"But he has abandoned his plans for us. He told us as much, Amelia."
"In one respect."
Mildly the Orchid interjected. "I think you suspect Jagged of too much cunning, Amelia. After all, he is much involved with a somewhat larger scheme. Why should he behave as you suggest?"
"It is the only question for which I have no ready answer." Amelia raised fingers to her forehead.
A knock at the front door. Jherek sprang to answer, glad of respite, but it was his father, all in voluminous lemon, his features composed and amused. "Good morning to you, my boy."
Lord Jagged of Canaria stepped into the sitting room and seemed to fill it. He bowed to them all and was stared at.
"Do I interrupt? I came to tell you, sir," addressing the time-traveller, "that the quartz has hardened satisfactorily. You can leave in the morning, as you planned."
"With Harold and Inspector Springer and the rest!" almost shouted Amelia.
"Ah, you know."
"We know everything —" her colour was high, her eyes fiery — "save why you arranged this!"
"The time-traveller was good enough to say that he would transport the gentlemen back to their own period. It is their last chance to leave. No other will arise."
"You made sure, Lord Jagged, that they should wish to leave. This ridiculous vision!"
"I fear that I do not follow your reasoning, beautiful Amelia." Lord Jagged looked questioningly at Jherek.
Amelia sank to the sofa, teeth in knuckles.
"It seems to us," Jherek loyally told his father, "that you had something to do with Harold Underwood's recent vision in which God appeared to him in a burning sphere and ordered him to return to 1896 with a mission to warn his world of terrors to come."
"A vision, eh?" Jagged smiled. "But he will be considered mad if he tries to do that. Are they all so affected?"
"All!" mumbled Amelia viciously from behind her fist.
"They will not be believed, of course." Jagged seemed to muse, as if all this news were new.
"Of course!" Amelia removed her knuckles from her mouth. "And thus they will be unable to affect the future. Or, if they are caught by the Morphail Effect, it will be too late for them to return here. This world will be closed to them. You have staged everything perfectly, Lord Jagged."
"Why should I stage such scenes?"
"Could it be to ensure that I stay with Jherek?"
"But you are with him, my dear." Innocent surprise.
"You know what I mean, I think, Lord Jagged."
"Are you concerned for your husband's safety if he returns?"
"I think his life will scarcely change at all. The same might not be said for poor Inspector Springer and his men, but even then, considering what has already happened to them. I have no particular fears. Quite likely it is the best that could happen. But I object to your part in arranging matters so — so suitably."
"You do me too much credit, Amelia."
"I think not."
"However, if you think it would be best to keep Harold Underwood and the policemen in the city, I am sure that the time-traveller can be dissuaded…"
"You know it is too late. Harold and the others want nothing more than to return."
"Then why are you so upset?"
Jherek interposed. "Ambiguous parent, if you are the author of all this — if you have played God as Amelia suggests — then be frank with us."
"You are my family. You are all my confidants. Frankness is not, admittedly, my forte. I am not prone to making claims or to denying accusations. It is not in my nature, I fear. It is an old time-travelling habit, too. If Harold Underwood experienced a vision in the city and it was not a hallucination — and you'll all admit the city is riddled with them, they run wild there — then who is to argue that he has not seen God?"
"Oh, this is the rankest blasphemy!"
"Not quite that, surely," murmured the time-traveller. "Lord Jagged has a perfectly valid point."
"It was you, sir, who first accused him of playing at God!"
"Ah. I was upset. Lord Jagged has been of considerable help to me, of late…"
"So you have said."
As the voices rose, only the Iron Orchid remained where she had been sitting, watching the proceedings with a degree of quiet amusement.
"Jagged," said his son desperately, "do you categorically deny —"
"I have told you, my boy, I am incapable of it. I think it is a kind of pride." The lord in yellow shrugged. "We are all human."
"You would be more, sir, it seems!" accused Amelia.
"Come now, dear lady. You are over-excited. Surely the matter is not worth…" The time-traveller waved his hands helplessly.
