“And you damaged the sonic-broadcast unit?”
“Yes.”
“You did it at such a time that you knew Paul and I would go down together to replace it.”
“Yes.”
“And the other?”
“Yes, that too. I filled Paul’s mind with things I had felt and seen beneath the ashram of the Chickcharny.”
“And you could look into Frank’s mind as well. You knew how he would react. You set up the murder!”
“I did not force him to do anything. Is not his will as free as our own?”
I looked down into the tea, troubled by the thought. I gulped it. Then I stared at her.
“Did you not control him, even a little, near the end, when he attacked me? Or—far more important—what of a more rudimentary nervous system? Could you control the actions of a shark?”
She refilled my teacup.
“Of course not,” she said.
We sat for another silent time. Then, “What did you try to do to me when I decided to continue my investigation?” I asked. “Were you not trying to baffle my senses and drive me to destruction?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I was watching you to see what you would decide. You frightened me with your decision. But what I did was not an attack, at first. I tried to show you something of the dreamsong, to soothe you, to put you at peace. I had hoped that such an experience might work some mental alchemy, would soften your resolve—”
“You would have accompanied it with suggestions to that effect.”
“Yes, I would have. But then you burned yourself and the pain pulled you back. That was when I attacked you.”
She suddenly sounded tired. But then, it had been a very busy day for her, all things considered.
“And this was my mistake,” she said. “Had I simply let you go on, you would have had nothing. But you saw the unnatural nature of the attack. You associated it with Paul’s raptures, and you thought of me—a mutant—and of dolphins and diamonds and my recent trip. It all spilled into your mind—and then the threat that I saw you could keep: alluvial diamonds and Martinique, into the central data bank. I had to call you then, to talk.”
“What now?” I asked. “No court could ever convict you of anything. You are safe. I can hardly condemn you. My own hands are not free of blood, as you must know. You are the only person alive who knows who I am, and that makes me uncomfortable. Yet I have some guesses concerning things you would not like known. You will not try to destroy me, for you know what I will do with these guesses if you fail.”
“And I see that you will not use your ring unless you are provoked. Thank you. I have feared it.”
“It appears that we have reached something of a standoff.”
“Then why do we not both forget?”
“You mean—trust each other?”
“Is it so novel a thing?”
“You must admit you are possessed of a small edge in such matters.”
“True. But it is of value only for the moment. People change. It does not show me what you will be thinking on another day, in some other place. You are in a better position to know that, for you have known yourself far longer than I.”
“True, I suppose.”
“I, of course, really have nothing to gain by destroying the pattern of your existence. You, on the other hand, could conceivably be moved to seek an unrecorded source of income.”
“I can’t deny that,” I said. “But if I gave you my word, I would keep it.”
“I know that you mean that. I also know that you believe much of what I have said, with some reservations.”
I nodded.
“You do not really understand the significance of ’Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaïlll’kje’k.”
“How could I, not being a dolphin or even a telepath?”
“May I show you what it is that I am seeking to preserve, to defend?”
I thought about it for a time, recalling those recent moments back at the station when she had hit me with something out of William James. I had no way of knowing what manner of control, what sort of powers she might be able to exercise upon me if I agreed to some experiment along these lines. However, if things got out of control, if there was the least feeling of meddling with my mind, beyond the thing itself, I knew a way to terminate the experience instantly. I folded my hands before me, laying two fingers upon my ring.
“Very well,” I said.
And then it began again, something like music, yet not, some development of a proposition that could not be verbalized, for its substance was of a stuff that no man possessed or perceived, lying outside the range of human sensory equipment. I realized then that that part of me which experienced this had its place temporarily in the mind of the statement’s creator, that this was the dreamsong of ’Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaï’lll’kje’k, that I witnessed/participated in the timeless argument as he improvised, orchestrated it, drawing entire sections of previously constructed visions and phrasings, perfect and pure, from a memory so vital that its workings were barely distinguishable from the activities of the moment, and blending these into fresh harmonies to a joyous rhythm I comprehended only obliquely, through the simultaneous sensing of his own pleasure in the act of their formulation.
