Celebrant (8 page)

The instructor’s voice echoes strangely, not rebounding from the walls around them but just floating away in fragments, as if the drafts here repeat them to themselves.
He leads deKlend through a doorway and into the halls, lit only by small round skylights.
The interior of the building suggests a wasps’ nest laid out in accordance with strictly functional institutional design.
The instructor stands by a door and gestures him into a chilly classroom with cork tile ceiling.
He’s gone when deKlend turns around.
Deciding to wait, deKlend seats himself on the frosty floor at the back of the room.
He adjusts his muffler, the shawl swathed around his shoulders, and the pair of blankets he wears like a robe, secured about his waist with a leather belt.
There are chalkboards on two walls, a blank wall, and one with windows, a flag drooping on a pole, some coat pegs on the blank wall, and a wire wastebasket.
Otherwise the room is entirely empty.

How cold it is!
(he thinks)

And later,

What has this shrinking or this tingling or this flashing silvericity have to do with ‘cold’?

And later
—
a moment later,

But then what does silver, or what has ink, or paper, or a sound made with the vocal folds, have to do with temperature?
Or ‘cold’ with cold?

When deKlend wakes up again, a number of students sit around him.
According to the chalkboard, the subject of the class is FLATTERY.

Do they know I am already an expert?
(deKlend wonders)
I could be teaching this class.

There are four teachers roaming the irregular aisles in this one room.
The students are informed that attendance is not compulsory and all of them immediately leave.

I don’t want to sit in here either (deKlend thinks)

In the halls, teachers mill in among the less numerous students a bit like contented nuns, trailing contrails of secondgradeteacherperfume.
To deKlend this already seems like an anomaly;
there’s something about the place that is fundamentally disengaged from activity.
Nothing happens here.

A tug on his arm summons him to meet Dr. Politte, the acting dean.
The interview is conducted in her high-ceilinged, gaunt-windowed office, faceted in shape;
a dim white vault, icy as a refrigerator.

I’m Dr. Politte.

She introduces herself without getting up or doing much else but shivering, as though stirring herself even that little, just to greet him, had unsettled an invisible envelope of warmth.

It’s always so cold in this building!
(she says)

The tailings of her words repeat and fade.

—
cold in this building!
—
cold in this building!
—
cold in this building
...

She gestures at the windows, crowded with dark branches.

With those hemlocks blocking the windows, no heat can get in at all (she complains softly)
And look
—
Look where that leak was
—

She points to water damage on the ceiling, but deKlend has to squint for some time at it before he sees the bulge;
some crumbling building matter, pale blue foam with flowers printed on it, not at all conspicuous.

Her desk is surrounded by a circle of wire wastepaper baskets.
Perhaps, deKlend thinks, she has one for each hour.

I’d like to examine your credentials, if you please, (she says)

Sitting behind the desk she seems too small for it, and like a half-melted candle, just starting to lose its shape.

Certainly, (deKlend replies) and begins rummaging in his empty, rusty leather portfolio.
Flakes of leather crumbling from it slide down his pant legs to the floor.

May I borrow a pen? (he asks without looking up)

Without a word, she hands him a fountain pen across the desk.
He leans way over to take it and thanks her, fumbling with half-melted zippers and rusty snaps.

And (he adds a moment later)
—
a large sheet of paper, or vellum
...
or parchment, anything like that
...
would you happen to have?
—
About this dimensions?

He is trying to keep the portfolio from spilling onto the floor, and bunches it up roughly under one arm while making squirrelly gestures with his hands.

She smoothly opens the right upper side drawer of her desk, reaches in and pulls out a paper tube, which she holds out to him gently, so as not to crush it.
He thanks her, taking it in his hand with care.
He closes his portfolio and sets it across his knees, spreading the paper on it, pen between his fingers like a cigar, leaning too close to the desk.

Ink?
—
Please, ink?

From the same drawer, which she hadn’t bothered to close, she produces an inkwell and passes it to him.
He thanks her, puts it on the edge of the desk nearest him, fills the pen, and begins to draw.

