Celebrant (60 page)

I don’t know.
That’s an intriguing question.

Maybe you’ll be one of them next.

What makes you say that?

Um.
I don’t know.

She follows him as he makes his round, tending the botanophotophones.
Their voices mingle with the song of the plants
—
the melancholy, portentous pipe organ of Goose Goes Back, and Burn’s bugle voice, stern and clear.

Do people turn into gods too?

Do you mean, people, as distinct from me?

Yes.

(after a pause)
Yes, they also become gods.

How?

By reincarnating as gods.

How?

I don’t know.

Now they enter an area like a ruptured dome where the roof gapes open to the sky.
A pool lies flat against the floor, all its ruffles spreading in the same direction.
Fluorescent trees with black trunks of gleaming radio surround the pool with loud chirps.
One chirps, and this seems to set off all the others one at a time in random sequence.

I have met a man who will be a god, I believe.

How can you tell?
(Burn looks up at him)

He follows the god he will be.

Burn shakes her head.

Gods are immortal (Goose Goes Back explains) and that means they live throughout time, without past, present, and future.
So they can meet the people they were before they were born, although they may not always recognize them.

Goose Goes Back sets down his device on a table, obviously specially prepared for it.

They may not recognize each other, but meet by chance.
The god in this case travels far and wide, and encounters many.
He may have met this man, and neither of them knew they were going to be the same.

The water enters the pool through a broad, flat aperture in the wall, and falls over a little hump with a steady rush, forming curved shells of water streaked white and black.
The smell coming off the water is so intensely fresh it might have been a kind of perfume, almost harsh.

You must not follow me past that point.

Goose Goes Back indicates a marker standing between them and the pool, marking the boundary of the future part of Votu.

That’s nothing (Burn says)
I go in there all the time.

That’s unusual.

They advance toward the marker.

You just stop remembering things?
(Burn asks)

It makes no difference (Goose Goes Back says) I am not alive.
Do you stop remembering things?

I don’t have anything to remember (she says)
Is that the water they use?

Yes.
It comes from the ocean beneath the mountains.

Is it poisonous?

It’s forgetting water (Goose Goes Back says)

A weird, inverted magnetism hits her in the air past the boundary
—
it’s like a magnet pulling all your skin, or flesh, outwards, so that it is slightly off the bone.
Burn can feel her bones move inside her flesh, and feel herself moving inside an invisible envelope in her shape.

Goose Goes Back strides off among the trees, having picked up another weird device.
Burn kneels at the water’s edge and watches it forming swift-skating triangles.
The water pants in her face, cool and astringent.
She can see all the way down to the marble basin bottom, and from time to time an invisible fish made entirely of current twists below the surface and arcs away toward the deep center.

Burn thrusts her hands into the cool water, lifts them to her face, and takes a drink.

deKlend:

deKlend was just admiring the awnings, the elaborate awnings that he sees everywhere here.
Whatever the name of this town is.
If he could only get a straight answer.

The little girl steps toward him, smiling roguishly.
Then she abruptly turns, flits away, giving her narrow little behind a vulgar wiggle before she goes.
A wand of dark breaks her jump, and she emerges from the other side, alighting on a windowsill.
Her leotard she has left somewhere in between, and she perches naked with her side to him and her elbows between her knees.

Er
—
say!
(deKlend says, sort of wagging his finger in the air)
You’ll catch cold!

It isn’t such a good thing to say
—
actually he feels he’s failed
—
but it’s still better than nothing.

The little girl giggles at him and then very abruptly sniffs long and loud and ragged.

deKlend stops with a rap of his heel.

Phryne!

A fleeting look of frustration disappears behind that gloating expression.
The girl extends one leg and eases down into the shadow running along the wall.
As she comes toward him in the dark she is preceded by a heavy wave of despair, the confirmation of the worst expectations.
And out of that, and the dark
—
a milk person caught in some dark medium.
Now Phryne puts the pad of her bare foot deliberately on the toe of deKlend’s shoe, steps up onto his other foot and laces her arms around his neck.

deKlend kisses her, so tenderly it takes her aback.

