Against the Day (105 page)

But
she was frowning, earnest as he had seldom seen her. “La Mayonnaise,” Pléiade
explained, “has its origins in the moral squalor of the court of Louis
XV—here in Belgium the affinity should not be too surprising. The courts
of Leopold and Louis are not that different except in time, and what is time?
Both monumentally deluded men, maintaining their power through oppression of
the innocent. One might usefully compare Cleo de Mérode and the marquise de
Pompadour. Neuropathists would recognize in both kings a desire to construct a
selfconsistent world to live inside, which allows

them to continue the great damage they are inflicting on the
world the rest of us must live in.

“The sauce was invented as a new
sensation for jaded palates at court by the duc de Richelieu, at first known as
mahonnaise
after Mahon, the chief port of Minorca, the scene of the
due’s dubious ‘victory’ in 1756 over the illfated Admiral Byng. Basically
Louis’s drug dealer and pimp, Richelieu, known for opium recipes to fit all occasions,
is also credited with the introduction into France of the cantharides, or
Spanish fly.” She gazed pointedly at Kit’s trousers. “What might this
aphrodisiac have in common with the mayonnaise? That the beetles must be
gathered and killed by exposing them to vinegar fumes suggests an emphasis on
living or recently living creatures—the egg yolk perhaps regarded as a
conscious entity—cooks will speak of whipping, beating, binding,
penetration, submission, surrender. There is an undoubtedly Sadean aspect to
the mayonnaise. No getting past that.”

Kit was a little confused by now. “It
always struck me as kind of, I don’t know
.
. .
bland?”

“Until you look within. Mustard, for
example, mustard and cantharides,
n’estce pas?
Both arousing the blood.
Blistering the skin. Mustard is the widelyknown key to resurrecting a failed
mayonnaise, as is the cantharides to reviving broken desire.”

   
“You’ve
been thinking about mayonnaise a lot, mademoiselle.”

“Meet me tonight,” a sudden fierce
whisper, “out at the Mayonnaise Works, and you shall perhaps understand things
it is given only to a few to know. There will be a carriage waiting.” She
pressed his hand and was gone in a mist of vetiver, abruptly as the other
evening.

“Sounds too good to pass up,” it
seemed to Root Tubsmith. “She sure is a pip, that one. You need company?”

   
“I
need protection. I don’t trust her. But you know—”

“Oh ain’t that the truth. She’s
trying to talk me into teaching her my Q.P. system. Well, maybe not ‘talk,’
exactly. I keep telling her she has to learn Quaternions first, and darn if she
doesn’t actually keep showing up for more lessons.”

   
“She
learning anything?”

   
“I
know I am.”

   
“I’ll
pray for your safety. Meantime if you never see me again—”

   
“Oh,
be optimistic. She’s a goodhearted working girl, is all.”

The Usine
Régionale
à la
Mayonnaise or Regional Mayonnaise Works, where all the mayonnaise in West
Flanders was manufactured and then sent

out in a variety of forms to different restaurants, each of
which presented it as a unique Speciality of the House, though quite extensive
in area, was seldom, if ever, mentioned in guidebooks, receiving, in
consequence, few visitors other than those employed there. Among the dunes west
of town, next to a canal, visible by day for miles across the sands, rose
dozens of modern steel tanks of olive, sesame, and cottonseed oils, which were
delivered through a further maze of pipes and valves to the great Facilité de
l’Assemblage, electrically grounded and insulated to allow production to
continue uninterrupted by the disjunctive effects of thunderstorms.

After sunset, however, this
cheerfully rational example of twentiethcentury engineering dissolved into more
precarious shadows. “Anybody here?” Kit called, wandering the corridors and
catwalks in a borrowed lounge suit and some nifty razortoed congress shoes.
Somewhere invisible in the dark, steam dynamos hissed, and enormous batteries
of Italian hens squawked, clucked, and laid eggs which rolled ceaselessly, day
and night apparently, in a subdued rumbling, by way of an intricate arrangement
of chutes cushioned in guttapercha, to the Egg Collection Area.

Puzzling thing, though, shouldn’t
there’ve been a little more factoryfloor activity around here? he couldn’t see
any shiftworkers anyplace. This looked to be all going on without any human
intervention—except now, suddenly, for whatever invisible hand had just
pulled a switch to set everything into motion. Ordinarily Kit would have been
fascinated by the technical details, as giant gas burners bloomed percussively
alight, belts and pulleys lurched into motion, drippingheads swiveled into
place over the
cuves d’agitation,
oil pumps engaged, elegantly curved
beaters began to gather speed.

But not a pair of eyes, nor the sound
of a purposeful step, anyplace. Kit, who seldom panicked, felt close to it now,
though this still might be all about nothing more than mayonnaise.

He didn’t exactly start running, but
his step might have quickened some. By the time he had reached the Clinique
d’Urgence pour Sauvetage des Sauces, for the resurrection of potentially failed
mayonnaise, at first all he noticed was the floor getting a little
slippery—next thing he knew, he was on his back with his feet in the air,
in less time than it took to figure out that he’d slipped. His hat had been
knocked off and was sliding away on some pale semiliquid flow. He felt
something heavy and wet in his hair. Mayonnaise! he seemed now actually to be
sitting in the stuff, which was a good six inches, hell make that closer to
a
foot deep.
And, and swiftly rising! Kit had blundered into flashflooding
arroyos slower than this. Looking around, he saw that the mayonnaise level had
already climbed too high up the exit door for him

even to pull it open, assuming he could even get that far. He
was being engulfed in thick, slick, soursmelling mayonnaise.

