Celebrant (10 page)

Evidently, whrounim marriages are solemnized by cross-transplanting scalps.
The whrounims are surgical wizards who regard every newborn child as raw material.
To retain the anatomy one had at birth is considered barbaric, and every adult whrounim is an anatomical collage of micrografts from dozens of others.

They exchange tissue only from among themselves (Nardac tells deKlend), to avoid rejection.

Do they die? (he asks)
Or do they simply keep freshening themselves up with new material, indefinitely?

I’m not too sure
...
(she says)
But what’s the difference?
How can they tell who they are, finally?

But there are many things you are not allowed to do, (she adds cryptically after a moment)
The whrounims have all sorts of rules for us.

I don’t see any whrounims here (deKlend says)

I wouldn’t know if there were or not.
I’ve never seen one.

Didn’t one summon you to the school personally?
One did me.

Nardac glances at him.

Was it a tall, silent fellow?
With an off-puttingly self-satisfied expression?

Yes, that’s him.

He’s no whrounim (Nardac says complacently)
That was
—

She breaks off, turning aside to sneeze violently.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.

Here it comes aga
—

Four times.
Five times.

Oh!

deKlend gazes around himself.
Peal of smile
...
the bell
...
the knell smile
...
the unspooling ribbon of haloes of holes, a ribbon from above admit sunlight into the dark tower
...
a complicated asterisk of smoke from the bowl
...
the sun appears at the groin of each arch as he passes.
The toll of the bell breaks out
here
, then vanishes, to reappear way over
there
, rising in a fading crescent of sound, passing secretly through space so its continuation is like an answering bell responding from the distance.

Nardac rubs her nose with her talons.

He’s the precentor.
Adrian.

She sniffs, fighting off another sneeze.

He rings the triangle every day at the beginning of session.

From a group of students nearby comes an answering sniff, like a sound of ripping paper.
The whisky-like smell of the canal flips once over him and drifts away with the echoes.

He didn’t open his mouth, did he? (she asks, suddenly uncertain)

No.
I remarked on that.

That was him.
Adrian never opens his mouth if he can help it.

She screws her features up a little in distaste.

Worst case of tongue thrush you’ve ever seen.

The path narrows, and deKlend has to draw in too close to Nardac.

Why do they bother with the school?
(deKlend asks)
What’s the point, if they don’t attend it themselves?

He wrote a book you know
—
what’s that?
Oh, there are as many opinions about
that
(Nardac says) as there are people here.
Personally, I think it’s a sort of whim.

deKlend takes in the facts without following them too closely.

No one seems to know what whrounims look like.
It’s not that they possess no racial characteristics
—
just the contrary, in fact.
The whrounims give the lie to the notion that different racial characteristics arose among human populations as they divided and took up habitation in the world’s different climates and terrains.
Among the whrounims, babies are born exhibiting the entire range of human characteristics, of all possible so-called races.
They maintain that this is in keeping with the archaic, original nature of mankind;
that even within small, isolated communities, the earliest human populations were, they say, astonishingly diverse, so that each generation expressed a wild sampling of phenotypy.
Because of this great diversity, early human children only rarely resembled their parents.
Children normally looked nothing like either parent.

However, as humanity grew more numerous and dispersed, and as certain human societies began to place emphasis
—
with mounting insistence
—
on demonstrable familial continuity (in particular where the transmission of hereditary privileges and property were concerned), and in the dividing up of family groups and so on, parents began to reject and abandon
—
and even to kill
—
children who did not resemble them, sparing only those children who did.
It was this that brought about the current state of affairs, in which children all tend to resemble their parents closely.
Unaware of their history, people invented stories that stood the truth on its head, insisting that all humanity began with basically identical individuals and only became differentiated later.
Being the same was made to seem the more natural thing, when that sameness was actually the consequence of deliberate and willful intervention.

The whrounims had not gone that route.
They continue as various as ever, and traits and qualities long vanished in all other human populations (with the occasional atavistic exception) are said to persist among them, and to be distributed surgically.

So what does a whrounim look like?
(deKlend asks)

Everybody, I suppose, (Nardac answers)

By now they’re passing along a gravel drive.
As they watch the brown sky thickening with the onset of artificial night, brought on as the whrounims dim their distant city lights, a convoy of silent trucks with shimmying metal tanks on their beds goes lumbering by.
A sound of crying babies is plainly audible, coming from the tanks.

