A Storm of Wings

9: The Explanations of the Ancient Airboatman

Midwinter clutches the Pastel City, cold as thought.

In the Cispontine Quarter the women have been to and fro all day gathering fuel. By afternoon they had stripped the empty lots to the bare hard soil, bobbing in ragged lines amid the sad induviate stems of last year's growth, their black shawls giving them the air of rooks in a potato field. Not an elder or bramble is left now but it is a stump; and that will be grubbed up tomorrow by some enterprising mattock in a bony hand. At twilight, which – exhaled, as it were, from every shattered corner – comes early to the City's broken parts, they filled the nearby streets for half-an-hour, hurrying westwards with their unwieldy bundles to where, along the Avenue Fiche and the Rue Sepile, Margery Fry Road and the peeling old 'Boulevard Saint Ettiene', the old men sat waiting for them with souls shrivelled up like walnuts in the cold. Now they sit by reeking stoves, using the ghost of a dog-rose to cook cabbage!

Cabbage! The whole of the Low City has smelt of this delicacy all winter. It is on everyone's breath and in everyone's overcoat. It has seeped into the baize cloth of everyone's parlour. It has insinuated itself into the brickwork of every privy, coagulated in alleys, hung in unpeopled corners and conserved its virtues, waiting for the day when it might come at last to the High City. This evening, like an invisible army, it filtered by stages along the Boulevard Aussman, where it woke the caged rabbits in the bakers'back yards and caused the chained dogs to whimper with excitement; flowed about the base of the hill at Alves, investing the derelict observatory with an extraordinary new significance; and passed finally to the heights of Minnet-Saba, where it gathered in waves to begin its stealthy assault on the High Noses. On the way it informed some strange crannies: inundating for instance a little-used arm of the pleasure canal at Lowth, where its spirit infected incidentally a curious tragedy on the ice.

The air was bitter inside the nose, the sky as black as anthracite. The Name Stars glittered cynically, commemorating some best-forgotten king. Down below on the frozen canal a grubby satin booth was pitched, its yellow shutters up, its cressets cold. From its door a long-legged brazier, kept fed with frigid horse dung, looked out like a red eye. In it, under the zodiacal representations and the testimonials to its proprietor's efficacy, a poet and a for tune teller sat, cheating one another feverishly at 'blind Michael'.

The poet was a rag of a man, little, and hollow-cheeked from a life of squalor, with his bright red hair stuck up on his head like a wattle and greed lurking in the corners of his grin. He gave his small hands no rest – when he was not trying to palm cards or filch the bottle, he was flapping them about like a wooden puppet's. At slow moments during the play he would stare silently into the air with his face empty and his mouth slack; then, catching himself, leap up from the three-legged stool on which he sat and go jigging round the booth until by laughing and extemporizing he had got his humour back. In mirth, or delivering doggerel, his voice had a penetrating hysterical timbre, like a knife scraped desperately on a plate. He had made a 'ballade of stewed cabbage'earlier that evening, but seemed to hate and fear the smell of the stuff, grimacing with dilated nostrils and turned-down mouth when a wave of it passed through the booth. His name was Ansel Verdigris, and the fat woman across the card table was his last resort.

Fat Main Etteilla with her aching ankles and her fatal cough, known to be the wisest woman in the Low City: yet she paid the poet's debts; admired his verses without in the least understanding them; and, though he gave her nothing in return for it, forgave both his perversions and his frequent distempers. All is made possible in the shadow of the Dark Man. On his calmer days Verdigris sat on her knee and ventriloquized her customers. When his nerves were bad, and he drove them away by spewing on the cards, she slapped his head. He made her laugh. She feared death, but he feared everything: and the closer to death she came the better she looked after him. One of her great soft hands made three of his! They were an odd pair to be keeping the night alive like that down on the deserted pleasure canal while worthier people slept. There was a cemetery behind the booth, and Verdigris could not keep his eyes off it.

At midnight he scratched his armpits and parted for the hundredth time the grubby satin curtains. The gravestones seemed to stretch back indefinitely under the moonlight. Where they ceased the Artists'Quarter began, its piebald roofs hanging on the dark skyline like an evil conundrum. Up the slope went his eyes, through the graves and into the city; back again. 'You sleep well enough out there!'he jeered, and then said a name the fortune teller could not catch. His narrow angular shoulders shuddered convulsively. She called him back but he hardly heard. He had not slept well himself since the night he murdered Galen Hornwrack. It was a yellow night, that one, grimed into his raddled brain and smelling of that unspeakable bundle with its rotting eyes. Ever since, he had had a feeling of being followed around. 'Someone walked over my grave,'he said. He laughed. 'Well I'll not mourn!'The moonlight flooding past him into the booth was of a peculiar cast: in it, as we shall soon see, things seemed almost more solid than they did in broad daylight. 'They sleep well enough out there on All Men's Heath,'he said, and made to draw the satin closed.

