Celebrant (11 page)

His teeth grit in a spasm of fear, and he sucks breath through his teeth.

—
prayerwalking is walking in place/in spirit, walking homeless in the spirit.
What is the spirit?

His eyes stare up as though an orderly were bending over him now, clutching some steel implement
—

THIS is the ‘lurking evil’ (he thinks)
The evil force threatens me with the sanatorium
—

He takes a deep breath and holds it, his skin icy and criss-crossed as his every hair stands on end.

—
The enemy!

He swallows arduously.
It’s like engulfing an egg.

...Reasoning:
This theme will have two aspects.

deKlend concentrates doggedly, desperately, on the pedagogical tone, a classroom, a boring seminar, the most boring, the most pedantic teacher imaginable is rattling on to him about the theme having two aspects, one, the more obvious, being the possibility that deKlend is an inmate of an insane asylum and all of this stuff about Votu and the Madrasa and the Bird of Ill Omen is his hallucination, through which the sanatorium can be glimpsed when the delusion wears thin and now the full storm of his terror shakes him like a rag
...
the pedant quails against the blackboard, a huge shadow gathering its darkness before him, but somehow, through chattering teeth, he continues the lesson:

S-second is the p-possibility that the sanatorium itself is a menacing s-spirit
—

His face twists wildly.

—
like
—

—
A MONSTER!

(his voice rises to a shriek)

—
A DEMON!

This outburst unleashes his words and they erupt from his mouth in a complicated rush, like verse, hastily-recited, but distinct:

A demon that closes around you when something about you, a thing that involves your personality, your power, your imagination, your freedom, which
in toto
I shall henceforth refer to as your
principium individuationis
, is damaged or grows weak or is over
—

He swallows quickly.
He must finish before that slinking shadow reaches him.

...
It is reaching for him
now!
—

—
overpowered
—
when your
principium individuationis
is damaged weak or overpowered the sanatorium begins to materialize around you, like a pneumacidal web.
You begin to see the corridors, the orderlies, smell the food, the body odor and the disinfectant
...

Is it receding?

He listens, straining.
He searches the dark for any sign.

No, there is no click of heels.
There is no bad smell.

There is the must and gloom of the faculty lounge.
The dim brown light outside the narrow windows.

deKlend lies back and draws up his blanket again.

It’s not finished (he thinks)

Neither am I.
I learn from my mistakes.
When I take notice of them.
I often do.

Still listening, rallying, relaxing, his confidence returning again.

With my own hand I’ll write myself, now.
I won’t get trapped like that any more (he thinks)

In Votu:

Trees skirt the city wall, and dash against it in a continuous tune wind, like surf.
The upper portion of the wall is skirted by inlaid mosaics of sensitive architecture made of nerve material, maintained and sampled with hyponic needles
—
they repeat the echoes.
There is also a continuous inner wall that surrounds the city factory, where a certain variety of energy is produced by dancing on rugs.
These special carpets are produced only in Votu, and virtually none have ever been removed from the city.
It’s said that a curse of some kind will fall on any who take a carp
et out of earshot of the walls.

The weaving of carpets of any kind, dance carpets included, is work reserved exclusively for Votu’s women.
Dance carpets are made in keeping with the Votuvan idea of time, using only forgotten patterns, which are spontaneously recreated, not at random, not intuitively, by the weavers as they listen to old music.
They gather in time-honored workshops, not in the factory.
One wall (at least) is open, the looms stand in a circle, the musicians play outside.
The women are all former dancers, who frequently heave themselves up from their seats and go to dance in the clear spot at the center of the shop, in a deep and serious groove.
Their dancing is strenuous and dignified but not extravagant, not demonstrative, not solemn;
they listen down into themselves and then wheel out like boulders suddenly turned into tops.
Lifting their thick hands and heavy arms they motion with stunning elegance;
the severe looks of this one, the sweat sparkling on her cheeks, now melt calmly into a benign expression of motherly delight.
They’re telling stories to each other in gestures dense with unmistakeably articulated meanings.
The dances of patterns involving patterns are recorded in the carpets and can be danced back by other dancers who know how to retrieve time.

The dance rugs are alive;
they live and heal.
They don’t need to be beaten out, because they eat dust.

