Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “It is simple enough. Sometime around the Flood, my colleague Corkring wrote a rather derivative booklet on Coleridge and so considers that author as a private property I am intruding upon. I suppose that the abduction of this student is for him a form of revenge.”

  Gibiser seemed to find the explanation plausible but did not want let Gabriel see that, and adopted instead a diffident, disapproving, whatever-it-is-I’m-against-it expression that came as part of the package along with the panoply of Dean.

  “If I read correctly between the lines, his allegations are, however, of another nature.”

  “I don’t like to wallow in another’s man mud,” muttered Gabriel, barely unclenching his jaws to say it.

  Gibiser nodded pensively.

  “We are coming to a situation where it is his word against yours, then.”

  “It’s my word against his oink, you mean.”

  The Dean pretended he had not heard.

  “And I regret to say that in such a situation, his word is mightier than yours. First, he is a full-fledged fellow and you are not. Then, Mr. d’Allier, you are, if I may say so, a man with a past. I am speaking, of course, of previous involvements with students.”

  Gabriel wanted to protest, in the name of the largely mythical nature of the said involvements, but he was silenced by a gesture from Gibiser, who did not want to discuss further such an unsavoury matter.

  “And at last, and this may be even more crucial, Professor Corkring is, as you may know, Special Councillor of Studies for the Council of Seven. And—I am speaking honestly to you here—his defeat for the office of Vice-Regent of the College has made him, shall we say, a bit nervous and dangerous to contradict. I would not want him to carry these matters higher than they should go, which he is wont to do, if he is not given satisfaction.”

  “Which, if I may read between the lines, means I cannot count on your support?” asked Gabriel, who, as soon as he had heard the words Council of Seven knew not only that his case was hopeless but also that the noose would only get tighter if he struggled.

  “Since when do you need support from anyone, Mr. d’Allier? You are a loner,” said Gibiser, as if that settled the matter. The French half of Gabriel’s brain heard l’honneur and almost felt flattered, while the other half remained a cold blank. He got up and walked out without a word.

  He went back to his office, holding his anger in himself as in a cup about to spill. Rage in Gabriel never burst out in fits but got ice-cold and crystallized into unforgettable, unforgiving grudges. Fuelled up by the snowcaine, he paced up and down, from door to desk and from sofa to bookshelves, sometimes whispering atrocities to a phantom Corkring, sometimes devising various plans for public humiliations, sometimes refusing to stoop so low as to acknowledge both the miserable scheme and the pitiful existence of his colleague. He almost did not hear the soft knock on the door, but eventually he opened it with an aggressive swiftness, only to find himself face to face with none other than Phoebe O’Farrell.

  “Yes?” he asked, dark-eyed and frowning.

  “Can I have a word with you, sir?” asked the girl, who looked ill at ease.

  “It depends on what you have to say.”

  “I feel I must explain something to you.”

  “I feel that, too,” he said, leaving the door ajar and seating himself behind his desk.

  Phoebe O’Farrell closed the door and sat down. She was a petite pale girl, with light brown eyes and long, flowing, curly hair of a subdued red, always dressed in a slightly quaint, Pre-Raphaelite way, and even to the objective eye she was cute as a red-alert button. But she was a wee tad affected, and from the little that Gabriel had read or heard from her, she had an Ophelian streak of potential craziness that he had, since day one, deemed wiser to steer clear of, so Corkring’s allegations, the reader will be pleased to know, had no truth to them whatsoever.

  They both remained silent for a while.

  “I have a problem with Professor Corkring,” said the girl.

  “That makes two of us,” said Gabriel while dusting off, as casually as he could, some traces of a white volatile powder he had noticed on his desk.

  “I have shown him my work, the work I had started with you.”

  “You should not have.”

  “I know that, sir. He asked me what I was doing and wanted to see it. He gave me some suggestions about it, and …”

  She glanced up at Gabriel in embarrassment, and suddenly he realized that he was putting her through the same kind of ordeal that he had endured this morning when facing the Gentlemen of the Night. He encouraged her with a smile that may have looked like a grin, because a little more time elapsed in silence.

  “And …?”

  “He told me that you wanted to steal my ideas.”

  “Which ones, my dear?”

  The girl lowered her head. Once again, he felt cruel and remembered he should try to encourage her, if he wanted to know anything.

  “So you know that is not true, I hope.”

  “Yes,” whispered the girl.

  “Very well. Did he suggest something else?”

  “He said that what you were interested in was … you know …”

  “I do not.”

  “… going beyond professional relationships.”

  “I don’t think I have ever given you any cause of alarm on this point.”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly, and, Gabriel felt, or liked to think, almost regretfully.

  “So you know better.”

  “And then, he said he could help me, because he knew the subject very well and also knew a lot of people who could be very useful to me, if I were to keep on working with him.”

  “On this, he did not lie. He knows a lot of people. And so I take it that you were interested.”

  “I did not want to work with him. But I did not know how to refuse.”

  “Et tu, Phoebe …” said Gabriel, pointing an accusing finger at his student. But that did not make her smile, as it was vaguely intended to do.

