The Chamber in the Sky Page 16

  “According to the mechanized spies floating in the blood, our subs are outnumbered. Wildly. Only hope is that the Thusser haven’t had time to bring enough weapons through from Earth.”

  A jolt ran through the landscape. For one startling moment, the clanksiege teetered. The general swore and banged at the controls. The machine regained its footing. Down on the ground, piles of garbage slid and shifted.

  “Another heartbeat,” said the general. He shook his head. Down below, in a tent, geologists and mathematicians were hard at work, trying to figure out when each pulse was coming and which way it would push the flux or the lux effluvium.

  Now another skirmish had broken out near the new gates. Lord Attleborough-Stoughton, the railroad baron, and Lord Gwarnmore, Duke of the Globular Colon, had started a movement called Equal Walls, Equal Citizens. They objected to the fact that some people’s houses and businesses were protected, while others weren’t. They were mainly interested in this because the walls would do nothing to protect their own property: the railroads and various neighborhoods at the edge of the city. So they shot off guns and threatened to shoot anyone fleeing into the safety of the walls. They wanted to force the mannequins to protect the whole city, rather than just one part.

  “They’re crazy,” said Kalgrash. “Nuts, nuts, nuts.”

  The general nodded. “We have to decide when to take them both down. Gwarnmore and Attleborough-Stoughton. May they live long and may their fields be fertile.”

  “The Thusser will be here in just a few hours. We can’t have people outside the walls.”

  “It’s a mess,” the general repeated. “Living, breathing creatures — they’re always a mess. Never trust them, troll. We have to love them. We have to serve them. But don’t trust them.”

  The ground jolted again. Another heart; another heartbeat.

  Below, three men in bowlers were in a fistfight over a box of stolen ice cream.

  In the prisoner-of-war camp in Pflundt, the Norumbegans felt safe for the moment. With so many of the Thusser gone, there were no longer the daily visits from overlords looking for victims to attach to Thusser houses. For a few days, at least, families could rest easily that they would not be hypnotized and stuck to a wall.

  So they lolled against the walls of their prison, staring into space.

  Brian, Gregory, Gwynyfer, and Lord Dainsplint sat in a cell with their arms crossed.

  Gwynyfer said, “It smells horrid in here.”

  Dainsplint said, “Brian had an accident in his bunk. Nervous little blighter.”

  Brian said, “No. You had an accident in my bunk.”

  “If you can’t learn to control yourself like one of the big boys … if you insist on needing special pants …”

  They fell silent for a while. Then Brian said, “I wonder where the Umpire is right now. I wonder how close we are, sitting here.”

  Gregory said, “We looked for it.”

  Brian was excited. “You did?”

  “Yeah,” said Gregory. “No dice. We thought it might be down at this factory in the lower town where they’re holding all the windup people. They’ve let most of the mannequins run down.”

  “They’d have to,” said Dainsplint. “The mannequins were built to serve Norumbega. They’d give their lives to fight the Thusser, if given half a chance.” He said grimly, “Pity we lost the secret of constructing the mannequin soul when we lost everything else. We could have built a real army again. Protected the homestead, the hearth, and the happy glade.”

  Brian asked, “How could you just lose the secret?”

  “Because we hadn’t done it for centuries. We left it to mannequin manufacturers. I mean, manufacturers who not only made mannequins but were mannequins themselves. We didn’t want to have to work. By the club of the Dagda, a job … getting a job … what a thing.” He sighed. “So we left it all to the manns themselves. That and everything else. Then came the flight from Old Norumbega, and here we were, many of us dead in the Season of Meals, and the manns all abandoned us like the lazy, willful little tick-tocks they are, and — that was it! We could make drones with simple brains, but gone was the day of the mann with a spring in his step as well as in his knee joint. Gone was the day of the mann with the dahlia in his buttonhole and the poem in his soul. After a while, the little cads concealed the secret from us. Can you imagine the cheek of it!”

  “So they could still build an army of mannequins, if they wanted to?” Brian asked.

