Out on Blue Six (11 page)

“You can’t be.”

“Oh, yes, I can be.”

“You’re not.”

“Of course I’m not. But I was. Are you surprised?”

“I don’t know what to think down here anymore. I might scream, though.”

“Please don’t.”

“You did look very familiar.”

“That’s because I am. But you wanted to know who I am. Well, if I tell you the story of the ex-Elector and the King of Nebraska, maybe you’ll have less difficulty in believing that I is what I am.” The King of Nebraska stood up and took himself on a circuitous lecture walk of his exhibits. “Have you any idea what they do to ex-Electors?” He picked up the death mask and placed it on the gramophone turntable. “In fact, have you any idea just what it takes to be an Elector?” The mask revolved slowly, a kaleidoscope of expressions. “It’s not all riding about blessing shrines and opening arcologies and dedicating resort complexes and exhorting factory workers. As Elector, you are, I was, the point of equilibrium between the collective corporations of the Seven Servants, the Ministry of Pain, and the Polytheon. By the way, do you know what ‘equilibrium’ means? It comes from two old words, ‘equi,’ meaning equal amounts, and ‘librium,’ which is the name of a tranquilizer. So you’ve got some idea of what it’s like to be the Elector. God, State, Industry. That’s a lot for a zook from Ton SurTon who is dancing his buns off in the Purple Beret one night and the next resting those same exquisite chunks of his anatomy on the Salamander Throne receiving the lauds of city, corporation, and computer.” He slipped a marq into the laughing sailor. The glass case shuddered and the malevolent matelot clashed wooden teeth and rolled about, cramped with mechanical guffaws. “Experience. That’s the key. Responsibility without experience is as much fun as a chocolate bedpan. Each Elector leaves behind him the memories of his term of office recorded on a biochip.” He removed the hair from behind his left ear and tapped with a fingernail. There was a clink. “I got one, too. In goes the biochip and voilà! You’re forty-three ex-Electors. Quite a party to be throwing inside your own head. And useful, too. I’ve had a great time with these folks. But what they don’t tell you, and what none of your predecessors knows”—he slapped the roaring automaton and it fell silent, mouth open—“is that in order to get you as Visible Symbol of the Compassionate Society onto one admittedly minute biochip, they have to wipe you clean as a toilet bowl, sister, sans memories, sans consciousness, sans self, sans everything.” He slipped a hand up the ballroom dancer’s skirt, ran his fingers over her plastic backside. “Wiped clean and born again, a new soul without the slightest memory of what you have been before. Found this out quite by accident a couple of years before my term was due—I somehow got access to a restricted Ministry of Pain file. Passing strange, I thought, something restricted from even the wonderful gallant Elector? So I hired a Scorpio punk to pick the file, and when I found what was inside, I started planning my escape. I began the construction of Victorialand—God bless her and all who sail upon her—my little nest egg, my hedge against the great inevitable. So, maybe it wasn’t what an Elector should be doing, but have you any idea how many Electors of Yu would be classified as Socially Disfunctional had they not ascended to the Salamander Throne? Not counting myself, there have been at least three Genuine Bedouine PainCriminals nominated to Electordom since the whole burlesque began four hundred and fifty years back.” Leaving the plastic ballerina’s panties round her ankles, the King of Nebraska crossed to the aquarium, picked out a fish, and popped it into his mouth.

“Don’t bother trying to shock me,” said Courtney Hall. “They’re just carrots. I looked.”

“Ten points for observation. You’ll go a long way down here, daughter.”

“So, if you slipped off the Salamander Throne before you made your recording—”

“Biogram,” said the King of Nebraska, snapping plastic dentures like castanets.

“Whatever, that means that whoever is Elector now—”

“Hasn’t the slightest clue of what he or she or it is meant to do.” Jonathon Ammonier stamped his heels in a flamenco spin. “Regular little bastard, amn’t I?” He held out a pair of dentures in classic mock-Shakespearean style. “To biogram or not to biogram; that is the question. Whether it is better to suffer the slings and arrows of personality erasure and become a drooling cretin, or beat it to one’s own private underground kingdom, leaving your successor flat on his ass on the Salamander Throne. Well, it should be an education for him … Or her. Or it.”

“So, that’s why Victorialand. But why Nebraska?”

