Madame Ligeia ignores his tears and struggles to win control of the overheating globe. Now it is veering off Darktree and illustrating early memories in the existence of the metropolis. Here is the way Chaud-Mellé remembers its own birth: the foundation stones being planted at an angle by a drunken Scot; the duels between architects and the compromise which ensured every design was used simultaneously; the origin of a government addicted to intrigues; the erection of the first clock tower, by heretic locksmith Mortice d’Arthur; the establishment of vaudeville cottages and variety theatres patronised by ghosts and walking cadavers. And all this in reverse, so that youth grows more wrinkled than old age. Prior to the city are odder scenes, half-glimpsed.
Darktree observes a valley which should be empty, but is not quite. Beasts with tentacles flop in nettles on the edges of the screen. Madame Ligeia is clucking her tongue in dismay as these long lost secrets slide and bumble back into the present. Suddenly there are glaciers everywhere and rows of mammoths playing woolly counterpoint with massed trunks. The ice recedes; in its place is a wonderful city, quite unlike Chaud-Mellé, bright and clean, with buildings cut from enormous jewels. The seer rips a chart from the wall and drapes it over the crystal ball. Straining the muscles of her arms, which are far less powerful than her mind’s biceps, she succeeds in pulling out the plug.
“It is not permitted for you to know about Sitnalta, capital of the High Sessatrams. They lived before the last ice age, when their republic was raised from the seabed in a vast cataclysm. I refuse to reveal that they resembled scholastic umbrellas.”
“I’faith, madam! I would deem it rude to pry.”
The fortune teller nods in relief. “That is fortunate, because they were a damned race and their legacy continues to haunt this location. We are living directly over the caverns they excavated for experiments with time. Some say they were explorers who sailed the chronoflow all the way to its source: the singularity which existed at the start of the cosmos. Others think they were hairdressers.”
“I’ll venture no opinion on cunning parasols.”
Blue veins on her lofty forehead swelling and sinking with tides of gentle emotion, Madame Ligeia grips the footpad around the shoulders. “I am unable to help you. It’s best for you to depart. The crystal ball has been damaged by a spike of some kind and can’t be operated properly. You must search for the zoo on your own.”
With a final glance at the VTOL Hermes, Darktree takes his leave of the seer. She is composed, but next week she will feel a profound regret at his visitation. Tripping down the stairs, stepping on each black cat, he leaves the Café Worm amid another round of applause, trotting rapidly in another new direction, as if searching for a sixpence in a putrefying pudding. Balloons and ice collect above. While percolating his way along Multatuli Avenue, which has coffee beans embedded in the road instead of cobbles, he hears the crack of a distant catapult. A speck ascends at an alarming angle over the houses to the west; it appears to be heading for the roof but dips enough to avoid impact, colliding instead with a faint clang against one of the stalactites.
Darktree pulls on his nose as the figure hugs the icicle and slides down its girth, coming to rest right at the tip. He regards the dangling sculptor with a measure of sympathy. He would dearly like to assist him, but it is not his vocation. He must keep his promise to Conrad; there is no time to save every artist who volunteers to be a projectile. Besides, this is a generous stalactite; if the chap holds on long enough, it will lower him to the ground as it grows, perhaps within months. Onwards Darktree lopes, down Ocampo Terrace and across Borges Square to the Saki Steps, which are wittily trenchant with the viscera of another clock tower dissolution. Hopping all the way, the footpad gains a rare prospect at the top, a belvedere which offers views of a fair portion of the unfair city.
He can study Hauser Park from here, more unlikely than a worthwhile sausage with its marquees and bunting, and even inhale its spicy smokes, but it is huddled on a vast platter of disorganised streets. The instant he descends from his vantage, he will be lost in the maze again. And the zoo is hiding, possibly screened by the radii of perfervid balloons. The colicky spheres are clustering in ominous groups, like eggs planning the hatching of parents. Darktree must continue his meandering beneath them, back down into the huddle of fissures, breath condensing with the effort of keeping his balance on the icy paving. There are frequent indications of Clarice’s presence somewhere ahead: slumped bodies, trickles of sand, punctured objects drained of content.
