Cowsowhorseacropolis - Appetizer
Treats of Infiltration
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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A long skein of salmon-skin, bristly rope creaked and ran stiff through open air. A grunt sounded above. The taut weave shifted up with a jerk. Then the line stopped and swayed. The same voice growled.
“I can’t figure it, Mr. Grey. How in the bubbles are you so… so…” asked Ordus.
Mr. Grey, clinging tight to the scratchy rope’s bottom, looked up. Above him, Ordus strained against a metal rail. He heaved at his end of the rope with legs, arms, and back all at once. Empty space, and the too-thin-looking cord, lay between them.
Mr. Grey said, “It isn’t all me. The violin and coffin have some weight.”
Ordus breathed hard. He craned his head over the rail and met Mr. Grey’s stony gaze. He stage-yelled. “What do you think you’re doing?! I told you; keep your eyes on the higher scaffolds. If we’re spotted, we’re finished.”
Mr. Grey looked dutifully higher, to the upper reaches of a giant marble torso. That same instant, a huge, primeval hissing filled the air. Dark smoke-clouds geysered across the marble. Forward movement set the rope swaying like a pendulum. Slow, mechanical energy filled Jodee’s giant, moving fortress of marble and metal; her Cowsowhorseacropolis.
One leg - two grooved pillars of marble, connected by complex metal ligaments, thick as a tram-car is long - lifted. It whooshed through the air. It hoofed the ground. The impact juddered up the leg, through the smooth torso, along the metal rails, and down the rope, where it vibrated through Mr. Grey.
The cowsowhorse siege-engine released another burst of diesel-flavored fumes. Then it rested, building energy for another stomp. Gradually, the rope pendulum stopped.
Ordus heaved again, and Mr. Grey shifted another fraction toward the rail. The diegeonary spoke in an exhale. “It’s not that you’re heavy. You are. That’s just not what I meant. No, there’s something else.”
“Is it that I’m a tourist?” suggested Mr. Grey.
“No. It’s not the same with that friend of yours. Honeydew. Why isn’t she here anyway? Helping this infiltration?”
“She thought it wasn’t quite her business,” said Mr. Grey; a rephrasing of Honeydew’s actual words: ‘This Coats vendetta is stupid’.
Despite Ordus’ orders, Mr. Grey’s eyes drifted from the polished torso’s upper reaches. With one hand he squeezed the prickly rope, though a harness made him secure. With his other hand he dug into his pocket. He watched, for a spell, the ticker’s hand. Each tock synced with one of Ordus’ rope tugs. Mr. Grey forced his eyes to stay on the juddering ebony bar behind the crystal face. He wished Ordus would talk more, though he understood a muffled tongue was their ally in here. Mr. Grey willed a host of idle thoughts through his mind; anything that might occupy his senses. He thought of the Great Fishes, the oracle, The Lost City. He thought of Wine Medo. He started thinking of Tom. At last, unable to resist a nibbling, macabre compulsion, Mr. Grey looked down.
Space prowled below. A vast tract of open air. It seemed to tug Mr. Grey by his toes, even as Ordus yanked him higher. An insane thought entered Mr. Grey’s head: ‘Why not unbuckle the harness?’ He folded his arms across his chest, as though tying them up.
The ground lay a long, long, long way underneath all that emptiness. Panache unrolled in rough-and-tumble-and-tawny hills, patchwork quilts of cottonfruit farms, and the thin midnight lines of undersea rivers. Across it all, the pale pillar-hooves of the Cowsowhorseacropolis stomped. Another foot lifted, whooshed, fell. The land rippled under its force.
The ripple passed through a series of dark lines across the land, in the direction of the colossus’s march. Mr. Grey knew these were the Defense Force soldiers; arranged in orderly columns, mounted on regular-sized cowsowhorses, their guns locked and loaded.
The opposing force, Jodee’s vast tourist horde, swarmed directly under Mr. Grey. They marched in less-organized clusters, dressed in varied robes and sun-hats, and armed with shoulders and clubs. The horde cavorted through the fields and heaths, closer to the Cowsowhorseacropolis’s marble hooves than Mr. Grey would call advisable. As bees sally from their hive caves, and flit in throngs among the knots of blooming flowers; just so did the mighty multitude cavort beneath the colossus.
Mr. Grey’s notice fell suddenly, through the empty space, onto a tourist he recognized. He saw Nuggets, wearing his rosebush-suspender robe, waving his tiny cloth visa - tinier through the long, empty distance - over curled hair. Mr. Grey watched the youth dance right into the shadow of the recently raised hoof. Mr. Grey’s hands squeezed a creak of complaint from the rope’s fibers. Just before the hoof sent quake-through-land and shudder-through-torso, Nuggets danced aside. Mr. Grey relaxed his grip on the rope.
The recognition spurred a new thought in Mr. Grey. Something he hadn’t considered. “Um, Ordus?”
“What?” said the diegeonary after a gasp. “Did you figure it out?”
“Figure what out?”
“What I said a stomp ago! What separates you from that Honeydew? From others too.”
“Oh, I can’t say.”
“Then what do you want? I’m out of breath here.”
“I wondered: should we be worried about being seen? We’re infiltrating in broad Sun-Fish-light?”
“Of course not! The Sun Fish picks sides. And he’s picked ours, no doubt about that. He’ll hide our entrance. In a way the Prawn Fish never could,” Ordus jerked the rope.
Mr. Grey thought the drifting diesel fumes the likelier source of any stealth. Instead of saying so, he said, “Oh,” He checked his ticker again and let a few tocks and tugs pass. Then he said, “Does that mean the Sun Fish wanted us - Honeydew, the partisans, and me - to find the Lure? And he concealed us - again, all our group - from your searching? So that we could retrieve it”
“Do you want to help or not?” Ordus gave an even sharper tug.
“I would like to be of assistance, yes.”
“Then you just keep those grey eyes on the upper decks,” Mr. Grey did as requested; until the ground again beckoned. After a moment, Ordus continued, “It’s something with your playing…”
“What about my playing?”
“For the last time; the distinguishing feature.”
Ordus’s voice sounded loud and close. Following a final, angry yank of scratchy rope, Mr. Grey felt a hand beneath his shoulder. He reeled his head from the ground and found himself face-to-face with the diegeonary. Mr. Grey clambered over the rail with Ordus’s help. They stood together on the metal Cowsowhorseacropolis scaffold; a marble shank on one side, the breezy air on the other.
“Something about the way you keep timing,” said Ordus. He prodded Mr. Grey’s violin coffin and lifted his trumpet from the scaffold. “No matter what I do, I always get a little out of whack. It's a word like that! Like ‘whack’…”
Mr. Grey shrugged, “This helps,” He showed his smooth, clean ticker.
Ordus took it and stared hard, boring into the glass face. He said, “Useful device you’ve got here.”
“You can borrow it for the mission, if you like.”
“What? Don’t you need it to keep… keep…”
“I’ve enchanted before while it was under repair. If I have to do any fiddling, and I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does, I should be able to keep…”
“TEMPO!” shouted the diegeonary.
They heard the tramp of other footsteps on the catwalk. Ordus grabbed Mr. Grey and pulled him through a flush door in the marble; into Jodee’s Cowsowhorseacropolis.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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