Illustration by ATom.
The king of All Britain fought his strange war on Earth while his subjects schemed against him. Much later Smith was to realise just why the king hadn’t seemed to notice…
I saw Sorn’s bier, an electrically driven train decorated like a fanfare, as it left the North Sea Bridge and passed over the green meadows of Yorkshire. Painted along its flank was the name HOLATH HOLAN SORN, and it motored swiftly with brave authority. From where we stood in the observation-room of the King’s Summer Palace, we could hear the hollow humming of its passage.
‘You will not find things easy without Holath Holan Sorn,’ I said, and turned. The King of All Britain was directing his mosaic eyes towards the train.
‘Things were never easy,’ he replied. But he knew as well as I that the loss of Sorn might mean the loss of a kingdom.
The King turned from the window, his purple cloak flowing about his seven-foot frame. I felt sorry for him: how would he rule an alien race, with its alien psychology, now that Sorn was dead? He had come to depend entirely upon that man who could translate one set of references into another as easily as he crossed the street. No doubt there were other men with perhaps half of Sorn’s abilities, but who else could gain the King’s trust? Among all humans, none but Sorn could be the delegate of the Invader King.
‘Smith,’ he said, addressing me, ‘tomorrow we consign twelve tooling factories to a new armaments project. I wish you to supervise.’
I acknowledged, wondering what this signified. No one could deny that the aliens’ reign had been peaceful, even prosperous, and he had rarely mentioned military matters, although I knew there was open enmity between him and the King of Brazil. Either this enmity was about to become active, I decided, or else the King forecast a civil uprising.
Which in itself was not unlikely.
Below us, the bier was held up by a junction hitch. Stationary, it supplemented its dignity by sounding its klaxon loudly and continuously. The King returned his gaze to it, and though I couldn’t read his unearthly face I suppose he watched it regretfully, if he can feel regret. Of the others in the room, probably the two aliens also watched with regret, but certainly no one else did. Of the four humans, three were probably glad he was dead, though they may have been a little unsure about it.
That left myself. I was more aware of events than any of them, but I just didn’t know what I felt. Sometimes I felt on the King’s side and sometimes on the other side. I just didn’t have any definite loyalties.
Having witnessed the arrival of the bier from the continent, where Sorn had met his death, we had achieved the purpose of the visit to the Summer Palace, and accordingly the King, with his entourage of six (two fellow beings, four humans including myself) left for London.
We arrived at Buckingham Palace shortly before sunset. Wordlessly the King dismissed us all, and with a lonely swirl of his cloak made his way to what was in a makeshift manner called the throne-room. Actually it did have a throne: but it also had several other kinds of strange equipment, things like pools, apparatus with what psychologists called threshold associations. The whole chamber was an aid to the incomprehensible, insectile mentality of the King, designed, I suspected, to help him in the almost impossible task of understanding a human society. While he had Sorn at his elbow there had been little need to worry, and the inadequacy of the chamber mattered so little that he seldom used it. Now, I thought, the King of All Britain would spend a large part of his time meditating in solitude on the enigmatic throne.
I had the rest of the evening to myself. But I hadn’t gone far from the palace when, as I might have guessed, Hotch placed his big bulk square across my path.
‘Not quite so fast,’ he said, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly.
I stopped – what else could I have done? – but I didn’t answer. ‘All right,’ Hotch said, ‘let’s have it straight. I want nobody on both sides.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.
‘Sorn’s dead, right? And you’re likely to replace him. Right?’
‘Wrong,’ I told him wearily. ‘Nobody replaces Sorn. He was the one irreplaceable human being.’
His eyes dropped in pensive annoyance. He paused. ‘Maybe, but you’ll be the closest to the King’s rule. Is that so?’
I shrugged.
‘It has to be so,’ he decided. ‘So which way is it going to be, Smith? If you’re going to be another traitor like Sorn, let’s hear it from the start. Otherwise be a man and come in with us.’
