Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  [fifth leaf]

  After the funeral, Polystom stayed at his uncle’s house for less than a week. There was a great deal to be sorted out; an executor had arrived, and was working through the instructions of Cleonicles’ will. The executor was a young military officer, First Flying Squadron – another surprise, for Polystom had expected a civilian executor. But he was efficient, and deferential. ‘You’re chief heir, of course, sir,’ he had said. The sir was a little problematic: as an officer, the executor was of approximate social standing to Stom. Polystom had no military ranking, and so it wasn’t a military courtesy. To call Stom sir because he was the seventh Steward of Enting was technically correct, but a little stuffy and unfashionable. But Polystom couldn’t correct the usage without embarrassing the man. He coughed, put his hands deep into his pockets, and ignored the fellow’s use of the honorific.

  ‘But your uncle suggested,’ the executor continued, ‘that a cousin of yours – Pithycles, I believe is the name – should take up residence in the house and rights over the estate here, on the moon. Is this agreeable to you, sir?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stom. Running this estate as well as his responsibilities on Enting would be far too much bother.

  ‘There are various other tabled items in the will,’ said the executor. ‘Perhaps too many to detail at any length with you, here? If it’s alright with you, sir, I’ll deal with them myself.’

  ‘Whatever you think best.’

  ‘Your uncle’s main butler was killed with your uncle, of course. The underbutler in line is a young man, name of Agor. It would be appropriate, I think sir, for you to interview him, to ascertain whether he’s ready to take on the responsibilities of acting as butler to the new master.’

  ‘Very well.’

  So Polystom interviewed the nervous young servant, asking him a few desultory questions. He seemed shaken – by the two deaths, he said. He’d never seen anything like it, he said. His father and grandfather, both still alive (this was said with an apologetic duck of the head) said they had never seen anything like it. It was terrible. It was awful. What was the cosmos coming to?

  ‘Never mind that, now,’ said Stom. ‘It’s terrible, yes. But the purpose of this interview is to determine whether you’re ready to take over the responsibilities of being chief butler.’

  ‘I think so, sir,’ said Agor, miserably.

  ‘Did the previous butler . . .’ (Polystom had met him a hundred times on his visits to the moon, but now couldn’t recall his name) ‘. . . did he show you the ropes, as it were? Do you know what your duties are?’

  ‘He was very good at bringing me on, sir,’ said Agor. ‘I’ll try my best, sir.’

  ‘Then that seems fine. That’s the proper order of things. Of course you’ll want to speak to the executor, when he gets back from the Eastern Estate. And of course you’ll want to decide on which underbutler should follow on from you.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I should take up running the estate straight away, sir?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Polystom crossly. ‘The estate won’t run itself, now, will it.’

  ‘There’s just one thing, sir. It’s a slightly out-of-the-ordinary thing, sir, and I’m sorry to bother you with it. But I’m not sure what to do about it.’

  ‘Well? What?’

  ‘It’s just that a skywhal beached itself a couple weeks back, and the master told us to store it until he could embalm it. For study, he told us, sir. So we pulled it out of the water and put it in a barn west of the lake. Only I don’t know what to do with it now, sir. The master told us to keep it. Should we keep it? If it’s to be embalmed, then there’s nobody on the estate who knows how, except Old Epops, who used to help the master with some of his experiments, and he says he doesn’t know how to deal with such a large carcass. Or if we’re supposed . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Polystom, bored with this speech, interrupting the servant’s gabble. ‘The skywhal. I heard about that. It’s a very unusual thing, I suppose.’

  ‘It is, sir.’

  ‘Well, I suppose Uncle wanted to keep it for science. But Pithycles has no interest in science. There won’t be any of that going on when he’s master in this house. I suppose we should do something about the skywhal – I tell you what,’ said Polystom, his interest pricked for the first time since he had come to the moon. ‘I tell you what. I’ll come and see for myself.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  So he had taken that afternoon to drive out along the slurpy shallow coastline of the lake, with the new butler Agor at the wheel, fifteen minutes to a large, dark, wooden barn perhaps two hundred yards from the water’s edge. All the way out there Stom was wondering what the actual sight of this extraordinary thing would be like. It was, he had decided, inherently poetic. It was a symbol somehow connected with his uncle’s death. He had been toying with the idea of writing a poem. Or perhaps, if he could find somebody to write the music, an opera: the subject would be his uncle’s death, and the extraordinary events of his last day alive. The skywhal and his uncle would be the main characters, the one singing the eerie music of the skies, the other singing verses to do with down-to-earth subjects like science. In his mind Polystom thought of the fallen skywhal and his uncle as symbols of one another; or perhaps of the skywhal as a symbol of himself, poetically floating Polystom. Whichever, it was clearly important for him, if he wanted to write poetry, to see the beast for himself.

  The car had stopped, and Stom hopped out.

