“Next stop,” he yelled. “Manifest Station.”
They passed an enormous building like a cathedral, within a few meters of its windows, and people peered at them out of offices. The edifice was perforated in several places with what looked like random holes, and bursting from them were railway lines. They sprang in different directions: horizontal; up like a roller coaster; corkscrewing down. A few hundred meters from the great building, they plunged into holes in the street, and down into darkness.
“Manifest Station,” Jones said. A dark-windowed diesel train burst out of the building, close enough to make the bus shake. It helter-skeltered downward into the earth.
“Where’s it going?” Zanna said.
“Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities,” Jones said. “If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless…It’s a terminus.”
They hovered above a big yard at the side of the station containing twenty or thirty double-decker buses, with passengers milling around them. Each bus had a different sign where the numbers should be— faces, insects, flowers, random patterns. On their sides, where London buses carried adverts, were paintings, short stories in big print, pictures of chessboards with games in progress, musical scores.
But these were details. What made Zanna and Deeba stare and make little sounds of wonder was how the buses moved.
UnLondon’s terrain was difficult. There were thin tangled streets, sudden steep hills, deep pits, patches where roads seemed to be made of something too soft for wheels, on which pedestrians bounced. To deal with the various difficulties of their routes, the UnLondon buses had adapted.
They trundled on caterpillar treads. They rolled on enormously inflated rubbery wheels. They coasted on skirts of air like hovercrafts. In the sky was another aerobus, below a round balloon. Conductors leaned out of the vehicles, bristling with weapons.
A bus approached the terminus from a thicket of tall spindly towers. It picked its way over the roofs on four enormous lizard legs that sprouted from its wheel housings. The driver spun the wheel and tugged at levers, and the bus’s padded gecko feet closed gently around buttresses and splayed on slanting roofs, leaving no marks behind.
“Manifest Station Terminus,” Jones belted. “Who’s changing here?”
They winched Mrs. Jujube and two other passengers down in a basket. “This is the Scrollscrawl bus, and you want the Rusty Star Sigil bus,” Jones told one. “And you, sir, look for the Terrible Mouse Sigil.”
As the bus swung in position, Deeba looked up and made a little startled noise.
“What is it?” said Zanna.
“I thought I saw something,” said Deeba, pointing up. “Like…a crab. Moving on the ceiling.”
“Well…” Zanna looked around. “It’s gone now. This place is full of weird things.”
The basket dangled between a bus on stilts and another on what looked like giant ice skates. The three passengers got out. At the last moment a man wearing a toga ran and caught the basket; said good-bye to a companion, who hurried off; and got in.
He was big and heavy to haul. When he stepped onto the platform, there was a hissing. The milk carton was huddled behind Deeba, exhaling aggressively.
“Curdle,” Zanna muttered. “Deeba, keep your manky[12] pet under control.”
The new passenger stared huffily at Curdle from behind his beard.
“See that?” Deeba whispered.
“That bloke does not like us.”
They went much higher this time, midway between the roofs and the strangely lit sky. UnLondon sprawled to the horizon. A few animal-footed buses crawled carefully over and around houses. Light from the empty sun gleamed on a million surfaces. It was a ragged and jagged landscape. Low clouds buzzed below their wheels, obscuring neighborhoods, moving in various directions purposefully.
“That?” Jones pointed at what looked like a shirt, racing madly through the air. “When washing blows away in London, if it stays in the air long enough, it blows all the way here. Then it’s free. Never has to come down.”
They passed a stepped pyramid, a corkscrew-shaped minaret, a building like an enormous U.
“I wish my mum was here,” Deeba whispered. She couldn’t even look up as the thought took her. “And my dad. Even my brother Hass.”
“Me too,” said Zanna.
“’Course you do,” said Jones gently. The sadness and homesickness that filled the two girls was sudden, but it didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. It had been there many hours, underneath everything, and now that things were calmer, with the beautiful view below them, it sort of ambushed them.
“My mum must have the police and everything,” Deeba said.
“Actually, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said Jones.
“What do you mean?” said Zanna.
“Difficult to explain. The Propheseers’ll tell you.” The girls shook their heads in exasperation. “Just…I wouldn’t worry yet.”
Deeba and Zanna were quiet. Sensing their mood, Curdle snuffled up to Deeba’s foot. She picked up the little carton and, ignoring its sour smell, stroked it.
“Yet?” Zanna said. Conductor Jones looked evasive, and started muttering something about air currents and tacking and the directions. “You said,” Zanna insisted, “don’t worry yet?”
“Well,” he said grudgingly. “Londoners can get out of the habit of thinking about some things. Things that come here. But I wouldn’t worry yet.”
13. Encounters on a Bus
Obaday and Skool could tell Zanna was upset. Obaday offered to read to her from his jacket. “Although,” he added doubtfully, eyeing his lapels, “I confess this story isn’t quite the alpine romance I was expecting…” When she declined his offer, he opened his bag and handed Zanna and Deeba what looked like two tiles and cement. They stared at them dubiously, but they were both starving, and the strange sandwiches had a surprising— and surprisingly enticing— aroma.
They bit experimentally. The tiles tasted like crusty bread— the cement like cream cheese.
Below them was the Smeath, the great river of UnLondon, drawing an amazingly straight line across the abcity. A few spirals, curlicues, and straight lines— tributaries and canals— poked off from it in various directions, into the streets. Bridges crossed it, some familiar in shape, some not, some static, some moving.
“Look at that!” Deeba cried out. Far off, there was a bridge like two huge crocodile heads, snout-to-snout.
Deeba started humming a tune, and Zanna snorted with laughter and joined in: it was the theme song to the program EastEnders, which started with an aerial shot of the Thames.
“Dum dum dum dum dum, deee dum,” they sang, looking down at the water. The passengers looked at them as if they were mad.
A few birds and intelligent-seeming clouds examined the bus curiously. “Here comes a highfish,” said Jones, and the girls jerked back in horror at the approaching jackknifing body, its ferocious teeth and unmistakable shark fin. It glided with a faint burring sound. Where its ocean cousins’ side fins were, it grew dragonfly wings.
Jones leaned out and banged the side of the bus. “Get out of it, you dustbin!” he shouted, and the big fish darted off in alarm.
“What is that?” said Zanna. They were approaching a truly enormous wheel. Its base dipped into the river, and its highest point arced hundreds of meters up, almost to the bus.