“… capture Salustrade before…”
“… he tripped the switch which only he knew about…”
“… and which would put paid to all civilization’s possibilities…”
“… and the destruction of all those with Victorian values who were supposed to seed the stars…”
“… which we used to gaze at in the night skies of our childhood…”
“… and what will there be now…”
“… nothing but faggots, cripples, half-castes and aidsters, colonizing their own world…”
“… most of whom work down here in these (god) forsaken machine rooms…”
“… before Big Bang lets them out…”
“Ptcha! Ptchoo! You’re nought but the bottomings of my loo!” Suddenly the last voice was not Tristan or Clovis at all. It was a whisper, another’s voice, which was the first they had heard for several years. They could not quite appreciate its meaning, but the words themselves continued to be quite clear. “I’ve crawled on all fours through pipes of congealed oil, unlocked my bones to ravel a passage through the twisted machine parts, shrunk my skull to the size of a rat’s head to nose forward across the blade ends of boosters, transfixers and turbines—and I’ve double-talked unsprung clockworks to let me through, entered among the triggers of unmarried cogs on feather-hair trellises, forged relationships with unfulfilled piston-shafts—and all this just to rescue those whom I was told must be rescued…”
“The angel has arrived, Tristan!”
“To take us back to Heaven, Clovis!”
“Don’t give me that donkey’s doings!” returned the whisper. “I’m Salustrade, and I did not squeeze through this awful sewer just for you to give me this God-shit!”
“Salustrade?” The voices spoke together, recalling a time when the name had actually meant something to them.
“I’m that black balloon which tripped you up when you first came to Starship City, all those years and years ago. I had covered myself in the glory of black oil that used to make the machine parts down here love each other, and I had slipped through the slightest grill, to tip the wink to all the others in the know. I’ve since met up with bookish Padgett Weggs, who knows more than those actually in the know. He knows more than is good for anybody, I can tell you. He says we’re to make room for Great Old Ones who (altogether he feared them himself once) have more complex metal parts than the inventors of all this little lot of a machine maze I’ve come through just now had hot dinners…”
Tristan and Clovis stared at the darkness whence the whisper came. They were still convinced that this was a visitation from an apprentice angel. But Salustrade continued: “Even now, monstrous Irreducibles and living Dirigibles crank in from the stars, Black Gods, Old Gods, even Older Gods, Great Gods, heaving, churning, clucking Ancient Ones, Old Heads on even Older Shoulders, with Big Wings far too Big for their own Bodies, their Bones, their Old Old Elder Bones tougher than Earth’s toughest metal, and all conjoined like a trillion Siamese Monster-Twins!”
Tristan felt the light kiss of a metabolic rat and its almost human snarl “Ptch! Ptchoo!” which it uttered when passing his ears on the return journey. But Salustrade’s whisper droned on, if whisper it still was: “I’m come in for cover, I admit—all my crippled and mindless pals must want me to seek the advice of the Machine-Oracle that they thought must still lurk down here—the question is, what can be done about it? All the clever ones (with clean knickers and ambitions to match) parted company with their bodies sky-side, when I flicked that springy hair across the wrong terminals on the wrong day… O Machine-Oracle, tell me!”
Tristan and Clovis shrugged together and raised themselves on all four legs, scuttled like a dying spider, bouncing off the corroded walls like a squash-fly. It was as if possessed. “Go back to your Padgett Weggs!” it shrieked like a banshee in heat. “Bring him and teach him how to shovel shit! See how he likes being apprenticed to the Devil!”
“He’ll be dead by now,” came the voice of the one who called itself Salustrade. “He was a simple bookish man. In fact, they’ll all be dead, except me.”
“Then, go back and tell them the Oracle can do nothing but hope, against all the sensible possibilities, yes, hope—that Time has character enough to have second thoughts.”
“I know not the way back—I left my memory upon a powerful magnet near an oil-belly below the piston rooms—it sumped me good and proper.”
With that, the rust-clogged parts shuddered, as if about to move in some semblance of togetherness. The churning from distant regions of the submachines was faint at first, much like Earth-start must have been in the earliest days. Then, with increasing uproars and slow, but powerful, outbursts, the lights flashed on and off, on and off, and vise versa, revealing great shiny moving parts of new-forged steel shafts, hot pistons and eccentric wheels flying together like long-lost lovers. And so, Tristan and Clovis were sprung like rats from a trap by irresistible exifugal forces into the interface of the serrating top edges of Starship City and the down-burgeoning metal-god systems of the Great Old Ones. There, with much unconfessed relief, they saw the rejigged hob-madonna rocket hover back down to Earth—since the firework-man had originally forgotten to light its fuse. These good and healthy people once in an infinity of little bits were returning, blending back together again, as they would always maintain, to save the world from things even worse than themselves. Tristan and Clovis bounded off, embarrassed but determined to rejoin the guerilla armies who were even now feeling their own bodies to see if there were any signs of the dislocations, mortal wounds, decapitations, and downright smithereens which they once thought the good and healthy people had suffered. And now they had Old Gods to fight, too.
“Cancher blinking move?”
The night had drawn in early across the roofs of Starship City, bringing creatures with it that could fly more easily through darkness than daylight—because, as Padgett Weggs, the dosser, told his sleeping partner, night’s density and the creatures’ specific gravity were complementary—though he did not use those very words nor fully comprehend the implications of metal being lighter than air. He pointed into the impenetrable sky and screeched: “You can see their shape of wings! Hovering up there, if you only knew how to use your eyes, my dear.”
“Cancher blinking move?”
“I’m already pushed right up to the wall of the Lakeminster Memorial, my dear.”
“And I’ve got the bleeding curb in my back!”
The woman, unlike Mr. Weggs, had her standards, since she wore fashionable suede gloves to her elbows. Upon one finger she sported a sparkling nugget of glass, which often made other dossers blind with envy and mumbling with fury. And there were plenty of such dossers since the oil rooms exploded.
“You only want to sleep with me for my money.
“No, Elizabeth, I love you more than any down-and-out can say. I want to protect you from the things that flap up, even now, to roost upon our dying bodies and probe our skulls with their drill-beaks.”
“I’ve seen you leer at my trinkets, when you’re not spouting nonsense.”
“Your eyes are jewels enough, my dear—your words the only books.”
“You never cuddle me right. Cancher see women need loving properly?”
Padgett Weggs ringed her with his arms. “There, there, Elizabeth, I can love you as good as any man. My mother taught me how to hold a lady like she wants to be held.”
“Kiss me, then, Padgett.”
He planted his damp mildewy lips upon the uprising flower of flesh and circled it with his musty tongue. He eased his hands under the many layers of sacking and lifted them above her head. The air was chill and he felt the woman shiver. The gaslight shuddered, too.