It sounded strange to hear Sorn called a traitor. Technically, I suppose he was – but he was also a man of genius, the rarest of statesmen. And even now only the 0.5 per cent of the population roused by Hotch’s super-patriotism would think of him as anything else. Britain had lived in a plentiful sort of calm under the King. The fact of being governed by an alien conqueror was not resented, even though he had enthroned himself by force. With his three ships, his two thousand warriors, he had achieved a near-bloodless occupation, for he had won his victory by the sheer possession of superior weapons, without having to resort much to their usage. The same could be said of the simultaneous invasion of Brazil and South Africa: Brazil by fellow creatures of the King, South Africa by a different species. Subsequent troubles in these two areas had been greater, but then they lacked the phlegmatic British attitude, and more important, they lacked Holath Holan Sorn.
I sighed. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Some human governments have been a lot worse.’
‘But they’ve been human. And we owed a lot to Sorn, though personally I loathed his guts. Now that he’s gone – what? The King will make a mess of things. How do we know he really cares?’
‘I think he does. Not the same way a man would care, but he does.’
‘Hah! Anyhow, this is our chance. While he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What about it? Britain hasn’t known another conqueror in a thousand years.’
I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t know. Eventually he stomped off in disgust.
I didn’t enjoy myself that evening. I thought too much about Sorn, about the King, and about what Hotch had said. How could I be sure the King cared for England? He was so grave and gently ponderous, but did that indicate anything? His appearance could simply be part of his foreignness and nothing at all to do with his feelings. In fact if the scientists were right about him, he had no feelings at all.
But what purpose had he?
I stopped by Trafalgar Square to see the Green Fountains.
The hand of the invader on Britain was present in light, subtle ways, such as the Green Fountains. For although Britain remained Britain, with the character of Britain, the King and his men had delicately placed their alien character upon it; not in law, or the drastic changes of a conqueror, but in such things as decoration.
The Green Fountains were foreign, unimaginable, and un-British. High curtains of thin fluid curled into fantastic designs, creating new concepts of space by sheer ingenuity of form. Thereby they achieved what centuries of Terran artists had only hinted at.
And yet they were British, too. If Britons had been prompted to conceive and construct such things, this was the way they would have done it. They carried the British stamp, although so alien.
When I considered the King’s rule, the same anomaly emerged. A strange rule, by a stranger, yet imposed so easily.
This was the mystery of the King’s government: the way he had adopted Britain, in essence, while having no comprehension of that essence.
But let me make it clear that for all this, the invader’s rule did not operate easily. It jarred, oscillated, went out of phase, and eventually, without Sorn, ended in disaster. It was only in this other, peculiar way, that it harmonised so pleasingly.
It was like this: when the King and his men tried to behave functionally and get things done, it was terrible. It didn’t fit. But when they simply added themselves to All Britain, and lay quiescently like touches of colour, it had the effect I describe.
I had always thought Sorn responsible for this. But could Sorn mould the King also? For I detected in the King that same English passivity and acceptance; not just his own enigmatic detachment, but something apart from that, something acquired. Yet how could he be something which he didn’t understand?
Sorn is dead, I thought, Sorn is dead.
Already, across one side of the square, were erected huge, precise stone symbols HOLATH HOLAN SORN DIED 5.8.2034. They were like a mathematical formula. Much of the King’s speech, when I thought of it, had the same quality.
Sorn was dead, and the weight of his power which had steadied the nation would be abruptly removed. He had been the operator, bridging the gap between alien minds. Without him, the King was incompetent.
A dazzling blue and gold air freighter appeared over the square and slanted down towards the palace. Everyone stopped to look, for it was one of the extraterrestrial machines, rarely seen since the invasion. No doubt it carried reinforcements for the palace defences.
Next morning I motored to Surrey to visit the first of the ten factories the King had mentioned.
The managers were waiting for me. I was led to a prepared suite of offices where I listened sleepily to a lecture on the layout and scope of the factory. I wasn’t very interested; one of the King’s kinsmen (referred to as the King’s men) would arrive shortly with full details of the proposed conversion, and the managers would have to go through it all again. I was only here as a representative, so to speak. The real job would be carried out by the alien.
We all wandered round the works for a few hours before I got thoroughly bored and returned to my office. A visitor was waiting.
Hotch.
‘What do you want now?’ I asked. ‘I thought I’d got rid of you.’
He grinned. ‘I found out what’s going on.’ He waved his arms to indicate the factory.
‘What of it?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you say the King’s policy is … ill-advised?’
