Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  There were men who later claimed that their first contact with true, manly love (as opposed to the counterfeit kind represented by a fem’s bewitchments) had occurred under the influence of beloved Teachers exercising what were known as ‘Library privileges’. For Bek, the Library had been the scene of his first contact with aggressive lust, and his experiences had not stopped there.

  Among the boys themselves there were similar conventions, copied from their elders. Those who had been most intrigued, and perhaps most frightened, by Bek’s singular parentage used the crudest possible methods of proving themselves unshaken by his presence among them.

  Through such forced encounters, Bek had first learned to differentiate between his treacherous, lascivious and vulnerable body and the outraged spirit trapped inside it; and he had learned to hate. At Endpath, he had had to school himself to give the cup without a tremor to men whom he recognized from those times; they came to him in pilgrim gray. The only one he had truly dreaded to see on the Rock had been Servan, because Servan was the only one to whom both body and soul had responded - still responded.

  Even then, Servan had had the awful integrity of a DarkDream; his actions rose cleanly from the pit of his being through the medium of muscle and bone without the slightest distortion by scruple. In other words, he did what he wanted without any concern for why he wanted it or the effects of his actions on others. He seemed subject only to the objective limits of possibility, within which he gracefully made his way. In the Boyhouse he had bent the rules where he chose, creating spaces of comfort around himself and those whom he protected. He’d been a hero to some, for that. Many had felt the beauty of his ruthless, uncomplicated egotism.

  To Bek, he’d been (and remained still) a shameful but irresistible indulgence. Bek had thought of him oftener at Endpath than he had admitted that night on the causeways. Now he could have laughed, remembering how he had tormented himself with images of Servan in the hands of vengeful Teachers; Servan mutilated, starved, destroyed. Look at him, with his sleepy, knowing grin, his easy self-assurance! At the deepest levels of his soul, there were no conflicts to wrench him apart. His effortless coherence kept him alive and flourishing while everything around him fell to pieces. Contact with him was like the promise of immortality. Perhaps it was that completeness, at base, that the body-brute loved.

  The buoyant, confident Cityman who stared back at Bek from the glass was simply his physical self infused with Servan’s assurance and vigor. This was the price: each time Servan lay with him, beguiling him with comfort and delight, the carnal being became more real; the farseeing and austere soul gave ground.

  Deliberately, Bek moved out from under Servan’s arm. With a grin and a shrug, Servan followed him on down the hall, picking things out of the wall-niches and replacing them in the wrong openings. He knew this morning-after remorse for what it was worth.

  At the end of the corridor, light shone under the tall double doors to the Library. Those lights were never all blown out, day or night. Images and records of the unmen were kept here. Darkness was the element of their kind, and though all of the unmen were dead except the fems’ descendants, no one wanted to take chances. The aisles between the stacks were like cool doorways down the sides of the great room. At the far end was a large window, curtained with sun-blazoned drapes.

  But there was no order here. The floor and the study-tables were littered with books and loose sheets of paper, as if vengeful ghosts had torn through the shelves. Everywhere, obscene images faced them from the scattered pages: crouching creatures covered in fur or scales, or sprouting incredible apprendages; swarms of monsters, in motion or laid out in dead rows; gesticulating figures that looked like men, but were actually Dirties dressed in skins or rags; grubby Freaks with hair to their shoulders; fems actually brandishing their – fists and waving placards with writing on them.

  Servan waved the fem back. ‘Looks like there’s been a fight.’ Steel flickered down into his hand, as a thick-shouldered, gray-haired figure emerged from one of the aisles. Bek’s heart clenched.

  But it was Kelmz, not some filthy-handed Senior Teacher. ‘Nothing to get excited about,’ the captain said. The words were for Servan and the knife in Servan’s hand, but Kelmz’ eyes were on Bek – an eloquently sympathetic glance. Kelmz had passed this way too, in his own youth.

  Having discarded the false mantle somewhere, he stood simply-clad as any Junior despite his lined face and gray hair. Because of this – or because in traveling together they had used the age-rank structure as a tool and a disguise instead of as a system of truth, or because of the havoc wrought in this hated room by Kelmz’ researches – the years that stretched between him and Bek suddenly seemed not to be a barrier but a spectrum which included them both.

