Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

‘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 …’