Instantly the reek of stewed cabbage redoubled, rooting him to the spot. A lethal claustrophobia overcame him. 'Hornwrack!'he shrieked. He spun round, blundered past the fortune teller (who had got laboriously to her feet and spread her arms in an elephantine gesture of comfort), and tumbled out on to the ice, where his feet slipped from under him. In an attempt to keep his balance he grabbed the brazier by one of its iron legs. This only served to upset it over him. Squealing with pain and fear he slid out of the light, plucking feverishly at the glowing embers in his clothing.

The Fat Main was used to his convulsions. Grumbling hardly at all she righted the table. Queer little scenes glowed up at her from the scattered cards, ancient hieratic conjunctions of tower and insect stimulating her to worn prophecies. A good marriage, she thought, and a bad one: and there a blond-haired man. (Each card was like a small bright doorway at the end of a corridor. She was perhaps too old now to step through and be enshrined in pasteboard with a hermit crab and a flight of swans.) On her way to the back of the booth to see what had upset him this time she stopped to turn one card at random; stare at it for a moment, panting; and nod heavily to herself. Then she parted the curtains and looked out.

For a month or more, agents and emmissaries of the Sign of the Locust – now grown massively in power though its outlook became daily more esoteric, and seeking revenge for (among other things) the bloody confrontation in the Bistro Californium – had sought Ansel Verdigris through the warrens of the Low City. They were oblique but patient. Every clue had pointed to the pleasure canal. Now, their gait curious in the extreme, they raced silently down the slope of All Men's Heath toward the quivering Main. They were wrapped in rags and bandaged about their peculiarly misshapen heads, and as they hopped high in the air over the graves their arms flew out at odd angles and their knives were white in the moonlight.

Verdigris, with one short anticipatory gurgle, squirmed further into the shadowy undergrowth on the far bank of the canal…

Soon after they had entered it the booth began to agitate itself in a violent and eccentric fashion, lifting its skirts and tottering from side to side as if it was trying to remember how to walk – while out of it came a steady rhythmical thumping sound, like two or three axes hitting a wet log. A dreadful astonished wail rose up in accompaniment to this, modulating with each blow. Verdigris bit his lips and drew back further into the weeds. He put his hands over his ears, but this changed nothing. The knives of the Sign rose and fell regularly; and the booth, like some remarkable engine in the night, continued to propel itself with an uncertain shuffling motion this way and that across the ice. After a little while, having reached the centre of the canal (where only lately it had been all boiled chestnuts and skating anemone-boys), it collapsed. Amorphous figures struggled momentarily beneath it; then it gave them up and they poured away through the cemetery in a quiet tattered wave, like the shadow of a cloud crossing a stony field. The booth gurgled and was still. It had somehow become tangled in the legs of the spilt brazier. Fire licked, reluctantly at first, at its grubby skirts. Then it was engulfed in a sudden silent rush of flames.

Ansel Verdigris stood on the ice in the unsteady yellow glow. He drew his knife and, in an access of some emotion he did not quite recognize, went off shouting up the hill and was ambushed and killed among the gravestones.

Not far away from All Men's Heath in the sharp and cabbagey night, Tomb the Dwarf kicked at his pony. His feet were cold. He had recently entered the City through the Gate ofNigg after three or four weeks in the deep wastes with Cellur the Bird Lord. Adventures and privations had attended him there, as they always did: old lizards following his steps, blinking at night in the small light of the fire; the pony quagged perpetually to its elbows in seepage hollows; and a great bird, first hanging high up in the air above them then settling nervously on a rock to inspect them from intelligent puzzled eyes, every feather made of metal! He had a friend buried in every acre of the North – knights of the Methven, sour old prospectors, all the thieves and princes who had traipsed with him at one time or another the useless places of the Empire. They had followed him too, as night drew in across the old battlefields of the Great Brown Waste.

The season now teetered on the cold iron pivot of the solstice, and Viriconium was asleep for once, huddled against the cold; you could hear its catarrhal snores from upper windows. The mosaic of its roofs, whited by moonlight and last week's frozen snow, lay like the demonstration of some equivocal new geometry. The Low City had retreated from him even as he entered it (dogs shivering outside the gatehouse, no other sign of life; the tunnel smelling of pee, black ice and that merciless vegetable), so that he seemed always to view it at a distance. He did not understand its mood. A muted expectancy, a cold glamour resistant to his dwarfish intuition, vibrated in its surfaces: he had for a moment (it was a moment only) a sense of two cities, overlapping in a sprawl of moonlit triangles and tangled thoroughfares. This conceit caused him to smile but remained with him nevertheless, quite distinctly, as if he had seen the future as a composite city uninhabited by human beings.

More beggars were abroad than a single city had a right to, moving quietly about in ones and twos, the deformities that would by day be displayed up on Chamomile Street outside the pot-house doors, now half-hidden, under scalloped rags and strange tight bandages – as if when left to themselves they sought a finer aesthetic of suffering, and a subtler performance of it. Tomb stood up in his stirrups to see over the parapet of a bridge. (Toc toc went the pony's hooves, little and sharp on the cobbles.) 'Someone at least is keeping the night alive,'he observed. Underneath him the Pleasure Canal diminished toward Lowth in an icy curve, its surface tricked out with dim reflections of the Moon. 'The ice is miraculously hard. They've lit a brazier down there on it.'Cellur, though, seemed preoccupied. 'Now it's spilt!'Faint shouts and wails, as of laughter, floated up. 'Look here, Cellur – some fool's set fire to a conjuror's booth!'

