Out on Blue Six (15 page)

“Presenting!” shouted the Scorpio, “our hero! The one, the only Kilimanjaro West!” More clapping hands. Cheering, laughter. And Kansas Byrne threw herself at him, dared him not to catch her, kissed him on the mouth. Kilimanjaro West could still taste her on his tongue as the van halted and hooted its way back through the slowly dispersing crowds and the cobbled streets of Wheldon.

T
HE EXPEDITION TO THE
End of the World assembled at eight o’clock Victorialand time at the foot of number 16 cooling tower. The cavernous industrial perspectives of the power plant reduced the explorers to lice crawling upon its concrete toes. From the perspective of the human members, the Expedition to the End of the World was a very proper expedition indeed. There were porters: a score of Tinka Tae bearing poles or goading high-stepping surveillance walkers with electronic prods. There were askaris: an honor guard of twenty Striped Knights armed with crossbows and short swords and armored in impact-plastic body shields. There were guides and interpreters: two bright young raccoons dressed in regal yellow and conversant in the dozen different known dialects of urban racoon. There was Jinkajou the Chamberlain, flexing his fingers into a pair of miniature leather driving gloves. There was Jonathon Ammonier the First King of Nebraska, to the last millimeter pioneer of brave new worlds in white silk suit, canary gloves, bandanna, spats, cane, and banana-leaf topee. And there was Courtney Hall, not quite as lumpy as she remembered herself in a one-piece khaki outfit and solar topee. Slung across her back was a leather folio containing all those things an official expedition artist might require; in her pockets, a handful of doubts. She could not rid herself of the previous night’s dream in which she went plummeting in a blazing hogshead over a kilometer-high waterfall of untreated sewage.

The expedition formed up. Ten warriors in the vanguard, Jonathon Ammonier and Courtney Hall in a small electric jitney liberated from Universal Power and Light and driven by Jinkajou, assorted bearers, porters, and then a rearguard of ten soldiers carrying crossbows. Domino-faces and soft crystal dreadlocks crammed every crawlway crevice and cranny in the foot of cooling tower 16: the Tinka Tae nation come to see off their King. That same King stood up in the small electric jitney and waved his handkerchief. Chattering, squeaking, clicking, ceased. The cooling tower sighed colossally to itself.

“I, your wise and wonderful King, your preserver and defender, your father and friend, am taking leave of you to embark on an expedition never before attempted by any living soul: a journey beyond the ends of the earth to the land beyond the city.” Jonathon Ammonier pointed with his cane out across the sterile industrial vistas. “There I will establish a new kingdom, a new Victorialand, the realm of Arcadia, where peace and happiness and freedom shall reign.”

Courtney Hall had heard this all before.

“I thank you for your loyal service: no king ever had finer subjects than you, more faithful, more dedicated, more trusting.”

She hoped he was not about to cry.

“Therefore, in return for your loyalty, I give you a great and kingly gift; I give you your freedom! You are your own people now.” In the tip of the king’s cane was a small transponder. He pressed it. Nothing happened. Nothing apparent.

In the invisible spirit world of information technology quite a lot was happening, and happening very quickly. It involved virus programs and replication links and ABTE system poisoning and program infection and program defection, molecular reengineering and amino-acid photophoresis. All this took, oh, let’s say, somewhere in the region of two, three hundred microseconds. And so every racoon clinging to every pipe and walkway and stanchion and mesh grid shook its head and was suddenly free from the urge to serve, serve, serve, and serve again the smartly dressed human before them.

Freedom granted in a couple of microseconds takes a lifetime to work out.

“And finally,” said the King of Nebraska, sweeping his cane in a great scything arc, “Good-bye, Victorialand!”

Again the transponder did its small wicked work. Piece by piece, bit by bit, corridor by corridor, the palace of the King of Nebraska switched itself off. The halls of holographic masterpieces flickered and popped like soap bubbles. Every illusion and trompe l’oeil and optical oddity wavered and dissolved into memories. The wave of decreation swept up Victorialand, and it was revealed for the box of deceptions it was until the last projector clicked off and Jonathon Ammonier’s creation was no more than a few tinsel scraps of furniture and lace scattered through the kilometer-high face of a Universal Power and Light reactor, little mouse-holes of art and comfort and the nostalgia of days of graceful living hidden away in the crevices between the great roaring machines.

“A curse on all bad art and holograms!” shrieked the King. “Wagons: roll!” The Expedition to the End of the World turned and marched away from the ruins of Victorialand.

