Part 79 (1/2)

”Dr. Grishkin, we...”

Grishkin raises an admonitory finger. He sips tea. He points to his surgical window. Birkin Grif watches it, fascinated.

”The ash-flats,” intones Dr. Grishkin: and, having dropped his conversational bomb, sits back to watch its effect.

Horror. Silence. Tension drips viscous from the Californium ceiling. Far off, the crowd whispers. Nothing so dramatic has happened in Californium for a decade.

”I am to take you to the ash-flats of Wisdom.”

Skinless Lamia shudders ever so slightly. Into the silence fall three perfect silver notes. Jiro-San has taken up his lute.

”I think I have changed my mind,” she whispers.

”It is too late, all is arranged,” says Dr. Grishkin. ”You must come, now it is inevitable that you come.” There is the slightest edge of annoyance to his voice. This annoyance is persuasive. One feels that Dr. Grishkin had gone to much trouble to...bring things about. He does not wish to be disappointed.

”But will He be there?” asks Birkin Grif, anxiously. ”There is little sense in risking so much if He is not there.”

Comes the answer: ”There is little sense in anything, Mr. Grif. But He will be there. He has sent me.” He sips tea. It is so simple, the way he puts it, it seems already an accomplished fact: but then, his oily job is to simplify, to smooth the way. Lamia leans forward, speaks from the corner of her mouth, the perfect conspirator. Dr. Grishkin finds her skinned proximity delightfully disturbing, her aorta distinctly beautiful.

”The Image-Police, Dr. Grishkin: what of them?”

”Pure paranoia, dear lady. There is nothing very very illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the illegal about a little trip to the edge of Wisdom. Just to the edge edge, you understand, merely a sightseeing trip: a little pleasant tourism...” He leers. ”Shall we go?”

They leave. The fat man waddles. Birkin limps. The skinless lady is sinuous. As they pa.s.s Jiro-San's table, he gazes wistfully. He finds Birkin very handsome.

TRACK THREE: THE ASH-FLATS OF WISDOM.

Wisdom is a wilderness. Long ago, there was a war here; or perhaps it was a peace. Most of the time there is but small difference between the two; love and hate lean so heavily upon one another, and both are possessed of a monstrous ennui ennui. Certainly, something destroyed whatever Wisdom was: so well that no one has known its former nature for two centuries. From its border one can see little but sense much.

Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand s.h.i.+vering there in a cold wind, peering through the mesh fence that separates city-ground and forbidden ash. Their cloaks-black for him, gray for her-flutter nervously. Soft flakes of ash fill the air about them with dark snow. Grishkin is huge in voluminous purple, talking animatedly to a grayface guard outside his olive-drab sentry box. Meanwhile, the desolation seems to whisper, You have no business here, everything here is dead You have no business here, everything here is dead.

There is a bleak sadness to this waste, a bereavement: it mourns. Eidetic images of ghosts flit on this wind: women weeping weave shrouds at ebbtide; famine-children wail to old men at twilight. Here there are two kinds of chill, and cloaks will not keep out both.

Abruptly, Grishkin takes out a small silver mechanism, and points it at he guard. There is an incredible blue flash. The body of the guard drops, improbably headless, jetting dark blood from the venturi of its neck. Dr. Grishkin vomits apologetically: a sick valediction. He returns, wiping his mouth on a canary-yellow handkerchief.

”You see? There is no problem, as I have said.” He retches, his fat face white. ”Oh dear. Excuse me, do excuse me. I grow old, I grow old I grow old, I grow old you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported.” you know. Poor boy. He has a mother in Australia. He was exported.”

”How sad,” says Lamia. She is gazing at Dr. Grishkin's heaving stomach through the surgical window. She feels quite sympathetic. ”Sympathy is so quaint,” she tinkles. ”Poor Dr. Grishkin.”

Poor Dr. Grishkin, his spasm over, takes out his little glittering mechanism again, and aims it at the fence round Wisdom. The incredible-blue-flash performance is repeated, whereupon the mesh curls and congeals like burning hair.

