Enemies of the System. Brian Aldiss
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finish and get into the buses. Most of the others have already gone ahead.’
‘These old theories were nonsense, inevitably,’ Kordan said to her, taking her arm as they left the dining-room. ‘Medieval. Like alchemy.’
She regarded him with slightly raised eyebrows and a smile he had not seen before. ‘But alchemy led somewhere, Jerezy Kordan, Academician. It provided one of the foundations of scientific advancement. Whereas psychoanalysis was a dead end.’
‘Ah ha, then you are also familiar with these ancient and interdicted models. Psychoanalysis!’
‘It is part of my job to acquaint myself with what is forbidden.’
He looked searchingly at her. She met his gaze. He said nothing, and they moved out into the open. Kordan stood on the steps, breathing deeply as he looked ahead.
Buses waited like great slumbering beasts.
The exobotanist, Takeido, caught Kordan’s attention, coughed, and said apologetically, ‘It was a pleasure to listen to you talking at the breakfast table, Jerezy Kordan. Working on the Jovian moons, one is much alone. One thinks, one longs to talk…to talk about many things, such as the topics you touched on. May Jaini Regentop and I ride with you to Dunderzee?’
Kordan looked at the youth, as if thinking how young and thin he was. He watched the black eyebrows twitch nervously on Takeido’s forehead.
‘You are at liberty to choose any seat you wish in the bus,’ he said. ‘But language is much more precious and must be guarded. Better to be resolute than curious. “Resolution is the foe of deviation,” as the saying has it. I imagine that applies as much on Jupiter and Lysenka as on Earth.’
‘Of course…’ said Takeido, and swallowed.
‘Let’s get aboard the buses, then,’ said Kordan smiling. He nodded at Sygiek. She nodded contentedly back, and they walked down the steps, fully in command of their world, towards the waiting buses.
The gates in the fortified perimeter of the Unity Hotel slid open. Above them fluttered a banner with the device of the United System and the legend:
STRIVE TOWARDS THE SECOND MILLION YEARS OF BIOCOM-UNITY!
As the LDB rolled through the gateway, Sygiek noticed that she was seated next to the stocky man who had made the remarks about chessputers on the gulfhopper not experiencing glee. He nodded genially, as if they were old companions.
‘A session of idle sightseeing!’ Sygiek exclaimed to Kordan, turning away from the other man. ‘I have never done such a thing in my life, and half-doubt the propriety of it now. Days are more to be valued when fruitfully occupied.’
Kordan scrutinised her, as if trying to read her thoughts. ‘Don’t reproach yourself with such sentiments, Millia. We are not idle. We are on Lysenka to restore our energies, so that we can return to the System better equipped to work for it and to appreciate its values.’
The stocky man leant forward, clasping his hands between his knees, and said, addressing them both, ‘Don’t be too strict with yourselves, friends. Savour enjoyment as a positive force in its own right. Idleness has virtues of its own.’
‘Exactly what I meant,’ said Kordan, pleasantly. ‘Idleness restores our energies.’
The stocky man introduced himself as Vul Dulcifer 057, Chief Engineer responsible for the air-conditioning systems of Iridium, on Venus. He had a big hard head, with big hard features. Gazing out of the window at the passing scenery, he said, ‘Like everyone else, I am never idle. My work keeps me going thirteen E-hours a day, and I run various committees. “Utopia is sustained only by hard work” – I know the party slogan, don’t remind me. The System’s a machine. If a few of us have made it to this Classified planet, with all these degenerate capitalist animals running about, then we are of the elite, and I maintain that we have earned some idleness. I frankly see idleness as a just reward, not simply one more obstacle on the assault course of World Peace.’
As she watched and listened to him speaking, Sygiek thought that she and Dulcifer could never be compatible. He was as small and dark as she was tall and pale. He was thickset, with massive shoulders; his every movement expressed energy. The irises of his eyes were a dark sea-blue, rolling between black fringes of eyelash. His dark hair was sparse, and clung close to his square skull. She was aware as she watched the movements of his clearly defined lips of a disturbance within her, a disturbance chased by the reflection, ‘He regards Kordan and me merely as two standard products of the System, without minds of our own…’
‘To speak of idleness as a reward can lead swiftly to incorrect thinking, isn’t that so, Jerezy? Idleness can be no different on this planet from what it is anywhere in the System: a trap, a bait for deviationist ideas. How can those properties change? Creative idleness is a different matter.’
A hostess, rosy of cheek, with long legs and a warm smile, came down the aisle of the bus, pausing to exchange a word with everyone. She was trim in her red uniform; most of the tourists wore sloppy-maos.
‘Are you enjoying the primitive landscape?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it charmingly undeveloped? What an inspiring symbol of potential.’
‘Yes,’ said Dulcifer. ‘And at the same time we’re exercising our minds like good utopianists with an argument about the nature of idleness.’
Takeido and Regentop had been listening from the seat in front. The former turned and said to Dulcifer, ‘You seem to lack a little data, utopianist. You see, idleness is a physiological malfunction. It’s mistaken to treat it as a quality of mind, when injections can cure it as soon as it manifests itself.’
As he spoke, he kept glancing at Kordan to see how he was taking this speech.
A bureaucrat by the name of Georg Morits leant across the aisle and said vehemently, ‘You’re right there, but let me remind you that idleness is still sometimes manifested as a mental quality in unfortunate throw-backs to homo sapiens. I know. I have to deal with quite a few committals of that sort of person, in my line of business. I’m in an office in Moscow, you know. The city of cities.’ They did know. This dull person had been boasting during the banquet of how beautiful it was in Moscow, an old city which had been the capital of the first communist state and many times rebuilt. ‘You can be legally charged with being a homo sapiens, you know. It’s in the statute banks now.’
‘Not on Venus, it isn’t,’ said Dulcifer, sturdily. ‘That’s like charging an animal with the offence of being an animal.’
They made no response to that. They knew all about Venus, and the devolutionary tendencies of Iridium City.
‘We are straying from the point. If I could remind you of the historical background to this argument –’ Kordan began; but Sygiek cut him off, saying, ‘Shall we just forget this silly discussion?’
Kordan looked hurt, but Dulcifer said, smiling to remove the sting from his remark, ‘You are too repressive for vacation-time, Utopianist Millia Sygiek! I’d like to hear what your companion was going to say. Frankly, scenery bores me – but I’ve never lost interest in my fellow human beings.’
Warmth rose in Sygiek’s cheeks. She turned a gaze on him which would have melted iridium but she said nothing.
‘I was merely going to say – for the sake of the historical record – that those early genetic engineers who established homo uniformis, Man Alike Throughout, were the –’
‘Forgive me, Academician Kordan, but I am in technoeugenics, working on the Central Council,’ said Jaini Regentop, giving him her polite smile, ‘and you are not correct in your phraseology. Those genetic engineers were merely instruments of change in the great progression from homo sapiens to homo uniformis; they took orders. First had to come the immortal work of physiologists and the great endotomists – ’
‘Jaini, you should not interrupt Jerezy Kordan,’