Klaxon City (part three)

The Death entered Klaxon City. The real Klaxon City, where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet, of various heights, from the top of which stretched out in the wind (the wind?) many skycraft with each one’s make, build, substance, inflatability, non-inflatability, traction, torque etc. mere seeing from ‘ground’-level could not fathom. You had to climb up to them to discover if they were, say, flyable. Having flown to their perches here was no guarantee of future flyability. A few weren’t sufficiently rendered from the flesh and bone that some (not always the few in question) once were. Not renderable, let alone non-friable enough to safeguard against weathering. But weather was a dubious topic in Klaxon. It depended on the nature or mood of the city’s geographical cavity at any one time in the vertical cross-section of its dynasty as opposed to in the more usual horizontal considerations of surface cities.

I had died more than once, and, then, it was at least once on the surface that I had died, but several times below the surface. I had suffered a fatal knife-wound in a casino when the gambling laws were relaxed, because I questioned whether the silver ball was in the right hole when the robots visibly tilted the roulette-wheel with their hands, and the tellers later blaming it on an earth tremor. There was no disembowelling of their rules. Even Henry Fifth would have been given short shrift. Unto the breach…

But I was trying to forget my past. I even imagined the deaths. How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real … well the rest is common sense.

As I wandered into the city streets from the brow of the hill I last left our readers watching my progress: I took one last glimpse at the Canterbury Oak, which visibly moved at its thin spacious upper levels, giving the uncanny impression that its large trunk below moved in unison. It was soon stolid, however, etched like a giant black hold-all that God had dropped there in disgust because there wasn’t enough room in it for as many effects as even magic could have managed, let alone a full-blooded religion.

I turned to the abodes. Solid rock-caves that had been built like houses out in the open, where a few scrawny children played hide-and-seek. I knew things would become more palatial the more towards its centre I approached. And at least there I would also find grown-ups grown-up enough to interact like real characters. Not just children acting as human scenery.

One skycraft tethered to one of the few pylons stationed this far into the city’s outskirts was a strange seemingly solid rocket-ship that, like the Canterbury Oak, was misshapen where you thought misshapen would be out of the question. Its business end seemed at the bottom where a single pin glinted in the light of the Sunne*: a pin often twirling lightly in a whimsical nostalgia for its former firedrill**. Nobody would be on board, I knew, and thus the whimsicality of its lower pin’s twirling only gave tiny shadows of doubt. Like speckled ants on my skin. It was not a balloon. It seemed solid enough, with several storeys, sieved by sightholes. It just hung there as if its specific gravity was too hard to match with rhythmic gravities elsewhere – unlike some of the other pyloned skycraft that were like proud pennants in stiff winds. It almost sagged, and visibly bloated. But that was the effect of the incessant klaxon noise, something to which I had already grown accustomed without even mentioning that I was trying all the time to forget it, relegating it, as I did, to some wishful-thinking 'white noise'. Yet this klaxon noise (whether oak- or tannoy-derived), I suspected, was indeed the ‘wind’ I had earlier doubted existed as such. Noise as air movement.
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*The Sunne acted like the sun but was not the sun. This does not represent a fantastical or imaginary approach to cosmology, merely a shorthand for something that will eventually become quite reconcilable given the circumstances of intertextual reality. For the moment, please treat Sunne and Sun as blood brothers (ie. crude synonyms), if you currently lack confidence to revel in their essence and truth as spiritual brothers (mutual metanyms, if not alter-nemos). Stub of pencil: Sunne = Sunnemo?

**’Firedrill’ was a difficult concept to grasp in this context. This made me think that The Death would have indeed been preferable after all, rather than now (alive) having to explain what is meant by this or that word or concept. I hope they will clarify themselves naturally in the course of events, with the description needed for such events hopefully allowing collateral construction of clue-semantics vis a vis many words or concepts otherwise ungraspable.

(KLAXON CITY continued here: part four)

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