Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

‘I’ve passed nothing but ice and snow for days,’ Harry grumbled.

‘A cup of really hot toddy could change that fast.’

The first corpse they came on was lying face down in the dirt. Julliann rolled him over with a boot. It was an Adolescent, encased in green leather. Half his cranium and the top of his face had been sliced off – not wisely, maybe, but too well. Julliann bent suddenly and prodded with a finger in the mess of semi-rigid brains.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you’re going to wash your hands afterwards. What are you looking for anyway? Chewing gum?’

For answer, Julliann came up with a little amber bead. It rolled into the palm of his hand. He held it for inspection under Harry’s nose. Harry moved his nose away. The bead was shaped like a sucked lozenge with two thread-fine horns only a few microns long protruding at one end.

‘Know what that is? It’s an electrode.’ A fleck of gory matter still adhered.

‘How did you know it was there?’

‘I didn’t know, but I expected to find it. I saw one in spilled brains yesterday, and another a couple of days back.’

‘You must look harder at spilled brains than I do, partner! Now tell me what an electrode is!’

He yelled as he finished speaking and swung his sword. Julliann and Gururn turned as two and stood shoulder to shoulder. The feral kids were coming again, driving their bull-roaring bikes, their Yankos and Vastis, skidding over the firm, armed with lances and pikes.

‘Whoooooooargh!’ roared Gururn. He was a good man to have in a battle, pronunciation apart.

The contest was less unequal than it looked. On this broken ground, the bikes made poor going and could, with a well-timed swing, be kicked over. So long had the Adolescents been in the saddle that they were helpless out of it, their atrophied leg muscles unable to bear the weight of their bodies. Also, they had a tendency to run each other over and stab one another in the back with the lances.

It was sixty-four against three. The three triumphed, but it was a dashed close-run thing. Afterwards, they threw a torch on the broken bikes and sat round warming themselves by the fire.

‘We could sleep if only it would get dark. Not a chance of that with all these suns clattering round the sky.’

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Gururn mumbled.

Julliann did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to think the logic-line of his life clear. It made no sense even to him, and he was no intellectual. There had been other occasions when he had tried to sort things out, and something in his brain just switched –

‘Julliann, Julliann …’

He roused, was himself again.

‘Let go of my shoulder, what are you shaking me for?’

‘Are you all right? You flung that bead away and then you went sort of numb.’ Harry’s face was flecked with fear and saliva.

‘Let me alone!’

They saw a sausage-shaped mauve sun rising at a rate of knots. It took some believing. The supernatural nature of the struggle between Milwrack and the Hunchback was being somewhat overplayed.

He slumped before the crackling Yankos in misery, not daring to think about what he needed to think about but could not. How many people had had electrodes inserted in their skulls?

He jumped up and screamed, ‘They’re meddling with us! They’re meddling with us! This isn’t happening! It’s an illusion!’

Harry jumped up, scattering goshawk. ‘That again! You need a toddy too, pal! Let’s go and join up with Milwrack.’

The goshawk circled round the snowed-out rocks, banking tightly, returned, and took a really firm grip on Harry’s right shoulder.

Smix-Smith was not so much a corporation, more a lay of wife, an executive wit had once remarked, referring to his uxorious boss. But humour was filed swiftly away when the boss was on the scene. Even when the boss’s dopple was on the scene.

Attica Saigon Smix came out of Texmissions Bay at full tilt, caused by the incline of the ramp on winch his stretcher ran. The vehicle had its course prescribed. It moved through the mammoth building at close to the speed of sound, down corridors of widths scarcely greater than its own, now and again shuttling into elevator shafts and becoming its own cage. It ejected its human-type burden into a small but luxuriously appointed presidential anteroom to the World Executive Council Chamber, code name Beta Suite, on the walls of which hung, among other treasures, the only Tiepolo etching in the world to survive the war. It depicted the flight into Egypt, and was reputed to be more valuable than Egypt itself.

As he climbed off the stretcher, Attica Saigon Smix was greeted by one of his secretaries for state, Chambers Technical Dictionary (for so this intellectual bonhommous kyllosic Christian member of the Kikuyu tribe had been christened). Chambers offered a potted version of recent events. Attica Saigon Smix read it through swiftly as he entered the council chamber.

Ten members of the executive were present round the traditional table. He wondered if any of them had been through the same complicated transcendences to get here as he. Lights above their seats indicated whether they were their own embodiments or projects of some kind. Two members were companalogs, which C.C. found it convenient to have around. For the rest, all had been top-level members – until a few fleeting but crippled years ago – of various national governments. Ex-red Russian and Chinese sat down with ex-democratic Netherlanders, ex-fascist South Americans, and Americans like Dwight Castle.

Just as they had once carved up their own states, these men now settled down amicably with their ex-enemies to carve up the earth, together with such portions of the solar system as could be appropriated, discovering with alacrity and pleasure how much they had in common with their opposite numbers.

How H.G. Wells, Wendell Willkie, and other valiant dreamers of the World State would have cheered to see their vision made actual! At last, major ideological differences, the plague of the twentieth century, had been healed. ‘United World!’ was now slogan and actuality.

Those few billions of human beings who objected to the idea for one reason or another were being eliminated as fast as the limited efficiency of the postwar machine allowed.

As he settled into his seat at the head of the table, Attica Saigon Smix nodded to the committee. One curt nod. All-inclusive. Nevertheless, though all were included, some were more included than others – in particular, John Thunderbird Smith.