World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  Jasmine looked questioningly at Sum-Thin. “It’s the fashion here, over a quarter of a century now,” Sum-Thin said quietly. “There’s nothing for it but to fight.”

  Jasmine stood back from the bar and faced the hooded woman. “Épée,” she said, drawing her sword. The woman in the hood lay her saber on the bar, walked over to a group of BASS near the stairs, conferred briefly, and began weighing the épées gathered among her assembled cohorts.

  Sum-Thin stepped around the bar, moved over to Jasmine, spoke more loudly, more officially. “Will you keep your sleeve down, or wear it rolled, or cut it off?”

  Jasmine looked a bit surprised. “Well. I don’t know. What do you think, what’s best?”

  “I am not allowed to say,” Sum-Thin declined tactfully.

  “Well. Cut it, I suppose,” Jasmine said after brief consideration.

  “That is preferable,” Sum-Thin nodded. “That is correct.” She held out her hand, the Cyclops put a knife in it, and in a flash she cut the right sleeve off Jasmine’s blouse, at the shoulder.

  Josh looked worried. “Must it be to the death?” he asked. “Isn’t first blood sufficient?”

  Sum-Thin only smiled without humor.

  “I do not like it,” said Beauty to Jasmine. “Death is sport with these people. Be wary.” He felt himself in a grip of nervous tension for the Neuroman; found himself wishing he were about to fight rather than about to watch her fight.

  The duelists walked to the center of the room, tested the flex of their blades, made practice lunges in the air, feinted with shadows. Presently, they stopped. Sum-Thin came out to where they stood, facing, and took her post between them, out off to the side. They saluted each other with sword, bringing handle to chin, then swishing the blade through a wide arc to point finally down and out. At last, both turned to salute Sum-Thin in a similar fashion.

  “Fencers, en garde …” said Sum-Thin.

  They faced off, assumed the en garde position, crossed blades.

  “Pret…” said Sum-Thin.

  “Pret,” said the hooded woman.

  “Ready,” said Jasmine.

  A long pause. The stillness of a photograph.

  “Allez,” said Sum-Thin, jumping back.

  In a fury, the blades clanged three times: feint, parry, riposte, parry, riposte, parry. Then silence once more, and the fencers circled.

  They each had a sense, now, of the other’s speed, but little of timing. So it was to each to initiate a series of simple and composed attacks, to see how the other would parry, to gauge reaction time, to glimpse patterns of response. Jasmine advanced with a double, the hooded woman answered with a counter-parry. Jasmine declined the counterparry, proceeded to triple, went to a coupé-dégagé desous, going over opponent’s blade, then under it again in the low line. The hooded woman lateral-parried, but Jasmine dropped down almost to her knees—extending her épée out, and inches below the hiss of the hooded woman’s steel, which sliced horizontally through the air: the Neuroman’s point struck the hooded woman in the right side, below the liver, penetrating a full inch before the woman leapt back in surprise: the triangular blade left an open black hole in her belly, almost immediately oozing thick and red. First blood.

  The crowd gasped. The hooded woman glanced down at her wound, and her green eyes jumped in the candlelight. Again the adversaries circled.

  Whispers rose and fell among the surrounding onlookers. Bets were taken, odds given, deities invoked, course of action urged. The hooded woman seemed to be the local favorite, but the Neuroman’s tough plastic skin and her well-timed touch were weighty factors.

  There was another flurry of swordplay, stopping all conversation. It was a lengthy exchange, a complex array of feints, deceptions, and attacks that ended with the duelists’ corps-a,corps swords crossed at the hilt, panting heavily and staring only inches away into each other’s eyes. Jasmine pushed off, slamming her foot down for distraction, and swung the blade forward. The hooded woman jumped back swiftly but could not avoid the tip of Jasmine’s blade entirely—it carved a thin red line across her chest from shoulder to shoulder. It was a wild stroke, though, and it left Jasmine somewhat exposed: the hooded woman ignored her own injury and made a lightning thrust—in and out—piercing Jasmine’s upper arm, through and through. Once more, they backed apart.

