Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 2 - Serpent Mage

by Serpent Mage (lit)

  "No," Ruth said smoothly. "Come in."

  Salafrance drifted through the door, seeming as tall and slender as a tree, her long face and cold eyes difficult to read as she looked from person to person, lingering on Kristine and her improbably wide belly and then turning her full attention to Michael, who stood by the couch in the living room, feeling awkward and young all over again.

  "I did not know my love for men would lead to this," she said. "I followed the way of Elme for five hundred years, but out of an inner perversity, not by plan. Granddaughter, this is your husband?" She indicated John with a nod of her long chin.

  "His name is-" Ruth began.

  "Yes. I have been watching you all for some time. I hope that does not upset you."

  Ruth swallowed hard but shook her head.

  "I have much to apologize for. I did not prepare my children adequately. I am afraid they issued foolish edicts and did not understand who or what they were, and how they must choose mates wisely. You suffered for this, Great-granddaughter."

  Michael could read his mother's emotions, barely held in check - half an urge to order Salafrance from her house, and half simply to weep. She did neither. Salafrance sat in the living room at Ruth's invitation and gestured for Kristine to sit beside her.

  "Does he read your child for you?" she asked.

  "Michael?" Kristine asked, embarrassed. "Yes. He does"

  "And is it a maker, as well?"

  "We don't know," Michael said.

  "Male or female?"

  "Female," Kristine said. "The doctors confirmed it."

  Salafrance smiled ironically. Her almond eyes could have been regarding anybody in the room at any given moment, without the slightest impression of darting about. "Power is carried by the female. Great granddaughter," she said, focusing her full attention now on Ruth.

  "Yes?"

  "I am proud of you, most proud."

  Ruth smiled. Michael knew then that his mother would never come to love or even be comfortable around Salafrance Underhill, but she could now be comfortable within herself.

  She had not failed her heritage.

  At dinner, as Salafrance picked at rice and vegetables, she asked, "Where is the nectar of mages?"

  "I gave it back to my father," Michael said.

  "It's in my wine-cellar. Closet, actually," John said.

  "It has waited long enough, don't you think?"

  "Sidhe don't drink, Grandmother," Michael said quietly.

  "Do you know the rule - always forbidden, on occasion mandatory?"

  Michael nodded.

  "This is such an occasion," Salafrance decreed.

  "I'll bring it," John said, pushing his chair back from the table.

  "I am told, and I have felt, that you are in control of this world now, of its making and its song," she said to Michael. "This is so?"

  "It is so," Michael said.

  "And what sort of mage are you?"

  Michael smiled. "That's a broad question."

  "Are you an obvious one, dancing with the song at all times, watching the steps of all who dance with you?"

  "He doesn't meddle," Kristine said defensively. "Hardly anybody knows what he does or who he is." Michael patted her hand.

  "I. don't want to control everybody or act as a policeman," he said. "I don't think I should have any real authority over how people behave or make moral judgments. I won't impose my will on others. I'm a poet, not a master. I may tune the instruments, but I don't lay down every note of the song."

  "And if it comes about that the races try to destroy the balance again?"

  "I'll write that bridge when I come to it," he said, irritated that she should see so quickly what worried him most about the future.

  "You are a very young mage," Salafrance said. John returned with the opaque, time-darkened bottle of wine.

  "What is its provenance?" Salafrance asked.

  John was puzzled, uncertain how to answer. "Arno Waltiri gave it to us."

  "The human who shared his body with the Cledar mage.?"

  "The same," Michael said. "He had it from David Clark-ham. I've heard Clarkham stole it from Adonna."

  "We should all drink." Salafrance said. "Except for Kristine, who bears perhaps another maker, one who will drink this wine in her own due course."

  "I don't think I could stomach it anyway," Kristine said.

  The bottle was sealed with a thick slug of wax impressed with a tiny sharp design, two triangles nested like a Star of David. When John cleared out the wax plug from the bottle's neck, working carefully to avoid breaking the ancient glass, an almost palpable aroma filled the room, richer by far than Clarkham's wines, beyond a bouquet and into the realm of a summer-heated fruit garden.

  "Who took this bottle, and when, I do not know, but I know whence it comes," Salafrance said. "The sigil tells me. It was once in the collection of Aske and Elme themselves. It may be the last bottle of its kind, and it carries special virtue. It is fitting that the first human maker and mage in untold ages should drink of it and be confirmed by the experience. That is what Elme would have wished, and Aske would have been proud beyond his time."

  "You knew them?" Ruth asked, awe-struck.

  "I am not that old, Great-granddaughter," Salafrance said, and Michael sensed the depths of her humor. "I have met those who knew them. So has Michael." Her look was potent with meaning. Michael almost shivered.

  "Now that both Councils have dissolved, and new orders are found, and new songs to which we dance, let us toast the new mage in humble surroundings, toast a humble creator who vows not to enslave for order's sake but to do what he must, and that alone: tend a garden fit for all God's creatures and weave a lace pleasing to all."

