by Adam Roberts
‘Offworld?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What do you mean, offworld?’
‘Nobody knows, sir. Only they weren’t servants from the moon, sir.’
‘Were they servants at all?’
‘Masterless men, sir,’ said the messenger, gabbling the words in the horror of them. ‘Vagrants, is what people are saying. They looked dirty and disreputable.’
The whole thing had an unreal timbre. Perhaps that was why, Stom thought to himself, he couldn’t register the sorrow of his uncle’s death. He couldn’t quite believe that the old man wasn’t breathing any more. ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Vagrants? How could vagrants have come to the moon from another world? Vagrants don’t buy tickets to travel by balloon-boat.’
‘They weren’t off any balloon-boat, sir,’ said the messenger. ‘Nor any plane. That’s all been checked . . . the first thing that was checked.’
‘So how did they come from offworld?’
‘A skywhal beached itself in your uncle’s estate that same day, sir. We all saw it. And they say that three figures leapt off it when it was still in the sky, and floated to the ground by parachute. That’s what they say, sir, though I never saw it with my own eyes.’
It was clearly all a joke. In poor taste, but it was surely too ridiculous to be serious. ‘And you say,’ Stom repeated, ‘that my uncle is dead?’
‘Yes, sir. Dead, sir.’
The messenger had a coldsore on his lower lip, towards the left: the scab of dried blood was perfectly oval, flat, like a ruby planed and buffed and fitted into the skin. It was fascinating. Polystom couldn’t stop looking at it. It was simultaneously revolting and oddly ornamental.
He felt like laughing. The hilarity bubbled up out of him like champagne bubbles in a flute-glass. But a gentleman did not laugh. It was an ill-bred thing to do. He turned another ninety degrees, so that his back was now to the messenger.
‘Thank you,’ he said, keeping his voice steady with some effort. ‘That’s all. If you go down to the kitchens, they’ll find some food for you.’
‘I’ve a letter for you too, sir,’ said the messenger in a wretched voice.
‘Leave it on the side there,’ said Stom. ‘I’ll see to that later.’ He didn’t feel like laughing any more.
His nails needed paring. Usually he had one of his servants attend to them whilst he listened to music. But he felt like doing them himself. He went upstairs to his own bedroom, and through to his annexe bathroom. There he sat down on the edge of the bath, and brought out the nail scissors from their ledge. The left hand was easily trimmed; little finger first, curving the scissors in a tight arc as he cut, cutting away a crescent moon. The ring finger, releasing another splinter of cut nail like a discarded shirt collar in miniature. The middle finger, cutting off a lopsided shred, and then cutting again to balance out the shape of it. The pointing finger, cutting the nail away, and then using the blunt side of the scissor blade to push back the encroaching skin from the bed of the nail, tidying it up, like pushing down the earth around a newly-bedded plant. Finally the thumb, a different shape altogether, a flatter curve, that Stom cut straight across and then cut the corners off of. Transferring the scissors to the left hand and starting to cut the nails of the right-hand fingers was trickier. The coordination did not come naturally. The little finger. The ring finger, where the pink nail displayed a curious little splash of darker pink within, like a fly squashed and trapped in amber. The middle finger, where the nail, uniquely, sported miniature corrugations from left to right. Pointing finger. Thumb. He was finished. The floor was scattered with the splinters of his cut nails, like broken frosted glass.
Polystom got to his feet. His uncle was dead. Surely he should be upset? No more trips to visit him on the moon. No more conversations with him about science. Why didn’t he feel anything?
He contemplated the situation. In four years he had lost his father, his co-father, his wife and now his uncle. This was surely a great loss, a kind of tragedy. Wasn’t it? This accumulation of grief.
But there was nothing. He took some food, and felt the savour of the food and the intoxication of the wine, but nothing more. He received reports from subsequent messengers, and later in the day a great-aunt came to stay for a week. The two of them discussed how terrible it was, but Stom’s concerned face and woodpecker tut-tutting were acts, carefully performed to catch the appropriate degree of grief. The days went by, and the weeks, and there was no grief in his heart for his dead uncle. The sadness refused to grow.
