Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  Polystom sat, that afternoon, for a long time, looking out at the unquiet Middenstead sea. Or not looking, really, but rather hearing the sound the wind made as it moved through mauve-dark sky. The sifting noise of wind brushing the trees behind him. The noise of the water touching and touching at the beach, and the sound of the sand itself, the sound of the sand lessening.

  His father and co-father had died within weeks of one another. It was a sort of revelation to Polystom. He had only seen their relationship from the outside, and had taken the bickering and emotional turbulence for the entirety of their connection. So it is we mistake tics and superficial habits for a deeper truth. But Polystom’s father sickened and died over six months, and by the seventh month co-father was gone too. It was as if his prop had been knocked away. Polystom realised, belatedly, that there were depths in his two fathers’ relationship (and by extension, in any relationship) of which he had been unaware. For all their bickering, the two of them had been together without breaks for longer than Polystom had been alive. For all they had fought, their relationship had worked.

  They seemed so incompatible, an ill-matched pair. His father so placid, a man who might go for a whole day without saying a single word. A tall man, skinny, but always a little hunched over as if in embarrassment at his height. Many mornings he would simply not attend to his hair, not even call a servant to smooth it down, so it flailed and spiked off the dome of his head. He would wear the previous day’s clothes, stained as they might be with food. There had always been that quality in his father of elsewhereness. As a boy it had infuriated Polystom, because he had read it as a sort of withdrawal, a stepping away from Polystom himself, as if his son’s demands were somehow irrelevant to the father. But perhaps there had been a greater peace in that elsewhere, wherever in his father’s head it was located.

  His co-father, on the other hand, had been a shorter, bulkier person, his body covered in hair. His beard had reached from just below his eyes right down to cover his face, chin and neck in sow-bristles. Even his back had been knitted with thick hair, as Polystom knew from swimming expeditions. And as if this bristliness were an index of sheer energy, as if the hairs were like iron filings standing up in the magnetic force of his personality, he had been enormously, bustlingly restless. Do! Do! Create! Create! What was needed was action – now above all! Now above all! The Mudworld was a threat to everybody, to the Stewardship of all the worlds! They must do something, organise, push on, sort something out.

  ‘Why?’ Young Polystom had once asked. ‘How exactly is the Mudworld a threat?’ The three of them had been picnicking on the eastern flanks of the Neon Mountains, father, co-father and Polystom, with servants and a car a respectful distance away. The afternoon had been hot and clammy, every crease of Polystom’s young body stuck with sweat.

  ‘Are you an idiot?’ co-father had blustered. ‘Don’t you read the newsbooks? What’s the matter with you? Your own cousin died fighting on that world!’

  His father, slowly pulling free the cork of a bottle of black wine, had said nothing. Polystom, hot and young and feeling bad-tempered, had pointed out that he had hundreds of cousins, had lost count of his cousins, but co-father ground him down with the relentless force of his personality.

  ‘Do you want me to recite the casualty lists? Don’t you see how vital it is to contain them there, on that world, rather than have them come through interplanetary space and attack us here? The whole System of Worlds has never been so tested! Young men like yourself have never had such an opportunity for glory and honour, for good working towards the common wealth.’ And so on, and so on.

  ‘I still don’t see why they’re such a threat, on that world,’ Polystom had grumbled; and co-father had gasped in exasperation, and father had silently poured three glasses of wine. Polystom had caught what he took to be a pained expression in his father’s eyes, although whether in disappointment at his son’s attitude, or distress that his partner and his son were fighting, was not clear.

  And when not blustering at Polystom, co-father had blustered at father, sometimes with enough intensity to provoke a response even from that serene man. They would be arguing over nothing, some irrelevancy; and the servants would shuffle awkwardly in the background, uncertain whether to stay or go. Maybe co-father would goad Old Polystom with some perceived failing or other, going at him for a quarter-hour, half-hour, until finally father’s colour would darken and he would reply. It wasn’t so, he would say in his grumbling baritone. It wasn’t like that. Then why, co-father would counter, is such and such the case? Eh? Why did such and such happen, if things are the way you say they are? I really don’t know, father would say with quiet dignity, though his flushed face and hard-focused eyes gave away his anger. Perhaps because of this? Or that? How should I know? Of course you should know, co-father would shout.

