Celebrant (9 page)

The Goddess is only one of a great many different kinds of machinery produced in the shen processors of the city factory.
This edifice is a long building that snakes up into the mountains, the only building in Votu, apart from the outer walls, to cross the boundary line into the future districts.
The factory groans at intervals, a drawn-out rasp like a hoary, chain-smoking old ram clearing his throat, to signal changing shifts.
The workers are unionized by the Motheaten
socialists, their books turning brown.

The factory produces a form of spectral wafer known as insulation, which is traded on long thin chrome spindles, and
adminicules
, made from ordinary water.
The heavy water that this process creates is used to run the machinery that produces the celestials, and the light water is pumped throughout the city grid.
Adminicules are microscopic particles of administration which, when combined in sufficient numbers, form
decisions
, usually in the shape of metallic statues or cylinders
—
the Goddess of Justice being a rare and prohibitively expensive ultradecision.
Ordinary decisions are used to monitor other production processes, including the layering of insulation on musculosks (musculo-skeletal units) in the incubators, thus producing the artificial people called
modets
.
Some modets are thought to be incarnations of persons engendered by sexual intercourse not resulting in pregnancy.

The inhabitants of Votu believe that every sexual act engenders life.
This life may be produced in the usual way, or in some other way, and the power to create life sexually is not in any way confined in space or in time, nor with respect to persons.
Unmoored in time and place, some sexual acts drift on a kind of conatus peculiar to them until intercepted by some sort of an opportunity, and then incarnate in new life:
animal, or “minate” [the sages of Votu consider the mineral to be living precursor to the vegetable, so the latter two categories are both equally indicated by the Votuvan term “minate”].
In some cases, the unmoored sexual act produces human forms, who appear in the future districts of the descending city.
The circumstances of their invisible parturition are unique to each case.
These beings are physically identical to humans engendered in the usual way, although they can be born at any age.
A handful are born old and decrepit, living only a short time.
The brains of these others are developed for the most part in keeping with their apparent age, so the aged newborns appear stocked with full memories.
At least one proved to be highly accomplished, and lived long enough to compose an influential dance.

In most cases these others simply join the people of Votu and lead lives no more or less likely to be remarkable in any other way.
They can however be distinguished by a special birthmark, a sooty smudge that appears persistently on the skin’s surface at a particular spot, different for each.
The smudge can be marred by rubbing, or scrubbed entirely away;
it will return in roughly the same place.
The mark actually consists of soot, graphite, charcoal, lead, minates, or combinations of these.

In reference to the mark, which resembles a smoke-stain, the others are colloquially referred to by the nickname, “Burn.”
This is not a generic name;
they are not collectively known as Burns.
If someone exhibits the mark, one is free to say to him or her, with a jaunty air, Well Burn, how’s the family?
Or, casually, Come back later, Burn.

The whispering statue teacher, ivy blanketing the ruined church is its nervous system
...
the blindfolded upraised face the light on the face
...
cheek-to-cheek with its marble slab, the cadaver murmurs, It is their statues who rule us.

The teachers!
False modets!
They’ve come, creeping out of the ground and street, curling around the edges of the houses like scraps of mist
...
but they are hard as stone, their livid, unblinking eyes burn with white rage, the earth trembles beneath their silent feet, gelatinous smoke creeps from their lips, parted in a grimace like the fixed spasm of some feebly-remembered anguish.
When they become aware of the presence of a child of school age, their smooth, gliding motion abruptly changes, and they advance in galvanic vibrations, snaking out their arms and legs in rigid angular ways.

Citizens of Votu defend their homes and places of work by decking them out in enchanted awnings, made by the carpet weavers.
Votu is a city of vividly-patterned awnings;
the buildings all look half-asleep unless a breeze is stirring.
Then, they’re like the lover who wakes up next to you, fluttering eyelashes and inviting you to pick up where you left off, unless the breeze becomes a strong wind.
Then, they’re like bedraggled, unshorn sheep turning their flanks to the elements and the wiser folks will roll or crank them in again.
Awning up, shutters closed, an old man surprised by sleep, his eyebrows still raised.

The magic land:
where corpses mill
...
a corpse strolls by, whistling
...
sounds are sometimes visible, the shape and color of his words
...
don’t listen to that melody if you want to stay sane
...

Studious in the magic land the brain grows heavy with powers, enacting the conflict in itself, the crash of desires in a hermetic ghetto, on the brink of the land of no memory, inhabited by neither rich nor poor but those who are sealed into a dream of magic and the supernatural, by turns tormented and enraptured over correspondences and omens, who can see the sun shine at night and the moon by day, whose torches candles and fireplaces shed darkness in ghoulish old houses, where the corners, attics, closets and basements blaze with light.

Like it?

