Celebrant Read online

  The Bird of Ill Omen sails close to the ground, like a lock of lustrous black hair. Oblivious to him, the huge sable bird never turns back its head, although deKlend keeps his eyes, as far as his own precarious balance will allow in his haste, riveted on the space between the upright faun’s ears, where the low hemispherical prominence of the bird’s head is thrust down, almost sullenly, before the brawny shoulders. The look on deKlend’s face isn’t imploring, or vituperative or doing much of anything; it seems he has no choice.

  The bird swings away and is devoured by its own motion, disappearing. Had it been otherwise, deKlend could not have lost it, because he never gets tired, never slows, runs nearly as fast as the bird flies, and can traverse any distance, any surface—even the wild ocean—as easily as a shadow.

  Now he has come to a halt on a mountain road overlooking a deep valley. Icy full moon light makes the exposed white stone of the mountain sides glow under black-blue rags of foliage, the jagged outline of brush creeps up from a valley floor, making it look like the charred bottom of an old cooking pot. All around, tiny silver flutes of smoke twirl into the stones earth and plants, and into his body. A palpitating force shimmers through the valley and the mountains, penetrating everything.

  That force trembles. deKlend becomes instantly alert. In the starry sky at one end of the valley an invisible wave burgeons in silence, like a colossal swell towering above the sea. With implacable slowness it looms steadily higher, throwing an unseen shadow down into the valley, gathering itself for the rush.

  deKlend quickly selects the best spot to meet it and gets ready. The gravity wave expands to its full height and hangs there. Its momentum begins to shift—now it rolls down into the valley in a steady, even, irresistible surge. deKlend can see it coming in a curved, perfectly transparent facet, and just as in the ocean the water before the wave seems to rise and swoop in gradually to join it, so do all the whorls of the individual fields of object-gravity stretch to receive and join this wave. deKlend’s own field leans, attracted, into the flux, and he can even feel the change it’s making, lightness gathering minutely inside his body. These waves, gelatinous ripples in the world’s gravity field, wash over the earth constantly, but, for all their enormous power, their effects are even less perceptible on the ground than the agitation of the surface of the sea is to the creatures who live in its depths.

  The wave is sweeping toward him like an eclipse. deKlend watches it come with a feeling of irrational dread, knowing all the while it can’t actually hurt him.

  Now the wave arrives—deKlend chooses his moment, steps into it and is washed aloft in mid-step running instantly along the forward edge of the wave, in the thin strip just in advance of it, where he is virtually weightless. The edge is like a narrow path through a sky of deep, vibrant blue, the earth travelling underneath him and bent up around his legs in a saddle shape, the stars in a tube and the wave’s crest forms a contrast horizon on his left. Apart from a little dead reckoning at the instant of departure, there is nothing he can do to determine his direction. The wave carries him, alone.

  He must keep running. While he won’t get tired, he does have to concentrate on maintaining his balance. His feet want to pinwheel beneath him and his strides keep getting longer and longer in a dash down a steep street. Eventually he will tumble out of the wave and go vaulting head over heels along the ground, which he never leaves however much it may seem he races through heaven. If this didn’t happen he might go on forever, like the world, but gravity waves disperse as mysteriously as they appear. Wayfaring like this, deKlend can cross whole continents in no time; so far does he go, he might as well be running alone between planets and flickering through the corridors of the sky.

  Now he finds himself wandering through stone passages so narrow he can press his palms to either wall, the arched ceiling only inches above his head. These passages grow darker until he is scrambling blind like a lost soul alone in the underworld. All the same, the terrifying sensation of being engulfed in the ground is missing; and he knows he’s actually high in the sky. It may be the sky beneath the ground, but it is still the sky.