‘You know as well as I do that the King’s policy is certain to be laughably clumsy.’ I motioned him to a seat. ‘What exactly do you mean? I’m afraid I don’t know the purpose of this myself.’
I was apologetic about the last statement, and Hotch laughed. ‘It’s easy enough to guess. Don’t you know what they’re building in Glasgow? Ships – warships of the King’s personal design.’
‘Brazil,’ I murmured.
‘Sure. The King chooses this delicate moment to launch a transatlantic war. Old Rex is such a blockhead he almost votes himself out of power.’
‘How?’
‘Why, he gives us the weapons to fight him with. He’s organising an armed native force which I will turn against him.’
‘You jump ahead of yourself. To go by the plans I have, no extraterrestrial weapons will be used.’
Hotch looked more sober. ‘That’s where you come in. We can’t risk another contest with the King’s men using ordinary arms. It would kill millions and devastate the country. Because it won’t be the skirmish-and-capitulate of last time. This time we’ll be in earnest. So I want you to soften things up for us. Persuade the King to hand over more than he intends: help us to chuck him out easily. Give us new weapons and you’ll save a lot of carnage.’
I saw his stratagem at once. ‘Quit that! Don’t try to lay blood responsibility on my shoulders. That’s a dirty trick.’
‘For a dirty man – and that’s what you are, Smith, if you continue to stand by, too apathetic even to think about it. Anyhow, the responsibility’s already laid, whatever you say. It depends on you.’
‘No.’
‘You won’t help?’
‘That’s right.’
Hotch sighed, and stared at the carpet for some seconds. Then he stared through the glass panels and down on to the floor of the workshops. ‘Then what will you do? Betray me?’
‘No.’
Sighing again, he told me: ‘One day, Smith, you’ll fade away through sheer lack of interest.’
‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘I just don’t seem to have the kind of mind that can make a decision. I can’t find any place to lay blame, or anyone to turn against.’
‘Not even for Britain,’ he commented sadly. ‘Your Britain as well as mine. That’s all I’m working for, Smith, our country.’
His brashness momentarily dormant, he was moodily meditative. ‘Smith, I’ll admit I don’t understand what it’s all about. What does the King want? What has he gained by coming down here?’
‘Nothing. He descended on us and took on a load of troubles without profit. It’s a mystery. Hence my uncertainty.’ I averted my eyes. ‘During the time I have been in contact with the King he has impressed me as being utterly, almost transcendentally unselfish. So unselfish, so abstracted, that he’s like a – just a blank!’
‘That’s only how you see it. Maybe you read it into him. The psychos say he’s no emotion, and selfishness is a kind of emotion.’
‘Is it? Well, that’s just what I mean. But he seems – humane, for all that. Considerate, though it’s difficult for him.’
He wasn’t much impressed. ‘Yeah. Remember that whatever substitutes for emotion in him might have some of its outward effects. And remember, he’s not the only outworlder on this planet. He doesn’t seem so considerate towards Brazil.’
Hotch rose and prepared to leave. ‘If you survive the rebellion, I’ll string you up as a traitor.’
‘All right!’ I answered, suddenly irritable. ‘I know.’
But when Hotch did get moving, I was surprised at the power he had gained for himself in the community. He knew exactly how to accentuate the irritating qualities of the invader, and he did it mercilessly.
Some of the incidents seemed ridiculous. Such as when alien officials began to organise the war effort with complete disregard for some of the things the nation took to be necessities – entertainment, leisure, and so on. The contents of art galleries and museums were burned to make way for weapons shops. Cinemas were converted into automatic factories, and all television transmissions ceased. Don’t get the idea that the King and his men are all tyrannical automata. They just didn’t see any reason for not throwing away priceless paintings, and never thought to look for one.
Affairs might have progressed more satisfactorily if the set-up had been less democratic. Aware of his poor understanding, the King had appointed a sort of double government. The first, from which issued the prime directive, consisted of his own men in key positions throughout the land, though actually their power had peculiar limitations. The second government was a human representation of the aboriginal populace, which in larger matters was still obliged to gain the King’s spoken permission.
The King used to listen very intently to the petitions and pseudo-emotional barrages which this absurd body placed before him – for they were by no means co-operative – and the meetings nearly always ended in bewilderment. During Sorn’s day it would have been different: he could have got rid of them in five minutes.
