Nowhere Near Milkwood (21 page)

We sped over the Pallid Colonnades and skimmed the Aracknid Islands and hovered over the sunken city of Amberzar to pick up supplies of damp cotton. It was better than I had imagined as a daydreaming youth. So the years of relentless ambition, of clawing my way to the top: that was the real waste! This was living as it should be, free of petty concerns. Now I was happy for the first time! My hair grew long, my knees grew scuffed and my shoes fell apart. I did not care! Up, up and away, was my cry! It rained, but the rain tasted sweet; it snowed, but the snow was like milk poured over chocolate; it hailed, but hail on the balloon's canopy was a percussion orchestra playing aphrodisiac songs from the figging-oases of Khyor. Grundy was finally gratified!

The auburn-haired girl dropped me off in a mountainous town deep in the Uneven Lands. I took a job here as a waiter and earned enough to buy a mandolin. Then I was back in the basket, with a new crew, heading into the caverns of Doyléu, to barter with the gnoles. Out through the crater of an extinct volcano in Grokkland, I found myself strumming melodies on my instrument, as if my thumbs had been born to the art. The captain and mates danced so wildly the gondola nearly tipped up. I blanched and kept silent for the rest of the day, but the following morning, my insatiable fingers sought out new insidious chords. I began to develop a repertoire of songs, wistful ballads and sarabands.

Frequently, in towns and cities, I met other hitchers, most of whom carried around musical instruments like myself. In Djiwondro, nine of us got together and busked ourselves stupid in the casbah, earning a gallon of scented tea and three days in jail for our trouble. Our relationships were cordial but casual; I picked up the lingo from them, passed tips on how to evade the local police, and shared suppers and scales. There were bouts of love too, both with female travellers and native girls, creases of passion in my previously ironed life. Yet I was chomped by wanderlust and could not settle anywhere. Always I had to ride the next balloon out of town, seeking adventures as fresh as seaweed. Like a barnacle, I felt compelled to attach myself to those bulbous forms. I visited Amana, Cus, Yam-Yam, Xopué, the jungles of Paraparapara.

In was over Qtiztowf that I first noticed the speck on the horizon. For months I felt I was being followed, a sensation which persisted even though I frequently changed balloons and direction, sometimes recrossing my original flight-path. I realised this speck had been with me from the beginning, right on the edge of my vision. In my fevered mind, it became the point of a needle, sewing buttons of restraint onto my freedom. Like a full-stop threatening to end the sentence of my joy, it punctured warm sunsets over the lakes of Ojidra or spotted the parchment empyrean which curved over the steppes of Rholl. Loathing human grammar, I fled nemesis like a crab fleeing an amoeba — sideways, scuttling, eyes popping. Smack in the centre of the Loverlei Prairies, I managed to hitch a lift aboard a military balloon, a spherical dirigible bristling with steel spikes. I was reminded more acutely than ever of a sub-aquatic scene, as the giant urchin released gas and dropped its ladder.

The captain was an old sugar with a beard big enough to hide flying fish, of which many skimmed past, on their migrations to the wadis of Al Datum. He had a heart problem and this was his last mission — to observe troop movements in the forests of Jabboo. He passed me a telescope and I was able to resolve the true character of my pursuer. The speck became a balloon of curious design, with reticulated legs which helped it to swim in the air. I confided my worries to the captain and he seemed delighted at the prospect of adventure. "We'll outfly the blighter!" he exclaimed, gunning his engine to maximum speed. The propellers lashed the clouds to ribbons and they fell to giftwrap the landscape below. The spot vanished for a brief period, but then it returned: through the eyeglass I saw its legs were flapping wildly and that the canopy was red in the face. Never before had I seen prawn and urchin play cat and mouse. The rival balloon seemed to be armed with a harpoon-proboscis.

For many days we lurched over countries and seas, the captain happy and flustered, steering between mountain ranges and under waterfalls. We even ventured into the orchards of Lubbalouana, impaling limes and plums on our spines. But the prawn dirigible would not be shaken off: so right out into the foggy Glib Ocean we headed, where navigation was impossible and only eels could easily find their way home. With the mist choking an engine, we were becalmed while we sought to pull strands of steam out of the ducts. The captain climbed over the rim of the gondola and used only his fingertips to lean over to the engine. It was a precarious business. He was sweating profusely, so to calm him down I took up my mandolin and struck up a graceful tune. Clogged by the fog, the melody warped into an atonal wail which startled the captain. His heart jumped: his visage was contorted with pain. As the blood rushed to his cheeks, his fingers grew slack on the rail and he tumbled down.

