Out on Blue Six (10 page)

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
d
ancing 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.
)

T
HEN AGAIN PERHAPS SHE
was dead. There were long periods of nothing that were more like her idea of death than anything else she had ever experienced. Then she realized that the very existence of experience meant that she could not be dead. Unless everything she had been taught in Religious Engineering about the Great Helix of Consciousness had been true after all.

And then she was nothing again.

And then she was something. More than something, somewhere, somewhen, somehow, somewhy. Awareness, sensation, location, time, and place.

Awareness: a gentle buoyancy, a floating without effort or exertion that made her painful pedaling of the sixteen-o’clock dream up the big gravity hill painful and unnecessary. A golden suffusion of illumination, as if she floated within a cylinder of her own light.

Sensation: all ranged in circles of ever decreasing diameter. On the rim of the largest circle, aches and hurts and torn flesh and pain. Closer, shadows and shapes and dark flat things crawling on the edge of her light. Closer still, tubes and wires and lines from her eyes and nose and ears and scalp and fingers and feet and thighs. Closest of all, the innermost circle, a gentle pressure from within; up nose, down throat, in belly, in lungs, in womb.

Location: more specific now she was centered within her circles: floating in a universe of warm, soothing jelly within and jelly without, back in the womb-boom-boom-doom boobidie-boom …

Which created time: now, the present, neither far future nor intimate past, now being the year 450 about two months into the autumn monsoon.

And place: wires, tubes, glowing jelly, naked, numb and floating …

Oh no no no no no!

A white sleep tank.

Warm, soothing jelly sucked the words out of her throat.

She wanted to shout and kick and beat her soft fists, but all the warm, soothing jelly would do was let her float. And wait. And live. And die. Again and again and again her consciousness switched on and off like a favorite piece of music. Until she came alive in a huge brass bed staring at the picture on the opposite wall. It was either a man’s face or a garden of noodles.

Then the brass hatch in the center of the floor opened and out hopped a racoon with a tray of breakfast.

“You eat. ’S good,” said the racoon. Clusters of biocircuitry spilled down its neck like surreal jewelry.

Soup. Cereal. Chocolate. And, “What are these things?”

“’S eggs.”

“Eggs? Like?”

“Reproductive cells.”

Courtney Hall (that was who she was!) did not have much of an appetite for breakfast after that. Waiter and tray therefore whisked promptly down the floor hatch, while out of an identical brass hatch high on the wall hopped another racoon so encrusted with biocircuitry that he seemed to be wearing dreadlocks.

“Up up about thee,” said the racoon. “Thou hast audience with King.”

“King of Raccoons?” asked Courtney Hall, no longer certain that she was not dead and passed into some Lewis Carrollesque afterworld.

“King of Nebraska,” said the venerable racoon.

“This is Nebraska?” asked Courtney Hall, finding the bathroom.

“This is Victorialand,” corrected the racoon. It clapped its tiny paws. “Chop chop.”

Her old clothes had been patched and repaired with such tiny, perfect stitches they suggested the delicate paws of tailor raccoons cross-legged in leaded windows. In the bath she replayed time past, the tunnels and the feral pets and her mysterious salvation. This was reality, even if an eccentric reality. As she dressed before the wall mirror, she examined herself for wounds and scars. Not a scab, not a stitch, only soft pink weals of well-healed flesh. How long did it take a body to heal in white sleep?

“Forty-three hours, madam,” said the racoon chamberlain. “But thou art fully healed and ready for thine audience with His Majesty, Bless ’Im. Please to accompany.” Still struggling with zippers and belts, Courtney Hall was chivvied through the human-sized brass doors into a long picture-lined hall. As the doors closed behind her, she glimpsed all the floor, ceiling, wall hatches open and an army of raccoons pour into the brass and silk boudoir.

The center of the hall was occupied by an induction track and a brace of powerchairs.

“Please to fasten belt,” said the racoon. A paw tightened on the thrust bar, and Courtney Hall was accelerated from rest to terrifying velocity in a period of time so brief she was still gasping as the powerchairs slammed to a halt. She found herself in a stretch of corridor so similar to the one from which she had departed that she indeed might never have left. In defiance of earth curvature the corridor reached for tens of kilometers in either direction.

An insect’s buzzing, a waft of air, and a third powerchair streaked out of nowhere and slammed to a halt beside her.

“Vincent van Gogh,” said the man who stepped off the chair. He nodded at the painting on the wall. It was of a haunted man with a red beard and a hat; all, save for the beard and the terrible eyes, painted in grays and blues. “One of my favorites. Can you imagine what he must have felt to have painted a thing like that?”

