Polystom (14 page)

And once, magically, dangerously, Polystom had come face to face with one of his bears. It happened towards the end of a Winter Year, just as it was turning to a Spring Year.
He had been wandering further than usual; the sun was slipping away. It was late in the afternoon, dusk permeating the gloom of the forest with sepia, and the fragrance of pine-needles and resin sharp in the cold air. Polystom had been walking for many hours. He had heard the moans of bearsong several times through the day, but had ignored them – they sounded distant, and his mind had been elsewhere. He had wandered on. The moon was low in the sky, its green-silver circle of light bitten into by the silhouettes of trees, and more trees, and then the up-line of a mountain. Soon the sunlight drained away entirely and green moonlight on dark-green trees gave the woods a spectral, unreal aspect. Sighing with the beauty of it, the melancholy loveliness of his lands, Polystom stopped where he was. He slipped his backpack from his shoulders and rummaged through it to bring out his torch. It would be time to go soon; not to walk home – that was too far – but to cut down through the trees to the nearest inlet or cove of the Middenstead, and then along the coast until he found one of his boat huts. Inside would be a kettle, a larder of dried food, bottles of pineberry wine – and a telephone, from which he could call his main estate and have a servant come collect him in a boat. He switched his torch on, not wanting to stumble and twist an ankle as he picked his way through the shadow at his feet. The light, a bright and syrupy yellow, sprang all about him, enamelling the tree trunks in their own sharp shadows, turning indistinctness into the upright painted flats of layered stage scenery.

And there was the bear, directly in front of him.

It hallooed, rather sorrowfully, at the suddenness of the light, more groan than roar. Polystom froze. The bear was twice his height (probably less in fact, but surprise and fear exaggerated the proportions). It looked, in fact, surprisingly unlike a bear, or unlike Polystom’s memories of bears – more like an enormous shaggy brown lion standing on its rear legs. Its fur was seaweedy and matted, hanging in
strands from its huge body. Perhaps the creature was not in perfect health. But its teeth, stained yellow by the lamplight but presumably white, jutted proudly out; and its eyes, so glossy they looked like globes of black oil, caught starbursts from the torch and glistened. Its front paws dangled in the air before its chest, like a man leaning on an invisible rail. Each paw sprouted long thorn-shaped claws.

The bear moaned again.

Polystom’s first reaction, when he had unfrozen enough to act, was to pull his thumb back over the switch of the torch. The yellow light vanished, his retinas’ recoil leaving everything utterly black for a moment until the softer silver-green moonlight faded up the world into half-vision. The outline of the bear was still there, one kind of dark massed against the variegated darkness of the background. For a time the scene stayed as it was, until Polystom saw, or thought he saw, the shape melt, droop, dissolve, and vanish. When he finally summoned the courage to move he backed slowly until his hand, reaching behind him, touched a tree trunk. This he slowly slid behind. Could bears see in the dark? He couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure if he’d ever known. His own breathing seemed appallingly loud.

When, after an age, he decided to risk the torchlight again, the sudden brightness showed only trees. The bear had gone. Pricking his courage, he forced himself towards the water. He had the superstitious sense that the lamp had somehow summoned the bear to him, or even called it into being, so he moved through the dark with the light off, tripping often over bumps and roots and twice falling completely. But he made it down to the glittering expanse of moonlit water, and then after a short trot into one of his boat huts. Inside, with the door bolted, he was trembling so hard he couldn’t stand up.

Later, with a boat on the way, and most of a bottle of wine inside him, he felt more self-congratulatory – his encounter took on resonances which fear had, at the time,
blocked out. He
had
stood his ground. It had been the bear that departed. And, the more he thought about it (jotting with drunken-messy handwriting in his little notebook) the more the encounter took on a magical or mythic quality. The bear, rearing up from nowhere in the middle of the moonlit forest; Polystom standing so close (not true, this part, but in his lubricated imagination it became true) that he could smell the odour of bear-pelt, the hot exhalations of old, eaten meat on the beast’s breath. It had appeared to him in a burst of light. Then it had vanished into darkness again. It came to seem to Polystom almost a blessing from the land, from his estate. It came to seem to him, obscurely, almost a materialisation of truth itself.

The moon like a perfect circle of green-and-silver stained glass, brimful of light. [
this last sentence is of dubious provenance, and may not belong at this point in the narrative
.]

