Polystom

by Adam Roberts

  ‘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.

  This dream was one he had had before. He seemed to become a world himself; to swell and circumbobulate into the weighty, iron-souled globe of a planet. And he was spinning, whirling through the sky, tethered by an invisible rope to the sun. And as he orbited, he became aware, as if this notional tether were an actual umbilicus, of the warmth and life that flowed out from the sun every moment. Each separate atom of light was nourishment to him. And as he fell in his great orbit, circling and circling, he became aware of all the other items caught in that great swirl of orbiting dance: the other worlds and their moons, the wallowing skywhals, even the microscopic-gritty trillions of atoms of air and other gases, each one a globe in miniature and each one swimming in its own great arc round the sun – more likely, perhaps, to be deflected by collision or other turbulence than larger bodies, but still in motion. The whole gorgeous mess of it all. A comet plunged through the more orderly ring of orbits like a bather diving into a body of water; and the ripples of its passage caressed the side of the Cleonicles-planet with delicious intimacy.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’

  With an almost electric jolt Cleonicles woke up, bucked out of sleep by the voices of excited servants. They were calling to him from outside the house; running up the grass towards the back door, yelling out. ‘Sir! Sir! Come quickly, sir!’

  He sat forward, his mouth gummy, and wiped his eyes free from the bristly flakes of sleep. What was going on? His butler was knocking at the door, a discreet tapping that might have been going on for some time, since it was of itself too low a noise to have penetrated Cleonicles’ doze. ‘What is it?’ he said, hoarsely.

  The butler slipped the door open and stepped inside. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘something has happened. A skywhal, we think, sir. It’s beached itself on your estate.’

  This woke him up. He was out of his chair immediately, stomping out of the study and down the corridor, firing questions at his butler, who, being only a servant, was no use at all with the answers. A mature skywhal? Or the immature one observed before? How long were its fringes – the prongs, along the sides of its body? ‘You’re useless man! You have no powers of observation! Where did it land?’

  At least the fellow knew the answer to this one: ‘In the lake, sir.’

  ‘The lake? It must have made an enormous noise!’

  ‘On the far side, sir. The splash was audible from the house, sir.’

  Outside, Cleonicles stomped along the pier. He climbed into one of the flat-bottomed air-propeller-driven lake boats and tapped the driver on his shoulder with his stick. Away! They buzzed over the water, scattering stork-boars before them. In minutes the carcass of the skywhal was visible, a hump of grey and black on the horizon. Minutes more, and the whole silhouette of the thing, tragic and magnificent, was there before them lying in the shallow water. It was the same youngster that Cleonicles observed earlier in the day, it must be – it must have beached on its very next orbit! Extraordinary, and unprecedented. But why had it happened?

  The boat hummed to a halt alongside the carcass, so close that Cleonicles could reach out and touch the rubbery, scale-dotted skin. Imagine it – beaching in his own lake, on his own moon! It was almost as if the creatures were intelligent enough to know that he, Cleonicles, was the single human who had studied them most thoroughly. As if this young beast had come specifically to see him.

  He was not wearing his waders, but in his excitement he hardly cared, and he hopped cheerily out of the boat, sinking into the lake up to his knees and ruining his Lassé Pedi shoes in the process. But to be able to touch the carcass of a skywhal! He sloshed along its length, tapping at the left-side vertebrae with his stick, counting them. Seven, eight, nine, ten: skywhals’ spines bifurcated just below the brainstem, running in twin lines down the left and right flank, joining up again at the sacrum from which the tail began. There were conflicting theories as to why this was, but Cleonicles himself believed that it speeded nervous reaction that would otherwise be too sluggish for so enormous a beast. Fronds sprouted from every third spine-node. Now, in the unfamiliar gravity,
they drooped like strands of seaweed, but in flight they fanned out left and right, helped the beast steer and sense its surroundings.

  Other servants came wading over to him. Sir! Sir! Voices like birdsong. It’s amazing, sir! Amazing!