I felt the delight in this dance of thought, rational though not logical: the process, like all of art, was an answer to something, though precisely what, I did not know nor really care; for it was, in and of itself, a sufficiency of being—and if one day it were to provide me with an emotional weapon at a time when I would otherwise stand naked and alone, why this was one of the things none has the right to expect, yet sometimes discovers within the recollection of such fragments of existence cast by a special seer with a kind of furious joy.
I forgot my own being, abandoned my limited range of senses as I swam in a sea that was neither dark nor light, formed nor formless, yet knowing my way, subsumed, as it were, within a perpetual act of that thing we had decided to call ludus that was creation, destruction, and sustenance, patterned and infinitely repatterned, scattered and joined, mounting and descending, divorced from all temporal phenomena yet containing the essence of time. Time’s soul it seemed I was, the infinite potentialities that fill the moment, surrounding and infusing the tiny stream of existence, and joyous, joyous, joyous…
Spinning, my mind came away, and I sat, still clutching my death ring, across from the little girl who had fled from the terrible flowers, now clad in wet green and very, very wan.
“O-cha do desu-ka?” she asked.
“Itadakimasu.”
She poured. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but I raised the teacup instead and sipped from it.
She had my answer, of course. She knew.
But she spoke, after a time: “When my moment comes—who knows how soon?—I shall go to him,” she said. “I shall be there, with ’Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaïlll’kje’k. Who knows but that I shall continue, as a memory perhaps, in that timeless place, as a part of the dreamsong? But then, I feel a part of it now.”
“I—”
She raised her hand. We finished our tea in silence.
I did not really want to go then, but I knew that I must.
There were so many things that I might have said, I thought, as I headed the Isabella back toward Station One, my bag of diamonds, and all the other things and people I had left behind, waiting for me to touch them or speak to them.
But then, I reflected, the best words are often those left unsaid.
MY BROTHER LEOPOLD
Edgar Pangborn
∫1
Memorandum from Jermyn Graz, Frater Literatus & Precentor,
to His Beneficence Alesandar Fitzeral, O.S.S., Abbot of St. Benjamin’s
at Mount Orlook in the Province of Ulsta, November 21, 465.
My dear Lord Abbot:
Your Beneficence has graciously requested information in writing concerning the life of my brother Leopold Graz, thirty-eight years deceased, fo
r the attention of the Examiners from the Holy City when they determine his spiritual status, whether the Church shall declare him beatified. My days of delay have been spent in prayer, wondering how best to comply. In spite of time, my brother’s death is new to me as yesterday; I am troubled and uncertain.
For longer than I wish to recall, I have been more an observer than a participant in the sorrowful comedy. I will try to write a narrative as simple as the rings of a tree trunk. I have lived a long time, as my brother Leopold did not, since we played together as boys with Jon Rohan and Sidney Sturm, the four of us a natural company, ever loyal (we thought)—one for all and all (we thought) for one. I think I would have died for any of them, certainly for Sidney, as we swore our readiness to do one day when Jon snagged his pinkie on a thorn and we hurried to make use of the fine fresh gore for writing purposes. Oh, how long ago!—I am bald and slow and wrinkled, and tonight my joints pain me.
I have made the common pilgrimages—to Filadelfia, Albani, the shrines of Conicut and Levannon. I never made the long pilgrimage in Abraham’s footsteps to the Old City of Nuin on the Atlantic, but I saw that ocean once, when I traveled as a young man to the highland from which one sees the Black Rocks emerge at low tide like scarecrows in the mouth of the Hudson Sea, and beyond them the great waters. I have beheld other marvels, including adult loyalties that warmed me—but I don’t find these more intense than those of boyhood, or less frail; seldom as joyous, since adult loyalties may be stained by cynicism, weariness, second thoughts.
