Interfictions 2 (36 page)

For a moment, there was silence around the Chamber of Audience. Then, the murals on the walls began to glow. The Ladies in Waiting began to clap and laugh and blush. The Pages leaped into the air and landed again on their toes, emitting the scent of Kifli flowers. The Guards cast off their veils and clashed their disintegrators on their shields, so that they rang through the halls. Everywhere, there was the sound of joy and of wonder. I myself could not keep my orifices from misting. To live at a time of the dreaming! The Hero had indeed brought us something greater than we could have imagined.

I wondered, for a moment, if I would become one of those poets who are celebrated for having created what no other poet could have—if I would create the poem of the Child-Empress's dreaming, of her becoming no longer a child but the full essence of herself, until eventually she emerged in the perfection of her nonphysical manifestation. But then my humility returned. Such poems were still to be created. The first of them would be about the Hero, of how he had died and yet fulfilled his Quest.

But today was a day of celebration. We sang and danced in the Chamber of Audience, celebrating the union of Lady Ahira and Captain Namoor. At the height of the festivities, the Child-Empress withdrew. But we knew now that it was not to contemplate her grief but to begin an important new event in her life. And we leaped higher and turned faster with joy, while the Musicians played their kurams and their dharms, until night fell and the mosses illuminated the ancient murals, and the moons rose, and the Jindal flowers spread their fragrance over the palace.

Is this an interstitial story? I don't know. Maybe it's just the way I write science fiction...

It refers to, but is not about, the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of adventure stories, which I have not read. (I've only, like a bad student, read the Wikipedia entry describing them.) It's about a literary genre that I began to call, in my own mind, Blank of Mars, turning Burroughs's series into a symbol for the genre, which might more accurately be called the swashbuckling interplanetary romance. Somehow, in the middle of a particularly complicated week, I started thinking about the Blank of Mars stories and Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles
at the same time, and started wondering what those stories would sound like from the perspective of the Martians.

I have a hunch that if you look at things from the “other” perspective—the perspective of the alien, the monster—they become interstitial, because aliens and monster are themselves in-betweeny, liminal, interstitial sorts of creatures. As an alien (of the sort we more politely refer to as an immigrant), I seem to see things from that perspective myself. Perhaps that's why I so often write not the story, but the underside of the story, which can be another story altogether...

Theodora Goss

[Back to Table of Contents]

Lionel Davoust

To Eldritch, walking the many ways
....

Guinevere

Dear Diary,

I wonder why I still write you. After all, tomorrow you will disappear, yesterday you disappeared. Nothing changes, and everything is in flux on this island that shrinks, that swells ... Do you know how hard it is to lead an infinity of lives all at once? I say an infinity, when, really, it's just a great many lives in which I remain essentially the same. I have unendingly committed these words to paper and I have never done so. I am young and old, the wife who loves and deceives, the hieratic figure.

But above all, I am weary.

Oh, I'm not complaining. Of us all, Arthur bears the heaviest burden—but also the most glorious. The heaviest because he dies endlessly, struck down by Oedipus, by Mordred, the son he loves and hates, without ever really dying—since, in leaving for Avalon, he always returns here, and it all begins again. He acquires the sword, and then his troubles begin—for when all is said and done, his story doesn't really start until the moment he becomes the incarnation of supreme authority. The rest is just a prologue, conceived only to satisfy the mind's appetite for beginnings.

I no longer dare consider what I am. What I truly am. I've lived so many variations of the Geste, and always the same story, the same betrayal, without power to change or to escape. I know there are boundaries I cannot cross; I don't know where they are, and yet I sense them, invisible, around me, shaping my acts, defining what I am throughout all my incarnations. And I will never be anything else. I will forever be remembered as the queen who betrays her husband, plunges him into uncertainty and grief, and hurls the realm into night.

But I can't stop myself.

All things considered, I'd rather have been Morgana la Fay, Merlin's mysterious student, the enchantress from another world: dangerous, unpredictable. Her reputation is no better than mine, but her aura of mystery veils her acts in romance. She is feared. Me, I'm not even hated; I am despised. I would have liked to be wicked, but no: I am merely weak.

