KINGDOM 1


The house gave ground as the fi re in ten billion angry sparks moved with fl aming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.


But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had fi lled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.


The fi re crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily fl esh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.


Now the fi re lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes! And then, reinforcements.


From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.


The fi re backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the fl oor, killing the fi re with a clear cold venom of green froth.


But the fi re was clever. It had sent fl ames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.


The fi re rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.


The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed, Fire, fi re, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, fi ve voices died.


In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fi re, vanished off toward a distant steaming river …


Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fi re avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fi ery study, until all the fi lm spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.


The fi re burst the house and let it slam fl at down, puffi ng out skirts of spark and smoke.


In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fi re and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fi re, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!


The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub- cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, fi lm tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.


Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.


Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:


‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …’


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