The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ No one thought can encompass the mind of Etash Wesa.

      In its twisted way, with something other than a voice, it seemed to be saying, “My dadar? Where is my dadar? I have been separated from it, and yet I shall find it.”

      The greatest terror of all those I had known was that Etash Wesa would indeed find me. I could look on him no more. Somehow I could move again. Screaming, I stumbled onto the beach. I obliterated the drawing. I covered my eyes with my hands. I pounded my head to drive out the memory of what I had seen, but still the red sky looked down on me, the sea of blood washed at my feet, and the thing in the coffin murmured.

      I picked up my knife out of the sand. If I lived not another instant it would be preferable to living in the sight of Etash Wesa. What did I care of my promised freedom? What did I care of strange wars between wizards? What did I care, even if the world would be better off rid of Etash Wesa?

      I did what I had to. I gouged out the eye Emdo had given me. Had I burst like a bubble then, it would have been a blessed escape.

      I heard Emdo’s voice for an instant: “No! Stop!” Then he was gone. The pain was real. The blood ran down my face. I gasped, fell onto the sand, and lay there, panting, bleeding, waiting for the end to come.

      I waited for a long time. The sun set and the stars came out. The salt tide went out and came back in again, nudging seaweed against my feet.

      The rest is a muddle, a fever dream within a dream within a dream. I think someone found me. I remember walking along a road for a time. There was a bandage over my empty socket. There were a few words, a song, a carriage wheel creaking and rustling through dry leaves. I think I lay for a day beneath the hot sun in the middle of a harvested field. A boy and several dogs came upon me, then ran away in fright when I sat up.

      Somehow I came to Ai Hanlo, the real city, where the Guardian rules, where the bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor at the core of Ai Hanlo Mountain. I remembered slowly—my mind was clouded, my thoughts like pale blossoms drifting to the surface—that my son was here, that he had come to serve the Religion. I went to the square of the mendicants, beneath the wall where the Guardian comes all draped in gold and silver to bless the crowds. I slept with the sick and the lame. Somebody stole my boots. So, barefoot, tattered, stinking, my face a running sore, I went to the gate of the inner city and demanded to see my son. But the soldiers laughed and sent me away. I begged, but they would not call for him.

      But what is the begging of a dadar?

      I prayed to whatever Forces or Powers there might be, to the remaining wisps of holiness that might linger over the bones of the Goddess, but what good are the prayers of a dadar?

      What good? At the very end, when I sat in a doorway, very near to death, a gate opened and a procession of priests came out, and I saw a face I knew, and I pushed through the crowd with the last of my strength. I called my son’s name and he stopped, and recognized me, and wept at my wretchedness. He took me to his rooms and comforted me, and later I told him that above all else I wanted to rejoin Tamda, his mother, my beloved, if she would have me, knowing me to be a dadar, without a soul, an uncertain thing.

      “But Father,” my son said, “consider what uncertain things all men are. What is a man, but a bubble in the foam, a speck of dust on the wind? Can any man know that his next breath will not be his last? Can he know how fortune will treat him, even tomorrow? What of the calamities that carry him off, or the diseases, or even that one, faint breath of damp midnight air which touches his old bones and makes an end to him? Then what? Do we walk a long road till at last we come to the paradise at the top of the world, there to hear forever the blessed music of the Singer? Or do we merely lie in the ground? You think these are strange words, coming from me? But the Goddess is dead, and the last remnants of her holiness quickly drain away. All things are uncertain. The world is uncertain. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Father, you are weeping. How can a mere projection, an empty thing like a skin filled with wind—how can such a thing weep? It may deceive itself, but not others. I see your tears. I know that you are more than a sudden, random, fleeting shape, as much as any man is. Yes, a man. If you were not always a man, I think you have become one over the years through your living and your love.”

      Which brings me back to weeping.

      When at last I was able to travel from Ai Hanlo, my son went with me. We followed the way Tamda’s wagon was said to have gone, asking after her in every town. She made a few coins singing, people said, or selling sketches or doing sleight of hand. She looked thin and worn, they said.

      At last we found her at a crossroads. It had to be more than just chance. She leapt down from the wagon and ran to me. Again we all three wept.

      Later she said to me, “We are always uncertain. If you fade away, so shall I, when we are old. It may be very sudden. How are you unlike any man in this? Stay with me. Let the days pass one at a time, and live them one at a time. You can love. How are you unlike any man in this?”

      Which brings me back to weeping.

      REFUGEES FROM AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY

      I first met Stephen Taylor in college, shortly after his first comic strip nearly got the entire staff of the campus newspaper fired, if not expelled. I found it leaning against the door of The Villanovan office one morning, in a large, flat envelope he must have placed there the previous night. As I sat at my desk, examining panel after panel in slack-jawed amazement, realized I had something very special here. There were ten panels in all, each on a separate piece of stiff poster board, way oversized, filled with hundreds of figures, fantastic detail, images spreading along the edges like the marginal doodles in Mad magazine.

      Fellow staffers gathered around. Joe Meese, the editor, mumbled something to the effect that the intricate line-work might not reproduce. (“We’ll do it real big,” I said. “A two-page spread.”) Fran Hamilton’s comment best summed up what we all were feeling.

      “Holy shit…”

      The strip was called Stephanus. It wasn’t signed, but the artist had executed a what I guessed was intended to be a self-portrait in the first panel, depicting himself dangling naked in a dungeon, nailed to an overhead beam by a single spike through both wrists. The face was round, soft, and boyish, with dark, tangled hair and huge dark eyes; the expression one of absolute, wrenching despair and bewilderment. He looked a little like Dondi, the war-orphan from that sappy newspaper strip, only older—Dondi grows up and goes to Hell, I thought.

      It got worse. Blood streamed down his emaciated body and pooled in a patch of light several inches below his feet, where rats gathered to drink. The blood became a river, pouring along the margins and into the next panel. Monsters swam in it, devouring escapees from burning ships. The ships themselves were shaped like idiotic, vacuous human faces, or like cupped hands or severed, upside-down feet. Menacing, dark cities loomed along the river’s banks, rooftops silhouetted against background fires, the flame-lit streets crammed with absurdly hideous images: Burning heads on spikes over doorways, their features stapled or safety-pinned into happy-face smiles. In a public square, a cute cartoon duck in a sailor suit was being broken on the wheel by masked executioners, while kiddie ducklings writhed in a semi-circle around them, impaled up the anus on spears.

      Rat-faced citizens fornicated on rooftops or in upstairs rooms, but always with malicious intent, sometimes devouring one another. One male-thing had apparently achieved simultaneous climax and death by chopping off its lover’s head with a cleaver, then burying its face so deeply in the spurting neck that it drowned. Meanwhile, a cartoon bomb covered with lipstick kisses fizzled away under the bed. Human and rat children alike cut their parents (and infant siblings) apart with chain saws or drove spikes through their eyes. In a hospital maternity СКАЧАТЬ