  “Of course! When the bloody things build a new mann, they still stick in brains. Fully working brains. A soul and nickel-and-dime memories and the whole lot. They have a factory town that makes heads somewhere around here. Place that does repairs whenever one of them breaks down. New heads, old heads, young heads, gold heads. The whole bit.”

  Brian took notice of this. He asked, “They have a factory that builds heads?”

  “Indeed. About fifteen or twenty miles from here. Kaputsville. That’s what it’s called. Kaputsville.”

  “So,” Brian pressed, “all their heads come from there? That’s the place where all the heads of the mannequin people come from?”

  “Yes. Unless they came over from Old Norumbega.”

  Brian stood up with a triumphant look in his eye. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s where the capsule is! The capsule and the giants aren’t in Pflundt at all! They were headed this way through the Volutes and the stomach — but they wanted to see where all the heads of the mannequin people came from! And it must be that town!”

  “Kaputsville?”

  “Yeah!” said Brian. “The town where the heads are actually made! The actual heads! That’s where they went!”

  Gregory laughed. It was a weird laugh, kind of jagged and narrow, but a laugh nonetheless. “I bet you’re right,” he said. “We were looking in the wrong place.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Brian. He paced back and forth in the cell. “We’ve got to get over there. The capsule could just be sitting there. There’s time to save New England — and New Norumbega!”

  “Indeed?” said Lord Dainsplint. “If only we were free?”

  “Yeah,” said Brian. He went over and looked out the barred windows.

  “Then, old sponge, you might wish to turn your attention to me. Because I’ve been thinking for the last few days, as I sat here, waiting for the dear Horde to drag me off and cook the old noodle till it’s al dente. And I believe I have come up with a plan.”

  In the caverns of flux, the vast pirate fleet of Thusser subs thundered toward the Dry Heart. And now they met the mannequin marines for the first time. Out of a branching capillary — a vein only a few hundred feet wide — mannequin ships poured, already firing torpedoes at the oncoming host.

  Thusser ships burst open like flower pods, dandelion blasts blooming in the green darkness of the flux. Metal skidded through the blood and buried itself in the walls. Still, the mannequins fired relentlessly.

  But the Thusser subs kept on coming. They didn’t seem to care that they would be destroyed. They didn’t fire back. They just chugged forward.

  Then one swerved. And another. And they headed right into the mannequin fleet. They smashed into mannequin ships. They erupted.

  Inside the mannequin subs, mechanical men and women in finned helmets clanked desperately up and down ladders, looking out portholes, dropping torpedoes into their firing tubes and launching them.

  Gradually, word went out, commander to captain: The Thusser didn’t have weapons; they were were using their subs themselves as weapons. They were controlling most of them remotely. They didn’t care if they lost them. In fact, losing them was the plan. They plowed them into the hides of mannequin gunboats.

  Explosions rocked the veins. The flux was dark with oil. The mannequin navy was surrounded, then swamped.

  There was no way they could protect the Dry Heart.

  At dinner in the prison yard, Lord Dainsplint ran back and forth, making sure that dinner was splotched
out on plates without a hitch. This was one of his jobs in the prison, but the Thusser guards noted that he was not usually so enthusiastic about his duties. Typically, he spent most of his time lounging on a bench and making fun of the guards for their accents or their socks.

  One of the guards muttered, “Watch him.”

  Dainsplint ran up underneath them and called up, “Hi-ho! Walerond in the kitchen needs to get another barrel of bug-juice out of the cellar. We’re running out. Can we borrow the keys to open the bulkhead door?”

  The guards were used to this. One of them silently tossed him down the ring of keys.

  “Spiffing,” he said, catching them in midair.

  They watched carefully as he ran over to the bulkhead door and unlocked it. One guard lowered the muzzle of his rifle. One wrong move, and they’d shoot his lordship in the back.

  But Dainsplint just did what he often did: unlocked the bulkhead for the cook’s assistant. Nothing unusual about that.

  From a distance, at least.

  As Dainsplint stood, hands behind his back, waiting by the bulkhead, he held a thick piece of cooked fat in his hand and rubbed it against the keys. He slopped them all over with grease.

