LITMIR.BIZ

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to walk, my love?’

      ‘Yeah, sure.’ She wanted to walk when he did. Always. She was nice. So this was the paradise he had invented for her. Loomis. Love.

      The cameras followed them, silent as hepatitis, drinking it all in, recording for posterity and their own delectation the slow stroll among these objects of Attica Saigon Smix’s invention. The trees were not trees, the butterflies not butterflies, the cows not cows, the buildings not buildings. They were delicate simplifications, pastiches of trees, butterflies, cows, and buildings, done in simplified shapes, executed in primary colours. The melons and flowers lying at their careless feet were detachable, embodied extracts of abstracts based on elementary pictures in nursery frescoes. Peace and infantilism met, with a smacking but pure kiss.

      ‘It’s nice here …’

      ‘Good for you to get away from business.’

      ‘Aren’t the cows cute?’

      ‘I just love their pretty little dangling bells and – uh, udders. You’re a clever old thing, Attica, did I ever tell you that?’

      Every day she told him that. It was the secret of both their successes.

      A cow was waddling by them, hat on head, gaudy melon-flower in chops, rocking quaintly from side to side. Three-dimensional and entirely touchable – rideable, even. Hygienic, too, of course. No defecations, no monstrous eructations of vile wind. Just a holobject, conjured by machines invented in the technological computer-laboratories of one of Smix-Smith’s subsidiaries.

      And the yokel figure also waddling towards them was no more than a holman, also three-dimensional, entirely touchable, hygienic. Man, hat, comic smock, pipe, clogs, all of one inorganic substance, a projection as tangible, as much of the physical world as oak, and far less unmanoeuverable. It touched its comic floppy hat, blew a little chugging pasteboard smoke-ring from its corncob, and produced a message from its daisy-embroidered smock.

      ‘Benchiffer, read it.’

      Benchiffer took the wafer, held it in photoelectric hand, and intoned: ‘Gall-bladder to Rupture Six. Regret Spy-Bell Zero Zero Zero became nondetectable time-refererents 03071255T. Jupiter Police Five-Star Alert and Exo-Systems Search in Code Areas Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, and Conquest. Full Emergency. Possible coordinates follow message. Suggest Red Rupture despatch dopple repeat dopple subiter Gall-Bladder Suite Beta. All parameters Bilious repeat Bilious advised. War footing. Transcendent. Jupiter Five-Star Alert. Burgess, Knight, Adlard, Cotton, Conquest. Red Rupture. Reddleman. QLLTX5973328764983AA448. Four-second destruct. Reddleman. Gabbice. Gall-Bladder Rupture Six.’

      ‘Is it important, darling?’ Loomis asked.

      The four seconds was up. The holman was blanked for a moment as the wafer destructed.

      ‘I’m Red Rupture,’ Attica Saigon Smix said, fingering certain keys on his chair. He turned slowly round, beginning to perambulate back through the tent-shaped trees towards Micromegas. He signalled to Captain Ladore, watchful at the gangway.

      ‘What’s it mean, darling?’ asked Loomis. She was all female; in her adolescence, she had liked to shower in company with her male cousins, and with her sister, Glamis. It had proved the beginning of a very cleanly way of life.

      ‘It’s that scab-devouring spy-bell near Jupiter that we’ve been keeping tabs on. It could do us no harm – we just didn’t know who owned it. How does it vanish just like that? When I get to Gall-Bladder – Oh, Ladore! Is it possible to project a dopple of me to Gall-Bladder from this location?’

      Immaculate Ladore was a projection himself, one of the multiple embodiments of Computer Complex detached to serve – and survey – the master of the Smix-Smith universe.

      ‘It means double transcendence,’ Ladore replied. ‘Micromegas carries the necessary equipment. We could perform the operation in ordinary space. Here, in this continuum, we lack energy. We shall have to tap the floor – it’s pure energy ready to hand.’

      ‘Get with it.’ But the companalog had anticipated the order; as the boss rolled up the gangway, syphon cables were snaking down, taking a bite into the space-floor.

      He looked back. She fluttered a hand. Ever the loving wife.

      Another companalog was waiting inside, guiding him down to Trexmissions Bay. Orderly movement, high-level activity, low-order sounds, non-smells – the entire synthetic, synapse-speeding gestalt of a multi-space sunship. Pent with emotion, null-emotion, and the fastest static known to man. Hyperthyroid, hythritic, the perfect kinematics of non-perceivable mobility in n dimensions. Real men, fake men – holmans, companalogs, cyborgs, androids, robots, down to espergdummies – all with a purpose not entirely or entirely not their own – even the real men, so far as ‘real’ was a term any more with coordinates in any actual world, drugged or gutted in some way or hooked to electroidal reflex. Eyes everywhere, and some anxious eye-movement. But never gaze meeting gaze. Never eye-contact. Deflection saved reflection.

      They brought him reverently to an intolerable prone position and swung the massive dopplegangster ovens round about his frame.

      A technician said, and a slight tendency to hairiness along the side of the neck suggested he was a real man, however controlled, ‘You know, sir, that you will have to rest here in lightly comative condition while your dopple is away? The life-death interface could be somewhat critical over the proposed distance.’

      ‘Understood.’ No baby-talk for these men. ‘Can you peel off an extra dopple to keep my wife happy, keep her company?’

      ‘We could peel off a half-dozen under normal circumstances.’ Dangerous talk to Smix of Smix-Smith, the normal circumstances being understood to refer to people in sound health, making their way along the mulcting trajectories of life unaided by excessive servos. ‘But we might find in the present case that doubling dopplers could lead to hyperemesis and actuality-decay. What we can do is take a soul-sliver and duplicate on the holoscope, to form a semi-project. Then we’d use companalog transjects to project speech transferences based on your recorded impulse-patterns.’

      Faithful, detesticled Benchiffer was at the wizened elbow to render the technical jargon down into boss jargon.

      ‘You might find yourself in excess of critical, psyche-wise, if you projected more than one dopple. But they can take a still-moment-transfix and give it pseudo-life and speech by souping it up through computer-project channels, using your life-channels from the banks.’

      ‘Will that thing be any good for Loomis?’

      ‘It could repeat yourself – itself – a bit.’

      ‘It might keep her happy. Let’s go. Gall-Bladder.’

      The ovens began to radiate. The old body they contained, yeah, and all which it inherited, began to dissolve and fade …

      …Leaving behind on the floor-world a double which moved slowly out in the fake sunlight among the nursery properties to greet Loomis, tasty of hand and lip and gesture …

      …And projecting through the incomprehensible mathematical intricacies (so complex that they were only marshalled in orderly impulses in one special maroon-red-coded section of computer-complex’s primal think-bank and in no human think-tank) separating a rather problematical here from a rather problematical there a capable and angry-alert dopple Attica Saigon Smix into the high (and highly fortified) chambers of a subterranean building in Easeaboard, N.A., otherwise known in the day’s code (leaving this special definition of ‘day’ to be unravelled by others) as Gall-Bladder.

      The guys in Gall-Bladder were still sweating blood about the whereabouts of the mystery spy-bell.

      That spy-bell – known to its occupants, with whom we have shortly to deal, as Doomwitch – marks with its disappearance the appearance of catastrophe in my narrative.

      My job, as I see it, is to relate the events in some sort of order, to produce a linear continuance which I believe can be perceived

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