Valentine Pontifex

by Robert Silverberg

  “Nevertheless the process exists.”

  “Does it, now?”

  “We’re ready to put it into limited experimental use. I see by my predecessors’ files that you’re known for your willingness to experiment.”

  “So I am,” said Aximaan Threysz. “What sort of thing is this?”

  It was, he said, something called protoplast augmentation, which involved using enzymes to digest the cell walls of plants to give access to the genetic material within. That material then could undergo manipulation, after which the cellular matter, the protoplast, was placed in a culture medium and allowed to regenerate its cell wall. From that single cell an entire new plant with greatly improved characteristics could be grown.

  “I thought such skills were lost on Majipoor thousands of years ago,” Aximaan Threysz said.

  “Lord Valentine has been encouraging some revival of interest in the ancient sciences.”

  “Lord Valentine?”

  “The Coronal, yes,” said Caliman Hayn.

  “Ah, the Coronal!” Aximaan Threysz looked away. Valentine? Valentine? She would have said the Coronal’s name was Voriax; but a moment’s thought and she recalled that Voriax was dead. Yes, and a Lord Valentine had replaced him, she had heard, and as she gave it more thought she remembered that something odd had happened to that Valentine—was he the one who had had his body exchanged with another man’s? Probably that was the one. But such people as Coronals meant very little to Aximaan Threysz, who had not left Prestimion Vale in twenty or thirty years and to whom Castle Mount and its Coronals were so far away that they might just as well be mythical. What mattered to Aximaan Threysz was the growing of rice and lusavender.

  The imperial botanical laboratories, Caliman Hayn told her, had bred an enhanced clone of lusavender that needed field research under normal farming conditions. He invited Aximaan Threysz to collaborate in this research—in return for which he would agree not to offer the new plant to anyone else in Prestimion Vale until she had had the chance to establish it in all her fields.

  It was irresistible. She received from him a packet of astonishingly immense lusavender seeds, great shiny things as big around as a Skandar’s eye, and planted them in a remote corner of her land, where there was no likelihood of their cross-pollinating with her normal lusavenders. The seeds sprouted rapidly and from them came plants that differed from the usual kind only in having stems of a thickness two or three times normal. When they flowered, though, the ruffled purple blossoms were enormous, as broad as saucers, and the flowers brought forth pods of awesome length, that at harvest time yielded huge quantities of the giant seeds. Aximaan Threysz was tempted to use them for the autumn planting, and cover all her acreage with the new kind of lusavender in order to reap an amazing bumper crop next winter. But she could not, for she had agreed to turn most of the oversize seed over to Caliman Hayn for laboratory study in Mazadone. He left her enough to plant perhaps a fifth of her land. This season, however, she was instructed to mix the augmented plants among the normal ones to induce inter-breeding: the augmented characteristics were thought to be dominant, but that had never been tested on so large a scale.

  Though Aximaan Threysz forbade her family to speak of the experiment in Prestimion Vale, it was impossible for long to keep the other farmers from learning of it. The thick-stemmed second-generation plants that sprang up everywhere on her plantation could hardly be concealed, and in one way and another, news of what Aximaan Threysz was doing spread through the Vale. Curious neighbors wangled invitations and stared at the new lusavender in amazement.

  But they were suspicious. “Plants like that, they’ll suck all the nourishment from the soil in two or three years,” some said. “She keeps it up, she’ll turn her place into a desert.” Others thought the giant seeds surely would yield tasteless or bitter lusavender-meal. A few argued that Aximaan Threysz generally knew what she was doing. But even they were content to let her be the pioneer.

  At winter’s end she harvested her crop: normal seeds, which were sent off to market as usual, and giant ones, which were bagged and set aside for planting. The third season would tell the tale, for some of the big seeds were of the pure clone and some, probably most, were hybrids between normal and augmented lusavender; and it remained to be seen what sort of plants the hybrid seeds would produce.

  In late winter came the time for planting rice, before the floods arrived. When that was done, the higher and drier lands of the plantation received the lusavender seeds; and all through the spring and summer she watched the thick stems rising, the huge flowers unfolding, the heavy pods elongating and turning dark. From time to time she broke open a pod and peered at the soft green seeds. They were large, no question about that. But their flavor? What if they had no flavor, or a foul one? She had gambled an entire season’s production on that.

