“Pull yourself together, Grant!” said Ritchie-Smollet. “Do you suggest these vehicles were smashed in a criminal plot between Algolagnics and the council? That is pure paranoia. The council is sending experts to deal with the damage.”
“You don’t need a plot to cause crashes on a motorway,” said Grant. “They happen all the time. When they happen on the council’s doorstep they’re cleared at once. Why the delay with us?”
“Because we are not on the council’s doorstep. From the council’s viewpoint we are a remote and unimportant province, but that does not mean they are out for our blood. The council traffic commissioner has talked to me on the phone. His clearance teams are fighting an imbalance at the Cortexin cloning plant. Half West Atlantis will sink if that isn’t stabilized first. But he’s moving heaven and earth to get the right men quickly here too. He said so. I know him. He is an honest man.”
“Haven’t you seen how the council works in peacetime?” asked Grant. “It never behaves badly. It never destroys a country of peasant villages, for example, but it lets the creature turn whole forests into paper so there are no roots to hold the water back. And when an accidental storm arises (as they always will), half a million people drown or die in the following famine, and the council helps the survivors, and the helpers organize the country’s industry in ways the creature finds profitable. I’m sure your traffic commissioner honestly wants to clear the intersection. I’m sure his honest experts have more urgent work to do. And I’m sure that three days from now, when our administration crumbles and the city is a horde of starving rioters, the council will introduce an honest emergency-aid programme and honestly evacuate Unthank down whatever gullet the creature offers.”
There was a long silence.
“It is true,” said the slow-voiced lady softly, “that with efery passing moment a broken nerf circuit of the new Algolagnics model becomes a more dangerous object. Virst ve haf only the fibrations, but after two days, on the old timescale, sublimation produces radioactive fumes of an unusually lethal ant vide-spreading type.”
“Why not clear up the mess yourselves?” said Lanark impatiently.
“We lack protective clothing. Vithout it nothing is able to lif vithin sixty metres of these objects.”
“Are they heavy?” asked Lanark. “Could you flood the road and float them off it?”
“Powerhoses,” said Grant to Sludden. “Open a storm drain and order the fire brigade to flush the mess down it with power-hoses.”
“Impossible!” bellowed Gow. “Even if Unthank is menaced in the way you suggest, which I do
not
for one moment admit, the forcing of unqualified firemen to do the dangerous work of trained nerve-circuit experts is in flagrant defiance of all normal and democratic procedure. I am sure our provost is not going to be led astray by the jeremiads of the guest speaker and the rantings of brother Grant. Once again we see extremists of the right and left combining in an unholy alliance against all that is most stable in—”
“Blood will have to flow,” said a loud dull voice behind the pillar. “I’m sorry, I see no other way.”
“Whose blood will have to flow, Scougal?” asked Ritchie-Smollet gently, “and when, and where, and why will it flow, Scougal?”
“I’m sorry if my remarks upset people” said the dull voice, “I apologize. But blood will have to flow, I see no other way.” Lanark walked over to the little door, opened it, ducked under the lintel and closed it behind him.
CHAPTER 37.
Alexander Comes
Finding no light-switch he climbed the narrow steep spiral in blackness, patting the wall as he neared the level of the attic. At last his hand touched a clumsy wooden bolt. He slid it back, shoved hard and stepped out into fresh air with a few stars overhead. Either he had left the chapterhouse by the wrong stairs or the stairs by the wrong door for he now stood in a gutter between two dim slopes of roof. He could hear muffled kitchen noises of water and clinking dishes, so the attic was nearby. The gutter was clearly a walkway too, so he moved along it toward the noise and came to a stone parapet overlooking a city square. It was a quiet square with a couple of tiny figures walking across. The houses on the far side were the old tenement kind with shops on the ground floor and some upper windows curtained and lit from inside. These seemed so pleasantly familiar that he stared, perplexed. Unthank was the only city he remembered, but he had always wanted a brighter place: why should he like the look of it now? The yattering noise from the intersection was very audible. So were yattering noise from the intersection was very audible. So were him. He knocked on this, and a moment later Frankie opened it. He was so delighted that he seized her waist and kissed her surprised mouth. She pushed him away after a while, laughing and saying, “Passionate, eh?”