Those men caused chaos, and cost the country many lives in the Brazilian war which shortly followed. After Hotch gained control over them, they were openly the King’s enemies. He didn’t know it, of course, and now that it’s all finished I often wish I had warned him.
I remember the time they came to him and demanded a national working week of twenty-five hours. This was just after the King’s men had innocently tried to institute a sixty-hour working week, and had necessarily been restrained.
The petitioners knew how impossible it was; they were just trying to make trouble.
The King received them amid the sparse trappings of his Court. A few of his aides were about, and a few human advisers. Then he lifted his head and asked for help.
‘Advise me,’ he said to everyone present.
But the hostile influences in the hall were so great that all those who might have helped him shrugged their shoulders. That was the way things were. I said nothing.
‘If the proposal is carried out,’ the King told the ministers, ‘current programmes will not go through.’
He tried to reject the idea, but they amazingly refused to let it be rejected. They threatened and intimidated, and one gentleman began to talk hypocritically about the will and welfare of the people. Naturally there was no response: the King was not equipped. He surveyed the hall again. ‘He who can solve this problem, come forward.’
There was a lethargic, apathetic suspension. The aliens were immobile, like hard brilliant statues, observing these dangerous events as if with the asceticism of stone. Then there was more shrugging of shoulders.
It speaks for the leniency of the extraterrestrials that this could happen at all. Among human royalty, such insolence would bring immediate repercussions. But the mood was contagious, because I didn’t volunteer either. Hotch’s machinations had a potential, unspoken element of terrorism.
Whether the King realised that advice was being deliberately withheld, I don’t know. He called my name and strode to the back of the hall.
I followed his authoritatively gyrating cloak, reluctantly, like a dreading schoolboy. When I reached him, he said: ‘Smith, it is knowledge common to us both that my thinkings and human thinking are processes apart. Not even Sorn could have both kinds; but he could translate.’ He paused for a moment, and then continued with a couple of sentences of the mixed-up talk he had used on Sorn, together with some of the accompanying queer honks and noises. I couldn’t follow it. He seemed to realise his mistake, though, for he soon emerged into fairly sensible speech again, like this: ‘Honk. Environs matrix wordy. Int apara; is trying like light to; apara see blind, from total outside is not even potential … if you were king, Smith, what would you do?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘people have been angered by the impositions made on them recently, and now they’re trying to swing the pendulum the other way. Maybe I would compromise and cut the week by about ten hours.’
The King drew a sheaf of documents from a voluminous sash pocket and spread them out. One of them had a chart on it, and lists of figures. Producing a small machine with complex surfaces, he made what appeared to be a computation.
I wished I could find some meaning in those cold jewel eyes. ‘That would interfere with my armament programme,’ he said. ‘We must become strong, or the King of Brazil will lay Britain waste.’
‘But surely it’s important not to foster a discontented populace?’
‘Important! So often I have heard that word, and cannot understand it. Sometimes it appears to me, Smith, that human psychology is hilly country, while mine is a plain. My throne-room contains hints that some things you see as high, and others as low and flat, and the high is more powerful. But for me to travel this country is impossible.’
Smart. And it made some sense to me, too, because the King’s character often seemed to be composed of absences. He had no sense of crisis, for example. I realised how great his effort must have been to work this out.
‘And “importance”,’ he continued. ‘Some mountain top?’
He almost had it. ‘A big mountain,’ I said.
For a few seconds I began to get excited and thought that perhaps he was on his way to a semantic break-through. Then I saw where I was wrong. Knowing intellectually that a situation is difficult, and why it is difficult, is not much use when it comes to operating in that situation. If the King had fifty million minds laid out in diagram, with all their interconnections (and this is perfectly possible) he would still be no better able to operate. It is far too complex to grasp all at once with the intellect; to be competent in an environment, one must live in it, must be homogeneous with it. The King does not in the proper sense do the former, and is not the latter.
He spent a little while in the throne-room, peering through thresholds, no doubt, gazing at pools and wondering about the mountainous. Then he returned and offered the petitioners a concession of ten minutes off the working week. This was the greatest check he thought he could allow on his big industrial drive.
