He whooped and cried with relief and pleasure, and sheer physical delight. He swooped, he wheeled, he skidded and whirled through the air. Cheekily he sat on an updraft and went through the contents of the tote bag. He felt the way he imagined an angel must feel doing its celebrated dance on the head of a pin while being counted by philosophers. He laughed with pleasure at the discovery that the bag did in fact contain the olive oil and the retsina as well as a pair of cracked sunglasses, some sand-filled swimming trunks, some creased postcards of Santorini, a large and unsightly towel, some interesting stones and various scraps of paper with the addresses of people he was relieved to think he would never meet again, even if the reason why was a sad one. He dropped the stones, put on the sunglasses and let the pieces of paper whip away in the wind.
Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a large and extremely disreputable cocktail party in the small of the back.
Chapter 19
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don’t have any particular need to believe it, then don’t go and look because you won’t enjoy it.
There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn’t believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one.
One of the problems, and it’s one that is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn’t leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and recessive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots or, more and more frequently, both.
Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each succeeding generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.
So, other factors come into operation, like when the drinks are going to run out.
Now, because of certain things that have happened that seemed like a good idea at the time (and one of the problems with a party that never stops is that all the things that only seem like a good idea at parties continue to seem like good ideas), that point seems still to be a long way off.
One of the things that seemed like a good idea at the time was that the party should fly — not in the normal sense that parties are meant to fly, but literally.
One night, long ago, a band of drunken astro-engineers of the first generation clambered around the building digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other, and when the sun rose the following morning, it was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people that was now floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.
Not only that, but the flying party had also managed to arm itself rather heavily. If they were going to get involved in any petty arguments with wine merchants, they wanted to make sure they had might on their side.
The transition from full-time cocktail party to part-time raiding party came with ease, and did much to add that extra bit of zest and swing to the whole affair that was badly needed at this point because of the enormous number of times that the band had already played all the numbers it knew over the years.
They looted, they raided, they held whole cities to ransom for fresh supplies of cheese, crackers, guacamole, spareribs and wine and spirits that would now get piped aboard from floating tankers.
The problem of when the drinks are going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day.
The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it.
It is in bad shape.
The party has attacked and raided an awful lot of it, and no one has ever succeeded in hitting it back because of the erratic and unpredictable way in which it lurches round the sky.
It is one hell of a party.
It is also one hell of a thing to get hit with in the small of the back.
Chapter 20
Arthur lay floundering in pain on a piece of ripped and dismembered reinforced concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking somewhere indistinctly behind him.
There was a sound he couldn’t immediately identify, partly because he didn’t know the tune “I Left My Leg in Jaglan Beta” and partly because the band playing it was very tired, and some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed πr2 each according to the amount of sleep he’d managed to grab recently.
He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was hurting, but he soon satisfied himself that he was not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as who wouldn’t be. He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds.
On the other hand, he would have been a little hard pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the building proper. He seemed to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or lip that extended outward for about three or four feet all the way around. It was a hunk of the ground in which the party building had had its foundations, and which it had taken along with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.
Nervously, he stood up and suddenly, looking out over the edge, he felt nauseous with vertigo. He pressed himself back against the wall, wet with mist and sweat. His head was swimming freestyle, but his stomach was doing the butterfly.
Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could now not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about to move an inch closer to the edge.
Clutching his tote bag he edged along the wall, hoping to find a doorway in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great reassurance to him.
He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope that the wall around the corner might offer more in the way of entrances than this one, which offered none.
The unsteadiness of the building’s flight made him feel sick with fear, and, after a short time, he took the towel from out of his bag, and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitchhike round the Galaxy — he put it over his head so he wouldn’t have to see what he was doing.
His feet edged along the ground. His outstretched hand edged along the wall.
Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner, it encountered something that gave him such a shock he nearly fell off. It was another hand.
The two hands gripped each other.
He desperately wanted to use his other hand to pull the towel away from his eyes, but it was holding the bag with the olive oil, the retsina and the postcards of Santorini, and he very much didn’t want to put it down.