I did not hear the splash. I was so distraught I threw the mandolin after him. The reduction in weight caused the balloon to rise: within an hour it was above the fog and in open, very dark blue, sky. The arrogant winds of the stratosphere clutched me and we raced along at a horizontal angle, in conditions as chill and rarefied as those of my bedroom. I was too terrified and upset to look back to see if the speck was still on my ribboned tail. I must have swooned away, but not before I secured my arm to a loose end of rigging. When I recovered, I was over dry land and the balloon had righted itself. I turned the valve to let out some helium; a gentle hiss accompanied my descent into more favourable altitudes. Below lay a bank of cumulus cloud, as fluffy as sea-foam, in which I thought I might glimpse dolphins leaping. My imagination was still watery: holding my nose as I plummeted into the cloud, I strained my eyes to see exactly where I was going. Without a working engine, I was helpless, like a clam sinking into the depths of yeasty beer...

The glider came from nowhere, turning at the last moment and fixing itself neatly onto my spikes. With the extra weight I started to fall at a greater rate than expected. The glider pilot made ineffectual attempts to disengage his fuselage, waggling his elevators and rudder like a duck seeking a mate. As we bottomed out of the cloud, I studied the occupants of the craft more carefully. At the controls sat a man and a woman, with a bemused dog lapping the windscreen; behind them another man was trying to force another woman out of an open door. This second woman had a blue apron tied around her waist and her hands were white with flour. She was obviously a mother. One of my spikes had pierced the cockpit and speared up between the legs of the bawling pilot.

Far below, a magnificent city spread its arms to welcome us. In all my months of travelling, I had never seen such a lovely urban landscape. The red-tiled houses, the alabaster towers and aquamarine pools appeared like a vision of a forgotten childhood story, one of those illustrations in a book whose title can never be remembered. The balloon landed in the greenest park and I jumped out of the gondola, eager to apologise to the glider passengers. But I found myself surrounded by a cheering crowd. An army of police officers hurried up to the glider and seized three of the occupants. The mother and the dog were set free. To my amazement, it was my friend, the President, who stepped close to shake my hand. My juggled mind could take no more of this. Holding onto him for support, I managed to blurt: "What are you doing here, sir?"

He laughed. "This is where I live! Come now, Titian, old pal, don't try any of this deadpan nonsense with me! You're a hero again, just like in the days of plenty, when ugli-fruit grew on bushes. What say we drive to my tower in my tortoise-chariot and I'll present you with your award? Not to mention giving back your old job!"

It then occurred to me, as doubtless it already has to my cleverest readers, that I had circumnavigated the planet (no mean feat considering it is triangular) and returned to the capital, where I started from! Let me also provide the solution to the mystery of my renewed popularity. In the glider, so neatly impaled on my balloon, were the chief conspirators of a plot to overthrow the government and replace it with a dictatorsub, which is a deeper version of a dictatorship and far more repressive. The names of these arch-intriguers were Clementine Jungg, Mina Argon and the maverick academic, Professor Fennel...

For years, apparently, they had been kidnapping mothers and dogs in a solar-powered glider, hurling the former to their doom and setting the latter free in strange nations to wander in a lost daze. In other words, they were responsible for that 0.1% of unsolved crime! The scheme was to incite mothers and dogs to rebellion: in the chaos, the putschists would drape wet seaweed over the Presidential tower. Tearing off their plastic costumes, they would reveal themselves as mutant prawns, eager to make a cocktail of human politics and philosophy.

I went with the President and we arrived at the marketsquare, where he ushered me into the suite of rooms at the apex of his tower. Words of encouragement were not all: a large sum of gold was also presented. With this, I knew, I could afford to commission my quartz and topaz statue at the Police Station. But first I had to check my old job really was being re-offered. It was: it seems Raphael Perkins had made a useless Prefect, messing up his very first case. He had personally set off to hunt down a felon who owed money to the Fire Company for unpaid bills. Having sailed away in an airship made to his specifications, nobody had heard from him since. There were rumours he had been sighted in the Glib Ocean, hanging in the fog as if he had nothing better to do. If he ever returned to the capital, the President vowed, he would order him to be body-searched. He had a crawling suspicion 'Raphael Perkins' was also a secret crustacean, perhaps even the mythic King Prawn, predicted by the Insufferable Oracle of Tosh. A false and wriggly redeemer.

