Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  But though there was to be no terror from above, there would still be some sort of loud destructive device involved. Brentford had protested, but Schwarz had made it clear that this was a question of honour for the anarchists, and therefore not negotiable. It was, however, Hardenberg’s conviction that quality had to prevail over quantity, and that a single, precise, well-timed blast at the right spot at the right time would have as much expressivity on the battlefield as numerous blind outbursts of terror. He had looked upon the map, lost in thought, then all of a sudden had pointed straight at the Greenhouse.

  Brentford protested again.

  “Too bad,” Hardenberg said with a straight face. “Hothouses are the best things to blow up. All those smithereens. But be at rest, Mr. Orsini, it was a just an idiotic joke. What we’ll do is take the most wickedly useless institution in the city and blow it to freedom come. It would be best if it were both a warning and a well-deserved punishment. I vote for the Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs.”

  Brentford, though he hated the idea of any ruins at all in New Venice, deemed the idea a lesser evil. And, after all, ruins, too, were part of the life of a city. A kind of Memento mori. Of Et in Arcadia ego.

  Mougrabin was to be entrusted with the whole operation, and Hardenberg had also insisted, for some reason, that it would be Gabriel, and none other, who was to serve as messenger to him. Gabriel was perfectly happy with his self-appointed office as a chaperone to the Elphinstone twins, and had little desire (or perhaps much too much) to go back to the Apostles’. Still, he did not want to be tiresome in these delicate circumstances, and with typical bad grace he finally surrendered.

  Which was why, on the eve of the military parade organized to celebrate the Victory over the Inuit, he had stealthily walked out of the underground hideout and by numerous roundabout ways through ill-lit and slushy streets had reluctantly hurried toward the Apostles’, Stella’s featherweight ghost using his stomach as a punching bag.

  And when he rapped the code on Mougrabin’s door, it was none other than Stella who opened it. In a man’s dressing gown.

  They stood facing each other, paralyzed. Gabriel’s soul fluttered in panic like a emptying balloon, as if trying to find a way out of his body.

  “Ah, Gabriel, my good friend!” said Mougrabin from behind Stella, putting on his braces. “I am so happy to see you!!!”

  He came to the door and hugged him, until Gabriel could not breath anymore.

  “We were very worried for you! Isn’t it true, Zvevdichka, that we worried a lot? Our Zvevdichka loves you a lot, you know,” he added, in a whisper that reeked of onion.

  The Little Star, however, had retreated to her room.

  “Whatever brings you here, my good friend?” Mougrabin asked, still standing in the doorway, his eyes blinking with emotion.

  Gabriel managed to remember the password.

  “Do me business in the veins o’ the earth

  When it is baked with frost.”

  Mougrabin’s face broke out into an ugly porcelain grin. He took Gabriel by the arm and pulled him inside the apartment, closing the door behind him and looking through the peephole for a while.

  “At last! It has come!” he exclaimed as he turned back toward Gabriel. “And you have joined our feast of Freedom. By highways or hedges, I always knew you would. Have you heard, Stella?” he called out. “He is now one of us!”

  But, locked in her room, Stella did not answer.

  Gabriel, trembling and holding his hat like a shy peasant, followed Mougrabin into a small, shabby living room. On the table, near the samovar, from which Mougrabin poured him a cup of steaming tea, and next to a small phonograph, was a strange device he had been cleaning, showing a piston and a cylinder with cooling vanes at the top, small enough to be carried in a coat pocket.

  “Do not worry!” blurted out Mougrabin. “It is not a bombchka. I have had my share of those,” he winked with his glass eye. “No, no, this is a new invention, quite extraordinary. It is called a Resonator. But I prefer to call it a Liberator. It’s a pun, you see—on the energy it liberates and the people it liberates. Hahaha. And where are we supposed to liberate this energy?”

  “The Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs,” said Gabriel, burning his tongue with the tea, which he noticed Mougrabin drank directly from the saucer. “Tomorrow morning during the parade. As it is a holiday, the building will not be occupied or guarded.”

