Nowhere Near Milkwood (18 page)

Yes, your King is in a bad position. My knights have devastated your ranks. Your Queen has fallen to a pawn (the shame!) and my rooks have yet to enter the fray. While you consider your next move, I will tell you a story. You are my only friend now; the prison guards refuse to listen to me. Whenever I try to talk to them, they simply open their hideous mouths and gibber. I can almost believe it when you tell me they are not men at all, but intelligent apes who have recently paid a visit to the barber.

My name, of course, is Titian Grundy. Once, I was the Prefect of Police. I had money, power, the love of auburn-haired women. I knew the President personally. My influence over him was profound. I taught him how to balance on a trapeze and how to juggle ugli-fruit. In return, he paid close attention to my suggestions concerning subsidies to elk farmers. Our relationship was one of mutual help and respect. We were a symbiosis. Possibly even a gestalt.

He lived far away from the City, in a field of blue grass by the banks of a tawny river; in a golden tower full of music machines. When an itinerant band of jesters, mummers and acrobats set up their yellow tents in his field, he asked permission to join their troupe. They refused, however, because of who he was. Yet the following morning, when the Carnival opened, there he was, juggling and tumbling with the best of them. I alone had arranged it for him. Nothing was too much to ask.

And similarly, when I wished to extend my elk farm high into the Carbuncle Hills, he lent me a pair of silver scissors to cut through the red-tape. In other words, I was granted a licence without so much as a murmur from the Ministry of Environment. Twice its former size, my farm earned me twice as much in subsidies. I even purchased a single elk and let it roam free on my grounds.

But I am already digressing. You are plainly not interested in pastoral reminiscence. Very well, I shall return to my story. The story in question concerns the day when I solved the very last crime in the history of the world. I recall every detail as clearly as a dandrum recalls a bugaboo. On that day, I threw down my pen, sat back in my chair and lit a cigar. It was obviously a time for celebration, yet a nagging doubt pulled at the corners of my mind. With astonishing ease, I ignored it and left my padded office. I have a genius for not taking things to their logical conclusion.

Out in the street, I mounted my powered unicycle and threaded my way through the Talking Plaques. Talking Plaques were men and women who had been recruited from the ranks of the unemployed. Their task was to recite a list of all the crimes ever committed on that spot since the world began. Thus, whenever I approached them they would call out things like, "Dorian Bilious dropped litter here on 13th November 2503," or "Thomas Major assaulted a minor here on 24th May 1762," or "Ug stole a piece of meat from Og here on 6th August 20,307 BC."

It was incredibly irritating, of course, to be assailed from all sides by these lists. But as the scheme had been my own idea, I felt that I had no right to complain. The Talking Plaques were sometimes clustered in large, dense groups, so dense indeed that wide detours often had to be made around them. When a particularly compact group was approached, the resultant cacophony was deafening and the actual words incomprehensible.

Few areas of the City were free of these groups. Indeed, few areas of the entire land. A great many crimes had been committed since the world began. I even had two such groups ensconced in my own home.

Eventually, I managed to steer my unicycle onto a road relatively free of the ghosts of past crimes and gunned the engine to maximum speed. This road took me out of the City and towards the President's tower. He was spending less and less time at work, as his obsession with juggling overtook his love of politics.

The President had built his tower on one of those very rare places where not a single crime had ever been committed. I was grateful for this. In the distance, I could just make out a row of Talking Plaques. But they were out of earshot and thus I was spared their hideous monotone babblings.

The President received me as cordially as always and poured me a cup of blue-green tea. Then he wound up his music machines and we enjoyed an hour or two of Cereal Music. After the machines had wound down, he offered me mulled wine jelly, but I could see that his fingers were itching to resume juggling. On the table next to his Presidential telephone stood a bowl of bruised and battered ugli-fruit.

Reluctantly, I declined his offer and got down to business. I kept an eye out for his wife but she was not there. In fact, she was hardly ever there. She had her own apartment in a geodesic dome located far beyond the Pallid Colonnades, where I often brought her gifts of artificial flowers and edible ribbons for her auburn hair (yes, I admit it. I was having an affair with her. We had spent many happy hours trying to occupy the same point in space-time.)

