One was a little smaller than the other. This was the female. And it was her who was now scratching her head. Her mate moved in as if to watch. But too late. She was off, under the water and away. Time to swim again. And this time to the other bank. Within seconds her head broke the surface again - but now towards the middle of the flow. And her mate was in pursuit. They were now seals. Every thirty feet, a smooth-snouted prow easing itself from the water. First one and then the other. And then again they'd disappear.
And so this went on until they'd made the other side. And as they arrived there, a bright flash of yellow swooped down from above. It was a kiskadee about its business. Then it was a streak of many colours: an ariçari on the wing. And now the ariçari was passing a group of egrets in a tree. They were preening themselves. And they just carried on preening. They'd seen this chap many times before. And although he was colourful, they knew he was also harmless. They'd ignore him and just get on with their feathers.
The otters had now pulled themselves out of the water and were lying on a patch of muddy bank. The female of the pair was on her back; the male was front down, his big flat tail still half submerged in the cool river water. He turned. He had heard something. And as he turned, he rose a little on his front legs. Then down again. No. There had been nothing. And even if there had been, he'd lost interest. His attention was now taken by the muddy bank and quite where upon it he should roll. His mate had not left him much room, and he might just have to roll in the water. But, there again, another real swim might be even better - and one with his mate joining in. He looked at her, growled softly and then slid into the river. Three seconds later she was in too. Then they swam and rolled together, two creatures at play and two creatures at ease - at the heart of this Rio Florenta.
To begin with, there was virtually nothing to see. Only the keen-eyed might have noticed that all the macaws, all the storks and even all the vultures were flying in the same direction - up the river against its flow. Then there was a slight haziness in the sky that hadn't been there before, a high haziness as though more clouds were being born. Then there was a new noise, a strange noise, a little like distant rain. But it was different from rain - not quite so soft.
Now the otters were out of the water again. This time side by side and clearly alert. They were like a pair of pale-breasted sentries looking down the river and sniffing the air. They had become statues, static things with their lithesome essence frozen to stone. There was something down that river which they didn't like, something which posed a threat - and in some way they'd sensed it was there.
And now there were more birds than ever flying up the river, far more than was ever natural. And in the distance there were now new noises: the sounds of alarm - shrieks, howls, bellows and squawks. And then nearer, crashing sounds, sounds to make egrets take flight. And from the far bank of the river appeared a tapir, then another, and after them two more and then a further three. One after the other they plunged into the river in a very un-tapir sort of way. And then they began to swim along the far bank and on up the river - a sight never witnessed before.
The otters were now becoming very restless; one could see it in their movements. They were stretching their necks and shaking their heads. And they were growling, growling together, their mouths pulled back to reveal those fearsome white teeth. And they seemed unsure of what to do. Stay where they were? Retreat to the forest? Take to the water? Or maybe even take a look? Well, they were otters. And all otters are inquisitive. They just love the unknown…
But then they began to bob up and down, and as if with one mind they took to the water and set off upstream. It was as though the unknown had suddenly become the understood - and they hadn't liked what they'd learnt.
One still couldn't see anything, so it had probably been the smells. It was a minute or so more before the first signs were clear to the eye, the first wisps of smoke drifting along against the current. And even then they were more like trails of morning mist than a signal that the forest was on fire.
More minutes passed and more birds flew past in the crowded sky. The sounds were getting closer - the alarm calls louder and the sound of something like distant rain now a sullen roar - the roar of an advancing wall of fire. Then the smoke arrived. Not now in fine drifting wraiths, but instead in a cloud of grim grey. It was becoming difficult to see the far bank of the river, and its silver-sheeted surface was changing to a gloomy black shroud. But worse was to come, far worse than this. And it came when the grey turned to red.
It was indistinct to begin with, just a faint orange shading to the smoke. Then there were clear dots of crimson, glowing embers floating through the air. Then the orange pulsated into red, and the red took on form, huge tongues of flame leaping skywards as they ate up the trees.
It was here. The inferno had arrived. And now the wall of green was one of black and red, spitting and hissing like a giant monster from the depths of the world. Beauty was being ravaged, wonder was being raped - all by a hideous whirlwind of man-made madness. For this wasn't nature's work. No, this was the hand of man. It was he who had put the torch to the trees, he who like a lunatic was destroying in an instant what had taken aeons to create. And what for? What possible reason could there be to wreak such havoc on such a marvel, on such a rich assemblage of flora and fauna - and in such a cruel way?
The next scene in the film showed the reason. It was a panorama of the Rio Florenta taken just two years after the fire. It was of a rolling prairie covered in harsh spiky grass and chopped up into large untidy fields by strings of wires on crooked posts. And in these fields there were tangles of weeds midst patches of ferns - and countless black stumps, charcoal monuments to the once great trees that had stood on this land. And here and there, a field was in use - with tired looking cows on that rough spiky grass, foreign animals foraging on foreign fodder in a place that had once been a shrine, a shrine to creation itself.
