“Alba?” said Lady Crane. “Can you see the picture from where you’re sitting?”
“Very clearly,” said Alba, although her eyes were closed, and her head reclining. “I can see it on my eyelids. Those don’t look like the stars of Aphasia, do they?”
“They’re not, Alba. That’s the physical universe. That which surrounds and excludes human thought. The Other World. The opposite end of the superstring.”
Alba shuddered. “It looks so cold. How can I remember a place I’ve never been?”
“Try harder,” Skronk growled from his corner.
The piano screen brightened. A white star was emerging from the star field, shining ever brighter as it neared the discarnate camera eye. Luminous vapor whorls swirled round a glowing core that danced and flared like a flame. It seemed constantly on the verge of coalescing into a beautiful young woman. She surged toward the camera eye—half naiad, half ice comet. Out here, her scale was impossible to guess. She might be larger than a gas giant or smaller than a snowflake. Six lesser lights of six different colors trailed after the comet woman, swerving and dipping like fireflies around her vapor trail.
“Crane, what are they? They look like fairies. Yes, like void fairies from the rings of Saturn, emissaries from the realm of hail and mist.”
“Exactly. They’re journeying on a crucial mission to Earth. The last remnants of the fairy nations of Earth have called a solar council. Saturn had to send a representative. Although the voyage was hazardous, Queen White Speck of the Outer Ring undertook the task. But Queen White Speck was headstrong. She refused an escort of Martian gremlins. She embarked into the void with only her six handmaidens as retinue. She thought she could defend herself against the vacuum predators. She was wrong. A swarm of electrostatic leeches caught her party unprepared.”
Up on the screen, the tragic leech attack was being staged, and not very convincingly. This particular part of the film resembled seven silent film starlets being pestered by floating duffel bags with rubber tail fins. There was very little blood, but a maximum of melodramatic posing in diaphanous gowns. The piano did its impression of Rachmaninoff.
“They’re so beautiful,” Alba murmured. “What a waste.”
“What’s a waste?” asked Lady Crane.
“They died so young. The leeches came, with their ink clouds and their shock stingers. Queen White Speck was mortally wounded, just when we had almost reached Earth.”
“You were one of them?”
“Did I say that? Perhaps I was. Life is full of surprises. All these years I’ve imagined myself a mere mortal. Have I been under an enchantment?”
“Which one of them were you?” asked Lady Crane.
“You see that greenish one? Hanging close to the big white one? That was me. There were six of us. One for each color of the rainbow. We were all so devoted to Queen White Speck.” Alba sighed.
“Inflation,” said one of the medical millipedes.
“Grandiosity,” agreed another.
“Has to be processed,” a third observed stoically. “It’s a question of retracing the design path.”
“How long is this going to take?” Skronk asked no one in particular.
“Silence,” commanded Lady Crane.
“Vacuum leeches dislike the color green for some reason. My sisters were eaten alive, but I never got a scratch. Queen White Speck was leaking light like a wicker basket, and all that light was going to waste. So we created Aphasia. White Speck told me to hover in the Earth’s atmosphere. She said that a provision would be made for my survival. But she wasn’t going anywhere.”
“How did you two create Aphasia?”
“Aren’t you watching? It’s right there on the screen.”
The screen was filled by an extenuated creature of pulsing green light fibers, slowly spinning on her axis. This youthful inhuman version of Alba spun ever faster, and her peripheral fibers fanned out around her head like a revolving galaxy of angel hair. All at once a torrent of white light flooded down on her.
“Adjust the exposure,” shouted a millipede.
The lightfall penetrated the proto-Alba’s chest. Her heart chakra diffracted the white torrent into prismatic coils of rainbow fairy lightning. She discharged the lightning as jerking thrashing bolts that spent themselves into a few square miles of partial cloud cover. As the clouds were innocently drifting past some pasture land, harming no one, minding their own business, they were dragged unceremoniously from the material plane.
The film cross-faded to the noosphere, where Alba’s graft of earthly weather was rapidly blossoming into the ornate basins and mesas of Aphasia.
