New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  As he expected, Thomas Paynes-Grey was there, sitting on one of the wooden benches that ran along the room, red and sweaty, a shock of curly blond hair sprouting from around the mask cocked open on his forehead. He was flexing his foible back to some lawful angle, after a thrust that must have been ferocious. In spite of his blond pencil moustache, his long, fine face looked very young, but having seen him lead the cadets against the Council one year before, Brentford knew that there was more to him than his healthy, cheerful mien. What that “more” was Brentford intended to find out as soon as possible.

  “Ensign Paynes-Grey?”

  “Oh, Your Most … er … Mr. Orsini,” said the ensign, rising and saluting, “Glad to see you again, sir. I must say I was just gutted by the results of the election.”

  Well, at least he was spontaneous and frank.

  So was Brentford. “Not as badly as I was,” he answered, sitting beside him. “I still have to let off some steam. Would you care for a little bout with me?”

  “I would be honoured. Foil, sabre, or épée?”

  “Foil or épée, whichever you like, as long as it’s not sabre. I never got the point of it. So to speak.”

  “Épée, then. Best of five?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I’ll get you some gear.” And before Brentford could say thank you, he had sprung to a cabinet and come back with plastron, jacket, mask, and glove.

  “I’ll give you one of my épées.”

  “It’s superb,” said Brentford, weighing the weapon and squinting down at its dark-bluish blade. He noticed that the épée was slightly unbalanced, but decided to say nothing about it.

  He put on the whites, and catching himself in a mirror, realized once again how much better they made you look—straightening the spine, cocking up the head, strengthening the hand; all of this turning you into an armoured angel who would face a dragon with cold-blooded aplomb. The mask was different but equally magical: it changed your head into the faceted eye of a fly, slowing time all around you, cutting your adversary’s swiftest moves into a Muybridge series of laughably clumsy swats.

  They soaked their points in the ink pots, saluted, and ten minutes later there was little that a short-winded but victorious Brentford hadn’t had a chance to observe about the ink-smeared Paynes-Grey. He could blame his opponent’s swashbuckling style on the training the cadets now received, no doubt, but the young man’s relentless dynamism and recklessness seemed to be entirely his own. A certain stubborness too—it had taken Thomas three failures to renounce the cut-over feint and low lunge that got him parried in septime and touched in the knee every time—could be understood, Brentford supposed generously, as the sort of bravura with which he felt a certain sympathy. But the young man was no killer; after catching up and moving one touch ahead, he had left himself open for two touches by Brentford in the wink of an eye. What’s more, in his salute afterwards he revealed no inbred hatred of defeat. Besides, from the way Thomas adjusted his uniform afterwards and slanted his cap back on his carefully recombed hair, one could deduce a touch of vanity and a sound consciousness of his effect on the fair sex (but here Brentford cheated, for he had other sources of information on that). All in all a good soldier, perhaps, but not a warrior.

  Instead, Thomas Paynes-Grey was, in a sense, the quintessential New Venetian officer who spends his life waiting for an attack that never comes. Brentford himself had almost become one of these idle Hectors, and it was to escape the gnawing feeling of purposelessness that he had chosen administration as a career: In that, at least, there was something to be done. He supposed that it was the same desperate need for action that had made this “young noble of the poop” a leader in the mutiny against the Council of Seven—that, along with the pleasure of casting himself as a romantic hero. Reasons, Brentford felt, as good as his own had been, and perhaps even not all that different.

  He took Thomas to the Map Room, a perfect place for a quiet conversation, mostly because it was always empty. Brentford liked its uncertain light, its subtle smell of dust, and the austerity of its meshed casings along the whitewashed walls. The cadet’s St. Jude banner hung folded in a corner, rusty red as a dried bloodstain, its crossed anchor and quarterstaff crumpled into near invisibility.

  “I don’t come here often,” Thomas confessed. “It looks too much like a classroom.” He had the vulpine smile of the bad pupil who knows his charm will get him through.