  “It is as if it were already done! Perform’d to point. Pfuii!!” said Mougrabin, with a graceful gesture. “And thanks to you, my friend.”

  “I’ve done nothing,” said Gabriel, thinking of how much it had actually cost him to come there. He wondered why Hardenberg had so badly wanted him to carry this message. Maybe the arch-Anarchist knew about Mougrabin and Stella, and had wanted Gabriel to face the truth. As if having seen Stella with Wynne had not been enough of a truth to face. Now he had to accept that she was the sweetheart of this scarecrow, who looked at him with a tear in the corner of his good eye, and then put his mangled hand on his shoulder.

  “No! I mean because of your music. The little piece you called Lobster-Cracking.”

  Gabriel did not understand. He had forgotten about the little wax roll he had recorded out of boredom during the winter. He had happened to have it in his satchel when he went to Doges College, and he had given it to Phoebe as a countersign for Brentford. The last time he had seen it, it was in Wynne’s hands, at the hospital, on the night when he had met Stella …

  “It is the exact frequency we need to start our little Liberator, you see. This device, Mr. Treschler has explained to the idiot I am, works with a force called resonance frequency. The bigger is the building, the lower the frequency should be, though I ask you not to ask me why. Linked to a small phonograph, such as this one, it plays the song inside the walls, making it echo through the building, and then, you just have to wait for the entire place to tumble down! It is genius. Russia would have been free long ago with such machines at our disposal! Mr. Schwarz, the chemist of the Ariel, who is a bomb fiend, was not very happy with Treschler bringing it along! Isn’t that true, my Little Star, that your daddy was angry?” yelled Mougrabin.

  “Her daddy?” repeated Gabriel.

  “I’m Stella Schwarz, the daughter of Doktor Schwarz and a French petroleuse,” said Stella, her eyes puffy from crying, as she leaned against the doorframe of the living room. “I’m sorry I have lied to you.”

  “And the song … You stole it from Wynne …”

  Stella nodded and sobbed, her face in her hands.

  Mougrabin whispered in Gabriel’s ear.

  “I suffered from this as much as you did, my friend. But it was the only way.”

  “But … how did you know that this song existed … and could do this?” Gabriel insisted.

  Stella sniffed, and took a deep breath.

  “One day, as we were rehearsing at the Trilby Temple, and while I was waiting in the ballot box, Wynne, who was in charge of Handyside’s security, approached him for a private talk,” she explained between sniffs and sobs. “Wynne said that he needed Handyside to come to the Kane Clinic and mesmerize a girl, so that she would look as if she were in a coma. Their idea was to blame it on the effect of a very-low-frequency song. Of course, I had heard my father and Treschler and Max … I mean Mikhail … talking of the new device in the Ariel, and I knew that such a song was just what they needed to make it work and that it could be decisive. At some point, Wynne explained that he would allow the Gentlemen of the Night to do a round-up at the Toadstool in order to catch the man who had recorded the song. I went there after the show, but they took us to the clinic and put me in a room before I could find out anything. Then I met you. And I swear to you, on the head of Voltairine de Cleyre, Gabriel, I did not know it was your song. Not before you made me listen to the other pieces.”

  “Then … you … searched my place?”

  “Be glad she did,” said Mougrabin. “That
is how she found the book. She knew it was dangerous for you and she brought it to me.”

  “I did not find the song, and so understood Wynne had the only copy,” Stella went on with difficulty. “So the next time I met him at the Trilby Temple, well … It was horrible, believe me, going to the Ingersarvik, with this hypnotized woman and that old …”

  “Shh …” said Mougrabin, coming back to her.

  He took her in his arms, and softly rocking her, stroked her lustrous wavy hair with his mutilated hand. “It is over now. Now you must go and prepare yourself.”

  Stella left the room, looking at Gabriel with a sorrowful expression. He nodded, so slightly that she may not have noticed. He struggled to understand why she had deemed it necessary to go through this ordeal. But that was typical of radicals, he thought, this ability to convince themselves of the necessity of anything, provided it would turn their beliefs into action, their dreams into realities. Not to mention the influence of that damned Russian freak, who now came back to Gabriel with eyes that were, this time, unmistakably tearful, including the glass one.

