The dog was reluctant at first, but came to her after a time, its tail wagging intermittently as it grew more confident of her sanity. She rubbed its head, the contact soothing. All was not lost. What Gentle could do, she could do. He didn’t have the copyright on adventuring. She’d find a way to go where he’d gone, if she had to eat the blue eye grain by grain to do so.
Church bells began to ring as she sat chewing this over, announcing in their ragged peals the arrival of midnight. Their clamour was accompanied by car horns in the street outside and cheers from a party in an adjacent house.
‘Whoopee,’ she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite sex over the years. She’d forgotten most of them. The ones who’d fought over her; the ones who’d lost their wives in their pursuit of her; even those who’d sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten. History had never much engaged her. It was the future that glittered in her mind’s eye, now more than ever.
The past had been written by men. But the future -pregnant with possibilities - the future was a woman.
1
Until the rise of Yzordderrex, a rise engineered by the Autarch for reasons more political than geographical, the city of Patashoqua, which lay on the edge of the Fourth Dominion, close to where the In Ovo marked the perimeter of the reconciled worlds, had just claim to be the pre-eminent City of the Dominions. Its proud inhabitants called it casje au casje, simply meaning the hive of hives, a place of intense and fruitful labour. Its proximity to the Fifth made it particularly prone to influences from that source, and even after Yzordderrex had become the centre of power across the Dominions it was to Patashoqua that those at the cutting edge of style and invention looked for the corning thing. Patashoqua had a variation on the motor vehicle in its streets long before Yzordderrex. It had rock and roll in its clubs long before Yzordderrex. It had hamburgers, cinemas, blue jeans and countless other proofs of modernity long before the great city of the Second. Nor was it simply the trivialities of fashion that Patashoqua reinvented from Fifth Dominion models. It was philosophies and belief-systems. Indeed it was said in Patashoqua that you knew a native of Yzordderrex because he looked like you yesterday, and believed what you’d believed the day before.
But as with most cities in love with the modern, Patashoqua had deeply conservative roots. Whereas Yzordderrex was a sinful city, notorious for the excesses of its darker Kesparates, the streets of Patashoqua were quiet after nightfall, its occupants in their own beds with their own spouses, plotting vogues. This mingling of chic and conservatism was nowhere more apparent than in the city’s architecture. Built as they were in a temperate region, unlike the semi-tropical Yzordderrex, the buildings did not have to be designed with any climatic extreme in mind. They were either elegantly classical, and built to remain standing until Doomsday, or else functions of some current craze, and likely to be demolished within a week.
But it was on the borders of the city where the most extraordinary sights were to be seen, because it was here that a second, parasitical city had been created, peopled by inhabitants of the Four Dominions who had fled persecution and had looked to Patashoqua as a place where liberty of thought and action were still possible. For how much longer this would remain the case was a debate that dominated every social gathering in the city. The Autarch had moved against other towns, cities and states which he and his councils judged hot-beds of revolutionary thought. Some of those cities had been razed to the ground, others had come under Yzordderrexian edict, and all sign of independent thought crushed. The University city of Hezoir, for instance, had been reduced to rubble, the brains of its students literally scooped out of their skulls and heaped up in the streets. In the Azzimulto the inhabitants of an entire province had been decimated, so rumour went, by a disease introduced into that region by the Autarch’s representatives. There were tales of atrocity from so many sources that people became almost blase about the newest horror, until, of course, somebody asked how long it would be until the Autarch turned his unforgiving eyes on the hive of hives. Then their faces drained of colour, and people talked in whispers of how they planned to escape or defend themselves if that day ever came; and they looked around at their exquisite city, built to stand until Doomsday, and wondered just how near that day was.
2
Though Pie’oh’pah had briefly described the forces that haunted the In Ovo, Gentle had only the vaguest impression of the dark, protean state between the Dominions, occupied as he was by a spectacle much closer to his heart, that of the change that overtook both travellers as their bodies were translated into the common currency of passage.
Dizzied by lack of oxygen he wasn’t certain whether these were real phenomena or not. Could bodies open like flowers, and the seeds of an essential self fly from them the way his mind told him they did? And could those same bodies be remade at the other end of the journey, arriving whole despite the trauma they’d undergone? So it seemed. The world Pie had called the Fifth folded up before the travellers’ eyes, and they went like transported dreams into another place entirely. As soon as he saw the light, Gentle fell to his knees on the hard rock, drinking the air of this Dominion with gratitude.
‘Not bad at all,’ he heard Pie say. ‘We did it, Gentle. I didn’t think we were going to make it for a moment, but we did it!’
Gentle raised his head, as Pie pulled him to his feet by the strap that joined them.
‘Up! Up!’ the mystif said. ‘It’s not good to start a journey on your knees.’
It was bright day here, Gentle saw, the sky above his head cloudless, and brilliant as the green-gold sheen of a peacock’s tail. There was neither sun nor moon in it, but the very air seemed lucid, and by it Gentle had his first true sight of Pie since they’d met in the fire. Perhaps out of remembrance for those it had lost, the mystif was still wearing the clothes it had worn that night, scorched and bloodied though they were. But it had washed the dirt from its face, and its skin gleamed in the clear light.
‘Good to see you,’ Gentle said.
‘You too.’
It started to untie the belt that bound them, while Gentle turned his gaze on the Dominion. They were standing close to the summit of a hill, a quarter of a mile from the perimeters of a sprawling shanty-town, from which a din of activity rose. It spread beyond the foot of the hill, and halfway across a flat and treeless plain of ochre earth, crossed by a thronged highway that led his eye to the domes and spires of glittering city.
‘Patashoqua?’ he said.
‘Where else?’
‘You were accurate then.’
‘More than I dared hope. The hill we’re standing on is supposed to be the place where Hapexamendios first rested when He came through from the Fifth. It’s called the Mount of Lipper Bayak. Don’t ask me why.’
‘Is the city under siege?’ Gentle said.
‘I don’t think so. The gates look open to me.’
Gentle scanned the distant walls, and indeed the gates were open wide. ‘So who are all these people? Refugees?’
‘We’ll ask in a while,’ Pie said.
The knot had come undone. Gentle rubbed his wrist, which was indented by the belt, staring down the hill as he did so. Moving between the makeshift dwellings below he glimpsed forms of being that didn’t much resemble humanity. And mingling freely with them, many who did. It wouldn’t be difficult to pass as a local, at least.
‘You’re going to have to teach me. Pie,’ he said. ‘I need to know who’s who and what’s what. Do they speak English here?’
‘It used to be quite a popular language,’ Pie replied. ‘I can’t believe it’s fallen out of fashion.