Juno had just typed her seventeenth move. She was two pawns down, and the computer would probably mate—as usual—before the twenty-fifth move.
She saw that Dion had finished writing.
“How goes it, love?”
“Ferkinorrible.”
“What were you writing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“If you want a label,” he said irritably, “let’s call it ‘Footnote to a Monograph on the Possible After-Effects of Armageddon’.”
The computer replied to the move as Juno had expected it would, and the R5 square on her chess board glowed where the computer had just eliminated her bishop with its knight. She took the knight with a pawn and some resignation. The computer had its rooks doubled.
Juno turned to Dion once more. “There will be no Armageddon,” she said confidently. “Because the affairs of the world are now virtually controlled by women.”
“You stupid, big-breasted bitch.”
Juno stood up. As an afterthought she signalled her resignation to the computer. Then she faced Dion, arms akimbo.
“Don’t mix it with me, little troubadour. Otherwise, I may have to snap you in two.”
“Stupid, big-breasted bitch,” he repeated calmly. “What the Stopes do you know about anything, you arrogant cow?”
“You’re trying to needle me.”
“Ah, the dawn of intelligence in the master sex… No Armageddon, quoth the dom. And, lo, the pronunciamento becomes graven on a stone tablet… Armageddon arrived some time ago, dear dim playmate. It started with a Hollywood musical called Hiroshima and worked up to a genetic climax with the usurpation of the human female.” He hiccupped once more. “People got burned at Hiroshima, but by Stopes the rest of us got fresh-frozen when you shrivel-wombs became pill-happy.”
“I think I should order some coffee,” retorted Juno with dignity.
“Do that thing. It indicates the limit of your imagination.”
Juno lost her temper. She lunged across the room. Dion met her with what he hoped would be a devastating blow to the solar plexus. It never arrived. Juno snatched at his arm, translated the movement into a whip and side-stepped. He somersaulted over the bed.
“Try again, playboy,” she taunted.
With an angry growl he leaped back across the bed. Juno hit him once. He fell, retching.
“Little one,” she murmured, cradling his head. “Oh, my little lost one. What is it?”
“Life,” he said, when he could breathe freely. “Life and vodka. Poetry and lack of hope… I’m sorry, shrivel-womb. This one is on me.”
“Read me your poem—please.”
“There isn’t enough time. Kismet, via the royal command, calls us to Stonehenge.”
“Victoria can wait. Besides, I doubt if we shall be presented. I’m only a second grade… Read me the poem.”
Dion took the piece of paper. “You won’t like it.”
“Read it—please.”
“You won’t understand it. I’m damned if I do.”
“Read it.”
When he had finished, he was amazed to see that Juno was crying. There were no sounds, but the tears flowed freely down her face.
“What is it?” he asked. “Surely not recognition of genius at my time of disintegration.”
“Love me,” pleaded Juno. “For Stopes sake, love me… It’s the damned ticking of the clock.”
Dion shook his head. “Start learning, Amazon,” he said. “I’ll do it in my time—not in yours.”
Thirteen
FROM an altitude of five hundred feet, Stonehenge looked like the wreckage of some monstrous Christmas cake. The whole area was covered by a high transparent tepee through the top of which the smoke from a butane-fed bonfire and a hundred torches rose like a solid column in the still air. The megaliths were covered with sheets of iridescent metal foil pressed hard against their contours so that metal and stone seemed as one. In the great circle, witches and warlocks seethed like a colony of disturbed ants. Victoria had evidently not yet arrived, for the royal standard was nowhere to be seen.
Dion and Juno were riding separate broomsticks. Their night sky suits glowed dully green against the star-pricked darkness. Juno’s witch hat tilted precariously on the back of her head, held in position only by the band from her headlight.
The jet packs whistled softly behind the two of them as they slowly circled the area. They dipped their headlights so that they would not blind other guests.
“What do you think?” shouted Juno against the whistle of the jets.
“I don’t think,” returned Dion. “Thinking is bad medicine.” He glanced up. “I’ll race you to the stars.”
She laughed. “Not tonight, stripling. The Queen commands us.”
“Coward, flat-belly, sycophant,” he called. “Follow me.” He switched off his headlight and opened the vertical jet throttle wide. He fell upwards like a crazy stone.
Juno called: “Dion!” But he was already away, a hundred feet above her. She switched off her own light and followed him.
They both fell giddily, insanely towards the dancing stars.
At one thousand feet, the chill and rushing air made their faces tingle.
At two thousand feet frost formed on their eyebrows.
At three thousand feet they were level once more.
“Stabilize!” gasped Juno. “For Stopes sake, stabilize.” The words hurt as the freezing air ripped into her lungs.
But Dion would not or could not hear. On and upwards he fell, the rush of air singing louder than the straining jets.
At eight thousand feet, Juno could go no higher. The pain in her ears, the numbness in her face, the frost on her sky suit and the deeply penetrating cold that sank through the rubber into her limbs—all these told her that she could go no higher.
“Stabilize!” she mouthed vainly. “Stabilize!” But the words had no substance, the air was too thin, and Dion had already left her behind—a sad little, mad little troubadour bent on falling upwards to his fresh-frozen death at the threshold of the stars.
