Modem Times 2.0 (3 page)
Authors: Michael Moorcock
Checking his watches, Jerry smiled and turned up the collar of his black car coat. He put one gloved hand on the Roller’s gear stick, another on the wheel. He was still searching for his Dornier DoX seaplanes. Last he’d looked Catherine had been aboard.
“What’s the time? My watches stopped.”
When asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry it’s almost uninhabitable. But that’s not what Willem van Cottem sees. “It will be a green world,” says van Cottem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. “Tropical fruit can grow wherever it’s warm. You still need water, but not much. A brief splash of rain every once in a while is enough. And voila—from sandy soil, lush gardens grow. The secret is hydrogels, powerfully absorbent polymers that can suck up hundreds of times their weight in water. Hydrogels have many applications today, from food processing to mopping up oil spills, but they are most familiar as the magic ingredient in disposable diapers.
—Popular Science
, July 2010
“B
ELONGING, JERRY, IS
very important to me.” Colonel Pyat glanced up and down the deserted Portobello. Crows were hopping about in the gutters. Old newspapers, scraps of lettuce, squashed tomatoes, ruined apples. Even the scavengers, their ragged forms moving methodically up and down the street, rejected them.
Jerry looked over at the cinema. The Essoldo was showing three pictures for 1/6d.
Mrs. Miniver, The Winslow Boy
, and
Brief Encounter
.
“Heppy deddy?” he asked no-one in particular.
“There you are!” The colonel was triumphant. “You can speak perfectly properly if you want to!”
Jerry was disappointed. He had expected a different triple feature. He had been told it would be
Epic Hero and the Beast, First Spaceship on Venus
, and
Forbidden Planet
.
“Rets!” he said.
Art, which should be the unique preoccupation of the privileged few, has become a general rule … A fashion … A furor … artism!
—Felix Pyat
“T
HERE’S ALWAYS
A bridge somewhere.” Mo paced up and down the levee like a neurotic dog. Every few minutes he licked his lips with his long red tongue. At other times he stood stockstill staring inland, upriver. From the gloom came the sound of a riverboat’s groaning wail, and an exchange of shouts between pilots over their bullhorns. Heavy waves of black liquid crashed against hulls. The words were impossible to make out, like cops ordering traffic, but nobody cared what they were saying. Further downriver, from what remained of the city, came the mock-carousel music inviting visitors to a showboat whose paddles, splashing like the vanes of a ruined windmill, stuck high out of filthy brown water full of empty Evian and Ozarka bottles.
Further upstream, scavengers with empty cans were trying to skim thick oil off the surface.
Jerry called up from the water. He had found a raft and was poling it slowly to the gently curving concrete level. “Mo. Throw down a rope!”
“The Pope? We haven’t got a pope.” Mo was confused.
A rope!
“We going to hang him?”
Jerry gave up and let the raft drift back into midstream. He sat down in the centre, his gun stuck up between his spread legs.
“You going to town?” Mo wanted to know.
When Jerry didn’t answer, he began to pad slowly along the levee, following the creak of the raft in the water, the shadow that he guessed to be his friend’s. From somewhere in the region of Jackson Square vivid red, white, and blue neon flickered on and off before it was again extinguished. Then the sun set, turning the water a beautiful, bloody crimson. The broken towers along St. Charles Street appeared in deep silhouette for a few moments and disappeared in the general darkness. The voices of the pilots stopped suddenly and all Mo could hear was the sullen lapping of the river.
“Jerry?”
Later, Mo was relieved at the familiar razz—a kazoo playing a version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He looked up and down. “Is that you?”
Jerry had always been fond of Berlin.
A mysterious young man met at luncheon Said “My jaws are so big I can munch on A horse and a pig and a ship in full rig And my member’s the size of a truncheon.”
—Maurice LeB, 1907
M
ONSTROUS HOVERING BATTLE CRUISERS
cast black shadows over half a mile in all directions when Jerry finally reached the field, his armoured Lotus HMV VII’s batteries all but exhausted. He would have to abandon the vehicle and hopeto get back to Exeter with the cavalry, assuming there was still a chance to make peace and assuming there still was an Exeter. He leapt from the vehicle and ran towards the tent where the Cornish commander had set up his headquarters.
The cool air moaned with the soft noise of idling motors. Cornish forces, including Breton and Basque allies, covered the moors on four sides of the Doone valley, the sound of their vast camp all but silenced by its understanding of the force brought against it. Imperial Germany, Burgundy, and Catalonia had joined Hannover to crush this final attempt to restore Tudor power and return the British capital to Cardiff.
Even as Jerry reached the royal tent, Queen Jennifer stepped out, a vision in mirrored steel, acknowledging his deep bow. Her captains crowded behind her, anxious for information.
“Do you, my lord, bring news from Poole?” She was pale, straight-backed, ever beautiful. He cared as much for her extraordinary posture as any of her other qualities. Were they still lovers?
“Poole has fallen, your majesty, while the Isle of Wight lies smouldering and extinguished. Even Barnstaple’s great shipyards are destroyed. We reckoned, my lady, without the unsentimental severity of Hannover’s fleet. We have only cavalry and infantry remaining.”
“Your own family?”
“Your majesty, I sent them to sanctuary in the Scillies.”
She turned away, hiding her expression from him.
Her voice was steady when it addressed her commanders. “Gentlemen, you may return to your homes. The day is already lost and I would not see you die in vain.” She turned to Jerry, murmuring: “And what of Gloucester?”
“The same, my lady.”
A tear showed now in her calm, beautiful eyes. Yet her voice remained steady. “Then we are all defeated. I’ll spill no more senseless blood. Tell Hannover I will come to London by July’s end. Take this to him.” Slowly, with firm hands, she unbuckled her sword.
.
