He steadied himself on the ruins and walked towards a particularly large ash-pool. He stopped when he reached it. He stared down into it. He put his fingers to his lips and mused over the ash-pool.
He picked up a piece of brick and flung it down into the grey ash. When it reached the surface, the brick disappeared without disturbing the ash.
He took another brick and another and hurled them down.
The same thing happened. The same thing didn't happen.
A shadow fell across him. He looked up and saw a tall building rising above him. It consisted of a huge shaft built of glass bricks with a series of platforms going up and up until at the top there was the last platform with a dome over it. A man stood there, beckoning to him.
He ran towards the tower, found he could spring on to the first platform and from that one to the next until he reached the platform covered by the dome.
A man similar to a frog was waiting for him.
'Look down there, Maldoon,' he said.
Maldoon looked out over the neat city spread below. Each.block was of exactly the same dimensions, each one was square.
The man waved his reptilian hand. The light shone through it, grey as the ash.
'A country is like a woman,' said the man.' Look down there.
It wants to be subdued, wants to be bested by a strong man.
I did it. I quieted the country's perturbation - and raped it!'
The frog-man looked self-satisfied.
'It's peaceful,' said Maldoon.
'The most peaceful country in the system,' the mail-frog quipped. ' The most peaceful system in the country. Who are you, Maldoon?'
'Either you or me,' said Maldoon, forgetting his name.
'Jump, Maldoon,' said the man similar to a frog.
Maldoon merely stood there.
'Jump!'
He began to clamber around the ash-pool. (Sun, sky, ruins+Maldoon)=(Maldoon-Maldoon) His name was a throb in his head, merely a throb in his head.
M al-doon, Mal-doon, Mal-doon.
Had it ever been his name? Perhaps not. Perhaps it had always been - m al-doon, mal-doon merely a throb in his head.
Yet, apart from the ruins and the light, there was nothing else to know.
He paused. Was that a memory? That, at the back there? Out - mal-doon, mal-doon - out - mal-doon - concentrate, mal-doon.
The ruins appeared to blur for a moment and he stared at them sharply, suspiciously. They seemed to be folding themselves around him. No, he was folding himself around them. He flowed around them, over them, through them.
Maldoon!
The cry from somewhere was imperious, desperate, ironic.
Yes, he thought, which way? All or nothing, Maldoon, he cried to himself, nothing or nothing, all or all!
Out here is in here and it is infinite. He remembered, or was told, he could not tell. (Infinity+Maldoon)=(Infinity) With relief, he was glad to be back. Things were right again.
He paused and sat on a piece of broken concrete which sprouted spliced hawsers and which changed to a mound of soft soil with reeds growing from it. Below him was the city-roofs, chimneys, church-spires, parks, cinemas, smoke drifting. Familiar, yet not what he wanted.
He got up from the mound and began to walk down the path towards the city, still only half-aware of who he was, why he was, what he was and how he was.
'Why do I tire myself out trying,' he thought. ' One day I shan't be able to exert enough will to pull myself back and they'll find me up here either raving or curled up in a neat little bundle.'
Yet he could not decide, still, which was true -the city below or the ruins.
'Are they both real?' he thought as he walked off the grass and on to the road leading into the city.
He sauntered along the road, passing under a railway bridge of thick girders and peeling green paint, turned a corner into a side-street which was full of the smoky smell of autumn.
The houses were of red-brick and terraced with tiny gardens submerged beneath huge, overgrown hedges. Behind one of the hedges he heard children playing. He stopped and put his head round the hedge, watching them with their coloured bricks, building and pushing them down again.
When one of the children noticed him and looked up, he pulled his head back and walked on along the street.
But he was not to escape with impunity. The child cried 'It's him!' and followed him along the street with its companions chorusing rhythmically: 'Mad Maldoon! Mad Maldoon! Mad Maldoon-he's a loon!' and laughing at this old jest.He pretended not to notice them.
They only followed him to the end of the street and he was grateful for this, at least. It was getting late. Dusk was falling over the houses. His footfalls echoed among the roofs, clattering hollowly from chimney pot to chimney pot.
Mad Maldoon, mad maldoon, madmaldoonmaldoonmaldoon.
Heart-beats joined in, maldoon, maldoon, head-beats, maldoon, maldoon and the houses were still there but superimposed on the ruins, the echoes swimming amongst their unreal chimney pots.
The dusk gave way to night, the night to light and slowly the houses vanished.
The bright ruins stretched away, never obscuring his view of the horizon. The blue, blue sky was above, and the sun which did not change its position.
The ash-pools, he avoided. The tumbling ruins, fixed and frozen in time and space, did not fall.
What caused the ruins? He had completely forgotten.
There were just the ruins now, as the sky and the sun went out but the light remained. Just the sound of some unseen surf pounding at the last vestiges of his identity.
Mal-doon, mal-doon, mal-doon.
Ruins past, ruins present, ruins future.
He absorbed the ruins and they him. He and they went away for ever, for now there was no horizon.
The mind could clothe the ruins, but now there was no mind.
Soon, there were no ruins.
THE PLEASURE GARDEN OF FELIPE SAGITTARIUS
THE AIR was still and warm, the sun bright and the sky blue above the ruins of Berlin as I clambered over piles of weedcovered brick and broken concrete on my way to investigate the murder of an unknown man in the garden of Police Chief Bismarck.
My name is Minos Aquilinas, top Metatemporal Investigator of Europe, and this job was going to be a tough one, I knew.
Don't ask me the location or the date. I never bother to find out things like that, they only confuse me. With me it's instinct, win or lose.
They'd given me all the information there was. The dead man had already had an autopsy. Nothing unusual about him except that he had paper lungs - disposable lungs. That pinned him down a little. The only place I knew of where they still used paper lungs was Rome. What was a Roman doing in Berlin? Why was he murdered in Police Chief Bismarck's garden? He'd been strangled, that I'd been told. It wasn't hard to strangle a man with paper lungs, it didn't take long. But who and why were harder questions to answer right then.
It was a long way across the ruins to Bismarck's place. Rubble stretched in all directions and only here and there could you see a landmark - what was left of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Brechtsmuseum and a few other places like that I stopped to lean on the only remaining wall of a house, took off my jacket and loosened my tie, wiped my forehead and neck with my handkerchief and lit a cheroot. The wall gave me some shade and I felt a little cooler by the time I was ready to press on.
As I mounted a big heap of brick on which a lot of blue weeds grew I saw the Bismarck place ahead. Built of heavy, blackveined marble, in the kind of Valhalla/Olympus mixture they went in for, it was fronted by a smooth, green lawn and backed by a, garden that was surrounded by such a high wall I only glimpsed the leaves of some of the foliage even though I was looking down on the place. The thick Grecian columns flanking the porch were topped by a baroque facade covered in bas-reliefs showing men in horned helmets killing dragons and one another apparently indiscriminately.