The carpet weavers traditionally marry the craftsmen who produce Votu’s one and only export.
Oblate globes of glittering steel in concentric fine circles or spirals, streaked with lines suggesting the globes might be made by braiding.
There seem to be two hemispheres that fold out into solid rims at the join;
from each hemisphere protrudes a bullet-shaped bulb with a smoothly receding hole at its tip and, two small sharp holes at the base.
The bulbs protrude at an angle parallel to the planar section of the spheres at their widest point, and are positioned at forty-five degree angles to each other, although this is sometimes to the “right” and sometimes to the “left.”
These balls are produced in total secrecy and no one at all knows what they are for, including the traders who come to Votu to buy them.
Likely the craftsmen don’t know either, but they are sworn to complete secrecy in any case.
They are made solely for export;
they wander away, changing hands from trader to trader in city after city, because no one else in the world can make them, and because there are people who reside very far away
—
so far away, they might not even be human
—
who pay an excellent price for the globes in any quantity and at all times.

Even though these essential goods, carpets, awnings, and the nameless globes, are not made there, the city factory drives the metabolism of Votu, and it must therefore be defended.
The first police had been automatons called ecstatics, who proved impossible to control.
Everyone was terrified of them, because they killed.
Those who were killed by them vanished without a trace, from the city, from history, from memory, as if they had never existed at all.
Fortunately, for reasons of their own they all deserted the city, never to return.
There is nothing further to be learned about them.
If it weren’t for the persistence of the records, one would think they had killed themselves.

Their replacements are indignation-elementals known as celestials.
These are tractable, all but invisible anthroforms, with no minds to speak of
—
a minder is required to set them on someone.
Since they consist only of tenuous matter, tough but exceedingly light, they have great speed and strength;
they apprehend their quarry by jumping their outlines around him and then walking him to the lockup, like a living suit of clothes.
Such prisoners are conspicuous, walking stiffly and deliberately, arms rigid at their sides, clothes flattened to their bodies as if they were soaked, rolling their heads, shouting pleas and curses.
When the prisoner is in his cell and the arrest is complete, the celestial dies
—
apparently of sheer delight
—
melting into a dry fluid collected by a sluice in the cell floor to be pumped back and recycled in the Indignifier.

A huge grimacing steel mouth in the factory wall emits the celestials, blowing them like bubbles from a nozzle set between its teeth.
Bubbles take human shape as they sink toward the ground, a dull matte transparency like a dusty vinyl balloon.
They smell like halitosis and each has around its neck a folded white collar with a triangle of white beneath it, like the bit of shirt exposed above a high vest.
Once formed, they join a streaming wind that circles the inner wall.
The celestials don’t usually get involved in affairs not directly bearing on the factory.
They do not police the city.

The insulation conjuring room in the City Factory is red and tinsel and very cold;
bundled up, men in caps and women in kerchiefs, the workers dance in place, divided into ranks by enormous steel cables that they rub with special bows as they dance.
These bowed strings are also fingered by a cyclopean hydraulic hand on a vast fretboard behind the workers.
Snow falls from the air around them and big flakes of heavy ice keep splintering off the sides of the ghost containers and crashing, scattering broken fragments and ice dust on the floor.
A metronome keeps the time, but it becomes inaudible the moment the hydraulic rams powering the hand start up.
Supervisors situated above the main floor, in alcoves like spartan opera boxes, watch the dancers.
When one becomes exhausted, the supervisor’s hand shoots out, pointing, and a runner zips in along a trench sunk below the level of the dance floor, pulls the collapsing dancer down into it and carries him or her off to the cots in the resting bay.
Meanwhile, another dancer is dispatched, coming from the other direction, down the trench to replace the spent one.
There are supervisors ensconced in loftier boxes to replace exhausted supervisors as well.

Watch as cobwebs of lambent blue gossamer draw stiff filmy lines inside the chamber.
Then eyes sink, like pits, into a black cloud.
A halo of shuddering light
—
the ghost climbs the ladder
—
some rise into the bulb above, in other cases the maxwell devil switches the tubes with a clank and the ghost is drawn into insulation like silk, forming the filaments into sheets.

deKlend:

The Madrasa is a backwater and the knowledge, if any, that it imparts is not portable.
It stays in the school like animals in a zoo, and the students merely come to visit the knowledge.
Some trek in on the mountain roads that run like narrow gutters between ridges of stone with softer infillades of puzzle rock, that only just lean back from the vertical.
Every day a sleek, cyclops tram of enamelled steel like black glass, piped with chrome, with a bullseye lamp front and center, emerges from a tunnel to release a well-scrubbed handful of neatly dressed students.
They carry shiny leather satchels.
Others evidently live at the school, which continues not to make any provision whatever for them.
They fill blankets with straw, roll themselves up and together like heaps of tamales, sleeping for days at a stretch in doorways or drooping from holes in the ceiling or stuffed up the chimney.
The chemistry instructor goes to retrieve his jar of formaldehyde, a wave of stale air meets him as he opens the cabinet and there are two or three puffy, blinking faces in there, students rolled up in the shelves, tearing up the few remaining books and burying themselves in ripped-out pages.