Well, I took back my job. But I did not spend the gold on statuary; that is a task for posterity. It was just enough to pay off all my debts to the Fire Company, but I have principles. I refuse to pander to stupid bureaucrats; I have enough problems instilling the qualities into my own staff. Yet I did not relish sitting in that cold house; my eyebrows were so weighed down with ice that I walked with a perpetual stoop, beautiful forehead trailing in the frost. A solution came to me while I was giving a lecture to the Order of Pirate Housewives, who knit with cutlasses. As I am so dashing, they were pleased to accept a commission from me, which cost no more nor less than my reward. Now my house wears a woolly jumper and hat, with a scarf wound five times round its gables. The temperature is going up and I am as happy as a squid in a glove. The sun still rises like a fishwife, but now it sets like a lady.

I have arrested many large objects in my time. The moon and the gruesome elk-god, Moozsgyrrgtlk, are two of the biggest. The President's nose has still not been outlawed, therefore that suggestion can be disregarded. I am quite an expert at bringing unwieldy, grandiose or overbearing felons to justice. Indeed, Titian Grundy, Prefect of Police, has been witnessed tackling illegal mountains and even tectonic plates with no weapon other than his innate smugness and a hive of trained bees. Because I am him, I must enjoy his credit and acknowledge his admirers, who are numerous but too modest to show themselves. They know my reputation is founded on all things ample, save the bosoms of maidens.

Thus my disquiet when ordered to apprehend the smallest particle in the universe was considerable. Previously, my anxiety had neatly matched the dimensions of each culprit, fitting inside the skin like a righteous skeleton. I argued with the President, but he was more obstinate than an ugli-fruit pip. He had been studying physics in nightschool, in a futile attempt to make friends, and he was having problems with his homework. A question had been set concerning the basic building-blocks of all matter and rather than study boring theory, he decided on a practical approach, enlisting my talents to actually capture it. I had to bring it to him in chains by Monday or else suffer demotion.

"Interrogate it without solicitors present," he barked. "I want the particle to sing like a canape. We'll find out what it thinks it's up to at the sub-atomic level. Quantum rascal!"

"What if it has an alibi?" I hissed.

"Don't fall for that nonsense, Titian. You know the world's not the place it should be. Obviously the fundamental bits which make it up must take the blame. I'm desperately unhappy: nothing is right. Something has got to be responsible for this — it's what women, music and fruit can be finally reduced to. That's the blighter!"

With heavy spleen and cynical lip, I returned to the Police Station in my butterfly-powered rickshaw. The nine-sided building loomed like an obsidional inselberg (simile courtesy of Satsuma Ffroyde, who refuses to reveal what it means.) I stabled my moths with Percy Flamethrower at the gate and entered my office. I called for the Police Surgeon Specific, Dr Celery, and spent the minutes prior to his arrival by dismissing from my mind scenes of nuclear fusion suggested by the frontage of Lola Halogen. Clashing protons, colliding planets: they seemed identical to my fevered but rather comely olive-hued imagination.

Dr Celery was inexcusably late. His white coat was marked with tiny stains, lending him an unfocussed appearance, as if the man had sent his portrait to see me — one painted by a metaleptic pointillist (another of Satsuma's recondite metaphors; I really must sack him.) First I outlined the President's demands and then I berated him for his tardiness. "While I worry about extending, or shrinking, my jurisdiction into the realm of leptons, you conduct empirical research!"

He apologised and named a remarkable coincidence as his defence. He had been working on a chemical which could shrink objects to zero or its existential equivalent. Some of this powder had spilled over my voice as it passed under his door, reducing its importance. Thus his tarrying was without malice. I accepted his grovelling, hoisted him up from his knees by his stringy beard and expressed pleasure that his invention so neatly anticipated a solution to my predicament.

"Well it was your idea in the first place," he sighed. "You told me to end overcrowding in our prisons. I realised that by miniaturising our detainees we could fit more in one cell."

"My idea? Ah yes, I am very clever!"

