Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (17 page)

‘Got to get him out of the middle,’ panted Prince Charming. ’Got to give him some bait!’

‘Me,’ breathed Marianne. ‘Me?’

‘Me, I’d rather thought,’ he replied. ‘I’ll slide off. You get forward in the saddle here and hang on. When the thing comes after me, if it does, get behind him in the middle out there with the dogs. Got that?’

‘But what about you?’
Marianne
wailed ‘What about you!’

‘I’ll have to run for it,’ he said grimly, sliding off the wall side of the horse, shield at the ready and battle axe in hand.

Horse and Marianne circled counterclockwise. The Duke of Eyes stopped rotating and concentrated on Prince Charming, now huddled under his shield at the arena wall as though in a state of paralysis. The crowd was on its feet cheering, throwing popcorn, and releasing clouds of brightly colored balloons. The Queen was smiling widely, in very good temper, and now nodded magnanimously, signalling her champion to close in for the kill.

‘Twelve to one on the Duke,’ the hawker cried. ‘Get yer bets down. Twelve to one on the Duke.’

Whatever victims the Duke had met in the past, he was not accustomed to meeting armed opponents. He lashed out clumsily with the flame thrower in an attempt to knock the shield to one side. The Prince jumped high, thrust down with the shield to catch the tentacle beneath it, then cut it through with a mighty swing of the axe while the crowd cheered.

The Oueen frowned.

The cheering stopped as though cut off by a knife. The crowd murmured disapprobation. ‘Foul,’ several sycophantic voices called. ‘Foul.’

‘Five to one on the Duke,’ the hawker cried again. ‘Five to one on the Duke.’

The Prince retreated behind his shield once more and circled. The Duke’s remaining weapons could not be used at a distance. The mighty treads began to revolve, shrieking as they did so. That same flowering rust that had bloomed on everything metal in the city now bloomed on the gears that moved the great treads. Swiveling and lurching, the Duke scrabbled toward the Prince crabwise, each movement accompanied by an ear-shattering shriek of corroding metal.

Behind the Duke, the horse and Marianne moved on tiptoe toward the center of the arena, dogs at either side.

Prince Charming stuck his head up from behind the shield to stick out his tongue at the Duke. ‘The Queen is a coprophagist,’ he cried in a stentorian voice. ‘She’s got steatopygia and her eyes are crossed!’

The Queen scowled. The crowd sat down, huddling in their thousands, making no sound.

‘Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa,’ cried the Prince. ‘Old metal guts, afraid to fight.’

The Queen snarled and gestured: Forward!

The Duke of Eyes extended all remaining tentacles and lunged, only to find himself skidding wildly to the right because of the rust that had largely immobilized one tread.

From behind the mechanical monster, the Black Dog barked wildly. ‘Now, Prince. Here, Prince, here, Prince, here!’

Prince Charming dropped shield and axe and ran for his life. Behind the Duke of Eyes the horse began to occult, winking in and out of existence, each time longer between reappearances. The momegs, too, began to wink. The crowd rose to its feet, screaming. The Queen made an imperious gesture, and the great machine lifted and turned, ponderously creaking and screaming, even as Prince Charming threw himself across the last few feet to the center of the arena and caught the momentarily visible horse around one rear leg.

Then they were gone.

With a scream of rage, the Queen turned and stormed out of the arena. With a clatter of treads, the Duke of Eyes wobbled through the great, timbered door. Later the people of whatever-city-it-was commented upon the strange lights that moved all night in the high, private wing of the palace.

Slick as a frog’s back, clay-gray, the flats stretched from under the wagon wheels in all directions to the veiled horizon. Water covered most of it, a mere sheen of moisture licking at mud edges, flattening the hollows, leaving only a narrowly wandering track above the waterline to glimmer like light on wet silk, an uncertain highway from somewhere to anywhere. Tracks came spinning endlessly off the wheels and meandered across the flats until they vanished into misty distance, the net result of all peregrinations yielding no particular direction. Four dogs, red and blue, gray and yellow, bent to the traces, following the black lead dog as he tracked the ridge to leave their paw, wheel and hoof prints in the firmly silted sand. It was forever from where they were to where the tracks vanished in mist. An equivalent featureless distance lay on every hand.