I have been for fifteen years precentor here under your tranquil rule. You will remember I was a monk, inscribing after my name the good letters O.S.S.,* long before that. I am also proud of my secular name Jermyn Graz, for our artisan father came from an agrarian family descended from a commune of Old Time; yet I am content to be only your devoted Fr. Jermyn, precentor of this Abbey.
* Ordo Sancti Silvani.
My brother Leopold was born December 13, 405. Thirty-eight years ago, in the reign of Emperor Mahonn and the patriarchate of Urbanus II, he was arrested under the name of Brother Francis, charged with treason, and transferred after ten months’ imprisonment to the Ecclesiastical Court at Nuber on suspicion of heresy. And as you know, he was tried, condemned, and executed at Kingstone, October 28, 427.
I have never had the privilege of reading the trial transcript, but my memory lives. When they bound him to the stake the sky did darken and a torrent flooded the streets; the soldiers were obliged to pour oil on the faggots. Some murmured that this showed disregard for God’s voice in the storm, but then the crowd fought in the usual way, trampling and shoving to snatch magic relics from the ashes.
None of our family survives him but myself. Our father died years before Leopold’s execution, and our mother still longer ago, when Leo was seven. I think the Examiners may disregard the rambling of my mother’s sister Lora Stone, who thinks my mother had had no carnal knowledge of our father Louis Graz in the nine months before Leopold’s birth, but was impregnated by fire from heaven. My aunt is very old, fumbling at the past like a child with broken playthings. She did not come to live with us until a year after my mother died.
We are taught that none can be born without sin; that every birth delays the Liquidation, our destiny. But sometimes I sinfully wish I might have held in my arms a child of my brother Leopold.
And I am ravaged by doubts, my Lord Abbot, especially on summer nights after Matins when I should be attentive at prayer. I fall to imagining this earth not liquidated but inhabited by a people changed, no longer constantly at war nor obsessed by greed and fear, a people such as my brother spoke of as dwelling in a City of Light. They would deal charitably; they would enjoy their days. They might one day recapture the lost skill of Old Time and journey to the stars—but then I recall how little can be left of the resources of earth that made this conceivable in Old Time, and I am back in the old cobwebbed halls of human folly without a candle. I have never mentioned these doubts in confession; I have hugged the small sin to myself for comfort, until now this question of my brother’s sainthood has smoked me out. The study of history (under Church guidance) has been my life. I am forced to see Old Time as an age when men, by their own written admission, had so wasted and befouled the earth that it could no longer support their fearsome numbers, and nature cut them down with war, plague, famine, and that bearing of sterile monsters which follows intercourse like a tax paid to Hell. And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis. To me the beauty of earth, of its other dwellers less arrogant than man, often appears more sublime than our grandest achievements. Where nature spreads a floor of loveliness we scrape our feet and shit on it.
[In the brittle faded original of this letter by Jermyn Graz the foregoing paragraph is marked by a marginal line and exclamation point, probably conveying indignation. This mark was undoubtedly made by Wilmot Breen, a justice of the Ecclesia and the ranking prelate of the Nuber Examiners in 465, for his initials in the same script and ink are attached to other marginal notes further on.]
I know we are taught that in a few years the elect shall be taken into heaven and all others submerged as if they had never been, when the oceans rise entirely above the dry land, and the world as we have known it passes away, a drop of water in the firmament. Still, when the nights are in summer and I hear the sad-merry clash of the crickets and katydids and trill of frogs in the moist woods beyond the monastery walls—my lord, I wonder and I wonder.
I alone live to remember Leopold as a child. Jon Rohan died in 435 from aftereffects of a wound received in the War of 426-429. I lost Sidney before that: a devoted young doctor, he died in 430, the year of the red plague that followed the Moha War —a return, some say, of the epidemic that did so much to destroy the society of Old Time. I alone recall the voice of the boy Leopold in the choir of the Kingstone Cathedral, how it soared.
Here was a day of 413: Leopold seven, I fourteen, Jon Rohan twelve, Sidney fifteen. We met a black-browed Gypsy, old and horny-footed, in a meadow by Twenyet Road; we were wandering, not far from home.
