Prince Charming stuck his head up from behind the shield to stick out his tongue at the Duke. ‘The Queen is a coprophagist,’ he cried in a stentorian voice. ‘She’s got steatopygia and her eyes are crossed!’
The Queen scowled. The crowd sat down, huddling in their thousands, making no sound.
‘Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa,’ cried the Prince. ‘Old metal guts, afraid to fight.’
The Queen snarled and gestured: Forward!
The Duke of Eyes extended all remaining tentacles and lunged, only to find himself skidding wildly to the right because of the rust that had largely immobilized one tread.
From behind the mechanical monster, the Black Dog barked wildly. ‘Now, Prince. Here, Prince, here, Prince, here!’
Prince Charming dropped shield and axe and ran for his life. Behind the Duke of Eyes the horse began to occult, winking in and out of existence, each time longer between reappearances. The momegs, too, began to wink. The crowd rose to its feet, screaming. The Queen made an imperious gesture, and the great machine lifted and turned, ponderously creaking and screaming, even as Prince Charming threw himself across the last few feet to the center of the arena and caught the momentarily visible horse around one rear leg.
Then they were gone.
With a scream of rage, the Queen turned and stormed out of the arena. With a clatter of treads, the Duke of Eyes wobbled through the great, timbered door. Later the people of whatever-city-it-was commented upon the strange lights that moved all night in the high, private wing of the palace.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Slick as a frog’s back, clay-gray, the flats stretched from under the wagon wheels in all directions to the veiled horizon. Water covered most of it, a mere sheen of moisture licking at mud edges, flattening the hollows, leaving only a narrowly wandering track above the waterline to glimmer like light on wet silk, an uncertain highway from somewhere to anywhere. Tracks came spinning endlessly off the wheels and meandered across the flats until they vanished into misty distance, the net result of all peregrinations yielding no particular direction. Four dogs, red and blue, gray and yellow, bent to the traces, following the black lead dog as he tracked the ridge to leave their paw, wheel and hoof prints in the firmly silted sand. It was forever from where they were to where the tracks vanished in mist. An equivalent featureless distance lay on every hand.
At times the drier ground split into two or three branches, making the lead dog whine with frustration until the momeg, Gojam, flicked the whip in one direction or another to indicate the chosen route. Nothing differentiated the choices. There was always as much water on one hand as on the other; there was always an equivalency of mud, a sufficiency of glimmer, shine, vapor, colorlessness, sourceless, shadowless light.
‘A dull world,’ said Gojam to no one in particular, ‘yet one I have always favored.’
These are tidal flats, aren’t they?’ asked Prince Charming.
‘So I have always believed,’ Gojam replied with a polite smile that showed his pointed teeth and crinkled several of his red little eyes.
‘Then the tide ought to—come in, oughtn’t it? At some time?’
‘So I would suppose. Though I have never seen it do so.’
‘You come here often?’
‘When it seems appropriate.’
‘May one ask,’ whinnied the horse from his position at the rear of the wagon, ‘what made it seem appropriate on this occasion?’
‘Well,’ Gojam mused for a moment, his dewlaps quivering and his long, pendant ears swaying to and fro with the power of his concentration. ‘Firstly, it isn’t inimical. I mean, you can all breathe here, and the temperature isn’t unbearable. Secondly, it’s a placid sort of place. Very little happens. At least, very little has happened when I’ve been here in the past. I thought that would give you all time to collect yourselves, as it were…’
‘Very kind of you,’ murmured Marianne, wondering if her tenant, Marianne, would interrupt her in mid-speech. ‘I, for one, could stand a little collecting.’
‘And, thirdly,’ the momeg continued, ‘I doubt that half a dozen momegs in the universe know about this place. Which means that though the dark woman, the Queen, Madame Delubovoska, will probably track you here eventually, it isn’t likely to be a place she’ll look for you right away.’
‘Madame Delubovoska,’ mused the Prince. ‘That was the woman who was attempting to kill us, wasn’t it?’
