Five to Twelve

by Edmund Cooper

  The nightmare thickened.

  Presently, with Leander close at his side, still laughing, Dion rose up over the doomed House, high over the Thames, waiting for the crack of doom.

  It never came. Leander couldn’t stop laughing. Even at a thousand feet he couldn’t stop laughing. His laughter seemed to roll thunderously across the sky.

  And the sun continued to shine quite calmly, as if it were just another day.

  Twelve

  IT was, indeed, just another day. The sun may have lacked warmth but not determination. Its richly chilled light pierced the misty azure of the kind of sky that might once have delighted a character called Rupert Brooke. Dion, disposing luxuriously of Danish sausage and cider, sat on his Oxfordshire hillside gazing at nothing in particular and delighting in the retrospective trauma of a death that never occurred.

  Diverted from an assumed collision course with eternity, he was even too relaxed to murder Leander who, likewise with sausage and cider, contemplated a kingdom from the past.

  It was hardly worth breaking the windblown silence to discuss anything so mundane as atomic eggs that failed to hatch, but an obscure perversity compelled Dion to demand an explanation.

  “What happened?” he asked lazily, through a mouthful of sausage. “Did somebody piss on the fireworks?”

  Leander, who had stopped laughing somewhere over Hertfordshire, gave him a benign and radiant smile. “Dear, dedicated scion of social justice,” he murmured, “I love you quite truly.”

  “What happened?” repeated Dion. “Why no boom? Why no ascending radioactive blossom transporting its political burden to day-hidden stars?”

  “Have you ever seen a purple dom?” enquired Leander tangentially.

  “No. Have you?”

  “No, my good friend.” Leander belched and poured himself some more rough cider. “But we may yet be rewarded by that entrancing sight.”

  Dion sighed. “I fear I am about to be reprogrammed.”

  “Only by purest joy,” said Leander. “Believe me. Only by purest joy… The atomic egg—as you have perceived with some brilliance—was no atomic egg. Death, at this stage, was not intended—it being only a dye bomb.”

  “So?”

  “So, the dye is an excellent dye. It genuinely attacks the pigmentation of the epidermis… So all who sat in the House when you conferred upon them the royal shade will have purple faces etcetera for at least three months. Ridicule, dear lad, is a most terrible weapon. I fear there may be several temporary deaths by embolism before the government resigns.”

  Dion contemplated the pleasing prospect for several moments before it occurred to him that he had quite unnecessarily gone through hell.

  “Why,” he asked gently, “did someone not tell me—preferably, clown, yourself—that this was not an affair of mass domicide? Forgive the slight carp, but I might have slept easier.”

  “The High Command,” shrugged Leander.

  “Ah, yes, the High Command.”

  “The High Command, my hero, did not have quite the same opinion of your sterling calibre that I, myself, possessed. They wished to test you. Furthermore, they wished to test your resolution in such a way as would convince them that, when the time came, you would strike your true blow for the bent brotherhood without flinching. I have no doubt they are now satisfied.”

  Dion thought about it. “Speaking only for my selfish self,” he remarked at length, “I am somewhat less than satisfied. Also, I think that at this stage I may resign from the Lost Legion with the loose equivalent of honour. I have done what was required. I accepted the hazard. The fact that the death egg turned out to be a dye egg is beside the point. I have no wish to strike any further blows. As far as I am concerned, the Lost Legion may eructate, ejaculate and—for all I care—bifurcate. The game does not interest me. Consummatum est. Now kindly press your button.” He took a deep swig of cider.

  Leander stared. Briefly, he was nonplussed. Briefly, Dion enjoyed it.

  “I see you are nonplussed,” he said. “What’s the problem, matey? Did you forget to bring your snuff box?”

  Leander so far forgot himself as to speak with a mouthful of Danish sausage. A small shower of protein accompanied his words. “You are no longer afraid of dying?” he enquired.

