Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

“The Lady protect us all!” she cried.

“What is it?”

“Look! Look!”

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

But that was far from the worst of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally! The Coronal’s banquet!

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

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

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

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