Authors: Edmund Cooper
Time was abolished, turned inside out, stretched, shrunk, rolled into a ball and torn into infinitely small pieces. He travelled east for twenty-one centuries, secure in the fiction that the journey would never end.
Curiosity was his downfall.
Curiosity was literally his downfall. He peeped through a hole in eternity, and suddenly needed to know where he was. He touched the jet control and sank gently into the carpet of cotton wool. The sun ran away in despair, the blue sky rolled itself up and tried to follow him, but it was smothered in the opaque grey limbo of the fog.
Down went Dion, slowly, gathering a frozen shroud of ice crystals as he sank.
The audio-radar stopped purring. Then it murmured
anxiously. Finally it began to screech with a monotonous rhythm.
Regally, Dion ignored the warning.
A few seconds later, before he could actually comprehend what had happened, he was waist deep in the icy waters of the North Sea.
H
E
stabilized.
It seemed the most idiotic thing to do. He could either have shot back upstairs into a gold morning or cut the jets and let the weight of the pack take him to the bottom of the deep black sea.
Instead of which, he stabilized, enjoying a luxurious masochism as the icy water fought a winning battle with the heating circuit in his sky suit. His toes went dead first. Then the numbness crept less than stealthily up his legs.
He tried to think of Socrates and hemlock, and the sweet nobility of wrapping it all up in a final
non sequitur
. Instead of which he found himself totally absorbed by the slippery jet contours of the sea. There was a slight swell, and he was bobbing up and down gently like the float on a fishing line. He wished some goddam thing would bite or else the fisherman would make another cast. The jets whistled softly, a musical monotone. A permanent prelude in A flat.
The North Sea, wreathed in skeins of November fog, just didn’t bloody care. Which was very satisfying. It was a totally disinterested party, and it didn’t care one fragmented coprolite about the fate of Dion Quern.
The water swirled about him, sucking playfully without any conviction. And Dion bobbed up and down with the swell, waiting for a sign from that bastard fog-bound sport on the black side of the sun.
None was vouchsafed. Fog there was at the beginning
and fog there would be at the end. And between the beginning and the end there was nothing but indecision, vacuity, cowardice, dead legs and about fifty fathoms of water.
“I am a dead man,” said Dion aloud. He was disappointed because there was no echo and because nobody disagreed.
“I am a poet,” he said belligerently. But nobody wanted him to prove it.
“I am an innocent bystander,” he pleaded. But there was no corroboration.
“God blast it, I’m alone!” he sobbed. The North Sea did not dispute the point. The fog was no less indifferent.
“I’ll pull out the plug,” he threatened. Nobody admonished him.
“You’ll be sorry,” he screamed. But a grey sorrow already covered the bleak black sadness of the sea, and there were no tears left for Dion Quern.
So he cut the jets, sliding down into the water with a suddenness that totally unnerved him. There should have been a pause, or a hint of slow motion. Time for a last thought. But the speed with which the North Sea closed over his head was most disquieting. Even as he slipped into the depths he began to suspect a conspiracy. Also he did not much care for the salt water freeze-stinging his face.
Temporarily forgetful of certain obvious facts, he opened his mouth to utter further well chosen words. The sea rushed in, and he panicked.
But he did not panic too much. Groping between living and dying with half-numbed fingers, he found the jet control and hit it to full vertical thrust.
Miraculously, he stopped falling to the bottom of the sea. Gas streamed angrily and noisily from the cylinders in his pack. He shot back up to the surface and out from the water like a demented porpoise heading for the stars. He had just
enough presence of mind to switch to booster heat before he blacked out.
A limp porpoise, trailing vapour and drops of salt water, rose through the fog layer and plunged inertly up into the high gold world of sunlight. It would have continued up to the ten thousand ceiling, where Dion would have undoubtedly hung until he froze as stiff as a Victorian paterfamilias, had not the pilot of a continental helibus possessed little faith in the wonders of automation.
She did not trust the tiny black box that was programmed to take the helibus infallibly to Brussels. So, instead of enjoying a brief narcosis, as most pilots would have done, she sat on the control deck, grudgingly conceding navigational decisions and watching the foggy peaks flip by below.
