by Ron Miller
“Only a little. Needless to say, many of them only want to go out of sheer curiosity or a sense of adventure, while their scientific specialties are entirely inappropriate: ornithologists, oceanographers, topologists, that sort of thing. Of the remainder, I think that the only fair thing to do is to draw lots, I suppose. Not that that will make everyone happy.”
“Too bad,” she said unsympathetically.
“Not everyone is happy now,” he added, “with the idea that one of the three spaces available is being taken by you.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps it might not be better if a scientist goes in my place . . . ”
“Oh no, no, nonono, not at all!” the professor protested. “The whole idea was, after all, yours in the beginning . . . ”
“It was only a facetious suggestion . . . ”
“ . . . and, of course, without your influence I doubt that the king would have gone so far with our financing, which has gone so unfortunately beyond the original budget. For that, if for no other reason, you have as much right as anyone else to go. And we mustn’t underestimate or underappreciate the support we have gotten from the public! It seems that it is of the opinion that the lovely young princess is going to be the sole passenger. If you dropped out, the Academy would be stormed!”
“You exaggerate.”
“There would be delay, without doubt, and we cannot allow even a moment’s delay. No, no, I won’t hear of your not going.”
“All right, all right, forget it,” the princess replied a little testily and the professor looked at her sharply.
“My dear young friend,” he said, “whatever has been the matter with you lately?”
“I’ve been fine.”
“I must disagree,” he said kindly, sitting down on the edge of the one of the couches. “Although psychiatry could not be further removed from my field, there’s no mystery that something is troubling you. Your emotions are simply too transparent. Is it Gyven?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She sat on the opposite couch, placed her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in the palms of her hands. “I really don’t know, Professor; I’ve felt so . . . lost lately, so confused, so useless. I’ve been walking around in a fog, not knowing what to do, what I’m doing or what I’m going to do. Nor even what questions to ask. Nothing seems to really interest me; at the same time, I’m restless and bored.”
“And you miss Gyven?”
“Of course I do. No, I take that back. I’m not even sure of that any more. Do you know, I haven’t even thought much about him these last few days? Maybe not even for the last few weeks. I don’t remember how much I was thinking of him even when he was here and I don’t know if I feel bad about it. Is that wrong?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it wouldn’t be if you had someone else to think about.”
“But wouldn’t that be more wrong? I still love Gyven and even if I didn’t, I still care about him very much. He’s done nothing intentionally to hurt me . . . ”
“Except to ignore you?”
“Well, yes, but I don’t think that he meant that to hurt me.”
“Look here, Princess,” Wittenoom said, his long body folding onto the couch next to her like a carpenter’s rule, “may I tell you what I think?”
“Of course you can.”
“I believe that you may have outgrown Gyven. He was exactly what you needed at the time you needed him. And he helped you become much of what you are, but in doing so he also changed you, and in changing you he made himself obsolete. Gyven was like the training wheels on the bicycle of your life.”
“But it seems so unfair to him! It’s as though I’ve used him and am tossing him aside.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think that the situation is anything at all as calculatingly cold-blooded as that. No. You haven’t cold-heartedly cast him to the wayside, you have only weaned yourself from your need for Gyven, which of course doesn’t mean that you don’t need somebody. Everyone does. Even a misanthrope at least needs someone if only to have someone to hate. It is a rare and fortunate individual who discovers just one, single person who fills all of their needs all of their life.”
“Have you?”
“I did once.”
“I’m sorry!” said Bronwyn, instantly contrite, “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No, it’s all right. I may not be a very good example, I don’t know. My . . . person . . . was so overflowing of everything that I ever needed that even though she’s been gone for many, many years she still continues to satisfy and help me.” For the briefest moment, the text of the only love poem he had ever written passed blurrily before the professor’s myopic eyes . . .
O sweet agglomeration of cells
In whom a summary beauty dwells,
O rarer much are you to me
Than globule animalculæ!
Come, come, be mine, and we will tread
Where tortuous fungi never spread.
Then will the fever of our bliss
Destroy bacilli in our kiss.
. . . as though he were seeing the meticulously-scrivened paper itself. His Great Love had never replied and, in fact, he had never seen her since.
