Eighty Minute Hour

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?’ asked Loomis. She was all female; in her adolescence, she had liked to shower in company with her male cousins, and with her sister, Glamis. It had proved the beginning of a very cleanly way of life.

‘It’s that scab-devouring spy-bell near Jupiter that we’ve been keeping tabs on. It could do us no harm – we just didn’t know who owned it. How does it vanish just like that? When I get to Gall-Bladder – Oh, Ladore! Is it possible to project a dopple of me to Gall-Bladder from this location?’

Immaculate Ladore was a projection himself, one of the multiple embodiments of Computer Complex detached to serve – and survey – the master of the Smix-Smith universe.

‘It means double transcendence,’ Ladore replied. ‘Micromegas carries the necessary equipment. We could perform the operation in ordinary space. Here, in this continuum, we lack energy. We shall have to tap the floor – it’s pure energy ready to hand.’

‘Get with it.’ But the companalog had anticipated the order; as the boss rolled up the gangway, syphon cables were snaking down, taking a bite into the space-floor.

He looked back. She fluttered a hand. Ever the loving wife.

Another companalog was waiting inside, guiding him down to Trexmissions Bay. Orderly movement, high-level activity, low-order sounds, non-smells – the entire synthetic, synapse-speeding gestalt of a multi-space sunship. Pent with emotion, null-emotion, and the fastest static known to man. Hyperthyroid, hythritic, the perfect kinematics of non-perceivable mobility in n dimensions. Real men, fake men – holmans, companalogs, cyborgs, androids, robots, down to espergdummies – all with a purpose not entirely or entirely not their own – even the real men, so far as ‘real’ was a term any more with coordinates in any actual world, drugged or gutted in some way or hooked to electroidal reflex. Eyes everywhere, and some anxious eye-movement. But never gaze meeting gaze. Never eye-contact. Deflection saved reflection.

They brought him reverently to an intolerable prone position and swung the massive dopplegangster ovens round about his frame.

A technician said, and a slight tendency to hairiness along the side of the neck suggested he was a real man, however controlled, ‘You know, sir, that you will have to rest here in lightly comative condition while your dopple is away? The life-death interface could be somewhat critical over the proposed distance.’

‘Understood.’ No baby-talk for these men. ‘Can you peel off an extra dopple to keep my wife happy, keep her company?’

‘We could peel off a half-dozen under normal circumstances.’ Dangerous talk to Smix of Smix-Smith, the normal circumstances being understood to refer to people in sound health, making their way along the mulcting trajectories of life unaided by excessive servos. ‘But we might find in the present case that doubling dopplers could lead to hyperemesis and actuality-decay. What we can do is take a soul-sliver and duplicate on the holoscope, to form a semi-project. Then we’d use companalog transjects to project speech transferences based on your recorded impulse-patterns.’

Faithful, detesticled Benchiffer was at the wizened elbow to render the technical jargon down into boss jargon.

‘You might find yourself in excess of critical, psyche-wise, if you projected more than one dopple. But they can take a still-moment-transfix and give it pseudo-life and speech by souping it up through computer-project channels, using your life-channels from the banks.’

‘Will that thing be any good for Loomis?’

‘It could repeat yourself – itself – a bit.’

‘It might keep her happy. Let’s go. Gall-Bladder.’

The ovens began to radiate. The old body they contained, yeah, and all which it inherited, began to dissolve and fade …

…Leaving behind on the floor-world a double which moved slowly out in the fake sunlight among the nursery properties to greet Loomis, tasty of hand and lip and gesture …

…And projecting through the incomprehensible mathematical intricacies (so complex that they were only marshalled in orderly impulses in one special maroon-red-coded section of computer-complex’s primal think-bank and in no human think-tank) separating a rather problematical here from a rather problematical there a capable and angry-alert dopple Attica Saigon Smix into the high (and highly fortified) chambers of a subterranean building in Easeaboard, N.A., otherwise known in the day’s code (leaving this special definition of ‘day’ to be unravelled by others) as Gall-Bladder.

The guys in Gall-Bladder were still sweating blood about the whereabouts of the mystery spy-bell.

That spy-bell – known to its occupants, with whom we have shortly to deal, as Doomwitch – marks with its disappearance the appearance of catastrophe in my narrative.

My job, as I see it, is to relate the events in some sort of order, to produce a linear continuance which I believe can be perceived in the haphazard-seeming flow of chance, motive, and encounter. The next generation, less wedded to ideas of causality and effect (‘liberated by the neuro-sciences’, as they would claim!) will have to reinterpret the whole damned tangled business for themselves.

At about this time, I was wheeling across the courtyard at Slavonski Brod Grad with old George Hornbeck, when he said something interesting on the subject.

