by Adam Roberts
‘Oh,’ said Nemo.
‘We can’t get him out from this side,’ said Thinity. ‘He needs to get himself to a disconnection point. And he can’t do that at the moment. Not whilst the league of gents have him. Not whilst he’s strapped in a torture chair in a dentist’s surgery.’
‘So what can we do?’
Tonkatoi looked sombre. From a cupboard on the wall he drew out a long thin something wrapped in rags. This he unpacked to reveal a gleaming samurai sword. ‘Use this on him,’ he said glumly. ‘It’s the only way.’
‘Sounds a little, uh, full on,’ said Nemo, eyeing the sword uncertainly.
‘Full off,’ corrected Tonkatoi, staring at Smurpheus’s supine form.
‘It’s a vicious shame,’ said Thinity. ‘But there’s no other option. A few hours of torture, and he’d give the machine intelligences precise directions of how to get to Syon Lane. That must not happen. So, goodbye Smurpheus.’
Tonkatoi hefted his sword, and brought it into a striking position. ‘Owi,’ he said, ‘’Ere goes nothing.’
‘Stop!’ cried Nemo. ‘Stop!’ He held out his arms, and both Tonkatoi and Thinity looked at him.
Chapter 11
Rescue
‘Stop!’ said Nemo. ‘We have to rescue him. Rescue him from the McAtrix.’
‘It’s a lovely thought, Nemo,’ said Thinity. ‘But it’s not practical.’
Nemo felt a gushing tingle in his solar plexus, the physical manifestation of thrilled anticipatory excitement. This was the single nicest thing that Thinity had ever said to him. He swallowed noisily. He grinned. ‘It’s a lovely thought,’ she had said. Lovely thought! He had said something that had provoked in her the thought of loveliness! This, said his hormones, is a major breakthrough. Push on! Capitalise on it! ‘I’ll do it,’ he blurted. ‘I’ll rescue him.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Seriously?’ said Thinity. Her beautiful features were poised on the verge of looking impressed. Nemo liked that.
‘Sure. He’s obviously important. I’ll – you know. Pop in, rescue him.’
‘That’s crazy talk, Nemo,’ said Tonkatoi. ‘They’re holding Smurpheus in the most terrifying chamber of torture known to the McAtrix. That’s a dental chair he’s strapped into – those are dentists working on him. The scariest people there are. Believe me, it won’t take much jabbing and drilling on his teeth to get him to confess. And when he does, we’re all dead. It’s off with ’is ’ead. It’s the only way.’
‘Um,’ said Nemo unsure, ‘off with EZ?’
‘With ’is hh-ead,’ Tonkatoi clarified, the ‘h’ sounding like a phlegm bullet hitting a wall.
‘Ah. Or,’ Nemo suggested again, ‘I could go in and rescue him. And he could keep his head.’
‘But it’s never been done before,’ said Thinity.
‘That’s why it’s going to work,’ said Nemo boldly.
There was a pause. ‘Well,’ Tonkatoi suggested. ‘That’s not a wholly logical assertion, though, is it? The way to get things to work is to practise ’em. Go over and over ’em until they become second nature. To work ’em through until you’ve got the kinks ironed out. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Well, possibly so,’ said Nemo.
‘No, seriously,’ said Tonkatoi earnestly. ‘You can’t say it’s going to work because you haven’t practised it, because you haven’t really thought it through. The most you could say is that it’s going to work despite the fact that you haven’t practised it or really thought it through.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Nemo testily.
There was an uncomfortable pause.
‘Very well,’ said Thinity. ‘If you’re going in, I’m coming with you. You really think we can infiltrate the Dentist’s Room, past the Waiting Room and into the Chamber of Dental Torture itself? You think we can rescue Smurpheus? OK, I believe you. Let’s do it.’ She turned to the Joe-Ninety console. ‘Let’s get inside that dentist without arousing suspicion – let’s do it. What do you need?’
Nemo turned to face her. ‘Gums,’ he said. ‘Lots of gums.’
(|:-|||)
They swept into the McAtrix and found themselves at the public phone opposite the dentist’s. A wind was buffeting the street, and had knocked over a rubbish bin on the far side of the road, but it died down within moments of their arrival.
