I’m ashamed now to describe how easy it was to get Sandy Verstandig into bed. How easy it was to secure access her phone while she slept.
And finally, how easy it was to substitute my plan for Grale’s in the reformation queue, and conceal all traces of my crime.
Crowding against the windows at Myxomycota once again, as the final seconds ticked away until midnight, I almost shivered with anticipation. There was Bloorvoor down below, all lit in red. Soon it would be rechristened Bushyhead, when it assumed the lineaments of my visionary design. It was all I could do not to chuckle aloud at the shock Grale was about to receive.
Of course, the mixup would be immediately apparent, the unmistakeable substitution of my superior design for her inferior one. But it would not be totally improbable that the second-place entry might have been mistakenly inserted ahead of the winner in the queue. Yes, Sandy Verstandig would take some minor blame. But no lasting harm done. And then, in the morning, the populace would see just how wonderful their new neighbourhood was, and vote to keep it. I’d get the accreditation, and be back up to eleven. Grale would look like a whiner and sore loser if she contested the results.
As I said, I wasn’t thinking too clearly.
Various people addressed me in those last few minutes, but I don’t recall anything they or I said.
And then midnight arrived.
The deliquescent “demolition” of Bloorvoor occurred perfectly, rendering the district featureless. All the condo nodes and vacuoles awaited reincorporation into the new buildings. Our room held its collective breath for the manifestation of the winning design.
And that’s when all chaos erupted.
The senstrate began to seethe and churn, tossing out irregular whips and tendrils and geysers. Condo nodes bobbed about like sailboats in a typhoon. I could barely imagine the ride the inhabitants were getting, although I knew that automatic interior safety measures—inflatable furniture, airbag walls and such—would prevent them from being harmed.
The watchers were stunned. I saw Grale with her eyes wide and mouth agape. That image alone was sufficient reward. But also my only tangible satisfaction.
Because what happened next was utterly tragic.
My design emerged, but hybridized with Grale’s!
Somehow I had botched the queue, overlaying and blending the two plans. I never would have thought such a thing would be possible. But the reality stood before us.
The most outré buildings began to self-assemble, mutant structures obeying no esthetic code, arrayed higgledy-piggledy across the district. A nightmare, a surreal canvas—
I backed away from the window. “No, no, this wasn’t supposed to happen—”
I have to give Grale credit for sharpness of hearing and intelligence. She was on me then like a tigress, bearing me to the floor and pummelling me half-senseless, while outside our sight the mashup reformation surged on. We rolled around for what seemed a bruising eternity, until other planners managed to separate us.
Restrained by Partch and O’Day, almost growling, Grale confronted me. “Moses, you don’t know what a huge fucking mess you’ve gotten yourself into!”
And I certainly didn’t.
But neither did she.
Of course you know how the new hybrid district of QualBushy (sometimes also known as HeadQuad) broke all duration records. Approved the morning after by a shocking 97.6 percent of the populace. Not falling to its next reformation for an astonishing 10,139 hours.
Mashup designs became the sine qua non for all reformations. iCity experienced a renaissance of design fecundity and doubled in acreage. Mount Excess was joined by Mount Backup. Partnerships formed, broke up, and reformed among the planners at an astonishing rate.
Except for one pairing that endured.
Grale and Moses.
I give Holly top billing because I’d never hear the end of it at home around the dinner table if I didn’t.
RETURN TO THE 20TH CENTURY
January 1, 1960, and the whole globe was atremble with anticipation. For today marked the start of ceremonies surrounding the official inauguration of the new man-made continent dubbed Helenia.
A truly unique milestone in human progress had been reached. The cunning assembly of millions of hectares of artificial land from great carven sheets of the Himalayas and Rocky Mountains, covered with rich topsoil dredged from the many productive ports and harbours of the whole world, and utilizing the scattered Polynesian isles as seeds around which to accrete, represented the supreme accomplishment of human craft and ingenuity to date. Although the startling and productive twentieth century still had four decades to run, it certainly seemed to most of the citizenry that an apex of engineering, ingenuity and social coordination had been reached, one that would not soon be surpassed, if ever.
