Authors: D. F. Lewis
She woke she knew not from which dream within which other dream. The nightmare was not the contents of any dream but not knowing how many dreams she had to travel as dreamer and dreamed to get back to her real self. “New shoes,” she whispered through her milk teeth or through her old yellow teeth or through her toothless mouth. “New shoes,” she repeated as she walked to her bed on bare floorboards, the carpet gone. All that she was sure about was that
the laces had tied themselves
.
Sudra woke on her shelf in the hedgy tunnel and smiled.
*
It is common knowledge, of course, that Beth’s husband had in truth remained in the city—within a safe-house—whilst Greg was currently in the Drill masquerading either knowingly or unknowingly (it mattered little which of these) as Beth’s husband... thus providing Beth’s husband in the safe-house with an alias or, even, an alter-nemo (a more subtle form of alter-ego).
Notes to be clarified, scratched the stub of the pencil as it wrote out various repercussions regarding this knowledge.
Beth’s husband, in this way, was rather proud to have become Beth’s
real
husband, there having been a rather complex arrangement between various parties—including Beth herself—for this situation to prevail. Beth had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed herself—by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the City Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner—to believe that Greg was her real husband. Meanwhile, her really real husband—as yet nameless—arranged various factions back in the city to deal with the transport and distribution of the
Angevin
substance and its offcuts.
The only source for the raw materials that made up
Angevin
was the cream substance found to be cached at the earth’s Core. As with all scarce resources cherished by certain factions of humanity, there was both a cost and a danger in harvesting it. Or mining it, if that’s a better word.
(1) The logistics of travelling to the earth’s Core, (2) grappling with the ‘Corekeeper’ whose name needed to be fixed and thus neutered for prevention of its impeding the necessary work in the broadly difficult mechanics of the harvesting process itself (details of which will have to be left to kick in later, so that the full implications can hit home in full relevancy), (3) the harvest process itself, and (4) the hawling of the ‘cream’, i.e. transporting it back to the earth’s surface where most of humanity lived and where it could be refined in the ‘Dry Dock’ facility (a mobile industrial complex that was used to fool the other wings of the City Authorities).
Meanwhile, barrels of the stuff are in impenetrable containers stockpiled within the covered market (the underground part of it for obvious reasons) and the purest form of it (worth millions of pounds) is now held, by all accounts, in certain enclosed areas of the city zoo
.
All these mechanics (some unspoken)—including the inevitable ‘hawling’ process which was more difficult than the earlier harvest process—aren’t necessarily listed out as logically as it seems. Most of it is a mere summary of Beth’s husband rehearsing the whole tangled process from beginning to end... rehearsing it in a rather fragmentary conversation that he was conducting with a new
Angevin
recruit who sat with Beth’s husband in his flat housed at the top of the safe-house.
The recruit was evidently female behind a veil which she twitched from time to time giving her co-conversationalist tantalisingly sexy glimpses of her inscrutable face.
“Regarding point (3), has anyone got any nearer nailing the Corekeeper’s real name?”
Her voice was lilting in a rather Welsh fashion. Her shoes intermittently were scrunching the carpet, rumpling it up towards the table where various official papers sat, papers instrumental to the conference that was still proceeding between the two of them.
On one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which Beth’s husband would later lift to show to the female recruit as part of revealing the Nemonymous Navigation intrinsic to the whole master plan for the contraband and its later distribution—including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went before it.
On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’
Massacre of the Innocents
. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist—depicting a naked man with a beard who had a large white swan sitting on his lap... and he was fondling the long neck in a rather salacious fashion.
The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a
Twin Peaks
trademarked silent runner, implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, a night bus could be heard faintly droning past. Helicopters weren’t allowed over any part of the city these days.
The flat otherwise was quite neat, as if a cleaner and/or decorator had worked quite hard to spruce it up, but it still showed indelible signs of previous seediness.
Beth’s husband had evidently taken quite a time to answer the recruit’s latest question but, after a while, he pulled a paper from the table. The other as yet untouched papers were neatly stacked—in tune with the rest of the flat—bearing some form of ranked typescript. The paper he had actually picked up, however, was torn along one edge and bore handwriting. He passed it to the recruit.
“That’s the latest guesses. I can’t dignify them with any other word!”
She sniffed the paper, finding it to waft a faint aroma of stale beer. It was a mere list of smudged names.
Corekeeper (Coretaker): Infinite Cuckoo, Godspanker, Dognahnyi, Megazanthus, Weirdmonger…?
The sixth name was illegible and Beth’s husband shook his head when the recruit asked about it.
“Well, we know it’s not Dognahnyi,” he said, “because that’s already there in the list. Indeed I know it’s not Dognahnyi at all, because…”
But then he decided to decline specifying his reason for it not being Dognahnyi.
“Are we any nearer nailing it?”
He shook his head at the déjà vu question, then continued: “A more pressing matter is that there are various factions at this very moment travelling towards the Core, some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial... some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…”
“What for? Isn’t such confusion self-defeating… dangerous?”
Beth’s husband shook his head and said: “If it weren’t for the—what shall we call it?—confusion, where would we be? We’d be just like that rabbit frozen in the open by the headlights of an oncoming car.”
The recruit nodded and briefly slipped aside the lower half of her veil to reveal the pique of a smile.