  Looking down at the papers spread in his thick hands, Kelmz said, ‘You two are late, the dreaming’s already started.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the window. ‘If you’re careful, you can look out from behind the curtain without being seen.’

  The square was packed with a crowd asway with solemn, silent movement, above which floated the voices of the chanting boys and the smoke of the witch-burning which traditionally opened the dreaming ceremonies. The bodies of three fems, the conventional number, were angled sharply out from posts set into the central trench. They were already contorted and black in the grip of flames that could scarcely be seen in the bright daylight.

  Bek flinched from the sight of them. He had always had that reaction, an involuntary sympathy rooted deep in the body-brute. He forced himself to look again.

  On both sides of the smoking trench, long lines of men moved at a slow gait toward the Boardmen’s Hall at the end of the square. Heavy earthenware tables had been placed on the steps of the portico. Behind each table stood a Senior of the Board, his head and shoulders massively framed by a high-starched mantle of office. Each of them had a company bellringer in attendance, whose present job was to dip up manna-beer from the well in the table top and pour it into the cupped hands of each dreamer in turn. The man would drink, have his hands dried by the same young bell-ringer, and then kiss the palm of the Senior of the Board by whose grace he dreamed. He then would pass by to enter the Hall and find his assigned cubicle, where he would lie on fine matting to dream his heroic, soul-strengthening dreams.

  Fems and Rovers were carefully locked away for the occasion, while the entire population of men in good standing dreamed. Although men did not lawfully dream together, all had their dreams at the same time. When everyone had been served, the Seniors of Board would have the ringers drink, drink the last themselves, and then go in, closing the tall doors behind them and leaving the streets of the City empty.

  The voices of the boys were muffled by the thick, bubble-specked glass of the window, but by the rhythms Bek knew what chant they were doing. His memory supplied the words: the names and characters of the unmen, who were only properly spoken of under the bright noon sun at a dreaming. Having just done the beasts, they were telling the names of the Dirties, those gibbering, nearly mindless hordes whose skins had been tinted all the colors of earth so that they were easily distinguishable from true men: ‘Reds, Blacks, Browns, Kinks; Gooks, Dagos, Greasers, Chinks; Ragheads, Niggas, Kites, Dinks …’

  They chanted the Freaks, commonly represented as torn and bloodied by explosions their own bombs had caused: ‘Lonhairs, Raggles, Bleedingarts; Faggas, Hibbies, Famlies, Kids; Junkies, Skinheads, Collegeists; Ef-eet Iron-mentalists,’ the last a reference to the soft-minded values of the Freaks, iron being notoriously less strong than steel.

  Finally, the chant came to the fems, huge-breasted, doused in sweet-stinking waters to mask uglier odors, loud and forever falsely smiling. Their names closed the circle, for being beast-like (‘red in tooth and claw’, as some old books said) they had been known by beasts’ names: ‘Bird, Cat, Chick, Sow; Filly, Tigress, Bitch, Cow

  A counter-chant was being raised now by the Teachers, enumerating the dreadful weapons of th
e unmen: ‘Cancer, raybees, deedee-tee; Zinc, lead and mer-cu-ree … ’

  The floor underfoot seemed to vibrate as the passionate voices reinforced each other with righteous power.

  Servan said, ‘Remind you of old times?’

  13

  Bek remembered standing with the others on the Boyhouse roof, staring at the billowing smoke, and chanting. The smoke stank (it was by that same cooked-flesh stench that he had recognized the purpose of the Bayo Rendery); but the boys breathed it joyfully. It was the smell of evil being punished as no boy could ever be punished, for only witches were burned, and only fems were witches – always excepting, of course, the special case of DarkDreamers, but what boy ever imagined he would be one of those?

  The chants naming the wickedness of the Ancient fems were always shouted with extraordinary venom by the younger boys, who were closest to the separation from their own dams. The older boys were privileged to bellow out the list of the virtues of men, virtues which fitted men to master fems and boys in the name of order. Most boys of any age never came close enough to fems to observe their dreadfulness personally or knew many truly decent adult men among the Boyhouse Teachers; but they were convinced, and they chanted their throats raw.

