Part 12 (1/2)

If they thought about it at all.

Beth worked in Klaxon City-an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade near Soho-a sight better-cla.s.s than the arcades in Clacton, where saucy hats and bingo were more the rage. In Beth's arcade of work, there were high-prize jackpot fruit machines as well as mock-casino games with real tellers. Robot croupiers were not too far-fetched in the sort of computerised world that amus.e.m.e.nt arcades had now entered, following the miniaturization of machines everywhere-even in Clacton. So there were tellers who handed out chips and made masquerade of gambles being unforethought... mingling with robots who smiled wickedly, giving the punters confidence that all was random, because how could thinking machines not deliver the chance one always seeks in life: the pure chance? Only humanity snags the wheels of chance, with their intentions and misintentions of subconscious thought.

Many fought against thought.

Beth was one who fought against thought. She just dreamed of that ultimate chance where she could safely say that she was full of unmixed happiness. A dream she forgot immediately she woke up from it, although sleep was not the necessary prerequisite for thus dreaming. Not a sought happiness, because that always failed. But a found happiness. One that simply enveloped one, given the lack of forethought or ambition that the very act of seeking it would have entailed, given self-consciousness: a self-consciousness that women of Beth's ilk luckily lacked. Meanwhile, she simply plugged on. A pretty face neatly sunk on skullbone.

A plug makes things work. An electric plug. A bath plug. A rawl-plug. Even an advertising plug. The latter made a name into a catchword and the circling businessmen would cause manufacture of anything to match the catchword and made it work in tune with the catchword's neatly fitting its round peg in a round hole whilst making square holes of us all, without us noticing.

In modern screen drama there are swishes of sound to alleviate the changes of scene, large noisy tractions of vision that overwhelm the quiet reflective scene with an abruptness that life never really has on reflection: all misery is gradual, just as lives are gradual, never fast-changing, even if one can destroy a marriage with one simple act, but it takes days, often, to percolate and reveal its repercussions. Never in drama. Never in fiction. We need the swish of the curtain. A single alert. A sudden siren set off to indicate a change of scene, a change of dream. A false plug. Where amus.e.m.e.nt is taken from not knowing where things were or who people thought they were.

The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.

The Death entered Klaxon City. The real Klaxon City, where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet, of various heights, from the top of which stretched out in the wind (the wind?) many skycraft with each one's make, build, substance, inflatability, non-inflatability, traction, torque etc. mere seeing from 'ground'-level could not fathom. You had to climb up to them to discover if they were, say, flyable. Having flown to their perches there was no guarantee of future flyability. A few weren't sufficiently rendered from the flesh and bone that some (not always the few in question) once were. Not renderable, let alone non-friable enough to safeguard against weathering. But weather was a dubious topic in Klaxon. It depended on the nature or mood of the city's geographical cavity at any one time in the vertical cross-section of its dynasty as opposed to in the more usual horizontal considerations of surface cities.

I had died more than once, and, then, it was at least once on the surface that I had died, but several times below the surface. I had suffered a fatal knife-wound in a casino when the gambling laws were relaxed, because I questioned whether the silver ball was in the right hole when the robots visibly tilted the roulette-wheel with their hands, and the tellers later blamed it on an earth tremor. There was no disembowelling of their rules. Even Henry Fifth would have been given short shrift. Unto the breach...

But I was trying to forget my past. I even imagined the deaths. How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real... well the rest is common sense.

As I wandered into the city streets from the brow of the hill I last left our readers watching my progress: I took one last glimpse at the Canterbury Oak, which visibly moved at its thin s.p.a.cious upper levels, giving the uncanny impression that its large trunk below moved in unison. It was soon stolid, however, etched like a giant black hold-all that G.o.d had dropped there in disgust because there wasn't enough room in it for as many effects as even magic could have managed, let alone a full-blooded religion.

I turned to the abodes. Solid rock-caves that had been built like houses out in the open, where a few scrawny children played hide-and-seek. I knew things would become more palatial the more towards its centre I approached. And at least there I would also find grown-ups grown-up enough to interact like real characters. Not just children acting as human scenery.