They argued angrily about it, until things grew out of hand and the King ordered me to dismiss them. I had to have it done forcibly. Any one of the alien courtiers could have managed it single-handed by mere show of the weapons on his person, but instead I called in a twenty-man human bodyguard, thinking that to be ejected by their own countrymen might reduce their sense of solidarity.
All the humans of the court exuded uneasiness. But they needn’t have worried. To judge by the King and his men, nothing might have happened. They held their positions with that same crystalline intelligence which they had carried through ten years of occupation. I was beginning to learn that this static appearance did not wholly result from unintelligibility, but that they actually maintained a constant internal state irrespective of external conditions. Because of this, they were unaware that the scene that had just been enacted comprised a minor climax. Living in a planar mentality the very idea of climax was not apparent to them.
After the petitioners had gone, the King took me to his private chambers behind the courtroom. ‘Now is the time for consolidation,’ he said. ‘Without Sorn, the governing factions become separated, and the country disintegrates. I must find contact with the indigenous British. Therefore I will strike a closer liaison with you, Smith, my servant. You will follow me around.’
He meant that I was to replace Sorn, as well as I could. Making it an official appointment was probably his way of appealing for help.
He had hardly picked the right man for the job, but that was typical of the casual way he operated. Of course, it made my personal position much worse, since I began to feel bad about letting him down. I was caught at the nexus of two opposing forces: even my inaction meant that somebody would profit. Altogether, not a convenient post for a neutral passenger.
Anyway, since the situation had arisen, I decided to be brash and ask some real questions.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but for whose sake is this war being fought – Britain’s or yours?’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt a little frightened. In the phantasmal human-alien relationship, such earthy examinations were out of place. But the King accepted it.
‘I am British,’ he answered, ‘and Britain is mine. Ever since I came, our actions are inseparable.’
Some factions of the British public would have disagreed with this, but I supposed he meant it in a different way. Perhaps in a way connected with the enigmatically compelling characters and aphorisms that had been erected about the country, like mathematics developed in words instead of numbers. I often suspected that the King had sought to gain power through semantics alone.
Because I was emotionally adrift, I was reckless enough to argue the case. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘without you there would be no war. The Brazilians would never fight without compulsion from their own King, either. I’m not trying to secede from your authority, but resolve my opinion that you and the King of Brazil are using human nations as instruments … in a private quarrel.’
For some while he thought about it, placing his hands together. He answered: ‘When the events of which I and the King of Brazil are a part moved into this region, I descended on to Britain, and he on to Brazil. By the fundamental working of things, I took on the nature of Britain, and Britain in reciprocation became incorporated in the workings of those events. And likewise with the King of Brazil, and with Brazil. These natures, and those events, are not for the time being separables, but included in each other. Therefore it is to defend Britain that I strive, because Britain is harnessed to my section of those outside happenings, and because I am British.’
When I had finally sorted out that chunk of pedantry, his claims to nationality sounded like baloney. Then I took into account the slightly supra-sensible evidence of his British character. After a little reflection I realised that he had gone halfway towards giving me an explanation of it.
‘What kind of happenings,’ I wondered, ‘can they be?’
The King can’t smile, and he can’t sound wistful, and it’s hard for him to convey anything except pure information. But what he said next sounded like the nearest thing to wistfulness he could manage.
‘They are very far from your mind,’ he said, ‘and from your style of living. ‘They are connected with the colliding galaxies in Cygnus. More than that would be very difficult to tell you …’
There was a pause. I began to see that the King’s concern was with something very vast and strange indeed. England was only a detail …
‘And those outsiders who took over South Africa. What’s their part in this?’
‘No direct connection. Events merely chanced to blow this way.’
Oddly, the way he said it made me think of how neat the triple invasion had been. In no instance had the borders of neighbouring states been violated, and the unmolested nations had in turn regarded the conquests as internal matters. Events had happened in discreet units, not in an interpenetrating mass as they usually do. The reactions of the entire Terrestrial civilisation had displayed an unearthly flavour. Maybe the incompatibility of alien psychology was not entirely mental. Perhaps in the King’s native place not only minds but also events took a different form from those of Earth. What is mentality, anyway, but a complex event? I could imagine a sort of transplanting of natural laws, these three kings, with all their power, bringing with them residual influences of the workings of their own worlds …
It sounded like certain astrological ideas I had once heard, of how on each world everything is different, each world has its own basic identity, and everything on that world partakes of that identity. But it’s only astrology.
