Eighty Minute Hour

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.

II (#u3c328d58-fbdc-5028-a5e4-2912748e8ae5)

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.