Against the Day (210 page)

“The boys are about,” Professor
Vanderjuice scanning serenely the stilllambent sky. “I usually get a feeling
when they are. Maybe you’ll meet them. Hitch a ride. They’ll take you wherever
you want to go.”

Further implications of what Kit had
begun to think of as the Zermelo Situation continued to arise. “We tell
ourselves that Lemberg, Léopol, Lvov, Lviv, and Lwów are all different names
for the same city,” said E. Percy Movay one night, “but in fact each is a
distinct city of its own, with very precise rules of transition from one to the
other.”

Since Tuva, where he had heard such
unaccountably doublejointed singing, in times of perplexity, as other men might
routinely curse or absentmindedly reach for their penises or inexplicably begin
to weep, Kit had found

himself making down in his throat a
single low guttural tone, as deep as he could reach, as long as breath would
allow. Sometimes he believed that if he got this exactly right it would
transport him to “where he should really be,” though he had no clear picture of
where that was. After he had done this for long enough he began to feel himself
enter a distinctly different state of affairs.

One day Professor Vanderjuice
vanished. Some claimed to have seen him taken into the sky. Kit went down to
the Glowny Dworzec and got on a train headed west, though soon he got off and
went across the tracks onto another platform and waited for a train going east,
till after a while he was getting on and off trains bound for destinations he
was less and less sure of.

It was like the convergence of a
complex function. He would come to for brief intervals, and then go back inside
a regime of starvation and hallucinating and mental absence. He didn’t always
know where he was, or—especially unsettling for an old Vectorial
hand—which direction he was going. He might drift into consciousness to
find he was traveling up the Danube, through the Iron Gates, at the rail of a
bouncing little steamer gazing up at the rock walls of the Defile of Kazan,
taken inside the roaring of the rapids, as the river, beaten to mist, rose to
encompass him, like a god’s protective cloak—another time he might all at
once be seeing Lake Baikal, or facing some chill boundary at least that pure
and uncompromising. The other side of this “Baikal,” he understood, was
accessible only to those of intrepid spirit. To go there and come back would be
like living through the end of the world. From this precise spot along the
shoreline it was possible to “see” on the far shore a city, crystalline,
redemptive. There was music, mysteriously audible, tonal yet deliberately
broken into by dissonances—demanding, as if each note insisted on being
attended to. And now and then, in brief periods of lucid return, he found
himself thinking about nothing but Dally, aware that they’d separated, but
unable to remember why.

After some weeks of this, he began to
be visited by a sort of framed shadow suspended in the empty air, a transparent
doorway, approaching him at a speed he knew he would not always be able to
avoid. At last one day, still hesitant, he decided to approach it—might
then, in fright, have lost his balance, and seized all at once as if by
gravity, he toppled into the curiously orthogonal opening, exclaiming “What’s
this,” as to the astonishment of onlookers he was turned to shimmering
transparency, dwindling into a sort of graceful cone and swept through its
point into what appeared to be a tiny or perhaps only distant window of bright
plasma. Kit, on the other hand, found that he had remained the same size while
the luminous opening began to grow,

until it had flowed around and
wrapped him in antique rusts and reds, brass gleaming through an interior haze,
reassembling until he stood in a quiet hotel room in Paris, with Inner Asian
rugs on a wood floor, the smell of tobacco and ganja, and a scholarly old party
in a tarboosh and halfglasses bending over a sumptuouslybound stamp album, what
collectors called a stockbook, where Kit saw an array of mint, neverhinged,
superblycentered Shambhala postage stamps all with original gum from local
trees, issued in complete sets beginning shortly after the Treaty of Berlin
(1878), with generic scenes from the Shambhalan countryside, flora and fauna,
mountains, waterfalls, gorges providing entry to what the Buddhists called the
hidden lands.

The man in the tarboosh turned
finally and nodded in a strangely familiar way. “Lord Overlunch. Delighted to
meet you.”

“What just happened?” Kit feeling
dazed. He looked around a little wildly. “I was in Lwów—”

“Excuse me, but you were in
Shambhala.” He handed Kit the glass and indicated one stamp in particular,
whose finelyetched vignette showed a marketplace with a number of human
figures, Bactrian camels and horses beneath a lurid sunandclouds effect in the
sky.

“I like to look at these all
carefully with the loupe at least once a week, and today I noticed something different
about this tendirhan design, and wondered if possibly someone, some rival, had
crept in here while I was out and substituted a variant. But of course I found
the change immediately, the one face that was missing, your own, I know it well
by now, it is, if you don’t mind my saying so, the face of an old acquaintance
. . . .
”

   
“But
I wasn’t
. . . .
”

   
“Well,
well. A twin, perhaps.”

Lord
Overlunch was in town for the Ferrary sale, a major event in the history of the
stampcollecting hobby, at least for a look if not a bid on the Swedish
threeskilling yellow.

“And
to hunt up a few old faces, don’t you know. Since the Spanish Lady passed
through, close enough to feel the breeze from her gown, and try not to make out
the face behind the black mantilla, one grows compulsive, I fear, about who’s
aboveground and who below.”

   
“And
how’d I get here again?”