  “Correction. I am permanently afraid of dying. I am possibly the most devout coward in the business. But most of all, fellow poltroon, I am afraid of not living. You and your Lost Legion are providing some slight interference with my plans for living. Therefore, let us settle the matter amicably by making me dead. Now, where the hell is your snuff box? At this point, death could be highly advantageous, since the cider is now finished.”

  “The contingency planning was at fault,” apologized Leander. “I forgot to bring it. Who could have known that at the very apex of achievement—if you will permit such highflown verbiage—you would want out?”

  “So much for the master planners of the Lost Legion,” observed Dion contemptuously. “No doubt, you expected me to weep tears of gratitude for mere survival… I’ve had enough, drybones. I know what your worst is, so kindly go back to base and do it.”

  “What about the future of mankind?”

  “Compress it, stuff it and extrude it.”

  “What about the delectable Juno?”

  “Likewise.”

  “Ha,” said Leander thoughtfully. “There has to be.”

  “There has to be what?”

  “An Achilles’ heel.”

  “Then find it.”

  “We will, dear necrophile, we will. You represent too high a capital investment to be cancelled lightly. There are ways—there must be ways—of bringing you to heel.”

  Dion stretched, and gazed benevolently at his companion. “I could kill you here and now… I could solve the problem for both of us.”

  Leander looked at him curiously. “Then why don’t you?”

  “For three quite stupid reasons.”

  “The first?”

  “I am a fool.”

  “The second?”

  “You are a fool.”

  “The third?”

  “There is already a dearth of males.” Dion stood up and reached for his jet pack. “After all, one should not make life too easy—or too difficult—for the doms. Thank you for the fun session. It was less elevating than was formerly supposed; but, no doubt, the aftermath will occasion a slight tremor… Don’t call me. I’ll call you… If I ever get so drunk or bored that I can’t think of anything better.”

  He lifted from the hillside with a blast from the jets that rolled Leander head over heels.

  At one hundred feet he stabilized, then turned east for an exhilarating hedgehop back to London. He wondered vaguely why he had begun to think of London as home.

  Suddenly he remembered Sylphide. He wanted her. Not for love, not for sex, not for anything.

  Except a child.

  Thirteen

  THE government fell; the Purple Parliament remained in session; the Queen took to wearing a silver mask—thus making the gesture de rigueur for anyone who was anyone—to save the face of her ministers past and present; seventeen sports, eleven squires, five doms and three infras all confessed to tossing the dye bomb; and life went on as before.

  Dion himself had even thought of confessing. But the possibility that he might be taken seriously was an effective deterrent. It would clearly have brought him a grade two, which would have interfered not only with his occasional attempts to scribble poetry but also with the important discoveries he was making about human nature—chiefly his own.

  Having left Leander—as he thought, for good—in the sausage-littered wilds of Oxfordshire, he had returned to London with as much celerity as the jet pack could supply. He was almost chagrined to discover that his absence had not been noted. Sylphide lay just as he had left her.

  She yawned when he plugged into the vid to discover the score in the Mother of Parliaments.

  She yawned when he told her of the
sudden epidemic of purple politicians.

  She yawned when he made love to her.

  And she yawned when he again absently anointed her with what was left of the flat and now warm champagne.

  She had not even missed him. Which was all just as it should be, he told himself with some satisfaction. She was a vessel—a much ravished vessel of the future. And why the Stopes should a vessel of the future concern itself with matters that were not directly related to copulation, conception and birth?

  That she had conceived, there could be no possible doubt—if only because conception was fitting at such a time. When eventually this proved to be the case, he was not in the slightest surprised. In fact, he was convinced that he could actually recall the point of conception, when—at the second coming—secret battalions of living seed pulsed blindly like micro-miniaturized salmon towards the high dark pool of her waiting womb. There had been such a look on her face as if she—no longer Sylphide but a millennial woman with the secret of spring between her thighs—had known and shared the immense, silent knowledge of the moment of procreation…

  Now, with his hand on Sylphide’s breast, his mind turned towards Juno. He was amazed to find that he could think of her with tremendous affection. She thought she was the one who had wanted a child; but in reality she was only the first one to realize that Dion himself wanted a child. Dom she might be, but her intuition had not yet been run into the ground by time shots. She had known. Yes, she had known…

  He got out of bed and, prompted both by malice and affection took a fast pan up to the two hundred and fourteenth floor to see her. It was late afternoon, and she was not at home. Perhaps she had been mobilized out of her sabbatical to round up suspects for the morning’s political mischief.

