Looking at her, I notice that the triangles recede when I blink, so I start blinking rapidly to keep them away. Rolling over onto my other side, I can see Yunis struggling with the two men. Droop lip, his face an ugly, phosphorescent green, turned away from Yunis, stands bent over backwards, his short hair sticking out weirdly—Yunis must be holding him by the hair, using his fibrokinetic fibres. Wooden face is just breaking out of Yunis’ grasp, and aims an inept punch at his head; his eyes are as brilliant as sunlit clouds and leave trails as he swings. Yunis evades the blow easily. The fist flies into space over Yunis’s shoulder, the forearm only grazing the head.
Yunis delivers a textbook uppercut with a hand like a rubber mallet. I watch wood face’s spirit leaving his body, and he pancakes. Yunis turns to droopy and wrestles him to the ground.
“Just leave us!” Droop lip is screaming. “Just leave us here!”
He carries on in this vein while Yunis kneels on his back and binds his hand with a length of climbing rope. Even now, Yunis looks less angry than determined.
“Why save us?” Droop-o cries, his voice muffled against the artifact. “Why not leave us here?”
“Because,” Yunis says wearily, getting up. “If I lose you I lose face. Ever think of that?”
Yunis collects the two of them and bears them off, down the gravel slope into the trench. I can’t really move my head to follow them, and lie on my side, cradling my ringing skull. The crunching of footsteps and the raking slides of stones drop away and there’s not much left but a rustle of wind. Far away, right before my eyes, the Wa-Zo-Li-Reng are throwing themselves from the brink like divers and then rising up again in pendulum swoops like kites. Woolly, black gorilla kites.
No bigger than dots to me now, they do stately acrobatics that follow the contours of the lighter and darker patches in the azure dome of the sky. I notice that their blackness doesn’t fade, or take on any of the ambient blue, but keeps on looking felty and deep even from this far away. When the wind shifts direction, every now and then, a sonorous buzzing, like the rasp of a metal string, reaches me where I lie, still blinking back the triangles. They’re growing transparent, like ice in ice water.
One of the things is coming directly toward me, right now. It comes in low over the top of the artifact, like a half-melted X with the head in the groin. Not twenty feet away, it abruptly arcs nearly straight up, making a harsh buzzing sound, and sails over the void, dropping from sight nearly at once. Behind it trails a pungent, chemical odor, which dissipates almost immediately.
It’s back, well above me now. Slowing down and speeding up like a roller coaster, it circles nearly overhead. The song wavers with its movements. Then it straightens its course and beelines back toward the others, who are quitting the artifact in one shoal.
I’m not on Earth.
I feel empty. They’ve gone back to the landscape over there, where that huge rotten plant-head embryo ball spins and gropes around looking to hook itself back into me again. Every inch has its surveying corpse head on the horizon, fixed there like a watch tower, that can see through the smoke in all its colors.
Is this Earth? When did I leave? How long has it been?
Rip Van Winkle ran off with the fairy ninepin players and drank their speed-o’-light drink, came back after hundreds of years. To what.
There go the clouds. The colors dim out into the blue, in a way the creatures never did. The triangles fill up my vision with scales that follow the contours of light and dark in the azure dome of the sky. Eventually, I find myself rolling over onto my stomach. I get up, not daring to turn my head, keeping it and my neck just where they are. No sign of Down jacket, or Butterball. There may be figures well off that way; a few men in white shirts, with dark trousers, and neckties. Some women in skirts. They are walking on the walls and in the trenches, with their arms above their heads.
Let them do their thing. With great care, I settle myself, perching on the edge of the wall, then slide off onto the heap of stones, tobogganing down to the floor of the trench on my ass. My neck jolts a few times and my head hurts—not my neck.
...For the past eight or nine hours now I’ve been trying to cross the trench. No way to tell how long it has been.
I find myself watching my own body from a distance, like it was a character in a film. There I am, half in a heap.
“Get up dummy... Come on... Get up... Get up dummy.”
The bag is still looped around my shoulder, but it swings wildly with my drunken swaying.
“If he drops that bag I’ll kill him,” I snarl. “So help me I’ll kill him if he drops it.”
My legs skid out from under me and I drop to the ground again. I end up perched on the far corner of my left hip, my body stiff and curved like a boomerang, as I try to coil my self together. My legs have to be thrust forward and held together to ballast the rest of me. I look incredibly bad. My features have a dirt outline, there’s dust in my hair, and my lower lip is swollen. Maybe I hit it on something and failed to notice in the general festival of injuries. Finally, I watch myself tip forward and music begins to play, the lights in the background begin to pulse and swim, and dancers of both sexes, dressed in sparkling white tuxedos, descend to the floor of the trench in files, chugging their arms like locomotive pistons.
Oblivious to this, myself has gathered on folded knees and droops, careful not to allow his tottering head to settle on the gravel, though he seems tempted.
“Don’t do it you bastard. You’ll only drive bone fragments into your brain that’s messed up enough as it is. Your brain is broken already.”
