Out on Blue Six (7 page)

The man called Kilimanjaro West clapped his hands.

The sound filled all of Neu Ulmsbad Square.

“Wonderful,” he said.

And now that they saw that what he said was true, the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers whose mornings had been broken open uncurled to look at this something from beyond the edge of their happily bounded lives. In the dying moments of the Happening, each knew themselves to have been touched by something quite precious and rare and extraordinary. Something that had been taken from them years and years before. Something that some of them had never known they could experience. But the moment was dying. The roman candles were collapsing. The last rockets spent their brief lives in the sky above the BergHaus. The hang gliders turned in the sky for a final pass, the music came to a ringing conclusion, and a voice announced, “This piece of Performance Art entitled ‘The Elector Passes’ has been brought to you by the members of the Raging Apostles, an intercaste multimedia alternative arts group comprising independent nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers. We thank you for your participations in this event, and Raging Apostles hopes that it has in some small way brightened your day.”

Trailing thanks and blessings, the trio of aircraft slid low over the pinnacles of DeminaBerg to come in for hop, skip, and jump landings on Rue de La Fontaine. The birds of paradise set down their silk banners, removed masks, bowed to the audience, who, to their surprise, found themselves applauding. And whistling. And cheering. Just as if they had never seen anything like it before. Which they hadn’t. Then a trog in a Food Corps coverall whose senses had been sharpened by years in the subterranean agrariums cried out, “Love Police!” and the intercaste multimedia company of nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers scattered like starlings. And so did the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers. And only one man was left in Neu Ulmsbad Square to watch the black and silver pantycars come tunneling out of the clouds.

“Is this part of it?” asked the man called Kilimanjaro West.

A bird-of-paradise woman paused in her flight to be astounded.

“Yah, you stupid or something? That’s the Love Police, you know?”

“The what?”

“Fug! You are stupid! Never heard of West One?”

And because, somehow, she could see that he indeed had not, she seized his arm and dragged him across Neu Ulmsbad Square to the waiting ’lectrovan and the forest of waving, beckoning arms in its open rear. A thrust sent the stranger sprawling all knees and elbows across the collected Raging Apostles. The bird-of-paradise woman thumped down on the seat beside him. Suddenly she could no longer think why she had brought him. There was a sharp smell of burnt-out fireworks in the crowded van.

“Come on, come on!” shrieked the driver. The pantycar was settling on its belly jets as the three aeronauts made good fastening their collapsed gliders to the roof rack and swung inside. “About fuggin’ time, too!” the driver screamed, gunning the engine and sending everyone over everyone else as he accelerated down Finneganstrasse.

“Hey, who you got there, Kansas?”

She did not want to say that she did not know, that she had, for an instant, no more, no less, been as compelled as if the eternal clouds had opened and the lasers of God beamed down upon her. “A recruit,” she said. “I thought we could use him.”

“You what?” the driver screamed again. “Fuggin’ Yah, Kansie, he could be anyone, anything, nuh? You want us all to get Social Counseling, eh? Everyone up in West One?”

“Yet, he did seem, at least to me, to be an unprogrammed element, a true locus of spontaneity,” said the bearded man beside the frenzied, sweating driver.

“Unprogrammed, spontaneity, fug, he’s dangerous, put him out.” The driver swerved the crammed ’lectrovan around a procession of Eleventh Day Redemptorists.

“Just because he’s a stranger doesn’t mean he’s dangerous,” said the bird-of-paradise woman. “What is the point of being an alternative to the Compassionate Society if we don’t hold alternative values? What I’m hearing is pure
nona dolorosa
hurt-me-not straight out of kindergarten.”

“There is a value in unprogrammed elements in a programmed world,” said the bearded man, attempting conciliation. “I’d say give him a try. We measure our own humanity by how we respond to the unprogrammed, the unpredictable.”

“And he damn near made the event,” said a large and odorous trog wedged against the door.

“Love Police damn near unmade it.” A man shook his hair free from a sweaty head-mask. “Joshua, I’ve said this before, it’ll bear saying again. I don’t go with these big, big theatrical happenings. Small-scale stuff; interactive microdrama, ultrarealism, that’s good. This sort of thing is too flash. It gets us noticed. It’ll get us disbanded.”

