New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  Mrs von Bek spoke of the famous Englishman, Squire Begg, a cousin of hers, and his affinity with crows. He believed they possessed a primitive wisdom enabling them to talk in some way with humans, but first one had to learn and obey their language and customs, which were simple enough, though immutable. It was by these customs that, down the long millennia, crows survived. Assured of your courtesy, the crow would give full attention to your thoughts and desires. ‘Crows,’ she said, ‘came from all over the world to his London mansion in Sporting Club Square, and he was frequently sketched in the company of Egyptian, Amazonian or Antipodean crows, mostly hooded, who would mysteriously leave, returning without warning to their native grounds.’

  ‘I was once an initiate of my tribe’s Crow Cult. ‘ Rodrigo Heat’s words were thick as Mississippi mud. ‘My totem was the crow. I was sworn to protect the crow and all his kind, even with my life, even above my family. In return the crow offered us his wisdom. But his advice was not always suited to modem times.’

  ‘I heard of a young buckaree from up in Arizone who had his eyes pecked out by a crow. He went crazy in the sun, they said, and jumped off that old London Bridge up there, straight down until he hit the granite, thinking he was a crow,’ said Sister Honesty Marvell. ‘Nobody ever found out why.’

  Sam Oakenhurst suggested a game of Mad John Parker, but Honesty Marvell favoured Doc Granite, so in the end they made it a tambourine game and shouted like kiddikins over it. That night the Rose told Sam Oakenhurst that they might have to kill Paul Minct.

  At your service, he signalled, but bile came up in his throat.

  (We are not fragments of the whole, she would tell him, but versions of the whole. Mr Oakenhurst had told her of the last time he had stood in a ploughed field, full of bright pools of winter rain, on a fine, pale blue evening, with the great orange sun bleeding down into the horizon, and watched a big dog fox, brush high as he picked his way amongst the furrows, circling the meadow where he was hidden by the lattice of the hedge, sniffing the wind for the geese who had begun to cluck with anxious enquiry. All of it disappeared, Mr Oakenhurst said, in the Hattiesburg Roar. ‘I had thought that, at least, must endure. Now, even our memories are becoming suspect.’)

  He had no qualms about killing the man, if he proved actively dangerous to them, but he was not at all sure he could play this. He had given his word to something for which he might not possess the necessary bottom. By now he was as nervous of losing her approval as he was terrified by Paul Minct’s displeasure. The irony of this amused and sustained him.

  ‘Ma romance,’ she sang, ‘nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. But they shall not have muy coleur.’

  ~ * ~

  13. EL BUENO, EL FEO Y EL MALO

  THE THREE LEFT The Whole Hog on a mudbank near Poker Flats but not before Sister Honesty Marvell had butchered Roy Ornate in a quarrel over the nature of things. Paul Minct had finished her with a glass spike whereupon the swamp people, some devolved survivalists, had tried to crawl aboard, to be repulsed and mostly blown apart by the violent anti-gravity reaction of the colour to metal. They were extinguished by the power of their ornaments. Carly O’Dowd was dead, too, from a poison she had picked up somewhere, and there was reasonable fear of a whitey uprising until Rodrigo Heat put himself in charge.

  Almost as soon as they were ashore they came upon a scattering of the swamp people’s weapons, flung this far into the reed beds by the colour. Sam Oakenhurst had never held an original Olivetté PP6 before and he treasured the instrument in his hands, to the Rose’s open amusement.

  ‘Take up one of these weapons for yourself, ma’am.’ Paul Minct became proprietorial, motioning with his wicked fingers. ‘It will almost certainly prove useful to you.’ He bent and his arms, encased in hide, again emerged from their velvet wrappings to examine the scattered hardware. ‘I have made this journey before. Many times, this journey. Yes. This time we will go on.’ He straightened, turning the glittering weapon in her direction and, gasping at sudden pain, examined his pricked wrist. He watched the wand that had wounded him disappearing back into her cloak at the same moment as she apologized.

  ‘She is sometimes hasty in my defence.’

  ‘Swift Thom,’ he said.

  The wind was ugly in their ears. A grey whine from the north.

