Authors: Ian McDonald
“I can remember this city when it stood above water, one of the great cities of the world, it was; and the flood waters rose and who now can remember its name, save me? Ten million people lived here, and now they and their city aren’t even history anymore. It’s quite a pleasing irony that no event in human history has ever had the trauma on the human race that the establishment of the Compassionate Society has. I’ve seen the world the way it was then, when there were hundreds of squabbling, separate nations each looking to their own interests to the exclusion of all others. Billions of people, the populations of whole nations, were moved, brought to this city, to make one Society where everyone would be happy, and where they could all be watched and monitored to ensure no one person could jeopardize another person’s happiness.
Urbi est orbi
is what we are taught, yet from my memories it seems that that is another one of the Compassionate Society’s gentle lies, that every human on earth is contained within one city. I cannot be certain, but I have caught drifts, suspicions, rumors that there may be other Great Yus, as ignorant of our existence as we are of theirs, in other parts of the earth.”
“I’ve always wondered that,” said Courtney Hall, stroking in the skeleton cities in black pencil. “When I was small. When I grew up, it didn’t seem to matter.”
“Exactly!” crowed the King of Nebraska. “That is the triumph of the Compassionate Society. Outside of itself, nothing matters. Such wonderful arrogance! At the pinnacle of my vanity I could never hope to match that arrogance. Look at that wall”—she had looked at little else—“that wall is nine thousand kilometers round, five kilometers tall, one and a half kilometers thick; forty-seven thousand cubic kilometers of rock. Can you even begin to visualize the expenditure of human and material resources that went into its construction? And why? Arrogance. Sheer arrogance. So that humans would stop looking outward.
“Once we aspired to the stars. The outward urge. Not anymore. We have turned inward, into ourselves, in the name of happiness. Better to be happy, better to live a life without pain, or fear, within this wall than cry for the stars. There’s no outside anymore.”
Courtney Hall thought carefully before replying, “Yes, there is. You found it. I found it.”
The King of Nebraska clapped his hands in delight. “Madam! You never cease to amaze me! You are, of course, quite correct. What has this entire expedition been, if not a cry for the stars? Jinkajou! Chamberlain! A bottle of that peach brandy I have been saving for exceptional days!”
A dreary gray wind bleered across the deserted city, sent shivers across the water. Warmed by the peach brandy of exceptional days, Courtney Hall huddled over her unfinished portrait of the King of Nebraska. That night (for here, outside, planetary time had reimposed itself on biological, subterranean time) after sleep had stolen out of the dead city to cover the raft, the King of Nebraska came to Courtney Hall. The pain in his bones and his bowels and his blood kept him from sleep. He whispered her to wakefulness.
“I don’t trust them. So I’m not going to let them have it. I want you to have it, after.”
She did not consciously take in his meaning, but the subconscious dream-mind understood, for when she dreamed, she dreamed that Xian Man Ray and Angelo Brasil were bouncing the King of Nebraska’s head between them like a basketball, asking and asking and asking and asking the same question: “Where is it? Where is it? Are you going to tell us where it is?”
In the morning the raft was cast loose on the final stage of the journey to the Wall. The Wall dominated: every conversation, every sentence, every thought. Surface features were now discernible; not, as Courtney Hall had half-hoped, half-dreaded, the faces of the gods carved into its face, but perilously poised ramshackles of wood and stone and thatch that Jonathon Ammonier said were the settlements of the descendants of those construction workers who had chosen to remain with their work when the last basalt block had been lasered into place. He pointed out with his cane the patches of green and gold that were their steeply terraced fields. Courtney Hall caught the look of empires in his eyes again. Angelo Brasil spat delicately into the river.
As the raft approached the foot of the Wall the river swelled outward into a great wash from which the summits of sunken towers reached like the hands of drowning men, reaching for light. The image was so adamant, so apposite and uncanny that Courtney Hall screamed aloud when she saw the actual hand of the drowning man reaching for the light. The hand of some pre-Break Titan, some race of Behemoths created by those prehistoric people for purposes and plans unknown; and drowned, feet mired in the mud, as the floodwaters rose. A hand, grasping a torch. A beacon.
Only a statue.