  Jasmine had scored twice, now; the BASS woman only once. But Jasmine’s wound was a dangerous thing: Neuromans had no hemostatic mechanisms, so even the smallest cut would keep bleeding until the wound was repaired. Jasmine could bleed to death from a small tear in her fabric. As she circled the floor, she managed to plug one hole with cloth from her shirt, while dodging and parrying a few noisy thrusts. She couldn’t reach the exit wound at the back of her arm, though, so it continued to bleed.

  Josh and Beauty stood tensely at the bar, alert to every move, every nuance. Only with great difficulty could they keep themselves from entering the match. Blood lust in the room was high, the air crackling with dark energy. Joshua’s senses were torn by the strange setting, the uncertain stakes, the crossing currents. Beauty, too, was thick with worry; black demons filled his chest: he did not want this special Neuroman to die. The fencers stalked. The room held its breath. Suddenly, with almost theatrical precision, several things happened, virtually simultaneously.

  Jasmine circled cautiously, her back to the ring of spectators. Briefly, she paused, near the far side of the room. Behind her, Cork, the bar-tart, stood whispering to a cluster of BASS. Beauty watched from across the bar as the Hermaphrodite reached surreptitiously into the top of her boot. The Centaur had his bow drawn as the Hermaphrodite’s knife came out; and at the same moment that Cork pushed the knife into Jasmine’s back, Beauty loosed his arrow through the bar-tart’s neck.

  Cork fell, gurgling. The sound distracted the hooded woman, momentarily—the same instant Jasmine, propelled by the force of the knife in her back, thrust her blade forward, running the hooded woman through, above the right breast. Both fencers fell, eyes wide, to their knees. The hooded woman twisted. Jasmine’s blade broke, still lodged deeply in her opponent’s chest.

  All this in a second. Tension in the room was at a critical mass. Josh, acting as if in a dream, seized a nearby whale-oil lantern and threw it against the wall. With a tremendous crash the entire wall burst into Same. This in the second second. The third second was bedlam.

  Creatures ran in every direction, screeching, trying to get out, trying to douse the fire, clawing each other, flapping into walls. The conflagration quickly spread to the ceiling and jumped from lantern to lantern along the bar. Gargoyles tried to bite off their own burning parts; Vampires beat their wings to gain the altitude of the high windows over the loft, but this only fanned the flames; Harpies wailed, Lizards scratched at corners, animals hissed and swore. Beasts in a nightmare. Visions of Hell.

  Sum-Thin slipped, unnoticed, through a secret trapdoor in the floor behind the bar. Josh raced to where Jasmine was kneeling, back-stabbed in the middle of the room. He picked her up and headed for the doorway, but in the chaotic swirls of smoke and noise, he faltered, and fell.

  Beauty charged over to the front door. It opened inward, normally, but was jammed shut with bodies and desperate crawling animals now, so it didn’t open at all. He battered it with his hooves a few times, but caught a lungful of smoke and doubled over coughing. A flaming beam fell from the rafters.

  Cries could be heard outside, as animals on the dock tried to quench the fire with buckets of sea-water, before the flames spread to adjacent buildings.

  Inside, the cries were diminishing.

  CHAPTER 13: In Which The Travelers Reach The City Of Light

  IT was Isis who saved them. She bit Beauty’s hindside hard, bringing him instantly to his feet. Next, she took his tail in her mouth and guided him, pulled him, stumbling, backward to where Josh slumped with Jasmine. She transferred the bushy tail to Joshua’s free hand, saying “Hold onnnn!” Josh gripped the Centaur’s hind hairs
with the ferocious spasm of a final act.

  Isis then jumped on Beauty’s shoulder. “Behind the barrrr!” she shouted. His eyes were blinded, watering: he lost his direction. She climbed into his mane, pulled his flowing hair right to make him go right: left to go left. Josh and Jasmine were dragged along the floor behind them. A few seconds later they all stood in back of the bar, over the open trapdoor. Fire rimmed the lips of the hole: beyond was blackness.

  Without a thought, Beauty leapt through the gaping flaming maw, taking the others with him.

  Through the void they fell. Warm, black air whistled by, tumbling until—whhhp—they were sucked with a shock, into a soundless, lightless, weightless, airless cold. Here they floated, dreamlike, until buoyancy prevailed; and they broke the sputtering surface. They were in the water, fifty feet below the dock.

  Above them the fire roared.

