Travels in Nihilon (19 page)

Whistles were blowing, and people were fighting. The train began to move with many would-be passengers still trying to get on. A voice shouted orders from a loudspeaker, but she couldn't tell what it was saying. Several rifle shots sounded towards the back of the train, as it went faster, and the crowd with a united groan of disappointment appeared to draw back from it.

Jaquiline's face was half frozen from the cold mountain wind. She wanted to sleep, but was restless, and knew that it would be difficult if not impossible. She stood at the window, swayed by the train. ‘I can't get to sleep either,' Cola said. ‘I keep thinking of how happy my son must be now that he knows I'm going to Aspron because of him. He must be half cured already.'

‘But you said you weren't going,' Jaquiline reminded her.

‘Oh, yes,' said Cola, rustling in her sheets, ‘we can get off the train in the morning, when it reaches Agbat. That's the next stop. We'll sell our compartment for at least ten times the price of the ticket, then make our way into the hills. I went on holiday there four years ago. The people in that region belong to a tribe called the Gelts, who have fair hair and blue eyes, and love money – though they have none because they sit all day talking about it. So when our money runs out we may have to face cold, hunger, thirst, humiliation, though it will be much better than going to Aspron. You are very kind to share my bad luck in this way.' She came down from her bunk, and held Jaquiline's hand warmly. ‘I'm sure we shall be all right. It's safer in the mountains than in a town. We'd give ourselves away too easily there.'

Jaquiline wasn't sure now that she wanted Cola with her while she investigated the tourist attractions of Nihilon City. ‘I want to sleep,' she said, ‘I wonder if you'd be kind enough to lend me a nightdress?'

‘I can't,' Cola said. ‘All my cases must have been emptied and repacked with pieces of wood when I left them in the station this morning. I have nothing at all.'

‘My things were stolen too,' Jaquiline said, alarmed at such a coincidence. ‘My own cases are full of wood.'

Cola fell to such heart-stricken sobs that Jaquiline's sympathy came back. ‘You too!' she said, when she was able to speak. ‘My luggage is filled with wood because I'm going to Aspron. Tomorrow the police will get on the train, and when they open our cases, they will see that you have to go to Aspron as well.'

‘It's ridiculous,' Jaquiline cried. ‘There's been some dreadful mistake. I shall explain everything to them.'

‘You won't be able to,' said Cola, a little calmer. ‘When the police see wood in our cases they'll arrest us on suspicion of arson.' Jaquiline kissed her, as if to thank her for an idea that suddenly came to her: ‘We'll open the window and throw the wood out.'

Cola wept again. ‘You don't know what you're saying! If they see
empty
cases we'll be sent to Aspron for life.'

‘Then we'll throw the cases out as well.'

‘That's worse. No luggage at all means that we'll be shot on the platform as a warning to others. Let's accept our fate together in Aspron. It will be better that way.'

Jaquiline patted her soothingly. ‘All right, my love, if it will please you.' When Cola climbed back into the bunk, Jaquiline began to undress. This wasn't nihilism. It was a bad dream. She had no intention of submitting to such barbarous impositions, and remembered the book bought from her police chief friend at the frontier, a volume closer to her heart than ever because it contained a loaded revolver. When the police came, and if they came – for she could not readily believe all that Cola had said – to take her to Aspron, she would shoot them down like the dogs she was fast considering them to be. With her clothes off, she climbed into Cola's bunk, and they slept the night together, consoling each other for whatever might happen to them on the following day.

Chapter 21

After a reasonable night's sleep (except for a few puzzling rifle-shots sounding through his dreams), and a good breakfast, Richard went out of the hotel and into the main square of Nihilon City. A strong breeze was blowing from the nearby Athelstan Alps, stirring the trees along the pavements. The square was about two hundred metres from north to south and east to west, and in the middle of it – towards which Richard suddenly ran through fast-moving traffic – was a concrete colossus erected to nihilism. He stood before it with open notebook, glad to be working at last. It was supported on four sides by lesser monuments portraying the virtues of Madness and Anarchy, whose great fierce heads were chasing the tails of their enemies, Order and Progress. ‘This vast, towering, sprawling conglomeration of Nihilistic culture,' he wrote, ‘which seems to have been chipped in many places by bullets, deserves an asterisk in any guidebook. It is to be hoped, however, that a thorough renovation of it will take place before many years go by, because flocks of pigeons have painted it well, which, together with soot presumably blowing in from the industrial suburbs when the wind is in the right direction – have given it a somewhat piebald appearance.'

