Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  She blinks and she thinks she knows what’s on my mind

  There she goes through my nose and she is gonna find

  A lonely frozen sea that’s gonna blind her eyes But if by chance she can dance this is a paradise

  Hyperboreal

  Hyperboreal

  Lubberland, blubberland made of ice field and floe

  Ruined cities, memories moving like drifting snow

  I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d died from the cold

  But your body, baby, it will never grow old

  Hyperboreal

  Hyperboreal

  Oh for the kind of stuff that my dreams are made of

  It’s never dark enough let’s turn the heavens off

  Northern lights polar star

  However bright they are

  It’s all light

  pollution

  imperfection

  of night

  This was, Gabriel had to admit, the most exact captation of the collective life—and of his own—that he had ever heard from one of those bands. He had simply, in his ravishment, forgotten Phoebe. The audience must have felt the same: they all looked enthralled, unless their immobility had more to do with a fear of being noticed by that stubborn chord that whirled closer and closer and closer as if to decapitate them. Some people were even crouched on the floor, looking bleak and frightened, as if praying for the sonic scythe to spare their worthless lives.

  But then, all of a sudden, as if the plug had been torn from the socket, everything stopped and a rush was heard (through slightly buzzing ears) in the back of the room. Gabriel turned to see a pack of Gentlemen of the Night invading the premises, dressed to kill in top hats and Inverness coats, their dreaded sword-canes in hand. He was not long in spotting among the intruders a monocled Sealtiel Wynne, who was equally quick to notice him. The policeman lightly touched his hat to him with the knob of his cane, adding a sly little smile that made Gabriel want to bite his head off.

  One of the Gentlemen had hopped up on the stage and, carbon microphone in hand, suavely addressed the dumbstruck crowd:

  “Ladies and Gentlemen. We hope you will excuse this intrusion in the middle of a very pleasant evening. We would gladly have dispensed with the interruption if a matter of some urgency had not constrained us to act on behalf of your health. I have here”—he flourished a paper—“a recommendation from Doctor Playfair, from the Kane Clinic. He informs us, after long and painstaking research by the best experts in the field, that, unfortunately, the joint exposure to psychotropic products and droning sounds is hazardous to the well-being of the persons exposed, and is even, he regrets to say, likely to have irreversible effects on the nervous system. Not wanting to take any chances with the health of the citizens, the Council has delegated us, your humble servants, to take the measures necessary for your protection. As a consequence, and assured as we are of your understanding and cooperation, we take upon ourselves the responsibility of bringing this most entertaining event to a close, and, with our heartfelt apologies for the inconvenience, we will take you to the Kane Clinic in order to ensure that we have no damage as yet to deplore.”

  The crowd had started to wake up and was voicing, though in a rather muted fashion, its disapproval. But it was too late. The Poshclothes Police had started, politely but firmly, and with “if-you-pleases” that had a certain “if-you-don’t-please” ring to them, to tow the reluctant boreal bohemians toward the exit where the sled ambulances were “advanced.” Nicholas, Gabriel noticed, was slumped on the bar, sobbing with his head in his hands, and he truly felt sorry for him. As to himself, he was, for the third time today, full of an impotent anger for which—the impotency, not the anger—he hated himself as much as he hated this police force of foppish oafs. Sealtiel Wynne walked up to him and bowed slightly.

  “How strange it is to meet you again, Mr. d’Allier! But it is always a pleasure.”

  “Yes, isn’t it. It’s quite a scream, actually,” Gabriel said, with all the detachment he could muster. “What a coincidence, indeed.”

  “Coincidences! In New Venice!” said Wynne, sincerely amused. “Maybe our presence is a coincidence, but yours is certainly not,” he added, a little more seriously, pointing a white-gloved index finger at the breast pocket where Gabriel had put the sand packet. “Now would you mind joining our little party? I am sure it will not take long. After you, Mr. d’Allier … unless you wish to fly.”

