but they went here.’ The tentacle prodded at the four lower corners, then retreated like a wave.
A green mannequin with velvet hair and a lyre in one hand hung smiling from a cornice. The Orchid tapped its dangling foot. ‘Is this one of Jack-in-the-Green’s?’
‘I expressed admiration and he gifted it me. It sings the future, or what is a mile away, or something like that.’
‘Astonishing.’
‘And these wooden roses on the furniture are designed to bloom and even pollinate. That’s what this stuff is – not dust but chair pollen, do you see?’
Courtesies dispensed with, the visitors broached the subject of the Duke’s party. ‘We have been awakened by an astonishing intruder,’ said Lord Jagged.
‘What a thunderbolt!’ added the Orchid.
‘Show me,’ Krill said. From the floor arose a skeletal clockwork table. ‘The key fits right into the bone.’ He wound the key in the table, and the three visitors’ attention animated a scene of tiny figures which bubbled up from its surface. A tide of guests swarmed in around the Duke’s golden pyramid, upon which the Duke stood and gave his complicated speech. Principal Krill listened closely, his blue-green and grey head valving like a heart. Regina Sparks stood beside the Duke, her monochrome body distinct in the tableau. And then a toy-sized rider sped up the slanted wall and delivered his peculiar pronouncement, which Krill paused and played a second time before allowing the scene to complete. The diorama closed down.
‘Magisterial,’ Krill declared. ‘Eloquent.’
‘And Bishop Castle was rigorously eating everything he saw,’ Jagged added.
Krill flubbered a laugh. ‘I like Bishop Castle.’
‘We all do.’
‘What do you make of the theme, Krill?’ asked Volospion. ‘You helped the Duke with research for it, after all.’
‘He enquired after pyramidal tradition from the Ass Tech, Haninn and Tairona empires, but never told me how he planned to employ the knowledge. Perhaps he told Li Pao, whom he also consulted.’
‘But what about the fellow on two wheels, and his talk of “responsibility”?’ Volospion asked, trying for ‘indignation’. ‘What did it mean, all that? I feel indignant about it.’
Volospion himself had set the gold standard for meandering diatribes eight years earlier with his ‘Turn Me Upon Myself’ tirade. It had been the high watermark of the fashion and certain schullers, such as Principal Krill, had claimed to understand it. Krill had made second- and third-hand screeds by rearranging the words: ‘Me Upon Myself Turn’ and ‘Turn Upon Me Myself’ were judged the best by his polite if puzzled audience. But in private it was deemed to have become too specialized – perhaps even tedious – and Volospion had criticised Krill for merely rearranging his ideas. Krill had responded by introducing obscure words from his library, but ‘Turn Upon My Empathy’ was skippered by the realisation that Krill himself did not know the meaning of the new term. The fashion had knotted itself into complete inaccessibility. But the two-wheeled man seemed, improbably, to be saying something different.
‘Mayhaps he was merely failing aloud,’ the Iron Orchid suggested, her attention already wandering. She had no great love for Krill’s dank quarters.
His ‘indignation’ offered and ignored, Volospion put it away, puzzled – he would try it again in different circumstances. He hadn’t a clue what it was for, really. Enjoyment?
Krill’s pulsatile bonce seemed thoughtful, several wet valves opening and closing in succession. Then he stated: ‘The Duke of Queens was representing himself as the head of a government, possibly an empire. The two-wheeled man was, or was posing as, a revolutionary.’
‘What exactly was a government?’ asked the Orchid, and Krill explained.
‘Indeed?’ said Volospion, intrigued. ‘Any pirate or madman would be entirely pleased to have even one in his collection.’
‘Well, that’s that,’ said the Orchid briskly. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Wait!’ Volospion halted her. ‘There remains the matter of the “revolutionary”.’
‘Yes, Krill,’ said Lord Jagged with a mild smile. ‘Tell us what you know about our rambunctious raree.’
Krill’s treacly eyes regarded the unflappable Lord Jagged. ‘Rambunctious is he?’
‘He’s basically a fuselage with a snout.’
Krill stared a while more. Watching, Volospion supposed that Jagged had implied some doubt as to Krill’s knowledge. But it was Krill who had introduced everyone to the fashion for bone companions after his researches into the wild frontier of the American West. His insistence that the skeletons wear coonskin caps was the clinching touch of authenticity.
Krill began his explanation. ‘Fissure Science, the science of what has been left out, shows us that gaps in knowledge have a shape – a shape which can tell us a great deal about what should dwell there. Fetch me down that blue-gold triangular book, Volospion. The Grimoire Yetneyet. Rayskin binding, spine like an eel.’
Volospion wondered why Krill didn’t reach for it himself with one of his arms – he had never previously missed an opportunity to be creepy and undulant – but obliged. He shook the book, and opened it. ‘These pages won’t mix.’ He handed it to Krill.
‘You consider this fact exceptional? It is not. If history teaches us nothing else it’s that matters were fixed, for months or years at a time. Thank you. Now, observe – this page, and this. The information is packed in by a process of endlessly proliferating inverse contradictions. Unfortunately this means that there must be an equal number of false statements in it as there are true facts.’
‘How do you tell the difference?’ asked the Orchid.
‘By trial and error. You may even contrast a couple of truths to reach a third. For instance: “Synergy – the behaviours of whole systems not predictable from the behaviours of the individual elements”, and “Obviouswhynergy – the behaviours of individual elements not predictable from the behaviour of whole systems”. Now, in reference to our party-crasher. Revolutionaries feel a need to explain their acts – dictators do not. You can even track the transition from one to the other in this need to be understood. It might be thought that you could measure the age of an institution by the number of times it has become its opposite while retaining its original name. But in practice, once an institution becomes its opposite, it remains so as long as profitable power can be wielded for it in that permutation. This may be one of the key themes of the Duke’s drama, in fact.’
Lord Jagged of Canaria interjected with effortless precision: ‘You believe, then, that the revolutionary is one of the Duke’s cast of actors?’
‘You know very well, Jagged,’ Krill returned. ‘Ahem ... that I cannot yet say.’
‘How did an empire respond to such revolutionaries?’ the Orchid enquired. ‘Could it cope?’
‘Empire collapse can occur without revolution, according to history – being a matter of empire physics, troy equations and such. It’s all based on energy expenditure, resource extension and principle drift, you see?
