The Incompleat Nifft (25 page)

In beauties what man is my lover's peer
?

For, as in gold, so is he rich in graces.
 

None hath a form so various and rare,
 

Nor charm that shineth from so many faces.
 

Gildmirth, still sedate and unattending, had stepped into the skull-bone skiff floating alongside the boat. He stood serenely as this bore him toward the wall of instruments. His whole manner had the absolute concentration of a veteran gladiator's moves in a close fight, and certainly this was a duel he had been fighting for many scores of years, his own sanity always the prize at stake. The little cyclops pursued its song, giving it an ever more voluptuous prolongation of tempo and articulation:

Mayhap another's eyes are stars—both clear
 

as diamonds are—still they are but a pair
!

My love's as constellations blaze
 

Wherefrom a host of figures gaze
 

Whose features are so manifold
 

That tongue must leave them unextolled. . . .
 

But past this point, where the voice's honeyed languor deepened, mellowed toward diapason, the verses were lost to us, for a tenor squallpipe which Gildmirth had musingly taken from the wall here commenced a traditional South-Kolodrian jump-up. It was a vigorously impudent piece, even brisker than most of its ilk, the melody overlaid with irresistibly nimble and saucy fugal embellishments. The Privateer's fingering was consummate and his coloration, in a hundred different shades of irresponsible levity, was unerring. He had keyed his tune to the demon's, and while the phrasing of the two pieces was entirely incongruous, Gildmirth's had an accent whose stresses erratically coincided with the demon's, to produce a variety of emphatic discordances. Between these points of energetic collision, the jump-up's busy note-swarms ran amok in the roomy, pompous resonances of the Demon's lyrics, trampling his words past comprehension. They thronged through the shamadka's extravagant architecture of moods like a convivial mob of ne'er-do-wells who heedlessly affront refined environs by engaging in a perfect orgy of gaffes, crass conversation, accidental vase-breaking and crude personal habits.

Neither duellist faltered for an instant; each wove his half of the mismatch with unflawed continuity. Gildmirth seamlessly grafted a medley of other jump-ups onto his tune's conclusion as the demon prolonged the coda of its piece. The tumult of impacting notes was like swordplay, their relentless profusion chilling me with the thought that such a combat could be protracted to inhuman lengths, while we must wait however long it took the Privateer to fight his way out of danger.

And just then the music stopped. First the demon, and then Gildmirth swerved into ingeniously improvised resolutions, and stilled their instruments. For a moment none of us moved. We listened to the surfnoise as it repossessed the huge building. Slick as snail-bellies, the tentacles unwove from the shamadka till one plume only touched it. With this the demon pushed it underwater till its bowl filled, and it sank.

Then the demon lay almost inert. Its lax fronds, floating frontally extended, made slight, teasing undulations in Gildmirth's direction. At length it cocked its peak more upright. Its optic jelly regarded the Privateer, the honey-colored corpulence sagging and beginning to branch through its ragged socket. The steady sloth of this process put me in mind of a sand-clock's drainage. Pupillary buds began multiplying in the jelly's central depths, converging like glittery, dark hornets to torment the man with their scrutiny. Smiles and smirks of coquettish reprimand rippled out over the multifoliate mouth like water-rings fleeing a dropped stone.

"My precious pet!" it fluted. "Still so untidy? Oh gentlemen!"—the eye now swung to us, pupillaries scattering to read us separately—"My stubborn little plum-eyed poppet here, he
will
not tidy up! I tell him if he's going to
stay
somewhere, he
ought
to tidy up. He's supposed to be a man of consequence or was long ago at least. He's told
me
so at any rate. Just listen. What's your name? Are you still who you said yesterday you were?" The pupil-swarm recondensed, gnawed busily at the Privateer's impassive face.

"I am, oh Spaalgish weft, the man you well know me be. I am Gildmirth of Sordon-Head in southern Kolodria, also called the Privateer."

"Still
this Gildmirth, today as well? What about tomorrow?"

"I am who I have been, and I'll remain so, while I live."