The bearded man smiled, shrugged. The bird-of-paradise woman who had rescued the man called Kilimanjaro West removed her mask also, and he saw that her face was the image of that other man who had criticized.

“I sometimes wonder just why you are a Raging Apostle, Brother dearest, if you won’t put yourself on the edge for your art. Play it safe, play it along the line; sometimes I wonder if you really want to change anything at all. Live dangerously, Kelso, live for the moment. I think you forgot that, somewhere back down the line.”

“Kansas, I’m telling you, you don’t know a thing, not a thing. Joshua, any more of these big happenings and I’m out. An ex-Raging Apostle.”

“Ex-Apostle, or ex-Raging?” asked a new voice.

“Deva, you just …”

“Well, Citizen Unprogrammed Element,” said the bearded man from the front bench seat, again the conciliator, “have you got a name?”

“My name is Kilimanjaro West,” he said, and something in the way he spoke that name made the crowded ’lectrovan fall electrically quiet. “Pleased to meet you all.”

“Wow,” said the woman who had rescued him.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the bearded man, first to break the awed silence. “Joshua Drumm, artistic director, manager, and father figure to this troupe of social urchins. May I introduce the Raging Apostles: Winston, who so nearly would have left you on the street”—the driver ducked his head and flicked mistrustful eyes in the rearview mirror—“my general factotum, our faithful provider and fixer. Thunderheart Two-Birds Flying”—a huge hairy thing bared white enamel—“vocal arrangements, stunts, and for the present, accommodation. Dr. M’kuba Mig-15”—an ectomorphic face, etched with blue tattoo lines, nodded a nimbus of luminous hair—“technical arrangements and special effects. Devadip Samdhavi”—a glitteringly dressed young man made a small bow—“costumes, design, choreography and dance consultant. V. S. Pyar”—a massive boulder of humanity, his sweat a palpable presence in the swaying van—“movement, acrobatics, physical training, and much-needed muscle. Kelso Byrne”—the arguing man nodded, curtly—“musical arrangements, original compositions, tapes, and lyrics, and unfortunate twin of Kansas,” and the girl who had, on a whim, a notion, an inspiration, pulled Kilimanjaro West away from his fatal fascination, grinned and blew a kiss across the van—“artist, conceptualize wonderfully talented and quite impossible to work with.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed at the man called Joshua Drumm. “Together we are the Raging Apostles. Welcome, Cizzen West. Winston my man! Yah speed us away with your best efforts! To the Big Tree!”

“Okay, Joshi,” said the driver, and the already hurtling ’lectrovan found a miraculous third speed somewhere in its shrieking motor and careened, swaying and slewing violently, down the rain-wet streets of Neu Ulmsbad.

S
HE WAS NOT ALONE
down here. She was certain of it. Luminous arrows spray-painted on dripping walls. Discarded bric-a-brac: noodle cartons, numbgum wrappers, articles of clothing, a newssheet (intellectual shock to find Wee Wendy Waif gazing up through twenty centimeters of filmy rainwater). Wall panels removed, fizzing, sparking contraptions jerry-rigged to the power lines. The occasional heap of human excrement, hard and stale. The occasional ringing, plashing footfall—transported who knew how far?—along the ringing tunnels and crawlways of Undertown.

She was not alone.

Sometimes the thought terrified her; cold, hostile hands reaching into the cozy little womb she had woven into the underpinnings of New Paris Community Mall. At other times the presence of others/brothers sharing her runways and conduits was almost welcome. The solitude at the bottom of Shaft Twelve was absolute and unbroken. She had drawn one hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs on her walls, smiling down like Botticelli angels. For company. They only deepened her sense of isolation. She had always been a solitary creature. The Compassionate Society had made her that way. But there was a world of difference between being solitary and being alone. Before there had always been the possibility of company: the Dario Sanduccis, the Marcus Fordes, and his four and twenty cushioncats. Down in Shaft Twelve there was only herself. And the dream.

