Celebrant (15 page)

Abruptly, deKlend strides through the beam and the doorway facing him, the motes dancing in his wake, the light winks out.
He makes his way down into the basement, to where some motheaten rugs lie in a heap.
He squats beside them on his toes and, leaning over his knees, begins sifting the pile.

After a short time he gets straight up and makes his way from the basement to the tiny infirmary, which has glass cased cabinets and metal trays, a venex snakebite kit, and round bottles with their content labels etched into them.
He opens drawers of chiming steel instruments flicking them with his fingers then snatches up a pair of needle-tipped tweezers.
He returns to the basement at once and recommences his search at the beginning.
Sifting the pile, he draws each thread apart with a semicircular motion of the tweezers, checking every single one and then furling the rugs aside like flabby ledger pages.
Each one emits a dense smoke of dust and lint when it lands.

More hours go by.
It is dark outside.
The basement now looks as if it were full of wafting incense.
Cold sweat cuts grooves in the filmy webbing that clings to deKlend’s face.
He is slow and methodical, unhurriedly checking every fibre, but his eyes are starting to bulge and get glassy
—
he has not shifted position once since he arrived.

Light is gathering again when deKlend completes the last rug.
He gets up at once and staggers crazily on stiff knees but doggedly, up the stairs and down the hall to a wooden planter filled with turfed velvet.
He kneels beside it and begins again to scrutinize each thread with a semicircular scanning movement of the tweezers.
The nap of this pad is dense, and the day is well advanced when he moves to the collection of sheepskins on the back of the sofa in one of the store rooms.
From there he heads to the attic.

He passes a mirror hanging above a nightstand in between two rows of lockers and stares at his reflection.
He begins to tremble, and gingerly raises his hand to his mouth.

There it is!

The dim gleam of the bright filament, caught in his moustache.
Watching the mirror, he grabs at it jerkily, and it escapes, retreating deeper into his moustache
—
no!
He just turns his head in time to see it blink in a shaft of daylight gushing from a window in the hall to his right.
deKlend dashes after it
—
it blinks at him again from the next shaft in the row of beams boring into the gloom of the corridor, and now the next, a tiny wink of gold turning in the clear air.
Around the corner
—
gone
—
there in that sunbeam, it winks!
Not far away
—
he swats the air like a cat, trying to drive it into a corner with the puffs, blowing out his cheeks.

With a loud cry of dismay he next catches sight of it placidly rotating out of sight in a doorway leading outside.
There is no wind
—
there, he sees it, floating with the imperceptible breeze, and, from time to time, unhurriedly fluorescing as its shining flank turns toward the light again.

deKlend runs after it, reaching, clutching handfuls of air.
His face is drawn with fear, despair, hope and agony.

*

Nardac and her
special friend
are sitting together in a shrubby hollow beneath the stone wall.
It’s an unusually bright day for these parts, and they thought it would be fun to put on their sun hats and loose Isadora Duncan frocks, and have a picnic.
They tiffin on
divinities, egg salad sandwiches and cold beer.

A regular thumping sound and a curt ejaculation of what sounds like intense fright alerts them
—
suddenly a huge dark thing hurtles over the wall, right over their heads, and drops instantly out of sight on the far side of the hollow.

Whatever it is thumps away;
its shrieks echo in the midday stillness.

The two ladies are frozen in attitudes of surprise.
When Nardac looks at her friend, the other is gazing back at her, round eyed.

What an enormous bird!
(her friend says breathlessly)

That’s no bird, (Nardac says at once)
He’s a guest here.
Or was.

*

Stumbling, he flings his hand out and, before his eyes, he sees his fingers close convulsively on the bright filament.

He stops short, his closed fist dropping toward his abdomen, and looks about him, as if someone were calling him.
Breathing hard, he glances this way and that, and then, startled, he stops.
He has in confusion a flashing impression of the wheeling of the stars, majestic and remote, as if he’d come loose in space the moment he grasped the filament
—
then a nightmare stirs itself, rising like a god from the trees and the crumbling stone wall and the edge of the school, shouting from the mountainsides and steaming from the grass.

Something invisible is streaking toward him out of the blackened trees.
Without warning the ground tilts beneath his feet, precipitating him forward half falling half running.
He dives over the ground his face white with terror, not fleeing but he must not fall
—
must not fall
—
up comes the stone wall and he bounds over it and lands with a jar that buckles his knees and nearly sends him sprawling
—
with a yipe of sheer fright he wrenches his left foot forward in time and continues
—
what?
what?

