“A wittle lalk,” Cam continued Ox’s tale. “Just to the bop and tack. A prunday somenade.”
“Real sport,” Ox said, again a little bit too aloud: “The animate against the inanimate, our spirit against Neverrest’s.”
“Mear against bountain!” lyricised Cam.
“Go now, Susie,” Ox whispered gently.
“What about a game of polo?” Susie asked. She wasn’t quite sure what she was doing. Polo was the last thing she wanted. But she did need the Snow-it-alls to keep right-sized around her. And she had a need too to test various of the waters she currently found on offer.
“Go,” Ox bade her.
“I am waiting,” Elaide announced from the palanquin.
“Will I see you again?” Susie asked the bears.
“The Vis-all-seer waits,” aghasted the two Snow-it-alls.
“Please, Susie,” Ox urged her once again.
“Will I?” Susie asked as she divided the palanquin’s curtains.
“Oh yes,” said Ox. “Sure of it.”
“Intubidably,” Cam insisted.
Susie climbed aboard. The curtains were drawn. One side lurched into the air. The starboard side lurched even higher into the air. That was then adjusted.
Meantime, on board, the consequential rumbling and tumbling and rolling and settling had been occurring.
When they were again under-lurch – ‘under-way’ would be to imply a plainness of sailing totally absent from the experience – Elaide said, “You are a guest to our region, as yet unaccustomed to our ways. That is the second instance of such. There will not be a third,” she said definitively. “You kept me waiting. I-knew-its do not keep Snow-it-alls waiting. The circumstances do not exist in which an I-knew-it keeps the Vis-all-seer waiting.”
“But …” Susie started to protest.
“No ‘buts’, girl,” said Elaide. “They do not, Susie, exist.”
“I’m not an I-knew-it,” Susie said smilingly to her hostess.
Who replied, equally smilingly: “Oh yes, Susie, you most certainly are.”
Chapter 20
Susie started feeling around her shoulder for an indication (however small) that another head may be growing there. She was considerably unreassured by finding not one bump, but a definite six – and a possible seven. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Being an I-knew-it is a privilege,” said Elaide. “It leads you to privilege. It leads you to the privilege of privilege. And to its privileges.”
“Having two heads?” asked Susie. The idea was not one which struck her single head as being oh-wow-whoopee worthy.
“Oh, I should doubt that. I’d have to check with Jeanie, to be certain, but I do doubt that,” said Elaide. “You can’t just arrive from Earth, you know, and expect all the rights of IAO citizenry. Two heads, that sort of thing.”
Whilst Susie was deciding whether to mew or to phew, O’Nestly asked: “Jeanie?”
“Professor O’Logist,” replied Elaide, amazed at the question. “Another Snow-it-all. Presumably a sort of cosmic compatriot of yours, Mister O’Nestly. She also designed the firmament trees. You will, of course, refer to her only as ‘professor’.”
“Believe me,” O’Nestly said, “I’ll try not to refer to her at all.”
How long the rest of the journey took would vary spectacularly, depending on whom was asked. Susie was no longer sure she wanted to be in the Iffies-Andes-Orbutties. She longed for an opportunity to be alone with Mr E that she might discuss with him their whoosh home.
Bluemerang became Susie’s contact. Because he had cleared the path of braindeer, he remained cosseted amongst laurels. Few activities cause time to go more quickly than basking in glory.
Just as few cause time to go more slowly than the shshing of a rumbling tummy. For Nespa the trip was, because foodless, endless. Time, if you’re nine hundred and ninety-nine, assumes another dynamic entirely. O’Nestly realised, to his shock, that he missed Miss Chief – or missed, anyway, the opportunity she afforded him of being able, with nurtured ennui, to correct her. This allowed him to feel superior. Realising he needed to feel superior made him feel very inferior, however. Gloom is a great dragger of time’s feet.
After a few minutes/several decades the port side of the palanquin clunked heavily on the ground. Topple, topple, topple. Then the starboard side. Mini-topple, mini-topple, mini-topple.
