Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “They gave me good advice for the igloos,” pleaded Oosik.

  “And I’m giving you some as well,” said the guard. “Get them out of here, before I tell Mr. Peterswarden. Hey, but what are you hiding here?” he exclaimed, pointing at the long-haired Inuk Oosik was holding by the sleeve.

  “Nothing,” said Oosik, blushing. “It’s a little joke between us.”

  The oldest of the four befurred Inuit—a small, stocky man with a wrinkled face—said something to the long-haired man, who laughed and pulled out his hand from under his parka, showing a little carved knife he had stolen from the igloo. He handed it to the white guard with a smile that lacked some teeth. But the smile waned as the guard briskly grasped the knife and returned him an angry look. There was an instant of awkward silence. Gabriel could see the other Inuit get tense. The old one extended his hand toward the white guard, as, Gabriel supposed, a gesture of appeasement, but the guard violently pushed it aside, and taking a whistle from his breast pocket, blew it, the shrill sounds causing a commotion that rippled across the stilllife scenery. Guards suddenly appeared from all the corners of the hall, running toward the Inuit. Kelvin stepped in, trying to calm the guard, but the man would hear nothing, and tried instead to seize the thief, who, in his turn, pushed the guard back so violently that he fell to the floor. The other Inuit looked at each other, and then, without a word, all four started to run toward the exit, though other guards were now blocking the way. The Inuit tried to dodge them, but were tackled, and a wrestling match ensued that the fur clothes of the Eskimos seemed to muffle and make more playful to the casual observer (who, tired as he was, found it a good excuse not to intervene). Screams and swearing echoed through the hall, until more guards, streaming from the rear in Keystone Kops quantities, managed to catch and control the Eskimos. Other Inuit employees of the palace, along with Oosik and Kelvin, were trying to placate the guards. The fur-clad Inuit were now being put back on their feet and dragged away through the corridors, with complaints and protestations from the other workers.

  Gabriel decided it was time to leave, before the Gentlemen of the Night arrived. The incident, as far as he was concerned, had not been serious and was drawing to a close. He approached Kelvin, who was about to follow them all.

  “It’s more lively than it seems, here,” said Gabriel.

  “Sorry about this,” said Kelvin. “Everybody’s nervous with the oncoming inauguration. I hope it won’t be too bad for them. Or for Oosik. Or the other employees.”

  “The Eskimos who work here?”

  “Yes, the idea is that it’s the resident Inuit themselves who explain things to visitors. Some of them have their doubts about the project. We’ve even had a little sabotage lately. This is going to make things worse.”

  “You should go and make sure it cools off,” said Gabriel, who felt as if his head was about to burst with exhaustion. “I don’t want to detain you. Thanks a lot for the visit, anyway. It’s truly amazing.”

  “Thank you,” said Kelvin, shaking Gabriel’s hands before following the Eskimo cortege.

  Gabriel yawned and headed toward the exit. He hadn’t gone two steps when he felt a small object under his boots. It looked like a dancing bear or something, one of those miniature carvings that Inuit make when they are bored and forget about afterward. It must have been part of the whole staging. He knelt down and picked it up.

  It was only in the street that, opening his gloved hand, he realized that the tiny figure he held was that of the Polar Kangaroo.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Recording Riot

  That ragtime suffragette

  She is no household pet

  H. Williams & N. D. Thayer,

  That Ragtime Suffragette, 1913

  Brentford still had plenty of time before his appointment at the Blazing Building with the Council of Seven, and he felt he could afford to make a detour to Venustown, where, according to the flyer he had just been handed by a girl in a suffragette outfit, he could attend the launch party of THIS YEAR’S MUSICAL EVENT: LILIAN LENTON & THE LODESTONES’ NEW ELECTRICALLY RECORDED 10-INCH!!!

