Loring adjusts it for a few seconds, then snaps it on. I lose track of him. I mean I lose, really, my ability to see him, which just now isn’t all that good anyway, but I know he’s standing where he was. He’s attached the thing to the pedestal, which has a pneumatic tube inside. The device pressurizes the tube with a soft whir. Loring opens the hatch, exposing his hand, and inserts a sealed capsule made of brass. The usual secret messages. Maybe this one is for the chief censor back in the Stationery Office. A hoarse whooshing noise comes from the open hatch.
From my intermittently high vantage point I watch as foreign Galvophones begin to roll toward the outskirts of the camp. They form a wheel around it, keeping their rifles pointed up in that clever way they have. A creature the size of a house approaches. It’s like a huge sloth, covered in long, even fur. Reminds me of the things from the other side of the artifact. The head is almost formless, with eyes like cloth-covered buttons that seem instinct with sense all the same. The whole thing is a faded, muddy grey, except for a few narrow, incredibly vivid bands of color, yellow, purple, and green, at the midpoint of the long neck.
It stops near Loring and a figure emerges from the back of its head, climbing down to meet him. This figure might be another guard, except his silvery-grey outfit is all shaggy feathers. A sizeable pipe is clenched in his teeth. Loring passes a scroll to him. The feathery man takes the scroll and unfurls it, lifting it up to the light. Blueprints, I think. Feathery studies them intensely, his upper lip raised to expose his teeth, and puffs energetically on his pipe.
Abruptly satisfied, feathery turns, still puffing. He takes a long, meditative drag then, and exhales, emitting from the bowl of the pipe, not from his mouth, a perfect white cloud, just like the kind that scud across autumn skies. Feathery takes this cloud gingerly between his two long hands and kind of pats it, now on one side, now on the other, scooting it through the air toward Loring while being careful not to disrupt it. The cloud trembles like gelatin, and sticks to feathery’s hands a bit. Loring watches it come toward him with rapt attention. Then he whisks it into a second capsule and stuffs the capsule into the tube with a dexterity and quickness I wouldn’t have credited him with.
All right, so we home in on Loring. Feathery retreats to his sloth, which now is also smoking a pipe, and I lose track of him. Loring hustles himself over to some empty offices. Through a window, I watch as he paces impatiently up and down, hands clasped behind his back, pausing every few seconds to check his watch. After a few minutes the office door opposite my window opens and someone comes in. What follows is a pantomime love offering, presented on bended knee by Loring to a supercilious, extremely beautiful black youth dressed like a messenger. Only now does Loring become fully visible, and his case is plainly not helped much by the hot water bottle strapped to his head with a muffler, the red and glistening nose, the shawl, the thermometer clicking in his teeth as he pours his heart out in transports of rapturous passion.
Bored, the youth listens without deigning to look at him, arms folded. Loring removes the cloud from the capsule and offers it to the youth with both hands. The youth looks down at it haughtily and purses his lips. There’s a flickering of cool appraisal beneath the lowered eyelids. Finally, he opens and extends his hand, casually. Loring slips the cloud back into the capsule and lays it reverently in the palm. Fingers close languidly on the capsule, suggesting a desire to prolong this exchange.
Then, suddenly, the youth sweeps his other hand up, evidently bringing the interview to an end, and returns the way he came, as nimbly as a ballet dancer retiring to the wings. Loring watches him go in an ecstasy of contemplation, both fists pressed to his chest.
If that was a messenger, it was the first I’ve seen who wasn’t an old man. I could keep after Loring, but I think I’d rather know where his Hermes is headed. Following him is surprisingly easy. There he is—a silhouette on a blue road. I get a little closer and suddenly he stops, wheeling in place and holding out his wand.
“Who—?”
“Take it easy, friend.”
He probes the dark for the source of my voice. We’re in a little knot of trees, hidden from both the artifact and the camp. I have no idea where this path goes.
“It’s just me,” I assure him.
He continues to look, stepping quickly to the darker side of the path.
“Suit yourself,” I say.
I go over to him. A dead blue swimming-pool light plays almost imperceptibly over his features and body. He sees me. He’s only just caught sight of me, and now he shuts his eyes softly, folds his arms on his chest, and turns away without a word. When I try to follow him, I find I am not able to. The way he goes... he dwindles against the trees rather than into them, and I can’t figure out how to take even the first step to follow him. That blue light stays when he goes, and I watch his form vanish in the gloom. The blue light comes from me.
*
The face gazing back at me from the window is blue, but then all the light here is blue. Looking down at myself, I don’t notice anything different. The dark places in my reflection shimmer, as though they were smouldering. From time to time, I can hear revelry coming from other parts of the camp. I can remember eternal parties from I don’t know how long ago—thinking back on all that had almost happened, marvelling that this particular night has generously distended itself to accommodate so many extras.
I wander in and out of the open barracks. They are empty, but the lights are still burning and there are party hats and banners, half-empty glasses, brimming ashtrays, gleaming coldly where they were discarded. Is this a put-on? I can’t really imagine Operationals making use of any of this stuff. But perhaps they stoically go through the motions of festivity with the same joyless punctilio that typifies everything else I’ve ever seen them do.