At times the drier ground split into two or three branches, making the lead dog whine with frustration until the momeg, Gojam, flicked the whip in one direction or another to indicate the chosen route. Nothing differentiated the choices. There was always as much water on one hand as on the other; there was always an equivalency of mud, a sufficiency of glimmer, shine, vapor, colorlessness, sourceless, shadowless light.

‘A dull world,’ said Gojam to no one in particular, ‘yet one I have always favored.’

These are tidal flats, aren’t they?’ asked Prince Charming.

‘So I have always believed,’ Gojam replied with a polite smile that showed his pointed teeth and crinkled several of his red little eyes.

‘Then the tide ought to—come in, oughtn’t it? At some time?’

‘So I would suppose. Though I have never seen it do so.’

‘You come here often?’

‘When it seems appropriate.’

‘May one ask,’ whinnied the horse from his position at the rear of the wagon, ‘what made it seem appropriate on this occasion?’

‘Well,’ Gojam mused for a moment, his dewlaps quivering and his long, pendant ears swaying to and fro with the power of his concentration. ‘Firstly, it isn’t inimical. I mean, you can all breathe here, and the temperature isn’t unbearable. Secondly, it’s a placid sort of place. Very little happens. At least, very little has happened when I’ve been here in the past. I thought that would give you all time to collect yourselves, as it were…’

‘Very kind of you,’ murmured Marianne, wondering if her tenant,
Marianne
, would interrupt her in mid-speech. ‘I, for one, could stand a little collecting.’

‘And, thirdly,’ the momeg continued, ‘I doubt that half a dozen momegs in the universe know about this place. Which means that though the dark woman, the Queen, Madame Delubovoska, will probably track you here eventually, it isn’t likely to be a place she’ll look for you right away.’

‘Madame Delubovoska,’ mused the Prince. ‘That was the woman who was attempting to kill us, wasn’t it?’

‘I believe so,’ offered Gojam. ‘Switching nexi is a strain, and you may have forgotten. Let me take the liberty of reminding you. You were engaged in battle with a large, mechanical monster. Does that ring a bell? Ah, good. Your momeg friends approached me for a means of escape? Ah, you do recall.’

‘I remember
that
,’ said the Prince. ‘I went there to rescue a Fair Maiden – my own true love,’ he cast Marianne a melting glance, ‘but how I got there I really can’t recollect.’

The lead dog stopped, abruptly, making the other four dogs pile up in the traces with muttered growls. ‘Something,’ the Black Dog said. ‘Out there on the mud.’

They stared in the direction the dog’s muzzle pointed, seeing nothing at first, then a tiny interruption in nothing, and finally, protruding above the water, two miniscule pimples that had attracted the dog’s attention. The pimples blinked and disappeared, only to appear again, slightly to the right of their previous location.

‘Eyes,’ said Marianne. ‘Something with eyes.’

The eyes regarded them balefully from the level of the water’s surface before disappearing again. They might have been something quite small, close up, or something quite large, far away.

‘I had no idea anything lived here,’ Gojam remarked, scratching at a left ear with one pair of arms while twitching the reins with another. ‘Of course, I haven’t come here that frequently.’

‘About the tide,’ said the Prince, moodily attempting to pull two scraps of trouser together to cover an expanse of muscular thigh. ‘Reason would indicate it must come in at some time or other.’

‘I’ve always thought reason sadly overrated,’ remarked Gojam. ‘There are momegs who pay a lot of attention to it, just as there are some who disbelieve in it entirely. I tend to the middle view. Use it when it’s helpful and ignore it when it isn’t.’

‘I merely meant, it would be unpleasant for us if the tide came in while we were out here.’ The Prince sighed, turned to Marianne, gave her a long, burning look and touched her hand.
Marianne
stroked his in response, her eyes misty. The hand twitched and drew away as Marianne looked down and saw what it was doing.

‘You say “out here” as though there were some “in there” which might be selected instead,’ Gojam commented, uncrossing his third and fourth legs and stretching them over the dashboard of the wagon. ‘So far as I am aware, “out here” is all there is.’

