At the time Galen Hornwrack met his end here, all order and sense of purpose had vanished from the place. The buildings, alien to begin with, had begun to subside like hot glass, as if searching for a new centre of gravity. A partly transparent architecture of nightmarish balconies and over hanging walls had formed as Matter, struggling to find a compromise between human and insect demands, began to teeter and grope toward verticals and horizontals that satisfied neither. Streets laid down under no wholesome plan ended in pits, or in staircases which themselves petered out after a turn or two up the sides of some enormous windowless cylinder. The towers shuddered and quaked, vibrating between human and alien states; then slumped and dissolved like jelly. A languorous buzzing sound accompanied this process, and beneath that the clangour of enormous bells, as if matter were trying to toll itself apart. Appalling winds howled down the changing thoroughfares. Streams of tiny blue motes tumbled from the higher cornices; out in the open squares (through which, as in a dream, could be discerned the equivalent plazas of Viriconium – opposite pole, node of nightmares, sister city) struggled the changed individuals of the swarm; while among the alleys of this disintegrating province proliferated the thick, yellow stems of some mutated plant.
Above, vast clouds of the insects hung in the throbbing purple sky, making adventive, meaningless patterns as they attempted to replicate or restart the endless spatial pilgrimage. They hurled themselves into huge pits dug in the desert. They invented useless vehicles which rolled like mouldy grapefruit between the dunes, rising a few feet above the ground to emit foul gases. ('Regretfully,'whispered the madwoman, 'it is part of a scheme you cannot understand.') Into this chaos Galen Hornwrack was persuaded to lead his party, unaware that circumstances were about to return to him a fragment or two of his distant – indeed by now almost imaginary – adolescence.
Under a sky like a glass mantle, at an intersection in the disintegrating ground plan of the city, two insects performed a dance in the suicidal light. Disease had maimed them, their eyes were like rotting melons; yet vivid heraldic insignia flared along their blue and green flanks like the lights of deep-sea fishes. Stiff and quivering, with curled abdomens and spread wings, moving one damaged limb at a time, they had the air of being painted on one of Elmo Buffin's sails, or tattoed in glowing inks on an upper arm. through this architecture of melting wax by small energetic movements of its finny hands.
Evening came, and with it a purple gloom through which darted curious flames.
Out of this, wreathed in a glutinous yellow fog, some clumsy insects dragged themselves. There were three or four of them. Alstath Fulthor put his hands to his head and fell down. 'Oh oh oh,'he cried. 'Oh, oh,'whispered the insects. They approached with a peculiar reluctance, dipping their great masks. Their grey wing-cases and armoured yellow underparts were cross-hatched with self-inflicted wounds. From these wounds were growing like buds a variety of pink new half-human limbs, joined to the pricked and rotting carapaces by a transitional substance, membranous, neither flesh nor chitin. There were clumps of little hands with mobile, perfect fingers, each one having a tiny fingernail like mother-of-pearl. There were the faces of very young children with closed eyes. There were eyes alone (as indeed there were legs and torsos and internal organs), gummy with post-natal sleep, and of a very distinct blue like enamelling on an old brooch. Some of the faces murmured drowsily.
Whether these insects were ambassadors or soldiers was not clear. They had recognised Hornwrack's party as human, and been attracted by the magistral lustre of the Reborn Man's scarlet armour. (When they approached him their own insignia flared up along their sides, orange and emerald.) They could not speak, though, and he could not help them. They remained: immobile, at once heraldic and debased. It was the madwoman who sat up suddenly to speak on their behalf.
'We did not ask to come here,'she said. She watched Hornwrack, who in his turn licked his lips and stared at the travesty of a baby's head.
'What?'he said.
'Go away and wait,'she begged. 'Leave us to be finished here. We cannot live here much.'She opened her mouth and blood trickled from her lacerated tongue. 'Give us in peace,'she whispered, holding her head on one side in a listening attitude, her mouth full of crushed flowers. 'Oh!'
At the end of this speech she was standing with her back to the insects, her eyes bright with a horrifying intelligence. Their own great faceted orbs observed Hornwrack calmly over her shoulders. They were motionless. Hornwrack began to back away, laughing. 'No more of this!'he heard himself exclaim. He held up his hands. 'I don't want to hear any more.'He looked round for guidance, but Fulthor was grunting on the floor, and the spectre of the ancient airman had inconveniently vanished. Suddenly a kind of fake anger overcame his fright. He dragged the sword of tegeus-Cromis from his belt, shoved the woman aside, and waded into them with it. But it was only steel, and quickly broke in half. The ambassadors fell back without resisting him, rustling, bearing their dreadful human buds. (One of the heads woke up. Leave us alone, it whispered, looking directly at him.) Then another wave of disintegration surged out of the core of the city, which was now very close. Hornwrack staggered. The ambassadors writhed and thrashed, their joints gouting fluid. Fay Glass screamed.
'Leave us alone! We will soon die here!'
Hornwrack could bear no more of it. He was used to a less equivocal violence. Retching, he stumbled over to Fulthor's inert body and got the powered broadsword from its ceramic sheath. He had never used one before. He went back and cut inexpertly at the flailing forelimbs and compound eyes of the ambassadors. This time they made a half-hearted fight of it as they backed into the purple gloom. But their odd, gnarled weapons only sputtered feebly in the damp.air; gave up strings of pale light: and failed utterly. They tumbled on to their sides as he chopped off their legs. They whirred round in circles, pushing the earth up into irregular mounds. Soon they were all dead. He stared at them in astonishment; at the artifact fizzing in his hand; at Fay Glass. At the last moment they had tried to direct his attention away from the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly's airboat, the Heavy Star.
The hull of this ship loomed over him, crawling with the enigmatic corrosions of its hundred-year sojourn in the Moon. It was embedded in a tall bulwark of compacted sand which curved away right and left like the shell of some huge stadium. Hornwrack walked round it, awed, exultant. That famous machine! Lights were dimly visible through its fissured outer skin; pulpy vines enwrapped it; a few flakes of black and silver paint adhered to its stern – the colours of the House of Methven, set there at the height of the air-siege of Mingulay.
“'Fear death from the air!”'shouted Hornwrack. He laughed. He took hold of the madwoman's wrist in his enthusiasm and pulled her along after him. “'Fear death from the air!”'He thought of Fat Main Etteilla, and the Bistro Californium with its clientele of perverts and poseurs. He thought of the dwarf who had beaten him up in the palace and then abandoned him in the shadow of the Agdon Roches. He thought of the High City, which had wooed him merely to betray him. He thought of the Low City, of the boy in the Rue Sepile, the drifts of sodden chestnut leaves in the late-afternoon light of November, the women laughing in the upstairs rooms. He though of the candle at night, a cat sneaking into the room, the smell of geraniums – one dawn following another until they made eighty years of wounds and fevers. None of it meant anything. It was as if he had been relieved of these things, only to have them changed somehow and given back to him merely as memories. 'If I can rip her loose we'll fight our way out of this madhouse!'he said. He would fly down to the Pastel City in the last airboat left in the kingdom. There he would speak with the dwarf, perhaps even the Queen. There he'd state his terms. 'She'll never take to space again,'he said, rubbing his thumb over the thin, whitish, lichen-like growths, the network of tiny cracks that dulled the crystal skin. Even this slight contact made him shiver with excitement. He kicked at a door in the stern to see if it would open, and was rewarded by a hollow boom. 'But her motors still work. Look!'