by Ian McDonald
She still could not justify to herself what it was that had decided her to bring him home to her glass house among the pipes. Pity, loneliness, the call of the waif in the rain. Mystery. Whatever, it was a thing that had never featured on any of her psychofiles. Sometimes he irritated her so much that she wanted to throw him back to the rain. The way he sat, the way he watched; watched, watched; what? Rain. And his questions, his utter and absolute ignorance. When he asked her his questions, she had grown brittle and tense and signed her distress to him in butterflying nona dolorosas. What did he do but ask, What is that thing you do with your hand?
Such ignorance was beyond belief.
“That is the nona dolorosa, the hurt-me-not, the nonverbal signal we give when another person is saying or doing something which hurts us.”
“Why?”
Was he some test from the Ministry of Pain? Some awful assessment, and if so, had she passed or failed?
But there were also the times when she came to him, driven by the fires inside, for him to touch the plastic button the white brothers had put in place of her left nipple. Then the wires in her head would ring and sing like angels, and for a consciousnessless, conscienceless time she would writhe and spasm in synthetic ecstasy on her soliform bed. And the monsoon rains rained, rained, rained down on the streets of Yu. And he would watch them, and the questions would begin again. So much he did not understand about the condition of being human. Hunger. The first word he had spoken as BeeJee &ersenn knelt beside him on the streaming cobbles. He had rubbed his hands across his belly and said, “Why do I feel this?”
Such an incredible question. Her laugh had frightened her a little, but you cannot send nona dolorosas to yourself.
“When did you last eat? There’s a Food Corps dispenser just around the corner …”
Whatever it was in his eyes she had seen, it made her take him home with her. I shouldn’t be doing this, she told herself as she spooned her fleech-mush into a bowl and reconstituted it with water in the dispenser. A nonsocialised introversion level 6 winger with Grade 3 narcissistic tendencies doesn’t do this.
“Haven’t got much,” she said in spite of herself, “I use these, you see.” She tapped the bulbous green thing clinging to her wrist. And because he had not looked disgusted as everyone else looked disgusted when they learned what it meant, she explained the fleech to him. She hoped it would disgust him, too. “It pumps liquid food into my bloodstream while I’m tapheading.” She stroked the distended bag of flesh. “When I’m under, I can easily go for hours, days even, without eating, the taphead experience is so intense. Fleechie here keeps me alive. It’s quite smart really. It can feed itself from the dispenser and it’s keyed to my pheromone pattern so it can always find me wherever I am in the house.”
But he hadn’t been disgusted. He just hadn’t understood why anyone should have their neural pleasure centers wired to a button where their left nipple should have been.
“Because I’m a tapheader,” she said, but he knew nothing of nonsocialised introversion level 6 Grade 3 narcissistic wingers. “Don’t you even know what a winger is?” And when time had passed, she would come again to him as she always came, the fleech clinging to the nape of her neck, the left breast proffered. And because he had not yet learned the nature of self-hate, he would reach out to stroke the plastic nipple. As she spasmed in her synthetic ecstasy upon the stroking villi of the carpet, his understanding of the new universe unfolded like a rose in the bud. As her body arched and warped, he felt himself drawn to the small alcove amidst the tangles of heating ducts and power conduits where the air was clean of the heavy scent of sexuality and self-absorption. He loved to sit in the gathering darkness and finger the little magpie-bright trinkets BeeJee had deposited there: bauds and beads of junk jewelry bought for a song from Mr. Yoshizawa’s barrow on Narrow Lane; tiny plastic figurines, bean-eyed and reposeful, extruded from street slot-machines; miniature rubber genitalia, scraps of fur, leather, and spun-glass baubles that chimed when he tapped them.
“The butsudan?” asked BeeJee &ersenn. “What about it? It’s dedicated to Janja—she’s the Celestial of my caste—and to YamTamRay, the house spirits. They watch over me, they care for me, they know everything I do.”
But touching his fingers to the crude clay image of the straddle-legged Venus, he sensed something different: a questing, a questioning, an impatience that seemed to reflect his own incomprehension and hunger for history. Each time he sat in the green glow of the spirit lamp, he felt a disquiet, a need to go onward, outward, to embrace an entire universe within his arms. Thus, he said one day, quite unexpectedly, “I think I will have to go very soon.”
