A Storm of Wings v-2

by M. John Harrison

  'It isn't yet four. He never comes sooner than four.'

  'He seems late this afternoon.'

  As the clerestory dimmed, weighting the upper air with shadows, and the chocolate cooled in its china cups, the flames in the hearth achieved a transitory, phthisic prominence; and, one by one, like the compartments of a dream, the five false windows of the throne-room were filled with a grey and tremulous glow. Against this fitful illumination moved the silhouettes ofCellur and the Queen, nodding murmurous figures of a shadow play. The bird lord's success in controlling the windows – through which it was possible to see sometimes long lines of insects moving across an unknown terrain – had.been only partial. He could turn them neither on nor off. And though three out of five of them could lately be compelled to show some recognizable part of the Empire, how these views were selected was not clear to him. Since coming here he had sought:

  Contact with his own machines beneath the estuary at Lendalfoot;

  Views of St Elmo Buffin's fleet;

  Some intimation of the circumstances in which Horn-wrack and his charges now found themselves.

  Luck had not been with him. This was now to change, but not in a way he could have foreseen.

  The windows were arranged in a high narrow bay which resembled the stern lights of an old ship. The glow in them grew gelid and shifty. In the third pane from the left (for two hundred years prior to Methven's reign it had depicted the same view, becoming known as the 'Pane ofiars'and giving rise to a common proverb) it condensed into three or four muculent lumps, drifting like fish in a polluted tank. After a moment this activity had spread to the four other panes, and a further refining or condensation had revealed the lumps to. be the salient features of five deformed heads – or five images of the same head (two of them upside down). The head was in pain. A dark rubbery device had been forced over its nose and mouth. The straps securing this gag or mask cut deeply into the plump flesh of its cheeks, which was of a mouldy, greenish-white colour patched with silvery acne. Whether the expressions that contorted the visible features reflected hope or fatalism, anger or panic, it was impossible to tell. Its yes, though watery, were urgent.

  For some minutes this apparition struggled silent and unnoticed behind the glass as though trying to escape into the throne-room. A psychic gulf of such vastness separated spectre from substance that it seemed to be maintained in

  focus only by its own desperation; by some debilitating and debasing act ofwill. It could see Cellur and the Queen and it was trying to speak. Eventually it whispered a little, a syllable like a trickle of vomit in a voice quite at odds with the amount of effort needed to produce it.

  Gorb, it said.

  Its eyes widened triumphantly. Gorb. Cellur and the Queen murmured on. The cups clinked, the day darkened and slipped inevitably into night; thin blue flames danced in the hearth, leaving delicate indelible images on the surface of the eye.

  Gorb.

  The head flung itself about, its hidden mouth gaping, until

  'GORB!'

  fell into the room like a corpse.

  The windows flickered dementedly, shuffling views of the head like Fat Mam Etteilla shuffling the trumps. Cellur jumped to his feet, his cloak knocking the china on to the floor. 'It sees us! At last the windows have come to their full function!'(This was a guess: he was still in the dark.) Five panes showed the awful mutated face of the ancient airboatman – left profile, right threequarter profile. They showed sudden random close-ups of individual features – an ear, an eye, the mask with its proliferating tubes and cillia. Pentadic, huge, it winked down into the throne-room. 'Is it the man from the Moon?''Speak!'

  Speak?.

  All this time he has been struggling to speak!

  Now at last he masters the language – Benedict Paucemanly with his message from a white and distant planet:

  'Gorb,'he said. 'Fonderia diferro in Venezia … mi god guy… non-articulated constituent elements… Here lie I in the shadows of the veinous manna, burrowed into the absolute ABRACADAVER of the Earth… Earth! – all things are one to the Earth… mi god guy im all swole up… Fear deat hftom the air!'

