasy of Slavonski Brod Grad.

In the very first month of the war, the great dam at the Iron Gates on the Danube had blown out of existence. It was hit by thermonuclear bombardment from the forces supporting capitalist-communist union. The mighty cliffs of the southern Transylvanian Alps had been thrown still higher. For a few months, volcanic activity convulsed the whole area as a result of the bombardment. It was Europe’s first sniff of coming Armageddon.

Such was the tumult of the war that the news penetrated only slowly that the course of the Danube was irredeemably blocked. Its egress to the Black Sea was gone. The Danube began to backfill, its floods tumbling out darkly over rich wheatlands. That grand old fortress of legend and song, Smederevo, Smederevo that presided over the twilight of a state, Smederevo took leave of five centuries of history and sank below the smacking waves. Soon the whole Pannonian Plain was flooded, from as far west as decaying Varazdin, as far south as Slavonski Brod, and as far north as Balaton, the Bakony Forest, and the foothills of the Slovakian Ore Mountains, in southeastern Czechoslovakia. So was re-created the ancient Pannonian Sea, such as had existed through aeons of pre-historic time.

Slavonski Brod Grad was almost empty at that time. The bailiff had called Surinat, asking how he should deal with streams of refugees arriving at the higher ground on which the ancient pile stood. Mike Surinat had flown in to supervise at his father’s wish – and had shown little inclination ever to fly out again. The immense work of modernisation had gone on about him while he camped in a tower and the refugees lived in shacks in the inner court.

Lattices flicked in the view-screen, fled forward, vanished. A clear picture snapped into existence. A fish-eye lens showed Choggles the main compartment of Suite Fourteen.

Zoomer was having his drink. He clutched the glass in one hand. With the other hand, he fondled his immense pendant.

‘Symbolic!’ the child said aloud. ‘Dolly, I wonder if he’s going to do anything dirty!’ She bounced up and down in her seat.

His movements, however, were clean and boring – as are the movements of most people under observation, Choggles had found, perhaps because expectations of something more secret, more astounding, are always high.

Zoomer picked up a hand control and flicked on the holoscillator in the corner of his room. A mist formed and dispersed, and a cute little panorama of mill and barnyard was revealed, glowing under a hayrick-sized sun in cereal-packet colours. Choggles recognized the artwork as Zoomer’s own – after all, he was the original cereal-packet man in 3-D, until the government computer complex bought him up. She was probably looking at his latest creation.

Through the fish-eye lens, with its axial distortions, Zoomer’s farmyard looked rather exciting. It had outré angles of roofs and barn bearing down on pasteurised cows with pristine rumps. Farmhands stomped to infinity with macabre step. Dr. Caligari had gone Disney. Weather maxima was amazing, too. As in all Monty Zoomer works, the mise en scene was as de-atmospherised as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Amusing things were happening in the barnyard, like a funny little fat man falling off a tractor into a butt of rainwater. Zoomer was always for action: an adequate substitute for wit, as many an impresario has found, to the subsequent betterment of his bank balance.

Behind Choggles, a soundproof door chugged closed.

Someone was entering the watchroom!

Disturbed, vaguely guilty, Choggles switched off the viewer. Electronic orders of zoomastigina swirled in a second’s glorious life.

‘Mother!’

A wave of relief and pleasure and surprise swept over her. She had thought her mother on Mars.

Leda Chaplain was generally referred to by gossip-writers as ‘statuesque’, although which statue they had in mind was never revealed. She was tall, certainly, and spirited, always well-groomed, and possessed a rather horsey face. An equestrian statue, possibly.

Looking remarkably like her photos, she advanced into the room. She extended her arms to her daughter, who ran into them.

‘Mother! I thought you were on Mars!’

‘I was on Mars. As you see, I am not now!’

‘Oh, Mother, how lovely to see you! Come and talk to Becky and Mike. They’re – well, they should be around soon …’

‘I’d love to see them, darling, but this is rather urgent. It’s you I’ve come for.’

Choggles looked up at her, curiously.

‘Is anything wrong?’

‘It’s your father. They’ve found him.’

‘But Father’s dead …’

‘We thought he was dead … He’s alive, in one of the concentration camps in the Syrtis.’

Leda had taken up war work. When the war ended, she shipped to Mars to do what she could for the millions of unfortunates who had been incarcerated in concentration camps there. The confusion, the disorganisation, the endless involvement of misery, which confronted her then was still not entirely vanquished. By the end of the war, the survivors of the camps had, in many cases, no relations or homes on earth to return to; or they were too enfeebled to make the journey. Or they had lost their identity under the personality-changes inflicted on all of them during the start of their incarceration. Mars was an Auschwitz planet.