The President shook me by the hand and congratulated me. I had solved the very last crime in the history of the world, he said, and thus had made the globe a better place. Just out of curiosity, he asked me what this very last crime had been. Glancing at the notebook I kept in my top pocket, I told him. The notebook said this: "On 21st December 1999, Andy Fairclough did forget to brush his teeth."

So my job was finished, he added. After all, solving crime was what I was paid to do. The Police Department could now be closed down and I would be set free to retire to my elk farm.

At this I shuddered. This, of course, was the nagging doubt that I had successfully ignored earlier. I have, you see, a horror of elks. The last thing I wanted to do was to retire there among them, even though my herd consisted of only a single specimen.

I explained all this to the President. He listened attentively enough, his hands making little juggling motions under the table. My only other option, he said, was for me to declare myself unemployed and become a Talking Plaque. This was almost as unacceptable as the first option. Together we sat and thought deeply about the problem.

Eventually, prompted into inspiration by juggling-withdrawal, the President came up with a solution. He would change the law to make more work for me. For example, he would make illegal the possession of a nose over, or under, a certain length. This was an admirable solution indeed. Immediately this law was passed, I set about arresting those criminals whose noses were illegal, and researching the past to discover all those who had formerly possessed illegal noses and had thought they had escaped the long (but not too long) arm of justice. A clause exempted the President — whose own nose was formidable — from prosecution.

It was not long before I managed to solve these extra crimes. Many of the Talking Plaques were arrested and replaced by those whose noses were within the parameters of acceptability. However, the total numbers of Talking Plaques increased, as the jails began to fill up with owners of immoral proboscises.

Not that I was worried by the fact that all these extra crimes had been solved as well: I knew that I could rely on the President to change the law again. And, true to form, that is exactly what he did. This time, it was ginger beards that we made illegal. And, after that, dirty fingernails. In quick succession, we changed the law thirty-six times. Among others, things that had once been acceptable but were now heinous crimes included: owning pets, picking of the left ear, appendicitis, talking too quickly, talking too slowly and liking owls.

And then one day, when I arrived at the President's tower with a proposal to outlaw birthmarks, I found him lying face down on the floor, gnashing his teeth with rage. His tower was in disarray; broken music machines lay everywhere, bubbles of music floating free and bursting with resounding discords against each other. I thought, at first, that he had failed to perfect some particularly difficult juggling trick and had destroyed his tower in a frenzy of ugli-fruit collisions, but then I saw that the fruit in his dish were not bruised and I guessed that it was something more serious.

It soon transpired that my guess was correct. For the first time in three years, he had journeyed beyond the Pallid Colonnades and had visited his wife. There he had found a garment of underwear embossed with my own initials. I tried to deny the fact of the affair, but I blushed so pink that I gave myself away.

Tearing up my new proposal, The President suggested an alternative. He would make the solving of crime illegal. This alternative brought a chill to my bones. I was arrested shortly afterwards and brought to this very cell. My guards then were nice fellows. They even introduced me to the Talking Plaque who was going to recount my crimes. The Talking Plaque in question was a young girl with auburn hair. But she did not even look at me. I am not ashamed to say that I cried.

Naturally I appealed. And this was the crux of the whole matter. My appeal was a work of genius. I maintained that since the solving of crime was illegal, then the people who had arrested me had also committed an offence and should be jailed. And so on, until there was not a single person walking free in the whole world. I thought that this paradox would make the Appeal Judges see the absurdity of the charges levelled against me and throw my case out of court.

Unfortunately, after long and careful consideration, they agreed with me and promptly ordered the arrest of those who had arrested me. I was returned to my dank cell and I have remained here ever since. Slowly as I rotted away the months, the cells around me were filled: the chain reaction, once it had started, could not be stopped.

I suppose that one day soon the last human left on Earth will walk in here and lock the door behind them. I expect that the last human will be the President. And then, of course, apes or monkeys will have to guard the cells. I wonder when all this will happen?

Ah! You have made your move at last! It is a good move too. You know something? You look a little bit like the President yourself. Indeed, I would be willing to testify that you were him if it wasn't for the fact that you have no ugli-fruit with you. It is not so easy trying to juggle with bananas.

Now I'm sitting quietly on my cloud, I can confess everything. It's not very often that I get a chance to sit back and relax. So I'd better make the most of it. Put the kettle on, if you have to, or finish writing that letter to the friend you haven't seen for absolutely ages, but do it quickly. I haven't much time left.

