Aurorarama (42 page)

The aurora was now fading, the images losing clarity.

Hardenberg walked up to Brentford and, taking him by the arm, led him toward the crystal balustrade of the terrace.

“Now. How did you like our little
tupilaat
troopers? Made in East Greenland, thanks to our Inuit allies. It’s been a lot of work.”

Maybe Brentford would have liked it better if he had not faced the Phantom Patrol just the night before. This pantomime, successful as it was, hit too close to his funny bone.

“A bit horrible for a fairy tale.”

“
Tss, tss
. The most horrible are the best. Every child knows that. So you will take the kingdom I offered you?”

“It depends on what you want against it.”

“Nothing I will ask permission to get,” said Hardenberg with a certain haughtiness. “But nothing that should be of consequence to you.”

Brentford thought about it for a while. He had, so far, no reason not to trust the Aerial Anarchists.

“I have one more condition, or favour, to ask.”

“That would be your second wish. You’ll have just one left,” said Hardenberg pleasantly.

“I want no bloodshed.”

Hardenberg smiled widely, as if genuinely amused.

“Ah, Mr. Orsini … Do you know what it is that I like about you? You like to cast yourself as a down-to-earth politician and a no-nonsense strategist, but at heart, you’re like me, aren’t you? An artist and a poet. You should have called your book a
Butterfly on the Barren Land
. But you are no fool, and neither am I,” he added darkly. “And there is no way I can promise you such a thing.”

The night before the departure, Brentford had a dream. It was night and he was walking the streets of New Venice. In the mock moonlight, the city was nothing but a self-repeating myriorama of ruins, smashed-in roofs, broken columns, toppled statues, scattered objects, and clothes half-smothered in the snow. His steps crunching through the silence, he walked and walked on in
the cold, along avenues and across bridges, past empty arcades and pillaged shops, and did not meet a living soul. Now it is mine, he thought with bitterness, all mine …

H
ardenberg’s plan was that the Anarchists would not return to New Venice with the
Ariel:
now that the contract with the Council had been broken, it would have meant a field day for the Anti-Aerial Artillery. It was a much better idea, and Brentford had agreed, to let the Council think they had got rid of the traitors and the threat they posed.

They had hidden the airship in a cave inside the cliffs on the northern coast. Then, at night, using clever little electric motor sleds equipped with kites and spiked wheels at the front, they had discreetly rejoined the Fisheries, where the Scavengers, after Brentford’s explanations, welcomed them with no further question. By way of the Parcel Pneumatic Post they had been propulsed and hidden in the underground lair of the Scavengers, where they had made both their quarters and headquarters.

But though there was to be no terror from above, there would still be some sort of loud destructive device involved. Brentford had protested, but Schwarz had made it clear that this was a question of honour for the anarchists, and therefore not negotiable. It was, however, Hardenberg’s conviction that quality had to prevail over quantity, and that a single, precise, well-timed blast at the right spot at the right time would have as much
expressivity
on the battlefield as numerous blind outbursts of terror. He had looked upon the map, lost in thought, then all of a sudden had pointed straight at the Greenhouse.

Brentford protested again.

“Too bad,” Hardenberg said with a straight face. “Hothouses are the best things to blow up. All those smithereens. But be at rest, Mr. Orsini, it was a just an idiotic joke. What we’ll do is take the most wickedly useless institution in the city and blow it to freedom come. It would be best if it were both a warning and a well-deserved punishment. I vote for the Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs.”

Brentford, though he hated the idea of any ruins at all in New Venice, deemed the idea a lesser evil. And, after all, ruins, too, were part of the life of a city. A kind of
Memento mori
. Of
Et in Arcadia ego
.

Mougrabin was to be entrusted with the whole operation, and Hardenberg had also insisted, for some reason, that it would be Gabriel, and none other, who was to serve as messenger to him. Gabriel was perfectly happy with his self-appointed office
as a chaperone to the Elphinstone twins, and had little desire (or perhaps much too much) to go back to the Apostles’. Still, he did not want to be tiresome in these delicate circumstances, and with typical bad grace he finally surrendered.

Which was why, on the eve of the military parade organized to celebrate the Victory over the Inuit, he had stealthily walked out of the underground hideout and by numerous roundabout ways through ill-lit and slushy streets had reluctantly hurried toward the Apostles’, Stella’s featherweight ghost using his stomach as a punching bag.

And when he rapped the code on Mougrabin’s door, it was none other than Stella who opened it. In a man’s dressing gown.

They stood facing each other, paralyzed. Gabriel’s soul fluttered in panic like a emptying balloon, as if trying to find a way out of his body.

“Ah, Gabriel, my good friend!” said Mougrabin from behind Stella, putting on his braces. “I am so happy to see you!!!”

He came to the door and hugged him, until Gabriel could not breath anymore.

“We were very worried for you! Isn’t it true, Zvevdichka, that we worried a lot? Our Zvevdichka loves you a lot, you know,” he added, in a whisper that reeked of onion.

The Little Star, however, had retreated to her room.

