Authors: Ian McDonald
The hands of Jonathon Ammonier’s Fabergé watch had flicked sixteen thousand seconds worth of time away over its shoulder into the past between Courtney Hall’s awakening and the time she saw the gray.
Three thousand second-hands later the Expedition to the End of the World was spat out of the rapids at the end of the tunnel into a lazy lagoon of putrid water penned between canyonlands of industrial machinery. The raft drifted indolently on the nowhere-in-particular currents of the outfall sump, another gobbet of flotsam amidst the floes of hydrocarbon wax and reefs of polymer bubbles and lazy coiling anacondas of rainbow-colored oil. It revolved sluggishly between the clashing rocks of the Seven Servants, titans of stained steel sheeting and pockmarked pipework bearing names such as Universal Power and Light, TAOS Consortium, Food Corps, UNIMEG. With a soft shunt the expedition ran aground on a floe of rotting pseudoalgae growing out from the mouth of a Kaan BioTech outfall pipe. It took half an hour’s hacking at the slimy, ropy, nauseating stuff to free the raft and steer it once more into the center of the stream. Where balsa log had met mold, the wood had been digested to pulp. Courtney Hall could not stop herself calculating, with dreadful fascination, how long before the raft was dissolved, burned, melted, eaten into nothing. At the King’s command, she opened her leather folio to sketch the prismatics and fluorescents of the chemical river, the walls of the manufactories rising sheer out of the waters reaching up and up and up and up to a ceiling so high and remote it might have been a heaven. But when she opened her pencil box, she found that some presence in the atmosphere had dissolved all her pastels to excrement-colored sludge.
All the food that day tasted of ketones and esters. Every throat and eye was red raw from vapors and emanations. Shortly before arbitrary nightfall the King of Nebraska called for his Tinka Tae to carry him out into the light to speak with his artist. As Jinkajou made busy with towels, compresses, and lotions, the King whispered to Courtney Hall, “Look after them, will you? I wasn’t really very good for them at all. God, but not a Messiah. Should I have done it? Should I just have left them to be urban racoons?”
“You are the King.”
“Ah!” His upraised finger seemed brittle as a stick of candy. “But they didn’t ask for me to be their king or God or creator or anything.”
“No one asks for their king,” said Jinkajou unexpectedly.
The King of Nebraska clapped his hands. His cuticles were bleeding. “Didn’t I tell you he was a philosopher? Ah, my furry friend.” Then, as unexpectedly as his chamberlain had spoken, he whispered to Courtney Hall, “Don’t trust them. Don’t trust them at all.” Courtney Hall knew enough of the ways of DeepUnder to understand that trust born purely of necessity is no trust at all.
A sense of change, of increased and unexpected motion, woke Courtney Hall one second before Xian Man Ray’s shaking hand. Explanations were unnecessary; instantly awake, she felt the way the raft dipped and juddered beneath as the current grew stronger, faster with every moment. A splinter in the eye of the Body Corporate, the raft was swept along in a churning, onward-rushing procession of wax-bergs and foam-slicks, all hurrying faster, faster toward the dim blue rumble that Courtney Hall and Xian Man Ray and everyman jack of the crew down to the most junior racoon knew had to be a waterfall of industrial effluent pouring off the edge of the world.
Second by second, meter by meter, the current gathered strength and swept the raft closer to the edge. On either side the great stone faces of the Seven Servants stood sheer and unbroken. The dim blue rumble swelled to a roaring, to a thunder. The sailors watched a wax-berg the size of a small arcology tip ponderously, gracefully, and fall into nothing. They had a kilometer and a half left to them.
“Well, shug,” said Xian Man Ray with deep disgust. Then they all saw it. A kilometer forward on the starboard bow, a dark rent in the perfect uniformity of the factories. The wedges of pollution piled up about the slit indicated this was not a tributary, but a branch.
All hands and paws fell on the steering oar. The thrust of adamant, dogged water wrenched shoulders, tore muscles. Sweat, screaming, tendons straining like bridge cables, the blind red miasma of absolute human effort, and over, above, under, behind everything, the thunder of waters.
With a titanic heave that spun the steering oar from all the grasping hands, a crest of hurtling water seized the raft and shied it through the entry into the tunnel beyond.
