Complete Short Fiction, page 28
Whatever the case, it was this unlikely pairing that led to the Duke of Queens destroying most of Doctor Volospion’s locusts and thus, perhaps, precipitating some of the more interesting of the day’s later events.
“Do you find the spiders satisfying?” Doctor Volospion reached into the hamper and, with careful use of a pair of silver tongs, withdrew another sugared tarantula, its frosted legs kicking feebly. “I think perhaps Argonheart Po could have made them a bit more lively.” The hill on which they sat, gray sedge shadowed by the grim heights of Castle Volospion, was surrounded by legions of albino locusts, which—as if in purposeful contrast to the somnambulant spiders—marched back and forth across one another vigorously, climbing and grabbing to create various structures of living white insecta. At the moment, several million of them had combined to create a standing (and quivering) statue of a hugely muscled woman in a scanty swimming costume, the goddess Venus Beach of ancient tradition.
“It is primarily taste that motivates dear Argonheart, not animation,” replied the Orchid. “No, thank you, Doctor, I am quite full. Who would ever think that a haunch of centipede would have so much meat on it?” She patted at her stomach. Her gown of glittering magenta fish scales rattled slightly. A shadow passed overhead, darkening their picnic blanket; the distraction allowed a few of the sugared spiders to make a slow dash for freedom. “Who is that?” She stared as the gigantic air car swept past again, ears broadly extended to ride the wind, trunk extended and trumpeting loudly. “Oh, look, it’s some sort of elephant—it must be Abu Thaleb!”
“No,” said Volospion sourly. “It is the Duke of Queens. As usual, he poaches on the aesthetic preserves of others.”
“Hello!” shouted the Duke, leaning over the side of the vast ebony vehicle. “Hello, Iron Orchid! Doctor Volospion! Exciting news!”
“We wait breathlessly!” called the Orchid, laughing. Doctor Volospion looked perturbed.
The Duke of Queens, who tended to favor somewhat unstable forms of transportation, brought his massive, shiny black elephant around in another broad swoop. The creature’s ears spread even wider as it tried to slow itself, but a miscalculation sent it plunging past the picnickers, trumpeting in terror and kicking its huge legs, to crash and roll through the midst of the busy locusts with a drawn-out wet crunching noise.
“My insects!” hissed Volospion, rising. His eyes narrowed and his pale face became even paler as the distressed elephant slipped and skidded in the remains of the locust horde, trying to get to its feet.
The Duke of Queens had been flung free and now came wading through a froth of crushed exoskeletons toward the picnic knoll. He was dressed as a circus ringmaster, but the hoops were showing a tendency to slide down to his ankles, making it even more difficult for him to walk. “Terribly sorry, Volospion. It’s very tricky to land that one.” He looked back to where the monstrous black elephant, which had given up trying to rise, now lay with its legs in the air, chest heaving. “Perhaps if I made the ears bigger . . .”
“You are a fool, sir,” Volospion said bitterly.
“I am.” The Duke offered him a genteel and regretful bow.
“We thought you Abu Thaleb at first,” the Orchid smiled, amused as much by Volospion’s dagger-eyed anger as by the Duke’s landing. “Famous for his pachydermal proclivities. Have you borrowed your air car from him?”
“Oh, no!” said the Duke. “No, this is still a part of my fascination with the Dawn Age (spawned in large part by your clever son, most beauteous of blossoms). My airship is absolutely authentic—a perfect replica of Jumbo Jet, the largest device of its kind. Even the ordure it excretes is authentic, packed in little trays with special utensils . . .”
“You have ruined my locusts, sir.” Doctor Volospion was visibly trying to regain his good temper, but perhaps not completely succeeding. “Many hours of toil. But, there it is. Ha! Yes, there it is.” He showed the Iron Orchid a wintry smile before turning back to the Duke. “Only the small-minded nurse grudges, of course. This . . . entrance of yours has a point?”
“Ah! Of course! A most exotic occurrence! A new time-traveler has arrived.” The Duke of Queens was momentarily distracted as his airship made a thrashing, bellowing attempt to rise. “He is guest of honor at My Lady Charlotina’s and you are both invited.”
