The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Jove and Juno Olympian, this rich old pair of scrooge mcducks, who seemed so entertaining in their vanities and eccentricities, who so delighted the pretty young bride, to whom everything—almost—could be forgiven by society and nothing tarnish their public legend, simply because their joint fortune was vast beyond the imaginations even of other multi-tribillionaires—it was not. The fabled ocean of money was running dry. That was the reason they deigned to do such things as mingle with common millionaires in luxury ships and trains. They, the famous M.’s Olympian, were NTC’s hired entertainers for the paying passengers. It kept their New Acropolis in fuel for the power plant, it kept them in pocket money for the essential new gewgaws, and it kept them in NTC epicure meals at no extra expense to themselves.

  Of course, there were the other privileges they exacted from NTC, as part of keeping up the appearances so vital to their entertainment value. Such privileges as being picked up specially, bag and baggage, at their own residence, well after everyone else had gone through inspection. And of having their persons and luggage treated to “above suspicion” status, unloaded first and given direct to well-tipped baggage handlers after a customs check that if given to any lesser dignitaries—even Inindrucon agents—would be called perfunctory to the point of culpable negligence.

  Yes, the Olympians had motive, means, and every opportunity for sandbagging what still remained of their family fortune through a little drug-running. And yet that did not prove them guilty. Ilna must be careful not to let her reason influence her own perceptions, this night when the iron nerves were rusting a little. It might be the Dungeon Chessite, whose baggage had been sent and stowed so much ahead of her own arrival ... so that she might claim, at need, that the “true smuggler” had tampered with it? Ilna would welcome that, if it were M. Belladonna the Ribald. She would welcome the chance to treat the person who had stabbed Valkyrie, “in accident,” to some of the choicer interrogation techniques, beside which her treatment of the Raven had been mere friendly sport. But she must be fair. It might also be Captain Gage Burkhardt Denne, taking advantage of her position and her unquestioned access to all parts of the ship. Or any of her officers. Or Miz Ming, or M. Stewart, or the boy M. Garson. Or any member of the crew ... yes, including the one who now lay unconscious. Or even, after all, Tolliver himself.

  But for the moment, to avoid prejudicing herself as she had avoided prejudicing the Raven concerning whom to expect, she must do no more speculation, no more deduction or ratiocination. All of which had been useless this time, anyway. For now: wait only, and hope that she had deduced correctly, at least, about Gospodin Raven and his bride.

  Chapter 19

  “Their Houses are very ill built, the Walls bevil, without one right Angle in any Apartment; and this Defect ariseth from the Contempt they bear for practical Geometry; which they despise as vulgar and mechanick, those Instructions they give being too refined for the Intellectuals of their Workmen; which occasions perpetual Mistakes. ...

  “The flying or floating Island is exactly circular; its Diameter 7837 Yards, or about four Miles and an Half, and consequently contains ten Thousand Acres. It is three Hundred Yards thick. The Bottom, or under Surface, which appears to those who view it from below, is one even regular Plate of Adamant, shooting up to the Height of about two Hundred Yards. Above it lye the several Minerals in their usual Order; and over all is a Coat of rich Mould ten or twelve Foot deep. The Declivity of the upper Surface, from the Circumference to the Center, is the natural Cause why all the Dews and Rains which fall upon the Island, are conveyed in small Rivulets towards the Middle, where they are emptyed into four large Basons, each of about Half a Mile in Circuit, and two Hundred Yards distant from the Center [sic]. ...

  “At the Centre [sic] of the Island there is a Chasm about fifty Yards in Diameter, from whence the Astronomers descend into a large Dome, which is therefore called…the Astronomers Cave; situated at the Depth of an Hundred Yards beneath the upper Surface of the Adamant. In this Cave are Twenty Lamps continually burning, which from the Reflexion of the Adamant cast a strong Light into every Part. The Place is stored with great Variety of Sextants, Quadrants, Telescopes, Astrolabes, and other Astronomical Instruments. But the greatest Curiosity, upon which the Fate of the island depends, is a Load-stone of a prodigious Size, in Shape resembling a Weaver’s Shuttle. It is in Length six Yards, and in the thickest Part at least three Yards over. This Magnet is sustained by a very strong Axle of Adamant, passing through its Middle, upon which it plays, and is poized so exactly that the weakest Hand can turn it. It is hooped round with an hollow Cylinder of Adamant, four Foot deep, as many thick, and twelve Yards in Diameter, placed horizontally, and supported by Eight Adamantine Feet, each Six Yards high. In the Middle of the Concave Side there is a Groove Twelve Inches deep, in which the Extremities of the Axle are lodged, and turned round as there is Occasion.

