“Mind you,” continued Doug, “if I marry into the deMauves, I’ll never be short of pocket money and a cushy job at the factory. Perhaps I should just lie back and think of the linoleum.”
I would probably do the same thing—only with string.
“Doug,” I said, thinking about the Apocryphal man, “do you have any jam?”
“Of course.”
“Loganberry?”
He rolled his eyes.
“I wish. There’d be some in the deMauves’ cellar.”
“Would they sell any to me?”
He laughed, which I took to mean no.
We crossed the river in silence, walked past the factory and railway station and then headed out along the western road. Ahead of us a narrow valley opened up into the wood-covered heights of the Redstone Mountains. In between the hills I could see a large grey structure, and I pointed this out to Doug.
“It’s the five-part dam complex left behind by the Previous,” he explained. “It rained a lot round here, even then. It still feeds Blue Sector West by way of a seventy-three-mile-long aqueduct. So big you could once walk inside, but the lime scale is about a foot thick these days. You’d pass the dams on the way to High Saffron. Mostly silted up, now.”
After an abrupt right turn up a pathway, we arrived at the boundary. It was much like the one at Jade-under-Lime: simply an earthen dike thirty feet high, topped with a partially dilapidated stone wall and a deep ditch filled with clutching brambles. It was enough to halt a rhinosaurus or an elephant but wouldn’t stop a ground sloth or bouncing goat.
There was a phone booth on the village side of the boundary, which for sound colornomic reasons was painted grey rather than red. There was no door; only three panes of glass remained and soil creep had buried it to almost a quarter of its height. But the Bakelite telephone was still in good order, kept safe and dry under a domed cloche that would not have appeared out of place covering a cake.
Doug took off the cloche, dialed a number and reported where we were. Turquoise would be underground in the Plotting Room, where, for doubtless sound but unknown reasons, the team’s positions and progress could be marked on a large table painted with a map of the sub-Collective.
This done, Doug replaced the receiver and cloche, and we trudged on, the sun still low and the air cool and laden with dew. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of natural red in the countryside’s rich bounty. The birds, roused perhaps by our tramping boots, popped their heads out from under their wings and sang.
“I’d sing, too, if I could fly,” said Doug. “See over there? The Fallen Man.”
He was pointing at a low-walled enclosure just outside the boundary, on a flat piece of cleared ground overlooked by two large ginkgo trees and several rhododendron bushes that looked as though they were discussing invasion plans. I found a footpath, and trotted down for a closer look. The enclosure was perhaps forty feet in diameter, built to less than waist height. The iron gate had been saved from rusty oblivion by a timely coat of paint, but was no more substantial than a spider’s web. The grass within the enclosure was kept short and neat by the industrious work of a team of guinea pigs, which blinked at me from their burrows as I opened the gate. Inside was the Fallen Man: Like our lodger, he was something inexplicable in a world of carefully ordered absolutes, so what remained of him was kept exactly as it was, with nothing taken away and, aside from the wall and the guinea pigs, nothing added.
The chair and the man were lying flat on the ground, having landed sideways. Of the Fallen Man’s body, little remained. He had rotted long ago, and the weather had broken down the bones to crumbling white dust wherever they poked out of the finely nibbled grass. His heavy boots were still relatively complete, as were his helmet and other scraps of clothing, some of which were a faded red in color. The chair was not at all like the stuffed-leather variety portrayed in the sign outside the tearoom . It had been beautifully constructed of aluminum, brass and chrome and had once been painted, but the sun and rain had burnished the metal to a dull grey, and even though half-embedded in the soil and badly crumpled from the impact, the chair had not corroded appreciably.
“How long has he been here?”
“I remember being brought up here soon after he landed,” replied Doug after a moment’s thought. “That would have been about thirteen years ago.”
“Where did he come from?”
Doug shrugged and pointed straight upward, which was of little help.
“With all the unanswered questions kicking around,” he said, checking the time, “the arrival of a strange man strapped to a metal chair is of little significance.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “the bigger mystery is that no one seems eager to find out. What do you think?”
“If you’re buttering me up to join your Question Club,” said Doug with a smile, “you’re barking up the wrong tree. Knowing where the Fallen Man came from will not substantially alter our lives—and neither will finding out what the Something That Happened was, or even the name of Munsell’s seventh apostle and the Unrevealed Abomination.”
“Okay,” I said, “that’s the last time I mention it.”
We climbed back up to the footpath, and carried on in silence for the next half hour, following the contours of the valley until the earthen dike curved around to the south. We intersected the western road where it left the boundary through a large pair of sturdy wooden gates, and stopped to report in. There was another phone booth here, along with a rain shelter and a Faraday cage, conveniently located to protect travelers from lightning.
“You can make the call this time, Eddie.”
I removed the cloche, and rang Turquoise. I gave him our code and the number of the phone booth. He told me not to dawdle, and the line went dead.
“We’re about halfway around our sector,” said Doug, taking a drink of water, “and making good time.
Do you want to see something pretty amazing?”
“You’re not going to turn blue, are you?”
He laughed. “You saw that sideshow, too, did you? No. It won’t take long—just past the markers.”
He opened the gate, and we walked on the smooth Perpetulite toward the Outer Markers, which were nothing more than a series of wooden posts running at twenty-yard intervals parallel to the boundary, about five hundred yards farther out. They were decorated with scrap red to mark the village’s predominant persuasion, and were freshened every year as part of the Foundation Day celebrations. The Outer Markers were technically the edge of our world, but the strip between the boundary and the posts was traditionally a Tolerance Zone, in which one could disport oneself with a modicum of privacy and freedom. One could amble, think, talk, touch-dance, have an impromptu picnic, shout—even indulge in a cheeky bundle or matters more usually reserved for the wool store, as long as they’re conducted with all due discretion.
We arrived at the posts, and Doug pointed at the roadway with a grin. “What do you think of that?”
I’d often seen it happen to foliage, occasionally to small creatures, but never to something so large as a giraffe. The poor creature had chosen to drop dead on the roadway and the organoplastoid compound, rather than move it to one side, had elected to absorb it.
“There isn’t much tree cover on the road to Bleak Point,” explained Doug, “and the anti-rhododendron fires have damaged it quite badly; it’ll absorb pretty much anything it can get.”
The giraffe had been digested like leaf litter, and all that remained of it was a giraffe-shaped image in the smooth Perpetulite, the skeleton clearly visible with a subtle image of the giraffe’s reticulated hide across the top of it. The bones and teeth were breaking down, and the powdered white calcites were forming a sweeping trail toward the road markings.