Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

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 –’

‘Look, friend, I give myself, right? I give myself ! People want what I got. I keep the imagining popular. It’s for the masses, not for you in your precious secluded castles. You just pull in, I expand, I give out, I give the public what they want, okay?’

‘The argument of how many second-rate artists! A self-righteous way of saying that you pander to the lowest common denominator for as much cash as you can get!’

‘That’s the jealousy of an artist who’s never rated, right? And it’s the cruddy snooty toffee-nosed attitude of someone who has a lousy opinion of his fellow men. Why the suppurating sandbag shouldn’t I coin the copper while I can?’

Surinat laughed with at least a semblance of good nature. ‘Next you’ll be saying that commercial success is a proof of merit. Sorry, Zoomer, I’m only needling you!’

Zoomer was on his feet, jumping up and letting Becky collapse against Surinat.

‘What right do you get to needle me? Think you’re so good just because you’ve inherited this big fat ugly castle –’

‘Very different from your neat plastic dreams, isn’t it?’

‘– I tell you I serve the people. Better than all your word-games, your trifling. The times are all upset, who knows how much, and all you do is sit around all day and kipple about with words !’

‘My decadent view is, I fear, that words are the basic building blocks of man’s society. The universe could not begin to exist in any meaningful way until an intelligible word was spoken.’

‘Plasticine! Pictures were first, and popularity is too a test of merit. What other test is there?’

Becky said quietly, ‘You say you serve the people, Monty. I understood you served Computer Complex, and that they pay you?’

Zoomer said quietly, ‘So precisely what?’

‘So it’s not a question of popularity. The public accepts what C.C. dishes out.’

‘Aw; you’re all ganging up on me! You rich layabouts are all the same. You don’t know what it’s all about, you don’t know what it is to fight for existence. I’m going to get a drink. What’s so awful about working for the government, anyway?’ His dark figure merged with the dark.

Becky leaned more closely against Mike.

‘He likes blowing his top. And when he does, he’s even more lavish with his words than you are!’

They lay down side by side, hands soothing each other, lips gently nibbling, legs eventually intertwining.

‘By the far Pannonian Sea …,’ she quoted, and he took it up.

‘… that ocean

Born again from Mesozoic springs …’

They were both repeating it now as they lay embracing, while the sea came slobbering up to their feet.

‘We felt the quickening life of earth’s heart burst

As it had ever done, in change and motion,

From the great morning of the world when first

All baser things enjoyed life’s sacred thirst;

And dawning humans in the primal light

Ran to the shore and in the waves immersed

Bodies and minds. Then had they not won right

To build technologies against life’s true delight;

Simple and rough, they yet were flowering things –

But oh, the fruit, the tasteless fruit, man’s autumn brings!’

He had adapted it from verses of his favourite poet, hastily during the war, when the Pannonian Sea was still growing and there was some doubt whether the Grad would not disappear like a sword beneath its inundating waves. Now equipoise had been reached, as their two voices, furred by being kept low, reached in harmony the dorised cadence of the last line.

Becky had memorised the verse for her own pleasure, not to please him, not to please anyone but herself. Becky Hornbeck was a free person, containing within her the lack of stridence belonging to true independence. And she owned the Koh-i-Nor.

On the word ‘brings,’ their mouths came together with a sort of nimble precision which suggested both had been this way before and found in it a pleasure perhaps beyond the scope of words. Two independences merged to create a greater.

A small wet thing, dripping uncontrollably into the depths of a Mexican dogwood, had been crouching near enough to overhear the conversation between Surinat and Monty Zoomer. When Zoomer turned and flounced from the scene, the crouching shape arose and followed damp feet almost noiseless on the path.

Lights, lanterns, the modest floodlit façade of Slavonski Brod Grad, broken fretwork of pampas and variegated laurel, acacias made cavernous by fireglow, silhouettes of special people, the ambience of the pool, massed blacks where cypresses made mirror of ground and sky, the blaze of windows, primitive glow of serried barbecues, turrets gloomy above it all – through the broken scenes, each companionable in its own tent of night, went Zoomer, daintily picking his way, alone.

And Choggles Chaplain shadowed him in her swimsuit. Suspicious, sinister, unsuspecting, prepubertal.

She was hardly likely to guess at the sophisticated equipment packed into a tooth-sized package and embedded just beside Zoomer’s fifth vertebra. It gave him eyes in his back. And he had already seen that he was followed.

He went through the oleander patio, up the shallow fountain-adorned steps, in at the side door. When Choggles, still dripping, slid around the portal, she saw him already starting up the wide sweep of staircase, his head eclipsed by chandelier. She lurked behind a potted palm.

When he reached the top step, she ran lightly up behind him, every limb shining from its internal spring.

The door of his suite slammed almost in her face.