At last he encounters a conscious figure, a woman arranging puppets in the window of a narrow shop. Rapping on the glass, he charms her away from her task with a brackish smirk. Opening the door, tinkling a mutant bell in the process, she leans out and he notes the starched elegance of her movements: the jerky languidness of an electrified orchid. He kisses her rigid hand with a weary flourish.
“I wish to ask directions, madam. The zoo trundles away from me, as if pulled on castors by its inmates.”
She is mildly amused: “Carbuncles and mermaids would never agree to do that. It’s a fixed location and fairly near here. I can direct you to it, but I expect a favour in return.”
“Anything. I’m fully sick of peregrination.”
Beckoning him inside, she leads him past marionettes and diminutive chalets for Punch and Judy’s in-laws and onto a ladder with toy soldiers for rungs, requiring him to trust it down into a cellar where lathes and drills recover from dizzy spells. She straps him into a chair and now it occurs to Darktree that good turns might sometimes be wicked hypocrites, the sort of deeds that drink cider in church. He struggles ineffectually in her proxy embrace and she calms him with a gag improvised from a doll with wild hair and staring eyes. He chokes on cloth and sequins, cursing sewing machines behind buttoned lips.
“Don’t worry,” she croons. “I’m not going to cause unbearable pain. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Coppelia de Retz, the fanciest maker of automatons in this metropolis. You are the model for a new generation of puppets: clockwork doppelgängers.”
Huffing greatly and swallowing the doll, the footpad bellows: “Nay, I’ll not be fitted with pendulum and escapement! ’Tis a ticking cheek to use me thus. Unhand my bells, madam!”
“I need to calculate some physical contours. Then I’ll take samples of brain tissue to reproduce your mind. I respect the way you sport your tricorne, though I should do it differently. Your double will be smarter and more professional in the titfer.”
“Hamhocker! How dare you fondle my gear ratios?”
“Like this, with a spanner. And now for the boring of your cranium. Wait! Somebody has already drilled a hole: with a marlin-spike. Well, it makes my task easier. Here’s a piece of your cerebellum going spare. Now I can analyse it and encode your thought processes on an unwinding paper roll. Your ideas will be ruled and lined, and somewhat cleaner than they presently are. Boolean bertillonage!”
“I’ve no wish to become good. There are too many genres of iniquity to be sampled. Spare my vice organs.”
“Hush, template! Your double will possess your memories and skills, but lack your failings. He’ll be a superior rogue, not a saint. He’ll go his own way once released, promoting your character elsewhere, joined to you by beliefs and words, like a Siamese twin on an elastic tongue. Your future exploits will occur in pairs!”
“Certes, you have a point,” admits Darktree. His digestion rumbles, working on the doll; he belches a cotton mouth. “But you’re a furrowbutt all the same. A mistress of torques.”
“And you, ungrateful cog, are a seagull licker!”
Darktree is stunned into silence by this insult. When Coppelia lets him loose and rubs the circulation back into his limbs, he merely pouts. Keeping her side of the bargain, she reveals another ladder which delves yet deeper under the shop. How far to the caves Madame Ligeia warned him about? How many levels of ex
haustion?
“This drops directly into Wassermann’s Crush. The zoo is at the far end. Rely on your nose to guide you.”
Swaying on the rungs, the footpad descends into a tunnel which does not have subterranean manners. As he crouches further, it matures into a deep lane hemmed in by the foundations of warehouses and temples. Dozens of other passages branch off at prime number angles, but there is a real odour of mythical beings: charcoal, venom, petrifying tisanes. Not since the tollbooth in Rutland has Darktree felt such a passing of eras. Will he find Conrad baking the transition?
There is someone coming; a body brushes his side and vanishes. More feet pound closer. Lifting the lid of his saucy panic, he pirouettes his sandbag and obstructs the path of the interloper. Unseen blood splatters invisible walls. Darktree is greeted by a sardonic giggle from behind, a voice as roughly wise as that of an owl strapped to a plough. Capes slap his cheeks; three types of velvet, three flavours of sweat. Darktree has an irrational fondness for the owner.
“Thanks for saving me. Here’s a reward.”