  There was a bad smell, a miasma, in the air around the barn, and when Agor pulled the door open it washed out over him like a breaking wave, a ghastly stench of putrid flesh and ground-down faecal liquefaction. A mass of flies ducked under the eave and poured out into the light, the cloud of them flexing and spiralling outwards like pollen billowing off a tree-top in spring. Agor pulled wide the second leaf of barn-door, and the barn again spewed out a massive bolus of flies. There were countless more insects inside, their buzzing so drowsily intense it sounded as if a petrol motor had been left running in there. But the stink was so fierce, so overwhelmingly horrible, it had swept past the borders of the single sense to which it should properly have restricted itself – it was more than just a smell, it was a tangible pressure upon the body, it was a horrible, groaning noise of flies; it was the sight of a mountain of slimy decaying flesh; it was heat.

  Polystom buried his nose in the crook of his arm, but the wide-weave cloth of his Parca jacket was no filter. He stepped back, and back again, as if the smell had physically pushed him. Lifting his arm as he lifted his head, he squinted into the barn. The skywhal was just a dark mass; its mouth, open, had half-collapsed, and any features that might have made it recognisable as a skywhal – fronds, eyes, markings – had dissolved in putrescence. Rusty streaks of grey, mould perhaps, lay over the thing’s back; a piss-coloured treacly pool of something unspeakable had filled the floor of the barn, and was now creeping out through the open door.

  ‘Horrible!’ gasped Stom into the crook of his own arm. ‘You didn’t tell me it was like this.’

  The servant couldn’t hear him over the crescendo of insects, so Stom motioned to him to shut the doors again. Doggedly Agor pushed first one, then the other, great door shut. The buzzing dropped in volume, and Polystom trotted down to the water’s edge to breathe again.

  When Agor was at his side, he said: ‘How foul that was!’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Burn it. Burn the barn with it. No,’ he added, looking out at the placid stork-boars, who were stepping stealthily through the water, occasionally dipping their beaks into it for food, ‘no, on second thoughts. I wouldn’t want to burn a barn. Pithycles might need it. But you must bury that monster – take some men, remove the beast and bury it deep, away in the hills behind. Then wash the barn out properly.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Agor, somewhat glumly.

  ‘Drive me back now,’ said Stom.

  Polystom stay
ed in his uncle’s empty house for four more days. One day he took a tour through the whole estate, driven again by Agor. They drove completely around the lake, calling in at the stables and arable lands west, the dairy to the north, the orchards and hop-farms to the east. Everywhere Polystom noticed a subdued misery in the servants’ faces that seemed to him to go beyond bereavement for the death of the master. Their mood jarred with the clear purple-blue sky and bright sunshine.

  At their second stop, amongst farm buildings west of the lake, Polystom said conversationally to Agor: ‘I was here a couple of weeks ago. In this very yard.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Saw a man hanged here.’

  ‘I know sir. I was there. Met, he was called.’

  There was a pause. An autumnal bluefly drifted through the air in lazy curlicues, dragging its fizzing noise along with it.

  ‘That fellow,’ Polystom said, his mind running on the execution now, ‘he ran away, didn’t he?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘You say you knew him? The man who was hanged?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘A bad sort, I suppose?’

  ‘Worse than some. Not so bad as others, perhaps, sir.’

  Polystom was looking around the yard. A young girl appeared from between two buildings, carrying a laden pole across the back of her neck. It was an apple-stick for the horse; the apples as fat as footballs, gathered in bunches that dangled almost to the ground. She passed, her face carved in motionless unhappiness. ‘What do you mean when you say that?’ Stom asked Agor, as the girl went into one of the stables.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘When you say this fellow wasn’t as bad as others?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s my place to talk about it, sir.’

  ‘Not when,’ Stom said with sudden fierceness, ‘I asked you a direct question?’

  There was an awkward pause. ‘He wasn’t much liked by the stable-staff, sir,’ said Agor. ‘He started out working the cows to the north, and was moved because the underbutler up there wanted him out of the way. Something about a woman, I believe, a woman they both wanted. So the underbutler moved him down to the stables, and several people here took against him. He was a difficult character to get along with. I’d play dice-dominos with him sometimes. People didn’t much get along with him. Often he would be left out at mealtimes.’

  ‘What do you mean, left out?’ Stom’s attention was only half on the story. The girl had come back out of the stable; a pretty girl, but her face looked palsied by misery. Couldn’t she manage a smile?

  ‘When slops – which is how they’re named, sir, I should say mealtimes – when slops are called, it’s down to the underbutler who sits where. If a fellow’s excluded from the table he goes hungry.’

  ‘What?’ asked Stom. He hadn’t been listening. The girl disappeared again, between the buildings, and Stom turned back to the servant. Agor repeated his last sentence.

  ‘Is that why he stole?’ said Stom. ‘Because he was hungry?’

  ‘It was partly that, I think, and partly just his cussedness. He had a wish for self-destruction about him, I think. He welcomed being caught. He was almost glad at the hanging, it seemed to me.’

  Stom remembered the hanging. How unaesthetic that had been. ‘That girl who just passed us. Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘She looked extraordinarily glum. I mean, I’d expect her to be glum at the death of her master, but that was something else. Why’s that?’

  Agor looked extremely uneasy. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come on man!’ chivvied Polystom. ‘Do you know, or don’t you?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Her brother was knocked over last week sir.’

