Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss

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      She jumped up, shaking off the sucking embrace of the chair.

      She was confronted by a pair of glassily triumphant eyes.

      ‘Mother!’

      ‘Sit down!’

      She balanced herself against the animal surge of acceleration, light on her small feet, still shedding a warm trickle of water down one leg. A line from a favourite poem of her uncle’s tracered past her attention and she blurted a frightened misquotation.

      ‘You are, but what you are –’ And the words triggered their own answer.

      ‘You’re not my mother! You’re a holman!’

      She started to scream, unloading the decibels from her ten-year-old lungs right into that frozen expression of triumph. By then, they were no more than a zoomastiginum in the upper air.

       VII

      ‘Harry! Harry!’ he bawled through the pouring rain. He’d bawled for his father like that, in the old man’s dying days. Maybe it just meant he was a shouting man. ‘Harry, for crabs’ sakes!’

      Harry looked round, weary on his little eminence, still clutching his tired sword. Mud and blood were plastered over the clothes plastered to his meagre body.

      ‘What d’you want?’

      ‘Harry, if you weren’t doing this, what would you most like to be doing?’

      Harry and Julliann roared with laughter. They came and stood closer bellowing like old warthogs at Julliann’s joke. Gururn looked on puzzled, false mouth plastered across his splanchnocranium. He did not get the joke. He did not get jokes.

      ‘Hey, Conan, relax, will you? – There’s a lull in the storm!’ Harry the Hawk called to him.

      Gururn made some sort of a gesture, shambled towards the others, his two human friends in this inhuman desert. The fight between their gigantic ally Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback still continued over the ridge; the elements were joining in, though growing somewhat atmospherically bored. Every clout across shoulder, every fall on to knees, every whistling grunt from Whistling Hunchback, was celebrated in the heavens by a lightning flash, a gust of north wind, or a fresh cloudful of hail, slung down like chilled buckshot over the battle area. Now and again, an eagle was tossed in too, Boreas-borne. As if intelligent enough to be scared, Harry’s goshawk clung bedraggled to its master’s shoulder, clung there throughout the battle with the ravening Adolescents, losing the odd feather, croaking the odd word of encouragement to its master.

      The trio stood there resting, steaming.

      Mud poured past their ankles like failed chocolate pudding.

      ‘Let’s go and look at the guys we killed. It will help keep our spirits up,’ Julliann said. He also had a theory that he should always keep his mob on the move, so that they had no time to think about their wounds or his failure to pay their social security.

      They trudged over high ground, exchanging mud for old heaped snowbanks such as pervaded the whole region they had been travelling for so long. The spectacular suns overhead lit them like automobile headlights, making the going ever more difficult.

      ‘I’ve passed nothing but ice and snow for days,’ Harry grumbled.

      ‘A cup of really hot toddy could change that fast.’

      The first corpse they came on was lying face down in the dirt. Julliann rolled him over with a boot. It was an Adolescent, encased in green leather. Half his cranium and the top of his face had been sliced off – not wisely, maybe, but too well. Julliann bent suddenly and prodded with a finger in the mess of semi-rigid brains.

      ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you’re going to wash your hands afterwards. What are you looking for anyway? Chewing gum?’

      For answer, Julliann came up with a little amber bead. It rolled into the palm of his hand. He held it for inspection under Harry’s nose. Harry moved his nose away. The bead was shaped like a sucked lozenge with two thread-fine horns only a few microns long protruding at one end.

      ‘Know what that is? It’s an electrode.’ A fleck of gory matter still adhered.

      ‘How did you know it was there?’

      ‘I didn’t know, but I expected to find it. I saw one in spilled brains yesterday, and another a couple of days back.’

      ‘You must look harder at spilled brains than I do, partner! Now tell me what an electrode is!’

      He yelled as he finished speaking and swung his sword. Julliann and Gururn turned as two and stood shoulder to shoulder. The feral kids were coming again, driving their bull-roaring bikes, their Yankos and Vastis, skidding over the firm, armed with lances and pikes.

      ‘Whoooooooargh!’ roared Gururn. He was a good man to have in a battle, pronunciation apart.

      The contest was less unequal than it looked. On this broken ground, the bikes made poor going and could, with a well-timed swing, be kicked over. So long had the Adolescents been in the saddle that they were helpless out of it, their atrophied leg muscles unable to bear the weight of their bodies. Also, they had a tendency to run each other over and stab one another in the back with the lances.

      It was sixty-four against three. The three triumphed, but it was a dashed close-run thing. Afterwards, they threw a torch on the broken bikes and sat round warming themselves by the fire.

      ‘We could sleep if only it would get dark. Not a chance of that with all these suns clattering round the sky.’

      ‘Never seen anything like it,’ Gururn mumbled.

      Julliann did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to think the logic-line of his life clear. It made no sense even to him, and he was no intellectual. There had been other occasions when he had tried to sort things out, and something in his brain just switched –

      ‘Julliann, Julliann …’

      He roused, was himself again.

      ‘Let go of my shoulder, what are you shaking me for?’

      ‘Are you all right? You flung that bead away and then you went sort of numb.’ Harry’s face was flecked with fear and saliva.

      ‘Let me alone!’

      They saw a sausage-shaped mauve sun rising at a rate of knots. It took some believing. The supernatural nature of the struggle between Milwrack and the Hunchback was being somewhat overplayed.

      He slumped before the crackling Yankos in misery, not daring to think about what he needed to think about but could not. How many people had had electrodes inserted in their skulls?

      He jumped up and screamed, ‘They’re meddling with us! They’re meddling with us! This isn’t happening! It’s an illusion!’

      Harry jumped up, scattering goshawk. ‘That again! You need a toddy too, pal! Let’s go СКАЧАТЬ