  “I think it’s more like a museum,” Brentford answered. “Or some enchanted place out of time. Very New Venner in that respect. But tell me, Ensign, don’t you ever wish that you could see more action? Besides brawls in Venustown, I mean.”

  Thomas smiled again at this.

  “There was a revolution last year, remember …”

  “I remember it very well,” Brentford sighed. “And it was a lot of fun. But I’m afraid it’s over now … or, at least, it is here. The front lines seem to have moved somewhat.”

  “I’m not sure that I see what you mean,” Thomas said, with a frown.

  “Let’s say that, as far as I’m concerned, New Venice is not in New Venice anymore. I’ll serve it abroad and do my best to save it from there.”

  “Abroad?” There was a sparkle in Thomas’s blue eyes. They had spent too much time watching the icepack through frosted field glasses, these eyes, and they clearly wanted a revenge.

  “I have been posted to Paris to run the New Venetian Embassy. And I need a military attaché. For about a year. You seem the perfect choice to me.”

  “We have embassies now?” Thomas asked, not even trying to hide how much the compliment had flattered him.

  “A shadow embassy, if you prefer. On a secret mission.”

  That sparkle again. Brentford watched Thomas as the scenes of his present life danced through his mind. A life of parades, pub crawls, unfocussed fights, and blurry girls in darkened gondolas. Thomas would miss it, no doubt, but after the rush of excitement that he had felt while leading the Cadets to revolution last year, boredom had taken its toll. Paris had a ring to it. It seemed synonymous with possibility. With adventure. With pride. With more blurry women.

  “I’d serve New Venice anywhere,” he announced grandly.

  Brentford felt not only relieved but also moved by Thomas’s loyalty, to the city and to him.

  “New Venice is anywhere we are, now. Welcome aboard, Ensign.”

  IV

  The Metis

  It would be stretching the truth to say that Gabriel was on familiar terms with Tuluk. Sure, they had once shared an icy iglerk, smelly furs, and a seal full of half-rotten birds, but to Gabriel that was something that he would rather forget than celebrate. True, Tuluk had saved his life when he was dying out in the cold, and that was a bit harder to obliterate from memory, but—blame it on Gabriel’s innate modesty regarding the value of that life, or on an ungrateful nature at the core of his soul—he was not one to dwell on this, either.

  The present visit made his situation still more embarrassing. The previous day’s mission with Jean-Klein Lavis had been to talk an expatriate into doing something that, after all, most exiles want to do eventually—return home. Gabriel doubted that the Inuk would show the same enthusiasm at the prospect of leaving his Arctic homeland.

  And so it was rather reluctantly that Gabriel walked into the drab Blithedale neighbourhood towards the pink-granite gate of the Technical Teams Workshops & Warehouses. His maternal grandfather had worked there for a while, and Gabriel remembered that on one of his first visits to New Venice, as a six- or seven-year-old boy, he had been totally awed by this gate, as if it were the entrance to the abode of Tubal-Cain. To his sober adult eye, the place looked more like run-down barracks, or even, if it had not been for the odd clang or echoed call, like some abandoned boomtown mine. A man muffled up to the eyes in a small office full of clocks reluctantly gave him the information that he requested, and—after a few misses—he found the workshop where Tuluk worked as a sled mechanic. The place had
an acrid smell of welded metal and cold grease, and Gabriel found himself liking it. He came on his mother’s side from a family of jewelers, locksmiths, and wrought-iron craftsmen, so in a sense, he was at home here, even if it was a home he seldom thought about.

  Tuluk was there with his back turned, amidst a shower of golden sparks, fixing the bent runner of a Coanda turbine sledge. Gabriel thought he had better wait before calling out to him, and so observed him for a while, thinking about the eeriness of seeing among these metal scraps and tools a man he had first met in the most unmerciful Arctic wilderness.

  Tuluk was a half-blood, and even in this respect he was the pure product of Inuk common sense: it was customary for Inuk women to get pregnant from passing sailors so as to avoid too much inbreeding among their small population. The babies were felt to be no less Inuit than the other children, and Tuluk, when Gabriel met him, was an unusually tall but otherwise typical bulky, black-haired Eskimo hunter, with bear claws protruding from the toes of his fur kamiks. The father, nameless and apparently faceless, did not appear on the surface of his son. Lighter eyes, perhaps, were the only clue.

