by Gene Wolfe
“Beg? Why, no. You’re perfectly correct, sir. It’s absolutely forbidden. But there’s a beggar on every corner—you must know the kinds of things they say, and that’s not what I’m telling you at all. I’m not hungry, and I have no starving children. I don’t want your money for myself, but for a god, for the Outsider. It’s a major error to restrict one’s worship to the Nine, as I—Never mind. The Outsider must have a suitable offering from me before shadedown. It’s absolutely imperative. You’ll be certain to gain his favor by supplying it.”
“I wanted—” the prosperous-looking man began.
Silk raised his hand. “No! The money—three cards at least, at once. I’ve offered you a splendid opportunity to gain his favor. You’ve lost that now, but you may still escape his displeasure, if only you’ll act without further delay. For your own sake, give me three cards immediately!” Silk stepped closer, scrutinizing the prosperous-looking man’s ruddy, perspiring face. “Terrible things may befall you. Horrible things!”
Reaching for the card case at his waist, the prosperous-looking man said, “A respectable citizen shouldn’t even stop his floater in this quarter. I simply—”
“If you own this floater, you can afford three cards easily. And I’ll offer a prayer for you—many prayers that you may eventually attain to…” Silk shivered.
The driver rasped, “Shut your shaggy mouth and let Blood talk, you butcher.” Then to Blood, “You want me to bring him along, Jefe?”
Blood shook his head. He had counted out three cards, and now held them in a fan; half a dozen ragged men stopped to gawk at the gleaming gold. “Three cards you say you want, Patera. Here they are. Enlightenment? Was that what you were going to ask the gods to give me? You augurs are always squeaking about it. Well, I don’t care about that. I want a little information instead. Tell me everything I want to know, and I’ll hand over all three. See ’em? Then you can offer this wonderful sacrifice for yourself if you want to, or do whatever you want with the money. How about it?”
“You don’t know what you’re risking. If you did—”
Blood snorted. “I know that no god’s come to any Window in this city since I was a young man, Patera, no matter how you butchers howl. And that’s all I need to know. There’s a manteion on this street, isn’t there? Where Silver Street meets it at an angle? I’ve never been in that part of this quarter, but I asked, and that’s what I was told.”
Silk nodded. “I’m augur there.”
“The old cull’s dead, then?”
“Patera Pike?” Silk traced the sign of addition in the air. “Yes. Patera Pike has been with the gods for almost a year. Did you know him?”
Ignoring the question, Blood nodded to himself. “Gone to Mainframe, eh? All right, Patera. I’m not a religious man, and I don’t pretend to be. But I promised my—well, I promised a certain person—that I’d go to this manteion of yours and say a few prayers for her. I’m going to make an offering, too, understand? Because I know she’ll ask if I did. That’s besides these cards here. So is there somebody there who’ll let me in?”
Silk nodded again. “Maytera Marble or Maytera Mint would be delighted to, I’m sure. You’ll find them both in the palaestra, on the other side of our ball court.” Silk paused, thinking. “Maytera Mint’s rather shy, though she’s wonderful with the children. Perhaps you’d better ask for Maytera Marble, in the first room to your right. She could leave one of the older girls in charge of her class for an hour or so, I would think.”
Blood closed his fan of cards as if about to hand them over to Silk. “I’m not too crazy about chemical people, Patera. Somebody told me you’ve got a Maytera Rose. Maybe I could get her, or isn’t she there any more?”
“Oh, yes.” Silk hoped his voice did not reflect the dismay he felt whenever he thought of Maytera Rose. “But she’s quite elderly, sir, and we try to spare her poor legs whenever we can. I feel sure that Maytera Marble would prove completely satisfactory.”
“No doubt she will.” Blood counted his cards again, his lips moving, his fat, beringed fingers reluctant to part from each wafer-thin, shining rectangle. “You were going to tell me about enlightenment a minute ago, Patera. You said you’d pray for me.”
“Yes,” Silk confirmed eagerly, “and I meant it. I will.”
