While North Nast was relatively easy for smugglers to access, South was another story entirely. Like Central, it was mostly built above ground with relatively little going on below ground. Unlike Central, the reason relatively little went on below ground was because a volcanic seam had opened up a hundred fifty core-years ago and flooded most of the tunnels with lava. The rail tunnels to South actually stopped at makeshift depots twenty-five klicks outside the city proper.
Ern didn’t come in that way. His route was more circuitous. He was smuggled out to Central the same way he came in, where he met up with Phil. Hoyle came along—he’d tired of the many pleasures of North (which he told Ern about in a medical level of detail on their rail trip) and was eager to get on about making his own way in the world. Ern tried to get away to see his mother before leaving, but Phil’s people had other plans.
Then, Phil and a few of his men—who were now officially Ern’s “Goon Squad”—took him overland out of the city in a rock-hopper, a miserable four-day journey in what amounted to a box-on-wheels with a bucket toilet in the back. Ern passed the time jotting nearly-illegible notes for letters he wanted to write to Celine when they arrived and his whole world wasn’t bouncing anymore.
After all the time in Marino and North, he found that it took a little while to get used to the company of Phil and his roughnecks again, but in the end it was like sliding into an old pair of shoes. By the time he reached South, his vocabulary had expanded in directions he’d never have dreamed thinkable even six months ago, and he was having a grand time playing one-upsmanship with the other guys, finding ways to make even the most innocuous phrase somehow dirty or transgressive.
He got a thrill of freedom every time he said something that would have gotten him flogged, stripped, interrogated, or staked back in Central—especially when it earned a laugh. He wondered why Doc had never written about that. He made a mental note to ask at the first available opportunity, which came ten days later as he was working out the details for a seminar Doc was going to be giving at a place called College Ex Libirs Classico.
“What,” Doc said, “You mean why haven’t I written about humor?”
“Well...”
“I have. It’s just not one of the things that Molly is publishing right now.”
“What did you say?”
“Sounds like you already know.”
“Nast, I could’ve gotten a straighter answer staying in North.”
Doc chuckled and sat down in his maroon vinyl easy chair—a new-looking one, and far better quality than Ern had seen anywhere except Marino. One of the strange things about South: for all its faults, which were many, it was in better repair than any other place in the Cities of Nast.
Doc leaned back, his hands folded over his chest as if he’d never been more at home anywhere in the world.
“What do you want me to say? That humor is the enemy of the tyrant? That laughter is an act of rebellion? That humor is the final and last defense from the darkening of the soul? You already discovered that on your own. Rebellion and transgression and disallowed truth are what makes humor work. Well,” he inclined his head, “that and humiliation.”
“Humiliation? Ha!”
“You never laughed when a friend slipped on the slime and fell down in front of you?”
Ern looked back down at his paperwork uncomfortably.
“Pleasure in the humiliation of others, and sharing the humiliation through laughter, is the first kind of humor. All the others build on it. It is, as you found, a strange kind of freedom.”
“I thought you said freedom was about dignity.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
“You don’t believe what you write?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that.” He chuckled again.
“You’re laughing at my confusion. Humiliation, huh?”
Doc raised a bushy gray eyebrow.
Ern found himself laughing in spite of himself.
“You got it, kid.”
“You ready for this thing at the Libris place?”
“I think so. You expecting problems?”
“You told me to always expect problems.”
“Good.”
College Ex Libirs Classico. Ern hadn’t known what to expect from a place with such a highfalutin name. Going by his experience in Central, he might have expected a lot of bluster backed up by a run-down, humdrum room decorated in drab colors and furnished with uncomfortable chairs or bleachers arrayed around a acid-rotted stage.
He did not expect a cathedral.
But there it was. Dark and imposing, hewn from black obsidian shot through with golden flecks of pyrite and polished to a shine, trimmed in olivine and granite highlights, it looked like something out of one of the more exotic books in Doc’s library back in Marino.