Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

‘Well,’ said Guy Gisbone, hitching his trousers.

The alarm buzzed, raising vibrations along the sutures of their skulls.

Glamis was the first back to the screens.

‘Oh, the holy ruptured everlasting scab-devouring sainthoods!’ she exclaimed.

Every screen was showing Kandinski, continuous performance.

The terminals were mouthing babble.

Loudspeakers squeaked and gibbered.

Metallic mouths spat read-outs of unmitigated jabber-wocky.

‘This just has to mean –’ she said.

‘It can’t mean –’ Gisbone said.

‘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.

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.’