MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

Which old lady would you rather meet, on a dark night?

Now here is something very sad to think about.

The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty-three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller . . .

Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun "beyond all description bright"), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. For example, one solar week ago, man came stumbling out of the African rainforests. Herbiverous, bipedal-erect but by no means sapient. Four solar months ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth. One solar minute ago, we enjoyed the Renaissance. Having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, the sun will be with us for many solar years to come.

But it won't make old bones. Predictably, somehow (don't we see this every day?), the great decline will be presaged by increasingly hyper-manic activity (look out of the window, at the twanging joggers), by a frantic reassertion of once-infinite but now-vanishing powers. The doomed despot wants to leave nothing behind: its policy, then, is scorched Earth.

First will come the solar winds. It is not given to human beings to imagine the power of the solar winds. But we can make a start by trying to think of an ultimate hurricane consisting of heavy objects-things like trucks and houses and battleships.

During its life on the main sequence, the sun was never accused of being small or cold. Everyone knows that the sun is big and hot. Being big and hot is what it's always been so good at. Now, therefore, it gets even bigger and even hotter. It leaves the main sequence. The yellow dwarf becomes a red giant.

At this stage we give the sun about eighteen (solar) months-two years, at the most. In necrotic rage Chronos consumed its young. Now it retreats and shrinks and curls up and dies, a white dwarf, like all dead things, crystalline and embittered and entombed.

It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life.

"The History of Increasing Humiliation, dear sirs, proceeds apace." "Please don't fret. I have got dear Den ton out of Repton and into the Goldsmith. He didn't live very long anyway, so completion is more or less in sight." "Gentlemen: Worry not! The ice and cobalt blue of Siberia loom ever nearer." In the haystack of Richard's desktop (he couldn't find the needle), among its schemes and dreams and stonewallings, its ashtrays, coffee cups, dead felt-tipped pens and empty staplers, were traces and deposits of other books: books he hadn't told Gal Aplanalp about; books commissioned yet unfinished, or unbegun. These included a critical biography of Lascelles Abercrombie, a book about literary salons, a book about homosexuality in early twentieth-century English literature with special reference to Wilfred Owen, a study of table manners in fiction, his half of a picture book about landscaping (his half was meant to be a 25,000-word meditation on Andrew Marvell's "The Garden"), and a critical biography of Shackerley Marmion . . . Richard definitely wasn't going to Siberia. But then again, all the other books felt like Siberia: they felt laughably inimical. There were leper colonies, in Siberia. Richard had read about them for a week. To think of the Siberian lepers made him feel cold-it wasn't the weather but the isolation. The Siberian lepers, with all their pathos and disgrace; and lost in time, too, because nobody went near their world and so nobody changed it, and there it was, preserved in ice. What drew him to the Siberian lepers? Why did he feel like one? Siberia wasn't all like that; it wasn't all quarantine and gulag, wasn't all bitter ends. Siberia had bears, and even tigers.

He reread the impatient and quietly menacing letter from the publishers-about Siberia and Richard's wanderings there.

"They're kidding. Fuck it, I'm just not going."

"You said a swear": this was Marco, who now half-entered the study, supporting himself against the doorway in a leaning embrace.

"I'm not going, Marco. They can't make Daddy go."

"Who?"

"Birthstone Books."

"Where?"

"Siberia.?

Marco took this in. After all it was, for him, a perfectly average conversation. His face framed itself to say something nice-something, perhaps, about not wanting Daddy to go anywhere; but he just ducked shyly. That's where I'll end up, he thought. After Gina goes, and after Anstice has wearied of me. Among the Siberia lepers will I dwell. He imagined he would cut quite a dash, there in the colony, and would be entitled and even expected to go around sneering at those less fortunate than himself, at least to start with, until he too succumbed.

Kirk was out of hospital and Steve went around to see him: as you do.

They sat together, watching a video, Steve in his mack, Kirk on the couch, with a blanket. His face still looking like a pizza: heavy on the pepperoni. Kirk: his lieutenant. Organized the muscle.

It was a normal video they sat staring at. Cops and robbers. Or FBI and serial murderers. Steve had watched so much pornography, and so little else, that he had some mental trouble, watching normal videos. Whenever you got a man and a woman alone in a room, or an elevator, or a police car-Steve couldn't understand why they didn't start ripping each other's clothes off. What was the matter with them? Steve's glazed eyes strayed. Up on the book nook, above the TV console, was Kirk's modest collection of erotica: megaboobs from the boondocks. Steve knew all about Kirk's visions of eros: 200 pounds of nude blonde-on a trampoline.

"This it?" said Steve, meaning Kirk's general condition and immediate career plans.

Kirk droopily waved a hand at him.

"Beef?" said Steve.

"Beef," said Kirk, dropping his quilted face-with its onion rings, its anchovies.

See? Still pining. Beef had been put down by Kirk's brother Lee- after its third attack on Lee's daughter. Next came Kirk's retaliatory attack on Lee. And Kirk's brief rehospitalization.

"Kirk mate. You ain't going anywhere, are you?" said Steve, getting to his feet. "Give my love to your mum."

No one had as yet written a novel called Quacko. And for good reason. This novel would have no beginning, no middle and no end-and no punctuation. This novel would be all over the fucking gaff.

There wasn't going to be a novel called Quacko and there wasn't going to be any drugs war-or drags whah (rhymes with ma), as Terryterry called it. Drugs war? Get real. "Get real," Steve Cousins would sometimes murmur, when he saw women, in pornography, who hadn't had their breasts surgically enhanced. "Get real. Get a life," he would mur- mur, seeing the unfixed tits, scarless on the underhang. "Jesus. Get a life." And now that was what he had to do. He had to get a life. Taking a life: he knew how you did that. Some old guy in some old hut somewhere, in the fucking rain . . . The planet definitely lacked a person, down to Scozz. Taking a life and getting one were very different activities. But they weren't opposites, Steve Cousins felt.

Like a musician who can jam all night the love-life with legs is constantly improvising on anything that comes its way. So the Tulls, Richard and Gina (those veterans of sexual make-do and catch-can), as they faced this new challenge, looked to their powers of extemporization. After each display, after each proof of his impotence, it was into his excuses that Richard poured his creative powers. Nor did Gina's talent for the humane go untested by all these let-outs and loopholes, because, after all, she had to lie there and listen to them, nudging him here, prompting him there (yes, there … Ouuu, yes there!).