Blood laughed. “Don’t bother. But I’m curious, and I’ve never had such a good chance to ask one of you about it before. Isn’t enlightenment really pretty much the same as possession?”
“Not exactly, sir.” Silk gnawed his lower lip. “You know, sir, at the schola they taught us simple, satisfying answers to all of these questions. We had to recite them to pass the examination, and I’m tempted to recite them again for you now. But the actualities—enlightenment, I mean, and possession—aren’t really simple things at all. Or at least enlightenment isn’t. I don’t know a great deal about possession, and some of the most respected hierologists are of the opinion that it exists potentially but not actually.”
“A god’s supposed to pull on a man just like a tunic—that’s what they say. Well, some people can, so why not a god?” Watching Silk’s expression, Blood laughed again. “You don’t believe me, do you, Patera?”
Silk said, “I’ve never heard of such people, sir. I won’t say they don’t exist, since you assert that they do, although it seems impossible.”
“You’re young yet, Patera. If you want to dodge a lot of mistakes, don’t you forget that.” Blood glanced sidelong at his driver. “Get on these putts, Grison. Make them keep their paws off my floater.”
“Enlightenment…” Silk stroked his cheek, remembering.
“That ought to be easy, it seems to me. Don’t you just know a lot of things you didn’t know before?” Blood paused, his eyes upon Silk’s face. “Things that you can’t explain, or aren’t allowed to?”
A patrol of Guardsmen passed, their slug guns slung and their left hands resting on the hilts of their swords. One touched the bill of his jaunty green cap to Blood.
“It’s difficult to explain,” Silk said. “In possession there’s always some teaching, for good or ill. Or at any rate that’s what we’re taught, though I don’t believe—In enlightenment, there’s much more. As much as the theodidact can bear, I would say.”
“It happened to you,” Blood said softly. “Lots of you say it did, but from you it’s lily. You were enlightened, or you think you were. You think it’s real.”
Silk took a step backward, bumping against one of the onlookers. “I didn’t call myself enlightened, sir.”
“You didn’t have to. I’ve been listening to you. Now you listen to me. I’m not giving you these cards, not for your holy sacrifice or for anything else. I’m paying you to answer my questions, and this is the last one. I want you to tell me—right now—what enlightenment is, when you got it, and why you got it. Here they are.” He held them up again. “Tell me, Patera, and they’re yours.”
Silk considered, then plucked them from Blood’s hand. “As you say. Enlightenment means understanding everything as the god who gives it understands it. Who you are and who everyone else is, really. Everything you used to think you understood, you see with complete clarity in that instant, and know that you didn’t really understand it at all.”
The onlookers murmured, each to his neighbor. Several pointed toward Silk. One waved over the drawer of a passing handcart.
“Only for an instant,” Blood said.
“Yes, only for an instant. But the memory remains, so that you know that you knew.” The three cards were still in Silk’s hand; suddenly afraid that they would be snatched away by one of the ragged throng around him, he slipped them into his pocket.
“And when did this happen to you? Last week? Last year?”
Silk shook his head, glancing up at the sun. The thin black line of the shade touched it as he watched. “Today. Not an hour ago. A ball—I was playing a game with the boys …
Blood waved the game away.
“And it happened.
Everything seemed to stand still. I really can’t say whether it was for an instant, or a day, or a year, or any other period of time—and I seriously doubt that any such period could be correct. Perhaps that’s why we call him the Outsider: because he stands outside of time, all the time.”
“Uh-huh.” Blood favored Silk with a grudging smile. “I’m sure it’s all smoke. Just some sort of daydream. But I’ve got to admit it’s interesting smoke, the way you tell it. I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”
“It’s not exactly what they teach you in the schola,” Silk conceded, “but I feel in my heart that it’s the truth.” He hesitated. “By which I mean that it’s what I was shown by him—or rather, that it’s one of an endless panorama of things. Somehow he’s outside our whorl in every way, and inside it with us at the same time. The other gods are only inside, I think, however great they may appear inside.”
