Part 11 (1/2)

I took the hands of Susan and Amy as we proceeded to descend from the Core, our first job done. Stub of pencil: Beth and Greg may have had to be the next couple 'sacrificed', when the time came, even though, when compared to Hataz and Tho, they were rather too long in the tooth to be called young lovers! Edith and the rather gender-indeterminate Clare, even more so.

As we reached the lower slopes of Corepeak, I even wondered if what we had just seen was the real earth's Core. Or was there a core within a core? Or even a series of 'Russian Doll' cores? Bizarre thoughts, maybe. Stub of pencil: Mere untrammelled corespeak.

The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond Beth's control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.

At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan's pretty face, prettier than her own, though when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.

Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circ.u.mstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or a bus-driver or a radio phone-in counsellor? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.

Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn't now place him as a grown-up. The big ear seemed out of place. She dreamed of him mixing some foreign substances or murky mythologies into a huge tin bath. Amy was a similar dream portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought tooth-and-nail over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn't really differentiate one portrait from another.

Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so. She feared he was now dead. The portrait dream showed him alive, however.

The various Cores were not 'Russian Doll' within each other, as it turned out-but, rather, side-by-side cores in different geographies of lateral time. The strobe theory of history was now debunked and many scholars questioned its validity as a basis for much of what had happened and what was about to happen.

Let me baldly state that my credentials are impeccable and I can't be blamed for any misinformation as to what level of narration I actually work within. I am-to myself at least-all-knowing. If others know more than me, then, self-evidently, I do not know them.

Beth and Greg-whilst Mike and his party were still present in the vicinity of the one known Core-took advantage of their historic potential and eventually entered a rent in the Coreskin themselves... disguised as young lovers. Consequently, they are now-like Sudra and Nemo/Dognahnyi-as good as dead within the known transpirals. Greg and Mike did not say much to each other in advance of this event, because alter-nemos are notoriously anti-social among themselves. Beth did say goodbye to Susan with a hug, however.

Edith and Clare prepared themselves for a similar 'sacrifice'. They continued to absorb much fine literature on the a.s.sumption that whatever their brains carried outside the Core would be carried within it, too. This was 'sacrifice', not 'self-sacrifice', after all. Perhaps they depended on some form of osmosis.

The pair-of-young-lovers permutations of 'sacrifice' among the residual members were still undecided. Mike argued the case for himself and Amy being one pair, whilst Susan would bring up the rear accompanied by Arthur. We may never know the outcome of that, although we could guess. I simply don't know.

Meantime, man-city further stirred downward, the fly in fate's ointment. Clockwork without clockwork was the easiest and clearest way to explain its method of propulsion, now that Ogdon was no longer available to wind it up.

Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus's usual allotted white-lined s.p.a.ce alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. Never eat yellow snow, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could add to the maimed and the dead.

Later he would indeed be found dead in a state of Rigor Mortis or Shyfryngs... leaning at his body's slope upon the large still-turning clockwork-key in his back.

It was not exactly a TV interview. It was more Candid Camera. The four remaining Drillmates were left de-briefing the whole affair in advance of what they expected to be a grand climax, the exact nature of which was still unclear. The interpolations of any interviewer are left untranscribed.

SCENE: A disused Agra Askan grocery, lit inexplicably with arc-lights. A painting of The Archer from the old days is on the wall near some droopy turnips on shelves, looking remarkably like Thatcher.

Mike: It was wonderful to see the peacefully happy look on those youngsters' faces as they slipped through the coreskin. It made everything seem worthwhile.

Susan: I have a funny feeling, that it's not all over. Surely, Sudra is coming back. That was a dream-that part-wasn't it? I was told it was a dream.

Mike: Who by? No, that was not a dream, I'm sorry to say. Nothing is a dream when underground. Although, I suspect the zoo was not all it was cracked up to be when we were told it was dreamless. We should have guessed. The zoo is not underground. (Mike nods to the unseen interviewer.) Amy: Since my change, I've taken nothing for granted. I don't even take myself for granted. At times, I think the city itself is coming after us-a suicide-bomb strapped to its waist, ready to blow the Megazanthus and its coreskin to smithereens.

Mike: A suicide-bomb? That must be the covered-market, then?

Amy: Yes, one must a.s.sume so. And I once dreamed I operated a car bomb near the bridge. It was terrible.

Arthur: We must get back to the Drill. I know Nemo had many muskets stowed in a cabin somewhere. I heard him tell that to one of the businessmen when he thought I was too far away to hear what was being said.

