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  On the morning after the day when the crisis had reached its climax and the final lunacies had occurred, a strange hush settled over the Labyrinth of Majipoor, as if everyone were too stunned even to speak. The impact of yesterday's extraordinary events was just beginning to be felt, although even those who had witnessed what had taken place could not yet fully believe it. All the ministries were closed that morning, by order of the new Pontifex. The bureaucrats both major and minor had been put to extreme strain by the recent upheavals, and they were set at liberty to sleep it off while the new Pontifex and the new Coronal — each amazed by the unanticipated attainment of kinpship that had struck him with thunderclap force — withdrew to their private chambers to contemplate their astounding transformations. Which gave Calintane at last an opportunity to see his beloved Silitnoor. Apprehensively — for he had treated her shabbily all month, and she was not an easily forgiving sort — he sent her a note that said, I know 1 am guilty of shameful neglect, but perhaps now you begin to understand. Meet me for lunch at the cafe by the Court of Globes at midday and I will explain everything.

  She had a quick temper at the best of times. It was virtually her only fault, but it was a severe one, and Calintane feared her wrath. They had been lovers a year; they were nearly betrothed to be betrothed; all the senior officials at the Pontifical court agreed he was making a wise match. Silimoor was lovely and intelligent and knowledgeable in political matters, and of good family, with three Coronals in her ancestry, including no less than the fabled Lord Stiamot himself. Plainly she would be an ideal mate for a young man destined for high places. Though still some distance short of thirty, Calintane had already attained the outer rim of the inner circle about the Pontifex, and had been given responsibilities well beyond his years. Indeed, it was those very responsibilities that had kept him from seeing or even speaking at any length to Silimoor lately. For which he expected her to berate him, and for which he hoped without much conviction that she would eventually pardon him.

  All this past sleepless night he had rehearsed in his weary mind a long speech of extenuation that began, "As you know, I've been preoccupied with urgent matters of state these last weeks, too delicate to discuss in detail with you, and so—" And as he made his way up the levels of the Labyrinth to the Court of Globes for his rendezvous with her he continued to roll the phrases about. The ghostly silence of the Labyrinth this morning made him feel all the more edgy. The lowest levels, where the government offices were, seemed wholly deserted, and higher up just a few people could be seen, gathering in little knotted groups in the darkest corners, whispering and muttering as though there had been a coup d'etat, which in a sense was not far wrong. Everyone stared at him. Some pointed. Calintane wondered how they recognized him as an official of the Pontificate, until he remembered that he was still wearing his mask of office. He kept it on anyway, as a kind of shield against the glaring artificial light, so harsh on his aching eyes. Today the Labyrinth seemed stifling and oppressive. He longed to escape its somber subterranean depths, those levels upon levels of great spiralling chambers that coiled down and down. In a single night the place had become loathsome to him.

  On the level of the Court of Globes he emerged from the lift and cut diagonally across that intricate vastness, decorated with its thousands of mysteriously suspended spheres, to the little cafe on the far side. The midday hour struck just as he entered it. Silimoor was already there — he knew she would be; she used punctuality to express displeasure — at a small table along the rear wall of polished onyx. She rose and offered him not her lips but her hand, also as he expected. Her smile was precise and cool. Exhausted as he was, he found her beauty almost excessive: the short golden hair arrayed like a crown, the flashing turquoise eyes, the full lips and high cheekbones, an elegance too painful to bear, just now. "I've missed you so," he said hoarsely.

  "Of course. So long a separation — it must have been a dreadful burden—"

  "As you know, I've been preoccupied with urgent matters of state these last weeks, too delicate to discuss in detail with you, and so—"

  The words sounded impossibly idiotic in his own ears. It was a relief when she cut him off, saying smoothly, "There's time for all that, love. Shall we have some wine?"

  "Please. Yes."

  She signaled. A liveried waiter, a haughty-looking Hjort, came to take the order, and stalked away.

  Silimoor said, "And won't you even remove your mask?"

  "Ah. Sorry. It's been such a scrambled few days—"

  He set aside the bright yellow strip that covered his nose and eyes and marked him as the Pontifex's man. Silimoor's expression changed as she saw him clearly for the first time; the look of serenely self-satisfied fury faded and something close to concern appeared on her face. "Your eyes are so bloodshot — your cheeks are so pale and drawn—"

  "I've had no sleep. It's been a crazy time."

  "Poor Calintane."

  "Do you think I kept away from you because I wanted to? I've been caught up in this insanity, Silimoor."

  "I know. I can see how much of a strain it's been." He realized suddenly that she was not mocking him, that she was genuinely sympathetic, that in fact this was possibly going to be easier than he had been imagining.

  He said, "The trouble with being ambitious is that you get engulfed in affairs far beyond your control, and you have no choice but to let yourself be swept along. You've heard what the Pontifex Arioc did yesterday?"

  She stifled a laugh. "Yes, of course. I mean, I've heard the rumors. Everyone has. Are they true? Did it really happen?"

  "Unfortunately, it did."

