“If we planned ahead, sent a few messages,” Obaday went on, “maybe got a gnostechnician to check the travel reports on the undernet, stayed each night with friends in safe places in whatever borough we reached…then it would be perfectly safe. Well…reasonably safe. Safe-esque. But, yes, it would be ‘dangerous’ if we didn’t think ahead, and we took a wrong turning into Wraithtown, or met some scratchmonkeys or a building with house-rabies, or, lord help us, if we ran into the giraffes…”
He shivered, reached up absently, and touched his fingertips on the ends of his pins and needles. “But we’re not walking. We’re going to get there today. This is…well, a ‘special occasion’ doesn’t cover it, really, does it? We have to get you to the Propheseers one, as quickly as possible, and two, as safely as possible.”
They turned into a cul-de-sac of brick homes, houses on stilts, and a windmill made of a helicopter on its side. Skool pointed. He, or she, beckoned them to a shelter with a very familiar logo.
“Now,” said Obaday, “we have only to wait.”
Zanna and Deeba stopped. The milk carton bumped into Deeba’s foot and squeaked.
Zanna said, “We’re getting a bus?”
11
Public Transport
“I know!” said Obaday. “Hard to believe. But yes. I think we need to.”
Zanna and Deeba looked at each other. They didn’t speak, but messages went between them in a series of looks and raised eyebrows: What’s the big deal with a bus? Don’t know…
“I’ve got the fare,” Obaday said. “They never turn anyone away, but it’s traditional to pay what you can.”
They were joined at the stop by an elderly woman in a coastguard’s uniform, and a hulking figure in a dress at whom Zanna and Deeba had to force themselves not to stare. It was a lobster, waddling on two stubby legs, clacking her pincers.
Obaday looked at his watch, leaned against the pole, and began to read his sleeve. The girls watched the sky. A sliver of the hoop-sun was visible over the roofs. Troupes of starlings, pigeons, and crows crisscrossed in front of the clouds, in rather more organized fashion than they ever seemed to manage in London.
“Look,” said Zanna, pointing. There were other birds among them, half-familiar from pictures, like herons and vultures. There was at least one thing in the air that didn’t look like a bird at all, something that cawed enormously as it disappeared.
“So,” Deeba whispered, knocking the post of the bus stop. “What do you think’ll turn up?”
“Don’t know,” said Zanna.
“A load of camels?” said Deeba.
“A boat?”
“A carriage like in Sleeping Beauty?”
“A sledge?”
The girls’ smiles froze when they heard the familiar coughing of a big engine approaching. A double-decker red bus turned the corner.
“It’s just…” said Deeba.
“It’s a bus,” said Zanna.
Obaday Fing looked enraptured.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” he said.
The bus looked severely battered. Where it should have had a number was instead a strange sign that might have been a drawing of a roll of paper or might have been a random pattern. It was an old-fashioned Routemaster of the type that had been retired from London, with a pole and an open platform at the back, and a separate little compartment at the front for the driver, a woman in an antiquated uniform and dark glasses.
“The helmswoman,” said Obaday. “And with her one of UnLondon’s champions. Protectors of the transit, the sacred warriors.”
“Morning,” said a man, jumping out of the vehicle.
Obaday whispered, “The bus conductor.”
The conductor wore an old-fashioned London Transport uniform. It had been torn and fixed many times, and it was clean, but scorched and stained. Strapped to his front was a metal contraption, on which he drummed his fingers. He wore beads, and charms, and a copper truncheon on his belt.
“Mrs. Jujube,” the man said, pushing back his cap and bowing to the elderly woman. “Always a pleasure. Manifest Station again? And madam?” He inclined his head at the lobster. “Let me guess…the estuary? You know you’ll have to change buses? Please, go on in. And sir…” He turned to Obaday.