‘I believe so,’ offered Gojam. ‘Switching nexi is a strain, and you may have forgotten. Let me take the liberty of reminding you. You were engaged in battle with a large, mechanical monster. Does that ring a bell? Ah, good. Your momeg friends approached me for a means of escape? Ah, you do recall.’
‘I remember that,’ said the Prince. ‘I went there to rescue a Fair Maiden – my own true love,’ he cast Marianne a melting glance, ‘but how I got there I really can’t recollect.’
The lead dog stopped, abruptly, making the other four dogs pile up in the traces with muttered growls. ‘Something,’ the Black Dog said. ‘Out there on the mud.’
They stared in the direction the dog’s muzzle pointed, seeing nothing at first, then a tiny interruption in nothing, and finally, protruding above the water, two miniscule pimples that had attracted the dog’s attention. The pimples blinked and disappeared, only to appear again, slightly to the right of their previous location.
‘Eyes,’ said Marianne. ‘Something with eyes.’
The eyes regarded them balefully from the level of the water’s surface before disappearing again. They might have been something quite small, close up, or something quite large, far away.
‘I had no idea anything lived here,’ Gojam remarked, scratching at a left ear with one pair of arms while twitching the reins with another. ‘Of course, I haven’t come here that frequently.’
‘About the tide,’ said the Prince, moodily attempting to pull two scraps of trouser together to cover an expanse of muscular thigh. ‘Reason would indicate it must come in at some time or other.’
‘I’ve always thought reason sadly overrated,’ remarked Gojam. ‘There are momegs who pay a lot of attention to it, just as there are some who disbelieve in it entirely. I tend to the middle view. Use it when it’s helpful and ignore it when it isn’t.’
‘I merely meant, it would be unpleasant for us if the tide came in while we were out here.’ The Prince sighed, turned to Marianne, gave her a long, burning look and touched her hand. Marianne stroked his in response, her eyes misty. The hand twitched and drew away as Marianne looked down and saw what it was doing.
‘You say “out here” as though there were some “in there” which might be selected instead,’ Gojam commented, uncrossing his third and fourth legs and stretching them over the dashboard of the wagon. ‘So far as I am aware, “out here” is all there is.’
‘Wrong,’ said the horse. ‘It may be all you’ve seen, magnificent sir. All you have become aware of in your peregrinations. All you have intuited or assumed or inferred from the lack of structure around us. Not all, however, that there is. I suggest you gaze toward the horizon, slightly to the left of our present line of travel.’
‘I see it,’ said the Red Dog after a time. ‘A tower.’
‘Towers,’ corrected Blue Dog. ‘Misty, but still quite real.’
‘I wouldn’t have said real,’ murmured Gojam. ‘Evident, perhaps. Or perceivable. Not necessarily real.’
‘A nice philosophical point,’ commented the Prince, perking up a little. ‘Could we direct our travel in the direction of those possibly spiritual and/or ephemeral structures?’
Gojam sighed, flicked the whip, and directed Black Dog slightly to the left at the next branch.
‘Eyes,’ said Marianne again, pointing toward the water. This time there were several pairs of lidded hemispheres blinking at them from the fluctuating surface.
‘They seem interested in our progress but not hostile,’ Gojam remarked. ‘In keeping with the placidity I have always found he
re.’
‘Wherever here is,’ neighed the horse rudely, mostly to himself.
‘How did you and the—the other momegs become acquainted?’ Marianne asked hastily, giving the horse’s nose an admonitory tap of her fingers.
‘Become acquainted?’ Gojam stared at her with one set of eyes, rapidly blinking the other to convey confusion. ‘I am not aware that we are acquainted.’
‘I only thought – you were kind enough to let them exit through your… your locus.’
‘Through a nexus of which my locus was a part, most accurately. It’s impossible to exit through a locus. A locus doesn’t go anywhere. It merely is. Interminably and dully in most cases. Which is not responsive to your inquiry. Well, I would have done as much for any entity. Known or unknown. Recognizable or strange. Dynamic or static. Your friends approached me politely and I responded in kind. What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another?’
‘I see,’ she murmured. ‘What indeed.’
