Polystom (16 page)

‘Gravity,’ said Cleonicles.

‘Isn’t this
gravity
just another name for God?’ he had said, wide-eyed. But Cleonicles had no desire to be unfair to his nephew, even in his own mind. When he had said that he had been fourteen years or so. It was of course a characteristically adolescent way of seeing things. The boy had grown up a little since then, if only a little.

It was mid-morning. Cleonicles was in his study, with charts in front of him. He had, the previous year, calculated the relative luminosities of the various stars to be observed from the margins of the cosmos, and using a candle-scale of his own devising he had calculated and plotted their distances. The scale had much educated guesswork about it, of course, and it assumed that all stars were the same size and luminosity as the sun. Latterly, Cleonicles had begun to doubt this postulate. The sun, after all, burned air, as all such fires did. The electrical combustion of ‘stars’ must needs follow some different, anaerobic physics, and this in turn implied a different refractive index. But until he understood exactly how the ‘stars’ shone, he could not properly map them out.

He went through his charts. According to these earlier calculations, the nearest star was less than four thousand miles beyond the outer limit of the System. But a recent paper in the Proceedings of the Organisation of Constitutive Sciences argued for distances of millions or even billions of miles – an impossible gap to bridge. Cleonicles still nurtured the dream of one day reaching out into the emptiness at the edge of the System. Of course, conventional flying devices had no purchase upon vacuum, for their wings and propellers needed atmosphere in which to operate. But a projectile fired from near the edge of the cosmos might hurtle to a nearby star. He had drawn up plans, once, long ago: a sealed projectile, fired by an enormous tube; a second projectile fired afterwards and carrying enough explosives for the voyagers in the first projectile to be able to blast themselves back into the cosmos when their journey was complete. There were difficulties, most particularly, the difficulty of not killing the crew with the severity of the acceleration at firing. But if they could be overcome! Scientists could travel to these stars, to other worlds, and all this tedious debate would be superseded!

So much depended upon accuracy of observation. A
journey of a few thousand miles would be nothing, but millions of miles? Billions? It would take up the whole lifetime of the crew; and of their children, and their children’s children. There had to be a way to determine what the distances were to the stars. But it was hard! Many scientists, like Scholides, refused to accept that ‘stars’ existed. They argued that Cleonicles’ observations were amenable to some other explanation. For many years now, Cleonicles had tried to find a definite proof for his speculations. Alas, the fundamental
relativity
of observation thwarted him. Was he looking at great objects far away, massive globes of fire in a vacuum? Or small objects very close by? Had the photographic lenses fitted to his balloon-probes captured miniature sparks, atmospheric effect? Was it some sort of fogging of the film? Were they flecks of the stuff that marked the border of all things?

Cleonicles tried, for the tenth time that day perhaps, to focus his mind on the physics of this, but his mind slipped from the problem, and once again he found himself thinking of his nephew. It was puzzling. For some reason the ghost of Polystom lingered still about the house he left only days before. It had been a good visit, better than most. The boy had not whinged endlessly about his nightmares, his loneliness, his – worst of all! – sense of purposelessness. He had attended the execution of the servant with Cleonicles, which was good for morale all round, although he had (it was true) gone unwillingly, and grumbled about it. But still! The two of them had chatted, uncle and nephew, about stars again, which Polystom had insisted on interpreting in a ‘poetic’ rather than a ‘scientific’ manner . . . a common fault of his. They had taken a stroll down by the lakeside, and had talked about the management of the estate on Enting. Cleonicles had suggested, as gently as he could, that it would soon be time for the boy to visit Stahlstadt, to take up some of the larger responsibilities of Stewardship. The System didn’t run itself, he chided gently. Order was a
fragile blossom, a delicate crystal, and needed constant attention. Polystom had nodded, sucked at his lower lip, plunged his hands into the very bottom of his pockets, and said nothing.