“This is, I must, I cannot tell you,” Obaday stammered. “It is an honor, a real, I cannot, I am overcome! On behalf of all of UnLondon—”
“Well,” said the uniformed man, in what sounded like polite boredom. “You’re very kind. May I ask your destination?”
“I am Obaday Fing, and this is my associate Skool, and this is Deeba, and this—” He swept his arm at Zanna. “—is the reason for our journey. Your route takes us towards the Pons Absconditus, I think?”
Obaday rummaged in his pocket and brought out a handful of money. There were francs and marks and ancient English pound notes, and colorful currency Deeba and Zanna didn’t recognize. “One young lady has her own ticket.”
Zanna held out her travelcard. “This,” said Obaday, “is—”
“The Shwazzy,” the conductor whispered. He grabbed the travelcard and examined it.
“I know that look,” he said to Zanna, smiling. “Astonished, bewildered, excited, frightened…awed. That’s the taste of the first few days in UnLondon. It takes one who’s swigged it to recognize it. Shwazzy, it’s a great honor.”
“You recognize it…?” Zanna said.
“You came here, too?” Deeba said.
“Where d’you think I got this?” he said, pointing at his uniform, and the box around his midriff. “Where you two from?”
“Kilburn,” said Zanna.
“Ah. I’m a Tooting boy originally. Joe Jones—pleased to meet you. I went abnaut—that’s what it’s called, crossing down, or up, or sideways, from there to here—and came to UnLondon, what, must be more than a decade ago.”
“You did?” said Zanna. “Thank God! You can explain things.”
“We dunno what’s going on,” said Deeba. “We need to get back, I want my mum and dad…”
“Hey, Rosa!” Jones shouted, and the driver leaned out of her window. “See who we’ve got on this trip?”
She peered over the top of her glasses.
“Blond…” said Jones. “Young lady. From out of town. As things are getting nasty in the abcity…”
Rosa’s eyes grew wider and wider.
“That is never the Shwazzy!”
Zanna and Deeba looked at each other.
“Oh my lord!” Rosa went on. “I heard rumors from the old place that something was happening, on the drivers’ grapevine…one of them even said she’d tracked the Shwazzy down to a café! But I thought it was just foolishness…But it’s finally happened! It’s time!”
“It is indeed!” the conductor said. “And it’s down to us to get her to the Pons Absconditus.”
“So, she’s going to fight for us! She’ll fix things!”
“Hold on,” said Zanna. “I don’t know anything about that…”
“What’s the holdup?” the elderly woman shouted.
“Coming, Mrs. Jujube!” Joe Jones spoke quietly to Obaday and the girls. “We should be careful who knows about this. There are…those who’d like to get in the way. The Pons is a few stops away. We’ll go as usual, so no one knows anything’s up. Get you there in a few hours.
“Please.” Jones closed Obaday’s fingers around his money without taking any. “You’re escorting the Shwazzy. Now remember—not a word. As far as anyone’s concerned, you’re just regular petitioners, come to ask the Propheseers a question. And what about that? Is that with you? Does it have a name?” He pointed at the milk carton, hesitating by the bus’s platform.
“Yes,” Deeba said. “It’s called…Curdle. Come on, Curdle.”
Zanna crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows.
The carton leapt happily inside after them.
“Curdle?” whispered Zanna.
“Oh shut up,” said Deeba. “Just get on with being Shwa
zzed, will you?”
There were a few other passengers on the bottom deck, oddly dressed men and women and a few even odder other things. As they always did on buses, Zanna and Deeba headed for the staircase to the upper level. The conductor stopped them.
“Not this time,” he said. “Wait a bit.”
He rang the bell, and the bus moved. Obaday and Skool sat, but Zanna and Deeba stood next to Jones on the platform at the back.
“Our next stop’s Manifest Station,” he said. “We’re heading straight there.”
“Not straight there,” Deeba said. She pointed through the front window. “I mean, there’s a wall in the way.” They did not seem to be slowing down.
