Dancers at the End of Time (6 page)

You will get her away from Mongrove, though it will turn the world upside down! You will entertain us all. You will thrill us. You will hold our attention for months! For years! We shall speculate upon your success or your failure. We shall wonder how far you have really involved yourself in this game. We shall watch to see how your grey time-traveller responds. Will she return your love? Will she spurn it? Will she decide to love Mongrove, the more to complicate your schemes?" Lord Jagged reached over and kissed Jherek heartily upon the lips. "Yes! It must be played out in every small detail. Your friends will help.

They will give you tips. They'll consult the literatures of the ages to glean the best of the love stories and you will act them out. Gorgon and Queen Elizabeth. Romeo and Julius Caesar. Windermere and Lady Oscar. Hitler and Mussolini. Fred and Louella. Ojiba and Obija. Sero and Fidsekalak. The list goes on — and on! And on, dear Jherek!"

Fired by his friend's enthusiasm Jherek stood up and yelled with laughter.

"I shall be a
lover!
"

"A lover!"

"Nothing shall thwart me!"

"Nothing!"

"I shall win my love and live with her in ardent happiness until the very universe grows old and cold."

"Or whatever our space-travelling friend said would happen. Now that factor should give it an edge." Lord Jagged fingered his linen-coloured nose. "Oh, you'll be doomed, desired, deceived, debunked and delivered!" (Lord Jagged seemed to be fond, tonight, of his d's.) "Demonic, demonstrative, determined, destructive." He was dangerously close to overdoing it. "You'll be destiny's fool, my dear! Your story shall ring down the ages (whatever's left, at any rate). Jherek Carnelian — the most laudable, the most laborious, the most literal, the very
last
of lovers!" And with a yell he flung his arms around his friend while Jherek Carnelian seized the whistle string and tugged wildly making the locomotive shriek and moan and thrust itself throbbing into the warm, black night.

"Love!" shouted Jherek.

"Love," whispered Lord Jagged, kissing him once more.

"Oh, Jagged!" Jherek gave himself up to his lascivious lord's embrace.

"She must have a name," said Jagged, rolling over in the eight-poster bed and taking a sip of beer from the bronze barrel he held between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand. "We must find it out."

He got up and crossed the corrugated iron floor to brush aside the sheets from the window and peer through. "Is that a sunset or a sunrise? It looks like a sunset."

"I'm sorry." Jherek opened his eyes and turned one of his rings a fraction of a degree to the right.

"Much better," said Lord Jagged of Canaria, admiring the golden dawn. "And what are the birds?"

He pointed through the window at the black silhouettes circling high above in the sky.

"Parrots," said Jherek. "They're supposed to eat the branded buffalo."

"Supposed to?"

"They won't. And they should be perfect reproductions. I made a mistake somewhere. I really ought to put them back in my gene-bank and start again."

"What if we paid Mongrove a visit this morning?" Lord Jagged suggested, returning to his original subject.

"He wouldn't receive me."

"He would receive
me
, however. And you will be my companion. I will feign an interest in his menagerie and that way you shall be able to meet again the object of your desire."

"I'm not sure it's such a good idea now, darling Jagged," said Jherek. "I was carried away last night."

"Indeed, my love, you were. And why not? How often does it happen? No, Jherek Carnelian, you shall not falter. It will delight so many."

Jherek laughed. "Lord Jagged, I think there is some other motive involved here — a motive of your own. Would you not rather take my place?"

"I? I have no interest at all in the period."

"Aren't you interested in falling in love?"

"I am interested in
your
falling in love. You should. It will complete you, Jherek. You were
born
, do you see? The rest of us came into the world as adults (apart from poor Werther, but that was a somewhat different story) or created ourselves or were created by our friends. But you, Jherek, were born — a baby. And so you must also fall in love. Oh, yes. There is no question of it. In any other one of us it would be silly."

"I think you have already pointed out that it would be ludicrous in me, too," said Jherek mildly.

"Love was always
ludicrous
, Jherek. That's another thing again."

