Puzzling thing, though, shouldn’t there’ve been a little more factory-floor activity around here? he couldn’t see any shift-workers anyplace. This looked to be all going on without any human intervention—except now, suddenly, for whatever invisible hand had just pulled a switch to set everything into motion. Ordinarily Kit would have been fascinated by the technical details, as giant gas burners bloomed percussively alight, belts and pulleys lurched into motion, dripping-heads swiveled into place over the cuves d’agitation, oil pumps engaged, elegantly curved beaters began to gather speed.
But not a pair of eyes, nor the sound of a purposeful step, anyplace. Kit, who seldom panicked, felt close to it now, though this still might be all about nothing more than mayonnaise.
He didn’t exactly start running, but his step might have quickened some. By the time he had reached the Clinique d’Urgence pour Sauvetage des Sauces, for the resurrection of potentially failed mayonnaise, at first all he noticed was the floor getting a little slippery—next thing he knew, he was on his back with his feet in the air, in less time than it took to figure out that he’d slipped. His hat had been knocked off and was sliding away on some pale semiliquid flow. He felt something heavy and wet in his hair. Mayonnaise! he seemed now actually to be sitting in the stuff, which was a good six inches, hell make that closer to a foot deep. And, and swiftly rising! Kit had blundered into flash-flooding arroyos slower than this. Looking around, he saw that the mayonnaise level had already climbed too high up the exit door for him even to pull it open, assuming he could even get that far. He was being engulfed in thick, slick, sour-smelling mayonnaise.
Trying to clear his eyes of the stuff, slipping repeatedly, he half swam, half staggered toward where he remembered having seen a window, and launched a blind desperate kick, which of course sent him flat on his ass again, but not before he’d felt a hopeful splintering of glass and sashwork, and before he could think of a way to reach the invisible opening to climb through, the mayonnaise-pressure itself, like a conscious beast seeking escape from its captivity, had borne him through the broken window, launching him out in a great vomitous arc which dropped him into the canal below.
He surfaced in time to hear somebody screaming “Cazzo, cretino!” above the rhythmic sputter of an engine of some sort. A blurry wet shadow approached. It was Rocco and Pino, in their dirigible torpedo.
“Over here!”
“È il cowboy!” The Italians, in their glossy Vulcanized working gear, slowed down to fish Kit out of the water. He noticed they were casting anxious looks back down the canal.
“Somebody after you?”
Rocco resumed speed, and Pino explained. “We just got her out of the shop and decided to have a look at the Alberta, thinking, how dangerous can it be, when there’s no Belgian navy, vero? But it turns out there are Garde Civique, in boats! We forgot about that! All up and down the canals!”
“You forgot,” muttered Rocco. “But it doesn’t matter. With this engine we can outrace anything.”
“Show him!” cried Pino. The boys got busy with choke controls, spark timers, and acceleration levers, and presently, sure enough, sending up a roostertail of water and black oil-smoke, they had the craft snarling along the canal at forty knots, maybe more. Whoever might be back there was probably breaking off the chase about now.
“We’re going to stop in and surprise the girls,” said Rocco.
“If they don’t surprise us,” Pino in what Kit recognized as romantic anxiety. “Le bambole anarchiste, porca miseria.”
A mile or so past Oudenberg, they turned left onto the Bruges canal and crept in to Ostend, dropping Kit off at the Quai de l’Entrepôt before going off to look for a berth safe from the attentions of the Garde Civique. “Thanks, ragazzi, see you down the trail, I hope. . . .” And Kit tried not to stand there too long gazing after his deliverers from death by mayonnaise.
The crew of Inconvenience had been ordered to Brussels to pay their respects at a memorial service for General Boulanger, held each September 30 on the anniversary of his suicide, an observance not altogether free of political suggestion, there having remained within the Chums of Chance bureaucracy a defiant residue of Boulangism. Official correspondence from the French chapters, for example, could still be found bearing yellow-and-blue postage stamps, with the General’s likeness printed in a sorrowful brown—to all appearances legitimate French issues, ranging from one centime to twenty francs, but in reality timbres fictifs, said to be of German origin, the work of an entrepreneur who hoped to sell them after a Boulangist coup, though sinister hints were also in the air of involvement by “IIIb,” the intelligence bureau of the German general staff, reflecting a theory thereamong that Germany might stand a better military chance against a revanchist effort led by the somewhat discomposed General than any policy perhaps a bit more thought out.
The Brussels visit proved so melancholy that the boys had put in for, and to everyone’s surprise been granted, ground leave at Ostend, the closest accredited liberty port. Here before long, seemingly by chance, they had become aware of the convention of Quaternionists-in-exile at the Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue.
“Haven’t seen so many of those birds in one place since Candlebrow,” declared Darby, looking through one of the remote viewers.
“For that embattled discipline,” said Chick, “back in the days of the Quaternion Wars, Candlebrow was one of very few safe harbors.”
“Bound to run into a few that we know.”
“Sure, but will they know us?” It was just at that turn of the day when the wind was shifting direction from a land to a sea breeze. Below them crowds along the Digue streamed back to hotels, high teas, assignations, naps.