The curtains were drawn apart. The mussed band of the Sufrogs rumpled out of the palanquin. Elaide took a moment or two to compose herself before she imperioused from her conveyance to where several Emos were waiting to greet her.
The building outside which they stood appeared to Susie to be exactly the same as Snow-it Hall. A little smaller, perhaps, but essentially identical. She was going to ask Elaide about this. Elaide, however, was busy accepting the respect and salutations of those of her subjects deemed to be of sufficient prestige that they could be introduced to her.
“You are to help me prepare,” she turned around and said to I-knew-it 31 and 32. Again the I-knew-it chose to expel some of its unhappiness by louring at Susie.
Susie remained blissfully ignorant of the lour, however, as she was simultaneously tapped on the shoulder by Momma Shingle.
“Culture,” said Momma and cracked her knuckles, “sightseeing. I’m your guide.” And she started to Tigger down the road in front of her. “Now, to your left,” she said, “there is the Ughloovre. This was the inspired design by Snow-it-all Hitecht. ‘Archie’, to his many friends and admirers. I’ve never really understood why, to tell you the truth …” At which point Poppa pointed out to her that they were alone. “Please not to dawdle,” she shouted back at Susie and the Sufrogs, currently desultorying around the phhhting door which had just swallowed Elaide and her entourage.
The huddle shuffled forwards. “You’ve heard of culture vultures?” asked Susie.
“Certainly,” said Momma approvingly.
“Well, I’m sort of a culture sparrow,” Susie said. “Sightseeing, playing the tourist – I don’t mean to be rude, but they’re not really my thing. Exactly.”
“Exactly,” Momma seemed to echo.
Susie didn’t know whether Shingle was mimicking her or making a fresh point. “Exactly?” she asked.
“Exactly,” Momma confirmed. “Vultures aren’t born vultures, you know. They are sparrows grown into vultures by diligence and application.”
“That’s nonsense,” Susie said about a nanosecond before she regretted it. “What I meant to say is, surely vultures are born vultures.”
“You are new to the IAO,” said Momma, borrowing some of Elaide’s condescension and sprinkling it with a gloss all of her own.
“New to our ways,” said Poppa.
“Being contrary is not encouraged,” said Momma.
“Contrariness,” said Poppa, “leads to questioning and questioning leads to dissatisfaction.”
“And dissatisfaction leads to anarchy,” Q.E.D.’d Momma.
“It was to oust anarchy that the Snow-it-alls first took power,” said Poppa.
“It was their civic duty,” said Momma.
“Our civic duty,” Poppa added.
“Emos had to be protected from themselves,” said Momma.
“Snow-it-alls never wanted power,” Poppa reasonabled at them.
“They had power thrust on them,” Momma said. “They had to take that power or watch the world crumble into nothingness.”
“World-savers though we are,” humbled Poppa, “we are reluctant world-savers.”
“Expecting nothing,” martyred Momma, “for our pains.”
“A lack of contrariness,” Poppa said.
“A modicum of discipline,” said Momma.
“Sight-seeing,” said Poppa.
“Culture,” said Momma. “We don’t want to insist.”
“You,” said Poppa, the velvet of whose voice had suddenly turned to thistles, “don’t want us to insist.”
“To our left,” said Momma,
stepping out, “is the Ughloovre. This was the inspired design of …”
Sight-seeingly Susie and the Sufrogs trudged behind her.
Chapter 21
Thus they trudged, oh for half-an-hour or so.
The Ughloos was the name both of the ‘town’ and of the individual dwellings. Susie remembered one of Phil’s lessons about South Africa in the days of apartheid. The contempt those in power had for those they governed could be gleaned by the fact that they could not be bothered to think of a name for Johannesburg’s black suburb, merely encapsulated the long-winded South Western Township to the more easily articulated Soweto. Susie could not help wondering whether Phil would also have used the word ‘contempt’ to describe this dual use of the word ‘ughloo’.
The real problem with sight-seeing in The Ughloos was that there were no sights to see. Or, rather, what there was to see, you saw once and then saw it repeated a hundred times.