The Rio Florenta still flowed, but its waters were no longer silver. They were brown. And it was now a canal, a lifeless waterway with banks of crumbling earth. Above it flew no birds, no magic ariçaris with their coats of many colours, no naughty toucans with their beaks of yellow light. There was nothing, nothing but a blue and glaring sky.
The otters had gone too - and with them the very soul of this place.
The hateful image at last began to fade. And once again the subdued lighting in the theatre began to brighten, and to brighten to reveal an audience of three Lagooners. And again they wore those funeral expressions.
But then at these showings, they always did.
22.
It was mid-afternoon in the main auditorium and it was packed. Taking place was a members-only weightlifting competition. And this was always guaranteed to draw in the crowds. They were mostly women. Possibly something to do with the fact that this was Lollipop-land. And in Lollipop-land the reference to members-only was a literal one. The all-naked male contestants were required to lift the heaviest weight they could, using only their tools. Great chunks of metal were attached to their willies with a wire and clamp contraption, and they were then challenged to raise themselves from a squatting to a standing pose and thereby raise the weight from the floor.
There were just two categories within the competition for men of all sizes. One was the dead lift where the contestant had to lock his legs into a standing position for just three seconds. This was then won by whoever could achieve this carrying the heaviest weight. The other was the endurance event where a complicated matrix scoring system, which took account of the weight lifted and the time the weight was held, decided the overall winner. There was no clean and jerk competition.
The dead lift part of the afternoon's entertainment was nearing its climax, and preparing to make his lift was one of the iron men of members-only weightlifting: Swingalong Cassidy. He was a regular on the Lollipop, having now come to an arrangement with the management whereby in exchange for exposing his prodigious talents he would receive free accommoda
tion on board the vessel. And he was worth it. His member was a masterpiece.
Mind, it needed to be. On this occasion, it was up against some serious competition. Nothing less than the outsized appendage of Eric “The Log” Benson. And his penis was more like the stump of a third leg than a willy. And its enormous size posed an equally enormous threat to Swingalong's dominance of the current event.
So Swingalong's next lift was all-important - and certainly important enough to be described in the most revealing and revolting of detail. Or there again, in the interests of decency, it could be left largely to the imagination. And if one appreciates that in dead lifting, before anything is lifted at all, quite a lot of stretching goes on - and that in this instance, Swingalong, having passed on thirty kilos, was now attempting the impossible weight of thirty-three kilos - one will no doubt understand why decency has prevailed.
So suffice it to say that Swingalong did not lift this weight, nor did he lift any other weight ever again. The pundits in the audience put it down to over-confidence and a tendency Swingalong had developed to tug quickly when he should really have eased slowly. But whatever the cause, it had a dramatic impact on the lifter and on a large number of the ladies in the crowd. They fainted. And some of them even needed trauma counselling, such was their shock.
And something strange happened as well. Or rather it didn't happen. These contests were always attended by one or two Lagooners. And although they never took any active part, they would always intervene in the unlikely event of there being any injuries. Indeed it was said that after the competition they provided some very effective relief to any of the competitors who had suffered in any way at all. On this occasion there had been two of them. They were there when the contest had started.
What was strange was that they were not there at the time of Swingalong's accident. And there were no other Lagooners to come to his aid. Swingalong had to be attended to by the event's officials.
Other Lagooners did arrive a little while after, and they did then involve themselves in the fallen champ's condition. But the original two never reappeared. They had gone. And that was very odd. So odd, that if Eric hadn't witnessed it with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it. And if told about it by somebody else, he'd probably have come to the conclusion that this somebody, for the purpose of his own perverse amusement, was merely trying to pull his plonker…
23.
It had been a thoroughly miserable start to the day. He had woken up with a slight headache and a new pimple on his nose, and it had gone downhill from there. Even before breakfast he'd sustained a broken fingernail and cut himself shaving. And then breakfast itself had been a disaster. He'd spilt his coffee, there'd been eggshell in his omelette, and worst of all, a lump of jam had hurled itself off his toast and abseiled down his shirt. It was a write-off. Blackberry might live very well with apple but never with powder-blue shirts. And, of course, he'd made it infinitely worse by trying to rub it off, and succeeded only in rubbing it in. And the orange juice hadn't been too good either. It had been more yellow than orange - in taste as well as in colour - and it had made him feel horribly sick.
Matters hadn't improved when he'd begun his day's work. Now wearing a replacement pale green shirt, one with a rather nice comet motif on the breast pocket, he had taken up position at a Koffy Kup pavement coffee shop in one of the main shopping malls. It was close to where the second camera had been installed.
Renton had decided that in the absence of a better idea, he would adopt the “wait and watch the world go by” approach to finding his final suspect. And a lookout post close to where she'd first appeared would be as good a place as any to conduct his new campaign. This strategy did, however, ignore the unavoidable trials associated with an extended stay at any Koffy Kup emporium.
Now for many people, a visit to one of the many Koffy Kup outlets throughout the universe was a pleasure and a thrill. They were regarded as trendy and the place to be seen, a place where the beautiful people would assemble to chat and exchange gossip, which is presumably one of the few things that the beautiful people have to do with their time. But for Renton it was different. For Renton they were places to avoid.
