Against the Day (83 page)

   
“Then
your mission—”

“As ever—to find the holy City
ourselves, be there ‘fustest with the mostest,’ as your General Forrest used to
say—no reason you shouldn’t know that.”

   
“Of
course we don’t mean to pry—”

   
“Oh,
you lads are all right. I mean, if you aren’t all right, then who is?”

“You shame us, sir. If truth were
known, we are to be counted among the basest of the base.”

“Hmm. Would’ve preferred someone a little
more karmically advanced, but, howsoever—we do try aboard this vessel to
ignore the rivalries going on above us whenever we may, and anyone that’s after
our results is more than welcome to them—they can read the whole story,
right there in the papers, when we get back home at last, ‘Heroes of the Sands
Discover Lost City!’ Ministerial speeches and archiepiscopal homilies, not to
mention an opera girl on either arm, shaved ice by the ton, day or night at the
touch of an annunciator, neverfailing fountains of vintage Champagne,
jewelstudded Victoria Crosses designed by Monsieur Fabergé himself—well
. . .
except that, of course, if anyone
ever did actually discover a City sacred as that, he might not wish to wallow
all that much among the secular pleasures, appealing though they be or, shall I
say, as they are.”

If any sinister meaning was hidden
here, it either escaped the attention of the Chums or they had heard it just
fine, and artfully concealed that recognition.

On the futuristic frigate glided,
through the subarenaceous world, its exotically shaped steeringblades extended,
its augers ever in finelycalibrated rotation clockwise and counterclockwise,
among loomings of forbidding pinnacles and ominous grottoes never quite fully
revealed by the searchlight beams.

Such to the dead might appear the world of the
living—charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just,
terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam
forth. The hum of the viscosity equipment rose and fell, in what had come to
sound more and more like purposeful melody, reminding veterans of duty on the
Himalayan station, of transmundane melody performed upon ancient horns
fashioned from the thighbones of longdeparted priests, in windbeaten lamaseries
miles above the level of a sea at this distance belonging more to legend than
geography.

Randolph St. Cosmo, who had been
gazing nearly mesmerized out the viewing windows, now gave a sort of stifled
gasp—“There! isn’t that a
. . .
watchtower
of some sort? Have we been sighted?”

“Torriform Inclusion,” chuckled
Captain Toadflax soothingly, “easy to mistake. The whole trick down here’s
distinguishing manmade from Godmade. That,” he added, “and a head for the extra
dimension. Urban terrain doesn’t mean quite what it does up above—not if
we can approach a town from below as easily as any other direction.
Foundations, for example, become more like entryways. But I imagine you’ll be
eager to have a look at the map you’ve so kindly brought us. Least we can do in
our allbutboundless gratitude, you know.”

Installed in the Navigation
Room—a space so secret half the crew didn’t even know it was there much
less how to get to it—was one of the few Paramorphoscopes remaining in
the world.

All paramorphoscopical activities
aboard the
Saksaul
had been placed in charge of a civilian passenger,
Stilton Gaspereaux, who proved to be a scholarly adventurer in the Inner Asian
tradition of Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, though beyond the Navigation Room
chores his status on the ship was unclear. Unforthcoming about himself, he
appeared more than willing to talk about Shambhala, and the Sfinciuno
Itinerary.

“Among historians you’ll find a
theory that crusades begin as holy pilgrimages. One defines a destination,
proceeds through a series of stations— diagrams of which were among the
first known maps, as you see from this Sfinciuno document before you—and
at last, after penitential acts and personal discomforts, you arrive, you
perform there what your faith indicates you must, you go home again.

“But introduce to your sacred project
the element of weaponry and everything changes. Now you need not only a
destination but an enemy as well. The European Crusaders who went to the Holy
Land to fight Saracens found themselves, when Saracens were not immediately
available, fighting each other.

   
“We
must therefore not exclude from this search for Shambhala an un

avoidable military element. All the Powers have a lively
interest. The stakes are too high.”

The cryptic civilian had placed the
Itinerary beneath an opticallyperfect sheet of Iceland spar, deployed various
lenses, and made some fine adjustments to the Nernst lamps. “Here it is, lads.
Have a look.”

The only one not flabbergasted,
naturally, was Miles. He saw in the device immediately a skyship application as
a rangefinder and navigational aid. To look through it at the
strangelydistorted and only partlyvisible document the Chums had delivered to
Captain Toadflax was like experiencing a lowlevel aerial swoop—indeed,
engaging the proper controls on the viewing device could easily produce a long
and fearful plunge straight down
into the map,
revealing the terrain at
finer and finer scales, perhaps in some asymptotic way, as in dreams of
falling, where the dreamer wakes just before impact.

   
“And
this will take us straight to Shambhala,” said Randolph.

“Well
. . . .
” Gaspereaux seemed embarrassed. “Yes I thought so too, at
first. But there seem to be further complications.”

“I knew it!” Darby exploded. “That
’Zo Meatman was setting us up for suckers all along!”

“It’s strange, really. Distances,
referred back to an origin point at Venice, are painstakingly accurate for the
earth’s surface and the various depths below. But somehow these three
coordinates have not been enough. The farther we follow the Itinerary, the more
. . .
somehow
. . .
out of focus the details seem to drift, until at last,”
shaking his head in perplexity, “they actually become invisible. Almost as if
there were some
. . .
additional
level of encryption.”

   
“Perhaps
a fourth coordinate axis is needed,” Chick suggested.

