Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss
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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.
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,