King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  If the entire universe is her Adversary’s body, Enye can understand how this chamber might go on and on forever.

  An intrusion into the precise regularity catches her eye—a white something. She holds it in her vision as she jogs toward it; it is easy to lose in the uniformity of the great vaulted space. It seems to be a large white boulder. No, not a white boulder. Closer, she sees it is a tooth. A single molar, three times her height.

  Has her Adversary’s hold on reality slipped to such a degree that she no longer knows the shape and structure of her own body?

  On the other side of the molar she finds a man. He is imprisoned inside a metal gibbet anchored to the molar. Corroded iron bands bite into his flesh. He looks at her from the cage that holds his head upright and fixed, staring out across the endless vaulted arches. Enye recognises him, though her knowledge was not of him in his prime, as he is here, but of his old age.

  It is Mr. Antrobus.

  “How can you be here?” she asks.

  “Because you sent me here.”

  “But you are dead.”

  “I am. But in your imagination, I will live as long as your memory of me lives.”

  “But this is not my imagining.”

  “Isn’t it? We talked about heaven and hell, you recall.”

  “I recall that I said we make our own heavens and hells.”

  “Some of us have the power to make heavens or hells for others. I shared with you my image of hell and it was impressed into your dreams and your fears, and became reality.”

  “My God.”

  “In a sense, yes. This is, after all, the Mygmus.”

  He rolls his eyes downward, the only part of him other than his lips that is capable of movement. Between his feet is a dark hole.

  “What is that?”

  “A way out.”

  “Where does it go?”

  “I do not know. Not here.”

  “Why should I want to go somewhere else?”

  “Because it is not here.”

  “What will I find if I continue on here?”

  “Just the same, endlessly repeated. If you stay, you will be just the same way I am. We will both be prisoners of a place that never changes.”

  “It would seem that I have no choice.”

  “No. You have one choice. It is I who has no choice.”

  “Do I have to throw myself in?”

  “Can you see any other way?”

  In a moment, Mr. Antrobus chained to the tooth is the only variation in an infinity of flesh and bone.

  She falls only a few metres through the stifling darkness before the tunnel flattens into a curve. It is at once exhilarating and terrifying, a Big Dipper ride in absolute darkness, never knowing when the next dip comes, and when it comes, if it will be the end of the ride, or the edge of a final plummet to annihilation; nothing to hold on to, nothing to feel or see, nothing to anchor herself to in any way: a thousand-kilometre scream of free-fall adrenaline.

  Wasn’t there a scene like this in Dr. No? She thinks that this is an incongruous thought to think while sliding through the universe-filling body of your enemy. In such a situation, any thought is incongruous. The darkness brightens, flesh-tone red. The walls of the esophagus grow translucent. Her descent is less precipitous now—she can see the dips and curves and prepare for them. Will she end with a whoop and a splash in the Pancreatic Sea? Beyond the isinglass walls pass arteries and beating, flapping ventricles; ion-blue lightning forks along neurons and jumps synaptic gaps with a crackle of thunder; air sacs the size of small zeppelins swell and contract; floating within, falling free, are all the dreams and symbols of the dark night of a soul, frozen, inanimate, waiting for the breath of life to inspire them.

  Disease? Her Adversary’s madness, or her own? Trust nothing here, least of all yourself.

  Without warning the tube upends and dumps her with a shriek at her destination.

  The baby…

  But the landing is soft, yielding, folds of thick, fingerlike villi. She shakes herself free—the stroking of those, soft, yielding fingers makes her feel violated. What is this elsewhere to which she has been delivered? A small circular chamber with egresses leading from it. The walls resemble close-packed tree trunks moulded from red meat, the ceiling a lattice of interwoven fleshy branches from which yellow luminous sacs hang like lewd fruit. Immediately above her is the portal by which she slid into this elsewhere place.

  Chamber of Thirty-Two Doors.

  Pick a door. Any door.

