George paused beside a wrought iron gate and caught his breath. Had the war completely bypassed this island? Or had a faction of darkbloods emigrated from Antarctica and set up a colony off the tip of Africa? Closer observation suggested that the marchers were not unadmitted – certainly they bore little resemblance to Olaf Sverre’s cynical and irreverent Navy. They were like their city, palsied, broken, lost. Something pathological had visited these people – if not the war, then an equivalent catastrophe. They stepped to the beat of a convulsing drummer. They gasped like beached fish. Their clothing, a potpourri of styles and eras, was in worse shape than a scopas suit wardrobe after a thermonuclear exchange – rends, gashes, holes, with bare flesh beneath, yellow flesh, white, brown, cracked and gelatinous, here and there melting to bone.
‘Quite a show they put on, huh?’ said Brat. ‘Folk festival, I guess.’
Whenever he tried speaking with one of the marchers, the best he got was a blank look, more often a moan transmitting stenches and despair.
‘They don’t understand English,’ the general concluded.
The defendants moved down the sultry, glutted streets, jostling through the parade but in no way joining it. They came upon a plaza. Bricks glowed beneath the death’s-head moon. A defunct fountain lay in a web of fog. Across the way, a bright shop beamed through the night like a huge kerosene lantern.
The paunchy window was filled with hats. George gulped.
How had it managed to survive the Battle of Boston? How had it gotten here? Even the sign was intact: THE MAD TEA PARTY – REMARKABLE THINGS FOR HUMAN BODIES, followed by PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS CARTER – TAILOR, HATTER, FURRIER, INVENTOR, PROPRIETOR.
‘Looks like my best shot is to buy a costume and disappear into this Mardi Gras thing until the tide takes Sverre away,’ said Brat. ‘Are you really determined to get your balls back in order?’
‘Yes.’
‘I imagine I’ve got some pretty fantastic adventures ahead. I could use a man like you on my team, somebody who’s smart, strong… a little pig-headed.’
‘Sorry, Brat. A cure, then Antarctica, then a family – I’ve seen it all.’
The bells tinkled mournfully as the defendants entered. Gushing sweat, they wove through the vast collection of costumed mannequins. World War Three had not been kind to Carter’s inventory. The disintegrating tweeds of Edwardian gentlemen dusted the broken armor of Japanese knights. Eighteenth-century waistcoats rubbed tattered shoulders with nineteenth-century gowns.
‘Do you need lodgings?’ a voice called out in a British accent. ‘Several funerals are happening upstairs. Would you like a room with a viewing?’
The MAD Hatter had aged, not by the decades that had elapsed outside the darkblood realms, but enough to push him past the mortal side of sixty – eyes receding, red hair fading toward pink, brow stippled with liver spots. His top hat appeared to have contracted eczema.
‘I was sorry to hear of your species’s death,’ he said. ‘I meant to send a sympathy card. They don’t make belated sympathy cards, do they? “So sorry I missed your mother’s bout with cancer.”’
For the first time since the celebration banquet, George’s bullet wound began to throb. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble because of you, Professor.’
‘Trouble?’ said the Hatter.
‘I’m on trial for ending the world.’
‘Just remember, it could be worse. You could not be on trial for ending the world. You could be the corpus delicti instead. Signing that sales contract was the smartest thing you ever did.’
‘Hey, you know this bird?’ Brat asked of George.
Theophilus pulled off his hat. ‘Bird? The raven is a bird, also the vulture, but not I. You’re not a bird either, General Tarmac, though we’d all be better off if you were. Say, George, did you ever find out why a raven is like a writing desk?’
‘Right now I’m trying to find out about fertility. My secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’
The Hatter’s sigh was long and musical. ‘There just isn’t much reproduction going on in the world any more, is there? What with the extinction and everything. These post-exchange environments have little to recommend them.’
‘Extinction?’ said Brat. ‘Nonsense, the streets are teeming with your customers. You must do a pretty good business around carnival time.’
Spontaneously – no one knew who was leading and who following – the three men went to the window. The parade crawled across the plaza like some huge organism, flagella and antennae lashing in all directions.
‘Welcome to the City of the Invalidated Past,’ said the Hatter, ‘or, if you prefer, the Necropolis of History, or, if you don’t prefer, the City of the Invalidated Past. It’s your kind of town, George. Yours too, General.’ He jabbed his index finger toward the window. ‘Look, there’s a guard from the court of Harun al-Rashid in eighth-century Baghdad. And a Roman civil engineer who built a water mill in 143 BC. A merchant responsible for bringing improved plow designs to Flanders in 1074. A bishop who participated in the Council of Trent. A worker on Henry Ford’s original assembly line… Think about it! These people actually lived!’ Theophilus held his top hat in front of his heart. ‘They got up each morning. They breathed, argued, screwed, moved their bowels. They saw the sun. They had opinions about cats. Listen, do you hear it? Do you hear their sorrow? Their sobs and wails? They’re sad because they’ve been invalidated. When you turn the human race into garbage, you also turn history into garbage. “Why did we bother to invent writing?” they ask. “Or spinning jennies? Why did we trouble ourselves with the cathedrals?”’
They followed the Hatter’s short beckoning arm as he led them back to the counter, behind the velvet drapes, and into a hot, squalid room suggesting a laboratory from which nothing beneficial ever issued. Detached human heads were suspended over steaming vats of what looked like liquid flesh. Disconnected limbs swam in tanks of purple fluid. Skeletons dangled from the ceiling as if waiting to make their entrances in some demented marionette show. George felt that he was about as far from a fertility clinic as he could get.
‘This is where Victor Frankenstein did his post-graduate work,’ said Theophilus. Rusty surgical instruments and corroded technological bric-a-brac filled a dozen cabinets. ‘This is where Thomas Edison invented the burned-out light bulb.’
The Hatter, George decided, had lost his mind. Was it possible for a lunatic to go mad?
Tea things overran a linen-swathed table. Hungry and thirsty from their dash across the island, the fugitives sat down and indulged themselves, gulping hot tea, gobbling their way through a heap of stale rolls and crumpets. The Hatter joined them.
‘Every night, corpses float through the city,’ he explained merrily, smearing butter on a bran muffin.
‘War victims?’ A silly question, George thought. Of course they were war victims.
‘No, they died long before the war, centuries before in some cases. I pull them from the river. I dress them. I perform surgery. No problem finding spare parts. The whole world is made of spare parts now. Out go the shriveled organs and the dehydrated blood. In go the relays, motors, microprocessors, voice synthesizers, and spark plugs. But does that do it? Of course not. What is history without hopes, ideals, neuroses, illusions? Hence – my Z-1000 computer over there. Isn’t it wonderful what a man can do with a little technology and some free time?’
‘Oh, I get it – they’re robots!’ said Brat. ‘It’s like Walt Disney.’
‘If admitted,’ said Theophilus, ‘I would have lived in the early twenty-first century, turning out automatons as efficiently as a cobbler turns out shoes.’ He went to his work table and began transferring eyeballs from one glass jar to another, tossing the rejects into a teacup.