  He giggled weakly and shook his head. 'It's simpler than that.'He tried again. 'In the Time of Bone, in the Time of Dreams, when, on the far side of the Moon. I lay like a cheese, blue-veined and with a loop of blue wire for a brain… No. Simpler than that, too -'Look, as a young man I flew to the Moon. I would not do such a thing now. Something happened to me there, some transformation peculiar to the airs of that sad planet, and I fell asleep. I fell into a rigor, sank without trace into a trance in which I perceived for a hundred years the singing latticework of my own brain. It was a gift, do you see, or a punishment. (I no longer care which, though the question perplexed me then for its metaphysical implications if nothing else.) There, I was no longer a man at all but a theory, I was a thought received with the clarity of a sensation – hard, complex, resonant with proof. I was a crystal-set, and I thought that I could hear the stars.

  'I lay on a marble slab in a paved garden among formal perspectives, my naked body citronised by the light falling down from space. At my side a single rose grew like an alum cyst on a long stem. Sometimes it emitted a quiet but intolerably beautiful melody comprising four or five notes on a vanished musical scale. The frozen air filled my mouth. I soon forgot my ship, the Saucy Sal. I communicated with the spare, bony winds of that region, blowing in from between the stars. The Moon is a strange place. Up there, shadows fall motionless and subtly awry. It is a nexus. It was changed by many races who tried to come to Earth (or to leave it) during the long downfall of the Afternoon Cultures. It is a listening ear. It is an outpost.'

  In the throne-room hearth the small blue flames were exchanged mysteriously for a heap of orange embers. Dark seeped in through the clerestory windows. The dwarf did not come. Outside, the evening wind had brought more snow into the numbed city, hurrying it along as a guide hurries tourists down the picturesque but dangerous streets of some revolution-torn capital. (Streets that would turn later into black and silver geometrical proofs under the sovereign influence of the moonlight.) Benedict Paucemanly whispered like the waves on a distant beach, sometimes audible, sometimes not. He suffered frequent bouts of aphasia. Obscenities, mingled with a dubious lyricism, still made up much of his vocabulary. He still confused the grammar of a dozen old languages with that of a score of invented ones. But the backbone of his monologue was comprehensible. Cellur and the Queen, hypnotised by his awful pentadic image, listened to it and later reported it:

  'The Moon, or some secret relic of the Afternoon which still inhabits it, had captured the aviator on his arrival and made him into a sort of ear by which to listen to the populated universe (though “listen” is perhaps not the word to use). This, we learnt from him, had been a common practice at one time. He was paralysed and placed on a slab. Messages poured through him like a clear fluid. Around him rows of other slabs diminished into the distance, and on them he could see the empty shells of other “ears” abandoned millenia ago when their long sleep turned finally into death. Many of the bodies were broken; they were like hollow porcelain figurines. He found himself able to eavesdrop on the transmissions passing through him, but it was like eavesdropping on Babel. The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of “reality”. These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense-organs, evolutionary beginnings and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real; and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable, oneiric, hard to achieve, like
the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision…

  'Ten thousand sentient races populate the stars. All their mad jargons lace the aether. Paucemanly listened, but was unable to answer them. “All were distant, dreadfully distant. Their voices were a fading, incomprehensible whisper; a sickening rumour of otherness.” Thus he lay there on his catafalque: far enough from the human Umwelt to perceive the myriad realities of the cosmos; not far enough to be able to forget his own humanity. This state persisted for a hundred years or a little less, until new, strong transmissions invaded local space.

  'At first, new voices sang to him. This was the first feathery touch of their spiritual envelope or atmosphere. Latterly, he saw them, as a great filmy wing stretched across the cruel lunar meridian. Closer, they were a vast wave. He was soon inundated, sodden with their new “reality”. All other transmissions ceased. The rose which had bloomed beside his slab shattered with a sound of unearthly grief. A fine tracery of cracks appeared in the slab itself. The white gardens fell to dust around him. He was free. In that moment he lost his humanity for good. (But could not as yet attain any other form. The flesh has an inertia.) His.broadcasts to the Earth were begun too late: by then, the tenuous wave-fronts of the new consciousness had brushed the Pastel City, and in its gutters and alleyways and great Houses was conceived the “Sign of the Locust” – immaculate and ravishing, a philosophy like a single drop of poison at the centre of a curved mirror, an imperfect intuition of the alien Umwelt and of its implications for our own; the first infection of the human reality!