"I tried the chemical first on inanimate objects. It worked and now geography's not the subject it once was."

As he spoke, the stains on his coat rapidly dwindled to nothing. He beckoned for me to observe them through a magnifying-glass. There was no such instrument in the entire Department. Satsuma Ffroyde had once built a primitive microscope by drilling in a disc of uranium a small hole, in which a drop of pure wine was sustained by capillary attraction. But the sterile and tipsy images presented by so simple an apparatus were hardly appropriate to verify Dr Celery's claims.

Finally, Lola Halogen improvised a device by moulding on her facade two sandwich-wrappers of clear plastic. When combined into a convex lens of rare power, they opened up a fantastic vista of micro-jinks conducted over threads of cheap cotton. The stains were giant lakes, of sulphurous and chloric liquids, which drained rapidly away into buttonhole craters. These exotic dips had been obtained at reasonable cost from the populace of Xopué, which has a surplus of lagoons.

"You were the one who authorised the trade. The lakes came one at a time in buckets suspended from balloons."

"Did I? I thought there was a fishy smell lately."

"I've been experimenting on the pools for the past month. Today the work has paid dividends. My chemical is fully tested and is ready to use on convicts. But I don't advise it, sir."

"Why? Do you think they'll slip through the bars?"

"There's no way of halting the process. Any miscreants subjected to my powder will continue to shrivel until they fall through the molecules of the dungeon floor. They'll keep contracting until they reach whatever is the smallest size possible in our universe. Also, I don't know if the substance is deadly or not to organisms."

"It might kill the user? We'd better test it on a volunteer. Before I select Percy for the task, answer this question: why doesn't the stuff diminish its own atoms out of existence?"

Dr Celery looked uncomfortable. His suggestion that each item has a natural tendency to shrink, and that his powder was a catalyst to unlock this inherent urge, struck me as ludicrous. He theorised that everything wants to be a humble version of itself but is forced by negative gravity to assume macroscopic dimensions — the chemical and the President's nose included. Only when acting upon something else could the powder liberate the elemental compressibleness of matter.

Lola Halogen, our real intellectual, sneered at this, but as we had no alternative explanation, I snorted at her derision, sent her to fetch our trustworthy guard, Percy Flamethrower, and rewarded Dr Celery with a medal fabricated from a shard of crystal pier. When Percy entered, maple musket at the ready, he saluted stiffly and allowed his jaw to be opened with the point of my truncheon. Dr Celery hastened to his laboratory and returned with a phial of powder, while Lola brewed blue-green tea. A cup was offered to our hapless victim, adulterated with a magical pinch, and he drank it down in a single, sweet gulp.

At once he began to shrink. His eyes bulged — though they were soon no bigger than the eggs of a Paraparapara toucan — and he requested in a squeaky tone the meaning of the experience. Percy is always polite, even when the radius of his head is that of a simurgh's oubliette (curse your pitted rind, Satsuma Ffroyde!) Rather than watch him vanish without work to be getting on with, I announced that because of cuts in our budget we downsizing the staff. This did not mean I expected less devotion from him, but his duties were bound to change.

"We've got a new job for you, Percy," I explained. "You must ensure no germs pass this way into the Station."

He saluted again and raised his miniscule musket. "Fill this with a handful of viruses, shall I? Rely on me!"

I hid my grin in a sleeve and picked him up with a pair of tweezers which Lola kept handy for eyebrow emergencies. Then I deposited him on a glass slide, which I placed on the office threshold. I ordered Dr Celery to fetch a dose for myself. However, I wanted to go better prepared than our simple guard. I filled a suitcase with all manner of equipment, some of it official, most personal. The dandrum identikit, for example, was a waste of space. They have agents nowhere.

When the Police Surgeon Specific returned, Lola threw herself about my waist. If I was going to irreversibly diminish, she cried, I might as well do it over her. This raised the question of what substance I should stand on as I vanished into the sub-atomic cosmos. Decorum precluded the use of Lola as a base. Dr Celery proclaimed the whiskers of a cat as the most suitable location to surf the short-wave depths of inner space, but I felt he was being facetious. My poet's cat still lurked in the Station cellar, guarding my collection of cheese.

