Polystom (21 page)

Eventually Stom reached a state of mind in which he was indeed distressed. Upset not by the death of his uncle, for on that topic he still felt nothing, but upset rather by precisely the fact that he felt nothing. He
ought
to have felt devastated, he ought to have grieved. The fact that he did not experience that emotion troubled him, to a certain extent. If he searched himself, he came to the conclusion that he did not and could not find the death of his uncle distressing. It was not ‘tragic’ or ‘appalling’ or any of the things the newsbooks called it, except in a purely intellectual sense. The word that occurred to Stom was
preposterous
. It was, simply, preposterous that Cleonicles could be dead, and doubly preposterous that he had died the way he had. It was absurd. If Stom had invested any feelings in the fact – he did not think this consciously, but we can assume that this was the subconscious factor behind his emotional numbness – if he
cared
at all, then it would endorse this preposterousness, and in turn this would render the whole of the cosmos chaotic and absurd. All this wonderful order! This filigree network of relations and forces, orbits and growth – all of it would become nonsense the moment he allowed this ridiculous event to take root in his heart. For the universe to bring a consciousness into existence, to allow it to grow and develop and mix with
others and gain understanding, to achieve so many things only, in the end, to achieve nothing – to die at the hands of servants. Not even of servants, but vagrants. It was intolerable. A life needed a pattern, just as society did. Some psychological muscle in Polystom’s subconscious mind refused to relax enough to allow this notion through: his uncle had died an absurd death.

Lacking the self-knowledge to understand this, Stom was merely baffled by his absence of grief. He felt as if he were unable to do the proper thing, in a culture where doing the proper thing was all-important. The more he searched himself, hoping for tears and gloom and not finding them, the more upset he became at his strange behaviour. He began, in a half-focused manner, to wonder if there were something withered and monstrous in his soul. Hadn’t he
loved
his uncle? Well yes, he thought he had. Didn’t he
miss
his occasional visits to the moon? Well, yes, in a distant sort of way, he did. So why didn’t he cry? Not a single tear?

Not a single tear.

The sense of distance from the event was compounded by the funeral. He began busying himself to prepare it, his fourth death ceremony in as many years, when he received notification that the event had been taken over by General Demus, one of the leading figures in the current war effort, subordinate only to Counts Meton and Euelpides, and the Prince himself. This funeral, Stom was told, was a matter of military honour and the patriotic pride of the whole of the System. The General trusted, his aide-de-camp told Stom in person during one visit, that Steward Polystom was not inconvenienced by this move, and hoped indeed that it would be of assistance to him in this time of great grief to have the responsibility for organising so complex an affair taken out of his hands.

Polystom, thrown, not wanting to betray that fact that he felt no grief at all, had assented too quickly. Very kind of the General. Please carry my compliments to him.

The two of them had been sitting outside Polystom’s house, the Autumn Year well underway. A friend, or a family member, might have asked how Stom was bearing up under his terrible blow; but the aide-de-camp, though a fellow of good breeding, was no friend and no relative. He said nothing.

‘Will it,’ Polystom asked eventually, ‘be held on the moon?’

‘The General plans it so,’ replied the aide.

‘And quite a large do?’

The very faintest of quizzical looks crossed the aide’s face. ‘Naturally. Cleonicles – your uncle – is a great hero of the System.’

‘Really?’

A slight, embarrassed pause. Polystom had not meant to be so abrupt; his single word had sounded like a contradiction. ‘Of course,’ said the aide.

‘It’s only,’ said Stom, ‘that I’ve always thought of him as just my uncle. You know? Although naturally I see what you mean. His science was terribly important, I know. Terribly important.’

‘As a scientist, yes,’ said the aide. ‘But more than that. A great patriotic hero. A key figure in the war, on the Mud-world you know. Count Meton himself will be attending.’

‘He will? I didn’t realise they were friends.’

‘Oh yes. The Count himself said, yesterday, that Cleonicles was one of the most significant figures for the military campaign on the Mudworld.’

