Eighty Minute Hour
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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!’