  He waited for her, and fell asleep waiting. When she eventually got back, the black November night had surrounded London Seven in frosty stillness.

  “How went the fertility rites?” she enquired coolly.

  He grinned. “Well enough, madam. But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is pregnant.”

  “So soon? And how do you know?”

  “The operation is not measured by time but by effort.” explained Dion blandly. “And I know because I know. Also, an ovum sings when it is fertilized; and I have heard the sound of Musak.”

  Juno laughed and ruffled his hair. “What a nasty little troubadour you are. So you like her then?”

  “She appeals to my sense of the absurd. What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Hunting egg layers—fruitlessly… And you—apart from the granted?”

  “Painting politicians purple.”

  Juno looked at him severely. “Just the kind of pointless gambit that would appeal to a polysyllabic pre-shrunk Napoleon.” Then she added lightly: “You can account for your movements, of course?”

  “No. The only person who can is both pregnant and unconscious.”

  “All these allusions disturb me, little one. Are you in a mood to make love, or have you reached satiation?”

  Oddly, he was in a mood to make love to Juno. He was in a mood to make love to her, he told himself, chiefly out of a sense of gratitude. She had given him Sylphide, and she had given him self-knowledge that he might otherwise never have gained.

  But there was more to it than gratitude. And, as he began to caress the firm body that seemed to have pride and power implanted in its every pore, he knew that there was more even than affection. Besides, he could take away her pride whenever he chose to; because he had already discovered how to bring her to the very edge of submission, where pride and power were nothing, and where that strong, beautiful body became little more than a contained mountain of unthinking, all-feeling liquid, effervescent with desire.

  They made love quietly, expertly, taking their unhurried time to enjoy each other. Seeing the cloudy look in Juno’s eyes, Dion realized dully that love was a two-edged sword. He realized also—perhaps for the first time—that though Juno personified all that he resented, she was, at the very least, a friend. He wanted to let the definition fix in his mind, without exploring it further. And because of that, he was genuinely amazed that friendship could beget such passion.

  There was, of course, the inevitable comparison with Sylphide. Fancifully, he saw them both in terms of the eagle and the dove. But there was a time for all things. Even a time for eagles…

  Despite rewards, threats and a certain amount of what Victoria the Second called ‘discreetly ethical corruption’ (a euphemism for the illegal use on a fairly grand scale of truth and disorientation drugs on half the sports of Greater London), the sick-psych who had delivered the dye bomb remained undiscovered. Autumn blended into winter, the days died coldly into each other, and the December kick of Saturnalia—with its attendant Father Green Shield—came and went.

  Dion, undisturbed by any more baroque assignments for the Lost Legion, rejoiced in the continued absence of Lucifer (otherwise Leander Smith) and came to believe that since he had not dropped dead, his resignation must have been accepted in more or less good grace as a fait accompli. Or just possibly, perhaps, Leander or his minions were still needling some remote haystack in search of an Achilles’ heel.

  Whatever the answer, Dion Quern was too busy being quasi-human to take much time off for contemplative speculation. He passed his days eating, drinking, occasionally scribbling, and making merry, inordinately pleased by the confirmation of approaching paternity and wallowing nonchalantly in the quite different love of two quite different women.

  And therein lay the Achilles’ heel that an off-stage Leander waited patiently to discover.

  Fourteen

  WINTER dissolved wetly into spring. Sylphide’s belly and breasts became gently swollen. Dion had written a score of poems, one or two of which might just possibly survive him. And Juno had fallen out of her jet pack from a sufficient altitude to buy a country retreat.