  Polystom had been witness to so many of these arguments that they ceased to alarm him. As he grew older he accepted it as simply the way his two fathers related to one another. On the rare occasion when he did think about it, he may have wondered why these two men, who were supposed to be in love, gave one another so much distress; but it wasn’t for him to say. They had made some secret pact with misery to spend their lives fighting, he assumed.

  And yet they had lived together for many years, and it was only when they were both dead that Polystom realised they had been happy. That his quiet father had found a delight in the turmoil and passion of his partner; and that boisterous co-father had found strength in the calmness of his. As he presided over the funeral of his co-father, his second family funeral in four weeks, he finally understood, or thought he did, that the outward trappings of a relationship hold no more truth to internal health than the plainness of a person’s face is an index to the beauty of their soul. At the funeral he read a poem from Phanicles, his father’s favourite poet. His co-father had not relished poetry, but somehow Polystom felt that a poem was an appropriate gesture at a funeral. Poetry adorned the ceremony, he felt; and so he read something from Phanicles:

  the mountain silent after my lover’s gone

  and ash like velvet on the hearthstone

  and the comet with its great wind-sock of light

  and ash like velvet, white

  and shamrock, violet, hidden in the hedgebank by the stream

  and the fire now slowly silting down.

  Polystom chose that poem because of the delicious sense of sadness it brought to his mind. It wasn’t specifically a funereal poem, although there seemed to Polystom to be something obliquely elegiac about the lines. But as he finished the final line he looked down from the funeral dais to see the bored, or even disgusted, faces of his co-father’s relatives. This shocked him, and with a potent sense of inner revelation he realised that just as he had seen his co-father’s blustery aggression as a flaw, a vulgarity, something to be disregarded before you could feel love for the man – just so, exactly, there were many people in the Stewardship who saw his own and his father’s quiet love for poetry in exactly the same way. For them it was a weakness, a blot on character, a distraction from the life of doing and overcoming that properly defined a man. In the pulpit Polystom had a nebulous sense of understanding of what the world must look like to his co-father’s kin; the way it must have appeared to his co-father when alive. Polystom and his boy, the two of them hidden away in this foppish nothingness, burying their minds in this nonsense, blind to the world around them. Unmanning themselves with this mental decay called poetry, not pushing themselves into manly assertion. There were things to do! Leadership meant stepping out in front of the crowd, not hiding amongst the trees. It was a sort of sickness, a self indulgence, the very opposite of a self-discipline. Polystom looked down on the curled lips of his co-father’s brothers and cousins, and felt a needle of shame. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps it was a contemptible occupation for a man. Certainly it was inappropriate to read poetry at the funeral of his poetry-hating co-father. It was wrong because unmanly.


  And with this realisation, Polystom felt a deeper awe at the strength of the bond that had tied his co-father to his father. That had kept the furious spirit of his co-father living in this house for nearly twenty years, cloistered away from the burly flurry of Stahlstadt where great men made great decisions, and shaped the destiny of the whole Stewardship of Worlds.

