Chapter 2
THE SLEEP-POD WAS NOTHING more than a pay-by-the-day biotech coffin so small she had to crawl out through the entrance iris to turn around. It was wedged up on the twelfth level of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel, which was nothing more than a two-hundred-meter cube of girders, sleep-pods, and corrugated tubeways that offered temporary shelter to some six and a half thousand migros. And one yulp, Courtney Hall, thanks to the Ministry of Pain’s Emergency Shelter Section. The migros were not a caste that Courtney Hall had ever encountered even in the mixed-caste environment of Kilimanjaro Complex, though she recalled dimly from her social anthropology lessons that they were a caste of migratory laborers who drifted across the city in and out of casual employment. The harassed-looking yulp who had handled her case at the Department of Housing had assured her that her personal compatibility ratings, though not ecstatic, were higher with migros than with any of the other castes offering available accommodation in that locality at the time. Woken once again from fitful sleep by the voices from the adjacent pod where an entire family of mother, temporary father, grandmother, and two children and one fosterling lived in conditions of near-to-collapsar density, she wondered just how low those personal compatibility ratings had been.
She hated migros.
She hated their clattering, angular music that blasted from their angular radios. She hated the loud angular voices outside in the warren of tubeways as workers came off-shift from their water-processing plants and underground agrariums. Even more, she hated their conspicuous silences because when she could not hear them, she knew they were talking about her, muttering words like “transcaster” and “castebreaker” even though the harassed woman from the Department had made it quite clear that Cizzen Courtney Hall was resident with the full cognizance and approval of the Ministry of Pain until such time as the Environmental Maintenance Unit restored her home to habitability. She hated the way the tiny, wire-thin children stared at her every time she heaved herself like some fat mollusk out of the sleep-pod so she could lie with her feet where her head had been. She hated the continuous urinous smell from the sleep-pod waste-digester, and the thought of having to excrete where she lay outraged her yulp sensitivities almost as much as did the soft, muscular vibration of the quasi-living sleep-pod against her skin. She loathed remaining cocooned but loathed to go out more. So she remained a hermit in her pod, waiting for tomorrow when, for the first time, she could look forward to going to work, wondering when the Environmental Maintenance Unit would get round to patching up the hole the Love Police had blasted in her apartment wall. She thumbed in vain across the video spectrum in search of some channel that was not limited to wholly migro entertainment (almost exclusively long and exceedingly complex dramas drawn around the migro’s transitory plug-in, plug-out social order)—flick flick flick: same faces, places, races—until she came to the conclusion that migro entertainment was the only entertainment that the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel Lares and Penates system was sanctioned to narrowcast.
She wished she had Benji Dog back. At least he would have been something to talk to. No famulus. She felt very naked, as if she had slipped through the sustaining fingers of the Compassionate Society and had not been missed.
She tried once again to sleep, only to be woken by the vaguely obscene sensation of the sleep-pod’s synthetic flesh molding itself to her body contours. Her screaming fit woke the migro family next-pod and brought them peering in through the iris muttering in their all-but-incomprehensible dialect of City-ese and making all-too-comprehensible nona dolorosas with their fingers.
Sleep denied, wakefulness impossible, Courtney Hall found her mind escaping into a third state, a hallucinatory half-awareness where she remained conscious that her body was cocooned in the sleep-pod, while at the same time she hovered over the rooftops and streets like the omnipresent spirit of some Celestial. And from this altered state she passed onward into a kind of dreaming unlike any she had ever before known, in which she was utterly certain of her own self-awareness, so that everything that happened in this was, in a real and personal sense, actual, true.
In this dream she dreamed the sixteen-o’clock dream once more, but in this heightened state of awareness all those images and symbols that had so far evaded her now came flocking to her fingers like singing birds, and they lifted her, by her fingertips, and she flew with them.
In the sixteen-o’clock dream it was an impossible mongrel of bicycle and ornithopter, but it flew, oh, yes, it flew, banking and swooping between the thunderous gray monoliths of the arcologies and co-habs; oh, it flew. Huge, slow-beating wings feathered the air as she looked down into the rain-washed streets aswarm with faces. And in the sixteen-o’clock dream the faces looked up as she bicycled overhead, looked up from their rained-on lives to say, look, oh look, look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous, and as she flashed blue-silver over the sea of upturned faces she would wave a leather-gauntleted hand to all the rained-on lives, and then, flash! she would be gone, a streak of blue-silver splashing across the forty-story face of the TAOS girl, pedaling hard up the big, big gravity hill, steel wings laboring, silver pinions clawing handfuls of air, gray tears of warm monsoon rain streaming down her leather flying-helmet, down her goggles, but the white silk scarf streamed and snapped out behind her like purity. Striving, straining for the clouds, she could hear the voices in the manswarm below shouting, “Never do it, never make it, too far, too high, too much,” and she shouted down to them, “Of course I can, of course I will, watch me, watch me!” and up she went, up she went, straining, striving, yearning, up we go, up we go, into the clouds, the soft, wet, gray clouds, silver wings shredding the soft, wet grayness, swallowed, swaddled, smothered in softness, grayness, wetness, but still straining, striving, yearning, leaning on those pedals, up we go, up we go, up we go, until she burst from the stifling, swallowing clouds in a shout, an ecstasy, of wings, beating blue-silver in the sun as she skimmed the white cloud-tops, banking slowly, lazily, between the cloud-piercing summits of the arcologies, her wings angel-bright in the light of the naked sun. She flew up and up and up and up until even the clouds were reduced to a vague silver carpet some unfathomable distance beneath her, up and up and up and up into a realm of ion-blue where planes of light and shafts of luminescence shifted in and out of being and the tintinnabula of the angels chimed.
