Nowhere Near Milkwood (26 page)

"What are you doing down there, you fool?"

"No, sir, that's an alternative me, from a parallel dimension. He's obeying the orders of an analogous President to arrest you! At least one of your variations has had the same idea first! You've declared yourself illegal from a different direction."

The impostor roared: "Evening all. Enjoying ourselves, are we? Best come down to the prison for a chat."

"What sort of chat, you myriapod mounter?"

He winked. "Just a little one."

"Beware, sir! That's the most dangerous form of chat. His breath is reminiscent of teapot vapours. Plus he is me. I advise total mistrust of all his banter. Use me as a shield."

The President ducked down behind my rump, but I skipped aside. "Not this me! The other me! Him! Hide behind him, so that he can't seize you. Crouch behind my own me and he'll guess where you are as precisely as if he had eyes in the back of my head!"

"If I hide behind him, you'll have eyes in the back of his head and may strike a deal to scrutinise me."

"How can you question my loyalty, sir? I protected your wife's nose from a demented Savoy, picking the former, pickling the latter, when the cabbages spouted against the kings."

"Beatrix is still retroussé about that. But this is stupid prattle, serving no purpose in the greater narrative. No, the point is that I can do as I please. I refuse to be disgraced in front of my Prefect(s) in my own tower and thus am disinclined to hide. Instead I will declare Titian Grundy illegal. Arrest him quickly!"

I flicked out my handcuffs and approached the impostor, but while I was walking toward him, I somehow managed to secure my own wrists in the hoops of brass. Because I was now illegal, I had instinctively fulfilled my duties, apprehending the nearest version of myself, which was me. The President stamped a foot as I held up my chained wrists and coaxed a sad guilty rattle from the yellow links.

"Shall I knock myself about a touch, sir?"

"Police brutality is against the spirit of the age, though still in accordance with the wine of the aeon. Set yourself free, Titian. Ah, the key has snapped! Weaving them from chives has disadvantages. By Hopp and Drigg, I declare handcuffs illegal!"

The moment this pronouncement struck his ears, my impostor leapt to snap his own handcuffs around mine. This released me, because mine hoped to make it easier on themselves by offering no resistance. But now there was a paradox in the room, for the handcuffs which had arrested mine had no alibi, and the other Titian Grundy was forced to let the first lot go to secure the second. And then he had to let the second go to secure the first. And so on. Until the President wearied of this display, acrobatic though it was, and suddenly shouted:

"I decree an exclusion zone on confusion!"

The limit was set at one mile, and the impostor was forced to skate out of the building, the way he'd come, to avoid trespassing. I was very happy to see the back of him, because I had always wondered what my nape looked like. Horrid. I won't cut my own hair again. No time to regret my style, for doubts were also growing askew. You can imagine our sorrow as we watched him race into the haze. If we didn't understand the phenomena of copied towers soon, and understand it like logicians, with a cool nod at each strange twist, we would have to join him in exile. The exclusion zone is relevant to every confusion.

(5)

Because I am Titian Grundy's reflection, my good looks are mostly on the wrong side. But it doesn't matter, because they're all ugly anyway. When I went missing from his mirror I didn't expect to be gone for good. Just a holiday is what I had planned, a fortnight at the bottom of a saucepan or possibly a month in a cat's eye. But the President wanted me before I was able to pick. He caught me in transit, passing through a chrome axle under his tower and easing me off with a hatchet. He said nothing to the real me, preferring him to think I had deliberately absconded forever to a realm beyond identity. My owner searched for me in the corner of every myth and so was swallowed by Neptune.

The President riveted my image to a shiny panel and lifted me up to the roof of his home. Seven different towers pulsed in the distance with matching occupants and gilding. I peered at each through a telescope and saw they were watching me, some of them actually shaving by my features. The rival Grundys were unappealing, as I already knew from reflecting my individual model, but I never imagined that a multiplication of Prefects would increase the distaste geometrically, rather than arithmetically. I beheld an octagon of repugnance. I knocked on the surface of my panel to attract the President's attention and he took me down from the telescope and held my flat lips to his fat ear.

"It must be a crease in the cosmic fabric."

He shuffled. "I was told the cosmos was made of starched vacuum and couldn't be crinkled. My tutor lied!"

"The staff at Dictators' School always deceive their pupils. That's why you have had such a brilliant career in politics. Somehow this tower has duplicated itself, or has been duplicated by an outside agency. Laws of common sense have been infringed."

"An outside agency? Amnesty Interstellar?!"

"Eight Presidents are the last thing they'd want. No, it's far more likely to be a haphazard anomaly in the weave of space-time. I wonder if these other towers are past and future echoes of our reality? A temporal mirage of some kind. It is feasible."

"I don't think so. The Titian Grundy on that tower is making rather rude gestures at you in real-time. His tongue is poked at this moment. I suspect a more serious perturbation."

"If they were just echoes, a collision would present no problem. We will merely pass through each other. But if they're as solid and real as this one a tragedy is on the agenda."

"Why do you think I summoned you, Prefect?"

He hadn't actually, but I kept quiet, because his patience had worn so thin it could be used as a noose to hang a virus. I tugged at my chin and fretted. What if there was more than one dimension? What if a number of alternative universes existed side by side? They might have their own histories, similar but not exactly the same, with variations of culture, geography and fruit. They would be unaware of each other's presence in a continuum which extended sideways through the body of creation. Yes, the scenario was likely. A mandala of potentials. They should be detached by lateral space-time but at this point they had overlapped. I communicated this numbing hypothesis in a whisper.

