Feersum Endjinn

forests and hills of the bailey, then the curtain wall in the distance and further away still there's the hazy scenery of the far beyond. (They reckon you can see the sea from the very highest heights of the habitable castle, but though I seen this screened I never seen it with my own eyes.)

A rickety old chair lift takes me up and along, through a sort of tunnel in the hanging babil plants, and before long I arrive at the corner of the great hall and the place under the eaves where the Astrologers/Alchemists hang out, and hang out is exactly what they do, especially Mr Zoliparia, who being an important old gent of some note has got one of the prime positions in all the town for his apartments, viz. the right eyeball of the septentrional gargoyle Rosbrith.

The gargoyle Rosbrith looks out to the north, but because it's on the corner and there's nothing in the way, you can see east too, where the sun is prone to rise of a morning and the nastiness of the approaching Encroachment is popping up saying 'Hi there folks — it's lights out soon by the way!'

I hit a snag; Mr Zoliparia doesn't appear to be in.  I'm standing at the top of a rickety ladder inside the body of the gargoyle Rosbrith abanging and abashing on the little circular door of Mr Zoliparia's apartments but for all my hammering there's no answer.  There's a wooden landing below me what the ladder's perched on (it's rickety too, by the way.  Come to think of it most stuff in the Astrologers/Alchemists town seems to be pretty rickety) but anyway there's an old lady scrubbing the damn landing with some horrible bubbling stuff that's bringing the wood on the landing up a treat even if it is dissolving most of it and making it even more rickety, but the point is this stuff's making fumes go up my nose and causing my eyes to water.

Mr Zoliparia!  I shout.  It's Bascule here!

Perhaps you should have told him you were coming, Ergates says from her box.

Mr Zoliparia don't hold with modern-like implants and that sort of stuff, I tell her, sneezing.  He's a dissident.

You could have left a message with somebody else, Ergates says.

Yes yes yes I says, all annoyed because I know she's right.  I suppose now I have to use my own bleeding implants and I've been trying not to apart from contacting the world of the dead because I want to be a dissident like Mr Zoliparia.

Mr Zoliparia!  I shouts again.  I've got my scarf up round my mouth and nose now because of the fumes coming up from the landing.

O, bugration.

Is somebody using hydrochloric acid?  Ergates says.  On wood?  She sounds mystified.

I don't know about that I says but there's some old girl down there scrubbing away at the landing with something pretty noxious.

Odd, Ergates says.  I was sure he'd be in.  I think you better get down — but then the door opens and there's Mr Zoliparia in a big towel and what there is of his hair's all wet.

Bascule! he shouts at me, might have known it was you!  Then he glares down at the old lady and waves at me to come in and I scramble over the top of the ladder and into the eyeball.

Take your shoes off, boy, he says, if you stepped in that stuff on the landing you'll be rotting my carpets.  When you've done that you can make yourself useful and warm me up some wine.  Then he pads off, hoisting his towel up around him and leaving a trail of water behind him on the floor.

I start to take my shoes off.

You been having a bath, Mr Zoliparia?  I asks him.

He just looks at me.

Mr Zoliparia and me and Ergates the ant are sitting on the iris balcony of the gargoyle Rosbrith's right eyeball having respectively mulled wine, tea, and a microscopic morsel of stale bread.  Mr Zoliparia's in a chair what looks a bit like an eyeball itself, suspended from an eyelash above; I'm on a stool sat beside the parapet where Ergates is tucking into the bread Mr Zoliparia gave her (and what I moistened with some spit) — it's a whole huge lump of crust and far too much for her really, but she tears crumbs off and works them with her mouthparts and front feet until she can swallow them.  I heard Ergates say Thank you to Mr Zoliparia when he gave her the crust but I haven't told him she can talk yet and he didn't seem to hear her.

I'm watching Ergates carefully because it's a bit windy out here and though there's a sort of net under the balcony and Ergates wouldn't be harmed by a fall, she'd probably go straight through the net and even if she wasn't harmed she'd be lost; blimey, something as light as her could get blown right into the bailey from this high up and how would I ever find her then?

You worry too much, Ergates says.  I'm a highly resourceful ant and I would find you.

(I don't say nothing in return because Mr Zoliparia's talking and it would be impolite.) Anyway the point is quite frankly I'd rather Ergates was still in my pocket but she says she wishes to take the air and besides she likes the view.

… Symbol not of potency or invulnerability but of a kind of stultifying impotence and extreme vulnerability, Mr Zoliparia is saying, banging on about the castle again as he is often want to do.

We live in a folly, Bascule, never forget that, he tells me and I nod and sip my tea and watch Ergates eat her bread.

It's no coincidence the ancients used to refer to the quick and the dead, he says, swallowing some more wine and burrowing into his coat (it's a bit cold out here).  To live is to move, he says.  Mobility is all.  Things like this (he waves his hand around) are a kind of admission of defeat; why, the damn thing's little better than a hospice!

What's a hospice?  I ask, not recognizing the word and not wanting to use implants (and wanting Mr Zoliparia to know this, it has to be admitted).

Bascule, you might as well use the facilities you've been given, Mr Zoliparia says.

O yes, I says.  I forgot.  I made a show of closing my eyes.  Having done this for a while, I said.  Let's see; I yes, hospice — a place where you go to die, basically.

Yes, Mr Zoliparia said, looking annoyed.  Now you've made me go and forget; I've lost the flow.

You was saying the castle was like a hospice.

I remember that, he says.

Well I'm very sorry, I says.

No matter.  The burden of my argument, Mr Zoliparia says, is that to set itself up like this in such a defeatingly vast and intimidatingly inhuman structure is merely to announce the coming to rest of one's progress, and without that we are lost.

(Mr Zoliparia is big on progress though from what I can gather it's a pretty old fashioned idea these days.)

So there definitely weren't never no giants then?  I says.

Bascule, Mr Zoliparia says, sighing, what is this obsession with the idea of giants?  He fills his glass with more wine; it steams in the cold air.  I watch Ergates for a bit while he does this, zooming in to look at her face; I can see her eyes and feelers and watch her mouth-parts needing and tearing at the gummy-looking bread.  Pull back as Mr Zoliparia sets the wine jug back down on the table.

The thing is, he says, and sighs again, there were once giants.  Not giants in the sense that they were physically bigger than us, but bigger in their powers and abilities and ambitions; bigger than us in their moral courage.  They made this place, they built it from rock and materials we've lost the art of making and working.  They built it for a purpose in a sense, but it's ludicrously over-designed for its supposed function.  They built it the way they did for fun.  Just because it amused them to do so.  But they've moved on, and we are all that's left and now the place teems with life but then so does a maggoty corpse; there is much movement but no quickness in us; that's all gone.

What about the fast-tower?  I says.  That sounds pretty quickish to me.

O Bascule, he says and looks up at the ski.  Fast as in hold-fast or stuck-fast.  How many more times must I tell you?

O yes, I says.  So all these quick types left for the stars did they, Mr Zoliparia?

Yes, they did, he says, and why shouldn't they?  But what puzzles me is why they should abandon us so completely, and that why we should have given up the ability even to keep in touch with them.