The Steam-Driven Boy (26 page)

IX

The president of Eurafoot sat in shadow behind the Game table, a masked entity without a name.

‘Sit you down, Mr Monitor,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘You know the rules of the Game.’ When Truit had checked the seat for bombs and virus, Monitor took his place. An aide brought in a pad of paper and ruled the traditional four lines on its top sheet: Two horizontal, two vertical.

‘You may go first, Mr Monitor. You have “X”, and the advantage – for the moment.’

From the next room came gunshots and electric fizzling, as Eurafoot’s androids joined with Nabs’s cyborgs to fight off Hattonite assassins.

As Monitor started to make his move, his opponent leaned forward, bringing his face into the light.

‘You!’

X

Joe Feegle wrote, ‘It was a two-person, zero-sum game. Stan Houseman had established that general strict determinateness held in all cases of special strict determinateness, and in other cases as well, but he had not
excluded the possibility that the advance from special to general determinateness was no advance at all! Then he himself was an android, too!’

Joe was working on his novel,
ANDROGYNOID
, written under the pseudonym ‘H. K. (Kid) Cliplip’. Joe suffered from the delusion that he himself was written, under a pseudonym.

XI

‘You see,’ said the president of Eurafoot, ‘when Nexus Brill broke that window, he cut himself. He is now infected with a virus that will scourge our planet. It causes the feet to rot off, heh heh.’

‘I think Amos Hooks will have something to say about that,’ said a voice from the dark doorway.

‘The autistic child!’

‘Wrong,’ said Stan Houseman. He fired the demoralizer beam once, and the odd president flopped, spineless, to the floor. It was the end of the universe, all agreed.

XII

Nexus Brill saw the great ruled line coming across the sky. He speeded up the autogyro and tried to take evasive action, but it was no use. The ruled line reached him and cut him, along with the earth and sky, clean in two.

XIV

‘So it was Ed Pagon who gave birth to the new universe, eh?’

‘Right. There weren’t really any sides, since each company owned all the stock of the other, anyway. And since both were really owned by the Hattonites …’

‘Then everyone was an android, really.’

‘Brill must have suspected as much. When he cut himself on that window, he failed to bleed.’

He shook his head. ‘Brill
was
human, though bloodless.’

She smiled. ‘Then … it’s all over?’

‘In a sense.’

So saying, Stan and Karen Houseman walked barefoot with the other pilgrims, into the former shoestore.

A C
O-ORDAINER’S
M
YTH

Floogy Flarl was a wipeout man

Cashed his cogs, that wipeout man

Nobody knew how it all began

But Floogy Flarl

The Co-ordainer’s name was Hampton Syzygy of the planet Chicago, and he longed to go home. Even though he had to travel far beyond the Asteroid River of Mkaj, far beyond the Gaderene Galaxies and even to the edge of Edgeitself itself, his heart was turning ever homeward, toward the old Folkstad Ohm. But when his heart turned toward Folkstad Ohm it was full of bitterness and revenge, for Ohm was the ancient Lord of the Facility who had inherited Chicago, inherited it by killing former owner, the tyrant Stulk Hermanø. Ohm had ended Hermanø’s reign of blood only to begin his own. There was a song about this, too:

Stulk was wrong, but he wronged the wrong

While Folkstad wronged the right.

Hampton would soon do something about Folkstad Ohm, just as he would later undergo seven trials on the seven planets of Smurr. He would do these things that the adventure books might be filled with stories. But the adventure books came later, and Hampton Syzygy knew nothing of them, for he lived in the present. There was a song about this, too, but now is not for songs, but stories. And of all stories, the most strange and wonderful is the story of how Hampton Syzygy came home to Chicago, and why.

Hampton came back to Chicago by way of an otherfolk planet, Marvin Jarvis. The people of Marvin Jarvis were all otherfolk, created from animals to serve the human race and the Lords of the Facility. Two guides met Hampton at the spaceport: a sly-looking couple named F’Red and F’Annie, with their little son, F’art.