“Why not?” The King stood tall behind the suit of diminutive samurai armor, hand on metal shoulder in a gesture of fraternal solidarity. “Ah, Nebraska, Nebraska, mythical kingdom of the plains: gone like sunken Lyonesse, vanished like the dew of Taprobane, swallowed by the sands like Timbuktu or the Ethiopic Empire of Prester John. It is no more. Mourn poor Nebraska, your flat fields of wheat, yellow wheat, while beneath the soil grow your crops of missiles. You know what missiles are? Nebraska knew but it is no more. It’s a good name to be king of.” He minced across the Persian carpet to offer a hand to Courtney Hall. Courtney Hall could no longer resist his fine madness. Jonathon Ammonier, King of Nebraska, was a king truly and really, possessed of that mystical energy of command that is all the robe, crown, scepter, throne, and kingdom a true king requires.

She shook the spell away from her head like insects.

“Why did you stick me in a white sleep tank for three days?”

The King looked up from kissing her hand for the second time in her life and grinned. Courtney Hall noticed his gums were bleeding.

“My dear woman, you were cut up like a radish salad when my Striped Knights brought you in.”

“Don’t you think it was a pretty high-handed thing to do without my consent?” The idea of her having been vulnerable, nude,
naked
, before him made her cringe.

“Possibly,” said the King. “And then again, possibly not.” Dapper hands butterflied, a razzle of diamond knuckles. Between His Majesty’s fingers, a small plastic vial with some … thing within. Some … thing black and white and silver, impossibly thin, invisible when its writhing turned it side on to Courtney Hall’s eye.

She knew the question was obvious, but she had to ask it nonetheless: “What is it?”

“Unh unh. Wrong question, radish salad. Should be, ‘Where was it?’ Answer is, in your left wrist. Sweetmeat.”

Courtney Hall experienced nausea for the second time that day.

“Now you can ask, ‘What is it?’ Answer: Implanted Personal Monitoring Device. Or
tag
. Clever little thing, when all’s said and done.” He shook the vial, and the black and silver two-dimensional thing squirmed amoebically. “Okay, let’s see if you can work out the next question all on your lonesome.”

She could. “Why?”

“Very good. But I suppose it wasn’t so hard. Because the Compassionate Society (of which I was the erstwhile First Citizen and nigh-omnipotent symbol of authority, may I add) is not so foolish as to put all its trust into its cuddly little famuluses, when Citizen Average might, does, madam, wake up one morning saying, ‘Ho, hum, and lah-de-dah, but I do declare that I just feel like leaving little cubby bear or little conjuh-bangle hanging up in the wardrobe
ce jour la.
’ Oh, no. Benevolent incompetence is one thing, downright stupidity is another. Through the tags, the Ministry of Pain can pinpoint the exact location of any citizen at any time, can tell you what he’s doing, whether he’s making love or taking a shit or walking his poodle-kit along the level ninety-nine sun terrace. The whole famulus thing is really one colossal act of misdirection. Clever. Quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Been getting away with pointing at the sun while pissing on your shoes for four and a half centuries now.”

“You mean, everyone has one of these things?”

“Implanted just after birth. Amazing what you can find whilst scampering through the municipal dataweb.”

“Can I see it?” The King of Nebraska handed Courtney Hall the vial. She held it up to the light. The bioplastic Judas cringed away, barely alive, yet photophobic.

“And the Ministry of Pain can trace anyone, anywhere, through these tags?”

“That’s correct.” The King of Nebraska’s eyes twinkled villainously. “By Jove, I think she’s finally going to reach the conclusion I wanted her to reach.”

She was. “So you must have had your own tag removed in order to be able to abscond.”

“Abdicate. Please. As you have so correctly surmised, there was no way the Ministry of Pain was going to let me slip underneath the Salamander Throne in possession of something as valuable and unique as my little interior cocktail party. Oh, no. So I was forced to make myself invisible. The King of the Host of the Air. I vanished from their computers, one blip in the pointillist sea of millions winked and went out. I am a nonperson, the gods cannot see me, I pray, and so I live here in my splendid solitude safe and warm and wined and unmolested.”

“And so you had to take my tag, too, because you couldn’t take the risk of being associated with anyone who could possibly have been traced by the Ministry of Pain.”

“At last! The Love Police are, by and large, a lazy caste of hellions, and cowards to boot, but I couldn’t take the chance that they might not someday succumb to a sudden fit of heroism and suddenly decide to clear every miscreant and malefactor out of the DeepUnder. So, I had to make you safe. Kill you, in effect. Join the dead, madam.”

