Nowhere Near Milkwood (25 page)

(3)

I was sitting on my favourite cloud, the young female nimbostratus, when the inverse smoke-signal reached me. I yawned and stretched and squinted at the blankets which rose past my gaze. Unwelcome but tightly woven. Up into outer space they continued, until the blue of each pattern formed a miniature sky in the airless void. They lifted in a particular sequence, easily readable as a command. The President wanted me back on Earth. The smoke which pushed the blankets up was solid and jagged. A refrigerative machine of some kind must have been setting it firm as it coughed from a fire in one of his hotline grates.

Grumbling to myself, for I was enjoying my vacation in the Heavenly Realm, I opened my sack of meteorites and selected a nickel-iron sphere. While my soul cavorted in the aether, my body lay in suspended animation in Dr Celery's sub-zero vanilla crypts. He was due to thaw me out in two weeks and to prevent this occurrence I had been slinging cosmic rocks at his skull, wholly without success. Now I had to arrange the opposite and compel him to reanimate me early. I leaned over the edge of my cloud and aimed for the water-clock which controlled the calender of Police events from the courtyard of the Station.

My first attempt was a catastrophe, striking the eighth side of the nonagonal building, the 'Genetic Disorder' wing, and demolishing it. The surviving prisoners would have to be rescued and levered into full cells elsewhere, just before an expected visit from Amnesty Interstellar! Poor timing, but it couldn't be helped. My second shot was better, landing in the barrel of the water-clock and hurrying on the date by fourteen days. Dr Celery and his stringy beard came out to investigate the noise, noted the reading on the dial and went off to the crypt to melt the vanilla. I sighed and waited to become flesh.

Before I could kiss goodbye to the cloud, a tunnel opened up in the aether and I was sucked toward a brown light — the light is blue in the other direction. I floated down reluctantly, my stomach heaving. Then my senses were jangled and I found myself stuck inside my torso. A terrible disappointment, I must confess, for a soul to be knotted to tendons in a cage of bones. Dr Celery slapped my cheeks, also my face, not because it was strictly necessary but as revenge for my assassination attempts. And I roused fitfully, shivered and called for my uniform. He shook his head at this, his mind still unbrained.

"Wiser for you to rest," he declared.

"The President must not be defied. Fetch my medals and chin. Oil my tickshaw. Dress my lettuce cloak!"

A minute later and I was respectable, at least for a buffoon. But I was still unsteady as I mounted my transport and sprayed the formic acid over the aphids and mites. The tickshaw jerked forward and I curled deep in the wicker seat as gravity drew my thoughts to my heels. The tower of the President loomed sharp, like a nagging finger, and the spokes of its giant wheels glittered in the dusk. The fire and frozen smoke were being dismantled by workmen, having served their purpose. I braked the vehicle with a honey spray and lurched out. The President was on the roof of the edifice and I staggered up to him.

"Thanks for coming, Prefect. Look at this!"

I accepted the heavy telescope. "Another tower! And there's another Titian Grundy staring back at me!"

"Now point the lens a little to the right."

"A third tower, with a third Grundy! What's the meaning of this? Do I have an obsessive club of fans?"

"No, your only fan is the silk one passed down from Charlton Radish for ritualistic purposes. These other towers and its inhabitants are not simulacra. Eight in total, including this one. I first noticed them this morning, mere dots on the horizon. Since then they have trundled closer. It appears we are all converging."

"Oh dear, so an accident seems inevitable."

"My fears exactly. What are we to do? Where have they come from? No odder event has transpired in my remarkable career. I'm fond of my tower and do not wish to see it smashed. Although it is shielded by a field of negatively-charged emotions, I don't think they're sufficient to protect this structure from annihilation."

"We must instantly divert your trajectory."

"Impossible, Titian! My tower is designed to move of its own accord under an Unfathomable Synthetic Will. I rarely know from one hour to the next where it might decide to go. Hidden springs in the walls click into motion and the wheels start moving and my building crosses the landscape to a new location. It is a good way of avoiding assassination, but now I regret the cunning of the scheme."