As the time for war drew nearer, Hotch became more daring. Already he had made himself leader of the unions and fostered general discontent, as well as organising an underground which, in some ways, had more control over Britain than the King himself had. But he had a particular ambition, and in furtherance of this he appeared one day at Buckingham Palace.
Quite simply, he intended to do what I had refused to do for him.
He bowed low before the King, ignoring me, and launched into his petition.
‘The people of Britain have a long tradition of reliability and capability in war,’ he proclaimed. ‘They cannot be treated like children. Unless they are given fighting powers equal to those of the extraterrestrials – for I do not suppose that your own troops will be poorly armed – their morale will relapse and they will be defeated. You will be the psychological murderer of Britain.’
When he had finished, he cast a defiant glance at me, then puffed out his barrel chest and waited for a reply.
He had good reason to be afraid. One word from me, and he was finished. I admired his audacity.
I was also astounded at the outrageous way he had made the request, and I was at a loss to know what to do.
I sank on to the throne steps and slipped into a reverie. If I kept silent and showed loyalty to my country I would bring about the downfall of the King.
If I spoke in loyalty to the King, I would bring about the downfall of Hotch.
And really, I couldn’t find any loyalty anywhere. I was utterly adrift, as if I didn’t exist on the surface of the planet at all. I was like a compass needle which failed to answer to the magnetic field:
‘Psychological murderer of Britain,’ I repeated to myself. I was puzzled at the emotional evocation in that phrase. How could a human administer emotion to the King? But of course, it wasn’t really an emotion at all. In the King’s eyes the destruction of Britain was to be avoided, and it was this that Hotch was playing on.
Emerging from my drowsy thoughts, I saw Hotch leave. The King had not given an answer. He beckoned to me.
He spoke a few words to me, but I was non-committal. Then I waited outside the throne-room, while he spent an hour inside.
He obviously trusted Hotch. When he came out, he called together his full council of eight aliens, four humans and myself, and issued directives for the modification of the war. I say of war, and not of preparations for the war, because plans were now sufficiently advanced for the general outlines of the conflict to be set down on paper. The way the aliens handled a war made it hardly like fighting at all, but like an engineering work or a business project. Everything was decided beforehand; the final outcome was almost incidental.
And so several factories were re-tooled to produce the new weapons, the military hierarchy readjusted to give humans a greater part, and the focus of the main battle shifted five hundred miles further west. Also, the extrapolated duration of the war was shortened by six months.
Hotch had won. All Britain’s industries worked magnificently for three months. They worked for Hotch as they had never worked, even for Sorn.
I felt weary. A child could have seen through Hotch’s trick, but the King bad been taken in. What went on in his head, after all? What guided him? Did he really care – for anything?
I wondered what Sorn would have thought. But then, I had never known what went on in Sorn’s head, either.
The fleet assembled at Plymouth and sailed west into a sunny, choppy Atlantic. The alien-designed ships, which humans called swan-boats, were marshalled into several divisions. They rode high above the water on tripod legs, and bobbed lightly up and down.
Aerial fighting was forbidden by treaty, but there was one aircraft in the fleet, a wonderful blue and gold non-combatant machine where reposed the King, a few personal servants and myself. We drifted a few hundred feet above the pale green waterships, matching our speed with theirs.
That speed was slow. I wondered why we had not fitted ourselves out with those steel leviathans of human make, fast battleships and destroyers, which could have traversed the ocean in a few days whereas our journey required most of a month. It’s true the graceful swarm looked attractive in the sunlight, but I don’t think that was the reason. Or maybe it was a facet of it.
The Brazilians were more conventional in their combat aesthetics. They had steamed slowly out of the Gulf of Mexico to meet us at a location which, paradoxically, had been predetermined without collusion. We were greeted by massive grey warships, heavy with guns. Few innovations appeared to have been introduced into the native shipbuilding, though I did see one long corvette-shape lifted clean out of the water on multiple hydroplanes.
