by Ian McDonald
By royal decree (His waved handkerchief) the expedition halted. Ahead the tunnel shrunk patiently to sub-molecular dimensions. A team of engineers opened a section of wall, and a sudden typhoon of hot, electric air threatened solar topees.
“Pneumatique tube,” shouted the King of Nebraska. “Closest we could get the thing to Victorialand without arousing the suspicions of the Great Yu Rapid Transit Authority dispatching department.”
Thing? Courtney Hall was about to ask as a fast, white, horribly loud something blasted past, as if proof were needed that this was, indeed, a pneumatique tube. Her nervous system was still shedding sparks when five minutes later the thing (no other word could describe it quite so accurately) drew up by the hole in the tube wall and distended an orifice. If a Celestial could be assumed to have a penis, and if that penis could be assumed to be forty meters long, six high, made of brass and gold with a ribbed glass glans, then that was the best analogy to the thing.
“Electoral airbarge,” announced the King of Nebraska. “The command codes are another of those little things I forgot to surrender when I abdicated the Salamander Throne. Come, madam.” Under Jinkajou’s barked instructions the expedition was stripped down and loaded into the hovering golden phallus. “I’ve always wanted to do this. Oh, the number of times I’ve been tempted to go riding nonstop through all those dirty little commuter stations and leave every mouth a wide O of surprise and wonder, to have them whisper, ‘There he goes, there goes the Elector!’ Ah, madam, whatever happened to style?”
“Style is riding around in a forty-meter tin penis?”
The lurching surveillance walkers were being herded up the access ramp.
“But think of the symbolism!”
“Can’t have been too many women Electors.”
Within, the airbarge was an interior designer’s wet dream in brass, wood, and leather. Courtney Hall seated herself in one of the swiveling pilots’ chairs in the glass head of the golden penis. She spun round to take in the overstocked euphoriant bar, the naked female brass caryatids bearing electric flambeaux, the fake-fur-lined Jacuzzi, the small neon harmonium. She was rather taken by the tank of tropical fish that glopped softly as the airbarge rolled to the aircurrents in the pneumatique tube. “Oh, come on … Who designed this thing?”
“That’s real skin you’re sitting on, incidentally,” said the King of Nebraska. Courtney Hall felt immediately unclean. Jonathon Ammonier snapped his fingers in impatience. “Come on, come on, come on, come on. We’ve only one hundred and fifty seconds before the next scheduled pneumatique. So: stations please. Everybody ready?” Raccoons scampered about his feet. “Course set? Everybody strapped in? Right. Let’s be off.” Jinkajou slipped into the motorman’s chair and slid forward the brass power handle. The airbarge bucked and swayed alarmingly. Water slopped from the fish tank onto the Turkish carpets. Impellors whined as they were brought up to pressure. The great golden dork leaped forward. Acceleration punched Courtney Hall into her real-skin pilot chair. Tunnel lights leaped at her like predators. Wall buttresses smoothed into a blur. Great Yu Pneumatique Service was never like this. Great Yu Pneumatique Service never allowed you to see where you were going.
“I’m thinking I’m going to be sick.”
The King of Nebraska gallantly offered his banana-leaf topee.
On the first afternoon of the highly symbolic voyage beneath Yu, Courtney Hall began to wonder whether there had ever been an Elector nominated to the Salamander Throne who was over one hundred and fifty centimeters in height; for their one-hundred-and-eighty-six-centimeter guests constantly bumped their heads on light fittings, doorjambs, stairwells, ceilings, moldings, pipes, and conduits.
Dwarves and deviates, thought Courtney Hall as she collected her twenty-eighth bruise on her exploration of the penis-craft. The Electoral airbarge was a self-contained mobile palace: receiving rooms, dining chambers, a small state office, a study and library with real books, a trivia room, a bowling alley (forgotten peccadillo of a forgotten Elector), a large, sealed power section that occupied the after section, and a bathroom/conservatory complete with waterfall, pool, and herbal dip-pond. Courtney Hall let out a whoop of delight. A true sign of civilization in the great machine machismo fetish-fantasia. Ten minutes later she was la-la-laing up to the neck in jasmine-and tangerine-scented water. She was learning to take what luxury the DeepUnder afforded without too many questions. One question, however, bounced relentlessly through her thoughts, a trivial but nigglesome question of that kind that, once seized upon, are not easily let go. Vehicle or vessel? Train or boat? What was this thing she was traveling aboard?