  CHAPTER VII

  An Appointment At The Pole

  There’s a ginral wish among the crew to no whether the north pole is a pole or a dot. Mizzle sais it’s a dot, and O’Riley swears (no, he don’t do that, for we’ve gin up swearin in the fog-sail); but he sais that it’s a real post, bout as thick again as the mainmast, an nine or ten times as hy. Grim sais it’s nother wun thing nor anuther, but a hydeear that is sumhow or other a fact, but yit don’t exist at all. Tom Green wants to no if there’s any conexshun between it an the pole that’s conected with elections.

  R. M. Ballantyne, The World of Ice

  Brentford did not go back home straightaway. He had decided to walk the mile that separated the Dunne Institute from the Botanical Building, and while doing so he replayed his dream in his mind, stumbling on some connections he had so far neglected.

  The appearance of Hector Liubin V, whose stage name was Ekto Liouven, may have been triggered by the sheer idea of ectoplasm. Sandy Lake had been Ekto’s former sweetheart, when she fronted the Sandmovers in the heyday of “polar pop.” Brentford may have inquired about her because in his dream he was searching for a female interlocutor rather than a male one, and had eventually managed to conjure one. “Isabella Alexander” was, of course—how could that have escaped his attention?—made up of the names of Ross’s two famous ships—now the names of two famous capes—which had been under his command on his first encounter with the “Arctic Highlanders,” or Eskimos. Ross was a Scot, as Brentford partly was, and there was a time when Orsinis had been Rossinis, so his identification with Ross was in both respects more likely than otherwise. Then too, the whole thing may indeed have been a reference to Brentford’s own meeting with the Inuit earlier in the day, which had provoked the need for the incubation, and his presence on the ice field may have been tied to his idle remembrances about polar explorations on his way back from that meeting.

  Let us be more precise, he thought. He had wanted to speak to Helen or for Helen to speak to him—the woman (and a lot more than that) whose dead body he had left on the ice field a few years before, after her magic had saved the city. Vomiting ectoplasm on the ice field may have been merely a consequence of his desire to communicate with the dead Helen. And so must have been the Ghost Lady, for a spectre was more or less the form he would have expected Helen to take if she appeared. “Mr. Osiris” was another clue. After Helen had saved the city from Delwit Faber’s coup with the Lobster Girls and the House of Hellequin, Brentford had found crumpled in her hand the formula Isis had used to stop the Chariot of the Sun in order to help the diseased Osiris. The very name Osiris could be vaguely construed as a play on his name, Orsini, which in Italian was itself a pun on bear (a bear even appeared on his coat of arms). It would be only logical to find a bear on the arctic ice field, all the more since arctos also meant “bear.” Being on the ice, then, like the references to Ross, meant only that he was simply dreaming of himself waiting for a vision of Helen, not to mention that ice is the best backdrop for the kind of clear and sustained mental images he’d been hoping to see. The Ghost Lady calling him Mr. Osiris signified that, if she was not Helen herself, she was conscious of Brentford’s history with Helen, and was perhaps some sort of messenger. “Did you fly?” was more difficult to decipher, but Brentford remembered now that when Helen had made him join her on a kind of shamanic trip, he had found himself flying over an unknown city. So, as he summed it up, the dream was just a rather simple image of his own longing for Helen, and the message he had got was, after all, pointing to her more clearly th
an he had first thought.

  Of course, there was still the tiresome hypothesis that it was a simple circular circuit of wish fulfilment and that he had only received under a different form what he had first put into the dream. But then, there was the code, which he could not account for, and which could be in some way or another the answer he had been waiting for.

  It was when he passed in front of the Prince of Whales pub that Brentford got the idea. If ever he knew someone who could solve this riddle, it was the local legend William de la Whale, the brain behind Matball, that mind-boggling blend of human chess and Basque pelota that had been both a craze and a secret laboratory behind Transpherence. The ciphers with which William encoded the moves and tactics of his team were famous for both their subtlety and their solidity. He had even taught, if Brentford remembered correctly, Cryptography as an integral part of his poetry class at Doges College. De la Whale would know instantly if Brentford’s code made sense or not, and help him, or so he hoped, to solve it if it did.

