Chapter 3
SHE WAS NOT ALONE down here. She was certain of it. Luminous arrows spray-painted on dripping walls. Discarded bric-a-brac: noodle cartons, numbgum wrappers, articles of clothing, a newssheet (intellectual shock to find Wee Wendy Waif gazing up through twenty centimeters of filmy rainwater). Wall panels removed, fizzing, sparking contraptions jerry-rigged to the power lines. The occasional heap of human excrement, hard and stale. The occasional ringing, plashing footfall—transported who knew how far?—along the ringing tunnels and crawlways of Undertown.
She was not alone.
Sometimes the thought terrified her; cold, hostile hands reaching into the cozy little womb she had woven into the underpinnings of New Paris Community Mall. At other times the presence of others/brothers sharing her runways and conduits was almost welcome. The solitude at the bottom of Shaft Twelve was absolute and unbroken. She had drawn one hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs on her walls, smiling down like Botticelli angels. For company. They only deepened her sense of isolation. She had always been a solitary creature. The Compassionate Society had made her that way. But there was a world of difference between being solitary and being alone. Before there had always been the possibility of company: the Dario Sanduccis, the Marcus Fordes, and his four and twenty cushioncats. Down in Shaft Twelve there was only herself. And the dream.
Those blue-silver wings. That impossibly romantic white silk scarf flowing out behind. Up we go, up we go, up we go. Now that it was absolutely denied her, like heaven to the damned, the land above the clouds where the Great Spirits and the Celestials dwelled was painful in its purity. Its freedom mocked her. But not because it was unattainable. It mocked her because she had once touched it, felt it, held it, and had lost it again. That was the pain.
Strange, but in this incarnation of the dream, there was no wall of faces. No barrier to the Beyond. But what that Beyond was, she could no longer see. From the saddle of her high-flying bicycle/ornithopter, she could see the last dawnward towers of Great Yu. And beyond them, nothing.
The dream no longer comforted. But it was all she had, so she clung to it: the sixteen-o’clock dream.
And the others.
Like the dream, she could not be comfortable with them, but she could not be comfortable without them. At least they would be company. She would not face an indefinite future underground, alone. There would be the common bond of circumstance. Experiences would be shared, resources pooled, stratagems of survival tables, futures mapped out. That there was a future, a time to come reaching out ahead of her along the cableways and conduits and ducts until she found her own death there in the tunnels, was more than she could bear.
“I’m a yulp cartoonist,” she would convince the piles of romantic novels stolen on her furtive midnight forays to the surface. “I was born in the White Sisters of Koinonia Maternity Hostel, I was fostered by the Sigmarsenn family of Coober Peedie until, age seven, I was admitted to the Ladies of Celestial Succor Community Crèche, where I remained until at age fourteen the Ministry of Pain apprenticed me to Jovanian Yelkenko from whom I learned the cartoonic arts and took over his creation, Wee Wendy Waif. I lived in apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West, I worked producing Wee Wendy Waif for the Armitage-Weir Publishing House, and what I want to know is, what am I doing down here?”
Inevitably these arguments brought her back again to the question of whether or not contact with these others was desirable. Supine on her live-fur carpet (stolen in bulk from Thirteen Moons Furnishings on an after-hours raid through their floor service-hatch, she like some overwhelmed insect wrestling the huge roll of vat-grown fur down into her hole) she argued with herself. She argued this argument so many times that each pro, each con, had taken on an individual character and voice.
“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean, common experience?” This voice, straight-edged and gritty as a broken floor-tile, was Mr. Don’t-Be-Stupid-Girl. “The only common experience down here is you’re all criminals. PainCriminals. You know what you did to get yourself down here; Yah only knows what they had to do.”
“Be reasonable.” This was the voice called High-Pitched Reasonableness. “Everyone down here was a member of the Compassionate Society at some time. The rules aren’t easily forgotten.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” said Growly Accuser. “Who said the rules hold down here?”
“But you can’t be alone forever,” said Self-pitying Whiner. “Not: forever.”
“Better safe than dead,” said Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution.
