Celebrant (54 page)

Calm, silence, plain, mute, tranquil suspense.
Like looking at a painting.

The command comes as the spell breaks.
As if, in returning to myself, I see a few things exposed by that outward extension a moment ago, and then I can see what I was made for.
Then the command comes.
Like a foretaste of paradise!
The command may be arbitrary, but that I and only I would carry it out is not arbitrary.
Necessarily, I make it the future.
It’s a fate, distinct from duty
—
even duty for its own sake, although there is a resemblance.
But here what has to be done does matter, because it is delivered into the present from the future in this way, by me.

Adrian rubs his face.

I live in the antechamber of the palace of my own unhappiness (he moans)
I live in an old wreck I can’t believe is mine/me.

How do you write the autobiography of an illfated life?
You’d have to use the “would have been” tense throughout.

Remember that the so-called ‘goal of life’ is not important at all.
Not at all.
What matters is a feeling with no name, half smouldering anger and half contentment.
I go home to toast their success, not my death.
However, since they are no respecters of persons, but only blind strafers
...

In the sun, the back of his hand glistens like snake skin.
Exactly like snake skin, and soft veins in relief.
White sunlight gradually crosses his shirt, the interlocking threads of which form a pattern that looks just exactly like a different kind of snake skin.

The Bird of Ill Omen shares out his own luck.
It’s luck, plain and simple.
It’s only bad luck for those of a contrary nature.
Not sharing
our
nature.

You see (he says aloud)
—
he’s generous, that’s all.

He keeps his teeth shut.

Getting up, Adrian pauses abruptly, and heads over to the window.
He gazes out at clouds sailing over blue steppe.
One has a dimple in its side, vaguely resembling an X.

Adrian points directly at it with a rigid arm.

He left his stiff, angular mark for me, scratched into the side of that cloud (Adrian thinks)
Another sign!

In Votu:

Groper is a mechanical textile, woven out of fine, tenacious threads each of which is an independent machine, capable of stiffening or softening, stretching or contracting, expanding or condensing.
If it ever were to become inert, groper could be mistaken for a tarpaulin lying crumpled on the ground;
but groper never stops moving unless it is confined to a closed room.
Its shrine is a collection of microshrines which were in turn assembled into shrinettes, then these into small shrines which combine in the form of a ring to create the complete shrine.
A yew maze, built on a grand scale, is inside the ring, and, by closing the outer openings of the maze, the mathetes can keep groper confined indefinitely within its involutions.

While there are few variables to limit the shapes it can adopt, groper almost always remains the same.
It looks like a visible tailored coat being worn by an invisible caterpillar about the size of a pair of rhinos in single file;
holding itself in a horseshoe shape, it gathers its many corners into parallel sets of horn-like, conical feet, and perambulates by rippling them.
There is no suggestion of a head or tail and no sense organs, but, from a particular, if unmarked, patch on the forward end two huge plumes of cool, incandescent plasma are projected, like an enormous pair of supple, ghostly antlers.
These it apparently uses as antennae, to feel its environment.
They flit incessantly to and fro, each one in an arc of about 180 degrees on its side of the robot, feeling whatever lies before it and looking a little like two vast piano-playing hands
—
hence its nickname.
These jets are harmless;
people who have been brushed by them say they feel like cool, spectral fingers.

Being, along with anemone, one of the nimbler natural robots, groper gets around.
Groper is easy, because it need only engulf its partner in itself, but, owing to its unanatomical properties, the usual exchange of machine parts is not observed.
It may happen anyway, without being observed, or it may be that groper is noncommittal as natural robots go, and the consummation is cold.

For reasons that are not explained, groper is considered by many to be particularly holy, and the practices associated with it more advanced.
Groper’s perfect silence may have something to do with it, or it may be that the impression it gives of being blind reminds people of folkloric blind sages.

In Votu:

P
eople occasionally make reference to Harbingers of Happiness, folkloric figures who have no story of their own but who consequently are the subjects, at least in part, of a promiscuousity of stories.
All of these tales could just as readily have involved someone else with approximately the same characteristics in their place, so the reader or listener comes away with his or her desire to know more about Harbingers unsatisfied.
However, they are always described in the same terms and are easily recognized.

There are two, and there is something about them that makes it impossible not to compare them to a pair of roly-poly bear cubs.
They are male, identical twins, dressed in floppy red robes that are not too large for them but just in a very impractical style.
White cuffs protrude from the sleeves when these, being extremely long, are grappled up in bunches to expose the stubby hands.
They wear black hats that fold back to form a shape like a tall sail, and their bodies and heads are round.
One of them is constantly dragging his hand down his face, stretching and mashing the features, while the other drubs the side of his head with the back of his wrist, folding the hand in with his other hand.