"Are there no ways of braking it manually?"

"None. I am a prisoner of its whims. The alternative Presidents and Titians on the balconies of the other towers look as worried as we do. I conclude we must perish together."

"Woe! My prepared tomb is not wide enough!"

"By the gods, Titian, I'm scared."

"I don't think the gods exist, sir. At least I saw no evidence of a metaphysical order of beings during my stay in the Heavenly Realm. After you declared them illegal, maybe they willed themselves to nothing? Some felons go to vast lengths to evade Justice. I would like to discuss this situation with Dr Celery or Lola Halogen, even Satsuma Ffroyde, but I am fed up with the way they always mock my cerebral ineptitude. So I won't. I'll unravel this problem myself."

"A promotion if you're successful, Titian!"

"I am already at the summit of my profession, sir. If I am promoted again, I may trip over the top of the career-ladder and plummet down the far side and become a shoe-clerk."

"Just save my dwelling from demolition!"

I bowed deeply, not out of respect, but because I was so weary from acclimatising to the higher stresses of flesh life that I needed to rest my head on the floor. It lay there for long minutes. The President found this a charming gesture and he was mollified a little, a very little, so small a little that he grew angry at the modesty of it and raved against serenity, declaring it illegal. But still I couldn't lift my skull. Then he lashed out with his boot and kicked me straight. Because I am not yet a shoe-clerk I can't say what make of boot. But it doesn't matter. Eight towers were coming together to kick harder than this. And they were shod in silver and stepmother-of-pearl.

(4)

"He's glaring back at me!" I hissed.

"An abominable situation," agreed the President, "but I have to put up with your face from much closer."

"You are my friend and therefore immune."

"Not so. Ugliness does not function in the same way as bacteria. My stomach still heaves at your smile."

I had recently arrived from the moon, and my knees were aching. The President had summoned me while I was collecting blackness from the Dark Side for use as eyeliner for my beekeeper wife. There were no flowers to pick, so beauty products were the only romantic gifts I could offer her. Trying to serenade in low gravity is a fine way of making other husbands furious. Songs tend to spin past the window of choice and into the wrong bedroom. Makeup remains the only secure option. Not that she appreciated my efforts. In fact I hadn't spoken to her since the last Lunar Eclipse, an occasion she used as cover for her escape. I fumbled in the dim rooms of my dwelling but she had vanished.

While I was crouching on the edge of a crater, scooping up the best blackness with a spade, a selenite with a hose attached to its head came up behind me and jumped into the hollow. I sighed and turned and saw how the hose ran off the horizon into the void, the other end originating on the Earth. The President's tower hadn't enjoyed standing on the moon and had returned to the mother planet. He had taken a menagerie of selenites with him, partly because he liked strumming airs on their antennae. This creature was one from his collection and it had a careworn look, bloated from rich oxygen mixtures and callow cheese. It squatted on its heels in the dust, mouths agape, arms folded.

A few hours later, the first trickle spilled from the hose, licking the parched moon soil and swirling in unprecedented eddies. The selenite paddled fitfully, as I waited for the message. The President has a large tap in his bathroom, and optimum pressure, but this crater was very deep and required a lot of filling. I passed the selenite a handkerchief from my pocket and instructed it on how to knot it into a hat. The liquid was now up to its lower shoulders and it seemed unhappy. None of my business how an extraterrestrial entity chooses to waste its leisure! But no, the President had probably forced it to comply on pain of sanity, which is a dreadful fate for a lunatic citizen.

Eventually the sorry creature was wholly immersed and had to detach its head to save itself from drowning. The throat bolts slid out and its skull bobbed to the surface of the new pond, flared nostrils sucking the airless atmosphere in soundless undulations, purely for pleasure, as its lungs were still at the base of the crater. The last drop spluttered out of the hose and I peered closer in anticipation of the official message. It came at last in the shape of a bulge in the hose which worked its way very slowly between worlds, like astral digestion, and finally disgorged itself in the centre of the lake. A sealed bottle containing a letter. I hooked it with my spade and read it.

