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‘Don’t say we’ve slipped back in time, too!’ Dimittis groaned.
De l’Isle-Evens was not usually a man of action. But the shuttered visual-observation ports were behind his terminal, above the serried comp-buffer-units and drum-memories. He was there in a couple of strides, and had his hand on the flip button.
He paused.
They watched him.
He flipped the button and the shutters folded back as quick as a child’s eyelids.
Jupiter had gone!
They were peering out into empty space.
The disoriented instrumentation chattered like rutting marmosets.
V (#u3c328d58-fbdc-5028-a5e4-2912748e8ae5)
Mike Surinat said, ‘The apostles of apostasy are slaves of obedience to an iron whim.’
‘Obedience is for talent; only genius disobeys involuntarily.’
‘I disobey, thou disregardest, he revolts me.’
‘You’re out! You changed the person! It was “disobeys”, not “disobey”, right, Mike?’
‘Right, you’re out, Monty! Your turn, Dinah.’
‘Oh – “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking and giving pain in the neck.”’
‘The Infinite has reality only for immature minds.’
‘She who minds the baby rules the man.’ That was Choggles Chaplain, Mike’s ten-year-old niece. She spoke while looking at the swollen form of Dinah Sorbutt, so noticeably viviparous.
‘She who weeps least, weeps best.’
‘We are proverbial! “Least said, least mended!”’
‘“A waterproof cup is a wonder only if mended.” Not very bright, I’m afraid!’
‘Hm. I wonder whoever the troublemaker was who invented the idea of equality?’ Dinah.
There were now only three of them left in the game, so it was Mike’s turn again.
‘“Impossible! Wonderful! So what?” are the three cries uttered at the birth of anything ever invented.’
Dinah Sorbutt squealed with delight. ‘You’re out, Mike! You broke the rules! You took two words from my sentence, not one!’
‘Not at all. One of your words is always sufficient, Dinah. I took “Invented” merely.’
‘And “ever”! What about lousy old “ever”? You took “ever” too, so you’re out, and that just leaves Choggles and me.’
‘But, my darling bitch, you didn’t say “ever”. You said, did you not, “whoever”? And “whoever” is not “ever”, any more than “milestone” is “tone”. You are out for challenging incorrectly!’
‘Oh, your cruddy, non-sparking, complex, complicated word-games! How I loathe them! The world disintegrates and we play word-games!’
‘Had the whole world been innocently occupied playing my cruddy complex, complicated – whatever that is – word-games these last few years, it would not now be in its admitted state of disintegration.’
The vexed Miss Sorbutt, though heavily into the last days of her pregnancy, jumped to her feet and dived into the pool. The spray she sent up scattered itself in random but equable distribution over Mike Surinat and his niece.
‘Want to go on with the game, Choggles?’ he asked her.
‘No, thanks, Uncle. You’re always so shirty if I beat you. Isn’t he, Durrant?’ I was sitting with them and had been out of the running for some rounds.
‘If you beat me, it is because you cheat by introducing school slang into your jejeune sentences,’ Surinat told her. ‘I am “shirty” – to quote the latest example of what I mean – with your cheating, not your winning.’
‘So you say!’ She too jumped up. He was after her but she got away. She followed Dinah into the great octagonal pool.
Night like a great sea lay over their slice of the world. The pool itself, milky with underwater light, floated in the dark. Swimming in it was rather like being in a titanic womb. Perhaps Dinah Sorbutt found comfort in some such reflection. She drifted lazily and mountainously as Choggles butterflied up to her.
‘Can I feel the baby kicking again? Nobody’s looking, except perhaps my brother, and he won’t mind.’
‘Choggles, darling, please leave me alone. I’m not just a baby machine.’
‘I’m supposed to take an interest! Oh, please, Dinah! After all, I may have to go through the ghastly business myself one day. You’d think they’d dream up a less cumbersome way of carrying on the human race. I mean, you look ever so enormous …’
She duck-dived under Dinah, to come up panting on the other side.
‘You may only get one chance to bear a child,’ Dinah said, ‘now that the government controls fertility in both men and women.’
‘Well, that’s progress. Anyhow, it’s saved us from an overpopulated world, hasn’t it? That – and the millions slaughtered in the war.’
