So little happened in the city during the off season that the carnival had attracted instant attention. He had hired people to serve the drugs and food and drink he had laid on; he had banned cars and unhappy faces, and people who didn’t smile when they tried to get into the street were made to wear funny masks until they had livened up a bit. He breathed in deeply from where he leaned on the high window, and his lungs soaked up the heady fumes of a very busy bar just below; the drug smoke made it just this far up and hung in a cloud. He smiled, found it very heartening; it was all perfect.
People walked around and talked together or in groups, exchanging their smoky bowls, laughing and smiling. They listened to the band and watched people dancing. They gave a great cheer each time the mortar fired. Many of them laughed at the leaflets full of political jokes that were given out with every bowl of drugs or food and every mask and novelty; they laughed too at the big, guady banners that were strung across the fronts of the dilapidated old buildings and across the street itself. The banners were either absurd or humorous, too. PACIFISTS AGAINST WALLS! and, EXPERTS? WHAT DO THEY KNOW? were two of the more translatable examples.
There were games and trials of wit or strength, there were free flowers and party hats and a much frequented Compliments stall where one paid a little money, or gave a paper hat or whatever, and was told what a nice, pleasant, good, unshowy, quiet-tempered, undemonstrative, restrained, sincere, respectful, handsome, cheerful, good-willed person one was.
He looked down on all of this, shades pushed up onto the tied-back hair above his forehead. Down there, submerged in it, he knew he would feel somehow apart from it all. But from his high vantage point he could look down and see the people as a mass with different faces; they were far enough away to present a single theme, close enough to introduce their own harmonious variations. They enjoyed themselves, were made to laugh or to giggle, encouraged to get drugged and silly, captivated by the music, slightly deranged by the atmosphere.
He watched two people in particular.
They were a man and a woman, walking slowly through the street, looking all around. The man was tall and had dark hair cut short and kept artificially unkempt and curly; he was smartly dressed and carried a small dark beret in one hand; a mask dangled from the other.
The woman was almost as tall, and slimmer. She was dressed like the man, in unfussy dark grey-black, with a mandala of pleated white at her neck. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, and quite straight. She walked as though there were many admiring people watching her.
They walked side by side, without touching each other; they spoke now and again, merely tipping their heads in the direction of their companion and looking to the other side, perhaps at what they were talking about, as they spoke.
He thought he remembered their photographs from one of the briefings on the GSV. He moved his head a little to one side, to make sure the earring terminal had a good shot of them, then told the tiny machine to record the view.
A few moments later, the two people disappeared beneath the banners at the far end of the street; they’d walked through the carnival without taking part in anything.
The street party went on; a small shower came and drove people under the awnings and covers and into some of the small houses, but it was short, and more people were coming all the time; small children ran with bright streamers of paper, winding coloured trails round posts and people and stalls and tables. Puff-bombs exploded in smoky balls of coloured incense, and laughing, choking people staggered about, thumping each others’ backs and shouting at the laughing children who threw the things.
He drew away from the window, losing interest. He sat in the room for a little, squatting on an old chest in the dust, hand rubbing his chin, thoughtful, only raising his eyes when an upward landslide of balloons jostled up past the casement. He brought the dark glasses down. From inside, the balloons looked just the same.
He walked down the narrow stairs, his boots clacking on the old wood; he took the old raincoat up from the rail at the bottom, and let himself out of the rear door into another street.
The driver pulled the car away and he sat in the back as they rolled past the rows of old buildings. They came to the end of the street and turned into the steep road that ran at right-angles to it and the street the party was in. They slid past a long dark car with the man and the woman in it.
He looked round. The dark car followed them.
He told the driver to exceed the speed limit. They sped, and the car following them kept pace. He hung on and watched the city slithering past. They raced through some of the old government areas; the grand buildings were grey, and heavily decorated with wall founts and water channels; elaborate patterns of water ran down their walls in vertical waves, dropping like theatre curtains. There were some weeds, but less than he would have expected. He couldn’t remember if they let the water-walls ice up, turned them off, or added antifreeze. Scaffolding hung from many of the buildings. Workmen scratched and scraped at the worn stones, and turned to watch the two big cars go tearing through the squares and plazas.
He clung on to a grab handle in the rear of the car, and sorted through a large collection of keys.
They stopped in an old narrow street, down near the banks of the great river itself. He got out smartly and hurried into a small entrance under a tall building. The following car roared into the street as he closed but did not lock the door. He went down some steps, unlocking several rusting sets of gates. When he got down to the bottom of the building he found the funicular car waiting on the platform. He opened the door, got in and pulled the lever.
There was a slight jerk as the car started off up the incline, but it ran smoothly enough. He watched through the back windows as the man and then the woman came out onto the platform. He smiled as they looked up and saw the car disappearing into the tunnel. The little coach struggled up the smooth slope into the daylight.
At the point where the uphill and the downhill coach passed each other, he got out onto the outer platform of the car and stepped over onto the downhill coach. It ran on, propelled by the extra weight of water that it carried in its tanks, picked up from the stream at the high terminal of the old line. He waited a bit, then jumped out of that car about a quarter of the way down, onto the step? at the side of the track. He climbed up a long metal ladder, into another building.
He was sweating slightly by the time he got to the top. He took off the old raincoat and walked back to the hotel with it over his arm.
The room was very white and modern-looking, with large windows. The furniture was integrated with the plasticised walls, and light came from bulges in the one-piece roof. A man stood watching the first snow of winter as it fell softly over the grey city; it was late afternoon, and getting dark quickly. On a white couch a woman lay face-down, her elbows spread out, but her hands together under her side-turned face. Her eyes were closed and her pale, oiled body was massaged with apparent roughness by a powerfully-built man with grey hair and facial scars.
The man at the window watched the falling snow in two ways. First as a mass, with his eyes on one static point, so that the snowflakes became a mere swirl and the currents of air and gusts of light wind that moved them became manifest in patterns of circling, spiralling, falling. Then, by looking at the snow as individual flakes, selecting one high in the indeterminate galaxy of grey on grey, he saw one path, one separate way down through all the quiet hurry of the fall.
He watched them as they hit the black sill outside, where they grew steadily but imperceptibly to form a soft white ledge. Others struck the window itself, sticking there briefly, then falling away, blown off.
The woman seemed asleep. She smiled slightly, and the exact geography of her face was altered by the forces that the grey-haired man exerted on her back, shoulders and flanks. Her oiled flesh moved this way and that, and the gliding fingers seemed to provide force without causing friction, ribbing and creasing the skin like the smooth action of the sea on underwater grass. Her buttocks were covered by a black towel, her hair was loose and spilling over pan of her face, and her pale breasts were long ovals squashed beneath her trim body.