"My coming seems to have created some sort of tension," said Lord Jagged. "I only stopped by in order to pick up my wife and the time-traveller, to see how you were settling down, Amelia…"
"I shall settle down, sir — if I do — in my own way and in my own time, without help from you!"
"Amelia," Jherek implored, "there is no need for this!"
"You will calm me, will you!" Her eyes were blazing on them all. All stepped back. "Will you?"
Lord Jagged of Canaria began to glide towards the door, followed by his wife and his guest.
"Machiavelli!" she cried after him. "Meddler! Oh, monstrous, dandified Prince of Darkness!"
He had reached the door and he looked back, his eyes serious for a fraction of a moment. "You honour me too much, madam. I seek only to correct an imbalance where one exists."
"You'll admit your part in this?"
Already his shoulder had turned and the collar hid his face. He was outside, floating to where his great swan awaited him. She watched from the window. She was breathing heavily, was reluctant, even, to let Jherek take her hand.
He tried to excuse his father. "It is Jagged's way. He means only good…"
"He can judge?"
"I think you have hurt his feelings, Amelia."
"I hurt his? Oho!" She removed the hand from his grasp and folded both under her heaving breast. "He makes fools of all!"
"Why should he wish to? Why should he, as you say, play God?"
She watched the swan as it disappeared in the pale blue sky. "Perhaps he does not know, himself," she said softly.
"Harold can be stopped. Jagged said so."
She shook her head and moved back into the room. Automatically, she began to gather up the cups and place them on the tray. "He will be happier in 1896, without question. Now, at any rate. The damage is done. And he has a mission. He has a duty to perform, as he sees it. I envy him."
He followed her reasoning. "We shall go to seek for seeds today. As we planned. Some flowers."
She shrugged. "Harold believes he saves the world. Jagged believes the same. I fear that growing flowers will not satisfy my impulses. I cannot live, Jherek, unless I feel my life is useful."
"I love you," was all he could answer.
"But you do not need me, my dear." She put down the tray and came to him. He embraced her.
"Need?" he said. "In what respect?"
"It is the woman that I am. I tried to change, but with poor success. I merely disguised myself and you saw through that disguise at once. Harold needed me. My world needed me. I did a great deal of charitable work, you know. Missionary work, of sorts, too. I was not inactive in Bromley, Jherek."
"I am sure that you were not, Amelia, dearest…"
"Unless I have something more important than myself to justify —"
"There is nothing more important than yourself, Amelia."
"Oh, I understand the philosophy which states that, Jherek —"
"I was not speaking philosophically, Amelia. I was stating fact. You are all that is important in my life."
"You are very kind."
"Kind? It is the truth!"
"I feel the same for you, as you know, my dear. I did not love Harold. I can see that I did not. But he had certain weaknesses which could be balanced by
my strengths. Something in me was satisfied that is satisfied no longer. In your own way, in your very confidence, your innocence, you are strong…"
"You have — what is it? — character? — which I lack."
"You are free. You have a conception of freedom so great that I can barely begin to sense it. You have been brought up to believe that nothing is impossible, and your experience proves it. I was brought up to believe that almost everything was impossible, that life must be suffered, not enjoyed."
"But if I have freedom, Amelia, you have conscience. I give you my freedom. In exchange, you give me your conscience." He spoke soberly. "Is that not so?"
She looked up into his face. "Perhaps, my dear."
"It is what I originally sought in you, you'll recall."
She smiled. "True."
"In combination, then, we give something to the world."
"Possibly." She returned to her tea-cups, lifting the tray. He sprang to open the door. "But does this world want what, together, we can give it?"
"It might need us more than it knows."
She darted him an intelligent look as he followed her into the kitchen. "Sometimes, Jherek Carnelian, I come close to suspecting that you have inherited your father's cunning."
"I do not understand you."
"You are capable of concocting the most convincing of arguments, on occasion. Do you deliberately seek to mollify me?"
"I stated only what was in my mind."
