Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (20 page)

‘So far as I can see, there’s more risk in doing nothing. It’s a case of being damned if we do and damned if we don’t.’

Ellat said nothing to this, choosing instead to cling tightly to a serenity of spirit that had cost her a good deal to achieve. He would do it. She could not in good conscience advise otherwise. She would do what she had done so often in the past.

Wait and hope.

Therat recommended an afternoon reading from the Cave of Light, then spent the morning hours with Marianne, telling her of the history of the Cave. ‘I can’t expect you to believe in it totally,’ she smiled, her lips belying her eyes which burned into Marianne’s own with a fervid glow. ‘We do expect that you not come into the Cave as a skeptic. Just be open to whatever happens.’

‘Do I need to do anything? Learn any chants or responses or anything?’

‘Nothing at all. We’ll do the reciting. You will need to stand in darkness for a few moments, which makes some people rather dizzy. I’ll be next to you and you can hold on to me if you like.’

‘Do I get to see the – symbols or whatever they are?’

‘Certainly. All those present are requested to verify whatever message the Cave seems to be offering.’

‘What do I wear?’

‘Whatever you like. Ellat will give you a robe to cover whatever you’re wearing, but that’s tradition, not ritual. I’ve recommended about two o’clock, if that’s all right with you.’

‘I don’t know why not,’ said Marianne. She had been waiting all morning for
Marianne
to interrupt her or supersede her in some action, but nothing of the kind had happened. Still, the sense of being occupied was very strong.
Marianne
had not gone away.

When they arrived at the Cave that afternoon – Ellat, Aghrehond, Makr Avehl and Marianne – Therat, along with Nalavi and Cyram, met them at the entrance cavern and escorted them down the winding, sandy-floored tunnel by the light of flaring lanterns. Every wall, every pillar, every square inch of exposed stone was decorated with symbols: words, phrases, or numbers; some superimposed upon others; some ancient, some newly chiseled or painted on the stone.

They placed their lanterns upon the central altar. Words were chanted that Marianne did not recognize. She knew what they meant, however. In the ancient language of the Magi, the question that the Cave was to answer had been asked. What was the source of Madame’s power?

She felt Therat take her arm as the lanterns were turned off. They stood in darkness. Above them the great, perforated bulk of the mountain rested, spongy with micalined worm holes, through which the light from the outer world was reflected in and down, faint glimmerings, no more than the smallest candle glow, falling through all that weight of rock and earth into the cavern below. Light, reflected from leaf or stream or animal or stone. Never twice the same.

‘I see light,’ whispered Marianne.

‘The light rests on an hourglass,’ said Therat.

‘A sundial,’ said Nalavi.

‘A clock,’ said Cyram, all three of them at once, looking in three different directions. Then they were in darkness once more, unrelieved and absolute. After a moment, Therat sighed and struck a light. ‘Well, Makr Avehl?’

‘Time,’ he said. ‘The source of her power is time.’

‘What’s the matter, Makr Avehl?’ asked
Marianne
. ‘You don’t sound hopeful.’

Time?’ he replied. ‘How does one get at it? What does one do with it? How has she gained access to it?’

The momentary gods,’
Marianne
replied. ‘They’d know. They give time its reality, or so they say. No, that’s not quite it. They give space its reality, and that gives time its reality.’

Therat stared at her in the glare of the lantern light. ‘You have spoken with momentary gods?’ Therat asked.

‘There are five of them with us,’ Marianne began.

‘I summoned them,’ said
Marianne
. ‘It’s something I learned to do from… from Madame, I think. I was in this place, a library, I seem to remember, and she did this thing. Summoned something terrible. All the world was full of snakes, I remember that. And she had this Manticore. She summoned it up, too, from time to time. And she used… used the momentary gods to transport people into her worlds, I remember that. She would reach up and twist the tail of a momentary god, and it would establish a nexus and let someone through. Oh, I do remember that.’

‘And you learned to do this by merely observing her?’