A suite of offices. Unaffected dissipation hangs in the air. I’m suddenly struck by the floodlit, greeting-card artificiality of the disarray in the barracks. The reserved light of these offices forms itself slyly into islands, drooping from lamps and smoking absently. Unlike the wide-open barracks, the offices are compartmentalized, with many doors of glossy black wood. Here’s a little office with a filing cabinet; the top drawer is open, and a pair of men’s shoes has been tucked into it, the socks draped over the front. The space in the building has been so cleverly used that it seems bigger on the inside than it ought to be.
Opening a pair of double doors, I find myself in a spacious den with a sunken, pillow-lined area surrounding a circular hearth. Shag carpeting. There’s a bar in one corner, and a broad, low cabinet outfitted with a hi-fi set. The turntable is an onyx slab. The massive, black tuner is machined like an automatic pistol. The bar is fully stocked. I don’t recognize any of the bottles or even the kinds of liquor; no desire for any.
The sunken area is littered with glasses.
I turn to the next door. Virtually the moment I open it, I hear a woman sneeze on the other side. I’m entering a huge bedroom. The lights are out, but I can see by a huge picture window that looks out on the artifact. She’s been celebrating, too. She looks at me, and her face softens. I think I preferred it hard. The light from the artifact comes slanting into the room, and slants into her clear eyes, lying across them like two luminous floors in two identical, darkened rooms.
“Well,” she says, and her head bobs once. She breathes out through her nose and tilts her head down, as if she were dropping her gaze to the floor.
“You’re in the wrong place,” she says a moment later, smiling to herself. “As wrong as can be.”
Face tilts back up. There’s a note of pity in her voice that forebodes—what were they trying to keep me from tonight? What was being celebrated? Is this part of the distraction?
Her shoulders and arms are bare, emerging like lilies from a vase, out of the top of her dress. Currently, she has both arms crossed on top of a raised knee. The fabric of her skirt spills down like metallic foam from that knee. When she talks, her very white teeth glisten like
fangs.
The artifact is howling. Not too ferociously, it’s not a disruptive sound. It’s howling more or less to itself, as an aspect of its ordinary operations wound up just at the moment to a higher pitch of intensity than usual, and in fact the artifact’s howl has nothing really to do with anything external to itself, and why not howl? I could do with some howling myself. Why not sit and howl to yourself like a Bacon painting? Do you really have anything better to do?
I go over to her.
I’m a few feet away.
“Where should I have been?” I ask her.
She and I are looking toward each other.
There isn’t going to be any tender feeling between us. There’s only going to be gusts of appetite that will launch us at each other and leave us strangers, watching each other guardedly all the time. We’ll be 100% uncertain. When the impulses have gone voyaging somewhere else, we’ll each be aware of all those provocations to desire that open the other for us, but we’ll both be getting a load of the remainder. We’ll want there to be something to think about, but there won’t be anything to think about. The change will have happened, that’s all.
The space between us is emptying. It’s bare. I know what it is, of course, but the name I normally would give it carries associations, and points to memories, that I have to exclude. It’s the awkward silence that follows the announcement of a contentious decision.
It’s so bare and clear now that there’s nothing there.
*
A grey, actinic light from the windows turns all colors to silver. This is what passes for daybreak around here.
“Go ’way...”
She’s shoving at me.
“Go ’way, you idiot! Do you want him to find you here?”
I don’t want to budge. I can’t imagine my body being any heavier.
“Move!”
She gives me a surprising push that sends me nearly sprawling, loose from the covers, but somehow I get my legs under me. I go back and whip the covers off her and she spins, wide awake, glaring at me with those two blanks. My desire for her returns again. I like being a bit afraid of her. That’s the way it is. I don’t understand how she can be both this savage and a scary, authoritarian statue at once, even lying in her bed, naked and peering up at me, finding my eyes in the gloom, surprised but ready to banish me with a word, or maybe pounce lustfully on me anyway.
Again she orders me to go, but just as I relax and begin to turn, she rises and puts her hands on my shoulders.
“This can’t happen again,” she says sternly.
So why do I hear, “Come back later, I’ll be waiting for you” instead?
Unless it was, “The greater part of this I will explain again.”
There isn’t going to be any tender feeling between us. She never stopped being the merciless advisor. Then again, I never stopped being a dick. That’s a gap that nothing is going to close. All right. Then, good. I like it better this way.
*
I figure Guerrero probably knows. And if he doesn’t, it’s because he doesn’t care. But it would be different if I were trying to take Clare away from him, because his connection with her is an asset to him in the game. Not that I’m stupid enough to assume that I can make anything out of my connection to Clare. Or to blind myself to the possibilities, either.
What if he has his eye on someone, and wants me to take Clare off his hands, leaving him the wronged man and off the hook? He shouldn’t hold his breath.
Being linked to Clare could be mighty advantageous... Sure, and her zapping me with her “advice” every day.