  Well, the answer would be at hand soon enough.

  On Starday came word that the agricultural agent was approaching, and would arrive at the plantation, as expected on Twoday. But the same report brought puzzling and disturbing news for the agent who was coming was not Caliman Hayn, but someone named Yerewain Noor. Aximaan Threysz could not understand that. Hayn was too young to have retired. And it bothered her to have him vanish just as the protoplast experiment was nearing its end.

  Yerewain Noor turned out to be even younger than Hayn, and annoyingly callow. He began at once to tell her how honored he was to meet her, with all the usual rhetorical flourishes, but she cut him off.

  “Where’s the other man?” she demanded.

  No one seemed to know, Noor said. Lamely he explained that Hayn had gone off without warning three months ago, saying nothing to anyone and dumping an enormous administrative mess on the rest of the department. “We’re still figuring it all out. Evidently he was mixed up in a bunch of experimental studies, but we don’t know what sort or with whom, and—”

  “One of them took place here,” said Aximaan Threysz coldly. “Field testing of protoplast-augmented lusavender.”

  Noor groaned. “The Divine spare me! How many more of Hayn’s little private projects am I going to stumble into? Protoplast-augmented lusavender, is it?”

  “You sound as if you’ve never heard the term.”

  “I’ve heard it, yes. But I can’t say I know much about it.”

  “Come with me,” Aximaan Threysz said, and marched off, past the paddies where the rice now stood hip-high, and on into the lusavender fields. Anger sped her stride: the young agricultural agent was hard pressed to match her pace. As she went she told him about the packet of giant seeds Hayn had brought her, the planting of the new clone on her land, the interbreeding with normal lusavender, the generation of hybrids now coming to ripening. In a moment more they reached the first rows of lusavender. Suddenly she halted, appalled, horrified.

  “The Lady protect us all!” she cried.

  “What is it?”

  “Look! Look!”

  For once Aximaan Threysz’s sense of timing had failed her. Most unexpectedly the hybrid lusavender had begun to throw seed, two weeks or more ahead of the likely day. Under the fierce summer sun the great pods were starting to split, cracking open with an ugly sound like the snapping of bones. Each, as it popped, hurled its huge seeds almost with the force of bullets in every direction; they flew thirty or forty feet through the air and disappeared in the thick muck that covered the flooded fields. There was no halting that process: within an hour all the pods would be open, the harvest would be lost.

  But that was far from the worst of it.

  Forth from the pods came not only seeds but a fine brown powder that Aximaan Threysz knew only too well. Wildly she rushed into the field, paying no attention to the seeds that crashed with stinging impact against her scaly skin. Seizing a pod that had not yet split, she broke it open, and a cloud of the powder rose toward her face. Yes. Yes. Lusavender smut! Each pod held at least a cupful of spores; and as pod after pod yielded to the heat of the day, the brown spores
hovering over the field became a visible stain on the air, until they were swept away by the lightest of breezes.

  Yerewain Noor knew what was happening too. “Call out your field hands!” he cried. “You’ve got to torch this stuff!”

  “Too late,” said Aximaan Threysz in a sepulchral voice. “No hope now. Too late, too late, too late. What can hold the spores back now?” Her land was infected beyond repair. And in an hour the spores would be spread all through the Vale. “It’s all over with us, can’t you see?”

  “But lusavender smut was wiped out long ago!” Noor said in a foolish voice.

  Aximaan Threysz nodded. She remembered it well: the fires, the sprayings, the breeding of smut-resistant clones, the roguing out of any plant that held the genetic predisposition to harbor the lethal fungus. Seventy, eighty, ninety years ago: how they had worked to rid the world of that blight! And here it was again, in these hybrid plants. These plants alone in all Majipoor, she thought, were capable of providing a home for lusavender smut. Her plants, so lovingly grown, so skillfully tended. By her own hand had she brought the smut back into the world, and set it free to blight her neighbors’ crops.

  “Hayn!” she roared. “Hayn, where are you? What have you done to me?”