“I was the lens,” said Alba from her trance. “I created Aphasia from the light of my dying sisters. All I needed were some ordinary clouds.”
The film interrupted itself with a title card: SHE HAS PRODUCED AN IMAGINARY CONTINENT FROM THE LIGHT OF HER DYING SISTERS.
“So I came here to live and found myself something to do,” she went on. “I built an empire, and I banished death from it. I hate death. And leeches.”
Lady Crane folded her hands and smiled at the corners of her beak. Another title card appeared on the screen: HERE ENDS FALSE MEMORY PHASE DELTA: “THE CREATION OF APHASIA.”*1
The piano fell silent. Skronk stood up and stretched his back. The piano folded its screen.
Just then a shock wave rocked the palace. The throne room shook like a leaf. Jagged cracks streaked up the white jade walls.
A butler termite rushed in. “The glacier has reached the lotus pedestal! It’s firing icicles at the palace!”
A large section of the ceiling lurched off kilter and then fell through the floor. Six of the seven medical millipedes were crushed.
“This is bad,” Skronk told Lady Crane. “Very bad. We have to get her out of Lotus City. We have to take her as far north as possible.”
“I have summoned the Purple Scarab,” she told him. “He will be here soon.”
A huge black icicle transpierced the throne room, slamming Lady Crane against a wall and impaling her.
Moments later a giant black beetle crashed up through the remains of the floor and threw open its carapace. “Into the cargo hold!” shouted Skronk. The throne raised itself from its pedestal on six silver legs and scuttled up the scarab’s boarding ramp. Following close behind were the Secret Piano and a medical millipede loaded down with black boxes and cables. Skronk pushed them up the ramp and slammed the hatch behind him.
The Purple Scarab tunneled down through the stalk of the palace, unwilling to expose itself to ice projectiles in the open air. It tunneled through the foundations of Lotus City and into the raw cloudstuff beneath. It tunneled north, far below the surface, seeking asylum for the Ontological Controls Commission and their imperial captive.
Skronk crouched in a corner of the cargo bay. Alba lay sleeping on her throne. The last of the medical millipedes wept for the dead.
“This is all I need,” said Skronk. “And we’ve still got three piano rolls to go.”
* * *
—
The final defense of Lotus City involved entities from all quadrants of the empire, along with several entities visiting from Ataxia the wooden continent. Many wise and peaceable beings, ancient with years, were slain that day. Oilspin the Pen-Nibbed Octopus was lost. The Enormous Chocolate Face With Green Sugar Sprinkles In the Sky At Twilight perished as well, and the Denture Tank From Hell. Others fell beside them—shy harmless ectoids who had no business fighting a war—the Moonbathing Sphagnum Dancers, the Flutter In a Haze, the Golden Sand Fleas, the Tiny Riders…All who stood against the Black Glacier were soon transmuted into heaps of moldy papier-mâché. The glacier toppled the Lotus Palace and ground the city to rubble beneath it. Then it resumed its march northward.
Meanwhile the Purple Sca
rab’s tunnel had emerged into the starlight on a windy hillside in the feather forests of the Dripping Lands. A sliver of moon was glowing above the ground fog. Admiral Snailwick greeted the scarab’s passengers as they disembarked. He led them to dry quarters in a natural cave which the Mollusk Boys had converted into a concrete bunker. Surrounded by the hooded Mollusk Boys in berets and bandoliers, the three remaining members of the Ontological Controls Commission made camp and collected their wits. Alba was still sleeping soundly.
“Can you monitor the next phase or not?” King Skronk asked the medical millipede.
“I’ll do what I can do, sir.” The millipede used its tail to whack the side of one of the black boxes. Another oscilloscope came on-line. “Moonlight mode is now active. We are go for the gamma engram.”
“Piano?” said Skronk. “Do your stuff.”
“Aren’t you going to hold her hand and talk her through it?” asked the Secret Piano.
“Hell no. I detest the bitch.”