He recognises the noxious lilt of Xelucha Dowson Laocoön, transient comrade of the puszta. He wants to pause and chat, but it is impossible. He accepts the gift—a spare lens from a microscope—and bids farewell to the eldritch denizen of Chaud-Mellé, wishing him the very best, worst or whatever is suitable for his endeavours. Ignoring the prone figure of the one he has bashed, Darktree skips faster down the expanding conduit, gaining a portion which has lamps suspended from the walls, with hissing wicks and glass the colour of turmeric. There are more commuters here, a large number of them, squinting to read newspapers in the pseudo-saffron gloom, icicles frowning from eyelids.
In the distance, one of them balances leather knuckles on a fork: a shape in frosty motley. The footpad is delighted and empties some of the sand from his sack in order to receive the load. Concentrating wholly on his delicate task, the Warrior-Chef passes without acknowledgement. Only when gripped from behind does he glance up and comprehend the encounter. His relief is simmered in agitation; the harpy eggs are twitching with a horrid undulation and he must constantly adjust the fork’s angle to keep them from falling and breaking on the ground. Darktree lowers the globes into his sack, like ambitious grains.
“What kept you?” Conrad growls. “I had a ghastly time of it with my contact. Couldn’t persuade him to accept raisins as payment. Finally had to tempt him with sultanas. I needed you to grind his avarice with blows to the ribs and nose, but you’d vanished. It wouldn’t happen in Otranto! There we keep our criminal promises.”
Darktree apologises: “I got lost in the Festival. But why are these spheres struggling to escape my bag?”
“They’ve been fertilised. Joachim Slurp deceived me; he avowed they were already hard-boiled. But how can I complain? It’s an illegal trade. There’s no ombudsman for bestiaries.”
The footpad licks his lips. He is not really sure what an ombudsman is but does not like to betray his ignorance. “Ah yes, I expect mythical birds prefer to roost in bare trees.”
“Harpies are not strictly avian, sir. There is a good deal of human female in their genetic makeup—chiefly mascara and lipstick. They were kept as pets before the great flea epidemics itched the ankles of the city. But enough talk: we must convey these orbs to our pots before they hatch. My men will have prepared the sauces. We have a cauldron for each egg; twelve servings for the judges.”
“I know the route back. Allow me to guide you.”
“No, not that way. Wassermann’s Crush can only take us to 666th and Main—they’re springs, not arteries. There’s a shortcut to the Festival down this side tunnel. It comes out in the Rue Discord. Also, we will be protected from clock tower shrapnel.”
Wrestling with his sandbag, Darktree follows Conrad into the narrow passage, which slopes yet deeper into Chaud-Mellé’s bowels. Below he can hear rumblings of peculiar machinery. The leftovers of Sitnalta? As they tramp the stretch, the footpad relates his exploits to the Warrior-Chef, who is alternately beguiled and bored. In Otranto, so it seems, thinking puppets already exist, imported from Sicily. Indeed, they also have them in the cities of the north: one of them is making a name for itself as a journalist and castor oil hobbyist. But Conrad is impressed by his story of the black cats in the Café Worm. Most felines in this environment are tabbies, descendants of dwarf tigers.
“As for the washing line and gardens with allotments, that is silly fantasy. No vegetables can grow under this icy roof, sir. My credibility is tortured by some of your details.”
“ ’Tis true, I tell you! And the sculptor sprang from the war engine like a flea in a telescope. Bounder!”
“That’s the way, sir! Keep it believable…”
The side tunnel, which Conrad refers to as Cortázar’s Squeeze, acts like an amplifying horn for acoustics at its end. Apart from the Aeolian sounds of the Rue Discord, there are weird crashings and howls of alarm. Rascal and cook surface beneath a sky punctuated like a dictated stammer with balloons and dirigibles. The postal revolution has started. Parcels fall from above, smashing pavements into fragments the size and shape of letterbox flaps. A second class packet narrowly misses Darktree. Running through the wrapped storm, the pair reach the chaos of Hauser Park, with its disrupted culinary apparatus and startled punters milling about like Parmesan cheese dispensers. The other Warrior-Chefs are slumped near the iron cauldrons, shedding pasta tears.
Looking up, beyond the balloons, Darktree spots the artist clinging to the stalactite, directly over the heart of the Festival. Conrad tries to rouse his men from their grief. If they move quickly, he claims, they still have time to create a dish. But it is not the revolution which has upset these rugged cordon bleus. It is the fact that their very delicate sauces, prepared during the leader’s absence, have been filched. Peering over the side of each pot, lips flapping like ham flags, Conrad gestures at naught, slapping away his despair.
