Lake of the Long Sun

Chapter 10. ON THE BELLY OF THE WHORL

Auk leaned across the squat balustrade of Scylla's shrine to study the jagged slabs of gray rock at the foot of the cliff. Their disordered, acutely angled surfaces gleamed ghostly pale in the skylight, but the clefts and fissures between them were as black as pitch.

"Here, here!" Oreb pecked enthusiastically at Scylla's lips. "Shrine eat!"

"I'm not going back with you," Chenille told Auk. "You made me walk all the way out here in my good wool dress for nothing. All right. You hit me and kicked me-all right, too. But if you want me to go back with you, you're going to have to carry me. Try it. Smack me a couple more times and give me a good hard kick. See if I get up."

"You can't stay here all night," Auk growled.

"I can't? Watch me."

Oreb pecked again. "Here Auk!"

"Here yourself." Auk caught him. "Now you listen up. I'm going to pitch you over like I pitched you off the path back there. You look for Patera, Silk like you did before. If you find him, sing out."

With weary indifference, Chenille warned, "He won't come back this time."

"Sure he will. Get set, bird. Here you go." He tossed Oreb over the balustrade and watched as he glided down.

Chenille said, "There's a hundred places where that long butcher could have fallen."

"Eight or ten, maybe. I was looking."

She stretched out on the stone floor. "Oh, Moipe, I'm so tired!"

Auk turned to face her. "You really going to stay here all night?"

If she nodded, it was too dark beneath the dome of the shrine for him to see her.

"Somebody could come out here."

"Somebody worse than you?"

He grunted.

"That's so funny. I'd bet everything I've got that if you checked out every last cull in that godforsaken little town you couldn't find a single-"

"Shut up!"

For a time she did, whether from fear or sheer fatigue she could not herself have said. In the silence, she could hear the lapping of the waves at the foot of the cliff, the sob of the wind through the strangely twisted pillars of the shrine, the surge of blood in her own ears, and the rhythmic thumping of her heart.

Rust would have made everything all right. Recalling the empty vial she had left on her bed at Orchid's, she imagined one twenty times larger, a vial bigger than a bottle, filled with rust. She would sniff a pinch, and drop a big one in her lip, and walk back with Auk till they reached that bit where you felt like you were hanging in air, then push him off, down and down, until he fell into the lake below.

But there was no such vial, there never would be, and the half bottle of red she had drunk had died in her long ago; she pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples.

Auk bawled, "Bird! You down there? Sing out!"

If Oreb heard him, he did not reply.

Argumentatively, Auk inquired, "Why would he come way out here?"

Chenille rolled her head from side to side. "You asked me that before. I don't know. I remember us riding in some kind of cart or something, all right? Horses. Only somebody else was in charge then, and I wish she'd come back." She bit her knuckle, herself astonished by what she had said. Wearily she added, "She did a better job of it than I do. A better job than you're doing, too."

"Shut up. Listen, I'm going to climb down a ways. As far as I can go without falling. You rest. I should be back pretty soon."

"We'll have a parade," Chenille told him. Some minutes afterward she added, "A big one, right up the Alameda. With bands."

Then she slept and entered a great, shining room full of men in black-and-white and jeweled women. A three-sun admiral in full dress walked beside her holding her arm and did not count in the least. She walked proudly, smiling, and her wide collar was entirely of diamonds, and diamonds cascaded from her ears and flashed like the lights in the night sky from her wrists; and every eye was on her.

Then Auk was shaking her shoulder. "I'm going. You want to come or not?"

"No."

"There's good places to eat in Limna. I'll buy dinner and rent a room, and we can head back to the city tomorrow. You want to come?"

By now she was awake enough to say, "You don't listen, do you? No. Go away."

"All right. If some cull gets to you out here, don't blame me. I did the best I could for you."

She closed her eyes again. "If some cully wants to rape me, that's dimber with me, just as long as he's not you and he doesn't want me to wiggle around while he's doing it. If he'd like to vent my pipe, that'll be dimber, too." She sighed. "Long as he doesn't want me to help."