(Deep down under the rain and the clouds, down in the sleep-pod in the heart of the great city of Yu, Courtney Hall felt two large salt tears trace down her face.)
On she flew, through the place of the spirit powers, which, in their wisdom or their folly, had stooped low to touch the earth and bring the Compassionate Society out of the chaos of the Break. And then she saw it, glimpsed through the flickerings and phasings of the Celestials, something so remote that she knew it must be of stupendous size to be visible from the edge of heaven. A line of black that reached out seemingly to infinity, yet which closed behind her, a border of black circling the world. The edge. On she flew, and drawing closer, she saw that the line of black reached both outward and upward; high, she reasoned, but not so high that it had no upper boundary. Closer yet, and she saw that it was a wall of black bricks clean and smooth as obsidian, perfectly adamantine, perfectly untouchable. “Up we go, up we go,” she whistled to herself, and as she did, she noticed how the light caught the obsidian bricks at just such an angle that each brick seemed to have a face carved upon it. A wall of souls. “Up we go, up we go, up we go!” she shouted, and up she went, up beyond even the place of the gods, up and up and up until the breath was exploding in her lungs and the muscles in her legs blazed with cramps. With her last breath and final erg of energy she topped the wall (sharp-edged as the razor of wisdom) and saw what lay beyond.
Then a wind came tearing out of that place beyond and sent her spinning, plummeting toward the clouds. Blackness—she had lost consciousness of both her hallucinatory and earth-bound self. Out of the panic she somehow found the key to sanity and opened the door into the light. She found herself once more pedaling the silver flapping machine through the chasms and abysses of Yu. Over her shoulder was a sack, as if she were Siddhi Befana, Patroness of the Winter Solstice and bestower of gifts upon the worthy, and as she swooped above the upturned faces of the manswarm (look, oh look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous?) she seized great handfuls of paper and Stardust from her sack and sent them showering down upon the rain-weary heads of the citizens. And people of every caste and subcaste and sept and clan scrambled to grab some Stardust and paper, and what they found in their clutching hands sent them to their knees in joy and sadness. On each twinkling scrap of paper Courtney Hall had drawn what she had glimpsed in that instant of the things that lay beyond the wall, the things the Compassionate Society had pushed away and abandoned and forgotten, the old things, the things of wonder and terror and joy and pain.
And she was back.
Early-morning rain dripped from the corroded girders of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel. She heard it tip-tap-tip on the skin of her sleep-pod. And she heard another thing, the engine-thunder of a Love Police pantycar dopplering in low over the pantiles of Old Toltethren, chasing something bright and blue-silver and elusive as the reflection of a song through the edge of morning.
Doubting ended. Faith restored. What to do, how it must be done, and why; clear and unambiguous as the whisper of an archangel. Rebirth from the womb of a synthetic sleep-pod. Courtney Hall grinned.
The Enchanted Unicorn chocolate shop was perched on a stone ledge halfway up the artificial ravine that was Chrysanthemum of Heavenly Rest Mall. Courtney Hall sat at a table for one and watched gossamer-frail myke-lytes turning lazily in the gulf between the bustling, shop-lined walls. Her fingers, she discovered, were moving of their own accord, a sinister alliance of subconscious with motor reflexes, drawing with fiberpen on a paper napkin. Her fingers had felt naked without a fiberpen between them ever since she had left Armitage-Weir, and the first shop she had visited in Heavenly Rest Mall had been an artists’ supplier. And what was it pen and fingers had drawn? What else.
Wee Wendy Waif. As she could be. As she should be. As she would be. Now. Courtney Hall’s smile was as bitter as her chocolate. She paid the little anachronist girl (Marie Antoinette) on the till and went in search of Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard.
Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, Scorpio, had been early into his year out on blue six (the compulsory yearlong wanderjahr all young Scorpios undertook before returning to their keeps and employment for life with the TAOS Consortium) when Courtney Hall first came searching for his spun-glass cocoon that hung—surprising fruit—from one of the tendrils of the giant geneform clematis covering the east end of the Mall. Once you knew where to look, Yu was full of little nests and hideaways where the Scorpio young spent their time out in the city. She’d been in need of background material for a time-travel fantasy sequence that wafted Wee Wendy Waif to the mid-twenty-first century Gregorian when society finally, and relievedly, fell apart in the upheavals of the Break. Such information could only be accessed through application to the Ministry of Pain Prehistoric Records Division, but as usual, her deadline had come and gone for the third, fourth, fifth time, so she was forced to employ less orthodox tactics. It had taken twelve seconds for the Scorpio’s brain lynked into the city-wide datanet to pull her fish out of the ocean of tellix codes, accesses, files, Lares and Penates nets, and the lofty, luminous ziggurats of the Polytheon. Now, almost three seasons later, the Cap’n’s preparations to return to Chapter and Keep were complete. Still he seemed glad to be performing one final service for Courtney Hall before turning the cocoon’s units over to his successor.
“So, whazzit dis time, cizzen? More old movies?” As a caste, Scorpios possessed remarkable memories, even without the assistance of the memory chips they wore braided into their dreadlocks.
“Something different this time. Something a little more … challenging.”
“Say what?” A true craftsman, Cap’n Black Lightnin’ performed his services for love of his skill, a sentiment with which Courtney Hall could sympathize.
“I’d like you to locate the access codes to the Armitage-Weir compositing system”—he was grinning already—“and slip this in, in place of the regular Wee Wendy Waif cartoon.”
“Cizzen, you make my twilight days bright.” Lean bone fingers flexed and cracked to address themselves to the quest. Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, summoned his holographic familiars and was taken up in the cybertrance that wheeled his consciousness out along each of the million billion axons of Yu’s nervous system.
They say the whole city is alive, aware, at a level of consciousness totally alien to any we can know, Courtney Hall mused. Spooky.
Cap’n Black Lightnin’ gave a shuddering sigh, dismissed his communicants with a wave of his ectomorphic arms. “Got it.” The cybertrance had lasted forty-four seconds. He ran the cartoon through the scanner. “Neh, what is it about this cartoon’s special, neh? Art?” Courtney Hall felt deeply disappointed. Most Scorpios were functional illiterates but that was no excuse. Some of her biggest fans had been Scorpios. He returned the scanned cartoon, already worming its way through the Armitage-Weir computer system toward the laser printers of tomorrow’s newsstands. “There you go, cizzen. Many thankings.”
Back into the manswarm again.
The door startled her. It startled her because it was her door, 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West arcology. Damned absentmindedness and old engrained habit. Wonder what it’s like, have they started work yet, go on, one teeny tiny peek.
Rain and rust and ruin. Carpetgrass dead slime. That made her very sad. Maybe it hadn’t matched Marcus Forde’s, but she had loved her carpetgrass. So had Dario; then; once. Walls still frozen in dull, dumb buff. Dripping concrete, corroded tear-tracks where acid rain had cried down exposed metal. The stench from Benji Dog’s decomposing biocircuitry was really rather sad.
If she had had a new famulus, or even this poor old smashed famulus, or any famulus at all, she might have never done what she had just done. She could not decide whether that was a good or bad thing.
She spent that night out on the Nightwalk, down on street zero with the wet, monsoon-bedraggled zooks and zillies, splashing through the neon puddles to the hot, smoking lure of the next Salsa Salon or Jazz-Hot Klub, down along the Marilenastrasse where the paper lanterns swayed in the warm wind and on every street corner and in every window wingers waited in sexual ambush for each other; and in the still, small hours when the teams of street cleaners came whining and vacuuming over the cobbles, wiping away another day’s empty noodle cartons and foamstyrene chocolate cups and discarded tram tickets, she went underground to ride the booming shunting tunnels of the pneumatique municipal. She looked at the faces of the off-shifting workers, gray and featureless as paper handkerchiefs. She could not go back. To the Transients’ Hostel. To Kilimanjaro West, her home. To Armitage-Weir and her warm, friendly office. Home. She sat, crushed by a sense of looming inevitability ponderous as a falling moon. She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream, but out of its time and element, it failed to materialize. What dreams she had were grinding things of towers and canyon-deep streets and a shadow tall as all the world looming over them, the shadow of the Ministry of Pain and the great black cube called West One that was its semilegendary Department of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. West One, where the PainCriminals went … and came out as someone else. Where Grissom Bunt, Category Twelve PainCriminal, whoever he was, had gone. From which Grissom Bunt would never emerge again. Not as Grissom Bunt. She pictured a shaved naked skull crisscrossed with blue-ridged suture lines, heard a voice saying, “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t hurt a fly …” And then the skull opened up like sections of an orange along the fissure lines, and black things like vile bats came flocking up into her face …
She woke with a scream to find it was morning. She left the pneumatique at the next stop and went to see what she had done to the world.
