Nemonymous Night (38 page)

By-passing the various books that will one day be available to tell of the adventures of Greg and his family in Whofage, they returned to the station just in time to hear the tannoy’s announcement of their train’s impending resumption of its journey to the Earth’s Core.

*

After leaving Whofage Station, it wasn’t long before the train came to a series of irritating halts... with intermittent hisses of brakes.

“Engineering works,” suggested Greg.

Unusually, illumination within the carriage was a few notches of glimmer above pure darkness—thanks, it seemed, to a few uncertain chinks in the cavity-walls that allowed a thin effulgence from an ever-weakening Sunnemo... or so Greg assumed. His two children were sitting patiently on the opposite side of the carriage—far too patient to be believed possible, but they were probably over-awed by the novelties involved in this journey—as they had yet insufficiently evolved to be able to empathise with—or, rather, “wear”—their alter-nemos who had already travelled throughout Inner Earth during earlier times.

“It’s a pity we couldn’t visit Sudra this time,” said Beth, the children’s mother. Greg nodded, as she continued: “I hope her shoe business is keeping its head above water.”

“Bound to be,” said Greg, “with all those preparing for war.”

“I don’t know if she has military footwear in some of the displays.”

Greg laughed, saying: “Well, those jingle-jangly ones are certainly not suitable for spies!”

At that point, the train began to travel forward more consistently, if still painfully slowly—leaving Sunnemo’s dim light behind.

The two children took this opportunity—amid much fidgeting—to attend to some necessary matters of ablution or body-dispersal.

“Can’t you do that a bit more quietly?” snapped Beth.

Greg lit another spill, but the children had, by then, resumed their more natural sitting positions. Amy tugged up and down the padded armrest from its slot in the seat’s back—as if rehearsing some future tantrum.

“That’s enough of that,” said Greg, as the train finally picked up speed.

*

The train roared through the tunnel cavities like dust through a vacuum’s nozzle. Hours of wild churning passage (each chug having become a rough transition towards a uniform teeth-grinding surge) as the train’s travel touched upon the fasttracks... with the carriage vibrating and each pair of points being crossed with surprising ease as the train plunged onward alongside the very close proximity of the black cavity walls that formed the untouching but closely-hugging tunnel-sides. The passengers became accustomed to their own nerves, as they attempted to sleep.

Eventually, the train emerged into a more consistent area of Sunnemo light, where the cavity walls widened sufficiently to allow the appearance of surface travel, the striated mould on the rocks even granting the terrain a feel of fields: dunes of traditional countryside vanishing towards the horizon where Arthur imagined an English village nestled with its churchspire prominent... but not prominent enough yet to see. The trees were mysterious figures—perhaps setting out for Dunsinane.

Soon, however, Arthur (yawning and rubbing his sleepy eyes) saw the terrain had become less ‘traditional’ and in a field of mould turned brown, if not black, he saw thousands of boys squatting: each with a single overgrown ear: surrounded by bottles and cans and packets: delving into the subcarpet of Inner Earth with trowels.

Upon a distant hill sat a giant Toilet Frog, as if overseeing the ‘labourers’.

Arthur silently wept. He realised, frighteningly, that one could not escape the dream sickness—even here within Inner Earth, where they had all been assured dreams would be easily distinguishable from reality... as they had earlier been promised would be the case in the erstwhile zoo grounds of man-city, an area of the past which had been forgotten amidst subsequent events, forgotten not only by Arthur but, sadly, by us, too. Even fiction has its own version of pitiful senility amid the other realities to which it ever tries to cling.

*

Scene: Lecture Hall, Earth Towers Hall, London

“A new theory has emerged. We now need to proceed speedily from hypothetical literary matters concerning the use of Fiction as the New Magic in the role either of genuine cure or, at least, of constructively believable panacea. The Art of Fiction needs, therefore, to progress towards a stricter and more verifiable account of what happened or what will happen in the final war between humanity and a terrible foe and, subsequently, by extrapolation, to become a means to the end of neutralising the results of that very war.

