Tales of Majipoor (28 page)

The letter did not actually say he was dead. He was simply “no longer in Sippulgar,” she was told, and there was unclaimed property which would revert to the province if not collected by a member of his family. Certainly the implication of death was there, but not the certainty. I made inquiries in official circles and learned, after much patient probing, that Melifont Ambithorn had vanished under mysterious circumstances, was not expected to return, and his property in Sippulgar, such as it might be – undescribed – was formally considered to have been abandoned by him. Further inquiry yielded me nothing. “Mysterious circumstances,” was all anyone would say, and though I used my best political and commercial connections to get some more detailed explanation, the mystery remained a mystery. He had disappeared, and so far as the Prefecture of Sippulgar was concerned there was no likelihood of his turning up again, but no one would say explicitly that he was dead. Thuwayne could not accept such vagueness. Thus my journey to Sippulgar.

My first call was at the Prefecture. I bore documents establishing my family connection with Melithorn and informing me of the procedure I was supposed to follow when in Sippulgar, but even so it took me two hours to reach any official with authority to assist me in the case. He was, of course, a Hjort, puffy-faced and rough-skinned, with an enormous toadlike head. I do not like those officious creatures – who does? – but Hjorts populate our bureaucracy to such a degree that it is impossible for me to avoid frequent contact with them, and I have learned to be patient with their superciliousness and coarseness. The Hjort spent a long time pondering my papers, muttering to himself and jotting down copious notes, and said, finally, “Why are you here in place of his sister?”

I said with some restraint, “His sister – my wife – is not in a state of health that permits such a long journey. But I believe these documents make it clear that I am her officially designated representative.”

The documents I had shown him said so in the very first sentence. I refrained from pointing that out. The Hjort muttered to himself some more and at length, scowling – and when a Hjort scowls, it is with a mouth that stretches from Alhanroel to Zimroel – he scribbled something and applied his stamp of office to it and shoved it across the desk to me. It was a permit to receive the personal effects of Melifont Ambithorn, citizen of Sippulgar, legally presumed to be deceased.

His effects weren’t to be had at the Prefecture, of course. I had to cross half the city, a journey that entangled me in two more religious processions, noisy and fervid, before I reached the government storehouse where Melifont’s things were being kept. After the predictable official delays I was given three goodsized boxes, which I took back to my hotel to inspect.

One of them contained some clothing, a little cheap jewelry, and a small collection of books. There was nothing useful there. The second box, I was displeased to see, was crammed with what even I could recognize as the apparatus used in the practice of sorcery: ambivials, crucibles, alembics, ammatepilas, an astrolabe, a pair of phalangaria, stoppered flasks containing oils and powders of many colors, and various other instruments whose names I did not know. I sorted through this stuff with mounting distaste. Why had my brother-in-law, that restless, energetic man whose ambitions had driven him into all those ill-fated ventures in mining, banking, and shipping, gathered about himself such a hodgepodge of useless claptrap, such a huge collection of instruments and materials suitable only for exploiting the delusions of a credulous populace?

The answer to my question was right there in the question itself. But – perhaps it was the fatigue of my long day’s quest, or some effect of the close, humid air – it was some long while before I saw what should have been instantly obvious.

I opened the third box. In it were papers, arranged in no perceptible order: documents relating to Melifont’s many defunct business enterprises of years gone by, travel brochures, extracts from technical books, and so on, everything jumbled hopelessly together. I picked through it and was rewarded, after a time, with a small handwritten journal, practically illegible, the first entry of which was dated just eighteen months before. I leafed through it, but found my brother-in-law’s scribbled writing difficult to make out and the entries themselves cryptic to the point of incoherence, and set it aside for further study. Then came another great wad of obsolete commercial records, and, below these, the one useful find in the whole messy mass: a leather binder in which were kept a group of contracts and municipal licenses and other material, all of it just a couple of years old, pertaining to the partnership between Melifont Ambithorn and a certain Nikkon Flurivole, citizen of Sippulgar, with whom Melifont proposed to organize a firm devoted to “the enhancement and farthering of the spiritual welfare of the people of Sippulgar and the entire Aruachosian coast.”