You wanted out of here, old boy.

With every breath he shouts, hoarse and ragged his voice, roaring in horror.

Let go the bright filament and stay here if you like.
Otherwise, you’re going over.

From far away shadows that instantly lengthen reach toward him.
The land all around is impassive, scintillates in the bounds of each painful, shattering step, to break up and spin in tangles.
Now great slabs of color in the void erupt ahead and sickened he pitches forward and his outflung foot swings down and down until it passes the other and comes up again behind with nothing to meet it as he goes over.

Corridors of the sky

In Votu:

Dance is the most important art.
All the power for the city factory is produced by legions of dancers, and there are many other varieties of dance.
There is an extensive repertory of dances to be performed in silence, or in darkness, or both, and there is an unrecognized naturalist school, associated, it must be said, with certain reactionary elements in society despite its claims to be avant garde, which hides itself as the “dance of everyday life.”
Sexual dance is at once highly ceremonial and spontaneous;
interference in such dancing is a high crime punishable by summary banishment.
It seems sexual dance is preferred to undanced sex, even though it, by its nature, is not something that can be realistically done every day.
It’s quite strenuous.

The practice of sexual dance originates in the particular observances associated with the natural robot nicknamed “spider,” or “sea star,” or (most commonly) urchin.
A dark body bristling with tubular spines, and resting on a single hydraulic leg, urchin usually haunts the curtained alcove in its shrine, surrounded by chambers and alcoves, many of them honeycombed directly into the thick walls.
A thick scent of sex trickles from them.
People go to the shrine to perform sexual dances in the presence of the robot, which seems to radiate aphrodisiac forces.
The alcoves and little rooms are swathed in thick curtains and rugs that are changed by the mathetes after each use, and completely dark, because the anonymity of the celebrants, even from each other, is part of the rite.
Couples who go to the shrine expecting to be together emerge again in confusion, unable to say whether or not they have remained faithful to each other, and no one is accepted who arrives alone at the shrine.
Men are enjoined to be silent, but not the women, because it is believed, owing to the detection of certain peculiarities of its behavior at pivotal moments, that urchin considers women’s exclamations of pleasure to be music
—
perhaps even its favorite music.

All the natural robots respond immediately to music and dance;
even when they give no outward indication, it is nevertheless obvious that they listen.
Music and dancing never fail to stir them with an impulse to participate;
they produce sounds then unlike any others they make, and move enigmatically, in their own way.

*

Black rags or straps or ribbons flutter from the bridge and out of them appears the falcon.

The grass becomes a uniform, shimmering diamond pattern.
The shimmer bristles its hackles, undulates like water, lozenge-shaped areas of blur appear on it
—
it’s alive, whatever it is, not a shimmer or a blur or a pattern, but something in all these things.
The dim figure there, walking along the edge of the meadow like a velvety blob of ink, is a yellow and black tropical fish from a magazine.

Look up at the crescent moon and Venus in a blue sky.
Feel engulfed in the deepening blue.
Hear the sudden gust of loud voices and be alarmed, but only for a moment.
Those aren’t coming for her.

The grass darkens.
The shimmering and dancing she sees appear is nature
—
striations, braided coils, the gleams of supple mail, and abstraction.
Pigeon girls with dusty hair scatter and gather again in the streets.
Burn walks with her hands behind her back.

A mathete wearing a black kameez is watching them, from the shade of an awning.
His hood is thrown back, and the kameez is open at the neck, exposing a white satin shirt with a long collar and a drooping black bow tie.
This marks him as one of urchin’s mathetes.
He’s a rounded man, with a smooth face, circular glasses, and thick hair, perfectly white except for a single, thin lock, as black as ink, that sprouts from one half of his widow’s peak.
It makes him look surprised, an exclamation point just above his face.

He waves his hand, scooping.
Burn notices.
Goes over to him.

Little girl (he says, in a vibrant baritone)
Can you help us?
We need to find a discreet spot, of a certain size, where we can bring urchin and urn together.

His face is bone white, and his gums are shockingly red.

I assure you (he adds) that this is strictly for sexual purposes.

Burn sticks out her hand.

The mathete shows her a coin.
His hand like one of those white trombone-shaped flowers;
a long, pale, and somehow excessive hand.

Burn purses her lips and then shrugs.

Poof
—
she vanishes.
Darting up walls and over roofs she goes, searching, leaving a solitary footprint in the soil of a red clay windowbox four storeys off the street.