One skycraft tethered to one of the few pylons stationed this far into the city's outskirts was a strange seemingly solid rocket-s.h.i.+p that, like the Canterbury Oak, was misshapen where you thought misshapen would be out of the question. Its business end seemed at the bottom where a single pin glinted in the light of the Sunne#: a pin often twirling lightly in a whimsical nostalgia for its former firedrill##. n.o.body would be on board, I knew, and thus the whimsicality of its lower pin's twirling only gave tiny shadows of doubt. Like speckled ants on my skin. It was not a balloon. It seemed solid enough, with several storeys, sieved by sightholes. It just hung there as if its specific gravity was too hard to match with rhythmic gravities elsewhere. Unlike some of the other pyloned skycraft that were like proud pennants in stiff winds, it almost sagged, and visibly bloated. But that was the effect of the incessant klaxon noise, something to which I had already grown accustomed without even mentioning that I was trying all the time to forget it, relegating it, as I did, to some wishful-thinking 'white noise'. Yet this klaxon noise (whether oak- or tannoy-derived), I suspected, was indeed the 'wind' I had earlier doubted existed as such. Noise as air movement.

#The Sunne acted like the sun but was not the sun. This does not represent a fantastical or imaginary approach to cosmology, merely a shorthand for something that will eventually become quite reconcilable given the circ.u.mstances of intertextual reality. For the moment, please treat Sunne and Sun as blood brothers (i.e. crude synonyms), if you currently lack confidence to revel in their essence and truth as spiritual brothers (mutual metanyms, if not alter-nemos). Stub of pencil: Sunne = Sunnemo?

##'Firedrill' was a difficult concept to grasp in this context. This made me think that The Death would have indeed been preferable after all, rather than now (alive) having to explain what is meant by this or that word or concept. I hope they will clarify themselves naturally in the course of events, with the description needed for such events hopefully allowing collateral construction of clue-semantics vis a vis many words or concepts otherwise ungraspable.

Stub of pencil: However close you get to someone, you are never more than just a couple of ent.i.ties separated by the skulls of the head.

Greg suffered from an unbearable tinnitus of the Inner Ear. The only way-in his desperation-to cure himself of this incessant cricketing was to deafen himself. Whilst it would be relatively easy-given the will-to blind the eyes, ie with spikes, it is far more difficult to bring such instruments to bear on the hearing, short of bringing the deafness of death itself to one's aid. Slicing off the ears themselves would surely be counter-productive as this very act itself harbours the possibility of even more tinnitus that is allowed greater access-via the creatures of noise-permanently to attack an Inner Ear thus denuded of the mysteriously effective protection of the Exterior Ear. Doctors and Ear Specialists would probably disagree with this prognosis, but Greg wondered how they could know for certain. Only doing things to oneself and feeling the effect in oneself directly gives the ultimate certainty of one's own senses, i.e. the evidence of the self's senses at whatever level of felt reality one is working through. So, Death seems the only exit from the noise. Sleep does not dull it as dreams often increase the efficiency of the noise or change its very nature into a series of new home-grown noises, a gestalt of noises being dreamed as louder and more relentless. Klaxon City was one such dream. The Inner Earth. The Inner Ear.

As they scaled the pylon from their earthcraft, Greg and Beth began to stretch their legs in yawning downward strides. They had been cooped up in a serial cabin-fever for several months of travel in individual body-hugging room s.p.a.ces. The dream of a Corporate Lounge on board the earthcraft-where an urbane Captain dished out c.o.c.ktails and scintillating sights of Inner Earth-proved to be a dream even deeper than a dream being dreamed by merely one other single dream. Indeed, a single such cause-and-effect dream in the concertina of dreams proved to be even less reliable: whereby two dowager ladies known as Edith and Clare were not such ladies at all but chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand... presumably also to ensure that believability was not unduly affected by crossing any threshold of disbelief. These two stewards-when failing to maintain their 'lady' disguises-often became, by involuntary default, large bird-headed individuals who employed the otherwise human nature of their own residual-'lady' bodies in the seeming behaviour of insect-articulated ratchet-limbs that became (in their minds at least) spiny or spiky appendages that the large beaks of their heads actively tried (but failed) to snap up self-cannibalistically as tasty buggish morsels.

Greg, as he neared the pylon's base, turned to take a closer look at the misshapen tree on the hill overlooking Klaxon City-knowing instinctively that it was the perpetrator of the inner sky's wall-to-wall wailing: a series of echoes that bounced around the bowl of the city's cavity. Several separate ribbons of spatial reality-mixed with tangible strobes of time-fluttered in the air-movement of noise: a wind of striated history... a vertical cross-section of which Greg traversed. The earthcraft tethered to the top of the pylon seemed, for him, to become a religious vision that curdled gradually into a huge plume of black smoke from a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale. And, indeed, as each dream kicked in one by one, Greg was able to ignore the noise and the heat as he ruminatively considered the panoply of Klaxon's geography... while he continued to scale himself down. The vista of its configuration was like a huge human ear-a canyon, a ridge, a lobe, all const.i.tuents of the city's mingled G.o.d-given nature and subsequent fabrication.