  Cleonicles put his walking stick underneath the drooping length of one of the left-spine fronds, and tried to lift it. The fronds looked like filigree through a telescope, but the thing was in fact so heavy he could barely move it. Why had the creature fallen? Was it diseased – or dead, in flight? Or was it a healthy young animal that had, somehow, conceived the desire to die?

  ‘Sir,’ gasped one servant. ‘I watched it come down!’

  ‘It came from the sky there, yes?’ said Cleonicles, pointing back in the direction of the house.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the servant, unsurprised at his master’s knowledge. The master knew all sorts of things. ‘I watched it fall. I saw two of them break off and float to the east.’

  ‘Break off?’ said Cleonicles sharply. ‘What do you mean, break off? Two of them? Fronds?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the servant. ‘I took them to be.’

  ‘Well,’ said the old man, thinking. ‘We can recover them later if they did fall free.’ But what a strange thing! He had never heard of a frond disengaging from the main corpus of the skywhal. Was it some sort of unusual wasting sickness? Was that why the beast had crashed to earth?

  Then, splashing through the sour waters, gleefully counting vertebrae and fronds, Cleonicles went right round the great body before realising that all the fronds were present. ‘No frond came off this corpse,’ he told his servant. ‘So what was it you saw?’

  But servants make poor scientists. Their powers of observation are simply too limited. The man stuttered and grew blotchy-red in his embarrassment, and Cleonicles dismissed him. His butler was approaching on a second boat whose engine noise grew from hum to buzz to grainy roar. It swung to, coming to rest alongside the carcass just behind Cleonicles’ own boat, and its wake slopped water further up his blair-trou clad legs.

  Cleonicles was looking into the creature’s enormous mouth now: as large as an open barn, with the deeply ridged and liverish mucus membrane of the inner mouth folded into two channels that led air through to the gill-grilles. The interference-pattern shading of these grilles was just visible to the light of Cleonicles’ electric torch.

  ‘Sir!’ said the butler, excitedly, coming over. ‘It’s astonishing, sir!’

  ‘Isn’t it, though?’ agreed Cleonicles.

  ‘It’s so big!’

  ‘Small for its kind, though. A young one. Mature sky-whals are three, four, even six times as big as this.’

  ‘It’s rare, sir, isn’t it? For one of these beasts to come down to the ground?’

  ‘Very rare. Rare even amongst elderly skywhals. I believe it absolutely unprecedented among ones this young.’

  ‘So why did it happen?’

  ‘You are asking a good question. There are signs of predation on the far side – wounds above the right-spine fronds, some half-healed. They’re fairly extensive.’ Cleonicles sloshed round the mini-island of dead flesh, his butler in tow. ‘There,’ said Cleonicles, pointing with his stick. ‘You see?’ Six great gashes were visible, reaching up over the back of the great carcass from above the saddle of its fronds; two of these showed the grey scaly growth that indicated healing but four were still raw, the violet-red blood glistening within. Each gash was the size of a door, and the flesh inside two of the cuts had been scooped out.

  ‘It is like the marks left by the swoop of a giant claw, sir,’ said the butler. ‘What could cause such great injury?’

  ‘Not the monster you seem to be imagining,’ said Cleonicles, chuckling a little. ‘There are no such beasts as that, not in interplanetary sky nor anywhere else. Indeed, these skywhals have no predators – except for us men, of course. No, no,’ he added, poking the end of his stick into the wound, ‘these strange gashes are extremely unusual. Unusual indeed. Male skywhals sometimes fight,’ he said, more to himself than to his companion, ‘when the mating fever is on them. But that fever comes once in seven years only. And, besides, this fellow is far too young to be a mating buck. Could he have been struck by some debris, up in the sky? A comet, perhaps? But no, no, that makes no sense either – to leave six such stripes in his skin? So regularly spaced? It’s a puzzle, certainly.’

