Lake of the Long Sun tbotls-2

by Gene Wolfe

  "There can't be anybody in there!"

  "Of course there can," Silk told him. "There's another way in, that's all."

  Slowly-so slowly that at first Silk was not sure he was seeing them move at all-the woman in the lowest row lifted her hands to press against the crystalline wall that confined her.

  "Corporal of the guard!" Hammerstone blared. "Back of Personnel Storage!" Faintly, a distant sentry took up the cry.

  Before Silk could protest, Hammerstone had slammed the butt of his slug gun against, the seal, which shattered into coarse black dust. As Silk recoiled in horror, Hammerstone jerked open both doors and charged into the enormous hall beyond them.

  Silk knelt, collected as much of the black dust as he could, and, lacking any more suitable receptacle, folded it into his remaining sheet of paper and deposited it in his pen case.

  By the time that he had closed the case and returned it to the pocket of his robe, the imprisoned woman's hands were clutching her throat and her eyes starting from her head. He scrambled to his feet, hobbled into the brilliantly lit hall, and wasted precious seconds trying to discover some means of broaching the transparent cylinder that confined her before snatching Hyacinth's needler-from his pocket and striking the almost invisible crystal with its butt.

  It shattered at the first blow. At once the atmosphere within it darkened to the blue-black of ripe grapes, swirling and spiraling as it mixed with air, then vanished as abruptly as Mucor in the aftermath of his dream. With somnambulistic slowness the naked woman's hands returned to her sides.

  She gasped for breath.

  Silk averted his eyes and untied the bands of his robe. "Will you put this. on, please?"

  "We'll be lovers," the woman told him loudly, her voice breaking at the penultimate syllable. Her hair was as black as Hyacinth's, her eyes a startling blue deeper than Silk's own.

  "Do you know this place?" Silk asked her urgently. "Is there another way out?"

  "Everything." Moving almost normally, she stepped from the rack.

  "I must get away." Silk spoke as quickly as he could, wondering whether she would understand him even if he had spoken as slowly as he would have to a child. "There must be another way out, because there was someone in here who hadn't come through these doors. Show me, please."

  "That way."

  He risked a glance at her face, careful not to let his gaze stray below her long and graceful neck; there was something familiar-something horrible that he struggled to deny-in her smile. With cautious hands, he draped his robe about her shoulders. "You'll have to hold it closed in front."

  "Tie it for me?"

  He hesitated. "It would be better . . ."

  "I don't know how."

  She stepped toward him. "Please?" Her voice was under better control now, and almost familiar.

  He fumbled the bands; it seemed unfair that something he did automatically each morning should be so difficult to do for someone else.

  "Now I can fly!" With outstretched arms she spread the robe wide, running slowly and clumsily down the aisle until she nearly disappeared from view at the distant wall. There she turned and dashed back, sprinting without wasted motion. "I-really-can!" She gulped for air, breasts heaving. "But-you-can't-see-me-then." Still gasping, she smiled proudly, her head thrown back like Hammerstone's; and in her smile, the grinning rictus of a corpse, Silk knew her.

  "You have no right to this woman, Mucor!" He traced the sign of addition. "In the name of Pas, Master of the Whorl, be gone!"

  "I-am-a-woman. Oh-yes!"

  "In the name of Lady Echidna, be gone!"

  "I-know-her. She-likes-me."

  "In the names of Scylla and Sphigx! In the most sacred name of the Outsider!"

  She was no longer paying attention. "Do you-know why this-place is-so high?" She gestured toward the domed ceiling. "So that fliers-could fly-over it without-having to-walk." She pointed to a jumbled heap of bones, hair, and blackened flesh at the bottom of a cylinder on the second level. "I was her-once. She-remembered."

  "To me you're the devil who possessed that poor woman's daughter," Silk told her angrily. "The devil who possessed Orpine." He saw a flash of fear in her eyes. "I am a bad man, granted-a lawless man, and often less than pious. Yet I am a holy augur, consecrated and blessed. Is there no name that you respect?"

  "I will not be afraid, Silk." She backed away from him as she spoke.