Fighting began in a casual, restrained manner when the belligerents were about two miles apart. There was not much outward enthusiasm for some hours. Our own ships ranged in size from the very small to the daintily monstrous, and wallowed prettily throughout the enemy fleet, discharging flashes of brilliant light. Our more advanced weapons weren’t used much, probably because they would have given us an unfair advantage over the Brazilian natives, who had not had the benefit of Hotch’s schemings.
Inside me I felt a dull sickness. All the King’s men were gathered here in the Atlantic; this was the obvious time for Hotch’s rebellion.
But it would not happen immediately. Hotch was astute enough to realise that even when he was rid of the King he might still have to contend with Brazil, and he wanted to test his future enemy’s strength.
The unemphatic activity on the surface of the ocean continued, while one aircraft floated in the air above. The King watched, sometimes from the balcony, sometimes by means of a huge jumble of screens down inside, which showed an impossible montage of the scene viewed from innumerable angles, most of which had no tactical usefulness that I could see. Some were from locations at sea-level, some only gave images of rigging, and there was even one situated a few feet below the surface.
I followed the King around, remembering his warning of the devastation which would ensue from Britain’s defeat. ‘But what will happen if we win?’ I asked him.
‘Do not be concerned,’ he told me. ‘Current events are in the present time, and will be completed with the cessation of the war.’
‘But something must happen afterwards.’
‘Subsequent events are not these events.’ A monstrous swinging pattern, made of bits and pieces of hulls and gunfire, built up mysteriously in the chaos of the screens, and dissolved again. The King turned to go outside.
When he returned, the pattern had begun again, with modifications. I continued: ‘If you believe that, why do you talk about Britain’s welfare?’
He applied himself to watching the screens, still showing no deviation from his norm, in a situation which to a normal man would have been crisis. ‘All Britain is mine,’ he said after his normal pause. ‘Therefore I make arrangements for its protection. This is comprehensible to us both, I think.’
He swivelled his head towards me. ‘Why do you enquire in this way, Smith? These questions are not the way to knowledge.’
Having been rebuked thus – if a being with a personality like atonal music can be said to rebuke – I too went outside, and peered below. The interpenetrated array seemed suddely like male and female. Our own more neatly shaped ships moved lightly, while the weighty, pounding Brazilians were more demonstratively aggressive, and even had long gun turrets for symbolism. Some slower part of my mind commented that the female is alleged to be the submissive, receptive part, which our fleet was not; but I dismissed that.
After two hours the outcome still looked indefinite to my mind. But Hotch decided he had seen enough. He acted.
A vessel which hitherto had kept to the outskirts of the battle and taken little part, abruptly opened up its decks and lifted a series of rocket ramps. Three minutes later, the missiles had disappeared into the sky and I guessed what war-heads they carried.
Everything fitted neatly: it was a natural decision on Hotch’s part. In such a short time he had not been able to develop transatlantic rockets, and he might never again be this close to the cities of Brazil. I could see him adding it all up in his mind.
Any kind of aeronautics was outlawed, and the Brazilians became enraged. They used their guns with a fury such as I hope never to see again. And I was surprised at how damaging a momentum a few thousand tons of fast-moving steel can acquire. Our own boys were a bit ragged in their defence at first, because they were busy butchering the King’s men.
With the new weapons, most of this latter was over in twenty minutes. I went inside, because by now weapons were being directed at the aircraft, and the energies were approaching the limits of its defensive capacity.
The hundred viewpoints adopted by the viewing screens had converted the battle-scene into a flurry too quick for my eyes to follow. The King asked my advice.
My most immediate suggestion was already in effect. Slowly, because the defence screens were draining power, we ascended into the stratosphere. The rest of what I had to say took longer, and was more difficult, but I told it all.
The King made no comment on my confession, but studied the sea. I withdrew into the background, feeling uncomfortable.
The arrangement of vision screens was obsolete now that the battle-plan had been disrupted. Subsidiaries were set up to show the struggle in a simpler form. By the time we came to rest in the upper air, Hotch had rallied his navy and was holding his own in a suddenly bitter engagement.
The King ordered other screens to be focused on Brazil. He still did not look at me.
