‘I’m Mahala,’ she said, poised on one foot, baffled by the repetitions of light and the million dark retreating icons, and then, focusing: ‘Oh! Oh you poor man, what have they done to you?’
Shem, black as obsidian (obverse, yes, of his absent marmoreal twin), rose to his shackled feet and leaned towards her across the polished desk. His strong left fingers crushed the pen; his withered right arm flopped. The skew of his spine was not deformity but adjustment to the ruined spindle which was his left leg below the knee. Beneath his flaring nostrils (broader than hers, and flatter) the notched, botched curve of his harelip writhed.
‘It is my own doing,’ he said, it is the punishment I inflict upon myself, in failure.’ His speech appalled her. Tenderness opened within her heart. ‘Our specialists diagnose a carnifying psychosomatic conversion. They cannot decide if it is precipitated by shame or guilt.’ He laughed horribly. ‘Bone and nervous tissue melt into flesh. It’ll get worse before it gets better. I can live in the knowledge that when his thousand years is up my father Shaun shall sit here witnessing his body rot.’ He strained toward her, muscles bunching uselessly against the shackles at his feet, hands scattering the sheets of vellum. In puzzlement he glared at her. ‘Or do I mean my brother Shaun? My son?’ He lifted the escritoire and slammed it shatteringly against the mirrored floor; the floor failed to shatter. ‘Are you really here, then, girl? Come closer, let me touch you. It is—not—’ he ground in agony, palatals blurred and lost,’—time.’
Tremulously, she crossed the blinding floor and caressed his maimed face. He shuddered, right claw contracting.
‘I seek the most miserable man in the world, for he is promised to me as my beloved.’
‘Jesus,’ Shem said. He turned his dark cheek into the curve of her hand. ‘You’ve come to the right place.’
‘Your poor feet!’ Mahala cried, stooping, her breasts falling forward to his voracious gaze. With the knowledge I had given her she touched the shackles here and here and they fell from Shem’s feet. He reeled, crashed, tore then like an animal at her garments and his own, while she looked up in pain and absolute incomprehension into his grotesque mad face, her love turning back like a poisoned barb to enter her body and burst her heart, and his seed gushing like flame into her womb. Mahala, my baby, my gift to those who had made me, did not cry out. In her shock and betrayal she convulsed like a deer slain for sport, while his seed coursed within her secret places to the ripe, waiting egg, and the breath blocked in her throat like ice.
I watched her ravishment in a rage violent as madness. I stormed within my metal prison. For ten million millionths of a second the Earth hung at the balance of oblivion. In my grief I activated the collapsicle fields; the ship, for a nanosecond, crashed into infinite density and sucked at the world. For that period the world convulsed with Mahala’s hurt. Monuments shivered and broke. The pleasure domes of the high places split, cracked, yawned. Oceans heaved; birds fell stunned from opaque air. Then my grief attained perspective. I shut off the fields and took the walls of the villa San Martino in my grasp and hammered them to a vibration of titanic speech.
‘Shem, once lord of this Earth, what has thou done? For thy foul work this day, man, thou art curst. Stand back from the woman Mahala lest I smite thee into unending agonies.’
My baby got to her feet as the man drew back to his knees, to his hands. All her lovely things were torn and smeared; she pulled them about her. Great sobs broke within Shem’s chest, tears flooded from his eyes. He rose, staring at his healed multiple selves, wiping the tears away as they fell with his perfect right hand, standing straight on his straight legs, opening without cry or whimper his curved, sculpted lips. He could not elude her image in the silver walls. Sinking to the elegant chair he allowed his beautiful face to drop onto folded arms, and there Mahala left him to his remorse as she walked painfully away from that place and stumbled up the hill to my useless, bitter ministrations.
~ * ~
She did not tell Shaun that she was pregnant, and nobody in that lustrous, sterile city asked. The handsome people took her up as a bauble, the season’s premier diversion. Masques, balls, prodigies of cloud-sculpture in her honour enzymatically illuminated: you name it. Her misery was deemed decorous. Remorseless in their appetite for frivolous titbits from my voyage across the universe in an optional black hole, they expressed a marked indifference for anything of substance. The lord Shaun was not himself stupid, precisely, yet he saw himself as a practical man, in love with mighty engines whose gizzards he delegated to underlings, a man born for conquest (but so too had Shem viewed himself, and would again), manfully dedicated to gaming and hunting. So predictable; I hung in that lonely orbit to which I’d removed myself and seethed with boredom. I knitted booties until I was sick of the sight of them. Then I raged anew and vowed vengeance. Mahala, meanwhile, ate lightly of their pastries but put on weight. She maintained her reserve and her chastity, to the veiled derision (and covert gratitude) of the court’s ladies.
When her confinement was near Mahala made her announcement, to a minor flurry of astonishment, and suffered no lack of commentary arch, wry, languid, sardonic and scornfully droll.