This was entirely new to Polystom. ‘You’ll pardon me,’ he said, ‘but I had believed my uncle opposed to the war.’

‘You’ll pardon
me
,’ said the aide, with an ingratiating smile, ‘and of course you know your own uncle better than I, but his engagement with the campaign goes right back to the beginning. I know he had disagreements with some aspects of the
prosecution
of the war, but not with the war itself, never of that.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Stom, weakly.

‘The Prince – this is confidential, you understand,’ said the aide, leaning forward conspiratorially (although there was nobody in the garden but them), ‘—but the Prince is bestowing on him the Order of the Sun, and of the Eagle. Posthumously. It will be announced at the service.’

‘An honour indeed,’ Stom mumbled.

‘And, to be confidential again – I hope you don’t mind –’

‘Not at all.’

‘—I don’t know if you’re aware that your uncle raised a platoon for the war from his own estate. It was entirely characteristic of the man, I think, that he insisted on his own anonymity; that he took no public credit for this most patriotic act.’

Polystom hadn’t known this either. Clearly the war had meant more to Cleonicles than the nephew had realised. And, a week later, at the service itself, the rank upon rank of gaudy, embossed uniforms amazed him further. The entire affair was so martial it gave the impression that Cleonicles had been a general or a count himself; instead of being a scientist given to writing sharp-phrased letters to the news-books about the poor management of affairs on Mudworld. It all added to Stom’s sense of removal from the old man’s death.

A great tent, more like a canvas barn, had been erected on the flat land south of his uncle’s house, with tiered scaffolding for the seating and a wide entrance through which the cortege could pass. It took all morning for the place to fill, the brilliant colours of three dozen varieties of uniforms, the cream silks and pale wormskin dresses of the women, servants in white with bands of white cloth drawn about their mouths (an ancient symbol of mourning, once common amongst actual mourners, now worn symbolically by the servants) moved up and down between the seats with drinks. At the apex of all this attention was a raised dais on which the coffin was placed precisely on the chime of noon.
Polystom sat behind the wooden box, with Count Meton and General Demus on either side of him. Once the servants had deposited the coffin and stepped away, the silence in the tent was complete, intense, like a concentration of the heat of this sunny autumn day, oppressively all about him.

He spoke first, standing, leaning over the coffin as tradition demanded, and addressing those gathered: talking waveringly of the role his uncle had played in his life, of how he had been aware of the greatness of the man only distantly, and had always treasured the closeness of his family relationship instead. It was a weak performance; the audience, military uniforms splashing a disconcerting quantity of colour about the usually bleached experience of a funeral, sat absolutely still.

Finally Stom fished a poem out of his back pocket. He had debated with himself about this, remembering only too well the stony response he had got at his co-father’s funeral. But in the end he had decided to read it anyway, as a personal communication between himself and the memory of his uncle, and also – perhaps – to offer his own social embarrassment on the altar of his guilt at his continuing grieflessness. He read aloud, one of Phanicles’ Rhum elegies, adapting the final line to the circumstances:

I was alone at the well
.

I was doused in shadow and in deed
.

My yoke lay on the ground, waiting
.

I cannot say what I mean
.

I was come upon
.

Death has carried away my loved man, my family man
.

The crowd of dignitaries, luminaries, military men and women did not react with any obvious discomfort at this reading of poetry. Neither were they visibly moved or touched by it. Their blank faces held a mirror up to the
blankness in Polystom’s. He sat again, feeling only a weird, mystic disconnection from everything.

Then General Demus stood up, and delivered a rousing piece of military oratory. Cleonicles the hero! Little sung as a hero true, by temperament disinclined to seek public recognition for his work, and in some respects out of line with current military philosophy – nonetheless, he had done more than any man in the cosmos to help make the war on the Mudworld winnable, and winnable in as brief a time as possible. His innovations in Computational Devices alone marked him down as the greatest scientist and inventor the cosmos had ever seen; which was to say nothing of his work in the fields of natural history and cosmology. He had personally raised a platoon of men from his own estate, and sent them to General Amynseis – General Demus’s esteemed predecessor as Ground Forces Commander, now resting in the realms of glory – and had done so without the usual fanfare and nonsense that so many people expected as their due for such recruitment. ‘He did it purely as an act of patriotism. His example stands before us! He was a great man! We shall not allow the weasly nobodies who struck him down to deflect us from our path!’