Juno tried to hold it at eight thousand feet. But she could not. The cold was too intense and the air was too thin. With a despairing upward glance at the shrinking speck of luminous green, she lowered slowly to five thousand feet and waited.
Dion was drunk with pain and ecstasy. His wrist altimeter showed nine thousand five hundred feet. He could hardly feel his hands; but he didn’t care. The blood that had begun to flow from his nose froze on his lips; but he didn’t care.
The stars were dancing. And the dance was such that a man might aspire to join.
He held for a while at ten thousand feet. Indeed, he had to; for the jet pack had a built-in pressure safety device and would take him no higher. In the past, too many people had jetted up to the high reaches until the atmosphere became so thin that they lost consciousness. For a decade, it had been one of the favoured forms of suicide.
So he remained poised at ten thousand feet, watching the stars dance gently as the servo-jets rhythmically trimmed his attitude to the vertical. He let the cold eat through his sky suit, probing flesh and bone until it seemed to reach the very core of his personality.
The pain—the dull dead stinging of blood and nerves that were trying hard not to freeze—pleased him. He was purging himself by cold. He was confessing to the void, receiving absolution from the stars, demanding a sacrament from the great black deeps of space.
His face became a stiff mask. White crystals proliferated all over him, building a shell of ice. But still his eyes burned, translating the starlight into reflected fire.
And presently, there came a satisfying sleepiness. He knew it was dangerous and played with the danger, skating deliciously along the edge of oblivion. Then, vaguely, with no great feeling of urgency, he remembered Juno. A dom of great sense—and nonsense. A column of warm and pliant flesh several thousand feet below. He realized that, for no reasonable reason, he w
anted her. Now. In his time… If only to savour the knowledge that he had been where she dared not follow… If only to see the look in her eyes…
Poor, proud little dom. Magnificent of body but small of spirit. No talent for dying. Only a certain, comfortable talent for living. He tried to smile, but there was a smile already frozen on his face.
The stars briefly extinguished themselves—a first and dreadful warning. He groped through the darkness that was now darker than night for the jet control. He found it, but he couldn’t hold it. He could only tap it feebly. It was enough.
He began to fall back through the sky, the rush of air cutting his face and body as if he were falling into a fountain of knives. At seven thousand feet his voice returned and he could scream, creating a high column of sound that rode wildly down the night.
It was a scream of pain and pleasure. For the pain gave pleasure as feeling tore back into his body, the unendurable agony of resurrection.
He passed the five thousand level, where Juno cruised frantically, waiting for him. Searching the sky, she saw his downward track against the Milky Way and jetted towards him, switching her headlight on and signalling frantically.
He didn’t notice her. He was hypnotized now by the fiery circle of Stonehenge rushing up through the cosmos as if eager to touch him. How delightful to dive clean into that tiny central point that was the bonfire and send a shower of sparks and scattered life force over all the guests who were celebrating idiocy in the age of idiocy.
But at one thousand feet he decided to forego the pleasure. There was yet, perhaps, some living to be done. There was yet, perhaps, some purpose to be found—even if only a more artistic way of dying.
He hit the control once more and retro-jetted at full thrust. The roar of air about him became no more than a loud rushing, the rushing became a whisper so that he could hear again the complaining whistle of the jets. He had been falling at such a speed that full retro-thrust only saved him by a hundred feet from hurtling through the transparent tepee and hitting one of the megaliths. He bounced up again like a cork, remembering Juno.
They rendezvoused at three thousand feet, two dull green glow-worms who recognized each other in a way that neither could understand.
Dion stabilized. Juno jetted close.
“Psycho!” she sobbed. “Deadhead! Fool!”
“Medieval fool,” he conceded. “The joke is on both of us. They call it life.”
“Oh, Dion, you hazy crazy word juggler! Why did you do it? I nearly died for you.”
He laughed. “I nearly died for myself… It’s a very cold champagne that God serves on the ceiling, shrivel-womb. You should try it some time. There comes an interesting moment when the stars go dark.”
“I’ll never jet with you again.”
Dion was enjoying himself. “You will. Where I lead, you’ll do your tiny dom-best to follow. And each time you fail, you will get a little nearer to understanding the difference between men and women. Message ends.”
Juno was silent for a moment or two. Then she said: “Let’s touch down at Reception. They must have radar-tracked you. They’ll wonder what kind of oddball bounces against the sky.”
“Let them wonder,” he retorted equably. “And if anyone should ask, say: ‘Dion Quern, master of nothing, has briefly surveyed his kingdom… Have you ever tasted your own frozen blood?’”
“My dear one,” said Juno helplessly. “Sometimes, I even think I understand.”
Dion looked below him, at the hectic, illuminated circle round Stonehenge and then at the sea of darkness that covered the featureless plain.
“Reception can wait,” he said. “There will be time enough to entertain Victoria of England with the social inanities of our age. But for five minutes, wench, you can lie with your legs open behind a thorn hedge like any honest slut would have done in the last two millennia. Then you, too, can taste the taste of frozen blood.”