“Whatever brings you here, my good friend?” Mougrabin asked, still standing in the doorway, his eyes blinking with emotion.

Gabriel managed to remember the password.

“Do
me business in the veins o’ the earth

When it is baked with frost.”

Mougrabin’s face broke out into an ugly porcelain grin. He took Gabriel by the arm and pulled him inside the apartment,
closing the door behind him and looking through the peephole for a while.

“At last! It has come!” he exclaimed as he turned back toward Gabriel. “And you have joined our feast of Freedom. By highways or hedges, I always knew you would. Have you heard, Stella?” he called out. “He is now one of us!”

But, locked in her room, Stella did not answer.

Gabriel, trembling and holding his hat like a shy peasant, followed Mougrabin into a small, shabby living room. On the table, near the samovar, from which Mougrabin poured him a cup of steaming tea, and next to a small phonograph, was a strange device he had been cleaning, showing a piston and a cylinder with cooling vanes at the top, small enough to be carried in a coat pocket.

“Do not worry!” blurted out Mougrabin. “It is not a bombchka. I have had my share of those,” he winked with his glass eye. “No, no, this is a new invention, quite extraordinary. It is called a Resonator. But I prefer to call it a Liberator. It’s a pun, you see—on the energy it liberates and the people it liberates. Hahaha. And where are we supposed to liberate this energy?”

“The Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs,” said Gabriel, burning his tongue with the tea, which he noticed Mougrabin drank directly from the saucer. “Tomorrow morning during the parade. As it is a holiday, the building will not be occupied or guarded.”

“It is as if it were already done!
Perform’d to point
. Pfuii!!” said Mougrabin, with a graceful gesture. “And thanks to you, my friend.”

“I’ve done nothing,” said Gabriel, thinking of how much it had actually cost him to come there. He wondered why Hardenberg had so badly wanted him to carry this message. Maybe the arch-Anarchist knew about Mougrabin and Stella, and had wanted Gabriel to face the truth. As if having seen Stella with
Wynne had not been enough of a truth to face. Now he had to accept that she was the sweetheart of this scarecrow, who looked at him with a tear in the corner of his good eye, and then put his mangled hand on his shoulder.

“No! I mean because of your
music
. The little piece you called
Lobster-Cracking.”

Gabriel did not understand. He had forgotten about the little wax roll he had recorded out of boredom during the winter. He had happened to have it in his satchel when he went to Doges College, and he had given it to Phoebe as a countersign for Brentford. The last time he had seen it, it was in Wynne’s hands, at the hospital, on the night when he had met Stella …

“It is the exact frequency we need to start our little Liberator, you see. This device, Mr. Treschler has explained to the idiot I am, works with a force called
resonance frequency
. The bigger is the building, the lower the frequency should be, though I ask you not to ask me why. Linked to a small phonograph, such as this one, it plays the song inside the walls, making it echo through the building, and then, you just have to wait for the entire place to tumble down! It is
genius
. Russia would have been free long ago with such machines at our disposal! Mr. Schwarz, the chemist of the
Ariel
, who is a bomb fiend, was not very happy with Treschler bringing it along! Isn’t that true, my Little Star, that your daddy was angry?” yelled Mougrabin.

“Her daddy?” repeated Gabriel.

“I’m Stella Schwarz, the daughter of Doktor Schwarz and a French
petroleuse,”
said Stella, her eyes puffy from crying, as she leaned against the doorframe of the living room. “I’m sorry I have lied to you.”

“And the song … You stole it from Wynne …”

Stella nodded and sobbed, her face in her hands.

Mougrabin whispered in Gabriel’s ear.

“I suffered from this as much as you did, my friend. But it was the only way.”

“But … how did you know that this song existed … and could do this?” Gabriel insisted.

Stella sniffed, and took a deep breath.

“One day, as we were rehearsing at the Trilby Temple, and while I was waiting in the ballot box, Wynne, who was in charge of Handyside’s security, approached him for a private talk,” she explained between sniffs and sobs. “Wynne said that he needed Handyside to come to the Kane Clinic and mesmerize a girl, so that she would look as if she were in a coma. Their idea was to blame it on the effect of a very-low-frequency song. Of course, I had heard my father and Treschler and Max … I mean Mikhail … talking of the new device in the
Ariel
, and I knew that such a song was just what they needed to make it work and that it could be decisive. At some point, Wynne explained that he would allow the Gentlemen of the Night to do a round-up at the Toadstool in order to catch the man who had recorded the song. I went there after the show, but they took us to the clinic and put me in a room before I could find out anything. Then I met you. And I swear to you, on the head of Voltairine de Cleyre, Gabriel, I did not know it was your song. Not before you made me listen to the other pieces.”

“Then … 
you
 … searched my place?”

“Be glad she did,” said Mougrabin. “That is how she found the book. She knew it was dangerous for you and she brought it to me.”

“I did not find the song, and so understood Wynne had the only copy,” Stella went on with difficulty. “So the next time I met him at the Trilby Temple, well … It was horrible, believe me, going to the Ingersarvik, with this hypnotized woman and that old …”