The eyes bug, and I only manage to catch the little mouthful I spit up behind the palm. It’s a good thing the dancers have on their roller skates; they’re rolling around me now, arms linked across shoulders in a series of nested orbits, gliding smiling and turning their heads this way and that. Through the music someone cries, “Chorncen-dan-tra!”
I jerk around and confront a severed head. Clamped between the hands, held high above the gushing stump, the open throat, the front rinsed with thick gore, the body engulfed to the waist in the top of the artifact. The huge globes of the Newest drop in two stately arcs and meet like a pair of complacent hands folding, directly above the tear-streaked, contorted face. My body flails backward in shock at the sight and lands on the back, jarring the head violently. He clutches the back of his skull in his hands, barking with pain.
The dancers encircle him. Their hands pick him up, and carry him to the howling head. The body struggles, shouting with pain and fright. They dredge him in the flow of silvery mirage blood that spews from the now towering giant, a stream of black and silver mirage boiling from red and gold robes and forming a stream of thick mirror froth. The last I see of him, myself that is, he is engulfed in blinding silver foam, a scream gurgling in his throat, staring pin-pupilled into the gush...
I’m exhausted. I’ve never been so tired. I’m getting more tired with the effort of noticing how tired I am.
As the head-holder in front of me gradually takes his leave, emanations from the Newest come swirling down around me like the spinning lights from a mirror ball, and the unvarying, syncopated music it makes seems to dub me out in space as it recommences its regular communion with the artifact. Atoms of clear rationality, soft and radiant as falling snow. The pale blood congeals gradually.
I’m still covered in mirror mucus that hangs on me in heavy globs and smells like grey mustard. When I happen to look, I discover a scrap of paper curled into my left hand, which has been lying ajar on my stomach. The scrap is covered in even printing:
Stay put. Getting the others down. Will come back.—Yunis.
“That’s peachy,” I say, and haul out my trusty bandage box. After looping the gauze around my head a couple of times, I feel drastically better and I manage to get on my feet. With my hips and knees locked under me for good measure.
Since it’s possible to walk, I make my way over toward the far end of the trench. No sign of an
yone. A mist has fumed up over in the direction where I saw the Newest. The mist is white, not blue like everything else.
A nameless combination of weakness and residual vitality. That’s what I’ve got. It’s ridiculous to head over toward the scaffolded side now. In my condition, I’d never make it down a nice gradual ramp, let alone that popsicle-stick highway. But, I suppose, being nearer to the path makes retrieving me easier. Assuming Yunis doesn’t leave me here.
Something yanks the strap of my bag and spins me around. I nearly lose my balance, but only nearly, and the movement whips the bag around behind me as well. Loring is already trying to circle back of me too, so I keep turning.
“No!” I shout, like a man warning a dog. “No!”
Loring doesn’t say a word. He’s breathing hard, his clothes are in shreds, and his eyes are locked on my bag. He swipes at it drunkenly, and when he darts in close I can feel the heat roll from his body in waves. I’m getting ready to take a poke at him, when a high voice breaks in on us both:
“No interference with a courier.”
A luminous wand appears between us as we both start and turn, I to my left, Loring I guess to his right, both of us totally taken by surprise. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever met this particular old woman before, but then they all look so much alike. This one wears the tight-fitting, velvetty outfit, something like a cross between a leotard and a Beau Brummel get up. It has four big, flat, cloth-covered buttons arranged on the abdomen like the pips on a die.
“You are a courier!” Loring roars at her, and then flips his finger at me. “And he’s a fake!”
The old woman, having withdrawn her wand from between the two of us and folded her arms, gives Loring a look of withering disgust. With a long, thin finger, she taps her left bicep significantly. If I squint, I can just manage to make out an even stripe of silver there, which is barely distinguishable from the fabric. Loring squints, too, then lunges, bringing his face in close, eyes starting, and peers at the silver for a minute. Then he turns away, flapping his hands and really his whole body in a childish display of frustration.
“Aw... Umpire’s Bureau?” he asks incredulously, now looking open-mouthed at the old woman. He stays that way for a few seconds before he adds, petulantly, “But you’re outmoded—the Bureau’s outmoded!”
When the old woman pointedly overlooks this comment, Loring points at her arm.
“Your stripe! It’s so old you can barely—it’s all worn away!”
“That,” the old woman says, augmenting her dignity slightly by lowering his chin, “only goes to show how long have I been in service... The stripes of the most senior councillors at the Bureau are completely worn away. That’s how you know them.”
I wonder to myself if that means the messengers I’ve encountered in the past have actually been umpires of the highest seniority. Maybe, after all that service, they’re so old they’ve forgotten everything. Perhaps they forget all the way back to the time when they were just starting out in service, as messengers or bellhops or something, and revert to their first duties. Then again, they may not need to remember. If they’ve been doing the same thing for such a long time that it all becomes a habit, the sort of thing you do with your spinal cord and not with your brain, then they might be perfect functionaries, unconsciously performing their duties the way a butterfly unconsciously pollinates flowers or a tree unconsciously gives off oxygen.