Dinah said primly, ‘Many people think the fertility-switch reduces humanity to the level of machines and animals.’
‘We can’t be both machines and animals,’ Choggles said, reasonably. ‘In any case, you needn’t lecture me about all that. People of ten really dislike being lectured, you know. And besides, it’s wasted on me. Don’t forget that the Schally-Chaplain switch is named after my father, though we don’t talk about him.’
‘I know all about that, child. I’m just tired of your following me. Go and follow your uncle Mike, if you’re so mad about him.’
‘Don’t be personal – I didn’t ever ask you who the father of your foetus was, did I? Though of course I’ve guessed! Are you going to have the child delivered in a state maternity home?’
‘Of course. It’s compulsory.’
‘You know why that is, don’t you? It’s so that they can fix the baby with the switch! Mike told me.’
‘Stop it!’
‘You could get it done privately at a private clinic, I should think – you know, like those gorgeous old abortion-clinics you sometimes see in holodramas.’
Dinah started to swim slowly away. ‘That would be illegal. When the computer opens the fertility-switch to allow you to conceive, the fact is recorded, and they check to see that you go to a proper maternity home.’
‘Does it hurt the baby – the insertion of the Schally-Chaplain switch, I mean? My father did the operation on me himself.’
‘Oh, go away! I don’t want to talk about it!’ Dinah started kicking and splashing.
‘You’d better not over-exert yourself, Dinah, or you might give birth in the pool! Do you think that’s possible? Perhaps it would grow up amphibious …’
In the end, Choggles swam disconsolately away. Communication was really only in its elementary stages. She would have to say that to Mike; he might laugh, but Mike’s laughter was always partly against himself.
As she thought about Mike, she saw he had been standing at one end of the pool. Now he was turning, disappearing into the darkness.
He also, at one remove, had been thinking of parturition and the processes of species-continuance which appeared to be mankind’s sole blind objective. Now that science had finally taken control of that objective, after centuries of blundering attempts to do so, the human race would be subtly and inevitably changed.
He walked away into the dark. Behind him, the pool was a drop of amniotic fluid and a beacon for moths – except that moths and similar night creatures were fended off by a bumper beam a few metres above ground level.
Above night level floated the sound of Slavonski Brod guests, their idle laughter, their carefully directed nothings. The mating game and the horrid struggle for existence were here brought to heel – reduced to flirtations and mild egocentricities.
Surinat avoided the crowd about the pool-side bar and turned among the trees. Darkness he loved. Darkness was more suited to the human condition than daylight. There would come a time when darkness was continual, unpunctuated by any little local lamps. The idea rested him.
Of course, that time was billions of years ahead. A lot of suffering had to be got through before that. But the human brain – the human brain was always enfolded, under its thick encompassing bone, in darkness.
If your brain started seeing flashes of light, it meant a tumour; the pressure of the tumour acted like light. Darkness was the relaxing of pressure, of the pain of being human.
He should be amusing Monty. Monty was his honoured (and famous) guest. Monty knew all about pain, too, being an artist, however phoney an artist. Perhaps the fakes felt that inner human hurt even more keenly than genuine artists. There was something so alien about being genuine …
He should be amusing Monty. But Monty was not to be trusted – he worked for the enemy. A deal made with Monty might give Mike, and through him the Dissident Nations, a line to Smix and the World Executive Council, the people who had pushed through the Cap-Comm Treaty.
As Mike walked along the neat cobbled path by the outer garden wall, his feet brushed straggling bushes of verbena encroaching the path. The pale diaphanous smell flooded his senses, carrying him back to – to where? As long as it was back, the senses accepted it as happiness. But he smelt something else in another pace or two.
Cigar smoke?
‘Who the pox are you?’ He had his eraser out, was balanced on his toes, felt ready for crisis, peered ahead at a stocky figure leaning against the garden wall.
‘Sorry if I startled you, guv.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m only having a quick puff, guv.’
‘You are trespassing, you savvy that?’
‘Don’t be like that, guv! I’m only having a quick puff!’
Surinat had a light on the fellow now. A small huddled man in coarse clothes. Local. A fisherman perhaps. Mild, but absolutely unshaken and still drawing on his cigar butt. A real dodgey smelly old man with the arse of his trousers hanging down.
‘How did you get in here? Leave at once before the guards throw you over the wall.’