Whatever she had started started small. Small moues of facial angst in the lines for the newssheet booths. Small twitches of puzzlement in the faces of prollets lined up at the municipal tram halts; small smiles of delight on the faces of a group of tlakhs gathered by a poster-pillar; small, but growing, spreading like ripples into circles of pleasure and confusion and anger that impinged upon and interfered with each other to form new patterns of emotion as people turned to their neighbors in the cablecar line and pedicab rank to question, to talk, to argue, to console, and to draw together into eddies of opinion, whirlpools of controversy. Defying all customs of caste and creed, citizens gravitated to each other to debate significance, express consternation, throw newssheets fresh from the vendor’s printer to the cobbles and trample them underfoot. The workaday hum of Clarksgrad Plaza swelled to a hubbub, a bedlam as newssheets were snatched from readers’ hands, snatched back; there were arguments—arguments!—waving arms, red faces, an anarchy of shouting voices. The wet wind took up the shredded papers and plastered them like accusations on the wooden shrine of the plaza’s presiding spirit. As Courtney Hall passed through the streets of Great Yu, it was repeated at every tram halt, every public breakfast stall, every Food Corps costermonger’s barrow, anger and confusion and shouting voices, a ball of confusion gathering a thousand, ten thousand, a million, ten million souls into itself as it rolled behind Courtney Hall through the boulevards of Yu. And passing down Heavenly Harmony Boulevard, she saw the hot-noodle stalls and the shrines and the public confessoriums and the chocolate carts and the scribes’ booths—all empty; she saw people who could not even read thrust arms, hands, fingers through the press of bodies around the news-vendors’ machines to tear a sheet fresh off the printer and struggle to understand just what it was in those squiggling lines that was standing the world on its head.
Amazing how a simple satire on satire could have such an effect. Courtney Hall nodded to her old rival, the TAOS girl, performing her rituals and observances unseen above all the bowed heads. “How is it, O wonderful TAOS girl,” declaimed Courtney Hall, “that this best possible world of happiness and painlessness is so fragile that one little nip at its ankles by one woman, one yulp, one cartoonist, can set the whole thing teetering and tottering?”
Wickedly pleased, she continued on her way, sowing demon seeds of anarchy and confusion, and she came in time to the yellow-brick terrazzo between the twin frustra of her old home, Kilimanjaro West and Kilimanjaro East arcologies. She turned to the mobbing people. “Ladies and gentlemen, cizzens, I give you—satire!” No one heard her.
And then she saw it. Like one of the angels of the Panegyrist Creation Song, it fell from the clouds, a thing all black and silver. And dreadfully familiar. Courtney Hall watched it fall from the clouds and ram itself through the window of level 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West. Which the file-toothed bowlerboy, the trog in the strength-amplifying cyberharness, and the migro with the bean-paste sandwiches from Environmental Maintenance had just finished repairing. Causing said file-toothed bowlerboy, trog in cyberharness, and migro with luncheon problem to, physically as well as metaphorically, soil their vestments as they were invited to examine, at close range, the emission heads of nine Love Police luvguns.
“Citizen Courtney Hall of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society, you are under arrest for a Category Eight PainCrime violation; namely that you did, at or about twenty-thirty of the previous day, unlawfully gain access to, and utilize, a restricted security code, and through use of same, did with full cognizance and malice aforethought cause the general publication of Material Detrimental to the General Populace as specified under Section 29C, Paragraph 12, subsection 6, of the Social Responsibility (Publications and Mass Media) Act: Satire, Irony, and Associated Nonconstructive Criticism. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant …”
“Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant …”
“Not at the moment, Constable, we are dealing with a desperate PainCriminal.”
“Sergeant, this is the Environmental Maintenance Unit.”
“The what?”
“The Environmental Maintenance Unit.”
“Well, shug. It’s this helmet, I swear, it’s three sizes too big, I can’t see a thing through it. And that cretin of a dispatcher.”
“Might I remind you, Sergeant, that her job satisfaction and personal achievement indices read higher with us than anyone else. And that ‘cretin’ is a classified PainWord.”
(A pause.)
“Oh, all right, everyone back into the pantycar.”
“Sergeant, Sergeant!”
“What is it now?”
One insect-goggled head is very much like another.
“We got her! A backtrack through Tag Central, she’s down in the plaza!”
It might have been a smile the Environmental Maintainers saw at the bottom of the Sergeant’s black and silver helmet. Or a zipper.
“Right, cizzens! This time we get her! Constable Van Zammt!”
“Yezzir!”
“Get some French chalk on that restraining suit!”
“Yezzir!”
