Celebrant (58 page)

Tallness.

Would be a better word.
For it.

In Votu:

The echoing air of Votu
—
all sounds in Votu echo, although not always audibly, the level of echo varies.
Sometimes it’s so pronounced, like a cloudburst, that it makes it impossible to understand what someone is saying.
But heard or unheard, what one says always floats away repeating itself repeating itself repeating itself.

Burn walks with her hands behind her back
—
a bird flick against the light like last night’s lightning, just now.
Pigeon girls have gone in toward the middle of town, where there are arcades and open streets with market stalls.
There are big fragrant pyramids of yuzu and blozu, brown resin, trunks of live sugar eels sloppy with oil, creamy chocolates with opiated centers, quivering platters of sliced sloth nose, stacks of candles made from congealed yak sperm, buckwheat and sorghum in burlap sacks, camphor soap, black beans like smooth river-bottom stones, unbearably foul entelodont cheese in lead foil, the honey-and-maple cakes they sell everywhere, thin flakes of blue tobacco, expensive freshwater fish from the wells beneath the steppe (sold live from sweating brass buckets), morat, ginger nuts, koumiss in clay pots, deep fried cassia scrolls as long as rugs, braided black vine, more morat, brick tea, tubs of pepper specially ground for flavoring wine, rose consommé and jasmine jelly, pillowy blocks of nougat majoun, barrels of yellow-fletched apples and purple pears, a clear liquor distilled from dates called liksketts, all kinds of incense in crumbs and sticks, and bales of throbbing greens.
Those greens are so activated they shimmer emerald sheen, like the greenish light deep in spring glades.

Perched atop seats that have to be scaled with ladders are trumpet and cornet players, wearing all manner of festive and formal dress, who rap out crisp arpeggios to each other in turns, over the heads of the crowd.
They help to set the tempo for the people and to register the dignity of the transactions conducted all around them;
they also make announcements, when required.

The market teems with tall angsuigs wrapped in red, jovial borth hamnennoquen selling bolos magic bicycles and spirit duplicators, thivish epenthesists talking clock language, zungon embarrassadors carrying a ten volume set of
The History of Rope
, ogre angels with teeth filed to points, mnemosems of all descriptions, lascivious free rhombohydracks stalking the thoughtless young teg-hunoags and the severe sfrio girls, stately tripods who wear girdles of glass beads, swaggering bishnoggan, quiet bezemmyaans, harried and efficient hgrumis, wardrobers with their hands taped and hair pulled back, comfortable-looking lightly-dressed soitbeks.

Pilfery pigeon girls strut out cautiously among the milling people to snatch whatever fragments of life might fall on the ground.
Very often they eat what they find on the spot, as this is the best way to put it beyond reach of recovery.
Chernu has a bit of something, a little fried bread, and she holds it in her cupped hand, darting her head down at it tugging away bites.
Burn is hungry, and almost on cue a blozu rolls irregularly toward her from a turned back, wobbling on its corners.
She pounces on it and, with a flutter of her legs, she zips beneath a covered platform to bolt it down in the odd, muted light under there.
The day filters in through dull white canvas cover and makes her feel like she’s inside a dim paper lamp.
The blozu is a little stiff and underripe, but beautifully juicy and sweet enough.
Burn eats it with relish, and hiccups.

Venturing back out into the open, she spots rabbit girls milling in an elbow of the market.
The crowd gives them a wide berth.
From here, for some reason, they seem a little larger and brawnier than they should be, and the sun streaks their muscles like gold and silver paint.
Sometimes they do this, circling on all fours, more or less in place, raising and lowering their heads.
They seem to get into a kind of ecstasy of being overcharged with vitality.
Burn is able to find Kunty easily in among them.
Her hair is, unusually, pulled back, not hanging over her face.
Kunty is not circling but rising and falling with them, crouched majestically at one end of the open space in the midst of them.
Burn contemplates her without fear
—
it’s as if she were seeing Kunty in another world.

She picks up a trace of halitosis in the air.
Then the celestials start whirling down the street, coming from the factory.
Something must have dammed them up or unsettled their flow somehow and they’re spilling down the street.
On all sides she can hear the quick, quiet bursts of pigeon girls escaping.

The smell deepens.
There’s little reason to be alarmed
—
the celestials don’t capture people unless ordered to by their minders.
But it’s true they aren’t rosebushes in the odor department and they crinkle sinisterly when they brush up against someone.
Burn almost idly leaps to the top of a low wall, then down the other side, still wanting to look at Kunty.
Struck by something different.

Instead, she wanders out into a street.
Dusty, ablaze with light, and deserted.
The buildings are all roughly similar in this part, and they’re either a deep, vibrant crimson, or chalky and blue.
They all have sliding steel doors.
One of them is ajar.

