'It's a voice patch, Jacques, that's all, a new gizmo,' he said. 'Soon every shop in the Kakdorp will have one in its window. But I loved,' he said, speaking loudly, as one of the performers walked past in a white bathrobe, his cheeks red, his eyes bulging a little with fatigue, 'I absolutely loved that bit of business with old Spookganger.'

The performer opened a door and closed it behind him.

'That was Dirk Labelaster,'* he whispered to Tristan Smith. 'Would you like to meet him? We could visit him at home. He lives just near us. Are you still interested in posturing? Tell me who you want to meet.' he whispered to Tristan Smith. 'Would you like to meet him? We could visit him at home. He lives just near us. Are you still interested in posturing? Tell me who you want to meet.'

For answer, Bruder Mouse presented his immobile cheeky grin.

We descended a steel staircase. At the bottom we arrived at a closed roller door, not unlike the one at the entrance of the Feu Follet. Bill pressed a b.u.t.ton. The door rose noisily and we found ourselves outside the Sirkus, in the dank night air, by a small ka.n.a.l.

The air was fetid. There was broken gla.s.s, a burned-out truck. A man in a leather jacket came out from behind the truck and pointed his finger at us.

'It's OK,' Bill said. 'Relax. He's not a Misdaad Boy.'

This man was the wheelmajoor, the pilot of a boat, a gondel, which was sitting in the iridescent water with its motor purring. And now, as our party walked towards him, he held out his hand to help us aboard.

'It's a nice night to go to Saarlim?' Jacqui said.

'Yes, Meneer,' he said, but she could see he was not VIA, and as the gondel nosed out of the back ka.n.a.l, and into Bleskran Ka.n.a.l, as the great spires and domes, the luminous filtreeders, rose high above her, Jacqui left the cabin and went to stand alone in the prow. Then Saarlim appeared above her, around her, like the fairy city of the vids. It was one of those rare moments when a city can suddenly, unexpectedly, appear to open its doors to a stranger, and take them from the dirt and heat of the streets into that other secret world it shows only its creators and intimates.

Yet this experience, far from bringing our nurse a little peace, produced in her pa.s.sionate heart a fierce agitation.

You see, she told her mother, who could not see, was not here, could never know, even if she were told. You see You see you do not need to live your life like a pinched-up piece of leftover in a saucer in the fridge. you do not need to live your life like a pinched-up piece of leftover in a saucer in the fridge.

She sat in the prow, looking at the skyline, accepting the gla.s.s of champagne champagne from from Bill Millefleur Bill Millefleur, who came out on to the deck to give it to her personally.

She sipped champagne, and thought contradictory and agitated thoughts about that cautious street her mother still lived on, the genteel poverty, the suspicion, the habitual meanness which was thought of as caution, the d.a.m.n leftovers, the frozen sc.r.a.ps with date labels three years old.

I am going to wait in Saarlim for the snow. am going to wait in Saarlim for the snow.

Through the gla.s.s she could see Bill and me and Wally in intimate conversation. And she was somehow persuaded about me in a way she had not been before.

She sat out in the fog looking in at me.

She sat in the prow as the gondel glided along the black silky waters of the ka.n.a.l, beneath the golden gates of the Bleskran, under the great illuminated wharf of the Baan, where uniformed doormen waited to help us disembark.

She arrived on the private wharf with the champagne gla.s.s still in her hand, and walked in through the foyer in her now slightly soiled male costume as if she too were already someone special.

When she entered the carpeted elevator it was as if she did it every day. The elevator was, as appeared to be the Saarlim habit, gla.s.s-walled. As our little party rose into the night we were presented with this jewel-box view of the city, its water, its boats, the rippling gla.s.s towers of water filters, the glow of the Sirkus Domes, like so many Florentine cathedrals cl.u.s.tered densely around the Grand Concourse but then spreading away into the great dark night of Voorstand.