  He entered the pub, noted for its remarkable painting of a rather muddy and dark whale-hunting scene, asked for a Scores-by Stout and a Specksioneer Sandwich, and went to the Pneumatic Post Booth. There he wrote a message to Sybil to tell her he would be home late (though she would probably be partying somewhere), put it in a canister, sent it through the outward tube, and set about looking for William de la Whale’s address in the Dispatch Directory, where he found it quite quickly. It was in Yukiguni. He then ate his sandwich—the bread slices were held together by a miniature harpoon—at the lustrous counter, and having finished his beer with a manly gulp that recalled his glorious days in the dreaded Doges College Ice Rugby Club, he set forth for the Japanese quarter.

  It was just a few moonlit bridges away. Added to the fact that is always pleasant to cross bridges in New Venice, Yukiguni happened to be one of Brentford’s favourite places in the city. He entered the gate, slaloming among the smoking shadows queuing in front of the Toadstool, apparently a trendy spot these days, and immediately felt at ease in that somewhat labyrinthine network of narrow streets, miniature canals, and gibbous bridges covered with a snow that seemed lighter than anywhere else. It was deserted and dark, with a hum of its own, distant and muted, which made the place sound calmer than the rest of New Venice.

  Onogorojima, where William was supposed to live, was a tiny island right in the centre of the zone, circled and crossed by convoluted paths that quickly caused orientation trouble. The Hokkaido-style houses, with their empty bear cages and taboo windows in front, which were for divine use only, had no numbers whatsoever, and Brentford had to count them one by one before he decided on which door he was going to knock. Luckily, he could count well.

  A middle-aged woman slid open the entrance door just widely enough to poke her head through and take a look at the visitor, who, deerstalker hat in hand, introduced himself with the utmost politeness. The woman disappeared for a while, and then reappeared, letting Brentford in with a bow.

  He took off his rubbers, and after following the woman down a corridor was introduced into a space that was more Western than Japanese, and very disorderly. Around a solid desk, books were crammed everywhere, piled up in unstable rookeries, and the floor was littered with chessboards and go-ban, all frozen in mid or end game. The light was sparse, but though all Brentford could see of William was a flaky hand softly brushing a bald head, it was enough to make him realize that he had an aged man in front of him.

  “Mr. William de la Whale?” asked Brentford.

  “Plain William Whale will do,” said a slow, hissing voice that Brentford could barely understand. “These arcticocratic games are past their prime, aren’t they?” the voice kept on, slurring and dwindling into a crackle of slobbery static.

  “I am Brentford Orsini,” he answered, feeling he should skip the ducal part. There was a pause.

  “Visitors are rather rare here, Mr. Orsini. I suppose I should be grateful.”

  The words fell slowly, as in some sort of Chinese saliva-drop torture. Brentford started to feel embarrassed by the hot, stifling atmosphere, and he remembered, but too late, the rumours that a lifetime of substance taking had taken its toll on William’s brain, causing his early retirement from public life.

  “I do not know whether you should be grateful. But you can certainly be helpful.”

  “I seem to remember you run the Greenhouse?”

  “I do. Yes.”

  A long silence ensued, mercifully interrupted when the woman re-entered the room and put a tray with a kettle and two cups on the edge of the desk, where it just fit. A sweet-scented steam arose when the woman filled the cups.

  “This is my spouse, Kujira Etsuko.”

  Brentford bowed as he received the burning cup. As the light fell upon her, he could see that her skin still had that yellowishorange hue typical of the “Greenhouse girls” who used to metabolize Pineapples and Plums from their sweat while dancing for Matball Players and Transpherees. Her love story with William was famous in New Venice. How Angry Ananias Andrew, then the Master of the Greenhouse, had taken her away from William so that he could secure his services as an addicted trainer for his Matball team was part of a lore that Brentford knew by heart. Eventually, or so the story went, William had shot Andrew Arkansky. Brentford felt moved to meet her in the flesh, a flesh whose secretions had produced the most powerful drug ever known to man—but then, wasn’t that the case in every love story? Etsuko retired, yet somehow lingered in the fruity tang of the tea.

