Читать книгу Eighty Minute Hour - Brian Aldiss - Страница 5

Four things one particularly notices after wars of any respectable size: preparations for the next one, confidence that armed conflict is finished for ever, starvation, and feasting.

First, take a romantic setting.

In the stolid old castle of Slavonski Brod, on the night in which determinism forces me to open the story, feasting was the thing. Outside the grounds, over the walls, across the sea – all about – rumours of more terrible things were scudding like cloud. For a few hours, they had been shut out, fended away chiefly by dint of the personalities present at the roistering, by the languorous bravado and genial nature of Mike Surinat, whose castle it now was (his parents having died during the war); by the beauty and sweet perceptive nature of Becky Hornbeck, who now lived at the castle; by the cheeky dearness of my little sister, Choggles Chaplain; by the stolid capability of Mike’s C-in-C, Per Gilleleje; by the hard work behind scenes of such loyal friends as Devlin Carnate; and of course by the glamour of the many guests, at the castle to celebrate Mike’s simultaneous demobilisation from the army and appointment to diplomatic rank in the councils of the Dissident Nations.

Among those guests, I need mention only three. First and foremost is the peerless, glamorous figure of Glamis Fevertrees, about to embark on a perilous mission for the D.N. She is old enough to stand for me as at once sex-symbol and mother-figure. She dances with Per, and I wish I were able to glide across the great marble floor with her in my arms, out into the courtyard with its marble patterns, swirling among the pergolas and lanterns!

Mine are not the only eyes to fix on Glamis. A slight comedy goes among the other two most noted guests, the epicene genius of dream, Monty Zoomer, and his companion – who hastens to leave him – the stately and leather-skinned Sue Fox. Monty came with Sue and has eyes only for Glamis. Not that Sue cares – she is a woman who plainly hates sheep’s eyes.

Sue and Monty, of course, are not on our side. Yes, you might put it that way. They are not on our side of the political fence. They stand for the USA–USSR merger, the so-called Cap-Comm Treaty; we are against it. But as yet – or during this evening of festival – Sue and Monty are being nice to the minions of the D.N. Sue Fox can afford to be nice; she’s on the World Executive Council.

So much for the cast. Move nearer and hear what three of the groups are saying on this beautiful evening.

First, let’s go to the little pavilion perched at the end of the estate, on top of the wide stone wall, long ruined, now built up with a wooden ramp for this occasion. Go up the ramp! Observe that the pavilion has been repainted.

Inside, a little man in Hungarian gipsy costume plays a fiddle. He is a Hungarian gipsy. His melodies, gay but full of an irreparable loss, float out across the grounds. Only three people are in the pavilion, and they are not listening.

This first group consists of Becky Hornbeck, Sue Fox, and Choggles. Becky, like Mike, is in her late twenties and still somewhat mystical. Sue is older and a good deal grimmer, though not in a grim mood tonight. My dear Choggles is – herself. But I will stop talking so that they can be heard.

Sue Fox said, ‘As you say, the world is tightening up after the war. Dwight Castle and I were remarking the other day how work on the World Executive Council gets heavier week by week. And now the Computer Complex intends to introduce the concept of the eighty-minute hour …’

She caught the expression on Becky’s face.

‘I’m sorry, Becky – I shouldn’t be talking politics. Perhaps I only do it because – well, perhaps there is a little guilt there, especially when I find you and me on different sides of the fence, politically. Your mother and I were such great friends.’

Becky smiled. ‘We have always been great friends, Sue. We must not let politics alter that. I realise you hold your beliefs as honestly as we do ours.’

‘Of course. The world must unite, must forgo one single central government, and the Cap-Comm Treaty is a way of beginning … No, no, not a word more! I’m not propagandising, merely justifying myself!’

They both laughed, and the gipsy began a passionate lament to death, roses, Smederevo, red wine, white hands, and the passing of time.

More relaxedly, Sue Fox said, ‘They were telling me you found the Koh-i-Nor, Becky. How incredible!’

