Aurorarama: A Novel by Jean-Christophe Valtat

Author:Jean-Christophe Valtat [Valtat, Jean-Christophe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Mystery, Science Fiction, Adventure
ISBN: 9781935554882
Google: _R8RAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0040SY392
Goodreads: 9339737
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

The Failure of the Feast

“Why,” said he, laughing, “the barbed arrow of Master Cupid, my dear Gabriel, has penetrated quite through all the plates of your philosophy.”

Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 1890

Sybil was finally restored the day before the wedding. A party of ice-cutters working off Symmes Spit found her lying unconscious on a small drifting floe, wearing only a fur coat over her party dress. Dropping jaws and saws, they raced her on their sled to their cabin, from whence they sent a flashing balloon message to their headquarters, which immediately called a propelled sled ambulance.

Alerted by pneumatic post a few hours later, Brentford jumped on his Albany cutter sleigh and met her at the Kane Clinic. According to Doctor Playfair she was perfectly safe and healthy. She had obviously been given boiler pills and stokers when she had been abandoned, and this barely a few minutes before her discovery. She showed no signs of frostbite or even hypothermia and could resume a normal life after a simple check-up. Much of Sybil’s disappearence and rescue, then, had been staged, and Brentford had not been surprised to hear that journalists from the Illustrated Arctic News, notorious propagandists for the Council of Seven, had been on the spot under the pretext of taking notes and pictures for a coming series on the ice-cutting industry, “the cutting edge of our economy.” Meanwhile, of course, Lilian Lenton had dropped out of the headlines.

Sybil did not seem to remember anything from the previous days, and, though a bit absent-minded at times, tried to get interested in the wedding plans as if nothing had happened. However, there was actually nothing much left to do in terms of preparation, as Brentford’s mother had taken charge of things in the no-nonsense way that ran in the family. Curiously, the complications this was bound to create did not spin out of control, and except for a little nitpicking, Sybil took in the situation with a surprising coolness that bordered on indifference, and she did not even react when she heard that Handyside’s performance would have to be cancelled.

She had, it soon appeared, other things on her mind. When the Cub-Clubbers came by to discuss the musical program for the wedding, most of the talk revolved instead around their next recording, and the sessions, it appeared, were already booked at the Smith Sound Studio for the day after the ceremony (“I’m soooo sorry, honey”). If Brentford had overheard correctly, the idea was simply to record a copycat of a Lenton song, talk-over and all, with the subversive edges blunted and a few typical Cub-Clubbers jazzy gimmicks thrown in. If this were some sort of commission from above, he would of course never know, but he suspected it strongly. The Council’s way of doing poletics was as inventive as it was pervasive.

Brentford had to admit to himself that the Handyside episode had somewhat marred their relationship. If she seemed oddly detached, maybe as an aftereffect of the hypnosis that she

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