  'They were insects long ago. They need no vehicles, but slip like a swarm of locusts down the faults and cleavage zones of space (which they conceive of as an extensive empty wasteland littered with the stony rubbish of planets and echoing with their own dry stridulations). Their motives are unclear: instinct – or something resembling it – compels them to search the continuum endlessly for some solution they cannot even define to themselves. Now, that cold passion is in ruins, and they are trying to live on the Earth. They were never meant to come down here and build a city. It is their tragedy as much as ours.

  'This was how the great aviator put it to us. Out of confusion he had offered to lead them to the Earth. (Who can blame him? – woken from apparent death on the far side of the Moon, he had found himself neither insect nor human nor anything he had once been! They were all he had to cling to.) Out of a greater confusion they had followed him. Now – totem or deity or mere interpreter – he was encysted at the heart of their new city, passing his immobile hours in the blue mosaic flicker of his half insectile dreams, involuntary amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt.

  “'Already it is too late for human consciousness ever to fully repossess the World; the new dream pours out like mist to envelope and mutate it.” Yet the swarm had been contaminated in its turn: “Where once it boasted the horny membranes of the locust, the mantis or the wasp, now it imagines flesh, skin, hair. It regards itself with horror. It is losing the struggle to maintain its inner vision, its hermetic certainty in the face of the void.'

  'In the grip of this perceptual stalemate the very substance of the planet had begun to fade, stretch and tear, like an old net curtain at a window in the Boulevard Auss-man. If it continued, the conflict between Man and Insect would become nothing more than a jumble of meaningless shadowy events pivoting round a decaying point in space and time. In areas of major confrontation, matter, in its attempts to accommodate both “realities”, was already distorting, drifting into new forms and miscegenations. New ranges of mountains had appeared in the north; coastlines had taken on new forms, plastic, curious, undependable, draped with a new vegetation which had come up out of the sea along the flight-paths of the insects and now assumed a grey, etiolated, mucoid transparency; vast hallucinatory displays filled the skies at night, great shifting modular curtains like the view from a mosaic eye. All this had been added to the minor symptoms already observed, the Sign of the Locust, the rains of lights. In addition, the conflict of two dreams had woken older dreams: the factories of the Afternoon rebuilt themselves fragmentarily in the Great Wastes, producing clouds of corrosive vapour; strangely-dressed figures speaking ancient languages were posturing in the streets of Lendalfoot and Duirinish.

  “'The World,” whispered Benedict Paucemanly, “is desperately trying to remember itself… blork… nomadacris septemfasciata!. .. what a lovely bit of meat…

  Embers settled in the hearth. The doors of the throne-room rattled suddenly, their brass motifs of coelacanths and mermen shifting uneasily in the bluish gloom, and were still. It was the wind, perhaps; or perhaps something had fallen against them. From the passage outside was heard briefly an indistinct groaning; a dull clamour far off; silence. Something was happening out there, but those within were captivated by the wavering pentadic spectre of the old airman, his voice faint and his flesh tortured by the mask which, he explained, was now his sole means of perceiving the 'real', the human world. Methvet Nian said nothing, but only watched in horror and compassion the nodding of that wounded, debased head; and gently shook her own, while Cellur the birdmaker tugged his robe tighter round his thin chest and shivered. His head ached with the cold, and with the effort of following that faded cloacal whisper. He had recognized in the spectre's antics a certain self-consciousness. There was an archness in its winks and gross nods; the narcissism of the confessional informed its breakings of wind.

  'What must we do, then?'he asked, a little impatiently.