The streets were geometrically straight. At the same point in each, at the same height, from an identical lamp-post cctv cameras pointed fixedly along the streets’ length. At regular intervals the horizontal streets were crossed by lateral ones. Which shared with the horizontal ones their uniformity.
Each ughloo was like a child’s drawing of a house. A door divided two windows on the ground floor. The first floor had windows directly above those of the ground. The walls were painted white. The red roof (presently covered in an even snow) rose to a ‘v’ at the top. Each ughloo had a small garden before it, in which grew a single firmament tree – as brashly decorated as their ‘natural’ cousins but of about a tenth their size. Beneath the left window a dozen yellow flowers peeped through the snow; beneath the right one a dozen red ones.
Momma Shingle waxed lyrically on about the beauty of these dwellings, how the Emos had previously lived in anarchy and chaos, and how much happier they now were living within the ordered regime ordered by the Snow-it-alls.
Susie thought it quite the horriblest place she’d ever seen. She ached to get Mr E to one side and connive with him about their return to Earth. Until such was possible, she thought the most prudent line to take would be that of least resistance. Her Sufrogs seemed to have intuited the same thing: It wasn’t that a cat had got their collective tongue, more that a panther had.
As they wended their way through these cloned and claustrophobic closes, so looming ever larger above them was the mountain, the peak of which they had glimpsed with the polo-bears.
Mount Neverrest.
Now as they drew closer to it they could start fully to appreciate the immensity of it. This was no figure which scratched an itchy sky, this was a colossus enveloped by a sky and which shrank that sky. The firmament trees which had seemed mighty in the forest now looked twigly insubstantial.
Susie stopped in awe. She’d never seen anything even vaguely this huge, this daunting, this … well, everythinging. Emotions and thoughts hurtled through Susie at that moment at a speed so fast that, like the figure earlier in the sky, she’d been unable to identify them. But they got buried deep within her psyche. They were life-changing. For years to come, at moments of stress or distress, some of those emotions, some of those thoughts would return to her. More slowly on such occasions. And they’d pow-wow with her, smoke a pipe of peace, settle her a little – and settle within her.
“That’s where the bad people go,” said Poppa following Susie’s glance.
“No, no, Poppa,” said Momma, “only the very bad people. Those who are a real threat to emocracy.”
“You send bad people there?” Mr E astounded. “It’s beautiful. If you’ll, don’t you know, excuse me …”
“Where are you going?” Susie panicked. She had Bluemerang embibbed. But she suddenly felt uneasy at the way the Sufrogs, as a group, were splintering.
“There are gods sitting on that mountain,” said Mr E. “I have a need to talk with them.”
“Gods!” sneered Poppa.
“The worst of our criminals are condemned to climb to its peak,” Momma laughed. “It is a sentence of death. None has ever returned.”
“And the polo-bears?” Susie asked.
“Polo-bears!” sneered Poppa, who had made a general practise of sneering, and was thus rather good at it.
“They climb it,” Susie insisted. “They just told me they did.”
“Polo-bears … It’s not just their size which is whopping,” said Momma, picking her words with care. “Polo-bears … fantasise.”
“You’ll be at the Ughloovre,” said Mr E.
“I’m coming with you,” O’Nestly told the beanbag frog.
“I’ll meet you, don’t you know, at the Ughloovre,” said Mr E firmly.
“I could do with a conversation with your gods,” said O’Nestly. “I presume they know English.”
“They know every language,” Mr E told him. “And none.”
“Well, that’s that cleared up, then,” said O’Nestly as he and Mr E sauntered off.
“And here, on your right, Susie,” said Momma, “we have the intersection between 6th Street and 3rd Road.”
“It’s just like the last intersection,” said Susie, whose vague whim to join Mr E and O’Nestly now sprouted into yen.
“Of course it is,” said Momma. “It is precisely therein wherein lies its beauty. In the economy both of imagination and scale. And cost of construction, of course.”
“Of course,” enthused Poppa.
“Of course,” desultoried Susie. She looked yeningly down the street. Mr E and O’Nestly had disappeared.
