Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.) Read online

  The memory flickered briefly to the body of the dead servant, two days ago, hanging from the spar. The way it had rotated slowly left, right, like a great slow shake of the head.

  The most amazing thing has happened, Cleonicles wrote. A skywhal had beached itself in the Lacus, not three miles from my house. As I’m sure you know such an event is almost unprecedented in the natural history of our System. Occasionally, but very occasionally, a senescent adult will beach itself; but this beast was immature, no more than thirty-five yards long, barely twenty years old by my estimate. More mysteriously, there were several parallel wounds on its anterior right-spine side, each six feet or more in length and of some depth. The surface fascia had been separated so far that healing was only intermittent; and from what I could see there were associated deep internal cavities as well. I’m having the carcass carried ashore where we will – somehow! – improvise an embalming strategy. Then I’ll be able to study it at my leisure. You must come again, my dear boy, and examine it for yourself! Perhaps it will kindle your interest in natural history, and thereby your entry into science! I can see your sceptical expression in my mind’s eye as I write, dear boy; but would ask you to allow an old man his dreams, howsoever implausible. You have my love, dear boy. C.

  He sealed up the letter and took it down to one of the footmen, who hurried away with it. Forty miles east was Rompez, where the balloon-boats docked on their regular trading jaunts; a mail-boat would pick it up today, or the next day, and carry it over to Enting.

  As the footman bicycled away with the letter, Cleonicles stood in the doorway thinking. Something felt sluggish inside him, something weighing him down and preventing him from concentrating his energies on science. He didn’t understand his own recalcitrance. There was, after all, a pressing problem, which was how to administer embalming fluid adequately to a carcass the size of the dead skywhal. But instead of going through to his study, or out to one of his laboratory sheds, he stood musing on the front door. What was wrong? Why had he been unable to settle to anything solid, constructive, this day?

  It was unsatisfying. Frustrating. But sometimes days were like this.

  Memories kept popping unbidden into his mind. It was curious. Usually Cleonicles thought little of the past, except to draw on his enormous body of scientific knowledge. Something inside him kept triggering the memories. He thought again of his nephew, the flush on his face at the hanging two days earlier. Something nagged him about the servant’s execution, but it was not immediately clear what this might be. The whole thing had gone very smoothly. It hadn’t been pleasant: the face gargoyling like a child making himself ugly on purpose; the latrine smell wafting over the yard as the dying man had soiled himself; the front of the tongue, a solid convex, coming steadily further and further out of the mouth. But these things weren’t supposed to be pleasant. They were supposed to be educational.

  ‘Parleon?’ he called from the door. ‘Parleon?’

  The butler emerged from a side door, hurrying across the grass towards his master.

  ‘Parleon,’ said Cleonicles. ‘Drive over to the west stables, and have the body of that servant taken down.’

  The slightest hesitation. ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You think I should leave it longer?’ Cleonicles asked.

  ‘A week is traditional, sir.’

  ‘I know. But I think two days is enough. He was a solitary criminal, stealing by and for himself. It wasn’t a more general insurrection, you know. It must be horrible for the estate servants to go about their business under that—’ bulging black eye, he was going to say, but thought better of it. ‘Under that presence,’ he said. ‘And the weather is warm. It’s probably smelling by now.’

  ‘Yes sir.’ The butler departed.

  But still Cleonicles wavered at his own front door. What was the matter with him? Something felt clogged inside; in a metaphorical sense, but also in practical terms. He had emptied his bowels that morning, but there was a distinct pressure down there now. Perhaps he needed to go again. Ah well.

  Cleonicles crossed the hall, went through to the lower master bathroom. He tugged the light on; it was a silk cord weighted with a plug of amber. There was a tiny asterisk, a dead fly, in the heart of the amber. The stone’s soul perhaps. The cord yielded with a click and flooded the room with white brilliance, where the fittings in the room sparkled with their usual opulence. Two great marble baths, shaped like cupped hands, lying empty to the right and the left. Two polished granite commodes were positioned like thrones at the far end of the room, and to either side of them two sinks carved each from single pieces of green marble. The whole of the far wall was mirrored. As he settled himself onto one of the two toilets, Cleonicles found his eye drawn by the lazy meandering oscillation of the amber ball at the end of its length of cord, pendant from the switch in the ceiling. It moved through the air as a fly might on a summer day, sweeping a small figure of eight, the motion that his pulling hand had imparted to it. Would it be possible, he thought to himself, to create a mathematical equation that would describe both the sinusoidal trajectory of that body, that cord-dangling sphere of amber, and also to describe the rate at which the circles lessened and therefore the amount of time the whole system would take to reach equilibrium?

  He could do it, probably; but he was too tired to do it now. Maybe at some later stage. And his bowels were refractory, refusing to play along. He had definitely felt the inward yawn of something, some lower food-canal bolus of digested food ready to emerge. But now that he was here, sitting on the toilet, it seemed that nothing wanted to emerge. Tiresome. A waste of time.

