Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “You would not have met Helen, anyway,” Judy said to Punch, with a twangy voice.

  “You have a gentle way of breaking the news, these days,” said Brentford. “How do you know?”

  “Because I met her,” Judy said. “And she said you did not need her anymore.”

  “You met her?” asked Brentford, trying to catch Gabriel’s fleeting eyes.

  Gabriel looked up and stopped clowning.

  “Well, sort of. That kind of dream, you know.”

  Brentford nodded as if he knew.

  “Why would she have given me that appointment, then?”

  “She did not approve of your wedding, obviously.”

  Brentford let it sink in and sighed, his eyes on the ceiling.

  “Neither did my mother and neither did you. And neither did Sybil, and neither do I anymore, I suppose. And now even the Gods are against me.”

  Gabriel said nothing, promising himself not to talk about the wedding anymore. It seemed to have happened a long, long time ago anyway, and this time, he also brought good news.

  “But she also said that she would take care of your hunting quota problem.”

  “How’s that?”

  “How would I know? She’s the goddess, not me. Expect good seal and walrus hunts, though. In my dream, it was rather her line of work.”

  “Does she have anything to do with the Inughuit being here?”

  “Not that I or they know of. But now that you ask, there is a kind of connection, actually. Helen referred to the Polar Kangaroo as being of great help. He was in my dream as well, and He appeared to the Inuit and took them to me just in time.”

  The implication of the Polar Kangaroo was big news, indeed. If the Macropus Maritimus Maximus had surfaced again, it was both the sign of a major crisis and the signpost toward some sort of solution. What Brentford had to do was follow its big footprints to wherever they led: it had already woven some threads, hadn’t it, though Brentford was still striving to see a pattern. And if, moreover, the Polar Kangaroo was involved with Helen, the pattern promised to be quite spectacular.

  He rose and walked to the window in the side of the gondola. There was nothing but darkness down there, with maybe something that stirred and was only their own shadow. What he saw was mostly his own worried reflection, trying to follow another thread in his head without getting further tangled.

  “What do you know about magic mirrors?” he asked Gabriel. For some reason, Gabriel, sceptic though he was, always seemed to be acquainted with the strangest notions. However absurd the question, Brentford knew he might get an answer.

  “You mean the mirror you told me about? From the coffin? With Lancelot on it?”

  “The very one. I saw a woman in it,” Brentford said as he slowly walked back to the table.

  “It is never be too late be acquainted with that side of your personality, I suppose.”

  “A woman that wasn’t me or in me,” Brentford specified with an amused patience as he sat down.

  “Hmm …” As always when he reflected, Gabriel raised his eyes slightly toward the left, as if he were reading his cue from somewhere over Brentford’s shoulder. “All I know is that such visions are called phantoramas. Some seers favour mirrors over other methods, as they induce no abnormal states and show things in a more stable, less fleeting way than the usual magnetic vision. But as to the content, give or take a few specificities, it does not differ from normal clairvoyance and is entirely dependent on the disposition of the seer. Theoretically, what you saw was either a distant or dead person photographing herself onto it, so to speak—or, of course, some trick of your sick mind.”

  “Are you by any chance calling Isabelle d’Ussonville a trick of my sick mind?”

  “A trick of your mind, very certainly, but sick I hope not, for I happen to have seen her as well. Dead in that coffin, first.”

  Brentford opened monocle-dropping eyes at the coincidence.

  “Then,” his friend went on, “I saw some younger, vaporous version of her coming from the mouth of one my students, but that, of course, is strictly between us.”

  “More between us than you think,” Brentford answered, rubbing his chin, which was his own symptom of reflection. “I have seen her myself, besides, as a, what, phantorama. In a dream and as the same sort of vapour you describe, maybe out of the very same mouth, at the Trilby Temple. But why would this dear lady haunt us?”

  Gabriel thought perhaps it was because of their shared tendency to expect wonders from women. Trying to turn someone like Sybil Springfield into a model spouse or a vaudeville girl like Stella Black into a pure romantic love was in its own way being open to supernatural phenomena, but maybe, he surmised, Brentford wanted a less speculative answer.

