[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In any event.I had hung around the conference hall formaybe half an hour of day one, in the equivalent of a RoyalBox, munching the complimentary delicacies - which hadbeen laid out beforehand, in anticipation of the arrival ofsome important personage, as opposed to an Invisible Idiot -and looking down upon the stormily applauding crowd as yetanother Dellahan delegate made yet another quarter-hour-long speech to announce what his name was before I decidedI had had enough.I had a job to do.Prince Jimbo seemed happy enough, having found a pieceof string from somewhere, which had kept him amused sincebreakfast.Possibly it was just me, but I got the distinctimpression that, on leaving Thanaxos, he had reverted evenfurther from the cheerful drooling idiot I d originally met toan actual moron with the mental capacity of a small dog andthe mental age of a toddler.Maybe it was just that he hadbeen extensively coached for that first meeting - but Icouldn t shake the feeling that there was somehow more to itthan that.I debated whether to just leave him here - he d probably besafer than if I took him, if only on account of not beingnoticed - but there s such a thing as professional pride.Imight be using this job as a cover, but it was still a job and,while I d have rather pitched the little sod over the rail andinto the crowd below, I d been contracted to look after him.Icouldn t let him out of my sight.I sighed. Come on, Jimbo, I said shoving him ratherharder than I d meant to in order to get his attention. We releaving.A look of petulance crossed Prince Jimbo s face for havinghis fun with this marvellous bit of string spoilt, and then heforgot about it. Are we going somewhere nice? he said, achildish hope briefly animating his slack-jawed features. We re going somewhere, I admitted.The petulance was back again. Don t want to go if it s notsomewhere nice.I sighed. All right, Jimbo.It s somewhere nice. Bingo! The imbecilic, sunny joy of the terminally retardedburst from him.And then his face changed yet again. What the hell are you doing now? I shouted.Prince Jimbo had clenched his fists and face and stuck hiselbows out in a horribly familiar-looking little tableau of innerstrain.He relaxed again. Uncle Mumfrey told me to always go before I go somewherenice, he said proudly. And I just have.Professional pride has a hell of a lot to bloody answer for.We had simply walked out of the palace, unaccosted,unremarked upon and, apparently, barely even noticed.Thecity outside was your usual hubbub of urban sprawl, andyou d have to be a new arrival from where conditions wereslightly better - even a Thanaxos soft-shoe-shuffling itselfinto a war footing - to catch the impression that a faintpatina of seediness and grubbiness had only quite recentlycome across this scene.And that, by degrees imperceptibleexcept over the course of months, the trend was going downrather than up.Now there are any number of travel journos, outworldcorrespondents and the like (Sela wasn t one of them) whowill tell you that, when you visit a basically theocraticculture, you can smell the raw Faith with a capital F in thestreets.No you can t.Raw something else, perhaps, but notraw Faith.What you re smelling is the fact that mere, prosaicthings like building things, repairing them and keeping themclean are done in a cursory, slipshod fashion, because theeffort, attention and time of the people who should be doingthem is eaten up by the protocols of the intangible.Likewiseproducing any kind of art outside the prescribed bounds, orthinking up new gadgets to do things, or ways to make surethat almost everyone is pretty-much fed.As I d seen in the palace, Dellah was in transition  waswilling this transition - but the cultural lag of a billion-oddpeople trying to get their heads around the same idea meantthat by my lights things could have been worse.It would bequite some time before the beggars outnumbered the peoplegiving alms.For the moment Dellah retained some semblanceof the development it had achieved before the blockade.There were hover cabs, here and there - and the thingabout hover cabs was that with their floaters and theworking-life perpetual engines that kept their maintenancedown, they were, effectively, all-terrain vehicles with no limiton the distance.It was but the work of an increasinglyinfuriating hour to drag Jimbo through a crowd that keptbumping into us unawares, locate an empty cab, plug Boxinto it and short the controls to manual.I could only hopethat this strange sense of obscurity we possessed didn tsomehow extend to the fact of this large lump of metal andmoulded resin barrelling through pedestrian-crowdedmarkets, streets and combinations of the two.Fortunately, itdidn t.There s a long, long tradition the whole galaxy over, uponthe various planets of the galaxy at least, of cities deridingthe open country and vice versa.The city, says the country,has cut itself off from Nature and wallows in its owndecadence and filth, while the country, say the city dwellers,stands up to its collective knees in the shit of its farmanimals and shags them.In fact, from the outside, you cansee the two planetary states as being roughly equal  thecities merely being scrunched up tight and the country beinglaid out flat.In any case, after getting out of the city and itsdeclining but still relatively high levels of wealth, I got to seehow the other half were living under the revolutionary NewDellahan regime.They weren t doing very well.I gather that it used to rain all the time on Dellah  theresult of the Sky Pylon, a vastly extruded, monomolecularcable that physically connected the planet to its orbital spacestation and disrupted the weather patterns.Now the Pylonand the station were gone, and the world was reverting todesert.There were sad little clusters of sandstone huts thatlooked like outhouses.The outhouses, of course, werenonexistent.Each grouping was surrounded by a scraggypatch of cultivated land that I assumed was the equivalent ofa vegetable garden - but if they were, the lot of them wouldn thave produced the garnish for a tub of coleslaw.I saw figures in the landscape, just standing there as ifthey had been dumped - I recalled those faceless, spectralcreatures you see, in the murk between the Futurism and themotorways, in a lot of Nazi art.The land itself seemed halfdead as I drove through it.I was just following a direction asopposed to actual directions, for there was no road, paved orotherwise.It was all scorched foothills and flatlands well onthe way to becoming desert, a crazy paving of erodedtrenches, the skeletal remains of cattle in the pastures thatthey d overgrazed.Prince Jimbo just sat there, gazing out of the window, hismind seemingly switched completely off.He d had anotheraccident, and even with the cab s air conditioning - working,for a wonder - on full blast, the smell was getting to me.It was almost a relief, in the end, to come upon thedevastated wreckage of the university [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]