“Your epitaph… Now, who is this child you have clearly stolen?”
“Her name is Sylphide, and she is going to bear me a son.”
Dion inspected the girl whose womb he was required to fertilize. She was frightened and she seemed less than repulsive. He was pleased on both counts.
“Enchanté de faire votre connaissance,” he said with a courtly bow.
“Merely, monsieur. J’espére que notre connaissance sera trés heureuse pour tous.”
“Your French is almost as limited as mine,” said Dion. “How did this big bitch trick you into coming back to England?”
“Please,” said Sylphide nervously. “Dom Juno has been very kind. She has already given me one thousand lions.”
“Another thousand on conception,” added Juno, “and then a thousand on delivery.”
“Dead or alive?” enquired Dion maliciously.
Juno’s good temper was rapidly evaporating. “Don’t play too rough, little one,” she advised. “And don’t abuse my infra. She’s paid to conceive not to take punishment.”
Dion began to laugh. “My infra! By the lord of misrule, what do you think you are—a seventeenth century sultana?”
“Cut the transmission. We have spent half the day jetting and we are rather tired… Now, talk nicely to the squawk box and get us something to eat.”
At the mention of food, Dion realized that he himself was hungry. He had been drinking a lot, but he could not remember the last time he had eaten. He went to the vacuum hatch and spoke into the pick-up. “Accoutrements for three,” he said. “First, avocado stuffed with shrimps. Second, pasta chuta. Third, Mexican strawberries with cognac. Fourth, Cheshire cheese, Danish butter, Finnish crispbread. To drink: two litres of rosé, half of Hennessey XO, black coffee, cream, demerara sugar. Ten from now. Out.”
“Stopes!” exclaimed Juno with delight. “The man creates poetry in food also.” Impulsively, she flung her arms round him.
“Unhand me, cow,” snapped Dion. “The Last Supper was a dramatic occasion, was it not?”
“Signifying?”
“Signifying that life is frequently shorter than you think, and no one has yet calculated the square root of tomorrow.”
Juno began to get angry again. “Who or what has scrambled your transistors, stripling? You are like a bear with a sore amplifier. If it’s a fracas you are looking for, you can have it.”
“Not in front of the child,” advised Dion drily. “Who knows what indelible impression it might leave upon her yet untarnished womb.” He turned to Sylphide. “I presume that this will be your first?”
“Yes, it will.”
“You wouldn’t want to keep the infant?”
She looked at him helplessly. “What could I do with a child?”
“Ah, so. A fitting comment on our lovely world.” He glanced at Juno. “Where does this innocent live, sleep and endure the ravages of passion? Or have you not yet considered? This box is hardly big enough for a ménage à trois.”
“I have considered,” retorted Juno. “For the time being, Sylphide has a room of her own on the twenty-third floor. Later, we shall see.”
“When the fruit, no doubt, is ripening on the tree,” added Dion.
Further verbal skirmishes were cut short by the arrival of the meal.
While they ate, Dion learned a little more about Sylphide. She was twenty-three and had been unclaimed. Her mother—still, possibly, alive somewhere—was a half Dutch, half English infra and her father an English squire. The dom who had paid for her conception did not live to collect on the investment, having got herself killed while carrying out research in synthetic viruses. So Sylphide had received the usual bounty of a state orphanage until she was eighteen. Thereafter she had lived on domestic work for high-bracket doms, occasional prostitution, and occasional work as a sponsong singer in bars, clubs, bierkelkrs and brothels. She was already tired of life—which, possibly, was why she was prepared to settle down to a career of regular pregnancies.
“Don’t you think there is something overripe in the state of Denmark?” enquired Dion, when he had heard her story.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Nor does he,” said Juno acidly. “I must warn you, Sylphide. Given three decimal places of chance, Dion will torment the life out of you. He’s an atavism. It’s his way of beating his chest… If he makes too much trouble, tell me, and I’ll reprocess him.”