They fly through the air on a spacious couch, whose legs click out like landing gear as they touch down.
When people notice
—
usually as the couch is coming in for a landing
—
they flock to the spot and gather respectfully in line, coming up one at a time to tell these councillors their problems and concerns.
Harbingers of Happiness, perspiring, listen with simpering smiles of encouragement, fanning themselves with enormous heavy red fans and performing their characteristic gestures.
Then they dispense advice that sounds convincing enough as they speak, but which always turns out to be completely useless, and fly on.

That their advice was useless is part of the stories, part of them, and everyone knows it.
But people never pass up a chance to see and talk to them when they are heard of again.
It may be that their appearance is such an impressive anomaly, and encountering them is such an occasion, portentous and encouraging, if confusing, that, even when it is considered in total isolation from the rest of the celebrant’s life, which is usually a rapid succession of horrible catastrophes, that this caveat about the inutility of their counsel was the one thing about them that proves not to amount to much in practice.
Seeing, and, if possible, talking to them, and getting an answer, no matter how bad, is what counts in Votu.

Pigeon girls, after slaking thirst at one of the many fountains, gather in the shade high off the street.
They’re under a sort of free-standing roof, covering a terrace under construction.
Burn sits in a corner, her mouth streaked by the water, her light skin striped with soot.
While other girls don’t exactly defer to her, she is their leader, and she sits at the extremity of the group.
After her victorious fights with Kunty and the Whrounim, and with the addition of Gina, Burn has led pigeon girls into unprecedented prosperity.
They are lean, but not hollow-eyed like before, fewer of them go naked, and they seem happier.
All of them make a point of touching Burn from time to time, as if to make sure she’s still there.
Rabbit girls have come to regard this change of fortune superstitiously, as a sign that favor of some kind has shifted to pigeon girls and given them ascendancy.
Burn alternately looks in at the other girls, and then out toward the street.

Burn is intrigued by mannerisms, the idea that people are distinguished from each other, often from everyone else, by idiosyncrasies in their dress or gestures of speech.
Burn often practices this or that affectation, adopting whatever feels natural.
It’s important, she learns, that new affectations should not be too obvious or too abruptly adopted.
Each should be a touch no one notices, that seems always to have been a part of her, and which would be recognizable as hers at once.
Burn actually has almost no mannerisms, but she thinks she has many.
Often, when she sees something that looks interesting to her, like a way of gesturing with the hand when trying to persuade someone of something, she will begin to rehearse it, then forget what she’s doing and why but become engrossed in some aspect or other of the movement she’s making.
Movement is something it would never occur to her needs justification, or explanation.
Not moving seems more weird to Burn.

A woman is leading a platoon of little children along the street.
They are well-fed, well-behaved, well-dressed, well-educated children.
The girls wear straw hats with long, broad ribbons, and dark blue smocks.

Oh, I like those nice hats! (Sandy says)

Whenever I see them
—
whenever I see them, they make them sit still (says a tall, pale brown pigeon girl with battered feathers stuck in her black hair)
They sit in a class and I look through the window and they’re all sitting still.

She looks around self-consciously at the girls, looking at her.

Other pigeon girls have managed to get their hands on a bottle of candy-colored stuff and are passing it around.
It’s the thick, strong, honeylike, herb-flavored drink that everyone lays down in autumn to drink in the spring.
Burn takes her swig without coughing, making an outraged kind of face though.

They leave the terrace, walking and drinking.

The drink makes Burn topheavy.
She keeps becoming more levels.
It’s bright out but not hot.
The relentlessly dazzling sunlight is unbearably intense beauty and seems almost hostile, like a fascinating predator.
When she comes across any sizeable shadow, Burn stops and peers into it for a while for relief, like plunging into a pool in the woods.
She thinks woods are dotted with dark, still, fresh pools.
The day pole-vaults straight up on all sides of her to enormous distances, so she can feel it all around her like a colossal building.

Burn and Gina are holding hands.
Pigeon girls have managed to find her some clothes, and she’s all wrapped up like a mummy in colorful, diaphanous scarves.
Now she makes a soft cooing sound that means she wants to sleep.
Gina needs a great deal of sleep.
As Burn releases her hand, their eyes meet.
Gina might always be thinking of something else, or she might be aware only of what is immediately in front of her.
She doesn’t come and go.

Other pigeon girls pass them by, and Burn joins them presently.
Burn walks with her hands behind her back.
Lowering her gaze for just a moment, she’s alone when she raises it again.
How long a moment?