Celebrant (6 page)

There is smoke from the moon, a long plume of frail white smoke.
Its light falls on brilliant red yellow and purple buildings, unlit streets swarming with tiny lanterns and candles carried by the people thronging them.
The moon’s light falls on white roses that grow from white ceramic tubs, pigeon girls darting past whip by in a whirring cloud of echoes and afterimages, a sharp smell of their sweat.

Let’s try that direction (he
thinks, not in so many words)—

The vacant room, with a few bits of trash littering the floor, is part of a suite of offices.
It’s necessary to go through another room, with a sizeable metal desk in the middle, to get to it, and there are pieces of paper that are rain collected in the shallow hollows dimpling the top.
For a moment he stops, deKlend does, a little too close to a doorway, brighter sunlight, still dimmed by dense overcast, thinking that he can just barely fail to hear a voice raised in what could be a warning;
the sound throbs up and fades as though it were lifting itself with effort.
Its tone conjures up a sketchy image in deKlend’s mind, of workers moving something heavy and too big to see around, so that another one has to guide them, and that other is calling out to them to stop, perhaps because that heavy thing is about to break loose and crush him.
It seems he’s been turning that cry over and over in his mind, whether or not he heard it, for a long time, although it seems too short to speak of remembering it yet;
it has ceased and it hasn’t yet.

Going through the doorway with no door
—
that’s it, presumably, leaning in the corner to his right.
There’s a narrow window just about opposite him, the sill comes down nearly to his knees, and through it he sees a small paved open space like a quad not more than a couple of dozen feet across that forms the common area between the offices.
One side is buried in climbing vines, like a tangled shadow.
Satin sky overhead, the light is dim and even.
A large figure emerges from the narrow arch in the wall and crosses the quad with long booming strides that shake the ground.
It is all veiled, in a voluminous haystack of floating robes, black on black embroidery, and a hat atop its veiled head the brim shielding the fiercely staring eyes beneath.
It moves with a kind of haughty exasperation and impatience, not seeing him, plunging in among the offices.

The figure does not turn its coldly burning eyes on him as it passes the window where, he feels sure, he is sufficiently conspicuous to be seen.
In his dreams, he would sometimes catch a glimpse of a large figure all veiled, impressively dressed, although he’s encountered a man with a black wrap about his midsection, squatting there in the corner of the room he’d lived in eight years ago, a black wrap and nothing else on his enormous, powerful body, but it was veiled anyway in a shadow that was bound to the head, the upper arms and the thighs by twine.
He’s encountered a stinking man all in shreds, layered in long ragged veils one on top of another.
And even then, as in every other case, the childish thought would come back to deKlend
—
what makes me different from
this
man?

Was it the same one every time?
Every time, in a single dream?
Was it the same dream?
The same night?
In any case, always the same question, and the same judgement, and one other, somewhere in there.
Before he’d seen the figure he’d been discussing something in dream talk with some others, and one of them, all smeared, said to him he needed seasoning.
Then he’d seen the figure again, right along the ridge above him, taking long impetuous strides, the veil catching and jerking free of the brush lining the path.

deKlend says to himself, glancing down, well, I can’t appear to him like
this!

—
Like what?

He might get the wrong idea (deKlend thinks) and mistake me for some shabby, capering little good little
fellow
.

There’s hollow breathing in the next room;
deKlend listens, motionless in agonized suspense, cold sweat on his face, trickles down his back.
He doesn’t dare breathe himself for fear of being heard by the breather in the next room.
He gasps
—

A rolling plain, covered in cream-colored stubble, and silver against the dark grey soil, same overhead, and one of the shadow trees turns out to be him, good old Veily, again.
Although deKlend is sneaking up on him, deKlend moves quickly, thinking that the faster he moves, the faster whatever noise he might be making will stop.
Having drawn up behind the figure almost too close without evidently attracting its notice, deKlend reaches down to pluck up the hem of its cape, several feet of which are trailing on the ground.
There is a crease in the hem, but his fingers keep slipping off from it, and the cape does not move.
Reaching down to lift it, he can barely get his fingers under it
—
it’s heavier than lead, impossible to budge.
Looking up he meets the constellation glare of the figure, who has turned his head to him

That arm shoots out and takes him in an unbearably strong grip, the figure is laughing silently at him and dragging him along again across a rumbling black and silver plain strewn with boulders that jump, totter, clash, and fall while the cape spreads oceanic night in their wake, like a high black canopy, melting and fine as mist, which sheds flashing dust, in long threads like rain tracks in the air.
That tinsel dust is as fresh as rain.
The stars shine through the transparent canopy.
The drumming has gone below the horizon, and him with it.
Now nobody stands there in the brilliant, clear fog.

*

Now what about that homelessness?

