As I was finishing a passage on the economy — verdict: permanently on the brink of collapse — I became distracted by a fidgeting at the edge of my field of vision. Looking round, I saw a short thin man rise from a sofa and walk towards me. His suit was the most peculiar colour — the fragile pale-blue of a blackbird’s egg. He had a slight cough, I noticed, and the rims of his nostrils were chapped and red.
‘My name’s Ming,’ the man said. ‘Walter Ming.’
At that moment a large suitcase slipped from the grasp of a passing bell-boy. The case promptly sprang open, spilling its contents across the lobby floor, including somewhat bizarrely, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, which came to rest against the toe of my left shoe. The disturbance partially obscured the thin man’s words, just as a clap of thunder might have done.
‘Wing?’ I said. ‘As in bird?’
‘Ming. As in dynasty.’ He smiled mirthlessly.
I introduced myself, and we shook hands. Ming’s palm had a dry, almost papery feel to it, and his black hair was thick and lustreless. Stooping quickly, I picked up the bottle of Tabasco and gave it to the flustered bell-boy.
‘You just arrived,’ Ming said.
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Pneuma,’ I said. ‘The Red Quarter.’
Ming had turned away from me. He was watching the bellboy, who was trying desperately to force everything back into the suitcase.
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’
Ming didn’t answer. In spite of his slight build, he seemed ponderous, like a city in which too much evidence of the past remains, and I thought of Cledge, the Green Quarter’s capital, whose shabby low-rise tenements I could sometimes see from my office window if the air was clear. I was about to ask whether he was a melancholic by any chance when Howard appeared before me. My room was ready, he was happy to say. Shaking Ming’s hand again, I told him that it had been a pleasure and that I was sure we would run into each other later on. I thought I could feel his curiously lifeless gaze resting on me as I moved towards the lifts.
On opening the door to my room, I was immediately struck by the oppressive quality of the furnishings, which had more in common with a museum, I felt, than a hotel. The sofa and the armchair were covered in a heavy plum-coloured brocade, and both the wallpaper and the curtains were dark-blue. My sense of claustrophobia was heightened by the bookshelves, which had been built into the wall on both sides of the bed and which were crammed with ancient, musty-looking hardbacks. In the middle of a stack of pillows and carefully positioned on a folded paper napkin was a complimentary chocolate in the shape of a smiling mouth. On the wall opposite the bed was a mural depicting a scene in which men in rowing-boats fished under a moonlit sky. I walked over to the writing desk. Here I found a bouquet of flowers and a wicker basket filled with fruit. A card from the organisers of the Sixteenth Cross-Border Conference wished me a rewarding and relaxing stay. I turned to the window. It looked west, over grey rooftops, the clutter only interrupted by the vertical spikes of a number of church spires. In the distance lay a smudged, uneven strip of countryside.
As I stood there, taking in the view, I remembered the man in the railway station — his sweaty pale-green skin, his oiled hair. The image had a surreal clarity about it, like the last fragment of a rapidly evaporating dream, something which, in the ordinary run of things, I would have automatically discounted or ignored. I slipped a hand into the pocket of my overcoat, half expecting it to be empty. There was something there, though — a sharp edge, a piece of card.
When I looked at the card for the first time I was slightly disappointed. I don’t know what I had hoped to find. Something typical of the Blue Quarter, I suppose — a kind of souvenir. But this was nothing more than a flyer for a place called the Bathysphere. It could be a new restaurant, I thought, or a bar. Or it might be a show. I studied the card more closely — the name and address written in dimly visible steel-grey, the background midnight-blue — then lifted my eyes to the window again. I remembered bathyspheres from adventure stories I had read when I was young. Round metal contraptions, large enough to hold a person, they were designed to be lowered to the bottom of the sea. A profoundly phlegmatic idea, then. Perhaps, after all, the flyer did typify the country I had entered. I wondered why the man in the station thought I’d be interested. Or did he hand out the cards indiscriminately to anybody who passed by? After staring over the rooftops for a while, I shrugged, then slid the card back into my pocket and forgot all about it.
The first event of the conference involved a visit to the Underground Ocean, which Vishram had alluded to, of course, and which the programme described as ‘one of the Blue Quarter’s most extraordinary attractions’. It would provide delegates with a chance to ‘mingle informally’ before the real business of the conference began. We were to assemble in the hotel lobby at three-thirty that afternoon. Transport would be laid on. As the programme breezily assured me, this was an opportunity ‘not to be missed!’. It would be followed by a cocktail party, which would be held in the Concord Room on the ground floor of the hotel from six o’clock onwards.
We gathered in the lobby at the appointed time, about forty of us. Several of the delegates had met before, it seemed, and were busy renewing their acquaintance, talking and nodding and laughing, while the rest of us stood in awkward silence, at slight angles to each other. Hotel staff were putting up decorations — blue streamers looping from one light fixture to another, and a sparkly golden banner above reception that said Happy Rearrangement Day! A portrait of the Queen gazed impassively down at me. She had been classified as a phlegmatic during the Rearrangement, and now, twenty-seven years later, she was still alive, having outlasted both her choleric husband and her melancholic eldest son.
A conference official finally arrived, and we were guided through the garden to the canal where a glass-topped barge was waiting for us. Climbing on board, I sat down next to a big pale man in a sports jacket. I had noticed him earlier, in the lobby, part of a group of delegates who had greeted each other like old friends. As the boat pulled out into the canal, I turned and introduced myself.
‘Nice to meet you,’ the man said. ‘I’m Frank Bland.’
We shook hands.
‘You seem to know a few people,’ I said.
He grinned sheepishly. ‘I’ve been on the circuit for a while.’ He gave me a glance that slid sideways across my face, like an ice-cube on a mirror. ‘You ever swum underground?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘It’s something else.’ He stared straight ahead, then nodded, as though his opinion needed reinforcing.
A woman with a microphone stood up and started pointing out the sights.
In less than half an hour we were drawing up outside an enormous rectangular building with a flat roof and no windows. It had the dimensions of a film studio or an aircraft hangar, and was painted a colour that reminded me of fired clay. A sign on the roof said THE UNDERGROUND OCEAN in huge white letters. Above the entrance, in blue neon, were the words subterranean surfing.