“Heretofore, it was believed (and I am the first to admit that I was one of those believers) that the Core—aka Earth’s Core, Mount Core, Sunnemo, Jules Verne’s Centre Of The Earth—housed a single malignancy known as the Angel Megazanthus or the Infinite Cuckoo or other possible names that were listed by various protagonists. Gradually, however, queries began to crop up as to whether its initial appearance as a malignancy represented in effect a benign force in disguise. One that fought on humanity’s behalf.

“Then, with even more powers of creative meaning and truth, it was proposed that the force inhabiting the Core had not
started
its life there but had always existed as a generally migrating form in a wider universe... but then it was plucked from its otherwise slow and self-occupied passage through space-time and transported to the Core—perhaps accidentally—by a means of public transport invented by humanity.

“It was a proposal coupled with a diverse concept of dream sickness, a sickness that yet enabled the potentiality for good to evolve.”

Stub of pencil: Aide Mémoire. I’m getting stuck. The fact that a core could double up as a sun was probably the most crucial ‘vision’, when Captain Nemo—all those years ago—showed Sunnemo to Mike from the window of the Drill’s corporate lounge. And I’m due to explain that the ‘skies’ of Inner Earth are beginning to be populated with vast machines that rival even Sunnemo in size and it must be wondered if these are related to the Unidentified Flying Objects that often pepper our surface skies. But a singularly outlandish flying-saucer hovers, currently, over Klaxon City, like a spinning wheel churning through soft earth as well as off-detritus. End of notes.

*

“The fish smelled!”

Arthur smiled as he replaced another divot above the body that he and his younger sister Amy had just buried during a solemn ceremony of childish reveration... marking a departure from life by one of Amy’s loved pets.

“He didn’t!” Amy dabbed at her eyes.

At that moment, a low-flying helicopter—vanes clacking fast—banked over the apartment towers, criss-crossed as in a display of aviation above the allotments and finally churned quickly into the distance. If children were able to feel their own paranoia for what it was, then Arthur sensed that his worst enemy was the pilot of that chopper spying on him... and, with the sensitivities that only children can feel but not understand, he somehow knew that the pilot was himself (Arthur) from a future he was yet to inhabit.

He turned to Amy, deciding to ignore his dark instincts with regard to the diminishing pinprick of the helicopter now being lost to the suburban horizon. While both their sibling feelings towards each other were typically abrasive he did, at heart, worry about her and, before being able to stop himself, he proceeded to quench Amy’s tears regarding her recently deceased goldfish.

“You’ve still got a canary in a cage. And that fish really smelled!”

“It only smelled after it died.” Her sobs worsened to the extent of giving her words an even higher pitch than normal.

When they had found her dear fish floating at the top of the bowl bloated like a human ear, the room was so filled with fumes, Amy’s canary showed signs of soon choking to death itself had not the fish-bowl been removed forthwith to the outhouse. And, if not death, certainly some state between life and death which could not easily be defined.

Arthur stared at Amy, his immediate impulse caught between hugging her and scolding her for being so sentimental, but the words he used to convey this thought to his brain were much simpler than words such as ‘scold’ or ‘sentimental’. He recalled their mother’s story of dream sickness and wondered if it would be any use in comforting Amy by reminding her of it in words she could understand. Arthur himself had failed to understand their mother’s version of it, but deep within yet another instinct similar to the earlier one regarding the helicopter, he understood the story quite well as he replayed it in his mind.

Once upon a time—their mother had begun by telling them—there was a country where people could not judge between the state of dreaming and that of experiencing real things while awake. A girl called Sudra lived in that country. Not a country of the blind, but a country of dream uncertainty. Sudra loved the new shoes that she had been given for Christmas. But how could she be sure they were new enough? Or even shoes at all in such a world? She decided to visit the wisest man in the country who happened to live in the same village as Sudra and her family. This man told her the shoes were not only new, but also real. She was relieved—at first. Until she worried if the wisest man in the country was a dream himself. Why would the wisest man in the country happen to live in the same village as Sudra? But he had to live somewhere. He had even claimed he was the wisest man in the whole world, not just the wisest man in this particular country. Did this claim not prove he was lying, and, if lying, did not the probability of this being a dream increase considerably? Or lessen? Sudra didn’t know where to turn. The shoes were strange shoes since at the front and back of each one were little bells. And they were yellow shoes. Her parents said this would help them find her, should she get lost. But Sudra had never seen shoes like them before in the country where she lived. They must have been specially made. And the family was so poor how could they have afforded such bespoke shoes? She decided to test out the reality of her current thoughts by unthinking them. People got over deaths by unthinking them. They got over grief and pain simply by unthinking them. Yet she still smelled the countryside that surrounded the house, she still smelled all the common and customary smells of the house itself... and even with her eyes closed as she concentrated on unthinking all her doubts, the smell of the smells continued to smell around her. And when the parents entered the room to find her, she had vanished! Only the shoes remained, sitting silently on the yellow carpet. But Sudra’s smell remained for her parents to follow.