  The two of them, father and co-father, had sometimes visited Stahlstadt of course, and on a few occasions young Polystom had accompanied them. The first time he had been overawed by the scale of the city, the luxuriance and heat of the planet of Bohemia on which it was located. The second time, he had swaggered more, being fourteen and of a swaggering age. The three of them stayed in the same hotel, his father and co-father in one room and Polystom in a room by himself. But he had not wanted the other people in the hotel to know how largely, still, the towers, high walkways and massy stone objects of the city intimidated him. He had pretended a world-weary confidence, strolling up and down the wide stone stairways, riding the sliding cars as if he had been doing it all his life. Everybody else seemed so much sleeker than he. Everybody else seemed to fit in. Once, foolishly, he slipped off a sliding car and grazed his knee on the track. He never saw anybody else do that. On another occasion he walked down a main esplanade so caught up in admiration of the trio of colossal towers that dominated the city centre that he put his foot in a grille and fell over. People were too well bred to laugh openly, of course, but he sensed their amusement. Back in the hotel, as the three of them were leaving, a hotel servant dropped one of Polystom’s bags. There was nothing fragile in the bag, but Polystom beat the boy with a rage fuelled by relief that there were clumsier people on the planet than himself.

  He had been glad to return home after the second visit, back to the estate where he knew every square metre of the wood around the house, where the servants respected him. He sank into his favourite poetry as a weary man sinks into a hot bath, for the comfort as well as the sensation of being cleaner afterwards. It was a month before his seventeenth birthday. He was reading Phanicles’ ‘Meadow Poems’.

  Who is it, then, that imagines me out of my mountain lair

  and into the habit of hovering, here, at the doorstone,

  mornings, in the slant new sun, the cobwebs covering

  a whole field like a shroud of butter muslin

  woven, light and water, like a poem

  coming quietly into being?

  He had visited the arable land south and east of the Middenstead often enough, and it was pretty countryside of course, but Polystom’s heart was in the woodlands. He wished fervently that Phanicles had written some ‘Forest Poems’, but there was a subject that had never inspired the great man. Polystom tried writing such poetry himself, tried to imagine himself becoming, after his father’s death, the Poet-Steward, the ruler with poetry in his soul. But somehow the poems fell flat. No matter how excited he had been writing them, no matter how much of the thrill and energy of being in the forest he tried to pour into them, somehow they simply didn’t work as poems.

  I stand in the forest, still and straight

  as a tree, arms at my side

  and the mist wraps around my legs

  in the marvellous morning

  like a thought of the beauty of the trees all around me

  each tree like a beautiful thought itself

  here I can feel the cool quiet comfort

  of safety and satiety. The trees

  like arms, they protect me. The atmosphere

  of trees all

  around me, like air upholding a wing, so here I am I.

  No, it was no good. He was ashamed to show his poetry to anybody in the family. He made his groomsman read it, but the fellow was a servant, and all he could do was nod and mutter appreciatively. One day, Polystom thought, one day I’ll have a soul mate, somebody who’ll understand my poetry and my love for poetry.

  [fifth leaf]

  He told her, one breakfast, ‘We have not been together as man and wife for a week.’ He meant we have not made love, but could not bring himself to speak so directly.

  She looked at him, but didn’t reply. She drank coffee for breakfast, ate no food. It was no wonder she was so slight in her frame. If she nibbled away a side of bread in a day it was a large meal for her. Eat! he shouted inwardly. Eat some damn food! Build up some small reservoir of strength, so that you can act as a woman and not as a ghost! But he didn’t say any of this out loud, nor did his inward fury inform his speaking voice.

  She was looking past him now, out of the breakfast room window. A brisk spring wind was blowing straight up the Middenstead. The glass was rattling gently in its frames.

  ‘Nestor tells me,’ Polystom said, after a while, ‘that you have taken to sleeping in the Velvet Bedroom.’

  She caught his eye briefly, with the most ghostly of smiles on her face. Was she mocking him?

  ‘He also tells me,’ Stom continued, gripping the handle of his butter spoon with unnecessary force, ‘that you don’t settle in any one bedroom for very long.’ If only you took one bedroom, he wanted to say. If only you settled yourself somewhere. Then I would know where to find you. He spooned a lump of butter onto his plate.

  ‘I found some sketches under the chaise-baissé in the Yellow Room,’ she said, unexpectedly. This wrong-footed Polystom, who had become used to her unbroken silence at breakfast. She couldn’t even be consistent in that!

  ‘Sketches?’ he snapped.

