Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Pssst! All the cool kids are doing Vignettes.
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Oliver Locker-Lampson, Lord Protector of Britain [1932 - 1954]
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Oliver’s breath rattled as it passed his fleshy, stagnant lips, which were distorted into a forceful (but hopefully statesmanlike) frown by the presence of the portrait artist in the chair opposite. Even as a younger man, he had not been under any misapprehension concerning his appearance, but now, it seemed, he was old. This portrait would be the last, and it had better be damned accurate, or nobody would ever get the measure of him. Oliver knew that his reputation had been blown out of all proportion: Oliver the Great Military Commander; Oliver the Foe of Tyranny; Oliver the Protector of the Realm… Oliver the Traitor, the Cherry-Picker of Parliaments, the Murderer of the Irish, the Regicide. His horns blown down the parapets of Jericho, only to find that bluster was no match for actual authority, built on solid foundations.
Oliver recalled that one of his late opponents had argued in much the same terms (incidentally, at this point, the foundations of the Palace shook as if impelled by an earth-tremor).
His vision had been failing since the Civil War, all those years ago – he would not see this portrait completed, whether it was completed or not. The same went for his New State: only after Oliver’s death would its true integrity be tested – the Major Generals circling; every Continent embroiled in a million tiny wars; the exiled King fornicating in the Netherlands, breeding a harem of bastards to buzz like flies around England’s resolute shores – coming to think of it, Oliver wasn’t sure whether the King’s lasciviousness was the truth, or mere puritan propaganda. He wondered if there was any difference any more, as he looked around him at the dusty ornateness of the now-ramshackle ruins of the Palace at Buckingham.
“Warts and all” he breathed. Speaking had begun to pain him, but he said those words every time he sat for a portrait, and he was damned if he was going to stop now. It was practically a tradition, and where would Britain be without traditions? At the heel of the barbarous heathens of Moscow, no doubt.
Click. Click. Click. went the camera shutter. A big brute in uniform peered over the photographer’s shoulder, watching every flash.
The bombs grew louder.
How had he come to this? It was simple really. He stumbled into being a Hero, despite the obvious limitation of having been an MP. He had driven Armoured Cars on the Western Front, and from there, his career had progressed naturally to helping out the old Tsar in Galicia, helping to kill that priapic lunatic Rasputin and fighting the good fight against the dirty Reds. Those Reds now controlled half the globe, between all their different alliances and factions!
“Rout the Reds! Rout the Reds!” cried Oliver, fully lost in his reverie, barely noticing the hurried click-click-click that came when he waved an imaginary sabre against a an equally illusory Communist mob. His eyes turned fiery once more for a split-second, before the exertion deadened his arm and caused a flood of dense grey to cover his eyes like a lead blanket. “Cruel necessity,” he sighed, “cruel necessity.”
There was a faint rat-a-tat-a-tat of gunfire somewhere.
Then there had been the British Civil War. He hadn’t started it – oh no, that had been the others: the extremists, the visionaries. Oliver had just tagged along in his blue shirt and his khaki trousers, doing the administration. He’d written a song once – ‘March On’, it was called. He could still be proud of that rousing anthem when Berry warned him of how much debt they owed and Lambert told him which Colony had fallen to the Reds or the Anarchists or the ghastly Americans since the last meeting of the Major Generals. They were probably down to Pitcairn and Gibraltar by now, presuming that clown Franco hadn’t done anything too patriotic since last month.
None of these men were in the first rank at the outset. These were all Oliver’s men, for better or worse. Berry was something in the newspaper trade before he had joined the Party; Lambert was a good old loyal soldier, as was Worsley. That Butler chap had even been a politician before entering New Politics! And then there was Oliver himself, who had – in the clear light of day – become head of the Fascists not because of any particular talent on his part, or even mere charisma, but from his huge staring eyes that bore deep into the skulls of the perverts and scoundrels waiting for omnibuses all over the country. No one rises as high as he who doesn’t know where he is going.