  ‘You would not prefer to pack this OK9?’ continued Paul Minct. ‘Some kind of back up?’ He dangled the thing by its flared snout, as if tempting a whitey gal to a piece of pie. But she had stirred a memory in him and he turned away, looking out to where the saplings shivered. To Sam Oakenhurst she flashed a fresh play, then she gathered her gravitas so that when, also controlled, Mr Minct turned back, she seemed proudly insouciant of any slight.

  Again Sam Oakenhurst recognized a game beyond his usual experience.

  ‘She is all I shall need,’ said the Rose, almost distantly, while Paul Minct retreated, having apologized with equal formality. He took the OK9 for himself and also hid a Ryman’s 32/80 (“a beastly, primitive weapon”) in his pack.

  They were walking up a well-marked old road which followed the edge of the lake. The road had run between Shreveport and Houston once. They could follow it, Paul Minct assured them, as far as San Augustine. ‘I have heard or read of a weapon called Swift Thom,’ he added as he lengthened his gait to lead them South. ‘The subject of some epic.’

  ‘Not the subject,’ she said. Oh, he is easily clever enough to kill me, Sam. He tricked me into a show.

  He doesn’t know that he succeeded. He will not dare risk a move on you until he’s sure of me. Sam Oakenhurst fell in beside her.

  I must take risks, Sam. He must not escape me. I am pledged to his destruction.

  ‘Hey, hola! Les bon temps rolla! Ai, ha! The good times pass! Pauvre pierrot, muy coeur, mon beau soleil,’ sang out Paul Minct up ahead. ‘What a day, pards! What a day!’

  A tremor moved the ground and the reed beds rippled.

  Around them suddenly boiled the cloudy landscapes, the powerful mirages, of the Free States, all in a condition of minor agitation, as if not fully in focus. Crazy tendrils erupted into a bewildering kaleidoscope, each fragment a fresh version of its surroundings and of the people inhabiting them. A thousand images of themselves, in a variety of roles and identities, poured away down fresh cracks in the fabric of their histories.

  Sam Oakenhurst found this a depressing illusion.

  ‘They refuse to search for the centre and hold to it against all attacks and temptations. There must be sacrifices. Lines drawn. And faith. You’re familiar with The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr Oakenhurst, you being a preacher’s son? There’s a book, eh? But if only life were so simple. We must press on, holding together, through this valley of desolation, to our just reward. We must know complete trust. And what a reward, my dears!’

  Orange and yellow pillars pissed like egg yoke into the sky and splashed upon a gory firmament.

  ‘Here we are,’ sang Paul Minct. ‘This is it!’ He paused before the yelling pillars and threw back his head as if to drink them up; his crude cartographic visor flickered and flashed and made new reflections. ‘We are about to pass into the Free States. This is the malleable world indeed! This, or one like it, must bend to our will. Do you not think?’

  The Rose was unimpressed. Not as malleable as some, she told Sam Oakenhurst. She moved with an extra grace as if until now her blood had hardly quickened. She had the alertness of an animal in its natural element. Sam Oakenhurst thought they were walking into the suburbs of Hell and he told her that while he remained at her service he was also entirely in her hands. This experience was too unfamiliar. He had thought the stories only legends.

  ‘Here is what all matter should aspire to,’ Paul Minct continued. ‘Here is true tolerance. Everything is free.’

  ‘Tolerance without mercy,’ murmured Sam Oakenhurst, willing to reveal this fear if only to disguise his other, more profound, anxieties.

&nb
sp; ‘We shall find further allies here!’ Paul Minct appeared to have forgotten his earlier pledge as he led them between the columns. ‘I will guide you.’

  But it was soon left for the Rose to lead them, with miraculous confidence, through the vivid shadows, through volatile matter and corrupted time. Perspective, gravity and the seasons were all unstable and Sam Oakenhurst felt he must throw up as Paul Minct, with angry gestures of refusal, had done after they had walked the Bridge of Rubies for uncountable hours. Mr Minct, expecting to be the most experienced of them, clearly resented the Rose’s easy pathfinding. Generally he managed to hide his feelings. It was as if, with the sureness of one who knew such waters well, she steered their boat through the wildest rapids.

