Nowhere Near Milkwood

by Rhys Hughes

  I was fearful that I might, and mentally prepared myself for the harrowing voyage to his insulated tower in the crater of the smoking volcano on the outskirts of the city, but then as I returned along Death Row and up Poorly Passage, I noted something on the stone floor of the first cell, which I had assumed was empty. Scowling in the dim light of the moondwellers' luminous antennae, I unlocked the gate and went in. Peculiar sort of captive! I didn't remember arresting this suspect. A plate of cakes.

  Stooping, I crammed one into my mouth. Sweetened...

  I frowned.

  The Mischief Towers

  (1)

  The President is a man with perfect timing, but all of it is bad. On the last occasion he summoned me, I was in the middle of tricky negotiations with an official from Amnesty Interstellar. A miserable lot, those Civil Rights people, raving about Justice and Equality, as if I don't take the issues as seriously as they do! In fact, I devote most of my working day to keeping the former as far away from the latter as possible. It's very difficult, even with a pulley, a bronze rope and a crowbar cast from the titanium shin of the Supreme Roger. Once I stretched both ideals so much that something snapped, probably my conscience. I awarded myself a medal and strutted up and down my shadow.

  For some reason, this official had the notion I was mistreating the prisoners in my charge. Our dungeons were full of natural disasters, not just winds but mudslides and avalanches and earthquakes, and we had been forced to stuff them a dozen to a cell, because the asteroid impacts had ruined one whole wing of the prison, and would have continued to destroy the world had we not granted each crater a job in the kitchen as a dish, a position from which a meteoric rise to sink looked feasible. Certainly the narrow space meant that some of the weaker catastrophes were bullied by the larger. Glenda the Monsoon, for instance, kept putting down Myron the Sandstorm, mushing his aridity.

  But this was hardly to be avoided in any system of confinement. The forest fires and tidal waves were bound to cluster together in clans and pick on each other, however gently or roughly we dealt with them. So the fault was not ours. It was the intractability of the universe and I felt sour at taking the blame for its behaviour. While I boiled, my tormentor took shrill notes on a foolscap parrot, hurling the occasional glower at me and clucking his liberal tongue.

  "Mister Grundy, here is a breach of regulations!" he finally cried, as he peered into the tiniest cell.

  I scratched my chin. "Ah, the tornadoes."

  "They are underage, perhaps only dust-devils. I will have to report you for minor climatic harassment."

  "A horrible slander," I replied, "for I run a tolerant regime. None of my men have ever broken a wind."

  "You must understand more, condemn less!"

  "The principles of rehabilitation are familiar to me, I assure you. This morning I argued for the early release of Myron. I concluded he had already paid his dunes to society."

  "Locking up a desert seems such a waste!"

  "Sometimes it's necessary. They get agitated, fluffed, stardrunk. I blame it all on bad precipitation."

  "You are a callous idiot, Mister Grundy!"

  While the official scolded me, a dozen workmen entered the corridor and began attaching pulleys to the ceiling. I grimaced, for I recognised them as the same labourers who had constructed a suspension bridge above the President's bath. Had they come to help me pull Justice and Equality even further apart? No, for these wheels were relatively fragile, unable to bear the mass of a Scruple-Fission Reaction. They sparkled in the icy light of the recidivist Aurora Borealis thrown in with the tornadoes. In a minute the workmen had finished, threading platinum string through the pulleys, leaving without even a request for a mug of sugary wolf-whistle tea or a hobnailed nob for dunking.

  Instantly the wheels began turning and I forgot the presence of the official as I watched the strings move. He was blabbering and preaching, but his voice faded into a hum as another sound entered the prison. Slow and stiff, it grew louder, until the metal wall and floor were vibrating and chiming in harmony. Then I saw it coming down the corridor: a puppet with iron shoes, done in the exact image of the President, dangling from the strings on the regularly spaced wheels! It jerked closer and stopped only when it stood face to face with me. For a moment it swung awkwardly on its supports, head and arms and feet swivelling in random directions. Then it offered me its wooden hand.