‘Besides,’ he confessed, compressing one set of lips while sneering with another, ‘I do detest Madame Delubovoska. She has a nasty habit of summoning up momegs on the spur of the moment, without any concern for the inconvenience it may cause, and then splatting them back again whenever it suits her. If she returns them at all, which I have reason to doubt in some cases. A very very close friend of mine, virtually a contiguite, was used twice by Madame and actually burned both times as a dismissal. No lasting damage, of course. We’re virtually indestructible, but we do have feelings.’
‘How awful for him,’ murmured Marianne, feeling faintly guilty without being able to remember why. ‘How awful for you. How many – ah, contiguites do you have?’
‘Oh, twelve. Depending upon the packing, don’t you know. They do insist on shifting it about.’
‘Twelve at my locus, too,’ said the Black Dog. ‘Of course, it’s unstressed space in my neighborhood. Things can get packed a lot tighter than that around singularities, I understand.’
‘Indeed,’ said Gojam, playing idly with the whip. ‘So I’ve been told by some momegs who’ve been there. And a lot looser around discontinuities, if it comes to that—which we all fervently hope it never does.’ He shuddered delicately. ’No matter how dull the locus, it’s better than no locus at all.’ He sighed, moodily. ‘Are we getting any closer to the whatevers?’
They were getting considerably closer. What had at first appeared to be towers now proved to be lumpish promontories culminating in tall, cylindrical structures that were either unfinished or in a state of ruinous decay.
‘Eyes,’ said Marianne again. This time there were a hundred pairs or more, moving gently along the surface of the water, observing their progress.
‘A veritable metropolis, gentlemen and lady,’ suggested the horse. ‘An urban center. Who knows what delights and surprises may await us.’
‘Whatever it is, it’s made out of mud,’ remarked the Red Dog. ‘Wet mud.’
‘Wettish,’ corrected Black Dog. ‘If it were really wet, it wouldn’t hold shape.’
‘Not necessarily true,’ admonished Gojam. ‘There you go, naughty, naughty, being reasonable again. You have to remember where we are.’
‘Wherever that may be,’ nickered the horse, very quietly, to himself.
‘Wherever it is, we approach,’ said the Black Dog, firmly.
As they drew closer, they could see that the structures were indeed made of mud, tiny dab on tiny dab built up in endless layers, like the nest of a cliff swallow or a mud dauber wasp, the accretion of protracted and focused effort, mud on mud on mud, higher and higher, a mighty mound with little jug-shaped dwellings covering it, the round jug necks peering in all directions. At the top of the great mound a slightly smaller mound began, and on top of that one, another still. Extending high above these three great clumps, like a mud-man with a tall hat, a long cylindrical chimney of mud dabs spiralled lumpishly upward into the mists.
‘Wettish,’ remarked the Black Dog with satisfaction. ’Damp.’
‘Hail, great travelers,’ called a small voice. ‘Accept the hospitality of the Tower of Petition.’
It took them a little time to locate the speaker. It had crawled out of the water onto the track before them and lay there now, propped high on two front flippers with its eyes bulging toward them, the top of its head reaching approximately to Black Dog’s knees.
‘Hail,’ said Gojam in a kindly voice. ‘Very nice of you, I must say.’
The speaker flipped itself toward the mud hive, found an upward track among the dwellings and scuttled up this slick and obviously well-traveled incline until it was at their eye level. ‘I would invite you in, but there seems to be some disparity in size.’
Think nothing of it,’ said the Prince. ‘We may have been trespassing. If so, it was unintentional, and we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.’
The speaker waved both flippers before its face as though to wave away such an idea. ‘We are honored by your presence. Some of us have been following your progress with deep attention. Even now our philosophers are engaged in colloquy to determine which of the Great Questions should be put to you. Who knows? Your arrival may actually put an end to Construction!’
‘Construction?’ asked Marianne. ‘This construction?’ She gestured upward at the tower. ‘It’s very impressive. We wouldn’t want to… interrupt anything.’ Her eyes dropped to the water level where great numbers of the mud creatures were scuttling up into and upon the building. Many of the mud jugs were already occupied, and serious eyes peered at them from every direction.
