Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “What happened?” he asked after a moment, while Playfair pretended with not much conviction to feel his pulse and check his pupils.

  “It happened that you had a fainting spell in the waiting room and were brought here,” he explained.

  “We have probably detained you too long, so we will let you go now, Mr. d’Allier, hoping that it has not caused you too much discomfort,” Wynne added with a chilly courtesy. “Do you want us to call you a taxsleigh?”

  “Oh no. I’m fine,” said Gabriel. “I will walk a little. The air will do me good.”

  He rose to his feet, uncertain as a young foal.

  “You seem to need exactly that. I suppose you know the way back,” said Playfair.

  “I certainly do,” said Gabriel.

  But he did not head toward the exit.

  CHAPTER IX

  The Arctic Eden

  Unnipped by daintiest frosts, in every field Flowers crowded thick; and trees, not tall nor rude With slender stems upholding feathery shade, Nodded their heads and hung their pliant limbs In natural bowers, sweet with delicious gloom.

  Anon., The Arctic Queen

  The first thing Brentford saw when he walked out of Yukiguni was the chaos around the Toadstool: dozens of reluctant bohemians being pushed into ambulance aerosleds by neat but inexorable Gentlemen of the Night cutting sturdy black silhouettes against the headlights and casting shadows long enough to reach him. Protests were muffled, reduced by the distance and the cold to disapproving cartoon balloons of vapour. Brentford restrained his impulse to intervene, deeming it wiser to stay clear of the mayhem and go home. Still, he worried about the increasing number of troubles caused by the Council itself.

  Up to now it had been a tenet of New Venice that there should be no uniformed police force and that the plainclothes force must be almost invisible. For reasons he strove to understand, this sound utopian principle had recently started to tilt a little, then a little more, to the point where there was now a distinct trend toward the harassment of certain categories of citizens, such as the bohemians, who were usually too busy or too lazy to create trouble outside their own bodies and brains. Not to mention that the already subtle borderline separating a plainclothes policeman from a provocateur had on more than one occasion become rather blurred.

  It seemed as if this unfortunate turn of events was what had summoned forth the black airship that Brentford now saw as he crossed Bears Bridge, floating overhead in a miniature elliptical eclipse that gave the moon a certain disquieting wink. Perhaps it was some foreign threat, or some panopticon watch keeping the Gentlemen of the Night incredibly well informed of what happened below; either way, it was anything but reassuring. When you added to the equation the Inuit Independentists and the recent tupilaat invasion, you had an overall atmosphere akin to what the Alaskan Inuit called, if Brentford remembered correctly, the Qarrtsiluni—the moment spent waiting in the dark for something to explode.

  Brentford, leaving the bridge and its sculpted bears, reached the Arctic Administration Building and headed toward the Botanical Building, further on the right. Its lights were turned down, and the glass-and-metal structure loomed large and mysterious. One could sense the life inside, the silent but stubborn relentless growth that had a strength of its own that Brentford had come to appreciate. He was walking to the back door, his own keys in hand, when out of some dark nook a darker shape emerged, wearing the black outfit and white beaked mask of a City Scavenger. Secret words were exchanged.

  “Blankbate?” said Brentford. “Do you want to come in?”

  Blankbate did not answer, but he followed Brentford inside. They passed rows of thick curtains and glass doors and eventually found themselves under the glass dome, surrounded by palms and enormous leaves and feeling smothered by their warm, damp breath. The heat could be felt rising from the floor, along with the faint rumble of the buried resonance coils. A few light bulbs, planted directly in the soil, gave off a sparse light that made the paths visible. This might not have been what a long and noble tradition had in mind when it affirmed that Eden was to be found at the North Pole, but to Brentford it was a delightfully close approximation, and the fact that it was man-made did not spoil it for him—quite the contrary.

  He sat with Blankbate on a stone bench in a bower.

  “How can I help you?” Brentford asked, although—or because—he had more often been helped by the Scavengers than been useful to them.

  “You have heard the news? About the Done-Gone system?”

