Aurelia, Page 4

  Blaise Genet, in hot pain from his cracked ribs and in a pleasant fury over winning the hand from that large and dangerous man, Karl Talion, reversed the knife and began to open the throat of Karl Talion with its blade.

  “Wait, wait!” called a servitor in that gambling salon. “Everything must be done in order here.” The servitor had a large hank of slippery elm in one hand, and in the other he had a small device called a runnel that will channel blood from a cut throat into a flask.

  The servitor took the knife from Blaise, cut a strip from the hank of slippery elm, put the strip into his mouth and began to chew it. Then he gave the knife back to Blaise and held the runnel to the side of the throat of Karl Talion. A second servitor brought four crystal flasks of the one quart size.

  Blaise was cutting Karl Talion in the side of the throat with the knife. He didn’t cut him cleanly, and he didn’t intend to. He ground the blade in, and even the mask-face of Karl was contorted in agony. Blaise and the servitors began to fill the flasks with Karl’s blood. They filled the four flasks almost exactly full. The mask of Karl Talion (and it was a mask) paled and went ashen and haggard when the four quarts of blood were finally drawn from him. Then it was done with.

  “Can blood be had from a paper doll?” Aurelia asked. “I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  (A terrible knocking and clattering began of such intensity as to shake the whole world, and Blaise was amazed at the self-control of all the other persons who did not allow themselves to be disturbed by the racket. Even Aurelia, who did not know what the noise was, had still been expecting it and was not at all startled by it. She knew that it was an attribute of Blaise Genet.)

  The first servitor took the slippery elm quid from his mouth and rubbed it on the throat of Karl Talion to staunch the bleeding. It did so, but that big man was tottering on the edge of death. The slippery elm quid is the ptelea of the ancients, and it will staunch any bleeding.

  The terrible knocking grew louder and louder, and Blaise rushed out of the gambling salon to get away from it. But it was everywhere. Was it real? It was as real as anything else, and more real than most of the things. There was a real basis for everything that happened here.

  But sometimes it seemed that the terrible knocking was a private affliction of Blaise Genet. It was a loud knocking at the door or at the window. It was a determined knocking that wanted an answer. Somebody wanted to come in, or at least to communicate.

  This terrible knocking had come to Blaise’s door and to his window night after night, and there was never anyone visible there. It was all around his workshop every day, and no one was ever seen there either. Blaise fled from it regularly.

  He went to hotels to stay, and the knocking was always at his rooms there. He took a bus trip: the knocking was there, on the outside of his bus window all night, and there was nothing outside except darkness, and sometimes illuminated landscapes and cityscapes. He took a train trip. It was the same. It was a knocking at his window, day and night, loud to him, not heard or barely heard by other people. He took a plane trip and it was the same. Someone was knocking on the outside in the cold, thin air. He spent an entire year’s savings in taking a twelve-minute orbit of the earth. It was the same. Someone was knocking on the outside of the hull of the orbit ship and wanting to get in.

  “Oh, sure,” the assistant pilot had said to him. “It happens sometimes, every eighth or tenth trip. It means that we have a split-wit on board. The split-wit is you in this case. I will have to put it in the log that we have a split-wit on this trip.”

  It was really a knocking on the outside of Blaise’s head and his breast.

  “Who’s there? What do you want?” he would ask sometimes.

  “I want to come in,” the voice often said, and it was very like Blaise’s own voice. “You have a whole lodging to yourself. That is not allowed. I will come in and share it with you. And, later, others will come in also.”

  But the lodging that the voice was talking about, the lodging that Blaise seemed to occupy by himself illegally, that was Blaise’s own body.

  “Why don’t you answer it, Blaise,” Aurelia said now. “It is either a person or an aspect trying to be born. Allow it to be.”

  “I try. I don’t know how,” Blaise said. Now he was full of a sort of reckless generosity, full also of the fear of coming under the further dominance of Karl Talion if he drank too much of his blood. So he gave each of the other gamers, Julio Cordovan, Aurelia the Governess, Helen Staircase, one of the quarts of blood.

