Suddenly, through the agitated grey, as if in confirmation of his instinct, a dozen ibises winged low beneath the branches of the cypresses and cedars, as silvery as bass, so that Mr. Karaquazian in his scarlet travelling cloak felt an intruder on all that exquisite paleness.
When at last the sun began to wash across the west and the mist was touched with the subtle colours of the tea-rose, warming and dissipating to reveal the tawny browns and dark greens it had been hiding, he grew more certain that this time, inevitably, he and Colinda Dovero must reunite. He was half prepared to see the baroque brass and diamonds of the legendary Prosers, milking the Stains for his sweetheart’s security, but only herons disturbed the covering of leaves upon the water; only ducks and perpetua geese shouted and bickered into the cold air, the rapid flutter of their wings bearing eery resemblance to a mechanish engine. The cypress swamp was avoided by men, was genuinely timeless, perhaps the only place on Earth completely unaffected by the Biloxi error.
Why would such changelessness be feared?
Or had fundamental change already occurred? Something too complex and delicate for the human brain to comprehend, just as it could not really accept the experience of more than one matrix. Jack Karaquazian, contented by the swamp’s familiarity, did not wish to challenge its character. Instead, he drew further strength from it so that when, close to twilight, he saw the apparently ramshackle cabin, its blackened logs and planks two storeys high, riveted together by old salt and grit cans that still advertised the virtues of their ancient brands, and perched low in the fork of two great silvery cypress branches overhanging the water and the smallest of the Stains, he knew at once that she had never truly left her claim; that in some way she had always been here, waiting for him.
For a few seconds, Jack Karaquazian allowed himself the anguish of regret and self-accusation, then he threw back his cloak, cupped his hands around his mouth, and with his white breath pouring into the air, called out:
“Colinda!”
And from within her fortress, her nest, she replied:
“Jack.”
She was leaning out over the verandah of woven branches, her almond eyes the colour of honey, bright with tears and hope; an understanding that this time, perhaps for the first time, he had actually made it back to her. He was no longer a ghost. When she spoke to him, however, her language was incomprehensible; seemingly a cacophony, without melody or sense. Terrible yelps and groans burst out of her perfect lips. He could scarcely bear to listen. Is this, he wondered, how we first perceive the language of angels?
The creosoted timbers lay in odd marriage to the pale branches which cradled them. Flitting with urgent joy, from verandah to branch and from branch to makeshift ladder, she was a tawny spirit.
Naked, yet unaffected by the evening chill, she reached the landing she had made. The planks, firmly moored by four oddly plaited ropes tied into the branches, rolled and bounced under her tiny bare feet.
“Jack, my pauvre hobo!” It was as if she could only remember the language through snatches of song, as a child does. “Ma pauvre pierrot.” She smiled in delight.
He stepped from the pirogue to the landing. They embraced, scarlet engulfing dark gold. It was the resolution he had so often prayed for; but without redemption. For now it was even clearer to him that the mistake he had made at the Breed Papoose had never been an honest one. He also knew that she need never discover this; and what was left of the hypocrite in him called to him to forget the past as irredeemable. And when she sensed his tension, a hesitation, she asked in halting speech if he had brought bad news, if he no longer loved her, if he faltered. She had waited for him a long time, she said, relinquishing all she had gained so that she might be united with him, to take him with her, to show him what she had discovered in the Stain.
She drew him up to her cabin. It looked as if it had been here for centuries. It seemed in places to have grown into or from the living tree. Inside it was full of magpie luxury—plush and brass and gold-plated candelabra, mirrors and crystals and flowing muralos . There was a little power from the Stains, she said, but not much. She had brought everything in the car long ago. She took him onto the verandah and, through the semi-darkness, pointed out the burgundy carcass of an antique Oldsmobile.
“I thought . . .” But he was unable either to express the emotion he felt or to comprehend the sickening temporal shifts which had almost separated them for ever. It was as if dream and reality had at last resolved, but at the wrong moment. “Some men took you to Aberdeen.”
“They were kind.” Her speech was still thick.