  “Well, it seems Helen uses her spirit as a kind of homing pigeon to contact you,” Gabriel proposed. He had a hunch that Helen was not too keen on appearing to Brentford in her present state, but he kept that to himself as well. “What business this d’Ussonville may have with us, however, I do not have the least inkling.”

  “Nevertheless, we’re on to something here,” said Brentford, easing himself back in his wicker armchair.

  “Would you care for quick a tour of the Ariel?” Treschler interrupted them.

  The engineer was a swift and efficient guide.

  “Originally,” he said, leading them through the corridors, “the Ariel was stolen from the French army by a group of our fellow anarchists. It was then called the Patrie or something. You will agree that we have improved on that, as we have on the rest of the craft. From this porthole you can see the reversible propellers, one on the rear and two on each wing, swivelling up and down for manœuverability. As you could observe for yourselves last week, the ship can remain in stationary flight for quite a long time.

  “And these,” he said, opening a door, “are the motors. Electric. They look rather insignificant, I admit, but they can push us to a good 60 knots, if needed. Our little secret, not patented, of course, is that we can recharge the batteries through the Aurora Borealis. It is hard enough to fly airships in the Arctic because of the ice weighing everywhere and getting encrusted in the propellers, so that when the propellers turn, they shoot little slivers of ice that tear the envelope. So it is good to have a little power in exchange for all the trouble.

  “These Keely devices,” he added, indicating a row of glass tubes linked to coils and batteries, “allow us, by separating air and water, to produce Vapouric Ether, much lighter and safer than hydrogen, that we use to refill the gas bags. As a matter of fact, everything in the ship is based upon a simple ether-electricity loop. We can make each from the other according to our needs, electricity for the motors or Vapouric Ether for the bag, so that we have few autonomy problems. What more can anarchists ask for?”

  “Now, if you please,” he said, indicating a steel ladder that led to a hatch. From there, they could access the upper gallery, at the bottom of the envelope. A very narrow walkway ran along the whole hundred yards of a V-shaped keel frame that sloped away at each end. It was very cold and they all hurried toward the nearest hatch, which was located amidships.

  “The Ariel is, in technical parlance, a kind of Parseval semi-rigid airship. The bag holds approximately 350,000 cubic feet of gas and can lift about twenty tons. Which means there is not one useless scrap of metal or piece of wood allowed on board, except weapons, of course, which are useless until they’re useful. As you can see over your heads, there are bulkheads between the seventeen gasbags, so that tears or shots through one bag do not necessarily endanger the ship. Those bags are not made of the usual Goldbeater’s skin, which is nothing but calf intestines. If they were, lifting such a ship would require the slaughtering of about 200,000 calves.”

  As Tuluk translated this to the Inuit, Uitayok frowned, but Brentford could not tell if it was because animal intestines were exactly the kind of technology Inuit would use or because the sheer numbers involved erased any doubts Uitayok might have had a
bout the insanity of the qallunaat. Impressed as he was, he was not a man to sacrifice ten generations of musk oxen, even for a flying umiak.

  “Talk about bad karma, huh?” Treschler kept on. “Maximilian and I, as self-respecting vegetarians, would not fly in a slaughterhouse, so we had to use thin bladders of vulcanized rubber instead. Now it is, if you’ll excuse me, these enormous condoms that lift us. We asked a German factory, Fromm, to make them especially for us. Now, that’s the equivalent of 200,000 babies liberated from karma. Just the thought of it makes one lighter, doesn’t it?”

  “The hull itself is rather solid, or so I hope, as there are three layers of rubber-proofed fabric with five layers of dope. Unfortunately, that’s just a kind of paint. The keel, on which you’re walking now, is made of wolframinium, but as you can see, it’s covered with rubber, so that the men do not get stuck to the metal when temperatures get really cold. The bracing and rigging of the gondola is made of Italian hemp and piano wire, just for the poetry of it. Now down again.”