Marianne
shook her head, confused. ‘I’m not sure that’s exactly it. Let’s say I absorbed enough to do it once, once only, without knowing what I was really doing and without any idea how to undo it.’

‘Shamanism,’ said Therat in a flat, dismissive tone. ‘Trifling with the structure of the universe. Foolish! Dangerous!’

‘Dangerous, yes, but we’ll have to deal with it somehow,’ mused Makr Avehl.

‘I still think we ought to talk to the momentary gods,’ advised
Marianne
, turning toward the entrance of the Cave. ’They may tell us something of value.’

Therat came with them to the Residence, where
Marianne
called the momegs. Black Dog came in answer to her call, but he was most unwilling to talk. He arrived. He listened briefly, then vanished. Marianne called him again, he returned to lie on the floor, head on paws, scowling at them all.

‘Come on,’
Marianne
said. ‘You know something. You told me the momegs give time its reality, or something like that.’

‘It’s true,’ he mumbled. ‘Each of us holds a chunk. Our birthright, so to speak.’

‘How big a chunk?’ asked Makr Avehl.

‘You don’t understand. It’s not like that. Not bigness or longness.’

‘Well tell me, what is it then?’

‘What it is, is duration. Or very rarely beginningness.’

Makr Avehl was relentless. ‘Explain that.’

Black Dog whined, pawed his nose, gnawed at some imaginary itch on his hind leg, then said, ‘Something happens. Then after that, something else happens. Let’s say, a light wave comes to my locus. It has duration there, a chunk of it, the only size there is, then it has to go somewhere, so it goes to my contiguite. Anyhow, my contiguite has a chunk of duration, too.
After
something happens somewhere else, something happens with him. Usually it’s light. Sometimes it’s quarks. We do a lot of durations and aftering with quarks.’

‘What about beforeness?’ asked Marianne, puzzled. ‘Don’t any of you have that?’

‘There’s no such thing,’ Black Dog barked, almost howling, putting his front paws over his ears. ‘That’s heresy. We give time its reality by duration and afterness. Everything happens after something else. Nothing happens before something else. It can’t! That’s just a human heresy, that’s all.’

‘Why are you so upset?’ asked Makr Avehl. ‘You’re saying time is quantized, aren’t you? I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. Does this have anything to do with where Madame gets her power?’

‘She twists things,’ sulked the Black Dog.

‘She’s evil,’ said the Foo Dog, erupting into the room from behind a chair. ‘She’ll end up destroying the universe, or at least this piece of it.’

‘Because?’

‘Because she keeps beforing things. She takes momegs and bends them double, so that things don’t go on to after, they twist around and go back before. That’s how
she
,’ the momeg indicated Marianne, ‘went back in her own time that way. She learned it from Madame and she borrowed Madame’s power to do it. Not that we blame her. She didn’t know what she was doing…’

‘I really didn’t,’ said
Marianne
, aghast. ‘Do you mean when I did that, I actually destroyed something?’

‘A momeg is all. One of us. Not one any of us liked very much. He was from a locus way out at the edge of things. Madame keeps a stock of rural momegs around. She thinks as long as she just nibbles away at the edges of things, it won’t really affect anything. She’s wrong, of course. Everyone with any sense knows that the edges of things are really the middle. There have already been disruptions.’ The Foo Dog brooded. ‘I suppose we should have told you this be… uh, at some prior eventuality.’

‘It would have been helpful,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘I’m not sure I understand it yet. Let’s see if I do. The black shamans taught Madame how to evoke momegs. They taught her how to twist momegs in half – is that right? – so that things go backwards or make loops in time instead of going forward?’

‘Taught her how, or gave her some device to do it with, I’m not sure which. Anyhow, she does it, and that makes holes in time where she can stick her false worlds,’ the Foo Dog nodded. ‘And it allows her to fool around with people in very unpleasant ways. And it’s all wrong, of course. Nobody ought to do it, ever. Up until recently, it was only the black shamans who talked about it, but more recently there was some respected human person who taught that time doesn’t always seem to come afterward, even though we know it does.’