Fresh air comes through.
The door glides to one side and she has to seize it and hang back with all her weight to keep it from banging.

Just inside the doorway, there’s a meter machine sealed in thick glass.
The light strikes the bottom of its circle in a crescent, then suddenly flops upwards to form an arc, shedding a nimbus of powdered glow that snows down to the bottom again.
This is accompanied by a pellety sound.

Beyond this is a sparkling passage lined with reflections to infinity, where Burn hears a soughing whoosh that surrounds her, shuddering in the fabric of the building.
Continuing warily on, she seems to enter a spacious room.
There are ranks of long steel wedges lined like crocodile jaws with small, bright spigots, and from each comes a twirling ribbon of falling water that drops in a straight, unbroken stream past the floor into a deep chute below.
The air smells and sounds like falling water.
The twinkling blue floor is covered with little tiles.
Burn peers in at the water, ranks behind ranks behind ranks, like the threads in a loom, or clear hair skeined and captured by steel combs.
These watercombs recede into the glittering depths of the room.
Burn watches the elflike play of the water, and nearly yields to the temptation to thrust her arms in between and among its stalks up to her shoulders.

She goes on.
The water makes no mist.
For that matter, its freshness is so strong the impression verges on repelling, as if she were too irredeemably dirty.
Burn rubs her upper arms.

Here are tubes, set against the opposite wall.
Water drums against the top of the tubes with a harsh, rasping sound, like static.
Here a stream of water, arcing down from the mouth of the tube, springs up into the air.
It strikes the top of a special chamber with a slap, coils and swings like a rope in a gale, gathering there, upside down.

Drift into the next room, which is dark from above, like certain rooms in museums.
Burn is walking on a mesh of thick silk cables, as smooth as polished ebony, and appearing misleadingly to the eye to be as hard.
A silent vortex of water, thousands of liters, majestically rises and falls in a basin sunk level with the floor.
It seems to Burn that there is a ball of nothing in the center of the whirlpool, that expands and contracts and trembles with vitality as it wanders through different, similar shapes.

To the right and some distance from this, there’s a clear glass tank about a foot long with a smooth opening in the bottom.
Water swirls up through the hole and fills the tank, not levelly, but in a saddle shape.

The repacitaser will kick in now (the woman says)

Burn looks up, startled.
There is a woman in a black satin tunic standing beside the wall.
She would have been just about immediately on Burn’s right as she came in, but Burn doesn’t usually miss people like that.

There’s a low, muffled click.
Like a cat, the water in the tank suddenly leaps, switching around its own meniscus, which stays where it was, at the halfway mark.
A second click.
The water drops, turning like a cat.
It doesn’t slosh or break up into even a single droplet, but, stiff as gelatin, lands with a quivering thump like the blow of a giant fist.

That’s bachelorization energy, that makes it do that.

Can you drink it?
(Burn asks)

The woman shakes her head, the whites of her eyes streaking in the gloom.
Her legs and feet are bare.
The tunic hangs down as far as her thighs.

What stops people from drinking it?
(Burn asks)

Death.
That’s light water.

Poison?

Poison.

The woman’s voice tightens in the dark.

Just working around it, you can get water blindness.
The only cure for that is to set out in the blazing sun, stare right up into it, until you can see again.

Burn imagines being in the tubes, like Beaula, drive along a steel tunnel struck through clear landscapes.
Caravans of identical bubbles sail over her head.

But the light hurts so bad you can’t stand it (the woman says)

There is a tunnel angling down into the earth.
There she sees reflections of light thrown onto the wall, feathers and rods, wires, and curling gauzes like smoke sails.

So you stay blind (the woman says)

What’s down there?

The woman crosses her arms casually against her breasts, sighing.

That down there is whrounim stuff and we’re good and careful with it.
There’s a residue of the High Whrounim.
Which some day or other
—
it was ooohh

(she cocks her head)

fifff-teen years ago I think?
Before you were born, anyway.

(That was almost a reproach)

It tumbled down the mountainside and was deposited.

Burn imagines the bank, where sacks of coins were enclosed in clay capsules and sent to and fro around the building in wind tubes.
The whole city for a moment is revealed to her as a huge arterialism of tubes tubes tubes.

I have my own ideas what to do with it (the woman says)

Can I see it?

Can you?
(the woman says)

Is she going to make that old joke?
(Burn wonders to herself)

I suppose.
But it’s haunted by a ghost.

Burn looks at her.

Oh
I
haven’t seen it (the woman says nastily)

With one hand, she strokes her fingers across her forehead from temple to temple.