  The visitors landed in the lounge and then headed toward the stern.

  “The storerooms are a bore, I assure you, but you may like the armoury, even if Herr Schwarz does not like people to nose around. Let’s just cast a quick glance. We have Maxim machine guns, mostly because Maximilian likes the name, I suppose. That’s a ten-barrelled Nordenfeldt. But, as you know, we anarchists are mostly renowned for our bombs. These over there are forcite, and you would not want to introduce them to a gelatine blasting cap without a very good reason. But Hans’s favourites are over there, in those quart champagne bottles. It’s a compound he calls anarchite. The burning comes with poisonous fumes, if I understand correctly.”

  “You intend to use these?”asked Brentford with concern.

  “You see, by tradition, the odds are usually against us and experience has proved that we have little to gain by using strength against stronger enemies. But if we have to use it, it means we have no choice but to go all the way.” While sitting at dinner opposite Hardenberg, Brentford noticed the Persian motto In Niz Beguzared carved on one of the plywood beams.

  “This, too, will pass,” translated Hardenberg.

  “So, Anarchy, too, will pass ?” Brentford asked.

  “Many things will have to pass before that, I’m afraid,” Hardenberg answered with serenity.

  A buffet dinner was placed on a side table so that nobody would have to serve anyone. The Inughuit had helped themselves to generous portions but rejected whatever they did not like, which appeared to be a lot. Everybody else had implicitly agreed on pretending not to notice the table manners of their anarchist role models, and but for the odd belch that caused a brief lull in the conversation, things proceeded smoothly enough.

  “May I ask what brought you here?” Brentford asked Hardenberg.

  “Professional obligations, mostly. We are under contract with the Council of Seven.”

  Brentford gagged loudly on his food, which silenced even the Inuit for a while.

  “What?” he managed to say weakly, tears in his eyes.

  “Some governments are very eager to have their own anarchist menace, as it allows them to pass what the French call Lois scélérates—scoundrelly laws. Most of them use their own secret police to infiltrate anarchist movements. But it’s not always possible, so they have to resort to freelance agencies such as us.”

  “I thought you were real Anarchists,” Brentford said, surprised at his own disappointment and suddenly worried that he might have fallen into a trap. But after all, this was exactly what he had suspected ever since the airship had appeared.

  “Oh! we are very much so, as much as anarchy can be real, which is not always as much as we would like it to be.”

  “Reality is just one more hallucination,” spat out Heidenstamm, banging on the table. “It has to be destroyed just like any other hallucination.”

  “Certainly, Sven, certainly,” said Hardenberg soothingly. “For the moment, however, it is just that we prefer dealing with these realities ourselves, instead of seeing them in the clumsy hands of the police.”

  “That means you have to play into the authorities’ hands,” said Brentford.

  “This is what we would like them to think, yes. They would not squander money on us, otherwise, I suppose. That said, the shortest jokes are the best, and since we left the city, we’re now officially traitors to our employers.”

  “But you do not help your fellow anarchists either.”

  “In a way, we do. But not necessarily in the way they would like. Maybe it’s because of the airship, but we have a more elevated point of view on what anarchist agitation should be.”

  “Do you know someone called Mougrabin, by the way?” interrupted Gabriel, who, when not struggling with the cutlery, was thinking that the more he looked at Hardenberg, the more the young anarchist resembled a Mougrabin without disguise or makeup.

  “Ah, Mikhail Mikhailovitch! A very sympathetic fellow indeed, but once again, one of those typical anarcho-masochists. Don’t misunderstand me,” Hardenberg kept on, now visibly warming up to his own ideas, “I have nothing against direct action, provided it’s, well, directed. I’m not one to shy away from political assassination as a principle. Some people are clearly evildoers, and you all know as well as I do that the world would be a better place without them, if only for the five minutes before others equally malevolent or even possibly worse replaced them.”