  “I was evasive as long as I could be, but last week he …” She stopped, stumbling on something that immediately attracted Gabriel’s attention.

  “I’m all ears,” he said softly, now beginning to enjoy himself.

  “I came across him in the college swimming pool and he asked me what … I should not tell you that.”

  “It is only fair that you do. I need to hear it,” Gabriel said, as benevolently as he could.

  Phoebe blushed a light pink.

  “What would I do if I saw him naked.”

  Ha ha. That was it. He’d known it all the time. One more of those old lecherous teachers, Gabriel judged, with all the unforgiving harshness of a middle-aged lecherous teacher. A snowcaine angel was prompting him to say “I hope you answered that you would vomit,” but the effect was starting to wear off, and the angel had now a feeble voice that he could overrule if he chose.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Phoebe, as if to herself.

  But Gabriel knew what he had to do.

  “It’s very simple. You go and work with him.”

  “But I wanted to work with you,” said Phoebe, turning a lily-white shade of pale.

  “I don’t want you to get into trouble. And I don’t want to get into trouble because of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and looked as if she were about to weep.

  Seeing this, the snowcaine angel found another entrance to Gabriel’s brain.

  “Please, don’t,” he said, getting up and walking toward Phoebe. He took her by the arm and sat her next to him on the red plush sofa, whose springs let out a scandalized squeak. “Let us see if we can solve this.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, holding back her little selfish tears.

  “I don’t want you to beg. I want you to earn it,” he said, his voice slightly trembling. She looked at him inquisitively.

  “First, it deserves a good spanking,” explained Gabriel, laying her firmly on his lap wit
hout feeling much resistance, only some surprise and a slight hesitation.

  Now maybe, dear reader, it would be more becoming in you to leave the room, and I would advise you not to look back on the scene if you can help it: were you to linger and witness, for instance, that Phoebe has now her grey dress and petticoats over her head, you would be, and not me, responsible for it, and you could not count either on yours truly or on Gabriel to confirm that this vision was not a child of your unbridled imagination. But we certainly can, if you please, come back a little later, and find Gabriel calmly sitting beside Phoebe on the sofa, and even hear him asking:

  “Now, Phoebe, would you mind doing me a favour?”

  CHAPTER V

  Phantasus & Phobetor

  Yes, for three francs’ worth of opium he furnishes our empty arsenal, he watches convoys of merchandise coming in, going to the four quarters of the world. The forces of modern industry no longer reign in London, but in his own Venice, where the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the Temple of Jerusalem, the marvels of Rome, live once more.

  Honoré de Balzac, Massimila Doni, 1837

  It was a brooding Brentford who was driven back to New Venice by the Subtle Army aerosled. The day, a short, dubious affair of a few hours, had started its retreat, pretexting that the grass was greener elsewhere, which, to be honest, was certainly the case. The frosted snow, which cracked and crunched as they passed, had turned a greyish blue, and above the city, where dim golden garlands of lights had started to gleam, blurred as through a tearful eye, the black airship had begun to assume a certain melancholy air. April may be the cruellest month, but in North Wasteland, February was a tough bitch in her own right.

  The airship’s shadow was not the only one being cast over Brentford’s brain. The meeting had left a bitter aftertaste, as was often the case when Inuit were involved. As much as he wanted to be useful to them, his duties to the city could not but get in the way.

  Since the natives had come into contact with the Whites, and though it was very clear that without them all Westerners who ventured there would have ended up as a dirty bunch of half-frozen cannibal wrecks, they had been exploited, misunderstood, and underestimated in every possible way. Brentford remembered that the profit margin of the usual barter, furs for needles and nails, had been around 1,000 percent for the Whites, and still the Inuit—unconscious dandies prowling the icepack with fortunes on their backs—felt they were striking a bargain, because for them, exchange value was use value, and use value was survival.

  When the first trading posts had been established, with a slightly more realistic price policy (but with false weights, bottomless bushels for blubber, and exchange wares of wretched quality), the Inuit had been almost disappointed with how much less expensive everything turned out to be, as this had seemed to take away the real worth of what they had gotten so far. It also made them realize how cheated they had been, and how miserable they actually were. What the Inuit failed to see was that, at that point, they were also being robbed of natural resources, with little or no redistribution of this wealth to compensate them. Maybe Brentford had been wrong: they would not know a fair deal if it came and bit them, because they had hardly seen one before. What sort of trade could it be, anyway, that involved two economies that were, literally, different as day and night?

  The Whites’ contemptuous treatment of the Inuit was all the more maddening in that, given the city’s new circumstances, Eskimo economics (and therefore—and there was the rub—Eskimo politics) could be one of the keys to the city’s salvation. Until recently, and especially since its reconstruction, New Venice had been lavished with sumptuous gifts, colossal food supplies and enormous quantities of raw materials and luxuries. From what Brentford understood, the Forty Friends Foundation, which funded and maintained New Venice afloat, did not do so out of the goodness of their hearts (though they certainly had some kind of fascination with the place), but because they desperately wanted to ward off an overproduction crisis and to redistribute world scarcity along more advantageous lines. New Venice was a kind of bottomless pit or raging fire in which they would sacrifice the accursed share of their enterprises before it turned against them.