‘Wrong,’ said the horse. ‘It may be all you’ve seen, magnificent sir. All you have become aware of in your peregrinations. All you have intuited or assumed or inferred from the lack of structure around us. Not all, however, that there is. I suggest you gaze toward the horizon, slightly to the left of our present line of travel.’

‘I see it,’ said the Red Dog after a time. ‘A tower.’

‘Towers,’ corrected Blue Dog. ‘Misty, but still quite real.’

‘I wouldn’t have said real,’ murmured Gojam. ‘Evident, perhaps. Or perceivable. Not necessarily real.’

‘A nice philosophical point,’ commented the Prince, perking up a little. ‘Could we direct our travel in the direction of those possibly spiritual and/or ephemeral structures?’

Gojam sighed, flicked the whip, and directed Black Dog slightly to the left at the next branch.

‘Eyes,’ said Marianne again, pointing toward the water. This time there were several pairs of lidded hemispheres blinking at them from the fluctuating surface.

‘They seem interested in our progress but not hostile,’ Gojam remarked. ‘In keeping with the placidity I have always found here.’

‘Wherever here is,’ neighed the horse rudely, mostly to himself.

‘How did you and the—the other momegs become acquainted?’ Marianne asked hastily, giving the horse’s nose an admonitory tap of her fingers.

‘Become acquainted?’ Gojam stared at her with one set of eyes, rapidly blinking the other to convey confusion. ‘I am not aware that we are acquainted.’

‘I only thought – you were kind enough to let them exit through your… your locus.’

‘Through a nexus of which my locus was a part, most accurately. It’s impossible to exit through a locus. A locus doesn’t go anywhere. It merely is. Interminably and dully in most cases. Which is not responsive to your inquiry. Well, I would have done as much for any entity. Known or unknown. Recognizable or strange. Dynamic or static. Your friends approached me politely and I responded in kind. What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another?’

‘I see,’ she murmured. ‘What indeed.’

‘Besides,’ he confessed, compressing one set of lips while sneering with another, ‘I do detest Madame Delubovoska. She has a nasty habit of summoning up momegs on the spur of the moment, without any concern for the inconvenience it may cause, and then splatting them back again whenever it suits her. If she returns them at all, which I have reason to doubt in some cases. A very
very
close friend of mine, virtually a contiguite, was used twice by Madame and actually burned both times as a dismissal. No lasting damage, of course. We’re virtually indestructible, but we do have
feelings.’

‘How awful for him,’ murmured Marianne, feeling faintly guilty without being able to remember why. ‘How awful for you. How many – ah, contiguites do you have?’

‘Oh, twelve. Depending upon the packing, don’t you know. They do insist on shifting it about.’

‘Twelve at my locus, too,’ said the Black Dog. ‘Of course, it’s unstressed space in my neighborhood. Things can get packed a lot tighter than that around singularities, I understand.’

‘Indeed,’ said Gojam, playing idly with the whip. ‘So I’ve been told by some momegs who’ve been there. And a lot looser around discontinuities, if it comes to that—which we all fervently hope it never does.’ He shuddered delicately. ’No matter how dull the locus, it’s better than no locus at all.’ He sighed, moodily. ‘Are we getting any closer to the whatevers?’

They were getting considerably closer. What had at first appeared to be towers now proved to be lumpish promontories culminating in tall, cylindrical structures that were either unfinished or in a state of ruinous decay.

‘Eyes,’ said Marianne again. This time there were a hundred pairs or more, moving gently along the surface of the water, observing their progress.

‘A veritable metropolis, gentlemen and lady,’ suggested the horse. ‘An urban center. Who knows what delights and surprises may await us.’

‘Whatever it is, it’s made out of mud,’ remarked the Red Dog. ‘Wet mud.’

‘Wettish,’ corrected Black Dog. ‘If it were really wet, it wouldn’t hold shape.’

‘Not necessarily true,’ admonished Gojam. ‘There you go, naughty, naughty, being reasonable again. You have to remember where we are.’