“Anyway, it’s unfair to yourself to be compared with me,” he continued as he squeezed his eyes to clear his vision. “We’re a generation apart, if for no other reason. My time of change, of mutability, of uncertainty and doubt is long past. You are still in the midst of your plasticity, like a blob of molten glass just removed from the furnace. Who knows what that blob will become? A work of art? A pane of window glass? A paperweight? The lens of a telescope? It depends not entirely upon the quality of the glass itself, but also upon the artisan into whose hands it falls. You are still very much potentiality. You still need the influences of other people, different people, as many different people as possible, as your needs evolve and you yourself as a result become different. You have the advantage over the inanimate and mindless blob of molten glass in being able to pick and choose your artisans. But you must not fear that you are being selfish or exploitative. As all of these people touch your life and help to mold it, so you too alter theirs. You are just obeying something like the First Law of Thermodynamics, or perhaps the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Something like that. Gyven is no more the same man you first met, or even the man he was six months ago, than you are the same woman he first knew. Remember, he had become an almost mindless, colorless, inhuman creature under the dubious care of the Kobolds. Look at him now! You have not so much grown away from him as the both of you may have simply grown apart, rebounding like a pair of colliding masses, with altered energy and direction, each taking something from the other. You’ve done nothing more than become two distinct personalities. Perhaps you were never destined to grow into one being. But if that’s so, then it’s as good for him as it is for you.
“It’s possible, too,” he added by way of consolation, “that Gyven is going through metamorphoses of his own and he is receding from you faster than you are receding from him. And it’s even possible, if human development can be subjected to the laws of celestial mechanics, that your orbits will again intersect, like the shards of a shattered asteroid or disintegrated comet.”
“I suppose you may be right,” said Bronwyn, perversely unwilling to mitigate her misery or guilt. “But what if Gyven doesn’t return before we leave? What if he comes back and discovers that I’m gone . . . that I’m not even on the planet any longer?”
“You could leave him a note.”
When the scientist and the princess returned to the Academy, the former discovered a heavy parcel awaiting him at the concierge’s desk. He signed the form offered by the impatiently waiting delivery boy while Bronwyn struggled to carry the package into Wittenoom’s office. It was a small cube, wrapped in brown paper and coarse twine, scarcely eight inches on each side, but, as the princess set it onto the desk with a thump, she remarked on its disproportionate mass.
“It must weigh fifty pounds!” she said
, as the professor entered, closing the door behind him. “Where’s it from?” he asked and she examined the stamps, cancellations and seals that plastered almost every one of the cube’s three hundred and eighty-four square inches of surface. “Great Musrum!” she exclaimed, “it’s from the Londeacan consulate in Spondula!”
“Spondula? The Spondula in Ibraila? What could possibly be in it? Who could it be from?”
While the professor speculated, Bronwyn bent her energies more practically. She snipped the heavy twine with a scissors and tore away the paper, of which there were two or three individual layers.
“I hate people who wrap packages like this. If they didn’t want us to get it open, why did they send it in the first place?”
“Why, it’s from Professor Melnikov!” exclaimed Wittenoom, who had been examining the discarded wrapping. “Whatever is he sending me anything for? He’s an archeologist, which is not my field at all, to say nothing of the fact that the man has been out of touch with the Academy for a year, off in the midst of deserts looking for lost cities and whatnot. Haven’t been able to read his reports: they’re boring as hell, as you might imagine. Dry as dust, in fact! Ha! Ha!”
“Haha, yourself,” replied the princess. “Look at this!” She had pulled a little tissue-wrapped object from the center of its nest of excelsior. It was evidently massive, in spite of its small size, vaguely cubical and scarcely four inches on a side, and she had to use both hands to lift it from the box. She dropped it with a thud to the tabletop and, tearing the tissue away, revealed a dully-gleaming yellow lump.
“Is it what it looks like?” she asked.
“It looks like gold.”
“I think that it is gold. What else is that color and weighs so much?”
“Nothing that I can think of. What are we supposed to make of this? It’s very nice of Professor Melnikov to send this to me, but it seems a little extravagant for someone I scarcely know.”
“Perhaps there’s a letter or note.” She dug around in the excelsior and did finally excavate a dirty little envelope bearing the Academy’s seal and Professor Wittenoom’s name inscribed in a spiky, scrawling hand. She handed it to him and he tore it open, pulling from it a small card.
“What does it say?” she asked, craning her neck to see over his arm.
“Not much, I’m afraid. I recall Melnikov as being somewhat taciturn, a recollection whose accuracy this note upholds.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What does it say?”
“Ah! Yes. Hmm. Only this: ‘My dear Wittenoom,’ he begins with characteristic informality, I see, ‘My dear Wittenoom, Thought that you and your gang of halfwits might be able to make something of this. Found in fresh crater not far from where I’m excavating, near Musrumforsaken village of Wa-Wa-something-or-other. Apparently secondary fall accompanying much larger meteorite that fell about hundred miles further east. Didn’t see impact, but heard and saw dust cloud. Have no idea why gold would be dropping out of the sky, but for Musrum’s and my own sake I daren’t let any of the primitives here think that’s what’s happening, as you may or may not be able to imagine. Use it as paperweight or, more likely, fund more of those harebrained crackpots of yours. Sincerely, R. R. Melnikov.’”