‘Father alive …’ The child could not take it in. She stared almost in disbelief at her mother. Leda looked tired and empty. ‘Can we go to him? Is he … very different?’

‘I haven’t even had the chance to see him myself. I was about to leave Mars when the news came through to Nixonville. The proof seems incontrovertible. I want you to come back to Mars with me. I’m going to need help – you know the hatred with which Auden is generally regarded.’

‘Of course I’ll come …’

Her mother took her hand. ‘I hoped – I knew you’d say that! Can you come at once?’

‘Exactly that, my pet. At once. This has to be cloak-and-dagger, darling, if you don’t mind. I want us to leave together at once, without telling anyone, not even your uncle.’

She pouted. ‘I’m not going to leave without kissing Mike, or telling Becky and her dad I’m going. Think how worried Mike would be if I just disappeared. Mummy, what’s this all about, anyway?’

‘Child, do as I ask! I know best! The universe is a place of perpetual struggle. Secrecy is essential.’

‘If you’re going to get shirty …’ She backed away, eyes anxiously searching her mother’s face, thinking how the desolation of Mars had entered that well-known face.

‘I’m sorry – I’m not shirty. I’m just nervous. Listen, there are many nasty sinister things going on between the planets. Lives are in danger, yours and mine included, as wife and daughter of a famous and much-hated man. Let’s go! Once we are safe in space, you can beam signals to your uncle to your heart’s content. I’ll speak to him too, and explain everything over the scrambler.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I give you my word.’

‘I can’t go in this sopping suit!’

‘There are clothes in the ferry.’

‘Where’s the ferry?’

‘Come with me – I’ll show you.’

She hesitated. ‘Mother, I’m scared.’

‘Everyone’s scared these days – with good reason. Mars is even worse than earth. But I’ll look after you. Your father needs us, that’s the prime consideration.’

So she went, clutching her mother’s thin hand. Her mind swam with the electronic zoomastigina of confusion. The war had been over so long … And her mother and father had been separated before the war. Still, there was compassion. Her mother was a compassionate woman, grim though she was at present. Mars … Dolly, what would she do on Mars, what could she do? Still, it would be an adventure. Her friends would be jealous. But Mars … in this sort of holothriller way …

She was hardly aware of how they slipped together from a rear entrance to the Grad, of climbing into a car and driving to a desolate stretch of coast, where a machine waited. Nor did she realise at first that this was an ordinary flying machine, unfitted for space. In fact, it looked rather like Monty Zoomer’s, the little she had seen of it from a distance.

Numbly, Choggles admired her mother’s skill at the controls as she slumped back into an embracer, feeling it wrap her gently and seductively round. They lifted, banking and swinging grandly as they climbed. Momentarily, she glimpsed through the nearest port breakers marking a dark shoreline, followed by an elaborate small flower in the night. It was Slavonski Brod Grad, by the far Pannonian Sea, warm, civilized – as civilization went – filled with kindly and intelligent people who loved her (as well as the other anti-life kind)., ..

And the blossoming sight, as it swept by and was replaced by the stupider nullity of night jerked her out of her passive mood.

She jumped up, shaking off the sucking embrace of the chair.

She was confronted by a pair of glassily triumphant eyes.

‘Mother!’

‘Sit down!’

She balanced herself against the animal surge of acceleration, light on her small feet, still shedding a warm trickle of water down one leg. A line from a favourite poem of her uncle’s tracered past her attention and she blurted a frightened misquotation.

‘You are, but what you are –’ And the words triggered their own answer.

‘You’re not my mother! You’re a holman!’

She started to scream, unloading the decibels from her ten-year-old lungs right into that frozen expression of triumph. By then, they were no more than a zoomastiginum in the upper air.

VII

‘Harry! Harry!’ he bawled through the pouring rain. He’d bawled for his father like that, in the old man’s dying days. Maybe it just meant he was a shouting man. ‘Harry, for crabs’ sakes!’

Harry looked round, weary on his little eminence, still clutching his tired sword. Mud and blood were plastered over the clothes plastered to his meagre body.

‘What d’you want?’

‘Harry, if you weren’t doing this, what would you most like to be doing?’

Harry and Julliann roared with laughter. They came and stood closer bellowing like old warthogs at Julliann’s joke. Gururn looked on puzzled, false mouth plastered across his splanchnocranium. He did not get the joke. He did not get jokes.

‘Hey, Conan, relax, will you? – There’s a lull in the storm!’ Harry the Hawk called to him.