  The cook’s assistant reappeared on a ramp, trundling a barrel of juice in front of him. The guards watched Dainsplint slam the doors shut and lock them.

  As he jogged back over, he jostled the ring of keys against the fat.

  When he got back to the guard tower, he yelled, “Alley-oop!” and tossed the keys back upward.

  A guard caught them. “Eh!” he said. “They’re all sticky!”

  “Sorry!” said Dainsplint.

  And crouching in the doorway of their cell, Gregory said to Brian, “Step one complete.”

  Nighttime in the prison of Pflundt.

  All the prisoners were locked up in their cells. A single guard sat drowsily in the tower. High above the city of phlegm, the lux effluvium glowed a dull blue-black.

  Tars Tarkas was sleeping curled up by the bars of Brian’s cell door.

  Brian crept over to the door and whispered through it, “Hey! Tars! Hey there, boy!”

  The bacterium looked up, blinking.

  Brian held up a wad of cloth that had been torn off a sheet, balled up, and rubbed in fat. “Hey, Tars! Fetch!” Brian threw the ball of cloth.

  It didn’t go too far. It unfurled partway and dropped. But the bacterium was overjoyed. He scampered on his six legs to seize the thing. He charged back to Brian and presented the loose end through the bars of the door. For a little bit, Brian played tug-of-war with the dragony creature. Tars reared his first set of legs in the air and shook his monstrous little head back and forth. He pulled and pulled.

  Finally, he released it so Brian would throw it again.

  Dainsplint watched carefully as Brian played with his bacterium.

  Brian threw the lard-covered ball of cloth farther the second time. And even farther the third time. “Go get it, boy!”

  The fourth time, he held it up while Tars danced impatiently in front of him. He feinted — pretended to throw it — pretended again — and this time, clenched it in his fist while making a show of hurling it out into the yard.

  Tars didn’t notice the cloth hadn’t left Brian’s hand. He charged out into the center of the empty yard.

  “Fetch!” Brian whispered.

  Finding nothing, Tars started to sniff around. He disturbed a flock of pigeons, which flew away. He paddled his wings and rose off the ground.

  Brian watched anxiously as Tars clearly smelled the same fat smeared on something in the guard tower. The bacterium hovered closer.

  The guard in the tower stared bored over the walls, out at the city arrayed up and down the cliff of snot. The streets were dark. Most of the citizens were shut off.

  Beside him on the table were the keys to all the doors in the compound on a single ring.

  A small, dragony head poked up next to them. A long, snakey tongue licked sideways out of a shiny, beaky snout. It licked the fat smeared on the metal. It tickled at the keys and wrapped itself around their ring.

  Slowly, the bacterium pulled the keys toward him.

  The guard closed his eyes and settled into sleep.

  There was a faint rattle as the keys reached the edge of the table.

  The guard woke up and reached out to feel what was there.

  He grabbed the key ring and slid it back to the center of the table.

  He shifted in his seat and closed his eyes.

  Underneath the table, the clever bacterium waited. Tars Tarkas waited for ten minutes. Then slowly, carefully, he snaked out his tongue again and began dragging the keys toward him.

  Gently, he lifted them off the table.

  When he had them in his mouth, he flew to Brian.

  “Good boy!” Brian whispered. He reached out to take the keys from his prancing accomplice. He grabbed a couple and pulled the key ring out of Tars’s mouth.

  Tars tugged back.

  Time for tug-of-war!

  “No,” said Brian. “Leave it! Leave the keys! Tars! Come on, boy!”

  Tars pulled them away triumphantly and scampered back and forth in front of the cell. The keys dangled from his beak, rattling.

  “No! Come on! Come on, boy!”

  Lord Dainsplint let out a moan. “Little blighter. What blunt instruments am I given for my work!”

  Tars presented the keys to Brian then jerked them away, his tail twitching in fun and pride.

  “Tars! Please! Come on!”

