“That will do, if it’s strong enough. What sort of ointments do you have?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. A moment later she was assisting me in peeling the gauze away from my wounds, bathing them in mescat, and applying a perfumed unguent. She gagged several times, but her fingers were tender and careful.
“So,” I said as I wrapped myself up again, “this…sleep…of which you speak…you undergo it willingly when the time comes?”
“Would a phylite be willing to let decay sneak up on her? Would she be so selfish?”
“Well, but—how old are you?”
“Ah, you are coarse! Did I not tell you that I would sleep sweetly soon? And am I not an elusid?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She sniffed. “I’m one year less than forty.”
“Forty!” I cried. “Why, I wouldn’t have thought you past sixteen!”
The girl—I couldn’t think of her otherwise—made a face. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said. She poured two drinks, handed one to me, and settled into a velvet settee with the other. She patted the cushion beside her. I complied, taking a sip from the glass. The mescat was stronger that what we’d distilled in Arras.
“You’re an elusid,” I said. “That’s your phyle?”
“You mean you haven’t heard of it?”
“I told you. I’m an alien.”
“Oh. I’m not used to talking to…that is… Yes, I’m an elusid, of the phyle of Joram Elusis. Soon they’ll start letting us into Bel. We’re practically all elusids now, you know. I hardly ever see members of other phyles when I go out. That’s a good thing, because non-elusids are all so queer. You’re queer, too, but not in the same way.”
“No?”
“No. You’re more like a meteor that fell from the sky, or something. Listen, if you’re really an alien, why did you come here? Haven’t you heard that all misfits are troublemakers? Why, take that robber who skulks in the old necropolis. There are hoplites in the streets now because of him. Hoplites! In Enoch!” Her eyes were wide; the subject evidently agitated her. “Whatever made you come here?”
I sighed. “From a high place I saw a palace set among the stars, Narva, which hangs in the sky over Bel. I came here to find the way to it.”
The girl stifled a laugh, her alarm already forgotten. “Bel! You’re trying to get to Bel? Why, what will someone like you do there?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, a little sullenly. “I don’t suppose you’ve been there.”
“Well, no,” she said, coloring, “but, as I said—”
“Yes, soon you elusids will be admitted. That’s wonderful.”
“I’ve got just the thing for you, though,” she said. “A little foretaste of your”—she giggled—“your future residence. A new picture disk. I just bought it yesterday.” She took up a hard plastic stereoscope, slid a film disk into it, and handed it to me. “Look into the eyepieces,” she said.
I held it up before the window and looked. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced, a sequence of hand-perfected emulsion images like bright shards of pure knowledge, windows upon silent, immutable worlds where no shifting shadow or trouble of change came to disturb. I stepped through those spheres, of which there were six, utterly forgetful of my surroundings, as though the girl at my side had dropped into the void.
The first was merely introductory, and showed a structure like a huge scaffold rising out of the open sea. The picture had been taken at dusk, and the skeleton was gemmed with silver lights. It was a tiny commercial city, a stopping-off place at the intersection of two viaducts that disappeared into opposite vanishing points at the corners of the horizon. The disk had doubtless been purchased there.
The main subject showed itself in the second picture. There I glimpsed for the first time the world-tower with its gently sloping base rising out of the waves of the deep sea. I would have taken it for a mountain had its peak not been so unnaturally steep. It shone over the waves with the tarnished glory lent by the level rays of a golden sunset, and upon its stratospheric crown sunlit corpuscles ascended and descended like fiery sparks. The viaducts converged upon it like so many slender spider threads. Here and there tiny argent lights winked in the darkened faces.
That image was followed by one taken from the floating gardens. In it the tower stood against a crisp blue sky dotted with small white clouds that partly obscured its upward leap. Its sea-stained sides were mirrored in the pacific waters that opened between the undulating mats.