“How is she?”
“She was sleeping when I left, but I sent for the nurse to be on the safe side.”
“Thanks Frankie, you’re a good girl.”
He walked beside the arches along the attic and softly entered the bright little cubicle. Rima smiled at him softly from her pillow. He said “Hullo” and squatted on a cushion by the bed. She whispered, “The contractions have begun.”
“Good. A nurse is coming.”
He held her hand under the bedclothes. A stout lady came busily in and frowned at him, then bent over Rima with a very wide smile.
“So you’re going to have a wee baby!” she said in the loud slow voice some people use when speaking to idiots. “A wee baby just like your
mummy
had when
you
were born! Isn’t that nice?”
“I’m not going to speak to her,” said Rima to Lanark, then drew a sharp breath and seemed to concentrate on something. “That’s right!” said the nurse consolingly. “It doesn’t
really
hurt now, does it?”
“Tell her my back’s sore!” said Rima sharply.
“Her back’s sore,” said Lanark.
“And do you really want your husband to stay here? Some men find it very, very difficult to take.”
“Tell her to shut up!” said Rima and a moment later added bitterly, “Tell her I’ve wet the bed.”
“It isn’t what you think,” said the nurse. “It’s perfectly natural.” She turned the mattress and changed the sheets while Rima sat on a cushion wrapped in a blanket. Rima said, “I’m having a girl.”
“Oh,” said Lanark.
“I don’t want a boy.”
“Then I do.”
“Why?”
“So that one of us will welcome it, whoever comes.”
“You must always put me in the wrong, mustn’t you?”
“Sorry.”
She returned to bed, scowled, ground her teeth and worked hard for a while, holding his hand tight; then she relaxed and cried desperately, “Tell her to stop this pain in my back!”
“Things must get worse before they get better,” said the nurse soothingly. She was drinking tea from a thermos flask.
“Ha!” snarled Rima. She thrust Lanark’s hand away, clenched her fists outside the covers and started working again, sweating hard. For a long time spells of fretful repose were followed by spells of silent, urgent, determined labour.
At last she raised her knees high, spread them wide and said sharply, “What’s happening?”
The nurse folded back the covers. Lanark leaned against the wall by the bed foot and stared into the red widening gash between Rima’s thighs. She gasped and cried, “My back! My back! What’s happening?”
“He’s coming. I can see the face,” said Lanark, for in the depth of the gash he seemed to see a squeezed-thin face emerging, six inches high and less than half an inch wide, the nose thin as a string and ending in an absurd little flap, the eyes on each side sunk in vertical creases. The mouth was a tight-pursed hole and the nurse kept sticking her finger in it, presumably to help it breathe. Then the mouth opened into an oval with something flat inside, and the oval grew and filled the whole gash, and the flatness was a dome coming out, and the dome was a head gripped by the nurse’s hand. Then the universe seemed to go slow and silent. In slow silence a small, pale-lavender, enraged little person was lifted up, dragging after him a meaty cable. He had a penis, and his elbows and knees were bent, and his fists and eyes clenched tight, and his aghast mouth was yelling a soundless scream of fury. Rima, whose face seemed to have been scrubbed by a storm, turned on him a slow smile of loving recognition. The small person flushed red, opened an eye, then another, and after some hiccups his scream wavered out into angry sound. The universe returned to the usual speed. The nurse gave the baby to Rima and told Lanark sternly, “Go and get two soup plates from the kitchen.”
“Why?”
“Do what you’re told.”
He ran along by the arches hearing sounds of a service from the cathedral floor. A remote ministerial voice was chanting, “My buird thou hast hanselled in face o’ my faes; thou drookest my heid wi’ ile, my bicker is fou an’ skailin….” Jack sat in the kitchen listening to Ritchie-Smollet, who was leaning on a table. “I would have advised more caution, but we’ve burned our boats and must abide the issue. Ah, Lanark! How are things with you?”
“Fine. Can I have two soup plates, please?”
“Congratulations! Boy or girl? How’s the mother?” asked Ritchie-Smollet, handing over plates from a pile.