“I feel the difficulty may lie here,”
directing their attention to the center of the display, where, visible only at
intervals, stood a mountain peak, blinding white, seeming lit from within,
light pouring from it, bursting continually, illuminating transient clouds and
even the empty sky
. . . .

“Thought at first to be Mount Kailash
in Tibet,” said Gaspereaux, “a destination for Hindu pilgrims for whom it is
the paradise of Shiva, their most holy spot, as well as the traditional
starting point for seekers of Shambhala. But I’ve been out to Kailash and some
of the others, and I’m not sure this one on the map is it. This one can also be
seen at considerable distance, but not all the time. As if it were made of some
variety of Iceland spar that can polarize light not only in space but in time
as well.

“The ancient Manichæans out here
worshipped light, loved it the way Crusaders claimed to love God, for its own
sake, and in whose service no crime was too extreme. This was their
counterCrusade. No matter what transformations

might occur—and they expected anything, travel backward
or forward through Time, lateral jumps from one continuum to another,
metamorphosis from one form of matter, living or otherwise, to
another—the one fact to remain invariant under any of these must always
be light, the light we see as well as the expanded sense of it prophesied by
Maxwell, confirmed by Hertz. Along with that went a refusal of all forms of
what they defined as ‘darkness.’

“Everything you appreciate with your
senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your
children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a
lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic
triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a seabreeze
flowing over unclothed skin—all these for the devout Manichæan are evil,
creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to
time and excrement and darkness.”

   
“But
it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.

“And a true follower of this faith
had to give all of it up. No sex, not even marriage, no children, no family
ties. These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from
seeking union with the Light.”

   
“That’s
the choice? Light or pussy? What kind of a choice is that?”

   
“Suckling!”

   
“Sorry
Lindsay, I meant ‘vagina,’ of course!”

“Sounds a little,” Chick scratching
his beard, “I don’t know, puritanical somehow, doesn’t it?”

   
“That’s
what they believed in.”

   
“Then
how’d they keep from dying out after the first generation?”

“Most of them went on about the
business of what you’d call their normal lives, kept on having children, so
forth, it depended what level of imperfection they could accept. The ones who
kept strictly to the discipline were called ‘Perfects.’ The rest were welcome
to study the Mysteries and try to join the small company of the Elect. But if
they ever reached a point where they knew that’s what they wanted, that’s where
they’d have to give everything up.”

   
“And
there are descendants living down here?”

   
“Oh,
I expect you’ll find it quite populated indeed.”

Presently the opticaloffset detectors
of the
Saksaul
revealed in the near distance scattered but unmistakable
ruins in the GræcoBuddhist and ItaloIslamic styles and, moving among these,
other subdesertine vehicles, whose courses, upon being roughly plotted,
appeared to converge with the
Saksaul
’s
own, somewhere in the obscurities ahead. From above, below,
and either side, structures more complex than geology could account for began
gathering closer—domes and minarets, columned arches, statuary, finely
fil

igreed balustrades, windowless towers, ruins written on by
combat ancient and modern.

“We shall put in at Nuovo Rialto,”
the Captain announced. “Port and starboard liberty sections.” This news was
received ambiguously by the crew, “N.R.” being a good liberty town for some
needs but not others. The longsubmerged port had been settled around 1300 on
the ruins, by then already half swept below by the unappeasable sands, of a
Manichæan city, which dated from the third century and according to tradition
had been founded by Mani himself in his wanderings beyond the farther banks of
the Oxus. There it remained and flourished for nearly a thousand years until
Jenghiz Khan and his armies overran that part of Inner Asia, leaving as little
as they could either standing or breathing. By the time the Venetians found it,
little remained that had not succumbed to wind, gravity, and an excruciating departure
of faith. In the brief time they occupied Nuovo Rialto, the Westerners managed
to put in a network of cisterns to collect what rainwater came that way, run
some pipe, even sink a few wells. Inexplicably, as if attending to ancient
voices somehow preserved in the crystallography of the silica medium which was
so mercilessly engulfing the town—as if secret knowledge had once been
written that permanently into its very substance—they began to fall year
by year under the influence of the old paraChristian doctrines. The first
undersand explorers here had identified Manichæan shrines dating from no
earlier than the fourteenth century, clearly a thousand years more recent than
they ought to have been.

The crew meanwhile were busy with the
Passing of the Remarks traditional when entering a new liberty port.

   
“ ‘
As above, so below,’ ain’t it.”

   
“Never
fails.”

   
“Talk
about battered caravanserais!”

   
“Lot
of laundry to do, maybe I’ll just stay on the ship
. . . .
”

   
“Place
smells like Coney Island. “

   
“What,
the beach?”

   
“Naahh—Steeplechase
Park, at the vaudeville show!”

“Now prepare for docking, starboard
side to,” the Captain announced. Nearby loomed a high, ruinous structure of
great antiquity, of some redbrown color suggestive of blood spilled none too
recently, whose supporting pillars were torchbearing statues male and female,
and whose pediment was inscribed in an alphabet invented, according to
Gaspereaux, by Mani himself, and in which The Book of Secrets and other sacred
Manichæan texts

were also written.

   
It
was here, evidently, that the sandfrigate planned to tie up. After evening
“chow,” enjoying a cigar on the fantail, Chick heard a highpitched screaming,
which seemed to him almost articulated into speech. He located a pair of
undersand goggles, slipped them on, and peered into the darkness beyond the
settlement walls. Something large and heavy came thundering by, in high
swooping hops, and Chick thought he recognized the smell of blood. “What in
Creation was that?”