Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ my humble admiration.’

      ‘But Attica Smix gave it to you – or was it Loomis? You can’t give it to me.’

      ‘Yes, yes, have it with love!’

      ‘Let’s exchange pendants, then. I have one I always wear, though it doesn’t go with this dress. It’s in my bag …’ She put his pendant round her neck, and produced hers, a smaller one, with an image of two graceful people, male and female, engraved on it.

      ‘Ooh, Glamis, they’re naked!’

      ‘Put it on – it’s fair exchange. They’re Daphnis and Chloe, from an ancient Greek engraving. It was given me by the man I mentioned earlier, Jack Dagenfort.’

      ‘That’s the guy that made that old film The Heart Block! I’ll always wear it, Glamis, and always think of you!’

      He summoned an oleaginous tear for the great occasion.

       II

      Through the barren castle of Slot Surinat went the conspirators. They laughed as they went, for the castle was theirs. Battles had been fought, hardship overcome, blood shed, money spent, and many a tear dropped in shuttered secret or down into an open grave – all for the moment when the War of Continuance would be won. Now few were left to mourn or cheer …

      But there were other dimensions.

      The ravaging weapons of war had revealed them, had so torn the fabric of the universe that now strange paths to otherwheres and otherwhens lay open to those who were knowledgeable – or courageous enough to tread those paths of madness.

      The first of those conspirators, walking so forthrightly now through the long corridors, was Julliann of the Sharkskin. A small man he, booted, belted, buckskinned, broadsworded, to the hilt, his face like an old brown canvas sail, his hair whirling like smoke about his head. And flame seemed to crackle in that smoke as he flung open his mouth in a harsh laugh.

      ‘So Mad Mike Surinat is not here to meet us, my friends! So much the worse for him! He may rob us of a further triumph, but he yields us his castle!’

      So saying, he clapped Harry the Hawk on his back. Harry laughed in response, and the goshawk riding hooded on his shoulder never fluttered.

      ‘The Surinats are too decadent for these warlike times, Julliann,’ Harry said. He was large and heavy. He held himself, physique and psyche, under tight control, like a bear on a greyhound’s leash. As he moved, he flashed his torch from side to side, scanning every doorway as a matter of rote, in case they were surprised.

      The third conspirator never spoke. He also was built tall and solid, but in his bulk was something animal and ungainly. Something animal lurked in his silence too. The lick of the torch revealed a mighty face with a small expression, tiny eyes set in dark sockets, a minor fortress of a nose, and a great immobile mouth plastered across the lower half of the face. This was Gururn, fugitive from the Smix-Smith world, slayer of life, the secrets of his own life as mute as granite.

      They moved now through a floor of the castle newly painted, its surfaces smothered in a prismatic white reflectant paint, so that everywhere the opened colours of the spectrum, newly released, leapt at them and assaulted their vision. To walk down a corridor was to be battered to death by the plumage of courting peacocks.

      Growling, Gururn flung open the shutters of a tall window and peered out. Only the perspectives of the façade of the castle met his gaze, near, distant, remote, winding over hill and valley, punctuated insanely by courtyard and tower and minaret – a vision by some crazed Gustave Moreau compiled of Henri Christophe’s Sans Souci, Pandua, Hambi, Polonnaruwa, Amber, Alcatraz, Blenheim, and the terrifying repetitions of the Escorial and Ramesvaram. Its fretted surfaces were like a myriad dead moths, pinned recklessly one atop the other by a frenetic lepidopterist in his cups.

      Slam! The shutters went shut again. The three conspirators moved among the ruinous glory of peacock light. Now there was no laughter between them.

      They came to an elevator. The elevator lifted them ten storeys. So elaborately had the Surinats built that none but they and their nearest allies could locate the jet-powered elevators that sped in one continuing movement from bottom to top of their warrening house.

      They were walking through suite after suite of interconnecting rooms, each bigger than the previous one, until the ultimate room of the series encompassed all the others and they were forced to turn about and seek another way. Julliann’s legs ached. Now the elaborate heterochromatic effects were lost. The three companions found themselves tramping a forlorn corner of this building men had once called the Ultimate Structure. The basic crain, that man-made stone which nothing could corrupt, stood naked; doors and casements had been but casually slotted into it. Nothing had been dressed. Every perspective had a perspective encased within it, like the receding oily pools of death within a basilisk’s eye.

      ‘I knew this castle as a lad,’ said Julliann.

      The others said nothing, merely marched.

      ‘Spent my entire adolescence trying to find my way out of it,’ said Julliann.

      The others said nothing, continuing to march.

      ‘Have I ever been free of it?’ said Julliann.

      The others said nothing, still marching forward.

      But Julliann reeled sideways, clutching at his brow, gasping, and struck his temple against a crain pillar. He managed to stand, rocking, supporting himself with one hand, staring ahead in fear as if he gazed into one of those dimensions so lately and so unpleasantly revealed to man.

      Then did Harry the Hawk and Gurum halt, and turn, and go uneasily towards him.

      ‘What ails you, Julliann of the Sharkskin?’

      He closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he looked less curiously.

      ‘You see me clearly enough, don’t you?’

      ‘Clearly enough,’ said Harry, and Gurum nodded.

      ‘Come near and touch me, touch my clothes.’

      Wondering, they did as he bid them.

      ‘You feel me, don’t you?’

      ‘You know we did.’ A nod.

      ‘You can smell me, can’t you?’

      Two nods.

      ‘For all that, I could be an hallucination. Or we three could be caught in some kind of illusion. Death in a basilisk’s eye, sort of thing.’

      Harry clouted him on the arm and set him moving again. In his harsh and rapid voice, he said, ‘You recall when the fight was on between our friend Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback? We stood up to our knees in that muck like mud which vanished even as the Hunchback fell? You recall that time?’

      ‘I had forgotten. Now I recall. The sky ran with suns until it resembled a pin-table machine. What of it? It was far enough from this castle!’

      ‘Would we were there, then,’ mumbled СКАЧАТЬ