  The Done-Gone system was the principle that allowed the Scavengers to go home or drift freely in their barges as soon as the trash was picked up, instead of having regular shifts. Brentford had indeed heard that the Council, who had little hold over the Scavengers and wished to gain more, had put some pressure on the Arctic Administration to put an end to this “abuse.” Working on a tight schedule did not agree with the Scavengers, who prized their freedom all the more because they had paid for it by being a caste of anonymous, invisible pariahs. The Administration, which could not refuse everything to the Council, had relented on this point, and now, as was only predictable, the Scavengers were angry.

  “Yes. I have heard. There was nothing I could do.” Brentford indicated the greenhouse to account for the fact he had no power over such matters anymore. Blankbate could not doubt, he thought, that he had done his lobbying best, but to no avail.

  “There may be a strike, then,” said Blankbate, who was a man of few words.

  Brentford understood. This would add spice to the troubles that were presently brewing and disorganize the city even more than the usual tug-of-war between the Council and the Administration, in a way that cast both institutions in roles that were rather against type. Whereas the Council was supposed to keep intact the utopian ideals of the Seven Sleepers who had founded the city, it was now more than ever involved in all matters of business with the “Friends” who funded it, and these Friends had themselves increasingly turned from philanthropists into shareholders who wanted a return on their investments. The Administration, which had originally been devoted to the practicalities of running a city at a latitude that was anything but reasonable, had meanwhile—and Brentford was one of the main actors in this conversion—evolved toward a faithfulness to the first principles that was at times somewhat fanatical. For once, they had agreed on something, and that was going to cause more harm than good.

  “Do what you should,” said Brentford, though he could not say he relished the idea of a Scavengers strike and the trouble it would bring, mostly in the prowling shapes of Bipolar Bears high on fresh human garbage. But some loyalties, and debts, had to come first. During the Faber affair, the Scavengers had proved to be reliable and essential allies. Maybe it was in his power to convince them not to go on strike, but he respected them and their autonomy.

  “I’m behind you whatever happens. You’ll have to be aware that they’ll probably ask you to resign your weapons.”

  Blankbate nodded his beak. “But there still will be bears.”

  “Yes, and even more of them. But I suppose the Council will decide that you only need the guns when you pick up the Garbage.”

  “Who will defend the city against the bears, then?”

  “The Subtle Army, I suppose.”

  Blankbate thought about it for a while.

  “They’re not allowed to carry guns in the city.”

  “Not yet. But they will be. I even think the Council is only waiting for such an occasion, with that airship over us, and all the Inuit agitation. One might even wonder if the attack against the Done-Gone system is not being made for the precise purpose of having you play into their hands.”

  “So, no strike would be better? This is what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying it’s not up to me. I suppose there will be a vote. Just do not forget to mention those consequences when you address the voters.”

  Blankbate remained silent for while, lost in thought.

  “Chipp
sends his regards,” he finally said.

  “How is he?”

  “Like a man who has made some big discovery. He brought back something strange yesterday that he thought I should tell you about, before we warn the authorities.”

  “Why me? Am I implicated?”

  “Not as far as I know. But he knows you deal with strange things sometimes. Like that woman who talked to the Polar Kangaroo and stopped time or something.”

  “Hmm,” said Brentford, who suddenly remembered he had an appointment with Helen at the North Pole. Maybe Chipp was right after all: he did deal with strange things.

  “Chipp found a sled in Niflheim with no driver and a dead woman in it. It had arrived straight from the North.”

  “You mean the dogs took it here on their own?” said Brentford, hiding how the words dead woman had affected him. Could this be Helen coming back?

  “That’s what Chipp said. Yes. The woman was holding this.”

  Blankbate unbuttoned his coat and took out a small oval mirror that he handed to Brentford, who examined it as well as the lights allowed. Its slightly convex surface seemed tainted by some faint greenish hue. He held it up to his face, and the blur of his breath made something appear on the glass, a letter or a drawing, as if traced with a finger. He brought it closer to his lips and exhaled on it, so as to blur the entire surface.

