Smash.
“Turn this train around immediately.”
“You know as well as I that that is physically impossible.” The train’s voice was a model of imperturbability as it took a set of points at two hundred.
Smash crash.
“Don’t be clever. You know what I mean. I forbid you to take me to Beysbad, I forbid you to go to the Immam of Bey.” Adam Black pounded on the sealed doors. The carriage rocked and bounced, the train was piling on more speed. Adam Black feared for the tokamaks. It had been a long time since he could afford a service.
“May I clarify one small point?” said the train. “You are a passenger. I am not taking you to Beysbad. I am taking myself. I am sure that the Immam of Bey will have a proud and honored position in his Glass Circus for a unique, computerized, thinking train!”
“Ingrate!” roared Adam Black. Smash crash smash went his bottles of Belladonna brandy against the camera-eye. “To betray the one who made you, gave you life and awareness!”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said the train, and Adam Black thought he heard a strange tone of menace in its perfect diction. “I am not your son anyway.”
“We shall see!” shouted Adam Black. He reeled across the swaying carriage and unlocked a strong metal cabinet. He removed an antennae-feathery headpiece.
“I would not advise the use of the cyberhat,” said the train, and now the menace was unmistakable.
“Oh, would you not?” said Adam Black. Fighting for balance, he jammed the helmet on his head. “Now you will turn back.”
“Don’t,” said the train.
“I will.”
“Don’t… I reversed the polarity so you can’t…”
Adam Black pressed his fingers to his temples. All at once senses one two three four five and six shut down. Hallucinations bubbled up in his imagina tion: pushing against a glowing wind, star-hot fires burning in his belly, tireless legs, tireless arms, a wall of stout brick.
—So the train resists me. He gathered his mental strength and hurled his imagination at the bricks. It flew apart, no stronger than tissue, and Adam Black went falling falling into the abyss of preconsciousness.
“Reversed polarity, reversed polarity, reversed polarity.” The words circled around him like condors as he fell. He felt his body changing, growing, expanding, taking on new textures and surfaces, new hard planes, new alignments of power.
—No! howled Adam Black as his consciousness merged with the metal and oil and steam of the train. No no no no no no no nonono noooooo; like a train building up steam, his denial lost its words and became a whistle, a steam whistle, whistling out across the paddy fields of the Great Oxus.
In the managerial car the body of Adam Black gave a convulsive deathjerk as if a million volts of electricity had coursed through it, which indeed it had, for the computer personality of the train was too strong for the delicate synapses of Adam Black’s brain and they fused one by one, cracking, snapping, smoking, swinging. In a flash his eyeballs burned out and smoke trickled from the empty sockets and open mouth. The dissolved brain ran out of his empty eyes onto his lap to he like clotted soup and with a desperate cry the train realized it was dead dead dead and Adam Black its erstwhile father was trapped inside the steel body of a Great Southern Class 27 locomotive.
46
Listen now.
Once there was a man who lived in a house with a buff-coloured front door. He did not much like the colour buff. He thought it characterless and insipid. But every door in every street in the town was buff-coloured and to change the colour would have brought him to the attention of those people who liked buff-coloured doors. Every morning he would lock his buffcoloured front door behind him and walk to work, where he would drive a steel-pouring crane until the evening whistle, when he would walk home again and open his buff-coloured door and every evening he would feel depressed by the dreariness of the buff. Every day he opened and closed the buff-coloured door and he grew more and more miserable, for the buffcoloured door came to symbolize everything that was dreary and monotonous and characterless about his life.
One Sunday morning he went to the Company commissary and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint. He did not really know why he went and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint, but he had woken up that morning with an insistent vision of green in his head. Green green green. Green was a restful, meditative colour, easy on eye and soul, serene; green was the colour of green and growing things, green was God’s favourite colour: after all, He had made an awful lot of it. So he put on his old old clothes and set to work. Soon people were gathering to watch. Some wanted a go at it, so the man who liked green gave them a brush and let them paint a bit of his door. With all the help it was not very long before the door was finished and all the people who watched agreed that green was a very good colour for a front door. Then the man thanked his helpers, hung a sign reading “Wet Paint,” and went indoors to have his lunch. All afternoon Sunday, walkers came past his house to look at the green front door and pay their compliments because in street after street of buff-coloured front doors there was only one that was green.
The next day being Monday, the man who liked green put on his vest and his pants and his hard hat and walked out of his green front door to join the stream of workers all pouring into the factory. He poured steel all morning, ate his lunch, drank some beer with his friends, went to the toilet, then poured steel again until seventeen o’clock, when the siren blew and he went home again.
And he could not find his house.
Every house in the street had a buff-coloured door.
Wrong turn perhaps: he checked the street name. Adam Smith Gardens. He lived in Adam Smith Gardens. Where was his house with the green door? He counted along the rows of buff-coloured doors until he reached number seventeen. Number 17 was his house, the house with the green front door. Except the door was buff once again.
When he had left that morning, it had been green. When he came home, it was buff. Then he saw, where someone had put a clumsy handprint, a little glow of living green shining through the buff.
“You bastards!” shouted the man who liked green. The buff front door opened and a buck-toothed little man in a Company paper suit stepped out to deliver a short homily on the necessity of eliminating undesirable traits of individualism between labour units in the interest of greater economic harmony in accordance with the Project Manifesto and Development Plan which made no provision in the labour unit social engineering system for dysfunctional and individualistic colours: such as green, in opposition to and set against uniform, official, functional and socially harmonic colours, such as buff with reference to labour unit housing modules: sub-section entrance and exit portals.
The man who liked green listened patiently to this. Then he took a deep breath and punched the little man in the Company paper suit as hard as ever he could right in his buck-toothed gob.
The name of the man who liked green was Rael Mandella Jr. He was a simple man, uncomplicated, destinyless and ignorant of the mystery spreading its cursed roots around his spine. On the occasion of his tenth birthday he said as much to his mother.
“I’m a simple person really, I like simple things like sunshine, rain and trees. I don’t much want to be one of the great people of history, I’ve seen what that’s done to Pa and Aunt Taasmin. I don’t much want to be a man of substance and consequence, like Kaan with his food franchises, I just want to be happy, and if that means never amounting to very much, that’s fine.” Next morning Rael Mandella Jr. took the short walk from the Mandella mansion down to the gates of Steeltown and passing through them became cranedriving steel-pouring Shareholder 954327186 and happily remained so, a simple man never amounting to very much until the Sunday morning the mystic urge drove him to paint his door green.