“Like it, Burn?”

deKlend:

The Madrasa Dabeb Chafif is still a family business, run by Mrs. Manoah’s son Julien.
The next morning, deKlend watches from the window of the teacher’s lounge as Julien’s smoking helicopter hacks up from behind the hemlocks and lands on a ledge thrust out into the void.

Oh, they’re back
early
, (the music director groans)

deKlend spends much of the day delivering messages, going to and fro and up and down among the rainstreaked concrete buildings, which are scarcely less run down than the teachers.
There is a canal of caustic-looking black water and a loading dock where barrels of fresh explanations are unloaded on a regular schedule.
Manoah is able to procure them through his black market connections.

deKlend finds Manoah interesting, and would cultivate his acquaintance if he didn’t refuse all unnecessary conversation with anyone he regards as a social inferior:
a narrow circle, extending only to his immediate family.
To the best of deKlend’s knowledge, this storied family consists in Julien and his sister Angela, a big oafish woman with steel-grey hair who stomps around in old brogans and short khaki pants.
A few inches of wide, mayonnaisey knees peep out from above the tops of her long stockings, made from black sponges.

Manoah attires himself in the most insanely flamboyant style deKlend has ever seen.
He teases his pale red hair out until it radiates from his head in a fantastic ginger corona that would have made a thinner man look like a giant dandelion.
His broad, flat upper lip is smooth and a little oily;
he has a carroty goatee and a ruddy-purplish, terra-cotta complexion.
Everything he wears is copious, flowing, gauzy, flame-colored, and surmounted by capes with stiff collars, so he always looks as if his head, wanly flaming, had broken through, and gotten stuck in, the bottom of a decoratively-ornamented colander.
He keeps his hands in magnificent condition;
the nails gleam like opal flakes
—
but deKlend’s are still more beautiful.
Manoah snatches papers from him without turning toward him, nostrils flickering, and without swivelling his piggy little eyes.
deKlend thinks he is jealous.

Scuttlebutt solemnly avers there is a wife somewhere, although it is hard to imagine what species of womanhood would freely join herself to such a creature, but evidently it was, and still might nearly be, a great aesthetickal affair of the heart.
According to rumor, she, who is never reliably named but could be anything from Yvelynne to Mulcybirette, is a votary of the muse.
Her sensibilities are of such a lofty delicacy that she foreswears to commit her works to writing, let alone anything so vulgar as print.
The hieroglyphs of her virtually imperceptible melodies are written only with the ethereal pencil of subtle, starlike inspiration on the tenuous pages of her memory, and she herself is never seen.

As a rule, Manoah holds diwan during his prolonged imperial baths and expects his retainers and attendants to take notes and recite information to him while he talks suavely on a meerschaum phone or as he scrubs and salves his acres of pink flab.

“Every night at midnight, Manoah strips naked, puts a tasselled hat on, hops into bed, and reads slave narratives.
He’s a completely unreasonable person.”

deKlend overhears most of this from the staff quidnuncs and the rest from Nardac, the art historian.
She’s an elderly woman, completely bald, who wears caftans and ungainly jewelery.

Nardac seems to take to deKlend.

Come have a look at our gardens.

—
gardens,
—
gardens,
—
gardens.

Looking up at the brownish nothingness overhead, deKlend experiences horror, and for a moment seems about to suffocate under the heavy lid.
This impression fades, without entirely disappearing, as he walks with Nardac.
She talks at random about the gardens, the whrounims, the scene.

The overhanging mountains are filled with haunted houses, and from a distance one can often make out people fleeing from one or another of them, aghast.
In their frenzy to escape they often collide with each other at crossroads.
Traffic congestion is at its worst around midnight.
In recent years this problem has diminished a bit with the establishment of a refugee network, by means of which the gastered visitors rotate from one haunted house to another, in the belief that one who has been marked for destruction by a particular house is thereby immunized against the depredations of any other.

The grafticulture of the whrounims is unbelievably developed.
The trees fold into each other, the forest canopy is all multicolored roses instead of leaves, and the gloom beneath them, velvety with petals, is so overpoweringly fragrant the smell burns in the eyes and nose with a sugary heat.
They stroll the corpse way, where the path is lined with false charnel pits filled with plants that naturally take the shape of dead bodies, and that burst into huge stink blossoms, sickly pink leather punchbowls, that attract pollinating flies by counterfeiting the carrion reek of rotting meat.

The brilliantly-decorated domes and spires that overtower the campus are more numerous all the time;
they come in all colors excluding only white, color of mania, and black, color of true love.
The use of black and white is restricted in the subterranean dominions of the whrounims.

Although they maintain the Madrasa, the whrounims neither teach nor study, nor even appear there, and speculation about these unknown benefactors, their motives and even their physical nature, is rife.