‘Oh,’ said Nemo, ‘my.’ His mouth felt as if it were full of slimy cotton wool. Thinity looked at him, parting her lips: her gums were red, swollen, enormous. He almost recoiled. But it occurred to him that his own gums were certainly as diseased and revolting as hers. He prodded at his front teeth with a forefinger; they wobbled painfully in his mouth.
‘This should do it,’ he said. His words came out stickily, indistinct, as if he had inserted four creme eggs into the cavity of his mouth.
‘Uh-huh,’ agreed Thinity. ‘Las’ fuh ’alf-n’our or so,’ she added. Nemo nodded, as if he had understood what she said.
Together they crossed the road.
They opened the door and walked up a staircase. Through a second door they came into a spacious dentist’s waiting room. Half a dozen people were sitting in chairs leafing through the magazines provided. They all looked up as Nemo and Thinity entered, and then, as one, switched their eyes back to their reading-matter.
Nemo’s heart was going like a sweet wrapper caught in a bicycle wheel.
Thinity, on the other hand, seemed cool. She stepped up to the reception, where a bulky dental nurse in a white uniform was standing. Nemo hurried his step to stand alongside her.
The nurse regarded the two of them with naked scorn. There was a deep and hostile irony in the way she said ‘How can I help you?’ in the least helpful voice imaginable.
‘It’s our guh’s,’ said Thinity, pointing at her mouth. ‘Our gu’hs.’
‘Your gums. Yes, I see,’ said the dental nurse. ‘Oh indeed. Well you’re certainly both emergency cases. I’ve never seen such bad gingivitis. Dear me, it’s worse than gingivitis. It’s gingivitissimus. You’ve more plaque than a historically significant town house in central London.’ She chuckled, as if she were piquantly amusing herself. As perhaps she was.
‘We were hoping,’ said Thinity, ‘to see a den’ist pri’y ur’jently.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Pret-tee ur-ghen-t-lee,’ said Thinity, negotiating her way past the syllables like a barefoot woman over a pebbly beach.
‘Of course. I’ll see what we can do. I take it that you are celebrities? You realise that this dental practice serves only celebrities?’
‘Sure. I’m a sin’er and vo’alist,’ said Thinity. ‘Ro’ and roh.’
‘What?’
‘Rok,’ said Thinity painfully, ‘and ro’uhll. Vair famous, me.’
‘I see. And you?’
‘Er,’ said Nemo, looking about him. ‘I work on di’gh’ital radio.’
The dental nurse looked long and hard at Nemo, but after several seconds she nodded. ‘Well,’ she conceded, looking at their latex, or plastex, clothes. ‘You’re certainly dressed as celebrities, both of you. Wait here a moment.’ She unlocked a door in the waiting room wall and stepped through into a corridor. She pulled the door shut behind her.
Nemo turned his head to see that every individual in the waiting room was staring at them. They had all, through that mysterious telepathy of the English communality, sensed the possibility of somebody jumping the queue. In the England of the McAtrix, as in the old England of actual existence upon which it was based, jumping a queue was the second-worst crime a human being could commit in the unwritten social code, a fraction behind jumping actually on the windpipe of the monarch.
Nemo simpered at them.
As one, they went back to reading their magazines.
Nemo’s attention wandered. There was a lengthy fish tank in the corner of the room. Even the tropical fish inside seemed to be watching him, all floating with their little fishy faces up against the glass. And behind t
he tank was a picture of Sydney Opera House, so realistically rendered that, at first, Nemo thought it was a window granting this improbable view. There was no way he could actually see Sydney Opera House through a window in this dentist’s. He was, he reminded himself, in London, not in Sydney. Or in a Torquay hotel bedroom. Still, it was a fantastically realistic representation.
‘Nemo,’ said Thinity, speaking slowly and as distinctly as was possible, ‘before we go in.’
‘Uh-huh?’ said Nemo.
‘You realise that we will have to ffffaiii-ih.’
‘Wha?’
She opened her mouth wider and tried to enunciate a little more clearly. ‘Fffaaaiiii-ih.’
‘Fight,’ said Nemo. ‘Ah.’
‘As long as you’re ready for that,’ she said. ‘Faii’ing gents.’
