Valentine Pontifex m-3 Read online

  What is this? Oh, good Lady my mother, what is happening on Castle Mount?

  Valentine clung desperately to his bucking, panicky animal. The whole world seemed to be shattering, crumbling, sliding, flowing. It was his task to hold it together, clutching its giant continents close against his breast, keeping the seas in their beds, holding back the rivers that rose in ravening fury against the helpless cities—

  And he could not sustain it all.

  It was too much for him. Mighty forces thrust whole provinces aloft, and set them clashing against their neighbors. Valentine reached forth to keep them in their places, wishing he had iron hoops with which to bind them. But he could not do it. The land shivered and rose and split, and black clouds of dust covered the face of the sun, and he was powerless to quell that awesome convulsion. One man alone could not bind this vast planet and halt its sundering. He called his comrades to his aid. “Lisamon! Elidath!”

  No response. He called again, and again, but his voice was lost in the booming and the grinding.

  All stability had gone from the world. It was as though he were riding the mirror slides in High Morpin, where you had to dance and hop lively to stay upright as the whirling slides tilted and jerked, but that was a game and this was true chaos, the roots of the world uprooted. The heaving tossed him down and rolled him over and over, and he dug his fingers fiercely into the soft yielding earth to keep from sliding into the crevasses that opened beside him. Out of those yawning cracks came terrifying sounds of laughter, and a purple glow that seemed to rise from a sun that the earth had swallowed. Angry faces floated in the air above him, faces he almost recognized, but they shifted about disconcertingly as he studied them, eyes becoming noses, noses becoming ears. Then behind those nightmare faces he saw another that he knew, shining dark hair, gentle warm eyes. The Lady of the Isle, the sweet mother.

  “It is enough,” she said. “Awaken now, Valentine!”

  “And am I dreaming, then?”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “Then I should stay, and learn what I can from this dream!”

  “You have learned enough, I think. Awaken now.”

  Yes. It was enough: any more such knowledge might make an end of him. As he had been taught long ago, he brought himself upward from this unexpected sleep and sat up, blinking, struggling to shed his grogginess and confusion. Images of titanic cataclysm still reverberated in his soul; but gradually he perceived that all was peaceful here. He lay on a richly brocaded couch in a high-vaulted room all green and gold. What had halted the earthquake? Where was his mount? Who had brought him here? Ah, they had! Beside him crouched a pale, lean, white-haired man with a ragged scar running the length of one cheek. Sleet. And Tunigorn standing just to the rear, frowning, heavy eyebrows contracting into a single furry ridge. “Calm, calm, calm,” Sleet was saying. “It’s all right, now. You’re awake.”

  Awake? A dream, then, only a dream?

  So it would seem. He was not on Castle Mount at all. There had been no snowstorm, no earthquake, no clouds of dust blotting out the sun. A dream, yes! But such a terrible dream, frighteningly vivid and compelling, so powerful that he found it difficult now to return to reality.

  “Where is this place?” Valentine asked.

  “Labyrinth, lordship.”

  Where? The Labyrinth? What, then, had he been spirited away from Castle Mount while he slept? Valentine felt sweat bursting from his brow. The Labyrinth? Ah, yes, yes. The truth of it closed on him like a hand on his throat. The Labyrinth, yes. He remembered, now. The state visit, of which this was, the Divine be thanked, the final night. That ghastly banquet still to endure. He could not hide from it any longer. The Labyrinth, the Labyrinth, the confounded Labyrinth: he was in it, down in the bottommost level of all. The walls of the suite glowed with handsome murals of the Castle, the Mount, the Fifty Cities: scenes so lovely that they were a mockery to him now. So distant from Castle Mount, so far from the sun’s sweet warmth—

  Ah, what a sour business, he thought, to awaken from a dream of destruction and calamity, only to find yourself in the most dismal place in the world!

  4

  Six hundred miles east of the brilliant crystalline city of Dulorn, in the marshy valley known as Prestimion Vale, where a few hundred families of Ghayrogs raised lusavender and rice on widely scattered plantations, it was getting to be the midyear harvest season. The glossy, swollen, black lusavender pods, nearly ripe, hung in thick clusters at the ends of curving stems that rose from the half-submerged fields.

  For Aximaan Threysz, the oldest and shrewdest of the lusavender farmers of Prestimion Vale, there was an excitement about this harvest like nothing she had felt in decades. The experiment in protoplast augmentation that she had begun three seasons back under the guidance of the government agricultural agent was reaching its culmination now. This season she had given her entire plantation over to the new kind of lusavender: and there were the pods, twice normal size, ready to be stripped! No one else in the Vale had dared to take the risk, not until Aximaan Threysz had checked things out. And now she had; and soon her success would be confirmed; and they would all weep, oh, yes! when she came to market a week ahead of everyone else with double her usual volume of seed!

  As she stood deep in mud by the edge of her fields, pressing her finger-ridges into the closest pods and trying to determine how soon to start the picking, one of her eldest son’s boys came running up with a message: “Father says to tell you he’s just heard in town that the agricultural agent’s on his way from Mazadone! He’s reached Helkaplod already. Tomorrow he’ll ride to Sijaneel.”