Where did you see that girl?

You talk in your sleep (Phryne forgets to be miffed and says)
Who is she?

deKlend is having fingers run through his hair and this is making it harad to htinihk
—
I don’t remember (he says)

Perhaps you saw her in Votu?

In Vot
...
Votu
...

The air of tragedy he can’t resist gathers all around him, raising up its columns in the dark.

Be careful of the sink (Phryne says)

deKlend examines the sink.
Giving it a little push with his hand, he nearly knocks the basin off its column.

Be careful of the balcony (she says)

deKlend notes the iron bolts, bright orange with rust, relaxing in their holes fixing the balcony rail and platform to the wall.

Watch out for the door (she says, with an imperfectly suppressed grin)

The door to the closet, which comes off in his hands and nearly falls on him, the hinges being loose.
deKlend has to shove it back with his legs.

The handle on the pitcher’s loose, too (Phryne says merrily)
Oh, and the drawers in the dresser fall on your toes if you don’t pull them out just so.

The expression on her face lights it up with such prettiness that deKlend goes over to her.

What do you need clothes for anyway (she asks softly)

deKlend wakes with a soft start, as though he’d been nudged.
Phryne lies beside him, sleeping.

A huge black bird clutches the railing and stares at him, more motionless than a statue.
He whispers Phryne’s name but she is deeply asleep.
The sunlight around the bird looks like smoke from an underwater fire.
deKlend gets up.
The bird watches him as steadily as if it were painted on the air.
deKlend throws on his clothes in a dream and then approaches the balcony.

He can smell it
—
something like dust, or incense.
The rubbery hands gripping the rail seem almost to throb or rattle without moving.
An unwavering, sharklike leer hangs suspended there beneath two lantern eyes as old and mocking as bad luck.
The toe of deKlend’s shoe brushes the metal frame of the balcony and it bursts into the air with an explosion of enormous wings that billow around his shoulders.
The bird swoops away.

deKlend follows it with his eyes, still blinking, his hands trembling with adrenaline.
Then, quick and nervous, he hurries to the door to the room.
He’s half out of it when he stops, brushes his moustache glancing at Phryne, naked and dreaming, he jerks a bit of paper from his pocket, scrawls on it, nightstands it, and then rushes swiftly out and down the stairs.

*

Phryne reaches sideways groggily, then sits up.
In two blinks, she knows she’s alone.
It doesn’t take her long to find this:

It came here, I go after.
Meet me at Á Un think I can find my way back there.
Do come
—
I want to ask you something.
—
dK

It’s confusing.
There’s a band playing somewhere
...
in the streets, coming nearer.
Phryne pulls on her dress and ambles to the water jug.
As she drinks, there, over the rim of the glass, through the window, over the roofs, out on the steppe beyond, she sees him.
He is racing nearly directly away from her, and above him
...
some kind of fluctuation
...

That bird!

Its shadow sweeps over him as the bird rocks to and fro.
deKlend is disappearing, in and out of the bird’s shadow.

—
No
...

When its shadow falls on deKlend, it’s the bird that disappears.
Or it feels that way.
Phryne looks into time as she looks into space;
she lengthens and peers into time.
And as those shadows coincide and she sees not two but one figure there she suddenly lights up with realization and bursts out beaming her black smile
—

deKlend!
(she shouts, making the walls ring)

You don’t have to chase it deKlend you idiot!

She rushes to the window, gaily pitching her voice after him.

You don’t have to chase it!
Don’t you know what you’re going to be?

She steps out onto the balcony, beaming, and shouting

Don’t you
know
you’re going to
be
the
—

With a sharp crack the balcony gives beneath her weight and breaks loose from the wall.
As the water glass spins from her hand the horizon rises up engulfingly like a hood, but it’s being put up over head in the wrong direction, covering her face.
There’s nothing around her but the softness of the air.
She is stretching out in it like a swimmer.