Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ the child said aloud. ‘Dolly, I wonder if he’s going to do anything dirty!’ She bounced up and down in her seat.

      His movements, however, were clean and boring – as are the movements of most people under observation, Choggles had found, perhaps because expectations of something more secret, more astounding, are always high.

      Zoomer picked up a hand control and flicked on the holoscillator in the corner of his room. A mist formed and dispersed, and a cute little panorama of mill and barnyard was revealed, glowing under a hayrick-sized sun in cereal-packet colours. Choggles recognized the artwork as Zoomer’s own – after all, he was the original cereal-packet man in 3-D, until the government computer complex bought him up. She was probably looking at his latest creation.

      Through the fish-eye lens, with its axial distortions, Zoomer’s farmyard looked rather exciting. It had outré angles of roofs and barn bearing down on pasteurised cows with pristine rumps. Farmhands stomped to infinity with macabre step. Dr. Caligari had gone Disney. Weather maxima was amazing, too. As in all Monty Zoomer works, the mise en scene was as de-atmospherised as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

      Amusing things were happening in the barnyard, like a funny little fat man falling off a tractor into a butt of rainwater. Zoomer was always for action: an adequate substitute for wit, as many an impresario has found, to the subsequent betterment of his bank balance.

      Behind Choggles, a soundproof door chugged closed.

      Someone was entering the watchroom!

      Disturbed, vaguely guilty, Choggles switched off the viewer. Electronic orders of zoomastigina swirled in a second’s glorious life.

      ‘Mother!’

      A wave of relief and pleasure and surprise swept over her. She had thought her mother on Mars.

      Leda Chaplain was generally referred to by gossip-writers as ‘statuesque’, although which statue they had in mind was never revealed. She was tall, certainly, and spirited, always well-groomed, and possessed a rather horsey face. An equestrian statue, possibly.

      Looking remarkably like her photos, she advanced into the room. She extended her arms to her daughter, who ran into them.

      ‘Mother! I thought you were on Mars!’

      ‘I was on Mars. As you see, I am not now!’

      ‘Oh, Mother, how lovely to see you! Come and talk to Becky and Mike. They’re – well, they should be around soon …’

      ‘I’d love to see them, darling, but this is rather urgent. It’s you I’ve come for.’

      Choggles looked up at her, curiously.

      ‘Is anything wrong?’

      ‘It’s your father. They’ve found him.’

      ‘But Father’s dead …’

      ‘We thought he was dead … He’s alive, in one of the concentration camps in the Syrtis.’

      Leda had taken up war work. When the war ended, she shipped to Mars to do what she could for the millions of unfortunates who had been incarcerated in concentration camps there. The confusion, the disorganisation, the endless involvement of misery, which confronted her then was still not entirely vanquished. By the end of the war, the survivors of the camps had, in many cases, no relations or homes on earth to return to; or they were too enfeebled to make the journey. Or they had lost their identity under the personality-changes inflicted on all of them during the start of their incarceration. Mars was an Auschwitz planet.

      ‘Father alive …’ The child could not take it in. She stared almost in disbelief at her mother. Leda looked tired and empty. ‘Can we go to him? Is he … very different?’

      ‘I haven’t even had the chance to see him myself. I was about to leave Mars when the news came through to Nixonville. The proof seems incontrovertible. I want you to come back to Mars with me. I’m going to need help – you know the hatred with which Auden is generally regarded.’

      ‘Of course I’ll come …’

      Her mother took her hand. ‘I hoped – I knew you’d say that! Can you come at once?’

      ‘Exactly that, my pet. At once. This has to be cloak-and-dagger, darling, if you don’t mind. I want us to leave together at once, without telling anyone, not even your uncle.’

      She pouted. ‘I’m not going to leave without kissing Mike, or telling Becky and her dad I’m going. Think how worried Mike would be if I just disappeared. Mummy, what’s this all about, anyway?’

      ‘Child, do as I ask! I know best! The universe is a place of perpetual struggle. Secrecy is essential.’

      ‘If you’re going to get shirty …’ She backed away, eyes anxiously searching her mother’s face, thinking how the desolation of Mars had entered that well-known face.

      ‘I’m sorry – I’m not shirty. I’m just nervous. Listen, there are many nasty sinister things going on between the planets. Lives are in danger, yours and mine included, as wife and daughter of a famous and much-hated man. Let’s go! Once we are safe in space, you can beam signals to your uncle to your heart’s content. I’ll speak to him too, and explain everything over the scrambler.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘I give you my word.’

      ‘I can’t go in this sopping suit!’

      ‘There are clothes in the ferry.’

      ‘Where’s the ferry?’

      ‘Come with me – I’ll show you.’

      She hesitated. ‘Mother, I’m scared.’

      ‘Everyone’s scared these days – with good reason. Mars is even worse than earth. But I’ll look after you. Your father needs us, that’s the prime consideration.’

      So she went, clutching her mother’s thin hand. Her mind swam with the electronic zoomastigina of confusion. The war had been over so long … And her mother and father had been separated before the war. Still, there was compassion. Her mother was a compassionate woman, grim though she was at present. Mars … Dolly, what would she do on Mars, what could she do? Still, it would be an adventure. Her friends would be jealous. But Mars … in this sort of holothriller way …

      She was hardly aware of how they slipped together from a rear entrance to the Grad, of climbing into a car and driving to a desolate stretch of coast, where a machine waited. Nor did she realise at first that this was an ordinary flying machine, unfitted for space. In fact, it looked rather like Monty Zoomer’s, the little she had seen of it from a distance.

      Numbly, Choggles admired her mother’s skill at the controls as she slumped back into an embracer, feeling it wrap her gently and seductively round. They lifted, banking and swinging grandly as they climbed. Momentarily, she glimpsed through the nearest port breakers marking a dark shoreline, followed by an elaborate small flower in the night. It was Slavonski Brod Grad, by the far Pannonian Sea, warm, civilized – as civilization went – filled with kindly and intelligent people who loved her (as well as the other anti-life kind)., ..

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