Aurorarama (9 page)

Let us be more precise, he thought. He had wanted to speak to Helen or for Helen to speak to him—the woman (and a lot more than that) whose dead body he had left on the ice field a few years before, after her magic had saved the city. Vomiting ectoplasm on the ice field may have been merely a consequence of his desire to communicate with the dead Helen. And so must have been the Ghost Lady, for a spectre was more or less the form he would have expected Helen to take if she appeared. “Mr. Osiris” was another clue. After Helen had saved the city from Delwit Faber’s coup with the Lobster Girls and the House of Hellequin, Brentford had found crumpled in her hand the formula Isis had used to stop the Chariot of the Sun in order to help the diseased Osiris. The very name Osiris could be vaguely construed as a play on his name, Orsini, which in Italian was itself a pun on
bear
(a bear even appeared on his coat of arms). It would be only logical to find a bear on the
arctic
ice field, all the more since
arctos
also meant “bear.” Being on the ice, then, like
the references to Ross, meant only that he was simply dreaming of himself waiting for a vision of Helen, not to mention that ice is the best backdrop for the kind of clear and sustained mental images he’d been hoping to see. The Ghost Lady calling him Mr. Osiris signified that, if she was not Helen herself, she was conscious of Brentford’s history with Helen, and was perhaps some sort of messenger. “Did you fly?” was more difficult to decipher, but Brentford remembered now that when Helen had made him join her on a kind of shamanic trip, he had found himself flying over an unknown city. So, as he summed it up, the dream was just a rather simple image of his own longing for Helen, and the message he had got was, after all, pointing to her more clearly than he had first thought.

Of course, there was still the tiresome hypothesis that it was a simple circular circuit of wish fulfilment and that he had only received under a different form what he had first put into the dream. But then, there was the code, which he could not account for, and which could be in some way or another the answer he had been waiting for.

It was when he passed in front of the Prince of Whales pub that Brentford got the idea. If ever he knew someone who could solve this riddle, it was the local legend William de la Whale, the brain behind Matball, that mind-boggling blend of human chess and Basque pelota that had been both a craze and a secret laboratory behind Transpherence. The ciphers with which William encoded the moves and tactics of his team were famous for both their subtlety and their solidity. He had even taught, if Brentford remembered correctly, Cryptography as an integral part of his poetry class at Doges College. De la Whale would know instantly if Brentford’s code made sense or not, and help him, or so he hoped, to solve it if it did.

He entered the pub, noted for its remarkable painting of a rather muddy and dark whale-hunting scene, asked for a Scores-by Stout and a Specksioneer Sandwich, and went to the Pneumatic
Post Booth. There he wrote a message to Sybil to tell her he would be home late (though she would probably be partying somewhere), put it in a canister, sent it through the outward tube, and set about looking for William de la Whale’s address in the Dispatch Directory, where he found it quite quickly. It was in Yukiguni. He then ate his sandwich—the bread slices were held together by a miniature harpoon—at the lustrous counter, and having finished his beer with a manly gulp that recalled his glorious days in the dreaded Doges College Ice Rugby Club, he set forth for the Japanese quarter.

It was just a few moonlit bridges away. Added to the fact that is always pleasant to cross bridges in New Venice, Yukiguni happened to be one of Brentford’s favourite places in the city. He entered the gate, slaloming among the smoking shadows queuing in front of the Toadstool, apparently a trendy spot these days, and immediately felt at ease in that somewhat labyrinthine network of narrow streets, miniature canals, and gibbous bridges covered with a snow that seemed lighter than anywhere else. It was deserted and dark, with a hum of its own, distant and muted, which made the place sound calmer than the rest of New Venice.

Onogorojima, where William was supposed to live, was a tiny island right in the centre of the zone, circled and crossed by convoluted paths that quickly caused orientation trouble. The Hokkaido-style houses, with their empty bear cages and taboo windows in front, which were for divine use only, had no numbers whatsoever, and Brentford had to count them one by one before he decided on which door he was going to knock. Luckily, he could count well.