‘It was incredible,’ Becky agreed. ‘But I expect incredible things. In fact, it was an old associate of my father’s, a man called Youings, who found the jewel on a beach near Bordeaux, France, washed ashore. He posted it to me as a Christmas present, wrapped up in an old newspaper!’

Choggles, who had been sitting with them and gazing silently over the Pannonian Sea, said, ‘The newspaper was called the Trafalgar Square – I’ve still got it, Becky. Let me keep it as a souvenir.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘You’re going to keep the diamond?’ Sue asked Becky.

‘I regard it as a souvenir of England. It’s in my suite. You must come and have a look at it.’

‘What fantastic things do happen!’

‘They aren’t fantastic if you believe in determinism. Recent brain research has proved that free will does not exist –’

‘Becky, I am not of the generation to believe in determinism. I refuse to believe, and facts will not sway me. I prefer your mysticism. Tell me more about the Koh-i-Nor. It was in British hands?’

‘Yes, ever since the British conquered India in the nineteenth century. It was on display in the Tower of London for many years – before the war.’

‘Hard luck about Britain … What are you going to do with it? What’s it worth now?’

‘I thought I’d keep it. When it was first heard of in history, one of the Moghuls – Humayan, I believe – that was in the early sixteenth century – claimed that it was valuable enough to feed the whole world for two and a half days!’

Sue Fox smiled. ‘Now the population has gone down a bit, it might do so again!’

‘That stone – well, it’s an emblem with no precise financial value – it has woven in and out of history like a needle through fabric. At one time, it spent six weeks in the waistcoat of a Victorian politician!’

A second group, a larger group, all male except for a pregnant Miss Dinah Sorbutt, who sat unobtrusively in the background, sprawled over a dinner table smoking cigars and every now and again summoning a fresh bottle of brandy or Perrier water. There were six of them – Mike Surinat himself; two of his staff, Carnate and Per Gilleleje; two guests, the Brazilian Geraldo Correa da Perquista Mangista, and a Japanese politician, Sanko Hakamara; and Becky’s old frail father, George Wainscott Hornbeck, retired industrialist. They were talking politics. Oh – and Choggles was also there; she had already heard the history of the Koh-i-Nor, and moved on elsewhere to avoid hearing it again.

Da Perquista Mangista was laughing at something Mike had said. ‘You are just a romantic, Mike. You should have worked as I have, for many a long year, in São Paulo, and then you would see how hard people really work!’

‘I could say the same about Tokyo,’ Hakamara said.

‘I know, I know,’ Mike said, laughing also. ‘Europe is now more or less played out, and the Eastern seaboard of the United States the same. We have recently witnessed the establishment of a Pacific Community, with California, Japan, South Korea, China, all labouring away hammer-and-tongs. I’ve no real objection to work, except that it now means work-plus-deadly-monotony. With the establishment of a single world-state, work-plus-deadly-monotony is going to rule the roost, rammed home by computerised arguments about “efficiency”, such as C.C. is now using to ram in its Eighty-Minute Hour schedule. I’m for inefficiency, smaller nations, slack in the machine, chaos, and all the other things for which I founded the I.D.I., my own personal club!’

Da Perquista Mangista said, draining off another large brandy, ‘Mike, I love you, and I love the totally out-dated concept of I.D.I…. You are a gaudy figure and the beleaguered Dissident Nations will surely need you as we get more beleaguered in the years ahead. But do not use that argument of yours in public – not, for instant, at the Dissident Nations economic conference I’m organising in Friendship City. Because the world on the whole believes in order and efficiency, even the nations of the D.N.’

‘Them especially,’ Hakamara agreed. ‘Japan, Yugoslavia, and Brazil are cases in point. Recall the legend on the Brazilian flag – “Order and Progress”. Our nations have become great through work.’