“Why?” Questioner and questionee reversed.
“There is something I must do, but it is not here.”
“Then where is it?”
“I do not know.”
“What is it?”
“I do not know.”
She came to him one last time before he returned himself to the rain. She was cat-nervous, almost fearful of him. She came to him and offered him her plastic nipple.
“One final question,” he said. “What is it you want from me?”
“Pleasure. Joy without ending,” she whispered, as if she sensed that this man could somehow grant her her heart’s desire. She closed her eyes as he reached out to stroke the plastic. BeeJee &ersenn cried aloud. Blue holy lightning burned along her pleasure circuits. And fused the nipple switch, the joyswitch, the key to her heart’s desire, shut forever.
He pulled on the heavy waxed raincoat she had bought for him and let himself out of the glass bubble among the pipes. Rain slanted across the bustling street, and he turned his collar up against it. He thought of names as he walked away from the glass house among the pipes. Names were the nails of history. Things were, had been, would be because they had names to guide them through time. Without a name he had no time-boundedness. Therefore he must have a name. But everything was already named, and all names were assigned. He would have to steal one. And a history, too, perhaps. He tried some names for fit and comfort. Stolen names were like stolen shoes, uncomfortable and ill-fitted to their owners. He was not comfortable with any of the names he saw around him as he walked through the wet, gray streets of Great Yu; the names of the streets, the shops, the pedicab drivers, the shrines and noodle stands and waxman booths. He passed from the tangled alleyways and tenements of the district called Little Norway into a place the like of which he had never seen before. Astounded, he stood on a broad plaza of yellow brick, a man reduced to an atom by the buildings that rose on either side of him, vast cones of masonry massive as fallen moons, so tall their uppermost levels were shrouded in cloud, so tall they might reach up and up and up forever. The twin behemoths shone with lights, more lamps than he had ever seen in one place before, a fallen constellation captured in stone. He fell to his knees, and as the twin arcologies reduced him to nothing, he also came out of his annihilated anonymity to realize that he was special, he was unique, that his light shone brighter than all the million glowworm windows, for he alone knew nothing. Uniquely, he understood what his days with BeeJee &ersenn had been teaching him: he, alone, was the alien.
And so he took a name. From the unbelievable towers of light he took a name he felt was worthy of his massive uniqueness.
“Kilimanjaro West,” he said. The stolen name fit well. “I am Kilimanjaro West.”
And onward he went, a named thing, rooted in the universe, yet apart from it, through the night and the rain-dancing streets. Now that he knew that he was, that he existed to celebrate his existence, he looked with delight and fascination at every all-night hot-food stall, every neon welcome to a caste bar or club, every vagrant waft of steam from the pneumatique ventilators, every puddle of yellow streetlight, every rain-slick cobble, because in the continued existence of those other things he saw his own being reflected. Onward he went, and onward, until, to his astonishment, he had walked out of the night into a new steel-gray
morning. Stopping in the place in which he found himself, he looked up and around him in awe and amazement. And saw the faces in the architecture.
Angel faces. Demon faces. Faces of women and children. Animal masks. Distorted homunculus grimaces vomiting warm, sour rainwater from stretched rubber lips. The faces of the gargoyles of Neu Ulmsbad looked down on the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West. And as that man looked up at them, he turned himself round to take all the strange newness in, round and round and roundroundround with gathering speed: beaks and claws, snouts, grins, bulbous eyes, gendefrownssneerssmileslewdwinks … he snapped to halt.
There were human faces among the angels and demons, mortals among the immortals, flesh amidst the stones. He strained his eyes to quarter the fluted, sculpted masonry. There they were. They were not so hard to find now that he knew what to look for.
“Hello!” he called.
The faces ducked from view behind a parapet.