We had been trained to fear and avoid Gypsies, as children are usually guarded against any strangeness that might illuminate the strangeness within themselves. We saw a sagging wagon in the meadow, a crowbait tethered on succulent grass, and would have slipped past. Something of mirage or phantasm was in the heaviness of the afternoon. It was that pregnant month, July. Before we saw the wagon, Leopold had been singing for us, casually; we had noticed a hawk high in the blue.
The Gypsy sat motionless on the gray stump of a tree beside the road, wearing a dull loin-rag and colorless sandals. His knotty flesh was brown like the earth behind him, his gray hair speckled white like the quills of a porcupine. He had a shoulder satchel; a clay pipe dangled in his hand unlit. I smelled sweat and coarse Conicut tobacco.
I am not fey. I was born for the prosaic life, passions and marvels passing me as a parade might wind down the road past a child who cannot open the window and call. But I have a more than natural sense for stress and change in others. I knew Jon was startled by the Gypsy and hostile. Sidney was startled too, but pleasantly, the sweetness of his nature responding to anything that showed no enmity. I knew my brother Leopold felt a recognition outside my understanding, as if in some territory out of time where he and the grizzled Gypsy could meet as contemporaries with a shared language.
The Gypsy asked: “Would any of you gentlemen possess a tinderbox? Mine’s in my wagon and I too lazy to go stumping after it.”
I had a fine new one, a present from my father. Up I stepped, and when the old man had tamped in fresh tobacco I made a light for him, my sliver of flame stabbing down into the gurgling bowl. Sidney stood near, and I knew his thought was for my safety, but the Gypsy was smiling with all dusty wrinkles. “I thank you.”
I said as I’d been taught: “It’s nothing—you’re welcome.”
“Welcome—that’s a variety of love, ain’t it?”
His qu
estion seemed directed at Sidney, the oldest of us, the kind one, slim and golden in the sun. Sidney smiled. Jon was standing apart and frowning, working his toes in the dust.
“So everything comes from nothing,” said the Gypsy, “and that’s what makes the world go round? Am I right, Youngest?” This to Leopold, who had ducked in under my arm. Either Leopold nodded or the Gypsy pretended he had. “I’m right,” he said, puffing, “and it’s not a bad arrangement, for if the world quit going round wouldn’t we fly off like beads from the end of a busted string?” Then he lifted some articles from his satchel and displayed them in the palm of his left hand. “Anyhow, I suppose I’m among gentlemen who believe the world is round. True, Youngest?”
My little brother said: “My name’s Leopold.”
“Why, that’s a sensible answer.” Then the Gypsy’s gaze was piercing me. “My Ma named me Aleites. You’ll be Leopold’s brother.” Seldom did others notice a resemblance. In those days I was sandy blond; Leopold’s hair was dark as walnut. Our other features differed: Leopold had a straight nose, a glorious high arch of brow; my nose was alway puggy, my lips too full. But that Gypsy saw our brotherhood. “And the name people call you—?”
“Jermyn.”
“Light and welcome—I must make you a return.” He was moving his big right hand over his left, jumbling the oddments there like one preparing a throw of the dice. “Jermyn, I’d have you choose one from this lot—alas, worthless as men measure things in the marketplace. Choose something to please all your blithe company.” I stared at his palm, incapable of decision; it looked big as a plowed field. “Here, for instance, my dear, is a bit of a garnet—I don’t claim it gives the wearer invisibility; we’re sensible people, aren’t we? Here’s the milk tooth of a chimera, which some say confers bravery if worn next the skin— I don’t say it, of course. And this gold phallus no bigger’n a thumbnail—perky, ain’t it? Made for a king’s son likely, the way every wench he met in his travels was supposed to jump out of her skin to please him, since we all know that next to a big one they like a gold one; but I never tried it out, don’t actually know a thing about it. I never guarantee a blessed thing; that’s why I’m a successful businessman.” His old nag nickered at that, and he had the grace to look embarrassed.
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