End of the world weather
—
clouds race along the sky, wind blows along the ground stripping the foliage from the trees for what always seems like the final time, blowing clean and pale and dead and cold and bright.
The-end-of-the-world is always there in every moment, too close, right now, step out to the end, and back?
Can you get back from the end of the book to now unmarked?
Identify the traits of one who has stepped out many times:
that person is all aswirl with intimate hypnotic spirals.
Does anyone ever see a dream end?

The limpid air shivers with a resounding voice, booming from peak to peak, tolling across the plain to the rocky place where he hides himself.
It does look like the vicinity of Votu, from the photographs.
The ground is black streaked with white ribbons of clay, and chalky pebbles litter the stony floor of the steppe.
There are boulders, too, and these give him pause because he remembers vaguely something minatory that is supposed to happen in the vicinity of such boulders.
The voice is booming all around him now, calling something like “boom,” or “boam.”

Turning round and round, looking for something, an escape probably, deKlend notices a brilliant, tapering light, clear as a star, flickering like a torch, darting and twirling at the feet of the remote mountains.
This incandescence flits along the ground in a kind of racing dance, tracing a shapeless character;
it leaves no streak behind it, nor is it at all troubled or distorted, the air is so clear and still.
It’s like some divine messenger, revelling in his exalted charge, and enjoying the sacred delay before he delivers.

Now it becomes distincter:
the shouted word is Burn!
...
Burn!
Turning around again, deKlend sees him, hurrying toward him down the short slope.
He vanishes into the thick shadow of a boulder, so only the glint in his eyes can be seen, darting through the veil like a flashing needle.
Velvetty hands emerge from the shadow and take up deKlend’s bare arm.
They raise it, bent at the elbow, and the black, veiled mouth closes firmly on the fullest part of the forearm.
There is no pain, only a sort of tugging, opening feeling and lightness, and as the arm is slightly lowered there is a bite taken out of it, like a bite in an apple, the clean, bloodless, fine-grained flesh and the crisp grooves.
The veil has been broken by the teeth and driven down into the gaps between them, so that each tooth protrudes naked and as it were delineated by the veil, which folds into the mouth behind and around them.
The toothed veil grins madly at him.
The arm is raised for another bite when the figure stops, closing its open jaws, and points to a brown spot on the arm, like a soft discoloration on the skin of an apple.

Rotten!
(he says flatly), his teeth opening and closing twice.
He seizes deKlend by the neck and tosses him headlong over his shoulder.
As he wakes, deKlend hears resumed again the sonorous call Burn!
...
Burn!
...
Burn!
He is still crushed in the blazing lava and sitting on the cold, wet grit beneath the table, writing letters with the tangy smell of varnish in his nose.

In Votu:

Pilgrims to Votu come to worship at the shrines of the five natural robots.

the NATURAL ROBOTS:

These are robots no one built, which were formed spontaneously in the mountains.
It is generally believed that they owe their being to a very unlikely succession of complications in the process of stalagmite formation.
Metal laminae and minate crystals form where conditions permit natural electrolism to occur in the vicinity of magnetic veins.
Travellers in the high mountains have remarked time out of mind on the plaguey static electricity they encounter, which made everyone’s hair stand on end and set everyone’s woolens crackling above a certain altitude.
Batterized stones murmur to themselves all over the slopes.
The natural robots are supposed to form when a particular concatenation of dry cells, minate armatures, silicon and crystal formations occur.
Most of them are so simple as to be indistinguishable from any other sedimentary formation.
The moving parts are microscopically small gears and springs, floating in jellified crude oil.

Naturally not everyone agrees with this version of events.
Other, arguably wiser, persons leave the mystery of the origins of the natural robots alone.

The larger, more elaborate robots have always been worshipped, if not quite as gods.
Many orders of mathetes have been established over time to attend to their maintenance, and because it made sense to dedicate a body of people exclusively to the task of studying them.
The discovery of no end of new inventions has proceeded from close scrutiny of their workings and behavior.

It is forbidden to name the robots, so they are given only nicknames:
there’s urchin, groper, troglodyte, anemone, and urn.
Urchin looks like a sea urchin, a haystack of pipes around a two-part body, with a single hydraulic foot.
Groper is a mechanical fabric and looks like a whitish-silver tarpaulin draped over a mammoth caterpillar that isn’t there;
it is in constant motion and feels its way along with giant ‘hands’ of charged plasma.
No one has ever seen troglodyte, who never leaves the cave below its shrine;
it is all covered in a material so highly reflective that even the faintest light rebounds with blinding intensity from its skin.
Anemone is capable of flight;
it is a boxy turbine skirted with machine fibers and spherical jettiphers.
Urn is actually more like a massive goblet with rough vertical stripes of rock along its sides, and huge drills.