My name, as you are doubtless aware, is Titian Grundy. Until recently, I was Prefect of Police. I held the position for so long that I can't even remember what I was before. Probably a student of some kind. I vaguely recall skipping through autumn leaves with an auburn-haired girl and a multicoloured scarf, but this means nothing. I might have been a cheese-maker who'd simply lost his razor.

Anyway, to return to my tale, I was sitting at my desk one day, spinning paper helicopters through my open window when I received a telegram by carrier-pheasant. The telegram was from the President, an old friend of mine, and it announced that a meeting of Parliament had decided to make gods illegal. The motion had been carried by six hundred and sixty-six votes to one.

Jumping up, I held my chin in my hands and considered the import of this radical legislation. I knew the reason for the decision, of course; it was staring me in the face from the cover of yesterday's newspaper. Yet another leading citizen had been killed by an icy meteorite. It was generally held that the gods were responsible: throwing divine snowballs that concealed both a malicious glee and a fair-sized boulder.

The responsibility, however, once entirely theirs, now lay with me. Now that the gods were mere criminals, as opposed to omnipotent beings, it was up to my Department to arrest them. If I failed in this assignment, I would doubtless be replaced. My career would be over and I would have to seek alternative employment (for some reason, the position of cheese-maker occurred to me.)

Naturally, I was eager to embark on a raid of the Heavenly Realm as soon as possible. I was prepared to sign an arrest warrant at a moment's notice. The problem, as always, was transportation. I knew that the Force had several solar-powered gliders at its disposal, and had recently saved up to purchase an atomic trampoline, but even these shining examples of aerial-transport technology would be incapable of taking me up to such a great height. I was nonplussed.

Sighing, I left the office and went for a walk around the large artificial lake that ringed the Department like a noose. Huge mechanical locusts flitted around my head, an invention of my second-in-command, Satsuma Ffroyde. They had been designed to keep intruders at bay. I stared into the dark umber waters for many minutes, struggling to find a solution to my dilemma by means of a thought-experiment. I set up the test-tubes and retorts of my mind and mixed the isotopes and catalysts of my imagination. But all was in vain.

I could see reflected, quite clearly in the lake, the whole of the Heavenly Realm. It seemed to me then that I could jump down quite easily to my destination through this mirror of the ineffable. But before I was lulled into the attempt by the rhythm of the reflected clouds, a sharp crack assailed my ears and looking up, I perceived an enormous meteorite hurtling towards me. Luckily I was able to step aside as it plunged into the lake, shattering my own reflection into a thousand glassy shards.

My lakeside meditation had saved my life, of this I was certain. Probably the gods, learning of Parliament's decision, had sought to destroy the potential agent of their nemesis. Staring into the mirror of the lake had not only warned me of the approach of the meteorite but had also diverted its trajectory. Obviously the gods had mistaken my reflection for the real thing and had aimed at the wrong target.

This blatantly unimaginative assassination attempt stiffened my resolve to complete all my duties to the best of my ability. I was determined now not to beg the President to reconsider his new law, as I had been tempted to do. Instead, I returned to my office and called a meeting of all my high-ranking colleagues. Together, I felt sure, we would come up with a method of reaching the hide-out of these ontological criminals.

The meeting, however, proved to be a major disappointment at first. Few of the officers present knew anything at all about the heights of theology. They talked listlessly about helium balloons and giant catapults. Satsuma Ffroyde even confessed to being an atheist. He claimed that modern research in pendulum-physics had proved that the universe ran on clockwork. When I rounded on him in disbelief, he turned purple and added that this was merely a metaphor.

"This is ridiculous!" I cried, throwing my arms up in despair. "Is there no-one here who knows anything at all about the gods and how to reach them? I mean, who is their ruler? Do they have one? Is it Grunnt or Drigg? Perhaps it is Wheeze? Who is the god of meteorites? Gaap? Or is he the god of holes?"

"I thought it was Chyme," mumbled one of the officers.

"No, no! Chyme is the goddess of Aeolian-Harps!" countered another.