“So I understand.”
“But mistaken. I had returned to find you. I went into the Stain while you were gone. When I tried to seek you out, I had forgotten how to speak or wear clothes. I got back here easily. It’s never hard for me.”
“Very hard for me.” He embraced her again, kissed her.
“This is what I longed for.” She studied his dark green eyes, his smooth brown skin, the contours of his face, his disciplined body. “Waiting in this place has not been easy, with the world so close. But I came back for you, Jack. I believe the Stain is not a sign of colour but a kind of counter-effect to the Fault. It leads into a cosmos of wonderful stability. Not stasis, they say, but with a slower rate of entropy. What they once called a lower chaos factor, when I studied physics. I met a woman whom I think we would call ‘the Rose’ in our language. She is half-human, half-flower, like all her race. And she was my mentor as she could be yours. And we could have children, Jack. It’s an extraordinary adventure. So many ways of learning to see and so much time for it. Time for consideration, time to create justice. Here, Jack, all the time is going. You know that.” She sensed some unexpected resistance in him. She touched his cheek. “Jack, we are on the edge of chaos here. We must eventually be consumed by what we created. But we also created a way out. What you always talked about. What you yearned for. You know.”
“Yes, I know.” Perhaps she was really describing heaven. He made an awkward gesture. “Through there?” He indicated, in the gathering darkness, the pale wash of the nearest Stain.
“The big one only.” She became enthusiastic, her uncertainties fading before the vividness of her remembered experience. “We have responsibilities. We have duties there. But they are performed naturally, clearly from self-interest. There’s understanding and charity there, Jack. The logic is what you used to talk about. What you thought you had dreamed. Where chance no longer rules unchecked. It’s a heavenly place, Jack. The Rose will accept us both. She’ll guide us. We can go there now, if you like. You must want to go, mon chéri, mon chéri.” But now, as she looked at him, at the way he stood, at the way he stared, unblinking, down into the swamp, she hesitated. She took his hand and gripped it. “You want to go. It isn’t boring, Jack. It’s as real as here. But they have a future, a precedent. We have neither.”
“I would like to find such a place.” He checked the spasm in his chest and was apologetic. “But I might not be ready, ma fancy.”
She held tight to his gambler’s hand, wondering if she had misjudged its strength. “You would rather spend your last days at a table in the Terminal Café, waiting for the inevitable moment of oblivion?”
“I would rather journey with you,” he said, “to paradise or anywhere you wished, Colinda. But paradise will accept you, mon honey. Perhaps I have not yet earned my place there.”
She preferred to believe he joked with her. “We will leave it until the morning.” She stroked his blue-black hair, believing him too tired to think. “There is no such thing as earning. It’s always luck, Jack. It was luck we found the Stains. It’s luck that brought us together. Brought us our love. Our love brought us back together. It is a long, valuable life they offer us, bon papillon. Full of hope and peace. Take your chance, Jack. As you always did.”
He shook his head. “But some of us, my love, have earning natures. I made a foolish play. I am ashamed.”
“No reg
rets, Jack. You can leave it all behind. This is luck. Our luck. What is it in you, Jack, this new misery?” She imagined another woman.
He could not tell her. He wanted the night with her. He wanted a memory. And her own passion for him conquered her curiosity, her trepidation, yet there was a desperate quality to her love-making which neither she nor he had ever wished to sense again. Addressing this, she was optimistic: “This will all go once we enter the Stain. Doesn’t it seem like heaven, Jack?”
“Near enough,” he admitted. A part of him, a bitter part of him, wished that he had never made this journey, that he had never left the game behind; for the game, even at its most dangerous, was better than this scarcely bearable pain. “Oh, my heart!”
For the rest of the night he savoured every second of his torment, and yet in the morning he knew that he was not by this means to gain release from his pride. It seemed that his self-esteem, his stern wall against the truth, crumbled in unison with the world’s collapse; he saw for himself nothing but an eternity of anguished regret.
“Come.” She moved towards sadness as she led him down through the branches and the timbers to his own pirogue. She refused to believe she had waited only for this.
