He shut his eyes and poised his pen, nib down, over the napkin.
His first blind stab missed all five of the names.
His second hit one.
Karakuchon.
However you pronounced that.
A seat was booked on the first available flight to Karakuchon, two days hence.
Two days to kill.
Stoneham had no great desire to see more of his surroundings than he had already seen, but it was that or fester in the hotel. Besides, walking would be a useful preliminary. A way of gradually easing himself back into the rhythm of travel. A way of getting back up to Speed.
Prihody Mishkarov was by no stretch of the imagination a beautiful or remarkable city. It had a couple of museums, dusty and stultifying; a couple of parks that were nearly scenic; a river, broad and sullen and slow; a red-light district where the great majority of clients were, predictably, soldiers on furlough. Stoneham wandered, using a tourist map purchased from a dingy rabbit-hole of a bookshop. It was either early spring here or late autumn—he could not make up his mind which. Bare trees, but not too cold. Newspaper headlines boasted in two-inch capitals of famous victories, acts of phenomenal heroism, “our boys” bravely defending freedom and democracy. Wherever the war was taking place, it was many thousands of miles from here, safely remote. There was no sense that the city, the motherland, was under any immediate threat. Stoneham imagined some fly-ridden foreign hellhole, young men dying half a world away from their families, from all they knew. He felt an empathy. The travel agent had assured him that Karakuchon (emphasis on the penultimate syllable) was nowhere near the fighting. Stoneham would not have been concerned if it was. He had chosen to go there, therefore he would go there.
The two days passed, and on the evening before he was due to leave Stoneham drifted towards the red-light district, pulled, impelled. Sometimes, in a new place, he met a woman and there would be a short-lived, intense affair. Sometimes that woman was a Fogg too, and there would be a greater-than-usual sense of connection in their passion. The vectors of two professional voyagers colliding, fusing. A feeling of mutual, coterminous urgency. Then separation, suddenly businesslike once more. Back to the quest for Speed. Just as often he met no one, no woman, and he did not care. But very occasionally he met no one and the imperative of sex arose anyway and became overriding. So he would take advantage of the traveller’s privilege—anonymity. Sleep with a whore. Nobody knew who you were. Move on.
Cooing and catcalls. Perfume and pheromones in the mazy alleyways. An almost limitless array of possibility. Like some carnal delicatessen, every kind of treat you could think of available. The high-minded Passepartout refused to relay many of the offers made to Stoneham, and those it did it translated obliquely, sometimes impenetrably:
>>The waguing of some strict control [poss. equestrian].<<
>>From the backyard and/or via the outhouse.<<
>>Use of immobilisation.<<
>>Severe scolding [as pf children].<<
He strolled, unhurried, whetting his appetite, letting anticipation mount. Finally he made his selection. She was not bad-looking. Tall. A broad mouth. Slim-limbed bordering on bony. In a bedroom that reeked of joss-sticks and sweat he found home, briefly, between her legs. She made all the right noises, that Esperanto of sighs and groans. The bed joined in, creaking, Morse-coding the wall with its headboard. Afterwards, all was still. Prihody Mishkarov was gone and there was only this room, the sounds in it, the susurration of stirred bedcovers, the slowing of heartbeats. Stoneham thought of Joanna. The woman lying beside him, the woman pretending she was not eager for him to leave—he realised now how like his dead wife she looked. Joanna was not so worn, though, not so grainy-skinned. At least, not the way he remembered her.
Feeling glutted and glum, Stoneham got out of bed, dressed, left.
He was reaching the edge of the red-light district, where sin petered out and respectability reasserted itself. All at once a drunken soldier lurched into his path. Stoneham tried to skirt around him, but the soldier, possibly on purpose, veered towards him. Bumped shoulders with him. Took umbrage. A torrent of threats and obscenities spilled from his mouth, his aggressive gestures obviating the need for the Passepartout. Stoneham held up his hands, backed away. Used every piece of body language that said I don’t want trouble. But that was precisely what the soldier was determined to give him. He swagger-swayed after Stoneham, still berating him, cheeks turning puce. Honour would not be settled until blows had been struck.
