Authors: D. F. Lewis
The shapes of Susan hand-in-hand with the now one-eared Arthur are already dissolving towards the translucent folds they pass between... out of reach of Amy whose hand Susan also held before fingers could no longer cling between the two expressions of farewell. Indeed, they had been trying to enter as a foursome, not as a pair of pairs, after firing off more pathetic musket-shots into the increasingly man-stained half-sky of scree. But the Core sorts pair from pair whatever the pitiful plans of prior pairing. It simply seems to know.
Mike cracks one last musket-shot helplessly into upper Agra Aska—while entering the Core himself, watching Amy’s wattled back vanish by thinning-out into a realm he cannot seem to reach... it is as if, effectively, he is entering the Core alone. Amy is no more. She has never been. Or she has joined Sudra elsewhere in nothingness. Susan and Arthur were already in the wings. Mike, in two minds, tried to escape the Core. He knew he could not have entered it alone. A pig’s breakfast of an entry. But he
had
entered alone. And thus he, too, never was—and became his own alter-nemo. And a ghost of a ghost hardly exists as much as even a ghost proper.
And the massive man-stain emerging like tangibly multi-dimensional dry-rot through the scree sky faded, too. Its job done.
The Angel Bird crew long, crew loud in final anger. It tussled into existence through its own skin, becoming a crude bifurcated core itself, moving in exquisite hope and joy through the solid clouds towards Heaven—but its matted hide was infested with crawling human-life in every interstice of its creatinous body, so weighed down by human vermin filling vacuums of uncleanliness that it eventually didn’t rise towards its just rewards in Heaven but toppled into the thick white ocean of Hawling-Hell (a core within a core within how many other cores it is impossible to determine) where stains spread like islands of rancid top-flat grease, before it was engulfed completely with a belch like a tufted two-legged cathedral of pain.
*
The book was its own suicide bomb.
The lift systems were too complicated to understand. They went up and down the vestigial service-shafts of the book, unattended and in vague orders of priority for ciphers to embark and disembark in the precise matching rhythms that allowed all the gaps to be filled at all possible permutations of history.
A ceiling of time and space, stitched with neat insect-ranks of long-pig right through a stick of holiday-rock, became a woven fire-wall or fire-floor of meaning via textures of text unfathomable to man, bird and beast alike.
*
It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory—to which I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one... time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse... or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
The Drill’s corporate lounge is empty and silent, except for the odd eerie shaking of the wall maps as its relentless path—through the ribbons of reality that is Inner Earth—continues towards the Core.
The jolt has finally finished, if one can actually imagine a jolt (by definition) that endures for more than just a few seconds. The rearward cabin is empty—as can be seen when the light slowly wells back into it. The window still simply shows the passing crazy-paved slabs of earth. A tortoiseshell hairbrush falls to the carpet, and becomes a yellow pig lung.
The city pub was empty. Merely that. The optics of the shorts gleamed as time threatened to begin another diurnal round with unforgiving dawnlight. The city started to thrum, but thrummed with what?
The top flat still retained its open curtain policy on silent runners. The empty Dry Dock could be seen, even in the dark. A tall tower-block in the distance winked like a gigantically based but underwhelming lighthouse light. A computer screen in the room blinked blankly in curious yellow. An empty veil fluttered on the carpet like a butterfly.
The covered market was at rest, its bomb simply being a pair of clogs with spurs and silver toecaps, the spurs still slightly jingle-jangling as if someone had just taken them off in a pique of feminine tantrum.
The city zoo echoed with utter silence. And a large human ear in the insect enclosure was still pitifully trying to bury itself.
Apocryphal Coda
My first glimpse was the hill where stood the Canterbury Oak, if standing and growing could be reconciled. That was not the tree’s real name; nothing bore its real name in my book. Nothing bore its real name, I dare suggest, in Klaxon City itself. If Klaxon City called itself Klaxon City, then it lied.
I had crossed the Inner Plains from a life I preferred to forget so, having tried to forget it, there would be a certain counter-productiveness in rehearsing a re-living of it merely to fill in the wavy area of my past with childish colouring.