The fourth depicted the tower’s crown, a glittering forest of steel standing out against a blue-black sky. Cranes and exposed girders bespoke its unfinished state. Huge elevators slid up and down along cables suspended from the very sky, with passengers boarding at landings in glass-walled structures.
The next picture was taken from within a car and showed several men and women looking out over the sunlit face of the earth spread beneath a star-strewn sky.
And the sixth and final image showed the interior of a vast toric space curving up and out of sight, its twilit ceiling and sides hung with verdure, its floor a captivating moss-garden dotted with pleasure-houses of steel and glass. In the shadows consorted the happy and beautiful Narvenes, eating, drinking, making love, served by shaved ghulim.
I lowered the viewer and sighed.
“I know,” the girl said. “I’m sorry I laughed. Maybe one day you, too, will be able to…”
I laid the viewer down on an end table. “Maybe,” I said, shaking my head. “But today I happen to be looking for the temple district. I don’t suppose you know where that is.” I took another sip of mescat. My head was beginning to feel like a balloon tethered to my neck by a thread.
“Why, that’s where you are right now,” she cried, clapping her hands. “Are you going to the procession? I am. There’s a new float that everyone is dying to see, and the princeps today is very handsome. We should go together! I want to show you to my friends.”
“You wouldn’t mind going with a helot?”
“Why—not as a joke! We’ll play a joke on them. I’m known for my jokes.” She looked me up and down. “After all,” she said softly, “I owe you something for saving me.”
I looked at her. Her eyes burned; her lips ripened. She pulled me to her. I put my hand on her breast.
Just then I became aware of a dark figure standing in the hall doorway.
23 Gods of Enoch
I rose to my feet, wishing I hadn’t drunk so much. My eyes were like two fish swimming around the apartment. The music box was winding down. I felt sick to my stomach.
The newcomer advanced into the room. He was like a male version of the girl. Actually, their appearance was less dissimilar even than that. His limbs were soft and rounded and his face was smooth. I recognized him from the elevator.
“Hello, love,” said the girl. “Look what I’ve found!”
“What?” The boy threw a petulant glance at my chest.
“An alien! He saved me from a slug.”
“You should be more careful. You were as high as Narva when I went out.”
“Aren’t you going to thank him?”
The boy looked at my feet. “What does he want? Here.” He proffered a rod. “Thanks.”
I ignored it. “Didn’t I see you running out of here as I ran in?”
The boy flushed. “No, that wasn’t me.”
The girl turned on him. “You mean you were here? Here in the building?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “You were here, and you didn’t do anything? I see it now! You concentrated the hebenum again! You wanted that thing to get me! You’ve been complaining about not getting enough time with your image! This was—”
The boy slapped her on the mouth. Without thinking I drew back and struck. The boy crashed against the washstand, broke the bowl, and fell to the floor. A dribble of blood appeared on his lip.
The girl screamed and flung herself on him. He thrust her away, still avoiding my eyes, but she
kept holding on to him. I just stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists.
“Go away,” the girl pled. “I don’t know who you are. But please just go away.”
I stumbled awkwardly out of the room, forgetting my hat.
* * * * *
I went down into the street. The heaped carcass of the nudibranch was there, twitching feebly. A piercing mechanical wail began to sound. I looked around but couldn’t locate the source. I circled the slug and went on my way.
As I reached a turning I looked back. There were two hoplites running down the street behind me. They wore black armor like the sentry on the Misfit’s wall. “There he is!” the boy shouted from the balcony, pointing at me. “There! An alien disguised as a helot! He tried to kill me!”
One of the hoplites took aim. A disk shot toward me. I leaped past the corner of the building and saw the disk fly by and return. I ran for my life, stripping gauze as I went.
A stairwell yawned before me. I flung myself down the steps. At their foot was a long corridor that went straight ahead into shadow. My footfalls echoed like thunder as I ran along it. A black gulf opened on my right. There was no telling if it led anywhere. Every second, though, I imagined the feeling of a disk slicing through the back of my head. I turned, tumbled down a short flight of steps, got to my feet, and kept running.