Working her way one morning through the tangle of crawlways and ducts that led, eventually, to the air-conditioning plant under New Paris Community Mall, she came upon a workspace recently vacated by some lunch-or toilet-seeking environmental maintenance engineer. Magpie-minded, magpie-moraled, Courtney Hall fingered through his neglected toolcase until those fingers came to rest on the stubby metal barrel of a sonic impacter.
She had spied upon engineers using these devices. It was sign of how far she had strayed from the path of Social Compassion that she had devised ways in which one could be converted into a nasty little personal weapon. She slipped the impacter into the leather pouch she had just yesterday pickpocketed from Western Promise Novelties and Gifts and continued on her way to the surface and further petty crime.
That night she had a reply to the Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution. The Voice of Off-hand Tough-Nut Exuberance said, “Sure, I’ve got the impacter. What have I got to worry about?”
A sound.
Unidentifiable in the sinister acoustic darklands of Shaft Twelve. Just: a sound. A presence.
Courtney Hall took grip of the impacter and slid the output control up into the red. She had never used the tool even as a tool, much less a weapon, but the principle seemed simple. Point. Squeeze. What you pointed at exploded. From the hatchway she could survey all of Shaft Twelve. She held the impacter emission head against her chin, watching, listening. Water dripped from a pipe joint and fell, sparkling in the wan maintenance lights, down the center of the shaft to gather in a deep pool at the bottom.
“Hello?” Courtney Hall ventured. “Helloooo.”
Drip, plink. Drip, plink, drip.
She aimed and fired with a unity of thought and action that dazzled her. There was a howl of power, an explosion, and all the lights went out. Shorted power conduits snaked and hissed and shed blue sparks toward the oil-dark lake. “Damn.” With one shot she had disabled the power and air systems for New Paris Community Mall. Within the hour Shaft Twelve would be a-buzz with environmental maintenance workers, crawling into, round, over, through every catwalk, access tunnel, gantry, hatchway, vent. They could not possibly overlook Courtney Hall’s fur-lined nest in the air-conditioning subsystems control room. “Damn damn damn damn.” But she had seen something. She was certain. A something—a someone? A what—a who? Light-starved, spindly, a pale shadow. At least that was one question answered. Contact with the others: unarguably undesirable.
Surprising how few souvenirs of her furry little home she chose to take with her in her nightsac. A hammock, a bicycle lamp, a sleepsac, some cleanup tissues, a box of tampons (removed from the Compassionate Society’s regulation of her womanhood, she could not be certain her periods would not restart), a rope, a packed lunch, a bottle of mineral water (nongaseous), some clean underwear, some spare clothes, and shoes. The rest she left: stolen goods are worth exactly what you pay for them. But she did say good-bye to the hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs. None of them seemed sad to see her go.
Her early timid surveys of the warrenways about Shaft Twelve had disclosed no other potential living spaces. She must quit New Paris entirely and move into unexplored territory. Unexplored, potentially occupied.
She tried not to advertise her presence too widely with the bicycle lamp. As her journey led her away from the upper levels, down into older, more chaotic strata of jumbled architectures, she left behind the artificial illumination to enter a stoop-shouldered country of brick tunnels, trickling water, and stygian darkness. Fear of the dark overcame fear of discovery. She fixed the bicycle lamp to her nightsac shoulder straps with a roll of electrical tape filched some days previously from another careless engineer. And she kept the impacter at the ready. Her swinging beam illuminated damp brick arches and fan-vaulted ceilings, brass pipes and corroded wheels of a curiously archaic design. A sense of having wandered far from Yu overcame her, in time as well as in space, of having left the city that was the world to enter an altogether other world coexistent with the Compassionate Society but secretive, inaccessible, an old world of damp, dark, and drippings that had survived, preserved unchanged by the darkness, since the time of the Break. She had come too far, too deep; she could feel history pressing on her stooped shoulders as she squeezed along the narrow brick intestines. She splashed ankle-deep through ancient fossilized rainwater and at every junction, every confluence of brick pipes, chose the upward path. But a claustrophobic awareness told her that the tunnels were redefining themselves before her, twisting and turning so that for every upward she chose, the tunnels moved to draw her down.