Distinctly, she heard the scraping of Auk's boots as he left the shrine, and after what seemed to her a very short time she struggled to her feet. The night was clear; eerie skylight glimmered on the rolling lake and illuminated every harsh, bare point of rock. On the horizon, distant cities wrapped with Viron in the night appeared as tiny smears of fox fire, not half so desirable as the icy sparkles that had deserted her wrists.

"Hackum?" she called, lifting her voice. "Hackum?"

Almost at once he emerged from the shadows of the rocks to stand upon that very outthrust point of rock from which Silk had watched the spy vanish from the shrine, and from which she had imagined herself pushing him. "Jugs? Are you all right?"

Something invisible tightened around her throat. "No. But I will be. Hackum?"

"What is it?" The flooding skylight that rendered every bush and outcrop far and fey prevented her from reading his posture (she was good at that, although she was unaware of it), even while it revealed it; and his tone was flat and devoid of emotion, though perhaps it was only made to sound so by distance.

"I'd like to start over. I thought maybe you'd like to start over, too."

He was silent while she counted seven thuddings of her pulse. At last: "You want me to come back?"

"No," she called, and he seemed to have become minutely smaller. "What I mean is ... I want you to come to Orchid's some night. All right?"

"All right." It was not the echo.

"Maybe next week. And I don't know you. And you don't know me. Start over."

"All right," he called again. And then, "Sometime I'd like to meet you."

She intended to say we will, but the words stuck in her throat; she waved instead, and then, realizing that he could not see her, stepped from under the dome so that she too was in the clear, soft skylight and waved again, and watched him disappear where the Pilgrims' Way bent inland.

That was it, she thought.

She was tired and her feet hurt, and for some reason she did not want to step back under the dome again; she sat down on the smooth, flat rock outside the entrance to the shrine instead, kicked off her shoes, and comforted her blisters.

It was funny how you knew. That was it, and this's him, and I never knew till he said that: Someday I'd like to meet you. He'd want her to leave Orchid's, and quite unexpectedly she realized she'd be glad to leave shaggy Orchid's to live anywhere, even under a bridge, with him.

Funny.

There was a brass plate thing let into the smooth stone of the shrine; she fingered its letters idly, naming the ones she knew. The plate seemed to move, ever so slightly, as if it was not. solidly fastened but hinged at the top. She got her nails under it, lifted it, and saw swirling colors: reds and blues and pinks and yellows and golden browns and greens and greenish blacks and others for which she had no names.

"Immediately, Your Eminence," Incus said, bowing again. "I understand entirely, Your Eminence, and I shall be on the scene within the hour. You can trust in me absolutely, Your Eminence. As always."

He shut the door slowly and almost noiselessly, bowing all the while, and made certain that the latchbar had dropped before he spat. The Circle was to convene after a dinner at Fulmar's, and Bittersweet had promised to show everyone the wonders she claimed to have achieved with an old porter, who would-as she reportedly had confided to Patera Tussah-adore her as Echidna, Scylla, Moipe, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, or Sphigx on command, all of it supposedly executed in compiler. Incus had wanted (never more than now) to see that. He had wanted very much to see the porter with his skullplate and faceplate removed. He had been (as he told himself angrily) more than merely anxious to witness at first hand an actual demonstration of Bittersweet's technique in order that he might compare it to his own.

Was it actually possible for anyone to download-or was the whole thing, perhaps, a great deal simpler than he had imagined? Ideally, one subverted the art of the Short Sun programmers, utilizing it to one's own advantage, as an expert wrestler threw an opponent too heavy to lift by enlisting his opponent's strength in his own cause.

Clenching his teeth and slamming his small fist into his palm, Incus sought to convince himself that there would be a raid tonight and that some well-disposed god had maddened old Remora so that he might be spared; but it was nonsense, and he knew it. He was entitled to go tonight. The Circle would not meet again until next month, and no one had toiled harder at black mechanics than he-no one had shared all that he had learned more willingly, earning this night a dozen times over. There was no fairness, no justice in the whorl. The gods did not care-or rather, were inimical. Beyond question, they were inimical to him.

