“Small dogs any good?” I asked.
“Keep at it.”
The small dogs were joined by medium-sized dogs, then finally the deep, throaty woofs of Great Danes.
They were joined by bloodhounds and wolfhounds, and pretty soon my head was full of dogs doing nothing but barking, whining and panting.
“Big dogs.”
She snapped the compact shut, and the sound abruptly cut out. I staggered for a moment.
“Steady,” she said, holding my elbow.
“What was that?”
“Precautions. A little bit of reconfiguring in the cortex. The big dogs just indicate you’re done—like the whistle on a kettle. Make a note of the time. We’ve got a couple of hours to be safe.”
“I saw colors. Real colors. And a Pooka.”
“He’s actually a Herald. A lost page from a missing book. He’s always there and always says the same thing.”
But I wasn’t really listening; I had far too many questions.
“You said ‘precautions’? And what do you mean, ‘We’ve got a couple of hours’? A couple of hours for what?”
“All in good time, Red. Come on, we better catch up with Courtland.”
“The Herald said something about ‘Gordini Protocols.’ What are they?”
“Trust me, Red, all in good time.”
We found Courtland waiting for us at a stone meetinghouse that was smothered with heavy ivy and still a creditable two stories high.
“Thought I’d lost you,” he said. “Get a load of this!”
He pointed inside the meetinghouse. The roof had vanished long ago, and the floor was covered in a thick carpet of moss. Floating just inside the doorway was an elegant craft about the size of a Ford. It was definitly a vehicle of some sort, but without wheels and constructed entirely of floatie material.
Despite a thick layer of lichen and creepers that were draped on it from above, it was still drifting free. A yard-high mark around the inside of the meeting house showed where it had moved about with the air currents, scraping against the walls. The only reason it had not drifted out and eventually made its way to the sea was that the meetinghouse door had partially collapsed, blocking its only escape. I placed my hand on the craft but, even by pulling hard, could make it dip only a small amount.
“At least six hundred negative pounds,” murmured Courtland, “spoons, a complete floatie. This place has riches in abundance—am I glad I came!”
I looked at Jane, who said nothing, and we moved off. The road we had been following was soon joined by a second that snaked in from the north. But it wasn’t any easier going. If anything, it was worse. The road was covered with the grassed-over lumps of rubble, long-rusted wreckage, stunted trees trying to grow as best they could on the thin soil, and at times impenetrable rhododendron that had to be skirted around, further slowing our progress.
“Where does the Perpetulite start?” asked Courtland.
“About a mile down the way,” Jane replied.
I looked at my watch. “We’re getting pressed for time. At this rate all we’ll manage is a quick look around before we need to head back.”
“You won’t want any more than that.”
After thirty minutes of scrambling over debris, we finally arrived at the Perpetulite. It was a four-lane roadway of perfect grey-black compound, and the bronze pins had been driven in closer together than at Bleak Point, so the spalling was less severe.
“Thank Munsell for that,” breathed Courtland, emptying a bootful of earth and sitting on the glossy black central barrier. The roadway even had Perpetulite lampposts of a much more modern design than the iron posts I was used to, and the lightglobes, where still present, were alight.
We walked down the road, which seemed somehow more incongruous here in the depopulated wasteland than at home. There, at least, there was someone to use the road or even see it; here it existed purely for its own sake.
There Shall Be Spoons
2.3.06.56.027: Flowers are not to be picked; they are to be enjoyed by everyone.
As we walked toward the town, the scattered broadleaf forest was replaced by the curved, whiplike branches of the yateveos, and since they always kept the ground beneath them meticulously clear of any brush or vegetation, the verges, side roads and collapsed buildings had a creepy well-manicured look to them. Not that our path was totally maintenance-free and perfection; the Perpetulite’s ability to remove debris worked only as far as the curb, so the edges of the road were marked by low banks of grass-covered detritus, a little like piecrusts.
Courtland saw his first spoon ten minutes later. It was by the side of the road, but he didn’t pick it up.
There was a yateveo looming above, and Jane told him there would be more spoons farther on. Even though the canopy of the carnivorous trees extended almost completely across the roadway and the barbed spines were at tensioned readiness, as long as we kept from yelling and didn’t smell of blood, they wouldn’t be able to sense us. The root sensors of the yateveo could not break through the tough layer of Perpetulite.
The road entered a circular junction, and we took the route that led to a bridge across the river. The tide was out, and by looking seaward along the silted-in tidal reaches, we could clearly see the large, flat-decked ship that dominated the mouth of the estuary. Even from this distance it was gargantuan; the gulls that wheeled above its superstructure looked like little more than specks.
Fifty yards beyond the bridge we came across a railway track. To the left it continued on toward the coast but looked unused; the way was impeded by trees and thick shrubbery. To the right the tracks curved off into the trees and headed north. We were standing at some kind of station, made entirely of Perpetulite. There were platforms, benches and light stands, but no ticket hall or canteen. It was quiet, too, and as we stood there, a bird fell from the sky and landed at our feet, quite dead.
“Spoons!” exclaimed Courtland, and he was right. Dotted along the side of the road were more of them, in great abundance. There were no yateveos here, so he scooped them up by the handful and poured them into his satchel with a satisfying jangle. But as we moved on he discovered more and, unable to carry them all, he became more selective. By the time we had walked the short distance to the twice-lifesize bronze of Munsell, he was nonchalantly tossing aside spoons that were not perfect and started collecting only the ones that were pristine or had unusual postcodes on the back, or those he described as yellow.
Beyond Munsell’s bronze was what looked like an open-air meeting place. It was a flat, circular piazza perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, with a series of ionic columns set about the periphery at fifteen-foot intervals. On top of these was a continuous and gently curved architrave, and decorating this in a long unbroken frieze were animals, human figures and Leapbacked technology, some familiar, some not. We passed slowly through the processional entrance arch and noticed that the columns, floor, panels and even benches and classically styled lamp stands were made entirely of a reddish veined Perpetulite, as though attempting to emulate the more transient marble.
It was, perhaps, the most awe-inspiring construction I had ever laid eyes on. Not just because of the scale or the symmetrical perfection, but the craftsmanship. The capitals were finely sculpted with a dramatic flourish, and the delicate sinews of the horses’ bodies within the frieze were as finely detailed now as they had been since construction, and would remain so as long as there was oxygen in the air and there were nutrients in the soil.
It was between the columns that the rain-tarnished spoons had gathered. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them—perhaps more. They were heaped right where the swirly-patterned Perpetulite ended and the lawns began, and they lay in a long jumbled mass that was so high I could barely step over them. But oddly, while most were already covered in moss, leaf mold and lichen, the ones facing the piazza were still shiny and new. I walked across to the simple stone monolith that stood in the center of the piazza. It was slender and tall, and it bore a familiar inscription. I sat on one of the benches to look at it: Apart We Are Together.