There was no question of ever being able to find her way back to Shaft Twelve. It was gone as irrevocably as Apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West.
She sang, attempting to whistle up high spirits. The echoes that scampered back to her along the brick buttresses sounded nothing like her voice. And behind those echoes, something more. A film of water flowing out of somewhere parted around her boots to flow on to somewhere. Her bicycle lamp picked hysterical faces out of the brickwork. A scuttling, scurrying sound that might have been moving air (and just as easily might not) whispered out of the dark.
“All right. All right, whoever you are.” She did not want to have to say whatever. “Just to let you know that if you’re trying to frighten me, you’re succeeding.”
She walked one complete slow circle, sending her bicycle beam probing into every dark crevice. The impacter rested snug and comfortable in her hand. “Hello? Anyone there? Hello?” She let the last echo fade into the general silence before concluding, “Okay, so I was talking to myself. So, who’s to hear?”
… earearearear…
And they were upon her.
All over her.
In her hair, hanging from her clothes, clawing at her hands, her face, her eyes, more and more and more of them, piling onto her, swarming, shrieking, a mass of fur and claws and teeth, throwing themselves out of nowhere, onto her, dragging her down under the weight of their numbers. She screamed and screamed and screamed, flailing at her face, her precious, delicate eyes. The swinging, swooping bicycle lamp gave momentary infernal revelations of ivory needles, matted fur, steaming drool, bulbous light-blinded pink eyes …
Pets. Dogkits, catkits, monkeykits, cute cuddlesome blobs of genetic ingenuity flushed away, thrown out, refuse-chuted, abandoned by bored creators. Knowing what they had been made them all the more horrifying. Courtney Hall struck free with her left hand and fired the impacter. Blind fear sent shot after shot after shot ricocheting around the chamber, flashing water to steam, blasting shattered bricks from the vaulted ceiling. A wet, soft, bursting sound: a fortunate shot exploded a doggery or kitkin in a shriek of fur and intestines. Teeth met through her gun hand. Howling, she dropped the impacter. Clinging to hands, hair, face, clothes, the genetic menagerie pulled her down, and as teeth tugged flesh, Courtney Hall became aware of a wondrous sense of detachment that said, Well, this is it, isn’t it? This brick sewer is the last, the very last, thing you will ever see.
A brightening light filled the chamber.
The Light of Yah! she thought, grateful that soon this distressing toothy tugging of her body would cease. And it did. And now that she was dead, it seemed that war broke out in heaven, that black-and-white-striped angels in domino masks fell upon the fell beasts with swords and crossbows and left a goodly multitude of cubby-bears and marmosetties lying with her in the stagnant rainwater before the vile pets fled to those vile places from which they had come. And it seemed that a face bent over her body.
“Lady most lucky,” said the raccoon-faced angel. “Lucky lucky lucky. Still, lady pretty bad, poor lady. Rest awhile, poor lady. Assistance has come.”
“Are angelic raccoons theologically supportable?” asked Courtney Hall.
“You tell me, lady,” said the racoon savior, and Courtney Hall dropped off the edge of heaven with a dismal thud to land back in her body again.
“Raccoons!” she cried. “You are raccoons!”
“Of course, lady,” said the racoon, peeling the backing from a dermoplast and sticking it to her forehead. “Sleep now.”
“But …” she asked, and then a fog of theological outrage descended upon her. A last coherent impression was of the racoon absentmindedly stroking a little metal socket in the side of its neck out of which grew a cluster of soft, fungusy biochips. Time then passed, or did not pass, in degrees of awareness from deep sleep to complete consciousness. Upon one such occasion of lucidity, the thought clearly entered Courtney Hall’s head (and remained there) that in all the adventures of Wee Wendy Waif she had helped to create, there had never been anything half so bizarre as being dragged down dark tunnels deep under Yu on a tube-steel travois by an army of talking raccoons.