She put on a pinafore. She was thoughtful as she washed the tea-cups, handing them to him as each one was cleaned. Unsure what to do with them, he made them weightless so that they drifted up to the ceiling and bobbed against it.
"No," she said at last, "this world does not need me. Why should it?"
"To give it texture."
"You speak only in artistic terms."
"I know no others. Texture is important. Without it a surface quickly loses interest."
"You see morality only as texture?" She looked about for the cups, noted them on the ceiling, sighed, removed her pinafore.
"The texture of a painting is its meaning."
"Not the subject?"
"I think not. Morality gives meaning to life. Shape at any rate."
"Texture is not shape."
"Without texture the shape is barren."
"You lose me. I am not used to arguing in such terms."
"I am scarcely used to arguing at all, Amelia!"
They returned to the sitting room, but she would advance into the garden. He went with her. Many flowers sweetened the air. She had recently added insects, a variety of birds to sing in the trees and hedges. It was warm; the sun relaxed them both. They went hand-in-hand along a path between rose trellises, much as they had wandered once in their earliest days together. He recalled how she had been snatched from him, as he had been about to kiss her. A hint of foreboding was pushed from his mind. "What if these hedges were bare," he said, "if there was no smell to the roses, no colour to the insects, they would be unsatisfying, eh?"
"They would be unfinished. Yet there is a modern school of painting — was such a school, in my time — that made a virtue of it. Whistlerites, I believe they were called. I am not too certain."
"Perhaps the leaving out was meant to tell us something too, Amelia? What was important was what was absent."
"I don't think these painters said anything to that effect, Jherek. I believe they claimed to paint only what the eye saw. Oh, a neurotic theory of art, I am sure…"
"There! Would you deny this world your common sense? Would you let it be neurotic?"
"I thought it so, when first I came. Now I realize that what is neurotic in sophisticated society can be absolutely wholesome in a primitive one. And in many respects, I must say, your society shares much in common with some of those our travellers experienced when first landing upon South Sea islands. To be sinful, one must have a sense of sin. That is my burden, Jherek, and not yours. Yet, it seems, you ask me to place that burden on you, too. You see, I am not entirely selfish. I do you little good."
"You give meaning to my life. It would have none without you." They stood by a fountain, watching her goldfish swimming. There were even insects upon the surface of the water, to feed them.
She chuckled. "You can argue splendidly, when you wish, but you shall not change my feelings so quickly. I have already tried to change them myself for you. I failed. I must think carefully about my intentions."
"You consider me bold, for declaring myself while your husband is still in our world?"
"I had not quite considered it in those terms." She frowned. She drew away from him, moving around the pool, her dress dappled with bright spots of water from the fountain. "I believe you to be serious, I suppose. As serious as it is possible for you to be."
"Ah, you find me superficial." He was saddened.
"Not that. Not now."
"Then —?"
"I remain confused, Jherek."
They stood on opposite sides of the pool, regarding each other through the veil of falling silvery water. Her beauty, her auburn hair, her grey eyes, her firm mouth, all seemed more desirable than ever.
"I wish only to honour you," he said, lowering his eyes.
"You do so, already, my dear."
"I am committed to you. Only to you. If you wished, we could try to return to 1896…"
"You would be miserable there."
"Not if we were together, Amelia."
"You do not know my world, Jherek. It is capable of distorting the noblest intentions, of misinterpreting the finest emotions. You would be wretched. And I would feel wretched, also, to see one such as you transformed."
"Then what is to be the answer?"
"I must think," she said. "Let me walk alone for a while, my dearest."
He acknowledged her wish. He strode for the house, driving back the thoughts that suggested he would never see her again, shaking off the fear that she would be snatched from him, as she had been snatched once before, telling himself that it was merely association and that circumstances had changed. But how radically, he wondered, had they changed?
He reached the house. He closed the door behind him. He began to wander from room to room, avoiding only her apartments, the interior of which he had never seen, though he retained a deep curiosity about them, had often restrained an impulse to explore.