  I took it and the marionette turned and led me along the passage to the outside. But the Amnesty Interstellar official wasn't keen to see me escape his attentions, so he clutched the hem of my jacket and the three of us stumbled into the sunshine. I was astounded to witness a series of posts newly hammered into the soil, extending to the horizon and beyond. Each one held a pulley and was a predetermined course for my guide. Such a peculiar method for the President to communicate his desire! He mostly relied on carrier-partridge or gibbon-sleigh. When we reached the slopes of the Carbuncle Hills, the puppet steered us with precision through the hazardous verruca fields. No sweat.

  And all this while, the official was distending my jacket, shouting in my ear or flipping the feathers of his parrot, ranting on about Truth and Mercy and other exotic notions.

  "Mister Grundy! You really must answer me!"

  We were within sighing distance of the President's tower and I felt my burden had grown excessive. I tried to knock his hand off with my own but he was tenacious. The puppet dragged us through the open door in the building and deposited us before the man himself, who was standing below the last pulley, working the cords.

  "Titian! Why are you so late?"

  I grovelled, but with a sneer. "Your servant was tardy." I gestured at the marionette and the official.

  "Freeloading passenger, eh? What audacity!"

  I nodded. "He increased the net mass and hampered my righteousness. He works for Amnesty Interstellar."

  The President shrugged. "In that case I'll make him illegal. Arrest this miscreant, Titian! Hurry now!"

  The official protested vigorously as I twisted his arms and secured them with my belt. There was nowhere in the tower to lock him up, so the President gave me his permission to take the puppet apart and reassemble it around the body of the criminal. I placed the key of a dungeon in the wooden fingers and we sent it back to the prison. The marionette rotated on a polished heel with a nasty leer and stalked off, footprints exactly fitting those of its first journey. The official inside begged to be let out and pounded the chest of his captor. When it reached its destination it would open a cell, incarcerate itself, lock the door and wait for him to starve. But not swallow the key.

  The President pouted. "Come upstairs with me."

  (2)

  My powered unicycle was reaching its maximum speed on the marble streets under the Pallid Colonnades when a line of Talking Plaques began jumping from the parapets into my path. I swerved to avoid the bodies and nearly tumbled into oblivion myself, but I didn't reduce my speed. I was trying to impress Beatrix Trifle, the President's wife, who witnessed my antics from her sofa at the top of her Ironic Column. This was the right way to woo her, which is why her husband never succeeded in showing her his own pillar. Her lips were a century of yards above my own, and her mouth was even more inaccessible. I can't say I adored her, or even liked her, but she knew how to prevent a puncture.

  Being one of my best ideas, the Talking Plaques were a truly horrid feature of the landscape. They cropped up almost everywhere, chanting in careful disharmony, reciting the details of any crime that had ever been committed on that spot. They drowned out the sound of my engine, hurting my sense more than a bee trained as a bailiff. Each time I trundled past on my circuit of passion, I heard the same dismal lists: "Dolores Spleen ruptured a cashew here on 67th Octember 3624," or "Martin Mocker raped a rope on 3rd April 1951," or "Andy Fairclough hid an owl in a mandolin on 12th January 2001." It was more than I could bear, so I daringly plugged my ears with honey while in motion.

  But that bear (which was more than
I could) must have licked it out quickly, for the voices were still audible and awful. Even Beatrix, high in the glowering sky, wrinkled up her face, which actually made her look pretty, in the same way that a small accident can improve a teapot which lacks a spout. My underwear experienced a desire to be torn from my rump and projected to her. It was risky to oblige but underleg adventures are my buttock and butter, so I sat sidesaddle and worked them down. As more Talking Plaques cascaded, my unicycle left its own remarkable skidmarks. I loaded the garment into my catapult, aimed and struck my target with a Parthian shot — not a misspelling.