“We’re going to hit it,” said Zanna. The bus gunned straight for the bricks. Deeba and Zanna winced and closed their eyes.
“Hold tight, please,” Jones shouted.
There was a hissing sound, the flapping of heavy cloth, and the thrumming of ropes. Zanna and Deeba opened their eyes again, hesitantly.
A tarpaulin bulged from the bus’s roof like an enormous fungus. It inflated into a huge balloon, tethered by ropes from the upper windows. The bus sped up, and the rugby-ball-shaped balloon stretched longer than the vehicle beneath it.
There was a thump behind them, as if something had hit the vehicle’s rear, a scuffing like an animal ascending the metal. Deeba and Zanna turned in alarm, then gasped and rocked and held on, as with a stomach-jolting tug, the bus started to rise.
Dangling below the balloon, it passed over the wall, leaving a threadwork of streets and buildings below, ascending over UnLondon.
12
Safe Conduct
“It’s beautiful,” Zanna said.
The girls held on to the pole and leaned out over the roofs.
“God,” said Zanna. “My dad would be sick if he saw me doing this.”
“Eeurgh,” said Deeba. “Imagine.” She leaned over and made a puking noise. “It’d go everywhere.”
Conductor Jones stood on the platform with them, and they both knew somehow that if they were to slip, he’d be there to grab them.
The bus puttered low over the streets. Towers poked up around it. UnLondoners looked up and waved at it.
They passed squat tower blocks, arches of brick and stone, the hotchpotch slopes of roofs. There were stranger things, too: skyscraper-high chests of drawers in polished wood, spires like melting candles, houses like enormous hats and bats. Deeba pointed at gargoyles and pigeons on some of the houses, then started: some of the gargoyles were moving.
“Your eyes,” said Jones. “Bigger than fried eggs. I remember seeing it the first time.”
He pointed out landmarks to them.
“That’s Wraithtown, where the roofs flicker. That’s the market. Those windowless towers? Backwall Maze. That big fat chimney-thing? It’s the entrance to the library.”
“Why you here?” Zanna said.
“I couldn’t do this back in London, could I?” Jones held on to the pole with one hand and leaned out over the city. “Do you see that?” He pointed at a building made from typewriters and dead televisions.
“We saw one like that before,” Zanna said. “Obaday called it…what was it?”
“A moily house?” said Deeba.
“You’ll see a lot of moil technology here,” Jones said. “Em Oh Aye Ell. Mildly Obsolete In London. Throw something away and you declare it obsolete. You’ve seen an old computer, or a broken radio or whatever, left on the streets? It’s there for a few days, and then it’s just gone.
“Sometimes rubbish collectors have taken it, but often as not it ends up here, where people find other uses for it. It seeps into UnLondon. You might see residue: maybe a dried-up puddle on a wall. That’s where moil dripped through. And here, it sprouts like mushrooms on the streets.
“The money your friend has? All the out-of-date and foreign coins and notes Londoners throw away. A few years ago when Europe got rid of its old money and you were all left with loads of useless old bits and bobs, so much found its way down here we had too much, and that meant terrible inflation. We had to feed loads of it to the moolaphage…Anyway. That’s sort of how things get down here.
“You could say I was a bit like that,” he said thoughtfully. “Obsolete, they said. If you find just the right manhole you can get here. The hard part wasn’t coming through, it was getting the bus through.
“I always worked on the buses, back in London. You probably grown up paying the driver, right? Or travelcards? Didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that most of the buses in London had a driver and conductor.
“I’d take the money and give the tickets.” He patted the machine he wore. “It was quicker, because the driver didn’t have to deal with everyone. And it was safer. Two of us there, all the time. But they decided they could save money if they got rid of half of us. Of course it messed things up. But them who made the decision were people who never took buses, so they didn’t care.