  He had to admit that the newspaper article Sybil had handed him with such a charming fury had triggered his curiosity. When he was a youngster, caught in the agitation of the city’s golden age, Sandy Lake had more than once enchanted him with her good looks and crisp little tunes that would turn his brain wiring into blinking fairy lights. Her band, the fine-tuned but foul-mouthed Sandmovers, had been the epitome of what the city was about in those days, as it stood upon the two pillars of attitude and addiction. But he would not have gone for such cheap flashes of nostalgia—for he knew ultimately how useless and heart-wrenching they were—if he had not dreamed of Sandy Lake at the Dunne Institute. He had to check the connection, if only to make sure it was nothing but a coincidence, though he knew very well that a coincidence, by the simple fact of being noticed, was always something.

  Venustown, just on the other side of Yukiguni, was not at its best in the daylight, being as it was something of a decayed tooth in the pearly-white smile of the city centre. The houses were rather greyish and their facades had little or none of the ornamental flourishes that characterized most of the local architecture. It certainly had an atmosphere of its own—especially at night, as its narrow, gaslit, cobbled streets, all mazes and byways, were haunted by the gold-plated ghosts of low life. But in the morning hours, it had a sort of sleepy, moody, unwashed ambience, so characteristic of red-light districts everywhere. The faint music that guided Brentford’s steps from Boötes Bridge up to Selene Street seemed out of place, a fading memory more than a reality, like a song hummed by a drunkard slumped in a gutter, such as the dark-faced Eskimo whom Brentford was trying hard not to look at.

  The “Year’s Musical Event,” probably thanks to Linko’s enthusiastic article, had drawn a substantial crowd on Great Pan Place, mostly hipsters but also quite a few rubberneckers, and Brentford wondered, not without melancholy, in which one of these categories he should be counted these days. Hoping that Sybil would not be spying incognito—but this was a rather early hour for her—he gently excused his way to the front of the crowd to see what was going on.

  In the middle of Great Pan Place, surrounded by a gang of white-clad suffragettes dressed like the young woman who had handed him the flyer, a van was parked, mounted with blaring compressed-air amplifiers from which the four songs of Lilian Lenton’s last recording were being played in a loop.

  It was fairly distinct from what a toe-tapping Brentford remembered from the Sandmovers. The electrified guitar still had that tense, clear-cut rhythmic urgency that was Lilian’s hallmark, but there was a darker, droning undercurrent to it that carried the song beyond the caffeined nervousness of the past. Her voice, also, was different. Lilian had replaced her former girlish nursery-rhyme mannerisms with a talk-over that seemed at first neutral but that became, as you listened to the lyrics, laden with a certain venomous tongue-in-cheek. However, it was the content that had undergone the most drastic change. If it remained allusive, a string of seemingly unrelated, enumerated words, the accumulation drew a picture that was, once deciphered, unequivocal: “Destroy,” said the song coldly, destroy everything.

  But the subsequent tune seemed to explore a quite different ground. It was as urgent, but heavier, more dramatic, with wide sweeps of noisy guitar and spine-tingling accelerations. The lyrics, too, came as a shock: they were a translation of a famous Eskimo chant in which a dead hunter speaks through the voice of a shaman, telling of how he died in graphic, moving images that Lilian’s less distant delivery underlined so powerfully that Brentford could almost feel the vermin in the hollow of his own collarbone. This was a daring addition to the genre, taking a rather innocuous form toward a whole new dimension. But most of all, it was when you added or contrasted the two songs he’d heard so far that something happened: there was a message in them that was both as encrypted and as clear as the one in A Blast on the Barren Land, warning t
hat the city would go nowhere fast if it forgot exactly where it was and whom it had been stolen from.

  The two remaining songs were in a lighter vein but right on the pulse: one was about the boredom that went with the city’s current undirected lifestyle—or that’s how Brentford interpreted it; the other, playfully but painfully, riffed on the widening gap between poor and rich, breaking again with amazing ease what had been regarded as rather taboo. The whole recording, when you summed it up, reflected exactly what Brentford thought about the city: that the utopia was neither given nor granted, but, quite on the contrary, had to be defended and redefined.

  The crowd, first silent and then bursting into applause and cheers as the music ended, may have had understood the same thing, or maybe not. John Linko, on the other side of the square, seemed especially rapt. Lilian, stepping forward under a wide-brimmed hat, saluted, surrounded by her band mates. Brentford was surprised to see how much she had changed: her eyes, which used to be slightly unfocused and teary from excessive sand consumption, were now piercing and determined; she had thinner lips and sunken cheeks and generally looked as if she had been sharpened on a grindstone. She was pretty, he thought, a blade to Sybil’s flame.