But kilometers later, across the waters at the foot of the Wall, the image still made her shudder.
The weather was no exception to the Wall’s domination. The winds and currents that had pushed the raft forward failed. All hands were set to paddling the remaining few kilometers. Courtney Hall bent to the oar and did not dare look up. To look up the face of a wall so high it seemed to be toppling over was instant vertigo. And Wall met water in a sheer, unbroken line. No opening. No grids, no vents, no tunnels, no spillways, no flumes, plumes, spumes. No way through.
No Beyond.
But the King of Nebraska’s spirit remained unvanquished by the Wall’s impenetrability.
“If we cannot go through, then we shall go over,” he declared.
“‘Over,’ he says.” Angelo Brasil wiped his blisters on his cycling shorts.
High above, the vertical farms cascaded green and gold down the higher slopes of the Wall.
“There must be paths, stairs, between the communities.”
“But do they reach sea level, Your Majesty?” sneered Angelo Brasil.
“Only one way to find out.” The King smiled. He pointed with his cane along the gently curving horizon of wall and water.
“Well, you can just do it without me, sweetie!” snapped Angelo Brasil. “I’m sick of this. Sick sick sick.” With a toss of dreadlocks he stormed off to the stern to sit looking back at the drowned city and the wastelands beyond. Xian Man Ray sighed loud exasperation, impatience, sororal duty, and she went to offer comfort, sympathy, and to cajole and coax. Endless and enduring as the Wall, the Tinka Tae porters and engineers laid their small weights to the paddles, and under Jinkajou’s barked instructions, the raft crept along the base of the Wall.
It was well after dark—twenty-two o’clock sky time (the discrepancy between it and Victorialand time, coupled with the fact that all food except for tofu steak and some gamy rat had been devoured that dinner, may have accounted for some of unraveled feelings)—before apologies were mumbled, forgivenesses offered and received. Which was just as well. Ten minutes later Trashcan the cyber-cat let out a yowl that set the raft rocking like a zook in a Jazz Hot club and stood stone still, fur bristling, pointing with her furry nose at the ladder cut into the obsidian face of the Wall.
S
NIPPING, SNIPPING, SNIPPING: TODAY
Mr. Slike the Scissorman is on the
P
s. Busy scissors snipping, snipping; out they come, the hurtful
P
s, excised, edited, deleted, floating down to litter the Scissor-room floor:
panic
and
papacy
and
paranoia
,
piles
and
pernicious
and
political
,
plutocrat
and
prostitute
and
Presbyterian
;
priests
face to face with
oppressors
,
nihilists
with
martinets
,
lepers
with
killers
,
Jansenists
with
interrogators
,
heros
with
grumblers
,
field marshals
with
enslaved
,
dissidents
with
communists
,
bastards
with
aristocrats
: a rustling, chattering cocktail party of incompatibles facedown in the final democracy of the Scissor-room floor. Knee-deep in paper, Mr. Slike the Scissorman snips snips snips with manic glee, out out out with the old hurtful words, the cruel words, the divisive words. In his Scissor-room on the fifty-fifth floor, language is being shaped by the snipping scissors of the scissorman like a silhouette snipped by some street artist. By the time he reaches
zeal
,
zouave
, and
Zymotic disease
there will be no more words left for people’s tongues to hurt each other with. There will be only kind, gentle, painfree words. The streets of Great Yu will resound with blessings, and language, like sweet perfume, shall, redeemed, fill the air. Often Mr. Slike the Scissorman pauses in his snip-snip-snipping to look forward to that day. Then, suitably reinspired, he returns to his holy task. Today the
P
s, tomorrow the
Q
s—good-bye
queens
,
queers
, and
querulousness
—how Mr. Slike the Scissorman loves his job! But then, he cannot very well do anything but, can he?
C
HILDREN’S CALLS IN MARBLE
halls …
Hide’n’seek laughter scurrying down ringing corridors; evocations of rustling silks and candelabras, hurrying down ringing corridors: the laughter of children. Heard, just for a moment, only a moment, then the corridors swell with the rush and boom of
pneumatique
trains and the flap of feet. Distant clanging, a bass hum that shakes the kilometers of brown marble corridors, a gust of warm electric air that sets the chandeliers clinking and tinkling. Then, once again, the laughter of children, singing down the corridors, filling the airshafts and ventilation ducts, eventually wafted with the warm, electric air out onto a wet and weary Salmagundy Street where the slubberdegullions gathered for warmth and companionship, all folded up in their brown polyweather wrappers like old, well-picked scabs.