There had to be someone like me in the story, I suppose.

Lancelot

Beneath a leaden sky, where the brown earth slid under the seas' calm waves—or of a lake so vast that fog hid the far shore—the inhabitants of the isle were gathered round the knight.

Clothed in shining armor, perched proudly on an immense caparisoned palfrey, square-chinned and hair blowing freely in the wind, Lancelot cast his unsullied gaze one last time over the company. He smelled of iron and ginger, of candles and sex. All Camelot held its breath, respectfully silent at the approach of an event which, through its regularity and heroic character, had taken on the formality of a ritual.

The knight finished the golden apple he'd picked from the royal orchard—he'd eaten it down the core—and took the lance offered by his squire. He brandished the weapon, crying out in a ringing voice: “For the king!"

The faceless crowd raised their fists vaguely in response and let out a few dubious cheers.

Before lowering the visor on his helm, Lancelot turned toward castle, toward his lover, agent of a tragic force. Guinevere had not come down to the shore, but he knew that their gazes would meet no matter the window they chose. They were bound to each other. Camelot never took the same shape twice; but on the island, only the meaning mattered.

The king's favorite turned back to the bank, leveled his lance, and spurred his steed.

The charger galloped joyously into the water without the slightest hesitation. The crowd took a few steps back to avoid the great sprays of mud.

The animal soon sank beneath the weight of armor and rider, disappeared, and quite likely drowned. Lancelot tried his best to swim but, dragged down by the iron in his turn, sank like a stone under the gray waters.

For a little while longer, Camelot followed the knight's progress by the trail of bubbles that traced his stolid, imperturbable march toward the open sea.

Then, when the bubbles grew so infrequent they were almost completely gone, the onlookers turned on their heels and hiked slowly back to the castle.

It was starting to rain.

Shadow

That very night, Lancelot returned—or perhaps it was the early hours of morning; the flow of time seemed to elude consciousness. When everyone's back was turned, a kelp-covered mound rose noiselessly at one end of the island, climbing to the low-hanging clouds.

The knight descended from the heavens' vault, still resolute, but with a glimmer of despair in his eyes. He was dripping wet, rust and seaweed splotched his armor, sand clung to his beautiful hair, and little fish wriggled from his chausses.

No trace of the horse. But another had doubtless already replaced it in the stables.

At the foot of the slope waited a large figure dressed in a voluminous night-black cloak, its face concealed by an unfathomable hood. Lancelot did not spare him the slightest glance, the smallest word. He even brushed it as he went by, but he kept walking, refusing to see it, to acknowledge its existence.

The shadow being, which seemed to float, immaterial, on the barren moor, turned toward the knight with infinite slowness.

He then raised his arm in a timid “Hi” before letting it fall again and shaking his head sadly.

Arthur

Mordred won. The Grail didn't save me. This son of incest, this hatred I myself sowed, rose up against me, gathered the forces of darkness, and crushed us. Mordred! You are an insult to my eyes, the essence of your mother's treason—my own half-sister! Your steps poison the barren moor! You are the High King's Nemesis.

There had to be one.

And yet I seem to remember another time, when we fought side by side.

I lie wounded, Excalibur at my side. The king passes, leaves this heathen land, unable to save it, unable to atone for his sins

...I die, struck down by a lance piercing my side, crucified on the pommel of my sword to save mankind ... My sword, Caledfwlch ... No, its name is Balmung. No, I slew the dragon with Balmung when I went by the name of Siegfried. That's another story, and the same one.

Ah, a red veil is falling over my eyes ... I can't see ... I'm rambling ... I am human, all too human.

I call Girflet to me. I have but one thing left to do.

I feel the loyal knight kneel beside his fallen master. I know I cannot trust him. And yet I must go through the stages of the Geste, again and again.

"Here I am, sire,” a solemn voice says.

"Good.” I sigh. Pain stabs my ribs. I feel the world draining away with my blood, which spreads over the earth without nourishing it. A light breeze scatters the chill mist and smoke, bringing the fresh smell of the lake, or the sea. Like everything else, the island changes shape, but it is always contracting—I'm sure of it.