Those blue-silver wings. That impossibly
romantic
white silk scarf flowing out behind. Up we go, up we go, up we go. Now that it was absolutely denied her, like heaven to the damned, the land above the clouds where the Great Spirits and the Celestials dwelled was painful in its purity. Its freedom mocked her. But not because it was unattainable. It mocked her because she had once touched it, felt it, held it, and had lost it again. That was the pain.

Strange, but in this incarnation of the dream, there was no wall of faces. No barrier to the Beyond. But what that Beyond was, she could no longer see. From the saddle of her high-flying bicycle/ornithopter, she could see the last dawnward towers of Great Yu. And beyond them, nothing.

The dream no longer comforted. But it was all she had, so she clung to it: the sixteen-o’clock dream.

And the others.

Like the dream, she could not be comfortable with them, but she could not be comfortable without them. At least they would be company. She would not face an indefinite future underground, alone. There would be the common bond of circumstance. Experiences would be shared, resources pooled, stratagems of survival tables, futures mapped out. That there was a future, a time to come reaching out ahead of her along the cableways and conduits and ducts until she found her own death there in the tunnels, was more than she could bear.

“I’m a yulp cartoonist,” she would convince the piles of romantic novels stolen on her furtive midnight forays to the surface. “I was born in the White Sisters of Koinonia Maternity Hostel, I was fostered by the Sigmarsenn family of Coober Peedie until, age seven, I was admitted to the Ladies of Celestial Succor Community Crèche, where I remained until at age fourteen the Ministry of Pain apprenticed me to Jovanian Yelkenko from whom I learned the cartoonic arts and took over his creation, Wee Wendy Waif. I lived in apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West, I worked producing Wee Wendy Waif for the Armitage-Weir Publishing House, and what I want to know is, what am I doing down here?”

Inevitably these arguments brought her back again to the question of whether or not contact with these others was desirable. Supine on her live-fur carpet (stolen in bulk from Thirteen Moons Furnishings on an after-hours raid through their floor service-hatch, she like some overwhelmed insect wrestling the huge roll of vat-grown fur down into her hole) she argued with herself. She argued this argument so many times that each pro, each con, had taken on an individual character and voice.

“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean, common experience?” This voice, straight-edged and gritty as a broken floor-tile, was Mr. Don’t-Be-Stupid-Girl. “The only common experience down here is you’re all criminals. PainCriminals. You know what you did to get yourself down here; Yah only knows what they had to do.”

“Be reasonable.” This was the voice called High-Pitched Reasonableness. “Everyone down here was a member of the Compassionate Society at some time. The rules aren’t easily forgotten.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” said Growly Accuser. “Who said the rules hold down here?”

“But you can’t be alone forever,” said Self-pitying Whiner. “Not: forever.”

“Better safe than dead,” said Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution.

Working her way one morning through the tangle of crawlways and ducts that led, eventually, to the air-conditioning plant under New Paris Community Mall, she came upon a workspace recently vacated by some lunch-or toilet-seeking environmental maintenance engineer. Magpie-minded, magpie-moraled, Courtney Hall fingered through his neglected toolcase until those fingers came to rest on the stubby metal barrel of a sonic impacter.

She had spied upon engineers using these devices. It was sign of how far she had strayed from the path of Social Compassion that she had devised ways in which one could be converted into a nasty little personal weapon. She slipped the impacter into the leather pouch she had just yesterday pickpocketed from Western Promise Novelties and Gifts and continued on her way to the surface and further petty crime.

That night she had a reply to the Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution. The Voice of Off-hand Tough-Nut Exuberance said, “Sure, I’ve got the impacter. What have I got to worry about?”

A sound.

Unidentifiable in the sinister acoustic darklands of Shaft Twelve. Just: a sound. A presence.

Courtney Hall took grip of the impacter and slid the output control up into the red. She had never used the tool even as a tool, much less a weapon, but the principle seemed simple. Point. Squeeze. What you pointed at exploded. From the hatchway she could survey all of Shaft Twelve. She held the impacter emission head against her chin, watching, listening. Water dripped from a pipe joint and fell, sparkling in the wan maintenance lights, down the center of the shaft to gather in a deep pool at the bottom.

“Hello?” Courtney Hall ventured. “Helloooo.”