“No wonder it weighs fifty pounds,” commented the princess, “It really is gold.”
“I’ve never heard of golden meteorites before,” replied the professor, “but then, meteoritics is somewhat out of my field.”
“People would go out of their minds if they thought that gold was falling out of the sky!”
“It’d certainly be dangerous. You’ve seen for yourself how massive the element is. That small specimen alone could destroy a house if it struck at the speed of the average aerolith!”
“You know, a thought has just occured to me.”
“What might that be, my dear?”
“You’ve told me that the breakup of the little moon is causing an increase in meteor showers?”
“Yes?”
“What if this meteor that fell in Ibraila is one of those meteors? One of the pieces of the little moon?”
“It may very well be. In fact, it’s most likely.”
“Well, then, if that’s so, or if it’s even possible, why, wouldn’t that mean that the moon itself is made of gold?”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOURI
The next time I get the urge to go to Spondula, grumbled Rykkla, I’ll talk myself out of it.
She had been on a road, a very dusty, rutted, potholed road, as corrugated as a washboard, as pitted as her captors’ faces, for only two days, though she would have argued persuasively that it had been much longer. She would have been wrong, of course, but in fairness an allowance must be made for subjective experience. She was surrounded by a company of ugly, fearsomely-competent-looking soldiers under the command of a supremely ugly man who looked dangerous enough to explode from a sheer superabundance of malignity. For all she knew, and suspected, advancement in the Ibrailan army was based solely upon the distance one could insinuate existed between oneself and humanity. Oddly, the officer seemed to be in his turn under the orders of a man neither particularly ugly nor particularly dangerous-looking. This person looked more like a elderly weasel, one ill-preserved by an amateur taxidermist, shriveled and wizened, with little bits of stuffing leaking through seams here and there, who had fluttered around what was to have been Rykkla’s funeral pyre, waving his skinny hands and piping orders in a reedy, high-pitched voice, like an outraged grandmother or a Punch-and-Judy man. The surly and disappointed villagers cowed beneath his wrath, even unto the burly thugs who had manhandled Rykkla. Meanwhile, the armed men who accompanied him untied the three-quarter-suffocated girl and helped her as she staggered down the still-smoldering pile of wood.
The weasel had turned to her, wringing his hands obsequiously after she had taken the long robe he offered, and said, surprisingly, “Miss Woxen, I presume?” When she assented, he introduced himself as Dubar ak-Poom, chamberlain of the court of the Baudad Alcatode, whose sincerely heartfelt apologies he offered, along with, by way of modest and insufficient restitution, the eradication of the village and all of its inhabitants.
“That won’t be necessary,” she replied, her voice momentarily muffled by the folds of the singed and still-smoking robe as she pulled it over her head. Her dark, hawkish face, scowling above the striped desert garment, made her look far more like an Ibrailan native than she would ever have cared to know. She was as disturbed by the eagerness of the man’s suggestion as by the appearance of sincere disappointment on his shriveled face. Had it not looked like it would have pleased him so much, she might have assented.
“We should at least punish those particular individuals responsible for your ill-treatment, Miss Woxen, don’t you think?”
“I’d just like to get out of here, if you don’t mind.”
“We should execute one,” he whined. “At least one, for discipline’s sake.”
“Look here, ak-Poom,” she said, suddenly serious, “there’s a friend of mine that the villagers left up there in a crater. He was hurt. For all I know he may be dying; I’m sure he must be. Can’t we go look for him?”
“They tried to kill your friend?”
“They stoned him and pushed him into the crater.”
“If they killed him, shouldn’t some of them be destroyed, then? It’d be well within the letter of the law, really, you know. And the spirit of the law certainly demands it.”
“Look, I really don’t care what you do with these miserable people . . . they’re your problem, not mine; I’m not a citizen, thank Musrum, of this benighted country. All I want to do is find my friend and get out of here.”
“Where did you say this odious crime took place?”
“Up there,” she replied, pointing to the rim of the distant excavation.
“I’ll send some of my men with you,” ak-Poon agreed, grudgingly, “they’ll help search for y
our friend.”