The President was very unhappy. "You mean to say those other towers are as valid as mine? That they have equal status in objective life? And does this also apply to my variants?"

"I'm afraid so, sir. None of you can really be considered the model for the others. There is no archetype as such. You evolved independently in eight parallel, but not identical, realities. These rival rulers have prolapsed into the fulcrum around which they revolved. Do not treat them as impostors, or you curse yourself!"

"So humane evasive action must be taken..."

"I can think of nothing, sir. Nets might be cast over them, but few fishermen are willing to work for you these days, not since you declared boredom and escaping the wife illegal. Somehow we must divert the towers around each other so that they miss."

"Dig curved trenches to guide the wheels? My towers would then pass harmlessly in a kind of giant waltz."

"There might be trouble where the trenches met. Remember that these structures are converging from eight different directions. Also it would take too long to excavate that amount of soil. No, we need to propel the towers into the air over each other."

The President steamed up my surface with his desperate breath. Then he inhaled sharply, almost sucking me through the glass, an idea burning one eye like naphthol on a jellyfish.

"Atomic trampolines! We'll set them up in front of the other towers and bounce them into an exchange of position. Then they will all trundle their own way, on divergent courses."

"That will also be quite amusing to watch."

"I'll order every gymnasium to hand over their fast-breeder springs while you beat your guard, Percy Flamethrower, about the kidneys with an iron rod to produce the heavy water."

"What if the Presidents in the other towers also decide to lay down atomic trampolines? Could get nasty."

"With so many minor details at variance in the parallel dimensions, it's unlikely more than one reality has invented such equipment. No need to panic, Titian. Let's get to work."

"Wait! I've just remembered that we're one of the realities without atomic trampolines! Cancel the plan!"

"Blister it, you're right! We don't even have radioactivity in this universe. Better think of something else! What if we stand large mirrors in front of every other tower? That should bring forward the date of the collision to a time when we aren't there. Then we will just proceed over the ruins like a capricious obelisk."

"Reflections have fled their mirrors in our world, remember? Titian is searching for me at this instant."

The President sighed. "I wish I was a puppet!"

(6)

In a military balloon bristling with steel spikes, the sole passenger of an old sugar on his last adventure. That's where I was. I never expected the President to reach me out there, particularly as he'd terminated our friendship numerous months previously. But he knows which side his uglis are juiced and is capable of suspending all grudges for profit. And he's capable of suspending a whole wardrobe of jackets from his nose. But I'm bragging for him now and that's his job. Anyway, I had become a rover of the sky, a mandolinist and romantic, with teeth so rotten the plaque had decayed, leaving them shiny and dazed. The wonders I had seen! Amana and Cus, Hogsbrud and Yam-Yam, Nouth and Niggle, Paraparapara and Djiwondro, rubber garters up a damsel's skirt!

Not that I'm in the habit of admiring such items of lingerie when I try to peer up skirts, but this is the modern age and boundaries keep on sliding. Can't be halted or reversed. Fly with the times, is what I say, at least now — when I was Prefect of Police I'd rather say arrest them! Clobber those upstart times! Lock them in a clock! That is because I was basically unhappy, a fretful cog in the diseased machine of society. The story of my life was a novel whose missing chapters included empathy and kindness and tolerance. Quite a blank tale really. Won't say I've caught up with my humanity, or made up for lost time, by voyaging this world in baskets, but some of the frustration has flaked away. O! the hot zephyrs of Khyor! Plus its perfumed cheese!

Just let me roll this smoke, finest Qtiztowf resin, don't you know, and I will proceed with my yarn. That's better. Light it from the engine above my head. The old sugar doesn't mind my drug habits, partly because his nostrils deserted in the trenches of the second Garlic Offensive and he can't smell the pungent dream, so he doesn't know what I'm doing. Not that he's an intolerant sort anyway. The nicest military man I've met in a long while. The Top Zincs in the offices are the unimaginative idiots, not the soldiers in (or above) the field. Consider the zoetrope reels of the Liliaceous Wars. They're all puffing parsley, grooving to Psychopomp Rock, mostly Jammy Cockrix and Joe Henner. No need to worry. Mauve haze, whole in my shoe, voodoo chilblain.

Guess I'm rambling, mind as well as body. Listen up then: it was in the orchards of Lubbalouana that the President came back into my life. I had almost forgotten him, but I still recalled his parting insult before I left the Capital. So I could visualise the words but not his nose. The strings on my mandolin were sighing softly. My socks were maturing, hole and rind, perfect for grating. Everything was mellow ochre, as bald coat singer Pegg Donzelcart might say. Not that he ever did. Too busy cooking green kebabs on his 13-string catarrh — traitor! Anyway, those orchards are the main source of the planet's plums and limes, which is heavy news for twigs, and it was impossible not to impale a thousand or more on our spikes as we pushed gently through.

However, once clear of Lubbalouana I realised the way the fruit was aligned on our armoured canopy wasn't random. Reading them from the top, a message was apparent. Each plum represented a dot, each lime a dash (a dash of lime is also good in overproof rum) in Morose Code, the glummest genre of encryption known to telegraphites. It was obvious the trees had been planted in a deliberate sequence to ensure this communication. Only the President has enough free time to bother with something so elaborate and unnecessary. Leaning out of the basket and craning my neck upward to read, I understood he was summoning me back to his tower. That is all he ever writes to me for, even on my birthday. The plums and limes demanded my instant return without a please.

"The blasted arrogance of the man!" I grumbled.