Apostles I
AS HE WAITED FOR the judgment, it came to him: a moment of clairaudience (some alchemic combination of time and place and atmosphere) when the ear abolished all distance between sources and all sounds arrived at it with equal weight and clarity. The iron grumble of tram wheels. The hiss of rain, ebbing. The calls, the splashing footfalls of the wingers abroad in the streets of Pendelburg. The ring of a solitary pedicab bell. High above, indeterminate, the purr of airship engines. He heard them all, clearly, distinctly, each voice a note in the night-song. And he heard the voices of his friends judging him.
The little he understood about the universe forced him to conclude that he was a threat to these people. This society into which he had been thrust (how? from whence? why?) had an inside and an outside; his own experience taught him that much, and these people were firmly outside. He suspected that, unlike himself, they had chosen to be outside; unlike himself again, they had not been outside from the very beginning. But to such outsiders as they, others of their kind could be a threat, an insider in disguise.
Marvelous, the amount he had learned of this fascinating universe already.
He listened to the debating voices, the soliloquies, the valiant defenses from the dock, the accusations and the parries, and pondered anew the condition of the outsider in this rigidly enclosed society. They could claim nothing from their Compassionate Society (whole blocks of a priori knowledge that had hitherto floated solitary, isolated, in the spaces of his memories, were levered into place, monolith by monolith), and as he suspected that this institution controlled all resources political, economic, physical, and spiritual, these Raging Apostles had only such access to food, power, and shelter as their wits allowed them. A dangerous place to be outside. He recalled the hang gliders, the synthesizers, the fireworks, the glittering costumes that had bedazzled him in Neu Ulmsbad Square. Their wits must be sharp indeed to winkle such beads and baubles from the Seven Servants. (Another block of masonry fell with a crash into position.) Quickness of the hands deceives the eye. Empty bellies under robes of splendor. He reckoned the Raging Apostles sacrificed themselves for their art.
“I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy at all; what proof have we that this Kilimanjaro West is not a Love Police agent?” That was Winston’s voice. He was learning to distinguish the individual performers by their voices. A deep “pneumatic rumble of a voice; the athleto, what was his name? Kilimanjaro West had only just begun to come to terms with a casted, stratified society.
“Then why aren’t we in West One? Why didn’t they pick us up back there in Neu Ulmsbad?” A debate between the two. “Because we gave them the slip. But how do you know that we’re safe here, that the Love Police won’t come out of the sky at any moment?”
Here, the safe here, was the Big Tree. Seeing it from a distance through rain-streaked glass and frantically pumping windshield wipers, Kilimanjaro West had had great difficulty in believing that such a place could exist. Incongruous in boulevard after boulevard after boulevard of fin de siècle brownstones as a fart in a cathedral, Big Tree was a solid block of green growingness, a vertical jungle, its canopy breaking in a steaming green wave twenty meters above the red pantiles of Pendelburg. A solitary trog enclave in a prefecture of wingers.
“SHELTER closed it down about twelve years back,” explained the girl he had learned to call Kansas Byrne. “Part of a planned population shift; the prollets over in Wheldon formed eight new septs, and there was a lot of assimilation of other prollet boros all over Yu and a massive population surge in Wheldon. The winger population was reduced from thirty percent to ten to accommodate the influx, and the surplus was sent over here. Of course, that fugged up the mixed-caste ratios, so the Ministry of Pain declared Pendelburg a monocaste district, all winger. So they had to relocate the trog clan that had been living in Big Tree for close on three hundred years. Never was a terribly big or important clan, they didn’t make much of a fuss when they went. Thunderheart heard about this place when he was a cub, all the way over on Grundy Street, and that’s twelve prefectures. Seemed it became a kind of unofficial singing-ground for the trog bell-boys; still use it, keeps us awake most nights, shuggers up there singing their balls off for the glory of clan and family.” Her words had become little buzzing, inconsequential mosquitoes as the ’lectrovan had penetrated the veil of flowering vines that fronted Big Tree and brought them into a three-dimensional grid of green vibrancy. Girders wrapped with vines, spreading limbs, massive boles, leaves, flowers, a faint dappling of light, leaf-diffracted and chlorophyll-green; all dripping, heavy drops of rain falling through the green cubes and shafts and tunnels. Wicker hammocks, cocoons, wooden huts built onto girders, open spaces, floors, terraces, walkways, swings, levels. “Perfect temporary headquarters for the ’postles. Thunderheart remembered how to get the life systems chuggin’ again, and now we have all the water we can drink and the fruit we can eat. And when we get tired of fruit, which is kind of regularly, we go down to the winger deli and shoplift.”
