Aurorarama (8 page)

While the Fox Fires were explaining that their last song was about the sensations and reflections that occur at night between bedroom and bathroom, Gabriel slithered toward the toilets himself: circular cabinets decorated with exhilarated Santas in flayed-deerskin clothes dangling from the ceiling. On his way back to the table, he decided that the snowcaine had worn off and that it was time to sand up. He inserted some boreal crowns in the slot to get packets of his personal favourite, the black Flying Fantasia Flint, which gave one a sensation, typical of dreams, of levitating and walking a few inches above the ground, with a sweet feeling of muscular effort and of resistance from the air. It would, Gabriel thought, enlighten his return home, and maybe even make him actually
want
to go home, provided he would not go alone. He hoped that Phoebe, who was already late to the rendezvous he had given her, would not be too long. He was curious to know how her mission had turned out, and perhaps, though he was not ready to admit it, he was also eager to see her again and bring her back to his nest, both of them on the winged shoes that he had just purchased.

But as the Fox Fires finished their set, no Phoebe was to be seen, and the only well-known face at the bar was that of the owner, Nicholas Sandmann. As one of the models for the “Goodnight Kids” cartoon, he had enchanted Gabriel’s rather dreary Newfoundland childhood, but these days, he was more famous as the man who had brought the sand craze to the city
and as the perennial leader of the Sandpackets Peddlers Syndicate. Gabriel felt that some homage was due.

“How are you, Nicky?” he asked the thin, round-headed man who never seemed to grow old.

“Hey, Mr. d’Allier, you’re asking? You’ve heard about that last decree?”

“Which one? Decrees come in droves, these days.”

“The one that forbids us to sell sand in the City Centre.”

“Oh, that one. It’s a tough one, isn’t it?”

“It’s a rabid sled bitch, that’s what it is. Doctors passing decrees and police acting in the name of Health, what bell does it ring?”

“Same as for you, I’d say. The Silver Age of the Silver Surgeons.”

“Exactly,” Nicholas said, wincing. “You’ve been there, haven’t you? You know what I’m talking about. Except the Silver Surgeons, they were against the Council then, and now, those
phoque-in-iceholes
work hand in hand.”

Gabriel nodded, thinking of the innuendos the Gentlemen of the Night had been making about his own consumption. When Transpherence—a trick that made it possible to charge a dead arcticocrat’s memory into that of his heir, thereby ensuring the continuity of the ruling elite—was one of the pillars on which the City was founded, the drug that allowed it, Pineapples and Plums, had proved so useful in asserting the Council’s power that the whole city had become a testing ground for it, the federal capital of Altered States. Accordingly, all sorts of other substances had been tolerated, with the view that they helped keep suicide rates during the Wintering Weeks down to a reasonable level (only a paltry eleven times the Canadian rate), or on the premise that a drugged people is a happy or at least a quiet people. Gabriel had been subjected to Transpherence, and remembered it, literally, with mixed feelings, but the drug part
had been the best, no doubt about that. But now those days were over, and even if the Council still managed to seem publicly tolerant on the matter, it obviously wanted to curb drug use one way or another, for some reason that eluded him.

“And you know why?” said Nicholas, whose train of thought had obviously closely followed Gabriel’s. “Because they want to destroy the local production.”

“What would be the point? The damned demand would still be huge.”

“Yes, but prohibition of the local product means real drug lords from the outside coming into the game and taking over from us. Which means money, and on quite another scale. And for everyone, if you get my meaning. Because no drug lord would ever work without giving a modicum of, you know, sweetener to the authorities to ensure his own safety.”

“Bribery? Is that what you mean?” Gabriel said doubtfully. He knew from Brentford how much the city needed money, but for the Council there certainly was some distance between going through hard times and organizing drug traffic for a profit. Despite his appreciation of Nicholas’s work, Gabriel could trace in him the paranoid, obsessive streak that characterized drug dealers and users across the whole known pluriverse. On the other hand, he knew equally well that those who feel persecuted are right half the time and that is much too often. Twice too often, actually, concluded Gabriel, whose maths were rather idiosyncratic.

“Me? I’ve said nothing,” answered Nicholas, with a wink.

Gabriel said good-bye and went back to the table, through a crowd that was thicker and rougher and mostly indifferent to his Mosaic attempts at parting its crashing waves. There was still no Phoebe to be seen, but he noticed a girl who he thought was watching him, and he tried to get closer to her, but in the middle of that thick, lazy crowd, it was like trying
to reach the stars through the trees of a forest. He renounced the struggle and went back to the table, where John Linko, the métis music critic, had joined Bob. Judging by his gestures, the journalist was visibly excited about something that Gabriel could not quite grasp, except maybe the name Sandy Lake, but he could have misheard that completely, as the Sun Dogs were now storming the stage.

This band, thanks partly to Linko’s relentless propaganda, was supposed to be the new luminary of the Neovenetian Nipi, or Northern Noise scene. They had just been signed by Perpalutok Records, which certainly enhanced their “canal cred,” and their gigs so far had generated a buzz that had only grown louder and louder, and was rumoured to linger after their deafening shows.