  “To go,” said Julio Cordovan the man with a thousand faces. “I’ll take mine with me to drink on deck.” And one of the servitors capped the flask for him.

  “To go,” said Aurelia, and they capped a flask of blood for her.

  “If you drink it, it will tarnish your wings, Aurelia,” Helen Staircase said.

  “No, I don’t have wings in a physical sense,” Aurelia answered. “But I have not met this custom before. Which world is this, Lamos, to have such a custom?”

  “To go,” Blaise Genet himself said, and they capped a quart of blood for him.

  “We used to play ‘Poles.’ We used to play ‘Symbols,’ ” Aurelia said thoughtfully.

  “That’s what we’re playing now,” Helen Staircase said. “Oh, I think I’ll drink mine here.” And she took it uncapped.

  “Brag isn’t really ‘brag’ on this world,” Aurelia said. “It can be bought off. The four quarts of blood are a buy-off.”

  “How rough do you play on your world, Aurelia?” Helen Staircase asked her. “Your antagonist boasts that he will drink your blood. Do you know what is to be known about your dark antagonist?”

  “You made that up, Helen,” Aurelia charged. “He didn’t say that. I will have to find out more about my dark antagonist. Or perhaps I will try to find out less about him. I will shut out all information about him. I will not allow him the run of a world that I govern.”

  This was the blood of Karl Talion that they were treating this way, drinking it off as if it were a commercial drink. Aurelia went to the condiment bar and shook salt and sulphur into it from the ornate shakers there. It wasn’t a bad drink, strong and filling, sharp and reminiscent of some heroic sequence, tasting like iron—what was the word for the iron taste? Ironic, yes.

  And Karl himself looked as if it were a case of life or death for him. The mask he was wearing was completely broken up in agony gashes and weariness lines. And yet it was genuinely a mask, and one could see that it fitted his face imperfectly, leaving gaps. Was there some new technology in this living mask, or was it simply an illusion gotten out of hand?

  “They play rough on this world I am to govern,” Aurelia said. “But why? Are these people no more than big-grown children over-age in grade? Or are they archetypes of some torturous passion set here at the beginning for my instruction? Or is there a difference? How would one of our smart kids go about analyzing this?

  “Aphthonica is a world of passionate archetypes who are at the same time big-grown children. I remember that much about Aphthonica, but it isn’t enough. Aphthonica and two other worlds are so. Crewman, is Aphthonica the name of the world we are on?”

  “I have heard it called many things, lady, but I have not heard it called that,” the Crewman on the River Boat said.

  Aurelia felt whole nations of strength singing in her blood. This is the strength that always comes to the ‘Shining People’ when they need it. “And sometimes it comes when they do not need it or want it at all,” Aurelia told herself impishly.

  It was the cluster of strengths that could permit her to dominate this world and govern it. It would allow her to impose herself on it, to savage it if it needed doing.

  “Somehow I don’t want to impose on it right now,” Aurelia told her blood-singing self. “It’s like a crooked story, it’s like a crooked song, it’s like a crooked ever-blooming happening. I want to watch it, I want to taste it, I want to hear it. Somehow I don’t want to dominate it, not right no
w.”

  Aurelia’s dark antagonist, her nemesis, her counterpart was there also. It or he looked as if it would speak. Aurelia felt as if she herself should speak, intricately and perhaps resoundingly. But these two (“—whoever he is, whoever I am,” Aurelia said) did not have any governorship over each other. Then the moment passed and the antagonist shuffled off like shabby lightning.

  There was a cry “Hands to the trolling lines!” All of them went to lend a hand to bring in the fish with the troll nets. And they brought in great draughts of them. Every person there was very strong on the ropes, even Aurelia who appeared slight. But what were these fish? Were they gar, were they bass, were they carp, were they what are called catfish on many of the worlds? (Lake fish are very similar on many different worlds; they are similar when everything else is different; nobody understands this, unless it has been explained quite lately.)