  Her nose hooked the item and my bowels fluttered with joy. Then she blew one nostril in my embroidered initials and it was all I could do to keep my balance. But now the Talking Plaques were leaking red liquid all over the surface of the road, spoiling the pallid glimmer and bathing my wheel like a tired mushroom. I changed gear, slowed down and finally the real reason for the mass jumping became clear. They were being shot by a sniper from afar! Somebody was deliberately inserting bullets into their spines, causing them to fall forward over the edge of the walkways. Such precision had an executive smell about it. I suspended my affections for Beatrix and considered the victims.

  Now I understood they were being killed in a particular order. When a Talking Plaque reached a certain letter in his statement, a shot would ring out and he would plummet before me with the solitary sound still on his tongue. The force of my passing would pluck it out and my ears would drink it like mulled whine. The result was a bloody message for me, made out of the last sighs of thirty souls. Because the text had already been repeated a dozen times, the death toll was a number even higher than the circumference of my lesser ego expressed in cubits. My innate arrogance, you see, has a satellite — a moon which waxes at home with my hive, but wanes in the presence of free elks.

  Anyway, I decided to concentrate on the content of the message when it was broadcast again. As feared, it was from the President. The fellow who had to intone the crime of Dolores Spleen only managed to get as far as "cashew" before he was shot, and this letter "c" formed the beginning of the bulletin. So too, the accuser of Martin Mocker reached "rope" and expired on the "o", whereas the one with Andy Fairclough's reputation to dilute gave up his own life on the "m" of "mandolin." And so on, until I had decrypted the following demand:

  "Come to my tower immediately, Titian!"

  I trembled and waved farewell to Beatrix, who was inserting my gift into a tube embedded in her column. Peculiar place to store underwear! I thought no more of it and steered for the President's edifice, which was located in a field between a sock and a soft place. The previous week he had swallowed eight cushions for a bet and was rushed to hospital, where his condition was described as comfortable. Now he was back and unstable and juggling his heart out, like many a lovable tyrant. Blast! Just as I was getting somewhere special and vertical with his wife! I sped through a door of his tower and dismounted.

  "Hello! Any lunatic autocrats at home?"

  But he wasn't sitting on his throne and his chamber was in complete chaos, with breakfast-pianolas snapping, cracking and popping, and not a few inverted bowls of fruit defending the carpet like bosom armour. Then a gruff voice hailed me from above:

  "Hasten upstairs, my trusty Prefect..."

  I bounded up the steps. "Here, sir! Good shooting, by the way! What can I do for you? Strum your chin?"

  "No time for that, my friend, more's the pity! Take a look at this, would you? What do you make of it?"

  He was standing on the balcony which rings the summit of the tower, holding a telescope to his eye, using his nose as a support in lieu of a tripod. A high-powered rifle stood propped against a table on which were spread charts and diagrams. These revealed the location of every Talking Plaque in the land and the texts they had to recite. An accurate sundial also stood on the surface. It was clear he had been timing the sentences of the chattering men in order to murder them at the correct letters for his summons. In the distance, the Pallid Colonnades bleached the horizon like filthy cream, and I could just make out Beatrix with my nude eye. I oozed a bead of sweat from my brow.

  The President whipped out a handkerchief from his pocket. "Not over there, clever chum! Peer this way!"

  I accepted this cloth and was about to mop myself when I recognised my initials and the inconstant mucus. The handkerchief was my underwear! So the President knew about my attachment to his spouse! How grotesquely would he punish me? By declaring my groin illegal? By setting a reformed dandrum on my bugaboo? Forgetting my birthday? But no, I'd misjudged his devotion to duty, his love of work.

  He gripped my shoulder. "Yes, I'm aware of your attempted affair. I may not visit Beatrix very often, for aesthetic reasons, but we exchange the evidence of our sins via pneumatic tube. I do plan to get very angry and have already smashed up the contents of my abode in preparation, but until then I require your talents."

  He raised the spyglass to my eye and I allowed him to focus it at a dark glade in tangled Jester Woods.

  Blinking thrice, I gasped: "Heavens!"

