Valentine Pontifex m-3

by Robert Silverberg

  “Khitain! You won’t believe what I’ve brought back!”

  “Will I want to?” asked Yarmuz Khitain.

  The accessioning process, it seemed, had already begun: the entire staff, such as still remained, had turned out to transport Nayila’s animals in their boxes through the gate and off toward the receiving building, where they could be installed in holding cages until enough was understood about them to allow their release into one of the open habitat ranges. “Careful!” Nayila bellowed, as two men struggling with a massive container nearly let it fall on its side. “If that animal gets loose, we’re all going to be sorry—but you first of all!” Turning to Yarmuz Khitain, he said, “It’s a real horror show. Predators—all predators—teeth like knives, claws like razors—I’m damned if I know how I got back here alive. Half a dozen times I thought I was done for, and me not having even recorded any of this for the Register of Souls. What a waste that would have been, what a waste! But here I am. Come—you’ve got to see these things—!”

  A horror show, yes. All morning long, and on deep into the afternoon, Yarmuz Khitain found himself witness to a procession of the impossible and the hideous and the wholly unacceptable: freaks, monsters, ghastly anomalies.

  “These were running around on the outskirts of Mazadone,” said Nayila, indicating a pair of small furious snarling animals with fiery red eyes and three savagely sharp horns ten inches long rising from their foreheads. Yarmuz Khitain recognized them by their thick reddish fur as haiguses—but never had he seen a haigus with horns, nor any so determinedly vicious. “Nasty little killers,” Nayila said. “I watched them run down a poor blave that had gone wild, and kill it in five minutes by leaping up and goring it in the belly. I bagged them while they were feeding, and then this thing came down to finish off the carcass.” He pointed to a dark-winged canavong with a sinister black beak and a single glowering eye in the center of its distended forehead: an innocent scavenger mysteriously transformed into a thing out of a nightmare. “Have you ever seen anything so ugly?”

  “I would never want to see anything uglier,” said Yarmuz Khitain.

  “But you will. You will. Uglier, meaner, nastier—just watch what comes out of these crates.”

  Yarmuz Khitain was not sure he wanted to. He had spent all his life with animals—studying them, learning their ways, caring for them. Loving them, in a real sense of the word. But these—these—

  “And then look at this,” Nayila went on. “A miniature dhumkar, maybe a tenth the size of the standard model, and fifty times as quick. It isn’t content to sit there in the sand and poke around with its snout in search of its dinner. No, it’s an evil little fast-moving thing that comes right after you, and would sooner chew your foot off at the ankle than breathe. Or this: a manculain, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Of course. But there are no manculains in Zimroel.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, until I saw this fellow back of Velathys, along the mountain roads. Very similar to the manculains of Stoienzar, is it not? But with at least one difference.” He knelt beside the cage that held the rotund many-legged creature and made a deep rumbling sound at it. The manculain at once rumbled back and began menacingly to stir the long stiletto-like needles that sprouted all over its body, as though it intended to hurl them through the wire mesh at him. Nayila said, “It isn’t content with being covered with spines. The spines are poisonous. One scratch with them and your arm puffs up for a week. I know. I don’t know what would have happened if the spine got in any deeper, and I don’t want to find out. Do you?”

  Yarmuz Khitain shivered. It sickened him to think of these horrendous creatures taking up residence in the Park of Fabulous Beasts, which had been founded long ago as a refuge for those animals, most of them gentle and inoffensive, that had been driven close to extinction by the spread of civilization on Majipoor. Of course the park had a good many predators in its collection, and Yarmuz Khitain had never felt like offering apologies for them: they were the work of the Divine, after all, and if they found it necessary to kill for their meals it was not out of any innate malevolence that they did so. But these—these—

  These animals are evil, he thought. They ought to be destroyed.