  The floor fails to come up to meet his foot and his next step becomes a plunge forward in total darkness. Panic jabs at him—but he drops only about a metre and lands with a jolt on his outstretched foot. His footfall resounds from distant walls in the breathless stillness of a sudden spaciousness all around him. Brilliant, high-hanging lights smash on with a bang, and there’s a wild eruption of regular noise off to his right. deKlend yelps in surprise and tries to claw the dazzle out of his eyes—a moment later, when he can see, he struggles to take in the cavernous chamber, a hundred feet high (he mistakes), nearly as wide, and far longer, virtually empty, sheer angles and surfaces in polished grey stone with black rubber lianas hanging here and there, a few steel piers on rails with steps leading to doors and passages high off the floors and some radiating pedestrian tunnels. Evidently he popped out of one of those, a black doorway that seems as small as a mousehole.

  The source of the noise, brilliantly illuminated by the arclights which bathe the entire vault in an acrid silvery blaze, is a gigantic mechanism too complex to take in all at once. deKlend stares at it with maniacal fascination as it glides forward one measured step at a time on tens of thousands of alternating black and golden metal human legs, bent at the knee and attached by thick rods to a coiling segmented drive shaft, forming a huge legbristling cylinder, and there are anywhere from four to six or three to seven of these huge legbristling cylinders slithering to and fro behind and among each other, evidently radiating from a long thorax with a single looming piston of charred-looking steel. The thing is as wide as the chamber. The globular head of the piston rises and falls slowly, as big as a tugboat, high in the air over the walking cylinders; and, slightly off-center, at the very front of this apparent chaos, is a shield of smoky brass, only just slightly too large for a man to carry, framed in a cloisonné mosaic of black and teal feathers, and on this shield a slightly blurry loop of luminous film steadily replays showing the body of what might be a drum major, in a red tunic with brass buttons, framed so as to crop out pretty much everything but the chest and abdomen, raising and lowering before his stomach the baton he cradles along his right arm. A black bar burning its way up the shield marks each repetition of the loop, and the strictly regular motion of the baton is in sync with the other movements of the machine, which advances at the rate of marching men. The bare feet, deKlend can see, come down onto the floor with a slap, and then the entire leg pivots so that the bent knee traces a wide arc, and then the leg lifts again, rising high into the air as the segment to which it is attached spins around the drive shaft to bring the next leg up beneath the bottom of the cylinder.

  The gargantua strides forward with the sound of tromping feet, an interior tattoo, the stern moaning of the piston and the whickers of the gears attached to it. Lanterns line its sides like the photophores on a deep sea fish, and throw a beaded line along the walls. As the lights hit a series of reflectors set into the walls, the machine stops its advance. deKlend notices that the feet are all exactly lined up along a transverse groove in the floor; the entire floor, in fact he notices now the entire vault, is marked by such grooves at intervals, dividing it into equal parts. The tall steel ribs that run from front to back along its sides flex outward toward the walls. Metal bulbs on the ribs close over the huge blackened bolt heads protruding in rows from the walls. With a loud thud and rattle they suck the bolts out—there’s a deafening clap like dozens of pile drivers dropping once in perfect unison.

  The moment the bolts are pulled, the drum major resumes lifting and lowering his baton, the feet instantly begin to march, the whole assembly churns forward, out from under the section of the ceiling it has just unbolted. The titanic block of solid granite screws down in a spiral with a grating roar of rock threads, a single plume of dust spurting from the underside as the block plummets just slowly enough to permit the machine to march complet
ely past the groove in the floor marking the end of that segment. The block slams the floor, shaking the whole chamber so deKlend is thrown back onto his ass. No dust rises. The machine is clear. The block completely fills in the space over which it had formerly hung. There are narrow gaps to either side of the base, like the bevels on the sides of a tooth, but now these fill with hoarsely crackling cement foam that hardens immediately, forming a seal. The marching machine is now bringing its lights forward again toward the next row of concave reflectors, belonging to the next segment of the chamber.—All the segments have these reflectors.

  In a flash, deKlend assesses the situation with his mind.

  The domain of the whrounims and their underground sky riddled with corridors were all the accomplishments of ancestors who, having finished a certain phase of their work, thought it best tragically to destroy what they had created, using elaborately specialized machines like this one, employing principles derived from the natural robots of Votu.