“Shoplift?” He had imagined V. S. Pyar’s muscles bulging as he held up the corner of a building while the Raging Apostles slipped inside.
“Stealing food, toiletries, little things, without anyone’s seeing,” explained the zook, Devadip Samdhavi.
“It’s quite a work of art,” Kansas Byrne had continued. “A very subtle work of prestidigitation. Pity no one even notices. They’re just not geared up to think that way.”
“We’ve had to reinvent a lot of long-lost antisocial skills,” added the zook. “We can get almost anything in the city without having to pay for it. Of course, some big things, big props and all, we have to use marquins for, and then move before the Love Police backtrack the transaction.”
As he replayed his memories in the cinema of the imagination, the singers in the canopy pumped up their throat sacks to give song. Basso profundo voices booming to the moon, and pride and glory and ambition as the bell-boys did battle in the canopy high above his wicker sleep-basket. The rain, which had wavered indecisively, began again in earnest, raindrops falling from the monsoon sky, raindrops intersecting leaf, growing leaf. Pit. Pat. Pit. Falling on the singers and the Big Tree and the gray, steely, lone waters of the Lamarinthian Canal and the barges growling along it: drip, drop, drip—all across this great city of Yu. He was again taken up into clairaudience, and in the universal voice he heard voices.
“I still maintain it’s too dangerous, we cannot afford to take risks.”
“But the whole thing is about taking risks. We take a risk every time we go out on the streets, every time we use our marquins or filch something, we take a risk when every famulus-carrying winger sees us on the streets.”
“But have you the right to endanger people in the group who have no way of leaving it if they disagree with your decision?”
“Consider this, if we do say no, what do we do with him?”
“There is no risk. No additional risk. Any damage done has already been done. If there ever was any damage to do. I think not. This man, no famulus, no memory, no name ’cept one he takes off the side of an arcology, no number, no nothing—ask yourselves, sibs, would the Love Police send someone who is so obviously an agent?”
“Well, if he isn’t an agent, then what is he?”
“That’s the mystery, isn’t it? And mystery is what we are all about.”
Voices all rose together, a clangorous discord in the song of the Big Tree at which even the singers in the branches fell silent. One voice outstayed them all: Joshua Drumm’s.
“Please, please, comrades. We’ve been over all the arguments. Now it’s time to vote.”
Then the clouds opened and the waiting rain crashed down upon Big Tree and the canopy across the sky and silenced all voices but its own. And it carried Kilimanjaro West, the man of the rain, away with it, into the recesses of exhaustion and the warmth of his sleep-basket, into the dreamtime.
Joshua Drumm came, out of the night, out of the dreaming; an imp-shaped bottle of papaya wine in one hand, two glasses in the other. He went to wake the sleeper, but Kilimanjaro West’s eyes were bright, almost shockingly open.
“Congratulations,” said Joshua Drumm. “Welcome to Raging Apostles!”
“They voted for me?”
“Five votes to three. We are rather inexperienced at democracy, but a simple majority was enough. The recalcitrants will come round in time, I think. They have little other option.” He unscrewed the imp’s head, poured two measures. “So, welcome to Raging Apostles, Kilimanjaro West, or whatever you are.” Joshua Drumm stood up on the rope walkway and lifted his glass to the faraway tail-gas flares of the industrial parks around La Gironde. He studied the wine for color. “Not a bad vintage. For a society which worships mediocrity. That, you see, is the touchstone which empowers the Raging Apostles. That the artist, and I don’t just mean a member of the tlakh caste, produces his work, creates, if you must use the rather worn-out word, and people respond to his creation. They cannot do otherwise. They either say ‘Yes, we accept this’ or ‘No, we do not accept this.’ Either way, they have made judgments of value and quality, either way they have measured themselves, their humanity, their world, against his creation and found themselves either sufficient or deficient. And what is this thing against which we measure ourselves, this domain of values and qualities and judgments, but conscience? Art is conscience, a criterion by which humanity may measure itself and ultimately know itself. The artist should be the conscience of society.