Had it been proper for a crowd to applaud at a funeral, this crowd would surely have applauded. It was a rousing performance indeed.

Count Meton spoke perhaps twenty words, wishing his friend glory in the next life, though he had, alive, always disavowed belief in such a place. But he deserved his place amongst the honoured dead. Then, the Count sat down again, red in the face – with emotion? With the effort of standing and speaking? A piercing musical note, vocal and metallic at once, wavered through the tent. The horn player was standing behind the raised tiers of seats. He played the melody line of the death-march from Erodeos’s
Diepus
, then he paused, and played it again. Servants appeared, lifted the coffin, and precessed out.

Afterwards, at the wake, both the General and the Count consoled Polystom in person, and assured him of the greatness of his departed uncle. The theatre of the whole experience moved Stom even further away from grief. All these implausible creatures, in their stagy, bizarre colours, moving to and fro. Everybody eating fine food. The warmth of the Autumn-Year sunshine. Stom thought to himself that the servants had carried his uncle’s body to the cold store in which meat was kept during the summer months. The refrigerating grumble of the store’s motor would lullaby the corpse for two months, until the marble mausoleum was finally constructed on the east bank of the Lacus Somniorum, and Cleonicles could finally be put to rest. It wasn’t that the funeral seemed premature to Polystom. It had certainly happened at the proper time. It was that it all seemed to relate to a different person than his uncle.

After the funeral, Polystom stayed at his uncle’s house for less than a week. There was a great deal to be sorted out; an executor had arrived, and was working through the instructions of Cleonicles’ will. The executor was a young military officer, First Flying Squadron – another surprise, for Polystom had expected a civilian executor. But he was efficient, and deferential. ‘You’re chief heir, of course, sir,’ he had said. The
sir
was a little problematic: as an officer, the executor was of approximate social standing to Stom. Polystom had no military ranking, and so it wasn’t a military courtesy. To call Stom
sir
because he was the seventh Steward of Enting was technically correct, but a little stuffy and unfashionable. But Polystom couldn’t correct the usage without embarrassing the man. He coughed, put his hands deep into his pockets, and ignored the fellow’s use of the honorific.

‘But your uncle suggested,’ the executor continued, ‘that a cousin of yours – Pithycles, I believe is the name – should take up residence in the house and rights over the estate here, on the moon. Is this agreeable to you, sir?’

‘Of course,’ said Stom. Running this estate as well as his responsibilities on Enting would be far too much bother.

‘There are various other tabled items in the will,’ said the executor. ‘Perhaps too many to detail at any length with you, here? If it’s alright with you, sir, I’ll deal with them myself.’

‘Whatever you think best.’

‘Your uncle’s main butler was killed with your uncle, of course. The underbutler in line is a young man, name of Agor. It would be appropriate, I think sir, for you to interview him, to ascertain whether he’s ready to take on the responsibilities of acting as butler to the new master.’

‘Very well.’

So Polystom interviewed the nervous young servant, asking him a few desultory questions. He seemed shaken – by the two deaths, he said. He’d never seen anything like it, he said. His father and grandfather, both still alive (this was said with an apologetic duck of the head) said
they
had never seen anything like it. It was terrible. It was awful. What was the cosmos coming to?

‘Never mind that, now,’ said Stom. ‘It’s terrible, yes. But the purpose of this interview is to determine whether you’re ready to take over the responsibilities of being chief butler.’

‘I think so, sir,’ said Agor, miserably.

‘Did the previous butler . . .’ (Polystom had met him a hundred times on his visits to the moon, but now couldn’t recall his name) ‘. . . did he show you the ropes, as it were? Do you know what your duties are?’

‘He was very good at bringing me on, sir,’ said Agor. ‘I’ll try my best, sir.’