  And she learns that this elsewhere into which she had slid is the centre of a maze. A maze of faces. As she explores tentatively down the high, narrow corridors, the clear, glassy floor lights up beneath her footfalls. Within the clear, hard substance are faces, eyes closed, lips moving as if talking in their sleep.

  A maze.

  She has always wanted to visit a maze like the one at Hampton Court Palace her grandmother told her about, where a man in a flannels and blazer and boater hat sat on top of a pair of stepladders and shouted guidance through a megaphone.

  “Not now,” she says aloud, and at the sound of her words, the sleeping faces open their eyes in surprise and horror.

  She could be trapped here. As trapped as the Mr. Antrobus phagus. She is no longer certain she knows the way back to the centre.

  A maze. Of faces. Her grandmother.

  It is the china maze from the Stone Gardens, the one mapped out with shards of broken pottery, pieces of the faces of the crowned heads of Europe. And in that maze, if you had the gift, you could see the wind. She summons that memory, imagines herself once again a little girl, standing at the centre of the gyre of fragments, trying to see the wind.

  Soft as a prayer, a touch on her right cheek. A breath of moving air.

  She takes the next opening on the right. A stirring of the hair on the back of her neck is confirmation and direction: forward, a touch on either cheek, left, right.

  There is a key to every maze.

  Beyond the maze is a vault so high she can barely distinguish the ribwork that supports the dome. The great space of the vault is filled with towers, some so tall their tops are lost in the steamy vapours that collect under the dome, some only as high as Enye’s waist, but so closely arrayed that she cannot see through them to the walls of the vault. The towers are made from dark, black, glossy bones knitted and fused together into suggestions of faces and ribs and contorted limbs. A glazed ossuary; bone totems. The surface beneath her feet is lined and fissured like human skin. As she advances between towers great and towers small, towers lofty and towers least, little creatures go skittering and skidding around her party shoes. She kneels to satisfy her curiosity: whining and whizzing, they detour around her. No longer than her thumb, they are half pixie, half car, internal combustion centaurs with human heads, arms, and torsos spot-welded into the engine housings of Dinky cars. They rev and roar away from her grasping fingers but she catches one, holds it up to her face. Tiny wheels scream and spin. She drops it with a howl.

  The human half of the Henry Ford centaur bit her.

  It lies on its side, wheels spinning, spinning, trying to heave itself with its arms back onto its wheelbase.

  Though she treads carefully and the auto-taurs display startling acceleration and manoeuvrability, she cannot avoid crushing some beneath her muddied party shoes.

  Far off between the slick back towers is a shine of white.

  And again: closer. Look. Where? There? No. Where? There.

  Glimpse: a white dress, like an old-fashioned wedding frock. Floating in the air a meter or so above the skin surface.

  And a fourth time: closest yet. Lingering for her to be certain she has seen it before drifting out of sight behind the bone totems.

  Heedless of the auto-taur traffic, she runs after the white dress. It leads her out of the place of the towers. It leads her through a place where banks and ridges of red gumlike material extrude eyeballs to observe her passage; some tiny and blue as th
e ol’ blue eyes of abalones, some globes several meters across with irises shaped like crosses, or triangles, or three parallel slits. It lead her through a grove of trees the branches of which terminate in minute, waggling homunculi. It leads her through a place where elephants with sundials growing out of their backs slo-mo across a checkerboard carpet. Enye thinks that she is gaining on it as she pursues the vision across the interior bodyscape: a Chantilly silk bridal gown filled with dried flowers; flowers for head and flowers for hands and the dead brittle stalks of flowers for body and form and substance. She draws nearer, but never near enough to touch, to test its body and form and substance and symbolism with her bare hands.

  It is not one of her memories, twisted and reinterpreted. She is certain of that.