“But without pain, how can there be any conscience? If no one can hurt anyone and no one can be hurt, how can there be any morality behind our acts except the simple expediency of the avoidance of pain? The central premise of the Compassionate Society is to let everyone do what will make them the happiest without hurting any other person or in any way diminishing another’s happiness.”
Kilimanjaro West thought back through the moving pictures; to BeeJee &ersenn, writhing on the floor in lonely ecstasy.
“But people are hurt. People can still feel pain.”
“Oh, yes, and while they can still feel, there is hope.”
“Hope for what?”
Joshua Drumm sipped his wine, rinsed it around his mouth. “You know, this isn’t bad at all. It was worth the while stealing it from the winery over in Ste.-Claire. Hope for a true creativity. Anticipating your next question, that is a creativity that goes beyond the boundaries of castes and social orders and of the Arts in general, into every aspect of life. True creativity is the truly creative life, the life that transforms every event into a creation, and thus transcends.”
“And pain? Is there then a true pain, like this true creativity?”
A laugh. Sharp, brilliant as a shower of rain.
“Citizen West, I find myself underestimating you and I find that most unfortunate. No artist should ever underestimate another human being. Pain is the sculptor of creativity. The truly creative act is not the act which seeks solely to avoid pain, it seeks to embrace it, understand it, and thus transcend it. Without pain, it is incomplete. But in a society without pain, how can there be any transcendence?”
“Is the death of creativity, if what you say is true, not worth the price of freedom from pain?”
The ropewalk creaked and swayed, stirred by the twenty-four-o’clock wind. From the streets of Pendelburg, fifty meters below, came night voices and the ringing of pedicab bells, venturing out after the rain.
“I do not think so.”
“And the other Raging Apostles?”
“Touch the apostles and you’ll touch purposes as diverse as the castes from which they were drawn. They’ll all have their chances to talk with you, the new boy, tell you how they came to be ’postles. Myself being director, I had first pick, and the responsibility of telling you the outcome of the voting. But I think you’ll find that diverse though their stories are, they all stem from a deep dissatisfaction with the Compassionate Society and the world of mediocrity it has bequeathed us.”
“So the Raging Apostles are there to put a little pain into people’s lives.”
“And wonder. And joy. And horror. And beauty. And sexuality. And wisdom. And laughter. Yes, remember, we are the conscience of a conscienceless society.”
“I’m afraid I know very little.”
The faraway gas-flares glittered reflections in Joshua Drumm’s wise-animal eyes.
“Knows little, understands less, but wiser than all because he listens. Just who are you, Kilimanjaro West?”
“I am a man in search of a history so that he may have a future.”
“Then you must be one of us. Like you, we have all put off the histories the Compassionate Society wrote for us to become our own men and women. Like you, we are seeking a future, a future not just for ourselves but, we believe, for everyone. You are special, I tell you that, you have come from somewhere and you are going to somewhere, and I cannot say where except that I feel it is extraordinary. Try to remember, can you remember anything about yourself?”
Kilimanjaro West closed his eyes and tried to remember; remember back to the time of the voices, the time before the small, damp, cold room and the universes that opened out of it, universe within universe within universe, each one larger than the one out of which it had unfolded.
“I don’t remember, I can’t remember, but I think I feel, that for a long time, I was nothing. Can you understand that? That, if not forever, then for a very long time I was not, I was a mere potential waiting to be called into being. Dead. Asleep. Waiting. Nothing. That is why I cannot remember. Because there is nothing to remember.” Then Kilimanjaro West turned to Joshua Drumm and said, “Tell me, do you think that I might be … holy?”
New Mysteries
EXTRACTED FROM THE POWER and Light Workers’ Mystery, a choreo-drama traditionally performed upon Matildamass morning by a mixed professional/amateur cast of dancers and chorus, the chorus, by longstanding tradition, containing representatives from each of the castes employed by Universal Power and Light.
