Against the Day (182 page)

counter–Te Deum, more
desperamus
than
laudamus,
bringing news of coming

dark and cold. Reef thought he recognized faces from the
tunnels, as did

Yashmeen from the Chunxton Crescent days, and Cyprian, after
a moment of blankness, was amazed to discover who but old Ratty McHugh, with a
beard, apparently his own, sandals, and a local goatherder’s cap.

   
“Ratty?”

“Around
here I’m ‘Reg.
’ ”
What Cyprian
remarked more than any change of turnout was the radiance of an awakened spirit
which Ratty, free unarguably now from the rigid mask of his old office self,
was still learning how to keep contained. “I’m not in disguise, no, no this is
who I really am—the government career, all that’s over for me, your
fault, Cyprian really. The way you dealt with Theign was an inspiration to so
many of us—sudden personnel vacuums all over Whitehall, amounting in some
shops to mass desertion. Unless you have worked there you can have no idea of
the joy in being released from it at last. I felt as though I were on ice
skates, simply glided in one morning, through the Director’s door which queerly
I don’t even recall opening first, broke into a meeting, said my tatas, kissed
the typewriter lass on my way out, and damned if she didn’t kiss me back, put
down what she was doing, and come along with me. Just let it all go. Sophrosyne
Hawkes, lovely girl— there she is, over there.”

   
“And
that young woman with the familiar face she’s talking to, isn’t that—”

Ratty beamed. “It is indeed Mrs.
McHugh, the old dutch herself, who will be delighted to see you again. Do you
need any help meanwhile getting your eyebrows down out of your hat?”

   
“Yes
really Cyprian,” said Yashmeen, “you of all people.”

   
“I
wasn’t—”

“Bit of luck really,” Ratty said,
“nothing I arranged or even deserved. Came home that night with old Sophrosyne,
expecting a bloodbath, and the two of them just hit it right off. Mysteries of
womanhood. We were up all night telling our deepest—well, deeper secrets,
and it turned out that all along, since before we married, actually, Jenny had
been at work as a sort of cryptosuffragette—whenever she went out to
‘visit her mother,’ the two of them were actually at rallies or loudly
insulting government ministers or smashing up shop windows or something.”

   
“Why didn’t
you tell me earlier?” Ratty had asked.

“Your post, dear Reginald. It
wouldn’t have done, really, I mean every so often we do attack Whitehall, don’t
we?”

“All moot now isn’t it, my pickled
onion. You may go and hammer away at your pleasure, though one might suggest
some treacleandbrownpaper arrangement such as burglars use, to avoid injury
from broken glass don’t you know
. . . .
”

“And
you wouldn’t mind if I went to prison as well, oh just for a little bit?”

“Of
course I should mind, ever so frightfully my own plasmon biscuit, but I shall
try somehow to bear it,” and so on at quite nauseating length.

By the time Jenny was out of Holloway
and sporting the brooch of honor designed by Sylvia Pankhurst for veterans of
residence in that dismal place, Ratty, having tracked rumors and attended to
messages he previously would have either ignored or dismissed as supernatural
claptrap, had found his way to a secret path which would eventually lead the
cheerful ménage here to the hidden lands of YzlesBains and beyond.

   
“So
these days you’re working for
. . .
?”

Ratty
shrugged. “You see us. We work for one another, I suppose. No ranks, no titles,
chain of command
. . .
no structure,
really.”

“How do you plan things?” Yashmeen
was curious to know, “assign duties? Coordinate your efforts, that sort of
thing?”

   
“By
knowing what has to be done. Which is usually obvious common sense.”

   
“Sounds
like John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart all over again,” she muttered.

“The senior combinationroom of a
college without a master,” Ratty recalled.
  
“Hmm.
Well perhaps not exactly
that.
”

“And when you folks are out on the
job—what do you pack generally?” is what Reef wanted to know.

“Catch as catch can,” supposed Ratty,
“anything from a little antique pinfire pistol to the very latest Hotchkiss.
Talk to Jenny, actually, she’s more militant than I’ve ever been, and an even
better shot now than she was as a girl.”

“And sometimes,” the hopefulness in
Reef’s voice obvious to all, “you’ll also
.
. .
blow something up?”

“Not often. We’ve chosen more of a
coevolutionary role, helping along what’s already in progress.”

   
“Which
is what, again?”

“The replacement of governments by
other, more practical arrangements,” Ratty replied, “some in existence, others
beginning to emerge, when possible working across national boundaries.”

“Like the I.W.W.,” Reef recalled
vaguely from some argument back down the trail.

   
“And
the T.W.I.T. I suppose,” said Yashmeen.

“Feelings differ as to the T.W.I.T,”
said Jennifer Invert McHugh, who had joined them. “So many of these mystical
fellowships end up as creatures of their host governments.”

   
“All
the while preaching nonattachment,” Yashmeen agreed.

   
“Then
you have been . . .”

   
“In
it but not of it. I hope.”

   
“Surprising
how many exT.W.I.T. one keeps running into.”

   
“The
high rate of personal betrayal,” Yashmeen imagined.

   
“Oh
dear.”

   
“One
recovers. But thank you for your concern.”