But little did anyone suspect that a looming crisis would soon spur mankind on to an even greater feat of construction and ambition, all in the name of sheer self-preservation of their remarkable civilization in the face of a malign and unknown rival!
The capital city of Helenia, Pontoville, was abuzz this temperate day with the arrival of assorted dignitaries from across the harmonious globe. These eminences from all the spheres of culture, politics, industry and religion arrived by several means. By swift undersea rail tube (one such contrivance emanated from San Francisco ((otherwise known as New Nanking)), one from Lima, and one from Manila). By streamlined submersible and surface-plying oceanic vessels. And of course by innumerable aircraft, both immense ships of state, featuring lifting balloons large as a castle and multifarious as a sculpture garden, and individual pinnaces and veloces from nearby territories such as the Sandwich Islands.
So heavily did the distinguished visitors plunge upon Pontoville, thronging the skies over the city of parks and towers and also its broad avenues and long piers, that they could not all be greeted individually by President Philippe Ponto and his first lady Hélène (nee Colobry). Later of course the President and his amiable consort would spend at least a brief interval of conversation with every superior guest, as they circulated at numerous state functions in celebration of the sixth continent’s official birthday. But for the moment on this first day of the festivities, President Ponto had reserved his time for welcoming only the highest among the high. Su Chu Peng, leader of the Oriental Republic; Bismarck III, chancellor of Germany and its North American satellite, New Germania; Kulashekhara II, Emperor of India; and so forth down the list of exclusively great names—with two humble exceptions, the first being the President’s immediate family.
Philippe and Hélène Ponto turned out in person at midday to greet Philippe’s father (and Hélène’s former guardian), Mr. Raphaël Ponto, the supreme industrialist, banker, speculator and visionary, whose titanic career had been an inspiration both to his son and the world at large. Accompanying the elder Ponto was his wife Josephine, herself well-noted for her role as an officeholder representing the Radical Feminist Party. And rounding out the party were Philippe’s sisters, Barbe and Barnabette, along with their spouses and offspring.
Philippe, a handsome moustachioed man barely past his first bloom of youth, clasped his stout father to his bosom, heedless of rumpling his official sash of office or of the impress of his many medals into his own and his father’s chest. They stood upon the high, broad and busy aerial platform where the express from Paris had just docked.
“Father, I cannot believe you have finally made it to this new land whose creation owes everything to your own guidance and exemplary career.”
Mr. Ponto, a stout and convivial iteration of his child, responded with bluff, hearty warmth and self-abnegation. “Well, you know that a few small matters have kept me busy till now, during the year or two of Helenia’s creation. The takeover of Portugal as a second pleasure park along the lines of Italy, for instance. But there was simply no way I would miss the official inauguration of such a monumental achievement. You have much to be proud of this day, my son!”
Phil
ippe made some humble rejoinders of his own, before moving to greet his mother and siblings in similar open-hearted fashion. Meanwhile, Mr. Ponto’s eye falling on Hélène, the elder man turned to his daughter-in-law, who so far had held back from the familial mingling.
“Why, Hélène, you look so distracted! Daydreaming perhaps? A privilege of youth. Still, it is most undiplomatic behaviour on this splendid state occasion. I thought my days of lecturing you were over. But perhaps I shall have to take you once more in hand!”
Hélène, a slim, attractive, blonde woman of average build, did not respond immediately to her father-in-law’s mix of chafing and jollying. Instead, she continued to stand at the ornate cast-iron railing of the platform, gazing up into the sky.
There above the city of Pontoville hung the daytime Moon.
The perpetual orb filled nearly the entire sky.
Some short time ago, Earth scientists had drawn the satellite much closer to its primary, by means of electrical attraction. Precisely speaking, the distance from one globe to another was now just six hundred and seventy-five kilometres, or roughly the gap between Paris and Lyons. Moreover, the rotation and gravitic interactions of the two planets had been locked and stabilized, so that the Moon neither rose nor set any longer, but remained perpetually in the sky over Pontoville, as a tribute to the importance of this new nation.