  “Is Gelotopolia the name of the world we are on?” Aurelia asked a man who pulled on ropes next to hers. “From the speckled fish, I mean. You know the byword ‘By the speckled fish of Gelotopolia.’ ”

  “No, of course this isn’t Gelotopolia,” the man said. “What a question! Oh, you’re joking. Oh, you’re Aurelia the apparition. Believe us, lady, we are very glad to have you among us. You are a special gift and an extra joy.”

  How did everyone know Aurelia by name? She hadn’t told anybody who she was. She had moved quietly and like a shadow, and she had spoken hardly at all. It was one of her singing powers that proclaimed who she was.

  The fish were all taken in, and fish-hands among the crewmen took care of them. Most of the people ate of the trolled fish then. Some of them had them raw, and later some of them dined on them cooked. These indestructible fish were what the people of the ‘floating world’ lived on mostly, whatever else they seemed to use.

  “I did not understand the hand when we were playing cards,” Aurelia said to the big-grown girl or lady. “We learned ‘Death-Play at Cards’ at school, but it was rather different. Would Blaise have been killed if he hadn’t turned up the right card? Would Karl have died if they had been playing for five quarts of blood rather than four?”

  “Yes. Both would have died in these cases,” said that large and buxom beauty, Helen Staircase. “But the people in the ‘floating world’ are a little bit like the heroes of Valhalla. We may die every day or, more usually, every night. But later, we are often able to scrub our deaths and destructions and to go again. This is partly, I think, because we live on the indestructible fish.”

  “But who are you people on the floating world?” Aurelia asked, “and of what world is this a part?”

  “Oh, we are the people placed here to confound you,” Helen said. “Do we need a better reason for being here? We are the people of the swamps and rivers and lakes, and they’re out of fashion. Mostly we are the people of the forgotten river-banks and the little scrub rivers. We have extraterritoriality, we know. We don’t count in the count of the land people. We are the trolls who live under the bridges, and that’s who we are. And we troll fish to live.”

  “Are you a separate species from the other people of this world?” Aurelia asked.

  “Oh no. We’re just more trollish. It’s always been this way. Lots of people have one foot in the floating world. Your tycoon, for instance, who will move you into his luxury cabin with his menage; he belongs a little bit to the floating world. He talks to fish.”

  “Oh,” said Aurelia. “Do they answer?”

  “They’d better,” Helen said. “Ordinarily a casual traveller to this world would have met a thousand different sorts of people before he met us. Your ship or your programming wanted you to meet misfits early. And we do have pieces of the power. There is a sort of power struggle going on. It is all very symbolic. There is no need for you to take it for reality.”

  “You are saying that this isn’t real?” Aurelia asked.

  “Oh, no, no. It is real. Yes, of course. I am saying that there is no need for you to take it for real. That’s a different thing entirely. If you take it for real you may be upset, and we don’t want that to happen.”

  Three men assaulted Aurelia suddenly and tried to throw her off the River Boat and into the churning water. Aurelia took quick reprisal and counteraction, and Helen was also involved. One of the men himself went into the churning water and was drowned. One of them lay on the deck in a broken posture. And one of them ran away.

  “I wish they wouldn’t do things like that,” said Helen who was breathing hard. “They will give you a bad idea of all of us. I believe that your dark antagonist is putting them up to this. Do you know who or what he is?”

  “No. No, I don’t. But I’m sure he’s not in this.”

  A little bit later and Blaise Genet (the young man who was made nervous by the constant knocking at doors and windows), Julio Cordovan (the man with the thousand faces), Karl Talion (the man with the pleasant mask that was now scarred and tired, the man who perhaps had no face at all), Helen Staircase (the biggest cheesecake doll in the world), and Aurelia herself were playing cards again, playing Crooked-Neck Cribbage this time.

  The old blind man, Michael Strogoff, was also playing cards, by himself, at the same table. To his blank cards he had now added one value-card. It was a multi-coloured Aurelia card. It was equal to the ace of trumps, to the ace of trumpets as they once called it correctly.

  Aurelia was stung as by a needle.