  Bek thought of gray-robed pilgrims stumbling along the narrow trail that led out over the black peninsula of stone to Endpath. The intervening step – that of walking to a dreaming at the Hall as one of the adult brotherhood of the Holdfast – was missing from his own experience. Watching now, he felt less substantial than the coiling smoke.

  ‘Well,’ Kelmz said, glancing out once, uninterestedly, ‘what’s been arranged?’

  ‘Do you know Senior Kendizen of the Quarterbacks?’ Servan asked.

  ‘That famishing fem-lover? Sure.’

  Servan gave him a narrow stare; Bek was startled too. Mature men did not ordinarily run down their peers before Juniors. ‘Kendizen is bringing someone here who can tell us where to find Karz Kambl.’

  ‘And you think Kambl will tell you where to find Maggomas,’ Kelmz said. ‘Well, maybe he will.’ He rubbed at his eyes, which were red-rimmed from hard use. ‘I’ll keep watch at the doors. You don’t want that fem sidling in here; and your contacts may be less dependable than you think. Like everything else.’

  Frowning after his broad back, Servan said, ‘I told you it was time to get rid of him. I’ve seen men torn loose from their certainties before. They generally end up as wreckage on Skidro, and starve in an alley, if they last that long.’

  ‘Not Kelmz,’ Bek said, curtly.

  ‘I grant you,’ Servan said, settling himself on the deep sill of the window, ‘he’s full of surprises for an old man. Take that dream of his; people do sometimes dream of beasts – the other unmen were still men of a sort, after all, but the beasts were entirely different. The lure of the alien is strong.’ With his foot, he stirred one of the pages on the floor. The picture showed a stick-legged, brownish creature in mid-leap, its placid face in strange contrast to the urgency of its movement.

  ‘Most men don’t go so far as to dream that they literally are beasts themselves. That takes a degree of imagination that I wouldn’t have thought Kelmz had.’

  He sighed. ‘You’d be surprised at the level of most DarkDreaming; I was. I used to think everybody used it the way I wanted to, to give imagination free rein and really dig down into the spirit. Well, men don’t; or else imagination and the core of the soul are mostly so petty that it’s hardly worth the bother.

  ‘I’m good at my work, mind you. I could give my clients beasts more marvelous than any that ever really lived. I could give them gilded courts of power and splendor, steel cities roaring with wealth and crowds. But the quality of the dream depends on the visualizing capacity of the dreaming mind that I have to work with. Most of them are pretty puerile – as you must have noticed, back there on the ferry.’

  Bek paced past him, back and forth. The Library disturbed him; the dreaming disturbed him, and Kelmz disturbed him. What disturbed him most of all was the possibility of meeting Raff Maggomas soon. Irritably, he said, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t stay with the Scrappers on some congenial basis – such as taking over their leadership yourself.’

  ‘There are too many famishing Scrappers already,’ Servan said, fiddling with the fringe of the window-curtain. ‘And when they’ve dug up everything worth salvaging that the company men have missed, they’ll have nothing left but the bondboy business – not my style.’

  ‘You nearly died of dreaming in the Boyhouse. Why do you stay with it? You may have built up a tolerance by now for a DarkDreamer’s low dosage, but someday you’ll take something stronger than you expect, and it will kill you.’

  ‘Oh, I like my work,’ Servan said, cheerfully. ‘In spite of everything. What could be more amusing than bringing to the surface the nasty little men who live inside our grandest, most noble-natured and mature brothers?’

  ‘Almost anything, surely,’ Bek grimaced.

  ‘My clients come back for another dose, which is more than can be said for yours!’

  Bek paced, thinking of the ambivalence of men’s attitudes toward Endpath and the man who brewed deathdrink inside its black stone walls. A peaceful death in the mists of dreaming, under the assurance of eternal remembrance in the Chants Commemorative, was said to be a good thing, worth striving for. Yet men came shaking to the Rock, babbling their sorrows in spite of the rules. And after they drank, they were no less dead than those who died outside, unremembered.