“Once,” Randolph with a long-accustomed melancholy, “they would have all been stopped in their tracks, rubbernecking up at us in wonder. Nowadays we just grow more and more invisible.”
“Eehhyyhh, I betcha I could even pull out my knockwurst here and wave it at ’em, and nobody’d even notice,” cackled Darby.
“Suckling!” gasped Lindsay. “Even taking into account considerations of dimension, which in your case would require a modification of any salcician metaphor toward the diminutive, ‘wiener’ being perhaps more appropriate, nonetheless the activity you anticipate is prohibited by statute in most of the jurisdictions over which we venture, including in many instances the open sea, and can only be taken as symptomatic of an ever more criminally psychopathic disposition.”
“Hey Noseworth,” replied Darby, “it was big enough for ya the other night.”
“Why, you little—and I do mean ‘little’—”
“Gentlemen,” their commander beseeched them.
However successfully it might have escaped the general view, the Inconvenience had come almost immediately to the attention of de Decker’s shop, which maintained a primitive sort of electromagnetic monitoring station out in the dunes between Nieuport and Dunkirk, which lately had been logging mysterious transmissions at unprecedented levels of field strength. These were intended for Inconvenience’s Tesla rig, one of a number of compact power-receivers allocated to skyships around the globe for their auxiliary power needs. The locations of the Transmitters were kept as secret as possible, being vulnerable to assault from power companies threatened by any hint of competition. Unfamiliar with the Tesla system and alarmed by the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, de Decker’s people naturally conflated this with those recent rumors of a Quaternion weapon which had Piet Woevre so intrigued.
Woevre couldn’t always see the skyship, but he knew it was there. When the wind was trained exactly across the dunes, he could hear the engines aloft, see the stars blotted out in large moving shapes of black against black. . . . He thought he had also glimpsed the crew up on the seawall, slouching along like a bunch of collegians in search of amusement, hands in pockets, taking in the sights.
It was October by now, the regular season was past and the breezes cool but not yet brisk enough to drive
away pedestrians from the Digue, though Lindsay found it uncomfortable—“Far too desolate, one’s face grows itchy with the salt, one feels like Lot’s wife.” In the sea-light and optical illusions out here, with all the demolition and new construction going on, the boys were often uncertain as to what a given mass at any distance might turn out to be—cloud, warship, breakwater, or, indeed, only the projection upon a perhaps too-receptive sky of some spiritual difficulty within. Hence, perhaps, the preference they had already noted in Ostend for interiors—casinos, hydropathics, hotel suites in a choice of disguises—hunting-lodge, Italian grotto, parlor of sin, whatever the lodger with the wherewithal might require for the night.
“And say, who are these strange civilians creeping around all of a sudden?” Darby wanted to know.
“The Authorities,” shrugged Chick. “What of it?”
“‘Authorities’! Surface jurisdiction only. Nothing to do with us.”
“You are Legal Officer,” Lindsay reminded him. “What is the problem?”
“‘The’ problem, Noseworth, is your problem, as Master-at-Arms—nothing is where it should be anymore. Almost as if persons unknown have been sneaking on board and rooting around.”
“But one cannot imagine,” pointed out Randolph St. Cosmo, “that much gets past Pugnax.” Indeed, with the passing years Pugnax had been evolving from a simple watchdog to a sophisticated defensive system, with a highly-developed taste, moreover, for human blood. “Ever since that mission to the Carpathians,” Randolph recalled, frowning a little. “And the way he drove off that squadron of Uhlans at Temesvár, almost as if he were hypnotizing their horses into unseating their riders. . . .”
“Some fiesta!” cackled Darby.
Still, their admiration for Pugnax’s martial skills was not unmixed these days with apprehension. The faithful canine carried about a strange gleam in his eye, and the only member of the crew who communicated with him much anymore was Miles Blundell. The two had been known to sit together side by side back on the fantail, wordlessly deep into the hours of the midwatch, as if in some sort of telepathic contact.
Since the mission to Inner Asia, Miles had been engaged ever more deeply with a project of the spirit which he found himself unable to share with the others in the crew, though it was plain to all that his present trajectory might take him perhaps further than he could find his way back from. Beneath the sands of the Taklamakan, while Chick and Darby had idled mindlessly at one liberty-port after the next, and Lindsay and Randolph had spent hours conferring with Captain Toadflax over how most effectively to carry on the search for Shambhala, Miles was being tormented by a prefiguration, almost insupportable in its clarity, of the holy City, separated by only a slice of Time, a thin screen extending everywhere across his attention, which grew ever more frail and transparent. . . . Unable to sleep or converse, he would often lose track of recipes, forget to stir the popover dough, wreck the sky-coffee, while the others continued calmly about the chores of the day. How could they not know of that immeasurable Approach? Thus he sought out Pugnax, in whose eyes the light of understanding was a beacon in what had without warning become dangerous skies.