  “This Stone cannot be moved from its Place by any Force, because the Hoop and its Feet are one continued Piece with that Body of Adamant which constitutes the Bottom of the Island.

  “By Means of this Load-stone, the Island is made to rise and fall, and move from one Place to another. ...”

  —Lemuel Gulliver’s description of Laputa

  Aye, ’twas a sweet pickle for Master Jeremy Tolliver, without mistake. He could have wished himself still whammied, for though that had enabled them, no doubt, to take him long ere now, at least he should have cared but little. Pity that the drug wore off always in its own time, never when bidden.

  He had indeed seen, when a single whammied wight amongst many, that somewhere on this island in the sky must be a fine cache of the priceless stuff. To find the same at once had been his aim, before competition made the search general. Clearly it had been in somewhat they ate or drank. Thus the galley was his first choice to search, and Mistress Lightouch the most obvious possessor of the secret. In truth, he had felt but small grief at the prospect of bullying that beldam just a little—a few threats, mayhap even a slap or two—in repayment for her bullying of him in his enforced capacity as scullion. He was, after all, both gentleman and prince of the high toby, no mere kitchen boy. But in the moil and gaiety of those drugged revels, he had missed the right doorway and been flung somehow into the one opposite, finding himself in the passage to the state quarters for visitors of rank to the Flying Island from the mainland below. Being there, the thought had swum into his brain that, amazing lucid though he was for one full to the very gills with whammy, a cold lavation might increase the willing power of his limbs to carry him about as his reason directed them.

  In locating the bath, he had first to try every door on both sides the passage. The half of them were locked, the other half unlocked; so that he might have helped himself to rare pickings, had he been some common housebreaker, which he was none, but rather a gallant of the open road, accustomed to relieving his victims of their coin and jewels face to face, with a song on his lips and a twinkle in his eye to comfort those of the fair sex for failing to rob them of their greatest treasure as well.

  He’d needed to dodge one of those fair damsels, he knew not how often, in the passage tonight—thinking at first that she leapt on him with all the hunger of Messalina herself—but nay, she was but dancing hither and yon in her own whammy whirl.

  When no one was therein, these Laputans left their bath unlocked, for any to view it who chose. Jemmy had viewed it: to his sober sight, a chamber all of blushing pink marble, laid out in ovals and rhomboids. The outlines of divers musical instruments were done in gilt on every surface, and done finely and artificially; the room itself, however, like all Laputan architecture, was much askew in its angles and crooked in its walls. He had remembered all this, with that strangely excited and exaggerated faculty of mind lent him by the drug; and he had glimpsed it again, made somewhat fearsome, by a bolt of lightning that flashed an instant after he’d reached and opened the correct door—at first he’d thought the out
er wall had fallen away in the storm, as the inner walls seemed like to do also. Then remembering, to his relief, that the outer wall of this chamber was of glass: to his perception thick bull’s eye, heavily leaded, though his mind dimly recollected some realizer explaining how ’twas in actual fact one single unbroke expanse of smooth steelglass (and, indeed, in his whammied phrensy he must have glimpsed for an instant the reality of that window betwixt himself and the lightning), he reeled into the room and shut the door.

  He had neither lantern, candle, nor tinder box. Such items were, indeed, forbade upon Laputa when they were “real,” although when the reality-perceiving climenoles pronounced them to be flashlights or glowsticks, they were allowed. But Jemmy had none of neither species, nor greatly desired any, for those crazy-angled walls of pink marble were fearsome enow in shadow and in memory, and actually beholding them again, as if about to fold in upon him like collapsing cards, might have shook his resolve, which depended and balanced only upon this: that he alone of the revelers understood why they reveled; and that sometimes, in a victim of sufficient resolve, such knowledge might be made to serve as dagger for helping hack one’s way through the mental fog.