The Sun Dogs were two well-built Brits or Scands in torn cashmere, and their gear consisted only of an electric cello, plugged into a compressed-air auxetophone amplifier that looked like a threatening tuba, and a Frying Pan amplified to the point of distortion. As soon as the room started to vibrate, and as a dark, ominous drone started to coil around the walls, it became palpably clear that this music directly linked one’s eardrum to one’s intestines and that it was, beyond good or bad, to be digested rather than listened to. It also had at times, under the murk, the repetitive, trance-like quality of Eskimo chant. This indeed was not without its effect upon intoxicated listeners, who swayed back and forth with the ebb and flow of the gravelly sound waves. The Sun Dogs’ best song was called Hyperborean, and if Gabriel understood it correctly, it was a cryptic paean to snowcaine. It went something like this:

This was, Gabriel had to admit, the most exact captation of the collective life—and of his own—that he had ever heard from one of those bands. He had simply, in his ravishment, forgotten Phoebe. The audience must have felt the same: they all looked enthralled, unless their immobility had more to do with a fear of being noticed by that stubborn chord that whirled closer and closer and closer as if to decapitate them. Some people were even crouched on the floor, looking bleak and frightened, as if praying for the sonic scythe to spare their worthless lives.

But then, all of a sudden, as if the plug had been torn from the socket, everything stopped and a rush was heard (through slightly buzzing ears) in the back of the room. Gabriel turned to see a pack of Gentlemen of the Night invading the premises, dressed to kill in top hats and Inverness coats, their dreaded sword-canes in hand. He was not long in spotting among the
intruders a monocled Sealtiel Wynne, who was equally quick to notice him. The policeman lightly touched his hat to him with the knob of his cane, adding a sly little smile that made Gabriel want to bite his head off.

One of the Gentlemen had hopped up on the stage and, carbon microphone in hand, suavely addressed the dumbstruck crowd:

“Ladies and Gentlemen. We hope you will excuse this intrusion in the middle of a very pleasant evening. We would gladly have dispensed with the interruption if a matter of some urgency had not constrained us to act on behalf of your health. I have here”—he flourished a paper—“a recommendation from Doctor Playfair, from the Kane Clinic. He informs us, after long and painstaking research by the best experts in the field, that, unfortunately, the joint exposure to psychotropic products and droning sounds is hazardous to the well-being of the persons exposed, and is even, he regrets to say, likely to have irreversible effects on the nervous system. Not wanting to take any chances with the health of the citizens, the Council has delegated us, your humble servants, to take the measures necessary for your protection. As a consequence, and assured as we are of your understanding and cooperation, we take upon ourselves the responsibility of bringing this most entertaining event to a close, and, with our heartfelt apologies for the inconvenience, we will take you to the Kane Clinic in order to ensure that we have no damage as yet to deplore.”

The crowd had started to wake up and was voicing, though in a rather muted fashion, its disapproval. But it was too late. The Poshclothes Police had started, politely but firmly, and with “if-you-pleases” that had a certain “if-you-don’t-please” ring to them, to tow the reluctant boreal bohemians toward the exit where the sled ambulances were “advanced.” Nicholas, Gabriel noticed, was slumped on the bar, sobbing with his head in his
hands, and he truly felt sorry for him. As to himself, he was, for the third time today, full of an impotent anger for which—the impotency, not the anger—he hated himself as much as he hated this police force of foppish oafs. Sealtiel Wynne walked up to him and bowed slightly.

“How strange it is to meet you again, Mr. d’Allier! But it is always a pleasure.”

“Yes, isn’t it. It’s quite a scream, actually,” Gabriel said, with all the detachment he could muster. “What a coincidence, indeed.”

“Coincidences! In New Venice!” said Wynne, sincerely amused. “Maybe our presence is a coincidence, but yours is certainly not,” he added, a little more seriously, pointing a white-gloved index finger at the breast pocket where Gabriel had put the sand packet. “Now would you mind joining our little party? I am sure it will not take long. After you, Mr. d’Allier … unless you wish to fly.”

B
rentford did not go back home straightaway. He had decided to walk the mile that separated the Dunne Institute from the Botanical Building, and while doing so he replayed his dream in his mind, stumbling on some connections he had so far neglected.

The appearance of Hector Liubin V, whose stage name was
Ekto
Liouven, may have been triggered by the sheer idea of
ectoplasm
. Sandy Lake had been Ekto’s former sweetheart, when she fronted the Sandmovers in the heyday of “polar pop.” Brentford may have inquired about her because in his dream he was searching for a female interlocutor rather than a male one, and had eventually managed to conjure one. “Isabella Alexander” was, of course—how could that have escaped his attention?—made up of the names of Ross’s two famous ships—now the names of two famous capes—which had been under his command on his first encounter with the “Arctic Highlanders,” or Eskimos. Ross was a Scot, as Brentford partly was, and there was a time when Orsinis had been Rossinis, so his identification with Ross was in both respects more likely than otherwise. Then too, the whole thing may indeed have been a reference to Brentford’s own meeting with the Inuit earlier in the day, which had provoked the need for the incubation, and his presence on the ice field may have been tied to his idle remembrances about polar explorations on his way back from that meeting.