“The marinade is stolen! Somebody has drilled holes in the bottoms! What will we do with the harpy eggs?”
Darktree controls his fear. Clarice is here, with her amatory drive and handbag. Will she propose in the midst of the insurgency? He manages to articulate an idea: “Salads?” Then muteness overtakes him as he gazes through the mêlée for more signs of his pursuer. Considering the concept with a frown, Conrad shakes his head.
“No, we can’t eat them cold. They’re going to hatch at any instant. I would rather be bitten by a chive.”
Now the balloons are snaring the clock towers in lines dangled from their gondolas, tugging over the shimmering pillars in cascades of hours and light. With each destruction, the ice ceiling seems to grow heavier, groaning like an obese solicitor. The mass of frozen water above them is waiting to fall like a polar laundry press, steaming smooth the crinkles in space-time called life. The footpad shares his concern between ground and sky with laudable impartiality. Death by ice; marriage to his anima. The only thing to choose between them is the ring. It will be simpler to stop the revolution, which is tied to the skirt hems of History, than to discourage Clarice, who wears trousers without pockets. Darktree berates the aerial marauders: “Conclude your beastly operations! Violence has no logical place in an advanced democracy.”
Conrad touches his collar lightly. “It’s a waste of time, sir. This state is an occultocracy. Also, the mutineers are revolting people; they putsch over the sides of their baskets.”
It is plain no one else has noticed the danger. Another clock tower is demolished, but most of the chefs and gourmets are too concerned with dodging parcels to worry about the bigger picture. If the ceiling falls, the insurgents will be flattened with the populace. Does the Post Office intend to commit suicide? Is this a return-to-sender martyrdom? Darktree paces and frets; he would run and seek the exit from Chaud-Mellé, but it is probably plugged fast with other escapees. Will the gelid reaper pick them off one
by one, in an orderly queue, or sweep them away all at once like chess pieces from the cuffs of a bad loser? Perhaps his scythe will buckle at these low temperatures: this is the major hope of the footpad, who still believes death is a farmer.
While he ponders metaphysics, there is a commotion among the chefs. They are being shouldered aside by a machine on wheels; it is the onager which hurled the sculptor. A bespectacled man in harness tugs the thing, panting like an engine which runs on sauerkraut. He slumps and wipes his glasses on his knee, replacing them and focusing on the stalactite. Then he applies a brake to the mighty catapult and begins to wind in the vast spoon on a system of pulleys and ratchets. Darktree assists him and soon the device is primed, like a nun on vodka. The ballistics expert makes a few hasty calculations on his thumbs.
“Herr I. M. Wright, I presume?” prompts the footpad.
“Ja, that’s for sure. There you see my first mistake in forty years of springing volunteers across town.”
“ ’Tis a frigid pity, sir. But what made it happen?”
With his asymmetrical alopecia and withered pectorals, the engineer resembles a pacifist’s trebuchet. “Altbier mit viel eis! I had three too many frothy drinks on my lunch break and used the wrong scissors to cut this rope. The sculptor veered off course and now I intend to rescue him by sending up a parachute. Unfortunately they haven’t been invented yet. Do you know how I can improvise one?”
“I believe so. Wait here!” And the footpad pulls at the pegs of the Festival tents, hoping to uproot one.
“Ein Blödmann! Ein Verrückter! How can he descend safely on marquee fabric?” The expert pounds at Darktree with his small fists. “Parachutes will be constructed from female undergarments. Everyone knows this! What do you take me for? Procure garters!”
Flustered by the outburst, the footpad does not protest but mumbles his apologies. Remembering the washing line which stretched from Calvino Street to Olaf Stapledon Crescent, he rushes out of the park. But before he crosses its border, he is welded to the spot by the distracting sight of Clarice climbing a nearby house. She scales the cracked façade, eaves and gables with the confidence of an adhesive chamois. Darktree knows he should hide his face, but he is too mesmerised to look aside. Just where is she going? The only summit is a chimney; she will not earn admittance to the Alpine Club on the basis of this achievement. Reaching the zenith of the property, she hops into space.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 122