Aurorarama (15 page)

H
iding the truth from Brentford was something Gabriel could consider doing, but, as a gentleman as well as a friend, lying to him was beyond the pale of the possible. Once he had told him that he was going to the Inuit People’s Ice Palace, he had little choice but to actually go there, however exhausted he was. Wondering why he had not simply admitted that he needed some sleep, he staggered toward the Marco Polo Midway.

Though it was early in the day, and not exactly warm, the Midway was already busy, people taking advantage of the few hours of decent daylight to stroll about and linger in front of the
shops, cafés, and attractions that lined the long avenue. A refuge against the most dreaded Hyperboredom of the Wintering Weeks, the Midway was a poetic hodgepodge of architectural styles, but with an overall cheapness that made it more Fairground than Fairyland. Through dreary days or dazzling nights, it catered almost nonstop to all kinds of questionable tastes in mass entertainment. Panoramas, dioramas, oloramas, cycloramas, mareoramas, myrioramas, and panopticons took the spectators through all kinds of famous monuments and places, exotic lands, ferocious battles, and natural catastrophes, unless they preferred a “Trip to the Moon” or a good update on the “War of the Worlds,” or even, if one believed the bold letters above the gigantic archways guarded by angels and devils, a replay of the “Creation of the World” or a peek through the formidable “Hellgate.” Gabriel had patronized, in more senses than one, each of these many times and though he professionally professed to see their naïve vulgarity, he had always tremendously enjoyed them, precisely because the imperfection and mechanical frailty of these industrial visions reminded him, more than anything else, of his own stuttering fantasies, the do-it-yourself of his dreams.

Nevertheless, the very idea of building the Ice Palace right there, a few steps from the pyramid-shaped Palace of Palmistry or the Trilby Temple, said a lot about the seriousness of its planners’ alleged anthropological concerns. The building itself, whose outside was now completed, was shaped, rather ridiculously to Gabriel’s mind, as a rough mountain or an iceberg of huge proportions, as if the Eskimos were some kind of troglodytes living in caves of ice. He walked up to a man in a sort of zookeeper’s uniform whom he supposed was a guard, and having explained his case had only a few minutes to wait—his heavy lids closing by themselves—before Kelvin Budd-Jones came to meet him at the door.

“Nice to see you. I do not have much time, however. We’re under considerable pressure, here.”

“I hope I won’t detain you too long,” said Gabriel, who was sincerely in a hurry to get between sheets that would not be made of ice. “It’s really kind of you, anyway.”

The entrance hall and the darkened corridor that curved toward the main rotunda were a dusty mess indeed, carpeted with crumpled blankets and tarpaulins, littered with dismantled iron scaffolding and boxes of greasy nuts and bolts.

“You’ve heard about Bob?” asked Kelvin, to strike up a little conversation, as they made their way through the obstacles.

“No,” Gabriel answered, realizing that since he had met Stella, he’d felt no interest or curiosity about anything or anyone else.

“His Polar Kangaroo has been stolen. Well, it has disappeared, while we were at the Kane Clinic. He’s not the happiest boy in New Venice, as you can imagine.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel, trying to look surprised. But when you started fiddling about with the Polar Kangaroo, no surprise would be the real surprise. He could well imagine the statue hopping away on its powerful hind legs. Generally, any manifestation of that wonder or freak of Nature, fictitious, real, or anything in between or beyond, was an omen of trouble threatening the city. Gabriel had a hunch he would hear about it again.

“Here, you see,” said Kelvin, indicating a blue glow running along the base of the curved corridor walls, “these are Geissler tubes full of argon. We were trying to imitate the light just as it appears over the horizon, so it’s a bit like being outside.”

“A bit, yes. Great idea,” said Gabriel, who appreciated the effort to simulate those sensations but who could not help thinking that a -30°F temperature would have been a more efficient way to produce a real Arctic feel, if that was truly the
point. Then you might get some notion of what being an Inuk was all about.