  But since the Great Crash had not been avoided that way, the tide, of both means and conviction, was turning, and even if the citizens did not quite realize it, the city was now skating on very thin ice, drawing figures that were increasingly less figure eights than plain zeros. That was how Brentford had come, in spite of his own tendency to despise hoarding and to value sacrificial spending as the most sacred human activity, to fight on the side of autarky, and that was how, consequently, he had begun to regard the Inuit and the way they negotiated with their surroundings with more than the usual amused or amazed curiosity.

  It wasn’t that they were thrifty or miserly—far from it—or that they were “one with nature” in any namby-pamby way: they were in a good position to know what a bloody mess it is, breathing in and out through endless sacrifices, in the frenzy of self-laceration that lies at the bottom of all things. No, they were well aware that nature had not been made to please them, and that it would only make things worse if they added to its, and their, necessary cruelty the luxury puerilities of greed and domination. It was not simply accumulation, sweet as it was, that would get them through the night, but the exacting duty of sticking together no matter what, and the wealth of memories, dreams, stories, rituals, and visions that are the true fortune of our unfortunate species.

  To Brentford, the idea was not to turn New Venetians into Inuit but to develop a system, or at least a mentality, loosely adapted from theirs (“as nearly as possible socialism carried into practice,” as Nansen had written) that could get the city going forward, instead of selling everything piece by piece, including the future, as the Council of Seven was doing. But convincing the authorities to think along the lines of Eskimo economics was certainly no easy task: the Councillors were, after all, descendants of the men who had had their sleighs drawn by other men instead of by dogs, who had suffered from scurvy and died of cold in wet woollen uniforms because they were not going to eat seal or wear fur like those “savages.” The True Community that Brentford had described in the Hotspur pamphlet was still, seductive as it was, one of those fata morgana mirages, a projection that seemed within reach but was still a long, dangerous, frustrating way down the road …

  His metaphor crystallized in a memory not quite his own, but rather that of his Italian ancestor Felice Rossini, a faithful servant of the Duke dei Abruzzi and a member of his Mount St-Elias and Stella Polare expeditions. While they had been in Icy Bay, their party had suddenly seen rising from the mist the famous Silent City of Alaska, which appears on a certain glacier, all streets and spires, every year between June and July. It was there and then that Felice had fallen in love at first sight with the idea of a New Venice, and had striven, with thousands of others, to make it a dream come true.

  It was a love that Brentford felt as well, and felt indeed to be older than himself. But what Felice could not have known, and Brentford did, was that even as you came closer to it, as he was doing now, reaching the Lotus Eaters suburbs under a lazy fall of snowflakes and soot specks, the city lost nothing of its illusory nature—a dream come true that remained a dream, as if you woke up each morning a prisoner in Slumberland. These musings, idle as they were, still gave him an idea, or even an urge, and bending toward the chauffeur, he asked to be dropped not at the Botanical Building, where he now resided, but almost a mile away from it, on the Beaufort Embankment.

  They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression that they had been cast down from the sky like palaces from another planet. You could not, by any stretch of the mind, imagine an architecture less adapted to its surroundings. An Idea
l City punished and banished to the Far North for its marble hubris, it loomed titanic and mad, its boulevards, arches, and palaces a playground for the caterwauling draughts that sharpened their claws on its flaking façades. And as it did almost every day in late winter, that typical moist fog known to the locals as cake was now seeping everywhere, slowly dimming the scene in a way that gave Brentford the impression that, too tired to will themselves further into existence, the very buildings evaporated, fading like the ghosts of their own unlikely splendour.

  Once on the Beaufort Embankment, Brentford saluted the driver and waited for the aerosled to be soaked into the distance. Though the Air Architecture here was supposed to be at its most protective, the cake felt like a block of cold static drizzle, and except for a few hurried, muffled, somnambulic shapes, the gaslit streets were deserted.

  Once he was sure not to be seen, Brentford crossed the embankment, took Barrington Street, and headed toward the Dunne Institute for Dream Incubation. Flanked by two twisted spires that made it look a little like a church, and guarded by the marble effigies of the brothers of Morpheus, Phantasus and Phobetor, the Institute was a sort of mental swimming pool for the tired or depressed citizen who could do with a good nap and some sweet dreams, but also for those who were seeking advice or answers to urgent but undecidable matters.

  The hall, under its night-blue and starry dome, offered two different gates, one called Ivory, for recreative dreams (including erotic ones, and even nightmares, which happened to be a surprisingly sought-after commodity) and the other one Horn, for the more serious kind of incubation, in which it was indeed hard to predict what the outcome would be (after all, as Brentford had heard Gabriel say countless times, all dreams made you horny). Anonymous behind his woollen scarf, Brentford asked at the desk for the expensive Horn fare. “Single or round-trip?” asked the clerk, with a smile, though the joke was rather worn out.