“A time-traveler? This is poor and common fare,” said Volospion, still waspish—both figuratively and literally, since except for his angular white features, the rest of him was covered by a shining, green-winged carapace.
“Ah, but not this time-traveler,” said the Duke. “You see, he invented us.”
Volospion’s smile was thin. “So, another messianic type. Tiresome.”
“Oh, no, this one is different.” The duke’s smile was wide and genuine. “You really must meet him.”
“We prefer to remain . . .” Volospion began, but the Iron Orchid interrupted him.
“How charming. Of course we will join you, most dedicated of ducal lords.” Ignoring Volospion’s attempt to catch her eye, she glanced briefly at the great black elephant, which had clambered to its feet only to stumble again, trumpeting piteously. The creature’s owner, his rings tangled, was not having much better luck getting up. “I think perhaps we should take my airship,” said the Orchid.
“Isn’t it all wonderful?” called Sweet Orb Mace as they alighted near Lake Billy the Kid. Her body—or his, for at the moment she was clearly and aggressively male—was naked to the waist, bulging with muscles. In one broad, knob-knuckled hand wobbled a long javelin made of shining gold, dripping with blood. “We have all come as authors in honor of My Lady Charlotina’s guest.”
“And who are you?” smiled the Iron Orchid.
“Don’t you know?” Sweet Orb Mace seemed a little crestfallen. “Only perhaps the greatest of the Dawn Age writers—Jake Spear, author of a thousand hard-boiled romances, such as “Romeo and Oubliette” and “The Virgin of Menace.” The rough-hewn features colored prettily. “I consulted the cities. Have I got the details wrong?”
“Of course not,” boomed the Duke of Queens. “You are most luridly authorial, most astonishingly hard-boiled.”
“Writers,” murmured Doctor Volospion. “What folly!”
“Yes,” said Sweet Orb Mace happily. “It is great fun, isn’t it? Look, see, flying through the air, wearing the cape? That’s Mistress Christia. She portrays Jane Awesome, a superheroine who defended humankind’s dark era in the name of Pride, Prejudice, and the American Way (which was, I believe, a large and busy thoroughfare of some kind.) And O’Kala Incarnadine is Paddington Bear Bomb, dispenser of explosive epigrams—you can see that one went off right in the middle of the cake! Frosting everywhere! And Hektor Jektor Pachinko has come as the poet Frosty the Sandburg—but, oh, someone has eaten his carrot nose! Poor Hektor . . .”
“I ask again,” said Doctor Volospion, casting a cold eye over the various celebrants as they made their way toward the center of the fête, a mountainous tent that had been erected on the shore the lake, “why exactly we should care about another babbling time-traveler?”
The Duke of Queens was admiring My Lady Charlotina’s tent, constructed in the shape of an antique object called a “book” (apparently some kind of tomb for authors and thus the subject of much fixation among such types), its spine looming high above the ground, flakes of gilt from the binding sifting down in a fine, dry rain. “Because this author invented us. He swears it is so.”
“Madness.” Volospion flicked the fingers of a pale hand.
The duke shrugged. “He knows many things about us. He regaled us earlier with stories and secrets that we thought we alone knew.”
Volospion turned, almost imploringly, to the Iron Orchid. “Many people know about us. Dozens of visitors from other times had heard tales of our sublime age before they ever reached it in person. That does not prove him authentic.”
“Is authenticity important?” she asked with surprising gentleness. “In any case, O most penetrating of practitioners, are you not generally fascinated by travelers of a metaphysical bent? Does it not interest you to meet someone who does not claim merely to know why we exist, but to have actually been the one responsible?”
“I am interested in prophets and oracles, yes,” allowed Volospion. “But although my menagerie is vast, I have debunked many more than I have collected. I am not easy to impress.”
“You will doubtless have an excellent time, then, proving his claims false.”
Something in the Iron Orchid’s tone made Volospion look at her sharply, but she had begun talking in an animated whisper with Sweet Orb Mace. Volospion adjusted his insect-shell hood, preening the antennae back from his corpse-pale forehead, but said nothing more as they made their way along the lakeshore to the tent.