*The Dome Projection is naturally little known in Voorstand, where no one would waste their time viewing a vid reproduction of a Sirkus. In the rest of the world, Meneer, Madam, this is often how we know you. Chemin Rouge, for instance, now supports two live Sirkuses, which change their show every three months or so. In contrast we have sixteen different Dome Projection theatres whose entertainment changes weekly. [TS] [TS]*You may be surprised to see that Bill Millefleur did not have to explain who Dirk Labelaster was. Labelaster is hardly a star, but he has a following among the Eficans. Dirk Labelaster? you ask. In Chemin Rouge? In Chemin Rouge? And I, in my turn, say to you: you have no idea of your effect on those of us who live outside the penumbra of your lives And I, in my turn, say to you: you have no idea of your effect on those of us who live outside the penumbra of your lives. [TS] [TS]

37.

I had been pleased to see my father. I loved him, although I had spent many years insisting I did not. But each time he did not understand my speech, he emphasized our eleven years of separation. This was the father who could not do the time. He could do what was 'brave' and 'dramatic', go to the Mall and say, 'This is my son, Tristan Smith,' 'This is my son, Tristan Smith,' or paint his face with Zinc 3001, but he did not have the spine to be a father. or paint his face with Zinc 3001, but he did not have the spine to be a father.

When I saw the flashy gondel bobbing at the wharf, I saw one more of his dramatic gestures.

Of course I now know that this was unfair, that a gondel is not 'flashy', that it is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary conveyance for a Saarlim bhurger. But when I was carried inside the cabin, I did not understand that gondels are hired by the hour by bank clerks and fishmongers, or that the liquors displayed so proudly in spotlit niches cost a very reasonable 3 Guilders a nip. Laugh if you like, but when I saw the black leather banquettes and small bra.s.s lamps, I thought he was trying to seduce me with his money, and by the time I sat on the banquette I was as depressed as Wally was, although for different reasons.

Bill, meanwhile, plunged anxiously onwards. He was in full gallop, round and round, smiling, laughing, juggling tall-stemmed gla.s.ses in one hand while with the other he eased the cork from a dripping wet bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

I declined the gla.s.s in sign language, holding my Mouse head to show him why I could not drink.

Then the d.a.m.n fool began to fiddle with my suit.

If he had only thought a moment more he would have realized I might not wish to undress myself in public, to show myself to him like this. I pulled away from him and turned, not towards Wally who was staring mournfully out into the night, but towards Jacqui who was seated on my left. In our days of tin-rattling my nurse and I had finally become allies. In the Water Sirkus she had been my friend and companion. Twice she had touched my knee, once my arm.

'Stop ... him,' I said. 'Please ... get ... him ... off ... me.'

But when I touched her arm she gave a small, apologetic shrug and slipped off the banquette away from me.

'Just ... tell ... him ...' I said, but I saw she had become my father's friend. She walked out of the cabin and up towards the prow, and let me tell you it was obvious to me then as she walked up and down that little deck, she walked not like a man, but like a woman, and a d.a.m.n frisky one at that.

You may be thinking, Madam, Meneer, that Jacqui left the cabin from a sense of delicacy, a wish to leave me alone for my difficult reunion with my father. Equally you may imagine that Bill Millefleur, in carrying champagne to her on the deck, might have been performing his role as a gracious Saarlim host.

I was in no state to imagine any such thing. I watched Bill and Jacqui, a man and a woman silhouetted against the lights of the filtreeders and wolkekrabbers.

It made me half mad with jealousy this whole world that I could never enter.

I turned to Wally. 'Let's ... go ... back ... to ... the ... hotel.'

But Wally had found a bottle of whisky and was pouring himself a generous drink.

'Take your suit off,' he said. 'Have a little drink. Enjoy yourself.'

'He's ... a ... creep.'

'Give him a chance.'

'He's ... such ... a ... phoney.'

'Don't be such a rucking Bruder. Take your d.a.m.n suit off. Can't you see he's pleased to see you?'

'Mr ... Walk ... Away.'

'Relax, he'll be back in a moment.'

'f.u.c.k ... him.'

But then Bill did come back, stooping under the low roof and seating himself beside me.

'Now, Tristan, speak to me.'