I knew beyond the hill would be Klaxon City; the Canterbury Oak was responsible for this name, a name given as a means towards an easy fantasy: a convenient digestibility of facts that make up any fantasy, even if, for me, this particular fantasy was not a fantasy at all.
Klaxon City, therefore. A city full of noise, a noise like klaxons or sirens. So a name like Klaxon City makes things straightforward. I shall not bother with its real name, a name which means nothing or, if it means anything, is lost in some mire of esoteric history or legend. The Canterbury Oak, too, is named thus because it is similar to a tree I once saw in Canterbury. A bottom-heavy tree with warped bark, almost a diseased bark, I guess, with a girth—shall I say of a million miles in circumference? I may as well. I should never be able to convey the
impression
of its irregular wrinkled girth (that lower end of its bole that met the earth) by any claim to know its measurements or any
standard
of measurement common to all who would like to know its measurements. Scales are quite out of the question. The trunk—as it tapered towards the top where sparse branches started to claw at the sky—had a wind-chewed roughness (I knew it was rough even from the distance I saw it but remained unsure of the wind), growing like a giant serpent whereby all its inner wooden fat had sapped towards its rooted tail, leaving it so dissimilar in bulk when bottom was compared to top. The branches were images of its relentless pain that had once been conveyed by its own internal sirens.
Now, with its sirens quiet for at least a generation, I was soon to learn that the citizens, having long been inured to its ancient noise (now dead or deaf to itself), needed to customise their own background of audible pain: thus building a city-wide tannoy-system to act as temporary coverage of such sirens. So, given the Oak’s recent bouts of cyclic silence, their own homegrown versions of siren-sound in the city seemed to take sway, as if the Oak had decided to remain silent now more often, in face of such unrivalled clamour. However, the citizens themselves—perhaps because they had grown irritated by mock sirens as opposed to the real thing—had started to hire surreptitious ear-muffs to assuage the skewering edges of sound. Some even trod a highly secret route of sound-proofing their houses. Once seen, however, the difficulty of such a task would become apparent.
Meanwhile, I crossed the brow of another hill as I completed my trek—from across the Inner Plains with just a portable tent and meagre rations—which started when an untold past had ceased unfolding and ending as I approached an as yet unknown future. I witnessed the scattered pylons of Klaxon City bearing their tethered skycraft. I knew to expect these. However, I had not been forearmed with any knowledge concerning the vastness of the city—occupying a space within a cavity of truth that housed a whole dynasty, not just one tranche of civilisation. However, that as yet unappreciated fact abandoned my mind when I suddenly became appalled by what hit me with the force of a tangible soundwave—the tannoy-system kicking in with a hair-trigger difference between silence (on one side of the brow) and cacophony (on the other).
*
Greg lived with Beth in London, but they also had a beach hut at Clacton on the coast about 90 minutes’ train-ride from Liverpool Street station. They were an ordinary couple, unmarried and childless. Yet nobody made that judgement of ordinariness about them, because nobody knew enough about them to warrant such a view. Greg thought he was ordinary. He worked in Waste Management as a lorry-driver. Beth thought she wasn’t ordinary at all. She was indeed ordinary, if in that thought alone. Both were malleable, but one of them fought against being malleable, and each thought the other to be the one fighting that particular fight. One of them was right.
If they thought about it at all.
Beth worked in Klaxon City—an amusement arcade near Soho—a sight better-class than the arcades in Clacton, where saucy hats and bingo were more the rage. In Beth’s arcade of work, there were high-prize jackpot fruit machines as well as mock-casino games with real tellers. Robot croupiers were not too far-fetched in the sort of computerised world that amusement arcades had now entered, following the miniaturization of machines everywhere—even in Clacton. So there were tellers who handed out chips and made masquerade of gambles being unforethought... mingling with robots who smiled wickedly, giving the punters confidence that all was random, because how could thinking machines not deliver the chance one always seeks in life: the pure chance? Only humanity snags the wheels of chance, with their intentions and misintentions of subconscious thought.
Many fought against thought.
