Brian Aldiss - Eighty Minute Hour

We sat down together, and he started to discuss paternity. He did ramble sometimes. Then he said, ‘Your other burden is the loss of your parents. I know your mother is doing good work on Mars, but she should be here with you and Choggles. Choggles is getting too precocious for her own boots … No, that wasn’t what I meant to ask you. Durrant, what are you intending to do with your life?’

Well, why not tell him?

‘I’m intending to write a novel. I’m not interested in holoplays, and pornography has its limitations. I want to write a good old-fashioned novel, with no more ambition in it than to reflect pleasure and disgust in what I see round me.’

At that time, I was not entirely serious. I did not entirely intend to write a novel, merely to keep old George, whom I regarded highly, content. Certainly, I did not intend to write this novel. But, the neuro-scientists declare, every human act can be analysed in chemical terms; so perhaps that conversation predetermined this book.

I hereby determine not to intervene in the narrative again – or not overtly. But, bereft of my own legs, I intend to play a long-legged God – the new kind of god, god of creation, slave of the creation it has created, as man has now become slave of the systems he created, according to the new neuro-philosophy. For – why not admit it – I’m vexed already with my task: by what scale of values is it more worthwhile to create or read a novel, even one with real people in it, than to opt for hallucinations provoked by root , as does my dark obverse, my brother, over in California? – Except in this: that drug-dreams cover old ground, and look back; I try to look forward, to encompass new thought.

Accordingly, I will travel with my characters all round space and time. If I do that, I will also travel into their thoughts. Why not? Mind is now proven an epiphenomenon of space and time! You see I write a story on deterministic principles.

The first flutter of this came to me as I sat in the sun with George Hornbeck, for I said, ‘I’d like to try and invent what others think. Thought has always seemed to me easier to understand than action.’ (And there I finish telling what I said.)

He gave his dry laugh. ‘Understanding is a relative expression. But we can all of us always do with a little more of it. Go ahead, Durrant, see what you can do for us – and yourself!’

He left me, walking quite strongly across the wide courtyard, an old man missing England.

Orbiting the sun in a region of space somewhere (not to put too fine a point on it) between Mars and Jupiter, was the space vehicle known to its enemies as Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero. To the D.N., and to its occupants, it was known as Doomwitch .

The occupants numbered ten humans, plus a very efficient computer. The ship was built by the Dissident Nations – those who could not or would not enter the World Government umbrella offered by the Cap-Comm Treaty. Most of the structure was Japanese-made, except the computer, which was a Danish model, an IMRA40, and the engines, which were Yugo-Hungarian.

Most of the crew were American. Four of them were conscious, while the rest lay in semi-deep, just three degrees Kelvin above BAZ (Biochemical Activity Zero), conserving air, nutrients, and power.

Of the four who retained, to varying degrees, that peculiar state called by its possessors ‘full consciousness’, we have met one before – Dr Glamis Fevertrees, last seen with Zoomer arranged tastefully about her feet. She still wore his pendant round her neck.

Also conscious was the cool, dapper, and scholarly Professor Jules de l’Isle-Evens, once a high-ranking scientific adviser to the EEC in Brussels before the EEC signed on with Cap-Comm, whereupon de l’Isle-Evens, an independent man, had joined the D.N.

The other two aware crew-members were Guy Gisbone, who, like many other technical men, had been involved with the massive Operation Sex-Trigger under the aegis of Auden Chaplain, before WWIII; and the perky and spotty Dimittis, who was referred to – not always behind his back – as ‘the cabin-boy’.

All four were busy. None was happy.

Doomwitch was the first D.N. spy-bell to be launched, whereas the Cap-Comm powers had virtually the free run of space. Its appointed task was to maintain constant watch and chart of all Cap-Comm space-going operations and feed them back to Tokyo, the new D.N. capital. But it had been detected by enemy posts near Jupiter almost before taking up position.

The enmity between Cap-Comm and D.N. was not yet formalised by anything so crass as a war-footing – indeed, nations still remained embarrassed at finding themselves on the opposing side to nations with whom they had been allied in WWIII, only three years before. But a state of tension existed, which the unscrupulous para-combine of Smix-Smith took full advantage of.

Guy Gisbone and the glamorous Dr Glamis lay on couches on their stomachs – not the most comfortable of positions for Gisbone, a well-fleshed man with plenty of belly – surveying the trajectories of shipping in the region of Mars. They had six monitors to watch, most of them filled with blank space most of the time, any one of which could have its contents switched to one of two larger screens if the contents proved important enough.

The profusion of screens caused a certain amount of headache. In addition, Jupiter, as omnipresent to Doomwitch as a hunch on a hunchback’s shoulder, was causing a static storm – Jupiter IV being in transit – and distorting images.

In the lab behind the observation bay in which Glamis and Gisbone were working, Jules de l’Isle-Evens sat with lightbrush and screen, working on an arachnoid-like polygraph, the coordinates of which he was plotting from a notebook.

Dimittis was cooking flapjacks.

All four joined in their computer-song.

GLAMIS

The inter-reactions of the biosphere

Proceeding at their statutory pace

Produced an ocean-vat of amino-acid.

From there the stages, difficult but placid,

That led us upwards to the human race

Are now deterministically clear.

JULES

The next step onwards has an equal clarity.

Like ripples on a lake-face interlocking,

Each stage becomes more complex than the last,

Governed by mathematic law. Thus, fast,

We recognise the new scheme time is clocking;

Computers have with mankind now gained parity.

QUARTET