He watched his great-aunt weeping, discreetly, into a gold-embroidered Kaspian-silk Sagé handkerchief. Her tears were like little hiccoughs. But he couldn’t imitate the crying.
He discovered, by accident, ten days later, the letter that the first messenger had been bringing, where it had been tidied with other mail. Most of this pile consisted of condolences, families striving discreetly to out-do one another with the opulence of their crested paper, some sheets as thick as cotton. In amongst them Polystom discovered his uncle’s handwriting, and he held the slender envelope up with a sudden, fierce joy. Some part of him thought that this sheet would be the tocsin to bring out tears. He thought: Cleonicles must have written this letter shortly before he died. Reading it will be like hearing him speak again, from beyond the grave, for one last time. Surely it will move me, and make me cry? There was something grisly about the eagerness with which he ripped the envelope:
My dear Polystom. Wonderful to see you again, naturally. I hope your nightmares ease themselves. I repeat what I told you; from the vantage point of science nightmares are a natural phenomenon, a way in which the brain purges itself of negative energy. In time they will subside. And I urge you, my dear boy, to consider remarrying. The time has come for it, I sincerely believe.
Nothing. No emotional response at all, except for a faint, and under the circumstances wholly irrelevant, flutter of irritation that the old boy was still meddling in his personal life. He read on: Cleonicles’ personal version of the dead skywhal, the beast that had been freighted with his own death.
I’m having the carcass carried ashore where we will – somehow! – improvise an embalming strategy. Then I’ll be able to study it at my leisure. You must come again, my dear boy, and examine it for yourself!
Nothing at all. The mind of Polystom noted the small ironies in the words, and even the spookiness in receiving an invitation from a dead man. He was able to read the letter as a reader of poetry might, the hulking carcass as a metaphor for the old man’s own death – a mighty creature fallen from high, his flesh raked, turned into so much meat to be manufactured into remembrance. But none of this moved him. Other things did: Phanicles’ Rhum Elegies still tickled his eyeballs with tears. Listening to beautiful music did it too. He still had the capacity for feeling. It simply didn’t assert itself over his uncle’s death.
Eventually Stom reached a state of mind in which he was indeed distressed. Upset not by the death of his uncle, for on that topic he still felt nothing, but upset rather by precisely the fact that he felt nothing. He ought to have felt devastated, he ought to have grieved. The fact that he did not experience that emotion troubled him, to a certain extent. If he searched himself, he came to the conclusion that he did not and could not find the death of his uncle distressing. It was not ‘tragic’ or ‘appalling’ or any of the things the newsbooks called it, except in a purely intellectual sense. The word that occurred to Stom was preposterous. It was, simply, preposterous that Cleonicles could be dead, and doubly preposterous that he had died the way he had. It was absurd. If Stom had invested any feelings in the fact – he did not think this consciously, but we can assume that this was the subconscious factor behind his emotional numbness – if he cared at all, then it would endorse this preposterousness, and in turn this would render the whole of the cosmos chaotic and absurd. All this wonderful order! This filigree network of relations and forces, orbits and growth – all of it would become nonsense th
e moment he allowed this ridiculous event to take root in his heart. For the universe to bring a consciousness into existence, to allow it to grow and develop and mix with others and gain understanding, to achieve so many things only, in the end, to achieve nothing – to die at the hands of servants. Not even of servants, but vagrants. It was intolerable. A life needed a pattern, just as society did. Some psychological muscle in Polystom’s subconscious mind refused to relax enough to allow this notion through: his uncle had died an absurd death.
Lacking the self-knowledge to understand this, Stom was merely baffled by his absence of grief. He felt as if he were unable to do the proper thing, in a culture where doing the proper thing was all-important. The more he searched himself, hoping for tears and gloom and not finding them, the more upset he became at his strange behaviour. He began, in a half-focused manner, to wonder if there were something withered and monstrous in his soul. Hadn’t he loved his uncle? Well yes, he thought he had. Didn’t he miss his occasional visits to the moon? Well, yes, in a distant sort of way, he did. So why didn’t he cry? Not a single tear?
