Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss
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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