A sad or inscrutable ending—their mother had explained—but one that had many possible meanings.

Indeed it did, thought Arthur, as he more simply retold the tale to Amy. And as Amy wiped the tears away, she even smiled. Now the whole world would be her fish. Just one of the tale’s many morals.

They laughed as many other morals of their mother’s fable took root.

Meanwhile, a huge spinning wheel appeared over the suburban skyline, constructed of many shining metal stanchions and cylinders, its central top cockpit filled with the biggest head of an unknown creature the children had ever seen. Soon, however, at a vast slant in the sky, it dipped towards the ground where its spinning edges began to delve: throwing up great cascades of earth like fountains of detritus towards the clouds that soon became gritty themselves. This Unidentified Flying Object soon vanished below the ground towards further skies it hoped existed inside the Earth—or it had simply grounded itself like a pitifully sick whale beaching upon the bank of a river.

“If the fish smelled anything,” said Arthur, “it certainly can still smell you, Amy.”

And he took her hand to go inside.

“Wait!” shouted Amy. And she picked up her favourite flowerpot nearby, in which sat her favourite doll, and she took this with her as she followed a now freshly unthinking, unthoughtful Arthur overland towards their home.

*

Scene: In Paternoster Square: just outside Earth Towers Hall, Klaxon City.

“There was no scene-setting,” said Crazy Lope, “only the bare stage.”

“Did anyone introduce Sudra?” asked Edith with the parasol. Indeed, she bobbed it up and down with the rhythm of her words.

“She did her best. Nobody knew what to expect.” Lope was fascinated by the lady’s parasol, if not hypnotised.

“What did Sudra say?” asked the matronly lady, still in tune with the parasol.

“Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, why keep saying her name? There’s only one person we can talk about at a time.”

“Well, what was said?”

“Verbatim? You want it verbatim?”

“As far as possible.”

The parasol remained dead still, despite a breeze, as Lope did his best to repeat, for Edith’s benefit, the exact words which Sudra used during her speech from the bare stage:

“‘
Speech needs nothing but the words and nothing outside of what was actually said. The explanation of my theory, therefore, will, today, be uninterrupted by scene-setting or, even, questions. I shall simply launch into it, as I have already done with the words about speech above, and then launch out of it before you have the chance to know what has happened. Indeed, a being’s most significant sign of humanity is speech. Once upon a time, speech developed slowly but, at least, it did develop and only in rare cases did it remain in the realm of animal grunts. But, now, children are becoming less and less innocent with the onset of an increasingly modern civilisation. Their eyes become cowed with experience, as if they can foresee the sex in which they’ll be forced to partake, by gratuitous choice or by love or by lust or by rape... or by a combination of any of these. Speech is part of this process, that and self-awareness, body-awareness, gender-awareness, genital-awareness... even before puberty. No wonder a sparkling infant soon becomes dowdy and bleary-eyed... with sorrow and sadness underlying the veneer of its happy-go-lucky speech. Another factor, too, is madness. You may feel the impossibility of self-madness. You may look at drunks or lunatics or any of the fringe people in the street mouthing obscenities or simply shouting nonsensical noises or grunting like animals. Indeed, as a side issue, have you noticed how even ordinary, clean-living folk are now more prone to mouthing uncouth words? Anyway, you may be confident in your own sanity but, then, completely unpremeditated, you find yourself shouting out... angry, say, at how the waitress is late with your order or, simply, the stress of an increasingly modern world finally takes its toll on you... and that is merely the beginning of uncontrollable madness taking you over as the language of speech once slowly took you over when you were an infant…’”