He first heard it there, by the Salmagundy Street ventilator, and it was a quandary to him, for it filled an empty, lost place inside him, yet it made that empty, lost place more void, more remote. It called, seemingly to him alone, and because he believed that he alone was graced to hear it, he followed, out of the rain and the night, under the brass sign that read
PNEUMATIQUE MUNICIPAL
, down ringing brown marble corridors beneath ceilings crusty with cherubs and the frozen rainstorms of chandeliers, over bridges of alabaster filigree, across cavernous domed concourses and echo-haunted platforms; he followed, it led, always just around a corner, just down a flight of steps, just across the tracks.
Others shared this station with him: near the entrance to the Dalcassian Gate downline, a trio of tlakhs in masks and streetgowns, crouched over their instruments, intent upon their thin, ascetic music. Time and again his path sent him across theirs, but he was reluctant to disturb their devotions. Where the lacquered ventilation grilles exhaled warm air, congregations of slubberdegullions, a caste of registered mendicants psychologically unsuited for any active part in the Compassionate Society, had unrolled their wrappers to steal a little cozy. Glittering cabochon famulus eyes watched the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West as he stepped between shrouded bodies drunk comatose on industrial ethanol, sacramental intoxicant and libation to whatever Celestial patronized the slubberdegullions. Famulus eyes watched, famulus bodies pulsed as they drew their wards’ blood through their own web of veins and arteries and purged it of poisons. The Binge Eternal; with no fear of hangover or alcoholic poisoning or DTs or cirrhosis. The marble galleries of Salmagundy Street station reeked of blue ethanol and old urine.
And always just around the corner, just down the staircase, just across the induction tracks: children’s calls in marble halls. Enough of children’s calls in marble halls; let us speak of
luck
. These things are connected, if you know where to look. Luck, you see, had pushed Kilimanjaro West off the guttering of that shop in Ranves, and as he fell five stories, luck had darted ahead to arrange for a cycle-drayload of semisolid biobase support plasm to be underneath at that precise moment when his body and planetary curvature would have intersected. Luck had also arranged for that consignment of gel to pass through the Love Police cordon (“PainCriminal at large, yezz, cizzen, dangerous PainCriminal,” which made the wingers gasp, and then gasp again, all the louder when they learned that this-danjeruzz PaneCrimmal was an
artist
, an
actor
, a
Raging Apostle
, Yah sakes!) without so much as a sleepstick prodded into the rapidly solidifying gel. Luck had prompted Kilimanjaro West to struggle free before his body heat set the stuff rigid, and luck it was steered his trail of slime through street after street through boro and prefecture until it brought late night and cold misery together in the warmth of the Salmagundy Street
pneumatique
ventilation grille. Where, treacherous as any late-night lover, luck had turned her back on him and stalked away under the neons and sprays of steam from the tenement heating ducts. For he had been seduced by the laughter of children. Forsaken by luck, the object of his fascination always remained just around the corner, just down those steps, just across those tracks.
The thin, acid harmonies of the tlakh trio grew now louder, now softer. At the foot of a cascade of marble steps he found a slubberdegullion woman piled like dung. She had not yet drunk herself into oblivion: a rancid bottle of blue ethanol invited Kilimanjaro West to communion.
Children’s calls in marble halls …
“What are they, why are they laughing?”
“Ainzhels,” mumbled the old woman, eyes focusing and defocusing as if searching for some microscopic universe close by. “Ainzhelsainjillsanizells. Doan messwiddem, doan go neerem. Ainzhels doan follow no rules, no, no no, no rools for dem …” She gave a great wail, as if some denizen of that neighboring universe (angel, demon, neither, both) had stepped through and sent her bottle of old blue smashing against the marble wall. “Angels!” Then she burped and the famulus clinging to her neck measured her blood alcohol levels and threw the neural switch that tripped her into unconsciousness.