For a while I blundered down passages and cross-passages in complete darkness. Flights of stairs carried me lower and lower. But there were no helots. There was no one at all.
I eventually found myself dropping into a pool of oily shadow where reflected daylight showed far ahead—far ahead, and at a lower level. Strange silhouettes stood against it: wheels and metal hulls, unseeing heads and trunkless limbs, figures of men and of beasts.
As I navigated the crowded space, the clutter thinned and the floor inclined gently downward. I was descending a ramp in a great hall. Grimy ornamental tiles paved the floor and the walls. A line of steam-driven cars with metal wheels stood between the two rows of pillars. Each bore an image or a group of images.
“You there!” barked a shrill voice. I froze and turned. A plump man in silk robes came bustling out of a dark side door. “You! We’ve been waiting for you. Thought you could get away from us, did you? Eh?”
“Why, I—”
“Never mind, never mind. You missed the asperges, that’s against you, but of course it’s really only a formality. The point is, the princeps has arrived.”
“The princeps?”
“Yes, the princeps, the princeps. A great honor for your phyle. You are the one who won the lottery, aren’t you?”
“Well, I—”
The hierarch clapped his fat, bejeweled hands. “Rubin. Rubin! Where is Rubin?”
People were trickling in through the door behind him now, going to their places along the line of cars. Many of them eyed me curiously. A young man emerged and rushed over. “Yes, Master Balam,” he said.
“Here is our princeps. Get him ready and take him where he’s supposed to be.”
“Yes, Master Balam.”
Almost before I knew it, I was robed in a surcoat of gold tissue, with a wreath of golden leaves on my brow and a jeweled mace in my hand. They led me to my car, which stood midway along the line, and I climbed up to a gold-plated throne in the center of a miniature moss-garden. From there I watched the people go back and forth on their errands, preparing for the procession. I could hear the murmur of crowds from beyond the great gate below.
At last everything was ready. A wavering note sounded in the darkness. The throngs outside fell silent. Down at the gate a corps of pipers swathed and masked in silk marched into the open air and began to play a weird, repetitive euphony. A team of gilt-toed dancers followed them, strewing the pavement with rushes. The cars lurched into motion, moving slowly down the hall, emerging one by one from its mouth. I watched as they rolled into the sunlight. Some bore smoke-blackened hulks of bronze or terra cotta; others carried images of marble and gold.
The view gradually unfolded. The line was emerging at one end of a gigantic urban rift, the seat of an ancient temple complex. The gaps between the old buildings had been filled in and temples of newer gods erected upon them, over and again down through the myriads, accreting in layers like fluvial deposits. The most ancient were little more than dark openings between buttresses; the most recent glittered in the exposed basements of high-rises.
The place was crawling with phylites like a swath cut in a termite nest. Every phyle seemed to be represented. It was like a thousand crowds in one. I picked out a few elusids, but they were only a tiny minority.
The masses cheered when my car emerged, hailing me as the princeps. But then as the din was dying down, one voice rose up above the others: “Amroth! Amroth!” Others took up the cry. Soon it was on every tongue, rippling back and forth along the rift. I raised one hand. The people went mad. Rods of silver and gold began to rain down on the car. Jairus had not exaggerated.
The procession moved slowly. Tired of sitting, I jumped down to the pavement. The officials were too awed by the crowds to stop me. I started pacing back along the line, touching the outstretched hands of the phylites while refusing their gifts. I looked up at the cars I passed as a pretext for studying the towers.
One of the first bore Amartas, bearded and golden, with a single round eye in his forehead. He held a scepter in one hand and a spear in the other. Close in his train was Tessa, the Star of the Sea, and all the Great Ones of Enoch.