‘We’re not completely human,’ F’Red said. ‘We’re really cleverly mutated foxes. That is, I am a fox, and F’Annie is a vixen. I forget whether F’art is called a pup or a cub.’ After failing to sell Hampton a used car, the couple drifted away in the crowd of otherfolk.

There were all kinds here: B’Ernie, the beaverman who built dams; E’Laine, the elephantgirl with the phenomenal memory; P’Rick, the
porcupineman, a deadly archer. Of course there were ostrichfolk hiding their heads in the sand; swanfolk who could break a human’s arm with one stroke of a powerful wing; snakemen who hypnotized (though their chief victims were birdfolk); electric eelmen working at the power station and many more. Hampton strolled through the streets, nodding and smiling to animalfolk friends. B’Ill the batman was trying to entangle himself in a womanman’s hair. B’Ill the bearman seemed hungry enough to eat a horseman. B’Ill the budgieman and W’Rita the wormgirl dropped their tasks and followed at Hampton’s command.

It was here that Hampton met M’Arlene, who taught him subtle and peculiar ways. He would not be able to take M’Arlene with him when he left Marvin Jarvis planet. She knew that and accepted it, and yet she ached to go with him, along with W’Rita and B’Ill. But they could help Hampton Syzygy, and M’Arlene could not.

There was nothing on Chicago that a monkeywoman could do.

Before he reached Chicago, Hampton Syzygy had to spend a year being scent-cleared on the planet Kipling Glory. The police agents of Chicago were dog-robots, trained to detect the smell of any out-planet on a man, be it eleven months old. This was the only out-planet where a man could acquire a new, acceptable smell.

Kipling Glory was a skull, the skull of the ancient giant Jo-how, slaughtered, it was said, by the Montag brothers. They had made of his spine a great starship capable of ‘light-doubling’ itself across the universe, and they had set out to find the Centre of the Pattern. Living here on a giant skull reminded Hampton of what Folkstad Ohm had done to the Syzygy family, and his thoughts were cold-tinged with the feel of revenge.

The day for revenge must come, but now it was time for waiting and for watching, and for washing the dishes. Disguised in the body of an idiot dishwasher, Hampton waited and watched and worked. The dirty dishes came in to the steamy yellow kitchen. Hampton breathed upon them, reaching down inside each dish with his mind and making it
wish
to be clean, making it vibrate with the hope of cleanliness. Dish-wishing, he called it, and worked at it for eleven months and more, until it was time to throw off his disguise and come to Chicago.

On Chicago he first visited, almost without realizing where he was going, the Shrine of the Seventh Type of Ambiguity. It stood on a hill overlooking the Desert of Doris Deadlock, an old computer set in the ruins of what once had been the English department of a university, when men had studied English as a medical and legal language. This old computer had long been used by the otherfolk as an oracle.

‘Why do we come to this place, O Human?’ said W’Rita. ‘You do not believe in the power of the oracle.’

‘I do not disbelieve, either. Anyway, this place is sacred to my family. It was near here my father, Herman Syzygy fought the Last Light-Swallower and killed it, and for that they made him a Protector of the
Check.’

W’Rita smiled, insofar as a worm can be said to smile. ‘That is true. What will you ask the oracle?’

But Hampton could not answer, for he would not allow himself to think of a question in advance. That way the computer’s telepathic capabilities would become as nothing, and he might gain power over it.

The question he finally did ask, standing on the windswept bluff overlooking the Venn Diagram Lakes, was:

‘What has one leg in the morning, four legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening, and when is a door not a door?’

‘Hmmm,’ said the old computer. ‘That’s a toughy. Would it be Long John Silver with a three-legged parrot?’

‘No.’

‘How about a leg of mutton magically transformed into a dog that pees on your doorstep at dusk?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, I give. What is it?’

