Chapter 6
Filing out of the zippelin, the first thing that hit me was the heat. The second thing that hit me was the heat. Pathia baked under an eternal summer. The worst part of it was the way the heat came up from the ground; it was as hot as the sun shining down, except without the bright light.
“Hat, glasses,” Drakeforth instructed. I nodded, my eyes screwed shut against the glare as I fumbled for our purchases.
It made a nice difference, and as long as I didn’t breathe, the heat was merely unbearable.
“Brrr,” Drakeforth shivered.
“Yes, we should get inside before we freeze to death.” In the same way that vaccines trick your immune system into fighting a disease with biological props, I felt I was getting the hang of hanging with Drakeforth.
We made it to the terminal, where the doors seemed to steel themselves before opening. Inside it was cooler, with a great colour scheme and eye-catching modern art installations. The temperature was much lower than outside, too.
“Try not to let them know that you know,” Drakeforth murmured.
“Who? What?”
“Exactly.” Drakeforth nodded.
If we were going to be tourists, that meant souvenirs. I went to a nearby shop selling T-shirts and flipped through the racks.
Drakeforth stood back and watched her shop.
“Pudding, we are at a junction in what, for simplicity’s sake, we will call space and time. You are going to make the first of many choices. The outcome of those choices, of course, will remain unknown to you until it is far too late. You will know about this later because you are going to write it all down, or he will. And if you think that’s breaking the fourth wall, then just you wait till I break the fifth wall.”1
My credit stick still worked in this part of the world, which was a relief. I held up a T-shirt for Drakeforth to see.
“My Sister Went to Pathia and All I Got Was This Amazing T-shirt,” I read. “I got it for Ascott. He hates souvenirs.”
“I’m sure he will not love it,” Drakeforth replied.
We joined the queue of people seeking formal admission to the country. While we waited to be admitted, I wondered: If we weren’t in Pathia in the official sense, then where the herbivore were we?
My passport got stamped by an immigration official with long hair in a complex sculpted style that suggested he used wallpaper paste as shampoo and slept on it wet.
I followed the signs to the baggage claim area and stood in expectant silence among a hundred other people, all of us staring at the luggage conveyor and waiting for the obvious to happen.
There are people who devote their lives to studying the big mysteries. They are motivated by money, curiosity, boredom, or, in many cases, the overwhelming need to prove that they are right, and everyone who ever doubted them can go do what famous playwright, Colin Oscopy, once invited the East Geshun Observer’s critic to do with her first night review of the production of Colin’s new play, Aubergine Emergent.
When people converge in groups around airport baggage claims, I am reminded that someone, for some reason, designed the entire baggage retrieval system in a certain way. I’m equally certain, that, like Oscopy, they harboured a deep, irrational hatred against their fellow man.
After forty minutes, Drakeforth joined me, a steaming take-away cup of tea in his hand. “Having fun?” he asked.
“Gosh, yes!” I gushed. “I saw all these other people standing around and I thought, that looks like the sort of mind-numbing activity I would really enjoy, and you know what? It’s more wonderfully mind-numbing than I ever imagined it would be.”
“Your bags are over there.” Drakeforth indicated a trolley so similar to the one I had wrestled with at the beginning of our journey that I wondered, for a moment, if we had ever left our point of departure.
“Right…” I took a deep breath and let my shoulders drop. “Where have you been for the last forty minutes?”
Drakeforth raised his take-away cup, “I’ve been sitting over there drinking tea, enjoying a fresh scone and wondering what you were doing standing at the baggage claim.”
“Pathia is a desert country, isn’t it?”
“Mostly,” Drakeforth agreed.
“Lots of loose soil, easy digging?”
“In places.”
I looked around. “I wonder if I can buy a shovel here? Or some other tool suitable for digging a shallow grave.”
“In Pathia, traditionally the dead are not buried, they are pathed.”
“Passed?” I frowned.
“No, after they have passed, they are pathed.”
I reached for my guidebook and thumbed through it until I found the section on burial customs. I read in silence for a few moments.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding!”
“Mind where you step,” Drakeforth said. “And when you see a sign saying, Keep On The Grass, do it.”
Between the city of Semita and us, a young woman with short hair stood holding a sign. In local pictograms and carefully printed letters, it said: Experienced Pathologist. Reasonable Daily Rates.
A cat was weaving between her bare ankles in a figure eight pattern that seemed to generate bliss for the small creature and made my toes curl in ticklish empathy.
Drakeforth went and spoke with her, and then leaned in and whispered something in her ear. They shook hands and she introduced herself as Harenae, and immediately offered to drive our trolley.
“Be my guest.”
I didn’t think it was fair to inflict Drakeforth and an airport trolley on her on the same day. However, she guided the trolley across the terminal with a casual ease that made my eyes narrow. The cat groomed itself and watched us leave.
1 Breaking the fourth wall is when a character in the story addresses the audience directly. The fifth wall is when you get taken out of the story by realising that someone is reading over your shoulder. Aimee hates it when people do that.