  The Endtendant was custodian of perhaps the most important ceremony of Holdfast life, and he was served as such. Though the companies’ ranks grew thin in the wake of faltering harvests, supplies of food for him and the Endpath Rovers came regularly. Yet each Endtendant was sent to the Rock as a kind of punishment; his Rovers were his jailers, and in the end each Endtendant in turn took the death-drink himself – as if to pay for his offense in having given good deaths to his superiors.

  It hadn’t taken Bek long to see that it was for his own death that he had been sent there. He had decided not to let himself be so easily discarded.

  Not that there was anything wrong in the soul of a man choosing to shed the bodily husk after a lifetime of battle with the void-stuff of which the world was made. Endpath itself was a recognition of the rightness of such a choice. Only by years of self-discipline and right action did a man know himself to be ready to die. However, Bek’s problem was precisely that he did not feel that he had yet engaged in a significant struggle. It seemed to him that he had only endlessly made ready, and that it was wrong to step out of the world before arriving at the meeting place he’d been preparing for all his life. So when he had found himself lifting the warm, lethal cup to his own lips, he had seen the necessity of leaving Endpath, and taking the shaping of his life into his own hands.

  Yet he missed the Rock. He missed it so hard that it made his eyes ache with trying to see something different from what was going on out there in the square: not magnificently glazed walls and deep arcades and a solemn procession of dream-bound men past a smoldering trench, but bare and sweeping lines of rock, sea, and shore. The wind always blew at Endpath out of the wide sky. The sea rolled vast and barren and clicked and chattered unceasingly among the pebbles at the foot of the Rock. All was simple, clean and final.

  For a moment he seemed to feel the touch of the black mask on his face and the weight of half-filled cups in his hands. The words of the Endpath offering sounded in his mind: ‘Here is the sleep of the body, the freedom of the spirit and the everlasting naming of the name.’

  ‘– paradox,’ Servan was saying, in his lazy, negligent manner. ‘What you do is supposed to be a good thing, but everybody knows in his heart that it’s rotten. What I do is supposed to be a crime, but everybody suspects that it’s a good thing, a service, even. It’s so stupid to say that a man will be remembered if his name is stuck into a chant for the famishing Juniors to gabble through every day as fast as they can so they can get to b
reakfast.’

  ‘How will you be remembered?’ Bek challenged. ‘In the songs of fems, that only corrupt men will ever listen to?’

  ‘That’s the only kind of man whose recognition I’d have any use for,’ Servan airily replied.

  Bek laughed, the dark mood broken. ‘If the Board had caught you during these past years, they probably would have sent you to me at Endpath to punish us both at a stroke, knowing that you don’t believe in the efficacy of the chants.’

  ‘What would you have done,’ Servan said, ‘if I’d come to you there?’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t visit me to find out.’

  ‘You’d have handed me my poison without a blink,’ Servan grinned, ‘after letting me coax you to bed first, of course, for old times’ sake. Eykar, relax, will you? Your pacing is driving me rogue. If you won’t sit somewhere, at least lean a bit.’

  Bek snapped, ‘Must I drape myself gracefully over the furniture in order to talk with you?’

  ‘All right, I admit it: in you, ease would be an affectation. But you ought to learn to be more appreciative of comfort, Eykar. Why are you so enamored of hard edges and sharp corners? If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in constant danger of falling asleep without a bit of pain here and there.

  ‘Why are you so impatient? Don’t let the tensions of ordinary Holdfast life get to you. Things must have been very peaceful in your kingdom on the Rock, complete with four devoted retainers and swarms of suppliant subjects. Was it hard for you to leave Endpath?’

  Servan was watching him with that connoisseur’s look, appreciating the effects of his words. Bek tightened his lips and said nothing.

  Shrugging, Servan shook the knife down out of his sleeve again and entertained himself by carving spirals into the plaster of the Library wall. The spiral was the sign of the void, of fems, of everything inimical to the straight line of manly, rational thought and will. It would infuriate the Teachers to find that symbol here tomorrow, not least because within an hour the boys would be terrifying each other with whispers that unmen-spirits had visited the Library during the dreaming and had left their mark.