  She can see where this dream of her Adversary’s is leading her. The woven walls and ceiling of the bodyscape flare outward and upward into an indefinite dimension so vast her senses might almost convince her she is in open air. The flesh floor rises gently to break before her into a scree slope of chaotic jumbled shapes, a steeply sloping mountain on the summit of which stands a throne. Phaguses, Enye realises as the slope grows too steep and chaotic for her steady jog, though the wedding dress floats effortlessly over the snarled debris: phaguses, Nimrods, Things from the Gateway, heaped on top of each other. Her hands seek out holds and grips among the projections and protrusions; the phaguses are cold to her touch, hard and colourless as enamel, annealed together by some unknown process of vitrification into one conterminous mass.

  She asks, are these phaguses that have been, or phaguses that are yet to be? as she picks her way up. Up we go, up we go, up we go, over things that look like running shoes with trout fins and tails and crystal wine decanters rimmed with feathery cilia and oyster shells with lolling warty tongues and stones with hands with diamond rings on their fingers and Honda mopeds with Mozart’s head for handlebars and things that are half shark, half skateboard all ossified and fused together. Then she finds the pig thing she dispatched in the alley behind the convent under her hand, and a ruff of black lace tutu, hard and cold as anthracite, and the lamprey wolf smashed to nothingness on the oil-stained concrete of the QHPSL car park, and a shred of T-shirt decorated with severed heads, pentagrams, and bondage, and a sandalled foot.

  Phaguses that have been.

  Up we go, up we go. The way grows steep. It seems to her that she has been climbing this mountain forever, and still it reaches before her to that unattainable throne on the summit. Up we go, up we go, still the silk wedding dress animated with flowers leads her though she no longer requires its guidance. Up we go, up we go, up we go, until she can go up no farther, she has arrived at the peak, at the summit of the mountain of destroyed dreams.

  The throne is a slab of stone standing in a small declivity among the petrified phaguses. Its back is to her. The stone slab is pierced at her eye level. Through the hole she can see the back of a head.

  She walks around the throne to see who is seated in it.

  It is a man. He wears a business suit of rather old-fashioned cut, a pointy-collared shirt, and a gaudy kipper tie of the kind that was thought most fashionable in the seventies. On the arm of the slate throne sits a girl. Her age is hard for Enye to define. She wears a tiny silk taffeta wedding dress in Chantilly cream that is in every respect the duplicate of the one that led Enye to the mountain of phaguses. The little girl plays with a dried marguerite, twirls it between her fingers.

  She looks at Enye, giggles, coyly.

  “Hello, Enye,” says her father. “Would you like to play, too?”

  The child bares perfect white teeth and giggles gleefully again.

  And Enye is sent cascading back through time. She remembers. She remembers every little thing.

  The times he had got up in the night when he said he had to go to the bathroom for a drink of water.

  The times he had come home early from work, and how quiet her mother had been to find him there.

  The times she had been sent shopping with her mother when he insisted that Ewan stay with him while they cleaned out the garage or the attic.

  The times she had heard Ewan’s bedroom door close in the early morning hours and when the house was silent again, so quiet she could not be certain she was hearing it, the pillow-stifled sobbing.

  The times he had insisted on bathing Ewan and drying him by the fire, even though Ewan was big enough to bathe himself, and far too big to dry himself by sitting naked in front of the fire.

  The times at the beach when, even after Ewan was old enough to dry himself, he had insisted on rubbing him down with the big striped beach towel with the puffins on it.

  The times when Ewan sat, just sat, sat, doing nothing but sitting, watching the rain fall on the garden, when her mother would get up to go over to him and he would say no, let the boy alone, he’s got to learn not be a sulk box.

  The times when her mother had come to pick them up from school in the old yellow Fiat 127 with suitcases and carrier bags in the back and driven them fast, very fast, almost recklessly, down to Ballybrack.

  The times when she had started to grow breasts and hair and feel like she was turning into a wolf from the inside out, when he would come up to her when no one else was around and ask to see how she was growing up there. And down there.

  The times he asked if she minded if he touched?

  Up there.

  And down there.

  And his thick, spadelike fingers, stained nicotine-yellow, reaching under the elastic…

  Up there.

  And down there.