  Agitated scratchings came from within Paul Minct’s mask and swaddlings. Occasionally the enmascaro uttered a little, shrill bubbling sound which added to Sam Oakenhurst’s own fearful nausea. For a while it seemed they passed between fields of stars, crossing by silver spans of moonbeams, but the Rose told them it was the abandoned forecourt of The Divided Arabia which at one time had been the largest shopping mall in the Western Hemisphere. What they witnessed was what it had become.

  ‘That stuff scares the devil out of me,’ Sam Oakenhurst admitted as they emerged from a forest of bright metallic greenery into a wide relief of desert dominated by the brazen stability of a tiny sun.

  ‘Now, my dears, this is more like Texas,’ said Paul Minct.

  ~ * ~

  14. NO ME ENTIERRES EN LA PRADERA

  THE FIRST TOWN they reached was Poker Flats, built in a wide yellow plain in what had been, Paul Minct told them, the old mustard-growing region. Her streets were full of whiteys and mixed couples and she was clearly a town given over almost entirely to license. Poker Flats announced herself as the Theater Capital of the Southwest and her main boardwalk was nothing but vivid marquees and billboards advertising simulatings, using living actors, of the great local V heroes, whose adventures Sam Oakenhurst had already skimmed at Lieutenant Twist’s. These were elaborate dramas concerning the love triangle of Pearl Peru, Bullybop and Fearless Frank Force, or the Quest for the Fishlings, featuring Professor Pop, Captain Billy Bob Begg and her Famous Chaos Engineers. Many of the protagonists were white. White barkers stood outside their booths and called to the newcomers. ‘So true you’d think it was V! Dallas Horizon.’ / ’It’s the net! Ontario Outer.’ / ‘Virtually V! Laramee Deadlock.’ / ‘Frank Force Face To Face! Ludoland.’ Their words were echoed overhead in the baroque calligraphy of the day. Power paint growled with all the brilliant vulgar bellicosity of the old circus towns. Poker Flats had been the first of the roving show cities to take permanent root. Such settlements were all over the Free States now, said Paul Minct, but the biggest were still Poker Flats and Porto Cristo.

  Paul Minct insisted they visit the shows and understand the nature of these dramas. ‘Real or fictional, black or white, they represent a breed of our own kind that has successfully escaped the logic of the Fault, discovering new universes beyond our own. There, my dear friends, Chaos and Singularity perpetually war, are perpetually in balance. And sometimes one is no longer certain which is which. Philosophies become blurred and intermingled out there in the Second Ether. This was how I first learned that it was possible to move from one version of our universe to another and survive. We never die, my dear friends. We are, however, perpetually translated.’

  What does he mean? asked Sam Oakenhurst.

  He understands something of our condition, she told him, but not much of it. He is like those old South American conquistadori. All he can see of this secret is the power and wealth it will bring him. He is prepared to risk his life and soul for that.

  Sam Oakenhurst grew fascinated with the legends portrayed on the stages. He talked about Pearl Peru, Corporal Pork, Little Rupoldo, Kapricom Schultz and others as if they were personally known to him. When the time came to leave Poker Flats, he bought several books of scenarios. As soon as they were back on the trail he studied them slowly, from morning to night, hoping to find clues to the versions of reality perceived both by Paul Minct and, in particular, Mrs von Bek. Perhaps the Fault was not the mouth of Hell, after all? Perhaps it was a gateway to Paradise?

  Walking beside the Rose, he recounted the tale of Oxford under the Squad warlords. The alien renegades, furious at Oxford’s resistance to their philosophies, informed the citizens that unless they immediately fell to levelling their entire settlement, colleges, chapels and all, they (the Squads) would eat their first born and bugger their old folk. ‘And Oxford, Rose, went the way of St Petersburg and Washington, but not Cheltenham, which is still standing but which has lost its first born. And her old people rarely, these days, walk abroad. ‘ The Squads had come in their black deltoid aircraft. Thousands. ‘They told us they represented the Singularity and we were now their subject race. If we refused to serve them, they punished us until we accepted their mastery. They have conquered, they boast, half the known multiverse and are destined to conquer the rest. Fearless Frank Force is their greatest ace. But nobody knows or understands the loyalties of the Merchant Venturer, Pearl Peru, whom he loves to distraction. His love is not returned. Pearl’s passion is for Bullybop alone. And Bullybop is a thorn in the side of the Singularity. Nobody is sure of her secret identity. Honour demands that Frank Force issue no challenge to his rival, yet Bullybop is marked by the Singularity as an outlaw. Here now is the moral conundrum we must solve before we can proceed along a further branch. There is a road, after all, Rose. There are many roads. And crossroads. I can sense them. We can choose some which exist or we can create our own. But there’s a formula, I know, and I must learn it.’