“We knew what we did was important. Look in the dictionary. ‘Conduct: verb. To lead, control, or guide.’ Some of us weren’t prepared to stop being guides. We look after travelers. It’s…” Conductor Jones looked down, suddenly shy. “Some people say it’s a sacred duty.”
“UnLondon…Well, sometimes, it can be a dangerous place. We had to be really ready to conduct.” He tapped the weapon on his belt, pointed into the cabinet beside him, at a bow and arrow, and coils of wire. “The drivers who came down swore to get the passengers from where they are to where they want to go. And to protect them.”
“Protect them from what?” Zanna said.
“There’s the occasional skymugger,” Jones said. “Airsquid, though mostly they hunt high, where the deep-sky fisherfolk go. And there are other things. Conductors on other routes, if they’re real unlucky, sometimes get attacked by giraffes.”
The girls stared at each other.
“You’re the second person to say that,” Deeba said.
“I’ve seen giraffes,” Zanna said.
“They’re so not scary…” Deeba said.
“Ha!” The whole bus looked up at Jones’s laugh. “They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves! Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course.
“There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots. You’ll find pigs, dogs, frogs, everything else getting through to here, though. There’s a lot of traffic back and forth. They know when things are happening. They pass messages.”
“Zann,” said Deeba. “That makes sense. All those animals, they knew you were…whatever you are.”
“The Shwazzy,” said Zanna.
“But no cats,” Jones went on. “Too busy trying to look cool. Anyway. You know what the main danger is down here. And it’s a danger that’s been growing. For years.”
“The Smo—” Zanna said, and he put his finger quickly to his lips.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”
“But what is it?” she said. “What does it want?”
“Can’t talk about it here,” Jones whispered. “Better safe than. You know what I mean. The Propheseers’ll explain.
“Next stop,” he yelled. “Manifest Station.”
They passed an enormous building like a cathedral, within a few meters of its windows, and people peered at them out of offices. The edifice was perforated in several places with what looked like random holes, and bursting from them were railway lines. They sprang in different directions: horizontal; up like a roller coaster; corkscrewing down. A few hundred meters from the great building, they plunged into holes in the street, and down into darkness.
“Manifest Station,” Jones said. A dark-windowed diesel train burst out of the building, close enough
to make the bus shake. It helter-skeltered downward into the earth.
“Where’s it going?” Zanna said.
“Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities,” Jones said. “If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless…It’s a terminus.”
They hovered above a big yard at the side of the station containing twenty or thirty double-decker buses, with passengers milling around them. Each bus had a different sign where the numbers should be—faces, insects, flowers, random patterns. On their sides, where London buses carried adverts, were paintings, short stories in big print, pictures of chessboards with games in progress, musical scores.
But these were details. What made Zanna and Deeba stare and make little sounds of wonder was how the buses moved.
UnLondon’s terrain was difficult. There were thin tangled streets, sudden steep hills, deep pits, patches where roads seemed to be made of something too soft for wheels, on which pedestrians bounced. To deal with the various difficulties of their routes, the UnLondon buses had adapted.
They trundled on caterpillar treads. They rolled on enormously inflated rubbery wheels. They coasted on skirts of air like hovercrafts. In the sky was another aerobus, below a round balloon. Conductors leaned out of the vehicles, bristling with weapons.
A bus approached the terminus from a thicket of tall spindly towers. It picked its way over the roofs on four enormous lizard legs that sprouted from its wheel housings. The driver spun the wheel and tugged at levers, and the bus’s padded gecko feet closed gently around buttresses and splayed on slanting roofs, leaving no marks behind.
“Manifest Station Terminus,” Jones belted. “Who’s changing here?”
They winched Mrs. Jujube and two other passengers down in a basket. “This is the Scrollscrawl bus, and you want the Rusty Star Sigil bus,” Jones told one. “And you, sir, look for the Terrible Mouse Sigil.”
As the bus swung in position, Deeba looked up and made a little startled noise.
Un Lun Dun Page 5