Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Past the gates, the Institute consisted of long, swerving, stifling corridors, ill-lit with gas torches held by black marble forearms that jutted out from scarlet walls. Brentford pushed the heavy ebony door corresponding to his ticket. He found himself in a small, black-walled changing room, where he undressed completely, hanging his clothes on another protruding hand, before taking a shower that served both hygienic and symbolical purposes. He drew a curtain aside, and in the dim, glimmering light of perfumed oil-lamps, found himself facing the incubator, a huge brass cylinder with a small padded door. There was actually little this machine did except isolate the dreamer, bathing him in warm saltwater on which he could float, while playing some low-volume, low-frequency drones that were meant to soothe the brain.

  Most of the incubation work was left to the dreamer, who had to choose from a distributor the right Complimentary Chemical Complements, as they were called. Brentford opted for the Shower Of Stars, which had always worked wonders for him, and had to phrase by himself, on a piece of paper he placed under his pillow, the question he wanted the dream to answer, writing it in sigils, which facilitated, it seemed, unconscious remembrance.

  Brentford eased himself into the incubator, set the sound waves to a classical 2-3 Hz pulse with cyclical forays into the theta spectrum, clicked off the electric lamp at his side, and closed his eyes, concentrating on the answers he wanted about what he should do with the Inuit. As a mathematician, he had always successfully practiced this lazy brand of shamanism known as creative naps, and for some time he had kept a book of dreams that had given him a good training in recall, so incubation was only natural for him. And indeed, though he preferred to be discreet about it, he did often resort to it to solve certain thorny problems at work. Or when he wanted advice from Helen.

  A low whirling buzz sounded in his ears and he quickly fell asleep, vivid and ludicrous pictures circling around him at full speed. He disappeared for a while, but soon, as he recalled afterward, he emerged in a snowy landscape, a wilderness that extended as far the eye could blink. He was clad only in blue boxer shorts that he instantly knew were not his but had been borrowed, though he did not know from whom. He was cold, but tolerably so, much less than he would have expected in such surroundings. There were, not surprisingly, two moons in the sky that he thought were both made of green cheese. At this thought, he felt like retching. His stomach contracted, painfully, and he started spewing and spooling off a white, light, cheesecloth-like stuff that probably was some sort of ectoplasm. As it fell on the icy snow, its whiteness made it at first indiscernible, but as it started to pile up, it grew increasingly visible, appearing as a human shape trying to grow. After a long, nauseous while, it reached Brentford’s height and became the figure of a former acquaintance, Hector Liubin V, a musician of the pre-Blue Wild era, whose face he could see delineated almost clearly under the ectoplasm but whose words he could not make out, as if the stuff were smothering them. He tried to guess: “Sandy Lake?” Brentford heard himself asking. The shape shifted and a young woman was now facing Brentford, wearing a crinoline and with her hands in a fur muff. “No, I’m Isabella Alexander,” she said, “but my friends call me the Ghost Lady. The woman was now hovering slightly in front of Brentford and did not seem made of ectoplasm anymore but rather sculpted in some volatile, thin, cloudlike stuff like the blur on those ridiculously fake spirit photographs. Her eyes were made of sky and one could see through her mouth as she spoke. “Tell me, Mr. Osiris,” she said, “did you ever fly?” but as Brentford tried to answer that … yes … he did … once … the woman vanished. As if a rug were being swept out from under his feet, Brentford felt he was going to wake up. He tried to call the Ghost Lady back, but all he managed to say was a row of letters and numbers that he found carved in his mind.

  Brentford opened his eyes and fumbled for the lamp, then, as quickly as he could, noted the numbers on the bedside note pad, though they did not make the slightest sense to him. He realized how frustrated he was that Helen had not come to his rescue, in one way or another, as he had secretly wished. It had been instead a short, disappointing dream that bore no clear relationship to his question or his desire—a string of reminiscences and associations that had seemed, as the figures themselves, flimsy and superficial. Only the numbers he was re-reading had, in their opacity, the slightly heavier weight of an apport, but for all he knew, they could just as well be nonsense.