  Not once, in all his time with Sidhe, had Michael ever heard them refer to a god beyond Adonna or Adonna's Yah-weh.

  "Which god is this, Grandmother?" Michael asked.

  "You feel this God in your blood, do you not?" she asked. She held up her glass, and the others followed suit. "The God that requires only our remembrance in extremis. The gentle, the mature, the ever-young, that demands nothing but our participation and growth. The composer of the Song of Earth and all worlds. Invoke this God, Michael, and be a maker and mage."

  Michael examined the color of the wine in his glass: both golden and brown, all wines become one wine, and said, "To all of us, of all races, and the matter we are made of, and the ground beneath our feet, and the worlds over our head. To strife and passage and death and life." He held his glass higher. "To horror, and awe, and all strong emotions, and most of all, to love."

  Salafrance drank, and the others drank as well.

  When they were finished, John put down his glass and said, "I think it must be an acquired taste."

  "It's wonderful," Ruth said.

  Michael frowned, drawing the flavors back and forth. He honestly did not have an opinion. In a few decades, perhaps he would appreciate what he was tasting now.

  "What's it like?" Kristine asked.

  He shook his head. "I don't know," he said.

  "All that suspense, and you don't know?" she chided.

  The rest of the evening went well, with Salafrance telling her own story and Ruth listening closely. There was much about life in the hills and alleged witchcraft and conflict between the early farmers and the clannish Sidhe. Salafrance told of a lonely and rebellious young Sidhe female - herself - coming down out of the hills into the communities of humans, enchanting and being enchanted in turn by a strong young human male and being taken to his cabin to bear children. In time, Salafrance could not stay apart from her kind; the love was strained by forces neither could control, and they parted, Salafrance leaving their children with the man, who found his house filled with witches and warlocks: his own offspring.

  Kristine slept in the crook of Michael's arm as the hour passed midnight. Salafrance said near dawn that she must leave, and Ruth escorted her to the door, where they had a few words alone.

  Then S
alafrance extended her arms and took her great-granddaughter into them, hugging her close. "Humans have always taught us how to love," she said.

  She departed into the dawn, and Ruth returned to the kitchen, her face wet with tears. John sealed the bottle again and placed it in the wine closet. Michael took Kristine home in the Waltiris' old Saab.

  The birth was late. Three days later, on a bright spring morning after a long-awaited night's rain, the sidewalks dappled with moisture and the grass still beaded, Michael opened the front door to retrieve the newspaper. Something feather-touched his aura, and he paused, listening.

  "Man-child," came a voice above his head. He looked up and saw Coom staring down at him from the roof, her long fingers tightly gripping the tile.

  "You still have much to learn."

  He turned. Nare stood on one leg on the lawn to the left, wriggling her long fingers before her flat chest.

  "Even a Lace-Maker and Gardener needs a few tens of years to mature and reach his potential," said Spart, sitting cross-legged on the lawn to his right, smiling at him with her head cocked to one side. "May we teach?"

  Michael's chest swelled with gladness, and he laughed. "Only if you'll teach our child, too."

  "Man-childs," Coom said. "Our specialty!"

  So it was that Michael Perrin came into his time, and the Earth found its youth once more.

  Afterword

  I have led a dull life, disliking chaos and favoring calm and work and family. Pardon my airs for even thinking of such, but any biography of me will likely be a boring read. Still, there have been a few moments of high interest. One involved the first version of the book you have just read. (Unless, like me, you are in the habit of reading all extraneous matter before sitting down to the main bulk.)

  This experience haunted me for years. It happened at a critical period, late adolescence, in the winter and spring of 1970-1971; I was a late bloomer socially and a hider of deep emotions, what I have since characterized as a "warm hearted iceberg," and so it was inevitable that I should fall hard for the first young woman who consented to go out on a date with me.

  Actually, I fell for Kristine even before the date. She was tall and slender and coltish, wide-hipped and long-legged, hair close-cut in a shag, a style worn by Jane Fonda at the time, unaffectedly bohemian; quite my opposite. We were at San Diego State College and had happened into the same beginning drama class. I asked her to accompany me to the showing of a documentary of Fellini's Satyricon (or more properly, Fellini Satyricon) at the late, lamented Unicorn Theater in La Jolla. Kristine consented.

  I got lost and arrived late at her rented house on Ingraham avenue, near the beach, and we got even more lost making our way to La Jolla, but we made it in time to listen to a pretentious question and answer session with the documentary's director. After, we went out for a late night coffee and talk.

  I was smitten. Not once did I say any such thing to Kristine; but indications must have been plentiful. I asked her to pose for a painting I was planning, a surrealist, adolescent bit of memento mori called "The Madonna of Probability." I had sketched a rough of this picture a short while before our date, always with her in mind.

  She consented, with the proviso that she must pose with her clothes on. I didn't have the presumption or imagination or courage to imagine it would be otherwise.

