Five to Twelve (13 page)

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.

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.”

T
HE
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?

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.

I
T
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.”