  "In the name ofPhaea, go! In the name of Thelxiepeia, go! In the name of Moipe, whose day this is, and in those of Scylla and Sphigx. Be gone in the names of these gods!"

  "I wanted to help. ..."

  "Be gone in the names of Tartaros and Hierax!"

  She raised her hands, as he had to ward off Hammerstone's blow; and Silk, seeing her fear, remembered that Hierax had been the name that Musk had given the white-headed one, the griffon vulture on Blood's roof. With that memory, Phaesday night returned: his frantic dash across Blood's lawn in the shadow of a racing cloud; the thump of his forked branch on the roof of the conservatory; and the blade of his hatchet wedged between the casement of Mucor's window and its frame, the window that had supplied the threat he had used the next day to banish her from Orchid's.

  Almost kindly he told her, "I will close your window, Mucor, so that it can never be opened again, if you don't leave me alone. Go."

  As though she had never been present, she abandoned the tall, raven-haired woman who faced him; he had seen nothing and heard nothing, but he knew it as surely as if there had been a flash of fire or a gale of wind.

  The woman blinked twice, her eyes unfocused and without comprehension. "Go? Where?" She drew his robe about her.

  "Praise Great Hierax, the Son of Death, the New Death, whose mercy is terminal and infinite," Silk said feelingly. "Are you all right, my daughter?"

  She stared at him, a hand between her breasts. "My- heart?"

  "It's still racing from Mucor's exertions, I'm sure; but your pulse should slow in a few minutes." She trembled, saying nothing. In the silence he heard the pounding of steel feet.

  He closed the double doors that Hammerstone had opened, reflecting that Hammerstone had specified the back of the armory. It might be some time before the hurrying soldiers realized that he had actually meant to summon them to this vast hall beyond it. "Perhaps if we walk a little," he suggested. "We may be able to find a place of comfort, where you can sit down. Do you know a way out?"

  The woman said nothing but offered no objection as Silk led her along an aisle he chose at random. The bases of the crystal cylinders, as he now saw, were black with print. By rising on his toes, he was able to examine one on the second tier, reading the name (Olive) of the woman in the cylinder, her age (twenty-four), and what he took to be a precis of her education.

  "I ought to have read yours." He spoke to her as he had to Oreb, to give form to his thoughts. "But we'd better not go back. If I had when I had the opportunity, I'd know your name, at least."

  "Mamelta."

  He looked at her curiously. "Is that your name?" It was one that he had never heard. "I think so. I can't ..."

  "Remember?" he suggested gently.

  She nodded.

  "It's certainly not a common name." The greenish lights overhead were dimming now; in the twilight that remained, he glimpsed Hammerstone running down an intersecting aisle half the hall away and asked, "Can you walk just a little faster, Mamelta?"

  She did not reply.

  "I'd like to avoid him," he explained, "for reasons of my own. You don't have to be afraid of him, however-he won't hurt you or me."

  Mamelta nodded, although he could not be sure that she understood.

  "He won't find what he's searching for, I'm afraid, poor fellow. He wants to find the person who energized all these lights, but I'm reasonably sure that it was Mucor, and she's gone."

  "Mucor?" Mamelta indicated herself, both hands at her face.

  "No," Silk told her, "you are not Mucor, although Mucor possessed you for a short time. It
woke you, I think, while you were still in your glass tube. I don't believe that was supposed to happen. Can we walk a bit faster now?"

  "All right."

  "It wouldn't do to run. He might hear, and it would make him suspicious, I'm sure; but if we walk, we may be able to get away from him. If we don't, and he finds us, he'll think you energized the lights, no doubt. That should satisfy him, and we'll have lost nothing." Under his breath Silk added, "I hope."

  "Who is Mucor?"

  He looked at Mamelta in some surprise. "You're feeling better now, aren't you?"

  She stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the distant wall, and did not appear to have heard his question.

  "I suppose-no, I know-that you're morally entitled to an answer, the best I can provide; but I'm afraid I can't provide a very good one. I don't know nearly as much about her as I'd like, and at least two of the things I think I know are conjectural. She is a young woman who can leave her body-or to put it another way, send forth her spirit. She's not well mentally, or at least I felt that she wasn't on the one occasion when I met her face-to-face.