After these came a car with a six-armed mechanical image. It smiled serenely and rolled lifelike ivory eyes in their sockets. Its limbs were so subtly jointed that it appeared a giant with flesh of supple bronze. It blessed the crowds as it passed, and they hailed it with screams of fear and adoration.
Then came the image of Ninursa, a gravid woman-form with a vestigial face. In her train was a company of eunuchs. Some joined them as they passed, strewing their bloody offerings over the pavement. They led a series of cars with images of the sun and the moon and the stars in their places. The stars were magnesium torches held aloft by winged spirits of black iron. They sang a sweet tune.
The next cars bore gods of a different stamp. The first held the effigy of a youth reclining on a couch, dead, with a gash in his side and a blush on his cheek, surrounded by mounds of sweetmeats. Around him was a circle of twenty-three nubile girls, all weeping for their lover.
Then came a float bearing a ruddy youth with wild, visionary eyes and an expression of fierce joy. Behind him an orchestra played strident music on horns and cymbals and kettle drums. I had never heard sounds of such sweet vigor. They overpowered me, and I longed somehow to open my heart to the phylites, to sink down with them, united under the intoxicating flow. In the car’s train was a band of wild dancers; I wanted to join them, but I stayed in possession of myself, in spite of myself.
And last of all came the inanimate image of Drungedt, cast in black metal, with inset eyes of enamel. It was something like a man and something like a cephalopod, with the eyes of a cephalopod, saucer-like, lidless, vacuous. It played an idiotic sequence of notes on a pipe hidden somewhere amongst its tentacles.
As it passed, a man leaped over the barricades and threw himself under the wheels. They came inexorably on, snapping his rib cage and skull, pressing his viscera and brains out on the pavement. The masses roared their approbation even as attendants rushed out discreetly to remove the remains and rinse the pavement with fragrant water. Several more such suicides followed.
The rear of the procession was brought up by an automated street-sweeper, a steam-driven engine equipped with huge rotating brushes that scrubbed the pavement and swept everything in its path—rushes, offerings, trash, victims’ remains—up into its hidden maw to be masticated, compacted, and incinerated.
I paced back up toward my place and mounted my chair.
The rift was cross-shaped. The other gash ran downhill from east to west, following the course of an ancient stream. The process
ion rounded the corner of heaped masonry and proceeded toward the head of the valley. As I neared the bend I eyed the new reach of towers. There was a woman pacing a high terrace, watching the procession. Her auburn hair gleamed like copper in the sun.
A ziggurat stood over the stream’s issue at the head of the canyon, overshadowed and half-smothered by the high-piled city. A pyramid of crystal and steel extended irregularly down its face. The cars were turning at its foot and continuing down the opposite side of the channel.
When my car reached the pile, a signal was sounded and the procession halted. Silence reigned. Two acolytes glided majestically down the escalator. They stepped off at the bottom and came toward my car with hands extended. I got down with my mace. A few shouts of “Amroth!” rang out confusedly, but were quickly hushed.
Now I was riding to the top with an acolyte at each elbow. I began to pass the pyramid’s sloping panes. Each compartment held the enthroned image of a man or a woman. They might almost have been alive. All the phyles appeared to be represented.
A mitered high priest awaited me at the top. There was no victim that I could see. A thousand eyes burned on my back.
24 Hela Again
The priest began reciting a prayer before the masses. I quickly surveyed the apex. The platform was a sweep of metal plates and fixtures, and the mechanical façade at the back was built into the foundation itself. It surrounded a portal filled with a strangely disgusting motion, like a hair-lined sphincter opening and closing, or a curled-up black larva undulating in an orifice. Millions of tiny hooks were continually threshing through one another, with a bulbous probe of iron moving in and out of the center at intervals.
“Great is Enoch,” the priest was chanting, “and great is the Cheiropt, its divine genius. Through its goodness we have this gift to offer, this holy and perfect sacrifice. May it make and preserve our peace.” The people rumbled their assent.
Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes Page 12