  "How marvelous, how perfectly marvelous! But such a thing turns the world upside down, doesn't it? It affects you in some dreadful way?"

  "It affects you, and me, and everyone in the world," said Calintane, with a gesture that reached beyond the Court of Globes, beyond the Labyrinth itself, encompassing the entire planet beyond these claustrophobic depths, from the awesome summit of Castle Mount to the far-off cities of the western continent. "Affects us all to a degree that I hardly understand yet myself. But let me tell you the story from the beginning—"

  Perhaps you were not aware that the Pontifex Arioc has been behaving strangely for months. I suppose there's something about the pressures of high office that eventually drives people crazy, or perhaps you have to be at least partly mad in the first place to aspire to high office. But you know that Arioc was Coronal for thirteen years under Dizimaule, and now he's been Pontifex a dozen years more, and that's a long time to hold that sort of power. Especially living here in the Labyrinth. The Pontifex must yearn for the outside world now and then, I'd imagine — to feel the breezes on Castle Mount or hunt gihornas in Zimroel or just to swim in a real river anywhere — and here he is miles and miles underground in this maze, presiding over his rituals and his bureaucrats until the end of his life.

  One day about a year ago Arioc suddenly began talking about making a grand processional of Majipoor. I was in attendance at court that day, along with Duke Guadeloom. The Pontifex called for maps and started laying out a journey down the river to Alaisor, over to the Isle of Sleep for a pilgrimage and a visit to the Lady at Inner Temple, then across to Zimroel, with stops at Piliplok, Ni-moya, Pidruid, Narabal, you know, everywhere, a tour that would last at least five years. Guadeloom gave me a funny look and gently pointed out to Arioc that it's the Coronal who makes grand processionals, not the Pontifex, and that Lord Struin had only just come back from one a couple of years ago.

  "Then I am forbidden to do so?" the Pontifex asked.

  "Not precisely forbidden, your majesty, but custom dictates"

  "That I remain a prisoner in the Labyrinth?"

  "Not at all a prisoner, your majesty, but—"

  "But I am rarely if ever to venture into the upper world?"

  And so on. I must say my sympathies were with Arioc; but remember that I am not, like you, a native of the Labyrinth, only one whose government duties have
brought him here, and I do find life underground a little unnatural at times. At any rate Guadeloom did convince his majesty that a grand processional was out of the question. But I could see the restlessness in the Pontifex's eyes.

  The next thing that happened was that his majesty started slipping out by night to wander around the Labyrinth by himself. No one knows how often he did it before we found out what was going on, but we began to hear odd rumors that a masked figure who looked much like the Pontifex had been seen in the small hours lurking about in the Court of Pyramids or the Hall of Winds. We regarded that as so much nonsense, until the night when some flunky of the bedchamber imagined he had heard the Pontifex ring for service and went in and found the room empty. I think you will remember that night, Silimoor, because I was spending it with you and one of Guadeloom's people hunted me down and made me leave, claiming that an urgent meeting of the high advisers had been convened and my services were needed. You were quite upset — furious, I'd say. Of course what the meeting was about was the disappearance of the Pontifex, though later we covered it up by claiming it was a discussion of the great wave that had devastated so much of Stoienzar.

  We found Arioc about four hours past midnight. He was in the Arena — you know, that stupid empty thing that the Pontifex Dizimaule built in one of his crazier moments — sitting crosslegged at the far side, playing a zootibar and singing songs to an audience of five or six ragged little boys. We brought him home. A few weeks later he got out again and managed to get as far up as the Court of Columns. Guadeloom discussed it with him: Arioc insisted that it is important for a monarch to go among his people and hear their grievances, and he cited precedents as far back as the kings of Old Earth. Quietly Guadeloom began posting guards in the royal precincts, supposedly to keep assassins out — but who would assassinate a Pontifex? The guards were put there to keep Arioc in. But though the Pontifex is eccentric he's far from stupid, and despite the guards he slipped out twice more in the next couple of months. It was becoming a critical problem. What if he vanished for a week? What if he got out of the Labyrinth entirely, and went for a stroll in the desert?

  "Since we can't seem to prevent him from roaming," I said to Guadeloom, "why don't we give him a companion, someone who'll go on his adventures with him and at the same time see to it that no harm comes to him?"

  "An excellent idea," the duke replied. "And I appoint you to the post. The Pontifex is fond of you, Calintane. And you are young enough and agile enough to be able to extricate him from any trouble into which he may stumble."

  That was six weeks ago, Silimoor. You will surely recall that I suddenly ceased spending my nights with you at that time, pleading an increase of responsibilities at court, and thus our estrangement began. I could not tell you what duty it was that now occupied my nights, and I could only hope you did not suspect me of having shifted my affections to another. But I can now reveal that I was compelled to take up lodgings close by the bedchamber of the Pontifex and give him attendance every night; that I began to do most of my sleeping at random hours of the day; and that by one stratagem and another I became companion to Arioc on his nocturnal jaunts.