Dropping angrily into his chair, he jammed the nearest quill into the inkwell.

My Dear Friend Fulmar:

It is with deep regret that I must tell you that the old fool has cooked up another perfectly ridiculous piece of busywork for me. I am to go to Limna tonight, and no other night will do. I am to consort with fishermen in search of a woman (yes, I write a woman) I have never seen, who may not be there at all, all because his worthless spies have failed him again.

So grieve, my dear friend, for your poor coworker Myself, who would be with you this night if he could.

Myself standing for 7, as even that fool Fulmar could not help but understand. Briefly but satisfyingly, Incus reread, admired, amended mentally, and at last approved the note before ripping it in two, wadding it up, and flinging the wad into the incineratium. The chances that old Remora would ever see what he had written and identify him as the writer were slight, but not so slight that prudence did not forbid him to write his mind in any such fashion. A fresh sheet, in that case, and more ink-with the quill grasped wrongly.

My Dear Friend,

Pressing duties constrain me to forebear the pleasant social meal to which you were so very kind as to invite me tonight.

His characteristic spiky M had been replaced by a new character remarkably like a double E upside down. Good-good!

You know, my friend, yet it might more thoughtfully be said that you cannot know, how much I have been looking forward to a plain firsthand account of the marvelous adventures of our mutual acquaintance Bee. Bee himself -

No, it would not do. Fulmar would be utterly thrown off the scent by the male pronoun; it would be necessary to stop at his house and leave a clear, straightforward message with his valet. Nor would the trouble and loss of time go entirely unrecompensed; he, Incus, would at least have the satisfaction of inquiring just how long it had been since the unfortunate valet had received his wages, and observing the chem's baffled incomprehension. The valet had been a most creditable little project, and one Fulmar could never have brought to its wholly successful conclusion without his help.

Rising from his chair, Incus whistled shrilly and told the fat and worried-looking boy who answered his summons, "I need a fast litter with eight bearers to take me to the lake. Some fool woman- Never mind. His Eminence won't authorize renting a floater, although he insists upon speed. Tell the men that there will be only one passenger, myself. You might well describe me, I'm not weighty. They'll receive double pay at Limna and be dismissed there. Do the best you can, but hurry. Meanwhile I've got a hundred urgencies that must- Go, I say! Hurry! Is your bottom still sore? I'll make it sorer if you don't fly."

"Yes, Patera. At once, Patera. Immediately." Bowing, the fat boy shut the door, made sure the latchbar had dropped, and spat expertly into a corner.

Fascinated, Silk watched as the door opened in a swirl of petals, seeming to create the lofty green corridor beyond it. "It took me a while to identify the sensation," he confided to Mamelta, "but I placed it eventually. It was the feeling I'd had as a small boy when my mother had been holding me and put me down." He paused, musing.

"And now we're in another place altogether, much deeper underground. Truly extraordinary! Is there a way to prevent Hammerstone's following us down in this thing?"

Mamelta shook her head, whether in negation or merely to clear it, Silk could not have said. "So strange . . . Is this another dream?" "No," he assured her. He rose from his seat. "No, it isn't. Put that thought from your mind entirely. Did you dream much, up there?"

"I don't know how long it was. Suppose I dreamed once each hundred years . . . ?"

Silk stepped out into the corridor. There was a well in it not far from the petaled door: a twilit shaft descended by spiraling steps. He set off down the corridor to examine it, felt something through the worn sole of one shoe, and stopped to pick it up.

It was a card.

"Look at this, Mamelta!" He held it up. "Money! My luck's certainly changed since I met you. Some god smiles on you, and smiles on me, too, because I'm with you."

"That is not money."

"Yes, it is," he told her. "Did you have money of some other kind on the Short Sun Whorl? This is the sort we use in Viron, and traders from foreign cities accept it, so I suppose they must use cards, too. This would buy a nice goat for Pas, for example-even a white ewe, if the market were depressed. Chop it into a hundred pieces, and every piece is one bit. A bit will buy two large cabbages or half a dozen eggs. Aren't you going to come out? I don't believe that the moving room is going to sink any farther."