Gururn made some sort of a gesture, shambled towards the others, his two human friends in this inhuman desert. The fight between their gigantic ally Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback still continued over the ridge; the elements were joining in, though growing somewhat atmospherically bored. Every clout across shoulder, every fall on to knees, every whistling grunt from Whistling Hunchback, was celebrated in the heavens by a lightning flash, a gust of north wind, or a fresh cloudful of hail, slung down like chilled buckshot over the battle area. Now and again, an eagle was tossed in too, Boreas-borne. As if intelligent enough to be scared, Harry’s goshawk clung bedraggled to its master’s shoulder, clung there throughout the battle with the ravening Adolescents, losing the odd feather, croaking the odd word of encouragement to its master.

The trio stood there resting, steaming.

Mud poured past their ankles like failed chocolate pudding.

‘Let’s go and look at the guys we killed. It will help keep our spirits up,’ Julliann said. He also had a theory that he should always keep his mob on the move, so that they had no time to think about their wounds or his failure to pay their social security.

They trudged over high ground, exchanging mud for old heaped snowbanks such as pervaded the whole region they had been travelling for so long. The spectacular suns overhead lit them like automobile headlights, making the going ever more difficult.

‘I’ve passed nothing but ice and snow for days,’ Harry grumbled.

‘A cup of really hot toddy could change that fast.’

The first corpse they came on was lying face down in the dirt. Julliann rolled him over with a boot. It was an Adolescent, encased in green leather. Half his cranium and the top of his face had been sliced off – not wisely, maybe, but too well. Julliann bent suddenly and prodded with a finger in the mess of semi-rigid brains.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you’re going to wash your hands afterwards. What are you looking for anyway? Chewing gum?’

For answer, Julliann came up with a little amber bead. It rolled into the palm of his hand. He held it for inspection under Harry’s nose. Harry moved his nose away. The bead was shaped like a sucked lozenge with two thread-fine horns only a few microns long protruding at one end.

‘Know what that is? It’s an electrode.’ A fleck of gory matter still adhered.

‘How did you know it was there?’

‘I didn’t know, but I expected to find it. I saw one in spilled brains yesterday, and another a couple of days back.’

‘You must look harder at spilled brains than I do, partner! Now tell me what an electrode is!’

He yelled as he finished speaking and swung his sword. Julliann and Gururn turned as two and stood shoulder to shoulder. The feral kids were coming again, driving their bull-roaring bikes, their Yankos and Vastis, skidding over the firm, armed with lances and pikes.

‘Whoooooooargh!’ roared Gururn. He was a good man to have in a battle, pronunciation apart.

The contest was less unequal than it looked. On this broken ground, the bikes made poor going and could, with a well-timed swing, be kicked over. So long had the Adolescents been in the saddle that they were helpless out of it, their atrophied leg muscles unable to bear the weight of their bodies. Also, they had a tendency to run each other over and stab one another in the back with the lances.

It was sixty-four against three. The three triumphed, but it was a dashed close-run thing. Afterwards, they threw a torch on the broken bikes and sat round warming themselves by the fire.

‘We could sleep if only it would get dark. Not a chance of that with all these suns clattering round the sky.’

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Gururn mumbled.

Julliann did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to think the logic-line of his life clear. It made no sense even to him, and he was no intellectual. There had been other occasions when he had tried to sort things out, and something in his brain just switched –

‘Julliann, Julliann …’

He roused, was himself again.

‘Let go of my shoulder, what are you shaking me for?’

‘Are you all right? You flung that bead away and then you went sort of numb.’ Harry’s face was flecked with fear and saliva.

‘Let me alone!’

They saw a sausage-shaped mauve sun rising at a rate of knots. It took some believing. The supernatural nature of the struggle between Milwrack and the Hunchback was being somewhat overplayed.

He slumped before the crackling Yankos in misery, not daring to think about what he needed to think about but could not. How many people had had electrodes inserted in their skulls?

He jumped up and screamed, ‘They’re meddling with us! They’re meddling with us! This isn’t happening! It’s an illusion!’

Harry jumped up, scattering goshawk. ‘That again! You need a toddy too, pal! Let’s go and join up with Milwrack.’

The goshawk circled round the snowed-out rocks, banking tightly, returned, and took a really firm grip on Harry’s right shoulder.

VIII

Smix-Smith was not so much a corporation, more a lay of wife, an executive wit had once remarked, referring to his uxorious boss. But humour was filed swiftly away when the boss was on the scene. Even when the boss’s dopple was on the scene.