  ‘This mania came over one of my men the first time we ever passed through Poker Flats.’ Paul Minct was cheerfully dismissive of the Rose’s fears. ‘They either recover or they don’t. In the end we had to shoot Peter Agoubi, poor chap. Lead on, Mrs von Bek. I’ll take care of Mr Oakenhurst.’

  ‘It will pass,’ she said. ‘He will regain control of himself soon, I am sure.’ For my sake, Sam, if not your own!

  This demand brought him, within a reasonable period, back to his senses, but his lasting emotion was of loss, as if he had been close to the secret logic of the multiverse and able, like her, to navigate a purposeful course through those quasi-realities. He could not make himself throw away his scenarios. He buried them deep at the bottom of his knapsack.

  ‘It’s unflattering to have a V character for a rival,’ she pretended amusement. They had found some good beds in a ghost town about a hundred kays from San Augustine. She indulged her weariness, her poor temper. ‘What is the actuality of this Pearl Peru? She sailed by accident through the Cloud of Saffron and that made her a heroine?’

  In any circumstances Sam Oakenhurst would have decided that it was impolitic to show admiration for a character with whom the Rose seemed to be on intimate terms and whom she disliked. Such experiences were not, he told himself, helping his sense of identity. Once he caught himself yearning for the familiarity of the machinoix shutterbox.

  Those people were real, he knew. But what he had experienced as myth, she had experienced as history. He vowed that he must never lose her. He was prepared to change most of his life for her. His curiosity about her was as great as his love. Now, he thought, they are impossible to separate. Our shoots are interwound. Our luck is the same. We are of the Just... He had a moment’s understanding that he had given up his own madness in favour of hers. What had he accepted?

  You are sworn to this, she reminded him. From now you must accept only what I determine as the truth. You will survive no other way. Any independent decision of yours could result in my death. You know this, Sam. You have dealt the hands. Now you must play the game, or we are both dead.

  This is new to me, he said.

  Play it anyway.

  ~ * ~

  15. TWO STEP DELLA TEXAS

  AFTER THEY HAD traded the Ryman’s and two samsonites for ponies at th
e Flooding Whisper horse ranch just west of San Augustine they made better progress into Golden Birches, where pale light shuddered and huge crows flapped amongst the black lattice of the distant treetops. They arrived in Lufkin to discover that the Pennsylvania Rooms were still run by Major Moyra Malu, the shade of an elegant old swashbuckler who had fought with K’Ond’aa Taylor at Pampam Ridge and had carried the flag to victory for Charles Deslondes in ‘07.

  At Paul Minct’s suggestion she was to be their fourth, but not before another week’s gaming had all parties apparently satisfied. Then they took Major Moyra’s good Arabs and headed through the milk tides down to Livingston where Paul Minct sought out Herb Frazee. The ex-president of the Republic was giving demonstration hands of Cold Annie and telling Tarot to what was left of Livingston’s polite society. He refused Mr Minct’s invitation but suggested they look up Mrs Sally Guand’ in Houston.

  The road to Houston took them through Silver Pines. The strange, frozen forest was cold as death nowadays, said Paul Minct, but once there had been fires burning on every mound. They came out into foothills above a summer valley. ‘There’s Houston.’ Paul Minct pointed. The huge city had recently melted and reformed into a baroque version of itself. Its highways made arabesques, glorious in the sunlight. Yet even here the uneasy terrain threatened to vaporize, become something else, and Sam Oakenhurst yearned for California where Pearl Peru, he had read, was a living celebrity.