THE EPIC SEARCH FOR A TECH HERO
The penalties in France will be much higher than in Belgium. The fine for a first offence will be Є150. And a man who is found to have forced a woman to wear a full-length veil will be punished with a fine of Є15,000 and face imprisonment. The crackdown on the veil has come from the very top of the political establishment, with President Sarkozy declaring that the burqa is “not welcome” in France and denouncing it as a symbol of female “subservience and debasement.”
—New Statesman
, May 31, 2010
M
ARIA AMIS, JULIA
Barnes, and Iona MacEwan, the greatest lady novelists of their day, were taking tea at Liberty one afternoon in the summer of 2011. They had all been close friends at Girton in the same class and had shared many adventures. As time passed their fortunes prospered and their interests changed, to such a degree, in fact, that on occasion they had “had words” and spent almost a decade out of direct communication; but now, in middle years, they were reconciled.
Love’s Arrow
had won the Netta Musket Award;
The Lime Sofa
, the Ouida Prize; and
Under Alum Chine
, the Barbara Cartland Memorial Prize. All regularly topped the bestseller lists.
In their expensive but unshowy summer frocks and hats, they were a vision of civilized femininity.
The tea rooms had recently been redecorated in William Morris ‘Willow Pattern,’ and brought a refreshing lightness to their surroundings. The lady novelists enjoyed a sense of secure content which they had not known since their Cambridge days.
The satisfaction of this cosy moment was only a little spoiled by the presence of a young man with bright shoulder-length black hair, dark blue eyes, long, regular features, and a rather athletic physique, wearing a white shirt, black car coat, and narrow, dark grey trousers, with pointed “Cuban” elastic-sided boots, who sat in the corner nearest to the door. Occasionally, he would look up from his teacakes and darjeeling and offer them a friendly, knowing wink.
“And should we feel concern for the Irish?” Iona determinedly asked the table. She had always nursed an interest in politics.
“Cherchez l’argent
,” reflected Maria.
Thinking this vulgar, Julia looked for the waitress.
.
LES FAUX MONNAYEURS
Things were happening as we motored into Ypres. When were they not? A cannonade of sorts behind the roofless ruins, perhaps outside of town; nobody seems to know or care; only an air-fight for our benefit. We crane our necks and train our glasses. Nothing whatever to be seen.
—E. W. Hornung,
New Statesman
, June 30, 1917
The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down Our money’s getting shallow and weak.
—Bob Dylan,
Modern Times
, 2006
J
ERRY’S HEAD TURNED
on the massive white pillow and he saw something new in his sister’s trust even as she slipped into his arms, her soft comfort warming him. “You’ll be leaving, then?” she asked.
“I catch the evening packet from Canterbury. By tonight I’ll be in Paris. There’s still time to think again.”
“I must stay here.” Her breathing became more rapid. “But I promise I’ll join you if the cryogenics …” Her voice broke. “By Christmas. Oh, Jesus, Jerry. It’s tragic. I love you.”
His expression puzzled her, he knew. He had dreamed of her lying in her coffin while an elaborate funeral went on around her. He remembered her in both centuries. Image after image came back to him, confusing in their intensity and clarity. It was almost unbearable. Why had he always loved her with such passion? Such complete commitment? That old feeling. Of course, she had not been the only woman he had loved sounselfconsciously, so deeply, but she was the only one to reciprocate with the same depth and commitment. The only one to last his lifetime. The texture of her short, brown hair reminded him of Jenny. Of Jenny’s friend, Eve. Of the pleasures the three of them had shared through much of the ‘70s when Catherine was away with Una Persson …
Looking over Eve’s head through copper hot eyes as her friend moved her beautiful full lips over his penis, Jenny’s face bore that expression of strong affection which was the nearest she came to love. His fingers clung deep in Eve’s long dark hair, his mouth on Jenny’s as she frigged herself. The subtle differences of skin shades; their eye colours. The graceful movements. That extraordinary passion. Jenny’s lips parted and small delicious grunts came from her mouth. This was almost the last of what the ‘60s had brought them and which most other generations could never enjoy: pleasure without conflict or fear of serious consequences; the most exquisite form of lust. Meanwhile, taking such deep humane pleasure in the love of the moment, Jerry could not know (though he had begun to guess) what the future would bring. And were his actions, which felt so innocent, the cause of the horror, which would within two decades begin to fill the whole world?
“Was it my fault?” he asked her.
She sat up, smiling. “Look at the time!”
.
HOME ALONE FIVE
I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a videoof a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.
—Seymour M. Hersh, “The General’s Report,”
New Yorker
, June 25, 2007.
P
ORTOBELLO ROAD, DESERTED
except for a few stall-holders setting up before dawn, had kept its familiar Friday morning atmosphere. As Jerry approached the Westway, one hand deep in the pocket of his black car coat, the other still in its black glove resting on the handlebars of his Gent’s Royal Albert bicycle, he glanced at the big neon NEW WORLDS Millennium clock, in vivid red and blue, erected to celebrate the magazine’s fifty-fifth birthday. Two doors closer to the bridge, and not yet open, were the
FRENDZ
offices, and nearby were
Time Out
, Rough Trade, Stiff Records International, Riviera Management, Mac’s Music, Trux Transportation, Stone’s Antiquarian Books, Pash’s Instruments, The Mountain Grill, Brock and Turner, The Mandrake, Smilin’ Mike’s Club; all the great names which had made the Grove famous and given the area its enduring character.
“I remember when I used to be a denizen round here. Glad to see the old neighbourhood has kept going.” Jerry spoke to his friend, Professor Hira, who had remained behind when the others had gone away.
“Only by a whisker,” said the plump Brahmin, shaking his head. “By a lot of hard work and visionary thinking on the part of those of us who didn’t leave.”