Celebrant (59 page)

It’s just a white brow.
Nothing else.

Burn walks over to the tunnel and looks back.
The woman remains where she was, an impassive set of features that seems rooted into the wall, like a fantastic, tawny-brown plant.

The tunnel is like an intestine, doubling back on itself.
The plaster lining wrinkles at the bends.
She space beyond is cavernous, and might go on in subterranean galleries for miles, neither wholly natural or wholly artificial.
The air is fresh and nearly odorless.
The noise of the water system, in which these cellars are nested, is just a whisper down here.
The roof is perforated with skylights, scattered at random, which sparsely dapple the floor with thick, slanted pillars of glare.
Smaller lights hang from the ceilings or are embedded in the walls in some sort of overall pattern Burn can’t quite encompass.
The wall-mounted ones blink as she walks tentatively into the void here;
going over to them, she sees why.
They’re reflectors, not lamps, angled to reradiate light from the nearest skylight.

That’s why it’s kind of golden in here (she thinks)

It’s true, the visibility here is like the sun-glow from a dark blonde head, distributed in space.
But, actually
—
as Burn goes further into sprawling emptiness
—
there are colored lamps, in fanciful shapes, a little off in the distance, all near the ground.
From that direction, too, comes profuse birdsong.

Going over to the lamps, Burn suddenly rushes forward and bursts into a wilderness of wild alien plants.
They all seem to be facing each other, and the birdsong is coming from them.
Each plant makes a continuous tone or chord, and pitchtangles, brittle chirps, tempo-switching trills, forming together an enveloping chorus around an empty middle, traversed by fragments of music in darting shafts and slow-spreading plumes.
This wilderness is confined toward one of the chamber walls with what looks like a breakwater made of stone slab baffles.

There is no prevailing color.
The plants are like sharply-defined petals of white and yellow on slack, lazy-looking blue, green, and red ribbon nerves.

She jogs past something enormous, white, man-shaped, like a statue, stops and turns to look as it strides from between two baffles.
Then, with a cry of fright, Burn starts back and disappears.
She flees, looking for an aperture in the breakwater, some way to get around
—
what she saw is between her and the tunnel mouth.
There’s enough light to see it
—
she can’t tell if it’s coming for her
—
it doesn’t move quickly
—

She goes around a corner and stops, peers back just barely clearing cover.
Burn watches it, breathing hard
—
silently, through open mouth, not through the nose, which makes noise.

It’s a massive, naked man, white as a sheet, with a white barrel up his ass and his head cut off and stuck on a pole protruding from his chest and his body split open from the waist and another body stuck inside.
Burn’s eyes race over the figure, trying to take it in.
The arms are striped blue and yellow.
For a moment she imagines torture and humiliation.
The other body is a mummy, all bundled up, holding its lower jaw in its skinny fingers.
The withered face looks like dried melt around the eyesockets.
The teeth are all exposed, nothing left of the cheeks but one strap angling down from the cheekbone to the chin.

It moves like tons of weight effortlessly and precisely controlled.
It doesn’t lumber and reel around.
Noticing the way it moves, Burn feels her fear slacken.
If it lurched, if it jerked and shuddered, or if it crept, she would have been terrified.
But there’s nothing hurried about the way this thing is moving, and there is something almost graceful about that way, and this converts much of Burn’s fear to curiosity.

It heard me (she thinks)
—
unless it can’t hear.

The thing isn’t coming after her.

Maybe there’s no way out this way and it doesn’t have to hurry just keep me from getting around it (she thinks)

It appears to be addressing its attention to the plants, which murmur, pipe, hoon, and warble to themselves on all sides of her.

Burn watches the being.
It holds in one hand a thing like a suitcase, made of white smooth shiny stuff, and with a big nozzle.
This it uses as you might use a watering can, applying it, with a deliberate tilt, toward the base of each plant in turn.

Suddenly this creature seems to her entirely of a piece with the scene, the chirping plants, a bower underground, and she loses all unreasonable fear of it.

She approaches cautiously.