Juno, glancing towards Stonehenge, saw the royal standard break in a spotlight glare. She opened her mouth, but no sound came. Dom and harlot, Dion was pleased to note, were at war with each other. The victory was a foregone conclusion.
Silently, almost submissively, Juno jetted down into the darkness.
Fourteen
THE Hallowe’en party which had threatened to hit an all-time nadir in the international social limbo had, in fact, turned out to be quite memorable. Victoria the Second delicately adjusted the bandage on her head as she sipped her iced Polish white spirit and surveyed the general wreckage with some satisfaction.
Great flaps of metal foil, torn from the megaliths, rustled complainingly in the light breeze. Strips of transpex drifted through the air like half-materialized ghosts. A couple of dead white cocks glared malevolently at each other on the now frosty ground; and somewhere in the outer darkness a few traumatized sports and wounded Peace Officers were drinking and singing themselves into oblivion. The Russian ambassador had retreated into hysterics, the European Proconsul had been carried off and doubtless raped by the pirates, the prime minister had a broken arm and a laser burn on her breast, and Victoria herself had been hit by a falling broomstick… Yes, it had been a memorable occasion.
Victoria had not yet received the casualty list; but there could hardly have been more than a dozen absolute deaths and perhaps four or five temporary deaths. The surgeons were already at work in the resuscitation unit; so it should not be long before a few lucky Peace Officers and less lucky pirates received the resurrection and the life.
At one stage it had seemed a cast titanium certainty that the party would never jet. The professional witches hired for the occasion had produced nothing more shattering than the ritual defloration of an infra virgin by six Happyland-inspired warlock zombies, a group hypnosis that was less spectacular than the cabaret at the old Cafe Royal, the sacrifice of a goat and two cocks, and a ninety foot tri-di projection of Lucifer taking dreary liberties with an old-fashioned nun.
The beer was good. So were the black sausages, the ox blood cocktails, the corps de ballet and the gladiators who had been bribed to fight to a temporary death. But, somehow, the whole thing had begun to fade.
Until, at midnight, when the programmed thunder and lightning had finished, the pirates came jetting down from the black sky with laser guns in their hands and sportive dreams of destruction in their retarded I.Q.’s.
Victoria was delighted by the diversion. Left to her own devices, she would have knighted every single one of them. However, the conventions had to be observed—particularly when four of the intruders swooped on the European Proconsul, scooped her up in a large fishing net just as she was sampling the barbecued black cat, and zoomed up into the night sky again for a destination unknown.
It had been quite an amusing sight. The pirates had kept perfect formation, the net had been cast expertly; and, before she realized what was happening, Josephine found herself swinging crazily at five hundred feet, her life depending on the formation jetting of the four grade one aspirants who each held a corner of the net.
Since the abduction clearly came under the heading of diplomatic incidents, Victoria was reluctantly compelled to do something about it. In response to her signal, the sovereign’s escort—which on this occasion happened to be a squadron of life Guards—got itself airborne and in hot pursuit.
But by that time, the pirates had mounted the second phase of their attack. Their laser beams cut the high transparent tepee into a mad carnival of whipping strips of trans-pex. At least a couple of the pirates, caught in the contorting tentacles of plastic, were snatched out of the sky and dashed to destruction against the ancient columns of stone.
By that time, even the Peace Corps had realized that this was not just another of Victoria’s surprise diversions. One by one, the Peace Officers who had come as guests sped to the Reception area, snatched their jet packs and duty accoutrements and became airborne.
At first, the attack on Victoria’s Hallowe’en party looked as if it might have been the imp
ractical joke of a few itinerant sports. But clearly it wasn’t. As more than fifty of them jetted down in disciplined formation, it became evident that the whole thing had been planned very carefully.
Juno was one of the first Peace Officers to get herself into the air. Dion watched her go with irritating bewilderment. One impulse goaded him to follow her, to see that she came to no harm. Another impulse held him back, persuading him to let the dom stew in her own crisis. Besides, these boyos from the fourth dimension were hotting up what had been a very cold piece of social discomfort.
By the time he had disposed of the second impulse, Juno had already departed and there were other things to think about. Particularly when a surprisingly small Guards officer fell out of the sky and inconsiderately died almost at his very feet.
She had such a young face—probably she was no more than thirty-five or forty. With multiple fractures in legs, arms and pelvis, she lay on the ground, a tiny extinguished glow-worm.
Dion cradled her head in his arms. She was hurt in too many places to feel pain. But an intense weariness came over her childlike features.
She uttered only six words before she died.
“Love me,” she said. “Love me! Love me!”
Then the body became slack and she was just another dead dom.
He picked her up, oblivious of the general pandemonium, and carried her out of the circle of light, away from the grotesque null-comedies that were being played around the megaliths of Stonehenge, to a quiet grassy hollow where there was nothing but frost and stars.
He laid her down very gently and straightened the shattered limbs. Then he sat there silently for a while, remembering the taste of frozen blood, thinking how easy it was to stifle the thin warm worm of life.
Presently, he kissed her already cold forehead and was guiltily pleased to find that he had bathed it in tears.
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. There was only the disquieting notion that, dom though she was, she never had been an enemy. She had been nothing more than a sad little machine.
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