Nowhere Near Milkwood (24 page)

"And that fact remains true," I grumbled.

"Certainly. But droplets of the chronoflow had leaked into the workings of your watch. When you were hurled into normal time, the watch stopped and trapped the liquid between the teeth of the cogs. With a little shaking I was able to dislodge them. There should be just enough to send me back to a point in time before Ugolino built this castle and trapped me here. I intend to kill him first."

He gestured with his pistol and grinned.

"What do you want with me?" I stammered.

"Extra weight, to keep the pyramid in the middle of the chronoflow. Also as a decoy to distract Ugolino. He is a powerful sorcerer. While he is busy turning you into a curtain rail, I will have ample opportunity to finish him."

While he spoke, I was aware of a deficiency in my foothold. The hatstand which had supported my heel was no longer there! Indeed pieces of the junk ziggurat were vanishing at astonishing speed. Humberto had not noticed; nor did I feel it strictly necessary to inform him of the phenomenon. He would find out for himself in due course. Gradually, I realised that the component pieces of our machine were making themselves absent in the reverse order in which they had been assembled. Thus the pyramid was gnawed away from the top down — coins, armour, vases, all blinked out of existence. Then the tripod, telescope, dagger and globe.

Finally we were left with a single spoon. As we fought with each other for the best grip, this too shimmered away. We landed with a bump back in the chamber, and it was full again. All the ornaments had returned to their original places!

"Of course!" I cried, snapping my sagacious fingers. "No time machine can go back to a point
before
it was built! As we travelled back through the past week, our work undid itself, because the ornaments existed at different locations at those instants! It is only possible to travel far back on a time machine which already exists!"

Humberto shrugged. "I will fetch a bottle of Oloroso from the cellar and we shall toast our failure."

When he was gone, I pondered the futility of all our toil. I also worried about the integrity of the green pyramid. Would it not also come apart as it raced to the source of the chronoflow? But no, it was a quark enlarged, and as such was indivisible. I was so engrossed in my metaphysical speculations that the bells announcing Humberto's return along the passage startled me. I jumped and fell on the boards, my nose spearing a knothole. I stood quickly, not wishing to belittle myself in front of my host. He bared his teeth on seeing me.

My ears heard,
"Bishy, bashy, jibber, jabber!"
but I understood these words to mean, "Let us drink away our sorrows!"

He took my arm and led me to the hearth. We sat and sipped.

"We can always try again," I said. "Build another. Not to travel back into the past but to send me into the future. I am the Prefect of Police and can requisition a hot-air balloon. I will be able to return with it here and you will be able to escape this castle in a more conventional manner."

He was delighted. "Excellent. We shall resume work tomorrow!"

As good as his word, Humberto helped me to recreate the junk pyramid. Because they had not yet been sprinkled in orthogonal time, the drops of the chronoflow were still trapped in my watch. At the end of the week, I mounted the device and bade my antique friend farewell. "Bat and haddock away!"

Were there enough drops to carry me upward to my own time? Assuredly, for once on the forward currents of time, which run parallel to the backward ones, the component pieces might drink their fill. And though they might turn rusty and worm-eaten, perhaps even crumble to dust under the weight of dying centuries, they would not traitorously fly back to shelves and mantelpiece without so much as a by-your-leave! And so I was confident enough as I hurtled forward, using my watch as a guide as to where to get off. At the appropriate hour of the correct century, I deliberately steered for the shallows and grounded myself in my own office.

I called for my assistant, Satsuma Ffroyde. He arrived with his customary glower and citric attitude. But as my deputy, he was bound to follow my orders.

"Contact my wife!" I roared, "and ask her to come to the station with her largest hive."

I sat back and waited for the object in question to arrive. My wife, who by my orders is allowed no further than the lobby, came quickly; her perfume wafted down the corridors, preceding the hive, which was carried at arm's length by a disgruntled Satsuma — he will never make a mandarin in
this
Force.

"Now, Satsuma," I clipped. "There is a terrible felon existing in the past who refuses to speak a law-abiding language. At first I thought his vowels were reforming; now I realise it was a trick, a case of my ears acclimatising. I want you to mount this time machine and arrest him. You'll know at which date to disembark, or rather the date will disembark you. When this pyramid of junk falls to nothing and leaves you stranded in a room, consider that your destination. The fellow who enters with a bottle of Oloroso is your target!"