  “There is nothing I like as much as a good riot, and an insurrection is a thing of beauty—before it is crushed, that is. But revolutions are another matter. For one thing, they are very complicated, frail mechanisms that demand conditions which are nearly impossible to meet. But even if they succeed, there are two major drawbacks to them.

  “The first one, theoretical as it is, is that as soon as anarchism starts imposing itself on others, it is not anarchism anymore, but exactly what anarchism is fighting against. So, as the saying goes, “your work once done, to retire is the way of Heaven.” The second one, sadly much more concrete, is that the outcome of any revolution is that the anarchists will end up being shot by both sides. Not because they will stand in anyone’s way to power, but because they will stand between everyone and the very idea of power. It happens every time.”

  “So, there is no future for anarchism?”

  “In a sense, that is a correct conclusion, Mr. Orsini. But it does not mean there is no anarchism. It just means that it only exists in the present, at very precise spots, for, alas, only a few people at the same time and in ways as yet undefined. It could be, for instance, happening now and here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who was it who wrote of the True Community? And what is the true community? Certainly not race or class, but people from all walks of life suddenly thrown together by persecution and forced to invent a new life, with whatever comes into their hands. What were the chances we’d all come together today? This is the stuff utopias are made of, as long as they last.”

  “It’s a seductive theory,” admitted Brentford, politely, still surprised at the mention of A Blast on the Barren Land. “But it is the city I want to save. Not throw a party for myself and a few friends.”

  But Hardenberg continued unabashed, his wide eyes hardened and dense with enthusiasm.

  “But what else is a city, really? No, seriously. We agree with you: who needs a utopia when one already lives in one? New Venice is a city made to fulfil all appetites. It is in itself a fulfilled appetite, or a dream come true, if you prefer. One of these pieces of paradise that are strewn all over the earth. We are well aware of that.

  “You see, Mr. Orsini, after years of sailing in the Ariel, we have come to see things differently than we did at ground level. Seen from above, the world is a most interesting piece of hieroglyphic scripture. You can very easily decipher where the style gets clogged or remains fluid, where freedom recedes and where it keeps on thriving. It dawned on us that this was a way that we could help a little, you kn
ow, like an acupuncturist’s needle. Smoothing out sore muscles here and there, undoing painful knots, easing the breath of the world. The Arctic is one of the last free spaces there is, be it for the men or be it for their minds—free to the point of being fearsome, actually, fearsome as only freedom can be. But now we can read as in a book that it is just being turned into one more boring knot on their maps. We could do a little something about it, couldn’t we?”

  Brentford said nothing, tapping his fork against the table. Had he really come to the point where he had to side with terrorists to save New Venice? He felt ill at ease about the “Blast” metaphor of his book and how now it was striving to get real. He had been asking for it, hadn’t he? Never write anything that you won’t be able to live up to someday, he thought.

  “Is it true that you want to share Aqilineq with Inuit?” Uitayok suddenly asked from his end of the table.

  Aqilineq. The Old Country. It was what the Inuit still called that ragged, splintered stretch of land where New Venice had been struggling to take root. Brentford met the riumasa’s eyes, intensely staring at him, and from the corner of his own noticed Hardenberg’s little smile.

  “That would only be normal, I suppose,” said Brentford, as casually as he could.

  Uitayok nodded slowly and returned to his meal.

  There was a pregnant pause.

  “Do you really want it?” insisted Hardenberg.

  “Right,” said Brentford, with all the irony he could muster. “What do we do now? Go back to New Venice and ask the Council of Seven to make room for us? Or do we just start throwing incendiary bombs around?”

  “I thought the author of A Blast on the Barren Land would be more of a dreamer,” sighed Hardenberg, putting back his hair behind his ear. “We can actually do both and a little more. We can turn history back to a fairy tale.”

  Brentford felt a certain anger swelling up in him.

  “Do you realize that at this very moment, while we’re having this interesting little table talk, the Subtle Army is attacking and probably destroying a fistful of defenceless Nunavut independentists? Can you turn that into a fairy tale?”