  “Lancelot” he read.

  “What?”

  “The word ‘Lancelot’ is written on the mirror.”

  Blankbate shrugged his shoulders, signifying it meant nothing to him. To Brentford it meant little more, except that it was his friend Gabriel’s middle name (a name which, Gabriel would remind him, was not even Lancelot’s real one).

  “How long can you keep this secret?” he asked Blankbate.

  “As long as we want. We have hidden the lady in our cold storage room.”

  “Can I keep the mirror?”

  “As long as you need it,” said Blankbate. “I have to go now anyway. Good-bye.”

  “Good luck,” said Brentford as Blankbate’s black, bulky shape receded toward the exit. The white mask turned toward Brentford and nodded, and then was seen no more.

  Brentford’s apartment was located in another wing of the Botanical Building, accessible through an exquisitely crafted wrought-iron spiral staircase. This led to a flat decorated in the finest Art Nouveau style, as if the iron girders had melded with the hothouse plants and given birth to a profusion of hybrid forms, in an unseemly and probably hypocritical reconciliation of nature with industry. Brentford knew it was kitschy, but that did not prevent him from finding it beautiful and comfortable (though he would not have advised someone to take phantastica in there).

  Sybil was waiting for him in the bedroom, and jumped out of bed in her rather transparent nightgown as soon as he walked through the door, looking very much like the White Sybil of Polarion, a painting of questionable taste that she had modelled for and which now was hanging in the room. In spite of the late hour, she was her dazzling, sparkling, kaleidoscopic self, a radiant sprite made out of glinting eyes, frothy silk, and luminous skin, who even in her negligee looked as if she were wearing jewels. Even her curls, which were exactly of the famous Venetian blond hue, had something fizzy about them. But, when you came a bit closer, her lightness and luminosity had nothing airy about them, but were rather the polished, gleaming surface of a lean muscular frame that executed nothing but high-precision movements: she was, above all, a dancer. As to her capacity as a singer, Brentford was, well, in love and would rather not comment on that (though it is safe to say he was not too fond of her band, the Clicquot Cub-Clubbers, nor of their bland, innocuous brand of jazz), but he reckoned that her main talent, maybe, was different: that of commanding undivided visual attention wherever she happened to be, as lit fountains and fireworks are usually wont to do. She was, in a word, moving.

  “Sweetie,” she moaned, hanging her arms around him like a necklace of white gold, “I thought you had left me for good.”

  “You did get my pneu, didn’t you?”

  “Oh! Very late! Oh my, that’s for me?” she asked, pinching the mirror from Brentford’s hands. Before he could react, she had wiped it clean with a swift brush of her gown. “It’s so nice. Thank you, honey. Smack, smack.”

  Brentford sighed, then scowled, but what could he do now?

  “You were nice with the Eskimos? You didn’t offer your future wife to them, did you?” she asked, while looking for a spot to hang the mirror.

  “Oh, darn, I knew I had forgotten something,” smirked Brentford, sitting on the bed. “Hope you’re not mad at me.”

  “I am so mad at you, my dear. I wished you had been here with me this afternoon. I was at the Ringnes Skating Rink with the band, didn’t I tell you that, for the Clicquot Club Caucus.”

  Brentford was trying to undo his tie, easier said than done with fingers numb from the cold. He was in Sybil-listening mode, letting himself be pleasantly lulled. Even when she was close to him, she had that kind of from-the-bathing-room voice: it flew from her body, and fluttered all around, so that she and her words never seemed to be in the same place at the same time.

  “I had to do a demonstration for the new Ice-cycle,” she said, as she unhooked a small drawing from the wall to put the mirror in its place. “You know what they are, don’t you? The front wheel is replaced by a little skate. I wished you had seen me. It was so much fun.”