Even by her normal generous standards, their hostess had outdone herself: the tables of food alone covered several acres: red herrings skewered on reviewer’s barbs sizzled over expanses of hot coals, and monstrous platters had been stacked high with half-baked plots, hoary wive’s tails, licorice quips, and old chestnuts. Editorial assistants in gravy mewed piteously, treading on each other in a desperate attempt to keep their tiny heads above the surface of the steaming liquid in which they swam. High above all this plenitude, on a mound of roasted vellum, stood the centerpiece—two vast moving figures made of ground chicken liver, who hacked at each other with serving knives, screaming in rage and pain at each blow, while the guests standing beneath them applauded and caught falling bits of the combatants on slices of bread.
“Ah, I recognize that pair,” said the Duke of Queens, pleased that his own researches were paying such a swift reward. “The terrible old gods of fiction, Vee Doll and Male Er, in their eternal struggle.”
My Lady Charlotina swept down on them from above, her voluminous skirts bellying out to slow her descent. She accepted kisses and compliments on her outfit, dress, shawl, boots, and veiled wimple all constructed of translucent pink flesh.
“Ham,” she explained to them. “Flesh of an extinct animal. I’ve come as a particular book rather than an author. What am I again?” she asked Sweet Orb Mace.
“The Smokehouse of Parma.”
“Of course. I’d forgotten—I’m quite distracted, you see. Have you met the real author yet? He’s just over there. I’d come with you, but Argonheart Po is making a new cake to replace the one that O’Kala exploded, and he’s very upset about having to work so hurriedly.”
My Lady Charlotina hurtled off across the great tent, making a swift and expert loop halfway to avoid Werther de Goethe’s air car, a funeral urn of marble so dark it glowed purple. Sweet Orb Mace lowered her blood-smeared spear as Werther’s urn hissed by overhead, then, as she hurried them toward the guest of honor, said, “It is his birthday, this author. That is in part the reason for the party. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Hmmm.” A tiny frown dimpled the Iron Orchid’s smooth cheeks. “He looks a bit old to be born only today, if he is a time-traveler. Surely even the most primitive of the ancient ones did not have beards like that in infancy? But of course, though I have done the deed once myself, I would not claim to be an expert.”
“It means an anniversary of one’s birth, also,” Volospion informed her. “They did not live very long, these Dawn Agers, and thus they marked the passing of each year, with a particular doleful emphasis after they passed into decrepitude at the year thirty or so.” He examined the author carefully as they approached, and did not seem to like what he saw very much.
“All the more reason we should make his celebration festive,” suggested the Duke of Queens, stopping to pull up his rings once more, which this time had become tangled in his ringmaster’s whip, a segmented tail growing from his lower back. “Such brief lives! But such ardor, such enthusiasm!”
“I have seen others who appeared more enthusiastic than this fellow,” observed the Iron Orchid quietly, for they had drawn close to the object of their scrutiny. “But I do think he looks rather sweet.”
“Ah,” said Doctor Volospion. “Sweet.”
The time-traveler was standing a bit apart from the nearest guests—a gang of drunken young Ruffian Novelists dressed in Tol’s Toy Soldier uniforms, waving long wooden Critic Bats—watching the ongoing, self-destructive struggle of Vee Doll and Male Er overhead with bemusement. The guest of honor was a bearded, sturdy man dressed in rather nondescript clothing—he alone, gifted with authenticity, seemed to feel no need for costume.
“Ah,” called out the Duke of Queens, “we meet again, celebrated scribe! Sweet Orb Mace and I have already had the pleasure of an introduction to you, but please allow me to present the Iron Orchid and Doctor Volospion. Iron Orchid, Doctor, you are in the presence of the very great and renowned Dawn Age fabulist, Maxwell Meerkat!”
As the Iron Orchid made an elaborate, scale-clinking courtesy, and Volospion tendered a brief nod of greeting, the author shook his head slowly, like someone not quite awake. “Maxwell . . .? No, no, actually it’s . . .”
“Please, vaunted Meerkat, no need for modesty!” The Duke of Queens turned to share his salutation with the crowd at large. “We are honored to have here among us such a fierce, fiery, and yet fundamentally friendly fabulist—the author of such works of undying glory as A Cure for Kansas and A Medicine for Milton Keynes! Creator of such magical heroes as El Rick and his aged sidekick Strom Bringer! Also that famously fateful fungus, the Eternal Champignon! And who could ever forget . . . forget . . .” The Duke paused for a moment, struggling as his shoulder rings slid down and pinned his arms to his side. “Ah, there are of course too many triumphs to mention!” he finished, still battling the wayward rings. “Huzzah for Maxwell Meerkat!” There was a spatter of applause.