Attica Saigon Smix came out of Texmissions Bay at full tilt, caused by the incline of the ramp on winch his stretcher ran. The vehicle had its course prescribed. It moved through the mammoth building at close to the speed of sound, down corridors of widths scarcely greater than its own, now and again shuttling into elevator shafts and becoming its own cage. It ejected its human-type burden into a small but luxuriously appointed presidential anteroom to the World Executive Council Chamber, code name Beta Suite, on the walls of which hung, among other treasures, the only Tiepolo etching in the world to survive the war. It depicted the flight into Egypt, and was reputed to be more valuable than Egypt itself.

As he climbed off the stretcher, Attica Saigon Smix was greeted by one of his secretaries for state, Chambers Technical Dictionary (for so this intellectual bonhommous kyllosic Christian member of the Kikuyu tribe had been christened). Chambers offered a potted version of recent events. Attica Saigon Smix read it through swiftly as he entered the council chamber.

Ten members of the executive were present round the traditional table. He wondered if any of them had been through the same complicated transcendences to get here as he. Lights above their seats indicated whether they were their own embodiments or projects of some kind. Two members were companalogs, which C.C. found it convenient to have around. For the rest, all had been top-level members – until a few fleeting but crippled years ago – of various national governments. Ex-red Russian and Chinese sat down with ex-democratic Netherlanders, ex-fascist South Americans, and Americans like Dwight Castle.

Just as they had once carved up their own states, these men now settled down amicably with their ex-enemies to carve up the earth, together with such portions of the solar system as could be appropriated, discovering with alacrity and pleasure how much they had in common with their opposite numbers.

How H.G. Wells, Wendell Willkie, and other valiant dreamers of the World State would have cheered to see their vision made actual! At last, major ideological differences, the plague of the twentieth century, had been healed. ‘United World!’ was now slogan and actuality.

Those few billions of human beings who objected to the idea for one reason or another were being eliminated as fast as the limited efficiency of the postwar machine allowed.

As he settled into his seat at the head of the table, Attica Saigon Smix nodded to the committee. One curt nod. All-inclusive. Nevertheless, though all were included, some were more included than others – in particular, John Thunderbird Smith.

John Thunderbird Smith was one of the companalogs, a particularly terrible-looking creature owing to the glittering spodumene substance in its ocular proprioceptors and a certain graininess in its overall composition. (It had been known, when debate was most furious, to become just slightly, nastily, translucent, as if in grisly warning of what might happen to the rest of them.)

Taking the initiative immediately, Attica Saigon Smix said, ‘This is Full Emergency. Some of you are present here in person. Don’t let it occur again. Send dopples of some kind. You are not expendable.’ He wondered if any of them had found a bolt-hole as safe and undetectable as he and Loomis had done. ‘Let’s begin business.’

Before the words had separated from the carbon dioxide in Smix’s mouth, Thunderbird Smith said, ‘We must not leave Beta Suite until we have decided how to program C.C. best to meet the crisis.’

‘Which crisis is that?’ Sun Hat Sent, the Chinese delegate, inquired.

Briefly, with a human gesture of despair, Thunderbird Smith let his gaze rest in pleading on the oil portrait of Sir Noël Coward on the wall next to the Tiepolo.

‘The crisis, the new crisis we have code-named Operation Seventh Seal. You have summary sheets before you. They may be précised as follows, and I accept the deductions arrived at by C.C. in its AAA8334 circuits, the circuits dealing with malfunctions of the external world. During the War of Continuance, as most of us recall, certain thermonuclear components were employed in hand weapons upwards to full-scale multi-megaton aerial-descent devices. The most noteworthy of such devices delivered adjacent to this region was an old-fashioned but considerable device of a fission-fusion-fission type, targeted on the ground-area Iron Gates Dam, power-centre of the Yugoslav-Hungarian Dissident Powers.

‘That device was comparatively clean. Nevertheless, its fireball generated a temperature estimated at 500,500,000 degrees Celsius.

‘Later devices attained higher maxima, temperature-wise. The Operation Snowfire raids on Luna, in which the satellite was completely destructed, attained maxima somewhat in excess of one hundred times the Iron Gates device, being able to draw on a planetary core as an additional heat-boost.’

‘This is steam under the bridge – let’s get to the nitty-gritty, Smith,’ said Savro Palachinki, who had been old-fashioned enough to arrive in corpore sano.

With another agonised glance at the features of the man who had provided inspiration for the nomenclature of the chambers they were in, Thunderbird Smith continued, ‘This background is an integral part of the Seventh Seal emergency. In brief, improved devices developed towards war-end attained temperatures and pressures in excess of a thousand times those found at the heart of the sun. We are still living with – and in some unhappy cases dying with – the after-effects of these remarkable scientific achievements.’