The hours pass in silence, except for the scraping of the nib.
Dr. Politte sits behind her desk, gazing at nothing with a wistful expression.

deKlend abruptly passes the rattling paper to her, making a little inarticulate noise of satisfaction.
She examines its curlicues, the incantatory inscription coolly glowing with prestige, noting the superb draughtsmanship, and scans the text in both calligraphy and black letter.

Where is your name? (she asks finally)

—
Isn’t it there?

Your name isn’t anywhere on this (she says gently, brushing the paper with her hand)
—
No one’s is.
I’m afraid I can’t possibly accept this.

She rolls it up and sets the tube on her right shoulder, balancing it there.
She lowers her hand, looking at him sympathetically.
Then, raising her hand again, and without removing her eyes from him, she pushes the tube with her index finger until it slips off her shoulder and down into one of the trash baskets.

He screws the cap back onto the fountain pen despondently.

If only someone
suitable
had applied (she sighs)

Presently the faculty secretary accosts him in the hall.

You can sleep on the sofa in there tonight.

—
in there tonight,
—
in there tonight,
—
in there tonight
...

The staff lounge is also dark and narrow, with a splintery wooden table running along the only wall with windows.
Staff come in and out
constantly.
deKlend misses him at first, but the music director is
sagging directly behind the door, under the unlit reading lamp, looking like an epitomization of fatigue.
Two persons, and since the power is out it’s of course too dim in there to see them, but they sound like teachers, go striding by at a rate better suited to walking out-of-doors.

So-and-so was the worst mortician in the business.
He was so bad his clients walked out on him.

Oh I think you’re crazy, (the other snaps peevishly)

—
And? (is the dry rejoinder)

uhahem
...
well
...

—
Is this a sanatorium?
(deKlend wonders, suddenly frightened)

He looks at the thick, bilious paint on the walls, the cruel, gleaming stone floors, polished with bloodstain-resistant wax.
The sofa he lies on is not only narrow but so low to the ground no one could sit on it without their knees coming up around their ears.
So, could it be he lies on a cot, actually?
He jerks his blankets together and grips them tightly.

—
I am not in the madhouse
(he tells himself fiercely)

In Votu:

The shadows in Votu all look like shadows only as long as you don’t examine them too closely
—
then you notice they’re actually all a very dark white.

The stones of the city are blue and green as long as you don’t look at them too closely
—
if you do, then you see right away they’re all as white as snow, which is actually transparent, having no color at all, even though snow is white.

*

Citizens of Votu resort to litigation, even where crime is concerned, only as a last resort.
All cases are tried in a chamber of the city factory called the court shop.
This court is directly presided over, not quite in person, by the Goddess of Justice.
This is a huge bronze machine, whose design applies certain principles gleaned from close observation of the natural robots.
She approaches the bench from behind, with a tread so heavy it shakes the room, emerging from the gloom of a narrow recess to take her position at the gavel.
Her position is so lofty, no one can see whether or not she takes up and strikes the gavel, or simply emits the knocks.
Technically naked, she robes herself in rippling air, whose distortions help to preserve her dignity.
She listens impassively to each counsel, who is permitted a fixed time in which to plead his case.
It is understood that the attention of the Goddess is available to the speaker only during that time, and that, once its duration has elapsed, not another word can she hear.
When the attorney is done, or when the time is up, a chime is rung.

A girl of no more than fourteen years is attached to the court, and her voice is the last to be heard by the Goddess in each case.
The girl speaks and rings a chime, and then performs her particular function.
Before giving a verdict, the Goddess of Justice always drinks a glass of water.
The girl’s task is to pour the glass and offer it to the Goddess.
The water is specially treated by the selzoids
—
people who live in the hinterlands and cannot survive without constant carbonization
—
so all its residues are exactly balanced.
The girl pours this glass of water from a steel ewer and carries it to the bench on a round lacquered tray.
The Goddess takes the glass in her hand with a faint click.
When her lips, which had till that moment seemed welded shut, part
—
everyone present holds breath an enchanted moment
—
a shining meniscus can be seen inside them.
She drains the glass at a draught, with audible gulps, followed at once by a hollow sigh, and the verdict, after which she turns and walks back into her alcove.
The justice of her verdicts is not often questioned, but there is no legal reason that a case cannot be brought before her again and again until the more persistent side gets the answer it wants.
Her impartiality is guaranteed because she is completely apart from the life of the city.