  “What a shame,” said Brentford, who regarded all these social and promotional events with what could pass as condescension. The recent occasion on which she and the Cub-Clubbers had entertained Bipolar Bears in garbage-rehab cages to celebrate the release of their cover of “You should a-hear Olaf laugh,” he had found, to say the truth, a tad ridiculous.

  “Here. It looks fine, doesn’t it? And oh, I saw the strangest thing today when I came back. A girl just fainted in front of the Greenhouse. She must have been waiting for God knows what. A man passed in front of her, maybe he brushed against her, and whoosh, down she went. They had to call an ambulance to fetch her.”

  Brentford almost told Sybil of the ambulances he had seen in front of the Toadstool, but Sybil was now looking at him with a movie actress’s expression of deep concern. He was used to these mood swings, and braced himself for what was to come.

  “And then, there’s some bad news” she said, with the pout of a spoiled child, which was, Brentford had to admit against his better judgement, more irresistible than exasperating. “Did you read the newspaper?”

  “I did not have time,” sighed Brentford.

  Sybil took a folded copy of the New Venice News, John Blank’s paper (“Ice-breaking the news since 1927 AB”) from the bedside table and handed it to Brentford.

  “Look who’s back,” she said.

  Brentford took the paper and read:

  MS. LAKE, BACK, PROMISES UPHEAVAL BY JOHN LINKO

  The Nethergate Psychomotive Transaerian Terminal, under yesternight skies.

  Where has she been, what has she done? It was supposed to be a homecoming. It turned into a theophany. Psychomotive coloured steam had not finished hissing when the shrill of the crowd took over. Cutting her way through the panting pink and green puffs, Ms. Sandy Lake appeared to us simple mortals as an omen.

  Do we have to recall to the neo-New who she is? Listen to the venerable stairs of Grönland Gardens, prick up your ears in the glasshouses in Glass Town, keep silent in New Boree Crescent, and you will know. New Venice is still humming with everlasting echoes of her heady “Yesterday’s Skies.”

  The highbrow or hurried reader will be content with knowing that her “As White As …” was said to have caught the very marrow of the icy city. But that is of little use to really measure the remanence of her name to the olde-New. For the eye- and ear-witnesses are still in awe of her charismatic performance during the Blue Wild Thing.

  Her lifestyle was indeed typical of the New Venetian golden age scene. Substances, unending live music partie
s—those were the days of roses, wine, and polar pop, of overbrimming dance cards … But in many more ways than one, reminiscences of Ms. Lake actually embody reminiscences of New Venice ‘in illo tempore’: open and fleeting, frail and fearless, the vanishing point of love and life.

  Where has she been, what has she done: I shook myself from my reverie as Ms. Lake passed me by on the terminal berth. Cheerful applause lasted long enough to stir a hunting Inuk from his hideout. But there was more to the group than a goodwill reunion. The clatter sounded organized, as if all were chanting slogans. The little crowd was exclusively feminine, and dressed as suffragettes, which somehow did not fit with Ms Lake’s tumultuous past.

  I was thinking of how information slipped unto me, when Ms Lake shouted out:

  —You must be the journalist.

  —Journalists are not supposed to get involved.

  —You are not asked to.

  —Where have you been, Ms. Lake?

  —My name is now Lenton, Lillian Lenton.

  —When did you cease to be Ms. Lake?

  —I’ve been to wondrous places down the Austral parallels. So many places, so different from one another. On the one hand, you are shattered by despair: no thing ever resembles the next, and the world looks like a roller coaster. On the other hand, you end up finding your way, and when you get to that point, it’s like you get to another level of consciousness.

  —What have you been doing?

  —Wah—baking doughnuts, of course, what kind of journalist are you? I’m talking of another level of consciousness.

  —There are a lot of people here tonight. Most of them are ex-fans of the Sandmovers?

  —I have been away for such a long time, I don’t think anyone here could sing a Sandmovers’ tune. Including me.

  —Did you give up music?

  —Precisely, no. It’s just that music has grown up in me. In my opinion, it hasn’t much to do with entertainment or partying anymore. There’s a kind of responsibility for those who are listened to by the people.