Only one minute into exhausted sleep, Courtney Hall was woken by a soft, intimate knocking from below. Knock knock knock, knock knock, knock knock knock; who’s that knock-knock-knocking on the bottom of the boat? Knock knock. Go away. Knock. Shut up, can’t you see I’m trying to sleep? Knock knock knock knock knock, and finally her exasperation overcame her exhaustion and she crept to the edge of the raft to see just what it was knock-knock-knocking, whether it be blind mutant albino alligators or feral pets or new mutations of man and toad and runaway biotech, or the dreaded giant radioactive turd monster, and tell it to stop it, just stop it, all right? An eddy caught the raft and the knock-knock-knocker bubbled to the surface. And looked at her.
Courtney Hall shrieked.
It had once been a trog. The patches of hair that clung to the blue flesh, the dissolved stump of a tail, identified what it had been. Somewhen in the arbitrary night it had become entangled in one of the frayed rope lashings that bound the raft together; the soft, come-hither knockings had been the bare bones of the skull bobbing against the balsa trunks. The cat’s chrome steel claws slashed it loose, but the dead trog bobbed along in their wake, a chaperone through night to the place to come.
At five-fifteen Victorialand time the raft ground gently to a halt. It had fetched up against another submerged obstruction. Xian Man Ray thrust her hand into the water to test the clearance and brought it up clutching a mat of fibrous, decomposed bones. The Expedition to the End of the World was beached upon a reef of skulls. It was a vile, purgatorial labor, levering breaks in the dam of the dead. The hands of the rococo watch stood at twelve-twenty Victorialand time before the shoal of bones finally bulged and gave before the flow of water. Still drained and sore from their escape by the falls, the adventurers had not even the energy to congratulate themselves as their raft and accompanying trog were whirled through the breach into the Fen of the Dead.
The Fen of the Dead was a place so far beyond the conceiving of either Compassionate Society or DeepUnder that the imagination could only deny its existence.
The underground river, released, broke into sluggish braids and streams that meandered between the banks and shoals of the dead. Like damned souls in a Joycean inferno, they lay; the dead, heaped on top of each other where the ebb and flow had laid them. Here skulls gazed eyelessly from fine gray silt, there hands, fingers curled upward, outward to the light; here the dead floated in a tranquil lagoon, all drawn together to share smiles of fixed serenity; there a surge of floodwater had carried away the side of an islet to disclose the geological stratification of the dead, from the half-sediment, half-petrified bodies of centuries past through tangles of stringy, half-rotted bones and gradually settling, snapping skeletons and rotting cadavers to the bloat-faced, empty-eyed new arrivals half-floating, half beached as if indecisive about where they should spend eternity. Humans and racoons poled through the miraculously clear waters, which swarmed with tiny threads of eel-worms continuously tear-tear-tearing at the dead flesh. Yulp and prollet, trog and tlakh, Scorpio and didakoi; the eel-worms devoured all impartially.
The stench of the dead was overpowering. Yet Jonathon Ammonier was filled with a luminous elation. He explained, “Don’t you see? Somewhere among these billions of skeletons are the grins of my forty-three predecessors: puissant and prestigious Electors of Yu; all come to this same end in this same place as those they supposed to rule. But not this one! Not this one! This one’s just passing through. This one will not end here like the others.”
The stygian journey continued through channels shallow and sluggish and lined with bones. The raft was drawn toward the center of the Fen of the Dead where the great metal hopper, visible to the explorers since their entry into the netherworld, funneled down from the roof to touch the water. Passing beneath and slightly to starboard of the huge metal cone, all aboard could clearly view the fine trickle of soft yellow ash pouring from its nozzle to be carried softly away by whatever currents stirred the Fen of the Dead.
“His awful straik may nay man flee,
Timor mortis conturbat me
,” sang the King of Nebraska.
The raft sailed on.
Courtney Hall did not want to dream that night, and the Spinner of Dreams granted her request. But of all Spirits of the Polytheon, none is so quixotic as the Spinner of Dreams, and in place of a dream he spun her a dull, dark emptying sleep more exhausting and oppressive than any nightmare. Courtney Hall rolled from her blankets worn and haggard to find herself looking at the sky.
She had almost forgotten what a
sky
was.
Curdled gray cloud filled her entire spread of vision, and she concluded with the dull logic of only-just-awake that the sky is just another ceiling to the world. But if sky, then …
“Where are we now?” Even as she spoke it she realized she had asked another of her inanely obvious questions.
The King of Nebraska was huddled in blankets by the smudge-fire sipping chocolate from a gilded mug.