  “The Greenhouse …” William kept on like a slowed-down, scratched wax roll. “How it is these days?”

  Brentford tried not to blunder.

  “It is a rather uneventful place.”

  William nodded his head, in and out of the dark.

  “In what way can I be of help?”

  “I have a code that I would very much like to subject to your perspicacity, Mr. Whale.”

  He felt instantly that he had pushed the right button on that rather creaky mechanism. William turned toward Brentford and lit a desk lamp that made his face appear more distinctly. He had sagging cheeks, a small moustache, rings around his eyes, and pupils with a moist glint that was not quite reassuring.

  “Oh, excellent. I like codes, Mr. Orsini. Human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve,” he said, baring his ravaged gums as he spoke. He had apparently retained his abilities and simply lost his teeth.

  Brentford handed him the paper on which he had scribbled the code and watched him scrutinize it.

  “It’s short. Which does not mean easier, as we have less material to rely on. Maybe a bit of context would not hurt.”

  “It’s a dream code,” said Brentford uneasily. “From an incubation.”

  William now had both elbows on the desk, biting his thin lips as he pored over the message.

  “You would be better placed than I am to crack a code your own wit devised.”

  “I tried, but to no avail,” avowed Brentford.

  “Would you tell me your dream, Mr. Orsini? And be reassured: I am not going to analyze it.”

  He had a conniving smile that Brentford mirrored. They were both from the Good Old Days, when the analyst was dreaded as a peculiarly perverse form of policeman who could cause endless trouble and spoil one’s Transpherence plan. Brentford told the gist of his dream, without, however, mentioning Helen.

  “What?” asked William, his glinting eyes suddenly sparkling. “Blue boxer shorts?”

  “As I told you,” said Brentford, who was not too keen on dwelling on his underwear, real or dreamed.

  There was a long pause.

  “Interesting,” said William.

  “If you say so,” said Brentford modestly.

  “Because it is the key we are looking for.”

  It was Brentford’s turn to remain silent.

  “I once had a good friend who wore such shorts,” said William with a surprising seriousness, and even, it seemed to Brentfor
d, a little trembling in the voice. “A great Matball player.”

  Igor Plastisine, thought Brentford, but did not say anything. The man had overdosed and gone crazy from metabolizing his own Pineapples and Plums. He, too, was part of the lore.

  “We had a code between us. And this is written in some dream-twisted version of that code.”

  “But I would not know it, even subconsciously, would I?”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t know it, but you came to me, someone who does know it, sent by someone or … something, who knew that you would do that. So, that dispatch was in the wrong canister and the wrong canister was in the right tube, after all. Those networks can be a bit complicated, but this is Smalltown, Dreamland all the same.”

  William, pencil in hand, crossing out and substituting letters, was now quite animated, and seemed to decipher the text without much difficulty. It was done in two minutes flat.

  “As to what the message says, I am sure that I do not have to fear your disappointment.”

  “And why is that so?”

  “Because it is, precisely, an appointment. A date, an hour, and a place.”

  William looked at Brentford, visibly amused.

  “But you may not like it.”

  Brentford waited, his heart beating.

  “On your own. March the 1st,” announced William in his hoarse voice. “90° N 65, 5 W°. H.”

  “That is the North Pole,” said Brentford, happy to hear from Helen.

  “450 nautical miles due north of us. Yes. That was where you must have been standing in your dream. That will be quite an interesting trip, I dare say.”

  “March first. It would still be polar night there,” said Brentford, computing quickly. He could not even say that he was surprised. Helen, if indeed it was she, was, typically, expecting a lot from him. In a sense, it was flattering. But it put him under some rather intensive pressure.