Elsewhere …
Watching three tons of Love Police pantycar traveling at eighty meters per second aim itself at her heart, Courtney Hall, renegade cartoonist, satirist, overweight, overheight, decided it would be a good time to take some violent exercise. She ran. Darting, dodging, weaving, charging, shouldering, shoving, blood pounding, breath blazing, black stars novaing across her retinas. A roar and rush of jets sent her rolling. She pulled herself into a lung-piercing lurch to see the pantycar coming in for a vertical landing. The doors were already gull-winging open. Black-and-silver-helmeted, goggled police drones crouched to jump. Desperation and nothing else sent her tumbling under the wheels of a tram. Sharp guillotine wheels ground past her head, then her fingers closed on a metal grille. She tore away the inspection cover. Metal steps spiked into the shaft of the personhole led down into anonymous oblivion. Head and shoulders went in. No more.
“Too big, too big,” shrieked the utterly inappropriate voice of reason.
The brick personhole reverberated to the beat of booted feet. Running.
Jammed. Wedged. Stuck.
Yah, the ignominy.
“There she is!”
“Where?”
“There, Sergeant!”
“Right! One good shot, Constable …”
A low, bubbling moan of prehuman fear. Then, one birth-strong heave pushed her through, and she was tumbling headfirst into the welcoming darkness.
Kilimanjaro West
THREE DAYS HE HAD been watching the rain. Still he could not understand it.
“Understand rain? What’s there to understand?” BeeJee &ersenn would ask, her carnivore features a mask of puzzlement.
“Why,” he said, and BeeJee &ersenn would shake her head in gentle stupefaction. But when she was gone, his eyes would be drawn upward again to the swirls of water shedding across the ribbed glass roof or the drops streaking down the gray glass walls, and he would stare for hours on end at the needles of rain sweeping over the tramcars and odd little electric tricycles with their rain-caped tricyclists and the crowds of splashing people, heads bowed beneath their brightly colored umbrellas. Hour after hour after hour watching. Still he was no nearer understanding “rain.”
She had found him in the rain, a huddle of bones and fabric discarded at the foot of the tenement steps. She had almost tripped over him as he watched the drops fall with idiot fascination. Somehow she could not hurry past with a brief flicker of nona dolorosa to indicate her annoyance. Something about him made her watch him, his big hands held out to receive the falling drops, alms of heaven, catching them in his mouth, smiling as they streamed down his face, his chin, his cheeks. Her heart sent her one way. Her feet sent her another, splashing across the street to his side.
She still could not justify to herself what it was that had decided her to bring him home to her glass house among the pipes. Pity, loneliness, the call of the waif in the rain. Mystery. Whatever, it was a thing that had never featured on any of her psychofiles. Sometimes he irritated her so much that she wanted to throw him back to the rain. The way he sat, the way he watched; watched, watched; what? Rain. And his questions, his utter and absolute ignorance. When he asked her his questions, she had grown brittle and tense and signed her distress to him in butterflying nona dolorosas. What did he do but ask, What is that thing you do with your hand?
Such ignorance was beyond belief.
“That is the nona dolorosa, the hurt-me-not, the nonverbal signal we give when another person is saying or doing something which hurts us.”
“Why?”
Was he some test from the Ministry of Pain? Some awful assessment, and if so, had she passed or failed?
But there were also the times when she came to him, driven by the fires inside, for him to touch the plastic button the white brothers had put in place of her left nipple. Then the wires in her head would ring and sing like angels, and for a consciousnessless, conscienceless time she would writhe and spasm in synthetic ecstasy on her soliform bed. And the monsoon rains rained, rained, rained down on the streets of Yu. And he would watch them, and the questions would begin again. So much he did not understand about the condition of being human. Hunger. The first word he had spoken as BeeJee &ersenn knelt beside him on the streaming cobbles. He had rubbed his hands across his belly and said, “Why do I feel this?”
Such an incredible question. Her laugh had frightened her a little, but you cannot send nona dolorosas to yourself.
“When did you last eat? There’s a Food Corps dispenser just around the corner …”
Whatever it was in his eyes she had seen, it made her take him home with her. I shouldn’t be doing this, she told herself as she spooned her fleech-mush into a bowl and reconstituted it with water in the dispenser. A nonsocialised introversion level 6 winger with Grade 3 narcissistic tendencies doesn’t do this.
“Haven’t got much,” she said in spite of herself, “I use these, you see.” She tapped the bulbous green thing clinging to her wrist. And because he had not looked disgusted as everyone else looked disgusted when they learned what it meant, she explained the fleech to him. She hoped it would disgust him, too. “It pumps liquid food into my bloodstream while I’m tapheading.” She stroked the distended bag of flesh. “When I’m under, I can easily go for hours, days even, without eating, the taphead experience is so intense. Fleechie here keeps me alive. It’s quite smart really. It can feed itself from the dispenser and it’s keyed to my pheromone pattern so it can always find me wherever I am in the house.”
But he hadn’t been disgusted. He just hadn’t understood why anyone should have their neural pleasure centers wired to a button where their left nipple should have been.
“Because I’m a tapheader,” she said, but he knew nothing of nonsocialised introversion level 6 Grade 3 narcissistic wingers. “Don’t you even know what a winger is?” And when time had passed, she would come again to him as she always came, the fleech clinging to the nape of her neck, the left breast proffered. And because he had not yet learned the nature of self-hate, he would reach out to stroke the plastic nipple. As she spasmed in her synthetic ecstasy upon the stroking villi of the carpet, his understanding of the new universe unfolded like a rose in the bud. As her body arched and warped, he felt himself drawn to the small alcove amidst the tangles of heating ducts and power conduits where the air was clean of the heavy scent of sexuality and self-absorption. He loved to sit in the gathering darkness and finger the little magpie-bright trinkets BeeJee had deposited there: bauds and beads of junk jewelry bought for a song from Mr. Yoshizawa’s barrow on Narrow Lane; tiny plastic figurines, bean-eyed and reposeful, extruded from street slot-machines; miniature rubber genitalia, scraps of fur, leather, and spun-glass baubles that chimed when he tapped them.
“The butsudan?” asked BeeJee &ersenn. “What about it? It’s dedicated to Janja—she’s the Celestial of my caste—and to YamTamRay, the house spirits. They watch over me, they care for me, they know everything I do.”
But touching his fingers to the crude clay image of the straddle-legged Venus, he sensed something different: a questing, a questioning, an impatience that seemed to reflect his own incomprehension and hunger for history. Each time he sat in the green glow of the spirit lamp, he felt a disquiet, a need to go onward, outward, to embrace an entire universe within his arms. Thus, he said one day, quite unexpectedly, “I think I will have to go very soon.”
“Why?” Questioner and questionee reversed.
“There is something I must do, but it is not here.”
“Then where is it?”
“I do not know.”
“What is it?”
“I do not know.”
She came to him one last time before he returned himself to the rain. She was cat-nervous, almost fearful of him. She came to him and offered him her plastic nipple.
“One final question,” he said. “What is it you want from me?”
“Pleasure. Joy without ending,” she whispered, as if she sensed that this man could somehow grant her her heart’s desire. She closed her eyes as he reached out to stroke the plastic. BeeJee &ersenn cried aloud. Blue holy lightning burned along her pleasure circuits. And fused the nipple switch, the joyswitch, the key to her heart’s desire, shut forever.
He pulled on the heavy waxed raincoat she had bought for him and let himself out of the glass bubble among the pipes. Rain slanted across the bustling street, and he turned his collar up against it. He thought of names as he walked away from the glass house among the pipes. Names were the nails of history. Things were, had been, would be because they had names to guide them through time. Without a name he had no time-boundedness. Therefore he must have a name. But everything was already named, and all names were assigned. He would have to steal one. And a history, too, perhaps. He tried some names for fit and comfort. Stolen names were like stolen shoes, uncomfortable and ill-fitted to their owners. He was not comfortable with any of the names he saw around him as he walked through the wet, gray streets of Great Yu; the names of the streets, the shops, the pedicab drivers, the shrines and noodle stands and waxman booths. He passed from the tangled alleyways and tenements of the district called Little Norway into a place the like of which he had never seen before. Astounded, he stood on a broad plaza of yellow brick, a man reduced to an atom by the buildings that rose on either side of him, vast cones of masonry massive as fallen moons, so tall their uppermost levels were shrouded in cloud, so tall they might reach up and up and up forever. The twin behemoths shone with lights, more lamps than he had ever seen in one place before, a fallen constellation captured in stone. He fell to his knees, and as the twin arcologies reduced him to nothing, he also came out of his annihilated anonymity to realize that he was special, he was unique, that his light shone brighter than all the million glowworm windows, for he alone knew nothing. Uniquely, he understood what his days with BeeJee &ersenn had been teaching him: he, alone, was the alien.
And so he took a name. From the unbelievable towers of light he took a name he felt was worthy of his massive uniqueness.
“Kilimanjaro West,” he said. The stolen name fit well. “I am Kilimanjaro West.”
And onward he went, a named thing, rooted in the universe, yet apart from it, through the night and the rain-dancing streets. Now that he knew that he was, that he existed to celebrate his existence, he looked with delight and fascination at every all-night hot-food stall, every neon welcome to a caste bar or club, every vagrant waft of steam from the pneumatique ventilators, every puddle of yellow streetlight, every rain-slick cobble, because in the continued existence of those other things he saw his own being reflected. Onward he went, and onward, until, to his astonishment, he had walked out of the night into a new steel-gray morning. Stopping in the place in which he found himself, he looked up and around him in awe and amazement. And saw the faces in the architecture.