*
Beth was more impatient than her sister Susan—so she was eager for the Drill to reach its destination and their holiday proper to begin. She had been told to bring all manner of things in her luggage, including respectable swimwear and a high factor suncream. So her expectations were quite sufficiently filled with excitement. But, all in all, she didn’t really know what to expect.
The mention of Susan in her mind reminded her for a moment that Susan had faded from her life in recent times. In fact, Susan had faded from many lives including anyone who was interested in her fate, along with her husband—what was his name?—Mike? Beth could hardly visualise them—and the excitement of each moment prevented memories from filling the less than momentary gaps between those very moments.
But they were all later symphonically saved by the portrait dreams (more of which later in this movement).
The actual logistics of the Drill’s journey itself, the means as it were to its ends, she would need to leave to her husband Greg to describe or rationalise or reconcile or extrapolate upon. All she herself could recall was that the Drill’s first penetration of the earth’s crusty rind was carried out with a tremendous amount of vibrating, as the helicopter-like vanes on its back took the strain of the task of industrially churning the excess waste from the downward path’s terrestrial backflow... in fact those very vanes created that rubbly backflow, as the Captain had called it when warning them about it before the journey started. A wonderful invention this Drill, she assumed, but she failed to appreciate the scale and the complexity and exactly how the various interconnecting devices worked as a synergy of ‘human coning’, as the Captain called it.
Thoughts of the Captain again reminded Beth of Greg. She hadn’t seen her husband for several days and she assumed he must indeed be with the Captain, in the secure cockpit ambit of the lower Drill... being shown better views (better than her own views) via windows nearer the bit-tip. All she could see through her own cabin window or the library windows was the passing sameness of crazy-paved slabs of lubricated earth—lubricated by a creamy oil that the Drill exuded from several ‘pores’ or ‘gills’ along its hull to ease the drag of friction or the danger of gouging by rogue rocks. After the initial teeth-grinding vibration, the Drill’s journey so far had been relatively smooth, give or take the odd crunchy jolt.
Thoughts of Greg had in turn reminded her intermittently to connect herself to the ‘lie-fixer’—although she didn’t call it that. It was more like the need for beauty sleep or sunbed treatment. It was a contraption that looked indeed more like a sunbed than a science-fictional synapse adaptor with throbbing electronics (which it effectively was). She simply needed to lie on it and be reminded... literally.
It was a rather refreshing and feminine activity to have to do. Far better than those mud baths she took regularly for her complexion. The mud, actually, on board the Drill, derived from loess.
In the Drill’s ornately leather-bound book-lined library, Beth often met up with the dowager ladies, Edith and Clare. It was akin to the coffee-mornings which Beth used to conduct in the City—when Greg was out at work. The turning over of gossip and the planting of metaphorical daggers. Edith and Clare were however more intellectually inclined than any of the previous members of Beth’s hen parties. There was classical music going all day in the library at least as an undercurrent of sound—such as Philip Glass’s
Akhnaten
or Wagner’s
Parsifal
. The two ladies often knew the exact name of the music being played and details of the composers. They were also very well read, trying to get Beth into reading Marcel Proust’s
In Search Of Lost Time
. Beth, however, soon gave up—without even finishing the first volume:
Swann’s Way
. The sentences were far too long for her and too florid—and nothing much happened to the characters (whom she couldn’t really visualise in any event) and what was all that about dunking a
petit madeleine
cake in a cup of tea?
Beth accidentally picked up a fantasy book entitled
Crazy Lope & Godspanker
by someone or other, but the first sentence put her off: “The carpet was quite ordinary.” Surely, there were better ways to start a book, she thought. In any event, she didn’t like Fantasy or Science Fiction—and certainly not Horror. The blurb on the back cover mentioned it was an ‘alternate world’ fiction treating of the rabbit plague in Fifties England where the rabbit’s disease—myxomatosis—mutated and spread into a human-to-human disease, thus wiping out the population. Dreary stuff, she thought, slapping the book back on the table, next to Proust.
Edith finally found some classics for Beth such as the Brontës and Jane Austen, until Beth did manage to find some pleasure in this middle-of-the-road literature, even without fully understanding all the social undercurrents of the historical settings. She did however have a good laugh at the title
Wuthering Heights
. She thought of the Drill as wuthering depths! Dickens and Shakespeare could probably wait for the return journey, suggested Clare. If there
is
a return journey, thought Edith.
The two ladies were very touchy-feely and Beth finally decided that they were not her type of people, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in such confined spaces. Like coach trips on the earth’s surface, one tried to mix with the other passengers to help the time pass much more pleasantly. Polite standards and talking terms needed to be manicured.
All three of them shared the loess treatment in the form of white mud baths—to tone up their otherwise scrawny bodies. Beth cringed however one day when she spotted Edith eating a bit of it as she wallowed in it.
*
At night, after several weeks of these dreary waking hours between her bouts of sleep, Beth dreamed. She knew they were dreams because she was now so far underground, they couldn’t be anything but dreams. She slept in the cabin meant for her and Greg, but by now she had almost forgotten she had come on holiday with Greg. There was not even any intercom to the cockpit, where she assumed, if she assumed anything at all, Greg was being guested by so-called Captain Nemo—hobnobbing as men of the world tended to do.
The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond her control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.
At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, but when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.
Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or even a bus-driver? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.