‘If you’ll allow an old man to express his point of view,’ George Hornbeck said, ‘I believe that work is mankind’s worst vice and affliction, killing more people year after year than all your drugs and automobiles combined. Even worse, it exhausts the planet as well as mankind. Of course, that’s only my view. Order and Progress lead to war. But then – I was born in the First World War.’

Mike Surinat smiled warmly at the old man. Since the death of his own father, since he had invited the Hornbecks, father and daughter, to live in Slavonski Brod Grad, he had come more and more to love them both. The old man’s philosophy was particularly sympatico.

‘Determinism saps our will not to work,’ he said. ‘The Cap-Comm merger merely gears everyone to work harder.’

Choggles piped up. ‘It will make the world like a police state, won’t it, Mike? Particularly with crooks like Attica Saigon Smix running the American end – he was involved with my father, and you know how awful Daddy was, introducing ZPG and everything.’ She glanced at Dinah Sorbutt’s greatly enlarged body. ‘Sorry, Dinah, old horse, almost ZPG – the human race has got to keep going somehow, hasn’t it?’

Dinah said, ‘Choggles, old horse, your zippy comments are rather out of place in a political discussion. Why don’t you buzz along, like a good girl?’

The Brazilian politician threw Dinah an admiring and grateful glance.

‘Suits me!’ Choggles said. ‘Politics isn’t as interesting as sex, is it?’

As she drifted off, Per Gilleleje laughed and said, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! She is correct, of course, about both Smix and her father, Auden. Auden Chaplain is dead now, but both he in scientific circles and Attica Saigon Smix in managerial circles showed genius. World-units have grown so large that we need genius, even when it is evil – that’s to say, against humanity. And it is this need for the anti-human which has led to the take-over of human affairs by the computer complex.’

‘Unfortunately, C.C. represents a genuine human desire to repress its humanity,’ Carnate said. ‘How else can you explain the atrocities of World War III, and all those poor wretches shipped out to Mars?’

‘My daughter among them,’ sighed Hakamara.

Let ‘atrocities’ be the key-word that allows us to slip away to the third group.

This is a more romantic group, although it numbers three, and three is not conventionally a romantic number. The group is sitting in the room generally known as the Green Tower Room. Most things in the room, human beings excepted, are green; and, to match the room, the articles in it are also round wherever possible. Spinet, radio, holocube – even the holocube contradicts its own terms and is round – chairs, sofa, chaise-lounge, all attempt rotundity; carpet, lampshades, footstools, occasional tables, precious vases – for them, conformation to circularity comes less oddly.

Monty Zoomer, the only one of the group of three to attempt even a perfunctory rotundity, was sitting on a pouffe. This pale young man, king of the pop world, whose holodreams had been shared with audiences all over the uncivilized world, wore velvet and directed a flow of velvet words at the second member of the trio. This was the slender, austere, still dazzling – though faded – figure of Glamis Fevertrees, a much-married American lady with a Persian style of beauty, a sallow smooth complexion, pale pink lips, and dark and lucid brows and eyes. It was with reference to these attributes that Zoomer was now reading a verse from a circular copy of Lalla Rookh which he had seized from a side-table.

‘And others mix the Kohol’s jetty dye

To give that long, dark languish to the eye –’

The third member of the trio, Choggles, who had just sneaked in, burst into laughter. ‘You can’t be serious, Monty! You ought to be reading that doggerel out to me – except I prefer Shelley – and anyhow I’m fair, not dark, a real little blonde –’

‘Nauseating child!’ Zoomer said.

‘Child! I’m nearer your age than Glamis is! She’s old enough to be your mother, Monty! You can’t really think she fancies you! You’re too fat to be any good as – help!’

She ran round the round room and out the door, laughing and screaming, hotly pursued by spherical cushions and a round of abuse.

Zoomer slammed the door and turned back to Glamis, adjusting his hair and the pendant that swung against his breast.