Following what she presumes to be its gaze, she looks for a few seconds at the plants at its feet.

What are they?
(she asks)

They are botanophotophones.

A buzzing purr of a voice, that just comes out of the air
.

What’s a botanophotophone?

Plants of visible sound.

They’re made of sound?

Yes.
They are sounds.

They’re living?

Yes.

Can you eat them?

Ah.
Hah.
..
Hah.
(it gradually throws itself back a bit, and is still)

Burn goes on looking at it.
It remains motionless for a few minutes.

No (he says then)

I wish you could (Burn says)

He seems thoughtful.

My laughter is unpleasant (he says)

When no words follow, Burn looks up, into the skull face.
She gets the idea that it is waiting for her to speak.

She shrugs, with a toss of her head.

Usually, I laugh in silence (he says)
I experience this laughter as a tremor in the mind.
What an awkward sound.

Then laugh silently from now on (Burn says)

(It says:)
Yes.

It holds out the glistening white box to a trumpet-like blossom that looks like a striped, transparent skirt.

What’s that do?
(Burn points)

It’s a resonator.

Does it hhh
—
is it watering them?

They drink the heavy water that trickles from the leaks (says the being)
My resonator adds frequencies they need to remain alive.
The frequencies must be very soft, or the sound might damage them.

Can I touch one?

Wait.

The being comes over to where she stands, by a blue-white calyx with scalloped edges that sprouts from a straw of sulky green smoke.

I must strengthen it first (he says)

He places the resonator next to the stem and adjusts its control.
The flower becomes steadily more intense, the blue turns to indigo, lightening at the edges of the petals, burning into the gloom like a bubble of blue magma.
The plant hums.

Now you may touch it.

Burn immediately puts out her hand to it, as if she were going to pet it.
Her teeth buzz the moment she touches it, her hand hums, and she pulls it away quickly.
She looks first at her hand, which is as it was, and then up at the being, towering over her.
Burn tries again.
If she only just touches it, she can feel burring that makes all her nerves vibrate like a single guitar string.
She steps back, holding her hand.

The being turns down the resonator and the blue plant resumes it former appearance.

If I did not strengthen it with my resonator (he says) your finger would have muted it.
These plants die if they are muted too much.

It turns toward her.
The movement requires three steps.

What is your name?

Burn shies a little away, and looks down.

Would you rather not say?

She nods.

Make up a name for me to call you.

Burn tries to think of a completely new name no one’s ever called her.

Kundri.

Hello Kundri.
My name is Goose Goes Back.

The name strikes Burn as so preposterous that she presses her fingers against her mouth to hide her grin.
She giggles.

What kind of name is that?
(she splutters)

That is my bardo name.

What’s a bardo name?

The name I have while I wait to be incarnated again.

What’s incarnated?

Getting a body.

Isn’t that your body?

Which?

Burn shakes her head.

Do you refer to this (the huge hand swings out and points to the mummy) or to this?
(the hand sweeps down the white body)

Burn shakes her head again and shrugs.

This (points at the mummy) was my living body.
This (the other) is a machine my spirit inhabits while I wait.

You aren’t alive?

As you see, my body is dead.
My spirit lives in this.

Who put you in there?

I don’t know.

Is that your face?
(With a flip of her hand, Burn gestures at the glowing, baby face inside the shining loop)

I’ve never seen it.
I can’t see my reflection.

Why not?

I don’t see the same way you do.
I can’t explain it further.

So you don’t know if that was what your face looked like?

No.

Why doesn’t it move?

It moves.

...I mean, move its mouth when you talk.

It doesn’t seem to take notice of what I do.

Burn is momentarily out of questions in this line.
She squats to look at a plant.

...
Will you get another body?

I have thought a great deal about that.
I don’t know, but I believe I will be drawn forth into a newborn child.
Or perhaps a newly conceived one.
But I can’t say when this will happen, or why.

They sure gave you a big long peter didn’t they?

Goose Goes Back is a he (she selects)

Or whether I will be a man or a woman, or a demon, or a god, or an animal.

Are the natural robots reincarnations?