Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“Are you girls apprenticed to sorcerers that you believe such tales!” I asked. “If there are indeed Exiles, then they are imprisoned in each one of us, and not in mere rocks.”

“Mere rocks!” said Lise. “Mere rocks throw out stranger things than men, since men themselves were thrown from rock. Only last year, on the coasts of Lystra, a new sort of crab was born from the earth which climbs trees and signals to its friends and enemies with a claw especially enlarged for the purpose.”

Lambant laughed. “That sounds a very old sort of crab to me! What we require by way of newness in crabs is a species that will crow like a cockerel, yield milk every Monday in the month, and raise its carapace when requested to reveal beautiful doll’s-house jewellery underneath. Or a really big tame land crab the size of that boulder but with a better turn of speed, which we could train to gallop like a stallion.”

“Marvellous! And it would be amphibious and carry us across the seas to lands of legend!”

“And not only across the seas but under them, for we could creep inside its carapace and be secure from the waters outside.”

“Then we should see the lairs of the ancient sea monsters, where they are still supposed to hide, growing as civilized as men and conveying sea lore to one another.”

“I’d grow ivy and bright creepers and ferns all over my crab, until it looked like a fantastic itinerant garden.”

“Mine would have musical claws that played as it ran!”

“Girls, girls, you take up the silly game so violently, you’ll batter your brains out on your imaginations!”

We laughed again, and sat together beneath a plaque let into the rock, on which was written a legend in the Old Language. They asked me to translate it and with some effort I did so.

“This sculptured stone has a melancholy voice. It bears an inscription to a friend who appears, from the dating, to have passed over into shade at least eleven centuries ago. It’s a sort of verse. It says...“

I hesitated, and then spoke firmly.

Chloe laughed politely, hand halfway to her pretty mouth.

“Well, it is certainly elegiac, even if it doesn’t make sense. Of course, such verses don’t rely too strongly on sense for their impact”

“Nothing about Death makes sense,” said Lambant, striking a pose. “For Death is the negative of sense; we know it not until it bears us hence—and then ‘tis positive we know it not...”

“...For it and we are both a load of rot!” completed Lise, and we hugged each other and laughed. Meanwhile, Lambant had swung the old plaque open and drawn from behind it a piping and highly spiced dish for our lunch, the saffron rice grains amply punctuated with dates and sultanas and little fish, their gaping mouths stuffed with bunny-cloves, in the Phrustian fashion. We cried with pleasure to the gods and, feeling deeper into the rock, brought out wine in clay bottles and a cream-coloured cloth.

“All we need is some of Master Bledlore’s glasses, and we have here a feast for a king—or a prince, at the least. After all, even princes have to slim on some occasions. Now, Prian, while we eat, we must talk of more serious matters than Death, whose very existence is suspect on such days as this—besides which, there are spells against him, which is why I wear this serpent’s fang tied by a thread of scarlet cotton at my buttonhole ... So, let’s begin our debate.”

“Maybe the girls don’t want to talk about decadence,” I said, helping myself to a handful of rice, as the others were doing. “And I for my part would rather talk about the girls.”

“That’s real decadence for you!” said Chloe. With her ravishing mouth full, she added, “But the fish are delectable!”

Addressing myself to her sister, I said, “I notice that your sister is the bolder of you in speech. In action, which is the bolder?”

“Pooh, Chloe is not my sister! Does she look like me? Does she speak like me? Do you suppose she thinks like me?”

“You are alike in beauty and wit, but perhaps, on reflection, both your sentences and your skirts are a bit shorter. And you eat faster!”

“We should have guessed they aren’t sisters, Prian! How could one matriarchal womb manage to coin two such masterpieces?”

“Thank you, Master Lambant, we will leave wombs on one side.”

“Such asymmetry would spoil the look of you ladies.”

“This decadent conversation proves it a decadent age,” I said, tipping the wine bottle. “How can there be further argument? Girls, concede it cannot be a creative age and we’ll say no more on the subject.”

“No, no, Prian!” cried Lambant. “I must side with the girls, for was not our decadent conversation about wombs, and what is more creative than a womb? Therefore it is proved a creative age!”

I gestured largely, spilling yellow grains over them all. “No, I won’t allow it. You don’t follow your own argument deeply enough, Lambant! For how is a womb made to be creative? To give you not too anatomical an answer and spare dear Chloe’s blushes and dear Lise’s divine pallours, it is made creative by the male’s search for ever newer and more intense sensations. And what is the search for ever newer and more intense sensations but the essence of decadence? Thus, in this climax my conception is proved to the hilt”

“But you cannot conceive what a mistake you make,” said Lise. “Your argument is abortive, for you are merely chopping logic.”

“Yes, following your own private meaning,” added Chloe.

“No, for you are privy to it, too. Do you think I want to conceal my movements? My droppings of wisdom all mount to the same thing—that this age is a decadent one. I for one rejoice in it One is comfortable in a decadent age. There are no wars, no major questions to be answered, no cold winds blowing from a religious north.”

I had steered the conversation to a less facetious turn, having almost wrecked it in the whirlpools of wit. Lise answered me seriously, “But you are not correct. This is what Chloe and I were talking about indirectly before we visited the marionettes. There are always wars—if not between nations, between households, between classes, between ages, between sexes, between one side of a person’s nature and the other. And there are always major questions to be answered, and will be as long as life is staged in our outrageous universe. Even the marionette show raised questions in my breast I could not answer. Why was I moved by those trumpery wooden dolls? They did not seek to imitate or satirise or even parody people. They were just wooden dolls. Yet I found a part of myself cheering first for Banker Man and then for Robber Man. Was that artistry at work? And if so, then whose artistry? The puppeteers or mine, that I used imagination despite myself? Why do I weep over characters in a book, who have no more flesh and blood than the thirty characters of the printed language? As for your absurd religious winds blowing from the north, Prian, are we not all the time in a storm of beliefs? What has all our talk been but different kinds of belief and disbelief?”

We heard music far off of a tinkling and involved kind, ignoring it as Lambant took over the discourse.

“You are admittedly right, Lise, yet right in such a small way that you must let me enlarge the argument on your behalf. It is true that even in a decadent age mankind is assailed by major questions—mysteries, I would prefer to call them. In a decadent age, of course, men simply turn their silken backs on such mysteries, or use them as stage settings. But there are mysteries much bigger than those you list. Look—I’ll name one. Before we met you two angels, my devilish friend and I had been to visit an artist, a miniaturist who engraves his masterpieces on glass, Giovanni Bledlore. He works obsessively for a pittance. Why? My theory is that he feels Time is against him, and so he builds monuments to himself in the only way he knows how, almost like a coral insect whose anonymous life creates islands. Time makes Master Bledlore create Art. Suppose he had all the time in the world! Suppose he could live forever! I’ll wager he would not raise his hand to cut one single goblet! Time is one of those big mysteries which drives all before it with its lash.”