What a pitiable, and yet lovable, figure his nephew cut sometimes! The mannerisms of a teenager in an adult man. His belief, evident in all his actions and all his statements, that he had suffered appalling and soul-forging tragedy . . . and why? Because some ridiculous girl had put her hands down his pants and then gone off to die. This wasn’t tragedy! This was an interlude, symptomatic of an inability to see the larger scale of things; as if – and thinking about the boy seemed to trip Cleonicles’ mind unconsciously towards poetry – as if the lad perceived all his own emotions through a microscope, magnified, and everything else out of view. And yet, despite this immaturity, Cleonicles couldn’t help loving the boy. His earnestness! The vertical crease running up his brow, already distinctly marked despite Polystom’s youthfulness – all that fretting and worrying. There was something oddly refreshing about it, Cleonicles supposed, or he’d have long found it tiresome. It was the
positive contrast
he made with the languid good manners of most of polite society. Cleonicles could see Stom now: his jerky long limbs, arms dangling at his sides and bouncing like a girl’s two long pigtails, like a rag-doll puppet’s arms. His legs, all angular knees and jutting feet, linked by long-boned thighs and shins like the handles of hitball bats. His eyes always wide, his mouth always drooping open. His brown-blonde hair cut short, starting to thin a little even at his young age, the fine strands stirring in any breeze to show flashes of scalp. He was his father’s boy in a great many ways. It was his father in him, if Cleonicles was honest with himself; this was probably the root of his affection for the lad. Cleonicles had loved his brother so deeply. Old Polystom had been the one person to whom he had felt bonded when he was younger. But now Old Polystom
was dead, sucked into the vacuum of death (to turn poetic again), and young Polystom his only relic.

Death, not something Cleonicles would usually spend time thinking about, had been the topic of many of the conversations he had had with his nephew, ever since the death of the girl, the death of whatever-her-name-was. Young Polystom’s grieving for his dead wife, it seemed to Cleonicles, had passed through the stages of absence, sorrow and regret into something much less healthy, into something obsessive. The lad had forgotten, or chose not to remember, how unhappy he had actually
been
when she was alive. Or so it seemed to Cleonicles. One evening, the two of them drinking together, he had suddenly said: ‘Uncle, what is the name you scientists have for this groove in the upper lip?’ He ran his hand from the underside of his nose to the centre of his top lip. ‘This little downward guttering, here, this little crease?’

‘I’m not sure, my boy, I’m not sure of the technical term,’ Cleonicles had replied. ‘I could check in Validicles’ textbook of anatomy – shall I have a servant fetch it?’

But Polystom hadn’t really been interested in the name. ‘Isn’t it strange?’ he had said. ‘The way it divides the upper lip into two, like two fleshy epaulettes. It’s like the contour made by roof-tiles meeting. Don’t you think?’

‘How fanciful your imagination is,’ Cleonicles had said, with a hint of severity. Being fanciful was, after all, in itself no virtue.

‘I dreamt about it the other night,’ Polystom said, with the gloomy little shrug that tended to accompany his pathetic indiscretions concerning his own emotional turmoil. Cleonicles didn’t say anything. ‘I dreamt I was looking at Beeswing’s face, and in particular that I was looking at that ridge. That beautiful little mark. I told her that I . . . I loved her because of that line, because of the way it pointed me towards her lips. And because of the unbrushed, pale, ghostly little hairs lined up upon it.’ Wasn’t
that just the way? A scientific question – a scientific answer – and then off into these windy irrelevances. Epaulettes? Hardly!

After a suitable pause, Cleonicles had said: ‘You need a new wife, I think, my dear boy. It’s time to put your first marriage behind you, your unhappy first marriage.’ He repeated this last phrase, to draw his nephew’s attentions back to the facts of the case. ‘Your
unhappy
marriage.’

But the boy’s young mind had drifted away, into whatever melancholic poetic inner wildernesses it visited. Cleonicles, clucking his disapproval, had given up.