In a moment of delicious unbelief, she saw Dion Quern arc swiftly towards the sun. She did not care greatly for what she saw, having had previous experience of off-lane sky walkers bent upon their own destruction. So she hit the M button, heaved to and sent the second officer to life-bus station. As the unconscious Dion continued to rise tranquilly heavenwards, the life-bus was launched to take up hot pursuit.
When Dion next awoke, he was in a bed at the London Clinic. Juno was sitting by his side. He had a terrible feeling of
déjà uv.
“Nothing but exposure,” said Juno cheerily. “You’ll never know how lucky you are. Save your totally incredible explanation till we get home.”
Dion gazed at her for a moment or two, collecting what-if anything-was left of his wits.
“Indecent exposure,” he said at length. “I fully realize how unlucky I am, and I do not wish to go home.”
Juno kissed him.
An hour later he was in the box at London Seven.
“I
WANT
a child,” said Juno.
“So?”
“So you contracted to provide me with one.”
They were sitting on the balcony bench, two hundred and fourteen floors up in London Seven, drinking coffee. Nearly half a mile below, the carpet of fog, which had remained tenaciously for two days, was now thinning a little. Dion watched the setting sun slowly transform it into a frozen crimson sea. The external atmosphere was cold, but the balcony was surrounded by a curtain of heated air streams. Thus was a bubble of summer preserved in the frosty altitudes of autumn. In the dying glow, the scene shimmered as light waves were deflected by the vapour content in a row of artificial thermals.
The crimson carpet rippled and heaved as if it had suddenly decided to live.
“The prospect of artificial insemination is not one that fills me with total ecstasy,” said Dion, collecting his thoughts.
“Reprogramme. I did not suggest it. A.I. produces interesting statistics. There is a higher incidence of neurosis in both bearers and babies… I want this one provided the hard way.”
“Hard for whom?” enquired Dion.
“Me, little troubadour. Do you think I
want
you to waste time and energy on an infra?”
“I might enjoy the experience.”
“I shall be happy if you do. But the object of the exercise is to get a healthy child. Don’t forget it.”
“What has addled your transistors, shrivel-womb? Did that high-spirited little contretemps on Hallowe’en give you an intimation of mortality ? Are you getting old and sentimental in spite of time shots?”
Juno sighed. “Oh, Dion! Why do you have to pretend that you are living inside a steel ball? You almost got yourself a permanent death for my sake. Is it so morbid that I should want your child?”
“Did they rape you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Did they rape you?”
She smiled. “I suppose you could call it that. They shot me full of something and I grovelled like a bitch on heat… It doesn’t matter now. The burns have healed, the psycho-docs have processed me, and the only complexes I have are about you.”
“Ha!” shouted Dion triumphantly. “You submitted. That’s why you want a child. You submitted, and dear old Dom Nature resurrected the million-year programming. The lust-juice is irrelevant. You lay flat on your back, mind vacant as a lunar vacuum, while your body remembered what it was all about… You’re trying to be an anachronism by proxy.”
“Would it matter?” asked Juno. He was irritated to find that her voice and manner were entirely calm.
“Yes, flat-belly, it would.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t cheat history for ever.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“That’s nothing. I’m living in riddles.”
“Is that why you tried to take a one-way ticket in the North Sea?”
“I was amusing myself,” he snapped evasively. “I was playing follow-my-leader with seagulls and fishes. The kick rebounded, that’s all.”
“There’s more to it, meistersinger. You were playing Russian roulette with yourself for a bullet.” She looked at him hard. “You’ve only been dead once. Are you already hooked on it?”
“We’re all hooked on it, love. We spend a mere nine months getting born, so why take a couple of centuries for the dying? The great kick is to burn briefly and with some slight radiance.”
Juno sighed. “That’s why I want a child. I can still hear the ticking of the clock… Something has happened to you, Dion.”
“Yes. I saw a big bitch cooking in a bonfire and quite lost my head.”
“No, something else. You were all right after you were resurrected at the Clinic. Something has happened since.”
He grinned. “One knighthood and the royal prerogative.”