A middle-aged woman slid open the entrance door just widely enough to poke her head through and take a look at the visitor, who, deerstalker hat in hand, introduced himself with the utmost politeness. The woman disappeared for a while, and then reappeared, letting Brentford in with a bow.

He took off his rubbers, and after following the woman down a corridor was introduced into a space that was more Western than Japanese, and very disorderly. Around a solid desk, books were crammed everywhere, piled up in unstable rookeries, and the floor was littered with chessboards and go-ban, all frozen in mid or end game. The light was sparse, but though all Brentford could see of William was a flaky hand softly brushing a bald head, it was enough to make him realize that he had an aged man in front of him.

“Mr. William de la Whale?” asked Brentford.

“Plain William Whale will do,” said a slow, hissing voice that Brentford could barely understand. “These arcticocratic games are past their prime, aren’t they?” the voice kept on, slurring and dwindling into a crackle of slobbery static.

“I am Brentford Orsini,” he answered, feeling he should skip the ducal part. There was a pause.

“Visitors are rather rare here, Mr. Orsini. I suppose I should be grateful.”

The words fell slowly, as in some sort of Chinese saliva-drop torture. Brentford started to feel embarrassed by the hot, stifling atmosphere, and he remembered, but too late, the rumours that a lifetime of substance taking had taken its toll on William’s brain, causing his early retirement from public life.

“I do not know whether you should be grateful. But you can certainly be helpful.”

“I seem to remember you run the Greenhouse?”

“I do. Yes.”

A long silence ensued, mercifully interrupted when the woman re-entered the room and put a tray with a kettle and two cups on the edge of the desk, where it just fit. A sweet-scented steam arose when the woman filled the cups.

“This is my spouse, Kujira Etsuko.”

Brentford bowed as he received the burning cup. As the light fell upon her, he could see that her skin still had that yellowishorange
hue typical of the “Greenhouse girls” who used to metabolize Pineapples and Plums from their sweat while dancing for Matball Players and Transpherees. Her love story with William was famous in New Venice. How Angry Ananias Andrew, then the Master of the Greenhouse, had taken her away from William so that he could secure his services as an addicted trainer for his Matball team was part of a lore that Brentford knew by heart. Eventually, or so the story went, William had shot Andrew Arkansky. Brentford felt moved to meet her in the flesh, a flesh whose secretions had produced the most powerful drug ever known to man—but then, wasn’t that the case in every love story? Etsuko retired, yet somehow lingered in the fruity tang of the tea.

“The Greenhouse …” William kept on like a slowed-down, scratched wax roll. “How it is these days?”

Brentford tried not to blunder.

“It is a rather uneventful place.”

William nodded his head, in and out of the dark.

“In what way can I be of help?”

“I have a code that I would very much like to subject to your perspicacity, Mr. Whale.”

He felt instantly that he had pushed the right button on that rather creaky mechanism. William turned toward Brentford and lit a desk lamp that made his face appear more distinctly. He had sagging cheeks, a small moustache, rings around his eyes, and pupils with a moist glint that was not quite reassuring.

“Oh, excellent. I like codes, Mr. Orsini. Human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve,” he said, baring his ravaged gums as he spoke. He had apparently retained his abilities and simply lost his teeth.

Brentford handed him the paper on which he had scribbled the code and watched him scrutinize it.

“It’s short. Which does not mean easier, as we have less material to rely on. Maybe a bit of context would not hurt.”

“It’s a dream code,” said Brentford uneasily. “From an incubation.”

William now had both elbows on the desk, biting his thin lips as he pored over the message.

“You would be better placed than I am to crack a code your own wit devised.”

“I tried, but to no avail,” avowed Brentford.

“Would you tell me your dream, Mr. Orsini? And be reassured: I am not going to analyze it.”

He had a conniving smile that Brentford mirrored. They were both from the Good Old Days, when the analyst was dreaded as a peculiarly perverse form of policeman who could cause endless trouble and spoil one’s Transpherence plan. Brentford told the gist of his dream, without, however, mentioning Helen.

“What?” asked William, his glinting eyes suddenly sparkling. “Blue boxer shorts?”