'I see nothing.'

'You wish to see nothing. You are a dreary companion, I can tell you that. It's all gone dark now anyway,'said the dwarf disappointedly. He craned his neck. Nothing. His pony drifted to a standstill. When he caught up again the old man was hemming and clucking nervously.

'Those alms-men are following us now. Be ready with your axe. I do not believe they are what they seem.'

'Arms-men! Bloody beggars, more like.'He shifted the axe from one shoulder to the other. 'Black piss!'He had looked back and got a glimpse of the beggars hopping after him, soft-boned and ricketty-kneed, their arms flying out this way and that for balance. It was a horrible sight. 'There are not that many beggars in the entire world!'They were all humps and goitres. Their mis-shapen heads were concealed under crusty swathes of muslin and hats with ragged brims. Up in the Artists'Quarter and all around the derelict observatory at Alves they were gathering in large groups, lurching crazily about in white-breathed circles, watching idly as Tomb and Cellur rode past, joining the quiet procession behind. An occasional soft groan came from amongst them. Cellur's horse slithered and stumbled from rut to frozen rut; and though the pony was surer-footed they still went slowly up the Rivelin Hill between the shuttered booths and empty taverns.

Into the High City they went, but it proved to be no sanctuary. When they quickened their pace, the beggars. quickened theirs, breaking into the parody of a run. Through the elegant deserted plazas ofMinnet-Saba (where the road is made of something that muffles the sound of hooves and the wind has mumbled puzzledly for millenia round the upper peculiarities of the Pastel Towers) they poured, and out on to the great exposed spiral of the Proton Circuit: reeling from side to side, jumping and hopping and tripping themselves up, always out of the power-axe's reach:

maintaining a zone ofquarantine about the old man and the dwarf, sweeping them along by the mere promise of contact. Tomb bit his lip and belaboured the pony's sides. All around him was a sort of dumb rustling noise, punctuated by the gasps and quiet desperate groans of the deformed. (Above and behind that he thought he heard a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered above the chase on huge thoughtful wings.)

Ahead, lights glimmered. In the gusty winds at the summit of the spiral, the overlapping filigree shells of the palace creaked as if they were part of some flimsier structure. Methven's hall: the Moon hung above it like a daubed head. 'Look!'For a moment its image wavered – two palaces were superimposed, behind it another landscape showed through. Blue particles showered from its upper regions, a rain of tiny luminous insects. They galloped toward it nevertheless. Where else could they go? It trembled like a dragonfly's wing; was refracted like something seen through running water on a sunny day; and accepted them almost reluctantly. New Palace Yard was almost deserted. Tomb's caravan still stood there, its shafts empty and its colours dimmed by the smoke of winter. No guards were there to observe the sparks fly up from the pony's hooves or watch the dwarf- axe in hand and white hair streaming out behind

– tumble to the ground and hurl himself back through the gate they had just come through, determined to hold it at all costs.

The beggars, though, had forgotten about him the moment he entered the palace, and now idled about outside, staring blankly at one another. They were not beggars, he saw: they were bakers and greengrocers, in the remnants of striped aprons; they were dukes and moneylenders: they were butchers. The Sign of the Locust peeped through their curious rags. They stood in the bluish moonlight and they seemed to be waiting for something; he couldn't tell what. (They no longer had any reasons for the things they did, but he wasn't to know that. A white and single instinct had them now, like a thin song in the brain.) He watched them for five or six minutes, feeling the sweat dry on him as the seconds stretched uneventfully out and his body relaxed. Cellur came up behind him and looked over his head. 'You can put up the axe,'he said with a certain morose satisfaction. 'The City is theirs, High and Low.'And he strode rapidly off into the outer corridors, heading for the throne-room. Tomb backed away from the gate with a half-hearted snarl and, stopping to collect the bundle of long silver rods he had carried behind his saddle to the Agdon Roches and back, followed him.

The corridors were full of rubbish, mounds of decaying vegetables and heaps of ashes. Everywhere were the discarded uniforms of the palace guard. Much of the food was spoiled, half-eaten, as if whoever had prepared it was unused to human provisions; or had forgotten what to do with them. Cellur shook his head.

'They have let us in,'he said: 'But they will not let us out again so easily. I wonder what they are waiting for.'

(Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, waited also, in a cold room with five false windows. It had been a long time to wait at the heart of emptiness, nothing human moving in the corridors outside.)