Not a single tear.
The sense of distance from the event was compounded by the funeral. He began busying himself to prepare it, his fourth death ceremony in as many years, when he received notification that the event had been taken over by General Demus, one of the leading figures in the current war effort, subordinate only to Counts Meton and Euelpides, and the Prince himself. This funeral, Stom was told, was a matter of military honour and the patriotic pride of the whole of the System. The General trusted, his aide-de-camp told Stom in person during one visit, that Steward Polystom was not inconvenienced by this move, and hoped indeed that it would be of assistance to him in this time of great grief to have the responsibility for organising so complex an affair taken out of his hands.
Polystom, thrown, not wanting to betray that fact that he felt no grief at all, had assented too quickly. Very kind of the General. Please carry my compliments to him.
The two of them had been sitting outside Polystom’s house, the Autumn Year well underway. A friend, or a family member, might have asked how Stom was bearing up under his terrible blow; but the aide-de-camp, though a fellow of good breeding, was no friend and no relative. He said nothing.
‘Will it,’ Polystom asked eventually, ‘be held on the moon?’
‘The General plans it so,’ replied the aide.
‘And quite a large do?’
The very faintest of quizzical looks crossed the aide’s face. ‘Naturally. Cleonicles – your uncle – is a great hero of the System.’
‘Really?’
A slight, embarrassed pause. Polystom had not meant to be so abrupt; his single word had sounded like a contradiction. ‘Of course,’ said the aide.
‘It’s only,’ said Stom, ‘that I’ve always thought of him as just my uncle. You know? Although naturally I see what you mean. His science was terribly important, I know. Terribly important.’
‘As a scientist, yes,’ said the aide. ‘But more than that. A great patriotic hero. A key figure in the war, on the Mud-world you know. Count Meton himself will be attending.’
‘He will? I didn’t realise they were friends.’
‘Oh yes. The Count himself said, yesterday, that Cleonicles was one of the most significant figures for the military campaign on the Mudworld.’
This was entirely new to Polystom. ‘You’ll pardon me,’ he said, ‘but I had believed my uncle opposed to the war.’
‘You’ll pardon me,’ said the aide, with an ingratiating smile, ‘and of course you know your own uncle better than I, but his engagement with the campaign goes right back to the beginning. I know he had disagreements with some aspects of the prosecution of the war, but not with the war itself, never of that.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Stom, weakly.
‘The Prince – this is confidential, you understand,’ said the aide, leaning forward conspiratorially (although there was nobody in the garden but them), ‘—but the Prince is bestowing on him the Order of the Sun, and of the Eagle. Posthumously. It will be announced at the service.’
‘An honour indeed,’ Stom mumbled.
‘And, to be confidential again – I hope you don’t mind –’
‘Not at all.’
‘—I don’t know if you’re aware that your uncle raised a platoon for the war from his own estate. It was entirely characteristic of the man, I think, that he insisted on his own anonymity; that he took no public credit for this most patriotic act.’
Polystom hadn’t known this either. Clearly the war had meant more to Cleonicles than the nephew had realised. And, a week later, at the service itself, the rank upon rank of gaudy, embossed uniforms amazed him further. The entire affair was so martial it gave the impression that Cleonicles had been a general or a count himself; instead of being a scientist given to writing sharp-phrased letters to the news-books about the poor management of affairs on Mudworld. It all added to Stom’s sense of removal from the old man’s death.
