Something jerked violently at Hackworth's neck. The woman had tossed a noose around him while he'd been staring out the window, and now she was hauling him out the door of the bar like a recalcitrant dog. As soon as she cleared the doorway, her cape inflated like a time-lapse explosion, and she shot twelve feet into the air, propelled on jets of air built into her clothing somehow-she payed out the leash so that Hackworth wasn't hanged in the process. Flying above the audience like the cone of fire from a rocket engine, she led the stumbling Hackworth down the sloping floor and to the edge of the water. The thrust stage was linked to the water's edge by a couple of narrow bridges, and Hackworth negotiated one of these, feeling hundreds of lights on his shoulders, seemingly hot enough to ignite his clothing. She led him straight back through the center of the Chorus, beneath the electric sign, through the backstage area, and through a doorway, which clanged shut behind him. Then she vanished.
Hackworth was surrounded on three sides by softly glowing blue walls. He reached out to touch one and received a mild shock for his troubles. Stepping forward, he tripped over something that skittered across the floor: a dry bone, big and heavy, larger than a human femur.
He stepped forward through the only gap available to him and found more walls. He had been deposited into the heart of a labyrinth.
It took him an hour or so to realize that escape through normal means was hopeless. He didn't even try to figure out the labyrinth's floor plan; instead, realizing that it couldn't possibly be larger than the ship, he followed the foolproof expedient of turning right at every corner, which as all clever boys knew must always lead to an exit. But it didn't, and he did not understand why until once, in the corner of his eye, he saw a wall segment shift sideways, closing up an old gap and creating a new one. It was a dynamic labyrinth.
He found a rusty bolt on the floor, picked it up, and threw it at a wall. It did not bounce off but passed through and clattered onto the floor beyond. So the walls did not exist except as figments in his spectacles. The labyrinth was constructed of information. In order to escape, he would have to hack it.
He sat down on the floor. Nick the barman appeared, walking unhindered through walls, bearing a tray with another stout on it, and handed it to him along with a bowl of salty peanuts. As the evening went on, other people passed through his area, dancing or singing or dueling or arguing or making love. None of these had anything to do, particularly, with Hackworth's Quest, and they appeared to have nothing to do with each other. Apparently Hackworth's Quest was (as the devil-woman herself had told him) just one of several concurrent stories being acted out tonight, coexisting in the same space.
So what did any of this have to do with the life of John Hackworth? And how was Fiona mixed up in it?
As Hackworth thought about Fiona, a panel in front of him slid to the side, exposing several yards of corridor. During the next couple of hours he noted the same thing several times: An idea would occur to him, and a wall would move. In this way he moved in fits and starts through the maze, as his mind moved from one idea to the next. The floor was definitely sloping downward, which would obviously bring him below the waterline at some point; and indeed he had begun to sense a heavy drumming noise coming up through the deckplates, which might have been the pounding of mighty engines except that this ship, as far as he knew, wasn't going anywhere. He smelled seawater before him and saw dim lights shining through its surface, broken by the waves, and knew that in the flooded ballast tanks of this ship lay a network of underwater tunnels, and that in those tunnels were Drummers. For all he knew, the whole show was just a figment being enacted in the mind of the Drummers. Probably not the main event either; it was probably just an epiphenomenon of whatever deep processes the Drummers were running down there in their collective mind.
A wall panel slid aside and gave him a clear path to the water. Hackworth squatted at the water's edge for a few minutes, listening to the drums, then stood up and began to undo his necktie.
He was terribly hot and sweaty, and bright light was in his eyes, and none of these things were consistent with being underwater. He awoke to see a bright blue sky overhead, pawed at his face, and found that the spectacles were gone. Fiona was there in her white dress, watching him with a rueful smile. The floor was pounding Hackworth on the buttocks and evidently had been for some time, as the bony parts of his backside were bruised and raw.
He realized that they were on the raft, heading back toward the London docks; that he was naked and that Fiona had covered him with a sheet of plastic to protect his skin from the sun. A few other theatergoers were scattered about, slumped against one another, utterly passive, like refugees, or people who've just had the greatest sex of their lives, or people who are tremendously hung over.
'You were quite a hit,' Fiona said. And suddenly Hackworth remembered himself being paraded naked and dripping down the thrust stage, waves of applause rolling over him from the standing audience.
'The Quest is finished,' he blurted. 'We're going to Shanghai.'
'You're going to Shanghai,' Fiona said. 'I'll see you off at the dock. Then I'll be going back.' She cocked her head over the stern.
'Back to the ship?'
'I was a bigger hit than you were,' she said. 'I've found my calling in life, Father. I've accepted an invitation to join Dramatis Personae.'
Carl Hollywood's hack.
Carl Hollywood leaned back against the hard lacquered back of his corner seat for the first time in many hours and rubbed his face with both hands, scratching himself with his own whiskers. He had been sitting in the teahouse for almost twenty-four hours, consumed twelve pots of tea, and twice called in masseuses to unknot his back.
The afternoon light coming in the windows behind him flickered as the crowd outside began to break up. They had been treated to a remarkable free media show, watching over his shoulders for hours as the dramaturgical exploits of John Percival Hackworth had played themselves out, in several different camera angles, on floating cine windows on Carl Hollywood's pages. None of them could read English, and so they had been unable to follow the story of Princess Nell's adventures in the land of King Coyote, which had been streaming across the pages at the same time, the storyline fluctuating and curling in upon itself like a cloud of smoke spun and torn by invisible currents.