‘Thini’y,’ said Nemo. ‘I fee’ I should tell you. I never fini’d my training. With,’ he took a breath, and tried to form the word past his swollen gums, ‘Chaew-dus, my training with Ju-das. I never fini’d it.’
‘You’re kiddin’,’ said Thinity, aghast.
‘There wa’n’t time,’ Nemo whined.
‘So you don’t know how to fai’?’
‘I know how to dance,’ he replied hopefully. ‘We jus’ ne’er got around to the fai’ing part.’
Thinity scowled; an expression made more fiercely intimidating by the inflamed condition of her gums.
‘For cryin’ out—’ Thinity started to say.
There was a click. The nurse had returned. ‘This way, please,’ she announced. The waiting room breathed a communal sigh of irritation and outrage. Thinity was looking, almost frantically, at the exit; but then, clearly thinking better of it, turned and followed the nurse through the door and into the main body of the surgery.
They walked down a lengthy corridor, past a number of purple doors. Through one of these Nemo thought he could hear the nerve-chilling banshee sound of a dental drill. He shuddered.
‘In there,’ Thinity hissed to Nemo as they passed the door. ‘Smur’eus – in there.’
‘The dentist will see you now,’ said the nurse, with a difficult-to-pin-down tint in her voice. It sounded, to Nemo, a little like triumph. She opened the next purple door along.
Inside this room, standing side by side, were three gents, dressed in white dental smocks which did not match their top hats.
Nemo recognised two of them: the one with the strange vocal inflections who had interrogated him, and his friend, whose name (Nemo remembered) had slipped out during that session as 38VVc31029837495–5444. The third gent had a similar demeanour. He was wearing dark glasses, which, given the relatively low ambient light levels inside the room, either meant he suffered from some pink-eye photosensitivity or else that he was striving a tad too effortfully for cool.
The first gent looked pleased. ‘Mr Everyman!’ he boomed sinisterly. ‘Wonderful to see you again.’
Thinity leapt. She pounced high, grabbing on to the light fitting that depended from the centre of the ceiling, and swung forward. Her legs akimbo, her left foot connected with the left-hand-side gent, her right with the right-hand-side one, with a double clunk. They both tumbled backwards.
‘Now!’ she yelled, dropping from the lampshade and holding out her hands at diagonals in front of her chest, in the traditional kung-fu style. ‘Next doo’, Ne Mo! Rescue Smu’eus!’
But Nemo’s attention was distracted by the centre gent who had dodged underneath the pendulous Thinity as she kicked his colleagues, and was now directly in front of Nemo. ‘Mr Everyman,’ he sneered.
He aimed a right hook at Nemo’s nose.
At long last Nemo reacted. Perhaps enough adrenalin had at last pooled in the bottom of Nemo’s brain for him, or perhaps the poised fist of the gent prompted some subconscious trigger. Whichever it was, Nemo acted with lightning speed.
He danced.
He quickstepped to the left, shimmied to the right, and just avoided the swiftly flying fists of the gent. ‘Our cover’s been blown!’ he yelled, his voice sounding like that of a man with a sofa’s armrest crammed into his mouth.
‘I know,’ returned Thinity as she ran centrifugally round the south, east, and northern walls of the room to evade the flying fists of the two other gents.
Nemo danced out of the room. He merengued. As the gent hurled himself at him he performed a salsa figure of eight. Back in the corridor he lambada’d. He danced the Silla Giratoria, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, half turn to the left, half turn to the right, as the gent tried, with an angry expression, to seize him.
Behind him, he realised, the receptionist was waiting, her burly arms ready. Before he was even sure what was happening a pencil shot through the air like a bolt from a crossbow, to embed itself twangingly in the plaster of the wall.
Nemo danced pachanga heel taps, and executed a perfect pachanga cross swivel, before hurling himself at the door of the room that held Smurpheus prisoner. But instead of bashing through this door, as he hoped, he rebounded from it with a sore shoulder. The gent leapt at him. In a panic, Nemo danced a honky-tonk stomp, but that just meant banging his feet up and down, and didn’t remove him from the scene of danger.
The gent whipped out a huge handgun, and in an instant had rammed it in Nemo’s face.
