The Chamber in the Sky (23 page)

Word had gone out across the Empire of the Innards that anyone who wanted to abandon the Great Body should make his or her way toward Three-Gut. Pioneer families in distant valves had given up their cabins and set out; people whose homes had been crushed in the collapse of New Norumbega decided they had nothing to lose. A few mannequins had said they would stay behind to help the breathers build again, if the violent spasms of the Great Body ever let up. Most of the mannequins, though, were traveling to a new home. They had earned it. They had received official permission for their own state before the fight with the Thusser had begun. The army had shuttled them through the heaving guts to the gateway between worlds.

In an unbuilt city in the middle of the endless sputum sea of Three-Gut, barely visible in the howling murk, Kalgrash stood on top of a flight of stairs. Beside him shimmered the portal to Earth. In two weeks, a few thousand mannequins and a few hundred breathers had passed through to find a new life in old haunts.

Now the last load of passengers was there. They wobbled down the gangplanks from their sleds. Their drivers cut loose the thombulants. They let them roam.
Thombulants would do better than mannequins or elves if the Body came to full life.

The pilgrims toiled up the steps with globs of splutter smacking on their coats. It was thick as cookie dough. They shielded their glass eyes with hoods.

“These the last?” the troll shouted to Dantzig, the pilot.

Dantzig nodded.

“Step on through!” said the troll over the gale. Blue light from above sparked and flared. His armor shone. “We're done, done, done!” He cackled in joy.

The mechanical pilgrims stepped through the portal. Kalgrash and Dantzig followed.

Suddenly, everything was silent. There was no storm. There was no giant Body heaving. It was dark and quiet and warm.

They were in a little tomb, and General Malark sat at a card table, checking their names off a list. They were beneath the mountains of Vermont.

“That it?” said the troll.

Malark nodded fiercely. “That's it,” he said.

Kalgrash sighed. He was back on Earth.

“Okay,” said Malark. “Let's close the gate.”

Wizards moved to either side of the portal. They touched runes. They spoke things. It did not take long. Kalgrash watched, while around him, the pilgrims muttered in the catacombs.

With a flutter of air, the gate between the worlds was closed forever.

“So there,” whispered Kalgrash.

Back in Three-Gut, the portal to Earth was suddenly not a space, but a slab. It stood on the top of a staircase to nowhere. The storm raged around it. No one would ever pass through it again.

In the distance, thombulants, pudgy and free, romped in muck.

“A
tempest touches down in a small Vermont town” was how the news told the story, and they spoke of cyclones and force-four tornadoes. Men in ties argued about how such destruction could fall out of clear skies. The wind was to blame, and had torn apart two hundred houses. Worse, in the weeks that followed, the government announced that the twister had burst tanks at a local chemical plant, releasing some kind of gas, some neurotoxin that caused hallucinations and loss of memory in victims throughout the area.

There was, in reality, no chemical plant, no neurotoxin, no invisible gas — but there was also no explanation for all the people who struggled out of the wreckage, half starved, with vague memories of demons dancing in the suburb streets. There was no reason that several hundred people should have no memory of weeks just passed, or should lie in a stupor until awoken. It was better to have an excuse. Someone typed one and printed out copies.

So the news talked about chemicals blown through the air, and there were shots of ruined houses. There were clips of Red Cross volunteers in sagging mesh vests reaching out their hands to pull people out of the debris. There were pictures of wide streets flanked on both sides by ruined mounds of planking, and a family in the middle of the street, clutching one another against the ruddy sky. There was a helicopter shot of kids who were found dazed at an intersection, riding their bikes in a circle counterclockwise, as if aping the rotation of the twister.

The human victims of the Thusser invasion spent weeks in the hospital. They were told of poisonous gas, but among themselves, they whispered about a curse. They knew something evil had stalked their streets. Many of them never went back to the ruins of Rumbling Elk Haven to claim the things that had not been destroyed.

No word ever came from the Great Body as to whether the Empire of the Innards survived the new convulsions or not. Perhaps the body settled down, and the Imperial Court still dances in lines as it once did. Perhaps, as seems more likely, the Great Body revived and even moved, shaking apart a whole civilization in moments, drowning them in its own weird fluids. Perhaps, in the midst of cataclysm and devastation, they regretted their decision to stay. Regardless, they made their choice, and they have never been heard from again.

The Norumbegan breathers who'd returned to Earth quickly disappeared. Some went to live in remote caverns of the old underground kingdom. Most of them set off to Europe to find their ancient cousins and to see the hidden
cities that their ancestors had left more than two thousand years before.