  The times when she was awakened by the sound of Ewan crying in pain and fear and humiliation, and the times the silhouette against the landing light filled her doorway, the shadow fell across her bed.

  Be nice to me. There’s a good boy. There’s a good girl. What’s this down here, oh, that’s nice, that’s good, that’s not old and used up, that’s new, that’s fresh, you love your daddy, don’t you? Don’t you? Of course you do. Then do this for him. Move this way for him. Touch this for him.

  And the doctor is shining his big bright light in her eyes and she can hear him saying, as if he thinks that she cannot hear, or is very, very stupid, “It’s as if she doesn’t want to remember, Mrs. MacColl. As if she has willed herself not to remember.”

  But she remembers.

  She remembers.

  Every. Little. Thing.

  “You bastard!”

  The swords sing from their sheaths across her back. Tachi and katana. Here, at the centre, the glyphs blaze and crackle from the blade like nova fire: She raises the katana over her head: Jodan No Kamae.

  Her father smiles, raises a forefinger from the arm of the slate throne.

  And she knows what he knows. She knows that if she strikes him down out of the hate in her heart, out of hurt and vengeance and hate, he will become more powerful than she has ever imagined. For if she cuts him down, annihilates him, the hate will go on forever. Hate will have the final say. Hate will be the final word. It will sound forever through the halls of the Mygmus, and so it will never end. The Warped Things, the Nimrods, the phaguses, the Lords of the Gateway, they too will go on forever, created and inspired by the power of her hate, until she is destroyed. By her own hate. And all hope of a new mythic vision, of a new mythology, new heroes, new gods, new demons to sweep away the tired pantheon of Otherworld, will wither in the twistings and perversions of her hatred.

  She wants to strike him. For the ten, the twenty, the hundred sins, the twenty, the hundred, the thousand violations and slow, pleasureful maimings, she wants to feel her sword cut into his flesh, she wants to see him annihilated by the God-light of her glyphs.

  For her mother.

  For Ewan.

  For herself. For the Enye MacColls that might have been, the lives they might have lived, the loves they might have loved, but for him.

  Action/no-action. Conception/no-conception.

  Two samurai, on a hillside, in the
rain. The driving, driving rain.

  All her strategies fail useless from her hands. The Way has failed her.

  Her Spirit is Void.

  She rips the connector from the katana. The glyphs fade to nothingness. She brings the sword in front of her face. The edge of the blade touches her nose. It is as sharp as the word of God.

  With a cry that yields to no simple analysis, she hurls the katana away from her, away from the mountaintop. The sword rumbles end over end out into the Mygmus. The light from nowhere and everywhere glitters from the flying blade until it can no longer be distinguished from the void.

  She turns to her father. Closes her eyes.

  She remembers once again her father’s violations of her brother and herself, of their mother, of their family. She cannot bear to look at them, their touch burns like bile, but she gathers them into her arms, embraces them. And takes them into herself. She speaks three words. Each one of the words costs Enye more than anything has ever cost her in her life. The alienation and separation from her mother, losing her job, losing Saul, her unplanned pregnancy, the quest to avenge the Midnight Children—none of these amounts to one fraction of the cost of a single one of the words: “I forgive you.”

  It is not a complete forgiveness. It is only three words of forgiveness, and it will take the rest of her life to work that forgiveness out, but it is a start.

  She opens her eyes.

  The slate throne is empty.

  The dark place she could never share with any of the people she loves tears as if rent by lightning, from the top to the bottom. A casket of ancient sorrows cracks open and is exposed to the light. The creatures that have swarmed and multiplied within keen and die.

  The little girl in the chestnut taffeta wedding dress comes from behind the stone throne. Enye goes down on her knees, beckons the little girl to her. The child is shy and sullen, but comes, curious, a shade fearful.

  “I’ve come to take you away from here. You don’t have to stay here anymore.”

  “I don’t want to go. I like it here.”

  “Here? What is there here for you?”

  “Myself.”