Elsewhere, three figures cross our field of vision like the vanguard of an as-yet-distant refugee column. The deep wastes of Fenlen roll away from them in the weak, variable light of late afternoon, hollow as a fevered cheek. Their faces are haggard but human. They walk – if walk is the word for this slithering, staggering progress through the mud – heads down into the rain and some yards apart. They rarely speak to one another. Madness and pain have divided them and they will not now be brought back together. All day long they have followed a fourth figure (there! – bobbing in the saturated air above them, like some great inflated spectral frog!) through a belt ofderelict factories. Often they halt and stare anxiously about, in case this floating guide has abandoned them: for they are forty days out from the wreckage of Iron Chine, and they have almost forgotten who they are. The moor ahead of them is scattered with interlacing ashpits, chancred with shallow albescent tarns, and strewn as far as the eye can see with broken earthenware pipes – the detritus, it may be, of some ancient ill-fated reclamation project. From the continental marshes and sumps to the north, the wind brings a deadly metallic reek; and mixed with that more often than not comes the faint smell of lemons, to usher in another period of delirium.

The woman imagines she is the spokesman of some alien race. Her cropped hair is daubed with mud, and she makes complicated motions of the fingers to symbolize the actions of wings or antennae. She speaks of a city on the plain. 'We lid not wish to come here,'she says reasonably, 'this is not our place!'There is a cold-sore at the corner of her mouth. For the last half-hour her gait had grown steadily more disconnected. 'Your breath burns us!'she exclaims with a light laugh, as if stating some principle so obvious as to need no demonstration; and she collapses into the mud. Her limbs move feebly then stop. Broken pipes are dislodged and roll down on to her. Her companions continue their ascent of the low ridge before them. At last one of them looks back.

'Fulthor,'he says dully, 'she can't go any further unaided;'and the other replies, 'I see the great-breasted chimerae with their ironic eyes, but I cannot go to them! This morning early I had a vision of Arnac san Tehn – him with the head like a god – sitting in a garden.'

He strikes himself repeatedly about the face and head. 'Dust and hyacinths in my father's library; dust and hyacinths my proud inheritance!'This litany seems to give him doubtful comfort. For some time he runs in erratic circles in the mud, his neck bent and his face pulled over to one side of his skull as if he has suffered a stroke. Eventually he joins the first figure (who has sat down wearily to watch him) and with much fumbling they raise the woman by her legs and shoulders. Their farting guide, meanwhile, hectors them in a language not heard on Earth before or since. He waves a fat, admonitory hand and they must follow; slower than before, up the dip of the long low ridge, sliding into peat groughs and shallow hidden pools, their eyes on their feet and the woman slung between them like a rotting hammock… Imagine that our field of vision is static, and that they have almost moved out of it, creeping across from left to right as the light fades. They crest the ridge. We see only their uncomprehending faces, made tiny and grey by distance; while they see only the city which spreads itself suddenly below them like excavations in a sunken garden.

A mist drifts over the scene – particulate, sullen, smelling of lemons.

The throne-room at Viriconium, on a cold and desultory afternoon three or four days after the death of the Fat Main:

three o'clock, and the night was already closing in, diffusing through the draughty passages where the old machines muttered and drew about themselves their meagre shawls of light. Methvet Nian: nine steel rings glittered cold and grey on her thin stiff fingers. She wore a cloak made from white fur clasped with amber and iron, and took her chocolate from a rare grey china cup. Her eyes were purple and depthless. Cellur the birdmaker sat with her, leaning forward a little, his face beaky and hollow in the weak light admitted by the clerestory windows high above. Their murmurs echoed in the chilly air. 'We know nothing but that the world is invaded.''Our fate in St Elmo Buffin's hands.'

'Nothing seen from the outer wall.''Great insects, marching south. The Queen held out one hand, palm flat, to the small blue flames of the fire, feeling an uncertain, transitory w armth.

Around them the palace was quiet, though not unpopulated. The Queen's guard had, it turned out, destroyed

some weeks before in a series of bloody, motiveless purges and episodic defections to the Sign of the Locust: the day after his arrival, Tomb the Dwarf had brought his caravan in from the courtyard, established himself like a nomadic warlord somewhere in the littered outer corridors, and taken charge of the handful of disorientated survivors he found living rough in the guardrooms and abandoned mess halls. It was a situation which suited both his inclinations and his experience. At night the dull ring of his hammer penetrated the intervening walls; he was rearming his little force. During the morning he made the round of his defences – which consisted mainly in barricades constructed from old machinery – or stared from the judas-hole he had contrived in the main gates at the silent 'beggars'without. In the afternoons he would knock on the throne-room door and allow Methvet Nian to serve him lukewarm chamomile which he compounded with a violent brandy from Cladich. I expect an attack soon,'he would report, and another day would pass without event. 'It can't be long in coming.'He was happier, he explained, with something to do. Never-theless he dreamed a lot, of the lost excitements of his youth.

