Five to Twelve

by Edmund Cooper

  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.

  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.”

  Eight

  DION 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.

  He gazed at the screen, and took courage from what he saw. Men were dying untidily, crazily and in vast quantities. They were dying of bayonet wounds, bombs, bullets, shells, fear, bad surgery, insane strategy and sheer stress. So who the Stopes was he, Dion Quern, to complain about a bomb in his chest? Everybody carried a bomb of one kind or another. What the hell! There had to be an end to living.

  And yet… And yet this was a different kettle of quandaries from when he had chosen to accept the possibility of death by sky-diving to the rescue of a naked Juno. That was a private luxury: this was just an infuriating bondage. And yet it was just the same kind of bondage as was being much appreciated by those poor inarticulate jokers in the antique movie. They were all living–and dying–with tin hearts. And for every one of them there was a Leander somewhere with a little red button.

  Dion tossed the empty altbier bottle at the waste-hole, which opened silently, silently swallowed, and closed silently. Then he reached for another bottle and flipped the cap.

  He had toyed with the idea of telling Juno about the death-box he was nursing at blood temperature. But would she have believed him? Yes, possibly. And if she had believed him, what would she have done?

  Answer: she would have sent for the U.S. cavalry, smashed the Lost Legion, and uttered tearfully and with some emotive ejaculation while an obscure pact vaporized.

  So that was a reasonable reason for keeping the merry knowledge to himself.

  However, there were some small complications. Such as having to toss an atomic grenade into the House of Commons in–if Leander was a reliable informant–three more days. Or such as not tossing the grenade and then simply waiting for the button-presser to press a button.

  It really was quite tiresome.

  And the most tiresome aspect was that Dion did not know what, if anything, he was going to do.

  He wanted to smash the doms. But would that be accomplished by elevating six hundred loud mouths to a higher plane? And, in any case, surely Don Quixote had a right to choose his own windmills?

  “I think too ferkinmuch,” said Dion aloud, still observing the sadly bloody drama on the screen.

  “I feel too ferkinlittle,” he added as an afterthought.

  The bottle of altbier being emptied, he tossed it at the waste-hole and selected another.

  “Cogito ergo somesuch,” he remarked definitively. A young German had just bayoneted a French officer and was praying to the corpse for forgiveness. The thirty-twenty was full of trauma and sadness and death.

  He sank himself in the gore and proceeded to methodically finish the carton of altbier. Two thirds through the movie and halfway through the last bottle, he was just contemplating the sublime possibility of calling up another carton when the plate buzzer made a nuisance of itself.

  He listened to it for a while, fascinated, toying with the idea of changing the entire future history of mankind by simply not answering it. Curiosity got the better of him. He switched to receive and almost instantly the screen showed the face of Leander Smith. He was evidently in a public call box.

  “Hi, saviour,” said Leander cheerily.

  “Good night, bastard,” retorted Dion, reaching for the cut stud. “You have a facility for being totally unloved and unwanted. I’m going through hell on the Western Front, and I require no assistance from anyone. How the Stopes do you always manage to plug in to my dried up thought-stream?”

  “Hold it,” said Leander, as he saw Dion move towards the stud. He held up the snuff box with his finger deliberately poised over the button. “You wouldn’t cut me dead, old sport, would you?”

  “Yes, joker. If you were unable to cut me dead also.”

  Leander smiled. “Esprit de corps. I like it. There’s not enough of it in the world these days… You are alone, I trust?”

  “Your trust is not unfounded. The good dom dallies briefly in Europe. Now state your sentiments and return to limbo.”

  “We have a rendezvous, brother ghost.”

  “I have not forgotten your foggy humour in the park.”

  “It is well. The assignment has been advanced one day.”

  “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses… Who is playing games with what’s left of my life?”

  “The High Command, dear sibling. They move in somewhat mysterious ways.”

  “Their non-happenings to perform,” added Dion. “So I live less and laugh louder. Very interesting. Now let me return to my little fairy tale, and I will bid you a very good night.”

  “Not so fast, friend of my youth. There are details to arrange.”

  “So arrange them, and stop wasting the valuable twilight of my life.”

  “You know a bar, the Vive le Sport”

  “I know a bar, the Vive le Sport”

  “I’ll meet you there, midnight tomorrow.”

  “You may be exceedingly lucky.”

  Leander beamed. “I hope so. Otherwise, you may be exceedingly dead.” He cut the connection, thus depriving Dion of the Parthian shot he had not had time to formulate.

  Dion kicked the bed three times and wished Juno were present so that he could strangle her and drop her lifeless body over the balcony, half a mile to earth.

  But Juno was no
t present, and there was no one to kill, maim or make love to. Defeated, frustrated, he settled himself in front of the thirty-twenty and returned to All Quiet on the Western Front.

  He was just in time to see the hand of a young and incredibly weary German soldier reach out to touch a butterfly. He was also in time to see an enemy sharpshooter cancel the action with a bullet.

  Nine

  SHE was small, slender and soft in the way that only infras could be soft. She was no more than a child—twenty-five, perhaps—but already poverty, or near poverty, had etched a few lines on her. Left to her own devices, she would age quite rapidly. By sixty—if she managed to avoid having too many children and lived that long—she would be quite old. Juno had found her singing for lions in a Munich bierkeller. She was mostly English, and her name was Sylphide.

  Juno brought her back to the box while Dion was trying to scribble poetry with his antique pencil. He had been recalling his encounter with Leander in St. James’s Park and was extrapolating upon it. He had also just crossed out the word dewdrop and substituted raindrop. One should not allow art, he felt, to get too perilously near life—particularly if the effect was maudlin.

  So the verse read:

  A raindrop grew into a glass cathedral

  and silence rolled like thunder in his head.

  He was asleep as one who is not living.

  He was awake as one who is not dead.

  Then Juno arrived with Sylphide, like a trireme with a sailing dinghy in tow.

  “Hail, meistersinger. I missed you.”

  “Hail and farewell. I missed nothing. How were the sports in Munich?”

  “More grateful than they are over here… What’s that you’re writing?”