Then deliverance.
A slim young prostitute interposed herself between Stoneham and the soldier. She took the latter’s hand. He looked as if he might hit her but then had second thoughts. The prostitute chucked his chin and murmured something, and a big greasy smile lit up the soldier’s face. He nodded. Stoneham had been forgotten about. The prostitute pointed to a doorway and the soldier obediently headed for it.
Before she followed him, she turned to look at Stoneham.
Her.
It was her.
The girl in the dream.
(If it had been a dream.)
Petite and dark-haired. Not quite elfin, but getting there. Nineteen? Twenty? Slender legs, calf-length suede boots. A skimpy elasticated skirt. Breast-expressing sweater.
The outfit was not the same. (What had she been wearing in the dream? Not this, at any rate.) The face and body were definitely her.
And her expression: disapproval. Or perhaps disappointment. A warning of some kind. Be more cautious.
Then she turned again and made for the doorway.
Stoneham went after her, not knowing why, knowing only because.
“Hey!”
He fumbled for his Passepartout. Wrenched it from his pocket. Hit the power switch.
“Hey, excuse me, hey.”
The girl kept going.
He pressed TRANSLATE. “I’m sorry, excuse me, but who are you?”
The Passepartout dutifully relayed the question, foreign syllables spilling from its speaker. But the girl, apparently unaware that she was being addressed, ducked through the doorway. The door slammed behind her. Stoneham was left on the street, Passepartout in hand, gazing dumbly at the closed entrance.
It had been her.
No, it had not been her.
It had simply been someone who looked like her.
A mistake. A random, insignificant coincidence.
Perplexed, Stoneham wavered for a moment, then stowed away his Passepartout, rolled his shoulders and continued back to his hotel.
The aeroplane bumped aloft, striving for altitude, propellers churning. For a moment its tail plunged. A sickening belly-swoop. They were not going to make it. Then the pilot had control again. A far cry from the sleek, silk-smooth jet-liner Stoneham had last travelled in. In that aircraft, take-off had been all but imperceptible—a slight tilting of the contents of his cocktail glass. This plane jumped and jolted as it climbed, as though titanic hands were paddling it upwards. A reek of engine oil permeated the cabin. The seats had virtually no cushioning. The airframe bolts rattled.
That was how it was when you Slowed: you descended several notches in comfort and safety. Stoneham remembered how crestfallen he had been, the first time. A small mistake, an error of planning, a missed connection—back down the levels he had slid. You never forget the first one, his Fogg Society counsellor, McWilliam, had told him. Some people never recover from it. But you just have to get back up on that horse. Or donkey, as it will have become. Get back up on it and start afresh. McWilliam spoke from bitter experience. He himself had Slowed a disheartening number of times. That was why he had given up, become a counsellor rather than a participant. Those who can, do. Those who cannot, advise.
The plane levelled out, bound for Karakuchon. Prihody Mishkarov was behind Stoneham now. He looked out of the window, which was already misting over with condensation. The city, all muddle and capillary streets, lay far below. Tapering into suburbs—red roofs, squares of garden, pocke
ts of industrial estate.
You dream of a girl: you see that girl, or one very like her.
Chance. Synchronicity. These things happen.
You’re a Fogg. You do what Foggs do. You move on.
Karakuchon. City of sand, city of glass. Literally a beach resort: spread out across a mile-wide oceanside strand. The buildings themselves made entirely of glass, extruded from the stuff on which they were founded. Indoor privacy achieved by means of blinds and screens. At high noon, a city of migraine dazzle. Sunglasses obligatory.
Every street was raw sand, sloping down towards the sea, so that the shore seemed just a broader thoroughfare, one which the tide regularly inundated. Ferried there in a dune-buggy taxi, Stoneham went promenading. It was his second evening in the city. The travel brochure said that sunset promenading was a tradition in Karakuchon. As the waves withdrew, people came out in their evening-wear. White cotton wafting, gauzy mists of chiffon, linen. Drafting sandal-furrows in the newly dried sand, they strolled. There was greeting and laughter, and a certain amount of speculative gaze-catching. Popular with singles, the travel brochure said. For which read: meat market.