Dion ignored her. “I mean that the world is a dazy-crazy place when alleged females like Juno drip power and lions while you and your kind can only get by if you drip babies.”
“But Dom Juno is a dom,” protested Sylphide uncompre-hendingly.
“Dom Juno is a dom,” he mimicked. “What a lucid sentiment! A tree is a tree is a tree. And where the Stopes does that get us? They can’t have programmed all rational thought out of you, child. Surely there is something left between your ears—or is it all concentrated between your legs?”
Sylphide burst into tears.
Juno picked up the bottle of Hennessey. “That’s your ration, playboy. One more volley of anti-social rhetoric out of you, and I’ll launch you down a long, long slipway.”
Surprisingly, Dion was ashamed. “Sylphide,” he said gently. “Dehydrate. Juno is right. Statistically, she’s bound to be right once in a while, and this happens to be it… I’m a psych-happy, frustrated, full-volume midget, and I humbly beg your pardon. You have jetted a thousand miles to have your womb blown up, not to have your head opened. I am filled with chagrin, to say nothing of remorse.”
Ignoring Sylphide, Juno looked at him anxiously. “Dion, what is wrong? Whatever it is, it’s getting wronger and wronger.”
“Nothing,” he said lamely. “I’m the spectre of a ghost, that’s all. Forgive me, children, for I know not what I do.”
He took the bottle of Hennessey from Juno and poured himself a substantial dose. He downed it irreverently in one, and then stood up.
“Midnight, monumental, looms,” he announced enigmatically. “I must leave you briefly, dear playmates. I go to take counsel with one whose finger caresses most affectionately a tiny button. Doubtless in my brief absence, you will decide whose bed shall presently be glorified this night.” He gave Juno a penetrating look. “In the interests only of futurity, I would recommend that the distinction falls to Sylphide.”
Ten
THE condemned man, thought Dion cheerily as he walked through the brisk November morning to collect an atomic grenade for the proposed elevation of the British legislature, had drunk a hearty breakfast. It being something of an occasion, he had allowed himself two prairie oysters and one bottle of champagne. In spite of which he still felt rather tired. What had been left of the previous night he had spent with Sylphide in her twenty-third floor box.
Since she was a complete stranger and an infra, he had made love to her several times and with considerable ardour. Enthusiasm did not have to be simulated for she was—in a dark and oddly vacant way—very attractive. Also she knew exactly what to do with her legs, her arms, her breasts and her tongue. Which was a considerable relief; for if one was going to dance, one should certainly not dance badly.
It was not, however, mere erotics that had kept Dion operating like a rabbit out to break its own record. Nor was it the result of a desperate need to please Juno. It was simply that whispers of mortality were scurrying about in his head like frightened mice. He thought it was very probable that he was going to die—by buttons, or atomic blast or the laser beams of enraged Peace Officers. And while the prospect was not wholly horrifying or displeasing, it did have a disquieting touch of finality about it. Particularly since he had a notion that he had already used up his quota of resurrections.
In short, he, too—much to his amused amazement—desperately wanted a child. Posthumous, almost certainly. But what the Stopes!
It was a very sad thing to discover that one wanted a child. Particularly if one was about to high-jet Lethe-wards.
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Sylphide had not been disturbed by his early departure. Literally, she had not been disturbed. Three or four energetic ravishments had been more than sufficient to remove all desire to remain conscious from her. She had fallen asleep almost at the point of final orgasm; and she had lain there without moving, her legs still wide apart, wearing nothing in the early light but the drowned look of a lost child.
During breakfast, Dion had fancifully anointed her breasts with champagne and had said a few tender words over the smooth flesh that concealed a womb which might even then be making private arrangements for its future expansion. But Sylphide did not feel the anointing and did not hear the benediction. Which, bearing all things in mind, was as it should be.
And now here was Dion, marching along to St. James’s Park, a most un-Christian Soldier of the Lost Legion.
Leander had chosen the rendezvous for the handing over of the atomic egg with a fine sense of humour. It was the very spot where Dion had been distracted from killing him only a few days ago.