“Thank you. A boy. She seems all right.”
“One has become two: the first and best miracle of all, eh? I hope you’ll allow me the privilege of christening the little chap.”
“I’ll mention it to his mother but she isn’t religious,” said Lanark going to the door.
“Are you sure of that? Never mind. Come back when you can and we’ll drink their health. I believe we’ve some cooking sherry in the larder.”
The cubicle seemed full of women. Rima suckled the baby, Frankie poured water from a kettle into a basin, the nurse seized the plates and said, “That’s fine, you can go now.”
“But—”
“We can hardly move as it is, there’s no room for you.”
He watched his son enviously for a moment then went slowly away, but not toward the kitchen, for he didn’t want company. He suddenly wanted to use himself vigorously, to run fast or climb high. He found a spiral stair near the organ loft and climbed quickly to another open walkway under the stars. It led through a chilling wind to another little door. He opened this and entered a large, dim, square, dusty room lit by hurricane lamps on the floor. A steep iron ladder slanted upward near the centre, and six Lugworm Casanovas lay smoking in sleeping bags along a wall. One of them said, “Shut it, man, nobody’s too hot in here.”
Lanark said, “Sorry,” closed the door and crossed to the ladder. Its rungs were cold and gritty with rust, it shuddered at each step. When the upper shadows hid him from the eyes below he climbed more slowly, not lifting a foot until both hands gripped a rung, not raising a hand till both feet were firmly placed. He came to a floor of narrow planks set an inch apart. Light shining up between them showed the foot of a steeper ladder. He climbed this more slowly than ever. In the wall before, to each side, and behind him, were huge windows barred by horizontal stone slats. He looked down through them onto the black cathedral roof edged with city lights. He stood on thin rungs high up in an old stone cage and listened to the faintly whistling breeze. With each extra step he tried to remember that the ladder was solid, and braced by an occasional rod against a wall that had stood for many centuries, and would probably not collapse suddenly without warning. At last he reached, not a floor, but a narrow metal bridge. Black machinery overhung it. He made out timber beams, a big wheel and a bell whose rim, when he stepped underneath, came down to his shoulders. He raised a hand to the massive clapper and carefully pushed it forward, meaning gently to touch the side, but the weight increased with the angle, he had to use unexpected force and the shock of contact bathed him in a sudden sonorous
Dong
. Half deafened, half intoxicated by the sound, he laughed aloud, let the clapper fall back and shoved it at the rim with both hands, ducked as it swung back again and then reached up again to hurl it forward. The detonation of the strokes grew inaudible. He felt only a great droning reverberating the bell, the bridge, his bones, the tower, the air. His arms were tired. He ducked out from under the bell and gripped a handrail for support, though at first the sound in it hurt his palms like an electric current.
The droning faded. He seemed to hear protesting cries from below and, ashamed of the noise he had made, climbed a ladder away from them. He came to a higher floor of wooden slats where the blackness was total, except for a chink of light below a door. He groped toward it, slid the bolt and went out onto a windy platform at the foot of the floodlit steeple. The racket from the intersection was audible again, sometimes louder, sometimes fainter. He wondered if this was caused by the blustering wind and stepped to the parapet facing the Necropolis, for the din seemed to come from behind it. The highest monuments were silhouetted against a pulsing glow in the sky. Wedges of shadow moved over this like the arms of a windmill. The yattering noise sank to a dull stutter, hesitated, coughed and stopped. The majestic beams of shadow swept the sky in silence for a while, then suddenly widened as the glow faded. The main light now was cast by the great lamp standards on the motorway. A remote mechanical braying began and came swiftly nearer. A line of red fire engines with braying sirens appeared round a curving bridge from the intersection and sped down the gorge between Necropolis and cathedral. The air began filling with traffic sounds. Lanark walked round the platform to the far side of the tower and looked down onto the square. A couple of trucks rumbled across it pulling trailers with metal wreckage on them; then a trickle of cars began flowing in the opposite direction. A mobile crane drove through a gateway to the cathedral grounds, crossed the stones of the old graveyard and parked against a wall. Lanark suddenly felt his chilled ears, hands and body and returned to the door in the spire.