  The thought astounded him. Nothing like it had ever crossed his mind before. Animals evil? How could animals be evil? He could say, I think this animal is very ugly, or,I think this animal is very dangerous, but evil? No. No, Animals are not capable of being evil, not even these. The evil has to reside elsewhere: in their creators. No, not even in them. They too have their reasons for setting these beasts loose upon the world, and the reason is not sheer malevolence for its own sake, unless I am greatly mistaken. Where then is the evil? The evil, Khitain told himself, is everywhere, a pervasive thing that slips and slides between the atoms of the air we breathe. It is a universal corruption in which we all participate. Except the animals.

  Except the animals.

  “How is it possible,” Yarmuz Khitain asked, “that the Metamorphs have the skill to breed such things?”

  “The Metamorphs have many skills we’ve never bothered to learn a thing about, it would appear. They’ve been sitting out there in Piurifayne concocting these animals quietly for years, building up their stock of them. Can you imagine what the place where they kept them all must have been like—a horror zoo, monsters only? And now they’ve been kind enough to share them with us.”

  “But can we be certain the animals come from Piurifayne?”

  “I traced the distribution vectors very carefully. The lines radiate outward from the region southwest of Ilirivoyne. This is Metamorph work, no doubt about that. It simply can’t happen that two or three dozen loathsome new kinds of animals would burst onto the scene in Zimroel all at the same time by spontaneous mutation. We know that we’re at war: these are weapons, Khitain.”

  The older man nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  “I’ve saved the worst for last. Come: look at these.”

  In a cage of closely woven metal mesh so fine that he was able to see through its walls, Khitain observed an agitated horde of small winged creatures fluttering angrily about, battering themselves against the sides of the cage, striking it furiously with their leathery black wings, falling back, rising again for another try. They were furry little things about eight inches long, with disproportionately large mouths and beady, glittering red eyes.

  “Dhiims,” said Nayila. “I captured them in a dwikka forest over by Borgax.”

  “Dhiims?” Khitain said hoarsely.

  “Dhiims, yes. Found them feeding on a couple of little forest-brethren that I suppose they’d killed—so busy eating they didn’t see me coming. I knocked them out with my collecting spray and gathered them up. A few of them woke up before I got them all in the box. I’m lucky still to have my fingers, Yarmuz.”

  “I know dhiims,” said Khitain. “They’re two inches long, half an inch wide. These are the size of rats.”

  “Yes. Rats that fly. Rats that eat flesh. Carnivorous giant dhiims, eh? Dhiims that don’t just nibble and nip, dhiims that can strip a forest-brother down to its bones in ten minutes. Aren’t they lovely? Imagine a swarm of them flying into Ni-moya. A million, two million—thick as mosquitos in the air. Sweeping down. Eating everything in their way. A new plague of locusts—flesh-eating locusts—”

  Khitain felt himself growing very calm. He had seen too much today. His mind was overloaded with horror.

  “They would make life very difficult,” he said mildly.

  “Yes. Very very difficult, eh? We’d need to dress in suits of armor.” Nayila laughed. “The dhiims are their masterpiece, Khitain. You don’t need bombs when you can launch deadly little flying rodents against your enemy. Eh? Eh?”

  Yarmuz Khitain made no reply. He stared at the cage of frenzied angry dhiims as though he were looking into a pit that reached down to the core of the world.

  From far away he heard the shouting begin: “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thalli
mon!”

  Nayila frowned, cocked an ear, strained to make out the words. “Thallimon? Is that what they’re yelling?”

  “Lord Thallimon,” said Khitain. “The new Coronal. The new new Coronal. He surfaced three days ago, and every night they have a big rally for him outside Nissimorn Prospect.”

  “There was a Thallimon who used to work here. Is this some relative of his?”

  “The same man,” Khitain said.

  Vingole Nayila looked stunned.

  “What? Six months ago he was sweeping dung out of zoo cages, and now he’s Coronal? Is it possible?”

  “Anybody can be Coronal now,” Yarmuz Khitain said placidly. “But only for a week or two, so it seems. Perhaps it will be your turn soon, Vingole.” He chuckled. “Or mine.”

  “How did this happen, Yarmuz?”