The briefing at the Vive le Sport had been nothing if not casual. It had taken place not in an oubliette or a chamber but at the main bar, with No Name presiding vacantly and intermittently over the encounter like a worn-out basilisk. For reasons that he was unable to itemize, Dion had expected to meet a small contingent of the Lost Legion. He had also expected the hatching and conspiring to take place in some seclusion and with a surfeit of sotto voce precaution.
Instead of which there had been Leander only; and the projected atomic dissolution of Parliament had beep discussed quite casually and openly over glasses of iced Polish white spirit. True, the Vive le Sport contained hardly anyone but No Name and two or three goose-cooked sports sufficiently withdrawn in flesh and spirit to exude nothing but vaporized alcohol and to receive nothing less than transmissions at one hundred decibels. Nevertheless, the great traditions of conspiracy were being needlessly flouted. It was, perhaps, too banal an environment in which to work out the details of one’s suicide.
The plan, fully approved—according to Leander—by the High Command of the Lost Legion, was elegantly simple. As all great plans are. It merely depended on resolution, speed, good luck and the flagrant idiocy of the person carrying it out.
At eleven forty-five precisely, one Dion Quern was scheduled to lay an atomic egg on the floor of the House. It would be triggered to dissolve Parliament exactly sixty-five seconds later—the time needed for him to vacate the cradle of democracy. Since such a delay was required for personal reasons, he had, therefore, to follow the atomic egg with a freeze egg which, presumably, would prevent any M.P. who happened to be awake from rejecting the motion. The entire operation was to be carried out in a shroud of obscurity supplied by others of the Lost Legion who—according to Leander—would have already planted two mist-and-tear eggs in the Strangers’ Gallery, These were programmed to release their opaque and noxious gases at exactly eleven forty-four and fifty seconds.
Thus Dion would rise briefly through a Nordic mist like some bright avenger from the distant shores of legend. Having hurled his bolt of divine destruction, he would then—weeping and coughing with the rest of the spectators in the Gallery—make his way out and be lost in the stampede.
Leander would be waiting for him in Parliament Square with jet packs; and the two of them, from the lofty vantage of an altitude of one thousand feet above the Thames, would be able to watch Parliament blow its top.
That was the theory. It was quite a good theory. As such, thought Dion gloomily, it was destined not to work. Inevitably some damn thing was bound to go wrong, and none other than D. Quern, late squire and citizen of Greater London, would be left sitting on top of the fireball.
He had, of course, been troubled by ethics—a fearsome ordeal even for a failed meistersinger. Was the tin heart of a frustrated poet worth forty metric tons of politically oriented doms? It was a nice question. But not one that was worth answering.
Perversely enough, decided Dion with bitter amusement, about the only thing that Leander Smith had done for him was to demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that he wished to live. To stay alive; to smell the late autumnal air; to feel pain; to feel pleasure; to get drunk; to write poetry; to listen to music; to beget a child. To beget a child…
It was an interesting demonstration—particularly since there was a high probability that it contained a built-in death sentence…
Dion found that he was walking down the Mall—deserted even at this comparatively late hour of the day. It reminded him that London was, compared with the great hectic days of the late twentieth century, no more than a ghost town.
Its population had been halved, the festering sprawl of the suburbs had for the most part been returned to grassland, and the bulk of the populace either lived in Central London (quaint regency hovels, if you could afford them) or in the ten London Towers that rose phallically against the bewildered sky.
So, the doms had accomplished something, he conceded grudgingly. They had smashed the ant-hill and had transformed it into a super-colossal funny farm. They had reduced populations, knocked out hunger, abolished the arms race and taken dignity from man. Life—unless you were an infra pregnant for the tenth time, or an impotent sport with an ugly face, or a poet with a psychorecord—was a glorious and wholesome adventure.
So what the Stopes! And what better reasons for lifting a battalion of ancient female politicos beyond the reach of abstract nouns and time shots.