  Dropping to all fours, he had advanced till his hand touched the edge of the bath pool, which he skirted to find the fountain, and turned both its handles as far as they would rotate, making water flow like wine. Clear, pure water, first of all the deities—or second, at latest—whose great oceanic womb, they said, gave humanity (like Venus) its very birth; whose tides and pulses echoed yet in every human vein: blood calling unto blood, element unto element, watery humour unto watery humour ... Jemmy Tolliver obeyed that call, sliding into the pool and lying face upwards to let the new baptism dance over his forehead ...

  Regaining his senses, he had found himself lying in wet garments by the side of the bath. Its water no longer flowed, but somewhere near at hand a female screamed from time to time, and in the intervals he heard a sound at the door, as of a rat worrying it, or a picklock. Light, also, beat its orange drum roll upon his closed eyelids, so that at length he opened them. The walls seeming no more crazily angled than was usual on Laputa, he had believed himself sobered.

  He guessed, now too late, here above, that his seeming sobriety then, in the bath, had been but one more whammy illusion; na’theless, he had been shrewd enough to lie still and listen till the scrabbling at the door ended in a tumult, as of a brief and sudden scuffle. When all was temporarily silence in that quarter—albeit from another quarter, from the apartment adjoining the bath, the female still screamed now and again—Jemmy seized his chance, like the bold high-tobyman he was, and slipped from the chamber, taking pains to reclose the door most softly yet snugly behind him.

  In one direction all was even yet garish lights and orgy, so he chose the other turning, and found an hatch control entirely like the one he had used earlier that day in going his errand to the island’s surface to fetch spice for Madam Beldam Cook. Pressing the said control, he caused the hatch to spring open above his head and the ladder to fall ready for his new ascent. Where the ladder he and his chance companions climbed earlier that afternoon had been, to his perception, composed of stout wooden slats knotted together with cords, the one which fell for him from out the promenade hatch was entirely of chain. That circumstance, he now mused, might have tipped his logick to the still-whammied condition of his senses; but it had not. He must have accepted it simply as some quirk of normal fantasy perception, or else a variation betwixt hatch and hatch. Laying the soles of his feet to the hard yet yielding iron links, he had mounted once more to the now-familiar surface of his Laputa.

  And found it dark, save for the stars. Seemingly the island flew just at the cloudline, with its nether regions in the storm and its surface above, for the lightnings appeared only as reflected flashes, never as jags sawtoothing the sky. (He thought, looking back from sobriety, that he must have quite forgot how what he perceived as sky above the concave surface of Laputa was in standard reality the upper skin of the enclosed balloon.) Stars twinkled underfoot as well as overhead. Now he recollected them to be tiny guidelights designed to outline the airship’s catwalks and vertical ladders for safety by night. Then, he had at first mistook those at his toes for gems embedded in the Laputan soil, and tried to prise up three or four to line his pockets withal, but given over the attempt when sooner than yield to his fingernails, they snapped them off to the quick. And he recalled that he sought a greater prize in that opiate for which fences paid many times its weight in gold.

  How he had contrived to traverse those walkways safely whilst still whammied, now defied his comprehension and sent cold thrills up his spine. Sure, the gods themselves must watch over fools, madmen, and opium dreamers. There were, of course, the guardrails; and when he was in his right frame of perception they seemed substantial, if as ill carpentered as the houses; but, whammied, he had found them mere withies and spiderwebs. Yet for all that, he remembered strutting and swaggering, stepping with a jaunty stride, now and again—he believed—whistling an air, forgetful that what had always appeared to him the solid if suspended ground of Laputa was in standard fact but empty air on either side the footpath, and a plunge through the lower fabrick of the balloon’s skin to the planet’s surface and death, as all passengers were fully forewarned.