“Someone’s got to do it,” insisted the millipede.
“So you do it.”
“I have to calibrate the nephostrophic feedback algorithms!”
“Well, I’m not touching the old bag, and that’s final.”
“So we’ll all die, and the world will end. Fine,” said the piano.
Admiral Snailwick wiped the mud from his boots and approached the throne of salt. He gazed at the old woman’s face while she slept. The admiral was a hollow uniform with a small pink snail that lived on its right epaulet. He had lost his body in a freak gunnery accident, and had it replaced with a naval uniform. Then he’d lost his head to a melon rocket and hired the snail as a surrogate head, for all the lettuce it could eat. (The admiral was under a curse. But that’s another story.)
“Just the mollusk I want to see,” said Skronk. “Can you get the queen of the world here to wake up. We need to run her through another fugue state.”
The admiral examined Alba’s restraints with the fingers of his white dress gloves. Somewhere on the scarab journey, she’d lost her crown.
“Let her go,” he told the throne. The throne withdrew its tentacles and lowered Alba’s feet toward the floor. Snailwick took her arm and helped her to walk a few steps. He sat her down on an ammunition crate in front of the piano. He brought her a mug of hot podwater with earwig honey and seated himself beside her, watching her closely.
“So, Your Grace. Are you ready for another concert?”
“Is that you, Snailwick? It is? I seem to be losing my eyesight along with my mind. Where is Lady Crane?”
“Called away on state business,” Snailwick told her. “Very hush-hush. Oh dear. Look at this. Your slippers and stockings are soaked. Let me plug in this heating snake.” The admiral respectfully removed his sovereign’s footwear. “And would you like for me to peel off your skin?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your skin. It’s rather old and wrinkly. I could peel it all off if you’d feel more comfortable.”
“No! Don’t touch me!”
“There there. Don’t take on so. I’ll start with this arm.” Snailwick took hold of a pinch of loose skin and peeled loose a long strip. There was fresh new skin beneath it, smooth as a peach.
“What are you doing?!”
“It’s a beauty treatment. Try it yourself. See how nice?”
Alba tried it. “That is relaxing. I had no idea that my skin was self-replacing. Go ahead, Admiral Snailwick. Peel it all off.”
The admiral obliged, within the limits of modesty. When he’d finished, a new Alba had emerged—a lovely girl only sixteen years old. She felt her smooth pink face with her smooth pink fingers. She even had long golden hair, which had been coiled beneath the old Alba’s flaky scalp.
Snailwick was beaming. “Now you look just as you did in the fifth year of your reign. Ravishing.”
“I remember it well. You’ve certainly cheered me up, Admiral. Shall we begin the concert? The night is young. You there. Piano.”
The piano looked to Skronk. Skronk nodded. The piano commenced a slow and rather dissonant obbligato, which elaborated itself into a web of musical tensions. The piano screen unfolded. The film began with a montage of wheat fields. Amber waves of grain, tossing their tassels in the autumn sun.
“I smell Wyoming,” said Alba, closing her eyes. “I’d know it anywhere. It’s an empty smell. Dust and wheat and leather tack. I can smell it quite distinctly. I’m sixteen years old, and I’ve run away from home. I’m living with my Auntie and my Uncle on a sheep ranch. The year is 1897.”
“Good,” said Admiral Snailwick. “Excellent.” His eyestalks were fixed on the screen.
A horizon line—pale blue above, pale yellow below. A field of wheat. And someone moving in the foreground—a girl, out of focus, pushing through the wheat. More wheat and some railroad tracks and then wheat again. Where was the girl? Here she was. Crouching down in the wheat stalks and looking back the way she came, as if pursued. Trying to catch her breath. Nowhere to hide. A girl in a straw hat with a green ribbon, a cotton dress, and a well-worn pair of work boots.
