And Strange at Ecbatan the Tree Michael Bishop

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husband s head, backward from the brow. Someone has told you already?
No. You are the first. He pulled his wife to him, and they embraced a silent,
undemonstrative, somehow expressive embrace. Coigns and I stood apart, not so much
excluded from this sharing as simply incapable of comprehending its intensity. Then
Gabriel Elk drew his wife with him toward the house, the woman almost an extension of
himself, he almost an extension of her, the two of them incomprehensibly and
reproachfully whole. Ingram, he said, Robin, come with us. We followed. Silently.
Later, in the arras-hung dining chamber, we talked while the beardless Gareth s
almost tangible presence hovered in our words and breaths. The stone table was between
us like a funeral slab; the Atarite Palace and the provinces of Ongladred were reduced in
our minds to ghostly greys on a battle chart. Before a single dead loved one, the concepts
of civilization defended and honor reaffirmed dissolve into fume and blow away, like
cannon smoke. Even with no one of my own to mourn, I knew that much; the knowledge
had grown in me.
He was killed four days ago, Robin Coigns was telling us. Those machines that
Sayati Snow and Master Gordon brought up to below Firthshir had turned it all around,
the fighting, you know, and the Pelagans had started back up north, all the way through
Vestacs and Eenlich, too, it looked like. The boy he was killed in the per-suit Field-Pavan
Barrow ordered right after the machines turned em around. Then, when he sees they can
still kill us, you know, while we re per-suing em, ole Barrow calls it all off and we just let
em go, just let em run but Gareth he was already dead, Sayati Elk, he was already lost,
along with a mess of others, all of em on-the-line fellows, too.
There was silence.
Bethel Elk sat with her hands folded in her lap, as regal in her silken green gown as I
had ever seen Our Shathra Anna. Gabriel kept his gaze down, apparently directing it at
his heavy, rope-veined hands.
Then he said: An irony, Robin. An almost maudlinly predictable one. Irony, a part of
my trade; a philosophical joke to work on my creations. Now it conies home to haunt me.
Bethel said, Forget that, Gabriel. We will mourn awhile.
The old man looked up; he looked at Robin Coigns. Where is Gareth? Was he buried
in the north?
He s under, Robin said simply. He s in the tunnel twixt Grotto House and
Stonelore.
Here?
Aye, Sayati Elk.
How?
He took a rifle ball in the throat, sir, through the Adam s apple so his wind was cut;
the ball lodged there, you see. It wasn t meant for me to be beside him then, I guess.
Others came running for me and took me back, but by then our officers knew him for
your son and called for haomycin to go into his blood so as to get him back here fore he
stiffened. I was shunted off to one hand, Sayati Elk, and most near cried, and watched em
do what they had to. Gareth he lay in the midst of all this scrambling, you know, and bled
the life all out and couldn t see me no more than if he was blind, his eyes gone back and
his face just as still as old milk. He got home fore I did, Sayati Elk preserved, sort of.
They took him off that way, with nothing for me to do but watch. I near cried, sir.
We put Gareth in a preservator, Gabriel, Bethel said.
Which one? They were all full.
They re empty now, Gabriel. Except for Gareth s, and Bronwen Lief's. After you left,
I had some men come out from Lunn and give the other dead ones their second funerals.
They were burned, our actors, all of them together in the place we always burn
them at the end of the summer. I couldn t leave them sleeping in that heartless ice,
Gabriel.
Why did you spare the girl?
I don t know. Because she was new newer than the others. Because I had seen her
dance.
I want to see Gareth, the old man said.
I asked, May I go with you?
After an almost imperceptible pause the old man said, Please, Ingram.
We excused ourselves. Bethel and Coigns permitted us to go without them. They had
seen the boy, and they knew Gabriel s wish for what it was, a plea for one last,
unhampered moment of communion. Perhaps I was less sensitive than they, for I knew
this, too, and should not have gone with him but I felt that he would have refused to let
me go if my presence had threatened to throw up a wall between him and his dead son. I
had to go with him. Down into the programming room, into the dark tunnel, into the
dormitory room for corpses. Sensing my need to accompany him, Elk had said yes.
And so we left the dining chamber, walked down the hallway of luminous panels, and
rode the elevator into the very womb and bowels of Grotto House. My sensation of going
home grew more pronounced, more and more uncanny.
Then we were in the icy preservator room, among the ranked coffins and the upended
storage tanks of lox. A faint musical seething played in my ears. Our breaths took shape
in the air like dreamlike sails; we had voyaged into a numinous place, a world whose
deities were enshrined in ice and plastic. Four of the shrines were empty, but in the two
closest to the door we found the daughter of Josu and Rhia Lief and the newly slain son of
Gabriel and Bethel Elk. These young people were the numens of the preservator room,
guardian spirits whose frozen youth mocked their guardianship. Were they not too
primevally vernal for such a custodial godhood? I stared through crystal at first the
woman, then the young man whose throat was swaddled in a wide bandage.
Bronwen Lief looked different to me. Her face was not a whit altered from the first
time I had seen her, long ages ago, back before the spring had come. But the smirk I had
then read in the twist of her mouth seemed not at all sinister now; it was not even a
smirk, it was instead a wholly natural flaw, human and therefore reassuring.
As for Gareth, he looked no different, no different at all except that his sparse,
adolescent beard had matured into stubble. If Bethel had had him shaved before
committing him to the preservator, then even in death his facial hair had continued to
grow. So: His corpse s features were fresh and youthful, but touched with the beginnings
of a revivifying weariness.
Wearing frost-gloves, Gabriel adjusted the cryostat on Bronwen Lief s preservator.
With the cryostat he could take the temperature within each coffin up and down a limited
scale of cold in a very brief time, although the preservator room itself remained at a
constant 0� C. in case of separate cryostat malfunctions. As the temperature in Bronwen s
unit rose toward that of the room itself, the old man leaned over his dead son and studied
the boy s face. He was growing into himself, Ingram. He was just on the verge of growing
into the wholeness of himself.
My hands, for warmth, were in my armpits. I was behind the old man, and as he
leaned over the preservator I noticed for the first time an angry red gleam on the back of
his head, his mottled, naked skull. It was a nevus, a birthmark, a magenta discoloration
just to the right of and a little above the brain stem. Before I could stop myself I had
reached out and touched the tiny mark. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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