declared another guest. “Pleasure employs muscles of enlightenment.” Then he led in a screaming chimp, assured everyone its name was Ramone, pushed it down a slide and said, “There you go.” Skychum told him he was playing a dangerous game.
A sag-eyed old man pronounced his judgment. “The dawn of the beard was the dawn of modern civilization.”
“In what way.”
“In that time spent growing a beard is time wasted. Now curb this strange melancholy—let us burn our legs with these matches and shout loud.”
“I ... I’m sorry ... what ...”
And the codger was dancing a strange jig on the table, cackling from a dry throat.
“One conk on the head and he’ll stop dancing,” whispered someone behind the cameras.
Another suspect was the ringmaster of the Lobster Circus, who lashed at a wagon-ring of these unresponsive creatures as though at the advancing spawn of the devil. “The time will come,” he announced, “when these mothers will be silent.” And at that he laid the whip into a lobster positioned side-on to him, breaking it in half.
A little girl read a poem:
behind answers are hoverflies
properly modest,
but they will do anything
for me
One guy made the stone-faced assertion that belching was an actual language. Another displayed a fossilized eightball of mammoth dung and said it was “simply biding its time.” Another stated merely that he had within his chest a “flaming heart” and expected this to settle or negate all other concerns.
Then it was straight in with Skychum, known to the host as a heavy-hitter among those who rolled up with their lies at a moment’s notice. The host’s face was an emulsioned wall as he listened to the older man describe some grandiose reckoning. “Nobody’s free until everyone is, right?” was the standard he reached for in reply.
“Until someone is.”
“Airless Martians still gasping in a town of smashed geodesics,” he stated, and gave no clue as to his question. After wringing the laughs out of Skychum’s perplexed silence, he continued. “These Martians—what do they have against us?”
“Not Martians—metaversal beings in a hyperspace we are using as a skeleton cupboard. Horror past its sell-by date is dismissed with the claim that a lesson is learnt, and the sell-by interval is shortening to minutes.”
“I don’t understand,” said the host with a kind of defiance.
“The media believe in resolution at all costs, and this is only human.” Once again Skychum’s sepulchral style was doing the trick—there was a lot of sniggering as he scowled like a chef. “Dismissal’s easier than learning.”
“So you’re calling down this evangelical carnage.”
“I’m not—”
“In simple terms, for the layman”—the eyebrows of irony flipped to such a blur they vanished—“how could all these bodies be floating out in ‘hyper’ space?”
“Every form which has contained life has its equivalent echo in the super-etheric—if forced back into the physical, these etheric echoes will assume physical shape.”
“Woh!” shouted the host, delighted, and the audience exploded with applause—this was exactly the kind of wacko bullshit they’d come to hear. “And why should they arrive at this particular time?”
“They have become synchronized to our culture, those who took on the task—it is appropriate, poetic!”
The audience whooped, flushed with the nut’s sincerity.
“The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.”
“But I call you a fraud, Dr Skychum. These verbal manipulations cause a hairline agony in the honest man. Expressions of the grave should rival the public? I don’t think so. Where’s the light and shade?”
Skychum leant forward, shaking with emotion. “You slur me for one who is bitter and raging at the world. But you mustn’t kick a man when he’s down, and so I regard the world.” Then Ramone the chimp sprang on to his head, shrieking and flailing.
“Dr Skychum,” said the host. “If you’re right, I’m a monkey.”
The ringmaster of the Lobster Circus was declared the winner. The man with the flaming heart died of a coronary and the man with the dung fossil threw it into the audience and stormed off. A throne shaped like the halfshells of a giant nut was set up for the crowning ceremony. Skychum felt light, relieved. He had acquitted himself with honor. He enjoyed the jelly and ice cream feast set up for the contestants backstage. Even the chimp’s food-flinging antics made him smile. He approached the winner with goodwill. “Congratulations, sir. Those lobsters of yours are a brutal threat to mankind.”
The winner looked mournfully up at him. “I love them,” he whispered, and was swept away backwards by the make-up crew.
At the moment of the turn, Skychum left the studio building by a side entrance, hands deep in his coat pockets. Under a slouch hat which obscured his sky, he moved off down a narrow street roofed completely by the landscape of a spacecraft’s undercarriage.
During the last hour, as dullards were press-ganged onto ferris wheels and true celebrants arrested in amplified streets, hundreds of multidimensional ships had hoved near, denial-allow shields up. Uncloaking, they had appeared in the upper atmosphere like new moons. Now they moved into position over every capital city in the world, impossible to evade. Fifteen miles wide, these immense overshadow machines rumbled across the sky like a coffin lid drawing slowly shut. New York was being blotted out by a floating city whose petalled geometry was only suggested by sections visible above the canyon streets. Grey hieroglyphics on the underside were actually spires, bulkheads and structures of skyscraping size. Its central eye, a mile-wide concavity deep in shadow, settled over uptown as the hovering landscape thundered to a stop and others took up position over London, Beijing, Berlin, Nairobi, Los Angeles, Kabul, Paris, Zurich, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo and every other conurbation with cause to be a little edgy.
One nestled low over the White House like an inverted cathedral. In the early light they were silent, unchanging fixtures. Solid and subject to the sun.
The President, hair like a dirty iceberg, slapped on a middling smile and talked about caution and opportunity. Everywhere nerves were clouded around with awe and high suspension. Traffic stopped. Fanatics partied. The old man’s name was remembered if not his line—a woman held a sign aloft saying I’M A SKY CHUM. Cities waited under dumb, heavy air.
Over the White House, a screeching noise erupted. The central eye of the ship was opening. Striations like silver insect wings cracked, massive steel doors grinding downward.
The same was happening throughout the world, a silver flower opening down over Parliament, Whitehall and the dead Thames; over the Reichstag building, the World Bank, the Beijing Politburo.
The DC saucer eye