Stoneham felt comfortable here. After Prihody Mishkarov anywhere was an improvement, but Karakuchon had a good vibe to it, an atmosphere of genuinely relaxed elegance. He had chosen well. Already, though, he was thinking about his next destination. He could not help it. After seven years as a Fogg, seven years in transit, it had become instinct: never settle, keep going, where to now?
The sinking sun turned the buildings to amber, then ruby, then amethyst. Stoneham directed his footsteps towards one of the outdoor restaurants along the waterfront. Glass tables, glass chairs, glass cutlery, glass glasses. The maître d’ seated him. A waitress came over with a menu printed on a sheet of clear acetate.
He ordered something to drink, a local aperitif, then set to perusing the menu with his Passepartout:
>>??? [unrecognised-type of fish?]<<
>>??? [unrecognised-type of fish?]<<
>>??? [unrecognised-type of fish or poss. cheese]<<
Not much help. He took pot luck. The dish that eventually arrived was a type of fish, poached, with vegetables. Quite tasty.
The restaurant filled up. Stoneham set to people-watching, the solo traveller’s habitual mealtime hobby. Someone in the far corner rose, paid the bill, made to leave. He eyed the person idly. Then his interest amplified. Jesus! It couldn’t be. The outfit was different, more demure, suitably Karakuchonian, but …
The girl from the red-light district in Prihody Mishkarov. The girl from the dream.
Or if not her, her identical twin.
He felt a moment of hilarious absurdity. This was too much. Someone somewhere was playing a practical joke on him. Was it really …?
He got up, jarring the table with his thighs. The girl was exiting the restaurant, setting off along the shoreline. Passepartout in hand, Stoneham went after her. Voices behind him, calling. He ignored them. He had to get to her. He had to ask her who she was and if she remembered him from two nights ago. He had to find out if she was the same girl. It was more than just the need to satisfy his curiosity. He was convinced she was important somehow, whoever she was. Because of the dream (the memory?). Because he had encountered her twice. She had a purpose relevant to him.
He had not gone more than five paces from the restaurant when a hand clamped around his upper arm. The maître d’. Polite but firm. No translation of his words necessary. A small matter of the bill, sir. Payment.
“I need to talk to her.” Stoneham gesticulated at the girl, urgent.
The maître d’ comprehended but at the same time failed to understand. Yes, sir. Quite. But the bill was a more pressing matter.
Stoneham tried to wrest his arm from the man’s grasp. The maître d’ would not let go.
The girl, still walking away, glanced over her shoulder to see what all the commotion was. Stoneham implored her with his eyes to halt, give him time to sort things out with the maître d’ so that he could then come and speak to her. No good. She turned her face forwards again and carried on.
By the time the bill had been settled, the girl was long gone. Stoneham spent an hour combing the sandy streets for her, in vain. He spent the whole of the next day doing the same. The compulsion dwindled as the day wore fruitlessly on. What was he up to? What was this thing he had about her?
As she had turned her head last night, after her glance back, he thought he had glimpsed a look in her eyes—the same look that had been there after she saved him from the drunken soldier in Prihody Mishkarov. But perhaps he had imagined it. Both times. Perhaps she was not even the same girl. Perhaps her features were typical of this level. Perhaps there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of girls here who looked like her.
Was he going mad?
A stout-bodied jumbo jet lifted off from an airport a few miles inland from Karakuchon. Classier and better-constructed than the propeller-driven rattletrap in which Stoneham had arrived a week earlier, it eased itself free from the runway, rumbling high. Soon there was only sea below, unending wave-scarred blue.
Goodbye, Karakuchon. Hello, Marn Werev.
Marn Werev: reminiscent of a Belgian city. Flat, planned, orderly, gleaming, greened.