‘It would be a blessing,’ the speaker said in a distracted tone. ‘We’ve been building it with conscript labor for sixty generations, and everyone is tired to death of it. Is there anything I can do to increase your comfort? The water is potable. At least, we drink it. If you’d like some scum, I can have some gathered for you. No? We quite understand. Different creatures, different needs. Though until now we had only postulated the existence of different creatures. And now! To see – how many kinds of you are there? I count at least four, but perhaps there are subtleties of which I am unaware?’
‘Three basic shapes,’ said the Prince. ‘Four if you distinguish on the basis of size as you seem to be doing. Two basic kinds. Nine entities, each different in some way from the others. I believe there are at least three sexes represented.’
‘Oh, you,’ said Gojam, twinkling.
‘Remarkable,’ twittered the mud creature. ‘Oh, I am incredibly rude. I haven’t given you my designation. I am philosopher’s assistant Puy.’
‘I am Prince Charming,’ said the Prince. ‘This is the Fair Maiden Marianne or Sleeping Beauty Marianne, I forget which. That is Gojam. That is a horse, nameless for the moment, though undoubtedly faithful. The dogs are all momentary gods, as is Gojam, designated by color.’
‘Color?’ asked Puy. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t recognize the concept.’
‘Ah, a measure of the creature’s ability to reflect certain wavelengths of light. Unimportant.’
‘They are Rouge, Delphy, Liquorice, Gold, and Silver,’ said Marianne, pointing to each in turn.
‘Delighted,’ said Puy, bowing on his flippers. ‘Utterly delighted. Ah, I believe the council of philosophers is approaching.’
Having made this announcement, Puy peered upward from the edge of the slide. Following his gaze, they saw several rather bulbous mud creatures sliding down the mud track from the top of the structure, braking madly at the turns with their flippers, then thrusting themselves onward on the straightaways, much in the manner of skiers negotiating a challenging run. They had reached the bottom of the chimney shape and were now negotiating tortuous turns among the dwellings. They arrived, rather out of breath, bowed to Puy, who bowed in return, and then took their positions before the visitors, still panting.
‘Honored guests,’ their spokesman peeped. ‘We, the council of philosophers, have determined which of the Great Q
uestions shall be put to you.’
‘Very flattering, I’m sure,’ said Gojam. ‘Is it your expectation we will answer this question or questions?’
The mud creatures stared at them, then at each other, murmuring rapidly.
‘… always thought…’
‘… never considered they might not…’
‘… could always threaten them…’
‘…try persuasion…’
‘We will be happy to try to answer your questions,’ said Marianne in a firm voice, frowning at Gojam.
‘I was only asking,’ said the momeg in a mild voice. ’Not all creatures really want their questions answered, you know.’
The rapid exchange among the mud peepers went on.
‘Trying to answer just isn’t good enough…’
‘… anything that size ought to know…’
‘… had to come from somewhere…’
‘We have decided to threaten you,’ the speaker went on at the conclusion of this conference. ‘You must answer the questions.’
‘Or?’ asked Prince Charming, curiously.
‘Or we’ll summon the tide,’ the creature answered.
‘It will wash away your entire building,’ the Prince remarked, with what Marianne regarded as commendable calm. ’Would you really want to do that?’
The conference resumed.
‘… hadn’t thought about…’
‘… sixty generations by my count…’
‘… all to do over again…’
‘Maybe we’ll just ask the questions,’ the speaker said at last, eyes half shut and an expression of pain on its fishlike face.
‘Ask away,’ invited Gojam.
‘We’ve been building this tower for over sixty generations,’ the speaker peeped. ‘Trying to get it high enough to see over the mist. You’ve probably noticed, you can’t see very far.’
‘We had noticed,’ Marianne said.
‘We were trying to answer several of the great questions for ourselves you see. It isn’t that we’re lazy, or lacking in endeavor. We’ve really worked very hard at this. It’s difficult, you know. The mud won’t dry thoroughly. It tends to slide. There’ve been some really bad accidents…’