Much of the square was lined with shops on the lower floors of the buildings, and there were many cafés, as well as several hotels, and from his central position he was able to observe the black ink-blot emblem of Nihilon flying from the roof of the Stock Exchange, while the hammer-and-chisel banner of nihilism itself fluttered from the office of Socialist Private Enterprise.

He referred to a thirty-year-old plan of the city in order to pencil in the positions of these edifices. The old bank was still in the same place, and so was the post, telephone, and telegraph office. The House of Deputies and the Peoples Savings Box were housed in one building, but the doors were closed and they seemed little used.

Several passers-by stopped to look over his shoulder at the map, and many more were standing around. A young man in a threadbare yet fashionable suit, who seemed to have a cold, leaned over and ran his black nihilist fingernail along certain streets. ‘I've never seen a map of our city,' he said with a smile. ‘I'm trying to make out where I live.'

‘Can't you buy them at the newspaper kiosks?' Richard said, knowing this to be difficult.

‘Yes,' answered the young man, carressing the edge of the map as if it were an expensive piece of cloth, ‘a city plan is published monthly, but they are different every time, and don't in any way resemble the real layout of the town.'

A middle-aged woman with a shopping basket came forward and tugged at the map, crying: ‘What beautiful colours! Is it a real one?' A huge fellow in cap and overalls elbowed them aside and offered a thousand klipps for it, while Richard vainly tried to fold it up. More people surged towards him, and he hit at a near-by face at the sickening sound of the thick paper tearing. A huge piece of the city vanished. Cars were stopping, and a driver leaned out, shouting: ‘He's got a coloured street-plan of the city.'

Richard's notebook was pulled away, and he felt a sly hand draw the fountain-pen from his lapel pocket. Letting this go, he pressed a fist to his coat to hold his wallet safe. Drivers ran from their cars to get at the map, but most of it had already gone, and Richard relinquished the last piece. When the crowd drew away, he leapt clear and into the road, but a few disappointed people were so enraged that they chased him through the traffic, and he ran as if his life was in danger, regretting that he had left the Professor's revolver in his suitcase at the hotel.

Entering a glass-fronted café, he closed the door behind, ready to defend himself should he be chased and cornered there. But he wasn't, so sat at a table on the glassed-in terrace, which gave a good view of people in the middle of the square still fighting over what was left of his map. He asked the waiter for a cup of black coffee, as well as a glass of Nihilitz, which he hoped would stop the tremors in his limbs.

He took more sheets of paper from his wallet, and with a pencil wrote his notes again concerning the monstrous and squalid megalith to Nihilism which stood in all-revealing sunlight across the road. He followed this by the comment that: ‘It is inadvisable to open a map in Nihilon, for it immediately draws spectators who are anxious to see what a real map of their city looks like, even though it may be hopelessly out of date. The enquiries that follow upon this act are often good-natured enough, but such curiosity has been known to get out of hand, so that the unfortunate traveller has had his map pulled from him and torn into a thousand pieces. This is no doubt due to a desire for possession, and for topographical orientation, which for no reason suddenly affects the whole crowd. While this is in some way understandable, though not totally commendable, what follows is undeniably bad for the traveller in that those of the mob who are baulked of their object occasionally resort to all but tearing the clothes off his back. For this reason the traveller is advised to have a newspaper with him at all times, in which to place his map while endeavouring to consult it.'