Oliver was used to the dizzy spells – he had them three or four times a day now, whenever he got carried away in his reminiscences – but this time the dull pain remained after the leaden grey india-rubber had ebbed away. There was something wrong with his eyes. “Martin,” he uttered, “I need you.” There was a presence beside him. His Canadian major-domo, Sergeant Edwin Martin, grunted and wheeled his chair away from the photographer, who, taken aback, was left shouting ‘Hail, Protector’ down the hallway as his sitter was rushed away to more necessary functions. Buckingham Palace convulsed once more in the wake of more bombs, causing a chandelier to fall in the room recently vacated by the Protector. The photographer spluttered out a cloud of masonry dust, and it dawned on him that it was probably wise to go home at this point.
“Up with you, then, Protector” grunted Martin as he lifted Oliver bodily over the commode. Every time, Oliver died of embarrassment. That he was reduced to this!
“My… head – it feels like wet cardboard.” Somewhere, a door was blown open and dozens of muzzles raised a god-awful clamour, like a pack of baying dogs.
“Winter is coming” said Martin. It was a statement of fact.
As Oliver peered through his dying haze at the white tiles of his personal bathroom, with its special rails for him to hold on to in various necessary positions, he regretted, for an instant, the chain of events that had brought him to this ignoble end. He regretted his championing of the Blueshirts and his – well, dictatorship was the only word, not that he had ever really dictated anything personally. But then his leaden mind rested on the pictures that that Armstrong-Jones fellow had been taking not five minutes before: there was nothing to regret in showing the world that one was an old man; no longer the wild-eyed counter-revolutionary who stared down from all those horrible posters. That was the honesty which Britain had been missing since the Civil War – perhaps not enough to assuage the deaths, and the poverty, and the endless restrictions – but something, damn it! He might as well die with some dignity.
“I was a Fascist. I crafted a New State, but Winter kills all new life eventually, in the dishonest name of Progress – that man is more Fascist than I, but I doubt he will make any progress whatsoever. God has brought me to where I am,” he declaimed to an almost-empty bathroom, “to consider the work I may do in the world, as well as at home. If He chooses to admonish me for the slackness of my work, so be it. If He chooses to punish me for killing those blasted Jews, let him do so. If he chooses to martyr me for his noble cause, I will gladly die. But know this: it is a blessed thing to die for one’s beliefs, and if Sir Ormonde Winter seeks to kill me for my age, my weakness or my lack of the common touch, then he will be disappointed. Fear God! Fear Naught!" He beat his chest so hard he cracked a rib.
“Martin? You may do the honours.”
The Canadian brute snapped Oliver Locker-Lampson’s neck like a dead reed, and left him there, sprawled across the soiled tiles. The New State was dead; the Wintertime of Nations was just beginning.
Oliver recalled that one of his late opponents had argued in much the same terms (incidentally, at this point, the foundations of the Palace shook as if impelled by an earth-tremor).
His vision had been failing since the Civil War, all those years ago – he would not see this portrait completed, whether it was completed or not. The same went for his New State: only after Oliver’s death would its true integrity be tested – the Major Generals circling; every Continent embroiled in a million tiny wars; the exiled King fornicating in the Netherlands, breeding a harem of bastards to buzz like flies around England’s resolute shores – coming to think of it, Oliver wasn’t sure whether the King’s lasciviousness was the truth, or mere puritan propaganda. He wondered if there was any difference any more, as he looked around him at the dusty ornateness of the now-ramshackle ruins of the Palace at Buckingham.
“Warts and all” he breathed. Speaking had begun to pain him, but he said those words every time he sat for a portrait, and he was damned if he was going to stop now. It was practically a tradition, and where would Britain be without traditions? At the heel of the barbarous heathens of Moscow, no doubt.
Click. Click. Click. went the camera shutter. A big brute in uniform peered over the photographer’s shoulder, watching every flash.
The bombs grew louder.
How had he come to this? It was simple really. He stumbled into being a Hero, despite the obvious limitation of having been an MP. He had driven Armoured Cars on the Western Front, and from there, his career had progressed naturally to helping out the old Tsar in Galicia, helping to kill that priapic lunatic Rasputin and fighting the good fight against the dirty Reds. Those Reds now controlled half the globe, between all their different alliances and factions!
