Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss
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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