  Yet traverse them he had, searching with little awareness of where to search, but with some vague notion of the Astronomers’ Cave and Laputa’s vital lodestone in its casing as likely being full of nooks and crannies for the caching away of small valuables. His problem, then, lay in reaching that said Astronomers’ Cave.

  Once during his peregrinations of the footpath, as he paused for another scan of the lights both near and distant, he had felt the footfalls of another human being vibrate in the supposed ground beneath him. Slipping into a space between Laputan houses, as he had done some days since when first hiding out on the island, he watched and waited until the climenole should go by. A climenole or some other servant he saw her to be—though just for an instant he might have mistook her for a wayward Laputan lady betaking herself to a rendezvous with her gallant; but her garments were those of servant or lackey: and moreover, the generous mesdames of Laputa took no care nor stealth to hide their affairs of the heart from their ever-abstracted husbands: so a climenole this one must be. Or, conceivably, a female astronomer careless, when alone, alike of the dignity of formal scholarly attire and the fashion of always appearing so absent-minded as to require the constant attendance of her own flapper.

  Indeed, she was not absent-minded at all, for she stopped briefly, at some little noise his boot made by mischance, and directed the beam of her lantern a little way between the houses, until he feared himself discovered and was preparing his excuses, when she turned away again. Noting her direction, he waited what he judged a safe while before taking up her trail, gliding along the path on hands and knees so as to avoid echoing the continued vibrations of her footfalls.

  He felt rewarded on beholding her, from a distance, when she halted and bent to open a trapdoor in the earth. From this orifice emerged the head of a second Laputan, and by what Jemmy could overhear of the words that passed between them, or, rather, of their tone—their speech coming to his ears somewhat distorted by the echoes both of the island’s concavity and of the whammy still fuming his brain (though he had then supposed it long dissipated), he understood them to be indeed climenoles to the astronomers, and not themselves astronomers; for on Laputa who, save servants, guests, and women, ever spoke with such unfashionably alert jocularity?

  And if servants they were to the astronomers, it then followed that their trapdoor must be a back entrance to the very Astronomers’ Cave which he sought. Huddling again between two houses, he waited, scarce breathing, until the second climenole had traveled back along the path in the direction from which the first had come, and all was once more quiet.

  Approaching the trapdoor, he had begun trying
to open it, and found this as seemingly futile a business as trying to prise the gems up from the edges of the footpath. Na’theless, where the jewels might be affixed with permanence, the hatch was designed to open, and therefore must open for him, too, could he but discover the trick of it. ...

  Stealth, he feared him, had given way to desperation before on a sudden that trap sprang at last open, and with a cry of triumph he swung himself down—only to see, when his momentum was already established, that the young female climenole stood ready for him with iron mace in her hand.

  Even then, he might have swung back up, he thought, had not sharp ridges sprung up on a sudden like Myrmidons in the slideway at his back, throwing him utterly out of balance—and when he regained it and found his footing, the poor, fair climenole lay senseless on the floor.

  How or when he had struck her remained unclear in his mind. Mishap it must surely have been, for ’twas never Jemmy Tolliver’s way to deal so of purpose with the fairer sex. But that, he had small doubt, was the chief reason they scoured Laputa for him now. Having found the poor young maid, they would hardly be of a mood to hear any excuses he could offer. But for her, he might have fobbed off his presence here above as an harmless stroll in the fresh air. Now, alas ...! Nor had he ever located the whammy, after all.

  And there was no where to run. Not on this flying island in the sky—not on the airship which it really was, neither. He could scarce elude them for ever. Fashionably abstracted philosophers that the King and Ministers—that is, the Captain and Watch Officers—might be on formal occasions, even they seemed most alert at present, and had brought up at least four saucy clear-sighted flappers with them, who even now scrambled every where about the paths, training their lanterns into each crevice and cranny. A mere matter of time. And if the poor damsel had died—for chafing her wrists and dashing her face with cooled coffee (from her own flask; he would that it had been spirits!) had done naught to bring her round—if she had expired indeed, then for Jemmy Tolliver ’twould be the long drop and dancing on air.