  “It is a small love, the one that cannot be shared,” said Mougrabin, squeezing his arm. “Sharing this one with you was … exceedingly painful. But it was also an honour.”

  He squeezed Gabriel’s arm harder, and spoke in a low hissing voice.

  “Freedom is not always a feast, Mr. d’Allier. It wants weeping and gnashing of teeth. It wants sacrifices. It wants blood. I am ready to make those sacrifices.”

  He released his grip and opened a drawer, pulling out the wax roll Stella had so dearly bought.

  “I would be still more honoured if you would come with us on the mission,” he said, now matter-of-factly. “And Stella would be happy, I am sure, for you to see what a brave and loyal young woman she is.”

  Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. He felt empty. His love had been mutilated beyond recognition, a revolting shambles of rotting body parts like those of a tupilaaq hastily knocked together. He watched Mougrabin easing his maimed body into a vest and a jacket, and knew he could never touch Stella again. But he also realized—watching the anarchist distributing about himself small fulminate phials, poisoned pins on a pincushion, phosphoric cords, and what-not—that, after all, it was more interesting to be Mougrabin’s girlfriend than his.

  If Gabriel had feared that the bombers would not be ready at such short notice, he was soon reassured. Mougrabin had been briefed extensively by Schwarz senior, who had previously studied, with the help of his daughter, every official building in the city and planned the destruction of each in both the most efficient and spectacular way. Blowing things up in New Venice was easy enough, since for all its pretention it was rather crudely built, but it was Schwarz’s theory that each building had its own personality and its own way to be blown up that would respect its features while producing maximum damage. He called this Anarchitecture.

  Since it had been decided that killing or dismembering people was to be avoided, Hardenberg had insisted that the Treschler machine be preferred over bombs, as it crumbled the building in on itself, with little steel or stone flying about. This had required a slight modification of the blueprints from the anarchitects, since it was now the acoustic qualities of the building and the vibratory characteristics of its material that had to be taken into account. But on the whole that was less troublesome for everyone than fiddling around with mercury fulminate.

  The N.A.N.A. was the target of choice for reasons even beyond its symbolic value. First, it was impressive enough. A long redbrick building, with a central gate topped by a dungeon, it evoked a British castle or college, and it looked so defiantly colonial that it was, in a sense, asking for trouble. Then too, as a late addition to the city, it was a bit off the beaten path, on an esplanade of its own (though it shared it in wintertime with the Jake Frost Palace, which had just been closed to the public), and except for its braggart’s frown it was rather defenceless. On top of that, it appeared that an Inuk informer working for the anarchists, going by the name of Oosik, had described the place to them inside and out, so that all of its tickle spots were well known to Mougrabin.

  The most difficult part was simply getting there without being noticed, but at this early hour, and with everybody on holiday for the victory parade, this problem solved itself, as long as one stood in the shadows of the surrounding buildings and did not attempt to cross the esplanade in the moonlight.

  The terrorist love triangle, by crouching and running and ducking for cover, soon reached the back of the building and, from there, a rear entrance that was used for deliveries. Deftly avoiding any jingling, Mougrabin thoughtfully selected a key from a key ring, and three trials were enough to let him in with Stella. Gabriel, wondering vaguely why he had agreed to come along, but too heartbroken to really care (maybe, inglorious as it was, he just wanted to see more of Stella), remained behind on the lookout. He stood in the dark, shivering with cold and sadness, at the northeastern corner of the building, from which he could see the Jack Frost Palace faintly gleaming under the moon, thinking how it would soon begin to melt, a soft and slow ruin, and he could not help imagining that all the city would dissolve with it, imperceptibly, until it left not a single trace, as if it had never been there at all. That felt better, somehow, than thinking about Mougrabin having taken Stella down to a cold, obscure kingdom from which he, Gabriel, would never ever be able to bring her back.