  There were, of course, Dream Interpreters in the Institute, but his sense of privacy, as well as his suspicion that the interpreters could well be linked to the Gentlemen of the Night, made it impossible for him to ask for an appointment. Naked, dripping on the floor, he felt cold and heavy-headed, a bit hung over from the dream, trying to remember what he meant when he said he had flown. But most of all, he just wanted to go home.

  CHAPTER VI

  Boreal Bohemia

  … an unpretending-looking fungus or toadstool to stimulate the dormant energies of the dwellers in this region of ice and snow.

  Mordecai Cubbit Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep, 1860

  During the Wintering Weeks, those months of rocksolid night that enshroud the city in an impenetrable gloom, the Toadstool had become one of the favourite haunts of the self-styled Boreal Bohemians. Located right near the Yukiguni Gate and announced by human-sized mushrooms at its door, it offered in otherwise quiet surroundings the comforts of warmth, hot drinks, buffet snacks, live, amplified popular music, and a high-quality Sand System, that is, a wide choice of the finest and most potent psylicate products around.

  There was even, on the upper floor, a large, warehouse-like, brick-walled exhibition space for local artists, called The Musheum. Gabriel d’Allier was up there, leaning on a steel pillar, quite dandy in his black double-breasted frock coat, floppy cravat, and Regency collar, which reached to his sideburns. He was talking to a gigantic man with a metallic hand, his friend and occasional band mate, Bob “Cape” Dorset, who also happened to be an artist in an avant-garde group exquisitely called Explorers’ Skeletons. It was the launch night of the last E.S. event housed by Musheum, “Chasing the Chimera: Circumpolar Cryptozoology,” a sculptural display of spirits, strange mammals, and other mythical creatures from the local lore. Bob was showing Gabriel the piece he had just built for the exhibition, a seven-foot effigy of the locally famous Polar Kangaroo, or Kiggertarpok, as this mysterious being is sometimes known to the Inuit. Gabriel and Brentford had collaborated on the work by offering Bob a little tune that was presently cranked out by a miniature phonograph hidden inside the innards of the beast and amplified by speakers located in its paws.

  To Gabriel the impression this made was uncanny. Even if it had been an indirect, purely mental encounter, he was one of the rare persons to have come in contact with that creature, which redefined reality in spectacular ways, even by extensive local standards. He could almost feel, looking at Bob’s expressionist, muscular, dynamic rendition of his subject, that the Polar Kangaroo was an inch away from coming alive, were it only in the telepathic, dream-inducing way that was its usual mode of self-manifestation. It was as if its wolf head was about to start breathing and as if this breath would translate in Gabriel’s brain to mysterious whispers and eerie pictures.

  “This would look fine in the Inuit People’s Ice Palace,” said another artist, Kelvin Budd-Jones, who had presented a Burning Inuksuk to the show.

  “How are things going there, by the way?” asked Bob.

  “The usual trouble,” admitted Budd-Jones. “Lots of pressure in every shape and direction. We are quite behind schedule. I should even go back and work there tonight,” he added, looking at his fob watch in sorry, White Rabbity disbelief. It was already late in the evening.

  “I hear the Inuit are none too happy with the idea,” Gabriel said. “It looks like a human zoo to them, and not quite cryptically.”

  Budd-Jones shrugged his shoulders, signifying that he had not come up with the idea in the first place. It was the North Wasteland A
dministration for Native Affairs that had commissioned that “permanent exhibition” of the Eskimo lifestyle, as a way to “bridge cultures” and “promote a better understanding between them.” Another frozen-over hell paved with slippery good intentions, thought Gabriel.

  “We are doing our best to present their culture in the most satisfactory way. But it’s the living in there part that doesn’t agree with them.” He paused awhile, then said, “You should come over sometime and judge for yourself.”

  “That would give me pleasure,” Gabriel answered.

  “We will be busy every night until the opening. Don’t hesitate to call and ask for me,” said Budd-Jones.

  “Hey! It seems the Fox Fires are on,” said Bob, as some noise crept upstairs on long grating nails.