But when the corridor ended and they entered the Hall, he was struck dumb. It was towering and vast and looked bigger than a normal panorama, perhaps because one entered it at floor level and not upon a mid-level platform. A painted roll, maybe forty-five feet in height, circled the entire rotunda, showing snowy peaks and icebergs adrift in the sea. A fjord, part paint, part real water, extended right to the middle and blended into a shore scene in the hall, where about twenty igloos were scattered on the blinding white floor. A few stuffed seals lounging on floes or peeping out of ice holes completed the picture, and Gabriel wondered if the Polar Kangaroo would not have felt indeed more at home here than in the Musheum.

This cardboard sublimity, as it tricked his senses into accepting that inside was outside, left him rocking uneasily between belief and disbelief. The light was dim, with a Sunday afternoon heaviness to it that felt barely comfortable. A frayed film of mist, probably made from dry ice, hovered above the ground, curiously at odds with the rather warm temperature around them. The scene in its entirety produced a strange sensation of frozen movement and epileptic clarity that was, Gabriel felt, slightly oppressive.

“It’s a panorama but also a diorama,” explained Kelvin, pointing at the painted scenery. “The canvas is actually transparent linen, with a few other layers behind. There are light rigs and filters behind the paintings and in the ceiling, over those fake clouds, so we can make the whole scene look like it’s day or night, and imitate sun dogs or mock moons. We can even do northern lights. I can’t show you now, but it’s quite something. I’m devising a trick that can synchronize them with electromagnetic sound waves. Right now, you can hear the wind, I suppose, as we’re testing the loudspeakers.”

There was an ominous hiss, in fact, but since nothing moved, not even the mist, except a few stray workers here and there installing props in the igloos, it just worsened the feeling of uncanny stillness. It reminded Gabriel of that night when Helen died after having stopped Time for a few minutes, and how scary it all had been.

“I’m impressed, really,” he said, becoming almost dizzy when he lifted his eyes toward the vault.

A titanic amount of work and skill had gone into this scheme, and he really wondered what was the point, beyond sheer performance. It did not look like the kind of cheap entertainment that the surroundings promised, but neither was it credible as a scientific or cultural endeavour. The idea of having real Eskimos going through the motions of hunting stuffed animals seemed especially ludicrous when everything around seemed designed for wax figures. It was enough to look at those four real Inuit in furs who came out of an igloo and blinked around, hands over their eyes, seeming as lost as Gabriel, to understand the absurdity of it all.

The four Eskimos regrouped and walked toward the exit, coming closer to Gabriel, who could hear them laughing behind their sleeves, when a fifth one, in an employee’s uniform, darted out of the igloo and ran after them, apparently furious. He caught by the arm the last of the group, a long-haired, bowlegged, smelly fellow who seemed to be hiding something under his parka, and whispered to him something in Inuktitut that Gabriel had not enough vocabulary to grasp but that was, by the sound of it, an unequivocal reproach. The other fellow strove to free his arm, pulling faces at his aggressor, while the remaining three seemed rather amused at the scene. Suddenly, another of the uniformed guards, a white man, strode from the entrance toward the group.

“Hey, Oosik,” he said, “what’s going on here?”

“Nothing, nothing, sir,” said the Eskimo guard, who looked rather embarrassed, while the others now laughed openly, elbowing each other in the ribs.

“Oosik, cousins or not, I told you to be discreet when you took them in,” said the white guard. “People are working here and have no time to fool around.”

“They gave me good advice for the igloos,” pleaded Oosik.

“And I’m giving you some as well,” said the guard. “Get them out of here, before I tell Mr. Peterswarden. Hey, but what are you hiding here?” he exclaimed, pointing at the long-haired Inuk Oosik was holding by the sleeve.

“Nothing,” said Oosik, blushing. “It’s a little joke between us.”