After careful consideration, I decided to ask the President for the use of the miniature village in the corner of his overgrown roof-garden. Accordingly, I took the second phial from Dr Celery, kissed Lola goodbye and steered my butterfly-rickshaw out of the City to the mighty Cliff of Puff, where the carnelian tower of our ruler stood at a precarious angle on the actual summit. On the difficult ascent, my mounts were eaten by a basilisk and I had to climb the remainder of the distance on my feet. It was a lengthy haul, but there was no alternative. The caterpillars in my groin-pouch were too feeble to saddle up.

The President received me cordially, without diluting to taste, and agreed to rent me his village. It was a cruel joke, of course, for rains had long since pounded it to charming fragments and in its place stood a perfect replica of the Capital. From the roof of the tower I could study the filth and beauty of the real thing, the alabaster houses and verdant parks stretching to the jaded horizon, and then glance down and perceive the same details as if from a vast height. Indeed, the simalacrum seemed nicer than the original. I chose the Temple of Drigg in the model as the starting point for my hypo-spatial jaunt.

Squeezing in by the altar, upon which gleamed a scale of the Cosmic Serpent, I broke the phial and swallowed its contents. Percy had come to no harm as he shrunk, but I was still nervous as my stomach digested the powder. I felt only a muted discomfort and the sensation of contraction, which I assumed would be violent, was entirely absent. Instead, external objects began to shift and change, growing blurred, pushing outwards, in a hitherto unsuspected display of ambition. The whole world, I realised, was growing, leaving me behind, like a fat child excluded from a game of leaptoad. The walls receded like females.

Soon, the Temple of Drigg had assumed its correct dimensions, and I was astonished at the craftsmanship which had gone into its manufacture. Everything in the imitation was rendered with superb precision. Even the grumpy icons were plated in bronze and neptunium. I had entered, without a visa, a city within a city, but I was afraid. My descent was too quick to acclimatise my sense: I needed time to fully absorb my predicament. I had picked the best place to extinguish my fears, where the horror of my condition might be assuaged by illusion. Leaving the Temple, I convinced myself this was the genuine Capital, a fraud possible to sustain so long as I did not look up at the enormous sky.

Risking excommunication, I broached the adjacent outhouse where the mouse-sleighs sacred to the denizens of the Heavenly Realm are kept, and borrowed one. In my city, sixty rodents drag each vehicle; here a single mouse was enough. I cracked the reins and directed it towards the second Cliff of Puff, up the slippery slope. The sides of the sleigh rose above me. At the base of the President's tower, I disembarked and hastened up the steps, which grew wider as I ascended. Once more in the roof-garden, surrounded by buildings smaller than me, I breathed a sigh of outrageous relief and wriggled into the Temple of Drigg, observing that yet another scale of the Cosmic Serpent glowed there.

Again the walls and ceiling parted from my body. Once more precious icons expanded to satisfy my aesthetic longing. These were less artistic than the first set, executed more clumsily, as was to be expected. After a few minutes of rest, it was time to leave. There were no mouse-sleighs in the outhouse of this Temple, but one powered by an aphid was adequate for my needs. We rattled down cobbled backstreets, under the lengthening eaves of restaurants patronised only by spiders. Indeed, I was forced to arrest one which refused to pay its bill. For a horrid moment, I thought I might not have enough handcuffs to restrain the arachnid, but Lola had slipped a spare pair into my groin-pouch.

Praying I would not meet a criminal millipede, I continued my slide to the third Cliff of Puff and up to the President's tower. The model in this roof-garden was far clumsier than its predecessors. Houses leant at wrong angles, warped bubbles of glass serving for windows. Petty reality was adopting an alien aspect, but at a pace I could accept. This was the gentle introduction to the microcosmos I needed. I entered the Temple of Drigg, noted the scale of the Cosmic Serpent, and waited. Sure enough, I fell to the size of a regular worshipper.

It was at this point that a low rumble became audible to my hirsute ears. What did it signify? Perhaps the volcano on the City outskirts had erupted again? If so, there was no hope for me. How can a man whose legs are becoming shorter outrun a river of flame? Then I realised this was a fallacious worry. Bodies are burned by heat which surrounds them, not by heat which exists elsewhere. As I continued to dwindle, the greater part of any lava flow which covered me would always be receding, bearing away most of its calefaction. The only fire which could now engulf me was one smaller than the spark of two glowworms rubbed together, a somewhat meek singe in the temperature scheme of things.