Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss
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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