Dream Paris (23 page)

“Never mind that,” I snapped. “Why can’t I leave?”

“Because now we know the truth. Not only are you a spy, but you’re the daughter of a spy. A member of the aristocracy! An enemy of the revolution!”

“No, she isn’t!” said Francis. “Tell him, Anna.”

He looked at me for confirmation. I said nothing. Jean-Michel was half right.

LA CHAMBRE DES ÉTOILES

W
E FOLLOWED
J
EAN-
M
ICHEL
from his office down the corridor to another lift. This one was smaller, more refined. Lined with wood panelling, the buttons were polished brass. To my surprise, we were going up, not heading down to the dungeons as I’d imagined. The top button was labelled
Chambre de Projecteur
: the searchlight room. I thought about the great beam that swept the city at night, searching for non-revolutionary thoughts. Jean-Michel pressed the penultimate button:
Chambre des Étoiles
.

“You must understand, Anna,” said Jean-Michel. “Revolution is the easy part: maintaining the ideal is much harder. The aristocracy constantly seek to resume power.”

“Anna isn’t part of the aristocracy,” said Francis.

“Her father was rich. He was part of the cartel that sought to regain power in Dream London.”

How did he know all this?

“He was a spy with the code name
Alphonse
.”

“That meant nothing. It was just a silly game of his!”

“He was a spy. All those people who used to meet in your house, planning how they would regain power…”

I thought of Captain Wedderburn, of Mister Monagan the orange frog man, of Shaqeel, my father’s supposed boyfriend. All those people who had met in our house and discussed the downfall of Dream London. Had one of them been spying for the French?

The lift doors opened and we entered the
Chambre des Étoiles
.

We were nearly at the top of the
Grande Tour
. You could
feel
the altitude. I could tell by the octagonal shape of the chamber that we were at the peak of the tower, just below the searchlight. The room was panelled in wood: dark wood decorated with golden wood, marquetry patterns forming stars on the walls and the sloping ceiling. A step led down from the wooden floor to a shallow octagonal well with a golden eight-pointed star stretched across it.

“
Formidable, non
?” said Jean-Michel. “Very few people get to see this room.”

“Why?” I asked. “I thought the citizens of Dream Paris were all equal.”

“We are. And this room is the opposite of equality. This is the room appropriated by the leaders who arose after the Revolution. They came here to plan for the prosperity of Dream Paris. They promised a bright new future, they promised that all men and women would remain equal.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I said. “I heard it in Dream London, I heard it in Mundane London, just before I left.”

“We hear it all the time,” said Jean-Michel. “They took this room as was their right, they set up their chairs and tables and their papers and they asked us to leave the room whilst they embarked on their great plans. And then…”

He walked to the edge of the room, beckoned to us to follow. We stood on the low raised step running around the perimeter of the room.

“You might want to hold on to something,” said Jean-Michel. There were discreet wooden handles set into the panelling. I took hold of one just as Jean-Michel rubbed his nose and the floor gave way in two halves, hinged at the edges. I grabbed at the wall, felt a sickening sense of vertigo as I looked down and down, past the bandaged girders of the superstructure to the ground, far, far below. We were so high up I could see to the edge of the city, see the tall dark walls that surrounded it, the flat plain beyond. I felt the gust of the wind against my face.

“Close it!” I yelled. “Close it!”

“You don’t like it?” said Jean-Michel, tilting that bloodhound face. “I understand. It makes you feel like stepping forward, does it not? It certainly makes me feel that way.”

He rubbed his nose again, and this time I recognised it for the misdirection it was. I saw where he pressed the space on the wall that caused the floor to hinge up again.

“Cross it,” said Jean-Michel. “It’s perfectly safe now.”

“No, thank you.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Francis laughed. There was a touch of hysteria there. Was he frightened of heights too? Then again, what sensible person wasn’t?

“You get used to it,” said Jean-Michel, stepping down onto the star floor. He jumped up and down a couple of times, paunch wobbling. Francis and I remained where we were. Jean-Michel ran a toe along the pattern on the floor.

“The odd thing,” he continued, “the odd thing is that twenty years after we dropped the first lot down here, another group of leaders emerged. They had great plans too. They knew exactly the rules people should follow. They appropriated this room as their own, just the same as last time. To the surprise of the Committee for Public Safety, they once more set out their tables and their papers and they asked us to leave whilst they got on with their great work. And just like last time, the floor was opened and they plunged to their deaths.”

“You’d think they’d have learned the lesson of history.”

“You’d think so. But leaders never do, because twenty years after that, the same thing happened again. And then twenty years after that, and twenty years after that. And every twenty years ever since then.”

“Oh.”

Jean-Michel smiled.

“You know how long it is since we dropped the last bunch of leaders down from here, little spy?”

“I think I can guess.”

“Twenty years, almost to the day.” He smiled. “Come, let us descend.”

W
E RETURNED TO
Jean-Michel’s office. He took us to the window.

“A beautiful city,
non
?”

It was. I saw the river Seine running through the middle of the city, splitting in two to pass either side of the
Île de la Cité
. The river was a lightning bolt of turquoise and sky blue; even from that height I could see the ripples reflecting from the surrounding buildings, making them shimmer and ripple in harlequin patterns of turquoise and white. I saw the black and white spots of liopleurodons patrolling the river, looking for a meal of mussellers.

