Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 3

Bradley was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been nine or ten years old when his mother disappeared. She was a statuesque, silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in somber dark clothes and wearing wireframe glasses. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the late twenties.

In the dream, his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He barely remembered his sister, except as a tiny, feeble baby with large watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—deep as a grave—which was filling with water. He thought perhaps it was the basement of an endangered house. They were looking up at him through the darkening water as a hurricane raged around them. There was air down in this basement, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were being submerged, down into the foul water which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was outside in the light and air watching them through a small window while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was out here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach in their faces or in their hearts, but they knew they must die in order that he might live, and this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

He could not remember what had happened, but somehow he knew the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself in a way that was private and unalterable. He remembered her smiling with affection when she found him dressing up in her strand of pearls, absorbed in how the feel of them transforming their drab basement room. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there was fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the fetid water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Green Country. It was an old, deer-grazed pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a desiccated cowpat here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees swayed very faintly in the breeze, their leaves stirring in dense masses like a woman's hair. Somewhere near at hand, just out of sight, he knew there was a clear, slow-moving stream where kiacks were swimming in the pools under the trees.

The woman with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though The Ronald and the Corporate and the TRUTH Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. Bradley woke up with the word 'Bowie' on his lips.

The faceboogle was giving forth a shrill whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was 7:00, getting-up time for knowledge workers. Bradley wrenched his body out of bed—naked, for an employee of the Outer Corporate received only 3,000 non-fungible tokens annually, and mosquito nets were 600—and seized a dingy sweatshirt and a pair of shorts lying across a chair. The Deskercizes would begin in three minutes. His room was redolent with a blend of nighttime humidity and sweat. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking, partly from smoking and partly from exposure to eco-bomb dust. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the smoker's cough, and his eczema had started itching.