* * *
“Be seeing you,” said O’Nestly to Mr E, once they were out of sight of the Snow-it-all.
“I thought,” said Mr E, “you were coming with me.”
“No disrespect, Mr E,” said O’Nestly, “but I find my conversations with the gods a touch one-sided. Maybe I’m just deaf.”
“We converse best when we listen,” said Mr E.
“Yes,” said O’Nestly, “that’s sort of what I mean. I needed a ruse, Mr E. I’d been ughloo’d beyond endurance, cultured to within an inch of my life. Sure, it’s not the gods’ company I need, Mr E, but my own.”
“So often, don’t you know,” said Mr E, “the same thing.”
“And there we go again,” said O’Nestly. “I know it’s English. I understand what the words mean. But their meaning … ? Seriously, it eludes me.”
“That which eludes us, don’t you know, is that which we most often embrace.”
“There we go, Mr E, once again,” said O’Nestly. “I hope you enjoy your chat with the gods. Me, I’m off to find a stray salamander or something. Have a chat about matters more … of this world.”
“It is often, don’t you know …” Mr E started to say.
“No,” O’Nestly stopped him. “No, thank you, Mr E. Enough’s enough. One more pithy epigram and I could be seriously pithed off. Thanks all the same. I’ll see you back at the Ughloovre.”
And he turned into the street directly on his right. Mr E marched on, his eyes fixed on a Neverrest which seemed to grow both in height and awe-inspiringness with every step he took closer to it.
* * *
“And here, Susie, on your left,” elsewhere Momma was saying, “we have the intersection between 8th Street and 7th Road. You will notice that it has the same architectural excellences as did the inter- …”
She was cut short by a giant hoot which sounded from above the cctv cameras.
“Ah, the Vis-all-seer’s speech,” said Momma. “Sad though it is to have to foreshorten this delightful tour of The delightful Ughloos, it is time, Susie, for us to return to the Ughloovre.”
At which point, from within each of the ughloos, emerged two Emos, of apparently identical appearance. These, at the end of their path, turned towards the Ughloovre and at an equal and uniform speed headed for the central building. This manoeuvre lacked any of the spit or polish of a military tattoo; but neither did it have the drudge of reluctance endemic in a school
crocodile. It was totally devoid of any emotion at all. Neither for or against. The response was less automatic than automoton, clockwork soldiers trooping a lack of colour, a music box ballerina twirling mechanically to tinned music.
* * *
Mr E found himself at the foot of the mountain. He then found himself a niche, protected from the elements, where he could armchair himself for his conversation. He knew it was going to be a lengthy chat. He needed to be comfortable for it.
* * *
O’Nestly didn’t know which street he was in. Nor did he care. He yearned to get lost, to feel something – even if that something was anxiety. But with the Ughloovre constantly visible on one side of him and Neverrest on the other, getting himself completely lost was not an option. Even a mild disorientation required a lot of imagination.
Around him too the Emos were making their uniform progress towards the Ughloovre. He wanted to stop one, question him – or her, there seemed to be no way of differentiating – about life in The Ughloos. What food they ate, how much they had to work, what they did to entertain themselves. But it would, he felt, have been akin to stopping a packet of Corn Flakes on a factory conveyor belt, asking those Corn Flakes the same question.
And then, out of the blue, O’Nestly noticed one of the Emos giving the quickest flick of its eyes, the merest twitch of its head, and O’Nestly knew he’d been seen.
He sensed that it would be prudent to assume some distance between himself and that Emo. But he resolved to follow it.
It was just as well that he did.
Because two intersections later, that Emo simply keeled over in the street. The other Emos merely stepped over it.
O’Nestly ran over to it.
It seemed dead.
Chapter 22
There is no ‘right’ way to pray, no way that is more reverential than others. There is no correct form of address either for God or for a god. It is not gods who demand pomp and pomposity. It is certain priests.
Mr E was praying. The look of him, though, was that of a club’s doyen comfortably ensconced in a leather chair.
Susie and the Snow-it-alls Page 9