"Very well," smiled Jherek. "To please you, my lean lord, I will do my best."

"To please us all. Including yourself, Jherek. Especially yourself, Jherek."

"I must admit that I might consider…"

Lord Jagged began, suddenly, to sing.

The notes trilled and warbled from his throat. A most delightful rush of song and such a complicated melody that Jherek could hardly follow it.

Jherek glanced thoughtfully and with some irony at his friend.

It had seemed for a moment that Lord Jagged had deliberately cut Jherek short.

But why?

He had only been about to point out that the Lord of Canaria had all the qualities of affection, wit and imagination that might be desired in a lover and that Jherek would willingly fall in love with him rather than some time-traveller whom he did not know at all.

And, Jherek suspected, Lord Jagged had known that he was about to say this. Would the declaration have been in doubtful taste, perhaps? The point about falling in love with the grey time-traveller was that she would find nothing strange in it. In her age
everyone
had fallen in love (or, at very least, had been able to deceive themselves that they had, which was much the same thing). Yes, Lord Jagged had acted with great generosity and stopped him from embarrassing himself. It would have been vulgar to have declared his love for Lord Jagged but it was witty to fall in love with the grey time-traveller.

Not that there was anything wrong with intentional vulgarity. Or even unintentional vulgarity, thought Jherek, in the case, for instance, of the Duke of Queens.

He recalled the party with horror. "The poor Duke of Queens!"

"His party was absolutely perfect. Not a thing went right." Lord Jagged left the window and wandered over the bumpy floor. "May I use this for a suit?" He gestured towards a stuffed mammoth which filled one corner of the room.

"Of course," said Jherek. "I was never quite sure if it was in period, anyway. How clever of you to pick that." He watched with interest as Lord Jagged broke the mammoth down into its component atoms and then, from the hovering cloud of particles, concocted for himself a loose, lilac-coloured robe with the kind of high, stiff collar he often favoured, and huge puffed sleeves from which peeped the tips of his fingers, and silver slippers with long, pointed toes, and a circlet to contain his long platinum hair; a circlet in the form of a rippling, living 54th century Uranian lizard.

"How haughty you look!" said Jherek. "A prince of fifty planets!"

Lord Jagged bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment. "We are the sum of all previous ages, are we not? And as a result there is nothing that marks this age of ours, save that one thing. We are the sum."

"I had never thought of it." Jherek swung his long legs from the bed and stood up.

"Nor I, until this moment. But it is true. I can think of nothing else typical. Our technologies, our tricks, our conceits — they all imitate the past. We benefit from everything our ancestors worked to achieve. But we invent nothing of our own — we merely ring a few changes on what already exists."

"There is nothing left to invent, my lilac lord. The long history of mankind, if it has a purpose at all, has found complete fulfilment in us. We can indulge any fancy. We can choose to be whatever we wish and do whatever we wish. What else is there? We are happy. Even Mongrove is happy in his misery — it is his choice. No one would try to alter it. I am rather at a loss, therefore, to follow where your argument is leading." Jherek sipped from his own beer barrel.

"There was no argument, my jaunty Jherek. It was an observation I made. That was all."

"And accurate." Jherek was at a loss to add anything more.

"Accurate."

Lord Jagged stood back to admire Jherek, still unclothed for the day.

"And what will you wear?"

"I have been considering that very question," Jherek put a finger to his chin. "It must be in keeping with all this — especially since I am to pay court to a lady of the 19th century. But it cannot be the same as yesterday."

"No," agreed Lord Jagged.

And then Jherek had it. He was delighted at his own brilliance. "I know! I shall wear exactly the same costume as she wore last night! It will be a compliment she cannot fail to notice."

"Jherek," crooned Lord Jagged, hugging him, "you are the best of us!"

"The very best of us," yawned Lord Jagged of Canaria, lying back upon the couch of plush and ermine as Jherek, clad in his new costume, pulled the whistle of the locomotive which took off from the corral and left the West behind, heading for gloomy Mongrove's domain.

The locomotive steered a course for the tropics, passing through a dozen different skies. Some of the skies were still being completed, while others were being dismantled as their creators wearied of them.