Leaving the palace for the city was like entering a dark crystal (especially at night, under the 'white pulpy spectre'the Moon); the shape of things became irregular, refracted; sudden astonishing mirages swallowed the Pastel Towers or engulfed the denizens of the streets beneath them. It was as if Viriconium (the physical city, that is, the millenial artifact which sums up a thousand dead cultures) had suffered some sort of psychic storm, and forgotten itself. Its very molecules seemed to be creeping apart. 'As you walk,'the dwarf tried to explain after a single clandestine excursion to the Artists'Quarter, 'the streets create themselves around you. When you have passed everything slips immediately back into chaos again.'Many of the Reborn had abandoned their houses in Minnet-Saba and were making their way north, a trickle of great horses, big-wheeled carts and vibrantly coloured armour: they carried their strange weapons with care. Down in the Low City the alleys were empty and stuporous – no-one was coming out except for coke or cabbage. Outside the palace waited the devotees of the Sign, becoming more mis-shapen beneath their cloaks and bandages every day…

In the room at the centre of the palace the light had almost gone. Draughts ran about like mice in the corners. White stiff fingers retreated beneath the fur cloak she clasped about her: 'It is so cold this afternoon. On the Rannoch Moor when I was little more than a child, Lord Birkin Grif killed a snow-leopard. It was not so cold then. He spun me round by the arms crying “Hold on, hold tight!” (That was earlier still.) The dwarf is late this afternoon.'

'It isn't yet four. He never comes sooner than four.'

'He seems late this afternoon.'

As the clerestory dimmed, weighting the upper air with shadows, and the chocolate cooled in its china cups, the flames in the hearth achieved a transitory, phthisic prominence; and, one by one, like the compartments of a dream, the five false windows of the throne-room were filled with a grey and tremulous glow. Against this fitful illumination moved the silhouettes ofCellur and the Queen, nodding murmurous figures of a shadow play. The bird lord's success in controlling the windows – through which it was possible to see sometimes long lines of insects moving across an unknown terrain – had.been only partial. He could turn them neither on nor off. And though three out of five of them could lately be compelled to show some recognizable part of the Empire, how these views were selected was not clear to him. Since coming here he had sought:

Contact with his own machines beneath the estuary at Lendalfoot;

Views of St Elmo Buffin's fleet;

Some intimation of the circumstances in which Horn-wrack and his charges now found themselves.

Luck had not been with him. This was now to change, but not in a way he could have foreseen.

The windows were arranged in a high narrow bay which resembled the stern lights of an old ship. The glow in them grew gelid and shifty. In the third pane from the left (for two hundred years prior to Methven's reign it had depicted the same view, becoming known as the 'Pane ofiars'and giving rise to a common proverb) it condensed into three or four muculent lumps, drifting like fish in a polluted tank. After a moment this activity had spread to the four other panes, and a further refining or condensation had revealed the lumps to. be the salient features of five deformed heads – or five images of the same head (two of them upside down). The head was in pain. A dark rubbery device had been forced over its nose and mouth. The straps securing this gag or mask cut deeply into the plump flesh of its cheeks, which was of a mouldy, greenish-white colour patched with silvery acne. Whether the expressions that contorted the visible features reflected hope or fatalism, anger or panic, it was impossible to tell. Its yes, though watery, were urgent.

For some minutes this apparition struggled silent and unnoticed behind the glass as though trying to escape into the throne-room. A psychic gulf of such vastness separated spectre from substance that it seemed to be maintained in

focus only by its own desperation; by some debilitating and debasing act ofwill. It could see Cellur and the Queen and it was trying to speak. Eventually it whispered a little, a syllable like a trickle of vomit in a voice quite at odds with the amount of effort needed to produce it.

Gorb, it said.

Its eyes widened triumphantly. Gorb. Cellur and the Queen murmured on. The cups clinked, the day darkened and slipped inevitably into night; thin blue flames danced in the hearth, leaving delicate indelible images on the surface of the eye.

Gorb.

The head flung itself about, its hidden mouth gaping, until

'GORB!'

fell into the room like a corpse.

The windows flickered dementedly, shuffling views of the head like Fat Mam Etteilla shuffling the trumps. Cellur jumped to his feet, his cloak knocking the china on to the floor. 'It sees us! At last the windows have come to their full function!'(This was a guess: he was still in the dark.) Five panes showed the awful mutated face of the ancient airboatman – left profile, right threequarter profile. They showed sudden random close-ups of individual features – an ear, an eye, the mask with its proliferating tubes and cillia. Pentadic, huge, it winked down into the throne-room. 'Is it the man from the Moon?''Speak!'

Speak?.

All this time he has been struggling to speak!

Now at last he masters the language – Benedict Paucemanly with his message from a white and distant planet:

'Gorb,'he said. 'Fonderia diferro in Venezia … mi god guy… non-articulated constituent elements… Here lie I in the shadows of the veinous manna, burrowed into the absolute ABRACADAVER of the Earth… Earth! – all things are one to the Earth… mi god guy im all swole up… Fear deat hftom the air!'

He giggled weakly and shook his head. 'It's simpler than that.'He tried again. 'In the Time of Bone, in the Time of Dreams, when, on the far side of the Moon. I lay like a cheese, blue-veined and with a loop of blue wire for a brain… No. Simpler than that, too -'Look, as a young man I flew to the Moon. I would not do such a thing now. Something happened to me there, some transformation peculiar to the airs of that sad planet, and I fell asleep. I fell into a rigor, sank without trace into a trance in which I perceived for a hundred years the singing latticework of my own brain. It was a gift, do you see, or a punishment. (I no longer care which, though the question perplexed me then for its metaphysical implications if nothing else.) There, I was no longer a man at all but a theory, I was a thought received with the clarity of a sensation – hard, complex, resonant with proof. I was a crystal-set, and I thought that I could hear the stars.