  And the effect of it made the whole world jump, and it disoriented her considerably. She looked around, and she could not guess who had done it. There were several personages in the gambling salon at this time. Some of them were playing ‘Damnation Roulette’ at which fortunes are sometimes made, but never lost. Herr Boch was there. Somewhere, Herr Boch ran the Antikenladen, also called the House of Mirrors and the Magic Store. At one time, Herr Boch had been horned, and there are still existing photographs showing him that way. This had been when he was quite a young man, and young men are sensitive when they acquire an abnormality of that sort. After a year of wearing them, the horns had fallen off Herr Boch and he had not been bothered by them anymore, except in recurrent dreams.

  (Aurelia had a special mental gift for the time of her journey. She would see things as they really were. She would not see them as they seemed to be. This is a requisite for rational governorship. “I am sure it would be more restful if I saw all this as it seems and not as it is,” she mumbled. “There is just no way of fitting true appearance in, and they are most unhandy when no one else sees them.”)

  There was the Prince of Nysa at the table with Herr Boch. And there was the now half-familiar tycoon who had just come in, apparently with something specific on his mind.

  “We used to play ‘Charades’ a lot,” Aurelia said in an inconsequential way.

  “That’s what we are all playing now,” Helen Staircase told her. And then the stinging needle had taken sad effect on ‘Shining Person’ Aurelia. There was one other thing she had forgotten, and it is dangerous to forget all that many things. She had forgotten to pray the prayer before she had left ‘Shining World’—“From the effect of alien needles and other strange intrusions, deliver me on my journey.” Well, she had remembered to say more than fifty of the short prayers, and had forgotten this one. Wouldn’t you know it that she would be wounded by this one chink in her defences!

  She rose reeling, and she was away from there. She crashed against things. Then Aurelia was no longer near the card tables. She was standing in the cool outdoors of the bucking lake. She was leaning her head against some sort of cabin or passenger suite that was raised one desk higher than the surroundings on the River Boat. She was whiffy, from the blood drink, or from the popular narcotic-of-the-week on the River Boat, or from the needle. She wiped her stele clean of all immediate memories and started over fresh.

  “My name is Aurelia, and I’m facing north,” she said resolutely, “and with that much data I should be able to figure anything out.”

  “Mixed-u
p girl, you are not facing north,” said a man with a varied display of faces. In fact, he was known as ‘the man of the thousand faces.’ Aurelia would have remembered him if she hadn’t just wiped her stele clean.

  “Little Miss Mix-Up is right in a way,” said a large and beautiful woman. “The direction she is facing is adjudically Earth-North. If she were on Earth, she would be facing north. She also had her name approximately right.”

  “Which Earth is it that I am not on?” Aurelia asked with a fuzzy tongue. “Natives call almost every world ‘Earth.’ What world am I on then?”

  “You are on the ‘River Boat,’ ” said a very large man with a mask. “See, you are holding a ticket in your hand. It says ‘One Paid Passage on the River Boat.’ This is where you are, so there is no reason for you to be mixed up.”

  “A man shot me in the arm with a needle,” Aurelia said, “or else he is going to do it in a minute. For safety factor, I sometimes apperceive into the future several minutes. The shot has addled my wits and confused me.” Aurelia seemed to know these people slightly, but she did have valid reasons to be mixed up.

  “Shot up? How?” asked the man with the thousand faces. “Like this?”

  “Ouch, yes, just like that,” Aurelia said. “In the arm. It was presumptive of him, and of you.”

  “It certainly was,” said the large and beautiful lady. “You mean that he shot you like this?” And the lady had a medical needle of her own, and she shot Aurelia in the midriff with it. “That will get your directions right. You have to have them right when we really shoot you.”

  “Oh stop that!” Aurelia protested. “What do you mean ‘when we really shoot you?’ ”

  “When we shoot you transitively as an arrow, not when we shoot you as a target. When we shoot you at something, then we don’t want to miss with you.”

  “Be careful, Aurelia,” someone said. “These foreigners want to abduct you to their own countries.”

  “Just let me—ah—” said someone else, and he shot Aurelia in the left thigh with a more than ordinarily sophisticated needle. “Ah, mine will have effect, and it will kill the effect of the others,” the man said. He looked mighty like a tycoon.