Beth was one who fought against thought. She just dreamed of that ultimate chance where she could safely say that she was full of unmixed happiness. A dream she forgot immediately she woke up from it, although sleep was not the necessary prerequisite for thus dreaming. Not a sought happiness, because that always failed. But a found happiness. One that simply enveloped one, given the lack of forethought or ambition that the very act of seeking it would have entailed, given self-consciousness: a self-consciousness that women of Beth’s ilk luckily lacked. Meanwhile, she simply plugged on. A pretty face neatly sunk on skullbone.
*
A plug makes things work. An electric plug. A bath plug. A rawl-plug. Even an advertising plug. The latter made a name into a catchword and the circling businessmen would cause manufacture of anything to match the catchword and made it work in tune with the catchword’s neatly fitting its round peg in a round hole whilst making square holes of us all, without us noticing.
In modern screen drama there are swishes of sound to alleviate the changes of scene, large noisy tractions of vision that overwhelm the quiet reflective scene with an abruptness that life never really has on reflection: all misery is gradual, just as lives are gradual, never fast-changing, even if one can destroy a marriage with one simple act, but it takes days, often, to percolate and reveal its repercussions. Never in drama. Never in fiction. We need the swish of the curtain. A single alert. A sudden siren set off to indicate a change of scene, a change of dream. A false plug. Where amusement is taken from not knowing where things were or who people thought they were.
*
The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.
*
The Death entered Klaxon City. The real Klaxon City, where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet, of various heights, from the top of which stretched out in the wind (the wind?) many skycraft with each one’s make, build, substance, inflatability, non-inflatability, traction, torque etc. mere seeing from ‘ground’-level could not fathom. You had to climb up to them to discover if they were, say, flyable. Having flown to their perches there was no guarantee of future flyability. A few weren’t sufficiently rendered from the flesh and bone that some (not always the few in question) once were. Not render
able
, let alone non-friable enough to safeguard against weathering. But weather was a dubious topic in Klaxon. It depended on the nature or mood of the city’s geographical cavity at any one time in the vertical cross-section of its dynasty as opposed to in the more usual horizontal considerations of surface cities.
I had died more than once, and, then, it was at least once on the surface that I had died, but several times below the surface. I had suffered a fatal knife-wound in a casino when the gambling laws were relaxed, because I questioned whether the silver ball was in the right hole when the robots visibly tilted the roulette-wheel with their hands, and the tellers later blamed it on an earth tremor. There was no disembowelling of their rules. Even Henry Fifth would have been given short shrift. Unto the breach…
But I was trying to forget my past. I even imagined the deaths. How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real... well the rest is common sense.
As I wandered into the city streets from the brow of the hill I last left our readers watching my progress: I took one last glimpse at the Canterbury Oak, which visibly moved at its thin spacious upper levels, giving the uncanny impression that its large trunk below moved in unison. It was soon stolid, however, etched like a giant black hold-all that God had dropped there in disgust because there wasn’t enough room in it for as many effects as even magic could have managed, let alone a full-blooded religion.
I turned to the abodes. Solid rock-caves that had been built like houses out in the open, where a few scrawny children played hide-and-seek. I knew things would become more palatial the more towards its centre I approached. And at least there I would also find grown-ups grown-up enough to interact like real characters. Not just children acting as human scenery.
One skycraft tethered to one of the few pylons stationed this far into the city’s outskirts was a strange seemingly solid rocket-ship that, like the Canterbury Oak, was misshapen where you thought misshapen would be out of the question. Its business end seemed at the bottom where a single pin glinted in the light of the Sunne#: a pin often twirling lightly in a whimsical nostalgia for its former firedrill##. Nobody would be on board, I knew, and thus the whimsicality of its lower pin’s twirling only gave tiny shadows of doubt. Like speckled ants on my skin. It was not a balloon. It seemed solid enough, with several storeys, sieved by sightholes. It just hung there as if its specific gravity was too hard to match with rhythmic gravities elsewhere. Unlike some of the other pyloned skycraft that were like proud pennants in stiff winds, it almost sagged, and visibly bloated. But that was the effect of the incessant klaxon noise, something to which I had already grown accustomed without even mentioning that I was trying all the time to forget it, relegating it, as I did, to some wishful-thinking ‘white noise’. Yet this klaxon noise (whether oak- or tannoy-derived), I suspected, was indeed the ‘wind’ I had earlier doubted existed as such. Noise as air movement.