'I lay on a marble slab in a paved garden among formal perspectives, my naked body citronised by the light falling down from space. At my side a single rose grew like an alum cyst on a long stem. Sometimes it emitted a quiet but intolerably beautiful melody comprising four or five notes on a vanished musical scale. The frozen air filled my mouth. I soon forgot my ship, the Saucy Sal. I communicated with the spare, bony winds of that region, blowing in from between the stars. The Moon is a strange place. Up there, shadows fall motionless and subtly awry. It is a nexus. It was changed by many races who tried to come to Earth (or to leave it) during the long downfall of the Afternoon Cultures. It is a listening ear. It is an outpost.'

In the throne-room hearth the small blue flames were exchanged mysteriously for a heap of orange embers. Dark seeped in through the clerestory windows. The dwarf did not come. Outside, the evening wind had brought more snow into the numbed city, hurrying it along as a guide hurries tourists down the picturesque but dangerous streets of some revolution-torn capital. (Streets that would turn later into black and silver geometrical proofs under the sovereign influence of the moonlight.) Benedict Paucemanly whispered like the waves on a distant beach, sometimes audible, sometimes not. He suffered frequent bouts of aphasia. Obscenities, mingled with a dubious lyricism, still made up much of his vocabulary. He still confused the grammar of a dozen old languages with that of a score of invented ones. But the backbone of his monologue was comprehensible. Cellur and the Queen, hypnotised by his awful pentadic image, listened to it and later reported it:

'The Moon, or some secret relic of the Afternoon which still inhabits it, had captured the aviator on his arrival and made him into a sort of ear by which to listen to the populated universe (though “listen” is perhaps not the word to use). This, we learnt from him, had been a common practice at one time. He was paralysed and placed on a slab. Messages poured through him like a clear fluid. Around him rows of other slabs diminished into the distance, and on them he could see the empty shells of other “ears” abandoned millenia ago when their long sleep turned finally into death. Many of the bodies were broken; they were like hollow porcelain figurines. He found himself able to eavesdrop on the transmissions passing through him, but it was like eavesdropping on Babel. The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of “reality”. These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense-organs, evolutionary beginnings and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real; and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable, oneiric, hard to achieve, like the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision…

'Ten thousand sentient races populate the stars. All their mad jargons lace the aether. Paucemanly listened, but was unable to answer them. “All were distant, dreadfully distant. Their voices were a fading, incomprehensible whisper; a sickening rumour of otherness.” Thus he lay there on his catafalque: far enough from the human Umwelt to perceive the myriad realities of the cosmos; not far enough to be able to forget his own humanity. This state persisted for a hundred years or a little less, until new, strong transmissions invaded local space.

'At first, new voices sang to him. This was the first feathery touch of their spiritual envelope or atmosphere. Latterly, he saw them, as a great filmy wing stretched across the cruel lunar meridian. Closer, they were a vast wave. He was soon inundated, sodden with their new “reality”. All other transmissions ceased. The rose which had bloomed beside his slab shattered with a sound of unearthly grief. A fine tracery of cracks appeared in the slab itself. The white gardens fell to dust around him. He was free. In that moment he lost his humanity for good. (But could not as yet attain any other form. The flesh has an inertia.) His.broadcasts to the Earth were begun too late: by then, the tenuous wave-fronts of the new consciousness had brushed the Pastel City, and in its gutters and alleyways and great Houses was conceived the “Sign of the Locust” – immaculate and ravishing, a philosophy like a single drop of poison at the centre of a curved mirror, an imperfect intuition of the alien Umwelt and of its implications for our own; the first infection of the human reality!

'They were insects long ago. They need no vehicles, but slip like a swarm of locusts down the faults and cleavage zones of space (which they conceive of as an extensive empty wasteland littered with the stony rubbish of planets and echoing with their own dry stridulations). Their motives are unclear: instinct – or something resembling it – compels them to search the continuum endlessly for some solution they cannot even define to themselves. Now, that cold passion is in ruins, and they are trying to live on the Earth. They were never meant to come down here and build a city. It is their tragedy as much as ours.

'This was how the great aviator put it to us. Out of confusion he had offered to lead them to the Earth. (Who can blame him? – woken from apparent death on the far side of the Moon, he had found himself neither insect nor human nor anything he had once been! They were all he had to cling to.) Out of a greater confusion they had followed him. Now – totem or deity or mere interpreter – he was encysted at the heart of their new city, passing his immobile hours in the blue mosaic flicker of his half insectile dreams, involuntary amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt.

“'Already it is too late for human consciousness ever to fully repossess the World; the new dream pours out like mist to envelope and mutate it.” Yet the swarm had been contaminated in its turn: “Where once it boasted the horny membranes of the locust, the mantis or the wasp, now it imagines flesh, skin, hair. It regards itself with horror. It is losing the struggle to maintain its inner vision, its hermetic certainty in the face of the void.'