Exasperated by their ignorance, I turned to Dr Celery, the Police Surgeon Specific. He alone in the Police Department could be relied upon to say something worthwhile. But he was by nature a very reticent man and had to be goaded to speak. After a lengthy goad with a bundle of Napierian Nettles, he cleared his throat and said:

"Of course the gods exist and I know a method of reaching them. I have made a small study of the subject. I think that you may safely forget about helium balloons and the like. Physically, of course, it is impossible to enter the Heavenly Realm. However, it used to be said that a person's soul left their body at death and floated on up there without any other assistance. It is conceivable that I could temporarily kill you by freezing you in a cryogenic tank and then re-thaw you after you have completed your mission..."

This was the sort of information that had proved extremely difficult to obtain since all the priests and clergy had fled the land during the great ecclesiastical-exile order issued by the President the previous year (one of them, apparently had tried to seduce him during a confessional.) I was delighted with Dr Celery and dissolved the meeting at once.

The time-period of my demise was to be set at one month. This, it was presumed, would give me plenty of time to seek out and arrest the gods even if they fled to the furthest clouds of their pearly paradise. Accordingly, I submitted to Dr Celery's cryogenic machines, letting the sub-zero vanilla freeze the very blood in my veins and the very thoughts in my brain.

As I lost consciousness, I found myself floating down a blue tunnel towards a light that was bright yet gentle. In one hand, I clasped the arrest-warrant I had prepared the day before and, in the other, a magnum of Chablis I had taken as my sole provision for the journey. As I sipped from the bottle, the light at the end of the tunnel seemed to glow still brighter. I heard strains of unearthly music and caught my first glimpse of the afterlife.

The tunnel disgorged me with a convulsive spluttering noise and deposited me before the ivory gates of the Heavenly Realm. The gates were open and were unguarded. I guessed that Tourmaline, the three-bodied, single-headed Dog that was said to patrol the divine entranceway had sneaked off for a moment to relieve himself. It was one of the problems to be expected with possessing three bodies.

I was grateful enough, of course, for Tourmaline is said to be quite bad-tempered and to bite even the most moral and holy of citizens as they file past. I was disappointed, however, that no-one appeared to greet me. Obviously, apart from the President, I had no friends on either side of the great divide between life and death. I sauntered through the gates onto the pearly meadows of the Heavenly realm. I became increasingly agitated and bitter when I discovered that even here there were no hordes of auburn-haired maidens willing to soothe my brow.

Anyway, as time is indeed growing very short, I shall briefly wind up my tale. I searched the Heavenly Realm for the gods but found only a large clockwork mechanism that seemed to be governing the Cosmos according to some pre-determined program. To this day, I cannot say whether the gods, aware of my approach, had built this device to rule in their place while they fled, or whether it had always been there. At any rate, I switched the thing off and allowed free-will to enter into the Universe for a change.

As for the blessed souls who cavorted around the Heavenly Realm, I couldn't prise any answers out of them either. They leapt around plucking harps and blowing trumpets in an incessant and extremely irritating manner. I rounded them up, arrested them one by one and imprisoned them in the vast palace that housed the clockwork machine. The President, of course, had earlier banned the use of musical instruments and therefore these ghosts and spirits were guilty of an offence under section G sharp of the Public Chord Act.

Alone in Heaven, I played at being a god myself. Monotheism had finally prevailed over the less-organised Polytheistic system. Playing god turned out to be harder work than I had anticipated. But I grew to enjoy the unlimited power; I let it caress me with its corrupting fingers. As I said before, at this very moment I am sitting on my favourite cloud, toying with the destiny of whole continents.

The only problem is that my month is almost up. It will soon be time for Dr Celery to re-thaw me and draw me back into my earthly body. I will have to give up this life of infinite privilege and become a mere Prefect of Police again, a servant of the State, mortal, fleshy and unliked. At least up here, I am reasonably content. Power, I have discovered, can be an adequate substitute for love.

Naturally I have tried to kill Dr Celery many times, to prevent him bringing me back to life, but I can't seem to get the hang of these meteorites. I gnash my teeth in fury, but all to no avail. At least, when I do return, I shall be able to avenge myself by telling him that the gods do not exist and that Satsuma was at least partly right. The destruction of his faith will be some consolation. However, my own faith is also starting to crack, although I am in a more secure position than either of my colleagues. If I were Dr Celery then the absence of the gods would be a savage blow indeed. On the other hand, if I were Satsuma then I would have to ask myself: who built the clockwork machine in the first place? It is more than merely a metaphor. Luckily, I have none of these problems.

Thank god I'm an agnostic!