Celebrant (51 page)

What can he see?
His flailing ineffectual hands, his legs and body wheeling under him and from time to time even catching sight of his own face his own head
—

But no blood, nor pain either.
Just the regular
whuff!
of having his wind knocked out and out and out again until he feels as though his diaphragm is being pounded up into his neck, blocking it and bottling all his blood up in his bulging head while his body is rebounding unharmed with the resilience of a cartoon character.

Whuff!

A galaxy explodes behind his eyes and something bursts from his mouth, feeling like a rag of tissue, maybe a long shred of lung but he can’t see it yet
...

Up flashes his body into view and the metal, the splattered remains of his sword, all gone.
There before him it hangs, looking like a badly snaggled, oversized stainless steel hacksaw proboscis all criss-crossed with precise scorings or fractures.

Still no good (he thinks angrily)

He swats at it with his hand, which for some reason obeys him now, and the blade bats apart in a long belt of smoke.
Plummeting without falling or touching the ground, deKlend begins slapping his pockets and drawing out fistfuls of smoke, tossing them aside like wads of fluff.
The smoke rail attracts them.

Every time his rapid rotation brings it into view, he lunges at the smoke.
Finally he gets it between his fingers gives it one quick jerk
—
instantly solid again, the blade comes away in his hand.
Now it’s long and exactly straight, dull as a butter knife, dingy as lead, and with a tine for a handle at both ends, but complete as before.
Holding on to it, deKlend feels a badly embattled relief.

There is a curious object in the sky overhead.
It takes him a moment or two to realize he’s seeing the sun without any of its light.
That’s an ominous, seething globe of bellowing fumes, swinging its scarves around itself as it spins and multiplies.
There’s a chain of suns spanning the sky in an arch from horizon to horizon.
deKlend feels the heat beaming down from every part of the sky like a ghost would;
it’s palpable, not remote, but disembodied, around him and not getting into him.

There are clearings in the avalanche and once inside one it occurs to him, for the all-too-brief moment before his irresistible momentum propels him out of it again, that his head has reversed and is oscillating drastically through two inflated phases of gravitational and anti-gravitational radiation.

deKlend raises his eyes to the sun that whirls just in front of him, filling his vision with an ocean of red muscles and gold smoke, vividly creased with black folds.
There’s a big, starfish-like scab
corkscrewing itself up toward the equator.
And it roars like a lion, like a lion’s lion!

Now what?
(he wonders)

deKlend feels himself being drawn into the corona, toward the blind, colossal bulb of the lightless sun.
Initiation power, still too new to have discernible characteristics, is blasting from it.
Not heat, not light, not even intensity, nothing but pure awe
—
wind without pressure, a shout of vacuum.
He is all tangled in it without being consumed, while the ruins are going berserk.

No, the weird motion he can sense going on all around him is the unfolding and resettling of the factory which is opening like a budding sprig of leaves.
Massive pipes and hoses rear up like monster lampreys and rivet their mouths to the flanks of enormous collecting tanks, the machines and the walls leap up into place again and, as the space is rebuilding, the sun and deKlend with it are becoming smaller and smaller.

In another clearing he sees a little vignette, a complete scene, viewed from a high balcony or a window
...
A strange young girl, maybe eleven years old.
It’s so difficult to tell age even under ideal circumstances let alone these antinomial ones.
A mop of bushy brown hair, dark brown skin, dirty.
Wearing a dress whose skirts are slashed into long tatters.
Thick russet fur on the fronts of her legs
—
dense muscles upholster her bare limbs, contracting as she tries again and again to step from the top of a box onto a high threshold.
—
Looking up (do you love me too?)
—
a little fillip of wind from the ground past the threshold, an updraft carries to him a trace of Phryne’s scent
—

Phryne!
(one of his party thinks or calls, looking at the girl)

He dives toward the vignette.
He is struggling to get to the day, the street he knows must be in Votu, Phryne.
deKlend reaches out with his two-handled sword blade and tries to hook the fringe of the vignette, hand outflung

In Votu:

It’s as if a long feather had crossed her bare back, through her dress.
A gust of breath escapes from her nose in surprise.
Kunty jerks, twisting her waist, and the stabbing pain of a sword wound seems to pierce her for just a moment there at the hinge.
It’s like a hand had just brushed her out of a painting she’d happened to be living in just at the moment.
The boxes, the wall, the sky, and so on, continue on all sides as before, except they’ve stopped seeming familiar.