The one woman at the table, Sue Fox, said, ‘At the risk of interrupting, Mr Thunderbird Smith, we should consider these aspects of the victorious peace as no longer worth discussion. After all, the cease-fire was signed over five years ago. As I have explained before, the radio-turbulences of spaceflight, the continued escalation of world temperature norms, the electrical storms, and of course the soaring cancer-death rate – in which we all take such a sympathetic interest – these after-effects of war, vexing though they may be, would nevertheless have manifested themselves, even if perhaps less dramatically, in the ordinary course of progress, war or no war. And we should therefore cease to keep harping on them!’

‘Sue’s right,’ Dwight Castle declared. It was the only thing he said all meeting.

Attica Saigon Smix saw that it was time he took over. By diving in before the woman stopped talking, he was on launch before Thunderbird Smith, who, being machine and therefore not quite human, remained silent.

‘We have harped on these things, these malfunctions of our biosphere, simply because they are now part of existence. Now we have to deal with a malfunction of one section of the environment about which we know remarkably little, whose functionings we have hitherto been privileged to take for granted: time. Time itself. The orderly function of time, just like the orderly function of space, has become at least partially inoperative through what you, Mrs Fox, chose to call “the ordinary course of progress”.’

‘C.C. is already working on the formulae of space-time displacement,’ Thunderbird Smith said. ‘Unfortunately, figures are scarce as yet. Positive proof of time-malfunction was provided by the disappearance of a spy-bell under observation near Jupiter in Code Area Conquest, its exact coordinates being known. Our reasons for believing that the spy-bell lapsed with the space surrounding it into a matrix hitherto regarded as past are set in Technical Appendix Two A before you. Please familiarise yourselves with the exposition.’

‘What other evidence have we that this highly unlikely state of affairs obtains?’ Savro Palachinki asked, biliously eyeing his way through the photostats of formulae before him. ‘How do we know this isn’t just C.C. chuntering to itself, with all due respect?’

‘We already take for granted other sorts of space opened up to us through the space-holes or warps caused by intensive gravitational thermonuclear disruption,’ Attica Saigon Smix said. ‘We must now face up to the fact that more than one time can exist simultaneously.’

‘Reports coming in confirm that remark,’ Thunderbird Smith said. ‘I am receiving formulations of them now.’ It did not stop him talking.

‘We believe we know exactly what phenomena in the physical world we are witnessing. Data are arriving to buttress the hypothesis. Thus it ever was in the history of scientific understanding. Right here in Beta Suite, only three days back, we discussed a report from State Swazi in Africa which announced that a Zulu War had broken out in Transvaal. The Zulu nation was being led by one Cetewayo. C.C. dismissed this at the time as unfounded, the factors being unbased in reality. It now seems as if a whole portion of South Africa has slipped back into the year 1879 or thereabouts.’

Chambers, standing behind Attica Saigon Smix, passed him a note. Smix read it out. The icterus index of his face was high. His hand trembled. ‘Gentlemen, Russian troops advancing through East Rumelia are strongly attacking the Ottoman Army outside Adrianople. This report is dated 18th January 1878… Where and what is or are East Rumelia, the Ottoman Army, and Adrianople?’

‘Russians! Russian troops? This concerns me!’ Savro Palachinki exclaimed, jumping up from the table. ‘I will send a dopple in my place as soon as inhumanly possible!’

Another note passed on from Chambers.

‘Gentlemen, control yourselves. Britain has invaded Afghanistan. Remember Britain?’

Someone else was jumping up and crying out.

Another note.

‘Please, gentlemen – the Khedive of Egypt has been deposed by the Sultan, whoever those persons may be, in a communiqué dated June, 1879.’

‘Carapace! It’s spreading!’ Sue Fox cried. ‘We’ll find ourselves in the last century before we know it!’

Another note handed forward by the unflustered Chambers.

‘Please, friends – order! Montenegro has occupied Dulcigno. Does anyone know where Dulcigno is? Or Montenegro? Please?’

‘C.C. will straighten matters out!’ John Thunderbird Smith called above the din. ‘These anomalies in the functioning of the natural order cannot be tolerated.’

His last words were lost in a general hubbub of alarm, as Attica Saigon Smix announced the outbreak of war in the Pacific, Chile against Bolivia and Peru.

IX

The little figures identifiable as Smith, Smix, Palachinki, Fox, Sent, and others glowed and gestured in a monitor screen far away, safe below the stately pile of Slavonski Brod Grad.

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