“Outside,” he said. “Look.” He pointed. Courtney Hall looked where he pointed. Her life butterflied up within her.
The finger pointed beyond the great slow river, beyond the empty-eyed skull buildings, the snapped and painful towers and fallen bridges that stood upon its banks: to: the Wall.
Now she knew that everything since the afternoon when the Love Police brought the walls in on her life was all a thread of malevolence spun from the Dream Spinner’s distaff.
The Wall spanned the world from edge to edge. It reached up to close off half the sky. It was the color that is blacker than black. There was nothing about it that could be excused by mere optical illusion. The Wall was. Her skill at perspective told Courtney Hall that she was some eighty kilometers from its foot. The distance, her calculations, only made the Wall all the more dreadful. It was five kilometers high.
In the sixteen-o’clock dream it had elated her. The reality dwarfed her. The Wall reduced all things to utter triviality: the tallest tower of the deserted city, the fly crawling on the back of Courtney Hall’s hand. She could never hope to fly over this. Only the King of Nebraska refused to bow to the Wall. To him, it was not a wedge of finality, a world-girdling
ne plus ultra
. Rather, it was proof that the Beyond did exist. It was the edge of the Dream-time. The Wall fired him, and the fire burned away all the outward signs of his sickness so that he was once again Monarch of Victorialand. He commissioned a triumphal work of art: the King before the Wall. As Courtney Hall searched her folio for clean, unstained paper and pencils, Angelo Brasil and Xian Man Ray held another of their whispered conferences.
“If you’re going to paint, my dear, then a-hunting we shall go,” declared Angelo Brasil. “My sister and my cat. It’s Meatland out there, and we’re getting a little bit tired of soybean.” They pulled the raft in to a mooring against a rotting jetty and went ashore, Trashcan the cat springing off into the ruins, steel claws sprung. Courtney Hall had little more than the outlines charcoaled in when the hunting party returned. In sheer exuberance at being able to use her talent, Xian Man Ray flipped ahead to dump a pile of bloody skinned carcasses beside the fire. While Tinka Tae porters scavenged the pier for firewood, Courtney Hall decorously threw up into the river.
“Saints, what is that stuff?”
“Rat,” said Xian Man Ray.
“Grow big out there, my dear,” added Angelo Brasil. “Some the size of children.”
At gut level Courtney Hall was still a child of the Compassionate Society, which subscribed to the principle of universal vegetarianism. She sat well upwind as the pseudosiblings spitted, then roasted their game.
“Hungry, my dear?” Angelo Brasil waved a cooked rodent leg, and when he was certain of Courtney Hall’s attention, he tore a gobbet of meat from the bone. Courtney Hall recalled barbecuing Striped Knights and was sick and furious. In some things the Compassionate Society was right. It was wrong to eat animals. She turned her attention to her drawing. The King talked, as models, and Kings, will, in sotto voce inaudible to the diners over the din of their dining.
“I have this theory about dying, madam,” he said. “I have this theory that it may be a most pleasant state indeed, to be dead. For the more I die each day, the stronger and stronger become the memories of my predecessors and the more I lose myself in them. I suspect, no, I know, that someday I shall be totally engulfed in the lives of the Electors, and that day I shall cease physically to be. I shall become a memory in a host of memories, and I must say, madam, I look forward to that very much. Tell me, madam, are you afraid of dying?”
“Yes,” Courtney Hall said. And because no one can lie to a dying man, she added, “Very afraid.”
“I was, too,” said the King of Nebraska. “Various fears various years. When I was young and I learned that at some time in the future the dance must end, the music stop, the lights go off: that, I think, is the primal fear, the fear of inevitability. Then when you told me, back there in the dark passage, I was afraid again because you were confirming something I had always known but had been afraid to believe. That is the second fear: the fear that each of us carries within ourselves the seeds of our destruction. Now, I see that dying is only leaving the constraints of yourself to join the rest, to become a memory in a universe of memories; and I more than anyone know what that is like.
“I have memories going back to the Break, can you imagine it? I spend a lot of time being those memories; they’re so much more interesting than the recent Electors. Spunkless lot, the recent Electors. I suppose I can’t really blame them; history has all but stopped for the Compassionate Society. But back then, ah, my dear madam; lusty people, lusty days! Things happened then. A time of changes unlike any ever before. It takes a lot of history to stop history.