  Paucemanly gave a loud belch. His image swam, retreated, and was replaced by something quite new: great dragonflies, jewelled and crippled, dragged themselves across the shivering panes while behind them the landscape heaved and humped itself into shapes nascent and organic. 'They mutate and die in the new vapours of Earth: but their breeding cells are full.'Wingless and melting, the insects were swallowed by the curious hills about them. These in turn folded back to reveal a face, brown and bony-looking like the stripped and varnished skull of a horse into which had been inserted two half-pomegranates for eyes. It stared into the throne-room. 'Oops,'it said. 'Green, brown, testing. Hello?'Paucemanly reappeared in a glutinous yellow fog, looking puzzled. 'Whatever emerges from them,'he went on, 'will wrest the world to its own purposes… testing…

  Septemfasciata .…'A high fluting sound came out of the windows. One of them shattered. Glass fell into the room. Nothing was revealed except a dusty hole which later proved to contain only some gold filaments and a few small bones. (Cellur, though, winced away as if he expected some alien limb to reach out of it.)

  In the remaining panes a tarry smoke obscured intermittently the greenish image of the airman. A clump of fat sinister fingers – his own – appeared, feeling their way over his face as if trying to remember it from some previous encounter. They rested thoughtfully on the mask; then with a quick, predatory motion clutched it by the straps and tugged it oW Vomit sprayed from the defaced features beneath. Paucemanly vanished instantly.

  'Is the world ending, then?'asked Cellur.

  'I want only death,'came the answer, a distant whisper clogged with self-pity and guilt. 'A hundred years in the Moon! Only death.'

  In the windows appeared a series of faded pictures of ordinary insects, the dry husks ofwasps crushed underfoot in an attic long ago, and hawkmoths like flower-pressings in an old book. A wind stirred them. They darkened one by one until there was nothing left at all. Cellur stood for a long time in the gloom, thinking of nothing. He could not make himself say anything to the Queen.

  The dwarf came in with his axe in one hand and a bundle of thin shiny steel rods in the other. He was out of breath and there was blood in his hair. He drank his lukewarm chamomile with a grimace. When he noticed the dark windows and broken glass he nodded grimly. 'They had the signal to pass the gates half an hour ago,'he said. 'We're done for in here.'

  He dropped the steel rods on the floor and, with a packet of tools he took from under his jerkin, set about assembling them. It was qu
ick work. Soon he had in front of him a half-human skeleton ten or eleven feet tall – his famous 'mechanical wife', grubbed up long ago from some frigid desert in the far North. It was quiet in the room as he coupled its metal bones. Nevertheless he paused every so often to tilt his head on one side and listen; and at one point said casually: 'Someone will have to bolt the doors. I can't reach them, and the lads out there won't last much longer.'(Cellur did not answer. Little motes of blue light like luminous beetles had begun to spill from the shattered window. They fell faster and faster, like rain. They filled the room with a queer glow which lit the white cheek of Methvet Nian as she sat staring silently at nothing.)

  A distant shout filtered through from the beleagured outer corridors. The whole palace seemed to shudder. The dwarf scratched his head. After a long life his understanding of such situations was preternatural. Steel scraped on steel, on stone, as he hurriedly spread the mechanical wife on the floor so that its legs stuck straight out and its arms were set close to its sides. He did something to it until it hummed and sent up motes of its own. Then he lowered himself down so that he lay limb for limb on its cold bones. A harness fastened his upper body into its flaring ribcage; its jawless skull he hinged forward to fit over his head like a helmet. 'It is my cold companion, that I thought I would never embrace again,'he murmured. Certain levers enabled him to control it, but for the moment he lay still in the curious blue light, performing some act of memory. Ozone, and a low buzzing, filled the air. The skeleton snapped its fingers inadroitly. It shivered and stretched, and of its own accord made grasping motions; but when he moved the levers at last, it failed to respond.

  Something threw itself with a crash against the throne-room doors.