It was this very orb that seemed now to transfix Hélène. She murmured mysterious words at the blank visage of Selene, words which Mr. Ponto could interpret as he approached his daughter-in-law.
“Alpha, we await your coming. Alpha, we are ready—”
Mr. Ponto laid a hand on Hélène’s shoulder, and the woman started, as if an electrical current had passed through her. She turned her face away from the lunar surface, its most minute details plain as the creases in one’s palm, even by day, and addressed her father-in-law.
“Oh, sir, it is so good to see you! I am glad you have arrived!”
“Now, that is more like the reception I expected, dearest.”
The reunited family consorted pleasantly for a few more minutes, amidst the hurly-burly of additional arrivals, with Hélène and her sisters-in-law exchanging news about the latest fashions of each continent. But their chatter was cut short by Philippe’s exclamation.
“I see it! Jungle Alli’s ship! The famed Smoke Ghost!”
All eyes turned to follow Philippe’s pointing finger. The President of a continent was as excited as a schoolboy. Here came the second party for whom he had deigned a personal reception.
Moving swiftly through the sky like some celestial pirate ship, the Smoke Ghost radiated a louche elan not exhibited by any other craft. Suspended beneath a balloon shaped like a recumbent odalisque of Junoesque proportions, its baroque gondola was scarred by hard travel and not a few bullet impacts. As the craft approached the docking platform, the dashing figure behind the wheel inside the pilothouse could be more and more clearly discerned.
Jungle Alli, christened Alice Bradley at birth.
Alice Bradley had been born to Mary Hastings Bradley and Herbert Bradley in Chicago, the “second city” of the Mormon interior of North America. Directly from her first juvenile stirrings of reason and independence, she had resisted the conventional life outlined in advance for her, utterly rejecting a future that included the infamous Mormon polygamous marriage. Partly to tame her rebellious spirit, her parents had sent her to a private girls’ school, Les Fougères, in Lausanne, Switzerland. But this rigid institution suited young Alice no better than her native patriarchy, and at age sixteen, in 1931, she had run away.
The next news of the renegade Alice Bradley came most unexpectedly from the heart of darkest Africa. At this time, the continent was not totally pacified and integrated into the twentieth century as it is today, with its productive citizens indistinguishable—save for the hue of their skin—from their Paris or Berlin cousins. Pockets of sub-Saharan barbarism still existed, and one of the most brutish tribes were the Niam-Niams of Central Africa. Cannibals one and all, they derived their name from their blood-curdling war-cry of “Nyama! Nyama!” Otherwise, “Flesh! Flesh!” Feared by natives and Europeans alike, the Niam-Niams maintained an inviolate sphere of privacy and secrecy.
But even this hostile bubble had eventually to be pierced by the superior forces of technology, culture and capitalism, and in 1940 a trading expedition from Marseilles entered the main Niam-Niam village under a flag of truce.
Imagine the consternation and discomfiture of the Europeans to discover, ruling over the cannibals, a young white woman!
Not precisely white any longer, after nearly a decade under the tropical sun. Nut-brown and nearly naked, save for a lion-skin skirt, with whip-cord muscles and long blonde tresses matted into elflocks hanging down to her shapely rump, Alice Bradley exhibited teeth stained brown and filed to points. She sat on a crude throne, clutching a feather-adorned spear. And she hailed the newcomers in the Niam-Niam tongue.
After overcoming their initial shock, the traders awoke Alice’s long-disused French and were able to converse. She detailed a long history of conquest, first over the Niam-Niams themselves by one lone sixteen-year-old girl equipped with no more than a Krupp repeating rifle, sixty pounds of backpacked cartridges, and an infinite supply of bravado and courage, and then, at the head of her adopted clan, of all the neighbouring tribes.
When asked tentatively what her ultimate aims and goals were, Alice Bradley grinned in her ghastly fashion and replied simply, “Freedom.” When asked if that goal were incompatible with her return to civilization, Alice said, “Not at all—so long as it’s on my terms.”