‘A coffee table, made from a door!’ Hampton explained how one began in the morning by putting one leg on, and then had all four in place by the afternoon, but one fell off in the evening. The old computer gave him a secret whereby he might ensnare the tyrant Ohm. W’Rita, the wormgirl who had been bred and created to tie packages up real pretty, now tied herself around Hampton’s finger so he would not forget the secret. They descended and began to cross the Desert of Doris Deadlock.

They made the crossing at night, when the sand was cool and blue-gray, and the sagebrush silver in the moonlight. Now and then Hampton glimpsed the desert’s owner, Doris herself, flitting behind a rock or bush. He knew it was truly Doris, for the moonlight gleamed on the padlock through her nose.

At dawn Hampton entered the capital city Vb and went straight to the palace of Folkstad Ohm. On the way, he explained to B’Ill the budgieman why he was needed.

‘Like all budgiemen, you were bred and created to guard mirrors, and that is what you must do now. I want you to guard all mirrors at the palace against the false image of Folkstad Ohm; otherwise he may slip in among his false images and escape my revenge. Do you understand?’

‘I understand and obey, O Human,’ said the budgieman, and seeing that the occasion was serious, he forbore adding the ‘Who’s a pretty boy?’ that was at the tip of his tongue. Hampton entered the palace the way M’Arlene had showed him, and made his way to the private chambers of the tyrant.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ said Ohm, looking up from his clairvoyance machine. Suddenly he made a dash at a mirror on the nearest wall, trying to slip into his false image, but B’Ill was there before him.

Now Folkstad Ohm turned craven. ‘What do you want of me, Syzygy? I can’t bring your wife and children back to life, can I?’

Revenge clouded Hampton’s mind, as he raised a death-weapon to spill the tyrant’s blood. Ohm had done a terrible thing to Mrs Syzygy and the children, by changing their spaceness. Hampton’s wife had been shrunk to the size of a dust mote, and battered to death by the Brownian motion in a sunbeam. The oldest of his two children had been made to swell to such a size that gravity collapsed his bones. He was now the Ricky Syzygy mountain range. Little Lydia, the baby, had been neither shrunk nor grown, but made so heavy that she sank to the molten centre of the planet and became one with it. Hampton thought of her every time he felt the tug of gravity. Revenge clouded his mind and he raised his weapon.

But then he saw W’Rita tied to his finger, and remembered the secret of the old computer. Reaching down inside the future, Hampton made some adjustments. This event became contingent upon that and the other, while another event vanished for good. As he worked, he spoke to Folkstad Ohm.

‘Whatever you hurt, you will be. Whatever you hate will be you. All your daggers backwards turn. O-U-T spells out goes he, with a dirty dishrag on his knee.’

Disbelieving in the spell, Ohm tried kicking a passing dog. In the instant before it felt the crushing pain of his iron boot against its ribs, the dog and Ohm exchanged consciousness. As a dog, he felt the ribs crack, and hot electric pain shot through him. He tried to bite the tyrant leg, and found himself back in his own body to be savaged by a pain crazed animal. The sentence was eternal, and just.

Hampton Syzygy returned to his own home, where he lived in peace for many years, until he fell asleep and went to hunt with his ancestors. But high above the Venn Diagram Lakes, the old computer still chuckled to himself, for the sixty or seventy millionth time:

‘A coffee table! Well I’ll be damned!’

BY J. G. B––

Chapter I: The Eternal Grocer

Price looked across the lagoon, a dry sweep of land, at the mirage. The lagoon was sublimating, turning from liquid ice directly into crystalline air, and through its wavering layers he could make out a Giacometi statue that was probably one of King’s men, grown thin. Fronds of zygote enwrapped the old supermarket now, smothering it in lianas and spermaceti, turning it into a fairly good Jackson Pollock painting, the one he always dreamed about. This, too, had a dreamlike mist about it, as did King’s man, turning and turning, driven by a wind of solidity. Pterodactyls honked overhead.