Blood shrugged, his eyes wandering toward the ragged listeners. “Well, they believe you, anyhow. But as long as we’re in here too, it doesn’t make a bad bit’s difference to us, does it, Patera?”
“Perhaps it does, or may in the future. I don’t know, really. I haven’t even begun to think about that yet.” Silk glanced up again; the sun’s golden road across the sky was markedly narrower already. “Perhaps it will make all the difference in the whorl,” he said. “I think it will.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You’ll have to wait and see, my son—and so shall I.” Silk shivered, as he had before. “You wanted to know why I received this blessing, didn’t you? That was your last question: why something as tremendous as this should happen to someone as insignificant as I am. Wasn’t that it?”
“Yes, if this god of yours will let you tell anybody.”
Blood grinned, showing crooked, discolored teeth; and Silk, suddenly and without in the least willing it, saw more vividly than he had ever seen the man before him the hungry, frightened, scheming youth who had been Blood a generation before.
“And if you don’t gibbe yourself, Patera.”
“Gibbe?”
“If you’ve got no objections. Don’t feel like you’re stepping over his line.”
“I see.” Silk cleared his throat. “I’ve no objection, but no very satisfactory answer for you, either. That’s why I snatched my three cards from your hand, and it’s why I need them, too—or a part of it. It may be only that he has a task for me. He does, I know, and I hope that that’s all it is. Or, as I’ve thought since, perhaps it’s because he means to destroy me, and felt he owed this to me before he struck. I don’t know.”
Blood dropped to his seat in the passenger compartment, mopping his face and neck with his scented handkerchief, as he had before. “Thanks, Patera. We’re quits. You’re going to the market?”
“Yes, to buy him a fine victim with these cards you’ve given me.”
“Paid you. I’ll have left your manteion before you get back, Patera. Or anyhow I hope I will.” Blood dropped into the floater’s velvet seat. “Get the canopy up, Grison.”
Silk called, “Wait!”
Blood stood again, surprised. “What is it, Patera? No hard feelings, I hope.”
“I lied to you, my son—misled you at least, although I didn’t intend to. He—the Outsider—told me why, and I remembered it a few minutes ago when I was talking with a boy named Horn, a student at our palaestra.” Silk stepped closer, until he was peering at Blood over the edge of the half-raised canopy. “It was because of the augur who had our manteion when I came, Patera Pike. A very good and very holy man.”
“He’s dead, you said.”
“Yes. Yes, he is. But before he died, he prayed—prayed to the Outsider, for some reason. And he was heard. His prayer was granted. All this was explained to me, and now I owe it to you, because it was part of our bargain.”
“Then I may as well have it explained to me, too. But make it as quick as you can.”
“He prayed for help.” Silk ran his fingers through his careless thatch of straw-colored hair. “When we—when you pray for his help, to the Outsider, he sends it.”
“Nice of him.”
“But not always—no, not often—of the sort we want or expect. Patera Pike, that good old man, prayed devoutly. And I’m the help—”
“Let’s go, Grison.”
The blowers roared back to life. Blood’s black floater heaved uneasily, rising stern first and rocking alarmingly.
“—the Outsider sent to him, to save the manteion and its palaestra,” Silk concluded. He stepped back, coughing in the billowing dust. Half to himself and half to the shabby crowd kneeling around him, he added. “I am to expect no help from him. I am help.”
If any of them understood, it was not apparent. Still coughing, he traced the sign of addition and muttered a brief formula of blessing, begun with the Most Sacred Name of Pas, Father of the Gods, and concluded with that of his eldest child, Scylla, Patroness of this, Our Holy City of Viron.
* * *
As he neared the market, Silk reflected on his chance encounter with the prosperous-looking man in the floater. Blood, his driver had called him. Three cards was far, far too much to pay for answers to a few simple questions, and in any case one did not pay augurs for their answers; one made a donation, perhaps, if one was particularly grateful. Three full cards, but were they still there?
He thrust a hand into his pocket; the smooth, elastic surface of the ball met his fingers. He pulled it out, and one of the cards came with it, flashing in the sunlight as it fell at his feet.