“As I told you,” said Brentford, who was not too keen on dwelling on his underwear, real or dreamed.

There was a long pause.

“Interesting,” said William.

“If you say so,” said Brentford modestly.

“Because it is the key we are looking for.”

It was Brentford’s turn to remain silent.

“I once had a good friend who wore such shorts,” said William with a surprising seriousness, and even, it seemed to Brentford, a little trembling in the voice. “A great Matball player.”

Igor Plastisine
, thought Brentford, but did not say anything. The man had overdosed and gone crazy from metabolizing his own Pineapples and Plums. He, too, was part of the lore.

“We had a code between us. And this is written in some dream-twisted version of that code.”

“But I would not know it, even subconsciously, would I?”

“Maybe you wouldn’t know it, but you came to me, someone who does know it, sent by someone or … something, who
knew that you would do that. So, that dispatch was in the wrong canister and the wrong canister was in the right tube, after all. Those networks can be a bit complicated, but this is Smalltown, Dreamland all the same.”

William, pencil in hand, crossing out and substituting letters, was now quite animated, and seemed to decipher the text without much difficulty. It was done in two minutes flat.

“As to what the message says, I am sure that I do not have to fear your disappointment.”

“And why is that so?”

“Because it is, precisely, an
appointment
. A date, an hour, and a place.”

William looked at Brentford, visibly amused.

“But you may not like it.”

Brentford waited, his heart beating.

“
On your own. March the 1st,”
announced William in his hoarse voice. “90°
N 65, 5 W°. H.”

“That is the North Pole,” said Brentford, happy to hear from Helen.

“450 nautical miles due north of us. Yes. That was where you must have been standing in your dream. That will be quite an interesting trip, I dare say.”

“March first. It would still be polar night there,” said Brentford, computing quickly. He could not even say that he was surprised. Helen, if indeed it was she, was, typically, expecting a lot from him. In a sense, it was flattering. But it put him under some rather intensive pressure.

“Oh, yes. You should bring a flashlight. And a camera to immortalize the deed. For you would be the first man ever to get there. Just imagine that.”

“Why do you say that? Peary went there, didn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” William chuckled, “he did not.”

“So you think that it was Cook.”

“Oh! Him! Even less so, if that’s possible.”

William got up and went straight to one of the teetering piles of books. Without much fuss, he withdrew a red volume, which he handed to Brentford. It was called
Journey to the Earth’s Interior
by a certain Marshall B. Gardner.

“Another of those Hollow Earth books,” said Brentford with a slight disdain.

“Exactly. But this one has the peculiarity of having been written
after
Peary’s and Cook’s expeditions, which means the author was facing a tough challenge when, without ever leaving his library, he still claimed that the pole marked a gate to the Earth’s interior. In this, you will agree that he was a brave man.”

“Certainly,” said Brentford, browsing through the book, thinking that Peary and Cook were, on the whole, more likely candidates for a Bravery award.

“It was vital to his theory that neither Peary nor Cook had ever reached the pole. And he spared no efforts to prove that. And if he is wrong about what he affirms, he is right about what he negates.”

Brentford had found the chapter entitled “Was the North Pole discovered?” From what he read there, skimming though he was, it was evident that both explorers had stretched the truth by quite a length.

“Peary,” resumed Whale, “came back much too quickly to substantiate his claim. Forty miles a day on a sled that Peary himself admitted he (or his men, since he could barely walk) had to push like a plough is simply not possible. His bearings must have been rather sloppy, to say the least, especially in a place where you quite easily get lost, and he had not taken into account the drift of the ice sheet either. So to say that he was thirty miles off the mark is really a generous estimation. As for Cook, he was certainly heroic as well, as the end of his trip
more than proved, but he himself admitted that ‘to touch that spot would be an accident,’ and his Eskimos let him down by saying they had never lost sight of the land. Henson was probably right when he said that Cook had just ‘half-hypnotized himself’ over the whole matter.”

“These men had certainly estimated that they had reached some North Pole inside of themselves,” said Brentford, handing back the book. “It is perhaps the one that counts.”