  ‘Knocked over?’

  ‘By the militia. They came through the whole estate like a dose of salts. Looking for the assassins, of course, and looking for them pretty vigorously, sir.’

  ‘They knocked him down?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure there was any particular reason why, sir. They were bustling, in a hurry, rifles out and shouting and running around. They weren’t particular, I think, sir.’

  ‘Is he going to be alright? That girl’s brother?’

  ‘No sir, dead, sir. He broke his back, took a high fever, and died in days.’

  ‘Broke his back?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Did he fall off a roof or something? What an unfortunate accident.’

  ‘No sir, just fell to the ground. I think it was the rifle butt in the small of his back that did the damage.’

  ‘What an unfortunate accident,’ Stom said again, a little vaguely. ‘Anyway. Anyway. Back to the car.’

  They drove on, up the western edge of the lake, past the barn with the decomposing carcass of the skywhal in it. The stench was noticeable even from the moving car. Figures were shuffling with doll-stiff awkwardness, scarves around their faces, carrying buckets in and out of the barn. The car carried Polystom on, and the air cleared.

  They called in at outhouses, straggly collections of servant cottages, and then drove past the broad arable fields that constituted the bulk of Cleonicles’ farmland. The lunar gravity, less than two-thirds that of Enting, enabled super-plants to grow, great towering cob-corns and a special breed of wheat that resisted insect depredation by exuding a waxy resin from a nodule at the top of each plant. Seeing the monster wheat, twice or three times his own height, reminded Stom that he was indeed on the moon. He had visited so often that he hardly noticed the difference in gravity now. He perceived it a little on landing, but after half an hour one tended to forget about it, and to be aware only subliminally of a sprightlier step and a lightness in one’s bones.

  They called in at an enormous barn, less a barn, more a great wall-less roof on six pillars, in which the autumnal harvests were stored. Servants were sheaving and piling the hay, and tipping drums of wheat into specialist winnowing machines. Stom stood, bored. There was hardly any arable growth on his own thickly forested lands. The thing that struck him most forcefully was the mournful looks on the faces of these servants, their sluggish, depressed manners. Back in the car he asked Agor whether this was also the result of the militia. ‘Well, sir,’ said Agor, raising his voice to be heard above the roars of engine and wind, ‘perhaps the way to put it is this: servants don’t like change. We like to know where we stand, sir. This whole terrible business with your uncle, sir, and then the militia shaking everything up and rushing around, it’s a terrible disruption.’

  ‘And that’s why people seem so depressed?’ Stom asked.

  ‘That’s it, largely, sir, yes.’

  They drove on. Round the northern shore of the lake, back down the eastern shore, stopping off when the whim took Polystom. They took a look at the dairy herds, animals half as big again as Enting cows, but creatures whose milk was hopelessly watery and which had to be skimmed and skimmed to produce something drinkable. They drove through orchards of huge trees, on which grew cherries the size of apples, apples the size of melons, pears like gourds, sourberries in clusters like strings of black onions.

  They drove through the hop farms, stopping at one of the breweries, for Stom to take a look at beer-brewing and at hop-wine and hop-whisky distilling. Stom wandered dreamily around this place, sniffing up the rich, sweaty aroma of stewing hops, tapping the fat metal bellies of the great copper stills. In another shed he climbed the ladder and peered over the lip of a beer tub, bigger than a swimming pool, where the sweet-salty smell and the foaming bubbling surface of the great lake of brewing beer seemed almost to hypnotise him. He stayed up there for many minutes. ‘Like looking into the crater of an active volcano,’ he said to the underbutler in charge of the distillery as he came down. ‘A beer volcano. Think of that!’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the underbutler blandly.

  But they had used up most of the day by now, and Stom, bored, told Agor to drive him home. He l
eant back in his seat, and watched the scenery whip past: hops growing in their chesslike grids on the left, the placid waters of the lake on his right. He was asleep when Agor pulled in at Cleonicles’ house. He woke to Agor’s tapping him on his shoulder with a start, stumbled into the house half-awake, and fell asleep again on a chaise-riche downstairs.

  There were a great many military people coming and going. General Demus himself came back to the moon from Kaspian. ‘What a pleasure, General,’ said Polystom. ‘An unexpected pleasure.’

  ‘I need, personally, to supervise a search through your uncle’s papers. I’m sure you understand, my dear Polystom,’ said the General, as his batman, crouched at his side, tidied up the gold-braid stitching on the rim of his jacket with a short needle. ‘There are a number of things we hope to uncover. Your uncle was involved in a number of confidential military projects. Intelligence for this, new weaponry for that, and always, naturally, the Computational Device.’

  ‘I must say I didn’t know anything about this,’ said Polystom. This little conversation was happening in the early afternoon, and Stom had drunk a fair amount at lunch. ‘Uncle never mentioned anything to me about it.’

  ‘Oh, he wouldn’t,’ said the General, slapping away the batman with the back of his hand. ‘He wouldn’t. He respected confidentiality. A trustworthy man, your uncle.’