‘Glamis Fevertrees – now that that little pest has gone, let me declare my admiration! My heart yearns for you – it’s lonely enough being a real creative artist, see, I got the gift from my father, so I suppose it was predetermined, but you have to work at it, and my life – well, there’s a great big Glamis-shaped gap in it. I could design a whole hololife for us together – you know the power I wield, now that I supply holodreams to anyone who wants them, keep the millions of oppressed happy through their comp-terminals. Well, it’s the responsibility, to supply something clean, nursery-pure, but still entertaining, and –’

‘You see, Monty,’ Glamis said, interrupting rather desperately, ‘you’re very sweet, but I don’t go much for sex, to be frank, despite all my marriages. I met a man called Jack once, on the very eve of my first marriage. Well, that’s another story … As a result, I get hooked on men of action, not artists. Either they’re too mixed up or – no, it’s probably because I have no free will, which is what everyone seems to be saying nowadays. I have no free will to love you, Monty, please understand.’

She wondered if he would grab her and whether she would faintly enjoy that. After all, it would be a conquest for her, a defeat like that!

But she had his measure: a man of words, not of action. The words poured from him as sweat from a labouring man.

‘And another thing, Glamis, that I ought to draw your attention to. The world’s in a very troubled state, I think you’d agree. All those big nuclear bombs let off everywhere – mucking up space as well as this poor old earth of ours – conditions could deteriorate. Easily deteriorate. People need a bolt-hole. Well, perhaps I could find such a bolt-hole. Just for the two of us. Now that I’ve won this enormous contract with C.C., supplying everyone with holodreams, I’ve come in contact with Mr Attica Saigon Smix. He’s a very nice old man, not at all like the villain his enemies say he is – haven’t I designed a nice little set-up for him and his missus! Wow! Now, he’s got a bolt-hole nobody knows about, and maybe one day I can find out where it is, and then –’

She had been standing against one of the little round windows, knowing her slender lines showed up to best advantage there; but the spate of his eloquence caused her to sit on a little circular Marie Thérèse armchair. She took his hand.

‘Monty, dear, that’s another thing! You work for and with Attica Smix. He is married to Loomis, and Loomis is my sister. We are not at all good friends, not at all. Not by temperament, not by upbringing, not by political conviction. I know she and Attica think well of you. It would complicate things too much if you and I had any sort of a thing going between us. You’re awfully sweet – no, don’t protest, but I have to go away on a mission tomorrow – forget about me, Monty, stick to Loomis!’

He flung himself at her beautifully shod feet, reached up dramatically, clasped her hands in his.

‘With Loomis it’s just mother-fixation on my part, honest! You’re younger than her, a little bit, anyway! I can’t help these things! You said it yourself – determinism. All this recent work on the brain – the neurosciences have proved that we do what we must do, right? I can’t help feeling like this about you, Glamis. The moment I saw you, I knew I was in the shadow of destiny!’

‘Does destiny really cast a shadow?’ she asked softly.

‘Okay, it picked me out in its headlights, then. Look, Glamis, if you’re going, you’ll be back won’t you? Let me give you a memento of me, something to remind you of the pallid and lonely existence of that wayward and eccentric world-genius of the inner landscape, Monty Zoomer, okay?’

As he spoke, he was bending his neck, removing the pendant and chain from his neck. He rubbed it on his velvet shirt.

‘Here, slip it on while it’s still warm, Glamis! A keepsake from you to me!’

‘It’s beautiful!’ She took it and examined it. She had already admired it from a distance.

It was of silver, heavy to hold, and some eight centimetres across. Across one side of it were depicted two male figures, one of them bearded, staring at each other or across each other’s shoulders. The workmanship was rough but powerful.

‘It really is beautiful!’ Covetousness rose in her.

‘Yes, it is a replica of an old Martian design, from a pendant that actually came from Mars. Attica bought it at a fabulous price and had copies made.’

‘From Mars! But it depicts two humans!’

‘Well, that was the story I heard. I’m no connoisseur. It’s yours if you will accept it with 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.