  Last year’s events, however, had turned the tide of his life. Tuluk, who had always lived outside New Venice, had not gone back to Flagler Fjord with his friends Tiblit and Sybil Springfield. He had, instead, discovered in himself a fascination for the clockwork and engines of the qallunaat. There were certainly many things for which you could reproach the white men. They were full of themselves, and everything they did on a big scale was bound to be either frightful or a ridiculous failure, or any bizarre blend of the two. But when it came to building machines, they were as clever as Inuit, but with many more resources and the freedom to make errors. Propelled or turbine sleds, among other things, had mesmerized Tuluk, and he would pester the mechanics who tended them until they explained to him how they worked. Brentford had heard about this, and, always willing to oblige the Inuit in any way he could, had managed to get Tuluk an apprenticeship in the Technical Team of the Arctic Administration. Not only had Tuluk proved himself priceless when it came to repairing runners, but he had also quickly shown an innate sense of mechanics, and was currently taking night classes towards a Technician’s degree. He did not enjoy the math, but when it came to fixing things, he was reported to be something of a genius.

  “Hello, Tuluk,” Gabriel finally called out once the ringing noise had stopped.

  The Inuk, in coveralls and kamiks, turned around and lifted his brass goggles to reveal a big, warm smile that took Gabriel by surprise. He could have done without the long greasy handshake, though.

  “Gabiriliq. Good to see you. What brings you here?”

  Gabriel hemmed.

  “Well, you know me, I need a favour.”

  Tuluk laughed.

  “Yes. The qallunaat always needs something. He owns everything and he begs for the rest.”

  It was a bitter remark, Gabriel thought, but Tuluk had delivered it with more philosophy than aggression. The Inuk was after all half-qallunaat himself, and grew a little more so every day that he spent in New Venice. To some New Venetians, like Peterswarden, such cases represented a sad corruption of the native purity of the Inuit. To Gabriel, who was rather wary of purity-mongers, it was interesting to try to imagine what was going on in this doubly irrigated brain. Not that he had a clue. He continued, tentatively, “In fact, the favour goes both ways. Mr. Orsini and I would like to invite you on a trip, and we would be very happy if you accepted.”

  “A trip out there, on the ice? A hunting trip?”

  “Ah, you know we do not hunt.”

  “You mean you eat someone else’s hunt. Someone has to hunt, no? You want me to hunt for you?” Tuluk squinted. It had taken him some time to adjust to the idea that you did not have to hunt to be a man, and in fact it seemed to Gabriel that he was still not quite convinced.

  “No. It’s not that sort of trip. We are going much farther. Much, much farther. To the south. Among the qavaat,” Gabriel added, using the word that he thought meant both southerners and idiots—and which, for Tuluk, probably included Gabriel as well.

  “Why do you want me there?” Tuluk’s frown was one that all New Venetians who dealt with the Inuit came to know: a bizarre blend of curiosity and ironic distrust.

  “People need our help. Their country became too cold. They think that an Inuk could teach them a lot.”

  “But why this Inuk?”

  Gabriel had agreed with Brentford that it would be better not to use the jail as an argument. The threat would do little to convince Tuluk—quite the contrary. He would simply go back to living in the wilderness with the other Inuit and never be seen again in New Venice.

  “Because you know the qallunaat very well, for one thing. And because you can help them with their machines in the cold. They have a lot of machines there, even machines we do not have here.”

  Tuluk looked at Gabriel, his hunter’s eyes in slits, as if trying to spy where the trap was hidden.

  “We have enough machines here. And I don’t want to miss the classes.”

  Gabriel detected a hint of nervousness, the discomfort of a man waiting to enter a world where he does not quite belong, a man who fears that the slightest mistake will make him an outsider again, this time forever.