  They all descended to the main room by a metal spiral staircase to meet an already considerable crowd, dressed with the calculated neglect and sense of detail of those “in the know,” wearing mostly Victorian clothes completed with Inuit accessories made of narwhal bones and fur. These scenesters, whose metabolisms had borne the continuous impact of both the harsh polar winter and various compensating substances such as boilers, stokers, sand packets, snowcaine, zeroïne, nemoïne, phantastica, and opiates of all kinds, had started to assume a somewhat ghastly appearance, with waxen complexions and stares instead of looks.

  Distance drinkers, as they had been known since a recent Arctic Administration edict, could be seen here and there at the luminous fly agaric–shaped tables, sitting on smaller-fungi stools. Acoustic respirographs round their necks, they were trying to hypnotize themselves with the sound of their own breath, in order to reach a hypnagogic trance, through which they hoped to suggest to themselves that the open bottle in front of them was enough to make them drunk.

  Shisha pipes were available on nearby shelves, on the back wall beside the bar, and to the right, in front of a fresco depicting a toad swallowing the sun under the eyes of an old black-clad king, stood the “Bufetonine Buffet” and the automated distributor of sand packets.

  Bob, Kelvin, and Gabriel huddled around a table that was almost free, while from the diminutive stage the Fox Fires spun around the place a web of barbed, electrified sounds, part crackling static, part ripped silk, that somehow ended, with the welcome help of a flute, by forming melancholy melodical patterns, or as they called them, “inscapes.” They were pretty much all student types, this lot, all in woollen sweaters, velvety breeches, and mountain shoes, putting much effort into ripping interesting noises apart from those Electro String Frying Pan guitars that had been introduced years before by Ekto Liouven V and other bands in his wake.

  Once again fashion had completed its meaningless but pleasant cycle and come back to its starting point. Well, not quite: the new vacuum-tube amplifiers were now much more powerful, and the new Nipi bands, as this batch were called, liked to slash and rip their cabinets to obtain sounds that would have been simply not tolerated by outmoded models of ears. This tolerance might well be due, Gabriel reflected, to the new drugs that were circulating, and that were themselves more violent and demanding than earlier ones, as if new thresholds had to be crossed every year, and as if music were both the seismograph and training ground of these sensory displacements. For him, who had spent the winter recording low-frequency drones on his electromagnetic keyboards under his Air-Loom Gang moniker (and had even managed to sell some of them to the Dunne Institute, where they had proved a good aid to all sorts of sticky, stifling nightmares), this new twist of local trendiness would mean that he would have to adapt, think of another idea, of another name, not only to follow but also to anticipate, and, with luck, to launch the next movement, if only to help the winter months pass away more quickly.

  While the Fox Fires were explaining that their last song was about the sensations and reflections that occur at night between bedroom and bathroom, Gabriel slithered toward the toilets himself: circular cabinets decorated with exhilarated Santas in flayed-deerskin clothes dangling from the ceiling. On his way back to the table, he decided that the snowcaine had worn off and that it was time to sand up. He inserted some boreal crowns in the slot to get packets of his personal favourite, the black Flying Fantasia Flint, which gave one a sensation, typical of dreams, of levitating and walking a few inches above the ground, with a sweet feeling of muscular effort and of resistance from the air. It would, Gabriel thought, enlighten his return home, and maybe even make him actually want to go home, provided he would not go alone. He hoped that Phoebe, who was already late to the rendezvous he had given her, would not be too long. He was curious to know how her mission had turned out, and perhaps, though he was not ready to admit it, he was also eager to see her again and bring her back to his nest, both of them on the winged shoes that he had just purchased.

  But as the Fox Fires finished their set, no Phoebe was to be seen, and the only well-known face at the bar was that of the owner, Nicholas Sandmann. As one of the models for the “Goodnight Kids” cartoon, he had enchanted Gabriel’s rather dreary Newfoundland childhood, but these days, he was more famous as the man who had brought the sand craze to the city and as the perennial leader of the Sandpackets Peddlers Syndicate. Gabriel felt that some homage was due.

  “How are you, Nicky?” he asked the thin, round-headed man who never seemed to grow old.

  “Hey, Mr. d’Allier, you’re asking? You’ve heard about that last decree?”

  “Which one? Decrees come in droves, these days.”

  “The one that forbids us to sell sand in the City Centre.”