Cleonicles’ last day alive began exactly like any other day, with the routine he had inhabited now for fifty years. He woke early, sunlight filtering beautifully through his bedroom curtains, and got himself out of bed. His morning servant, who slept on a pallet-bed outside the bedroom door, came in as soon as he heard his master stirring, and took him through to the annex. In this little cubicle Cleonicles sat on the lavatoire and moved his bowels whilst his servant lathered his face and shaved him. Decades of the procedure had made the old servant adept at guiding the razor smoothly over the knuckles and ridges of Cleonicles’ face. By the time the residuum of foam was being wiped away with a large damp cloth, Cleonicles had emptied his bowels. He came back through to the bedroom, with his servant behind him, and servant helped master into his underjohns, into his Daverné trousers, his undershirt and overshirt. Dressed, his feet slipped into his favourite house-shoes, with the lambswool linings, Cleonicles made his own way downstairs leaving his servant behind to make the bed, tidy the room and clean up the lavatoire. Breakfast was cooking; Cleonicles could smell it.

Naturally, he did not realise that this was his last day alive. He had every reason to expect, throughout this day and for many others, to continue his science. In fact, so established was his comfortable daily routine that he didn’t even look forward with any conscious shaping of his thoughts. If he had done so, he would have imagined working this day and the next on stellar observation and theory, with other work – covert work, for which he was still employed by the Prince – taking up a proportion of his time. Had he bothered to articulate this to himself he would
have thought of spending the next month in this. But he did not need to look forward: habit and contentment had positioned him in an eternal present where nothing in the future, and nothing in the past, could disturb his happiness.

His nephew Polystom had stayed three nights, but had left the previous day for his estate on the world above – the green-blue sphere of Enting, huge in the sky. He loved his nephew, of course, and enjoyed his visits, but there was also a certain relief in having the house to himself again. A troubled soul, his nephew. Something not quite in harmony within him. And on the occasions that he stayed some of his unsettled spirit percolated through into the general atmosphere.

After his breakfast, Cleonicles strolled on his front lawn and smoked a cheroot. The air was clear today, the booming chuckling of the stork-boars clearly audible over the sounding-board of the waters. They were gathering in a flock at the near shore, and Cleonicles wandered down to look at them. They were peculiar beasts. He had published a paper on them soon after moving to this house – decades ago, now. The shallowness of the Lacus Somniorum (which was generally two feet deep, sometimes three, across almost all of its enormous breadth and length) meant that there was virtually no tidal action, despite the colossal gravitational pull of Enting in the sky. But the birds seemed to flock in a tidal fashion, as if they were being pulled west and east by the gravitational tug. Cleonicles had dissected many of the creatures and was certain that he had found a small metallic node deep in their brains. It was nothing more than a piece of metal grit, but Cleonicles’ theory was that it in some way enabled them to orient themselves in the gravitational and magnetic fluxes. It was a difficult theory to prove.

Looking up, Cleonicles saw a rice grain-sized speck in the sky.

A plane?

No, the wrong shape.

It could have been a balloon-boat, a long way off, or then again a skywhal close by.

He trotted an old-man-trot up the lawn to the patio where his smaller telescope was set up. Angling it and settling his eyes against the eye-pieces took only a moment. It
was
a skywhal! Another one, flying close to the world. Once again it was a young one, its fronds underdeveloped. Extraordinary! This was the third he had seen in as many months. In his previous three decades on the moon he had never seen one of the shy beasts come so close up. They were sensitive to the gravity dip of any large body and preferred to stay away from them. Young ones could be curious, and had been known to stray close to worlds – although never this close, and never thrice in three months! More mature beasts kept themselves on languorous cometary orbits around the sun, sweeping endlessly through the interplanetary sky, feeding, growing, mating, eventually dying. Very rarely an elderly and perhaps sick skywhal would beach itself on a world, crashing to the ground to be dashed to pieces. This had not happened in Cleonicles’ lifetime, but it was well documented – happening once a century, perhaps, it could be expected. But why would this young creature return three times to the dangerous gravity of the moon? Assuming it was the same beast.