Greg grabbed Beth by the hand as they left the environs of their earthcraft's pylon-without bothering to think that the meter needed inserting with an unknown currency of coinage.

”That's for others,” said Greg, eventually, to himself, vaguely recalling the duty of parking fees on or within the scarce resources of a finite earth but also that he and Beth were simply crew members, not owners of the earthcraft.

The streets radiated as streets (i.e. as gaps between) from the area spa.r.s.ely planted with pylons to other areas where more cavernous buildings cl.u.s.tered around thicker clumps of variously-sized pylons-some pylons with craft tethered, others empty, and a few currently being roosted by kite-shaped birds with large black plumages. In the distance, the ambiance of a city built as a patchwork of overlapping quaint village-scenarios was disrupted as the rims of giant Angevin tanks were spotted in an apparently camouflaged industrial estate unglinting in the bright directionlessness of Sunnemo Cathedral's broken shafts through stained gla.s.s.

Greg and Beth, however, were window-shopping on a much lower level, as they pa.s.sed through a precinct where some earth-stripped caves were neatly thin-roofed and gla.s.s-fronted. These contained the hardly static wares of a thriving chamber of commerce even if the gaps between these 'shops' were deserted... window-shown to any chance pa.s.sers-by breaking this empty pattern. One labelled Sudra's Shoes brought a wry smile to their lips as they inspected the various jingle-toed items of footwear.

They dodged into something labelled Cave for some refreshment, hoping that any necessary payment by unknown coinage would be subsumed by serendipity.

Inside were two non-descript locals of short standing whose conversation Greg and Beth began to overhear-during which they decided to intervene with convenient questions, convenient to real visitors such as Greg and Beth themselves and to any possible vicarious visitors coiled on their backs like old-men-of-the-sea. Convenient if the conversation made any sense beyond its semi-conscious ability to refine sense into nonsense, or vice versa.

Beth was described in an unreported part of this exchange as middle-aged, buxom, pretty face scarred with frown-lines, still perky enough to lift her head above the narrative parapet. Greg remained naive despite a mature aura of be-whiskered pink chops. He still tried to maintain his own ident.i.ty in face of all attack to divert it elsewhere, but all descriptive resources remained counter-productive in this direction, whatever or whoever took up responsibility for them.

Crazy Lope: Where's the air from, then?

Go'spank: Sea air-it's sort of caught by the melting tectonics, you know, internal tsunamis carried within caches of air-movement made from noise.

Crazy Lope: Don't understand. Words don't do much for me. Any words. But specially those words. Where do words come from?

Go'spank: The words are like moving air, too, or fingered sound. Words are what drift through it. Tricking the above, the below and the across... (Laughs.) Greg: Been here long?

(Crazy Lope seems perturbed at the interruption.) Crazy Lope: We've been here longer than you two. We've been taking the was.h.i.+ng in.

Greg: Taking the was.h.i.+ng in? Is that a sort of pa.s.sword?

Crazy Lope: If you don't know it's a pa.s.sword, then it's not a pa.s.sword.

Go'spank: Or if you think it's a pa.s.sword what's it a pa.s.sword for? The whole background of black noise is just one never-ending pa.s.sword, perhaps. (Laughs.) Beth: (Frowning) How do they put up with all that here?

Crazy Lope: I block it out. Or rather the blocks block it out.

Go'spank: Dream blocks, yes.

Greg: Ah, but I was brought up to believe dreams were a sickness. They are perhaps defence systems, I see. Rather necessary evils. Yet so much depends on the gaps or streets between the dreams. Are we in a dream now or a gap?

Go'spank: Wish we knew. And if we did know how would you know we knew?

Crazy Lope: Wish You Were Here. s.h.i.+ne on Crazy Diamond.

Beth: It seems you can't talk properly without, you know...

Go'spank: I know... It's difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication. And to say all those words ”I know... It's difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication” has taken a lot of effort and concentration. I've never been able to say anything sensible for this length of time before, or perhaps this exact length is my personal best so far.

(The noise of a distant explosion is carried further than it would otherwise have been by sound atmospherics of the moment, as the other Cave customers do runners.) Greg: What's that?

Crazy Lope: What Go'spank just said.

Go'spank: Yes, an air cus.h.i.+on, even an air tsunami perhaps.

Beth: (Flicking a speck of dried mud from her eyelid) There's no noise now.