  ‘Of dogs, I think.’

  It took a moment for Stom to locate himself. ‘My great grandfather used to sketch. He assembled a bestiary of animal sketches. Perhaps those were discards. Or copies. The original are now in private collection – my mother’s mother keeps them all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Did you say dogs?’

  She nodded.

  ‘There aren’t any dogs on Enting, you know,’ he said. ‘The climate doesn’t agree with them. Lots of insects in the air here, aboriginal insects, and their bite kills off almost all breeds.’

  There was a silence after this little lecture, broken only by the fluttery rattle of the window panes in their frames.

  Shortly, Beeswing slipped out of her chair and through the door, vanished, as insubstantial an exit as befitted her.

  All that day Stom cursed himself inwardly, marching vigorously through the forest to try and burn off his sense of indignation. His mood wavered between fury and self-pity. For a while he would be spitting with frustration that there had been the chance of connection, that her observation on the sketches had suggested itself as a bridge, that if he hadn’t been so inwardly clotted with anger he might have responded kindly to her words, might have established a dialogue, and the two of them could have started the slow process of growing together. But this mood would flip about in moments and would be replaced by an anger as hard as knucklebones. What was the matter with her! Why couldn’t she be a more conventional wife! It wasn’t his fault, it really wasn’t, he had tried over and over. It was her! She had abdicated the proper responsibilities of a wife and partner. Even if she fought him it would be preferable; even if she spat at him and flashed her nails at his face. Anything would be better than this grey passivity, as if she weren’t entirely real, as if he weren’t substantial and important – the Steward of Enting, after all! By this stage Polystom was kicking great patches of last year’s pine needles into the air, like winnowing wheat, with swooping great swings of his legs.

  By his return to the house in the evening this rage had shrunk, distilled itself into a pearl of rancour seemingly located in his gut. His wife did not appear for supper. Stom sent the underbutler to seek her out, but after twenty minutes the young man returned, red with embarrassment, to say that mistress wasn’t hungry, chose not to dine with him. The rage flared in Polystom’s breast again – to humiliate him via a servant! It was too much. He ate his food with a savage deliberation, and then asked the underbutler where his wife might be found. In the Print Room.

  He thumped
his way along the corridors and to the Print Room furious, determined to vent his anger at Beeswing. He decided he was going to tell her that it wouldn’t do, that she was not acting in an appropriate manner, that she needed to pull herself together. But before he reached the door he was imagining both sides of the argument. What have I done wrong? he imagined her asking him. In what ways, specifically, have I erred? It wasn’t like that, Stom told himself. It wasn’t that he could say ‘you have over-stepped the mark in this or that regard’, or ‘this offends me’ or ‘that is unacceptable.’ It was more a question of her overall demeanour; her attitude, of her refusal to live the life demanded by the code that governed the whole of civilised life in the System. It was a sort of dumb insolence. And anyway (he was clenching his fists so hard that the muscles in his forearms were starting to ache) – and anyway! It wasn’t his responsibility to explain all this to her! Even if he could, even if he could lower his mind to an actuarial listing of specific instances, it would be inappropriate for him to act that way. It would be beneath him, in a very tangible sense. Couldn’t she see that? She was the maladjusted child of a lesser branch of blood. He was the Steward of Enting! His family line was one of the oldest, as well as the most distinguished, in the System. Presumably she had understood that, presumably that was why she had agreed to marry him in the first place. It was her job to accommodate him, and not the other way around. If he were to settle down beside her and start listing all the things she was doing wrong, it would be demeaning not only to himself but to everything he represented. He had given her a particular gift by marrying her! He didn’t insist upon any sordid exchange-value propriety, of course, but surely she understood what it meant to be married to somebody so well bred? He could stoop, turn himself into an accountant of proper and improper behaviour; he could demean himself by turning into schoolteacher and take her step-and-step through the correct way of acting. But if he did that sort of stooping, he would make himself less worthy of her love in the first place!