Take the seats. These were devices that had been carefully sculpted but had not been designed. They were to be looked upon but never sat upon. Certainly not by somebody as tall as Renton for any length of time. For they were like giant bedpans. Although, there again, they were not quite as comfortable. And they were low. So low, in fact, that one was obliged to look up to one's coffee rather than at it. Or rather one looked up to one's small polystyrene bucket, the sort with the lid that one needs a degree in advanced packaging to dislodge. And with Koffy Kup coffee it wasn't even worth the effort. Whichever one of the forty-seven concoctions making up the Klassic Kollection one was foolish enough to choose, one always ended up with some wishy-washy slop - about an inch of it hidden away at the bottom of the “Kup”. Looking into a Koffy Kup cup of coffee was, in Renton's opinion, like looking down a blocked drain - but not one blocked with coffee.
He suspected that they were obliged to use some genuine coffee somewhere in the process. But through whatever they did to it and through whatever they added to it, the result was something that neither looked like the real thing nor tasted anything like what he recognised as real coffee. It was disgusting - just like the Koffee Kup Kookies that accompanied the brew itself. These little monsters were presented as a “Koffee Komplement”, but in Renton's view tasted more of “Akcident” than “Komplement”, the sort of akcident that happens in a chemistry laboratory when the first year's synthesis of napthelene takes a turn for the worse.
And all morning and all afternoon Renton had to sip Koffee and nibble Kookies, while all the time sitting in an oversized bedpan. It was purgatory, and a purgatory made no less purgatorial by the Koffee Kup's patrons, the dozen or so Koffee addicts who during the day considered themselves beautiful enough to park their bums on bedpans and assault themselves with one of those damn Koffee Kup Kreations. And as may be obvious by now, Renton's strategy had not worked. By late afternoon he was in the advanced stages of caffeine-aggravated irritation, through having spent seven hours of his valuable life achieving absolutely nothing. This stakeout had been a complete waste of time. He had seen no one with even a passing resemblance to the blonde stunner he sought. And now what the heck could he do?
It was at this time that a lady Lagooner passed by his table - and this gave him an idea.
It was simple. Ask Orphenia.
If anybody could find a particular person on this ship it was this Lagooner lot. And he knew one of them. OK, not very well, but well enough to talk to. And she was always going on about looking after the guests - and making sure they were getting everything they wanted. So if he could make it plain to her that what he wanted was a specific blonde damsel - for whatever purpose - he couldn't believe she wouldn't help. And she would succeed. He was sure of it. He couldn't imagine that she'd fail.
So he kalled for his bill, kollected up his belongings and set off for the clinic with a “C”, the clinic where Orphenia worked and where he hoped he would find her.
Soon he was there and he saw immediately that the clinic was closed. It was in darkness and on the door were directions to a second clinic where around-the-clock attention could be sought - presumably for medical-sexual problems of the emergency kind. But this one was no longer open for business. It was, after all, late afternoon, and Renton was more disappointed than surprised. But he then did what he always did when he found himself facing a locked shop or a closed restaurant - or a deserted-for-the-night clinic: he tried the door handle. It was traditional, possibly even atavistic, something of the poking the dead animal with one's spear just to make sure it is really dead - and the handle turned and the clinic door opened.
He wasn't really sure why he went in. It may have been just a mix of curiosity and bravado. Or possibly his new detective sub-conscious was identifying an unexpected opportunity
. But whatever the reason, he did. And when he was inside he realised it wasn't in total darkness. Down one of the corridors off reception was a dim light. And it was the same corridor he remembered from his previous visit. It led to the examination rooms. And maybe it led to the doctors' surgeries as well. And maybe one doctor was working late. Maybe Orphenia was down there and the dim light was the light from her surgery's open door.
Well, it was worth a try. He'd come this far. So he might as well go on.
Thirty paces down the corridor he did indeed come to an open door - and it was where the light was coming from. He edged gingerly towards it and then peered inside. There was a desk, a screen, a couple of chairs and an unidentifiable medical contraption. But there was no Orphenia and not even another doctor. It was a cul de sac in Renton's covert expedition and he would now have to wait until the next day to track down Orphenia.
It was then, just as he was turning to leave, that he noticed another door. It was no more than a wall panel behind the desk. But it was open - there was a definite gap between its leading edge and the rest of the wall. And there was light coming through the gap. There must be another room or another corridor there. And perhaps that's where Orphenia was…
It turned out to be a corridor, a long featureless corridor leading to a set of spiral stairs. And at the bottom of the spiral stairs a now increasingly inquisitive Renton found another corridor, this one with a number of doors along its length. They were locked. He tried each one of them and they were all firmly locked.
It was only then that he began to question what he was doing. Just because he was a detective he didn't have the right to pry into other people's affairs - and into other people's rooms. And that's what he was now doing: gratuitous prying. Because he knew for sure that he was no longer looking for Orphenia. He was just looking for looking's sake. So it was time to go. Time to return before anybody found him and asked him what he was up to.
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