“Rout the Reds! Rout the Reds!” cried Oliver, fully lost in his reverie, barely noticing the hurried click-click-click that came when he waved an imaginary sabre against a an equally illusory Communist mob. His eyes turned fiery once more for a split-second, before the exertion deadened his arm and caused a flood of dense grey to cover his eyes like a lead blanket. “Cruel necessity,” he sighed, “cruel necessity.”
There was a faint rat-a-tat-a-tat of gunfire somewhere.
Then there had been the British Civil War. He hadn’t started it – oh no, that had been the others: the extremists, the visionaries. Oliver had just tagged along in his blue shirt and his khaki trousers, doing the administration. He’d written a song once – ‘March On’, it was called. He could still be proud of that rousing anthem when Berry warned him of how much debt they owed and Lambert told him which Colony had fallen to the Reds or the Anarchists or the ghastly Americans since the last meeting of the Major Generals. They were probably down to Pitcairn and Gibraltar by now, presuming that clown Franco hadn’t done anything too patriotic since last month.
None of these men were in the first rank at the outset. These were all Oliver’s men, for better or worse. Berry was something in the newspaper trade before he had joined the Party; Lambert was a good old loyal soldier, as was Worsley. That Butler chap had even been a politician before entering New Politics! And then there was Oliver himself, who had – in the clear light of day – become head of the Fascists not because of any particular talent on his part, or even mere charisma, but from his huge staring eyes that bore deep into the skulls of the perverts and scoundrels waiting for omnibuses all over the country. No one rises as high as he who doesn’t know where he is going.
Oliver was used to the dizzy spells – he had them three or four times a day now, whenever he got carried away in his reminiscences – but this time the dull pain remained after the leaden grey india-rubber had ebbed away. There was something wrong with his eyes. “Martin,” he uttered, “I need you.” There was a presence beside him. His Canadian major-domo, Sergeant Edwin Martin, grunted and wheeled his chair away from the photographer, who, taken aback, was left shouting ‘Hail, Protector’ down the hallway as his sitter was rushed away to more necessary functions. Buckingham Palace convulsed once more in the wake of more bombs, causing a chandelier to fall in the room recently vacated by the Protector. The photographer spluttered out a cloud of masonry dust, and it dawned on him that it was probably wise to go home at this point.
“Up with you, then, Protector” grunted Martin as he lifted Oliver bodily over the commode. Every time, Oliver died of embarrassment. That he was reduced to this!
“My… head – it feels like wet cardboard.” Somewhere, a door was blown open and dozens of muzzles raised a god-awful clamour, like a pack of baying dogs.
“Winter is coming” said Martin. It was a statement of fact.
As Oliver peered through his dying haze at the white tiles of his personal bathroom, with its special rails for him to hold on to in various necessary positions, he regretted, for an instant, the chain of events that had brought him to this ignoble end. He regretted his championing of the Blueshirts and his – well, dictatorship was the only word, not that he had ever really dictated anything personally. But then his leaden mind rested on the pictures that that Armstrong-Jones fellow had been taking not five minutes before: there was nothing to regret in showing the world that one was an old man; no longer the wild-eyed counter-revolutionary who stared down from all those horrible posters. That was the honesty which Britain had been missing since the Civil War – perhaps not enough to assuage the deaths, and the poverty, and the endless restrictions – but something, damn it! He might as well die with some dignity.
“I was a Fascist. I crafted a New State, but Winter kills all new life eventually, in the dishonest name of Progress – that man is more Fascist than I, but I doubt he will make any progress whatsoever. God has brought me to where I am,” he declaimed to an almost-empty bathroom, “to consider the work I may do in the world, as well as at home. If He chooses to admonish me for the slackness of my work, so be it. If He chooses to punish me for killing those blasted Jews, let him do so. If he chooses to martyr me for his noble cause, I will gladly die. But know this: it is a blessed thing to die for one’s beliefs, and if Sir Ormonde Winter seeks to kill me for my age, my weakness or my lack of the common touch, then he will be disappointed. Fear God! Fear Naught!" He beat his chest so hard he cracked a rib.
“Martin? You may do the honours.”
The Canadian brute snapped Oliver Locker-Lampson’s neck like a dead reed, and left him there, sprawled across the soiled tiles. The New State was dead; the Wintertime of Nations was just beginning.
Oliver Locker-Lampson, Lord Protector of Britain [1932 - 1954]
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