It was mid-morning, everywhere was quiet. Most of the distinguished guests we met at the party were still recovering from the evening before. Becky was up and about, radiant as ever – but meditating at this hour, as was her habit. Only Dinah Sorbutt, comfortably and almost completely pregnant, sat on a teak bench with her feet up in the sun and had nothing to do.

‘Durrant, I was talking to Becky last night,’ George told me. ‘Profound girl, my daughter. We were talking about whether there was a pattern to life, and it was a fairly sober discussion. Becky said she could always console herself by seeing a pattern – wallpaper, she called it – so that, even when things were bad, she knew something better was coming.’

‘It’s a young girl’s view,’ I said. ‘But Becky has real sensibility – in that respect she takes after you.’

‘I don’t know about that. I’m old and I miss England. I can’t believe Britain’s gone. I’m more conscious of the awful rifts of life than of its pattern. England is one of the rifts. And, you, Durrant – do you mind my saying it?’

‘That I lost both legs in the war? How can I mind?’

‘You face up to it well, my boy. And you use your prosthetic wheels well. Becky and I were wondering … how far it indisposed you mentally for action …’

‘I manage better than Mike’s younger brother, give me that. You know, I suppose, that he stays alone in their place in California, on some drug or other? He’s about my age, he got both his legs shot off, too – part of a pattern, Becky might say. But I’m not like him, George – in circumstances, maybe, but not in reaction to them – I’m more like Mike, I’m going to do something with my life.’

George smiled and nodded, looking down at the path, glancing at his watch. Soon it would be time for us to work.

Slavonski Brod Grad was not always a place of merriment. The parties were growing fewer as the economic situation deteriorated.

George Hornbeck and I fought our own little battle against the monolithic state threatening to engulf the world once the Cap-Comm Treaty was really a going concern.

We published creative pornography. Much of the material, mainly in the form of comic strips, was supplied by our Brazilian ally, da Perquista Mangista. We were backed by Brazilian money as well.

Our one-room offices were in the castle. We called ourselves P.P.P., which stood for Pornography Permissive and Progressive. Strangely enough, the idea had come from Russia, where their samizdat, or do-it-yourself publishing, led the world.

Our puny blow against machine-culture was done by machines which mainly ran themselves. We could afford a few minutes more in the fresh air.

‘Let’s sit on a bench and sun ourselves,’ George said. ‘It’s a traditional old man’s occupation. We don’t have to talk to Dinah. She’s a foolish woman. I wonder why she will tell nobody who the father of her infant is?’

We sat down together, and he started to discuss paternity. He did ramble sometimes. Then he said, ‘Your other burden is the loss of your parents. I know your mother is doing good work on Mars, but she should be here with you and Choggles. Choggles is getting too precocious for her own boots … No, that wasn’t what I meant to ask you. Durrant, what are you intending to do with your life?’

Well, why not tell him?

‘I’m intending to write a novel. I’m not interested in holoplays, and pornography has its limitations. I want to write a good old-fashioned novel, with no more ambition in it than to reflect pleasure and disgust in what I see round me.’

At that time, I was not entirely serious. I did not entirely intend to write a novel, merely to keep old George, whom I regarded highly, content. Certainly, I did not intend to write this novel. But, the neuro-scientists declare, every human act can be analysed in chemical terms; so perhaps that conversation predetermined this book.

I hereby determine not to intervene in the narrative again – or not overtly. But, bereft of my own legs, I intend to play a long-legged God – the new kind of god, god of creation, slave of the creation it has created, as man has now become slave of the systems he created, according to the new neuro-philosophy. For – why not admit it – I’m vexed already with my task: by what scale of values is it more worthwhile to create or read a novel, even one with real people in it, than to opt for hallucinations provoked by root, as does my dark obverse, my brother, over in California? – Except in this: that drug-dreams cover old ground, and look back; I try to look forward, to encompass new thought.

Accordingly, I will travel with my characters all round space and time. If I do that, I will also travel into their thoughts. Why not? Mind is now proven an epiphenomenon of space and time! You see I write a story on deterministic principles.

The first flutter of this came to me as I sat in the sun with George Hornbeck, for I said, ‘I’d like to try and invent what others think. Thought has always seemed to me easier to understand than action.’ (And there I finish telling what I said.)

He gave his dry laugh. ‘Understanding is a relative expression. But we can all of us always do with a little more of it. Go ahead, Durrant, see what you can do for us – and yourself!’

He left me, walking quite strongly across the wide courtyard, an old man missing England.

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

Orbiting the sun in a region of space somewhere (not to put too fine a point on it) between Mars and Jupiter, was the space vehicle known to its enemies as Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero. To the D.N., and to its occupants, it was known as Doomwitch.