Susan: Surely muskets will be like flea-bites on an elephant when the city arrives!

Mike: There's no telling. Sometimes things are more symbolic than physical. I learnt at least that during my tour of narrative duty.

Amy: (smiling) You mean you know things? I'm sure I don't, even though I've been programmed to know everything.

Mike: I don't think any of us even approach knowing anything.

Amy: But you know you were meant to be a hawler, if everything had gone to plan?

Mike: Hasn't everything gone to plan, then? I don't even know what a Horla is, after all this time. Something to do with time and memory and dragging things from deep inside one?

Amy: A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.

Mike (Remembering the incident with Captain Nemo): Well, I think I'm beginning to understand. It's like loving rare beef... as a sort of symbol. Hmmm.

Susan: Don't forget the birds. That angel in the core reminded me of a huge diseased bird. Despite the good it was doing to its nestlings.

Arthur: But there's no doing good simply for the sake of doing good. At the end of the day, the whole thing is being driven by the milking of Angel Wine from the Core, and selling it up the line. (Nodding to the interviewer) ...Yes, I know that's unproven, but it makes common sense.

The interviewer then left the grocery, someone who had been hidden by the TV cameras rather than revealed. Even as he left, his cape concealed his real configuration as truth or fiction. The four Drillmates' conversation continued after the arc-lights were switched off, but we have no means to continue our surveillance of what they said.

Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler-had always realised this perhaps-but now he knew it wasn't because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved antic.i.p.ation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d'etre. Mike remembered his step-daughter Sudra as she began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet-clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet.

Now Sudra was gone. All of them were now on the point of going, also. One thing that had been established: the earlier belief in 'carpet apes' in attendance upon the Angel Megazanthus was wide of the mark. The whole setting of the Core had turned out to be more angelic, more spiritual than any of the surviving visitors had ever hoped. Either the scurrying apes that catered for the ablutions of the Angel had never existed in the first place or-if they had once existed albeit in a mere state of nemonymity-they had since grown into Agra Askans (like Lilliputian Yahoos into giant Brobdignagians). If the latter version, any history books in Agra Aska had been expunged of such evidence. A textual exegesis or, if not, perhaps the strobe theory of history was a true one, after all. As it turned out, the primary-source evidence pointed to the Angel effectively caring for its own ablutions as well as for the ablutions of its wing-wrapped nestlings within the Coreskin, as part of the incubatory process involved in the constant o.r.g.a.s.m of angevinisation. It even nursed its own wounds of disease as they intermittently grew scabs and subsequently ruptured with blurts of depressurised pus. A self-sufficient moto perpetuo state of parthenogenesis. A recurrent dream of mutual self-healing made real by retrospective hawling.

Today, as they sat by the Balsam River on their last day together, Mike was trying to persuade Susan that he should enter the Coreskin paired with Amy as 'young lovers' rather than with his wife (i.e. Susan herself) of many years' standing: Mike: Who would go in with Arthur, if not you? Amy is his sister, after all. That would not be right, I'm sure you would agree, Susan, love. I think we lose all consciousness once we're in there, anyway, and so you won't know it's not me that you're paired with. I love you, I have always loved you, Susan, but now is the time to crystallise our love at the precise moment of separating. Our love would be diminished by continuing to conduct it as just a tawdry echo within the Core under the surveillance of the Angel...

Susan: (Tears in her eyes) It's meant to be more than just an echo. Did you actually say echo? It's supposed to be more than just s.e.x. It's a culmination of all we've been together. (She has a musket on her lap and she fiddles absentmindedly with its trigger.) Mike: But it's a bit of a cheat, anyway, Suse. We're meant to be young lovers when we go in and we're-what are we?-fifty or so? It's not as if we're taking the whole thing seriously. It's just for show. Amy will need my protection once inside...

Susan: I thought you said we lose consciousness of who we are...

Mike: I know, but we remain who we are even if we don't continue to know who we are. (Mike's own eyes are suddenly gla.s.sy with tears, as he pretends to watch a Riverboat moor in the distance.) Susan: I don't understand, Mike, I really don't understand. If we don't know what we know when in there, it won't matter if Amy and Arthur go in together paired as brother and sister, will it? They won't know that they're sister and brother. I would really be happier going in with you, even if I don't know it's you afterwards. I'd feel safer. More able to return the love given to me by whatever you turn out to be within the Core.

Mike: I think I really must... go in with Amy. And we ought to go in soon, before... you know... (Looking at the musket on his own lap).