Celebrant (46 page)

Kunty picks out a box and sets it against the wall, gets up on it and satisfies herself that, with this boost, she is now as tall relative to the door as the woman had been.
She raises her right foot and, with difficulty, sets it on the threshold of brick-ends, and it slips off.
It takes many tries to get a good purchase, and then, as she tries to lift herself up, she feels the strain of the muscle against the bones, the precarious balance.
She keeps trying, and her foot keeps slipping, slamming down onto the box with a jolt that goes all through her, and when she does begin to lift herself up she falls, onto the box, from the box, onto her back, getting up wincing with quick jabs of pain in her back, testing
—
it’s all right, keep trying.
She puts her foot up and goes on, trembling with effort as she lifts herself, balancing, thrusting forward, her head thrown back she looking up at the sky Kunty up at the sky with a look that says something like do you love me too?
Her foot slips and she only narrowly avoids being clipped under the chin by the threshold, which might have killed her.
A little fillip of wind rises all around her and floats away in an updraft.

When she first gets it, she’s facing the wrong way.
She rotated on the pad of her foot as she brought herself the last bit of the way up.
She gets down and keeps trying, seeing in her mind the woman stepping up and floating airily forward into the gloom of the doorway.
Kunty raises her foot to the threshold and, pressing straight down with groaning muscles, lifts herself straight up and forward.
Gasping with excitement, she jumps down and tries again, failing.
On the fourth repetition, she succeeds again, and more often than not thereafter.
Finally Kunty drops onto her bottom in the doorway and lets her burning legs droop over the threshold, breathing wearily, smiling.

Phryne:

Phryne releases her disguise, and it subsides in stages like an imploding building.
As always, the change is like the arrival of the worst, as if a barrier collapsed and the despair it had dyked back now comes flooding in.
Phryne feels it, but the emotion is also all around her.
To rendezvous with disappointment elementals it is customarily necessary to make some kind of complaint, or to crumple to the floor weeping.
Phryne’s transformation, and her air of tragedy, are enough, and the clean, animal fragrance of tears gathers in a mist that makes the room’s few colors fewer, paler, and thinner.

They are arriving, coming through doorways that open onto a jumbled landscape washed with a shivering glow that drops straight down, evenly, from every part of the sky.
They are lit only from behind as they enter, and each sidesteps into the dark as it clears the threshold.
Phryne sees bare arms hanging nervelessly down from clusters of shoulders, and rings of drooping heads.
The light kindles along the wilting curve of a swanlike neck, or brushes the numb edges of a grave and downcast face.
The eyes can only drop, drop tears and drop pupils, so that the iris disappears behind the lower eyelid like the setting sun to descend again from behind the upper.
One of them is bent double and ploughs the ground with its face and shoulders, dragging its arms behind it on the ground, palms up.
All of them have in common a weird, dense tenuousness.
They remind Phryne of the fountain in the courtyard of her family home, specifically of the way the clinging skirt of water sluicing over the surface of the smoothly polished stone made the rock itself seem to tremble and flow.

Phryne reaches into her bosom and withdraws the token she carries there.
She holds it out to them.
A limp, transparent hand, deeper white at the tips of its drooping fingers as if that whiteness had settled there, swings out from the dark and takes the token feebly.
There is a fleeting touch, and Phryne feels numbing cold puff over her, causing her to become completely still, to hold her breath, waiting for it to pass, while giving it no purchase.

From time to time, as she looks from one to another, the one she’d just turned her eyes away from would, in the last instant of her sight of it, look like a human being in a leotard, whose monstrous appearance had been conjured entirely by gestures.
But Phryne does not feel the presence of anyone else
—
she feels she is by herself.

The hand reappears from the dark, and now it’s extended palm up, fingers splayed and crooked, like a rake.
The token has been marked.
It’s a homeopathic procedure, a little like punching a timeclock, that keeps diplomatic channels open, and this contact is the center of Phryne’s core curriculum.

I wrap myself in disappointment (she thinks) and I try
—
only try
—
to keep it about me, so that it won’t get inside me.
It is a terrible mistake, a terrible danger, to think you have mastered it because that confidence is a lapse.
It sees that confidence as a lapse.
It punishes confidence.
But when you are struggling with it, or using it, you are in touch with it, and then you can know the extent of your powers, without assuming.

Phryne sniffs, sniffs again.
Then sneezes.
In the gout of light that pops from her face, she sees the disappointment elemental standing before her clearly.
Its head is in the act of crashing down into the chest, like a sandcastle being dashed by a wave, dissolving and sinking into the chest like crumbling sand, while another head is just beginning to come up over the horizon of the shoulders.
She does not doubt that the next head will rise and then sink sadly over its chest, then crash down, dissolve, as another appears over the shoulders.

