Afterwards they sat upon the green turf of the cliff overlooking the sea, and Ana ate grapes and offered him a sweet chicory-coloured cordial made from raisins. But he was playing, the oldest tunes he knew.
‘What is your song, song-smith?’ she asked.
‘In Tudor England, they called it ‘Greensleeves’. To it, Shakespeare’s country watched an Armada die. I liked such old things, beautiful things, around me, because it takes time that little longer to strip them away, to leave you naked and alone.’
There were no words she could say.
Then: ‘I would like you to tell me, truly ... Am I beautiful?’
He looked at her, looked away. ‘You are to me,’ he said, slowly, ‘like the memory of the first fresh-as-dew rainbow you ever see.’
‘Oh,’ she breathed, because there were no words. Except two. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
Karangetti laughed as he put a soulful expression on his face, a clenched fist on his breast-bone, and mock piety into his voice, and he said:
‘Ah, let us leave this paltry land,
And saile from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece,
I’le be thy Jason, thou my golden Fleece;
Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurl’d
And Bacchus’ vineyards o’er-spread the world:
Where Woods and Forrests goe in goodly greene,
I’le be Adonis, thou shalt be Loves Queene...
—Thou in those Groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love...’
He suddenly slumped forward, and the life peeled away from his face. ‘Ana, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I always try to shield myself behind irony. Because I’ve been hurt many times, and long ago I knew all the three weapons that I can forge. They are only silence, and exile, and cunning. What else can I do?’
‘Can I ever know you, really?’
Karangetti didn’t know himself. One thing there was, though: simply history. The past is a key to the present; for instance, he reflected, his newly-found letter was a sincere testament to what he had once been, and besides, it might distract her, while...
‘Ana, perhaps this—?’ he said, opening up the waterproof leather pouch and extracting the folded-up metalpaper. ‘No tricks, not now, not in this. Here I once managed to say some of it, the truth about myself. Read it if you will.’
Ana unfolded it like the wings of a butterfly. She hunched up and concentrated on deciphering the thrusting, loose and archaic handwriting.
‘... What these experiences were I did not know, until lysergic acid diethylmide. I took it, and walked through our public gardens at midnight; privet hedges shadowily enclosed green, ferny plants with leaves in the shape of hearts; and when I looked, the leaves were like green, velvet glass, dimly luminous. Each leaf was webbed faintly, or rather veined, glazed over and perceptibly glowing. Sometimes the wind stumbled by, shaking out a frenetic, faery music; each blade seemed to jangle, a tinkling like that of ancient glass. Their greenness was of soft jewels.
‘Much later, I read Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’, but even on that original, Blakeian trip, I realized things, and could for the first time call those previous moments of feeling-insight what they were: mystical experiences. The merest juvenilia of mysticism, of course, I am not Thomas a Kempis, nor a Traherne; certainly not a great soul. But once I was playing a record called ‘Alchemy’ by the Third Ear Band. I left, returned, and opened a door on to the naturally darkened, sound-filled bedroom, where I met something alien.
‘The strange music opened me to something. I saw visions. Of other places. Very different realities. And when I speak in my poems with symbols from my conceptual vocabulary—strangeness, piquant ‘otherness’, is very, very important. But what frightened me came in one moment of thought; the vivid certainty that even the ugly-eeriest visions can be entirely real and tangible. (Actually, I find a knowledge of the same frightening alienness in J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: how strange, that that music was originally written to test organs!) A wilderness of cracked, sunparched mud, flooded with twisting ribbons of black shadow...? Real?
‘Anyway, as the Man himself said, my words shift, change, and give way under the strain of meaning. You know, I think if I had the talent I would have liked to have been a conservatoire-schooled composer, not a self-educated acrobat juggling words, because—(Possibly, in a previous life-time, I may have orbited that mystery: pre-Renaissance music, their plainchants, the great clerical dances of France, the secular folk-songs that were sung, so says tradition, at Crecy, and to celebrate Agincourt, but, in principle, sacred music of all pre-16th century kinds, has such a profoundly nostalgic, elegaic effect upon me that I feel its communications are somehow deeply personal.)—just as Walter Pater wrote, ‘All art aspires toward the condition of music’. To become the formless spiritual essences James Joyce believed in; that is to say, to become diffusely, maximally inspiring, and to achieve an aethereal purity and perfection of form. And I, Marguerite, agree.
‘Storytelling almost always fails that acid test. And yet, rereading Tolstoy, I am irresistably reminded that the greatest literary art almost always has a representational ambience: and I know that there is only one thing that we, as literary artists, must aspire to. To reveal the transcendent and unique, in the commonplaces of our lives.’
* * * *
While Ana was engrossed in her reading, Karangetti slipped away, his thoughts already filmed with a pre-cognitive sadness.