  These archaic whrounim machines carry their own power plants and, since it is in the nature of power plants to require periodic infusions of some kind of initiative from outside themselves, the whrounims had made their machines with such fantastically delicate and subtle inner balance that even the most massive of them, of which the Dismantlafex presumably is one, could be set in motion by minute reverberations of kinetic energy.

  The Dismantlafex therefore should have reinitiated easily every time it undermined a section of the ceiling, the meteoric descent and landing of which produced great throbs of kinetic energy, but for some reason it forgot to keep moving and drifted off in its own thoughts for thousands of years until the frisson produced by deKlend’s left foot as it struck the floor as he blundered into the room broke the reverie of the Dismantlafex and caused its admirably incorruptible machinery to spring back to life and recommence its long-suspended task, which would continue until it came to the last segment of the chamber. Whereupon it would simply stay where it was, to be crushed beneath the last gargantuan block, thus completing the destruction.

  deKlend is overwhelmed with admiration. He casts about for some way to avert the Dismantlafex’s long foreordained suicide, but even before the next block groans free of its moorings and comes howling down he realizes that he simply hasn’t the time to paint over the reflectors—and then the Dismantlafex would march itself into the wall at the end of the chamber and probably plough itself into fragments there—let alone prop up the ceiling or figure out some way to trip all those marching feet at once. Apart from himself, the only thing he can save is his memory of the Dismantlafex, but he takes up a black fragment of broken rubber from the floor as a souvenir anyway before sprinting toward the nearest pedestrian tunnel—running all the faster as it occurs to him, slipping the fragment awkwardly into his outer right jacket pocket, that he has no way of knowing whether this particular tunnel will collapse by accident or design or go anywhere—but then starving in a tunnel is still preferable to being pulped or is it, it is slower, but then it might be more intelligent to try a farther tunnel, thinking he could check it and then, if it were a cul de sac, at least if it were a cul de sac he could identify as such without it taking too much time, he could turn around and try another passageway nearer to where he is just now, and farther away from the advancing machine. Whereas if he examined the nearer ones first, and found they were no good, the farther ones would become inaccessible in the meantime. Although this could be a fallacy, since he could end up trapped in the farther ones if the time it takes to investigate a passageway was insufficient to prevent the further ones from being sealed or whatever.

  This finishes occurring to him as he enters the passageway he had been aiming for all along and, while it does cause him to falter a single step, he charges on, vaguely telling himself he might go back in any case. His breath rebounds from the walls, plainer and plainer as the drone of the machine behind him fades.

  *

  A wet-looking sky, like fresh water color, blue and the scallops of the crater shadows on the moon. The ground is yellow, not stony but bunched up in clods like a nubby wool blanket. In places the ground trembles occasionally, as though shivering with cold. But the air is tepid, still, and feels like a bath. deKlend breathes it with relish, feeling released under the open sky. The level horizon seems too close. There’s a brambly tree standing nearby, emerging rather, out of a dense whorl of roots like a nest.

  Everything is listening. The only sound is shallow breathing between land and sky, and no motion. Turning up the yellow soil with the toe of his shoe uncovers faint pink and orange ribbons of fine-grained sand. deKlend sits down there where he came to earth a moment before, however that is understood, and homelessly gazes around him, hugging his knees. There is a tangle of fractures in the distance that must be more trees. One has little black beads in it—small birds. Motionless, they hop among the boughs. He can see them clearly against the sky, little points like musical notation. Gradually he begins to hear the moon’s descent toward the horizon, a nearly silent inhalation.

  A sinuous, fluorescent line appears along the sky, trailing a vaporous curtain of light. The light wavers nervously, like a clear veil rippling with delicate, luminous colors that sweep slowly across the sky and drain into the earth. Following their descent, deKlend sees that he is crawling with what looks like heat turbulence, but he is not hot nor does he feel anything at all unusual. Just above the ground, the sky’s effulgence forms long elastic funnels, swaying, as though the countryside were ablaze. Now the glow hovers like a film on the surface of water, seen from below. All around him and on his own body deKlend can see a shimmer of nearly invisible vortices of diverse sizes coiling into every object, and some coils within coils forming onion shells, rolling their hips. These are gravity fields. They don’t radiate from objects. They inundate into objects. They appear and disappear in what seem to be the same places as deKlend alters the focus of his eyes, and once he feels something like a muscular cramp in his irises and gasps as, for a moment, it seems the whole landscape is filled with whirling pitchers of smoke.

