The Condition of Muzak by Michael Moorcock Read Free Book Online Page B

away but when Jerry turned Gnatbeelson was at his shoulder.
    “Because I want to maintain the balance. I’ve a right to take a few precautions.” Jerry was defensive. “What’s wrong with that?” He peered down at the far wall. Written in a substance resembling, in colour, the ichor of spent batteries, were the words:
    Encore un de mes pierrots mort;
Mode d’un chronique orphelinisme;
C’était un coeur plein de dandyisme
Lunaire, en un drôle de corps.
    Jerry became sentimental. “How we loved to luxuriate in terror.” There had been good times here, when the three of them had spent their holidays, at play amongst their father’s discarded inventions, stretched upon heaps of confused circuits, with a bag of apples and a Wodehouse or a Sade. Simpler, if not sunnier, days.
    “I’m in full agreement with you, sir.” The old retainer’s voice seemed closer now, almost normal. “But why have you rejected all those books out of hand?”
    Desperately Jerry rounded on Gnatbeelson, displaying glowing eyes. “Can’t you see? It’s my last bloody chance to achieve a linear mode!”

5. NEED ACTUATORS THAT WON’T FREEZE, BURN, DRY OUT, OR BOIL?
    It might be 196–, thought Jerry, but the countryside beyond Dover had returned with incredible speed to its medieval state. Kent was wild and beautiful again; so lush that few would have guessed it had sustained and recovered from a major nuclear bombardment during the ‘Proof of Good Faith’ contests between the major powers. There were disadvantages: poor roads and slow progress; but his car wasn’t badly affected, even when it was forced to inch through bramble thickets or cross small patches of ploughed land where angry peasants occasionally appeared, to pelt him with pieces of rock or crude spears. The people of Kent, happy at last in their proper primitive state, were much more at one with themselves.
    A fairly unspoiled stretch of road took him close to the remains of Canterbury where skin-clad monks had erected a timber reproduction of the Cathedral, almost the same size as the original. The unseasoned scaffolding still surrounded it and more monks were at work with what was probably liquified chalk, painting the exterior in an effort to make it resemble stone. Elsewhere a project to restore the shopping precinct was in hand; soon Canterbury in facsimile would flourish again: triumph of Man’s optimism, of his faith in the future. Jerry hooted his horn and waved, turning up the stereo, to give them a friendly blast of ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, pursing his lips regretfully as one of the monks lost his footing on the scaffold and fell fifty feet to the ground.
    Soon he was nearing London. In the evening light the city was phosphorescent, like a neon wound; it glowed beneath a great scarlet sun turning the clouds orange and purple. And Jerry was filled with a sudden deep love for his noble birthplace, the City of the Apocalypse, this Earthly Paradise, the oldest and greatest city of its Age, virgin and whore, mother, sister, mistress, sustainer of life, creator of nightmare, destroyer of dreams, harbourer of twenty million chosen souls. Abruptly he left the Middle Ages and entered the future, the great grey road, a mile wide at this point, gradually narrowing to its apex at Piccadilly Circus. Now, as night drenched the tall buildings and their lights burst into shivering life, he could again relax in his natural environment.
    Against all the available evidence he was betting everything on simple cyclic time, on cause and effect, on karma. He passed through the first toll-check; now the road was covered; its perspex roof reflected the myriad colours of the headlamps below. He took the first exit up to the fast tier and joined the hundred-and-seventy mph stream; within a minute or two he was leaving it again, spiralling down the Notting Hill exit and making for home through the crowded park. The booths and tents of the nightly fair were only, he noticed,