“Still not what I mean… Who was the sport who visited you while you were still horizontal?”
“Sleuthing becomes you. His name was Attila T. Hun and he came to see me about a tour of the Balkans.”
Juno shrugged, and was silent for a while. She sat gazing at the red sun as it slipped with an odd illusion of jerkiness over the western edge of the world. Then she began to shiver slightly, though the temperature remained constant at eighteen centigrade.
“You’ll give me a child?” she asked at length.
“Why not? A new toy may divert you. You must be getting tired of itinerant poets.”
“I love you,” she said simply.
“Love is not enough.”
“What is enough, then?”
“Absolute submission-and a world where men can breathe without having to ask permission from the nearest domdoc, and where all women would be proud to see their bellies great with child… You want a child, and you can have one. It will be a pre-cooked, fresh-frozen, sterilized infant-and I wish you great joy of it. It will be a stranger to your breast and, if it’s a son of mine, an enemy to your kind. It will have a love affair with your credit key and it will break a leg dancing at your funeral.” He laughed bleakly. “Yes, you can have a child. So you had better find me some poor, misguided, hungry infra whom I can ravish and cherish and age… Her wretched body will bear the fruit of my love for the price of a couple of time shots; and because of that I shall love her. Even if she’s as dull as cabbage and as heavy as last year’s potatoes, I shall love her. Because she will have an abject pride, an ugly beauty, and a fearful courage… And if you can understand that, you’ll be halt’ way to knowing what’s wrong with this orderly, hygienic limbo you ageless, faceless ones have created.”
“I’m cold,” said Juno, “and I’m tired. Let’s go inside… Do you hate me so much, Dion?”
“No,” he said, getting up from the bench. “I don’t hate you. But I’m damned if I’ll ever weep for you. And that, dear beautiful playmate, is what really saddens me.”
D
ION
was alone in the box, and the world was briefly and deliciously still. He had been alone for almost a day and a half. The luxury of it fascinated him. He began to feel that God-or whateversuch—was not necessarily on the side of the big chronometers.
For reasons best known to herself, Juno had flipped off on a lion-kick. She had gone to Stockholm–so she said–to pick up some of the Swedish crystal that was too good for the Nordics to export. Then she was due to rendezvous with a chummy Interpeace dom for a beery evening in Munich. Then she proposed to surface jet to Rome for a few sex rags before high-jetting back to London on the morrow.
Allah be praised for the vagaries of alleged females. It meant at least, in this case, that one might have a little time to stand and steer.
Dion had plugged himself in to an antique movie on the vid. It was called
All Quiet on the Western Front.
He had found a mention of it in an old artpix catalogue and had requested playback from Centrovid. The computer had taken all of five minutes to fish it out of the National Film Archives.
And now, here was Dion, glued to the playback on a thirty-twenty wall screen. Some bastard dom had tried to reprocess the original as a tri-di colour piece. But after five minutes of it, Dion had hit the request button and blown
a few of Centrovid’s micro-transistors. So now he was on the original black and white, with its hazy haloes, crackly dialogue and moth-eaten dissolves. And he was enjoying every minute of it.
They don’t make garbage like that any more, he thought sadly, helping himself to another German
altbier
from the carton of six that had been delivered via the vacuum hatch. And the reason was that doms were not carnage-oriented. They could not stomach the blood-and-guts motif that was the secret fantasy syndrome of all self-respecting sports and that had been the catharsis-trigger of all red-corpuscle-wearing males since time immemorial.
He watched the battle scenes, sad and searing though they were, with an intentness that verged on ecstasy. The images were horrible, grotesque, nightmarish; but they belonged to a vanished world of men. And because of that there was dignity in absurdity, beauty in horror, even peace in the terrible roar of ancient guns.
He watched with his eyes and felt with his body; but the tiny court jester who quipped around in his head still persisted in juggling with the problems of Dion Quern.
The tin heart under his ribs hammered loudly. Dion imagined-as he had already imagined many times—Leander’s finger resting almost absently on the button. It was one thing to know that death is common to all. It was quite another thing to know that one’s own death depended on someone else’s caprice.