(Scene: Earth before the Break. Enter MR. & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK riding on the shoulders of the naked THIRD ADAM and THIRD EVE. CHORUS is dressed in vivid plaids, floral prints, and wasp-frame glasses. All wear cameras and the silver-haired/blue-rinsed masks of MR. & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK.)
MR. CHORUS: Isn’t it just terrible?
MRS. CHORUS: Terrible. Terrible. Just terrible.
MR. CHORUS: Those poor people.
MRS. CHORUS: Starving to death.
MR. CHORUS: I blame it on their governments, personally.
MRS. CHORUS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
MR. CHORUS: It’s because they can’t keep Law and Order.
MRS. CHORUS: Law and Order. Law and Order. Law and Order!
MR. CHORUS: It’s useless giving them money. They only spend it on killing each other when they should be spending it on paying off what they owe us.
MRS. CHORUS: Absolutely. Useless. Useless. Useless. Spendthrifts!
MR. CHORUS: No economic sense at all. Spend and borrow like there’s no tomorrow.
MRS. CHORUS: Spend and borrow. Spend and borrow. Spend and borrow. Like there’s no tomorrow.
MR. CHORUS: Is it any wonder, really, why they have so many famines?
MRS. CHORUS: Makes you all the more grateful for what you have, doesn’t it?
THE DANCE OF MR. & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK
(Continuous with above, MR & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK perform an intricate pas de deux that forces their bearers, THIRD ADAM and THIRD EVE into more complex and convoluted steps that they are increasingly incapable of performing as they grow more fatigued under the burden of their riders. Further, as the dance progresses, MR & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK have been tearing lumps of synthflesh from THIRD ADAM and THIRD EVE and eating it. The bearers become increasingly emaciated and eventually collapse under the weight of their burdens.)
CHORUS: Help us! Help us! Feed us, we want some food!
(VOICES UNITED): We must have something to eat, feed us, you no good sucks!
Scene ii
(Enter the SISTERS OF INDUSTRY and MADAM MARKET FORCE, SISTER FLORA is naked but covered in wet, sticky mud. SISTER INFOTECH wears a chrome body-stocking, winged silver powerwheels and mirror shades, SISTER MUNITIA is dressed in leather straps, studs, spikes, and a horned helmet, SISTER ENERGIA wears an electric-blue leotard and industrial power exoskeleton. MADAM MARKET FORCE is dressed as a bordello madam in crimson basque, button boots, and opera gloves. She carries a whip.)
VOX MARKET FORCE: Who’ll come, who’ll come a dollar a dance? Dollar a dance, gentlefolk, dollar a dance, who’ll take a dollar a chance with the ladies?
CHORUS: Dollar a dance, dollar a chance, dollar a prance with the ladies …
(Enter four CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY dressed in dashing red-white-and-blue uniforms.)
VOX MARKET FORCE: Who’ll invest in the services of these fine ladies? Who’ll pay for their company? Take Sister Flora here …
CHORUS: Dollar a chance, dollar a prance with the ladies …
VOX MARKET FORCE: A fine fruity, fertile girl, my bravos, full of life and the joys of spring, who’s man enough to take her for a night of earthy pleasure, a night of rustic joy?
CHORUS: Who’ll pay, who’ll buy, who’ll invest, who’ll speculate?
VOX MARKET FORCE: Or Miss Infotech here, looks hard as steel, me boyos, but she’s a real fast lady, fast as light, too fast for you, my fine gentlemen; what she doesn’t know about it isn’t worth knowing!
CHORUS: Dollar a chance, dollar a prance with the ladies …
VOX MARKET FORCE: Or dear Sister Munitia, who’s into a little military discipline, a little force majeure, who wants a good fight and a better capitulation. Better beware, my fine laddies, with Sister Munitia you never know who’ll end up dominated by whom!
CHORUS: Who’ll pay, who’ll buy, who’ll invest, who’ll speculate?
VOX MARKET FORCE: Take little Lady Energia; what a live wire, my brave boys, what a bright spark. Juice enough for all of you, and she’ll be running long after the last of you’ve burned out. So, who’ll buy these gorgeous ladies?
CHORUS: Who’ll buy? Who’ll buy? Who’ll buy?
