Margali Gueths wiped snot from her nose. How had I ever imagined her attractive?
“Of course. Or course it is. I will never allow my life to be blighted as you have allowed yours to be. The Great Continuity has hold over me no longer.”
Somehow with no passage of time that I could recall I found myself standing outside. The stars overhead appeared to me like gaping moth-holes in the shoddy fabric of the universe.
I climbed back into my landau. But I did not return to Vestry Street.
Rather, I went once more to my office, there to initiate the reformation of Margali Gueths.
The brazen woman had confiscated and destroyed a single daguerreotype from the Vaults.
But there were many more.
It was not necessary to disseminate certain information and imagery from her file to any actual scandal sheets. Those tabloids were a blunt instrument useful only for amusing the proletariat. Anonymously circulating the material among her peers was a more subtle and sufficient means of ruining her standing, and thus frustrating any attempt on her part to circumvent the Great Continuity’s disposition of Juvian Gueths’ estate.
In only a month, Margali Gueths’ ambitions to take her husband’s place had been rendered impotent.
And that was when she chose to hang herself.
My ultimate emotional convulsion—the spasm that violated my Template and caused the end of the Great Continuity—attendant upon the suicide of Margali Gueths was not immediate.
By the time I learned of her demise, some weeks after our disturbing dinner, I had regained my equanimity. No longer did her sobs and guffaws and taunts haunt my sleep. I had become utterly convinced of the correctness of my actions. In fact, very seldom did her case even cross my conscious mind. I had acted with all diligence and propriety, obeying the dictates and duties of my office, of my own Template.
Just as she had. Just as she had.
Almost a year after her suicide, I sat once more in my office, on a hot summer’s day. Lunchtime rolled around. Goolsby Roy entered, carrying a meal tray. The odour of veal reached my nostrils.
Something broke open within me, a chrysalis all unsuspected that I had been growing, harbouring deep within me like some new extension of my soul. The exact concatenation of circumstances summoned up Margali Gueths’s first appearance before me, as vividly as if she were present.
I stood up and moved wordlessly past my startled assistant.
Down, down, down I went, to the Vaults.
Fire, of course, was an omnipresent worry where the records were concerned. Many preparations and drills against its dangers were in place. Sand- and water-buckets hung at intervals throughout the Vaults. Due to their antiquity, however, piped water was unavailable. So the fire which I ignited and then abandoned, once it was well underway but before it could entrap me, was brought under control before spreading all that far.
But the intense conflagration did succeed in causing a portion of the Vaults to collapse, opening a hole in the Plaza. Curious citizens of the lowest sort quickly swarmed around the smoky excitement. The doormen of the Palace tried to drive them back, but, vastly outnumbered and without weapons, failed. Soon daring and ambitious men and boys were scrambling down the smoldering rubble slopes of the pit, to investigate what lay below.
Soon files were being passed among the crowd. Files that proved every bit as incendiary as my matches.
Here I will leave off my eyewitness account, since I—or any individual—was unable to take in more than a fraction of the widespread chaos that followed. The insensate looting, the burning of property, the lynching, the destruction of the Panocculus machines— A veritable apocalypse that raged up and down the ekumen like a living beast for weeks. The social structures of centuries died, as easily as drowned kittens.
Yet somehow I survived the interregnum. Somehow I was reborn into an age that has abandoned all I once held dear and essential. Templates, the Great Continuity, order, stability—
Such concepts as inheritance and the Amatory Scale.
All vanished, in favour of impulsiveness and unpredictability.
And a chance, perhaps, for the first time, to love.
FJAERLAND
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO
The ferry slid away, trailing thick, luscious ripples across the waters of the fjord. A not-unpleasant scent compounded of brine, pine and gutted fish filled the air. Most of the new arrivals were jostling into a sanitary, hermetic tour bus. But one man and woman set off on foot along a tiny paved road, pulling their wheeled suitcases behind them.
The village ahead seemed utterly deserted.
“They’re resting in peace,” said the man, pausing to light a cigarette, his angular face intent. He wore jeans, a pale shirt, an expensive anorak, and designer shades. “Dead as network television.”
“It’s Sunday, Mark,” said his companion. “It’s Norway.” She wore oversize sunglasses and low heels. A lemon-yellow silk scarf enfolded her crop of blonde hair, a soft red cashmere sweater draped her shoulders. She looked as if she wanted to be happy, but had forgotten how.
The stodgy crypt of a tour bus lumbered past them. The man offered the passengers a wave. Nobody acknowledged him. “Sweet silence,” said the man as the bus’s roar faded. “Like being packed in cotton wool.”
The woman looked around, studying the scene. “With the fjord and the mountains—anything we say feels kind of superficial, doesn’t it? The beauty here—it’s like a giant waterfall. And my soul’s a tiny glass.”
“We’re fugitives, Laura. They could gun us down any minute. That’s why everything seems so heavy.”
“Shove it, Mark!”
“Never hurts to face the facts. That big house up ahead, you think that’s a hotel?”
“I hope it’s a love nest for us,” said Laura with a sad little smile. “I’m ready to relax and be friends, aren’t you? It might help if I had a book to read.”
“You’ll be reading this,” said Mark, playfully tapping his crotch. “Page one.”
Laura tossed her head, mildly amused. A few steps later she stopped still and made a sudden extravagant gesture. “Lo and behold!”
Right beside the narrow road was an unmanned shelf of books—warped boards, a piece of stapled-down, folded-back canvas for protection from the elements—with a sign reading: Honest Books, 10 Kr. each. A gnome-shaped metal coin-bank was beside the sign.
“Honest—that’s wishful thinking on their part, right?” said Mark. “I say you just help yourself.”
“The windows look empty, but there’s people inside the houses watching us,” said Laura. “Village life, right?” She leaned over the books. “The only English ones I see are totally foul best-sellers.”
“Which you’ve already read.”
“Which I’ve already read. Years ago. I guess I could try a Norwegian book. I can read that a little bit. Thanks to all my work as an interpreter.”
“And thanks to granny on your family’s Minnesota farm.”
“Don’t mock the farm, Mark. We can’t all be city slickers. Oh, look at this strange book here. I’ll dream over it while nibbling brown bread.”
“No words in it at all,” said Mark, flipping through the mouldy, leather-bound volume. “Just symbols and blobs.”
“I wonder if it’s math?”
“Not like any I’ve ever seen. And what’s up with the title? God Bøk with that slash through the o.”
“Means Good Book,” said Laura. “I want it. Pay the troll, Mark.”
Mark dropped a ten kroner coin into the troll-shaped bank beside the books. The coin clattered resonantly, the sound seeming to issue from impossibly cavernous depths.