For somehow, the earlier, the great, light had departed, the certitude become broken as ground-dwellers’ promises—time regained its opacity, and one day the boys, translated here to Belgium, as if by evil agency, had begun to lapse earthward through a smell of coal smoke and flowers out of season, toward a beleaguered coast ambiguous as to the disposition of land and sea, down into seaside shadows stretching into the growing dark, shadows that could not always be correlated with actual standing architecture, folding and pleating ever inwardly upon themselves, an entire mapful of unlighted outer neighborhoods sprawled among the dunes and small villages. . . .
Miles, looking out at the humid distances from this height, at the hesitant darkness in which little could be read across a lowland fixed anciently under a destiny, if not quite a curse, contemplated the pallid vastness of twilight, in its suspense, its cryptic insinuation. What was about to emerge from the night just behind the curve of Earth? fog from the canals rose toward the ship. A smudged and isolated copse of willows emerged for a moment. . . . Low clouds in the distance bleared the sun, causing the light to break into suggestions of a city hidden behind what was visible here, sketched at in shadows of taupe and damaged rose . . . nothing so sacred or longingly sought as Shambhala, stained with a persistent component of black in all light that swept this lowland, flowing over dead cities, mirror-still canals . . . black shadows, tempest and visitation, prophecy, madness. . . .
“Blundell,” Lindsay’s voice missing today its usual aggravated edge, “the Commander has called Special Sky Detail. Please take your assigned station.”
“Of course, Lindsay, I was distracted for a moment.”
After securing the mess decks that evening, Miles sought out Chick Counterfly. “I have seen one of the Trespassers,” he said. “Down there. Out on the Promenade.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Yes. We met and spoke. Ryder Thorn. He was at Candlebrow. At the ukulele workshop that summer. He lectured on the four-note chord in the context of timelessness, and described himself then as a Quaternionist. We had quickly discovered our common love of the instrument,” Miles recalled, “and discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held—traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords—single, timeless events apprehended all at once instead of serially. Notes of a linear melody, up and down a staff, being a record of pitch versus time, to play a melody is to introduce the element of time, and hence of mortality. Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up.”
“Never thought of it like that,” said Chick, “all I know is, is it sure sounds better than when we sing a cappella.”
“In any case Thorn and I found that we communicate as well as ever. It was almost like being at Candlebrow again, only maybe not as dangerous.”
“You saved us then, Miles. You saw right into it. No telling what—”
“You fellows would have been saved by your own good sense,” Miles declared. “Whether I’d been there or not.”
But there was a sort of disconnection now in his voice that Chick had learned to recognize. “There’s something else, isn’t there.”
“It may not be over.” Miles was inspecting his Chums of Chance regulation-issue knuckle-duster.
“What are you planning, Miles?”
“We’ve arranged to meet.”
“You might be in danger.”
“We’ll see.”
So Miles, having duly submitted a special-request chit and received approval from Randolph, descended in civilian dress as a ground-party of one, to all appearances only another day-tripper among the seasonal throng creeping about the royal town below, ever hostage to the sea.
It was a bright day—at the horizon Miles could just make out the carbon smear of a liner. Ryder Thorn was waiting in the angle of the Digue by the Kursaal, with two bicycles.
“Brought your uke, I see.”
“I have learned a ‘snappy’ new arrangement of a Chopin nocturne that might interest you.”
They stopped at a patisserie for coffee and rolls and then pedaled south toward Diksmuide, the still air gradually accelerating into a breeze. The morning was alive with late summer. Harvest season was rolling to a close. Young tourists were everywhere in the lanes and by the canalsides, winding up their season of exemption from care, and were preparing to go back to schools and jobs.
The terrain was flat, easy cycling, allowing for speeds of up to twenty miles an hour. They overtook other cyclists, singly and in cheerfully uniformed touring groups, but didn’t pause to chat.
Miles looked at the countryside, pretending to be less puzzled than he was. For the sunlight had to it the same interior darkness as the watery dusk last ni
ght—it was like passing through an all-surrounding photographic negative—the lowland nearly silent except for water-thrushes, the harvested fields, the smell of hops being dried in kilns, flax pulled up and piled in sheaves, in local practice not to be retted till the spring, shining canals, sluices, dikes and cart roads, dairy cattle under the trees, the edged and peaceful clouds. Tarnished silver. Somewhere up in this sky was Miles’s home, and all he knew of human virtue, the ship, somewhere on station, perhaps watching over him at that moment.
“Our people know what will happen here,” said Thorn, “and my assignment is to find out whether, and how much, yours know.”
“I’m a mess cook for a ballooning club,” said Miles. “I know a hundred different kinds of soup. I can look in the eyes of dead fish at the market and tell how fresh they’re likely to be. I am a whiz with pudding in large quantities. But I don’t foretell the future.”
“Try to see my difficulty here. My principals think you do. What am I supposed to report back to them?”
Miles looked around. “It’s nice country, but a little on the motionless side. I wouldn’t say anything’s going to happen here.”
“Blundell, back at Candlebrow,” Thorn said, “you were able to see what your companions could not. You spied on us regularly until you were discovered.”
“Not really. No reason to.”
“You have persistently refused to coöperate with our program.”
“We may look like country boys, but when strangers show up out of nowhere with offers that sound too good to be true . . . well, common sense does sort of take over, is all. Can’t blame us for that, and we’re sure not going to feel guilty about it.”
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