And instantly I saw it all. My brother-in-law, having spent thirty years of his life failing at this promising project and that one, had in a desperate moment begun to dabble in sorcery, and very likely had gone on from that to set himself up in the business of starting a new religion.

Locating his partner, this Nikkon Flurivole, was my obvious next step. But there were no Flurivoles listed in the municipal directory, and a visit to the Prefecture got me nowhere, since the civic government was plainly not going to provide information about its citizens merely to gratify the curiosity of strangers from Sisivondal. In vain did I display the writ that allowed me to investigate the fate of Melithon Ambithorn, and the legal papers that showed that this Flurivole had been his partner in the last known commercial undertaking of his life. My writ, I was told, extended to information about Melithon Ambithorn and no one else.

I know how to handle such bureaucratic obfuscation. Bribing Hjorts is a fool’s game – they will take your money and report you for attempted bribery – but the city administration was not made up entirely of Hjorts, and after a couple of attempts I found a chatty little undersecretary in the Registry of Names who, for the price of a couple of bowls of good Muldemar wine looked Flurivole up for me and reported that he was, like Melifont, “no longer in Sippulgar,” that he was carried in the registry as “disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” and that his personal effects were available for claiming by the next of kin, but to date no one had filed a request for them. My jolly new friend even supplied me with Flurivole’s last known address; but when I went there – it was a residential hotel in a not very golden corner of the city – I learned that his rooms had been rented to someone else quite some while back, that the rental agent could not or would not tell me anything about Flurivole at all, and that the new tenant knew nothing about his predecessor in the building. Nor did the name of Melifont Ambithorn mean anything to him.

I was stymied. But I am a persistent man.

Often, when desired knowledge is difficult or impossible to find, it is best to stop looking for a time, and give the information a chance to come looking for you instead. I settled down to follow that tactic. I longed to be home, to dine at my own table, to sleep in my own bed, above all to hold my wife in my arms once again. Never had we spent so many days apart, and the separation was a torment to me. But I could not abandon my quest now. I had already missed the heart of the shipping season at home anyway; I did not want to return to Thuwayne with the mystery of her brother’s disappearance unsolved; and I was confident that I would sooner or later stumble upon the next clue in the puzzle.

For a week I wandered Sippulgar as a tourist might do. It is, after all, one of our most beautiful cities, well worth seeing. We of Sisivondal have learned to get along without municipal beauty in our lives, but that does not mean we are indifferent to it. So I visited the botanical gardens that Lord Tharamond had founded somewhere in the mists of antiquity, and saw more horticultural wonders in half an hour than I had in all the years of my life. I clambered to the observation deck of the immense Hendighail Tower and peered out over the Inner Sea, imagining I could see all the way to Suvrael. I looked at the masterpieces of art in the prefectorial museum. And one day I drifted down to the waterfront and discovered a street that held, cheek by jowl, half a dozen temples to the gods of alien worlds.

Sippulgar, for some reason, is home to a great many expatriate beings from other worlds. I don’t mean Hjorts or Ghayrogs or Skandars or the three or four other non-human species that have dwelled alongside us on Majipoor for thousands of years, and whose populations are thoroughly integrated into our own; I mean later comers whose numbers can be counted in the hundreds at best, scatterings from one world and another who, having come here for some commercial reason, have chosen never to return to their home planets. It may be that the mild humid climate of Sippulgar is appealing to these folk; at any rate, there are plenty of them there, of ten or a dozen different kinds, and that one particular street along the waterfront has been designated as their religious district. They have built a row of temples to their gods there, most of them small buildings, but, I discovered, dramatic and startling in their appearance, since their architecture owes nothing to Majipoori custom but is derived instead from the styles of the worshippers’ native worlds. So one building that looks like a collection of interlocking pink bubbles stands precariously close to another that is a cluster of threatening black spikes, an inverted green triangle is neighbor to a set of yellow insectoid legs reaching in suppliant fashion to the sky, and so forth.