He let her row them out into the pastel brightness of the lagoon until they floated above the big gold Stain, peering through that purity of colour as if they might actually glimpse the paradise she had described.
“Your clothes will go away.” She was as gentle as a Louisiana April. “You needn’t worry about that.”
She slipped over the side and, with a peculiar lifting motion, moved under the membrane to hang against the density of the gold, smiling up to him to demonstrate that there was nothing to fear, as beautiful as she could ever be, as perfect as the colour. And then she had re-emerged in the shallow water, amongst the lilies and the weeds and the sodden leaves. “Come, Jack. You must not hurt me further, sweetheart. We will go now. But if you stay I shall not return.” Horrified by what she understood as his cowardice, she fell back against the Stain, staring up at the grey-silver branches of the big trees, watching the morning sun touch the rising mist, refusing to look at Jack Karaquazian while he wept for his failures, for his inability to seize this moment, for all his shame, his unforgotten dreams; at his unguessable loss.
She spoke from the water. “It wasn’t anything that happened to me there that turned me crazy. It was the journey here did that. It’s sane down there, Jack.”
“No place for a gambler, then,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “What is this compensatory heaven? What proof is there that it is real? The only reason for its existence appears to be a moral one!”
“It’s a balance,” she said. “Nature offers balances.”
“That was always a human illusion. Look at Biloxi. There’s the reality. I’m not ready.”
“This isn’t worthy of you, Jack.” She was frightened now, perhaps doubting everything.
“I’m not your Jack,” he told her. “Not any longer. I can’t come yet. You go on, ma chérie. I’ll join you if I can. I’ll follow you. But not yet.”
She put her fingers on the edge of the boat. She spoke with soft urgency. “It’s hard for me, Jack. I love you. You’re growing old here.” She reached up her arms, the silver water falling upon his clothes, as if to drag him with her. She gripped his long fingers. It was his hands, she had said, that had first attracted her. “You’re growing old here, Jack.”
“Not old enough.” He pulled away. He began to cough. He lost control of the spasm. Suddenly drops of his blood mingled with the water, fell upon the Stain. She cupped some in her hand and then, as if carrying a treasure, she slipped back into the colour, folding herself down until she had merged with it entirely.
By the time he had recovered himself, there was only a voice, an unintelligible shriek, a rapidly fading bellow, as if she had made one last plea for him to follow.
“And not man enough either, I guess.” He had watched the rest of his blood until it mingled invisibly with the water.
11 Pourquoi m’Aimes-tu Pas?
He remained in her tree-cabin above the Stain for as long as the food she had stored lasted. She had prepared the place so that he might wait for her if she were absent. He forced himself to live there, praying that through this particular agony he might confront and perhaps even find a means of lifting his burden. But pain was not enough. He began to suspect that pain was not even worth pursuing.
More than once he returned to the big Stain and sat in the pirogue, looking down, trying to find some excuse, some rationale which would allow him this chance of paradise. But he could not. All he had left to him was a partial truth. He felt that if he lost that, he lost all hope of grace. Eventually he abandoned the cabin and the colour and made his way up the Trace to Nashville, where he played an endless succession of reckless games until at last, as fighting broke out in the streets between rival guilds of musician-assassins, he managed to get on a military train to Memphis before the worst of the devastation. At the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, he bathed and smoked a cigar and, through familiar luxuries, sought to evade the memories of the colour swamp. He took the Étoile down to Natchez, well ahead of the holocaust, and then there was nowhere to go but the Terminal Café, where he could sit and watch Boudreaux Ramsadeen perform his idiosyncratic measures on the dance floor, his women partners flocking like delicate birds about a graceful bull. As their little feet stepped in and around the uncertain outlines of an infinite number of walls, floors, ceilings and roofs, expertly holding their metaphysical balance even as they grinned and whooped to the remorseless melodies of the fiddles, accordion and tambourines, Jack Karaquazian would come to sense that only when he lost interest in his own damaged self-esteem would he begin to know hope of release.
