The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season

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THE FIXED STARS

FC2

Chapter One

1.1 The Speech of the Old Man

I am a humble servant of people. In this world we work together. You are a woman of fierce intelligence and I can see that you have been thoroughly educated; I need hardly explain to you why we people can survive only together and never apart. There can be no more devouring of one another in those prisons which I shall forbear to name-you know the prisons of which I speak.

The race of people does not have it easy. There is not much luck for us. The race of people finds trouble where we ought to find trouble, for trouble purifies us: the philosopher reminds us that person is the animal that is purified by striving. But you distrust me, Molly, and not without reason; for have you not stumbled upon me sleeping beside this crossroads, with neither partner nor visible handiwork, with hair on my head and a velvet girdle round my body, and with the mien of one untutored in the love of people? And therefore perhaps you think that, disdaining the labors which civilization requires, I occupy myself instead with concealing my scalp under hair and my form under velvet. But discard the notion, Molly, even as we discard certain other notions which I shall forbear to mention; for enigmas of every description surround us, as fog surrounds the sea: even a head covered in hair may contemplate essential labors; even on the hearts of the garishly clad may be graven the image of darkness.

We people were born to strive, and there are none who strive more than I. Even when people lived in those deranged collectivities the name of which offends decency-even then they hardly strove more than I now strive. Just as the chemist compounds elixirs, just as the beekeeper nurtures bees, just as you weave these ropes which I see here in your wagon, so too do I strive on behalf of our civilization, with this difference: that my striving surpasses that of all others. For the charge laid on me brings me each day into the greatest imaginable peril.

You scoff and harden your heart against me-and rightly, Molly, rightly. "This old man," you say, "thinking himself what he no doubt calls an intellectual, will end by presenting to me a dream of those towers and homes of depraved design which for so many centuries held people bewitched"-I mean those rectilinear labyrinths of steel and despair which none would care to hear me describe, the towers and homes of late capitalism.

But I ask your pardon, Molly, for matters lie with me not precisely as you think. The dream that I will present to you is a different dream.

A group of travelers came near this road not long ago, as no doubt the carers for the land have told you: wise travelers from distant coasts, clad like myself in velvet, not because they cherished textiles but because they had traveled through a difficult region. And it was they who laid my charge upon me, on a hillock in the shape of a kidney near a region where the people suffer defects in their genome. We walk together in this world, Molly, and the civilization that binds us binds us not one atop the other, as we were bound when the idle throve; but it binds us side by side. Nevertheless do some of us by chance or blessing possess a peace more puissant and a love more loving than the peace and love of others, and the strength to stand against the oldest enemy of people. It is to me that such puissant peacefulness falls, and to me my ghastly task, the accomplishment of which, as you will presently hear, offends decency.

Know, then, Molly, that although you and I cherish between ourselves the things that people cherish, and rejoice in the love among people, there yet dwells in the land a monster who cherishes not those things, and whom it is my calling to bring to peace. I refer, Molly, to the vampire, or wampyr: that monster who, clinging to loathsome solitude, nourishes himself by means having to do with the genomes of people and with dreams of despair-means which strike at the very heart of our communities.

It is in the struggle against this monster that I find my calling. I see now that you have not been educated so thoroughly as I had thought, and that weakness tempts you to turn away from me and to think me an old braggart and a teller of tales. But I shall make it my duty to deliver you to peace. When I have completed my speech, at a time not far removed from now, then the two of us will be joined in a certain love, which, though it be not the ordinary love which joins people, will nevertheless accomplish the ends of love. Then, owing to the nature of my love, you will become aware of certain animalcules of the dark, and witness their acts and hear their voices; and even as my peculiar love together with all the other kinds of love form together the great spectrum of loves, so too does the manifest speech of our civilization, which is both like and unlike my speech, sound in harmony with the songs of the animalcules of the dark, which also is both like and unlike my speech, and make with it one utterance, the utterance of utterances, which is woven of the speeches of people and also of the songs of the animalcules of the dark.