She rose and followed him into the corridor.

"Maytera Marble remembers the Short Sun. I'll try to introduce you to her. You'll have a great deal in common, I'm sure."

When Mamelta did not reply, he asked, "Do you want to tell me about your dreams? That might help. What did you dream about?"

"People like you."

Silk leaned over the coping of the shaft to peer down. The first six steps bore six words:

HE WHO DESCENDS SERVES PAS BEST

"Look at this," he said; she did not, and he asked, "Who were these people in your dreams?"

She was silent so long that he thought she was not going to reply; he went through a gap in the coping and down to the first step. "There's writing on all of these," he told her. "The next series says, 'I will teach my children how I carried out the Plan of Pas.' There must be a shrine of Pas's at the bottom. Would you care to see it?"

"I am trying to ... think of a way to tell you. We did not speak. Words. I have to remember to speak words now. I say something. But you do not hear me unless I move my lips. To move my lips and my tongue .. . while I make this noise in my throat."

"You're doing very well," Silk told her warmly. "Soon we'll have to go back up again, but not in that same little room since I'd assume it would take us to the place we left. I have to get back into the tunnels under Limna, however, and find the ashes from the manteion there. I'm not at all sure that we ought to take the time to look around this shrine and recite prayers and so forth. What do you think?"

"I . . ." Mamelta fell silent, staring.

"Patera Pike-my predecessor, and a most devout man-used to call out in dreams," Silk told her. "Sometimes he'd wake me in the next room. I think you may be afraid to speak, believing that this, too, is a dream; and that you might wake other sleepers. It isn't, so you will not." .

She nodded, the movement of her head barely perceptible. "I may have called out in the beginning. One was small, the Monarch's second daughter. The one you used to see dance."

"Moipe?" Silk suggested.

"I remember seeing her often at home, dancing through my dreams. She was a wonderful dancer, but we cheered because we were afraid. You saw the hunger in her face for the kind of cheers the others got."

"It may be Pas who favors you," Silk decided. "Indeed it probably is, since the moving room carried us straight to this shrine of his. If so, he'll certainly be offended if we don't visit it, after all that he's done for us. Won't you come with me?"

She joined him on the uppermost step, and side-by-side they descended the spiral, seeing the footprints of those who had preceded them in the thin dust on the treads, and shivering in the cool air of the shaft, which narrowed and grew darker as they descended.

They were less than halfway down when a faint odor of decay set Silk's nostrils twitching; it was as though an altar had not been properly cleansed and purified, and he (assuming that the shrine he anticipated included such an altar) resolved to purify it himself if need be.

Mamelta, who had lagged behind him by a few steps, now touched his arm. "Is that a hammerstone?" Silk looked back at her. "Hammerstone? Where?"

"Down there." She indicated the bottom of the shaft by a vague gesture. "Moaning? Something is moaning."

Silk stopped to listen; the sound was so faint that he could not lie certain he did not imagine it, an eerie keen- ing, rising and falling, always at the edge of his hearing, and often threatening to fade away altogether.

It was no louder at the bottom, where the soldier lay. Silk gripped the dead man's left arm and rolled him over, in the process discovering that he was no longer as strong as he had been. There was a ragged hole the size of his thumb in the dead man's blue-painted chest.

When he had recovered breath he said, "You'd better stand back, Mamelta. Chems seldom explode once the moment of death is past, but there's always a risk." Squat- ting, he employed one of the steel gammas forming the voided cross he wore to remove the dead man's faceplate. When bridging connections with the gamma produced no arc, he shook his head.

"How . . . ? Mamelta is my name, and I told you. Have you told me yours?"

"Patera Silk." He straightened up. "Call me Patera, please. Were you about to ask how this man died?"

"He is a machine." She was looking at the dead man's wound. "A robot?"

"A soldier," Silk told her, "though I've never seen a blue one before. Ours are mottled-green, brown, and black-so I suppose he must have come from another city. In any case he's been dead a long time, while someone in the shrine is alive and in pain."