“Unless it’s all her imagination,” said Alba, sitting on her ammo crate, gazing at the screen through closed eyelids. “But no. He’s really back there, and he’s following me. I’m sure of it. He saw me leave the barn dance, and I saw him starting after me. And he’s always got that knife on his belt. Worthless no-account roughneck. Him with his whiskers and his whiskey breath. Wants to get me alone and do something terrible. And he’s back there, stalking me, the way he’d stalk a deer. What possessed me to leave the barn dance by myself? Uncle would have walked me home. Now something terrible will happen.”
The camera eye swiveled and backtracked along a footpath, searching the wheat. It discovered the unsavory roughneck with the knife on his belt. He moved stealthily past the camera. He really was stalking the farm girl. But the camera didn’t follow him. It kept its attention on the footpath and backtracked farther. And its attention was rewarded.
Someone was stalking the stalker. A straight-backed woman in wire-rimmed glasses and a severe black dress. Hair in a bun, frosted with gray. She had the hands of a rancher’s wife and a double-barreled shotgun cradled on one arm.
The man caught up with the girl and let her see him. She froze in her tracks, too frightened to run. He grinned as if this situation he’d created was the funniest joke in the history of the world. Rape was in the air, and murder. The film was coming to a boil.
The woman with the shotgun was right behind him, but he was too intent on the girl to notice. Then he felt the woman’s eyes boring into him. He began to turn around.
The sky ripped open, and a blinding writhing torrent of fairy lightning struck the prairie. It was a lightning bolt from some larger stronger dimension. It would have incinerated all three characters in a microsecond, but it had other plans for them. The man and the woman fell to the ground. The girl remained standing. Rainbow fibers bleached Wyoming out of existence. The characters went translucent. As they faded away, one of them seemed to be turning into a cholla cactus. Another seemed well on her way to becoming a stork.
Several acres of pasture land also went missing, leaving a smoking crater which would later become a duck pond. Freak lightning, people said.
“So I never was a fairy princess,” said Alba regretfully. “I was just some little nobody from Earth who purely by accident got caught in that glorious searchlight and dragged kicking and screaming into the noosphere. What a letdown.”
“Things could be worse,” said Admiral Snailwick. “You were pioneers. Think what you and Lady Crane and the cactus king have accomplished here.”
“Could we please skip the details?” King Skronk asked loudly. “Time is a factor here.”
“The details are of the essence,” countered Snailw
ick.
The piano bashed its way through a rousing coda, a patriotic march. The film, meanwhile, had shifted its scene to the noosphere. Montage of happy families of happy ectic citizens performing acts of recreation and responsible citizenship under the civic leadership of their beloved absolute monarch.
Title card: HERE ENDS FALSE MEMORY PHASE GAMMA: “THE FARM GIRL”*2
The final chords of the soundtrack die away. Fade to black.
“Can we go straight on to phase beta?” asked Skronk.
“No way,” said the millipede. “She has to absorb and evaluate. And sleep.”
“Unless the world ends first.”
A roar like the end of the world shook the Dripping Lands. The floor of the bunker collapsed, and the last of the medical millipedes slid into the cloud crevasse and was never seen again.
“I don’t believe this!” Skronk raged. “How fast can a damned glacier move?”
“It’s a cloudquake,” said Snailwick. “The continent can’t support all that ice. It’s compressing the nephotonic plates.”
“Tell me later,” said Skronk. He sprinted up a slanting tunnel and emerged under a sky like none he’d ever witnessed—a sky full of feather trees. The hillsides around him were devastated. A boulder whizzed past his head, knocking off a yucca blade. Off to the south, the glacier was charging toward the bunker, smashing down the forest, leveling the hills, sweeping wooden wreckage, cloudsoil, and cloudstone before it. It wanted Alba. It was yearning to turn her to papier-mâché. Skronk sprinted back to the bunker.
“The glacier is here, Admiral. And it’s throwing boulders now.”
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.
The cactus king scooped up the drowsing Alba under one cactus-needled arm and the piano under the other. He sprinted up the tunnel into the maelstrom. At some point in the bedlam that followed, he realized that Admiral Snailwick wasn’t with them anymore.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 133