Courtney Hall studied the floating smear of molecular circuitry.

“It makes me feel dirty inside, like shit in my veins. Is it still tracking me?”

“Oh, no, it’s quite safe now. Deprived of contact with a human bioenergetic field, it becomes inert and will eventually die. But if you want, I’ll gladly have it waste-disposaled for you.”

“Please.” She handed the plastic vial to the racoon chamberlain, who bowed, and departed. “I suppose I really should thank you.”

“I suppose you really should, too. But I am a king, and kings expect no thanks. That’s the way it is, alas. However, if you think you can still eat after that—dinner!” He clapped his hands, and out of a score or more floorceilingwall hatches poured a scurry of raccoons, some dressed in aprons, some in bow ties, some in chef’s hats.

“Cute, aren’t they? Pardon my little anthropomorphisms: it’s all too easy to think of them as little people, and of course they aren’t. My subjects.” Small hands moved tables, chairs, polished glasses, laid silverware, lit candles. “I found them down here when I began building Victorialand. Just another pack of urban raccoons, smarter than the average vermin, but vermin nonetheless. I have to remind myself of their humble origins sometimes. Hell, I have to remind
them
of their humble origins sometimes. But then I got this idea, you may call it crazy, you may call it the most damn arrogant thing you’ve ever heard, I decided to make them into a race of subjects. My thesis was that if biogram technology could make a zook with an IQ in the high nineties into the Elector of Great Yu, it could also boost dumb vermin into smart sentients. Be hold, the result. The process is automatic now: all cubs are socketed at birth, and a small biochip tank produces my custom implants. They’ll be here, as a people, long after I’m gone. I rather like the idea of that. It’s more immortality than most folk can aspire to. I suppose in a sense I’m their god. Either that or mad. Or both. I don’t much want to be either, but what can I do? Resign? It can be a wee bit awesome sometimes, and that’s not at all good for the royal ego.

“‘Tinka Tae,’ that’s their name for themselves. It was one of their Striped Knight wide patrols rescued you from that pack of cutesicles. I have to keep the boundaries of Victorialand fairly heavily policed; there’s worse than feral pets down there. Nothing so wild as a domesticated thing gone wild. When the folks up there get tired of them or their famulus tells them it’s time for a change, they dump them down the garbage or flush them down the crapper. Some manage to survive, somehow, a few reproduce—even though they’re bred to be sterile. You should see the hybrids. They’re competing with the raccoons for an ecological niche, and I think maybe I got to the Tinka Tae just in time. Jinkajou here, my chamberlain, has been with me from the very start, the first racoon I socketed. More than just chamberlain, I suppose—buddy, confessor, grand vizier, devoted servant, and humble worshiper. Nearest thing that raccoons have to philosopher.”

Watching the Tinka Tae serving the meal’s innumerable courses, Courtney Hall concluded uncharitably that her host was really no different from those surface pet-creators he so despised. Less cuddlesome, not so cute, smarter, more dextrous, but the Tinka Tae were no less the creation of Jonathon Ammonier than any kit-craft cutesicle was the invention of its owner. Raccoons have no need of philosophers. The anthropomorphising hand had revoked any simple dignity they had possessed as animals. Liqueurs were served. The King of Nebraska spun a platter on his horn gramophone, an ancient, ancient thing called “As Time Goes By.” Replete, muzzy with unfamiliar (and unpsychofiled) alcohol, Courtney Hall was once again drawn to the Louis XIV conversation piece. The King of Nebraska sat down beside her and rested a kingly hand on her thigh.

Courtney Hall shuddered. Trapped by the absolutism of monarchy. One good smack to the gob would take care of any overamorous ex-zook, but the raccoons? Those vegetable knives looked sharp.

“I have a little, eh, favor to ask of you.” The royal breath smelled of onions. Courtney Hall tried to will herself into the top left corner of the room where the weather satellite obscured her projected view of the couch. “A commission. A royal command. Something only you can do for me.”

Get it over with. Please, Yah. Let him get it over and done with.

“Madam Hall, I want you to paint my portrait. You are an artist. And this place, this Victorialand, is full of paintings and portraits, but there is not a single one of me, Jonathon the First, King of Nebraska.” From behind the conversation piece his long arm produced a drawing pad and pastels. The King struck a studied pose of affected regality. It lasted no more than five seconds before it was shattered into giggles.