I suppose I am more tolerant of alien religions than I am of the home-grown creeds that have sprung up all over Majipoor in the past generation. Aliens are, as hardly needs to be said,
alien,
and it is quite reasonable to think that the strange workings of their minds have given rise to strange beliefs deeply rooted in their ancient civilizations. But belief in the supernatural is something new to us, and, it seems to me, quite extrinsic to our established nature. We acknowledge the existence of what we call the Divine, yes, but we have never backed that acknowledgment with scriptures or rituals; yet suddenly a new credulity has swept the world, a passionate and almost pathetic willingness to believe in the unbelievable, and I for one, dull prosaic businessman that I am, am not comfortable with it. So I feel disdain and even scorn for the frantic processions of the Beholders and the sea-dragon worshippers and the flagellantes and the blood-drinkers, for the installation in the plazas of our cities of huge idols with ten heads and twenty arms, for the believers in omens and prodigies, demons and goblins, for those who fill their homes with amulets and holy images, and all the rest of it; but, standing in front of this row of alien temples, I experienced only a sort of aesthetic pleasure, what one feels whenever one travels through the world and sees something attractive, something altogether different from what one sees at home.

I fall easily into conversations with strangers; and so it was, as I stood across the street watching strange-looking beings coming and going at the outworlders’ temples, I found myself discussing – warily, at first, then more openly – my attitude toward our current spate of religiosity with a fellow curiosity-seeker, an onlooker who, by the hue of his skin, was probably a native of this region. He was a small, finely built man with brightly gleaming eyes that shined like beacons out of his purple-black face, and he seemed to know which planet each of the different outworld types we were watching had come from. I complimented him on his knowledge, to which he replied, after telling me that his name was Vundafor Thorb and that his home was in the nearby town of Bekadu, that it was his business to know such things: he was an importer whose specialty was supplying these aliens with the foodstuffs and beverages of their native worlds. He said it in a casual way that told me that he actually disliked the presence of all these outworlders in Sippulgar, but that he saw it as a prime business opportunity.

“My late brother-in-law, I think, took the same attitude toward our new religions,” I said. “I have reason to think he saw all this feverish piety as nothing more than a good thing suitable for exploitation.”

“Oh?” And he gave me a sharp look, as though I had offended him by implying that I thought his own attitude revealed a cynical love of profit, which in fact I did. Not that I saw anything wrong with that. But then he smiled and said, “So he went into the religion business, your brother-in-law?”

“Apparently so.” And, bit by bit, I told him what little I could: the nature of Melifont’s character, his repeated failure in a series of grandiose enterprises, and the final letter telling my wife and me that he had embarked on some new project in Sippulgar, followed in time by the official notice of his disappearance. “I’ve been given three boxes full of his effects,” I said. “I found a diary in them that I’ve barely been able to decipher, but which talks about a partner of his named Nikkon Flurivole, and some legal papers indicating that he and this Flurivole were starting a company that was intended to bring ‘spiritual benefits’ to the people of Sippulgar. I translate that as meaning that they were going to trump up some lucrative new religion, don’t you?”

“Surely that must be it,” said my new friend.

“And in another box was a whole sorcerers’ shop full of the claptrap devices that wizards use – crucibles and alembics and ambivials and whatnot. You know what I mean.”

“Melifont Ambithorn was his name, you said?”

“Yes. And his partner was Nikkon Flurivole.”

“Indeed. I knew them, actually. Had some business dealings with them, as a matter of fact. A tall, dramatic-looking man, who walked with a limp? And the other one short, round-faced, sleepy-looking? ”

“I don’t know anything about the other one. But the tall man with a limp – yes, that was Melifont!” I could have wept with delight. If I had been a believer in any of the new gods, I would have given thanks to him. “What can you tell me about them?” I asked eagerly.