”Pretty,” observes the skinless woman.

”Impressive,” admits Birkin Grif. In the charred sentry-box bells begin to ring.

”Now we must hurry,” intimates Dr. Grishkin, and his voice is more than faintly urgent. ”Leg it!” He begins to waddle hurriedly toward a charcoal dune. They follow him through the broken mesh. The wind rises, whipping up small, stinging cinders. Cloaks fluttering, they top the rise and drop flat, facing the way they have come. A great turmoil of ash-flakes hides the sentry-box.

”The wind will have erased our tracks,” says Birkin Grif.

”Correct as ever, mon frere mon frere,” returns fat Dr. Grishkin. ”Officially, we have just died, n.o.body will bother us now.” He leers. ”I have been dead these ten years.” He laughs mordantly. His stomach trembles behind its window. Birkin Grif and his skinless mistress are unamused.

”Why does the ash never blow into the city?” asks Lamia.

”Come,” orders Grishkin, eyeing the weather with distaste.

PAUSE THE SECOND. FOR NARRATIVE PURPOSES THE ASH STORM ABATES.

Led by the seraphic murderer Grishkin, they flit like majestic moths-purple, gray, black-over the long low swells of ash.

This land is empty, composed visually of utterly balanced sweeps of gray, shading from the dead cream to the mystic charcoal. Slow watercourses cut the ubiquitous ash, silting swiftly, meandering, beds infinitely variable. Wind and water make Wisdom unchartable: age and the wind make it cripplingly lonely. Time is overthrown in Wisdom: its very mutability is immutable.

Thinks Birkin Grif: This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs This land is the ultimate vision of the Ab-real Eternity. Across it, we scuttle like three symbolic beetles without legs.

TRACK FOUR: I REMEMBER CORINTH.

Flitting minutiae on the broad back of the waste, they finally achieve their Heroic goal.

Dr. Grishkin stops.

He and Birkin Grif and the skinless woman stand-at the end of an erratic line of footprints-at the apparent center of an immense, featureless plain: the hub of a ma.s.sive stasis, a vast silence. The horizon has vanished, there is no obvious convergence of ash and sky: both are flat, monochrome gray. Because of this, environment is shapeless; dimensions are unclear; the three suddenly exist without proper frame of reference, with the sole and inadequate orientation of their own bodies. The effect confuses; they become dream figures on a back-cloth of ab-s.p.a.ce: unattached, divested of every vestige of their accepted and appropriate reality.

”It is here we must wait,” says Dr. Grishkin, his fat voice devoid of expression, drained of expression by the single-tone emptiness.

”But He is not here...” begins Birkin Grif, fighting to prevent the visual null from sucking up his very thoughts, speaking precisely only through mammoth effort.

”We must wait,” repeats Grishkin.

”Will He come, though?” demands Grif, thickly, struggling with the silence. ”If this is a fool's errand...” His implied threat falls flat, negated by the vacuum.

”You have lived a fool's errand for a millennium: why quibble now? Here we wait.” Slow steel in Grishkin's voice; again he will not be denied. They wait. At this point of minimal orientation, without movement or sound, it seems that eons pa.s.s. They wait. Nothing happens for a million years. Finally, Grif speaks, his words harsh and congested with a sudden aged, neurotic ferocity. ”I think I may kill you, Dr. Grishkin. He is not coming. All the way to nowhere, and He is not coming. I think I will kill you...” His face is distorted; his good eye winks, manic; this is a senile fury.

”Shut up.” Grishkin is smiling his rosebud parody. ”Shut up and look!”

”...I think I will kill kill you...” hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks. you...” hisses Grif, like a machine running down fixedly through a series of programmed spasms. But he looks.

Skinless Lamia is dancing on the ash, magnificently naked once more. Her feet make no sound. She moves to a muted hum of her own making; an insistent, droning raga. She dances possessed, smiling in introspective wonder at her own movement, ant.i.thesis of the greater stillness. Her dance is a final destruction of orientation: almost, she floats.