it, in what order we shall see presently, with glimpses already if you get out of bed at dawn and dare to look stark. The past will prove less utopian, the future more so. The belief is not a religious one, so to speak, though confused. Some fish we can eat.
‘It is not an obsolete thing to speak about the miracle. The individual cannot be completed and put away without any fantasies of hope. I don’t qualify for being put away. What I mean here is combining the elements of subconsciousness with political geology to make a reinforcement such is unknown. If the comparison is fair, we could complete it according to the schema existing today, rational for not rational, till someone gets the prize for their body.’
At this there was a murmur of general agreement from the delegates. Kchevov looked up from his papers – rather in astonishment, Squire thought. As the man got going again, Squire wrote a note to Frenza stating that Comrade Kchevov had now been speaking for half-an-hour and should be interrupted, since it was the turn of the next delegate to speak. He pushed it across d’Exiteuil’s space to the secretary.
Frenza stared at it, pushed it back interrogatively to d’Exiteuil. The two men started whispering together. Finally, Frenza rose furtively from his seat, came round d’Exiteuil’s seat and put his arm around Squire’s shoulder in a fraternal embrace. He spoke rapidly in Italian.
‘He says that it’s agreed that we should never interrupt a delegate if he is obviously delivering something of major importance,’ translated d’Exiteuil. ‘Particularly in this case where he is clearly building on much of your own work, under the keynote of exploring the familiar.’
‘His half-hour is up. You must interrupt him according to the rules, whatever he is saying. Ring your little bell and warn him that he has two minutes left. You’ve been to these sessions before. You know what to do.’
Looking genuinely anguished when this was translated to him, Frenza began a fresh speech, whispering urgently, his eyes close to Squire’s. D’Exiteuil translated, saying, ‘What the secretary says is that we must make not only scholarly allowances, etcetera, etcetera, but also diplomatic allowances in the present case. If we interrupted now, the Soviet delegations would be offended and see it as a political move.’
‘They can’t possibly be offended, they know the rules. What’s political about it?’
‘Then why did you suggest it?’ d’Exiteuil asked. ‘It must be political. You get us all into trouble. By the way, Tom, you upset our Romanian friend at breakfast.’
At that moment, another note was passed along. D’Exiteuil snatched it before Frenza could reach, and spread it out. It was in French, and suggested simply that, since the Soviet delegate had exceeded his time limit, he should be asked to sit down. It was signed with a flourish: Carlo Morabito.
D’Exiteuil and Frenza had another hurried confabulation, at the end of which d’Exiteuil signed with two fingers to Squire. ‘We give him two minutes more, okay?’
Frenza rang his bell and conveyed to Kchevov the news that he had five more minutes.
Squire listened to the exchange over the headphones. Kchevov apparently said that he was sorry for the interruption and would wind things up immediately.
He spoke on for some while. Frenza sat with his hand on the bell, but had become immobile, staring ahead, perhaps into the political future, like something on Easter Island. He stirred from his daze and invited questions only when Kchevov finally sat down.
A young Italian, one of Ermalpa’s smart set and an under-professor in the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, rose and remarked, according to the translation, that he proposed there was now only the continuous present. History had expanded into everyday life as a strategy for fiction. Fiction was fulfilling its destiny and becoming generally all-pervasive. While the Pope died of laughing, the brows of intellectuals were lined with fatigue.
Good-natured laughter and smart smiling followed these remarks.
D’Exiteuil intervened to say that he accepted Kchevov’s interesting talk in the true spirit, although he was fortunate in speaking from a position where the traditional union of church and state versus the people had been alleviated. Nevertheless, he felt that utopianism should now be regarded with a rather large set of reservations in view of its limited temporal applications, though he did see that it had compatibility with their general subject for discussion in certain clearly designated areas. Squire wrote that bit down on his notepad.
One of the Americans, Larry Clayton, rose to say that there was a concealed dilemma in what had been discussed so far during the morning, which was man’s inability to mature at a rate compatible with technological progress. There were small and large realisms and he believed that while what his Soviet colleague had had to say was revealing and significant, and a major contribution to the debate, it nevertheless fell under the category of a minor realism.
At the risk of achieving a fascist posture, he believed that his own country, the USA, should pursue a projectory of high technology to the limit of productive capacity. Before the oil ran out – though that was and remained a hypothetical parameter entirely based on relative cost-accounting – it was a priority to establish space colonies on the Moon and on synthetic planets in equivalent orbits, where a whole new nul-g vacuum technology could be developed, using limitless solar energy and maybe demolished superfluous gas planets such as Jupiter, which would provide more power than mankind had so far managed to consume in its total history. Such objectives achieved essentiality.
Concurrently with this admittedly somewhat lyrical scenario, he proposed that all aid to undeveloped countries be embargoed and even that the US become isolationist in intention and trade, the more effectively to gear itself outward to the universe in a receptivity attitude.
If all this sounded like a new version of economic extortion and the Monro doctrine, he would remind delegates that even Karl Marx had admitted that there had always existed a struggle between city and countryside, and that that struggle had proved a fruitful one. Indeed, it was in many of its phases the history of man himself. Now that urbanization was practically global, and the realization of Doxiadis’s Ecumenopolis fast approaching, a massive US advancement into neighbouring space would restore that fruitful dichotomy. The urbanization of vacuum was a top priority target.
Clayton admitted to a personal reservation to all this. He knew, none better, how desperately his country needed a new form of government, the present elite being entirely discredited, but he feared that access to new power areas would merely entrench the present elite, even in an altered environment, since those grabbed power who were nearest power. Almost all popular forms of entertainment, including TV and news media and present-day literatures like sci-fi – witness Asimov – were downright reactionary; the texts showed how greatly the masses were held in contempt, and he could not understand how the masses still ate up this stuff and made fortunes for those who so obviously despised them.
Of course, education had been withheld them. They needed a government of the people in an energy-surplus requirement environment, and then maybe mankind would mature along the utopianist lines outlined by his Russian colleague.
Frenza thanked everyone and called for the next paper.
Dr Dwight G. Dobell of San Andreas Baptist University read a well-researched and innocuous paper on ‘Abba, Pop Musicals, and Youth Say-So’. The Sicilian morning went by.
When the delegates moved out of the smoke-filled conference hall for lunch, only ten minutes behind timetable, Squire found Herman Fittich waiting for him in the marble gallery.
‘Well, that was all very instructive,’