Train was more realistic. Boat was more romantic. Had there not been boats that traveled underwater, back before the Break? The military (an old word, unused, due for deletion from the popular lexicon) used them to hide the world burners (two more words civilization could well do without) from their enemies’ sight deep under the sea. Enclosed, secret ships—what had they been called?
Submarines. Under the sea.
And a boat that sailed under the earth?
A subterrene.
Nice word. Now that deserved to be in the popular lexicon. And where, she asked the wicker cage of clockwork cardinals, is this subterrene going?
The End of the Line. A place of almost the same mythic vitality as the Beyond. Gangling yulp girls giggling on the pneumatique, riding out with their friends purely for the thrill of riding: dare you, dare you, dare you ride all the way to the end of the line, dare you, dare you, dare you not to get off at your stop, just sit on and on and on and let the train take you all the way to the end of the line.
But gangly, giggling yulp girls always got off at the right stop.
Does time inevitably turn all our dreams into realities and realities into dreams?
The walls, decorated with live bamboo, hummed slightly, the sole clue that this entire improbable device was hurtling through the municipal pneumatique tunnels at one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on a genie-carpet of magnetic levitation.
Courtney Hall spent most of the morning of the second day in the glass observation head losing herself in the fascination of monotony. Half hypnotized by the strobing tunnel lights, she moved unconsciously to the hip-sway of the subterrene’s lurchings and sudden veerings as the course computer sent it down another tube, into a new tunnel, avoiding scheduled services in the empty spaces between passing trains. Kilometer after kilometer after kilometer: all tunnels are one tunnel, all tubes one tube, and a hole within a hole through a hole is not three holes but one hole.
Early on the third morning of the subterrene journey, Courtney Hall was woken in her guest suite (ostentatiously decorated in red Morocco leather) by an absence of something. She was not quite certain what it was that was gone, but something was gone. All was quiet. And now she knew what was gone. The gentle universal vibration of the linear impellors: gone. The engines were shut down. Four-fourteen Victorialand time (and what was Victorialand but another gone thing; all that remained of Victorialand was its time): the Electoral airbarge had, at last, found its way through the Great Yu Pneumatique Service network to the End of the Line.
The King of Nebraska and his artist took an early breakfast of grapefruit and prunes in the observation glans, which lay pressed against a hymen of dry rock where the tunnelers had abandoned their tunneling. A team of Tinka Tae engineers were at work outside the hull burning another hole in the tunnel wall. The King of Nebraska sipped hibiscus tea; impeccable, immaculate, as only the man who knows himself King can be. Courtney Hall noticed that the royal gums were bleeding a little.
“Are you all right?” she asked carefully.
“Pink as a petal, puce as a plum, yellow as a Texas rose, madam.”
“There’s a hair on your jacket,” Courtney Hall observed.
The King fastidiously removed it. There were several hairs on his lapels and collar.
After breakfast the Expedition to the End of the World marshaled up and mar
ched down the ramp through the hole in the wall into the unknown, armed guards to fore and rear. For three hours it picked an arduous path through a cramped warren of communication conduits alive with the laser-blue spirits of telecommunication. The sound of dashing water drew them onward, dashing, plashing water always a frustrating bulkhead away. Bent treble in the confined crawlways, Courtney Hall was a purgatory of cramp. Her calf muscles were stiff balks of timber by the time the expedition, quite unexpectedly, squeezed itself through a wall iris out onto the sloping concrete bank of a subterranean river. Thereafter her discomfort was considerably eased, and for the remainder of the arbitrary day the expedition proceeded downstream by the King of Nebraska’s royal decree that all rivers flowed outward. Their path lit by softly glowing panels in the vaulted ceiling, they marched under the timefree sky until dog-tiredness demanded a halt. Courtney Hall stretched tight muscles and rubbed some of Jinkajou’s herbal healing ointment onto blisters in the warm synthetic security of a jolly-log electric campfire. Tinka Tae bearers unloaded their walkers and tofu steaks were grilled on the radiant plate while Jinkajou selected a Bacchanale & Dionysius ’28 from the mahogany cellarette.