Kunty shakes her head.
She can’t hear.

The sky goes dark.

The sun is still there, but it isn’t giving off any light.
Not itself.
Although it’s daylight all around her.
The sun is black, glistening, and nearly transparent, like a mare’s eye.

Now she sees a man’s well-kept hand waving ethereally in space near to her.
Kunty snarls and lashes out at it with her nails, trying to wave this apparition away.
She connects, and falls headlong.

—
A change of air, a rush of new smells, but the light has to catch up to her eyes, and that is happening, or will.

Phryne takes from her bosom a tassel from one of deKlend’s shawls, a memento amore he’d presented to her.
Holding it firmly she begins to search for his simultaneity wherever it is.
The link is firm.
She finds him almost at once.
The floor jolts like the deck of a grounding ship and nearly throws her off her feet.
Before her is the balcony.
She steps out.
The sun’s light disappears from the sky, though not from the ground.
She can see herself, the buildings and landscape no differently, but the sky is full of stars and, at the zenith, a sun with no light.
It’s a black, emberlike globe, with crimson fires spinning in its crevices.
Throwing off dark flares it seems to snort and plunge like a crazed horse trying to kick its way out of its stall.

Now horizontal and vertical momentarily change places and the sun seems like an approachable object lying on the floor just ahead of her.

He must be there (she thinks)
What would he be doing there?

She opens her lips to call to him and then turns, her drawn breath bursting from her mouth in a scream of intense surprise that is also a brilliant coruscation of light in a beam from her jaws.
In that light she sees deKlend swoop toward her
—
they streak from the spot across the landscape under a sun with no light.
deKlend runs, carrying Phryne in the form of a radiant image that mantles his shoulders and skates all over his back in dense gleams, like an enchanted shawl made of material cut from every sun.

deKlend:

deKlend swims like a frog through the air, making diamonds with his arms and legs, trying to get down toward the floor.
He’s not having much success.

Phryne had been there, in a lightning flash (he thinks)
It’s like a bedroom farce, with all this chasing and just-missing.

The sun rolls so near he could probably touch its lethal fire without putting himself to too much trouble;
he watches carefully for the silent whips of its flares.
The factory storms with an unavoidable swerve
—
a flare clips him square in the head.

In the split second before it touches him, deKlend has time to be disappointed.

Then, with the increasing crackle of a kindling limelight his brain rings with a sustained, piercing chime and rays of sunlight explode from all the many holes in his head.

...
Wandering in what is it
—
a boathouse or something, an estate in the countryside?
Late afternoon light.
Dusk starts soon.

She is wearing a light, cotton, summer dress with lace on it, that’s all.
And it’s clean.

And look how tall I am!

A male voice calls, jolting her.

Inside me
—
who is it?
(she thinks)

/Phryn/dri/, (the voice says weirdly) where have you gone?

Who’s there?
(she thinks)

I’m
here!
Who are you?!
(she thinks)

Who am I??
(she thinks)

I’m
Kunty!
(she says to herself)

She hates that man.
But something else too, she wants
—
wants
—
She can’t see him.
..
But her?
Is
she
here, too?

Kunty!
(she thinks, a shock riffling through her)
I haven’t been called that since
...

(She trails off)

I’m
Kunty!
Just Kunty!
(another she thinks)

She puts her hand to her forehead.

What’s going on?
(she asks herself)
It’s like I’m going back to being a child again
—

Who are you?
(she thinks, the younger voice)
What is it?

That stubbornness and hardness
—
I’d forgotten how strong
...

She looks down in astonishment, not at her dress but at the body that fills it.
She raises her two hands and glares at them
—
the nails are still hard and sharp, but they are clean and trimmed.
Far too short!
She reaches to her head
—
her ears are still long, though not as long.
They had never been all that long, but now they’re less long!