  “You will miss the classes, true. But your boss and tutors have agreed that you will get a lot of experience that people here won’t have and—” Gabriel had a sudden inspiration “—Mr. Orsini promised he will help you with the math. Once you’re back, you can pass the test as soon as you’re ready.”

  Tuluk pondered this. For the Inuit, the name Orsini was something of a gold-standard guarantee. Gabriel guessed that Tuluk did not know how far it had been devalued three days ago, and it certainly wasn’t the moment to disabuse him.

  “What is this place we are going to? Is it America?”

  “It’s farther than that. And on the other side of the ocean.”

  Tuluk nodded, obviously worried.

  “I am curious to see the world, but I do not want to be like these Inuit Mr. Peary took to America. They were shown like animals everywhere, got sick and saw the skeletons of their forefathers in a glass box.”

  “There will be no such things, Tuluk. We’ll work together. And I promise you that you will see things no Inuk has seen.”

  That triggered something. Tuluk bit his lip. “How long?”

  “About one year.”

  The Inuk looked around him, at this workshop that had become a home and the school where he learned the qallunaaq mind by dismantling and rebuilding its noisy, crazy, but crafty machines. But the curiosity that had brought him here was not so easily quenched, and Gabriel had been counting on that.

  “Do they have motorcycles there?” Tuluk finally asked.

  “Of course they have! And cars. And planes. And we will travel by Psychomotive, which may interest you.”

  Tuluk stood silent for a while. Not quite a white man yet, he did not seem bothered to be seen thinking deeply and at length before opening his mouth. As he smiled, Gabriel knew that he had made up his mind.

  “This Inuk will go with you, then.”

  Gabriel returned the smile. But beneath it, though he was glad that Tuluk would be around, he felt bitter, as if he had just conned the Inuk, like some vulgar fur trader. Whether he liked it or not, Tuluk had saved his life the year before, and now he could only cross his fingers and hope that he hadn’t offered him death as a payback.

  V

  Lady Franklin’s Friday

  It was two in the morning, and Brentford was waiting in the shadows that the shy moonlight could not reach. From where he stood he could discern under the arches on the other side of the Lady Franklin Plaza a covey of elegant women in black veils waiting for the passage of the Scavengers along the Rae Canal. The ritual brought back bitter memories of his brief stint as a garbage collector, and of the night he had found his first love, Seraphine Le Serf, among these women. In these days of Peter
swarden, the place seemed shadier and the night more menacing, as if it were Brentford being observed. But if he wanted to find Blankbate on a Friday night, this was about his only chance.

  A barge soon hit the embankment, and a few masked black shapes glided under the arches and immediately began rummaging among the fur and warm silks that were offered to them. Anonymous as the Scavengers were, Brentford could easily tell Blankbate from the others. Less from his bulk, maybe, than from his poise: as if he were being careful not to hurt others, he moved his hefty body in a thoughtful way that made him look even more dangerous. Brentford averted his eyes, trying to block out the hasty rustles and the muted moans that the wind carried raggedly to his side of the plaza. He tried to think of what he had done so far about that damned Embassy and what remained to be done. His very anger had made him fast and efficient. The Psychomotive was checked up and loaded and the false Canadian papers printed. The only quantity still unknown was the pilot, about whom the long-winded W. B. Sson had remained, for once, secretive. Meanwhile the news from Gabriel was good: in two days he had successfully enlisted such diverse characters as Tuluk and Jean-Klein Lavis. As for his own recruiting drive, besides a few bruises in the ribs, the mission to Paynes-Grey had been a pleasure and a breeze. Convincing Blankbate, however, would be a different kettle of rotten fish. And to speak frankly, Brentford would rather have the head Scavenger remain in the city to keep an eye on the new Regent-Doge instead of showing his ominous silhouette around Paris.

  As soon as the Lady Franklin’s Friday seemed to be over, Brentford hurried under the arches and swerved towards the embankment, hailing the garbage gondola just as it was unmoored.

  “Hey, would you pick me up?” he shouted from above.

  The beaked masks looked up at him. There were not many people who would dare to approach the Scavengers, but Brentford was one of them, and they recognized him at once.

  “Jump in,” said one.