From there, to Hüra. A desert oasis. High pink walls, mosaic-lined swimming pools, fanning palm trees, frenetic medina nightlife.
After that, austere Obgrada. Plains of milky snow all around. Regal avenues, lofty apartment blocks, a populace sturdily resistant to the subzero temperatures and resolutely defiant of boredom.
Then a cruise on a luxury liner, the Princess Angel, equator-bound, steaming from north to south, from cold to warmth. Stoneham could feel it within him now, like a plot unfolding, a doubt becoming a certainty.
Speed.
If you were doing well, you graduated through the levels without being fully conscious of doing so. An imperceptible shifting-up of gears. Only when you reached your next destination did you realise that the place you had come to was not in quite the same world as the place you had left behind. Something had changed, something fundamentally indefinable and indefinably fundamental. Somehow you knew—though you could not put your finger on how, exactly—that where you were was universally better than where you had been.
And with that sense of improvement, inextricably linked, was a sense of acceleration. The dockside gangplanks, the airport terminals, the customs checks came thicker and faster. You seemed to spend less time travelling; life seemed to become a state of continual arrival.
And you kept on moving, because that was what you did, what you had to do. That was how, as a Fogg, you shook off the past. You moved on.
So Stoneham was able, soon enough, with relative ease, to put the whole business with the girl behind him. Prihody Mishkarov and Karakuchon receded in his wake, becoming just two more stopovers, two more visa stamps in the pages of his umpteenth passport. He was pleased that he had not allowed the episode, peculiar as it was, to deflect him; he was proud to have begun gaining Speed again so rapidly.
Once more, Continuum beckoned. The ultimate goal of every Fogg. The final destination. The purpose. Nobody knew what it was. All that was known was that a few Foggs had disappeared into it. Had accumulated so much Speed, risen so high up the levels, that they vanished out of existence. An abstract concept. Perhaps an illusion. But this theoretical oblivion had been given a name nonetheless: Continuum.
Stoneham journeyed on.
Now he was aboard a train, heading for somewhere called Capa Douf.
Now he was on a bus, lumbering through lush green valleys towards X’sarné.
Now he was in a hired car, driving across a vast volcanic plain like a section of moonscape brought to earth. One thousand miles ahead: Fathomopolis.
Now a boat. Then a plane. Then a train again. Then another plane.
Time zones ceased to matter. Jet lag? Irrelevant. A nagging undertow of tiredness, that was all. Familiar and bearable. S
toneham had burned out his body’s circadian rhythm years ago. A few gruelling weeks and it was gone. Now he just went along with whatever hour of the day it happened to be where he was staying. Lived in the moment. Adapted.
Onwards.
On.
And then the girl again, and a grinding, shuddering halt.
The fire broke out in the laundry room, it was established later. What actually started it was never determined, at least not before Stoneham left Verradon. A faulty electrical contact in a tumble dryer? Or arson? Stoneham had his own theories.
Happily, no one died. The flames swept swiftly up through the Hotel Grant Roial, but at the first whiff of fumes a smoke detector was triggered and alarms sounded. The evacuation of the building was textbook. Everybody out in less than six minutes. On the street, faces illuminated by flickering orange light, the guests huddled in nightwear, slippers, hotel-monogrammed towels and bathrobes. One man had rushed outdoors nude. His blushes were partly spared by a jacket lent him by a night concierge, which he tied around his waist by its sleeves, like an apron.
Flames and smoke were churning out of the lower-storey windows when the firefighters arrived. They soon brought the blaze under control. Crowds had gathered in the roadway to watch. Water sizzled and hissed on charred brickwork, on blistered wood. Stoneham had had the presence of mind to grab his passport and his Passepartout before he left his room, and these were his only remaining material possessions. His room was one of those gutted by the fire. The hotel was saved, the damage limited, but Stoneham now had no clothes other than the pyjamas and dressing gown he was standing in; no cash; no ticket to his next destination, Rubàna Koss. All of those could be replaced, of course. He had his Passepartout. He had his life. Nevertheless …
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