  Brentford could not resist buying a copy of the record from a cute suffragette whom, as she lifted her head under her slouch hat, he recognized and saluted as Jay, or Guinevere de Nudd, one of his friends from the now defunct School of Night. She was a mean little troublemaker, and seeing that she was involved in this was for Brentford further proof that there was some kind of false bottom to the “musical event of the year.” But the crowd was pushing behind him and this was neither the time nor the place to discuss the matter with her. Thinking a bit too late that Sybil would not be too happy with a record by her rival, he decided to find a City Courier and have it brought to Gabriel as a gift.

  The scene suddenly shifted, taking him by surprise. The suffragettes had suddenly pulled placards from the van and were brandishing them. Some were carrying drums, others brass instruments, forming a kind of marching band that set about crossing Great Pan Place, pushing great blasts of brazen sound into the sullen damp skies. Brentford, caught in the maelstrom of the moving crowd, could not at first make out the signs that were bobbing over the band. Or, more exactly, it took him some time to simply believe what he saw: THE POLE TO THE PEOPLE said one, WHITE & INUIT UNITE said another, FREEDOM FOR FREEZELAND proclaimed a third. The crowd around him became hesitant, unsure of how to react: was this part of the promotional stunt? Was it a real revolt? Which one was the pretext for the other? The borderline was blurry, to be sure, but Brentford, having paid as much attention to the lyrics as he had, felt little doubt that he was witnessing an event with little or no antecedent, a feast of all firsts, as the Eskimos said, a piece of history in a city that had always strived to keep out of history, nay, a city whose very aim, as proved by the Seven Sleepers’ decision to reverse Time and impose an “After Backward” calendar, was to avoid it at all costs.

  Brentford followed the parade down the street as it opened for itself a way among the perplexed, disbelieving onlookers. He was now more or less elbowing his way through them, hoping to see more of the march as it went down toward the Chione Canal and the Boreas Bridge. As long as the cortege stayed in Venustown, with its long tradition of deviant carnival events, this would come off as nothing more than a curious little incident to be added to the local lore, but if it crossed the bridge and entered the city centre at Frislandia, it would become wholly different: a poletical event with unpredictable results.

  Brentford stopped at a little booth where a red-hatted Courier, stomping his feet to avoid freezing, was waiting for deliveries to make or messages to carry, and gave him the record with Gabriel’s address. Seeing people in these kinds of menial, low-wage jobs never failed to make Brentford bitter about the way things were heading (down, obviously), and finding them useful did not mitigate his feelings, either.

  He tipped the man generously and hurried to rejoin the crowd, but as he reached the tail of the cortege, the march stopped, and even seemed to retreat, the brass instruments tilting back like wheat stalks under the wind. False notes were heard, and slogans turned to screams. Brentford made his way toward the front, more muscularly perhaps than his good upbringing authorized, and almost stumbled into the ongoing chaos.

  A host of gentlemen in black frock coats and silk hats had interrupted the procession a few yards short of the bridge. Wedging dark, angular moves into the wavering whiteness of the march, they were trampling the drums, confiscating the horns, which they’d bent beyond repair, breaking over their thighs the signs that cracked like bones. Through their spats and shiny shoes, Brentford could make out, collapsed on the slimy cobblestones, the crumpled cape and kicking legs of Lilian Lenton, her feathered hat knocked across the pavement near his own feet.

  He wanted to step in, without bothering about the cost of a fight with the Gentlemen of the Night, when a group of Navy Cadets, probably just out of a nearby brothel, but chivalrous by tradition if not by trade, came to the rescue, shoving and pushing the Gentlemen of the Night away from the women they were brutalizing. It was most unexpected, but the crowd welcomed it with cheers that only infuriated the dapper coppers all the more.

