‘Perhaps you are deciding gradually to become a social disaster,’ said the Orchid, looking outward at the plain, ‘like Profumo the Monkey.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ muttered Volospion distractedly.
4 A Curious Kraken
Showing What Level of Illumination May Be Expected When a Squid is Consulted
The clockwork detail of Krill’s seashore Silence came into view. Its green dome swiveled like an owl’s head, one big eye observing them. Volospion sent out a mental inquiry. ‘May we enter, Principal Krill?’ He received a glutinous assent and the mantis deployed its many legs, settling softly upon Krill’s air jetty. The three disembarked and entered the Silence through a trapezoidal opening. As they descended through levels of lexicons, smudged portholes and silverine map tubes sealed with wax, Lord Jagged resumed his reasoning regarding the interloper. ‘I wonder, Volospion, that you don’t consider his speech.’
‘A couple of transposed phrases abutted together,’ Volospion declared. ‘It was tedious.’
‘He spoke our language – which would suggest he was the Duke’s creation. Or had been given a translation pill by the Duke.’
‘Or by someone else!’
‘Not very likely, if he is the wild thing you assert.’
They smelt the mix of salt water, artificial age-dust and pickled knowledge that hung around Krill and his enthusiasms – Krill had found a way for damp and dust to co-exist without sludging – and entered his green silverine chamber. Mechanical cases held books bound in muscle, books which opened with a key, books thicker than they were wide and books rotten as fruit. In one corner stood a russet world globe like a giant conker tattooed with cryptic empires; behind this, prospering fungi had made a wall of skin shelves. On a small platform in the circular chamber’s centre was a pile of draped tentacles crowned with a brain like a crumpled hat. Krill had presented this guise for so long that nobody, himself included, remembered if he was human, alien or artifice. Behind him a bay window thundered low with a sea of recent vintage, overlooking the crest of a fluorescent reef. Undersea animals like intestines touched the stained glass and moved on. A coil of eyes drifted amid palmate fronds in rich yellow, and a lovely grace note was a rose of suspended blood which roiled like a tornado above the reef. Volospion found it very tranquil and sinister. ‘Greetings,’ he said, ‘prime pullulator.’
‘Hail,’ Jagged took up, ‘tantacular tutor.’
‘I bid you halloo,’ said the Iron Orchid, ‘oceanic expositor.’
A mouth tore open like a pocket, trailing rinds of green skin like seaweed. ‘Welcome, eternal friends.’
As was customary, the visitors spent a brief time examining Krill’s newest acquisitions. Jagged inspected an ancient platter player which could emit recorded sounds through a lily-shaped trumpet, and Volospion ran a hand over a square hull of blue shellac. His fingers were intercepted by one of Krill’s remarkably fastidious limbs. ‘This,’ Krill remarked, ‘is a radio, a form of shellfish. Its legs have not survived, but they went here.’ The tentacle prodded at the four lower corners, then retreated like a wave.
A green mannequin with velvet hair and a lyre in one hand hung smiling from a cornice. The Orchid tapped its dangling foot. ‘Is this one of Jack-in-the-Green’s?’
‘I expressed admiration and he gifted it me. It sings the future, or what is a mile away, or something like that.’
‘Astonishing.’
‘And these wooden roses on the furniture are designed to bloom and even pollinate. That’s what this stuff is – not dust but chair pollen, do you see?’
Courtesies dispensed with, the visitors broached the subject of the Duke’s party. ‘We have been awakened by an astonishing intruder,’ said Lord Jagged.
‘What a thunderbolt!’ added the Orchid.
‘Show me,’ Krill said. From the floor arose a skeletal clockwork table. ‘The key fits right into the bone.’ He wound the key in the table, and the three visitors’ attention animated a scene of tiny figures which bubbled up from its surface. A tide of guests swarmed in around the Duke’s golden pyramid, upon which the Duke stood and gave his complicated speech. Principal Krill listened closely, his blue-green and grey head valving like a heart. Regina Sparks stood beside the Duke, her monochrome body distinct in the tableau. And then a toy-sized rider sped up the slanted wall and delivered his peculiar pronouncement, which Krill paused and played a second time before allowing the scene to complete. The diorama closed down.
‘Magisterial,’ Krill declared. ‘Eloquent.’
‘And Bishop Castle was rigorously eating everything he saw,’ Jagged added.
Krill flubbered a laugh. ‘I like Bishop Castle.’
‘We all do.’
‘What do you make of the theme, Krill?’ asked Volospion. ‘You helped the Duke with research for it, after all.’
‘He enquired after pyramidal tradition from the Ass Tech, Haninn and Tairona empires, but never told me how he planned to employ the knowledge. Perhaps he told Li Pao, whom he also consulted.’
‘But what about the fellow on two wheels, and his talk of “responsibility”?’ Volospion asked, trying for ‘indignation’. ‘What did it mean, all that? I feel indignant about it.’
Volospion himself had set the gold standard for meandering diatribes eight years earlier with his ‘Turn Me Upon Myself’ tirade. It had been the high watermark of the fashion and certain schullers, such as Principal Krill, had claimed to understand it. Krill had made second- and third-hand screeds by rearranging the words: ‘Me Upon Myself Turn’ and ‘Turn Upon Me Myself’ were judged the best by his polite if puzzled audience. But in private it was deemed to have become too specialized – perhaps even tedious – and Volospion had criticised Krill for merely rearranging his ideas. Krill had responded by introducing obscure words from his library, but ‘Turn Upon My Empathy’ was skippered by the realisation that Krill himself did not know the meaning of the new term. The fashion had knotted itself into complete inaccessibility. But the two-wheeled man seemed, improbably, to be saying something different.
‘Mayhaps he was merely failing aloud,’ the Iron Orchid suggested, her attention already wandering. She had no great love for Krill’s dank quarters.
His ‘indignation’ offered and ignored, Volospion put it away, puzzled – he would try it again in different circumstances. He hadn’t a clue what it was for, really. Enjoyment?
Krill’s pulsatile bonce seemed thoughtful, several wet valves opening and closing in succession. Then he stated: ‘The Duke of Queens was representing himself as the head of a government, possibly an empire. The two-wheeled man was, or was posing as, a revolutionary.’
‘What exactly was a government?’ asked the Orchid, and Krill explained.
‘Indeed?’ said Volospion, intrigued. ‘Any pirate or madman would be entirely pleased to have even one in his collection.’
‘Well, that’s that,’ said the Orchid briskly. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Wait!’ Volospion halted her. ‘There remains the matter of the “revolutionary”.’
‘Yes, Krill,’ said Lord Jagged with a mild smile. ‘Tell us what you know about our rambunctious raree.’
Krill’s treacly eyes regarded the unflappable Lord Jagged. ‘Rambunctious is he?’
‘He’s basically a fuselage with a snout.’
Krill stared a while more. Watching, Volospion supposed that Jagged had implied some doubt as to Krill’s knowledge. But it was Krill who had introduced everyone to the fashion for bone companions after his researches into the wild frontier