Cleonicles hurried indoors and returned with one of his sketch pads. Most scientists had cameras fitted to their telescopes, of course; and Cleonicles himself used a camera, attached to his major telescope, for his stellar work. But he still loved the older discipline of making sketches. He shifted the telescope minutely, tracking the great sky creature as it swam, and sketching its lenticular body, its mouth like an enormous leather catch-all bag left wide open, its stubby fronds. There was no doubt, as he compared his sketches, that this was the same beast he had seen before.

Why was it visiting him?

It wasn’t visiting
him
, of course, it was merely drawn for some reason to the moon, or perhaps only tracing out a peculiar trajectory through the sky for its own reasons. But Cleonicles had always found it hard to separate himself from his science. Part of the thrill he had tended to experience as a scientist came from his own soul, his own sense of engagement in the cosmos. He couldn’t quite shake the sense, somehow, that the beast was seeking him out, nosing through space to come to him. Foolish. The fondness of an old man.

Cleonicles stretched himself at the telescope. He
was
an old man, after all. And, yet, wasn’t there some special connection between the skywhals and himself? Between those great dumb sky-cows floating between worlds, and Cleonicles, most famous scientist in the cosmos? It was Cleonicles who had first thought of charting skywhal movement to index the concentrations of scilia in the sky. The beasts flew in arcs where they could be sure of scooping up the maximum amount of the microscopic creatures. Scilia were present all throughout the interplanetary sky, of course, and received wisdom had been that this distribution was uniform. It had been Cleonicles who had been able to show that in reality the scilia grew much more prolifically in certain areas than others; and that the skywhals organised their trajectories to sweep through these places. His early research had been mostly on scilia; this was how he had made his reputation in the scientific community as a young man. The miniature unicellular creatures that lived throughout the interplanetary atmosphere, billions upon billions of them, he had often observed through microscopes.

He had known from an early age that the excitement to be felt at observing such things outweighed any excitements generated by human contact. It wasn’t that he was a misanthrope, exactly. He liked people well enough. He valued
the time he spent with his family. In his younger days he had taken lovers. But the tang of that pleasure had always come abruptly upon him in the act, and had faded rapidly afterwards. The pleasure science gave him, however, was of an altogether deeper sort. It grew within him, a warmth in his viscera, at the prospect of study. It swelled to a sort of subdued thrill that permeated his whole body as his scientific endeavour – whatever it might be – occupied him. It lasted longer and gave more satisfying excitement.

He had come to understand this early in his life, probably, in fact, from his very first microscopic observations of scilia. That very first microscope, pronged and angular like a petrified branch. He had settled himself over the device, rested his eyes on the brim of the eye-piece, fiddled with the nipple that adjusted focus until the two bleary circles of light coalesced into a single bright disk. And there they were! Sluggish under gravity (for their normal environment was weightless), but vivid and beautiful, each one as though carved with infinite attention to detail out of a microscopic speck of glass. Each scilion was a sausage-shaped nodule, with a transparent cell wall and strands, almost eyelash-like, in a ridge along its ‘back’. At the centre-line of this tiny transparent lozenge were the tiny particles of cyanophyl with which the things converted sunlight into energy. The specks looked almost colourless under the microscope, with only the very faintest suggestion of mauve about them. It was these that provided a reaction surface where the carboniferous gases of interplanetary space were oxygenated, locking the carbon into their bodies. Cleonicles hypothesised it was the countless billions of these creatures, and their tiny specks of cyanophyl, that gave the interplanetary sky its colour. This theory, published in
Proceedings of the Chemical and Royal
as one of Cleonicles’ earliest papers was not uncontested – the prevailing view was that atmospheric colour was a gaseous phenomenon. Cleonicles argued that the gradations in the intensity of colour were
the result of greater or lesser concentrations of scilia. Others denied this, explaining these nebulous patches with reference to various, purely chemical, reactions. But that dispute, conducted with a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly restraint, had never especially engaged Cleonicles’ heart. His heart belonged not to the society of scientists, and their antique rituals, but to science itself – to his true bride, science itself. He had lost his heart to her as soon as the two blurry circles revealed by his microscope had swum together into the sharp one, and the secrets of the miniature world had been opened to him. It was
seeing
. It was being privy to details fundamental to the cosmos that were nonetheless overlooked by almost the whole population of the System. It was the awful beauty of these glass-coloured specks, the incredible precision with which they were fashioned.