They puffed over the old cities which nobody used any more, but which were not destroyed because the sources of many forms of energy were still stored there — the energy in particular, which powered the rings everyone wore. Once whole star systems had been converted to store the energy banks of Earth, during the manic Engineering Millennium, when everyone, it appeared, had devoted themselves to that single purpose.

They travelled through several daytimes and a few nighttimes on their way to Mongrove's. The giant, save for his brief Hell-making fad, had always lived in the same place, where a sub-continent called Indi had once been. It was well over an hour before they sighted the grey clouds which perpetually hung over Mongrove's domain, pouring down either snow or sleet or hail or rain, depending on the giant's mood. The sun never shone through those clouds. Mongrove hated sunshine.

Lord Jagged pretended to shiver, though his garments had naturally adjusted to the change in temperature. "There are Mongrove's miserable cliffs. I can see them now." He pointed through the observation window.

Jherek looked and saw them. Mile high crags met the grey clouds. They were black, gleaming and melancholy crags, without symmetry, without a single patch of relieving colour, for even the rain which fell on them seemed to turn black as it struck them and ran in weeping black rivers down their rocky flanks.

And Jherek shivered, too. It had been many years since he had visited Mongrove and he had forgotten with what uncompromising misery the giant had designed his home.

At a murmured command from Jherek, the locomotive rolled up the sky to get above the clouds.

The rain and the cold would not affect the aircar, but Jherek found the mere sight too glum for his taste.

But soon they had passed over the cliffs and Jherek could tell from the way in which the cloud bank seemed to dip in the middle that they were over Mongrove's valley. Now they would have to pass through the clouds. There was no choice.

The locomotive began to descend, passing through layer after grey layer of the thick, swirling mist until it emerged, finally, over Mongrove's valley. Jherek and Lord Jagged looked down upon a blighted landscape of festering marsh and leafless, stunted trees, of bleak boulders, of withered shrubs and dank moss. In the very centre of all this desolation squatted the vast, cheerless complex of buildings and enclosures which was surrounded by a great, glabrous wall and dominated by Mongrove's dark, obsidian castle. From the castle's ragged towers shone a few dim, yellowish lights.

Almost immediately a force dome appeared over the castle and its environs. It turned the falling rain to steam. Then Mongrove's voice, amplified fiftyfold, boomed from the now partially hidden castle.

"What enemy approaches to plague and threaten despondent Mongrove?"

Although Mongrove's detectors would already have identified them, Jagged answered with good humour.

"It is I, dear Mongrove. Your good friend Lord Jagged of Canaria."

"And another."

"Yes, another. Jherek Carnelian is well known to you surely?"

"Well known and well hated. He is not welcome here, Lord Jagged."

"And I? Am I not welcome?"

"None are welcome at Castle Mongrove, but you may enter, if you wish."

"And my friend Jherek?"

"If you insist upon bringing him with you — and if I have his word, Lord Jagged, that he is not here to play one of his cruel jests upon me."

"You have my word, Mongrove," said Jherek.

"Then," said Mongrove reluctantly, "enter."

The force dome vanished; the rain fell unhindered upon the basalt and the obsidian. For the sake of politeness, Jherek did not take his locomotive over the wall. Instead he brought the aircar to the swampy ground and waited until the massive iron gates groaned open just wide enough to admit the locomotive, which shuffled merrily through, giving out multicoloured smoke from its funnel and its bogies — a most incongruous sight and one which was bound to displease Mongrove. Yet Jherek could not resist it.

Mongrove desired so much to be baited, he felt, and he desired so much to bait him that he let few opportunities go. Lord Jagged placed a hand on Jherek's shoulder.

"It would improve matters and make our task the easier if we were to forgo the smoke, jolly Jherek."

"Very well!" Jherek laughed and ordered the smoke to stop. "Perhaps I should have designed a more funereal carriage altogether. For the occasion. One of those black ships of the Four Year Empire would do. Oh, death meant so much to them in those days. Are we missing something, I wonder?"