Presuming that they wished to preserve their anonymity, having not yet learned that anonymous faces in the architecture of Neu Ulmsbad might in some way be unnormal, he did not call to them again. Which meant that it came as a complete surprise to the early-morning people of Neu Ulmsbad Square when the small knot of raincoated citizens loitering at a waxman’s booth suddenly cast off their waxed raincoats to become iridescent birds of paradise and pulled from the waxman’s awning long, streaming banners with which they danced through the crowds of workaday citizens, wrapping them in rippling silk and mystery while from the back of the booth roman candles ignited and fountained silver fire into the air. In seconds Neu Ulmsbad Square was a dangerous, unpredictable, wonderful place, full of running, leaping figures, billowing streamers, and cracking thunderflashes sown from the bird-dancers’ belt-pouches. Taken by surprise, the morning people panicked. Only one man was not surprised. He was not surprised because he had no concept of normality that the events in Neu Ulmsbad Square could violate. The man called Kilimanjaro West watched with wonder and delight and everything was new. From the BergHaus parapet three silver hang gliders plummeted in a death dive that sent the assailed, assaulted public reeling to cover on the cobbles, thunderflashes doomsdaying around their ears. The banners of the bird-of-paradise dancers sought out the man called Kilimanjaro West, enveloped him in crisscrossing walls of streaming silver silk. The hang gliders soared high above the cobbles of Neu Ulmsbad. One carried a portable synthesizer. Another was fitted with an array of electronic and acoustic percussion devices. The third broadcast excerpts from the Ministry of Pain’s Electoral Selection Declaration. The roman candle fire-fountains mounted and mounted until, half the height of the lowering architecture of Neu Ulmsbad, they cast their own shadows over the huddled citizenry. Rockets began to arc into the air and detonate euphorically while a voice from heaven cried, “This is the essential nature of our democracy, that any citizen … any citizen … an … an … any citizen”—the sound source stammered in time to the tribal drums and the driving synthesizers—“may be selected to the highest. Of offices. May be selected. To the highest of offices. May be selected. To the highest of offices.”
The man called Kilimanjaro West clapped his hands.
The sound filled all of Neu Ulmsbad Square.
“Wonderful,” he said.
And now that they saw that what he said was true, the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers whose mornings had been broken open uncurled to look at this something from beyond the edge of their happily bounded lives. In the dying moments of the Happening, each knew themselves to have been touched by something quite precious and rare and extraordinary. Something that had been taken from them years and years before. Something that some of them had never known they could experience. But the moment was dying. The roman candles were collapsing. The last rockets spent their brief lives in the sky above the BergHaus. The hang gliders turned in the sky for a final pass, the music came to a ringing conclusion, and a voice announced, “This piece of Performance Art entitled ‘The Elector Passes’ has been brought to you by the members of the Raging Apostles, an intercaste multimedia alternative arts group comprising independent nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers. We thank you for your participations in this event, and Raging Apostles hopes that it has in some small way brightened your day.”
Trailing thanks and blessings, the trio of aircraft slid low over the pinnacles of DeminaBerg to come in for hop, skip, and jump landings on Rue de La Fontaine. The birds of paradise set down their silk banners, removed masks, bowed to the audience, who, to their surprise, found themselves applauding. And whistling. And cheering. Just as if they had never seen anything like it before. Which they hadn’t. Then a trog in a Food Corps coverall whose senses had been sharpened by years in the subterranean agrariums cried out, “Love Police!” and the intercaste multimedia company of nonauthorized artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers scattered like starlings. And so did the computer operators, power-supply engineers, shopkeepers, agricultural workers, transport drivers, electronics workers, restaurant waiters, and cablecar washers. And only one man was left in Neu Ulmsbad Square to watch the black and silver pantycars come tunneling out of the clouds.
“Is this part of it?” asked the man called Kilimanjaro West.
A bird-of-paradise woman paused in her flight to be astounded.
“Yah, you stupid or something? That’s the Love Police, you know?”
“The what?”
“Fug! You are stupid! Never heard of West One?”
And because, somehow, she could see that he indeed had not, she seized his arm and dragged him across Neu Ulmsbad Square to the waiting ’lectrovan and the forest of waving, beckoning arms in its open rear. A thrust sent the stranger sprawling all knees and elbows across the collected Raging Apostles. The bird-of-paradise woman thumped down on the seat beside him. Suddenly she could no longer think why she had brought him. There was a sharp smell of burnt-out fireworks in the crowded van.
“Come on, come on!” shrieked the driver. The pantycar was settling on its belly jets as the three aeronauts made good fastening their collapsed gliders to the roof rack and swung inside. “About fuggin’ time, too!” the driver screamed, gunning the engine and sending everyone over everyone else as he accelerated down Finneganstrasse.