The mannequins inherited the City of Gargoyles. They told themselves that they were keeping it ready for the return of their old masters — but they knew that their masters would never return. They had been promised their freedom if they beat the Thusser, and now, in the ancient city where they had been built to serve generations before, they declared a Republic of Automatons, a commonwealth of mannequins. The subterranean city came to life again. They even lit the sun.

One day a couple of months after the Rules Keepers swept the Game board clean, Brian and Gregory and Kalgrash sat on the side of Mount Norumbega with Wee Sniggleping and Gregory's cousin Prudence, who'd awakened from her Thusser slumber with the rest. It was getting cold already. The fall had come. The humans wore coats. Tars the heraldic bacterium was curled around Brian like a couple of belts.

Wee Sniggleping ate an apple. He chewed while he talked. He explained that he was training the mannequins to remove their loyalty to the old Norumbegans. It had to be done carefully, and with a very small screwdriver. “Important, though, that they do it before they write the constitution for their Republic. Otherwise the idiots will be calling it a Protectorate and waiting for the Empress to come back in glory and sit on their shoulders.”

Brian asked him, “What'll you do, now that the Game is over?”

“Backgammon. I've been teaching the troll. Once he stopped eating the pieces, he was a quick study.”

Kalgrash lifted up his mighty arm and watched himself flex his mailed hand. “I've been thinking, now that we have some free time, I should go back to having the smaller body. And naked. Whadaya think? I don't think there's going to be as much smiting. And I like to eat in the buff. Helps digestion.”

“Interesting,” said Prudence, leaning back on her elbows.

Gregory asked, “What about you, Prudence?”

“I wear clothes at mealtimes.”

“No. What are you going to do?”

She made a noise. “I wonder if I can move back into my house. It's been condemned because of the ‘chemical plant explosion.'” She rolled her eyes.

Brian looked down over the mess below them: the empty fields of mud, the torn-up houses, the toppled trees. He said, “Why didn't the Rules Keepers put everything back the way it was before the Thusser broke the Rules? I wish they could put the forest back. It was huge. It was so old. I can't believe it was all pulled up.”

“Gone, gone, gone,” said Kalgrash sadly.

They looked down at what remained of the fir forest on the slopes, the maples beginning to turn beside old stone walls. The few wrecked oaks between the cellar holes of suburbs.

Staring down at all of it, Snig hefted his apple and hurled it. He said, “That's right, Mr. Thatz. What's gone is gone. But in twenty years, there'll be a little forest there
again. You'll be here. You'll see it. And when you're sixty, when you're seventy, you'll climb the mountain, and the trees down there will be tall. Tall enough to get lost in. Tall enough for paths and clearings. You'll look at the forest, and you'll remember right now, us sitting here, me talking. And a hundred and fifty years from now, the woods will be old, and they'll look like they did the day you first came here. Just like when you and Gregory drove up a year ago in that carriage. You'll be dead by then, of course. You'll be gone. But the forest will look like it did when you were just a boy. And under the mountain, they'll still be telling stories about you. The machines will tell the tale of you and Gregory and Prudence and the Game. Kalgrash and I will still be alive, I suppose. We'll tell the story.”

Brian said suddenly, “I want to live here. I want to live near you all.” He looked desperately at them. He knew that's what he would do. Somehow, as soon as possible.

He realized as he said this that he was saying it to Prudence and Kalgrash and Wee Snig — that he hadn't looked at Gregory. He hadn't thought about Gregory and where he might end up. Guiltily, he turned to his friend.

Gregory hadn't noticed. The boy was looking out over the mountains, thinking thoughts he didn't say.

Brian would be back as often as possible. He wanted to see the Mannequin Republic thrive. He wanted to ice skate with Kalgrash in the winter. He wanted to be able to keep Tars the heraldic bacterium as a pet without hiding the poor germ in a duffel bag or on the top shelf of his closet. It didn't matter what happened: He would be here.

There they sat on Mount Norumbega. It was a republic of brave and hopeful mannequins. Four hundred years before that, it had been an empire, old and lazy. A thousand years earlier, by the reckoning of humans, it had been a young kingdom. Before that, it had just been a mountain where hunters came to find wolves. Fir and spruce grew on the heights. There were silver swamps on its belly, surrounded by birch. Porcupines found hollows in the moss. Glaciers had scraped across it in unimaginable aeons of frost. Once it had been under a sea.

Now, for a little time one day, these six sat upon its slopes. They ate apples.

The wind blew from the south.

M. T. Anderson is the author of
The Game of Sunken Places
; the National Book Award-winning and Printz Honor Book
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party
; the Printz Honor Book
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves
;
Feed
;
Thirsty
; and the Jasper Dash series. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which will also perish if New Norumbega isn't saved in the course of this book.