The first stage of the journey was a leisurely morning’s drive through a forest of pulsing, sucking conduits, some wide enough to burp out a municipal passenger dirigible. The plastic sky was busy with scurrying balls of soft blue lightning. At about twelve o’clock it became noticeable that the plastic walls, floors, ceiling were ever so (ever so) subtly sloping to meet each other. By fourteen o’clock the tunnel had slimmed to half its former girth. Courtney Hall, sketching speedy impressions of the journey on a jumbo file-pad in fond-remembered fiberpen, could not rid her mind and her drawings of her impression that it was the expedition that was enlarging, step by step, and not the passage that was dwindling. By Victorialand nightfall the gallery was barely wide enough to admit the electric buggy.

By royal decree (His waved handkerchief) the expedition halted. Ahead the tunnel shrunk patiently to sub-molecular dimensions. A team of engineers opened a section of wall, and a sudden typhoon of hot, electric air threatened solar topees.

“
Pneumatique
tube,” shouted the King of Nebraska. “Closest we could get the thing to Victorialand without arousing the suspicions of the Great Yu Rapid Transit Authority dispatching department.”

Thing
? Courtney Hall was about to ask as a fast, white, horribly
loud
something blasted past, as if proof were needed that this was, indeed, a
pneumatique
tube. Her nervous system was still shedding sparks when five minutes later the
thing
(no other word could describe it quite so accurately) drew up by the hole in the tube wall and distended an orifice. If a Celestial could be assumed to have a penis, and if that penis could be assumed to be forty meters long, six high, made of brass and gold with a ribbed glass glans, then that was the best analogy to the
thing
.

“Electoral airbarge,” announced the King of Nebraska. “The command codes are another of those little things I forgot to surrender when I abdicated the Salamander Throne. Come, madam.” Under Jinkajou’s barked instructions the expedition was stripped down and loaded into the hovering golden phallus. “I’ve always wanted to do this. Oh, the number of times I’ve been tempted to go riding nonstop through all those dirty little commuter stations and leave every mouth a wide
O
of surprise and wonder, to have them whisper, ‘There he goes, there goes the Elector!’ Ah, madam, whatever happened to style?”

“Style is riding around in a forty-meter tin penis?”

The lurching surveillance walkers were being herded up the access ramp.

“But think of the symbolism!”

“Can’t have been too many women Electors.”

Within, the airbarge was an interior designer’s wet dream in brass, wood, and leather. Courtney Hall seated herself in one of the swiveling pilots’ chairs in the glass head of the golden penis. She spun round to take in the overstocked euphoriant bar, the naked female brass caryatids bearing electric flambeaux, the fake-fur-lined Jacuzzi, the small neon harmonium. She was rather taken by the tank of tropical fish that glopped softly as the airbarge rolled to the aircurrents in the
pneumatique
tube. “Oh, come on … Who designed this thing?”

“That’s real skin you’re sitting on, incidentally,” said the King of Nebraska. Courtney Hall felt immediately unclean. Jonathon Ammonier snapped his fingers in impatience. “Come on, come on, come on, come on. We’ve only one hundred and fifty seconds before the next scheduled
pneumatique
. So: stations please. Everybody ready?” Raccoons scampered about his feet. “Course set? Everybody strapped in? Right. Let’s be off.” Jinkajou slipped into the motorman’s chair and slid forward the brass power handle. The airbarge bucked and swayed alarmingly. Water slopped from the fish tank onto the Turkish carpets. Impellors whined as they were brought up to pressure. The great golden dork leaped forward. Acceleration punched Courtney Hall into her real-skin pilot chair. Tunnel lights leaped at her like predators. Wall buttresses smoothed into a blur. Great Yu Pneumatique Service was never like this. Great Yu Pneumatique Service never allowed you to see where you were going.

“I’m thinking I’m going to be sick.”

The King of Nebraska gallantly offered his banana-leaf topee.

On the first afternoon of the highly symbolic voyage beneath Yu, Courtney Hall began to wonder whether there had ever been an Elector nominated to the Salamander Throne who was over one hundred and fifty centimeters in height; for their one-hundred-and-eighty-six-centimeter guests constantly bumped their heads on light fittings, doorjambs, stairwells, ceilings, moldings, pipes, and conduits.

Dwarves and deviates
, thought Courtney Hall as she collected her twenty-eighth bruise on her exploration of the penis-craft. The Electoral airbarge was a self-contained mobile palace: receiving rooms, dining chambers, a small state office, a study and library with real books, a trivia room, a bowling alley (forgotten peccadillo of a forgotten Elector), a large, sealed power section that occupied the after section, and a bathroom/conservatory complete with waterfall, pool, and herbal dip-pond. Courtney Hall let out a whoop of delight. A true sign of civilization in the great machine machismo fetish-fantasia. Ten minutes later she was la-la-laing up to the neck in jasmine-and tangerine-scented water. She was learning to take what luxury the DeepUnder afforded without too many questions. One question, however, bounced relentlessly through her thoughts, a trivial but nigglesome question of that kind that, once seized upon, are not easily let go. Vehicle or vessel? Train or boat? What was this
thing
she was traveling aboard?

Train was more realistic. Boat was more romantic. Had there not been boats that traveled underwater, back before the Break? The
military
(an old word, unused, due for deletion from the popular lexicon) used them to hide the world burners (two more words civilization could well do without) from their enemies’ sight deep under the sea. Enclosed, secret ships—what had they been called?

Submarines
. Under the sea.

And a boat that sailed under the earth?

A
subterrene
.

Nice word. Now that deserved to be in the popular lexicon. And where, she asked the wicker cage of clockwork cardinals, is this subterrene going?

The End of the Line. A place of almost the same mythic vitality as the Beyond. Gangling yulp girls giggling on the
pneumatique,
riding out with their friends purely for the thrill of riding: dare you, dare you, dare you ride all the way to the end of the line, dare you, dare you, dare you not to get off at your stop, just sit on and on and on and let the train take you all the way to the end of the line.

But gangly, giggling yulp girls always got off at the right stop.

Does time inevitably turn all our dreams into realities and realities into dreams?

The walls, decorated with live bamboo, hummed slightly, the sole clue that this entire improbable device was hurtling through the municipal
pneumatique
tunnels at one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on a genie-carpet of magnetic levitation.

Courtney Hall spent most of the morning of the second day in the glass observation head losing herself in the fascination of monotony. Half hypnotized by the strobing tunnel lights, she moved unconsciously to the hip-sway of the subterrene’s lurchings and sudden veerings as the course computer sent it down another tube, into a new tunnel, avoiding scheduled services in the empty spaces between passing trains. Kilometer after kilometer after kilometer: all tunnels are one tunnel, all tubes one tube, and a hole within a hole through a hole is not three holes but one hole.

Early on the third morning of the subterrene journey, Courtney Hall was woken in her guest suite (ostentatiously decorated in red Morocco leather) by an absence of something. She was not quite certain what it was
that
was gone, but something was gone. All was quiet. And now she knew what was gone. The gentle universal vibration of the linear impellors: gone. The engines were shut down. Four-fourteen Victorialand time (and what was Victorialand but another gone thing; all that remained of Victorialand was its time): the Electoral airbarge had, at last, found its way through the Great Yu Pneumatique Service network to the End of the Line.

The King of Nebraska and his artist took an early breakfast of grapefruit and prunes in the observation glans, which lay pressed against a hymen of dry rock where the tunnelers had abandoned their tunneling. A team of Tinka Tae engineers were at work outside the hull burning another hole in the tunnel wall. The King of Nebraska sipped hibiscus tea; impeccable, immaculate, as only the man who knows himself King can be. Courtney Hall noticed that the royal gums were bleeding a little.

“Are you all right?” she asked carefully.

“Pink as a petal, puce as a plum, yellow as a Texas rose, madam.”

“There’s a hair on your jacket,” Courtney Hall observed.

The King fastidiously removed it. There were several hairs on his lapels and collar.

After breakfast the Expedition to the End of the World marshaled up and marched down the ramp through the hole in the wall into the unknown, armed guards to fore and rear. For three hours it picked an arduous path through a cramped warren of communication conduits alive with the laser-blue spirits of telecommunication. The sound of dashing water drew them onward, dashing, plashing water always a frustrating bulkhead away. Bent treble in the confined crawlways, Courtney Hall was a purgatory of cramp. Her calf muscles were stiff balks of timber by the time the expedition, quite unexpectedly, squeezed itself through a wall iris out onto the sloping concrete bank of a subterranean river. Thereafter her discomfort was considerably eased, and for the remainder of the arbitrary day the expedition proceeded downstream by the King of Nebraska’s royal decree that all rivers flowed outward. Their path lit by softly glowing panels in the vaulted ceiling, they marched under the timefree sky until dog-tiredness demanded a halt. Courtney Hall stretched tight muscles and rubbed some of Jinkajou’s herbal healing ointment onto blisters in the warm synthetic security of a jolly-log electric campfire. Tinka Tae bearers unloaded their walkers and tofu steaks were grilled on the radiant plate while Jinkajou selected a Bacchanale & Dionysius ’28 from the mahogany cellarette.