Satsuma sulked. "What if he's armed?"

"Throw this hive at him. The bees within are suitably vicious and will despise the drooping flower on his cap. Freeze the felon with this canister of sub-zero vanilla and find a way of moving him to a location which will eventually become the site of our underground dungeons. Freeze yourself in the same place. The moment you depart, I'll go down and check the dungeons. I'll throw you both out and release you both — you because you are innocent, and he because he will have served his sentence."

Satsuma grumbled and moaned, but his options were severely hampered. He mounted the pyramid and I sprinkled the contents of the watch — which I had refilled on route to the present — over the junk, neglecting to give him the timepiece, to prevent him returning prematurely, or indeed returning at all, save orthogonally, sealed in ice.

He shimmered away and I skipped out of my office, down the spiral stairs to the dungeons. I checked each one in turn, but Humberto and Satsuma were not there. Plenty of other dastards and desperadoes — elks, cabbages, moondwellers, wasps, glider pilots, clockwork prawns — but no pair of nonsense babblers. Would I have to petition the President for a repeal of the Diphthong & Grammar Act?

I was fearful that I might, and mentally prepared myself for the harrowing voyage to his insulated tower in the crater of the smoking volcano on the outskirts of the city, but then as I returned along Death Row and up Poorly Passage, I noted something on the stone floor of the first cell, which I had assumed was empty. Scowling in the dim light of the moondwellers' luminous antennae, I unlocked the gate and went in. Peculiar sort of captive! I didn't remember arresting this suspect. A plate of cakes.

Stooping, I crammed one into my mouth. Sweetened...

I frowned.

(1)

The President is a man with perfect timing, but all of it is bad. On the last occasion he summoned me, I was in the middle of tricky negotiations with an official from Amnesty Interstellar. A miserable lot, those Civil Rights people, raving about Justice and Equality, as if I don't take the issues as seriously as they do! In fact, I devote most of my working day to keeping the former as far away from the latter as possible. It's very difficult, even with a pulley, a bronze rope and a crowbar cast from the titanium shin of the Supreme Roger. Once I stretched both ideals so much that something snapped, probably my conscience. I awarded myself a medal and strutted up and down my shadow.

For some reason, this official had the notion I was mistreating the prisoners in my charge. Our dungeons were full of natural disasters, not just winds but mudslides and avalanches and earthquakes, and we had been forced to stuff them a dozen to a cell, because the asteroid impacts had ruined one whole wing of the prison, and would have continued to destroy the world had we not granted each crater a job in the kitchen as a dish, a position from which a meteoric rise to sink looked feasible. Certainly the narrow space meant that some of the weaker catastrophes were bullied by the larger. Glenda the Monsoon, for instance, kept putting down Myron the Sandstorm, mushing his aridity.

But this was hardly to be avoided in any system of confinement. The forest fires and tidal waves were bound to cluster together in clans and pick on each other, however gently or roughly we dealt with them. So the fault was not ours. It was the intractability of the universe and I felt sour at taking the blame for its behaviour. While I boiled, my tormentor took shrill notes on a foolscap parrot, hurling the occasional glower at me and clucking his liberal tongue.

"Mister Grundy, here is a breach of regulations!" he finally cried, as he peered into the tiniest cell.

I scratched my chin. "Ah, the tornadoes."

"They are underage, perhaps only dust-devils. I will have to report you for minor climatic harassment."

"A horrible slander," I replied, "for I run a tolerant regime. None of my men have ever broken a wind."

"You must understand more, condemn less!"

"The principles of rehabilitation are familiar to me, I assure you. This morning I argued for the early release of Myron. I concluded he had already paid his dunes to society."

"Locking up a desert seems such a waste!"

"Sometimes it's necessary. They get agitated, fluffed, stardrunk. I blame it all on bad precipitation."

"You are a callous idiot, Mister Grundy!"

While the official scolded me, a dozen workmen entered the corridor and began attaching pulleys to the ceiling. I grimaced, for I recognised them as the same labourers who had constructed a suspension bridge above the President's bath. Had they come to help me pull Justice and Equality even further apart? No, for these wheels were relatively fragile, unable to bear the mass of a Scruple-Fission Reaction. They sparkled in the icy light of the recidivist Aurora Borealis thrown in with the tornadoes. In a minute the workmen had finished, threading platinum string through the pulleys, leaving without even a request for a mug of sugary wolf-whistle tea or a hobnailed nob for dunking.