Trying to clear his eyes of the
stuff, slipping repeatedly, he half swam, half staggered toward where he
remembered having seen a window, and launched a blind desperate kick, which of
course sent him flat on his ass again, but not before he’d felt a hopeful
splintering of glass and sashwork, and before he could think of a way to reach
the invisible opening to climb through, the mayonnaisepressure itself, like a
conscious beast seeking escape from its captivity, had borne him through the
broken window, launching him out in a great vomitous arc which dropped him into
the canal below.

He surfaced in time to hear somebody
screaming
“
Cazzo, cretino!
”
above
the rhythmic sputter of an engine of some sort. A blurry wet shadow approached.
It was Rocco and Pino, in their dirigible torpedo.

   
“Over
here!”

“
È il
cowboy!
”
The
Italians,
in their glossy Vulcanized working gear, slowed down to fish Kit out of the
water. He noticed they were casting anxious looks back down the canal.

   
“Somebody
after you?”

Rocco resumed speed, and Pino
explained. “We just got her out of the shop and decided to have a look at the
Alberta,
thinking, how dangerous can it be, when there’s no Belgian navy,
vero?
But
it turns out there are Garde Civique, in boats! We forgot about that! All up
and down the canals!”

“
You
forgot,” muttered Rocco. “But it
doesn’t matter. With this engine we can outrace anything.”

“Show him!” cried Pino. The boys got
busy with choke controls, spark timers, and acceleration levers, and presently,
sure enough, sending up a roostertail of water and black oilsmoke, they had the
craft snarling along the canal at forty knots, maybe more. Whoever might be
back there was probably breaking off the chase about now.

   
“We’re
going to stop in and surprise the girls,” said Rocco.

“If
they don’t surprise us,” Pino in what Kit recognized as romantic anxiety.
“
Le bambole anarchiste, porca miseria.
”

A
mile or so past Oudenberg, they turned left onto the Bruges canal and crept in
to Ostend, dropping Kit off at the Quai de l’Entrepôt before going off to look
for a berth safe from the attentions of the Garde Civique. “Thanks,
ragazzi,
see you down the trail, I hope
. . . .
”
And Kit tried not to stand there too long gazing after his deliverers from death
by mayonnaise.

he crew of
Inconvenience
had been ordered to Brussels
to pay their respects at a memorial service for General Boulanger, held each
September 30 on the anniversary of his suicide, an observance not altogether
free of political suggestion, there having remained within the Chums of Chance
bureaucracy a defiant residue of Boulangism. Official correspondence from the
French chapters, for example, could still be found bearing yellowandblue
postage stamps, with the General’s likeness printed in a sorrowful
brown—to all appearances legitimate French issues, ranging from one
centime to twenty francs, but in reality
timbres fictifs,
said to be of
German origin, the work of an entrepreneur who hoped to sell them after a
Boulangist coup, though sinister hints were also in the air of involvement by
“IIIb,” the intelligence bureau of the German general staff, reflecting a
theory thereamong that Germany might stand a better military chance against a
revanchist effort led by the somewhat discomposed General than any policy
perhaps a bit more thought out.

The Brussels visit proved so
melancholy that the boys had put in for, and to everyone’s surprise been
granted, ground leave at Ostend, the closest accredited liberty port. Here
before long, seemingly by chance, they had become aware of the convention of
Quaternionistsinexile at the Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue.

“Haven’t seen so many of those birds
in one place since Candlebrow,” declared Darby, looking through one of the
remote viewers.

“For that embattled discipline,” said
Chick, “back in the days of the Quaternion Wars, Candlebrow was one of very few
safe harbors~,”

   
“Bound
to run into a few that we know.”

   
“Sure,
but will
they
know
us?
”
It was just at that turn of the day when the

wind was shifting direction from a land to a sea breeze.
Below them crowds along the Digue streamed back to hotels, high teas,
assignations, naps.

“Once,” Randolph with a
longaccustomed melancholy, “they would have all been stopped in their tracks,
rubbernecking up at us in wonder. Nowadays we just grow more and more
invisible.”

“Eehhyyhh, I betcha I could even pull
out my knockwurst here and wave it at ’em, and nobody’d even notice,” cackled
Darby.

“Suckling!” gasped Lindsay. “Even
taking into account considerations of dimension, which in your case would
require a modification of any salcician metaphor toward the diminutive,
‘wiener’ being perhaps more appropriate, nonetheless the activity you
anticipate is prohibited by statute in most of the jurisdictions over which we
venture, including in many instances the open sea, and can only be taken as
symptomatic of an ever more criminally psychopathic disposition.”

“Hey Noseworth,” replied Darby, “it
was big enough for ya the other night.”

   
“Why,
you little—and I do mean ‘little’—”

   
“Gentlemen,”
their commander beseeched them.

However
successfully it might have escaped the general view, the
Inconvenience
had
come almost immediately to the attention of de Decker’s shop, which maintained
a primitive sort of electromagnetic monitoring station out in the dunes between
Nieuport and Dunkirk, which lately had been logging mysterious transmissions at
unprecedented levels of field strength. These were intended for
Inconvenience
’s
Tesla rig, one of a number
of compact powerreceivers allocated to skyships around the globe for their
auxiliary power needs. The locations of the Transmitters were kept as secret as
possible, being vulnerable to assault from power companies threatened by any
hint of competition. Unfamiliar with the Tesla system and alarmed by the
strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, de Decker’s people naturally
conflated this with those recent rumors of a Quaternion weapon which had Piet
Woevre so intrigued.