  The guard’s chair scraped back in the tower. The guard stood up and bellowed, “What’s all that, Cell Twenty-three?”

  He looked down from his tower. There was the human boy playing with his wretched bacterium. “Stop it, or you’ll lose your arms. And all privileges connected thereunto.”

  Brian waved timidly. With his other hand, he held the keys in a clump. They were still clamped in Tars’s beak.

  The guard turned away and sat down.

  Brian backed away from the door. Tars’s head clanged through the bars.

  Brian whispered, “Trade.” He held out the strip of greasy cloth. Tars snapped at it, and Brian pulled the key ring away. Tars sat down to give the cloth a good lick and eat it.

  Maybe five minutes had gone by when Brian reached around and unlocked his own door. He and Dainsplint slipped out.

  They made their way two cells along. Tars bounded by Brian’s side, making leaps for the key ring, which he now considered his. Brian unlocked Gwynyfer and Gregory’s door.

  The four of them flattened themselves against the walls. They walked sideways, in the shadows, to the kitchen door. It was only a space of twenty feet or so — but if the guard looked at them, his Thusser night vision would pick them up perfectly.

  Then they were in the dark of the kitchen. The two Norumbegans led the boys past counters and cutting boards. They unlocked the door to the outside world. A stone staircase led down to a back alley.

  They were free.

  It was time to visit the place where the heads of all the mannequin nation came from.

  In the veins of flux around the Dry Heart, a severed head drifted through the green. None of the Thusser paid attention to it. There was a lot of wreckage. They did not see that the head was gently rippling with transparent fins.

  The head tumbled quietly between Thusser ships. The motionless eyes watched the mannequin host retreating, defeated. Too many of them had been blown up by unmanned Thusser ships plowing into their hulls. The remainder were pulling back to defend the airlocks that led into the heart in the desert around New Norumbega. The Thusser fleet was left on its own.

  The head rolled gently past portholes and propellers.

  It was a gentleman with a side-part and blue eyes. He had been built to spy. His billowing fins wafted him gently past scenes of Thusser industry.

  They were setting something up. Some piece of vast machinery they’d taken from a factory somewhere. Thusser engin
eers, wearing stolen Norumbegan diving suits, were preparing a huge device for operation.

  They did not notice a floating head. There was a lot of flotsam and jetsam in the stream of flux.

  The head darted to the side, lurking in the shadows. It watched.

  The machine was a drill, the floating head realized. They were going to drill a new passage into the Dry Heart.

  It wasn’t a blade, the floating head realized. It was a drill. They were going to drill a new passage into the Dry Heart.

  The tip of the drill kissed the wall. The divers gave each other the thumbs-up. They began to swim away.

  And the drill began to turn. It spun. It was huge.

  The head swam off, trying to look as broken and severed as possible. It had news. Important news. Bad news.

  The church bells were ringing throughout the city. Noblemen in business suits were standing in the ruins of the palace, dressed in old papier-mâché animal masks, making magic signs with their hands. It was somehow supposed to convince their ancient gods to spare them. Everyone thought they were about to die.

  In the streets, Norumbegans were fighting with each other over shelter and donuts.

  That was when the quake hit. It was the largest yet. And as the city shook and the walls trembled, the veins of lux effluvium glowed blindingly. New Norumbega was seared with heat.

  Shielding their eyes, people ran — screamed — and shanty buildings fell. The light was pitiless.

  Then the quake stopped; the lux effluvium faded to its daylight simmer.

  Messengers were rushing to General Malark.

  “Portion of the wall’s down by St. Gwydion Plaza.”

  “Sir, the shelters on Confectioners Row collapsed.”

  “Casualty list for the navy, sir.”

  “Latest word from Barry, sir.”

  “Barry?” said Kalgrash. “Who’s Barry?”

  General Malark nodded. “Disembodied head number twelve. He’s one of our best men.” He asked the messenger, “What’s the word?”

  “The Thusser are drilling into the Dry Heart, sir. Huge drill.”

  General Malark winced. He said, “That was probably the quake we just felt. The Great Body’s in pain.”