But he seemed so far from me, so far, far away.

'You ... don't ... know ... what ... I've ... become.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, laying his hand gently on my shoulder.

For a moment I imagined he was apologizing for something that had happened on the deck, but then I saw it was the same old thing.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't catch that first bit. Maybe if you took the suit off. Maybe then you wouldn't be so m.u.f.fled.' It was typical of him that he did not ask me why I wore the suit, or what I was doing with it.

In any case I did not wish to take my suit off, and suffer his misunderstanding, all the false pity in his eyes. I wanted to set it straight with him I was a man. Thus I began to speak to him, slowly, very carefully.

'We ... have ... not ... seen ... each ... other ... for ... many ... years.'

'We have not seen your mother?'

'No!'

'All right,' Wally stood. 'Don't shout. Mollo mollo. Just say it again. Your dab will get the hang of it.'

But my father did not 'get the hang' of how I spoke, and thus I travelled towards the Baan, not deep in the intimate conversation Jacqui imagined, but in a misery of anger and misunderstanding.

38.

My father, in returning from the Water Sirkus, was late for an important dinner party in his own apartment. He had planned this dinner party three months before, and once it was planned it could not be cancelled this inflexibility being a reflection, not of his character, but of manners in Saarlim City.

As you know, Saarlim has its etiquette. One does not, as in Chemin Rouge, drop over for a roteuse and stay all day. One does not arrive with a round of cheese and a baton and expect to be welcomed. There is this surprising strictness, this lack of ease, which is disturbing for an Efican, and it co-exists with what feels like exactly the opposite tendency: it is not in the least impolite for a host to be absent from the greater part of his or her own dinner party.

If you are from Saarlim, you will find nothing unusual in all of this, but for the rest of us, let me tell you, Saarlim dinner parties at first appear anarchic confusing empty chairs and inexplicably appearing and disappearing guests. It is not until somewhere around eleven at night, when the Sirkuses are finally dark, well after we Ootlanders have lost all patience, that the table finally unifies. The tablecloth is replaced. New silverware appears. Ornate candlesticks are brought from hiding, and the pudding is served with a formality that we in Efica reserve for a good pork bake.*

You know this already, Meneer, Madam? Then skip ahead. There are other readers, however, to whom this may be surprising, Ootlanders who have until this moment expected your manners to be just like Bruder Mouse's or Bruder Duck's. You think this is preposterous? Then let me tell you: you have no idea how you are perceived.

Elsewhere in the world, when they imagine your personal character, they expect to see you blowing bubbles in your soup. They have seen the Drool or Dog pee in the Sirkus. They have heard the Mouse fart and play the bagpipes. They draw the wrong conclusion, and not merely about your table manners.

Having pa.s.sed their lifetimes spending one eighth of their gross incomes on Sirkuses, it is hard for some Ootlanders to accept that they are not attuned to the soul of Saarlim. They may never have visited Voorstand but they know the names of the Steegs, the ka.n.a.ls, the parks, the bars, the Domes. They own programme notes from performances they have never seen. They can discuss tragic deaths you never heard of, minor performers you have long forgotten. But they do not live in Saarlim and therefore there is much that they do not understand. It might be difficult to convince someone from Ukrainia, for instance, that it requires a highly tuned sense of etiquette to live in a building like the Baan.

So for the Ootland readers, let me make this thing clear: in the Sirkus, Bruder Mouse could say 'gaaf-morning' to any of G.o.d's Creatures, whether they had met before or no, but in the Baan it took a whole necklace of introductions for Bill to engineer a meeting with his neighbour, Kram. It was a slow process almost a year before he could put her, socially speaking, in check. And then another six months of toing and froing with the gold-toothed intermediary, Clive Baarder, before they could confirm a night which was suitable for both of them.

They lived in the same building, used the same gla.s.s-walled elevators, walked into or out of the foyers next to each other, and although she was a Sirkus Produkter and he a Sirkus Star, they might as well have lived on different planets, and even after the invitation was issued and accepted they waited until the dinner when they would finally know each other. This is one aspect of karakter.