Young. Thin as a noodle. Dressed in macaw-bright satins and silks. Lace fluttering at throat and cuffs; gold and diamond knuckles gave direction to the directionless light in the corridor. Stringy mustache penciled above the upper lip. Bright boyish eyes. To Courtney Hall, this stranger looked like a zook a disastrous couple of years behind the fashions.

He bowed. “The King of Nebraska welcomes Courtney Hall to Victorialand.”

Courtney Hall was not certain what constituted proper etiquette for a King of Nebraska. The. King obviated her unease by taking her hand and kissing it.

“My my my.
Nona dolorosa?
Even down here?”

She blushed, snatched her hand away, and shook it into normality.

“Never mind.” The King waved a lacy hand at hers. “Graciousness is the prerogative of kings.
Vade mecum.
” And he stepped clean through Vincent van Gogh.

Courtney Hall was at the fine point where if one more bizarrity occurred she knew she would not be able to stop screaming. A kingly head came back through the wall for her.

“It’s all holographic. Covers up a large expanse of Universal Power and Light’s barbarous devices. Victorialand’s rooms do tend to be rather far apart. Like kilometers; I have to put them where I can, not where I want. Still, isn’t it much nicer looking at holographic van Gogh or Matisse or Hockney or Spencer than several cubic kilometers of heat exchanger, don’t you think? Come along, my good lady.” He grasped Courtney Hall by the wrist and pulled her through the wall.

The King of Nebraska’s receiving room was a celebration of anarchy, a hymn to junk-shop aesthetics. A baroque white enameled stove was fitted with curved chromium pipes. On a revolving dais a couple of pale-faced mannequins in archaic monkey-suit and ball-gown were embraced in a frozen waltz. Menaced by a holographic tornado, they were guy-roped to the ground for safety. There was a stuffed cockatrice with one genuine evil eye. There was a wall completely decorated in tessellated electric guitars. There was an untidy pyramid of empty paint tins. There was a death mask, there was a porcelain water closet with a demon’s face leering out of the bowl, there was an inflatable couch in the shape of a pair of carmine lips, there were one hundred and ninety sets of plastic dentures, there was a laughing sailor in a glass case, a shelf of pickled snakes, a brass ship’s wheel, a small meteorite labeled kryptonite, and a suit of diminutive samurai armor with a skull grinning from within. Noseflutes, slitgongs, bagpipes, and dulcimers, an aquarium with pieces of sculpted carrot in place of fish, a horn gramophone with a plastic Jack Russell terrier inclining a quizzical head toward it, a stuffed rhinoceros with a drink’s waiter in his broad back, a magician’s vanishing cabinet, a table that looked like a naked woman kneeling, a Persian rug, a weather satellite suspended from the ceiling, a laser harp, a set of tail fins off a Ford Thunderbird, and a baby’s arm holding an apple.

The King of Nebraska watched with evident pleasure as Courtney Hall examined each object in turn.

“It’s, ah, interesting.”

“I was hoping you’d say something like ‘incredible,’ or ‘fantastic.’ Ah, well. Sit yourself down and tell me what you love and what you loathe. You’re the first outsider ever to view my little macédoine of mirth, and your opinion will be valued. Come, talk to His Majesty.”

Courtney Hall steered herself away from the gaping vinyl lips and sat down on a Louis XIV conversation piece. Unlike every other Louis XIV conversation piece she had ever sat upon, she had the sensation that this one was no reproduction.

“Oh, come come come,” wheedled the King of Nebraska. “First rule of monarchic hospitality: Always trust the king in his own kingdom. So, tell me, what is the creator of Wee Wendy Waif, Nobody’s Child, doing down in the DeepUnder far away from the Sun of Social Compassion?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure it is. Do tell. Long stories are the meat and drink of kings.” He positioned himself beside Courtney Hall on the conversation piece, and the long long story bubbled out of her like an artesian spring brought to the surface by the comfortable pressure of human company. A long and companionable line of sedimenty empty chocolate cups was halfway to the door before the source was all bubbled dry. “So, this is Courtney Hall,” she concluded. “Now, who is the King of Nebraska?” As she had told her long long story, she had not been able to rid herself of a déjà-vuesque sense of having met, seen, known this man somewhere, somewhen, somehow before. The King laughed, a head-tossing, affected, whinnying sound.

“Who am I? I am the King of Nebraska, Absolute and Undisputed Monarch of Victorialand, known to my friends as Dexedrine Johnny the Jitt. You, however, may know me better by my former name and title: Jonathon Ammonier, Elector of Yu.”