Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss
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as they would claim!) will have to reinterpret the whole damned tangled business for themselves.
At about this time, I was wheeling across the courtyard at Slavonski Brod Grad with old George Hornbeck, when he said something interesting on the subject.
It was mid-morning, everywhere was quiet. Most of the distinguished guests we met at the party were still recovering from the evening before. Becky was up and about, radiant as ever – but meditating at this hour, as was her habit. Only Dinah Sorbutt, comfortably and almost completely pregnant, sat on a teak bench with her feet up in the sun and had nothing to do.
‘Durrant, I was talking to Becky last night,’ George told me. ‘Profound girl, my daughter. We were talking about whether there was a pattern to life, and it was a fairly sober discussion. Becky said she could always console herself by seeing a pattern – wallpaper, she called it – so that, even when things were bad, she knew something better was coming.’
‘It’s a young girl’s view,’ I said. ‘But Becky has real sensibility – in that respect she takes after you.’
‘I don’t know about that. I’m old and I miss England. I can’t believe Britain’s gone. I’m more conscious of the awful rifts of life than of its pattern. England is one of the rifts. And, you, Durrant – do you mind my saying it?’
‘That I lost both legs in the war? How can I mind?’
‘You face up to it well, my boy. And you use your prosthetic wheels well. Becky and I were wondering … how far it indisposed you mentally for action …’
‘I manage better than Mike’s younger brother, give me that. You know, I suppose, that he stays alone in their place in California, on some drug or other? He’s about my age, he got both his legs shot off, too – part of a pattern, Becky might say. But I’m not like him, George – in circumstances, maybe, but not in reaction to them – I’m more like Mike, I’m going to do something with my life.’
George smiled and nodded, looking down at the path, glancing at his watch. Soon it would be time for us to work.
Slavonski Brod Grad was not always a place of merriment. The parties were growing fewer as the economic situation deteriorated.
George Hornbeck and I fought our own little battle against the monolithic state threatening to engulf the world once the Cap-Comm Treaty was really a going concern.
We published creative pornography. Much of the material, mainly in the form of comic strips, was supplied by our Brazilian ally, da Perquista Mangista. We were backed by Brazilian money as well.
Our one-room offices were in the castle. We called ourselves P.P.P., which stood for Pornography Permissive and Progressive. Strangely enough, the idea had come from Russia, where their samizdat, or do-it-yourself publishing, led the world.
Our puny blow against machine-culture was done by machines which mainly ran themselves. We could afford a few minutes more in the fresh air.
‘Let’s sit on a bench and sun ourselves,’ George said. ‘It’s a traditional old man’s occupation. We don’t have to talk to Dinah. She’s a foolish woman. I wonder why she will tell nobody who the father of her infant is?’
We sat down together, and he started to discuss paternity. He did ramble sometimes. Then he said, ‘Your other burden is the loss of your parents. I know your mother is doing good work on Mars, but she should be here with you and Choggles. Choggles is getting too precocious for her own boots … No, that wasn’t what I meant to ask you. Durrant, what are you intending to do with your life?’
Well, why not tell him?
‘I’m intending to write a novel. I’m not interested in holoplays, and pornography has its limitations. I want to write a good old-fashioned novel, with no more ambition in it than to reflect pleasure and disgust in what I see round me.’
At that time, I was not entirely serious. I did not entirely intend to write a novel, merely to keep old George, whom I regarded highly, content. Certainly, I did not intend to write this novel. But, the neuro-scientists declare, every human act can be analysed in chemical terms; so perhaps that conversation predetermined this book.
I hereby determine not to intervene in the narrative again – or not overtly. But, bereft of my own legs, I intend to play a long-legged God – the new kind of god, god of creation, slave of the creation it has created, as man has now become slave of the systems he created, according to the new neuro-philosophy. For – why not admit it – I’m vexed already with my task: by what scale of values is it more worthwhile to create or read a novel, even one with real people in it, than to opt for hallucinations provoked by root, as does my dark obverse, my brother, over in California? – Except in this: that drug-dreams cover old ground, and look back; I try to look forward, to encompass new thought.
Accordingly, I will travel with my characters all round space and time. If I do that, I will also travel into their thoughts. Why not? Mind is now proven an epiphenomenon of space and time! You see I write a story on deterministic principles.
The first flutter of this came to me as I sat in the sun with George Hornbeck, for I said, ‘I’d like to try and invent what others think. Thought has always seemed to me easier to understand than action.’ (And there I finish telling what I said.)
He gave his dry laugh. ‘Understanding is a relative expression. But we can all of us always do with a little more of it. Go ahead, Durrant, see what you can do for us – and yourself!’
He left me, walking quite strongly across the wide courtyard, an old man missing England.
Orbiting the sun in a region of space somewhere (not to put too fine a point on it) between Mars and Jupiter, was the space vehicle known to its enemies as Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero. To the D.N., and to its occupants, it was known as Doomwitch.
The occupants numbered ten humans, plus a very efficient computer. The ship was built by the Dissident Nations – those who could not or would not enter the World Government umbrella offered by the Cap-Comm Treaty. Most of the structure was Japanese-made, except the computer, which was a Danish model, an IMRA40, and the engines, which were Yugo-Hungarian.
Most of the crew were American. Four of them were conscious, while the rest lay in semi-deep, just three degrees Kelvin above BAZ (Biochemical Activity Zero), conserving air, nutrients, and power.
Of the four who retained, to varying degrees, that peculiar state called by its possessors ‘full consciousness’, we have met one before – Dr Glamis Fevertrees, last seen with Zoomer arranged tastefully about her feet. She still wore his pendant round her neck.
Also conscious was the cool, dapper, and scholarly Professor Jules de l’Isle-Evens, once a high-ranking scientific adviser to the EEC in Brussels before the EEC signed on with Cap-Comm, whereupon de l’Isle-Evens, an independent man, had joined the D.N.
The other two aware crew-members were Guy Gisbone, who, like many other technical men, had been involved with the massive Operation Sex-Trigger under the aegis of Auden Chaplain, before WWIII; and the perky and spotty Dimittis, who was referred to – not always behind his back – as ‘the cabin-boy’.
All four were busy. None was happy.
Doomwitch was the first D.N. spy-bell to be launched, whereas the Cap-Comm powers had virtually the free run of space. Its appointed task was to maintain constant watch and chart of all Cap-Comm space-going operations and feed them back to Tokyo, the new D.N. capital. But it had been detected by enemy posts near Jupiter almost before taking up position.
The enmity between Cap-Comm and D.N. was not yet formalised by anything so crass as a war-footing – indeed, nations still remained embarrassed at finding themselves on the opposing side to nations with whom they had been allied in WWIII, only three years before. But a state of tension existed, which