  “Oh, that one. It’s a tough one, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a rabid sled bitch, that’s what it is. Doctors passing decrees and police acting in the name of Health, what bell does it ring?”

  “Same as for you, I’d say. The Silver Age of the Silver Surgeons.”

  “Exactly,” Nicholas said, wincing. “You’ve been there, haven’t you? You know what I’m talking about. Except the Silver Surgeons, they were against the Council then, and now, those phoque-in-iceholes work hand in hand.”

  Gabriel nodded, thinking of the innuendos the Gentlemen of the Night had been making about his own consumption. When Transpherence—a trick that made it possible to charge a dead arcticocrat’s memory into that of his heir, thereby ensuring the continuity of the ruling elite—was one of the pillars on which the City was founded, the drug that allowed it, Pineapples and Plums, had proved so useful in asserting the Council’s power that the whole city had become a testing ground for it, the federal capital of Altered States. Accordingly, all sorts of other substances had been tolerated, with the view that they helped keep suicide rates during the Wintering Weeks down to a reasonable level (only a paltry eleven times the Canadian rate), or on the premise that a drugged people is a happy or at least a quiet people. Gabriel had been subjected to Transpherence, and remembered it, literally, with mixed feelings, but the drug part had been the best, no doubt about that. But now those days were over, and even if the Council still managed to seem publicly tolerant on the matter, it obviously wanted to curb drug use one way or another, for some reason that eluded him.

  “And you know why?” said Nicholas, whose train of thought had obviously closely followed Gabriel’s. “Because they want to destroy the local production.”

  “What would be the point? The damned demand would still be huge.”

  “Yes, but prohibition of the local product means real drug lords from the outside coming into the game and taking over from us. Which means money, and on quite another scale. And for everyone, if you get my meaning. Because no drug lord would ever work without giving a modicum of, you know, sweetener to the authorities to ensure his own safety.”

  “Bribery? Is that what you mean?” Gabriel said doubtfully. He knew from Brentford how much the city needed money, but for the Council there certainly was some distance between going through hard times and organizing drug traffic for a profit. Despite his appreciation of Nicholas’s work, Gabriel could trace in hi
m the paranoid, obsessive streak that characterized drug dealers and users across the whole known pluriverse. On the other hand, he knew equally well that those who feel persecuted are right half the time and that is much too often. Twice too often, actually, concluded Gabriel, whose maths were rather idiosyncratic.

  “Me? I’ve said nothing,” answered Nicholas, with a wink.

  Gabriel said good-bye and went back to the table, through a crowd that was thicker and rougher and mostly indifferent to his Mosaic attempts at parting its crashing waves. There was still no Phoebe to be seen, but he noticed a girl who he thought was watching him, and he tried to get closer to her, but in the middle of that thick, lazy crowd, it was like trying to reach the stars through the trees of a forest. He renounced the struggle and went back to the table, where John Linko, the métis music critic, had joined Bob. Judging by his gestures, the journalist was visibly excited about something that Gabriel could not quite grasp, except maybe the name Sandy Lake, but he could have misheard that completely, as the Sun Dogs were now storming the stage.

  This band, thanks partly to Linko’s relentless propaganda, was supposed to be the new luminary of the Neovenetian Nipi, or Northern Noise scene. They had just been signed by Perpalutok Records, which certainly enhanced their “canal cred,” and their gigs so far had generated a buzz that had only grown louder and louder, and was rumoured to linger after their deafening shows.

  The Sun Dogs were two well-built Brits or Scands in torn cashmere, and their gear consisted only of an electric cello, plugged into a compressed-air auxetophone amplifier that looked like a threatening tuba, and a Frying Pan amplified to the point of distortion. As soon as the room started to vibrate, and as a dark, ominous drone started to coil around the walls, it became palpably clear that this music directly linked one’s eardrum to one’s intestines and that it was, beyond good or bad, to be digested rather than listened to. It also had at times, under the murk, the repetitive, trance-like quality of Eskimo chant. This indeed was not without its effect upon intoxicated listeners, who swayed back and forth with the ebb and flow of the gravelly sound waves. The Sun Dogs’ best song was called Hyperborean, and if Gabriel understood it correctly, it was a cryptic paean to snowcaine. It went something like this: