Out on Blue Six (16 page)

“How much further?” Courtney Hall asked the King of Nebraska.

“Madam,” said the King of Nebraska, “if you paused for thought sometimes rather than letting your gob flap, you might see that that is a very stupid question. How do I know?”

Courtney Hall kept her gob sealed after that, and she did not tell the King about the red blotches on his skin, which she could not attribute wholly to the swirling flame-effect of the jolly-log heater. She did not sleep well that night. Her fear of twitching from her strict perpendicular position in one of the dull reflexes of sleep and rolling like a stupid log into the water kept her stiff as a winger’s fantasy all night, with the result that the next day, as they again followed the river, every muscle, sinew, and bone in Courtney Hall’s body howled protest.

The river stretched straight and undeviating before the explorers, its sheer geometrical perfection beckoning them on in the hope that farther on there might be some place where the straight curved. On that second day the King of Nebraska was visibly unwell. Every hour on the hour (as told by his ormolu pocket watch, which he wound every morning with religious diligence) he called a halt and sipped some lime cordial diluted with water from the river. On the seventh and penultimate march of the day, Courtney Hall drew Jinkajou aside and let the expedition, led by its King beating time with his gold-topped cane like a majorette, draw ahead of them some minutes.

“I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to go on. He looks awful.”

Jinkajou hissed, a peculiar racoon combination of menace and concern. “Not proper for loyal subject to speak thus of monarch, but His Majesty, Bless ’Im, pass blood when he piss.”

“He can’t not know that there is something seriously wrong with him. Someone’s got to tell him before he guesses what it is, and panics.”

The racoon folded its paws, sat back on its haunches, regarded Courtney Hall inscrutably. “Thou hast it right, madam. His Majesty, Bless ’Im, must be told.”

“So, who’s going to tell him?”

The racoon wrinkled its muzzle, a parody of a smile.

“His Majesty, Bless ’Im, correct; thou dost ask obvious questions. Please to recall, we are bound by our dilemma.”

“Well, thank you very much,” said Courtney Hall. “Thank you very much indeed.”

The camp that day was no longer the place of ease and stretching and warmth and comfort it had been the day before. A specter haunted it; two specters, the specter of the King’s sickness and the specter of Courtney Hall’s necessity. Three specters: the specter of Courtney Hall’s cowardice. She worried herself into insomnia analyzing opportunities, rehearsing excuses, waiting for the moment that came and came and came and always passed untouched because she was a coward.
The Compassionate Society has no need for courage
, she told herself,
I’m only acting according to my nature
. But the next morning she could not look at Jinkajou’s button eyes.

The halts that day were more frequent. Jonathon Ammonier could manage no more than half an hour before signaling with a wave of his silk kerchief for the askaris to slope arms and the porters to down burdens. With each halt a sound like the thunder of waters swelled until the air shuddered, as if the concrete culvert were the
vox humana
pipe of a planetary water organ. On the fifth march of the morning the Expedition to the End of the World came to the end of the river. Warriors, porters, interpreters, patiently treading surveillance walkers, chamberlain, artist, and King arrived abruptly on a mist-shrouded lip of concrete overlooking a cavern the dimensions of which verged on the ridiculous. To their left the water gathered itself for a leap and a yell into a sheer half kilometer of shining sky and fell in plumes of mist to break on jumbled rocks at the foot of the cliff. Through the curtain of spray the waterfall threw off, Courtney Hall caught glimpses of flashing, dashing silver darting across the floor of the cavern: their river, losing and finding itself beneath the shock of vegetation that carpeted the cavern floor. The King surveyed the new domain. There was a look of empires in his eyes, his proud, erect stance. Courtney Hall gladly excused herself that she could not shatter such a moment of personal glory with her whispers of mortality. She took pencils and paper from her folio and dashed down some impressions of the view from the falls. Forming a perspective grid with her fingers, she calculated with a certain shock that the silver glitter of water down there at the cataracts where the cave ended was twenty kilometers distant.

“A kingdom for a king!” shouted Jonathon Ammonier. The thunder of waters swept his words out into the abyss. “Look at it, just look at it! It might have been made for me; a pleasure garden for the undisputed monarch of the DeepUnder. Oh, the pomegranates; the pomegranates, the figs, the guavas—fresh from the tree!”

“But what is it?”

The King of Nebraska grimaced and snapped his fingers in vexation.

“An abandoned agrarium, a forgotten Disney World; does it matter? It’s forgotten, abandoned, therefore it’s mine. I claim this land for myself! Faithful bearers, luncheon! Set our table up here where we may dine and from this unexcelled preview contemplate this new addition to my domains. Chamberlain, your finest bottle of vintage! And if we have already drunk the finest vintage, then bring us the next-to-finest!”

They dined by the falls on red-bean-paste pancakes and a forty-year-old Moussec DuForge, and Courtney Hall made herself busy with questions (how was it made, what keeps the roof up, the lights shining) not because she had never really believed in the underground agrariums that fed the Compassionate Society (even though she had eaten her way through fourteen tons of those agrariums’ assorted legumes, pulses, grains, vegetables, and fruit), but because if she was asking questions, she could not be expected by Jinkajou and his racoons to tell the King about … you know. Jonathon Ammonier sipped his Moussec DuForge and answered her questions (underground firing of particle-beam weapons repossessed after the Break by the Compassionate Society, macroengineering techniques, hundred-meter, load-bearing members rooted in the upper mantle, thermo-electricity generated by heat differential along those load-bearing piers), and both could pretend that nothing was the matter, nothing at all. As they talked, the waters streamed past them and poured over the edge in a never ending cascade of lost time.

Five sips into the luncheon liqueurs (Courtney Hall discovered she had developed something of a taste for the King of Nebraska’s peach-and-bourbon) scouts returned to report the discovery of a winding house for a small funicular system. The design of the machinery was archaic, reported Bajinko, captain of the guard, but the railroad showed signs of recent use. Mindful of unexplained shapes in Shaft Twelve, Courtney Hall did not care very much to know that.

Once again the Expedition to the End of the World drew itself up. Porters and their stomping robots waited on the platform while the King took his chamberlain, his Striped Knights, his interpreters, and his artist on the first descent.

“All aboard, all aboard!” cried the King of Nebraska, standing tall and very smug at the control lever. “All aboard for Victorialand!” As the funicular was swallowed by the rock tunnel, Courtney Hall was seized by a sense of claustrophobic foreboding.

“Your Majesty,” she whispered, tugging at a royal sleeve. “Your Majesty, I have to tell you something.”

“Mmph?” said the King of Victorialand, transported by dreams of empire. “Yes, what is it, madam?”

“Nothing,” said Courtney Hall. Her tongue was sour with self-disgust. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

The funicular emerged into the light.

The mutiny came shortly after four-o’clock tea. Four-o’clock tea coincided with the interrogation of a native racoon the Striped Knight scouts had captured on wide patrol. The racoon squatted tremulously, nibbling at fragments of cheese biscuit the King from time to time tossed down from his folding camp table. Accustomed to the Tinka Tae, Courtney Hall had to remind herself that this beast was precisely that, a dumb beast, an animal.

“Much fear and trembling,” said the interpreter. Primal racoon was very much a visual language of body postures, facial expressions, and gestures. “Presence of species alien to his.”

“Ask him, does he mean humans?” commanded the King of Nebraska.

The funicular had shown signs of being used.

“He has identified the species with humans. However, and I must admit I cannot quite make out the inflection he is using, he seems to be implying species division within a single species, if I read his modifiers right.”

“Explain please.”

“As if a single species comprised two inner, distinct groups, hostile to each other.”

“Intraspecies hostility is an altogether alien concept to racoons. That might explain the language difficulty.” The King dabbed biscuit crumbs away from his lips with his handkerchief. When he took it from his lips, it was spotted with blood. “What is the matter with me?” he said tetchily.

“Does he mean that the humans in this biome are split into two mutually hostile camps?” asked Courtney Hall hastily, ashamedly.

The interpreter put the question.

“That seems to be the implication.”

The captured racoon jigged up and down impatiently and fell into a nervous cringe.

“Instinctive danger reflex. Repeated three times for emphasis. Danger, danger, danger.”

“What sort of danger? Ask him what sort of danger,” Courtney Hall pressed, but the captured animal succumbed to its thrice-emphasized fear and fled into the encircling trees. “I think we should go,” she suggested quietly.

“Nonsense!” crowed the King of Nebraska. He leaped to his feet, sending the folding table crashing over. “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! Out of the breast of danger we pluck this bright flower, honor! Honor is the treacle of kings. I can see this land sorely needs the wisdom and guidance of a divinely ordained monarch. Come!” He raised his gold-topped cane. “To me, my knights! Valiant riders of the cybernetic wave, surfers on the sea of sentience, come with me! Order up, order up, Chamberlain! Strike camp! Victorialand is dead and gone, but while her King lives, Victorialand lives, and all the fine art, good food, music, dance, and poetry that was Victorialand. The New Age, my friends, the New Age has come; a light in darkness shining and this benighted darkness will comprehend it not. Forward the Aesthetic Revolution! Come, come, come! Hurry along now chappies!” Porters scurried and hurried, warriors formed up into neat rows of confusion. The King of Nebraska inspected them through a pair of folding lorgnettes. Satisfied, he placed himself at the head of the column. “Strike up the band! Liberty Bells! Chop chop!” He clapped his hands at Courtney Hall, conspicuous by her absence of activity. “Chop chop!”

“No,” said Courtney Hall.

“No?” shrieked the King of Nebraska. “No no no no no?”

“No.” She was not alone in her defiance. Jinkajou the Chamberlain and the interpreter who had interviewed the captive racoon stood beside her. The porters froze in their tasks, tasting the sourness of free will caught between two opposing wills. “You’re sick, Jonathon. You’re not well, you’re not rational. You’re a sick man, Jonathon.”

“A sick man,
Your Majesty
.” Jonathon Ammonier’s voice was as shrill and stupid and petulant as a bird’s. “So. So. So. This is mutiny, madam! Mutiny! Faithless and perverse creatures! Obey your king!” The undecided Tinka Tae whined.

“Stop that, you bully,” said Courtney Hall. “You gave them free will, let them exercise it.”

The King of Nebraska spat at her. “Faithless and perverse creatures. All of you. Come, loyal friends, loyal servants. We shall go alone. Madam Hall does not want us to have any fun. Sick! Huh! Huh! Huh!” With a petulant toss of his head he marched his phalanx of Striped Knights into the dark forest.

“You are sick, you are sick! It’s true!” Courtney Hall called after him. “Radiation sickness! You’ve been poisoning yourself for years, you vain, stupid man!” The King of Nebraska’s childish voice was raised high in song so he could not hear Courtney Hall’s. A few of the porters abandoned their tasks and fled into the trees in pursuit of their rightful king. Those that remained went mechanistically about their labors. Animals have no need of sentience, even less of free will.

Disconsolately rocking back and forth, back and forth on a folding camp-chair, Courtney Hall filled the postmutiny hours with fantasizing. Not for the first time, and she was certain, not for the last, she fantasized she might wake soon and find herself in her apartment whole and clean and safe and regulated and maybe that little bit too tall and maybe that little bit too heavy, but she wouldn’t mind that, not at all, she’d agree to it readily if it meant her waking up in her floform bed and getting up for a shower and bowing three times to the Lares and Penates and emptying her mind to establish rapport with the Muse of Cartoonic Expression and saying to Benji Dog, purring and humming to himself on his famulus shelf, “What an extraordinary dream I’ve had!”

Damn, damn, damn him; stupid, stubborn man.

Why did she keep imagining she smelt smoke on the wind?

A bird shrieked and beat its way out of the green canopy of trees to flop across the concrete sky.

Damn him, damn him, damn him.

And something came crashing, smashing, rushing out of the greenness: a Striped Knight: Bajinko, captain of the royal guard, all assumed humanity swept away, reduced by animal fear and flight to an animal in a silly costume, a scrap of human affectation. A Tinka Tae no more, the terrified animal could not speak human language. The racoons moaned with excitement and dread: so great was the young interpreter’s agitation that his command of the human tongue kept slipping and sliding away into chitters of racoon primal.

“Woe, grief, folly! Warriors dead, heaps upon heaps upon heaps. Bolts spent, swords shattered, armor cracked. Feeling: blood, black, rage, pain, fury, fear, fire. Out of nowhere they came, out of everywhere: demons, ogres, mandrakes—leaping, whooping, jeering. Jeering, jeering … His Majesty, Bless ’Im, commanded them bow knee, bow head, make obeisance to rightful king. ‘You kneel, you bow, you make obeisance,’ say Demon-King, ‘to
me
.’ ‘Never!’ says His Majesty, Bless ’Im; then: blood, black rage, pain, fury, fear, fire! War, war, war! His Majesty, Bless ’Im, netted, taken. Brothers netted, taken, only this one is escaped to tell.”