Angel faces. Demon faces. Faces of women and children. Animal masks. Distorted homunculus grimaces vomiting warm, sour rainwater from stretched rubber lips. The faces of the gargoyles of Neu Ulmsbad looked down on the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West. And as that man looked up at them, he turned himself round to take all the strange newness in, round and round and roundroundround with gathering speed: beaks and claws, snouts, grins, bulbous eyes, gendefrownssneerssmileslewdwinks … he snapped to halt.
There were human faces among the angels and demons, mortals among the immortals, flesh amidst the stones. He strained his eyes to quarter the fluted, sculpted masonry. There they were. They were not so hard to find now that he knew what to look for.
“Hello!” he called.
The faces ducked from view behind a parapet.
Presuming that they wished to preserve their anonymity, having not yet learned that anonymous faces in the architecture of Neu Ulmsbad might in some way be unnormal, he did not call to them again. Which meant that it came as a complete surprise to the early-morning people of Neu Ulmsbad Square when the small knot of raincoated citizens loitering at a waxman’s booth suddenly cast off their waxed raincoats to become iridescent birds of paradise and pulled from the waxman’s awning long, streaming banners with which they danced through the crowds of workaday citizens, wrapping them in rippling silk and mystery while from the back of the booth roman candles ignited and fountained silver fire into the air. In seconds Neu Ulmsbad Square was a dangerous, unpredictable, wonderful place, full of running, leaping figures, billowing streamers, and cracking thunderflashes sown from the bird-dancers’ belt-pouches. Taken by surprise, the morning people panicked. Only one man was not surprised. He was not surprised because he had no concept of normality that the events in Neu Ulmsbad Square could violate. The man called Kilimanjaro West watched with wonder and delight and everything was new. From the BergHaus parapet three silver hang gliders plummeted in a death dive that sent the assailed, assaulted public reeling to cover on the cobbles, thunderflashes doomsdaying around their ears. The banners of the bird-of-paradise dancers sought out the man called Kilimanjaro West, enveloped him in crisscrossing walls of streaming silver silk. The hang gliders soared high above the cobbles of Neu Ulmsbad. One carried a portable synthesizer. Another was fitted with an array of electronic and acoustic percussion devices. The third broadcast excerpts from the Ministry of Pain’s Electoral Selection Declaration. The roman candle fire-fountains mounted and mounted until, half the height of the lowering architecture of Neu Ulmsbad, they cast their own shadows over the huddled citizenry. Rockets began to arc into the air and detonate euphorically while a voice from heaven cried, “This is the essential nature of our democracy, that any citizen … any citizen … an … an … any citizen”—the sound source stammered in time to the tribal drums and the driving synthesizers—“may be selected to the highest. Of offices. May be selected. To the highest of offices. May be selected. To the highest of offices.”
The man called Kilimanjaro West clapped his hands.
The sound filled all of Neu Ulmsbad Square.
“Wonderful,” he said.
And now that they saw that what he said was true, the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers whose mornings had been broken open uncurled to look at this something from beyond the edge of their happily bounded lives. In the dying moments of the Happening, each knew themselves to have been touched by something quite precious and rare and extraordinary. Something that had been taken from them years and years before. Something that some of them had never known they could experience. But the moment was dying. The roman candles were collapsing. The last rockets spent their brief lives in the sky above the BergHaus. The hang gliders turned in the sky for a final pass, the music came to a ringing conclusion, and a voice announced, “This piece of Performance Art entitled ‘The Elector Passes’ has been brought to you by the members of the Raging Apostles, an intercaste multimedia alternative arts group comprising independent nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers. We thank you for your participations in this event, and Raging Apostles hopes that it has in some small way brightened your day.”
Trailing thanks and blessings, the trio of aircraft slid low over the pinnacles of DeminaBerg to come in for hop, skip, and jump landings on Rue de La Fontaine. The birds of paradise set down their silk banners, removed masks, bowed to the audience, who, to their surprise, found themselves applauding. And whistling. And cheering. Just as if they had never seen anything like it before. Which they hadn’t. Then a trog in a Food Corps coverall whose senses had been sharpened by years in the subterranean agrariums cried out, “Love Police!” and the intercaste multimedia company of nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers scattered like starlings. And so did the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers. And only one man was left in Neu Ulmsbad Square to watch the black and silver pantycars come tunneling out of the clouds.
“Is this part of it?” asked the man called Kilimanjaro West.
A bird-of-paradise woman paused in her flight to be astounded.
“Yah, you stupid or something? That’s the Love Police, you know?”
“The what?”
“Fug! You are stupid! Never heard of West One?”
And because, somehow, she could see that he indeed had not, she seized his arm and dragged him across Neu Ulmsbad Square to the waiting ’lectrovan and the forest of waving, beckoning arms in its open rear. A thrust sent the stranger sprawling all knees and elbows across the collected Raging Apostles. The bird-of-paradise woman thumped down on the seat beside him. Suddenly she could no longer think why she had brought him. There was a sharp smell of burnt-out fireworks in the crowded van.