‘Your coffee and Nihilitz,' said the waiter, disturbing Richard's somewhat ravelled composition. People outside were running across the square and falling to the ground. A machine gun sent chips of pavement spurting along an arcade. ‘It's all right,' said the waiter, amused at Richard's pallor. ‘The glass at this café is bullet-proof.' The gun spattered another stretch of pavement and several people had formed a short queue by the monument to buy rifles, revolvers, and ammunition from a stall with a striped awning, before taking cover nearby and firing back with their newly acquired arms. A heavier explosion drummed along one of the side streets. ‘Why is it allowed to sell guns so openly?'

‘It's hard to say,' the waiter yawned. ‘Perhaps it's the war. Cronacia is at it again. It's all part of the system we live under. Our government, meaning President Nil, floated a commercial company to run a war against Cronacia, so that we could take over that country. That's what all these border incidents are about, if you want to know the truth. Every citizen of Nihilon is able to buy shares in the Cronacia Reconstructs Company, in order to destroy it and then draw dividends and profits when it's exploited – I mean occupied. I even bought a few certificates myself. It comes under the heading of Peoples Enterprise Number One, and rates very high on the Stock Exchange. Even foreign countries are beginning to invest in it, hoping to get their share of the spoils – I mean dividends – when Cronacia is finished and on the spit. Not that all is going too well at the moment. The trouble was, that just after our firm got going, the Cronacians found out about it, and so by way of revenge and self-defence, started a company in their own country – also a commercial concern with public shares – to ferment revolution in Nihilon. That may be what is happening now, sir, though it's early days, and still hard to tell. It could be over by the afternoon, because everybody sleeps for two hours. But if by any chance it picks up again in the evening, then it's more serious. That's two hundred klipps, sir.'

Other people on the glassed-in terrace were reading newspapers, or talking quietly, unperturbed at what was happening outside, though to their credit, thought Richard, a few at least were discussing the terrible dam burst at Fludd which had recently taken place. But he kept his attention on the square, where several cars had been driven into the central area and left, presumably as cover for the sharpshooters. Another vehicle in the far corner began to burn. When an ambulance roared in, its siren screeching with inhuman jerks, men in red overalls ran from it to pick up casualties, while other attendants pulled long boxes from it and took them to the gun-stall, which must have been running out of weapons and ammunition. ‘I thought Nihilon was famous for its law and order,' Richard said to the waiter, by way of a joke.

‘Oh yes, sir, it is. The law of the jungle, and the order of the slaugher-house. Nihilon is the greatest country in the world. Two hundred klipps, sir.'

‘That's rather expensive,' Richard said, drinking half the Nihilitz. ‘In fact it's extortionate.'

‘Bullet-proof glass costs a great deal,' the waiter informed him politely. ‘We had to replace it twice last week, so you're lucky to find it here at all.'

Richard passed him two hundred and fifty klipps. ‘What happens to it?'

‘It gets shot away. Or a bomb hits it. But we do our best for our customers.' He was called to another table, so left Richard to continue scribbling his notes. He was observed by an ageing man with short grey hair, an impeccably dressed, manicured man who was well-groomed and dignified, smooth in all his gestures, neither preoccupied with what might have been going on within himself, nor obsessed with the carnage in the square outside, from where in fact he had recently walked.

The man glanced disdainfully at a newspaper, then folded it and laid it by his Nihilitz. He gazed at a framed portrait on the wall of the café, a gold-framed picture of a bosomly woman dressed in black, with a boy of twelve by her side wearing an admiral's uniform. Richard had already seen either that same picture or a variation of it placed in the corridor of his hotel. When the bellboy had shown him to his room he had stood looking at one above his bed. ‘Doesn't it make you wonder where the father is?' the bellboy had asked.

‘Not really,' Richard said.

‘He's been shot,' the bellboy ventured. ‘That's what we always say.' And now in the café Richard suspected that, because of the unnatural glitter in the eyes of the child, there was an observer behind the picture, if not a microphone as well. He recalled that a printed notice on the back of the door at his hotel room exhorted guests to respect these portraits and pictures, because the management and staff, not to mention the Nihilonian public at large, held them in high repute.

The man's uneasy glances were divided between this typical portrait of Nihilon, and the pigeons flying outside the glassed-in front of the café. ‘They're waiting to take over our jobs,' he called.