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By Root 564 0

from Delwit Faber’s coup with the Lobster Girls and the House of Hellequin, Brentford had found crumpled in her hand the formula Isis had used to stop the Chariot of the Sun in order to help the diseased Osiris. The very name Osiris could be vaguely construed as a play on his name, Orsini, which in Italian was itself a pun on bear (a bear even appeared on his coat of arms). It would be only logical to find a bear on the arctic ice field, all the more since arctos also meant “bear.” Being on the ice, then, like the references to Ross, meant only that he was simply dreaming of himself waiting for a vision of Helen, not to mention that ice is the best backdrop for the kind of clear and sustained mental images he’d been hoping to see. The Ghost Lady calling him Mr. Osiris signified that, if she was not Helen herself, she was conscious of Brentford’s history with Helen, and was perhaps some sort of messenger. “Did you fly?” was more difficult to decipher, but Brentford remembered now that when Helen had made him join her on a kind of shamanic trip, he had found himself flying over an unknown city. So, as he summed it up, the dream was just a rather simple image of his own longing for Helen, and the message he had got was, after all, pointing to her more clearly than he had first thought.

Of course, there was still the tiresome hypothesis that it was a simple circular circuit of wish fulfilment and that he had only received under a different form what he had first put into the dream. But then, there was the code, which he could not account for, and which could be in some way or another the answer he had been waiting for.

It was when he passed in front of the Prince of Whales pub that Brentford got the idea. If ever he knew someone who could solve this riddle, it was the local legend William de la Whale, the brain behind Matball, that mind-boggling blend of human chess and Basque pelota that had been both a craze and a secret laboratory behind Transpherence. The ciphers with which William encoded the moves and tactics of his team were famous for both their subtlety and their solidity. He had even taught, if Brentford remembered correctly, Cryptography as an integral part of his poetry class at Doges College. De la Whale would know instantly if Brentford’s code made sense or not, and help him, or so he hoped, to solve it if it did.

He entered the pub, noted for its remarkable painting of a rather muddy and dark whale-hunting scene, asked for a Scores-by Stout and a Specksioneer Sandwich, and went to the Pneumatic Post Booth. There he wrote a message to Sybil to tell her he would be home late (though she would probably be partying somewhere), put it in a canister, sent it through the outward tube, and set about looking for William de la Whale’s address in the Dispatch Directory, where he found it quite quickly. It was in Yukiguni. He then ate his sandwich—the bread slices were held together by a miniature harpoon—at the lustrous counter, and having finished his beer with a manly gulp that recalled his glorious days in the dreaded Doges College Ice Rugby Club, he set forth for the Japanese quarter.

It was just a few moonlit bridges away. Added to the fact that is always pleasant to cross bridges in New Venice, Yukiguni happened to be one of Brentford’s favourite places in the city. He entered the gate, slaloming among the smoking shadows queuing in front of the Toadstool, apparently a trendy spot these days, and immediately felt at ease in that somewhat labyrinthine network of narrow streets, miniature canals, and gibbous bridges covered with a snow that seemed lighter than anywhere else. It was deserted and dark, with a hum of its own, distant and muted, which made the place sound calmer than the rest of New Venice.

Onogorojima, where William was supposed to live, was a tiny island right in the centre of the zone, circled and crossed by convoluted paths that quickly caused orientation trouble. The Hokkaido-style houses, with their empty bear cages and taboo windows in front, which were for divine use only, had no numbers whatsoever,