  (3)

  I was sitting on my favourite cloud, the young female nimbostratus, when the inverse smoke-signal reached me. I yawned and stretched and squinted at the blankets which rose past my gaze. Unwelcome but tightly woven. Up into outer space they continued, until the blue of each pattern formed a miniature sky in the airless void. They lifted in a particular sequence, easily readable as a command. The President wanted me back on Earth. The smoke which pushed the blankets up was solid and jagged. A refrigerative machine of some kind must have been setting it firm as it coughed from a fire in one of his hotline grates.

  Grumbling to myself, for I was enjoying my vacation in the Heavenly Realm, I opened my sack of meteorites and selected a nickel-iron sphere. While my soul cavorted in the aether, my body lay in suspended animation in Dr Celery's sub-zero vanilla crypts. He was due to thaw me out in two weeks and to prevent this occurrence I had been slinging cosmic rocks at his skull, wholly without success. Now I had to arrange the opposite and compel him to reanimate me early. I leaned over the edge of my cloud and aimed for the water-clock which controlled the calender of Police events from the courtyard of the Station.

  My first attempt was a catastrophe, striking the eighth side of the nonagonal building, the 'Genetic Disorder' wing, and demolishing it. The surviving prisoners would have to be rescued and levered into full cells elsewhere, just before an expected visit from Amnesty Interstellar! Poor timing, but it couldn't be helped. My second shot was better, landing in the barrel of the water-clock and hurrying on the date by fourteen days. Dr Celery and his stringy beard came out to investigate the noise, noted the reading on the dial and went off to the crypt to melt the vanilla. I sighed and waited to become flesh.

  Before I could kiss goodbye to the cloud, a tunnel opened up in the aether and I was sucked toward a brown light — the light is blue in the other direction. I floated down reluctantly, my stomach heaving. Then my senses were jangled and I found myself stuck inside my torso. A terrible disappointment, I must confess, for a soul to be knotted to tendons in a cage of bones. Dr Celery slapped my cheeks, also my face, not because it was strictly necessary but as revenge for my assassination attempts. And I roused fitfully, shivered and called for my uniform. He shook his head at this, his mind still unbrained.

  "Wiser for you to rest," he declared.

  "The President must not be defied. Fetch my medals and chin. Oil my tickshaw. Dress my lettuce cloak!"

  A minute later and I was respectable, at least for a buffoon. But I was still unsteady as I mounted my transport and sprayed the formic acid over the aphids and mites. The tickshaw jerked forward and I curled deep in the wicker seat as gravity drew my thoughts to my heels. The tower of the President loomed sharp, like a nagging finger, and the spokes of its giant wheels glittered in the dusk. The fire and frozen smoke were being dismantled by workmen, having served their purpose. I braked the vehicle with a hone
y spray and lurched out. The President was on the roof of the edifice and I staggered up to him.

  "Thanks for coming, Prefect. Look at this!"

  I accepted the heavy telescope. "Another tower! And there's another Titian Grundy staring back at me!"

  "Now point the lens a little to the right."

  "A third tower, with a third Grundy! What's the meaning of this? Do I have an obsessive club of fans?"

  "No, your only fan is the silk one passed down from Charlton Radish for ritualistic purposes. These other towers and its inhabitants are not simulacra. Eight in total, including this one. I first noticed them this morning, mere dots on the horizon. Since then they have trundled closer. It appears we are all converging."

  "Oh dear, so an accident seems inevitable."

  "My fears exactly. What are we to do? Where have they come from? No odder event has transpired in my remarkable career. I'm fond of my tower and do not wish to see it smashed. Although it is shielded by a field of negatively-charged emotions, I don't think they're sufficient to protect this structure from annihilation."

  "We must instantly divert your trajectory."

  "Impossible, Titian! My tower is designed to move of its own accord under an Unfathomable Synthetic Will. I rarely know from one hour to the next where it might decide to go. Hidden springs in the walls click into motion and the wheels start moving and my building crosses the landscape to a new location. It is a good way of avoiding assassination, but now I regret the cunning of the scheme."

  "Are there no ways of braking it manually?"

  "None. I am a prisoner of its whims. The alternative Presidents and Titians on the balconies of the other towers look as worried as we do. I conclude we must perish together."