The Spaalg abandoned this seemingly ritual banter as abruptly as it had opened it. Plumes swirling, it whipped round in the water, and traveled squidlike, in head-first zig-zags to hang above the map of the seafloor. From here it resumed its fretful confidings to Barnar and myself:

"This exquisite map for instance, see how he leaves it sunken. How are all his guests and visitors to read it there? As it is, only he himself, when he swims out to play in other shapes, can consult it conveniently. And he has no need to do so. When the gorging lust has been on him he's gotten as intimately familiar with the seafloor as the well-known louse in the proverb got with the bumps on the drunkard's arse. I'm sure that in sum my precious pet has spent more years groping on alien feet across these hills and plains"—it let the tip of one languid plume sink, and drew it ticklingly across the facsimile terrain—"than any alleged Gildmirth ever spent in any such a place as this so called Sordon-Head that he clings to in his stubborn fantasy. My goodness though. . . ." Its voice deepened with musing to the sound of a well-seasoned old wood-horn, and the caressing plume scribbled graceful whimsies on the map. "Whatever the name of the man who made this map, what a swaggering little pup he must have been, don't you think? I mean, did he expect to
finish
it? And fit it all in this room? How callow! What a dwarfish conception! This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean's infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which partly reduces the Primary Sea's endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind. Why indeed, behold! It
was
some dwarf, for is not this little city over here his former habitation?"

The Spaalg flashed through another turn, and hung buoyed above the Privateer's architectural micropolls. The fact that the creature was a Spaalg, when I learned it, had meant little to me beyond the fact that the breed was relatively insignificant in terms of the threat they posed as predators on humankind. The conventional expression "dimwebbers, meeps, and ropy spaalgs," connoting the whole class of minor demonry, told me this much. But now, watching that plumed slug—swift and graceful as a fine-muscled cloud of oil—pour one lithe tickler down into a little agora, and tease with its membraneously tufted tip the minutely fluted columns of a colonnade no higher than a gold kairnish half-nilling set on edge—watching the Spaalg doing this, I recalled another jot of information. Undle Nine-fingers refers to them somewhere as being "vermicles," which, in his nomenclature, designates the class of demons that are internally parasitic upon their prey. A cold squirming, originating from some point in the back of my head, made a fast, nasty trip down my back. Gildmirth's body was so solid—square and hale. Did his composure mask the deep gall of worm-work, neat, lethal tunnelings serving somehow as the pathways of this Spaalg's influence within him?

The Spaalg, keying up now to melodious contempt, continued. "How touching, in a way! Such diminutive presumption, such minuscule pomp! Such an imperious fellow too, this tit-bit tyrant. Things would be thus and so, done this way, that way, and this other way"—the plume flicked silkily among the toy rooftops—"in precisely that order, and immediately! How could such a proud-ling
fail
to deem his ambitious appetite too large for less than empire to sate? So innocent he was of the endless, orgiastic feast of exploration and discovery he was proposing for himself. The poor tot! He elbowed his way up to the table, and now he is surely gorging still, willy-nilly, on that stupendous repast. I'll wager his sides are splitting with the meal's abundance. And surely by now, through the ages of his engorgement with this—to him—alien universe, the bubble of whatever self he formerly had—so briefly and so long before—has burst, and is less to him now than the idlest imagining. Oh dear! Look! Oh, most horrible! Defacement unspeakable!"

The Spaalg's body-sausage folded, thrusting its eye from the water, the pupillaries cohering toward a painting across the room, one of Gildmirth's rather grandiose self-chroniclings in oils. "What has befallen my babekin now?" Its voice had a grieving crack in it, "His face! What obscene infections have obliterated it?"

The demon sped to the picture. Lifting and fanning out its plumes upon the canvas, it slid caressingly up its surface, holding its body arched upward to gaze pityingly at the encrusted canvas it climbed.