The afternoon had faded past its bee-drowsy glory, and the sun was standing upon the western clouds as Karangetti glanced up while passing between the gleaming metal gates again; alone, he entered the rioting formality of the gardens. Thoms snagged at his brocaded, black vest and the matching silk loons, both garments especially styled for him by a tailor friend. Karangetti had his sitar slung on his back, as always, but his walk was slow and unwilling.
Finding the old gravel promenade, he followed it down to the greengrown stone bridge by the long-dry fountain, and where the lake gleamed through a trellis of trees, came upon a small grove. Birds, mostly woodpigeons and swallows, exploded about his path. He walked upon a cool and shaded, flower-dappled meadowland, which had a scarlet surf of strange poppies that emanated a dizzying scent.
Karangetti stopped, and turned to face three of the four gravestones there. And in his mind, shadows of memory fled.
—Karoly Loransics. Impressions of a tall, angular way of walking; always a stifled coldness about him. One of the masters of- the star-beast itself; commanding its flight, using a runic code strange beyond quantumn mechanics and the unified field theory.
And Mohanal Mistry, lying here—short and round-cornered, no sharp edges. He was one of the librarians guarding and tending Eliot’s crystal memory. He was the only one of the three that Karangetti had known; he had been a friend. Karangetti painfully remembered listening one time at a tableful of growing beer glasses, to how a girl had gone away, taking the sun with her, and feeling too, something of the greyness. He had known the woman. Strange...
Elias Ovshinsky. A face, in the dim farrago of the three thousand of the Crew. Karangetti remembered talking with him once, strolling beneath the stark forest of spires of a psi-fortress the Loct had been beaten back from, on the guarded shore of the Loctcontinent itself. Tall. Tall as Karangetti himself, even, but with an ursine bulkiness about him: dark as well, but instead of raven feathers, his hair was greying black wire. A beard, great and bushy, a matching bass voice. Rather grossly, theatrically extrovert. A caricature, perhaps; but then Karangetti had not really known him.
One thing, though: he was not a man who would deserve this, death, a pointless and eternal sleep in the dust.
Karangetti stood looking at the pitted headstones for some moments. Celtic crosses, the eye of Buddha on Mohanal’s. Seeing their mannerisms of expression, idiosyncracies, gestures: people.
—Look, thanks, for trying. Thanks for coming to this place where I should have been
. Thanks for it all, and goodbye ...
He moved his head slightly, downwards.
What was it? The godawful poem, but two stanzas, yes, the last and one of the middle ones... ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, and in the morning and at the going down of the sun—’’ Something like that.
‘For man also knoweth not his time,’ Karangetti said aloud, ‘as the fishes are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
‘So man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep ...’
He knew he could say no more. He raised a hand in farewell, let it drop.
The fourth stone stood a little apart, under a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine ... Karangetti had once spent many hours, making it so.
The ankh of life, looped cross that was Resurrection and Eye also; it was carved upon a gravestone that, like the others, was greyed and pitted with time.
Marguerite Ferreira
2085-2112
Requiescat:
A spray of dog-roses climbed up the side of the worn stone and decorated the letters with white flowers. Violets grew on her grave, rosemary around it, planted by his own hands long ago. The language of flowers ... Standing there, an old play came into his head, very famous, a tragedy.
We know what we are. But what may we be?
‘Hi there ...’ he said, softly. But no answer came. A distant deamess on the hill, perhaps a secret sweetness in the stream. He found it hard to keep reality within its narrow bounds, and sometimes he guessed that after all this time his mind must be silted to the very edge of—But then, he thought, madness is a relative thing.
‘It’s been a while. Marguerite,’ he said, ‘my lady of the island, since last I wandered this way ... But, sometimes I have thought of you, and sometimes memories have come, I have wondered, and...’ He looked at the violets at his feet. A wind moved in them.
He talked to her a long time. About many things, really. Of stale hopes, barren fears. About the way the world was going, was changing and would change. About the way he was going, was changing, had changed. The artist and his clay, and who could say which was which, anymore? He talked of the most ancient of days too, which she had known and shared with him, those times before whatever happened to T. S. Eliot and the engaging Loct starship had—happened ...
And did she remember? Crazy days, the starship Ezekiel, and the worlds called Lindisfarne, Venus, and the Earth? Their walking together between the salt water and the sea-strand, beneath a silver moon called Rimbaud, an ivory moon called Baudelaire, and gazing up in wonder at the strange and jewel-heavy firmament. Visiting Leningrad, and the Ragnarok-scenery of Iceland. Bright moments, words, faces, gestures...
—And of course, she did.
After a meditative while, all his words went away and he sat down on the grass and loosely folded his legs as he brought round his sitar. He began to sing her an old song she had liked, a song written by a man called Harrison long before she had been born. An old ballad, slow and beautiful, almost sad.
‘It’s been a long, long... long time...’
As he sang, he plucked, so that his sitar’s strings made gentle agreement.
‘How could I ever have lost you-
When I... loved... you...’
His sitar threw bright shards of memory into the fading afternoon.