“Gentlemen in England now abed,” said Dion to no one at all, as he stepped into St. James’s Park and made for the bridge, “shall think themselves accursed they were not here.” He didn’t entirely believe it, but it was a pleasing sentiment.
As he crossed the bridge, he noticed that the still surface of the water below supported a veritable superabundance of ducks. This time, of course, he had nothing to feed them with. The time was always out of joint.
Leander was already waiting.
Leander was always already waiting.
It was a quite formidable talent.
“Well met by daylight,” called Leander cheerily. “I trust you slept well?”
“Well enough, gravedigger,” said Dion. “I’ve been raping the future.”
“Then let us, dear lad, create a small quantity of history for the future to remember us by.”
Dion looked up at the sky, and sniffed the air appreciatively. “It’s a fine morning,” he said.
Leander grinned. “A fine morning indeed. But, as some prophet or other must surely have said, a fine morning cannot guarantee a lack of darkness at noon.”
Eleven
THE prime minister was answering a question about the proposed National Day of Wake to mark the passing of the late European Proconsul. Dom Ulaline was in good voice; but her oration, thought Dion, was hardly the stuff of which history is made on. The time was eleven forty-four.
The Strangers’ Gallery was practically empty. So were most of the opposition benches. What was the point of coming along in the flesh when you could flop in your own box and, if you were so masochistically minded, take all the political yapcrap you could stand by looking on to the vid?
Most of the people in the Strangers’ Gallery were tourists—itinerant, culture-hungry doms (with their occasional squires) from Pittsburgh, Poona or Pekin. Little did they know it, but they were about to receive the raconteur’s dream.
Eleven forty-four and thirty seconds. Another twenty seconds and this dom-dominated democracy would be enriched by a small quantity of mass-decontamination. No doubt there would be transient sadness in the shires; but loud mouths there were aplenty. And it would not be long before some other P.M. was answering a question about the proposed National Day of Wake for the hot curtailment of the present session.
Dion thought of Sylphide and fingered the atomic egg secretly and nervously. It weighed a million metric tons, and it was burning his fingers to the bone.
If he had been a praying man, he would have prayed that she had
conceived. I am nothing but a pot-carrier, he thought hazily. I am a peripatetic vessel containing germ plasm, and my only worthwhile function is to fertilize every fertilizable female so that the earth shall inherit an untold quantity of Mark II Dion Querns, world without end. What the Stopes am I doing here, he thought. I should be elsewhere, laying a thousand infras, proclaiming the joyful gospel of eternal orgasm, filling an infinity of bellies with the greatness of child.
Eleven forty-four and forty seconds.
A fly alighted on the tip of his nose, and he sneezed.
The prime minister paused. A dom from Pakistan casually gave herself a block injection. A squire yawned. The leader of the opposition breathed deeply and discovered an interesting pain in her left breast. Dion shivered. And the sun broke through the clouds, sending shafts of light through ancient windows.
Eleven forty-four and fifty seconds.
The mist-and-tear eggs popped.
Balloons of opaque vapour expanded through the Gallery. The sunlight was cancelled. Dion Quern became a fully automated marionette.
As the stampede got under way, Dion stood up and hurled his egg. There was something else he had to do, he realized drunkenly and with tears streaming down his face as the gas swirled about him.
Ah, so! The freeze egg. He groped for it, being unable to keep his eyes open. Then he flung it wildly, having lost all sense of direction. And after that, he joined the general exodus, stepping heavily on the dom from Pakistan. She was thoroughly amazed to find that her favourite block had on this occasion produced a cry-fog through which English peasants insisted on trampling upon her without, if you please, any sexual connotation.
Somehow, Dion made it out into the sunlight. Goddammit, nobody stopped him. Goddammit, where the Stopes were all the Peace Officers? Goddammit, why wasn’t he dead and why wasn’t the House in orbit? Goddammit, why was Leander laughing so much he couldn’t even put on the jet packs?
And why, for crysake, had somebody pulled the plug out of time?
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