Then, unexpectedly, like a visitation, Ox Berger, a prosthesis better than the original on his arm, sought Mr. Karaquazian out at the main table and stood looking at him across the flat board, its dimensions roiling, shimmering and cross-flashing within the depths of its singular machinery, and said, with calm respect, “I believe you owe me a game, sir.”
Jack Karaquazian looked as if a coughing fit would take control of him, but he straightened up, his eyes and muscles sharply delineated against a paling skin, and said with courtesy, almost with warmth, “I believe I do, sir.”
And they played the long forms, sign for sign, commitment to commitment, formula for formula; the great classic flat-game schemes, the logic and counter-logic of a ten-dimensional matrix, rivalrous metaphysics, a quasi-infinity held in a metre-long box in which they dabbled minds and fingers and ordered the fate of millions, claimed responsibility for the creation, the maintenance and the sacrifice of whole semi-real races and civilisations, not to mention individuals, some of whom formed cryptic dependencies on an actuality they would never directly enjoy. And Ox Berger played with grace, with irony and skill which, lacking the experience and recklessness of Jack Karaquazian’s style, could not in the end win, but showed the mettle of the player.
As he wove his famous “Faust” web, which only Colinda Dovero had ever been able to identify and counter, Jack Karaquazian developed a dawning respect for the big farmer who had chosen never to exploit a talent as great as the gambler’s own. And in sharing this with his opponent, Ox Berger achieved a profound act of forgiveness, for he released Mr. Karaquazian from his burden of self-disgust and let him imagine, instead, the actual character of the man he had wronged and so understand the true nature of his sin. Jack Karaquazian was able to confront and repent, in dignified humility, his lie for what it had truly been.
When the game was over (by mutual concession) the two men stood together on the edge of the Fault, watching the riotous death of universes, and Mr. Karaquazian wondered now if all he lacked was courage, if perhaps the only way back to her was by way of the chaos which seduced him with its mighty and elaborate violence. But then, as he stared into that university of dissolution, he knew that in losing his pride he had not, a
fter all, lost his soul, and just as he knew that pride would never earn him the right to paradise, so, he judged, there was no road to heaven by way of hell. And he thanked Ox Berger for his game and his charity. Now he planned, when he was ready, to make a final try at the Trace, though he could not be sure that his will alone, without hers, would be sufficient to get him through a second time. Even should he succeed, he would have to find a way through the Stain without her guidance. Mr. Karaquazian shook hands with his opponent. By providing this peculiar intimacy, this significant respect, Ox Berger had done Mr. Karaquazian the favour not only of forgiving him, but of helping him to forgive himself.
The gambler wished the map of the Stain were his to pass on, but he knew that it had to be sought for and only then would the lucky ones find it. As for Ox Berger, he had satisfied his own conscience and required nothing else of Jack Karaquazian. “When you take your journey, sir, I hope you find the strength to sustain yourself.”
“Thanks to you, sir,” says Jack Karaquazian.
The olive intensity of his features framed by the threatening madness of the Biloxi Fault, its vast walls of seething colour rising and falling, the Egyptian plays with anyone, black, white, red or yellow, who wants his kind of game. And the wilder he plays, the more he wins. Clever as a jackal, he lets his slender hands, his woman’s hands, weave and flow within the ten dimensions of his favourite flat game, and he is always happy to raise the psychic stakes. Yet there is no despair in him.
Only his familiar agony remains, the old pain of frustrated love, sharper than ever, for now he understands how he failed Colinda Dovero and how he wounded her. And he knows that she will never again seek him out at the Terminal Café.
“You’re looking better, Jack.” Sam Oakenhurst has recovered from the machinoix’s torments. “Your old self.”
Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker. In his skin is the reflection of a million dying cultures given up to the pit long before their time; in his green eyes is a new kind of courtesy. Coolly amiable in his silk and linen, his raven hair straight to his shoulders, his back firmly set against the howling triumph of Satan, he is content in the speculation that, for a few of his fellow souls at least, there may be some chance of paradise.
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 22