Nemo, accordingly, said ‘eek’ on an indrawn breath. This single syllable captured precisely the quality of his high-pitched alarm.
The gun was being pressed up hard against his nose. He could feel the lips of its barrel wholly encircling the tip of his nose, squashing it against his face.
‘Perhaps now, Mr Everyman,’ sneered the gent, ‘you will accept the inevitability of my triumph?’
With a dancing genius born of terror, Nemo danced. He danced a mambo el molinita, with an underarm spot turn to the right and a swivel quarter turn, lurching backwards and away from the gent and slipping past the receptionist. He jived down the corridor, pulling sharply away from the gent, who yelled in frustration.
The gent’s gun was still attached to his face. He could feel the weight of it, dragging outwards by the momentum of his spin, but clamped to the lumpy end of his nose like a sucker fish. ‘Hey,’ objected the gent.
Nemo paso dobled (or, technically, paso singled) a few yards further down the corridor whilst trying to yank the gun from the end of his nose. It was attached tight as a sucker dart, but with one strong tug it came free. He looked up. The receptionist was advancing on him, holding a second sharpened pencil before her like a stiletto. The gent, looking mean, was running directly at him. Nothing seemed to knock off the gent’s top hat. With a sense of the irrelevance of the thought, Nemo found himself wondering why that was. It was uncanny.
‘Grrr,’ yelled the gent. It’s not an easy syllable to yell, that one, but the gent managed it.
Nemo quickstepped back, and rumba’d a few yards down the corridor. He did an alemana turn, opening out on to the left with both arms extended in a T. With an open-hip twist he brought the gun to bear on the two figures rushing up the corridor towards him.
He had never before in his life so much as touched a real gun, let alone fired one. But the situation seemed desperate. He aimed the gun as best he could, said, after a moment’s pause, ‘Cha-cha-cha!’
And fired.
The sound of the gunshot was like actual violence being done to Nemo’s ears. To say it was deafening would give the impression that it was akin to a radio turned up too loud, a party in the next-door apartment, or a truck driving past. But it was much much louder than any of these. It seemed to shred Nemo’s eardrums and leave him with only a muffled hum. The blast dazzled his eyes.
Worse, his pulling the trigger was followed by a sharp pain in his right wrist. The pain was so severe that he immediately dropped the gun. ‘Bugger,’ he yelled, a word which sounded faint and woolly to his own ears, although it was spoken with enough force.
He barely had time to take in the fact that a
large hole had now appeared in the middle of a poster of a rabbit, from whose grinning mouth a talk-bubble announced, ‘I’m A Clever Bunny Because I Brush Twice A Day.’ There was now nothing between the rabbit’s face and his fluffy feet but circular vacancy. Plaster dust was floating through the hole.
‘Bugger!’ yelled Nemo, holding his sore wrist in his good hand, and dancing furiously along the corridor and into the waiting room.
As he entered, all the waiting patients looked up, as one, from their magazines.
Nemo did the hockey stick, the peek-a-boo, the New York overspill and the zigzag in front of the astonished waiting patients, cursing loudly the whole time. They had heard the gunshot, and now were witnessing this gunless man come hopping and cavorting into the waiting room yowling in pain. Their faces were eloquent of thought processes concerning new developments in dental practice, and the likelihood of they themselves becoming test subjects. Nemo couldn’t worry about that. His thoughts were dominated by his own pain. He had the horrible sense that he had sprained his wrist very nastily indeed. Perhaps even broken it.
The gent and the dental nurse burst from the corridor into the waiting room. The gent was holding the gun.
Nemo leapt on to the table, scattering 1970s copies of Punch and Good Housekeeping left and right and occasioning squeals from the people sitting nearby. The gent leapt from one side and the receptionist from the other, and, rapidly, but gracefully, he chicken-walked back on to the floor. There was a crash as the gent and the nurse clattered together and fell on the table.
Still holding his wrist, and still swearing, Nemo did the mashed potato, the boiled potato, the alamana turn, the Turkish towel, the lado-a-lado, the promenade, the samba whisk, the bota fogos (in the shadow position) and finally the hover corté.
The gent was aiming his gun in a considered manner directly at Nemo. Nemo stopped dancing.
‘Move again and I will shoot,’ the gent declared.