It might have chosen any of the other pictures, for in all of them the Privateer's face showed the same staining, erosion and motley overgrowth as marked the rest of the imagery. The scene the Spaalg unctuously ascended appeared to involve some wizardly ceremony of subjugation performed by Gildmirth upon a shadowy knot of manacled demons. A large, metallic gladiator's net enveloped the subworlders. There was a chain attached to the drawstring closing the net's mouth, and the figure of Gildmirth held its free end firmly with several bights wrapped round the wrist for surer purchase. It was all crazily dappled and blurred with tidal growths, but their obscuration didn't quite look like an impartial vegetable proliferation. To some extent it seemed to edit, to revise the painted forms. You could just make out how Gildmirth had made his face sternly judicial, brows threatening storm, while the netted crew had a crouched and huddled posture as a whole. But now, bright lichens highlighted and contorted his cheeks and brow while a diffuse smokiness of fine black moss darkened mouth, eyes and throat-hollow to a necrotic black. On his arms the oils themselves, crumbling and damp, suggested tomb-flesh. No longer the solemn arbiter, he now stood in horror and recoil, a mortally damaged moribund. The hand that had been painted as reaching magisterially toward a table stocked with some kind of instruments, or texts perhaps, was now plunged into a plane of indecipherable dark shapes, and shadow had erased his hand along with what it sought. Meanwhile the demons' net was half-dissolved and their postures, due to subtle re-emphases and re-delineations, glowered, and crouched more as if to spring than cringe. In the revised work, the chain seemed more Gildmirth's fetter than a leash he held.

"Oh my little treasure-ling, my little toy-let! Who has treated you this way?" The voice was all wine and honey again. Two tremulous plume-tips grievingly caressed the painted Privateer's fungus-whiskered temples.

I felt a pang of rage that twisted like a sword in me. I'd watched the Spaalg feeding on its nobler prey, probing for the taste of despair with its tongue, long enough for the shock of comprehension to pass, and all at once I felt myself its prey as well, my soul as much the object of its defilements as Gildmirth's was. Looking round I saw the Privateer's face looking tormentedly from a dozen masks of putrefaction and blight. The Demon-Sea's revision of his self-image was galleried around us like a chorus of jeers. That he had been arrogant the paintings themselves, so huge and bravely framed, proved plainly. But it was an arrogance he more than redeemed by the straightness of his back now, surrounded by his enemies' vandalisms of his spirit. He unremittingly met the Spaalg's eye, clearly meaning to endure it till he died, or was free.

Yes! Still he waited to be free, defying the centuries of multiform turmoil that had rolled across him to erase that ever-receding little span of his independent existence—that comparative pittance of years containing all he had been, and all he had resolved to be. It was too much. It overflowed my capacity for outrage. The Spaalg had begun to speak again, and I roared:

"Silence!" Among my new gear was a battle-axe. I pulled this from my belt, not so much with intent to attack as a pure expression of feeling. "You feather-legged maggot," I hissed. "Is it that your pin-head simply lacks the circumference to contain the truth? We surface-folk are easy enough to kill the bodies of, but as for our wills, the heart-and-mind of us, we can be harder to kill than ghosts. Because we
are
ghosts. Believe it, Privateer." I turned to face that impassive prisoner of his own ambition's ruin. "You know I speak the truth. You in your sunless bondage, though starved of your world and glutted with this cosmic cloacum, remain no whit less real than any man free to walk under the sun. For we're none of us more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of his mind, a ghostly
wish-to-be
haunting the jerry-built habitation of his imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of
what-has-been
?
"
 

The Privateer answered nothing. He stared back at me, his pain-colored eyes huge with all the things he knew about what I spoke of—things I could not know, and hopefully never will. I suddenly felt foolish, useless to help him. I found I had been waving my axe as I harangued, and still held it brandished. The Spaalg gave a buttery little chuckle and said: "He has from me prolonged vitality. No man's memory is made of so tough a fabric that sufficient—"

I only knew I was going to throw the axe in the instant that I let it fly. The Spaalg, unflustered, dropped like a stone. The axe sank half its bit into the demon's late position on the canvas, while the creature turned its plunge into a neat, splashless dive, and surfaced smiling. It began—at once—to sing:

I once was a man with a heart and a face,
 

And while this heart and face were mine—