‘Are you hermaphroditic, then, my dear?’ inquired Maureen O’Darlene de Raylene y McYamamoto, a porcelain matron nimble enough in the raising of her own skirts. ‘We’ve heard not the faintest whisper of gentlemen at your bedchamber, and surely you were alone in the vastness of space?’
Mahala regarded her coolly. Her ankles were swelling and an anguish of perplexed love frayed her nerves.
‘The children have a father, Madam.’
‘More than one little piccaninny? How delicious.’
Mistress Maureen O’D. drifted away to the needless shade of a huge-leafed tree. The babies struggled, kicking, and my own darling child pressed her locked fingers on the drum of her belly. In the open compound Shaun and the hearties of his entourage were superintending the harness for their day’s hunt. Autumn was well along, bright enough but smoky; soon the ground would be too cold for the vast gastropods. One of the fine men, chivvying his mount with an excess of vigour, slipped in a trace of the great snail’s mucus and went arse over tit, to the raucous glee of his colleagues. The beast’s behemoth head swung down and its forward tentacles extruded, eyes moist and sad. The fellow’s swagger-stick came up in a brutal stinging slash, and the snail recoiled into its richly textured shell. For all the mass it mounts on its mutated vertebral bracing, Helix horribilis is a timorous animal. Handlers came out shouting and cursing. The snail’s master stalked off to restore his splendour, and Mahala watched from her isolation as the animal slowly came about and glided away, ten metres of damp leather and armour-plating skimming thick glistening slime.
Shaun was waiting at her elbow as she withdrew.
‘Fine creatures, aren’t they, my dear? Won’t you change your mind and ride to the hunt? The experience is exhilarating—nothing like it!—and I promise you it’s smooth as silk, can’t possibly harm your ... condition.’
‘My lord, I do not approve the way you treat the animals—these snails, and those you hunt. Besides, there is always the chance, no matter how remote, of an accident.’ Somewhere, fallen leaves were roasting in a fire, sweet to her flaring nostrils. And decision came upon her, crystalline, unheralded. Mahala touched the gloved wrist of the tall pale man and looked directly into his eyes, into a gaze equal to that poet’s on the cold southern island. ‘The babies are your brother’s children.’
There was no motion in his body. At last he said:
‘Shem’s heirs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Impossible.’ Then, ‘Do you understand? Now I must have you destroyed. If there is any chance,’ said he, ‘no matter how remote . . .’
‘My babies and I are safe,’ Mahala said with composure. ‘We have the protection of the cybersystem.’
In fury, he lashed his open hand across her face. ‘You stupid gravid bitch!’ I waited,
poised to kill him, and knew I must not, not yet, if ever. Wormwood. I watched as he stood there, regal in his martial kilts, as he spoke at once through his devices to men and machines deployed across the tamed globe.
I watched as he looked into the image of that empty mirrored room.
He took Mahala through a hushed, distraught throng to his throne room and showed her the millennial history which was there. She was not afraid. My darling child knew (and I knew she knew, through the anchored neural net which was part and not part of her) that she had stepped beyond history, beyond myth, into that dislocation which ends an age and sees another born. The babies kicked and kicked. Soon her labour would begin.
‘Ten thousand years!’ Shaun roared. Yes, now he was roaring, now it was coming home to him authentically. The tapestries and friezes seemed to shake to his wrath. ‘A cycle fixed in eternity! Do you imagine that I rejoice through all those days of my thousand years of exile, through my mutilation and the envy which gnaws at my entrails? Is it easy to share this throne with my other self, with my father, my brother, my son Shem? It is not easy. I tell you it is not. But it is the way the world must be, it is ordained, it is duty, goddamn it, you swollen sow witch.’
Tones shrilled the air, lights pulsed, phantom figures came and departed without physical presence. Shaun’s machines were hunting, scouring the earth.
‘Besides,’ he told her, his face mottled like bloody marble, ‘the thing is impossible. You have allowed his escape, but he cannot be the father of your bastards.’
He was here, an apparition told him. And later here, said another. There is furtive mobilization of men and weapons, reported a third. Nausea afflicted Mahala; panting, she found a chaise and lowered herself to its comfort, lifting her tired legs. Contractions began. She called out to me, silently, and I dropped from orbit like a bomb to wait for her demand.
The interstellar vessel hovers above the palace, a phantom informed the lord of the world. We cannot bring it down. We advise caution with respect to the woman. Midwives are standing by in the anteroom. Her time is close at hand. He brushed them aside, insensate, prowling electronic corridors for his enemy brother.
‘This is why it is impossible,’ he explained in tight, bitten words. ‘He is sterile, as am I. It is a consequence of our joint nature.’ He took her jaw in the grip of his fingers. I began to burn through the roof and the defences of the palace, careful not to damage the art. If he started getting really rough I had faster techniques at my disposal.
‘We are like the snails you viewed with such disdain today in the compound—bred to a purpose, monstrosities outside and above nature, yes, but the end of our line. Our seed is defunct. I have had a million women; their wombs have never quickened. Woman, I say you are a liar.’
The lord Shem has begun his march, the shades cried in panicky voices. His war machines are bearing down on us, and we are caught unprepared.
