M. Harrison: A Storm of Wings

Since their condition allows them no deeper relief, the merely selfish are raddled with superstition; salt, mirror, 'touch wood'are ritual bribes, employed to ensure the approval of an already indulgent continuum. The true solepsist, however, has no need of such toys. His presiding superstition is himself. Galen Hornwrack, then, cared as much for the Sign of the Locust as he did for anything not directly connected with himself or his great loss: that is to say, not in the least. So the first clue to their coming confrontation went unrecognised by him – how could it be otherwise?

Glued to its own feeble destiny in the leaden blue moonlight, the clique at the Bistro Californium regarded its navel with surprised disgust. Verdigris the poet was trying to raise money against the security of a ballad he said he was writing. He bobbed and hopped fruitlessly from shadow to harsh shadow, attempting first to cheat the fat Anax Hermax, epileptic second-son of an old Mingulay fish family, then a sleepy prostitute from Minnet-Saba who only smiled maternally at him, and finally Mooncarrot, who knew him of old. Mooncarrot laughed palely, his eyes focused elsewhere, and flapped his gloves. 'Oh dear, oh no, old friend,'he whispered murderously. 'Oh dear, oh no!'The words fell from his soft mouth one by one like pieces of pork. Verdigris was frantic. He plucked at Mooncarrots sleeve. 'But listen!'he said. He had nowhere to sleep; he had – it has to be admitted – debts too large to run away from; worse, he actually did feel verses crawling about somewhere in the back of his skull like maggots in a corpse, and he needed refuge from them in some woman or bottle. He nodded his head rapidly, shook that dyed fantastic crest of hair. 'But listen!'he begged; and, standing on one leg in a pool of weird moonlight, he put his hands behind his back, stretched his neck and recited,

My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows

And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows

Sickens and slithers down into the mallows

Murder will soothe us and settle our fate;

Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow

We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow:

The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows Encrimson the foam at the fisherman's feet!

No-one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an eye on both door and window (he expected nobody – it was a precaution – it was a habit), his long white hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack and Chorica nam Veil Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how badly off he really is.

'I dined with the hertis-Padnas,'she explained confidentially, not looking at Verdisgris as he bobbed uxoriously about in front of her. 'They were too kind.'She seemed to see him for the first time and her imbecile smile opened like a flower.

'Muck and filth!'screamed Verdigris. 'I didn't ask for a social calendar!'

Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack.

A grey shadow materialized behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream.

Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, gaped at him in grotesque surprise. 'No, Hornwrack,'he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came out and scuttled round his lips. 'Please. I only wanted -'

'Get out of my way,'Hornwrack told him. 'Go on.'

Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate 'shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.

A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all – like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name – Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere taint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human-being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick 'velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack's knife proferred like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris'disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, 'Hello my dear. Hello my little damp parsnip -'

'I,'she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks.

Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed.

'What's this?'he muttered to himself. 'No money! No money!'With a sob he threw it high into the air. It turned over once or twice, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner.

Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. 'Go home and rot, Verdigris.'He gazed down thoughtfully.

Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort neccessary to separate their dreams, their memories and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would leave the City to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured – and here we find them seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste – curious, flourishing, hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the Waste. All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert.

The search for a cure is forgotten; the attempt to come to terms with Evening abandoned. They prefer now to drift, to surrender themselves to the currents of that peculiar shifting interface between past, present and wholly imaginary: acting out partial memories of the Afternoon and weaving into them whatever fragments of the Evening they are able to perceive. Privately they call this twilight country of perception 'the margins'; and some believe that by committing themselves wholly to it they will in the end achieve not only a complete liberation from linear time but also some vast indescribable affinity with the very fabric of the 'real'. They are mad, to all intents and purposes: but perfectly hospitable.