“In truth, that’s about all the cities had to offer,” the duke whispered to the Iron Orchid as she helped him loosen the rings and push them back up to his neck. “Still, it’s nice to give things that personal touch.”
“Thank you,” said the author. “You’re very kind, all of you. But my name’s not actually . . .”
“Remembered in quite the way you had hoped?” The Duke of Queens smiled sadly. “Of course not, of course not. We are rather a post-literary age, I’m afraid. But the fact that you are retained in the memory banks of the cities at all is itself an indicator of your prestige.”
“I was told he claims to a greater posterity than that,” said Doctor Volospion crisply. “If what I heard earlier is true, Mr. Meerkat, you believe our entire age is the product of your mind.”
“Well . . .” The bearded man watched Doctor Volospion with a slightly discomforted fascination, as a hiker might regard a snake lying in his path. “Well, after a fashion. Certainly I’ve written about all of you, and considered you all to be the pure product of imagination. It’s all very . . . strange. I mean, I’ve never been to this place before, although I’ve imagined it in some detail. Of course,” he said to himself, frowning, “I suppose that strictly speaking I can’t really be sure I’m here now. I seem to remember having a nap. Perhaps I’m dreaming this.”
“I think,” said Volospion icily, “if you are going to take credit for our existence, you might at least let us believe we are a bit more significant than the byblow of some daydream.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Meerkat, turning to the others as if worried he had offended them, too. “God, no. You’re all quite spectacular, just as I’d always imagined you being. Lake Billy the Kid!” His smile was almost childlike. “It’s amazing, really. Have all the things I wrote actually happened?” He turned to the Iron Orchid. “Has your son fallen in love with a woman from the 19th century?”
“You know my son?”
“Jherek Carnelian!” Maxwell Meerkat laughed. “Of course—I invented him, too.” He saw the Orchid’s slightly frosty glance and his face fell. “Or that’s how it seems to me. It’s really quite a puzzle. I’ve made up lots of things—it’s been my job, you see—but nothing like this has ever happened before. The End of Time! It’s hard to know where to start. I’d love to meet Lord Jagged, for one thing, actually meet him. Is he here?”
“But why should we believe a word you say?” demanded Volospion, his smile broad but his eyes cold. “We have had many claimants, many prophets and lunatics visit us here at the End of Time.”
“Ah, yes, that’s right—you don’t appreciate people talking about Jagged, do you?” Meerkat nodded his head sagely.
“I assure you it is a matter of perfect indifference to me.” Doctor Volospion ostentatiously turned his shoulder to the time-traveler as more of the inhabitants of the End of Time began to gather. O’Kala Incarnadine, who was attempting to eat a bowl full of typeworms and lead slugs with his clumsy bear paws and making rather a mess of it, gave a sticky wave to his comrades. Gaf the Horse in Tears was carrying a red pencil and striped in the bloody weals of a Galley Slave. Bishop Castle’s huge hat flickered through different architectural shapes, one moment a minaret, the next a 68th Century purification dormitory.
“Do you like it?” Castle asked the author. “It is of course a reproduction of the famous Random House.”
“Do not be offended by our wonderfully sharp-tongued Doctor Volospion,” the Duke of Queens begged the guest of honor. “We are all thrilled to have our author among us. We are grateful that you have deigned to join us—so few creations can say that with certainty.”
“Yes, it is of course very pleasant to meet you,” said the Iron Orchid, “but although I do not entirely approve of Doctor Volospion’s tone, I think his question is valid. Why should we believe that you had anything to do with making us?”
The author frowned a little, considering. There was a shout of approval from across the tent as Mistress Christia finished congress with her ninety-ninth Sails Rep and invited the one hundredth in line to doff his naval uniform and take his turn.
“I suppose I could tell you something that no one else could know,” Meerkat said at last, almost apologetically. “I’m not really interested in proving anything, but I can’t help feeling at least a little bit that it would be nice to justify myself. I worked very hard on all of you, after all.”