  Now that I've had time to think about her, I believe she may be less disturbed than I assumed. She must see the whorl very differently from the way that most of us see it."

  "I feel I am Mucor. . . ."

  He nodded. "This morning-though I suppose it may be yesterday morning by now-I conferred with-" Words failed him. "With someone I'll call an extraordinary woman. We were talking about possession, and she said something that I didn't give as much attention as I should have. But I was thinking about our conversation as I walked out to the shrine-I'll tell you about that later, perhaps- and I realized that it might be extremely important. She had said, 'Even then, there would be something left behind, as there always is.' Or words to that effect. If I under- stood her, Mucor must leave a part of her spirit behind when she leaves a person, and must take a small part of that person's spirit with her when she goes. We usually think of spirits as indivisible, I'm afraid; but the Writings compare them to winds again and again. Winds aren't indivisible. Winds are air in motion, and air is divided each time we shut a door or draw a breath."

  Mamelta whispered, "So many dead." She was looking at a crystalline cylinder that held only bones, what appeared to be black soil, and a few strands of hair.

  "Some of that must be Mucor's doing, I'm afraid." Silk fell silent for a moment, tortured by conscience. "I said I'd tell you about her, but I haven't told you one of the most important things-to me, at any rate. It is that I betrayed her. She's the daughter of a man named Blood, a powerful man who treats her abominably. When I talked with her, I told her that whenever I had a chance to see her father I'd remonstrate with him. Later I had a lengthy conversation with him, but I never brought up his treatment of his daughter. I was afraid he'd punish her if he knew she'd spoken to me; but now I feel it was a betrayal nonetheless. If she were shown that others value her, she might-" "Patera!" It was Hammerstone's voice.

  Silk looked around for him. "Yes, my son?"

  "Over this way. Couple rows, maybe. You all right?"

  "Oh, yes, I'm fine," Silk told him. "I've been, well, more or less touring this fascinating warehouse or whatever you call it, and looking at some of the people."

  "Who were you talking to?"

  "To tell you the truth, to one of these women. I've been lecturing her, I'm afraid."

  Hammerstone chuckled, the same dry, inhuman sound Silk had heard from Sergeant Sand in the tunnel. "You see anybody?"

  "Intruders? No, no one."

  "All right. The guard detail ought to be here now, but they haven't showed. I'm going to find out what's keeping them. Meet me over at the door where we came in." Without waiting for Silk's reply, Hammerstone clattered away.

  "I must get back into the tunnels," Silk told Mamelta. "I left something valuable there; it isn't mine, and even if that soldier's officer allows me to leave, he's sure to see that I'm escorted back to Limna."

  "This way," she said, and pointed, though Silk was not sure at what.

  He nodded and set off. "I can't run, I'm afraid. Not like you. I'd run now, if I could."

  For the first time, she seemed to see him. "You have a bruise on your face, and you're lame." He nodded. "I've had various accidents. I was dropped down a flight of stairs, for one thing. My bruises will heal though, quite quickly. I was going to tell you about Mucor, who I'm afraid will not. Are you sure we're going the right way? If we go back-"

  Mamelta pointed again, and this time he saw that she was indicating a green line in the floor. "We follow that."

  He smiled. "I should have realized that there must be a system of some kind."

  The green line ended before a cubical structure faced with a panel of many small plates. Mamelta pressed its center, and the plates shuddered and squealed, turned pale, and eventually creaked into motion, first reminding Silk of the irising door that had defied his efforts, then of the unfolding of a blush rose. "It's beautiful," he told Mamelta. "But this can't be the way out. It looks like ... a toolshed, perhaps."

  The square room, revealed as the rose door opened, was dim and dirty; there were bits of broken glass on its floor, and its comers held heaps of the gray-painted steel. Mamelta sat on one, educing a minute puff of dust. "Will this take us to the lifter?"

