Limaal Mandella pulled the blinds, called the guard, and after the first stop at Cathedral Oaks there were no further disturbances.
35
The cylinder of rolled documents hung from Mikal Margolis’s shoulder twenty-five centimetres above the track. Mikal Margolis hung from the underside of a Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 air-conditioned first class carriage. The Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 air-conditioned first class carriage hung from the underside of Nova Columbia and Nova Columbia hung from the backside of the world as it circled the sun at two million kilometres per hour, carrying Nova Columbia, railroad, carriage, Mikal Margolis and document cylinder with it.
Ishiwara junction was half a world away. His arms were tough now, they could carry him all the world’s way around the sun hanging from the undersides of trains. He no longer felt the pain, of arms and Ishiwara Junction. He was beginning to suspect that he had a selective memory. Hanging beneath trains gave him much time for thought and self-examination. On the first such occasion after Ishiwara junction he had devised the scheme that had drawn him down the shining rails across junctions, switchovers, points, ramps and midnight marshalling yards toward the city of Kershaw. There was an irresistible attraction of dark for dark. The roll of papers across his shoulders would not permit him any other destiny.
He shifted to the least uncomfortable position and tried to picture the city of Kershaw. His imagination filled the great black cube with cavernous shopping malls where the exquisite artifacts of a thousand workshops commanded eye and purse; level upon level of recreation centres where every whim could be indulged from games of Go in secluded tea houses to concertos by the world’s greatest Sinfonia to basements filled with glycerine and soft rubber. There would be museums and auditoria, Bohemian artists’ quarters, a thousand restaurants representing the world’s thousand gastronomies and covered parks so cleverly designed you could believe you were walking under open sky.
He could see the clanging foundries where the proud locomotives of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad Company were constructed, and the Central Depot from which they were dispatched all across the northern half of the world and the subterranean chemical plants that bubbled their effluent into the lake of Syss and the factory-farms where strains of artificial bacteria were skimmed from tanks of sewage to be processed into the thousand restaurants’ thousand cuisines. He thought of the rainfall traps and the brilliantly economical systems of water reclamation and purification, he thought of the air shafts up which perpetual hurricanes spiralled, the dirty breath of two million Shareholders exhaled into the atmosphere. He imagined the outer skin penthouses of the managerial castes, their views of Syss and its grimy shore increasingly panoramic with altitude, and the apartments in the quiet family residential districts opening onto bright and breezy light-wells. He thought of the children, happy and well-scrubbed, in the Company schools learning the joyful lessons of industrial feudalism, which was not hard for them, he thought, for they were surrounded every second of every day by its pinnacle of achievement. Suspended beneath the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service, Mikal Margolis beheld the whole of the works of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation in his soul-eye and cried aloud, “Well, Kershaw, here I am!”
Then the first acid breaths of Syss caught at his throat and blinded his eyes with tears.
There is a level lower than the level of machine drudgery at which Johnny Stalin entered the capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. It is the level reserved for those who ride into the Central Depot hanging from the bottom of the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service. It is the level of the unnumbered. It is the level of invisibility. Not the practiced invisibility that enabled Mikal Margolis to escape from the Central Depot undetected among the masses of Company Shareholders, but the invisibility of the individual before the body corporate.
Up a flight of marble steps, through brass doors ten times the height of a man, Mikal Margolis found himself in a cavernous hall of shining marble and polished hush. Before him was a very large and ugly statue of Winged Victory bearing the legend “Laborare est Orate.” Several kilometres distant across the marble plains stood a marble desk above which hung a sign reading INTERVIEWS, APPOINTMENTS AND AUDIENCES ENQUIRIES. Mikal Margolis’s trainscuffed shoes clattered vulgarly on the sacred marble. The fat man in the Company paper suit stared down at him from behind the marble rampart.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to make an appointment.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to see someone in industrial development.”
“That would be the Regional Developments Offices.”
“To do with steel.”
“Regional Developments Offices, iron and steel division.”
“In the Desolation Road area… the Great Desert, you know?”
“One moment.” The fat receptionist tapped at his computer. “North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Office, iron and steel division, Regional Developments Offices, Room 156302, please join line A for your preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary.” He handed Mikal Margolis a slip of paper. “Your number: 33,256. Line A through those doors.”
“But this is important!” Mikal Margolis waved the roll of documents under the receptionist’s nose. “I can’t wait for 33,255 other people to go ahead of me just for some… some application to see some undersecretary.”
“Preliminary application for a preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary. Well, if it’s that urgent, sir, you should join line B, for an application for the Priority Clearance Programme.” He tore off a fresh numbered strip. “There. Number 2304. Door B please.”
Mikal Margolis ripped both numbers into shreds and tossed them into the air.
“Get me an appointment, now, for tomorrow at the very latest.”
“That is quite impossible. The earliest appointment is next Octember, the sixteenth, to be precise, with the water and sewage treatment manager, at 13:30 hours. You can’t throw the system about, sir, it’s for the good of us all. Now, here is a new number. Give me yours so I know who wants an appointment, and go and join line B.”
“Pardon?”
“Give me your number and go and join Line B.”
“Number?”
“Shareholder’s number. You have a Shareholder’s number?”
“Then you’ll have a temporary visitor’s visa. Could I have that, please?”
“I don’t have a temporary…” The fat receptionist’s outraged shriek turned heads all the way across the marble cathedral.
“No number! No visa! Holy Lady, you’re one of those… one of those…” Bells began to ring. Black and gold Company policemen appeared from unnoticed doors and advanced. Mikal Margolis looked for a place to run.
“Arrest this, this gutter boy, this tramp, this freebooter, goondah and bum!” screamed the receptionist. “Arrest this… Freelancer!” Thick foam sprayed from his mouth. The police drew short shock-staves and charged.
A sudden explosion of automatic fire threw everyone to the ground. The customary shrieker in such events shrieked. A figure in a grey paper suit stood by the door to line A, intimidating the lobby with a small black MRCW.
“Nobody move!” he shouted. Nobody moved. “Get over here!”
Mikal Margolis looked around for someone else the gunman could have meant. He pointed at himself, mouthing the word me?