Eighty Minute Hour. Brian Aldiss

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      Magnificent in fright, brave in alarm ….’

      From other gangways, minions were hastening down, their subordinate positions rendering them impervious to the impossibly grandiose exposure of their situation. By reason of their power, naked to the majesty of it, Attica Saigon Smix and his wife stood on infinity, stood on the immovable object, while the infinitely irresistible force of space flew over them. The floor felt warm, worn, hydroptic, apical, pinnate, like the flesh of a vulpine and voluptuous courtesan erotogenically dying.

      ‘Alone at last, my love.’

      ‘Alone with you, dear Attica!’

      ‘You like it here?’

      ‘Well, it is kind of novel … Is it – you know – science or art?’

      ‘Both, my love. Science and art. The two disciplines, once parallel, here unite. There’s been nothing like it before.’

      She gave a small laugh. ‘I’d think not! Does it need much – well, power?’

      His chair trembled slightly about him. ‘Power? Until the War, there wasn’t this much power available. Only the prolapse of other dimensions, other universes, into ours allowed us to broach entire new energy-systems. You explain to her, Benchiffer …’

      His voice was trailing away, amplification fading. But the faithful Benchiffer, perspex-encased, was already at hand, scooping up his master’s wilting sentence like some sensitive plant, applying to it the unction of his own calcareous personality. ‘Yes, madam, this aponeurotic floor is maintained in stasis by a power-drain from some of the newly opened-up universes. The energy quotients appear to be roughly in equipoise, so that one year of the floor’s existence probably drains one year from the entropaic-output store of an entire universe.’

      ‘I see … You mean we actually shorten people’s lives by us being here?’

      ‘Well, lives do tend to shorten anyway, ma’am, even with no one there meddling.’

      Benchiffer fell back, more pallid than ever, aware he had transgressed beyond his brief – to expound science – into dealing with matters coming within the domain of ontology and philosophy. Not that there was much to choose between any of them nowadays …

      But Attica Saigon Smix seemed unaware of the transgression. His eye-like lenses took in the synclastic horizons all about him, and were refreshed by them. Here was peace from the rabid systems he nominally controlled, peace and a hideout the like of which had never before been devised.

      He watched, chair-supported, as henchmen brought out holoscillators. In as much as he was capable of deriving pleasure through the intricate man-mechanism interfaces of his receptors, he derived pleasure from seeing the holoscillators come on.

      They came on now, warmed, as the henchmen hurried out of the way. A lithoponic mist formed, bodied forth, boiled as if cupellation were in process, and objects took shape within the uneasy cloak of it – trees, flowers, benches, marrow plants male and female, forts and little fortresses, music boxes and barrel-organs, roundabouts, homes for cows and doggies.

      ‘Benchiffer!’

      ‘Sir!’ Benchiffer twinkled as he moved, toes rotating like casters in the perspex.

      ‘That passage from that poet …’

      Benchiffer remembered. A constant threat of instant demolition proved an ideal mnemonic in all situations.

      ‘Shakespeare, sir … “The great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind …”’

      ‘As this lot appears, I guess their equivalent is sort of disappearing in some other universe,’ said Loomis. Her husband patted her for her cleverness. Also, he liked the poem, even if it didn’t rhyme.

      The pageant was growing rapidly substantial. Suddenly, it was there. The cow homes and the cows, the trees, the little gay buildings, the huge butterflies, all in motion, bright as a lip in a dream, covering – yeah, covering the whole scab-devouring floor of space.

      ‘Want to walk, my love?’

      ‘Yeah, sure.’ She wanted to walk when he did. Always. She was nice. So this was the paradise he had invented for her. Loomis. Love.

      The cameras followed them, silent as hepatitis, drinking it all in, recording for posterity and their own delectation the slow stroll among these objects of Attica Saigon Smix’s invention. The trees were not trees, the butterflies not butterflies, the cows not cows, the buildings not buildings. They were delicate simplifications, pastiches of trees, butterflies, cows, and buildings, done in simplified shapes, executed in primary colours. The melons and flowers lying at their careless feet were detachable, embodied extracts of abstracts based on elementary pictures in nursery frescoes. Peace and infantilism met, with a smacking but pure kiss.

      ‘It’s nice here …’

      ‘Good for you to get away from business.’

      ‘Aren’t the cows cute?’

      ‘I just love their pretty little dangling bells and – uh, udders. You’re a clever old thing, Attica, did I ever tell you that?’

      Every day she told him that. It was the secret of both their successes.

      A cow was waddling by them, hat on head, gaudy melon-flower in chops, rocking quaintly from side to side. Three-dimensional and entirely touchable – rideable, even. Hygienic, too, of course. No defecations, no monstrous eructations of vile wind. Just a holobject, conjured by machines invented in the technological computer-laboratories of one of Smix-Smith’s subsidiaries.

      And the yokel figure also waddling towards them was no more than a holman, also three-dimensional, entirely touchable, hygienic. Man, hat, comic smock, pipe, clogs, all of one inorganic substance, a projection as tangible, as much of the physical world as oak, and far less unmanoeuverable. It touched its comic floppy hat, blew a little chugging pasteboard smoke-ring from its corncob, and produced a message from its daisy-embroidered smock.

      ‘Benchiffer, read it.’

      Benchiffer took the wafer, held it in photoelectric hand, and intoned: ‘Gall-bladder to Rupture Six. Regret Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero became nondetectable time-refererents 03071255T. Jupiter Police Five-Star Alert and Exo-Systems Search in Code Areas Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, and Conquest. Full Emergency. Possible coordinates follow message. Suggest Red Rupture despatch dopple repeat dopple subiter Gall-Bladder Suite Beta. All parameters Bilious repeat Bilious advised. War footing. Transcendent. Jupiter Five-Star Alert. Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, Conquest. Red Rupture. Reddleman. QLLTX5973328764983AA448. Four-second destruct. Reddleman. Gabbice. Gall-Bladder Rupture Six.’

      ‘Is it important, darling?’ Loomis asked.

      The four seconds was up. The holman was blanked for a moment as the wafer destructed.

      ‘I’m Red Rupture,’ Attica Saigon Smix said, fingering certain keys on his chair. He turned slowly round, beginning to perambulate back through the tent-shaped trees towards Micromegas. He signalled to Captain Ladore, watchful at the gangway.

      ‘What’s it mean, darling?’ СКАЧАТЬ