'In the grip of this perceptual stalemate the very substance of the planet had begun to fade, stretch and tear, like an old net curtain at a window in the Boulevard Auss-man. If it continued, the conflict between Man and Insect would become nothing more than a jumble of meaningless shadowy events pivoting round a decaying point in space and time. In areas of major confrontation, matter, in its attempts to accommodate both “realities”, was already distorting, drifting into new forms and miscegenations. New ranges of mountains had appeared in the north; coastlines had taken on new forms, plastic, curious, undependable, draped with a new vegetation which had come up out of the sea along the flight-paths of the insects and now assumed a grey, etiolated, mucoid transparency; vast hallucinatory displays filled the skies at night, great shifting modular curtains like the view from a mosaic eye. All this had been added to the minor symptoms already observed, the Sign of the Locust, the rains of lights. In addition, the conflict of two dreams had woken older dreams: the factories of the Afternoon rebuilt themselves fragmentarily in the Great Wastes, producing clouds of corrosive vapour; strangely-dressed figures speaking ancient languages were posturing in the streets of Lendalfoot and Duirinish.

“'The World,” whispered Benedict Paucemanly, “is desperately trying to remember itself… blork… nomadacris septemfasciata!. .. what a lovely bit of meat…

Embers settled in the hearth. The doors of the throne-room rattled suddenly, their brass motifs of coelacanths and mermen shifting uneasily in the bluish gloom, and were still. It was the wind, perhaps; or perhaps something had fallen against them. From the passage outside was heard briefly an indistinct groaning; a dull clamour far off; silence. Something was happening out there, but those within were captivated by the wavering pentadic spectre of the old airman, his voice faint and his flesh tortured by the mask which, he explained, was now his sole means of perceiving the 'real', the human world. Methvet Nian said nothing, but only watched in horror and compassion the nodding of that wounded, debased head; and gently shook her own, while Cellur the birdmaker tugged his robe tighter round his thin chest and shivered. His head ached with the cold, and with the effort of following that faded cloacal whisper. He had recognized in the spectre's antics a certain self-consciousness. There was an archness in its winks and gross nods; the narcissism of the confessional informed its breakings of wind.

'What must we do, then?'he asked, a little impatiently.

Paucemanly gave a loud belch. His image swam, retreated, and was replaced by something quite new: great dragonflies, jewelled and crippled, dragged themselves across the shivering panes while behind them the landscape heaved and humped itself into shapes nascent and organic. 'They mutate and die in the new vapours of Earth: but their breeding cells are full.'Wingless and melting, the insects were swallowed by the curious hills about them. These in turn folded back to reveal a face, brown and bony-looking like the stripped and varnished skull of a horse into which had been inserted two half-pomegranates for eyes. It stared into the throne-room. 'Oops,'it said. 'Green, brown, testing. Hello?'Paucemanly reappeared in a glutinous yellow fog, looking puzzled. 'Whatever emerges from them,'he went on, 'will wrest the world to its own purposes… testing…

Septemfasciata .…'A high fluting sound came out of the windows. One of them shattered. Glass fell into the room. Nothing was revealed except a dusty hole which later proved to contain only some gold filaments and a few small bones. (Cellur, though, winced away as if he expected some alien limb to reach out of it.)

In the remaining panes a tarry smoke obscured intermittently the greenish image of the airman. A clump of fat sinister fingers – his own – appeared, feeling their way over his face as if trying to remember it from some previous encounter. They rested thoughtfully on the mask; then with a quick, predatory motion clutched it by the straps and tugged it oW Vomit sprayed from the defaced features beneath. Paucemanly vanished instantly.

'Is the world ending, then?'asked Cellur.

'I want only death,'came the answer, a distant whisper clogged with self-pity and guilt. 'A hundred years in the Moon! Only death.'

In the windows appeared a series of faded pictures of ordinary insects, the dry husks ofwasps crushed underfoot in an attic long ago, and hawkmoths like flower-pressings in an old book. A wind stirred them. They darkened one by one until there was nothing left at all. Cellur stood for a long time in the gloom, thinking of nothing. He could not make himself say anything to the Queen.

The dwarf came in with his axe in one hand and a bundle of thin shiny steel rods in the other. He was out of breath and there was blood in his hair. He drank his lukewarm chamomile with a grimace. When he noticed the dark windows and broken glass he nodded grimly. 'They had the signal to pass the gates half an hour ago,'he said. 'We're done for in here.'

He dropped the steel rods on the floor and, with a packet of tools he took from under his jerkin, set about assembling them. It was quick work. Soon he had in front of him a half-human skeleton ten or eleven feet tall – his famous 'mechanical wife', grubbed up long ago from some frigid desert in the far North. It was quiet in the room as he coupled its metal bones. Nevertheless he paused every so often to tilt his head on one side and listen; and at one point said casually: 'Someone will have to bolt the doors. I can't reach them, and the lads out there won't last much longer.'(Cellur did not answer. Little motes of blue light like luminous beetles had begun to spill from the shattered window. They fell faster and faster, like rain. They filled the room with a queer glow which lit the white cheek of Methvet Nian as she sat staring silently at nothing.)