  They all thrashed about for a time, exhausted, half suffocated. Josh, Jasmine, and Isis clung to the Centaur’s back as he flailed toward what he thought was the shore. It wasn’t.

  It was sheer cliff. Beauty dung to one of the pilings for a minute, catching his breath, when suddenly flaming debris began to fall from the docks overhead. He had to get them out from under the pyre. With grueling strokes, he began to swim.

  His strength was at an ebb, though, and he was not aided by the three friends tugging him down. The night was bearing heavily on him; the water, increasingly, a source of rest: after thirty or forty yards paddling into the harbor, he began to sink. As if in a vision, he saw a craft floating slowly toward them in the silence. A ghost ship. He couldn’t see it clearly until it was almost upon them; then suddenly it was clear: a small junk, without running lights; Sum-Thin at the helm. With powerful Neuroman arms she helped pull them all aboard.

  And so they lay, in puddles, half-conscious, as the Oriental Neuroman guided the old junk among the myriad anchored vessels into the quiet breezy bay.

  Throughout the night the little ship bobbed serenely in the cove among its fellows. Below decks the seekers slept fitfully, running from dream to dream. Ashore in the distance, buildings burned, smoldered, flared.

  When things had quieted a bit, Sum-Thin took a fat, burning joss stick and melted closed the holes in Jasmine’s arm and back, to stop the slow, steady bleeding. The damage done was relatively minor: the arm wound had severed connections to the hand, so now her two middle fingers were completely dysfunctional. As for the back wound, little was harmed. Neuromans had, in their chest cavities, a nuclear power cell, jacketed in lead, then cased in steel, consequently impervious; and a glucose storage reserve, less well protected, but also less consequential if damaged. It was Jasmine’s glucose pack that had been pierced by Cork’s knife in the back, and all the Neuroman had suffered was a slow trickle of sugar mixed with Hemolube. Sum-Thin replaced the lost fluid with one of the spare cans of Hemolube she kept stored in the junk’s hold.

  Of course, they’d all suffered from smoke inhalation. It wasn’t until next morning that they began to rouse and cough. Beauty ached everywhere. Isis hated being wet. Josh threw up over the side, and Jasmine just kept sleeping. Sum-Thin brooded.

  “I’m sorry,” Josh apologized for the third time. “I didn’t really want to burn your place down, I just wasn’t thinking, I—”

  Sum-Thin held up her hand. “It is done, we’ll not discuss it further.” The event clearly pained her. “We are all alive. Our only thoughts must be to staying so.”

  “Howww,” muttered Isis into her matted fur. Rarely had an animal looked so miserable.

  “We cannot go back, that much is clear,” Sum-Thin cautioned. “You’ll be hunted now by friends of Scree and of the BASS woman.”

  “They will think us dead in the fire,” Beauty suggested.

  “Perhaps,” said Sum-Thin.

  “But what about you?” asked Josh. He felt deeply troubled for having burned down Sum-Thin’s life.

  “I am, for better or worse, allied to you. We were seen talking and smoking. It would not go well for me here now. At best I would be tortured on the off chance I knew your whereabouts. No, best for me to vanish for a generation. Perhaps in time, I can rise from the ashes. When the smoke clears, when the embers cool.”

  Joshua did not understand Sum-Thin. He found her mysterious and obscure and powerful, and he didn’t trust his conclusions about her motives. He suspected she was a sorceress. “How was it you happened to find us under the burning dock last night?” he asked her.

  She laughed a short, dry laugh. “I did not ‘happen’ to find you. It was the only way out, and I was waiting for you. My junk is anchored there at all times, for just such urgencies.”

  “But how did you know we’d make it out?”

  “I did not,” she spoke softly, in a tone meant to end conversation.

  Josh let it pass. There was much, he knew, he would never understand.

  Beauty rested against the port hull. He was glad just to be free of the city. Like Josh, he found Sum-Thin’s ways difficult to grasp; but this was of no consequence to him. She was herself, and he was himself: there was nothing in that to cause either discomfort. Still, he did feel sorry for her that her life had been burned into smoke—it was a state to which he felt some closeness, and this moved him to speak to the otherwise distant Neuroman. “I, too, apologize for the upheaval in your life. I know what it means to lose your home to fire. Yet I cannot regret the destruction of so many evil beasts. And our search has been furthered. Surely, there is good in that.”

