Nowhere Near Milkwood by Rhys Hughes Page A

was grilled over natural vents in the floor, behind which magma seethed. There wasn’t room for a performer. Tiepolo ordered two vast toasted cheeses and a jug of wine, and we alternately seared and cooled our lips until we were satisfied and tipsy. I knew he wanted to reveal something to me. He wiped his hands with a napkin and asked: “Where are you from exactly?”
    “Not from this age,” I admitted.
    “I guessed as much,” he replied, “so maybe I ought to fill you in on the history of the world state. That’s what I’ll do.”
    And he did. He told me a garbled account of my own time, when the Cussmothers had started the process of uniting sovereign governments. This centralisation of authority had taken millennia to complete. There had been relapses, some even recently, into patchworks of tiny kingdoms, but those were just glitches. The applied ideals of globalisation were too strong to reverse. There was a single supreme leader, the President, who ruled his global domain with a road of chrome, hard but shiny, though in reality his power was limited, or at least frustrated, by those who worked for him, in particular the Prefect of Police, of whom he, Tiepolo Bunter, was one of the finest examples ever. They were living in a fabulous era of prosperity and peculiarity. Or rather they should be living like that. But something had gone wrong, seriously wrong, recently. It had to do with a safety mechanism which had been built into the workings of modern dictatorship. Listen carefully.
    To stop the people feeling oppressed by the many injustices integral to the running of an autocracy, it had been arranged that the acting President would be regularly overthrown by an insurrection. After his overthrow, he would go into exile. Then chaos would reign. The people would realise their mistake and call the President back from exile. They would actually welcome the re-establishment of strict laws and unfair order. Anything other than the utterly random misery of no rule at all. These systematic insurrections provided a much needed release of pressure for the general populace. They were arranged by the Prefect of Police and his underlings. Each period of total chaos lasted an average of two or three months. This time, however, it had been raging for more than a year, so long indeed that the original insurrectionists had clustered into two opposing groups, the rebels and the revolutionaries, each dedicated to overthrowing the other, whom they considered to be the culprits of the disorder. It was an ironic and hazardous situation.
    “A year?” I cried. “Why so long?”
    Tiepolo said, “Every insurrection demands a different place of exile, to stop the people realising the thing is rigged. Our current President has been almost everywhere, even to Cus and Yam-Yam. This time he went to a region of drab lagoons. A place of grey skies.”
    “I saw him there,” I replied. “He was wearing a big wide hat.”
    “That looked like a crescent moon on his head? Yes, that sounds like him. Well this region of lagoons occupies the site of a lost city, a city with a romantic name which stood there ages ago. It was called Cardiff. Anyway, it seems there was once a road in that same city which kept all people stuck to it in a mystical manner. Once they stood on it, they couldn’t leave, at least not easily. Although this road has long since gone, its influence somehow remains. Our President wandered onto it by mistake as he searched for a comfortable place to spend his exile. Now he’s trapped there.”
    “Can’t you pull him off?” I spluttered.
    Tiepolo blushed. “We’ve tried that, but the mystic force is too strong. We used pulleys and levers, but nothing worked. The adhesion exists in the minds of the road’s captives. The true solution is for the President to free himself by doubting the road. So he must doubt the entire landscape first. A desperate measure but the only one.”
    “I see,” I said, “but I approached him