400 Boys and 50 More (49 page)

The Vulture Maiden swooped again, avoiding Zhogmi Chhodak, and dropped a final gift to Dorje Wangdu.

It fit his hand like another finger. He felt the air humming around the curved blade as if the metal surface were one with his flesh.

The Vulture Maiden waited.

Dorje Wangdu walked up behind Zhogmi and placed a hand on his shoulder. At first, Zhogmi Chhodak didn’t move—his full attention was fixed on the Vulture Maiden. Then his shoulders slumped, all the sickness flooding out of him, deserting his body. When it departed, there was nothing left to animate the flesh. He surrendered at last to his culture.

The Vulture Maiden came only when invited, but she did not have long to wait. Dorje worked quickly. And when she was done, the sky swallowed her up as if she had never been.

Dorie Wangdu knelt on the hillside in the ruins of the monastery as the glow went out of Shining Hill, and the sky lost some ineffable part of its luster. Gyatso Samphel’s head had vanished, as had the sacred knife. Nor was there any evidence of Zhogmi Chhodak to incriminate him in all the long investigations that would surely follow.

After a time he heard voices calling, and a familiar head appeared over a mound of broken masonry. It was Gelek Thargey, the abbot. He let out a cry on finding someone alive in the rubble.

“The
ledhonrukhag
fled,” he gasped, helping Dorje climb up. “They left us alone in the dormitory. By a miracle, none of us was harmed—many of the soldiers have been crushed! But you survived.”

“Yes.” He came out unsteadily. Monks were combing the wreckage of the temple. He saw no uniforms.

“We will have to rebuild again,” Gelek Thargey said in a resigned tone of voice, limping along beside him. “At least it was a natural disaster—and not man-made. Do you think we'll be able to find the money, Jing Meng-Chen?”

He put a hand on Gelek Thargey’s shoulder.

“I think the DMC will help you, yes. But you must call me by my true name. Dorje Wangdu.”

The abbot regarded him intently, searching his eyes; then he began cautiously to smile. “Sometimes the whole world must move to shake an evil loose,” he said.

There was a cry of dismay nearby, as another body was discovered in the rubble. Dorje felt an ambivalent pang when he recognized Jowo Tenzin. He sank down beside him, closed the staring eyes, hoping the Vulture Maiden had come in a sweet form—but fearing that with Jowo’s guilty conscience, it might have been otherwise.

“Do you still know the rites of the
Bardo Thodol
?” he asked Gelek Thargey.

“I keep them up here.” The abbot tapped his brow, then leaned over the corpse and began softly to chant.

Dorje Wangdu closed his own eyes and let the words wash over him—a river of sound, deep with meaning he scarcely fathomed. He let it take him, hardly sensing the shadows of birds that passed over his face.

For at the peak of Shining Hill, thirteen vultures circled in anticipation of more burials. Finally, as if weary of waiting, the flock dropped down on the ancient, eroded walls of the nunnery below their rock table. There they cawed and beat their wings and clattered their beaks merrily, like a group of old women telling tales of the distant days, marking time while they waited for the feast being laid out in their honor.

* * *

“The Vulture Maiden” copyright 1992 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, August 1992.

GREAT BREAKTHROUGHS IN DARKNESS

(BEING, EARLY ENTRIES FROM

THE SECRET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHOTOGRAPHY
)

Authorized by

MARC LAIDLAW

Chief Secretary of the Ministry of

Photographic Arcana, Correspondent of No

Few Academies, Devoted Husband, &c.

“Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a
denouement
we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!”

— William Henry Fox Talbot

-A-

AANSCHULTZ, CONREID

(c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

Inventor of the praxiscope technology (
which see
), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

AANSCHULTZ LENS

The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

ABAT-JOUR

A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (
60 g.
), carbolic acid (
10 ccs
), zinc oxide (
30 g
) and lanoline (
480"
), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

“That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not
captured
him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

“I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

“You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

“No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half-assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all
Things
.

“This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.