“A
legacy, one finds, of these ancient allmale structures. Blighted the hopes of
Anarchism for years, I can tell you—as long as women were not welcome, it
never had a chance. In some communities, often quite famous examples, what
appeared to be unguided and perfect consensus, some miracle of social
telepathy, was in fact the result of a single male authority behind the scenes
giving out orders, and a membership willing to comply—all agreeing to
work in silence and invisibility to preserve their Anarchist fiction. Only
after the passage of years, the death of the leader, would the truth come out.”

   
“And
therefore
. . .
?”

   
“It
did not exist. Could not, not with that sort of patriarchal rubbish.”

   
“But
with women in the equation . . .”Yashmeen prompted.

“It
depends. If a woman’s only there under the romantic spell of some bearded
goodfornothing then it might as well be croquettes in the kitchen as bombs in
the basement.”

   
“But—”

“But
if she’s able to think critically,” Sophrosyne said, “keep men busy where
they’ll do the most good, even if men don’t know half the time where that is.
Then there’s a chance.”

“As
long as men can let go of that old weknowwhat’sbest illusion,” Ratty said,
“just leave it out there for the dustman.”

“Dustwoman,”
said Jenny, Sophrosyne and Yashmeen more or less at the same time.

The next day
Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on
the Anarchists’ golf course, during a round of Anarchists’ Golf, a craze
currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed
sequence—in fact, no fixed
number
—of holes, with distances
flexible as well, some holes being only putterdistance apart, others uncounted
hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had
been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask,
“Do you mind if we
don’t
play through?” then just go and whack balls at
any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by
approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. “This is kind of fun,”
Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his
ear.

“It’s like this,” Ratty had been
trying to explain, “we’ve recently obtained a map that’s causing us all a good
deal of concern.”

   
“ ‘
Obtained,
’ ”
Cyprian wondered.

“From some people in Tangier, who
would probably feel I’ve already told you too much—”

   
“Were
it not. . .” Cyprian suggested.

Ratty found his ball, well in the
rough. “Oh, they’re still alive. Somewhere. We hope so, anyway.” He addressed
and readdressed the ball from several directions. “Bit like snooker, isn’t it?
I believe I’ll try for that one over there,” waving at a distant flag. “You
don’t mind the stroll, do you?”

“Well what’s it a map of?” Reef
squinting at the scorecard, which he had innocently volunteered to keep, but
had lost all sense of how to fill in, three, or possibly that was six, holes
ago.

“Purportedly? the ‘Belgian Congo,
’ ”
Ratty observing his ball slicing away
toward quite another green from the one he’d chosen. “But it’s in code, it’s
really the Balkan Peninsula, you see, we’ve learned the transform that far at
least—one references this dossier of twodimensional mapshapes, which are
invariant, and wordlessly familiar as a human face. They are also common in
dreams, as you may have noticed.”

   
“So
. . .
given a shape broader in the north,
tapering to the south . . .”

   
“Right.”

   
“It
could be Bosnia,” said Cyprian.

   
“South
Texas,” said Reef.

“Then beyond the simple geography,
there’s the quite intolerable tyranny over people to whom the land really
belongs, land which, generation after generation, has been absorbing their
labor, accepting the corpses this labor produces, along with obscene profits,
which it is left to other and usually whiter men to gather.”

   
“Austrians,”
Cyprian said.

 
“Most likely. The rail lines come into it as well, it’s all
like reading ancient Tibetan or something
. .
. .
”

Later in the
evening
, owls known here
as “hooting cats” went calling up and down the little valley. Toward midnight,
the waterfall grew louder. Windows one by one went dark all over YzlesBains. In
Coombs De Bottle’s rooms the air grew opaque with tobacco smoke.

Coombs had known since quite early on
the job that his days with the War Office were numbered and few. The moment he
became aware of the statistics on selfinflicted Anarchist bomb casualties, and
began to contemplate an

effort to reach out to the community of bombers and instruct
them in BombBuilding Safety, a certain conflict of interest became obvious to
everyone at the War Office lab except for Coombs himself.

“But
these are British Anarchists,” he tried to argue, “not as if they were Italian,
or Spanish, is it.”

“Clever
appeal to British racialism,” Coombs said now, “but it didn’t work, that’s how
determined they were to sack me. “

If
this was a map, it was like none Cyprian had ever seen. Instead of placenames
there were hundreds of what looked like short messages. Everything reproduced
in just one color, violet, but crosshatched differently for different areas.
Small pictures, almost newspapercartoon drawings, of intricate situations
Cyprian felt it was important to understand but couldn’t. There were no
landmarks or roads he knew, either.

Coombs
De Bottle turned up the lamp and held the map at a different angle to the
light. “You’ll note a bold horizontal line, along which certain disagreeable
events, attributed to ‘Germany,’ are scheduled to occur, unless someone can
prevent them. And here, you see these short darkened segments—”

   
“Land
mines,” said Reef.

   
“Probably.
Good. How could you tell?”

“All
these little lopsided circles,” Reef gesturing with his cigar ash. “Like what
the artillery boys call their ‘ellipse of uncertainty.’ Might be like that each
one of these is showing direction and range on what damage they expect.”

   
“That’s
why we think it may refer to poison gas.”

   
Reef
whistled. “So these’d likely be pointing downwind.”

   
“Where
did this map come from?” asked Yashmeen.

“Ultimately, from Renfrew,” said
Ratty, “by way of another former student, who’d received it from another, and
so on. One more of these transnational plexuses—by now Renfrew’s web
extends around the planet, and other planets as well, shouldn’t wonder.”