  Khitain shrugged. With a wide sweep of his hand he indicated Nayila’s newly collected animals, the snarling three-horned haigus, the dwarf dhumkar, the single-eyed canavong, the dhiims: everything bizarre and frightful, everything taut with dark hunger and rage. “How did any of this happen?” he asked. “If such strangenesses as these are loosed upon the world, why not make dung sweepers into Coronals? First jugglers, then dung sweepers, then zoologists, maybe. Well, why not? How does it sound to you? Vingole! Lord Vingole! All hail Lord Vingole!’”

  “Stop it, Yarmuz.”

  “You’ve been off in the forest with your dhiims and your manculains. I’ve had to watch what’s been happening here. I feel very tired, Vingole. I’ve seen too much.”

  “Lord Thallimon! Imagine!”

  “Lord this, Lord that, Lord whoever—a plague of Coronals all month, and a couple of Pontifexes too. They don’t last long. But let’s hope Thallimon does. At least he’s likely to protect the park,” said Khitain.

  “Against what?”

  “Mob attack. There are hungry people down there, and up here we continue to feed the animals. They tell me that agitators in the city are stirring people up to break into the park and butcher everything for meat.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Apparently they are.”

  “But these animals are priceless—irreplaceable—!”

  “Tell that to a starving man, Vingole,” said Khitain quietly.

  Nayila stared at him. “And do you really think this Lord Thallimon is going to hold back the mob, if they decide to attack the park?”

  “He worked here once. He knows the importance of what we have here. He must have had some love for the animals, don’t you think?”

  “He swept out the cages, Yarmuz.”

  “Even so—”

  “He may be hungry himself, Yarmuz.”

  “The situation is bad, but not that desperate. Not yet. And in any case what can be gained by eating a few scrawny sigimoins and dimilions and zampidoons? One meal, for a few hundred people, at such a cost to science?”

  “Mobs aren’t rational,” Nayila said. “And you overestimate your dung-sweeper Coronal, I suspect. He may have hated this place—hated his job, hated you, hated the animals. Also he may decide that there are political points to be made by leading his supporters up the hill for dinner. He knows how to get through the gates, doesn’t he?”

  “Why—I suppose—”

  “The whole staff does. Where the key-boxes are, how to neutralize the field so that you can pass through—”

  “He wouldn’t!”

  “He may, Yarmuz. Take measures. Arm your people.”

  “Arm them? With what? Do you think I keep weapons here?”

  “This place is unique. Once the animals perish, they’ll never be restored. You have a responsibility, Yarmuz.”

  From the distance—but not, Khitain thought, so distant as before—came the cry: “Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

  Nayila said, “Are they coming, do you think?”

  “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.”

  “Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

  “It sounds closer,” Nayila said.

  There was a commotion down at the far end of the room. One of the groundkeepers had come running in, breathless, wild-eyed, calling Khitain’s name. “Hundreds of people!” he cried. “Thousands! Heading toward Gimbeluc!”

  Khitain felt panic rising. He looked about at the members of his staff. “Check the gates. Make absolutely sure everything’s shut tight. Then start closing the inner gates— whatever animals are out in the field should be pushed as far to the northern end of the park as possible. They’ll have a better chance to hide in the woods back there. And—”

  “This is not the way,” Vingole Nayila said.

  “What else can we do? I have no weapons, Vingole. I have no weapons!”

  “I do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I risked my life a thousand times to collect the animals in this park. Especially the ones I brought in today. I intend to defend them.” He turned away from Yarmuz Khitain. “Here! Here, give me a hand with this cage!”

  “What are you doing, Vingole?”

  “Never mind. Go see after your gates.” Without waiting for help, Nayila began to shove the cage of dhiims onto the little floater-dolly on which it had been rolled into the building. Khitain suddenly comprehended what weapon it was that Nayila meant to use. He rushed forward, tugging at the younger man’s arm. Nayila easily pushed him aside, and, ignoring Khitain’s hoarse protests, guided the dolly out of the building.