“How much further?” Courtney Hall asked the King of Nebraska.
“Madam,” said the King of Nebraska, “if you paused for thought sometimes rather than letting your gob flap, you might see that that is a very stupid question. How do I know?”
Courtney Hall kept her gob sealed after that, and she did not tell the King about the red blotches on his skin, which she could not attribute wholly to the swirling flame-effect of the jolly-log heater. She did not sleep well that night. Her fear of twitching from her strict perpendicular position in one of the dull reflexes of sleep and rolling like a stupid log into the water kept her stiff as a winger’s fantasy all night, with the result that the next day, as they again followed the river, every muscle, sinew, and bone in Courtney Hall’s body howled protest.
The river stretched straight and undeviating before the explorers, its sheer geometrical perfection beckoning them on in the hope that farther on there might be some place where the straight curved. On that second day the King of Nebraska was visibly unwell. Every hour on the hour (as told by his ormolu pocket watch, which he wound every morning with religious diligence) he called a halt and sipped some lime cordial diluted with water from the river. On the seventh and penultimate march of the day, Courtney Hall drew Jinkajou aside and let the expedition, led by its King beating time with his gold-topped cane like a majorette, draw ahead of them some minutes.
“I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to go on. He looks awful.”
Jinkajou hissed, a peculiar racoon combination of menace and concern. “Not proper for loyal subject to speak thus of monarch, but His Majesty, Bless ’Im, pass blood when he piss.”
“He can’t not know that there is something seriously wrong with him. Someone’s got to tell him before he guesses what it is, and panics.”
The racoon folded its paws, sat back on its haunches, regarded Courtney Hall inscrutably. “Thou hast it right, madam. His Majesty, Bless ’Im, must be told.”
“So, who’s going to tell him?”
The racoon wrinkled its muzzle, a parody of a smile.
“His Majesty, Bless ’Im, correct; thou dost ask obvious questions. Please to recall, we are bound by our dilemma.”
“Well, thank you very much,” said Courtney Hall. “Thank you very much indeed.”
The camp that day was no longer the place of ease and stretching and warmth and comfort it had been the day before. A specter haunted it; two specters, the specter of the King’s sickness and the specter of Courtney Hall’s necessity. Three specters: the specter of Courtney Hall’s cowardice. She worried herself into insomnia analyzing opportunities, rehearsing excuses, waiting for the moment that came and came and came and always passed untouched because she was a coward. The Compassionate Society has no need for courage, she told herself, I’m only acting according to my nature. But the next morning she could not look at Jinkajou’s button eyes.
The halts that day were more frequent. Jonathon Ammonier could manage no more than half an hour before signaling with a wave of his silk kerchief for the askaris to slope arms and the porters to down burdens. With each halt a sound like the thunder of waters swelled until the air shuddered, as if the concrete culvert were the vox humana pipe of a planetary water organ. On the fifth march of the morning the Expedition to the End of the World came to the end of the river. Warriors, porters, interpreters, patiently treading surveillance walkers, chamberlain, artist, and King arrived abruptly on a mist-shrouded lip of concrete overlooking a cavern the dimensions of which verged on the ridiculous. To their left the water gathered itself for a leap and a yell into a sheer half kilometer of shining sky and fell in plumes of mist to break on jumbled rocks at the foot of the cliff. Through the curtain of spray the waterfall threw off, Courtney Hall caught glimpses of flashing, dashing silver darting across the floor of the cavern: their river, losing and finding itself beneath the shock of vegetation that carpeted the cavern floor. The King surveyed the new domain. There was a look of empires in his eyes, his proud, erect stance. Courtney Hall gladly excused herself that she could not shatter such a moment of personal glory with her whispers of mortality. She took pencils and paper from her folio and dashed down some impressions of the view from the falls. Forming a perspective grid with her fingers, she calculated with a certain shock that the silver glitter of water down there at the cataracts where the cave ended was twenty kilometers distant.