“It’s
the way people reappear these days. The trains are not always running. The
switches are not always thrown the right way.” He looked at his watch. “Heavens,
I’m late. Perhaps you’d like to be my guest this evening at Chez Rosalie. You
might enjoy meeting my delightful American friend Miss

Rideout, who was one of the first actually to discover
Montparnasse after the war. Some sort of husband in the picture”—and then
he gave Kit an unmistakably friendly smile—“very much so indeed, I’m
told. Do come along, won’t you?”

Couples were out dancing the
Hesitation Waltz in the middle of traffic, despite the signs clearly posted
forbidding them to. From a nearby nightclub came the
bandoneón
accompanied
strains,
ubiquitous in Montparnasse this year, of the melancholy yet catchy tango—

Vegetariano
. . .

No ifs ands or buts—

Eggs and dairy? ah no,

More like roots, and nuts—

Pot roast
prohibido,

Tenderloin taboo,

why should my heart bleed o

ver the likes of you?

                         
Never
knowntobe

Fond . . .

Of Chateaubriand
. . .

Nor particularly close

To chipped beef on toast—steaks
and

Chops,
¡adiós!—Vege

tariano
. . .

Outcast Argentine,

Never could’ve gone
“
¡O

lé!
”
for
that cuisine
. . .

Gauchos curse your name,

Still you haunt my brain—

Somehow I’ll
carry
on, oh
. . .

Vegetariano!

May we imagine for them a vector,
passing through the invisible, the “imaginary,” the unimaginable, carrying them
safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic
Marne, now carry only lovers

and cheerful drunks, and music which
cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night, in the bars and
bal
musettes
for the dancers who will always be there, and the nights will be
dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be
broken into by light displaced from Hell, and the difficulties they find are no
more productive of evil than the opening and closing of too many doors, or of too
few. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard
everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still
in shade . . .

“
Look
at ’em down there.”

   
“All
that light.”

   
“All
that dancing.”

The
Garçons de ’71 were having their annual convention in Paris. Everybody on the
Inconvenience
was invited. The festivities would be pursued not on the ground but above
the City in a great though unseen gathering of skyships.

   
Their
motto was “There, but Invisible.”

“The
Boys call it the supranational idea,” explained Penny Black, wideeyed and dewy
as when she was a girl, recently promoted to admiral of a fleet of skyships
after the Bindlestiffs of the Blue had amalgamated with the Garçons de ’71,
“literally to transcend the old political space, the mapspace of two
dimensions, by climbing into the third.”

“There is, unfortunately,” Lindsay
was eager to add, “another school of thought which views the third dimension
not as an avenue of transcendence but as a means for delivering explosives.”

   
“You
can see how marriage has changed him,” remarked Primula Noseworth.

“Glad
anyhow to see you bunch of nogoods finally coming to your senses,” Penny
grinned. “Blaze, now, you want to watch out for old Darby here, he’s a fast
one.”

“Who,
this slowpoke?” tickling him at a reliable spot among his ribs. “He says I move
too fast for him—never at home, always in some kind of trouble, all the
rest of that. I told him, read the Agreement.”

She
referred to the document by which the girls had agreed to join their fortunes
with those of
Inconvenience,
only on the understanding that they would
always operate independently. They would be frigates, the boys a
dreadnought—they would be freebooters and irregulars, the boys Military
High Command. The boys would sail along, keeping pretty much to the ship, in an
illusion of executive power, and the girls would depart the ship at right
angles to its official course to do the adventuring, engaging the Exterior,
often at great risk, and returning from their missions like weary commandos to
Home Base.

Whereunto everybody had affixed his
and her seals, and Miles broke out magnums of 1920 Puisieulx brut.

One day
Heartsease discovers
that she’s expecting a baby, and then, like a canonical partsong, the other
girls one by one announce that they are, too.

And
on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are
neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that
when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective
hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all.

Its
corridors will begin to teem with children of all ages and sizes who run up and
down the different decks whooping and hollering. The more serious are learning
to fly the ship, others, never cut out for the Sky, are only marking time
between visits to the surface, understanding that their destinies will be down
in the finite world.

Inconvenience
herself is
constantly having her engineering updated. As a result of advances in
relativity theory, light is incorporated as a source of motive
power—though not exactly fuel—and as a carrying medium—though
not exactly a vehicle—occupying, rather, a relation to the skyship much
like that of the ocean to a surfer on a surfboard—a design principle
borrowed from the Æther units that carry the girls to and fro on missions whose
details they do not always share fully with “High Command.”

As
the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also
be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is
no longer a matter of gravity—it is an acceptance of sky.

The
contracts which the crew have been signing lately, under Darby’s grim
obsessiveness, grow longer and longer, eventually overflowing the edges of the
main table in the mess decks, and occasionally they find themselves engaged to
journey very far afield indeed. They return to Earth—unless it is to
CounterEarth—with a form of
mnemonic frostbite,
retaining only
awed impressions of a ship exceeding the usual three dimensions, docking, each
time precariously, at a series of remote stations high in unmeasured outer
space, which together form a road to a destination—both ship and dockage
hurtling at speeds that no one wishes to imagine, invisible sources of gravity
rolling through like storms, making it possible to fall for distances only
astronomers are comfortable with—yet, each time, the
Inconvenience
is
brought to safety, in the
bright, flowerlike heart of a perfect hyperhyperboloid that only Miles can see
in its entirety.