* * * *
Six
Ana was waiting at the entrance to the gardens. Somehow she had known ... Probably, she had heard his singing: she should have thought of that.
‘Remembrances...’ she said, levelly.
Karangetti nodded. They overwhelmed him, sometimes.
Anatera studied him, her green eyes again incredibly soft, huge and luminous: like everything else about him, he realized, his tastes ran to extremes. She dropped her gaze, then.
‘What was she like, Richard? I suppose she was... beautiful?’
The moon, he thought, walking in its brightness was not so fair.
He looked at her, sharply. ‘Maybe. I loved her when this world was new, and like Beatrice, she was stolen from me. Isn’t that—enough?’
No, Karangetti thought, not really any feelings of guilt, merely the flickering shadows of it. He continued, ‘She was a daughter of the Sun, and the immortal bitch of this isle: now she’s dead; but there’s no rest for me, from my wanderings. Her name—let’s just say it was Circe, or Calypso, or sometimes she was called Siduri...’
An expression ghosted across her face for a moment. It could perhaps, he considered, have been called a frown. So he softened.
‘She was tall, but not so tall as that, and slim, like a willow. She liked satins and furs, and bright colours. Vivacious, and of course she laughed a lot. She was tricky at times. I remember winter evenings, sitting in front of the fire, watching the snow fall past the windows, sharing a bottle of Moselle, when I would talk, you see, for hours that were punctuated when she began her laughing...’ He shook his head, slung his sitar like a guitar, and broke off some more bars of strummed memories. Then he raised his head, looked at Ana, not seeing her. ‘Her hair was long and fair—like yours. Milady, Milady like yours.’
He laughed a harsh metallic laugh, that went wrong somewhere in his throat.
After a moment, Anatera said, ‘And those other graves?’
‘Old acquaintances, from the crew of T. S. Eliot. Immortals gone to their narrow beds. Oh yes, did you think I was the only one? It was a gift given to us all at Home, the life everlasting. Three thousand of us came to this world; but the landing, the years of constant struggle with the land-octopus and a strange Nature, happenchance, too many strange gods ...’ He paused, not looking at her, but into the sunset.
‘As to what happened here, I will tell you.’ There, on the hill-top, with the wind freshening and the sun sinking, dying and bathing the sky with its blood, Karangetti swept horizons with his grandiose hands.
‘There, to the north, lies Mancontinent. There, far over in the south and east, is where the Loct came down...
‘It was a day in October, iron-skied, lightly raining. I was called away from our few weather eyes and installations and such on this place, to Beachead, which was then still a base rather than a city. Marguerite was alone in our house. It had happened before but she told me she didn’t mind ... Anyway—the Loct had been quiet for a year or two, but they chose that day to make an exploratory raid.
‘We’re well along the southern coast of the Manlands, not too far from its coastline. The Loctcontinent is long distant. And this is a very small, very lonely island. Besides, considering the weapons we used then not so long after the two ships were thrown here, there were no strategic, tactical or logistical or any real advantages to be gained by taking this place; it would inevitably fall to Man in short order. I have often thought about why, but—’ he shook his head.
‘She broadcast a cry for help. Mohanal and Karoly and Elias Ovshinsky were out in a stratospheric craft from the ship patrolling our southern skies for us. They came at once. I flew from Beachead, and heavy-weapons’ craft followed with all speed. And when I overdrove my dart-craft getting here, I quartered the island, and saw wreckage, signs of a passing battle, Loct, ruins of castles, all on fire.
‘And of course,’ he said, gently, ‘because of all our subterranean installations, our commandant could only decide to sterilize totally this beauteous, magical isle. So, our dirigibles went over, and sowed white phosphorus and phosgene behind them.
‘And a day or so later, I volunteeered to check out the island. I suppose I was more than crazy: I remember that there was a drink called vodka, once, and now it isn’t, anymore ... After a while, I set the robotic machines to healing and tending, and I
went away again, back to the mainland.
‘Just then, the Loct made their Fifth Invasion, and I got an arm frozen off—’ he held up his left hand, ‘—though, because of my RNA-surgery, I grew back the limb again. She was dead, and I was gone away from this place; in the deepest, darkest hours of night, when insomnia has me in its grip again, I often think of this island and what happened, here. And that’s how it all was, more or less. All very—pointless, stupid, random. A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing...’
The sun had swollen, into a big, bright red ember floating on the glowing horizon. It was making his eyes tic, staring at it for such a long time. Fair, far Fensalir in her high orbit and delicate-featured Galadriel were noticeable ghosts in the sky.
Ana wove about her the silence of sympathy, according to the script she read inside Karangetti’s head.
‘There was a poem—’ he remembered. ‘Part of it says: ‘What though the radiance which was once so bright, Be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass. Of glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind ...’ And that just about says all that I, too, would like to believe ...’ he trailed off sadly, then shrugged.
New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology] Page 18