  The invaders from the city, still roaring their leader’s name, sounded closer and closer. The park will be destroyed, Khitain thought, aghast. And yet—if Nayila truly intends—

  No. No. He rushed from the building, peered through the dusk, caught sight of Vingole Nayila far away, down by the east gate. The chanting was much louder now. “Thallimon! Thallimon!”

  Khitain saw the mob, spilling into the broad plaza on the far side of the gate, where each morning the public waited until the hour of opening arrived. That fantastic figure in weird red robes with white trim—that was Thallimon, was it not? Standing atop some sort of palanquin, waving his arms madly, urging the crowd on. The energy field surrounding the park would hold back a few people, or an animal or two, but it was not designed to withstand the thrust of a vast frenzied mob. One did not ordinarily have to worry about vast frenzied mobs here. But now—

  “Go back!” Nayila cried. “Stay away! I warn you!”

  “Thallimon! Thallimon!”

  “I warn you, keep out of here!”

  They paid no attention. They thundered forward like a herd of maddened bidlaks, charging without heeding anything before them. As Khitain watched in dismay, Nayila signaled to one of the gatemen, who briefly deactivated the energy barrier, long enough for Nayila to shove the cage of dhiims forward into the plaza, yank open the bolt that fastened its door, and dart back behind the safety of the hazy pink glow.

  “No,” Khitain muttered. “Not even for the sake of defending the park—no—no—”

  The dhiims streamed from their cage with such swiftness that one little animal blurred into the next, and they became an airborne river of golden fur and frantic black wings.

  They sped upward, thirty, forty feet, and then turned and swooped down with terrible force and implacable voracity, plunging into the vanguard of the mob as though they had not eaten in months. Those under attack did not seem at first to realize what was happening to them; they tried to sweep the dhiims away with irritated backhand swipes, as one might try to sweep away annoying insects. But the dhiims would not be swept away so easily. They dived and struck and tore away strips of flesh, and flew upward to devour their meat in mid-air, and came swooping down again. The new Lord Thallimon, spurting blood from a dozen wounds, tumbled from his palanquin and went sprawling to the ground. The dhiims closed in, returning to those in the front line who had already been wounded, and slicing at them again and again, burrowing deep, twisting and tugging at strands of exposed muscle and the tenderer tissues beneath them. “No,” said Khitain over and o
ver, from his vantage point behind the gate. “No. No. No.” The furious little creatures were merciless. The mob was in flight, people screaming, running in all directions, a chaos of colliding bodies as they sought to find the road back down to Ni-moya, and those who had fallen lay in scarlet pools as the dhiims dived and dived and dived again. Some had been laid bare to the bone—mere rags and scraps of flesh remaining, and that too being stripped away. Khitain heard sobbing; and only after a moment realized that it was his own.

  Then it was all over. A strange silence settled over the plaza. The mob had fled; the victims on the pavement no longer moaned; the dhiims, sated, hovered briefly over the scene, wings whirring, and then rose one by one into the night and flew off, the Divine only knew where.

  Yarmuz Khitain, trembling, shaken, walked slowly away from the gate. The park was saved. The park was saved. Turning, he looked toward Vingole Nayila, who stood like an avenging angel with his arms outspread and his eyes blazing. “You should not have done that,” Khitain said in a voice so choked with shock and loathing that he could barely get the words out.

  “They would have destroyed the park.”

  “Yes, the park is saved. But look—look—”

  Nayila shrugged. “I warned them. How could I let them destroy all we have built here, just to have a little fresh meat?”

  “You should not have done it, all the same.”

  “You think so? I have no regrets, Yarmuz. Not one.” He considered that a moment. “Ah: there is one. I wish I had had time to put a few of the dhiims aside, for our collection. But there was no time, and they are all far away by now, and I have no wish to go back to Borgax and look for others. I regret nothing else, Yarmuz. And I had no choice but to turn them loose. They have saved the park. How could we have let those madmen destroy it? How, Yarmuz? How?”