  She wished she could die, now, here, before what was about to happen could unfold. But she knew she would not be that lucky; for long life had been her blessing, and now it was her curse. The popping of the pods resounded in her ears like the guns of an advancing army, rampaging across the Vale. She had lived one year too long, she thought: long enough to see the end of the world.

  DOWNWARD HISSUNE TRAVELED; feeling rumpled and sweaty and apprehensive, through passageway and lift-shafts he had known all his life, and soon the shabby world of the outermost ring was far behind him. He descended through level after level of wonders and marvels to which he had not given a second glance in years: Court of Columns, Hall of Winds, Place of Masks, Court of Pyramids, Court of Globes, the Arena, House of Records. People came here from Castle Mount or Alaisor or Stoien, or even from impossibly distant and supposedly fabulous Ni-moya on the other continent, and wandered around dazed and stupefied, lost in admiration of the ingenuity that had devised and constructed such bizarre architectural splendors so far underground. But to Hissune it was—only the drab and dreary old Labyrinth. For him it had neither charm or mystery: it was simply his home.

  The big pentagonal plaza in front of the House of Records marked the lower limit of the public zone of the Labyrinth. Below, all was reserved for government officials. Hissune passed beneath the great green-glowing screen on the wall of the House of Records that listed all the Pontifexes, all the Coronals—the two rows of inscriptions stretching up virtually beyond the reach of the keenest eye, somewhere far up there the names of Dvorn and Melikand and Barhold and Stiamot of thousands of years ago, and down here the entries for Kinniken and Ossier and Tyeveras, Malibor and Voriax and Valentine—and on the far side of the imperial roster Hissune presented his credentials to the puffy-faced masked Hjorts who kept the gateway, and down he went into the deepest realm of the Labyrinth. Past the warrens and burrows of the middle bureaucracy, past the courts of the high ministers, past the tunnels that led to the great ventilating systems on which all this depended. Again and again he was stopped at checkpoints and asked to identify himself. Here in the imperial sector they took matters of security very seriously. Somewhere in these depths the Pontifex himself had his lair—a huge spherical glass globe, so it was said, in which the crazy old monarch sat enthroned amidst the network of life-support mechanisms that had kept him alive far past his time. Did they fear assassins? Hissune wondered. If what he had heard was true, it would be merely the Divine’s own mercy to pull the plug on the old Pontifex and let poor Tyeveras return at last to the Source: Hissune could not understand what possible reason there could be to keep him living on like that, decade after decade, in such madness, in such senility.

  At last, breathless and frayed, Hissune arrived at the threshold of the Great Hall in the uttermost depths of the Labyrinth. He was hideously late, perhaps an hour.

  Three colossal shaggy Skandars in the uniform of the Coronal’s guard barred his way. Hissune, shriveling under the fierce supercilious stares of the gigantic four-armed beings, had to fight back the impulse to drop to his knees and beg their forgiveness. Somehow he regained a shred or two of his self-respect, and, trying his best to stare back just as superciliously—no easy chore, when he had to meet the gaze of creatures nine feet high—he announced himself as a member of Lord Valentine’s staff, and an invited guest.

  He half expected them to burst into guffaws and swat him away like some little buzzing insect. But no: gravely they examined his epaulet, and consulted some documents they held, and favored him with great sweeping bows, and sent him onward through the huge brass-bound doorway.

  Finally! The Coronal’s banquet!

  Just within the door stood a resplendently garbed Hjort with great goggling golden eyes and bizarre orange-daubed-whiskers sprouting from his rough-skinned grayish face. This astonishing-looking individual was Vinorkis, the Coronal’s majordomo, who saluted now with a great flourish and cried, “Ah! The Initiate Hissune!”

  “Not yet an initiate,” Hissune tried to tell him, but the Hjort had already swung grandly about and was on his way down the center aisle, not looking back. With numb-legged strides Hissune followed him.

  He felt impossibly conspicuous. There must have been five thousand people in the room, seated at round tables that held a dozen or so each, and he imagined that every eye was fastened on him. To his horror, he was no more than twenty paces into the room when he heard laughter beginning to rise, softly at first, then more heartily, and then waves of mirth that rolled from one side of the room to the other, crashing against him with stunning impact. He had never before heard such a vast roaring noise: it was the way he imagined the sea to sound as it flailed some wild northern coast.