  Although she had looked at him as she spoke, Silk felt it was not his face that she had seen. "This won't take us anywhere, I'm afraid," he told her as the door folded again. "But I suppose that we might hide here for a time. If the soldiers have gone when we come out, I may be able to find my way back to the tunnels."

  "We want to go back. Sit down."

  He sat, feeling unaccountably that the stacked steel- that the whole storeroom in fact-was sinking beneath him. "What is the lifter, Mamelta?"

  "The Loganslone, the ship that will take us up to the starcrosser Whorl.''

  "I think-" Silk wrestled briefly with the unfamiliar term. "I mean, don't you-haven't you considered-that, that perhaps this boat that was to take you wherever it was, that it may have been a long time ago? A very long time?"

  She was staring straight ahead; he was conscious of the tightness of her jaw.

  "I was going to tell you about Mucor. Perhaps I ought to finish that; then we can go on to other things. I realize all this must be very unsettling to you."

  Mamelta nodded almost imperceptibly.

  "I was going to say that it has bothered me a great deal that her father appears to be unaware of what she does. She goes forth in spirit, as I told you. She possesses people, as she possessed you. She appeared to me, bodiless, in my manse, and later-today, actually-in the tunnels after I dreamed of her. Furthermore, the ghost of a very dear friend-of my teacher and advisor, I should have said- appeared to me at almost the same time that she did. I believe her appearance must have made his possible in some fashion, though I really know much less than I should about such matters."

  "Am I a ghost?"

  "No, certainly not. You're very much alive-a living woman, and a very attractive one. Nor was Mucor a ghost when she appeared to me. It was a spirit of the living that I saw, in other words, and not that of someone who had died. When she spoke, what I heard was actual sound, I feel certain, and she must have shouted or broken something in the room outside to make the lights so bright." Silk bit his lips; some sixth sense told him (though clearly falsely) that he was falling, falling forever, the stack of gray steel and the glass-strewn floor itself dropping perpetually from under him and pulling him down with them. "I was going to say that when Mucor possessed some women at a house in our city, her father never appeared to suspect that the devil they complained of was his own daughter; that puzzled me all day. I believe I've hit upon the answer, and I'd like you to tell me, if you can, whether I'm correct. If Mucor left a small part of her spirit with you, it's possible you know. Has she ever undergone a surgical procedure? An operation on her head?"

  There was a long pause. "I'm not sure."

>   "Because her father and I talked about physicians, among many other things. He has a resident physician, and he told me that an earlier one had been a brain surgeon." Silk waited for Mamelta's reaction, but there was none.

  "That seemed strange to me until it occurred to me that the brain surgeon might have been employed to meet a specific need. Suppose that Mucor had been a normal child in every respect except for her ability to possess others. She would have possessed those closest to her, or so I'd think, and they can hardly have enjoyed it. Blood probably consulted several physicians-treating her phenomenal ability as a disease, since he is by no means religious. Eventually he must have found one who told him that he could 'cure' her by removing a tumor or something of that kind from her brain. Or perhaps even by removing a part of the brain itself, though that is such a horrible thought that I wish there were some way to avoid it."

  Mamelta nodded.

  Encouraged, Silk continued, "Blood must have believed that the operation had been a complete success. He didn't suspect it was his own daughter who was possessing the women because he firmly believed, as he presumably had for years, that she was no longer able to possess anyone. I think it's probable that the operation did in fact interfere with her ability until she was older, just as it seems to have damaged her thought processes. But in time, as that part of her brain regenerated, her ability returned; and having been granted a second chance, she was prudent enough to go farther afield, and in general to conceal her restored ability; although it would seem that she followed her father or some other member of the household to the place where the women lived, as she undoubtedly followed me later. Does any of this sound at all familiar to you, Mamelta? Can you tell me anything about it?"

  "The operation was before I went on the ship,"

  "I see," Silk said, although he did not. "And then .. . ?"

  "It came. I remember now. They strapped us in."

  "Was it a slave boat? We don't have them in Viron, but I know that some other cities do, and that there are slave boats on the Amnis that raid the fishing villages. I would be sorry to learn that there are slave boats beyond the whorl as well."