Thus began the public career of the astonishing woman soon dubbed by journalists everywhere “Jungle Alli.”
For the next two decades, employing her obediently savage (and presumably dietarily reformed) cannibals as shock troops, Jungle Alli participated in the taming of the Dark Continent. Up and down the broad expanse of Africa, a mercenary in service of whichever government could afford her, Jungle Alli contributed to the establishment of law and order in pursuit of profit and fame. Her exploits became world famous, from the overthrow of the dictator of Senegambia to the suppression of the Tuaregs of Biskra. Hundreds of pulpy novels, hardly exaggerated, had been written with her as the star.
However, of late, Jungle Alli had begun to seem like a bit of an anachronism. Now that her work was finally done amidst these former backwaters, Jungle Alli found herself on the verge of being outmoded. The modern pacified world seemed to have few assignments for a rogue of her nature, and she had spent the last few years in frivolous deeds of personal derring-do: mountain-climbing, big-game hunting, motorcar-racing, and so forth.
Nonetheless, to those of young President Philippe Ponto’s generation, she remained an alluring figure of romance and adventure. Even in this era of complete female suffrage and equality—female dominance, some would maintain—when many of the fairer sex had built exemplary careers, the ex-Chicago girl boasted a worldwide celebrity. Having grown up on tales of Jungle Alli’s exploits, President Ponto had determined that she must grace the seminal celebrations of Helenia, confering her iconic mana upon the new nation.
Thus her arrival today.
With Jungle Alli at the controls, the Smoke Ghost manoeuvred delicately until achieving a mooring. Over the decks of the gondola swarmed dozens of Niam-Niams of boths sexes, bare-chested and grass-skirted, fur cuffs at ankles and wrists. They dropped a plank to the platform, and carpeted it with zebra hides. Only then did Jungle Alli condescend to disembark.
Now forty-five years of age, Jungle Alli remained an extremely attractive woman. Her lithe physique was modestly displayed by khaki pantaloons and blouse, complemented by high black boots. Twin pistols were slung at her hips, while bandoliers of cartridges crossed her chest. An unholstered machete slapped her thigh as she walked.
Jungle Alli’s still-golden hair, admixed with threads of grey, had long ago been bobbed neat and short. Fighting aerial
freebooters off the coast of Zanzibar ten years ago, she had lost an eye, and that sinister empty socket had henceforth been concealed by a patch. When she smiled, as she did now, the work of the best Parisian dentists was revealed, synthetic caps covering her cannibal heritage.
Accompanied by her honour guard of blackamoors, themselves a daunting entourage, Jungle Alli strode boldly across the gap separating her from President Ponto. She extended her right hand in the manner of her North American forebears, eschewing the more traditional European ceremonial double kisses. President Ponto took her hand and found himself wincing from the strength of her grip.
“Miss Bradley, allow me to extend the unlimited hospitality of our fledgling nation to one whose exploits have ever been—”
Jungle Alli interrupted the sincere but fulsome speech, employing her natal English. “No time for jawing now, chief. I’ve discovered that our planet is under attack!”
The state palace of Helenia consisted of a building inspired by Eiffel’s Parisian Tower. But the Tower that reared over Pontoville was precisely five times as large, rearing a full 1,600 metres into the empyrean and occupying a terrestrial footprint of many hectares. Nor did it feature mainly a lacy openwork construction, its lower reaches being walled off and devoted to governmental offices. And of course, the very tip of the enormous structure had been reserved for the sun-drenched Presidential chambers, serviced by a high-speed ascenseur.
Here, higher than clouds, sat now Jungle Alli, President Ponto, and the President’s father, Mr. Raphaël Ponto, the latter in his capacity as trusted advisor to his son and as representative of the international business community.
The legendary female African mercenary seemed utterly at ease, in comparison to the anxiety exhibited by the two men, and in fact had delayed imparting any more of her startling news long enough to enjoy a noxious cheroot, prefacing her indulgence by saying, “Damn nuisance not to be able to smoke in flight. But can’t risk your whole ride going up in flames.”
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