Instantly the wheels began turning and I forgot the presence of the official as I watched the strings move. He was blabbering and preaching, but his voice faded into a hum as another sound entered the prison. Slow and stiff, it grew louder, until the metal wall and floor were vibrating and chiming in harmony. Then I saw it coming down the corridor: a puppet with iron shoes, done in the exact image of the President, dangling from the strings on the regularly spaced wheels! It jerked closer and stopped only when it stood face to face with me. For a moment it swung awkwardly on its supports, head and arms and feet swivelling in random directions. Then it offered me its wooden hand.

I took it and the marionette turned and led me along the passage to the outside. But the Amnesty Interstellar official wasn't keen to see me escape his attentions, so he clutched the hem of my jacket and the three of us stumbled into the sunshine. I was astounded to witness a series of posts newly hammered into the soil, extending to the horizon and beyond. Each one held a pulley and was a predetermined course for my guide. Such a peculiar method for the President to communicate his desire! He mostly relied on carrier-partridge or gibbon-sleigh. When we reached the slopes of the Carbuncle Hills, the puppet steered us with precision through the hazardous verruca fields. No sweat.

And all this while, the official was distending my jacket, shouting in my ear or flipping the feathers of his parrot, ranting on about Truth and Mercy and other exotic notions.

"Mister Grundy! You really must answer me!"

We were within sighing distance of the President's tower and I felt my burden had grown excessive. I tried to knock his hand off with my own but he was tenacious. The puppet dragged us through the open door in the building and deposited us before the man himself, who was standing below the last pulley, working the cords.

"Titian! Why are you so late?"

I grovelled, but with a sneer. "Your servant was tardy." I gestured at the marionette and the official.

"Freeloading passenger, eh? What audacity!"

I nodded. "He increased the net mass and hampered my righteousness. He works for Amnesty Interstellar."

The President shrugged. "In that case I'll make him illegal. Arrest this miscreant, Titian! Hurry now!"

The official protested vigorously as I twisted his arms and secured them with my belt. There was nowhere in the tower to lock him up, so the President gave me his permission to take the puppet apart and reassemble it around the body of the criminal. I placed the key of a dungeon in the wooden fingers and we sent it back to the prison. The marionette rotated on a polished heel with a nasty leer and stalked off, footprints exactly fitting those of its first journey. The official inside begged to be let out and pounded the chest of his captor. When it reached its destination it would open a cell, incarcerate itself, lock the door and wait for him to starve. But not swallow the key.

The President pouted. "Come upstairs with me."

(2)

My powered unicycle was reaching its maximum speed on the marble streets under the Pallid Colonnades when a line of Talking Plaques began jumping from the parapets into my path. I swerved to avoid the bodies and nearly tumbled into oblivion myself, but I didn't reduce my speed. I was trying to impress Beatrix Trifle, the President's wife, who witnessed my antics from her sofa at the top of her Ironic Column. This was the right way to woo her, which is why her husband never succeeded in showing her his own pillar. Her lips were a century of yards above my own, and her mouth was even more inaccessible. I can't say I adored her, or even liked her, but she knew how to prevent a puncture.

Being one of my best ideas, the Talking Plaques were a truly horrid feature of the landscape. They cropped up almost everywhere, chanting in careful disharmony, reciting the details of any crime that had ever been committed on that spot. They drowned out the sound of my engine, hurting my sense more than a bee trained as a bailiff. Each time I trundled past on my circuit of passion, I heard the same dismal lists: "Dolores Spleen ruptured a cashew here on 67th Octember 3624," or "Martin Mocker raped a rope on 3rd April 1951," or "Andy Fairclough hid an owl in a mandolin on 12th January 2001." It was more than I could bear, so I daringly plugged my ears with honey while in motion.

But that bear (which was more than I could) must have licked it out quickly, for the voices were still audible and awful. Even Beatrix, high in the glowering sky, wrinkled up her face, which actually made her look pretty, in the same way that a small accident can improve a teapot which lacks a spout. My underwear experienced a desire to be torn from my rump and projected to her. It was risky to oblige but underleg adventures are my buttock and butter, so I sat sidesaddle and worked them down. As more Talking Plaques cascaded, my unicycle left its own remarkable skidmarks. I loaded the garment into my catapult, aimed and struck my target with a Parthian shot — not a misspelling.