  The Hjort marched on and on, for what seemed like a mile and a half, and Hissune grimly marched on behind him through that ocean of merriment, wishing he were half an inch high. But after a while he realized that these people were laughing not at him but at a pack of dwarfish acrobats who were attempting with deliberate clownishness to form a human pyramid, and he grew less uneasy. Then the high dais came into view, and there was Lord Valentine himself beckoning to him, smiling, indicating the empty seat close by his side. Hissune thought he would weep from sheer relief. Everything was going to be all right after all.

  “Your lordship!” Vinorkis boomed. “The Initiate Hissune!” ,/p>

  Hissune sank wearily and gratefully into his seat, just as an enormous round of applause for the acrobats, who were done with their act, resounded in the hall. A steward handed him a brimming bowl of some glistening golden wine, and as he put it to his lips, others around the table lifted their own bowls in a salute of welcome. Yesterday morning, during the brief and astonishing conversation with Lord Valentine in which the Coronal had invited him to join his staff on Castle Mount, Hissune had seen a few of these people at a distance, but there had been no time for introductions. Now they were actually giving him greeting—him!—and introducing themselves. But they needed no introduction, for these were the heroes of Lord Valentine’s glorious war of restoration, and everyone knew who they were.

  That huge warrior-woman sitting beside him was surely Lisamon Hultin, the Coronal’s personal bodyguard, who, so the story went, once had cut Lord Valentine free of the belly of a sea dragon after he had been swallowed. And the amazingly pale-skinned little man with the white hair and the scarred face was, Hissune knew, the famous Sleet, juggling tutor to Lord Valentine in the days of exile; and the keen-eyed, heavy-browed man was the master archer Tunigorn of Castle Mount; and the small many-tentacled Vroon had to be the wizard Deliamber; and that man hardly older than Hissune himself, with the freckled face, was very likely the onetime herdboy Shanamir; and that slender, dignified Hjort must be Grand A
dmiral Asenhart—yes, these were the famous ones, and Hissune, who once had thought himself immune to any sort of awe, found himself very much awed indeed to be of their company now.

  Immune to awe? Why, he had once walked up to Lord Valentine himself and shamelessly extorted half a royal from him for a tour of the Labyrinth, and three crowns more to find him lodgings in the outer ring. He had felt no awe then. Coronals and Pontifexes were simply men with more power and money than ordinary people, and they attained their thrones through the good luck of being born into the Castle Mount aristocracy and making their way through the ranks with just the right happy accidents to take them to the top. You didn’t even have to be particularly smart to be a Coronal, Hissune had noticed years ago. After all, just in the last twenty years or so, Lord Malibor had gone off to harpoon sea dragons and had stupidly gotten himself eaten by one, and Lord Voriax had died just as foolishly from a stray bolt that struck him down while he was out hunting in the forest, and his brother Lord Valentine, who was reputed to be fairly intelligent, had been witless enough to go drinking and carousing with the son of the King of Dreams, thereby letting himself be drugged and wiped clean of his memory and dumped from his throne. Feel awe for such as those? Why, in the Labyrinth any seven-year-old who conducted himself with such casual regard for his own welfare would be regarded as a hopeless idiot.

  But Hissune had observed that some of his early irreverence seemed to have worn away over the years. When one is ten and has lived by one’s wits in the streets since the age of five or six, it is easy enough to thumb one’s nose at power. But he no longer was ten, and he no longer roved the streets. His perspective was a little deeper these days: and he knew it was no small thing to be Coronal of Majipoor, and no easy task. So when Hissune looked toward that broad-shouldered, golden-haired man, seeming both regal and gentle at once, who wore the green doublet and ermine robe of the world’s second highest office, and when he considered that that man, only ten feet from him, was the Coronal Lord Valentine, who had chosen him out of all Majipoor to join this group tonight, he felt something very like a shiver traveling down his back, and he admitted finally to himself that what that shiver was was awe: for the office of the kingship, and for the person of Lord Valentine, and for the mysterious chain of happenstance that had brought a mere boy of the Labyrinth into this august company.