I’m thinking well, for someone with a broken brain. And does this mean that Chorncendantra has three sides, with one remaining neutral and observing the other two, perhaps the audience for whom the game is played? Are the different sides all on the same level, or is the umpire’s plane higher, since they would presumably be in a position to intervene in the dealings of the other two teams? Do they run the show?
But, if Loring’s right, and the Bureau is outmoded, then the umpires are just a bunch of superannuated flunkies who haven’t accepted—or noticed—the changes that come with the passing of time, and continue to go through the motions for nobody’s benefit.
“You heard the lady, Loring,” I say. “No fiddling with couriers.”
“Will you shut up?” Loring barks.
The old woman’s head shifts slightly, as if I’d startled her. Then, fixing me with a glare that tells me I shouldn’t presume too much, she says with asperity, “Provided that courier is actively doing his duty.”
“Is this proof enough?” I shake the bag strap on my shoulder. There’s probably a strap-shaped groove there by now. “I’m still lugging this thing around. You tell me where I’m supposed to deliver it.”
“That,” the old woman says, “is not my responsibility.”
“Whose is it?”
“Telling you that is also not my responsibility.”
“Do you know?”
She studies her fingernails nonchalantly. “No. That is to say, not particularly. It could be any one of a number of different persons, or, it could be more than one.”
“How about some names?”
“They would mean nothing to you.”
“But, if one says ‘deliver here,’ and another says ‘deliver there’—two different places—who should I listen to?”
“Both.” She gives me a condescending look. “You have more than one thing to deliver, don’t you?”
“Two claims on the same thing,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Wouldn’t happen.”
“It has.”
“A violation.”
“Will you pay attention to me?” Loring paces up and down impatiently during this exchange, with his hands thrust straight down into his pockets, sulkily kicking at pebbles and giving vent to theatrical sighs of exasperation.
“So which one of them is wrong?”
“The second one.”
“So, is this first-come, first-serve? It’s the first claimant I should listen to?” I ask hastily.
“The legitimate claimant.”
Boredom creeps into the old woman’s face. She pulls a thick yellow pad abruptly from her jacket, fills out a ticket and tears it off, presenting it to Loring. Loring snatches the ticket surlily and crumples it into his inside jacket pocket, where, thanks to a rent in the front of his jacket, it remains visible.
“Well,” the old woman says crisply. “I have to see to other infractions. Goodbye!”
With that, she goes, taking long bounding strides that bend her whole body backwards. In three bounds she’s gone. Loring, bent forward with his arms hanging down, looks up at me through his brows and shakes his head. Then, growling with irritation, he makes a gesture with both hands like he’s pushing me away, and walks off, swinging his arms loose at the elbow. The mist that concealed his approach encloses him and seems to attend on him as he walks off, dithering away from me.
This episode has invigorated my mental capacities like a tonic, and I reckon it would be wise to put my brains, which I expect will go back out of internal alignment at any moment, to good use while I can. Moving slowly and trickily, I make my way up toward the spot where we first arrived; long gouges in the gravel make that an easy place to find.
Lying on my belly, I drag myself over to the edge on the camp side and look down at the planks. The upper end of the first one extends just a little above the ledge... I ooze down the planks on my stomach, feeling every little gust of wind flirt up between the abundant gaps and cracks.
*
I’m washing up a bit when Darren opens the door partway and wriggles in. I regale him with my adventures.
“There were those Wa Zo’s up there, too.”
“They’re very important,” Darren says.
“I have a theory about them. I think that they’re what you turn into when you finally cover yourself head to toe in bandages. What do you think?”
Darren stares at me. Then his mouth opens all the way and he laughs full blast, still staring, like the idea’s so funny it’s breaking his mind. Finally he puts his face in his hands and shakes
his head.
I fiddle with my own bandages. No more on my right leg than before, but then again I have a good length of gauze wound around my head. There are plenty of bandages left, but running out of them doesn’t seem like the real problem—it’s been weeks since I last ate. What happens if I take the bandages all off at once? Instant starvation? Why the hell don’t I want to eat?
Darren’s at my side. He cuckoos and pokes at a bit of clabbered mirage that still clings to my jacket. Looking at his face, I feel a wave of foreboding impatience come over me.
“The Halls of Joy opened,” Darren says.
“Are you still talking Darren?” I ask him sharply.
This is bad. My fuse is too short and he’s too infuriating. I should leave.
“You saw them coming down with the Newest, when it communed with the artifact last night.” You’d think he was describing his tenderest feelings, from his tone. “The Halls of Joy were opened, and they came out.”
There’s something about that crooning, entranced tone, and the transported expression on his face, and the way he raises his hands toward his throat, and the giddy reasoning behind his face, the mind tickled provoked dizzied and intoxicated by enigmas, that I recognize. The realization washes away all my anger.
“You’re one of them!”
“What?” he blinks, smiling, and seeming to look around as if he couldn’t quite find the source of my voice.
He’s floated back a few feet away from me. I take a step closer to him, feeling my self-possession running out through my fingers faster than grease.
“You’re a High Rational.”
“How can I be?” His grin trembles like water, the corners of his mouth are drawing back rather than up. “High Rationals don’t have families. Clare is my sister.”
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