  He returned to his boat, and gave orders for the thing to be dragged over to the shore and there, he said, grandly, embalmed. Although, as he gave the order, he found himself wondering how this enormous feat was to be achieved. He would return to his house and work on the problem; it would take his men a day or more to pull the body over to the shore and then cover it with oilcloth. In that time, he told himself, he would be able to work out some impromptu method of preserving the creature’s flesh. He clambered back into the boat, and tapped the driver again with his cane, forgetting for a moment that it was still gory from the skywhal’s carcass, and leaving therefore a splatch of purple on the man’s uniform jacket. As the boat roared away over the water, and the wind rushed to embrace his body and face like a lover, pulling back his hair and making him crease up his eyes, Cleonicles thought through the alternatives. He could use a large copper pot that was lying empty in an outhouse to brew up some preservative fluid; but the difficulty would be in putting enough of it through the blood-lymph system of the creature. Skywhals lived in a weightless environment; unlike planet-bound fauna they did not have the disadvantage of gravity to impede their circulation. If a man’s heart did not pump his blood throughout his body it would pool, under this gravitational influence, in his legs and feet. But skywhals do not exist under such constraints. Accordingly, their hearts were small to the point of vestigiality, blood moving through their bodies chiefly by means of inertia. This in turn meant that their vascular system was much less clearly defined than many creatures’, and it would therefore be hard to ensure that any preservative permeated the entire system. But, Cleonicles thought to himself, smiling into the wind, he would find a solution to this particular problem. The beauty of science lay in finding solutions to problems.

  [second leaf]

  And so the hours of Cleonicles’ last day used themselves up. He took an elongated lunch hour, chewing bread dipped in brine wine, with strips of chargrilled fish and whole roasted pot-tomatoes, accompanied by a tart little radish wine, all the while reading the latest newsbooks. He was particularly interested in events on the Mudworld, because he had been so closely involved in the circumstances that had led, indirectly, to that world’s situation. Every now and again he would shake his head at the folly of mankind, at the great loss of life.

  After lunch he started a letter to his nephew. My dear Polystom. It was wonderful to see you again, naturally. I hope your nightmares ease themselves. I repeat what I told you; from the vantage point of science nightmares are a natural phenomenon, a way in which the brain purges itself of negative energy. In time they will subside. And I urge you, my dear boy, to consider remarrying. The time has come for it, I sincerely believe.

  Writing to him brought a sharp memory of the boy into Cleonicles’ memory, like a pungent whiff of some odour. His goofy smile, creasing the chin beneath it into a visual echo of the wide split mouth. For some reason (the points of connection in the brain relating to memory, Cleonicles had often thought, have a random quotient to them, so one memory will often trigger a completely unrelated one) – for some reason he remembered now travelling to Stahlstadt with the boy and his father, Cleonicles’ own brother. The three had flown to Kaspian. It had been their second visit, or conceivably their third. He remembered them all standing on a wide esplanade, paved with a complicated tessellation of Kaspian eagles and Enting bears, with a splendid view over the spires of the city. He remembered the weight of sunshine and heat, the sheer pressure of sunshine against his skin in the Stahlstadt summer, the world of Kaspian being that much closer to the sun. And he remembered looking down to see young P
olystom sprawled, face down, like a diver interrupted by the ground. His satchel was beside him, its mouth open as if it had been sick on the pavement: a red notebook, a small drinks flask, a pamphletty book of poetry waving its comb of pages in the air, a clutter of pens, a virgin chequebook, a squashy bar of chocolate. Polystom had tripped over his own feet, in the way that tall and gawky adolescents sometimes do. No permanent harm done. His servant had dropped to the floor, pushed the various ejecta back into the mouth of the satchel, and the boy had picked himself up, red-faced with embarrassment and rage. Cleonicles remembered that sunny afternoon so vividly. How Polystom had beaten the servant boy! His falling over had been no fault of the servant’s, but that wasn’t the point, of course. And to think that this same Polystom was now, fully grown, too squeamish to watch a delinquent servant being hanged by the neck! How curious a thing was human nature. People invented ‘compassion’ to fill all those parts of their lives that weren’t reserved for their own rage, embarrassment, and pride.