‘Are you talking about relativity?’ asked Makr Avehl. ’Really?’

‘That’s what he called it,’ said Wolf Dog, melting through a wall. ‘That’s not what we call it. We call it messing about with things that ought to be left alone. Though of course so long as people just talk about it, no harm is done. It’s when people start actually messing about with it that things start to go wrong.’

‘Then Gojam was right,’ said
Marianne
.

Makr Avehl stared at her in perplexity. It was Aghrehond who snapped his fingers in sudden memory. ‘He said something about Madame taking momegs and – what? Not sending them back at all?’

To quote him exactly,’ said
Marianne
, ‘Gojam said, “She has a nasty habit of summoning up momegs on the spur of the moment, without any concern for the inconvenience it may cause, and then splatting them back again whenever it suits her. If she returns them at all, which I have reason to doubt in some cases.”’

Makr Avehl ran his fingers through his hair, then smoothed it, then rolled it again. ‘She’s using them up. Burning them up, as we would burn gasoline. Through some – some mechanism, some spell, something. We need to find how she does it. If the mechanism can be destroyed – assuming she can’t build another one – that will do. If the source can be eliminated, that will do.’

‘If Madame can be done away with,’ said Marianne, ‘that will do as well.’

The others in the group looked at one another uncomfortably.

‘No?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Not except as a last resort,’ Ellat said. ‘People like Madame – often trade off vital parts of themselves in return for power. That, too, is a shamanistic tendency. Black shaman, I should say. Those vital parts are often – well, potentiated, I suppose one might say, when the person dies.’

‘You’re talking ghosts, here?’ Marianne challenged.

‘Something like that.’

‘So? What harm can a ghost do?’

‘I’m talking real ghosts, not comic-book creatures,’ Ellat said patiently. ‘Concatenations of evil intention. Which, after sufficient aggregation, become what we would call demons. As to what harm, a very great deal. To you. To Makr Avehl. To nameless third parties we don’t even know of.’

‘Take her word for it,’ said Therat, who had listened silently to the entire conversation with the momegs and who now spoke for the first time. ‘It would be better to render Madame helpless than to kill her. Truly. If you can figure out a way to do that, you will have done all that needs doing.’

‘And how do we do that?’

‘We go to Lubovosk,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘We go to Lubovosk and talk to the same people Madame talked to when she learned all this. We start with the black shamans.’

Three bodies and four people went. Two Mariannes, one Makr Avehl, one Aghrehond. Makr Avehl’s beard and hair were dyed white, he led the packhorse and walked with a cane. Marianne wore the typical peasant dress of the region; her hair was braided; her face was dirty. Dressed in leather trousers and a full-sleeved shirt under a filthy sheepskin jacket, Aghrehond drove a small flock of sheep with the help of a couple of the momegs who showed up from time to time to nip at a lagging heel or bark at a straying woolface. They climbed over a mountain by a secret trail maintained by the Alphenlicht border guards; they appeared in Lubovosk some miles inside the border with all the requisite papers tucked in one pocket or another.

Before they left, certain processes had been set in motion in Alphenlicht, behind them. Functionaries at the Residence started the day by announcing that the Prime Minister would shortly be married, that even now his intended bride, an American girl of impecccable Kavi descent, was visiting the family. All attention was drawn south, to the Prime Minister’s Residence in Alphenlicht. Such had been Makr Avehl’s intention.

When advised of this ruse, Marianne was furious. ‘I never said I’d marry you.’

‘Since I didn’t propose to you, that doesn’t surprise me.’

‘You can’t marry
her
unless I consent to it. It’s my body, damn it.’

Makr Avehl considered this for a long time, looking her up and down, walking around her as though she had been a filly for auction. ‘I think I could, don’t you know. We’d simply divide up the time. Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, and alternate Sundays would be yours. The other time would be ours. That would work out well, wouldn’t it? You’d have lots of time to yourself.
Marianne
and I would have time to ourselves. You could learn to sleep through our times, just as Marianne did during yours.’