The Chamber in the Sky (22 page)

For miles, nothing was whole.

A thin blond boy, a stocky boy with dark hair and glasses, and an elfin girl from another world stood and surveyed the wreckage.

They did not speak in their astonishment.

T
he next day, the Imperial Council of New Norumbega, rulers of all the Empire of the Innards, gathered on a hilltop to greet the Umpire officially. Their clothes were torn and muddy. Their faces were proud and weary. Their city was huge mound of garbage surrounded by a vast lake of green.

The lux effluvium burned pitilessly in the sky above them. The lake steamed in the heat.

The Empress sat upon her throne. Someone had found a swivel chair and covered it with a blue sheet. Girls stood holding a canopy over her. To either side of her stood Kalgrash and General Malark, holding huge ceremonial axes. The Court stood on rubble, all in a large circle.

The Umpire Capsule appeared in the midst of them all, the chapel carried by its three mechanical giants. It blinked into being. The door opened, and three kids stepped out, accompanied by a small, lively, and curious bacterium.

Gwynyfer Gwarnmore saw her father, the duke, and hobbled toward him.

“Why, hullo, old thing,” said the duke, putting his arms around her. “Living and breathing?”

“Only just.”

“We've had a frightful time of it since you've been gone.”

The Empress roared, “Is there no decorum?”

Gwynyfer Gwarnmore bowed painfully before her ruler. She spoke the formal greeting. She introduced Brian and Gregory as if they'd never been at court before. She said nothing about Tars the friendly germ.

Then there was a
whoosh
, and one of the Rules Keepers was among them. It could not be seen, except perhaps by the Court's wizards. Everyone could feel it towering over them however.

The Earl of Munderplast stepped forward in his muddy robes and bowed to the empty air. He declared, “The Court of Her Sublime Highness Elspeth, the Empress of Old Norumbega, New Norumbega, and the Whole Dominion of the Innards, Electoress of the Bladders, Queen of the Gastric Wastes, Sovereign of Ducts Superior and Inferior WELCOMES the Rules Keepers established by ancient custom in the Treaty of Pellerine, and we delight that they enter our Empress's divine and fearsome presence.”

The three mechanical guardians of the capsule turned their heads toward the Empress Elspeth.

“The.” — “Rules.” — “Keepers.” — “Greet.” — “The.” — “Empress.” — “Of.” — “Norumbega.”

She nodded.

“The.” — “Rules.” — “Keepers.” — “Have.” — “Determined.” — “That.” — “The.” — “Thusser.” — “Horde.” — “Were.” — “In.” — “Violation.” — “Of.” — “The.” — “Agreed.” — “Terms.” — “Of.” — “The.” — “Contest.” There was a pause. “Accordingly.” — “The.” — “Thusser.” — “Are.” — “Banished.”

There was a ragged cheer. The Council was relieved.

The Empress said, “Old Norumbega is ours again? The whole kingdom under the mountain?”

“Old.” — “Norumbega.” — “Is.” — “Yours.” — “In.” — “Title.” — “Full.” — “And.” — “Clear.”

“Well, that is just delightful. Things had gotten a little grimmers around here.”

General Malark stepped forward and bowed first at the Empress, then at the unseen Rules Keeper. “Your Highness,” he said, “the Mannequin Army shall make immediate preparations for the evacuation of the Great Body. With the submarines we have seized, we will start to shuttle civilians down to Three-Gut and to the portal between the worlds. We should be able to empty the Great Body of both breathing and mechanical Norumbegans within two weeks.”

Brian's heart swelled with joy. The mannequins were going to make it out of the Great Body. And their onetime masters, too. The City of Gargoyles, empty for centuries, would be full of people. Everyone was going to be safe. They wouldn't have to trust this strange, mammoth creature in which blood-tides were changing. The landscape was rumbling and at any moment, thousands of miles could be swamped in goo.

He and the others had done a good job, he realized. They had stuck with their mission, in spite of everything — all of them working together. It was over. Things could get back to how they were before the Thusser invaded the old country, four hundred long years earlier.

Brian smiled at Gregory and Gwynyfer. Victory was sweet.

Lord Attleborough-Stoughton was the first to step forward in protest. “Your Highness,” said his lordship, sweeping his dusty top hat off his head. “We cannot possibly leave the Great Body. We have built an empire here. It would be” — he paused briefly to think — “It would be unpatriotic.”

Duke Gwarnmore was the next to speak up. “Attleborough-Stoughton is right, ma'am. We can't possibly leave. Anyone who suggests crawling back to that hole under the mountain is a defeatist.”

“Probably a traitor,” said Attleborough-Stoughton. “A thin-blooded traitor and a fool. No true Norumbegan.”

Duke Gwarnmore said, “If the bally manns are suggesting we do a thing, why the deuce should we do it? They're nothing but windup upstarts. Rebels.”

Brian goggled. They were saying these things, he could tell, just because they didn't want to lose their position and their land. He burbled, “Don't listen to them!” And to the men themselves: “You're just — both of you — you just don't want to give up your railroads! And your estates! But no one can stay here! You can't!”

“The baboon's right,” said the Empress Elspeth. “We can't stay here. Who knows when this awful body will get up on its haunches and suddenly up will be down and we'll all be washed to kingdom come.”

“We don't know it has haunches,” said Duke Gwarnmore. “We don't know that it has any limbs at all. We could be perfectly safe.”

There was a murmur of “Mm, yes,” among the courtiers. They all had property they wanted to protect. And it was beneath them to evacuate, like a bunch of superstitious peasants in head scarves. None of them wanted to abandon their domains and their plantations and their fortresses in the kinks of ducts.