A massive door in the side of the shaft stood ajar. Silk opened it and stepped into the shrine, finding himself (to his astonishment) in a circular room a full thirty cubits high, with padded divans and glasses and multicolored readouts on its ceiling, its floor, and its curving wall. Every glass was energized, and in them all bobbed a tattered, skull-like thing that was no longer a face, wailing.

He clapped his hands. "Monitor!"

Gabbling sounds issued from the face. An irregular hole opened and closed; the sounds rose to a piercing shriek and a trapdoor in the center of the room flew back.

"It wants you to go into the nose," Mamelta said.

Silk crossed to the opening in the floor and stared down. At its bottom, fifty cubits away, swam three bright pinpricks that moved as one; irresistibly reminded of similar lights at the bottom of a grave he had dreamed was Orpine's, he watched until they vanished, replaced by a single spark. "I'm going down there." "Yes. That is what it wants."

"The monitor? Could you understand him?"

She shook her head, a minute motion. "I have seen this. Going to the ship that would lift us off the Whorl."

"This can't be any sort of boat," Silk protested. "This entire shrine must be embedded in solid rock."

"That is its berth," she murmured, but he had dropped to the floor already and swung his legs into the circular opening revealed by the trapdoor. Rungs set in the wall permitted him to climb down to a lucent bubble through which he looked across a benighted plain of naked rock. As he stared at it, a nameless mental mechanism adjusted, and the sparks swarming under the concave crystal floor were not merely distant but infinitely remote, the lamps and fires of new skylands.

"Great Pas ..."

The divine name sounded empty and foolish here, though he had employed it with no doubts of its validity all his life; Great Pas was not so great as this, nor was Pas a god here, outside.

Silk swallowed, dry-mouthed and swallowing nothing, then traced the sign of addition with the gammadion he wore about his neck. "This is what you showed me, isn't it? The same thing I saw in the ball court, the black velvet and colored sparks below my feet."

There was, or so it seemed to him, an assent that was not a spoken word.

It steadied him as nothing else could have. One at a time, he removed his sweating hands from the icy rungs of the ladder and wiped them on his tunic.

"If you wish for me to die, then I'll die, I know; and I wouldn't have it otherwise. But after you showed me this in the ball court, you asked me to save our manteion, so please let me go back to-to the whorl I know. I'll offer you a white bull, I swear, as soon as I can afford it."

This time there was no response.

He stared about him; some of the pinpricks of light were red, some yellow as topaz, some violet, many like diamonds. Here and there he saw what appeared to be mists or clouds of light-whole cities, surely. The somber plain was pitted like the cheeks of a child who had survived the pox, and far more barren than the sheer cliffs of the Pilgrims' Way; no tree, no flower, no least weed or dot of moss sprouted from its rock.

Silk remained where he was, staring down at the gleaming dark, until Mamelta, from a higher rung, touched the top of his head to get his attention; then he started, peered up at her in surprise, and looked away, dismayed by his glimpse of her unclothed loins.

"What you found? I have found where it belongs. Give it to me."

"I'll bring it," he told her. When he tried to climb, he discovered that his hands were cold and stiff. "You mean the card?"

She did not reply.

All the rooms were small, though the widest was lined with innumerable divans and was higher than the principal tower of the Grand Manteion, facing the Prolocutor's palace on the Palatine. In a room above that very tall cylindrical room, Silk's heel slipped on a small white rotted thing, and he learned where the pervasive odor of decay originated. A dozen such flecks of dead flesh were scattered over the floor. He asked Mamelta what they were, and she bent to examine one and said, "Human."

Crouching to look at another, he recognized the coarse black dust in which it lay; the polished metal cabinet that had presumably held thousands or tens of thousands originally had, like the room in which Mamelta and so many other bios had stood sleeping, been sealed with the Seal of Pas; that seal had been broken, and the embryos flung wantonly about. At the schola, Silk had been taught to regard the mere misuse of any divine name as blasphemous. If that was true, what was this? Shuddering, he hurried after Mamelta.

In a compartment so small that he could not help brushing against her, she pointed to a frame and dangling wires. "This is the place. You won't know how to tag it. Let me."