A great tent, more like a canvas barn, had been erected on the flat land south of his uncle’s house, with tiered scaffolding for the seating and a wide entrance through which the cortege could pass. It took all morning for the place to fill, the brilliant colours of three dozen varieties of uniforms, the cream silks and pale wormskin dresses of the women, servants in white with bands of white cloth drawn about their mouths (an ancient symbol of mourning, once common amongst actual mourners, now worn symbolically by the servants) moved up and down between the seats with drinks. At the apex of all this attention was a raised dais on which the coffin was placed precisely on the chime of noon. Polystom sat behind the wooden box, with Count Meton and General Demus on either side of him. Once the servants had deposited the coffin and stepped away, the silence in the tent was complete, intense, like a concentration of the heat of this sunny autumn day, oppressively all about him.
He spoke first, standing, leaning over the coffin as tradition demanded, and addressing those gathered: talking waveringly of the role his uncle had played in his life, of how he had been aware of the greatness of the man only distantly, and had always treasured the closeness of his family relationship instead. It was a weak performance; the audience, military uniforms splashing a disconcerting quantity of colour about the usually bleached experience of a funeral, sat absolutely still.
Finally Stom fished a poem out of his back pocket. He had debated with himself about this, remembering only too well the stony response he had got at his co-father’s funeral. But in the end he had decided to read it anyway, as a personal communication between himself and the memory of his uncle, and also – perhaps – to offer his own social embarrassment on the altar of his guilt at his continuing grieflessness. He read aloud, one of Phanicles’ Rhum elegies, adapting the final line to the circumstances:
I was alone at the well.
I was doused in shadow and in deed.
My yoke lay on the ground, waiting.
I cannot say what I mean.
I was come upon.
Death has carried away my loved man, my family man.
The crowd of dignitaries, luminaries, military men and women did not react with any obvious discomfort at this reading of poetry. Neither were they visibly moved or touched by it. Their blank faces held a mirror up to the blankness in Polystom’s. He sat again, feeling only a weird, mystic disconnection from everything.
Then General Demus stood up, and delivered a rousing piece of military oratory. Cleonicles the hero! Little sung as a hero true, by temperament disinclined to seek public recognition for his work, and in some respects out of line with current military philosophy – nonetheless, he had done more than any man in the cosmos to help make the war on the Mudworld winnable, and winnable in as brief a time as possible. His innovations in Computational Devices alone marked him down as the greatest scientist and inventor the cosmos had ever seen; which was to say nothing of his work in the fields of natural history and cosmology. He
had personally raised a platoon of men from his own estate, and sent them to General Amynseis – General Demus’s esteemed predecessor as Ground Forces Commander, now resting in the realms of glory – and had done so without the usual fanfare and nonsense that so many people expected as their due for such recruitment. ‘He did it purely as an act of patriotism. His example stands before us! He was a great man! We shall not allow the weasly nobodies who struck him down to deflect us from our path!’
Had it been proper for a crowd to applaud at a funeral, this crowd would surely have applauded. It was a rousing performance indeed.
Count Meton spoke perhaps twenty words, wishing his friend glory in the next life, though he had, alive, always disavowed belief in such a place. But he deserved his place amongst the honoured dead. Then, the Count sat down again, red in the face – with emotion? With the effort of standing and speaking? A piercing musical note, vocal and metallic at once, wavered through the tent. The horn player was standing behind the raised tiers of seats. He played the melody line of the death-march from Erodeos’s Diepus, then he paused, and played it again. Servants appeared, lifted the coffin, and precessed out.
Afterwards, at the wake, both the General and the Count consoled Polystom in person, and assured him of the greatness of his departed uncle. The theatre of the whole experience moved Stom even further away from grief. All these implausible creatures, in their stagy, bizarre colours, moving to and fro. Everybody eating fine food. The warmth of the Autumn-Year sunshine. Stom thought to himself that the servants had carried his uncle’s body to the cold store in which meat was kept during the summer months. The refrigerating grumble of the store’s motor would lullaby the corpse for two months, until the marble mausoleum was finally constructed on the east bank of the Lacus Somniorum, and Cleonicles could finally be put to rest. It wasn’t that the funeral seemed premature to Polystom. It had certainly happened at the proper time. It was that it all seemed to relate to a different person than his uncle.