As swiftly as he had snatched the ball from Horn, he scooped it up. This was a bad quarter, he reminded himself, though there were so many good people in it. Without law, even good people stole: their own property vanished, and their only recourse was to steal in turn from someone else. What would his mother have thought, if she had lived to learn where the Chapter had assigned him? She had died during his final year at the schola, still believing that he would be sent to one of the rich manteions on the Palatine and someday become Prolocutor.
“You’re so good-looking,” she had said, raising herself upon her toes to smooth his rebellious hair. “So tall! Oh, Silk, my son! My dear, dear son!”
(And he had stooped to let her kiss him.)
My son was what he had been taught to call laymen, even those three times his own age, unless they were very highly placed indeed; then there was generally some title that could be gracefully employed instead, Colonel or Commissioner, or even Councillor, although he had never met any of the three and in this quarter never would—though here was a poster with the handsome features of Councillor Loris, the secretary of the Ayuntamiento: features somewhat scarred now by the knife of some vandal, who had slashed his poster once and stabbed it several times. Silk felt suddenly glad that he was in the Chapter and not in politics, though politics had been his mother’s first choice for him. No one would slash or stab the pictured face of His Cognizance the Prolocutor, surely.
He tossed the ball into his right hand and thrust his left into his pocket. The cards were still there: one, two, three. Many men in this quarter who worked from shadeup to dark—carrying bricks or stacking boxes, slaughtering, hauling like oxen or trotting beneath the weighty litters of the rich, sweeping and mopping—would be fortunate to make three cards a year. His mother had received six, enough for a woman and a child to live decently, from some fund at the fisc that she had never explained, a fund that had vanished with her life. She would be unhappy now to see him in this quarter, walking its streets as poor as many of its people. She had never been a happy woman in any case, her large dark eyes so often bright with tears from sources more mysterious than the fisc, her tiny body shaken with sobs that he could do nothing to alleviate.
(“Oh, Silk! My poor boy! My son!”)
He had at first called Blood sir, and afterward, my son, himself scarcely conscious of the change. But why? Sir because Blood had been riding in a floater, of course; only the richest of men c
ould afford to own floaters. My son afterward. “The old cull’s dead, then?… It doesn’t make a bad bit’s difference to us, does it, Patera?… Nice of him.” Blood’s choice of word and phrase, and his almost open contempt for the gods, had not accorded with the floater; he had spoken better—far better—than most people in this quarter; but not at all like the privileged, well-bred man whom Silk would have expected to find riding in a private floater.
He shrugged, and extracted the three cards from his pocket.
There was always a good chance that a card (still more, a cardbit) would be false. There was even a chance, as Silk admitted to himself, that the prosperous-looking man in the floater—that this odd man Blood—kept false cards in a special location in his card case. Nevertheless all three of these appeared completely genuine, sharp-edged rectangles two thumbs by three, their complex labyrinths of gold encysted in some remarkable substance that was almost indestructible, yet nearly invisible. It was said that when two of the intricate golden patterns were exactly alike, one at least was false. Silk paused to compare them, then shook his head and hurried off again in the direction of the market. If these cards were good enough to fool the sellers of animals, that was all that mattered, though he would be a thief. A prayer, in that case, to Tenebrous Tartaros, Pas’s elder son, the terrifying god of night and thieves.
* * *
Maytera Marble sat watching, at the back of her class. There had been a time, long ago, when she would have stood, just as there had been a time when her students had labored over keyboards instead of slates. Today, now—in whatever year this might be … Might be …
Her chronological function could not be called; she tried to remember when it had happened before.
Maytera Marble could call a list of her nonfunctioning or defective components whenever she chose, though it had been five years or fifty since she had so chosen. What was the use? Why should she—why ever should anyone—make herself more miserable than the gods had chosen to make her? Weren’t the gods cruel enough, deaf to her prayers through so many years, so many decades and days and languid, half-stopped hours? Pas, Great Pas, was god of mechanisms, as of so much else. Perhaps he was too busy to notice.