  Meanwhile, Mougrabin had lit a phosphoric cord and, as surely as if he were in their own house, discovered with Stella a staircase that led down to the basement. There, he quickly strapped the Resonator to one of the pillars that held the vault aloft, while, equally nimbly, Stella fitted below it the muffled pavilion of the phonograph, before cranking it to play the roll.

  The sounds came out too low to be heard directly, but they were echoed by the amplifier, diffusing them through the walls like the beating of a gigantic heart, so gigantic it had the power the break the ribcage that surrounded it. Mougrabin and Stella could hear the distant thuds as if someone were digging a tunnel below them. The sound waves circuited through the whole building, gaining power as they did. A faint vibration could already be felt along the pillars. It was working. It would take some time but no stone would be left upon another. Mougrabin and Stella stood embraced for a while under that strengthening heartbeat and then, as a little dust fell from the ceiling, decided it was time to go.

  The sun was beginning to rise as they emerged. Gabriel still stood against the wall, and he could feel it almost pulsating. He did not recognize his own song. It was not his anymore, but, then, that was what happened to songs.

  “Everything went okay?” he asked without conviction.

  “Fine,” said Stella, who looked even smaller in her thick, black, fur-lined jacket. She took off her crocheted hat and shook her corkscrew curls out in a moment of pure terrorist eroticism. Gabriel closed his eyes.

  Mougrabin looked at the ashen dawn. They had taken too long.

  “We should get away,” he said. He looked determined, and calmer than Gabriel had ever seen him.

  But as they reached the corner of the building, Wynne suddenly sprang out in front them, his unsheathed cane in his hand.

  “Here you are!” he said.

  But he had sprung a little too soon. They were still a few yards away from him and had time to turn and run for their lives.

  “The palace!” shouted Mougrabin.

  They had the whole building to run alongside, and a good two hundred yards of esplanade to cross. But Wynne was an athlete and he would soon catch up.

  “Let’s separate!” bellowed Mougrabin, running quite quickly in spite of his slight limp.

  They moved apart from one another, so as to disorient Wynne. Who would he really want to catch? Stella, the girl that he thought he had stolen from Gabriel and who had stolen the roll from him? Or that d’Allier for whom there would be, he had promised, no third chance of escape? Stella was the one he had been following tonig
ht, but d’Allier was the closest. He would be the chosen one.

  A blast threw Wynne off balance. A little phial had exploded not far from him, and a few glass splinters had peppered him. He started again, his rage increased, veering toward Mougrabin, but quickly changed his mind, as he reckoned this one was dangerous. D’Allier was better game, and almost in his reach. A promise is a promise. He would pay for the others.

  Gabriel, meanwhile, had regained the yards he had lost but, blame it on his lifestyle, was not much of a sprinter. His body shook in exhaustion and fear. He entered the esplanade, dazzled by the dawning sun, already losing his breath, with Wynne pumping his legs like pistons just a few paces behind.

  The Jack Frost Palace loomed, blindingly, in front of him, a mere hundred yards away. It was his last chance. Mougrabin and Stella had disappeared. Maybe he was saving them by sacrificing himself. Maybe he was just unlucky. He was gasping, a side stitch stabbing him, by the time he reached the security barriers that protected the public from the crumbling castle. He tried to jump over them but stumbled, then regained his balance and darted toward the gate, while Wynne now swiftly escaladed the clanging rails behind him.

  The place was like a maze, full of open courts and inner gates, but hesitation was not an option, though any dead end would be fatal. He panicked as Wynne’s shadow almost reached him.

  “Stop! Stop right now!” cried the policeman.

  Gabriel was perhaps not, as he had dreamed he was, one of those men who turn around, knife in hand, to face the enemy. Especially without a knife. But he was stubborn enough to keep on running, turning left or right as soon as he could, although his lungs were about to burst and his legs were giving in. He went through another gate, but this time there was no exit, just a circling wall, its crenels about ten feet high. He was trapped. Wynne was coming closer, with the strides of an ogre. Gabriel nervously searched his pocket, looking for some weapon, and all he found was the polar kangaroo amulet. He clutched it and closed his eyes.