The very next day, Cleonicles had gone off to preside over the hanging of one of his servants, and he had invited the boy to accompany him. It was one of the estate servants, a man who had been caught stealing several times, and who had tried finally to abscond by making his way through the Speckled Mountains. He had been caught, of course, and now he was facing the consequences. It was rare for Cleonicles to have to execute a servant – he was pleased to say, because it was not something in which he took any pleasure. But on the occasions when it was necessary he preferred hanging as more humane, in its way, than flogging. Flogging was more common on the sunward worlds. Hanging was regarded as a better method on the outward planets. And so Cleonicles had set the time, and decided that the best place was one of the courtyards in the western stables, a forum large enough for all the servants from that part of the estate to assemble. Their watching the event was more important than the execution of the individual, in fact, which was why (in Cleonicles’ opinion) hanging was more effective than flogging. Watching a man flogged roused levels of passionate excitement in the breasts of servants, he thought, that counteracted the deterrent effect. Hanging was a cooler business, more rational, and more likely to promote serious thought. It was also good, of course, that several representatives of the governing class
be present, to give weight to the proceedings. And so Cleonicles asked Polystom to attend.

‘Come along to it, my boy,’ he had said. ‘Ten-minute drive, the whole thing won’t take half an hour, and we can be back for tea.’

‘I’d rather not, uncle,’ Polystom had said.

‘Rather not? Have you something better to do?’

The boy had mumbled something about doing some reading.

‘Reading? Nonsense! Come to the hanging. It’ll do you good. It is a bracing experience, you know. And it’ll do the servants good to see some true blood there.’

‘Really,’ Polystom had said, colouring, ‘I’d prefer not to.’ And as soon as Cleonicles saw the blush he realised, with a little shock, that his nephew was actually
squeamish
about watching a man hang. The very idea! ‘I won’t hear of it!’ Cleonicles had said. ‘You’re Steward now. You’ll have to preside over your own justice system. You’ll have to discipline your own estate. I
won’t
hear it!’

So he had bundled the shy fellow into the car, and talked to him all the way there about the necessity of enforcing discipline, about how hanging was
far more humane
than flogging a man to death, about the stupid servant’s multiple crimes and about his eventual dash for freedom into the Speckled Mountains – ‘What else can I do with him? He’s tied my hands, my dear boy.’ And Polystom had said, ‘Yes Uncle, I know Uncle, of course Uncle.’ But at the vital moment, when three servants had leaned into the rope and pulled with all their strength, and the hoist had gone up with the curiously slack figure of the condemned man hanging from it – during that time Polystom had blushed again, and looked away. Looked away! Imagine it! ‘You’re missing it,’ Cleonicles had hissed. The hanging man’s feet were tied together, naturally, as were his hands, but instead of bucking and twisting as some executees did, he simply dangled. The three men had not pulled with enough force to break his
neck (a sign, Cleonicles knew, that the fellow was not well liked amongst the servants), and so was alive for a while, his face puffing up and darkening and his tongue coming out like a mass of blown bubble-gum. But still he didn’t struggle. Eventually he was just a limp quantity of dead flesh, rotating with meticulous slowness to the left, stopping, rotating back to the right, stopping, and going through the same motion again.

In the car back to the house Polystom had stared out the window at the passing scenery, and had responded to his uncle’s conversation only with grunts. Foolish boy.

The charts curled unregarded on the table in front of the old man now; he was pressed back against his chair, his eyes shut. Memories were seeping through his mind like alcohol. He was not used to wallowing in his memories in this fashion. They made him sleepy. His eyelids came down with that fuzzy droopy blur-darkness. Not the clean-cut image of a shutter descending that he had once thought, as a boy, ought to be the way the retinas observe, from the inside, the closing of eyes. How certain he had been! How worried that there was some pathological degeneration in his eyes. Sitting in a corner shutting and opening and shutting his eyes, wondering
does everybody else see this as a hard focused line coming down? Is there something wrong with my eyes? Am I going blind?
The anxieties of being a boy. But the old man’s eyes were shut now, and a darkness as dark as vacuum itself smoothed the old man into sleep.

Cleonicles snoozed. He often napped during the day. Unless particularly gripped by some scientific endeavour, he would sleep two or three times. This was something over which he felt no shame: it was important to rest his brain, after all, if he expected it to function at full efficiency. And as he slept a dream swirled into being in his head. It was the sort of sleep, propped upright in a chair, the windows
bright, where the sleeper half knows that he is sleeping, and yet is sleeping still. He is so far into the subterranean location of sleep that he cannot move his arms, but he knows that he has arms, and that they are draped in his own lap. He is half conscious of life going on around him, and yet the fragments of subconsciousness that constitute dream-state come swirling up around him, blizzard-like.