It came to him, as he entered his own bedroom and lay down upon the bed, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown, that perhaps all these new feelings were new only to him. Jagged, he felt sure, had known such feelings in the past — they had made him what he was. He vaguely recollected Amelia saying something about the son being the father, unwounded by the world. Did he grow more like Jagged? The thoughts of the previous night came back to him, but he refused to let them flourish. Before long, he had fallen asleep.
He was awakened by the sound of her footfall as she came slowly upstairs. It seemed to him that, on the landing, she paused at his door before her own door opened and she entered her rooms. He lay still for a little while, perhaps hoping that she would return. He got up, disseminating his night-clothes, naked as he listened; she did not come back. He used one of his power-rings to make a loose blouse and long kilt, in dark green. He left the bedroom and stood on the landing, hearing her moving about on the other side of the wall.
"Amelia?"
There was no reply.
He had grown tired of introspection. "I will return soon, my dear," he called.
Her voice was muffled. "Where do you go?"
"Nowhere."
He descended, passing through the kitchen and into the garden at the back, where he normally kept his locomotive. He boarded the craft, whistling the tune of Carrie Joan , feeling just a hint of nostalgia for the simpler days before he had met Amelia at the party given by the Duke of Queens. Did he regret the meeting? No.
The locomotive steamed into the sky, black, silver and gold now. He noticed how strange the two nearby scenes looked �
� the thatched house and its gardens, the lake of blood. They clashed rather than contrasted with each other. He wondered if she would mind if he disseminated the lake, but decided not to interfere.
He flew over transparent purple palaces and towering, quivering pink and puce mounds of unremarkable workmanship and imprecise invention, over a collection of gigantic prone figures, apparently entirely made of chalk, over a half-finished forest, and under a black thunderstorm whose lightning, in his opinion, was thoroughly overdone, but he refused to let the locomotive bear him back towards the city, to which his thoughts constantly went these days, perhaps because it was the city of his conception, perhaps because Lord Jagged and Nurse worked there (if they did), perhaps because he might study the man who remained his rival, at least until the next morning. He had no inclination to visit any of the friends whose company would normally give him pleasure; he considered going to Mongrove's rainy crags, but Mongrove would be of no help to him. Perhaps, he thought, he should choose a site and make something, to exercise his imagination in some ordinary pursuit, rather than let it continue to create impossible emotional dilemmas for him. He had just decided that he would try to build a reproduction of the Palaeozoic seashore and had found a suitable location when he heard the voice of Bishop Castle above him.
The bishop rode in a chariot whose wheels rotated, red and flaming, but which was otherwise of ordinary bronze, gold and platinum. His hat, one of his old crenellated kind, was immediately visible over the side of the chariot, but it was a moment before Jherek noticed his friend's face.
"I am so glad to see you, Jherek. I wished to congratulate you — well, Amelia, really — on yesterday's party."
"I will tell her, ebullient Bishop."
"She is not with you?"
"She remains at home."
"A shame. But you must come and see this, Jherek. I don't know what Brannart has been trying, but I would say it had gone badly wrong for him. Would you be amused for a few minutes?"
"I can think of nothing I should want more."
"Then follow me!"
The chariot banked away, flying north, and obediently Jherek set a course behind it.
In a moment Bishop Castle was laughing and shouting, pointing at the ground. "Look! Look!"
Jherek saw nothing but a patch of parched, unused earth. Then dust swirled and a conical object appeared, its outer casing whirling counter to another within. The whirling stopped and a man emerged from the cone. For all that he wore breathing equipment and carried a large bag, the man was recognizable as Brannart Morphail by his hump and his club foot. He turned, as if to tell the other occupants of the cone not to leave, but already a number of small figures had tumbled out and stood there, hands on hips, looking around them, glaring through their goggles. It was Captain Mubbers and the remnants of his crew. He gesticulated at Brannart, tapping his elbow several times. Wet, smacking noises could be heard, even from where Jherek and Bishop Castle hovered watching.
The End of All Songs dateot-3 Page 24