Six of the chamberlain’s soldiers accompanied Rykkla back up the rubbly slope, where they discovered no sign of the big man. The interior of the bowl-shaped depression was lined with pulverized stone and rocks, none larger than Rykkla’s fist. There certainly was nothing as large as Thud, who would have stood out like a hogshead in a room full of thimbles. Nevertheless, she searched until Chamberlain ak-Poom began to pipe shrilly from the base of the crater rim and, in turn, his men began to insist that she abandon her search. She went with them, relunctantly, having already admitted to herself that her hopes were groundless.
As she now jounced along the road to Spondula, Rykkla wondered: If Thud’s body wasn’t in the crater, then where is it? He’s obviously either dead or alive; if dead, there should have been a body; if alive, then where could he have gone? And if he is gone, why hasn’t he come to me? To that latter question she had no reply, but the further she rode from the crater, the further she knew she was retreating from any possible answer.
The spires and domes of Spondula solidified from the horizon’s wavering mirages like crystals forming from a supersaturated solution just after noon on the third day. As she grew closer, Rykkla relunctantly admitted to herself that it was not an unattractive sight, though even more attractive would be her first sight of Spondula harbor, which would be filled to the brim with ships bound for anywhere at all. As the caravan crested the last low hill before the city gates, she caught a tantalizing glimpse of the crowded quays and sparkling pale blue sea beyond. The city was built in the midst of the Spondula River delta, which spread its dazzling lacery beneath the hovering sun, and, just for a disturbing moment, the capital looked like a patient spider squatting in its dew-jeweled web.
The capital, close up, was as dry, dusty and vaguely threadbare as the rest of Ibraila, but for all of that it was no less glamorous or seductive. A sense of immense history oozed from every crack and crevice, like oil from an overburdened barrel. Rykkla could not help but feel her torpid spirits being stirred, like the bitter leaves at the bottom of a cup of tea. Spondula, for all that it was the capital of a country she had with good reason grown to find repellent, still had the power to recall the thousand faerie tales that were set among its mosaic towers, labyrinthine palaces, and domes decorated and gilded like a basketful of St. Wladimir’s Festival eggs. There was the imposing bulk of the Great Cathedral of Bujoldipoor, with its graceful spires and pretty Ibrailan fountain (though now dry and deprived of its elegant roof); the National Perdusium that preserved records from the dawn of history itself, that no human had looked at in centuries; the sprawling University with its hundreds of sequestered scholars each spending his entire life ruminating on a single thought (though some of the more progressive savants had taken to recording their philosophies, the older conservatives strove for that hallowed ideal where they would die upon arriving at their one Great Thought, before being tempted to utter so much as a single word of it). The city’s narrow, dirty, dog-infested and interminably convoluted streets were packed with throngs of noisy and noisome people who seemed to be doing nothing more useful or purposeful than milling and shouting. Natives of every outlying province as well as foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; dandies and frontiersmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; fortune-hunters, gold-hunters, game-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, men-hunters and women-hunters; truth-hunters and hunters after these hunters. Splendid ladies in silk, beautiful girls in rags and barefoot harridans; keen-eyed traders from the North and philosophers from the East; Ibrailan, Tamlaghtan, Peigambarese, Londeacans, Fezzarans, Mostazans, Udskayans and races and costumes and languages that Rykkla did not recognize. There were Udskayan traders with their heads stuck through holes in ragged blankets; there were aristocratic idiots trying to attract the female of their species; there were powerful-looking Mostazan boatmen and tobacco-colored planters from the Ibrailan border mountains. There were drab, ascetic Musrumic priests and jeweled, fat Musrumic bishops; soldiers in full regimentals and mercenaries in an amalgam of uniforms; there were slaves of every color and sex; jesters, mourners, teetotalers and drunkards, reformers and blackguards; fashionable Smerdenites and old-fashioned Doondners, Spôn-Rapidans and bulging Bool Bluffners, green-painted Splun-folk and startling Hideho People; and ten thousand filthy, naked children that scuttled underfoot like sandfleas. There were vendors of all kinds selling products of all kinds from shops, stalls, pushcarts, baskets, trays, urns, jars and barrels; from the middle of the road, from beneath patterned, patched awnings, from blankets and cloths spread at the foot of some crumbling, stuccoed wall or another. There were all manner of sweetmeats, piles of gourds, Smïybla melons, Puhnakha raisins, contrasting with the perfume vendors, bead, hardware, pottery and rug sellers. It was only a short time before Rykkla was caught up in the color and busyness of it all and forgot completely, or at least overlooked, the underlying seediness and hopelessness and Spondula gradually regained its old Romance, like a decrepit, alcoholic actor donning one of his ancient, ill-fitting, threadbare costumes in a pathetic effort to one last time hear an ovation that would never come.