You are always explaining karakter to us visitors, telling us it means politeness, manners, breeding but even as you do so you let us know we can never hope to understand exactly what it is. It is in the blood more than in the language. It is a Saarlim thing and after twenty years in Saarlim City it was still a notion that made my father not quite easy.

Bill had a six-room apartment. Peggy Kram occupied an entire floor, a real Bleskran trothaus with topiary and library. She dressed in long flowing garments in various earth tones which you could wear down to the Kakdorp among the throng without being remarked on as anyone wealthy but which, in the muted lights of a trothaus with the lights and the little lasers dancing on the ceiling fibre, was obviously a Van Kline with a price tag of 100,000 Guilders.

Such was life in the society whose original Christian vegetarian heresies still reflected the character of the 'Sirkus with no prisoners'.

Bill's whole dinner party (the one which had been irrevocably set for the night when he would finally have the chance to reunite with his lost son) centred on Peggy Kram, and not because Bill thought her charming or even interesting he feared that she was neither but because Bill's contract with the Sirkus Brits had finally been terminated and Peggy Kram was a produkter who not only owned twenty Ghostdorps (where she had whole families of actors playing out the 'The Great Historical Past') but also four Sirkus Domes in Saarlim City.

Bill needed work.

And when he returned to his own dinner party at half past ten he hoped that the family obligation which had made his absence necessary might further elevate Kram's idea of his karakter. And yet, as he had never been totally confident that he truly understood the nuances of karakter, he entered his own apartment with some trepidation.

What he saw there did not encourage him.

His lover of that year (Malide Van Kraligan, the posturer) was asleep on the sofa with her little rose-bud mouth open and her slender arm across her eyes. Peggy Kram, a little plump, but very glamorous with her mane of blonde curls, was loudly quarrelling with the English bottelier (hired for the occasion) about the temperature of her Mersault.

The rented antique lace tablecloth was rumpled. The gla.s.sware and silver was in total disarray and Martel Difebaker, a legendary posturer, a man known for his fastidiousness, was sitting nodding his head in a stricken sort of way. Clive Baarder (who had been the intermediary for the meeting) was filing his nails.

When Mrs Kram looked up and saw the enigmatic figure of Bruder Mouse, she stopped arguing about the wine.

I barely noticed her. I knew nothing of karakter. Nor did I know that she was one of the most powerful women in Saarlim. I was hot, tired, thirsty, irritated to find my father entertaining strangers on what he had three times declared an Important Night. So when the gold-toothed Baarder rose from his ornate chair and took a mock karate position in relationship to me, I had had enough. I walked out of the room.

In doing this, it was not my intention to damage my father economically. I did not understand his situation. And when he finally found me, dipping my snout into a basin of water in the bathroom, he still did not explain who Mrs Kram was.

'Tristan!'

I turned, with water pouring down my neck and wetting my chest, in search of something practical to help me drink.

'Get ... me ... a ... straw ... please.'

Bill knew he could keep his Big Shot Guest waiting a moment longer two minutes, maybe three while he finally established his meeting with me.

'Please, please. Please take the head-bit off. We have to understand each other.'

'Go ... back ... to ... your ... friends.' I shrugged myself free of him.

'They don't have to see you,' he said. 'You can get back in your suit for them.'

'Mo-dab ... I'm ... just ... so ... thirsty.'

But he began to fiddle with the suit. Or that is what I imagined. Later, on the road to Wilhelm, he swore to me that he had done no such thing, that he was simply patting me, but the fluttering feeling of his theatrically ringed fingers awakened old feelings of anger and I pushed him, hard.

He looked so hurt I thought he was going to cry.

'Please ... get ... a ... straw.' I wrote s-t-r-a-w in the air, slowly.

'Oh,' he said, 'a straw.' straw.'

He rushed out and came back with a whole d.a.m.n box of straws. He had perhaps a minute before he had to go and be the host.

Tristan, I have to work when I go in there,' he said. 'I just need to know that we're OK.'

At last I had a single straw. I began to syphon down the chlorinated water.