  After numerous experiments he can find no way to affect them.

  But I’m not hallucinating (he thinks) These are nothing at all like any hallucinations I’ve ever had.

  A giant shadow bulges into the membrane covering the sky, and deKlend feels as though he were being sucked up by the hair, so faintly he probably wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t coincided with the appearance of that opalescent black obscurity overhead. He feels like a rubber band that has been just a little drawn out, and the very top of his skull tickles. The shadow collapses, and the odd sensations go with it. The membrane he now sees is all throughout itself fissured with black imbrications and folds, like loops of calligraphy that squeeze and flex on a drowsily undulating surface.

  Blinking and casting about himself, deKlend watches the vortices. He falls asleep.

  deKlend wakes again with the impression he’s been sleeping a long while. But the night around him is exactly the same. The moon is just where it was. deKlend rises stiffly.

  I can’t have slept through the day (he thinks) and into the following night. I must have fallen into one of those prevaricating sleeps that engulf one so totally, and into which one plunges so precipitously and deeply all at once, that they seem a lot profounder than they really are. They take up more time than they last.

  deKlend knocks the fine yellow dust from his body and begins to walk. The sky has resumed its previous, freshly-painted appearance, but with dim explosions of vivid color that burst and fade like cold, sparkless fireworks. Now and then, a vortex flickers up from a stone or other remarkable object, like a single, skinny tongue of flame flicking from a bed of embers. Otherwise, his vision is as it was.

  I seem to have forgotten that I have a good reason for being here (deKlend thinks). But it may have changed since I arrived. I didn’t know what to expect, before I came, and now that I am here, I still don’t know what to expect. I know that I am led on
—that I must make my way somehow to Votu on the endless earth, that I must make my sword and bring it there, and I must learn about mnemosem, or that is I must first discover what is it mnemosem and then—?

  —Make my sword?

  deKlend wracks his brains—I don’t remember anything about swords.

  ...and yet this idea comes to me with subtle indications of being a conviction. Of mine.

  So this maybe is one of those ideas that is neither exhaled by the mind, in the normally mysterious way, which is a kind of trade secret in the production of everyday ideas, kept from me by the obscurity of the complexity, and darkness, of the production process, nor is it, I suspect, an idea I’ve learned from anyone else. It doesn’t have a return address. This is the kind of idea that one just finds there, in some mind at hand. I imagine a curator who checks a sealed collection, a set of items locked away for decades, and finds an uncatalogued thing unaccountably mixed in with them. It has always been there, and it seems almost as if it weren’t really there. But there it is, that idea—I must bring to Votu a sword that I have made. The old fantasy of a sword. They said, when I was young, that those as makes swords has fits.

  I’ll make a sword (he decides) and then I’ll have it. That way (he thinks) I’ll be covered.

  Covered how?

  By having one. Whether or not I have any use for it.

  deKlend stops thinking.

  He hears crickets, and walks in among the thicket of shadows thrown on the ground by high myrtle trees. An enormous black bird swoops by without a sound. The air smells like herbs.

  The shadows lengthen into streets. Empty streets. deKlend hears singing. The houses are made of pale brown adobe with dark wooden beams and shutters. The moon’s light falls directly to the ground and shudders. It passes the houses without shining on them, so they have no gleaming outlines, but are visible by their own colors. The street is made of uniform, compacted gravel that doesn’t crunch, the little stones are mottled indigo and white and walking on them his feet make no more sound than if they were grains of sand. Broad and gently rounded as the back of a whale, the street is dimly vibrating in the night like static, although the night, which must be dark, does not seem dark. In the dark, everything is distinct.