To put the vampire to peace is no small work: we achieve it only by a terrible means. For darkness and solitude are his native elements, and the hanging rope which slays us people who live in community is to him as the sea is to the octopus, as the veld to the lion; and the means of bringing the vampire to peace is also the engine of delusion. I speak of a certain element, Molly, yellow and orange in color and rich in scent: that element which is the spirit of discord among people, and which was the fuel and fetish of an epoch which saw people bound not in love but in strangled networks of toxins and cravings: that element which makes man into meat, water into mist. Do you know the element of which I speak? I hope you will forgive my bringing up matters on which no friend of people will care to dwell; but what is required is precisely that the heart of the vampire be cast into that prickly and beguiling phenomenon with which the peaceful have no commerce.

You recoil strongly from me now, for to cultivate this element is a perversion. But I myself do not cultivate it; I wait, rather, for a certain season, that season which comes after spring, that season which dries the trees and brings the lightning, and makes of the forest an abomination; then I search out the vampire, and, coming upon him, cut out his heart and hurl it into the objectionable phenomenon from afar. Still you recoil, and I see that you hope I will leave you soon. For you suppose that, my duties being bound to a certain season, that season which comes before fall, I idle away the remaining seasons in low schemes, in accumulating commodities, in erecting structures. You dare! Let me assure you, friend of people, that I am no idler. Though we find ourselves now in the last days of spring, and the lightning not yet come, the matter of vampires requires my constant attention. For the vampire is not without cunning; our ways are transparent to him; when the season approaches during which that phenomenon which the peaceful abhor menaces the forest, he departs with his harem and household for other lands, where the people be fewer but the climate damper, as suits him. Therefore it is my duty to mark him with this chemical spray, which has been distilled and decanted using only the most universal technologies by the unambitious working in small groups. The advantages of this spray are fourfold-

1.2 Smoke

When Molly and her mother first arrived on that coast, they came to the bathhouse. There they met the matron, who wore a hairmold over her scalp the likes of which neither of them remembered having seen before. The bathhouse was neither large nor small, but was well placed among cool cedars, and overgrown with fragrant woodbine; and it overlooked a fertile valley, which many of the people called the finest valley in that half of the continent, although none could say which half of the continent that was. When Molly and her mother had put aside their things and taken the numbing drug, the matron looked them over. It was a fine spring day, and they went nude and unshod.

"Are you contagious?" the matron asked.

Molly looked at her mother and her mother looked at Molly.

"It is a simple examination, then," the matron said. She ushered them into a narrow wooden room lit from high above by six skylights. "Wait here," she said, and left.

Molly and her mother had just time to turn to each other and begin to ask what there was about them that had led the matron to think them contagious, when there burst in upon them a very small man wearing tight boots. This man lost no time, but, saying, "Hi, hi, hi," sprang onto the bench which ran the length of the room and began to examine them, first Molly, then her mother. In each case, his procedure was this: he first chafed vigorously his patient's face and all her limbs, and, producing a miniature color chart from a pocket in his boots, held it against her breast in order to measure the flush his chafing had raised; he entered this measurement on a yellow index card. He next addressed her heart and liver, listening to the first with bare ear to bare breast, not for long, and palpating the second with moist fingertips. Finally, he took down a small blowgun from a hook on the wall, discharged a cloud of choking powder in her face, and demanded to inspect her buttocks.

When he had satisfied himself, he sprang down from the bench and left the room, saying, "Aha, aha."

This procedure and protocol dismayed the two women. They opened their mouths, each about to suggest that they quit the bathhouse and resume the road; but before they could utter a word, the matron returned.

"It is only a precaution," she said, "because we once had a contagion here." With that she brought them into an antechamber scented with anise and citrus, in which a great number of people lay in hammocks, sipping cold infusions and recovering from their baths; and from that room she brought them into a long hallway. The far end of this hallway opened onto the cedar forest and the mild air of the afternoon, and along the two sides ran cedar doors, each decorated with a number carved of darker wood and all but the last standing open. From the bath-chambers within came the sounds of splashing and laughter and the mild scents of pine-soap. The matron led Molly and her mother the length of the hallway, counting all the while on her fingers. The planks of the floor cooled their bare feet, and the breezes of the bathhouse cooled their scalps, and as they passed the open doorways the people within left off looking at each other and peered instead at them, but continued their laughing without interruption. When they reached the end, the matron hesitated, saying: "I thought there had been more baths." They followed her back the length of the hallway, and back again a third time, she in growing confusion, and Molly's mother started to say, "If there is no room-" but the matron interrupted: "No! There is number twelve." She composed herself carefully. "Number twelve is perfectly pleasant."