After he had watched developments for a short time, he decided to meditate in solitude, as was his habit. I don’t know whether it was carelessness or simple ignorance, but without a pause he opened the door and stepped on to the outside balcony.
Fortunately, the door opened and closed like a shutter; the air replenishers worked very swiftly, and the air density was seriously low for less than a second. Even so, it was very unpleasant.
Emerging from the experience, I saw the King standing pensively outside in the partial vacuum of the upper air. I swore with surprise: it was hot out there, and even the sunlight shining through the filtered windows was more than I could tolerate.
When he returned, he was considerate enough to use another door.
By this time the monitor screens had detected the squadrons of bombers rising in retaliation from Brazil’s devastated cities. The etiquette of the old war was abandoned, and there was no doubt that they too carried the nuclear weapons illegally employed by Hotch.
The King observed: ‘When those bombers reach their delivery area in a few hours’ time, most of Britain’s fighting power will still be a month away in the Western Atlantic. Perhaps the islands should be warned to prepare what defences they have.’ His gem eyes lifted. ‘What do you say, Smith?’
‘Of course they must be warned!’ I replied quickly. ‘There is still an air defence – Hotch has kept the old skills alive. But he may not have expected such quick reprisals, and early interception is essential.’
‘I see. This man Hotch seems a skilful organiser, Smith, and would be needed in London.’ With interest, he watched the drive and ferocity of the action on the sea-scape. ‘Which is his ship?’
I pointed out the large swan-boat on which I believed Hotch to be present. Too suddenly for our arrival to be anticipated, we dropped from the sky. The servants of the King conducted a lightning raid which made a captive of Hotch with thirty per cent casualties.
We had been absent from the stratosphere for two minutes and forty-five seconds.
Hotch himself wasn’t impressed. He accused me of bad timing. ‘You may be right,’ I said, and told him the story.
If he was surprised he didn’t show it. He raised his eyebrows, but that was all. No matter how grave the situation might be, Hotch wouldn’t let it show.
‘It’s a native war from now on,’ he acclaimed. ‘There’s not an alien left in either fleet.’
‘You mean the Brazilians rebelled too?’
‘I wish they would! The green bosses hopped it and left them to it.’
The King offered to put Hotch down at Buckingham Palace, the centre of all the official machinery. Hotch greeted the suggestion with scorn.
‘That stuff’s no good to me,’ he said. ‘Put me down at my headquarters in Balham. That’s the only chance of getting our fighter planes in the air.’
This we did. The pilots had already set the aircraft in silent motion through the stratosphere, and within an hour we slanted downwards and flashed the remaining five hundred miles to England.
London was peaceful as we hovered above it three hours in advance of the raiders. Only Hotch’s impatient energy indicated the air of urgency it would shortly assume.
But what happened on Earth after that, I don’t know. We went into space, so I have only a casual interest.
It’s like this: the King showed me space.
To see it with the bare eyes is enough, but on the King’s set of multi- and null-viewpoint vision screens it really gets hammered in. And what gets knocked into you is this: nothing matters. Nothing is big enough to matter. It’s as simple as that.
However big a thing is, it just isn’t big enough. For when you see the size of totality – I begin to understand now why the King, who has seen it all the time, is as he is.
And nothing is important. There is only a stratified universe, with some things more powerful than others. That’s what makes us think they are important – they’re more powerful, but that’s all. And the most powerful is no more significant than the least.
You may wonder, then, why the King bothers with such trivial affairs as Britain. That’s easy.
When I was a young man, I thought a lot of myself. I thought myself valuable, if only to myself. And, once, I began to wonder just how much it would take for me to sacrifice my life, whether if it came to it I would sacrifice myself for a less intelligent, less worthwhile life than my own. But now I see the sacrifice for what it is: simply one insignificance for another insignificance. It’s an easy trade. So the King, who has ranged over a dozen galaxies, has lost his war, his army, and risks even his own life, for Britain’s sake. It’s all too tiny even to hesitate over. He did what he could: how could he do anything else?
Like the King, I was quickly becoming incapable of judgement. But before it goes altogether, I will say this of you, Hotch: It was a low trick you played on the King. A low, dirty trick to play on a good man.
First published in New Worlds 148, March 1965. © The Estate of Barrington J. Bayley. Reproduced with permission.
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