“Come on, come on!” shrieked the driver. The pantycar was settling on its belly jets as the three aeronauts made good fastening their collapsed gliders to the roof rack and swung inside. “About fuggin’ time, too!” the driver screamed, gunning the engine and sending everyone over everyone else as he accelerated down Finneganstrasse.
“Hey, who you got there, Kansas?”
She did not want to say that she did not know, that she had, for an instant, no more, no less, been as compelled as if the eternal clouds had opened and the lasers of God beamed down upon her. “A recruit,” she said. “I thought we could use him.”
“You what?” the driver screamed again. “Fuggin’ Yah, Kansie, he could be anyone, anything, nuh? You want us all to get Social Counseling, eh? Everyone up in West One?”
“Yet, he did seem, at least to me, to be an unprogrammed element, a true locus of spontaneity,” said the bearded man beside the frenzied, sweating driver.
“Unprogrammed, spontaneity, fug, he’s dangerous, put him out.” The driver swerved the crammed ’lectrovan around a procession of Eleventh Day Redemptorists.
“Just because he’s a stranger doesn’t mean he’s dangerous,” said the bird-of-paradise woman. “What is the point of being an alternative to the Compassionate Society if we don’t hold alternative values? What I’m hearing is pure nona dolorosa hurt-me-not straight out of kindergarten.”
“There is a value in unprogrammed elements in a programmed world,” said the bearded man, attempting conciliation. “I’d say give him a try. We measure our own humanity by how we respond to the unprogrammed, the unpredictable.”
“And he damn near made the event,” said a large and odorous trog wedged against the door.
“Love Police damn near unmade it.” A man shook his hair free from a sweaty head-mask. “Joshua, I’ve said this before, it’ll bear saying again. I don’t go with these big, big theatrical happenings. Small-scale stuff; interactive microdrama, ultrarealism, that’s good. This sort of thing is too flash. It gets us noticed. It’ll get us disbanded.”
The bearded man smiled, shrugged. The bird-of-paradise woman who had rescued the man called Kilimanjaro West removed her mask also, and he saw that her face was the image of that other man who had criticized.
“I sometimes wonder just why you are a Raging Apostle, Brother dearest, if you won’t put yourself on the edge for your art. Play it safe, play it along the line; sometimes I wonder if you really want to change anything at all. Live dangerously, Kelso, live for the moment. I think you forgot that, somewhere back down the line.”
“Kansas, I’m telling you, you don’t know a thing, not a thing. Joshua, any more of these big happenings and I’m out. An ex-Raging Apostle.”
“Ex-Apostle, or ex-Raging?” asked a new voice.
“Deva, you just …”
“Well, Citizen Unprogrammed Element,” said the bearded man from the front bench seat, again the conciliator, “have you got a name?”
“My name is Kilimanjaro West,” he said, and something in the way he spoke that name made the crowded ’lectrovan fall electrically quiet. “Pleased to meet you all.”
“Wow,” said the woman who had rescued him.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the bearded man, first to break the awed silence. “Joshua Drumm, artistic director, manager, and father figure to this troupe of social urchins. May I introduce the Raging Apostles: Winston, who so nearly would have left you on the street”—the driver ducked his head and flicked mistrustful eyes in the rearview mirror—“my general factotum, our faithful provider and fixer. Thunderheart Two-Birds Flying”—a huge hairy thing bared white enamel—“vocal arrangements, stunts, and for the present, accommodation. Dr. M’kuba Mig-15”—an ectomorphic face, etched with blue tattoo lines, nodded a nimbus of luminous hair—“technical arrangements and special effects. Devadip Samdhavi”—a glitteringly dressed young man made a small bow—“costumes, design, choreography and dance consultant. V. S. Pyar”—a massive boulder of humanity, his sweat a palpable presence in the swaying van—“movement, acrobatics, physical training, and much-needed muscle. Kelso Byrne”—the arguing man nodded, curtly—“musical arrangements, original compositions, tapes, and lyrics, and unfortunate twin of Kansas,” and the girl who had, on a whim, a notion, an inspiration, pulled Kilimanjaro West away from his fatal fascination, grinned and blew a kiss across the van—“artist, conceptualize wonderfully talented and quite impossible to work with.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed at the man called Joshua Drumm. “Together we are the Raging Apostles. Welcome, Cizzen West. Winston my man! Yah speed us away with your best efforts! To the Big Tree!”
“Okay, Joshi,” said the driver, and the already hurtling ’lectrovan found a miraculous third speed somewhere in its shrieking motor and careened, swaying and slewing violently, down the rain-wet streets of Neu Ulmsbad.