At that moment a man, hairy all over like a bear, happened to enter from the end of the hallway that was open to the cedar forest, and to overhear what the matron said. His eyes grew wide, and he cast a darting glance at Molly and her mother; then he charged into a nearby bath-chamber-it was number eleven-and they heard the sound of voices raised, and then splashing, and before they could contemplate the meaning of anything a group of four emerged and hurried past them.

"You might use number eleven," said the matron, adjusting her hairmold, "but it is not clean. And number twelve is perfectly pleasant." And, grasping in her horny grip an elbow of each of them, she brought them to number twelve.

It was a cozy chamber, higher than it was deep, and filled through a window on the opposite wall with light and birdsong and the dry smell of the forest. The tub was built into the floor and lined in pink tile; it occupied half the room. There was a chair and a scale. The matron preceded Molly and her mother, and stood in the doorway as though listening; then, turning with a sniff, "I will bring towels," she said, "because there are none."

Molly and her mother, left alone, selected fragrances from their bathkits. "What a strange woman," Molly's mother said. At the sound of her voice, cries of panic erupted to the right and to the left. A shattering crash and a cracking thump sounded nearby; somebody cursed. "That will be numbers ten and fourteen," Molly's mother said. "It may be they're not used to strangers." And, indeed, it was not long before a floor creaked on the left, and another on the right, and the slap of running feet faded up the hallway.

"I hope we will be welcome here," Molly said.

They opened the rubber seal and admitted the icy water of the creek into the tub. They had lost time in the examination room, and the numbing drug would soon run its course; they leaped into the bath and began scrubbing.

But Molly, whose senses were younger and sharper, soon remarked on a peculiar quality of the water: "It is distinctly pink." The hue vanished against the tile of the bath below, but when she scooped up a soapdish-full and scrutinized the water against the white, there was no mistaking it: the water in that bath was pink and getting pinker. "Earth in the pipes," said Molly's mother; "it is a rustic place." "But it swirls," said Molly, "like smoke."

Molly's mother froze at the word. "We do not discuss-" she began. But Molly said, "I don't like it, Mother." Around them swirled eddies of pink, now of red, swirling indeed like smoke-precisely like smoke. "An animal has been killed upstream," said Molly, scrambling from the bath; "a large animal, or else-" "But perhaps it is something they do here," her mother said, "adding a red substance to the water; suppose it is a perfume or some other luxury. I ought to have brought you traveling earlier, Molly, and taught you to trust more in people; for to trust in people is the most important lesson a young woman can learn."

Nevertheless, Molly's mother stepped out of the water, which now ran crimson; and when she stood beside Molly she turned to look where Molly was looking, which was in the direction of the bath, and this is what the two women saw: black clouds, unseasonable, had passed over the sun; the sky was dark; the room drew its light from the air above the tub, which shone all through itself with a glassy texture and a pale blue light, and in which, in a gathering and refracting of this light as though it were passing through a lens of semi-fluid shape, the features of a man's face now began to form.

And who knows what might have come next? Except the floor creaked behind them then, and someone screamed: it was the matron, holding in her arms a thick stack of towels. She hurled these without delay in the direction of the tub and the uncanny light, took hold of Molly and her mother, and, showing herself stronger than she looked, propelled them before her up the hallway.

They came into the antechamber and there was further screaming; everybody left the bathhouse.

The commotion lasted well into the evening. The matron became ill and was taken away. The man like a bear and his group of four gave new towels to Molly and her mother. "That old man who died of the cold," the man like a bear said-"it was not long ago." "I shall never recover," Molly's mother said, and told the story again.

The man like a bear said, "Certainly there was something detestable between that old man and the matron. She was only a girl then. She likely told you of a contagion, but there was never a contagion: that old man died of cold, the cold of the water and the cold of the matron. Now he is bound here," the man like a bear shook his beard sagely: "bound like a dweller in one of those long-ago concrete prisons of which it is impolite to speak."

1.3 Andrea and Thomas

In the wagon they found one hundred and forty lengths of rope.

"We will bring them to the crèche," said Thomas.

"We cannot carry them to the crèche," said Andrea. "They are too many."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE FIXED STARS by Brian Conn Copyright © 2010 by Brian Conn. Excerpted by permission.
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