Those are full of babies, (Nardac explains pensively)

What on earth for?
(deKlend asks, his large eyes widening in astonishment)

Whrounims don’t tax in money, but in male offspring.
The firstborn from each couple.

—
They don’t eat them (she adds after a moment, grinning sadly)
I think they make them into soldiers, something like that.

The real problem is the girls.
Since the parents have to give up at least one male child, and since they value boys more than girls, they get rid of baby girls.
They don’t keep them.
I think they regard girls as a luxury, or a waste of time and of food.
They keep trying to have boys and, when they get girls instead, they get rid of them.
They leave them out for the birds, or throw them into deep gullies, or pools.
Some they tie to kites or balloons and let loose on the wind.
And no one, anywhere, talks about it.
A girl’s birth they call a ‘false pregnancy.’

The subject seems to depress her, and she wanders off in silence, without saying goodbye.

deKlend returns alone.
The halls of the school are deserted.
No quarters have been found for him yet and he will have to sleep a second night on that narrow sofa in the lounge.
A dish of bread and fruit has been set out for him, though.

Lying in the dark, he listens deep into the silent fabric of the school.
In one of its secret rooms a receiver is tuned to the wandering signal of Black Radio of Votu.
Its squelched, whirring voice says:

apencindybdiasndukmdnbdujdnysioedbeuenbdhjdbhdnbhdwiwygdhuwndyithndywodfjndgborthshamnenoquenotheuwmndyiwnduyjwjthdiwhdfhgncousbjneoundidmfiepcvncyeifpvjhcndoieyfmdoitrolgviotughdbwyvnjfuiencxuwjdusnsuemxciovncgsmncnckjgsnmjhudmsdjusdnewdcsmnemosemturnfherdufdplvfnmviuremvuhdofnfirnmfdydnetwvxowmvpoxcldlemxpslekohfieponbofboerjidmurnpeindlbmxodkfopendkdoioecihlbbsoosismonamtiatosfsh

Listening to that sourceless voice, travelling through the walls from somewhere, he experiences the floating anticipation he gets from listening to songs, when a verse ends and the next one begins while the music doesn’t change.
It’s like a soft blow, or something yielding inside.
The murmur goes on, a steady tone with a warbling distortion running through it, like another voice hollowly encompassing it.
The music director, looking off into space, shakes his head.
Static gushes from the speaker.

deKlend tries to sleep.

Sleep, by which I mean a discontinuous series of solitary gymnastics in sweat-soaked blankets in an airless room (he thinks bitterly)

While
they
‘sleep’ in canals lined with clove trees under hooning woodwinds.

Abruptly he lifts his head and looks around.
The music director is no longer sagging behind the door.
deKlend is alone in the gaunt room.

Again he is pierced with an unaccountable pang of intense fear.
He tucks his clammy hands under his arms to warm them.
Cold nausea settles ponderously down on him.
He lies flat on his back, his head propped up on the armrest, uncomfortable, and convinced he’ll vomit if he moves.
The stink of institutional food in his nostrils sickens him, he begins to hear orderlies walk the hard waxed hallways outside and the abrupt, resounding noises of a hospital ward.
His breath erupts from his mouth, and through his own irregular gasps he can hear the muttering of the orderlies
...

The idea has its moment.
Miss that moment and, even if it can be remembered and set down later, even if it is set down word for word as it was, the delay will have killed it.

Reason is the magic.
Remember that at all costs, even if it must be cut with a knife into the body.

A child can
see
it
—
the magic
—
but the child won’t be able to understand it.
The attention of the mature person is fixed on plans which won’t come to fruition for a long time, if ever, and from which they divert themselves with hasty half-snatched one-quarter-pleasures, and this costs them the sensitivity.

That’s it (deKlend thinks, quaking with terror under his thin blanket)
Think slowly and methodically, don’t skip ahead, not a single step.
Articulate each thought distinctly to yourself, elaborately
—
drag them out, grind them.

The skilled practitioner must cultivate a sophisticated reason.
This is why magic is uncommon.
Those who have the vision usually lack the reason, and those with the reason usually lack the vision.
Only the one with both reason and vision will be able.
What has been underway
—