As far as I’m concerned, Clare seems to be acting on impulse only, but who knows what’s behind her impulses? She’s not trying to stabilize her marriage by letting off steam with me—both she and Guerrero have calculated reasons to stick together and they don’t strike me as the kind to start putting sentiment ahead of prompting ambition.
Go back to being a spectre, sweeping through the camp in a trance. Not affecting anyone, and not affected by anyone. Not doing anything wrong, at last. Look back over my well-thumbed past, smudged and easy to read incorrectly, and think that even the least infraction must be acknowledged and atoned for, the way I chimed in with the chorus of insulters in fifth grade, day after day mocking a boy who’d done nothing to me. To have had even that little bit of malice is unacceptable. Or decide that you’ve decided to be a fuck up, and abandon any idea of ever doing anything right.
What’s right? Slipping by like a ghost, do no harm, leave no trace, or relent and confess you want something, and you’re no better than all the other wanters? I’ve always been betrayed by what I want, because nothing ever is only what I want. Always, it is what I want and isn’t what I want. When it comes to that, you can sit and stare while your mind plays tricks or shrug and roll on to the next disaster. “Bad star,” I think it means. Bad star jelly. They don’t need an artifact to collect that. Just set me up with a white truck and I’ll deliver six pints of it every morning.
All of my own making—I’ve always insisted on that, right or wrong. All of it has been my fault. I am the only imperfect one, but don’t imagine this is a distinction life confers on me: not everything unique is special. That looks plausible. Besides, it’s a bit late to be debating whether or not to adulterate with Clare.
What happens when my tether runs out? I can’t wait. Seems a pretty drastic way to go about distracting me. Maybe she, as a Central, has to keep Chorncendantra symmetrical, so a wedding night on one side has to have its corollary infidelity on the other. Or was this my wedding night? Am I ‘Mr. Clare’ now?
Is this something I can turn to my advantage? It’s sort of an alien question to me now. I have to make myself ask it, and keep on struggling to remember. My guess is that Clare will be even harsher with me now, but what about the others? Will it make any difference, or will the reaction be equivocal as usual? Everything in Chorncendantra is equivocal because the game has two sides, but then again, doesn’t one side have to win? Is the winning side pre-ordained, so that each side fulfills itself in the end, winners as winners and losers as losers, or does one really cancel out the other, and waste all the stuff on that side? Or grab all for itself?
Maybe winning the game is a matter of keeping it going at a stalemate forever, or for as long as possible. Like the winner is the one who holds out the longest. In that case, it would be the decisive, imbalancing move that loses the game. Is that it? Both sides scheming to come up with brilliant moves, impossible to anticipate or prepare for, in order to blow the game and lose it? Do they want to lose? So is this winning? Or is this the challenge, the ‘fun,’ maintaining the impasse at the highest possible level of difficulty, both sides doing everything they can think of to wreck it?
It makes too much sense to be wrong. So, to play, I should try to think of something drastic and unpredictable to do. The impasse is dynamic, like a tug-of-war between two sides of equal strength. Did Clare spit it in my ear? Or did we model it for each other last night? If it was night. She got what she wanted. Did she get all of it? All of what she wanted? She wanted all of it. There are almost certainly sub-impasses within the larger one, proliferating down from the level of the intramural opposition to the little in-team wranglings of mites like me and Loring. If I hadn’t blipped Loring, would he be the one skulking away from Clare’s room right now? Does that mean I was being pulled up, as a consequence of overcoming Loring, or let go, to reset the balance? Perhaps Loring’s wary affability the last time we met was a sign that we’d so far satisfactorily kept each other wryly in check.
If I’m right, then I would have to be able to figure out a way to sabotage the game: if I failed to take advantage of an opportunity to do something repercussive—unless the game is so subtle, and those High Rationals... they are that subtle... unless the game is so subtle that momentous inaction would go into the calculation of the balance just as any, comparably grand, active gambit would.
Chorncendantra is unsabotageable.
QED.
—Unless you pull a big active stunt feebly: start off strong, then wimp out at the halfway mark, when everything else is committed. Betrayal, any abrupt change of plan or side has to be excluded as a foreseeable event. But petering out...
Somehow knowing that there might be a way to avenge myself on all of them—avenge what??—is reassuring.
I sit down on a boulder underneath a big tree and stare out at the land, away from the artifact.
It’s so reassuring that I lose all interest in doing it. Knowing this, if it is correct, is enough. Or maybe I’m settling for the satisfaction of having done some clever thinking. Mental calligraphy, when the message is banal.
“Would it have been Loring skulking away from Clare’s room?” A nice way to think about Clare. Take a long look at that thought, and other of your thoughts like that one, and then ask yourself sincerely if you aren’t a prick.
*
And besides, Loring seems to have his heart set on that Hermes anyway. Then again, he may be an unusually well-rounded enjoyer. Then again, he might have known I was watching and staged that little scene to throw me off the track. Then again, what track would he have been trying to throw me from? Then again, the more time I throw away in fruitless speculation about other people’s motives, the less time I spend thinking about what I’m going to do. I have to remember that the aim in watching them isn’t to figure them out, but to find an opportunity to intervene.
Member Page 29