  The retreat was a disused nineteenth century farmhouse, built solidly, bleakly and enduringly of Derbyshire stone in the Vale of Edale. Edale, one of the more spectacular valleys of the Peak District, hardly knew that the twenty-first century existed. It was too far north and the terrain was too uneven for it to have been absorbed by the regional agricultural collectives. There was no point even in establishing hydrophonics towers there, since these could be run far more efficiently and profitably near to the big cities.

  So Edale, satisfactorily isolated from the twenty-first century, and almost deserted except for hill sheep and a few eccentric human refugees, was quite ideally situated for making love, giving birth to children or scribbling verses. Another thing that recommended it from Dion’s point of view was that it was two hours by jet pack from London. Even a helicar could not make it in less than forty minutes.

  Juno still kept her box in London Seven. But Sylphide, being disgustingly happy in pregnancy and therefore something of an affront to any self-respecting dom, had been exiled to the farmhouse—appropriately named Wits’ End by Dion. A little to Juno’s surprise, and occasioning slight but continuous bruising to her ego, Dion chose to spend more time at Wits’ End than at London Seven. Each time she herself went to visit Edale she felt vaguely like an intruder.

  She had wanted to insulate the walls, build in pre-serve and disposal mechanisms, put in heat exchanges and telecommunications, and even re-roof the house with a heli-deck. But Dion had blocked all these plans effectively. He had declared that if Wits’ End was to be raped by technology, he would never come to it again.

  So the stone walls and stone roof were retained, ice-cold water was pumped up from the bowels of the earth by an antique two-stroke, and log fires burned noisily on the ancient hearth. There had been an extensive search for period furnishings—brass bedsteads, old mattresses, a heavy black dining table, antique carpets, a couple of rocking chairs and a davenport, cut glass oil lamps, even a gramophone and a picture of the Monarch of the Glen.

  The final effect was claustrophobic in the extreme. Dion
loved it, Sylphide tolerated it, and Juno loathed it. Juno loathed it because at Wits’ End an era had been recreated when women were nothing but chattels. Dion loved it for the same reason. And Sylphide, apparently unaware of the psycho-philosophical implications, simply revelled in the windy silence of the valley, the frequency of Dion’s continued lovemakings, and the subtle smugness of pregnancy.

  The relationship between the three of them was exceedingly complicated, but workable. Juno wanted a child—specifically Dion’s child—and she was prepared to tolerate much to acquire it amicably. Dion also wanted a child and wanted consciously to love the woman who bore it—wanting to demonstrate that what he believed to be a natural relationship was the only one it was possible to fully enjoy. This did not prevent him from desiring Juno—or from needing her. There were times when he could happily have broken a water barrel over Sylphide’s head—her conversation being somewhat limited—and at such times, Juno was the perfect antidote. But Juno was, by herself, not enough. Nor was Sylphide. Therein lay his quandary. He was looking for one woman whom he could wholly love, yet he could only find different aspects in two quite different women. As for Sylphide, she wanted little but security and physical fulfilment. Granted these, she was happy enough in her role of reproductive vegetable.

  There were times—very frequently—when Juno tired of the Wits’ End pattern of existence and had to go back to London and place her finger on the pulse of the city. There were times—infrequently—when Dion had to do the same. But they rarely went together.

  It was on one of these rare occasions, when they were in the box at London Seven after an evening’s slumming and alcoholic jollification in the West End, that Leander put a call through on the plate. The buzzer sounded and Dion, being nearest to the receive stud, took the call.

  As soon as the face showed on the screen Dion hit the cut stud. Leander’s face dissolved almost in the instant that it had formed—but not before Dion had registered a triumphant gleam in eyes that stared briefly and sardonically at him. He waited by the plate, motionless and numb for a few seconds, wondering if he was about to drop dead or if the call was about to be repeated. Nothing happened. Perhaps Leander simply was not in the mood for buttons.