“Where have I been?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Hornwrack. “Look, I am sorry to have cut off your fingers. I no longer bear you any grudge.” (He examined this statement with surprise. It was true.)
Fulthor looked down at his maimed hand.
“My mind feels very clear,” he said. “Where is the dwarf?”
He had forgotten everything, and could not take in Hornwrack’s explanations. Causality meant nothing to him. “Have we been to Iron Chine already, then?” he would ask. “Or have we yet to see those burning sails?” Or, holding his head tenderly as if he could feel Time coiled and knotted there in it like purple braid, “We’ve to meet Arnac san Tehn. Tonight, in the Garden of Empty Wounds!” Smiling secretively, the madwoman took his hand and affected to count the fingers. He bore this calmly. The two of them stood there against black waste and obsidian sky; and in Hornwrack’s imagination a light surrounded them. It was as though they had already separated themselves from the world in preparation for their descent into the past. He was filled with a deep resentment of their beauty (in response to which images of the Rue Sepile passed through his brain like fatal playing cards, or the lines extemporised by some bad poet in the purgatorial night-“Here is the smell of fog; I see dead geraniums on your windowsill, and women whisper in the lighted rooms”), but this was suppressed immediately by a corresponding urge to protect them, both from the world and his own envy.
“You will have to look after each other now,” he told Fulthor. He stared at the city fulminating like a spot of phosphorus on the horizon. “I don’t know how you’ll get back to Viriconium, even if you want to go there.”
He tried to think of something else to say.
“Good luck.”
They watched puzzledly as he trudged back to the Heavy Star, which was sinking a little under its own weight in the mud. For a moment it looked as if the madwoman might run after him. An expression of ordinary human intelligence crossed her face. Then she laughed. The old machine rose gracelessly into the air and turned towards the city.
The city! Its end is near. It expands and contracts, like a lung. Regular spasms of dissolution shake it like the vomits and distempers of a dying king. It is full of fires, not all of them real; memories of a history never achieved, a future unrealised. Sketchy and counterfeit, the towers of its sister city Viriconium advance and recede through a roseate smoke. Up from the buildings come fountains of earth! They pour into the sky as if gravity had been reversed, and where they fall on the surrounding plain a litter of insects is deposited, bits of dead insects which lie like ruined machinery amid the crude stones. At the height of each spasm the ground tolls like a bell; deep in the streets inexplicable phantoms stalk (headless women, their jewelled sandals sinking into a carpet of dusty grasshopper husks; rains of stinking skulls and luminous beetles; a sail moving down some nonexistent Pleasure Canaclass="underline" failed dreams of a compromise with the bony skeleton of earth); and a great mad hooting goes up from the heart of the city, a groan of pain and horror in which may be distinguished the voice of the mutated airboatman calling to the assassin he has lured across a thousand miles to serve him Kill me.
The insects ignored this lowing call-as of some large but delicately organised animal being disembowelled-and forced themselves in and out like wasps round a rotting apple. They buzzed erratically across the plain; hurled themselves into the pits they had dug; and gathered in the dark air in diffuse humming clouds. Meanwhile, the Heavy Star, stern down, fabric wounded by the curious stresses of space, floundered toward them with blue lights leaking from its engine rooms. They were aware of it. It fascinated them. They made sudden abortive darts and forays in its direction. Did they link it with their flight down from the moon? Did they perceive Galen Hornwrack encysted at the heart of its simple nervous system? Some of the more daring individuals threw themselves against its hull, only to topple away into the convection currents and streams of floating debris, which consumed them. This agitation grew as Hornwrack approached the erupting city. Their forays became more purposeful, and more prolonged. The city pulsed and heaved, generating a savage mauve glare, and they came up from it like smoke.
Up on the watershed Fulthor and the madwoman, interrupted in some partial rite of the Afternoon, some fragment of an old sin, shaded their eyes against the novel light. (Their iconic calm now representing a wiser- or at least more ordered-station of the world, a culture which would surely have taken such fireworks in its stride.. ..) The plain was alive with crippled insects, tiny as aphids and bathed in the magnetic radiations of the city. A cold wind sprang up, lashed the boggy waste, and-rolling their wingless corpses before it like the discarded regalia of a mystery play- rushed away into the North; while above, the Heavy Star, a wobbling black mote in the hectic air, rose to meet the spreading swarm, and was engulfed.
They fastened themselves on to its outer hull like locusts on a branch. It strained forward as if the air had solidified around it, and was brought to a standstill above the perimeter of the city, where the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly greeted it with booms and roars of self-pity, waving his infested limbs. (From up on the watershed this activity seemed like the movements of some tiny damaged mechanical toy.) He had replaced his mask but was unable to secure it, so that it hung awry on his blubbering tub-like head like the woollen cap on the head of a retarded child. His new organs pulsed, engorging themselves in time to the rhythms of the city. “In the moon,” he said, “it was like white gardens.” He begged for freedom in an abandoned language. He blinked up, watching the insects as they continued to alight on his old ship. When they could find no further space to settle, they attached themselves to one another in a parody of copulation. Beneath this rustling layer the Heavy Star struggled to gain height. Suddenly, violet bolides arced from its bows! Caught up in the discharge of the ancient cannon, many of the insects dropped away, crackling and roasting and setting fire to their neighbours, so that they fell about the ears of the decaying airboatman like burning leaves.
Fear death from the air! Up there, we can see, Hornwrack fears nothing. He makes the boat his own. Power plants enfeebled by its unimaginable journeys, substructure creaking like an old door, it nevertheless wriggles ecstatically under his hands, light flaring off its stern. We see it even now, long after the fact, rolling and spinning against the southern quadrant of the sky. The patterns it is making are gay, adventive, dangerous. It tumbles off the top of a loop and falls like a stone. It soars eighteen hundred feet vertically upwards, spraying violet fire almost at random into the dark green varnished sky. Persistence of vision makes of it a paintbrush, violet strokes on an obsidian ground, while the insects fall like comets all around it, trailing a foul black smoke, to shatter and burst pulpily on the plain beneath! Even the watchers on the watershed have abandoned their cruel calm. He may yet escape! something whispers inside them. He might yet escape!… But now the energy cannon has stopped working, and he seems to have undergone a fatal faltering or change of heart. They bite their lips and urge him on. Some listlessness, though, prevents him: something inhaled from the cabbagey air of the Low City long ago. Now the Heavy Star drifts immediately above Paucemanly’s carcass like an exhausted pilot fish. The insects descend. All Hornwrack’s efforts have made no impression on their numbers. One by one they approach the wallowing vehicle. One by one they settle on its creaking, riven old hull and commence to bear it down…