“Hey, who you got there, Kansas?”
She did not want to say that she did not know, that she had, for an instant, no more, no less, been as compelled as if the eternal clouds had opened and the lasers of God beamed down upon her. “A recruit,” she said. “I thought we could use him.”
“You what?” the driver screamed again. “Fuggin’ Yah, Kansie, he could be anyone, anything, nuh? You want us all to get Social Counseling, eh? Everyone up in West One?”
“Yet, he did seem, at least to me, to be an unprogrammed element, a true locus of spontaneity,” said the bearded man beside the frenzied, sweating driver.
“Unprogrammed, spontaneity, fug, he’s dangerous, put him out.” The driver swerved the crammed ’lectrovan around a procession of Eleventh Day Redemptorists.
“Just because he’s a stranger doesn’t mean he’s dangerous,” said the bird-of-paradise woman. “What is the point of being an alternative to the Compassionate Society if we don’t hold alternative values? What I’m hearing is pure nona dolorosa hurt-me-not straight out of kindergarten.”
“There is a value in unprogrammed elements in a programmed world,” said the bearded man, attempting conciliation. “I’d say give him a try. We measure our own humanity by how we respond to the unprogrammed, the unpredictable.”
“And he damn near made the event,” said a large and odorous trog wedged against the door.
“Love Police damn near unmade it.” A man shook his hair free from a sweaty head-mask. “Joshua, I’ve said this before, it’ll bear saying again. I don’t go with these big, big theatrical happenings. Smal
l-scale stuff; interactive microdrama, ultrarealism, that’s good. This sort of thing is too flash. It gets us noticed. It’ll get us disbanded.”
The bearded man smiled, shrugged. The bird-of-paradise woman who had rescued the man called Kilimanjaro West removed her mask also, and he saw that her face was the image of that other man who had criticized.
“I sometimes wonder just why you are a Raging Apostle, Brother dearest, if you won’t put yourself on the edge for your art. Play it safe, play it along the line; sometimes I wonder if you really want to change anything at all. Live dangerously, Kelso, live for the moment. I think you forgot that, somewhere back down the line.”
“Kansas, I’m telling you, you don’t know a thing, not a thing. Joshua, any more of these big happenings and I’m out. An ex-Raging Apostle.”
“Ex-Apostle, or ex-Raging?” asked a new voice.
“Deva, you just …”
“Well, Citizen Unprogrammed Element,” said the bearded man from the front bench seat, again the conciliator, “have you got a name?”
“My name is Kilimanjaro West,” he said, and something in the way he spoke that name made the crowded ’lectrovan fall electrically quiet. “Pleased to meet you all.”
“Wow,” said the woman who had rescued him.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the bearded man, first to break the awed silence. “Joshua Drumm, artistic director, manager, and father figure to this troupe of social urchins. May I introduce the Raging Apostles: Winston, who so nearly would have left you on the street”—the driver ducked his head and flicked mistrustful eyes in the rearview mirror—“my general factotum, our faithful provider and fixer. Thunderheart Two-Birds Flying”—a huge hairy thing bared white enamel—“vocal arrangements, stunts, and for the present, accommodation. Dr. M’kuba Mig-15”—an ectomorphic face, etched with blue tattoo lines, nodded a nimbus of luminous hair—“technical arrangements and special effects. Devadip Samdhavi”—a glitteringly dressed young man made a small bow—“costumes, design, choreography and dance consultant. V. S. Pyar”—a massive boulder of humanity, his sweat a palpable presence in the swaying van—“movement, acrobatics, physical training, and much-needed muscle. Kelso Byrne”—the arguing man nodded, curtly—“musical arrangements, original compositions, tapes, and lyrics, and unfortunate twin of Kansas,” and the girl who had, on a whim, a notion, an inspiration, pulled Kilimanjaro West away from his fatal fascination, grinned and blew a kiss across the van—“artist, conceptualize wonderfully talented and quite impossible to work with.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed at the man called Joshua Drumm. “Together we are the Raging Apostles. Welcome, Cizzen West. Winston my man! Yah speed us away with your best efforts! To the Big Tree!”