The oldest of the four befurred Inuit—a small, stocky man with a wrinkled face—said something to the long-haired man, who laughed and pulled out his hand from under his parka, showing a little carved knife he had stolen from the igloo. He handed it to the white guard with a smile that lacked some teeth. But the smile waned as the guard briskly grasped the knife and returned him an angry look. There was an instant of awkward silence. Gabriel could see the other Inuit get tense. The old one extended his hand toward the white guard, as, Gabriel supposed, a gesture of appeasement, but the guard violently pushed it aside, and taking a whistle from his breast pocket, blew it, the shrill sounds causing a commotion that rippled across the stilllife scenery. Guards suddenly appeared from all the corners of the hall, running toward the Inuit. Kelvin stepped in, trying to calm the guard, but the man would hear nothing, and tried instead to seize the thief, who, in his turn, pushed the guard back so violently that he fell to the floor. The other Inuit looked at each other, and then, without a word, all four started to run toward the exit, though other guards were now blocking the way. The Inuit tried to dodge them, but were tackled, and a wrestling
match ensued that the fur clothes of the Eskimos seemed to muffle and make more playful to the casual observer (who, tired as he was, found it a good excuse not to intervene). Screams and swearing echoed through the hall, until more guards, streaming from the rear in Keystone Kops quantities, managed to catch and control the Eskimos. Other Inuit employees of the palace, along with Oosik and Kelvin, were trying to placate the guards. The fur-clad Inuit were now being put back on their feet and dragged away through the corridors, with complaints and protestations from the other workers.

Gabriel decided it was time to leave, before the Gentlemen of the Night arrived. The incident, as far as he was concerned, had not been serious and was drawing to a close. He approached Kelvin, who was about to follow them all.

“It’s more lively than it seems, here,” said Gabriel.

“Sorry about this,” said Kelvin. “Everybody’s nervous with the oncoming inauguration. I hope it won’t be too bad for them. Or for Oosik. Or the other employees.”

“The Eskimos who work here?”

“Yes, the idea is that it’s the resident Inuit themselves who explain things to visitors. Some of them have their doubts about the project. We’ve even had a little sabotage lately. This is going to make things worse.”

“You should go and make sure it cools off,” said Gabriel, who felt as if his head was about to burst with exhaustion. “I don’t want to detain you. Thanks a lot for the visit, anyway. It’s truly amazing.”

“Thank you,” said Kelvin, shaking Gabriel’s hands before following the Eskimo cortege.

Gabriel yawned and headed toward the exit. He hadn’t gone two steps when he felt a small object under his boots. It looked like a dancing bear or something, one of those miniature carvings that Inuit make when they are bored and forget about afterward.
It must have been part of the whole staging. He knelt down and picked it up.

It was only in the street that, opening his gloved hand, he realized that the tiny figure he held was that of the Polar Kangaroo.

B
rentford still had plenty of time before his appointment at the Blazing Building with the Council of Seven, and he felt he could afford to make a detour to Venustown, where, according to the flyer he had just been handed by a girl in a suffragette outfit, he could attend the launch party of THIS YEAR’S MUSICAL EVENT: LILIAN LENTON & THE LODESTONES’ NEW ELECTRICALLY RECORDED 10-INCH!!!

He had to admit that the newspaper article Sybil had handed him with such a charming fury had triggered his curiosity. When he was a youngster, caught in the agitation of the city’s
golden age, Sandy Lake had more than once enchanted him with her good looks and crisp little tunes that would turn his brain wiring into blinking fairy lights. Her band, the fine-tuned but foul-mouthed Sandmovers, had been the epitome of what the city was about in those days, as it stood upon the two pillars of attitude and addiction. But he would not have gone for such cheap flashes of nostalgia—for he knew ultimately how useless and heart-wrenching they were—if he had not dreamed of Sandy Lake at the Dunne Institute. He had to check the connection, if only to make sure it was nothing but a coincidence, though he knew very well that a coincidence, by the simple fact of being noticed, was always
something
.