Curious, and still half-stunned by the looting of Pas's treasures, he gave her a card. She attached three clips, then studied a glass overhead. "This is a different kind," she said. Stooping, she inserted it in the frame at ankle height. "Let me see them all."

He did; and she tested each as she had the first, working slowly and appearing unsure of her decisions at times, but always making the correct one. As she worked, a broken gray face took shape in the glass. "Is it time?" the face inquired-and again: "Is it time?" Silk shook his head, but the face continued to inquire.

Mamelta told Silk, "If you have more, you must give them to me."

"I don't. There were seven left after Orpine's rites, two left from Blood's sacrifice, and the one that you saw me find. I've given them all to you to repair this poor monitor. I never knew that money ..."

"We must have more," Mamelta said.

He nodded. "More if I'm to save my manteion, certainly. Far more than ten. Yet if I take back those ten cards, he'll be as he was when we arrived." Exhausted, Silk leaned against the wall, and would have sat if he could.

"Have you eaten? There is food on board."

"I must go back down." He sternly repressed the sudden pleasure her concern gave him. "I have to see it again. The monitor- Is this really a kind of boat?"

"Not like the Loganstone. This is smaller."

"Its monitor was correct, in any event-what I saw from the bow was something I was meant to see. But you're correct as well. I should eat first. I haven't eaten since- since the morning of the day we went to the lake; I suppose that was yesterday now. I ate half a pear then, very quickly before we said our morning prayers. No wonder I'm so tired."

Small dishes swathed in a clouded film that Mamelta ate with obvious enjoyment grew almost too hot to hold as soon as the film was peeled away, and proved to be pressed from hard, crisp biscuit. Still shivering and grateful for the warmth, they devoured the dishes themselves as well as their contents, sitting side-by-side on one of the many divans; all the while, the monitor inquired, "Is it time? Is it time?" until Silk, at least, ceased to hear it. Mamelta presented him with a deep green twining vegetable whose taste reminded him of the gray goose he had offered to all the gods on the day he had come to Sun Street; he gave her a little dusky-gold cake in return, though she appeared to feel that it was too much.

"Now I'm going to go down into the bow again," he told her. "I may never return to this place, and I couldn't bear it if I hadn't gone again to prove to myself forever that I saw what I saw."

"The belly of the Whorl?"

He nodded. "If that's what you wish to call it, yes-and what lies beyond the belly. You can rest up here if you need to, or leave if you'd rather not wait for me. You're welcome to my robe, but please leave my pen case here if you go. It's in the pocket."

A little food remained, with some of the crisp dish; but he found that he did not want either. He stood up, brushing crumbs from his ash-smeared tunic. "When I come back, we-I alone, if you don't want to come-will have to return to the tunnels to recover the azoth I left there when I met the soldiers. It will be very dangerous, I warn you. There are terrible animals."

Mamelta said, "If you have no more cards, there may be other repairs I can make." He turned to go, but she had not finished speaking. "This is my work, or at least a part of my work."

The ladder was the same, the pinpricks of unimaginably distant light the same, yet new. This otherwhorldly boat was a shrine after all, Silk decided, and smiled to himself. Or rather, it was the doorway to a shrine bigger than the whole whorl, the shrine of a god greater even than Great Pas.

There were four divans in the bubble below the end of the ladder. While eating with Mamelta, he had noticed thick woven straps dangling from the divan on which they sat; these divans had identical straps; seeing them, he thought again of slaves, and of the slavers said to ply the rivers that fed Lake Limna.

Reflecting that straps stout enough to hold slaves would hold him as well, he dropped to the upper end of the nearest divan and buckled its uppermost strap so that he could stand on it, virtually at the center of the bubble, while grasping the last rung.

By the time he looked out again, something wholly new was happening. The plain of rock had blanched unwatched, and was streaked with sable. Craning his neck to look behind him, he saw a thin crescent of blinding light at the utmost reach of the plain. At that moment it seemed to him that the Outsider had grasped the entire whorl as a man might grasp a stick-grasped it in a hand immensely greater, of which no more than the tip of the nail on a single finger had appeared.

Terrified, he fled up the ladder.