I chuckled softly as I finished dressing. How long had I lived in this place? Forty-five years of memory—but how much of it counterfeit?
The hall mirror showed me a middle-aged man, slightly obese, hair thinning, wearing a red sport shirt and black slacks.
The music was growing louder, the music only I could hear: guitars, and the steady thump of a leather drum.
My different drummer, aye! Mate me with an angel and you still do not make me a saint, my comrades!
I made myself young and strong again.
Then I descended the stair to the living room, moved to the bar, poured out a glass of wine, sipped it until the music reached its fullest intensity, then gulped the remainder and dashed the glass to the floor. I was free!
I turned to go, and there was a sound overhead.
Stella had awakened.
The telephone rang. It hung there on the wall and rang and rang until I could stand it no longer.
I raised the receiver.
“You have done it again,” said that old, familiar voice.
“Do not go hard with the woman,” said I. “She could not watch me always.”
“It will be better if you stay right where you are,” said the voice. “It will save us both much trouble.”
“Good night,” I said, and hung up.
The receiver snapped itself around my wrist and the cord became a chain fastened to a ring-bolt in the wall. How childish of them!
I heard Stella dressing upstairs. I moved eighteen steps sidewise from There, to the place where my scaled limb slid easily from out the vines looped about it.
Then, back again to the living room and out the front door. I needed a mount.
I backed the convertible out of the garage. It was the faster of the two cars. Then out onto the nighted highway, and then a sound of thunder overhead.
It was a Piper Cub, sweeping in low, out of control. I slammed on the brakes and it came on, shearing treetops and snapping telephone lines, to crash in the middle of the street half a block ahead of me. I took a sharp left turn into an alley, and then onto the next street paralleling my own.
If they wanted to play it that way, well—I am not exactly without resources along those lines myself. I was pleased that they had done it first, though.
I headed out into the country, to where I could build up a head of steam.
Lights appeared in my rearview mirror.
Them?
Too soon.
It was either just another car headed this way, or it was Stella.
Prudence, as the Greek Chorus says, is better than imprudence.
I shifted, not gears.
I was whipping along in a lower, more powerful car.
Again, I shifted.
I was driving from the wrong side of the vehicle and headed up the wrong side of the highway.
Again.
No wheels. My car sped forward on a cushion of air, above a beaten and dilapidated highway. All the buildings I passed were of metal. No wood or stone or brick had gone into the construction of anything I saw.
On the long curve behind me, a pair of headlights appeared.
I killed my own lights and shifted, again and again, and again.
I shot through the air, high above a great swampland, stringing sonic booms like beads along the thread of my trail. Then another shift, and I shot low over the steaming land where great reptiles raised their heads like beanstalks from out their wallows. The sun stood high in this world, like an acetylene torch in the heavens. I held the struggling vehicle together by an act of will and waited for pursuit. There was none.
I shifted again…
There was a black forest reaching almost to the foot of the high hill upon which the ancient castle stood. I was mounted on a hippogriff, flying, and garbed in the manner of a warrior-mage. I steered my mount to a landing within the forest.
“Become a horse,” I ordered, giving the proper guide-word.
Then I was mounted upon a black stallion, trotting along the trail which twisted through the dark forest.
Should I remain here and fight them with magic, or move on and meet them in a world where science prevailed?
Or should I beat a circuitous route from here to some distant Other, hoping to elude them completely?
My questions answered themselves.
There came a clatter of hoofs at my back, and a knight appeared: he was mounted upon a tall, proud steed; he wore burnished armor; upon his shield was set a cross of red.
“You have come far enough,” he said. “Draw rein!”
The blade he bore upraised was a wicked and gleaming weapon, until I transformed it into a serpent. He dropped it then, and it slithered off into the underbrush.
“You were saying…?”
“Why don’t you give up?” he asked. “Join us, or quit trying?”
“Why don’t you give up? Quit them and join with me? We could change many times and places together. You have the ability, and the training… “
By then he was close enough to lunge, in an attempt to unhorse me with the edge of his shield.
I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.
“Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!” he gasped.
“All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you speak, not the final results.”
“Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?”
“Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly,” I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. “All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do.”
I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.
I remounted and rode on.
After a time, there came again the sound of hoofs at my back.
I spoke another word, which mounted me upon a sleek unicorn, to move at a blinding speed through the dark wood. The pursuit continued, however.