“No one can make us do a thing,” said the Duchess Gwarnmore. “We are Norumbegans.”

Brian said,
“You can't — you can't just endanger everyone in the empire, all your subjects, just so you can keep ahold of some stupid spleen or something! And the railroads! All of you? This is crazy!”

He wouldn't have been able to speak that way to adults, just a few weeks earlier. But he could tell that in this case, it wasn't a bad thing to shout.

The Empress seemed to agree with him. “It does seem a little shabby to squat here, chaps, when there's a whole castle and some first-rate boulevards waiting for us back in the old home.” She squinted into the distance. “Attleborough-Stoughton,” she said, “your railroads are under this noisome swamp. That's a thing that requires a thorough thinking-over.”

This didn't worry his lordship. “Subaquatic railroad cars!” Attleborough-Stoughton exclaimed. “If we can't drain the lake.”

“Lakefront property,” said Duke Gwarnmore. “We all of us own a great deal of it, now.”

“Lakefront property!” agreed his wife. “He's not wrong about that! I see resorts! Grand hotels! Waterskiing! Paddle boats! Women in white with parasols estivating in the ventricles!”

“Yes,” cried Lord Attleborough-Stoughton, “on the shores of Lake Elspeth.”

Now the Empress looked interested. “What was that?” she said. “It could be called Lake Elspeth?”

“Of course, Your Sublime Highness,” said Duke Gwarnmore, bowing.

Brian was hysterical with anger.
“What are you talking about?”
he cried.
“You're all going to die! You're going to be digested or … or … or smooshed…. or …”

“Tell the little mite to clamp his mouth shut,” said the Empress, “or we're dunking him in Lake Elspeth.”

The courtiers clapped at their sovereign's wit.

“Why,” she said, smiling out over her dominion, “it seems, lads and ladies, that the old Dry Heart ain't quite so dry no more!”

It was time for the capsule to go. It was going back to Earth, where it would be forever deactivated.

Brian and Gregory were going back with it. Tars the joyous germ could tell something was happening, so he stuck by Brian's side. He wanted to go wherever Brian was going.

Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, of course, would not even think about going back to Earth.

Brian was not sorry to see the last of her. He shook her hand and watched Gregory and Gwynyfer walk off, their hands touching.

Brian turned to Kalgrash. “You sure you don't want a ride back?”

“Naw,” said Kalgrash. “Even though most of the breathers are staying — crazy, crazy, crazy — the mannequins are going to evacuate, and I'm going to help. We're gone. We're going to try to save whatever Norumbegans want to give up this dump and come with us. The general and I are going to organize the evacuation.”

“That's really nice of you. You're so great. But you don't know how long the Great Body is going to be safe,” said Brian. “What if in two weeks it's all the way back alive, and everything's moving around and flushing and pumping brunch all over the place and stuff?”

Kalgrash promised him, “Two weeks, and we'll be eating Fudgsicles at the top of Norumbega Mountain.” He crossed his mechanical heart.

“Okay,” said Brian. “All right.”

He had that strange feeling in his gut that everything was over. The adventure was done. Time to go home.

Not too far away, Gregory stood with Gwynyfer on a
concrete heap. He put his arms around her. It felt good to hold on to her. He said, “I can't believe you're staying. I'm going to …” He couldn't talk. He didn't want her to hear that he was crying. He pressed his chin into her shoulder and wiped his eyes.

“You've been terrific fun,” said Gwynyfer. “We did things I never would have done.”

“I'll never forget it,” said Gregory. He waited, but she wasn't saying anything, so he hinted, “What about you, Gwynyfer? Will you ever forget all of this?”

She patted his back kindly. “No, of course not, Human G.”

“Norumbegan G,” he whispered. He held on to her as hard as he could.

And then he realized she was waiting for him to stop. She was looking over his shoulder. She was silent because she was watching friends of hers skipping around in the green water. Boys in shorts kicking up spray. She was smiling. She was anxious to get down to the water's edge.

He let go of her. He almost pushed her away.

She smiled wistfully at him. She touched his face. “Bye, then,” she said.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Bye.”

Ski trips crumpled and slid down slopes. So did school dances, him and Gwyn arm in arm, and eating at restaurants, and pulling each other along the streets of New York, and sitting on mountaintops in New Hampshire. All of it balled up and hurled downhill and it didn't matter anymore anyway.

He walked to the capsule. When he turned back to look at her, she was already bounding down the trash heap on her bad leg, calling out to old friends.

Gregory stepped into the open door. Brian was already there with Tars, waiting to be transported.

The Empress of the Innards walked through the mounds, the girls holding the canopy above her. In their torn tails and punched-in derbies, the Court followed behind her, giggling at her jokes.

This was the last glimpse Brian and Gregory ever had of the Court of Norumbega.

Two weeks later, a final caravan of mechanical refugees made its way across the ooze of Three-Gut. Everything was in turmoil. Wind howled. The air was filled with flying sludge. Slow waves of goop smashed across the prows of the sleds, almost rolling over the thombulants that dragged them. Through the veins in the sky, jolts of electric light jittered through the lux effluvium.

It was not clear whether the Great Body was ever going to quiet down again. Every few hours, there were convulsions. Some geologists said that it was going to return to full life as no one had seen in living memory; some theologians said that with the Thusser gone, it would pass back into its deathly sleep. Philosophers said that everything would always be the same; poets said that the Great Body was one of a flock, all migrating
through some vast space, and that the flock had just spotted its goal. The noblemen and noblewomen of the Court, who did not want to leave, paid for scientific proof that everything would settle down and be just fine. That was the story that was printed in the
Norumbega Vassal-Tribune
.