  He stood and pulled his trousers up again. Out of habit he washed his hands anyway, and then left the bathroom, turning the light off behind him and imparting who knows what erratic new orbit to the amber-weighted string.

  Outside he went back to his study, but he was not comfortable in his bowels, he could definitely feel the turd still inside there, skywhal-shaped and pressing against the walls of his lower intestine. He paused on the stairs, and debated with himself whether to return to the bathroom. It was possible that, were he simply to be patient, he could just sit on the toilet and wait until his sphincter decided to release itself. But he had no time for that. He had work to do! And he closed the door of his study behind him with an air of decision.

  But in his study he could not settle to work. Instead his mind went back six years; danced over that intermediate bar of time like a hurdler. As he leaned back in his chair he was six years younger. He was back in the middle of his last prolonged sexual experience, a year-long dalliance with an estate servant. He had not come from the stable estate to the west, but from the hop fields of the east.

  Melesias, he had been called. A fine young man.

  Why had his wandering mind lighted on sex? What had triggered these memories? The cause-and-effect was too tenuous. And why should he be reminded of this particular dalliance, out of all his life’s sexual encounters? Something somewhere in his brain wasn’t right. Perhaps it was a sign of incipient senility, of a degeneration of the mental will. Had the bulging body of the man he had hanged two days earlier linked a chain of memory in his mind? From one servant to another. Even as he indulged his remembrance, the more scientific part of his brain was cogitating on ways of experimentally testing the functioning of memory. Had there been any serious research published on the topic? Not that he knew about. The corpse hanging loose, limp, a general image of detumescence despite the fact that the individual features of the hanging body strained and bulged.

  The way it swung, gently, almost lullaby-like.

  As a young man, Cleonicles had been close to his younger brother. Had loved him more deeply than any other human being. Had spent most of his time with him. Indeed, he had admired him on occasion to the point of hero-worship. There was a solidity about Old Polystom’s character, a stillness of spirit, that touched Cleonicles deeply. With it went a sort of automatic certainty about things. Polystom simply knew, for ins
tance, from an early age that he preferred boys to girls, and he went through no inner anguish or uncertainty over the fact. Following in his wake (though he was the older brother) Cleonicles too experimented with male sexual partners to begin with. But his sexual drive was not as powerful as Polystom’s; the real urgency with him was intellectual. He sometimes chose partners, or picked out attractive servants, and played the active role in a same-sex coupling. He even tried the passive role, in the spirit of experiment (he was a budding scientist after all, or so he told himself), but he enjoyed it less. Something about being dominated in this fashion excited his body, but the sheer discomfort of it, and the indignity of it, was just not compatible with his mind, his sense of self. After he moved to his own house, he ceased playing with boys, and on the rare occasions he did indulge it was with women. As science took a larger and larger role in his life, so sex waned. He stopped having proper relationships, with real people, altogether; and only occasionally availed himself of the servants.

  But, in the latest decade of his life, he had found his taste changing. He was not entirely sure why. Sexuality was not a topic he thought worthy of properly scientific exploration – it was surely too unpredictable, too capricious, as well as being too low – and so he did not attempt to analyse himself with any precision. Nonetheless, for some reason he found himself fantasising, on the rare occasions when sex did enter his mind, of males rather than females. In his last decade, he returned to men for his rare outings into sexual activity. He didn’t understand it, and didn’t especially want to understand it. Over a period of three years, he had a number of fairly long-lasting ‘relationships’ with several of the servants, the last of them with Melesias, the young, strong hop-hand from the east of his estate.

  He had spotted that one on a tour of the hops one harvest time, and had called him up to the house to work on the hothouse flowers. Observing his fine touch with plants, the way he could seemingly draw life up through their stems so that even sickly growths grew well and strong, Cleonicles had remitted him to one of his experimental greenhouses, growing plants not native to Enting. Growing mutated forms of algae that helped the old scientist approach some of the mysteries of the scilia. Now, sitting in his chair on his last day of life, Cleonicles’ memory was strong with the image of this man, this Melesias. He had had a feminine skin, smooth, with only wispy hairs growing on the underside of his jaw, and a curved womanly chin like a billiard ball. But he had had strong masculine eyes, and a good jutting skull at the back of his head that Cleonicles associated with intelligence. His body was slender and dense with muscle. It had been a month or more before he had summoned him to bed, and then for a further month all he had been able to do was wrestle impotently with him under the sheets. Cleonicles was, indeed, getting old; and although his member perked up at odd moments, it refused to perform on demand. There was one occasion when he managed to get it up and in before it softened, but this achievement alone gave him little pleasure. The placid, work-horse manner of Melesias did not help him gain erotic arousal, he decided, and over the weeks that followed he ordered the servant to be more dominant. There was something paradoxical in ordering such a thing (dominance should assume control automatically, surely, it shouldn’t have to be told to do so), but it seemed to answer some deep need in Cleonicles. Melesias pinned his frail arms behind his body, used his superior strength to move him about the bed, pressed him face down into the mattress. It was a novel, humiliating and deeply exciting experience: the sort of excitement that grew from the belly to thrill through all his limbs like a slow explosion outwards. ‘Order me about,’ he ordered, the fizzing sexual excitement dissolving the illogic of the statement. Clumsily, warily, Melesias had played along. Come here, the servant had said. Lie on your front. Like this, not like that. Now, Cleonicles insisted, put it in! Do it, do it! The first time the servant had tried, he had pulled out quickly at Cleonicles’ wince and grunt of pain, and the old man had shouted at him, beaten him with his feeble arms, for his tenderness. Again! Again! And this time it had not been so hurtful; maybe the little ring of muscle had sagged with age, or maybe his excitement covered the pain. Don’t move it! Just leave it in there! And Cleonicles, panting under the weight of the man on his back, had fumbled around underneath himself and brought himself off easily.