A distant shout filtered through from the beleagured outer corridors. The whole palace seemed to shudder. The dwarf scratched his head. After a long life his understanding of such situations was preternatural. Steel scraped on steel, on stone, as he hurriedly spread the mechanical wife on the floor so that its legs stuck straight out and its arms were set close to its sides. He did something to it until it hummed and sent up motes of its own. Then he lowered himself down so that he lay limb for limb on its cold bones. A harness fastened his upper body into its flaring ribcage; its jawless skull he hinged forward to fit over his head like a helmet. 'It is my cold companion, that I thought I would never embrace again,'he murmured. Certain levers enabled him to control it, but for the moment he lay still in the curious blue light, performing some act of memory. Ozone, and a low buzzing, filled the air. The skeleton snapped its fingers inadroitly. It shivered and stretched, and of its own accord made grasping motions; but when he moved the levers at last, it failed to respond.

Something threw itself with a crash against the throne-room doors.

The dwarf was stuck in the harness. He writhed about. 'Bolt the doors one of you, or it's the end of us!'He got free and addressed himself feverishly to the machine. Sparks came up from it; it gave up slow yellow fireflies to join the flow of blue light from the broken window. A smell like burnt horsehair filled the air. As for Cellur and the Queen:

neither of them seemed to be able to move. Their faces were waxy with despair, their eyes like lemurs'. For Tomb it was only a physical disaster, it was only another war; for them it was a disaster of meaning. They murmured in low, slurred voices to one another, like old intelligent animals – 'Saint Elmo Buffin'; 'a fatal chance'. Tomb broke his nails on the ancient machinery. He was a dwarf not a philosopher; it was just another war: and he thought he still had time to win it…

He strapped himself back into the harness. The mechanical wife lifted itself from the flagstones with a groan and an ungainly lurch, like an overloaded camel. It was worn out, like all the other machinery in Viriconium. No-one knew what it had been used for all those centuries ago in the doomed Afternoon Kingdoms. It flailed clumsily about, smashing pieces of furniture in its efforts to stay upright. It fumbled on the floor until it came up with the dwarf's power-axe, which it proceeded to swing in dangerous, humming arcs. 'Ha ha,'laughed the dwarf. He pulled the skull-piece down over his head. His old eyes blinked redly. He felt alive. He only had to stamp his feet and the walls shook. He moved his levers. Trailing creamy white motes like cabbage moths, the mechanical wife shambled over to the doors, one enormous hand reaching triumphantly for the upper bolts…

Outside in a victorious gloom, the remnants of the palace guard bubbling to death at their feet, were gathered the devotees of the Sign. Since the murder on the Pleasure Canal they had lost touch with their ruling echelon in the fluorescing windy mazes of the Artists'Quarter; their ideological priorities had become unfathomable, even to themselves; and their very flesh had suffered violent and useless evolutions. In their endless quartering of the Low City they had uprooted railings, constructed wooden clubs studded with bits of broken glass, helped themselves to butchers'cleavers and old kitchen knives black with corrosion; gathering an army fit for the mutated, the motivationally-bankrupt and the burst. The pain of their transformation had caused them to loosen or unwind the bandages which had previously disguised their humps and tumours, and these now flapped about them in crusty strips as they hopped and sprang erratically along the palace corridors on their strong, bent legs.

Their eyes were puzzled and full of agony. They could not become insects. The flesh, ultimately, resists: there is a conservatism of cell and marrow. But they would never again be human – From wounds like women's lips had bloomed a fantastic, irrelevant anatomy: drooping feathery antennae, trembling multi-jointed legs, a thousand mosaic eyes, vibrating palps and purposeless plates of chitin. Where these new deformed organs merged into the original flesh was a transitional substance, pinkish grey, weeping like an unsuccessful graft. None of them were in the right place. From a mutilated torso sprang six thin legs, rattling like dry sticks in a wind. (They seemed to be beckoning. The man from whom they had grown screamed involuntarily whenever he caught sight of himself.) Here rubbery, saw-edged mandibles had burst from flower-like lesions at knee or nape and were now speaking unknown languages in reedy, creaking voices, there a gristly membrane flapped like a mantle, dotted with the abortive stumps of wings. For the genitals of a magistrate from Alves had been substituted a coiled mothlike tongue. which poked out uncontrollably at intervals. Some of them leapt and sprang about unpredictably, like grasshoppers on a sunny day; others had lost completely the power of upright locomotion and dragged themselves round in circles like crippled blowflies. This degradation was not wholly their own: behind the desperate murmurs that escaped them could be sensed the rustling whisper of some crippled demiurge: the pain of the Idea striving to clothe itself.

Propelled by a black horror of their own state, dimly but bitterly aware of the humanity they had willingly discarded, they broke down the doors and bore the mechanical wife of Tomb the Dwarf back across the throne-room, beating at it with their old shovels and broken swords. Hung up there among its gleaming limbs he swung his axe; tottered; retreated. While behind him Cellur the birdmaker woke from a dream of dissolution and found it to be real.