Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

‘Father alive …’ The child could not take it in. She stared almost in disbelief at her mother. Leda looked tired and empty. ‘Can we go to him? Is he … very different?’

‘I haven’t even had the chance to see him myself. I was about to leave Mars when the news came through to Nixonville. The proof seems incontrovertible. I want you to come back to Mars with me. I’m going to need help – you know the hatred with which Auden is generally regarded.’

‘Of course I’ll come …’

Her mother took her hand. ‘I hoped – I knew you’d say that! Can you come at once?’

‘Exactly that, my pet. At once. This has to be cloak-and-dagger, darling, if you don’t mind. I want us to leave together at once, without telling anyone, not even your uncle.’

She pouted. ‘I’m not going to leave without kissing Mike, or telling Becky and her dad I’m going. Think how worried Mike would be if I just disappeared. Mummy, what’s this all about, anyway?’

‘Child, do as I ask! I know best! The universe is a place of perpetual struggle. Secrecy is essential.’

‘If you’re going to get shirty …’ She backed away, eyes anxiously searching her mother’s face, thinking how the desolation of Mars had entered that well-known face.

‘I’m sorry – I’m not shirty. I’m just nervous. Listen, there are many nasty sinister things going on between the planets. Lives are in danger, yours and mine included, as wife and daughter of a famous and much-hated man. Let’s go! Once we are safe in space, you can beam signals to your uncle to your heart’s content. I’ll speak to him too, and explain everything over the scrambler.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I give you my word.’

‘I can’t go in this sopping suit!’

‘There are clothes in the ferry.’

‘Where’s the ferry?’

‘Come with me – I’ll show you.’

She hesitated. ‘Mother, I’m scared.’

‘Everyone’s scared these days – with good reason. Mars is even worse than earth. But I’ll look after you. Your father needs us, that’s the prime consideration.’

So she went, clutching her mother’s thin hand. Her mind swam with the electronic zoomastigina of confusion. The war had been over so long … And her mother and father had been separated before the war. Still, there was compassion. Her mother was a compassionate woman, grim though she was at present. Mars … Dolly, what would she do on Mars, what could she do? Still, it would be an adventure. Her friends would be jealous. But Mars … in this sort of holothriller way …

She was hardly aware of how they slipped together from a rear entrance to the Grad, of climbing into a car and driving to a desolate stretch of coast, where a machine waited. Nor did she realise at first that this was an ordinary flying machine, unfitted for space. In fact, it looked rather like Monty Zoomer’s, the little she had seen of it from a distance.

Numbly, Choggles admired her mother’s skill at the controls as she slumped back into an embracer, feeling it wrap her gently and seductively round. They lifted, banking and swinging grandly as they climbed. Momentarily, she glimpsed through the nearest port breakers marking a dark shoreline, followed by an elaborate small flower in the night. It was Slavonski Brod Grad, by the far Pannonian Sea, warm, civilized – as civilization went – filled with kindly and intelligent people who loved her (as well as the other anti-life kind)., ..

And the blossoming sight, as it swept by and was replaced by the stupider nullity of night jerked her out of her passive mood.

She jumped up, shaking off the sucking embrace of the chair.

She was confronted by a pair of glassily triumphant eyes.

‘Mother!’

‘Sit down!’

She balanced herself against the animal surge of acceleration, light on her small feet, still shedding a warm trickle of water down one leg. A line from a favourite poem of her uncle’s tracered past her attention and she blurted a frightened misquotation.

‘You are, but what you are –’ And the words triggered their own answer.

‘You’re not my mother! You’re a holman!’

She started to scream, unloading the decibels from her ten-year-old lungs right into that frozen expression of triumph. By then, they were no more than a zoomastiginum in the upper air.

‘Harry! Harry!’ he bawled through the pouring rain. He’d bawled for his father like that, in the old man’s dying days. Maybe it just meant he was a shouting man. ‘Harry, for crabs’ sakes!’

Harry looked round, weary on his little eminence, still clutching his tired sword. Mud and blood were plastered over the clothes plastered to his meagre body.

‘What d’you want?’

‘Harry, if you weren’t doing this, what would you most like to be doing?’

Harry and Julliann roared with laughter. They came and stood closer bellowing like old warthogs at Julliann’s joke. Gururn looked on puzzled, false mouth plastered across his splanchnocranium. He did not get the joke. He did not get jokes.

‘Hey, Conan, relax, will you? – There’s a lull in the storm!’ Harry the Hawk called to him.

Gururn made some sort of a gesture, shambled towards the others, his two human friends in this inhuman desert. The fight between their gigantic ally Milwrack and the Whistling Hunchback still continued over the ridge; the elements were joining in, though growing somewhat atmospherically bored. Every clout across shoulder, every fall on to knees, every whistling grunt from Whistling Hunchback, was celebrated in the heavens by a lightning flash, a gust of north wind, or a fresh cloudful of hail, slung down like chilled buckshot over the battle area. Now and again, an eagle was tossed in too, Boreas-borne. As if intelligent enough to be scared, Harry’s goshawk clung bedraggled to its master’s shoulder, clung there throughout the battle with the ravening Adolescents, losing the odd feather, croaking the odd word of encouragement to its master.

The trio stood there resting, steaming.

Mud poured past their ankles like failed chocolate pudding.

‘Let’s go and look at the guys we killed. It will help keep our spirits up,’ Julliann said. He also had a theory that he should always keep his mob on the move, so that they had no time to think about their wounds or his failure to pay their social security.

They trudged over high ground, exchanging mud for old heaped snowbanks such as pervaded the whole region they had been travelling for so long. The spectacular suns overhead lit them like automobile headlights, making the going ever more difficult.