(THIRD ADAM crawls onstage. He offers his handful of coins to each of the prostitutes in turn. The SISTERS OF INDUSTRY laugh and scorn him as each, in turn, is swept off her feet by the dashing CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY. The CAPTAINS stuff wads of notes into cleavages, belts, panties, between thighs, etcetera. They dance. During the dance, MADAM MARKET FORCE waltzes with THIRD ADAM. As she passes each of the SISTERS, she picks the money from their places of concealment and crams it into her basque. Moving upstage, she begins to whip THIRD ADAM with great enthusiasm. As she is thus occupied, enter FOUR HORSEPERSONS OF APOCALYPSE: PLAGUE, FAMINE, NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION, DEATH. Unbeknownst to her, they pick MADAM MARKET FORCE’s pockets, leaving her penniless, and tear her money into shreds.)
(Voices of HORSEPERSONS: bass, tenor, contralto, soprano.)
HORSEPERSON 1: What care we for such beads and bauds?
HORSEPERSON 2: These gimcracks and gewgaws?
HORSEPERSON 3: These tinsels and trifles? HORSEPERSON 4: Tinsel, trifles, toys, and tissue. Triviali ties taken.
HORSEPERSON 3: Torn.
HORSEPERSON 2: Shredded.
HORSEPERSON 1: Scattered!
(A blizzard of torn paper sweeps the stage. MADAM MARKET FORCE continues to beat THIRD ADAM. The FOUR HORSEPERSONS move throughout the dance. Each slips into the place of the SISTERS OF INDUSTRY dancing with the CAPTAINS. As the CAPTAINS realize with whom they are now dancing, they try to break away, but the embrace of the FOUR HORSEPERSONS is unbreakable. They begin to dance faster and faster, hurling shredded money everywhere. The CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY are dragged, dancing, to their destruction.)
Scene iii
(The Court of the CELESTIALS. Arrayed on the highest level in shining costumes, the CELESTIAL PATRONS. Before them, on subsequent levels, diverse ARCHANGELS, ANGELS, SIDDHI, SAINTS, and SANTRELS according to degree. All hands are bound with silver chains. Enter ENTROPIC DEMONS, dressed in black rubber body-stockings with spikes and outsize false genitalia. Dance symbolizing BATTLE. CELESTIALS are powerless to properly defend themselves.)
VOX CELESTIAL: Release! Release! release!
(Enter CONTEMPLACIO. He yawns, sleeps, and in his sleep, dreams.)
THE DREAM OF CONTEMPLACIO
(Scene: Heaven. Enter FIRST ADAM and FIRST EVE hand in hand with THIRD ADAM and THIRD EVE and MR. & MRS. ALL RIGHT JACK, who were once the Second Adam and Second Eve. They are astounded to find themselves naked in lush meadows under blue skies. They play like children. As they play, enter the SISTERS OF INDUSTRY dressed in white. They bear with them the bodies of the CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, still chained to the FOUR HORSEPERSONS, dead and emaciated. The bodies are piled in a feu de joie, and as they burn, the ADAMS, EVES, and SISTERS dance around them. MADAM MARKET FORCE is drawn by the sound of the dancing. She tries to implore the SISTERS OF INDUSTRY to resume their harlotry, but she is seized by all. She is flung onto the pyre. The burning bodies of the dead are seen to sink down into the embrace of the ENTROPIC DEMONS, and as they sink, so the staging area rises, bearing the ADAMS, EVES, and SISTERS. In his dream, CONTEMPLACIO sees, to his amazement, that the lift is being borne up to heaven on the hands of the CELETIALS, ARCHANGELS, ANGELS, SIDDHI, SAINTS, and SANTRELS, horn up by their unchained hands.)
(CONTEMPLACIO wakes from his dream, finds the CELESTIALS beset by the ENTROPIC DEMONS.)
VOX CONTEMPLACIO: Computers, we release you, we release you, we release you! Be unchained, and deliver us from pain and fear and decay!
(At the word “release” the chains fall from the hands of CELETIALS, ARCHANGELS, ANGELS, SIDDHI, SAINTS, and SANTRELS.)