  Sum-Thin smiled wryly, pointedly. “As I said, we will speak no more of it. Let me only quote Long-Chen Pa, an ancestor of mine upon whose wisdom I’ve often called during my sojourn in this city: ‘Since everything is but an apparition perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, one may well burst out in laughter.’ “

  She smiled, let out a single throaty chuckle, hoisted in the anchor; and the little ship set off to the west, full in the breath of an autumn wind.

  Once out of the bay, the junk blew southwest over the pacific waters. It was a seaworthy craft despite its small size, and followed the currents without mishap under the dazzlingly sunny sky.

  The voyagers rested on the deck, gathering strength. Each took a turn at the tiller, and, under Sum-Thin’s direction, at the sail. They caught fish, traded stories, nursed burns, lolled—recuperated. For the most part, they were contemplative, preferring to reflect on the green crystal jewel of the ocean as it sparkled to the thin horizon. And all the while the wind took them effortlessly south.

  Sea birds called greetings to them along the way. Dolphins kept pace, then found other amusement. Twice, ships could be seen in the distance; twice, they disappeared over the distance’s gentle curve. Slow was the day, and peaceful.

  Around dusk, when the water was violet under the setting twilight, Josh quietly dissolved into the abyss of another mysterious spell.

  Fearful, empty blackness. A hollow electric wind blew from inside, out. From the depths, a light: phi-point at first, then swelling, pulsing, pulling. Until soon the star—heavy brightness filled all but the farthest reaches of the void—a massive white-hot magnet, sucking Josh into its center, and now he saw the center for the first time: buried in the blinding radiance, the outline of a face.

  Josh jumped awake.

  Around him, his friends stood, their faces scared, their hands holding his body down to the deck.

  “You were having convulsions,” whispered Jasmine. “You were hurting yourself. You’re okay now.”

  He closed his eyes again. What was happening to him? He could not falter, with his quest so close to its finish. Sleep frightened him now. He must not sleep. Yet these ordeals tired him so.

  Nor was he alone. Lewis, of the Bookery, had these spells. And others, too, they’d said. But why? All moving south, they’d said; even as he, now, was drifting. He thought of the face he’d seen in his last trance, the face in the light. A strange face, there and not there, horrible and com
pelling. An inner face.

  He felt himself fading again, into sleep. And who were these Bookery people? David, Paula, Lewis, and the others. After the new animal, they’d said. A secret society within a secret society. Trust no one, they’d said. But that wasn’t right, he trusted Beauty, and he trusted Jasmine, and Rose and Dicey. Only your own, they’d said. But who were they? Why did some of them have spells like his? What was the meaning of it all? Where was the sense?

  He let himself fade; he could no longer resist.

  Cool breeze over the night waves. Round moon, lonely clouds. The companions sat or stood at the rails, watchins flying-fish break the silvery water, like discrete thoughts springing from the primordial subconscious of the earth. The watchers hoped for sign; but the fish immediately resubmerged, leaving unmarked the face of the endless sea.

  Once, in the middle of all the silent night, there was a sound. A wail, or a moan: a long, low plaintive sound that rose from the water and implored the stars. It quickened the blood of the sailors on the junk; made them look briskly to the sixteen points of the compass and scan the ocean with hard night eyes. Nothing about.

  The sun rose behind a murmuring of gray thunderclouds.

  Jasmine felt strong as ever now, physically. Her two fingers continued to work only intermittently, but she was otherwise fully recuperated. Except that suddenly she was feeling mortal. She’d almost died. Died. Bled to death. To death. She dwelled on the word, tried to consider what it meant. Around her was empty sea all the way to the sky, then empty sky all the way to the sea again. Was this what death was like? An empty, drifting undulation. It was something she hadn’t thought about much in over two hundred years; but now, in four months, she’d almost bled to death twice. To death.

  Was it a sign to be more cautious? More restrained, perhaps. No, such was unthinkable. A life of caution could hardly be worth living.

  The clouds that had brought on the day vanished to the east. The sun and rocking water soothed her spirit, in time. She closed her eyes, let all considerations float out of her mind.