‘Okay, guv.’ The man vanished.
A whiff of Balkan tobacco, daintily over-ridden by the pallid lemon of verbena.
Then Surinat understood. He gave a peremptory chuckle (just for the record), but he was shaken.
He walked along the path more slowly until he reached the promontory. There he sat, looking over the dark Pannonian Sea. Clusters of lights could be seen over on the Hungarian shore. And there were individual lights, bobbing above the boats that carried them.
It was a fine place in which to feel the old ache, and to worry about the broken people for whom the war would never properly be over: his fatherless brother, Julian, his fatherless niece, Choggles. And me, I suppose. And himself. I have no legs, but I can guess his thoughts!
He was not submerged in meditation too deeply to hear approaching footsteps and the murmur of voices. He recognised the girl’s tones first: Becky Hornbeck, who had come under his wing, and whom he increasingly loved.
And the man was Monty Zoomer.
Mike stood up and made himself known. If they wanted a touch of romance on the promontory, he would politely leave them alone. He knew from experience how well the promontory worked.
‘Don’t go,’ Monty said. ‘Let’s sit and talk. We can both cuddle Becky, can’t we?’
‘Just don’t be too grasping,’ she said.
In the darkness, the two men looked not unalike in stature. But Surinat was more fine-boned, would probably grow thinner as he approached middle-age, as had his father before him, and many of the long line of Surinats. Whereas Zoomer, of nondescript origins which included a Danish-Irish-Dutch mother and a Jewish father called Zomski, had put on meat lately, success adding stature to him.
Indifferently, Surinat settled on the short crisp grass; the grass was fed on salt spray and felt like yak fur. He put his arm round Becky. Even had she meant nothing to him, ah, the warmth, the precious fugitive human warmth of a female body – the one tolerable organisation in a universe of random heat-exchange!
Zoomer, kicking out his legs, was already talking. Subject, as usual, himself.
‘Black was the colour crayon I used to like using most when I was a kid. Guess it was yours too, eh, Surinat?’
‘Yellow.’
‘Well, it means something, I guess. I used to sit out in the courtyard and draw and draw, while my dad was there, writing his endless television plays. See, we weren’t disgustingly rich like the Surinat family. “Nice blue sun” – remember that catch-line? It was famous for years, everyone said it, back before the war. My dad got it straight from me, working away on my crayoning. It was just something I said, aged two and a bit, sitting there out in the courtyard with Dad and my brother. “Nice blue sun!” He’d pass the crayons out the box to me one by one – trying to control my life even then!’
Zoomer laughed at his own recollections. ‘We didn’t like being out in the courtyard all that time, but it was so crowded in the house – the Zomskis used to take in boarders, you know … Humble beginnings, Surinat, humble beginnings! Big blokes from little acorns grow. My brother used to peep in on boarders making love.’
‘Was that your brother Dimittis?’ Becky asked.
‘Funny how he got that name. See, his real name’s Nanko, after his grandfather. But when I was little, all I could call him was Nunkie. The beginnings of creativity, in a way. Distortion and creation – you should know that, Surinat. Everyone called him Nunc, then, and so it went –’
‘Talking about creativity,’ Mike said, ‘can we do a deal on a new holoplay? You have the equipment, I can finance, we can both contribute ideas.’
‘I’m very busy at the moment, see. I’m something like a universal property. Frankly, I’ve got more money than I know how to do with, so your offer hasn’t all that attraction …’
‘I know you’re big time, Monty, but wouldn’t you say that your id-projects are getting – well …’
The night took the pause easily in its dark-throated wing.
‘Go ahead and say it, then, Surinat. How are my projects getting? You weren’t going to say debased, were you?’
Mike was staring through the dark at him. Zoomer was no more than human size, slightly underweight, in fact. Nothing monstrous. And intellect the size of a pinhead. How come he had such undeniable talent? – because it was talent as well as ego.
Yet there was so little to like or even notice about Zoomer, except for his wild hair and the pendant thumping against his plump little courtyard-bred chest.
‘No, I wasn’t going to say debased … What made you think that? I was going to say attenuated. As is only natural, you aren’t the creative force you were five years ago. You’ve given out so much, of course you need an infusion of fresh imagery. I saw one of your holomasques last –’