Finally, I came upon a small clearing, a cairn piled high in its center. I recognized it as a place of power, so I dismounted and freed the unicorn, which promptly vanished.
I climbed the cairn and sat at its top. I lit a cigar and waited. I had not expected to be located so soon, and it irritated me. I would confront this pursuer here.
A sleek gray mare entered the clearing.
“Stella!”
“Get down from there!” she cried. “They are preparing to unleash an assault any moment now!”
“Amen,” I said. “I am ready for it.”
“They outnumber you! They always have! You will lose to them again, and again and again, so long as you persist in fighting. Come down and come away with me. It may not be too late!”
“Me, retire?” I asked. “I’m an institution. They would soon be out of crusades without me. Think of the boredom—”
A bolt of lightning dropped from the sky, but it veered away from my cairn and fried a nearby tree.
“They’ve started!”
“Then get out of here, girl. This isn’t your fight.”
“You’re mine!”
“I’m my own! Nobody else’s! Don’t forget it!”
“I love you!”
“You betrayed me!”
“No. You say that you love humanity… “
“I do.”
“I don’t believe you! You couldn’t, after all you’ve done to it!”
I raised my hand. “I banish thee from this Now and Here,” I said, and I was alone again.
More lightnings descended, charring the ground about me.
I shook my fist.
“Don’t you ever give up? Give me a century of peace to work with them, and I’ll show you a world that you don’t believe could exis
t!” I cried.
In answer, the ground began to tremble.
I fought them. I hurled their lightnings back in their faces. When the winds arose, I bent them inside-out. But the earth continued to shake, and cracks appeared at the foot of the cairn.
“Show yourselves!” I cried. “Come at me one at a time, and I’ll teach you of the power I wield!”
But the ground opened up and the cairn came apart.
I fell into darkness.
I was running. I had shifted three times, and I was a furred creature now with a pack howling at my heels, eyes like fiery headlights, fangs like swords.
I was slithering among the dark roots of the banyan, and the long-billed criers were probing after my scaly body…
I was darting on the wings of a hummingbird and I heard the cry of a hawk…
I was swimming through blackness and there came a tentacle…
I broadcast away, peaking and troughing at a high frequency.
I met with static.
I was failing and they were all around me.
I was taken, as a fish is taken in a net. I was snared, bound…
I heard her weeping somewhere.
“Why do you try, again and ever again?” she asked. “Why can you not be content with me, with a life of peace and leisure? Do you not remember what they have done to you in the past? Were not your days with me infinitely better?”
“No!” I cried.
“I love you,” she said.
“Such love is an imaginary number,” I told her, and I was raised from where I lay and borne away.
She followed behind, weeping.
“I pleaded with them to give you a chance at peace, but you threw that gift in my face.”
“The peace of the eunuch; the peace of lobotomy, lotus and Thorazine,” I said. “No, better they work their wills upon me and let their truth give forth its lie as they do.”
“Can you really say that and mean it?” she asked. “Have you already forgotten the sun of the Caucasus—the vulture tearing at your side, day after hot red day?”
“I do not forget,” I said, “but I curse them. I will oppose them until the ends of When and Wherever, and someday I shall win.”
“I love you,” she said.
“How can you say that and mean it?”
“Fool!” came a chorus of voices, as I was laid upon this rock in this cavern and chained.
All day long a bound serpent spits venom into my face, and she holds a pan to catch it. It is only when the woman who betrayed me must empty that pan that it spits into my eyes and I scream.
But I will come free again, to aid long-suffering mankind with my many gifts, and there will be a trembling on high that day I end my bondage. Until then, I can only watch the delicate, unbearable bars of her fingers across the bottom of that pan, and scream each time she takes them away.
THE MAN WHO LOVED THE FAIOLI
It is the story of John Auden and the Faioli, and no one knows it better than I. Listen—It happened on that evening, as he strolled (for there was no reason not to stroll) in his favorite places in the whole world, that he saw the Faioli near the Canyon of the Dead, seated on a rock, her wings of light flickering, flickering, flickering and then gone, until it appeared that a human girl was sitting there, dressed all in white and weeping, with long black tresses coiled about her waist.
He approached her through the terrible light from the dying, half-dead sun, in which human eyes could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly (though his could), and he lay his right hand upon her shoulder and spoke a word of greeting and of comfort.
It was as if he did not exist, however. She continued to weep, streaking with silver her cheeks the color of snow or a bone. Her almond eyes looked forward as though they saw through him, and her long fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms, though no blood was drawn.
Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it—with desire and with grace, for such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.
John Auden considered his life and his death, the conditions of the world upon which he stood, the nature of his stewardship and his curse and the Faioli—who was the loveliest creature he had seen in all of his four hundred thousand days of existence—and he touched the place beneath his left armpit which activated the necessary mechanism to make him live again.
The creature stiffened beneath his touch, for suddenly it was flesh, his touch, and flesh, warm and woman-filled, that he was touching, now that the sensations of life had returned to him. He knew that his touch had become the touch of a man once more.
“I said ‘hello, and don’t cry,’ ” he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees that he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus, “From where do you come, man? You were not here a moment ago.”
“From the Canyon of the Dead,” he said.
“Let me touch your face,” and he did, and she did.
“It is strange that I did not feel you approach.”
“This is a strange world,” he replied.
“That is true,” she said. “You are the only living thing upon it.”
And he said, “What is your name?”
She said, “Call me Sythia,” and he did.
“My name is John,” he told her, “John Auden.”
“I have come to be with you, to give you comfort and pleasure,” she said, and he knew that the ritual was beginning.
“Why were you weeping when I found you?” he asked.
“Because I thought there was nothing upon this world, and I was so tired from my travels,” she told him. “Do you live near here?”
“Not far away,” he answered. “Not far away at all.”
“Will you take me there? To the place where you live?”
“Yes.”
And she rose and followed him into the Canyon of the Dead, where he made his home.
They descended and they descended, and all about them were the remains of people who once had lived. She did not seem to see these things, however, but kept her eyes fixed upon John’s face and her hand upon his arm.
“Why do you call this place the Canyon of the Dead?” she asked him.
“Because they are all about us here, the dead,” he replied.
“I feel nothing.”
“I know.”
They crossed through the Valley of the Bones, where millions of the dead from many races and worlds lay stacked all about them, and she did not see these things. She had come to the graveyard of all the worlds, but she did not realize this thing. She had encountered its tender, its keeper, and she did not know what he was, he who staggered beside her like a man drunken.
John Auden took her to his home—not really the place where he lived, but it would be now—and there he activated ancient circuits within the building within the mountain, and in response light leaped forth from the walls, light he had never needed before but now required.
The door slid shut behind them and the temperature built up to a normal warmth. Fresh air circulated and he took it into his lungs and expelled it, glorying in the forgotten sensation. His heart beat within his breast, a red warm thing that reminded him of the pain and of the pleasure. For the first time in ages, he prepared a meal and fetched a bottle of wine from one of th
e deep, sealed lockers. How many others could have borne what he had borne?
None, perhaps.
She dined with him, toying with the food, sampling a bit of everything, eating very little. He, on the other hand, glutted himself fantastically, and they drank of the wine and were happy.
“This place is so strange,” she said. “Where do you sleep?”
“I used to sleep in there,” he told her, indicating a room he had almost forgotten; and they entered and he showed it to her, and she beckoned him toward the bed and the pleasures of her body.
That night he loved her, many times, with a desperation that burnt away the alcohol and pushed all of his life forward with something like a hunger, but more.
The following day, when the dying sun had splashed the Valley of the Bones with its pale, moonlike light, he awakened and she drew his head to her breast, not having slept herself, and she asked him, “What is the thing that moves you, John Auden? You are not like one of the men who live and who die, but you take life almost like one of the Faioli, squeezing from it everything that you can and pacing it at a tempo that bespeaks a sense of time no man should know. What are you?”
“I am one who knows,” he said. “I am one who knows that the days of a man are numbered and one who covets their dispositions as he feels them draw to a close.”
“You are strange,” said Sythia. “Have I pleased you?”
“More than anything else I have ever known,” he said.
And she sighed, and he found her lips once again.
They breakfasted, and that day they walked in the Valley of the Bones. He could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly, and she could not see anything that had been living and now was dead. So, of course, as they sat there on a shelf of stone, his arm about her shoulders, he pointed out to her the rocket which had just come down from out of the sky, and she squinted after his gesture. He indicated the robots, which had begun unloading the remains of the dead of many worlds from the hold of the ship, and she cocked her head to one side and stared ahead, but she did not really see what he was talking about.
Even when one of the robots lumbered up to him and held out the board containing the receipt and the stylus, and as he signed the receipt for the bodies received, she did not see or understand what it was that was occurring.
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth Page 24