“A kingdom for a king!” shouted Jonathon Ammonier. The thunder of waters swept his words out into the abyss. “Look at it, just look at it! It might have been made for me; a pleasure garden for the undisputed monarch of the DeepUnder. Oh, the pomegranates; the pomegranates, the figs, the guavas—fresh from the tree!”
“But what is it?”
The King of Nebraska grimaced and snapped his fingers in vexation.
“An abandoned agrarium, a forgotten Disney World; does it matter? It’s forgotten, abandoned, therefore it’s mine. I claim this land for myself! Faithful bearers, luncheon! Set our table up here where we may dine and from this unexcelled preview contemplate this new addition to my domains. Chamberlain, your finest bottle of vintage! And if we have already drunk the finest vintage, then bring us the next-to-finest!”
They dined by the falls on red-bean-paste pancakes and a forty-year-old Moussec DuForge, and Courtney Hall made herself busy with questions (how was it made, what keeps the roof up, the lights shining) not because she had never really believed in the underground agrariums that fed the Compassionate Society (even though she had eaten her way through fourteen tons of those agrariums’ assorted legumes, pulses, grains, vegetables, and fruit), but because if she was asking questions, she could not be expected by Jinkajou and his racoons to tell the King about … you know. Jonathon Ammonier sipped his Moussec DuForge and answered her questions (underground firing of particle-beam weapons repossessed after the Break by the Compassionate Society, macroengineering techniques, hundred-meter, load-bearing members rooted in the upper mantle, thermo-electricity generated by heat differential along those load-bearing piers), and both could pretend that nothing was the matter, nothing at all. As they talked, the waters streamed past them and poured over the edge in a never ending cascade of lost time.
Five sips into the luncheon liqueurs (Courtney Hall discovered she had developed something of a taste for the King of Nebraska’s peach-and-bourbon) scouts returned to report the discovery of a winding house for a small funicular system. The design of the machinery was archaic, reported Bajinko, captain of the guard, but the railroad showed signs of recent use. Mindful of unexplained shapes in Shaft Twelve, Courtney Hall did not care very much to know that.
Once again the Expedition to the End of the World drew itself up. Porters and their stomping robots waited on the platform while the King took his chamberlain, his Striped Knights, his interprete
rs, and his artist on the first descent.
“All aboard, all aboard!” cried the King of Nebraska, standing tall and very smug at the control lever. “All aboard for Victorialand!” As the funicular was swallowed by the rock tunnel, Courtney Hall was seized by a sense of claustrophobic foreboding.
“Your Majesty,” she whispered, tugging at a royal sleeve. “Your Majesty, I have to tell you something.”
“Mmph?” said the King of Victorialand, transported by dreams of empire. “Yes, what is it, madam?”
“Nothing,” said Courtney Hall. Her tongue was sour with self-disgust. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”
The funicular emerged into the light.
The mutiny came shortly after four-o’clock tea. Four-o’clock tea coincided with the interrogation of a native racoon the Striped Knight scouts had captured on wide patrol. The racoon squatted tremulously, nibbling at fragments of cheese biscuit the King from time to time tossed down from his folding camp table. Accustomed to the Tinka Tae, Courtney Hall had to remind herself that this beast was precisely that, a dumb beast, an animal.
“Much fear and trembling,” said the interpreter. Primal racoon was very much a visual language of body postures, facial expressions, and gestures. “Presence of species alien to his.”
“Ask him, does he mean humans?” commanded the King of Nebraska.
The funicular had shown signs of being used.
“He has identified the species with humans. However, and I must admit I cannot quite make out the inflection he is using, he seems to be implying species division within a single species, if I read his modifiers right.”
“Explain please.”
“As if a single species comprised two inner, distinct groups, hostile to each other.”
“Intraspecies hostility is an altogether alien concept to racoons. That might explain the language difficulty.” The King dabbed biscuit crumbs away from his lips with his handkerchief. When he took it from his lips, it was spotted with blood. “What is the matter with me?” he said tetchily.