Francis spoke quietly.

“Why are you showing us all this, M Ponge?”

“I want you to understand. Dream London was a place of England. The people there merely accepted another set of rulers. But Dream Paris is a place of France. A place of revolution! This is the place of
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
.”

“I just want to find my mother!”

“And this is the problem. You have a fortune scroll. You
will
find your mother. But what then? Will you simply take her home with you? What if she doesn’t want to go? Have you thought of that?”

“Why wouldn’t she want to go home?” But I had thought of that. She’d written me a letter telling me not to come here.

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t want to go. I don’t know what goes on in Dream Paris.”

Jean-Michel ran his hand through the bristles on his chin. He didn’t look as if he had slept much last night.

“I should just send you to the Bastille right now and have done with it!”

“But you don’t want to, do you, Jean-Michel?” I smiled at him, did my best to appear open and helpful. “Let me go and find my mother! That’s all I want! I’ll leave, straight afterwards, no matter what!”

“And what about your father?”

That brought me up short. Francis was quick to intervene.

“The scroll only mentions her mother. There’s no point getting in her way. She’s going to find her.”

Jean-Michel nodded.

“And what then? What about the Prussians? Count Thomas von Breisach is very interested in you. Why would he wish to find your mother?”

“I don’t know!”

“The Dream Prussians seek to develop the ultimate weapon. Our spies tell us of something called an Integer Bomb…”

“My mother knows nothing about weapons!”

“Perhaps not. But here in Dream Paris we are surrounded by enemies. There is the jewelled city, Dream Prague, that sends out a jewelled path to entice our citizens to itself.”

“I’ll watch out for the jewels…”

“Or Dream Moscow. The booms of its cranes reach out for hundreds miles, a hook is lowered and it captures someone, maybe a child. People rush forward, they take hold of the child, they try and pull it back to safety and then suddenly they find themselves hundreds of feet in the air, too high to let go. They can do nothing but hang on as they are carried away to another city…”

“I’m sorry about that!”

“And then there are the older cities, far, far away, the land stretching as long ago as time. Dream Troy, Dream Luxor, Dream Ur…”

“That’s not my problem!”

“But it’s
my
problem! And then there are those within the city who seek to overthrow the established order! Every man, woman and child who is enslaved, indebted or simply homeless runs to Dream Paris, runs here, only to find that they are presented with nothing more than the opportunity to starve to death. Every army or commercial interest or bank who has been restricted in its own territory sees Dream Paris as a new market to exploit. Everyone wants to come to Dream Paris, no one wants to leave it as it is! And now you walk in here looking for your mother. An aristocrat, a spy, the daughter of a spy. Looking for a vanished woman who everyone seems to have an interest in. What am I supposed to do?”

I didn’t know what to say.

He looked at Francis.

“What would you do?” he asked.

“I’d lock her up,” he said. He turned to me and shrugged. “Sorry, it’s true.”

“And I should do that too,” said Jean-Michel. “But there is the fortune. She’s going to meet her mother anyway.”

He sat down at his desk and shook his head. I felt my heart pounding.

“You’ve seen the
Chambre des Étoiles,”
he said. “You know what happens to aristocrats. To leaders. Remember this.”

Was he letting me go?
I felt Francis’s hand on my arm, felt him pushing me from the room before he could change his mind.

“Don’t push me!” I called.

“Just shut up and go,” hissed Francis.

I did. He was right.

For once.

THE PUBLIC RECORDS OFFICE

W
E WALKED FROM
the shadow of the tower into the glare of the Dream Parisian morning. Looking across the wide apron, I saw that Kaolin hadn’t sought the shelter of the shade like the other Dream Parisians. She stood waiting in direct sunlight. You could feel the heat radiating from her as we approached.

“And what did Jean-Michel have to say?” she asked.

That we shouldn’t place ourselves in your debt,
I thought.

“Just the conditions of us being here in Dream Paris,” said Francis, smoothly. “Shall we go?”

Kaolin had a different car waiting for us, one more befitting her station. This one was long and black, its high blue windows revealing velvet upholstery.

We climbed in. Francis didn’t even bother to remove his pack now, I noticed. He just sat sideways in the seat, the wire playing out through the closed door. Kaolin drove. Down one boulevard, past a wide set of stairs leading up to a church, children playing in the playground set off to the side. Around a corner, down a hill, swerving around a woman riding along on a bike, her child balanced in front of her, safe between her arms…

… and then we were plunged into traffic hell. Cars, lorries, bikes, scooters. The sound of horns, the wail of sonar, a maelstrom of metal, a maze of movement.

“There’s our destination,” said Kaolin, pointing. “The
Place de l’Étoile
.”

“Both hands on the wheel,” muttered Francis.

The
Place de l’Étoile
was the focus of any number of wide boulevards: the target of most of Dream Paris, it seemed. The Public Records Office was marooned on a roundabout in the centre, the Dream Paris traffic constantly circling it like Dream piranha. Kaolin swerved and swooped through the melee, gradually getting closer and closer to the middle. She eventually pulled to a halt on a little parking bay at the edge of the roundabout. The rest of the traffic whizzed by in a hooting roar.