Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [80]
The very morning when he had been driving Sybil back to the Greenhouse, the streets—already barely passable after the snowstorm—had been blocked because of an incident involving the native employees of the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. Dressed in furs and installed on a platform decorated with mock-igloos in front of the Nothwestern Administration for Native Affairs, in order to give speeches promoting the official opening in two days’ time, they had done quite the contrary, slandering the Palace and distributing leaflets that had a distinct autonomist flavour to them. “Gentlemen” from the crowd had of course “volunteered” to “protect” the Inuit from the angry crowd and “sheltered” them until things cooled off. All of which could of course have been predicted, given the recent events, and in Brentford’s opinion had been predicted by the Council, who had not only let it happen but had wanted it to happen, because it served their obscure plan to stoke up racial tensions.
The last straw had been the astounding accusation that the snowstorm had taken such proportions in so little time because the Air Architecture had been sabotaged. Though in normal times the Council would have been only too happy to blame the Arctic Administration for such supposed shortcomings in their protection of the city, they had this time designated as culprits four Inuit from Flagler Fjord, who had been jailed and released for petty theft the very same day and had, allegedly, wanted revenge upon New Venice.
This injustice made Brentford want to spew vomit like a fulmar under attack. He knew the Air Architecture very well, as his father, who had designed and run it, had taken him many times for walks along the impressive rows of Astor vibratory disintegrators that heated and relentlessly pumped the methanegas hydrates out of the permafrost. There was no way whatsoever that four Inuit with knives made of “starshit” meteor stone could ever damage that shiny, greasy underground beast. Now the February Freeze Four, as the press was calling them, were on the run, and that was the only news Brentford could mildly rejoice about.
Even the fact that Arkansky had kept his promise to restore Sybil and had left him alone so far was not especially reassuring. As Brentford had yet to reciprocate by disclosing the ghost’s identity, he knew something wicked would sooner or later come his way, and he feared it was going to be during the wedding.
Speaking of which, his best man, Gabriel, seemed to have disappeared. Bah. His friend was right not to care, after all. Brentford felt ashamed and stupid to be getting married when everything, public and private, seemed to be going to the dogs. And then a pneumatic dispatch arrived, informing him that his mother had slipped on the ice and broken her leg.
Gabriel’s nerves had snapped one after the other, like so many strings on a Loar guitar.
Waiting on Stella’s doorstep until three o’clock in the morning in the snowstorm had not helped his health. It was not so much the common cold he’d come away with as the way he had treated it in the following days. A steady diet of opiate pills, Freezeland Fags, Wormwood Star Absinthe, bad coffee, and almost no food had turned his body into a thin, taut, anatomical écorché, with no muscles and all the nerves showing, the whole offering little or no protection against the outer world.
That world now consisted almost entirely of Stella’s place, a collective apartment at the edge of Novo-Arkhangelsk. The Apostles’, as the demure-looking building was called, was the former site of the offices and warehouses of the now defunct Mirrilies & Muir department store. There, artists,