Her nose hooked the item and my bowels fluttered with joy. Then she blew one nostril in my embroidered initials and it was all I could do to keep my balance. But now the Talking Plaques were leaking red liquid all over the surface of the road, spoiling the pallid glimmer and bathing my wheel like a tired mushroom. I changed gear, slowed down and finally the real reason for the mass jumping became clear. They were being shot by a sniper from afar! Somebody was deliberately inserting bullets into their spines, causing them to fall forward over the edge of the walkways. Such precision had an executive smell about it. I suspended my affections for Beatrix and considered the victims.

Now I understood they were being killed in a particular order. When a Talking Plaque reached a certain letter in his statement, a shot would ring out and he would plummet before me with the solitary sound still on his tongue. The force of my passing would pluck it out and my ears would drink it like mulled whine. The result was a bloody message for me, made out of the last sighs of thirty souls. Because the text had already been repeated a dozen times, the death toll was a number even higher than the circumference of my lesser ego expressed in cubits. My innate arrogance, you see, has a satellite — a moon which waxes at home with my hive, but wanes in the presence of free elks.

Anyway, I decided to concentrate on the content of the message when it was broadcast again. As feared, it was from the President. The fellow who had to intone the crime of Dolores Spleen only managed to get as far as "cashew" before he was shot, and this letter "c" formed the beginning of the bulletin. So too, the accuser of Martin Mocker reached "rope" and expired on the "o", whereas the one with Andy Fairclough's reputation to dilute gave up his own life on the "m" of "mandolin." And so on, until I had decrypted the following demand:

"Come to my tower immediately, Titian!"

I trembled and waved farewell to Beatrix, who was inserting my gift into a tube embedded in her column. Peculiar place to store underwear! I thought no more of it and steered for the President's edifice, which was located in a field between a sock and a soft place. The previous week he had swallowed eight cushions for a bet and was rushed to hospital, where his condition was described as comfortable. Now he was back and unstable and juggling his heart out, like many a lovable tyrant. Blast! Just as I was getting somewhere special and vertical with his wife! I sped through a door of his tower and dismounted.

"Hello! Any lunatic autocrats at home?"

But he wasn't sitting on his throne and his chamber was in complete chaos, with breakfast-pianolas snapping, cracking and popping, and not a few inverted bowls of fruit defending the carpet like bosom armour. Then a gruff voice hailed me from above:

"Hasten upstairs, my trusty Prefect..."

I bounded up the steps. "Here, sir! Good shooting, by the way! What can I do for you? Strum your chin?"

"No time for that, my friend, more's the pity! Take a look at this, would you? What do you make of it?"

He was standing on the balcony which rings the summit of the tower, holding a telescope to his eye, using his nose as a support in lieu of a tripod. A high-powered rifle stood propped against a table on which were spread charts and diagrams. These revealed the location of every Talking Plaque in the land and the texts they had to recite. An accurate sundial also stood on the surface. It was clear he had been timing the sentences of the chattering men in order to murder them at the correct letters for his summons. In the distance, the Pallid Colonnades bleached the horizon like filthy cream, and I could just make out Beatrix with my nude eye. I oozed a bead of sweat from my brow.

The President whipped out a handkerchief from his pocket. "Not over there, clever chum! Peer this way!"

I accepted this cloth and was about to mop myself when I recognised my initials and the inconstant mucus. The handkerchief was my underwear! So the President knew about my attachment to his spouse! How grotesquely would he punish me? By declaring my groin illegal? By setting a reformed dandrum on my bugaboo? Forgetting my birthday? But no, I'd misjudged his devotion to duty, his love of work.

He gripped my shoulder. "Yes, I'm aware of your attempted affair. I may not visit Beatrix very often, for aesthetic reasons, but we exchange the evidence of our sins via pneumatic tube. I do plan to get very angry and have already smashed up the contents of my abode in preparation, but until then I require your talents."

He raised the spyglass to my eye and I allowed him to focus it at a dark glade in tangled Jester Woods.

Blinking thrice, I gasped: "Heavens!"