She goes to the window.
The light feels clammy
—
she is drenched from head to foot in nowhere’s tears
—
certainly she isn’t crying.
Her hair hangs down in long fringes, her dress clasps her like a wet rag.
Her face is bare, all her cosmetics flushed away, the transparent lips and eyelids, and the tight, skinny little line that has appeared on either side of the mouth, where the skin one day will fold with age.

There’s nothing to see outside but a dull glare.

The whole thing with deKlend is dreamlike (she thinks)
Is there anything real there?
And does he know me?
Where is he?
Is he really anybody?
Are we just playing?
Are we really together?
Are we just playing?
What do I want?

I don’t know (the words chant themselves)

In Votu:

They read not from left to right, but from east to west.
The writing of Votu goes queerly out of focus as one turns this way and that, until one finds the right angle.
The book, made of incense, smoulders in your hand, underscoring the words as you read them with a line of smoke swaying and waving;
incense pouring like silent music into the room, from the book.

Read all you like, no book will be able to tell you with assurance what the incubators are for.
They originate in the far future and were planted when they were set to hatch.
They look like huge sooty iron eggs emerging from the ground and bending slightly at the top like a Phrygian cap, with a rectangular slot parallel to the ground and high up on the curve.
But this description is not really accurate.
It doesn’t even give a passable idea of them.
Anyway, these slots are not openings, just indentations.
The incubators are sealed, and often (or never) radiate oppressive, wet heat that cannot be seen to perturb the air, and which only makes itself felt suddenly, within a distinct circumference of five and one third feet.
The incubators are all identical and are distinguished by numbers given them by the assittante regristat’s office, bronze placques on posts.

Nerve floss, all-purpose material that can be molded by touch
—
actually, this is assuredly what the incubators are for:
producing nerve floss.
Because this material is in a sense aware, it is responsive to stimuli and can be made into all manner of useful artifacts
—
windows, for example, that feel heat and cold, and can make themselves correspondingly thicker or thinner, or develop minute perforations, and which can sense sex or nudity in a room and become opaque for privacy’s sake.

The people are like stars, not strictly the same, not strictly different.
So many pass through the city, many of these passengers stay a long while;
Votu’s own are that much more elusive.
They appear to do what people do wherever they congregate, and for denizens of a holy city of pilgrimage they don’t seem all that devout.
Go up and speak to one, she isn’t any more or less mysterious than anyone else, but then you are struck with simple, immediate mystery.
After your conversation, you come away and, as you remember it, the mystery loses its special, simple quality and becomes a kind of exotic confusion like any other mystery.

The people of Votu are like travelling reflections and detached eye-photographs and eye-fireworks of statues or paintings scanning along the buildings, partially-animated statues with a sort of shadowy fire smouldering in them, and features of the architecture, the bend of a street going around a gentle curve, and so on.
They trickle out of their doorways like glittering water.
They’re still just people.
A man goes by grinning fiercely, showing all his teeth and eyes, swinging his hands.
A long white beard comes along, containing a thin-lipped frown, above it a slender nose with two pop-eyes for wings.
A dapper tweed suit and brown homburg hat dances up with the feather-light step of a marionette, brilliant white eyes in a very dark-skinned face, a hoarse voice.
A bookish-looking young woman with a languid way of walking undulates past, her hair gathered in a knot the size and shape of an apple perched on top of her head.

“
So
tired
...
” she says quietly.

Another old man with whiskers, and the skin beneath is so white he looks like a cat.

A young man of about fifteen and covered in acne hurries by with a bushel of oranges.
The bitter smell of the rinds trails after him.
Later on, there will be staggering drunks shouting out what ought to be sung, and couples who walk close together in the dark without a light.

There’s a lot going on in Votu, after all.
Sitting with his companion on a bench, under an arch, in an alcove, beside the street, one of many, an alcove whose arch is thickly whitewashed with sunlight, Knosp Knoak shows her a statuette of Quarviouk Tatanlasmaik Boma.
The king’s sceptre is a huge ceremonial toothbrush, almost as tall as he is.
Now he ruefully explains how, in the course of his clerical duties, he would sometimes have to put on an antediluvian bear suit
—
real bear skin, and the head
—
and be led into the courtyard, shuffling behind the superintendent, where he would perform a limp, parodic dance.
This was just the custom.
The superintendent had worn the skin himself once, and, as was also customary, he did what he could to keep such performances to a minimum.
They didn’t occur on a timetable, but on certain fairly common occasions.
Provisions had been made for the omission of bear dancing, which, although it wasn’t as demeaning for the superintendent, was just as big a waste of his time as of the bear impersonator, and the superintendent invoked the skip-it provisions.
One of the things the chief docent looked for in a prospective superintendent was resourcefulness in applying the omission rules.
Sadly, the dance could not be entirely avoided.
With a smile and a little waggle of the hand, Knosp Knoak firmly declines to show how he danced.