  But afterwards he had been deeply bothered by the encounter. The thought of it nibbled away at his well-being. It was hardly dignified; to allow a servant such dominance, even in play. Three days later he had called Melesias back and had tried to reverse the roles, smacking the young man’s broad back with his stick hard enough to bring up weals, like brushstrokes of red oil paint. But scream and beat as he could, his own member refused to do anything but hang dead from the scaffold of his torso, flopping from side to side.

  Sexuality was not something, Cleonicles realised, that could be gainsaid or argued down. As immutable in its own way as gravity. There was no point in fighting it.

  Months had passed, most of a year, and each time Cleonicles indulged himself he felt less comfortable in his mind. But each time he did it, the bodily thrill increased. He had the servant ride him, pump him, and it had been extremely uncomfortable, so much so that for an hour or more afterwards he had been unable to hold his stool in, and had sat on the toilet glum and sore. But at the time, whilst it was happening, it had fuzzed his mind with a sort of animal bliss. It would not be quite right to say that he was disgusted with himself, since he was too well-bred to allow that sort of vulgar slackening of character. But he was unsettled, and his unease went deep.

  Eventually, the balance between pleasure and unease tipped away from sex. Cleonicles reached a mental place where the sight of the servant revolted him. He sent him away: first of all to the furthest reach of his estate, and then, when the irritant of knowing that the man was on the same world as him grew too great, further away than that. He gathered together two dozen fit men, Melesias among them, as an Enting platoon of foot, and sent them off to his friend Amynseis as a sort of gift. Thoughtful and patriotic, the old general had replied by letter. Unlooked for, my dear old friend, given your current public position on the war; but I can see that your common sense runs deep. Be assured they will be put to good use on the Mudworld! Cleonicles replied that he would prefer it if his platoon were not mentioned in any public despatch as being his – say, rather, ‘a volunteer unit from Enting’ – and that he specifically did not want casualty reports sent to him. And that was the last he had heard of Melesias. Five years since. General Amynseis was dead now, of course. He had died of an apoplectic seizure whilst commanding troops in combat (the fit so fierce, apparently, that his aide-de-camp had thought he had been shot) and a new general had taken charge of the offensive. If any men remained out of Cleonicles’ little platoon, they had surely been reassigned to different battalions.

  In that intervening time Cleonicles had been pleased to observe, of himself, that he no longer craved the sexual encounter. He had indulged himself, once or twice, after Melesias, but latterly had simply not thought of that subject at all. Blessed release, he told himself.

  [third leaf]

  [this leaf does not appear tattered or degraded, and yet it is unusually short, which may indicate a hiatus. It is given here whole; emendation in this case would self-evidently be spurious and hypothetical.]

  And the time still ticked away, as Cleonicles mooned in his study, thinking of the past. The hours bore down upon him, passed through him and swept away, the last ones that Cleonicles would ever know. Eventually, the hold of memory released him a little, and he wandered downstairs and out onto the lawn to smoke a second cheroot in the afternoon light.

  His butler drove up the long lakeside driveway, and parked the automobile outside the main garages. He clambered out and puffed over the lawn to where his master was sitting. No longer a svelte man, Parleon: his waist bulging out like an onion, oedematous wrists, his eyes sinking into the flesh of his face, his forehead reaching now almost to the top of his skull. �
��Sir! Sir!’ he panted.

  ‘Did you do it, Parleon?’

  ‘They cut the body down, sir. Buried it out behind the hillock, at the back of the furthest stable.’

  ‘Away from the regular servant graveyard, I hope?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Unmarked grave?’

  ‘Yes sir. But sir, there’s something else.’

  ‘Really? Something else?’

  ‘Yes sir. Several of the estate servants out there reported seeing strangers.’

  The word was like electricity in Cleonicles’ body. He sat straight up in his chair. ‘Strangers?’

  ‘Interlopers, sir. Nobody they recognised. Dirty-looking men; three of them. One woman I spoke to said they had a disreputable look about them.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cleonicles, sitting forward. ‘Strangers, eh!’

  So the end began.

  Cleonicles was on his feet, reaching for his stick, which he had propped against the back of his recliner. ‘We’d better go in and phone the militia captain,’ he said. ‘The last time we had interlopers they turned out to be deserters from a military balloon-boat – do you remember?’