  Brentford, as a former cadet, felt quite elated by this turnaround and could not resist doing his bit: he took a step toward Lilian, who had managed to get up, and seized her by her firm lean arms, not without a little thrill of tactile pleasure. Unfortunately, however, she immediately mistook his black Macfarlane for a Gentleman’s uniform, her look shifting quickly from seeing stars to cold-steel contempt. As he opened his mouth to say “nothing to fear,” a cadet, who had made the same mistake as Lilian, hit Brentford with a neat punch on the chin that sent him reeling toward the spectators. The world took some time to oscillate back into place, and all that Brentford could see as soon as he was able to regain some control over his eyes was some Gentlemen of the Night carrying Lilian Lenton toward an ambulance aerosled that had just arrived from the other side of the Bridge.

  He watched the ambulance go, stroking his chin with his gloved hand and checking on the tips of his fingers that he was not losing blood. A Gentleman of the Night flew by in front of him, crashing into the cheering crowd. As he had feared, the historic revolt that had enthused him so much a few minutes ago had reverted back to the trivial slapstick of a Venustown carnival brawl. He shook his head, his brain a painful tuning fork vibrating back to the right pitch.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Unwelcome Guests

  O! Sleep it is a gentle thing

  Beloved from pole to pole

  Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  If there was a place that Gabriel liked as much as New Venice itself, it was his apartment on New Boree Street. Not that it was especially vast or comfortable. The lower level was occupied by a kitchen at one end and a greenhouse at the other, and both were equally neglected. The space between, with bare walls but floorboards copiously covered in a quilt of thick carpets, was sparsely furnished, just an enormous stove, a round table, and four upholstered chairs, a buffet, a pianorad, a phonograph, and, usually facing the hothouse, a worn-out, puffy burgundy velvet sofa that had seen some action and still more inaction.

  At each side of the flat, two corkscrew staircases led to his favourite place, a horseshoe-shaped mezzanine whose walls were covered with bookshelves almost up to the ceiling.

  Behind the fine wrought-iron railing that surrounded the mezzanine, a mammoth writing desk sat in the middle of the central platform, commanding a panoramic view of the whole flat; the rear part was occupied by a bathroom boasting a round tub, and a small but cosy bedroom whose ceiling displayed a crude map of the heavens: the stars were, in curious accordance with ancient Eskimo beliefs, little holes, but the only supernatural presence beyond them was the Electricity Fairy. Large windows framed with thick velvet curtains offered a vista of St-Brendan Bridge and the leaden Crozier Canal, and b
eyond that the small whitewashed houses of Ballymaclinton Harbour.

  To the obsessively obsidional Gabriel, this was his Troy, where he would defend himself to the last. His books, lined up with a compact precision, were the battlement from which he would shoot the poisoned arrows of his wit. Needless to say, then, that he was disgusted when he came home to find the door ajar and his place occupied by the Nemesis Brothers, Sealtiel Wynne and Robert DeBrutus.

  The plundering had begun. Books were strewn all over the floor, some open and some not. Wynne was plucking them off shelves, flipping through them and tossing them aside at full steam under the benevolent, if not affectionate, look of the Angel of the Law, who was sprawled across the displaced sofa. Discipline was slackening, noted Gabriel. That was what happened when you were indulging your basest instincts. He knew something about that.

  “Ah, Mr. d’Allier,” said DeBrutus. “We were expecting you. I hope you do not mind our having preceded you. The concierge was so kind as not to let us wait in the cold. She has been very helpful. It really is a pearl that you have.”

  Gabriel said nothing, slowly assimilating the scene. He felt surprised, and a bit saddened, by his own detachment from it. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe he was through judging them. They were dead men, as far as he was concerned. He just hoped that when they came to realize it, it would be slowly and painfully.

  “Oh, and there was a City Courier who brought you a record,” continued DeBrutus, displaying some pieces of broken shellac. “Unfortunately, there has been an accident. Mr. Wynne inadvertently sat on it. These things are so frail.”

  “My apologies. By a stroke of chance, it was only the new Lilian Lenton record,” commented Wynne, lifting his eyes from a book. “Did you know she started a pro-Eskimo riot this morning? I am really surprised that a man of your standing would have such democratic tastes.”