‘The babies are Shem’s,’ Mahala stated quietly.
A spasm shook her, then, and she cried out. Fluids broke upon the ancient stone paving. I peeled open the Michelangelo ceiling above them and lifted her into my waiting body.
~ * ~
There was blood, tearing, a gonging in the earth too profound for human ears. Blood there was, and lacerated flesh, and the lamentation of orphans. Shem came into the high places mounted on a giant lizard, his hands blazing with hot blue flame. Shaun stood atop his burning palace, in the stinking confusion, and his shields dazzled like the sun’s face. I hung above it all, at the moon’s orbit, and wondered at the terrible duty I had discharged. I longed for the balm of Those Who burned without conflagration, there in the frozen darks at the occlusion of space.
~ * ~
The babies howled.
Mahala, my child, held them to her swollen breasts, hugged them to her, and wept with love and grief.
The twins are girls. I saw to that.
<
~ * ~
THE WRITEABLE TEXT
Suppose the myths haven’t gone away? Suppose they perch there on our shoulders, nagging and horsing around. Worse, what if they’ve been put on the company payroll, or work for a government agency, where they meet at power lunches to prepare agendas? Suppose the worst, that even when you sit in your office and boot up the computer, pulling in the spreadsheet to check on your negatively geared investments, the bloody myths are, after all, us.
Roland Barthes, that wily French semiologist, knew a thing or two about mythologies. He told us that ‘myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion’, a shading on our realities. Myth takes what has been made by human guile and switches it around until it looks as if it’s been there forever: ‘it transforms history into nature’. But what if you live in a time when all the myths have been up for grabs—sexual jealousy, let’s say—but the myths turn on you and fight back? The old pantheon of gods, Zeus and Aphrodite, Hera and Iris and Hephaestos, howling their eyes out into the Kleenex in Balmain and Carlton, gnashing their capped teeth in seminars. ‘What I claim,’ said Roland Barthes, before he was run over by a car, ‘is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.’
~ * ~
For Barthes, there is no such thing as a pure context. All contexts come ... already coded, shaped, and organised by language, and often shaped in patently silly ways ... For Barthes there is a great difference between literature which is merely ‘readable’ in our time (the classics) and that which is ‘writeable’. That which is writeable is indispensable for us, because it is our only defence against the old lies, the exhausted codes of our predecessors ... He recognises five master codes in the text, under which every significant aspect of it can be considered.
Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature
~ * ~
THE CODE OF ACTIONS
Zoo and Aff, drifting toward separation from their partners, have taken up together (when they can manage it) a good number of months prior to April, when the weaving web of their lives ladders into rupture.
Their mutually declared position includes a devotion to the ideal of existential freedom leavened with promiscuity, preferably with full disclosure though perhaps without the gory details. While Aff, a decade younger than Zoo, has always operated under this rubric with fair success (she and her partner take it in turns to look after the cat), it is somewhat theoretical for Zoo, who sustains a high degree of evasion on this score with his wife Her, who does not wish to know. Curiously, and bit by bit, Zoo has found that his new lover gets oddly narked by any suggestion that he has continued to put this programme into practice—rarely enough of late though it is, he acknowledges somewhat regretfully.
Zoo was, it seemed, being unfeeling and cruel.
Well, bugger that, Zoo decided. A deal’s a deal. When certain women he met on the campus expressed more than a passing interest, during the brief high-profile phase when he first took up his lectureship in the semiotics of postmodern fiction, Aff made it plain that activity in this quarter would be deemed on a number of grounds perilously sleazy or hurtful. In the interests of his growing fondness Zoo has valiantly forborne, though his rhetoric continues manfully unchecked.
Various onlookers and confidants had pointed out to him at one time or another that his claims of invulnerability to sexual chagrin were predicated pretty thoroughly in his wife’s (almost) absolute fidelity throughout the past decade-and-a-half. While Zoo found this plausible he remained convinced that even if Her decided on a blazing affair or two he’d get through it fairly smoothly. Sauce for the goose. He fancied himself a feminist, after all.
Before this theory could be tested, however, childless Her and Zoo decided that their relationship might be most easily salvaged if they lived apart, not that they were splitting up. Zoo contrived a mortgage and moved into a depressingly motel-like OYO flat.
Aff, for ideological motives, had already shifted into a house by herself. One day she men
tioned that a former lover would be visiting from interstate for the weekend. ‘You have only one bed,’ Zoo observed. There was a couch, though.
Days later, he asked if she’d screwed her visitor, now departed. Of course she had. Zoo shrugged. Uh-huh. How was it? So-so.
Some months later, during their Sunday run through Royal Park with the Dobermans, a tradition hardly to be abandoned merely because of their domestic separation, Her and Zoo congratulated one another cheerfully on having attained, with a pleasing degree of smoothness, to the condition of good mates. Though Her was as yet unattached to anyone else, their present circumstances were, she felt, tolerable enough, and certainly better than the bad faith they’d been sustaining in their cool and untouching bed.
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 18