Eighty Minute Hour

‘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 Gururn.

‘In that place and that hour, Julliann, you clutched your head and cried that life was an illusion, even as you did just now. And a further time. We sat and drank the poisons with the Spider General. You won’t forget that in a hurry!’

‘I had forgotten the Spider General … Did he not turn into a woman? Was there not also a Queen of All Questions? But the poisons I remember – two of them, taken by turns, to serve as an antidote to the other. It’s long past. What of it?’

‘In that hour, Julliann, when I swear my soul was snow-white with fear, you clutched your heart and vowed you were no more than a puppet in another’s dream, even as you did just now.’

Julliann strode down the corridor, eyes on the floor.

‘If I did –’

‘Just this, my friend – that you have no business to let your mind feast itself on such fancies, for you are the realest man I know … And if the day ever comes when I am truly tested by the Powers Above, then I pray you will be by my side!’

Julliann looked sideways at his companion – mutely, but with his storm-dark eyes speaking volumes. Then his gaze slid away again, as will the gaze of men who are burdened with things of which they will not or cannot speak.

The passage down which they strode met another, a meaner one. They took it. A row of small shops stood here. The blank eyes of their shutters were presented to the world, like the eyelids of sleeping merchants. No man could guess what lay behind them.

After the last shop stood a swing door. Julliann pushed through. A stairway lay beyond; it had a window on it, but the window only showed further rooms and corridors, all desolate. They mounted the stairs.

The stairs rose straight, then reached a landing, then turned and went up again. There were more landings, more turns, more and more stairs.

At last, exhausted, they came to a landing where they were forced to stop. They leaned on the balustrade and breathed deep. The unrelenting windows showed the same unrelenting views.

Julliann was suffering great pain from both legs, though he forebore to show it.

Gururn lifted his great paw of a hand. They listened, knowing how sharp his hearing was. A sound of irregular crying came to them.

Turning his shaggy head, Gururn looked at Julliann in silent question.

Julliann nodded.

They moved silently forward, down a corridor carpeted in some kind of wickerwork. This time, Gururn led.

Without hesitation, he headed for an elaborately carved door. In his posture, in his tread, in his eagerness, was a bestial thing hitherto half unexpressed. As he pushed open the door, Julliann peered under his mighty arm.

A woman sat at a small pattern-organ, which threw out a yellow and black helix unregarded, for her delicate hands were over her face.

She wore a dress, simple in its authority, which revealed the sweep of her shoulders and thus emphasised her vulnerability.

The slight sound of the door opening jerked her from her tearful reverie. Slowly, lowering her hands as she did so, she turned to face the intruders. Julliann, with a gasp, recognised her as Strawn Fidel, the betrothed of Fletcher Surinat.

As her eyes lit on Gururn, the latter moved into the room. With one sweep of a paw, he dragged the mouth-mask from the lower half of his face, revealing the unhuman jaw, the powerful yellow teeth, the blond hair growing in twists from his gums. Her first screams set him bounding forward at her with a cry of hungry expectation.

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

Space had a floor. It stretched below the hurtling sunship as the ship’s transverters dragged the vessel from cupro-space to the ordinary dimensions of the X-World.

The floor looked like nothing more than a sheet of typing paper floating down towards the bottom of some translucent and undisturbed pool. But it grew. It grew as the Micromegas burst towards it; it came upwards, upwards from its translucent and ripple-innocent pool, upwards, spread far beyond the confines of any pool, until it threatened to dwarf the limitless spread of starlight above and round it.

The sunship was decelerating, tearing down through the resonating G’s in one grand orchestral crash as if ripping the rivets out of nature itself.

Unstirring and unstirred, Attica Saigon Smix sat with his wife Loomis watching the mighty floor of space rise to meet them. They were comfortable in their embracing chairs before the visiscreen, with Captain Ladore standing immaculate behind them.

Loomis’s unchanging beauty was of a Persian kind, her face as smooth and beautiful as an Isfahan dome of cerulean china, her hair sable and coiling, uncurled, about her neck with an intent of its own. She had rested one hand on the wrist of her husband.

He – he whose least word to the computer pentagons of earth was unrecognised in every last household of its numberless warrens – he – boss of all bosses, last overlord of all commercial overlords – he – great communist-capitalist of the united capitalist-communist empire – he – Attica Saigon Smix of Smix-Smith Inc – was a pale shadow of a man. The slight pulsations of his ivory skin revealed, not the normal circulations of a normal blood-stream, but the unfaltering beat of internal servo-mechanisms.