In old-fashioned zincplate script, the President formally requested the pleasure of my presence in his elongated domicile as soon as rapidly convenient. I turned and bounced back to my lunar cottage, preparing the seat of my Shanks' Pony. The porcelain hybrid was uncomfortable but very efficient, provided the chain didn't break. I aimed it for the peninsula which connected Earth and Luna and flushed it a dozen times. It frothed, grumbled and slushed as the cistern refilled, projecting me in wide arcs across dry seas and jagged peaks. Once I landed hard and cracked the lid but the main functions remained unimpaired. Down the thirty-nine million steps into the hygienic ozone layer!

The continents lay spread before me like a half-eaten banquet, with spilt-ale oceans and bagel atolls. The President's tower had moved to an isolated forest where clowns practised seriousness privately. My Shanks' Pony weaved between trees and I switched off the afterburners. My bowels were grateful for that. Coasting through blackberries, I stained my chin and reputation with juice. I parked my transport outside the President's gate, a childhood touch recalling the era when every latrine was located outdoors, and hoofed it under the portals. He was upstairs with a single spyglass and eight resentments, so I joined him and shook at the phallic creepiness of the additional towers.

I studied one Grundy after another. "Ugh!"

"My sentiments exactly, Prefect. But they are getting closer by the blink. What do you think they want?"

"To go in a different direction, by the look of it. They don't care to meet us any more than we wish to meet them. By the way, don't you try to weed your roof-garden sometimes?"

"It's only a cheesewort, Titian! Ignore it and it'll probably leave you alone. It's a mature perennial."

I sat on one of the houses in his miniature village and eased spiky tendrils from under my toes. "I could accuse the scene of impossibility, but it won't stand up in Court. The other towers are overgrown too. They can't be used as concrete evidence."

"Shall I summon Professors Warp and Woof?"

"The University quacks? No, I'll resolve this on my own. They would only make matters worse. One might suggest burning the towers down while his rival advocated freezing them up, and in tandem no progress would be made at all. Give me a little time."

"You have five grey seconds and one pink!"

"Not enough! Wait, an idea has birthed. Instead of trying to fathom the physics involved in this crisis, we should act first and then obtain the facts during interrogation. For instance, by declaring all the other Presidents illegal, you will sanction me to arrest them. They might have more insight into the event. If not, we can keep them locked up, because ignorance of the law — any law, including those used in science — does not constitute a plausible defence."

"The identity parade will be bewildering."

"I will ensure you don't accidentally pick yourself. And if you do, I'll get you a very good solicitor."

"My legal insurance has run out. It escaped from the stocks a month ago. I hope this anomaly truly is scientific in character, not artistic. Otherwise there'll be no laws to be ignorant of, and we will have to let the other Presidents walk free. But I trust you, Titian, even though you once attempted to fondle my cheese."

"Fondue, not fondle, sir! A charity jape. No, I can't lie to you! I admit the deed. It had auburn rind."

He raised an imperious thumb and pointed. "Go thither and apprehend the extra Presidents, to the tune of seven, for I now declare refraction of identities to be bent behaviour."

The tune in question he played on an ugli-fruit balalaika. I prefer the melody of pi myself, or any irrational number other than the root of 2, which is for squares. Seven is a ditty for hepcats and much too young for officials. But the President is a mean ugli plucker, as few citizens will deny, and he ushered me vibrantly on my way, down the steps, though not vibrantly enough, for he followed me closely, humming the words with the panache of a sour belch locked in a radiator. But a surprise greeted us when we attained the main hall at ground level. Another Titian Grundy glided through the door on centipede-skates, each tiny leg fitted with a castor, shaking his truncheon at us.