"Take Caladbolg,” I tell him, pointing to the sword, “and throw it in the water."

He barely has time to open his mouth before I cut him off: “Yes—in the water. And do it the first time around. For you will disobey me: you'll hide it and come back and lie to me. I'll ask you what you've seen, and you won't be able to tell me that an arm clothed in shimmering brocade seized Durandal and drew it beneath the waves. You'll make three trips before following my orders. Must we really go through all this
again
? I'm tired, Girflet—or Bedivere, what does it matter, today you are the same—I'm tired."

I sense my knight is taken aback. Through the scarlet veil, I can just see him leaning toward me like a conspirator.

"But everything has to go in threes, sire,” he whispers. “It must be so."

What idiocies we have decreed. I dare not answer that everything has to go in pairs, by fours, fives, sevens, or twelves: each number has its own symbology, but it's pointless to argue with him. He cannot transcend himself. Today, he is the archetype of my second-in-command.

"Well, hurry up, at least."

Guinevere

Dear Diary,

Something new, at last! Of course, whenever a new pattern is added to the Geste, it becomes immortal and fits in as though it has always been there. We ourselves forget this change; we become the new development. That's why I must set what happened down on paper.

The enchanter came to see us with many rolls of parchment under his arm. He conferred with Arthur for a long time, and when they left the council chamber, my husband had a gleam in his eye that I hadn't seen in a long time. He gave the lumberjacks, the weavers, the faceless servants orders; soon they brought the materials the bard-wizard had asked for to the court—long wooden staves, squares of cloth, a few metal mechanisms—and put them together according to the old man's instructions.

What a strange creature stood before us! A spidery web, a delicate bird, holding at its heart a cradle where Merlin settled.

...
I can feel the memory fading! As if my mind can't retain this story. I must finish quickly.

Slowly, the machine's wings began to beat and its tail to swivel. The mentor flew away in his machine, headed west; we lost sight of him in the fog around the isle. He returned from the east, of course.

Or ... did he rise from the waters?

Did he fall from the sky?

I don't know anymore! What does it matter—the Geste has refused this new development, I can feel it. And so I'll forget even the existence of this object, even this strange vision ... After all, Merlin is a sage, a guardian of arcana and mystery. His magic lives in the rustle of the trees and the murmur of the waves, not in a sterile construct. None of this fits his role. I'll lose this tale like all the others, or perhaps, in a random reordering, I have found it once more.

One thing, however, is certain: the isle seems even narrower than before. This morning, the seas were almost lapping at Avalon/Camelot's west wall.

The Round Table

"Repent,” roared the Grail, “repent!"

Lancelot leaped to his feet, pounded a silver-gloved fist on the table, and exploded: “I won't let some golden gravy boat tell me what to do!"

Arthur cast upon his knights a gaze in which emptiness jousted with disenchantment. On the walls hung the same tapestries that had hung there since the dawn of time, and yet the symbols embellishing them changed, coexisting in a single spot, melting one into the other—the Celtic tree of life, the Christian cross, the medieval coat of arms: blue, with six golden lion cubs.

The space seemed to stretch itself around the Round Table so that it might accommodate twelve or a hundred men, depending on the version. But their number didn't matter; the table stayed the same shape even if sections of it sometimes seemed parts of a giant cosmic wheel of fortune. At the current table, only a few faces could be clearly identified. The stony charm of Lancelot. The angelic perfection of Galahad the Pure, seen by some as the incarnation of Christ. The youthful wonder of Perceval, who began the Quest in all innocence, in all ignorance, and failed before succeeding.

And yet, Arthur reflected, his face was partly hidden by the Grail, which he'd put on his head. No one knew how to take this; Perceval, who symbolized youth and na?vet?, never stopped surprising, never stopped following a path whose internal logic defied all reason. This was a nice way of saying that he behaved, perpetually, like a simpleton. Arthur couldn't help thinking there was something rotten in the kingdom of Britain.