  At the time, I was painting and writing in tandem, working on my first novel, which I called The Infinity Concerto. The central idea of the novel had interested me since I first gave that same title to a short story in my first years in college; some key elements I had conceived in high school, particularly the episode of the Chinese sorcerer whose power was limited to things golden or yellow.

  After that date, I expressed my buried emotions by making Kristine a character in the book. I worked on "The Madonna of Probability," actually quite a hideous picture, a young woman standing against a dull leaden sky carrying the swaddled skeleton of a child.

  Our only other "date" was a few hours in San Diego's Balboa Park, where I sketched her as we sat on a grassy stretch before the Globe Theater. The sketch was so inadequate that today I cannot remind myself of the full details of her face by looking at it; nor can I recall what she looked like enough to bring a picture to mind. I was idealizing her, not seeing her clearly; also, I was never an expert at human features. (To this day I have not sketched portraits of my beautiful children, perhaps for this reason, that I would be inadequate to the task.)

  During this outing, I told her I had made her a character in the book I was writing. She seemed flattered. I promised that when the book was published, I would send her a copy. I must have seemed very bizarre.

  When I dropped her off at her apartment, she stepped from my car, turned, leaned into the doorway, and asked why I was doing all this. I did not admit my infatuation; I was trying to play it cool, yet my feelings must have been more than obvious, even overbearing.

  We met in class, and at rehearsals for a silly student play (not written by me, thank God) in which she was to be an artist's model, and I some other role. I was not the artist in the play, but I painted a few deliberately awful pictures for background.

  We did not go out again.

  Writing the book, it soon became clear to me that the character of Kristine had to be removed from the narrative at some point, for reasons of plot; my character could not finish his arc of development encumbered by a partner. I remember writing these scenes in a kind of trance; she did not die, but was involved in a hideous accident that took her away from the protagonist's life, dropping her into the "mist of creation," a place where anything was possible. (I still have a picture of the Mist of Creation rising from an embryonic, incomplete farm scene, prematurely revealed, completed before the novel.)

  I had not spoken with Kristine for more than a month. She had turned down another date at one point, and I did not have the courage to ask again; it was obvious she sensed my infatuation and was not at ease around me, and who could blame her? One-sided infatuation is not a comfortable responsibility. In many respects, she was more mature than I, although we were the same age.

  After a time, I did not even see her on campus.

  I experienced odd moments. One evening, listening to the adagio of Mahler's unfinished tenth symphony, I had an epiphany of life and death as intense as anything I have felt before or since. It was not directly connected with Kristine. But hearing of a car accident at Sunset Cliffs, days later, I thought of her.

  I had already ended her part in the novel. The protagonist was suffering intense grief over his loss. The book was far from finished, but "The Madonna of Probability" was nearing completion. Adding the final touches one evening, I decided to call Kristine and let her know it was done, and she could see it if she wished. I did not phone immediately; the thought of calling bothered me. I blamed my reticence on lack of courage. Perhaps I did not want to impose on her any more. Still, something compelled me.

  The next day, in my last class of the day, an English class, I again fell into a strange mood and wrote a poem, part of which is now in The Serpent Mage. The poem strongly hinted of a loved woman's death. I dreaded making the call. At home, late in the afternoon, I stood in a dark hallway and dialed the number of Kristine's apartment.

  A room-mate answered. Hadn't I heard? she asked. Kristine had left school about two months ago and returned to Marin County. She had been killed there in an automobile accident. (Not in the Sunset Cliffs accident.)

  I ran outside and stood in an empty lot nearby, in shock. When I returned to my room, I simply sat, stunned. For weeks I went through the motions of being alive, but inside, I was shattered. I had faced the death of loved ones before - grandmother, uncle, acquaintances. But none seemed quite so immediate, so strange and final. And what haunted me - frightened me - was that I had seemed to know what would happen to her from the very beginning, from the time I first imagined her holding a symbol of death.

  I went through various rituals, trying to escape th
is not wholly appropriate grief. There had been little enough between us. She had been friendly and kind and little more. And now I was going through the fire. I was facing not just the ultimate end to all possibilities of love, but a metaphysical puzzle straight out of The Twilight Zone.

  I had modeled a character in the novel after a living woman, and then had removed her; and the living woman had died. I didn't take the more bizarre aspects of this too seriously; that way lay true madness, and I have never fancied madness. But it seemed obvious that I had sensed Kristine's impermanence; in the plot of my life, at least, I had known she would be removed.

  In bed one night a few weeks after, I gathered all my mental forces and tried to break through the barrier of death, to communicate with Kristine. I had done this once, five years before, to communicate with a recently dead uncle: nothing had happened then. But what I now experienced burned and horrified me; I imagined a kind of shell of Kristine, memories present but soul gone, having a relation to the living woman like that of a flake of dead skin to live flesh. She or it seemed to occupy a sphere of newly dead around the Earth, protecting us from harsh outer realities much as dead skin protects the pink growing flesh beneath. I doubt this was any genuine revelation, but it hurt me so much that I recorded it in a diary, then ripped that page out and threw it away. Here were truly things I did not want to know.