  It was taxing work. I was in truth the Pontifex's keeper, and we both knew it, but I had to take care not to underscore the fact by unduly imposing my will on him. And yet I had to guard him from rough playmates and risky excursions. There are rogues, there are brawlers, there are hotheads; no one would knowingly harm the Pontifex but he might easily come by accident between two who meant to harm each other. In my rare moments of sleep I sought the guidance of the Lady of the Isle — may she rest in the bosom of the Divine — and she came to me in a blessed sending, and told me that I must make myself the Pontifex's friend if I meant not to be his jailer. How fortunate we are to have the counsel of so kind a mother in our dreams! And so I dared to initiate more than a few of Arioc's adventures myself. "Come, let us go out tonight," I said to him, which would have frozen Guadeloom's blood, had he known. It was my idea to take the Pontifex up into the public levels of the Labyrinth for a night of taverns and marketplaces — masked, of course, beyond chance of recognition. I led him into mysterious alleyways where gamblers lived, but gamblers known to me, who posed no threats. And it was I who on the boldest night of all actually guided him beyond the walls of the Labyrinth itself. I knew it was what he most desired, and even he feared to attempt it, so I proposed it to him as my secret gift, and he and I took the private royal passageway upward that emerges at the Mouth of Waters. We stood together so close to the River Glayge that we could feel the cool air that blows down from Castle Mount, and we looked up at the blazing stars. "I have not been out here in six years," said the Pontifex. He was trembling and I think he was weeping behind his mask; and I, who had not seen the stars either for much too long, was nearly as deeply moved. He pointed to this one and that, saying it was the star of the world from which the Ghayrog folk came, and this the star of the Hjorts, and that one there, that trifling dot of light, was none other than the sun of Old Earth. Which I doubted, since I had been taught otherwise in school, but he was in such joy that I could not contradict him then. And he turned to me and gripped my arm and said in a low voice, "Calintane, I am the supreme ruler of this whole colossal world, and I am nothing at all, a slave, a prisoner. I would give everything to escape this Labyrinth and spend my last years in freedom under the stars."

  "Then why not abdicate?" I suggested, astounded at my audacity.

  He smiled. "It would be cowardice. I am the elect of the Divine, and how can I reject that burden? I am destined to be a Power of Majipoor to the end of my days. But there must be some honorable way to free myself from this subterranean misery."

  And I saw that the Pontifex was neither mad nor wicked nor capricious, but only lonely for the night and the mountains and the moons and the trees and the streams of the world he had been forced to abandon so that the government might be laid upon him.

  Next came word, two weeks ago, that the Lady of the Isle, Lord Struin's mother and the mother of us all, had fallen ill and was not likely to recover. This was an unusual crisis that created major constitutional problems, for of course the Lady is a Power of rank equal to Pontifex and Coronal, and replacing her should hardly be done casually. Lord Struin himself was reported to be on his way from Castle Mount to confer with the Pontifex — foregoing a journey to the Isle of Sleep, for he could not possibly reach it in time to bid his mother farewell. Meanwhile Duke Guadeloom, as high spokesman of the Pontificate and chief officer of the court, had begun to compile a list of candidates for the post, which would be compared with Lord Struin's list to see if any names were on both. The counsel of the Pontifex Arioc was necessary in all of this, and we thought that would be beneficial to him in his present unsettled state by involving him more deeply in imperial matters. In at least a technical sense the dying Lady was his wife, for under the formalities of our succession law he had adopted Lord Struin as his son when choosing him to be Coronal; of course the Lady had a lawful husband of her own somewhere on Castle Mount, but you understand the legalities of the custom, do you not? Guadeloom informed the Pontifex of the impending death of the Lady and a round of governmental conferences began. I did not take part in these, since I am not of that level of authority or responsibility.

  I am afraid we assumed that the gravity of the situation might cause Arioc to become less erratic in his behavior, and at least unconsciously we must have relaxed our vigilance. On the very night that the news of the death of the Lady reached the Labyrinth, the Pontifex slipped away alone for the first time since I had been assigned to keep watch over him. Past the guards, past me, past his servants — out into the interminable intricate complexities of the Labyrinth, and no one could find him. We searched all night and half the next day. I was beside myself with terror, both for him and for my career. In the greatest of apprehension I sent officers out each of the seven mouths of the Labyrinth to search that bleak and torrid desert outside; I myself visited all the ra
kish haunts to which I had introduced him; Guadeloom's staff prowled in places unknown to me; and throughout all this we sought to keep the populace from knowing that the Pontifex was missing. I think we must have succeeded in that.

  We found him in mid-afternoon of the day after his disappearance. He was in a house in the district known as Stiamot's Teeth in the first ring of the Labyrinth and he was disguised in women's clothes. We might never have found him at all but for some quarrel over an unpaid bill, which brought proctors to the scene, and when the Pontifex was unable to identify himself satisfactorily and a man's voice was heard coming from a supposed woman the proctors had the sense to summon me, and I hurried to take custody of him. He looked appallingly strange in his robes and his bangles, but he greeted me calmly by name, acting perfectly composed and rational, and said he hoped he had not caused me great inconvenience.