  “Then he’ll be in the Vale by Twoday,” she said. “Good. Perfect!” Her forked tongue began to flicker. “Go, child, run back to your father. Tell him we’ll hold the feast for the agent on Seaday and we’ll begin the harvest on Fourday. And I want the whole family to gather in the plantation house in half an hour. Go, now! Run.”

  The plantation had been in the family of Aximaan Threysz since Lord Confalume’s time. It covered an irregularly triangular area that stretched for five miles or so along the banks of Havilbove Fluence, jigged in a southeasterly way down to the outskirts of Mazadone Forest Preserve, and swung by roundabout curves back toward the river to the north. Within that zone, Aximaan Threysz ruled as lord absolute over her five sons and nine daughters, her uncountable grandchildren, and the twenty-odd Liimen and Vroons who were her farmhands. When Aximaan Threysz said it was seedtime, they went out and seeded. When Aximaan Threysz said it was harvest time, they went out and reaped. At the great house at the edge of the androdragma grove, dinner was served at the time Aximaan Threysz came to table, whenever that time happened to be. Even the family sleeping schedules were subject to Aximaan Threysz’s decrees: for Ghayrogs are hibernators, but she could not have the whole family asleep at once. The eldest son knew he must always be awake during the first six weeks of his mother’s annual winter rest; the eldest daughter took command for the remaining six weeks. Aximaan Threysz assigned sleep-times to the other family members according to her sense of what was appropriate to the plantation’s needs. No one ever questioned her. Even when she was young—an impossibly long time ago, when Ossier was Pontifex and Lord Tyeveras had the Castle—she had been the one to whom all others turned, even her father, even her mate, in time of crisis. She had outlived both of those, and some of her offspring as well, and many a Coronal had come and gone on Castle Mount, and still Aximaan Threysz went on and on. Her thick scaly hide had lost its high gloss and was purplish with age now, the writhing fleshy serpents of her hair had faded from jet black to pale gray, her chilly unblinking green eyes were clouded and milky, but yet she moved unceasingly through the routines of the farm.

  Nothing of any value could be raised on her land except rice and lusavender, and even those were not easy. The rainstorms of the far north found easy access to Dulorn Province down the great funnel of the Rift, and, though the city of Dulorn itself lay in a dry zone, the territor
y to its west, amply watered and well drained, was fertile and rich. But the district around Prestimion Vale on the eastern side of the Rift was another sort of place entirely, dank and swampy, its soil a heavy bluish muck. With careful timing, though, it was possible to plant rice at the end of winter just ahead of the spring floods, and to put in lusavender in late spring and again at the end of autumn. No one in the region knew the rhythm of the seasons better than Aximaan Threysz, and only the most rash of farmers would set his seedlings out before word had come that she had begun her planting.

  Imperious though she was, overwhelming in her prestige and authority, Aximaan Threysz nevertheless had one trait that the people of the Vale found incomprehensible: she deferred to the provincial agricultural agent as though he were the fount of all knowledge and she the merest apprentice. Two or three times a year the agent came out from the provincial capital of Mazadone, riding a circuit through the swamplands, and his first stop in the Vale was always Aximaan Threysz’s plantation. She housed him in the great house, she breached the casks of fireshower wine and brandied niyk, she sent her grandsons off to Havilbove Fluence to catch the tasty little hiktigans that scurried between the rocks of the rapids, she ordered the frozen bidlak steaks to be thawed and roasted over logs of aromatic thwale. And when the feasting was done she drew the agent aside and talked far into the night with him of such things as fertilizers and seedling grafts and harvesting machinery, while her daughters Heynok and Jarnok sat by, taking down notes of every word.

  It mystified everyone that Aximaan Threysz, who surely knew more about the planting of lusavender than anyone who had ever lived, would care a straw for what some little government employee could tell her. But her family knew why. “We have our ways, and we become set in our ways,” she often said. “We do what we have done before, because it has worked for us before. We plant our seeds, we tend our seedlings, we watch over the ripening, we harvest our crop, and then we begin all over in the same way. And if each crop is no smaller than the crop before, we think we are doing well. But in fact we are failing, if we merely equal what we have done before. There is no standing still in this world: to stand still is to sink into the mud.”

  So it was that Aximaan Threysz subscribed to the agricultural journals, and sent her grandchildren off now and then to the university, and listened most carefully to what the provincial agent might have to say. And year by year the method of her farming underwent small changes, and year by year the sacks of lusavender seeds that Aximaan Threysz shipped off to market in Mazadone were greater in number than the year before, and the shining grains of rice were heaped ever higher in her storehouses. For there was always some better way of doing things to be learned, and Aximaan Threysz made sure she learned it. “We are Majipoor,” she said again and again. “The great cities rest on foundations of grain. Without us, Ni-moya and Pidruid and Khyntor and Piliplok would be wastelands. And the cities grow ever larger every year: so we must work ever harder to feed them, is that not so? We have no choice in that: it is the will of the Divine. Is that not so?”

  She had outlasted fifteen or twenty agents by now. They came out as young men, brimming over with the latest notions but often shy about offering them to her. “I don’t know what I could possibly teach you,” they liked to tell her. “I’m the one who should be learning from you, Aximaan Threysz!” So she had to go through the same routine again and again, putting them at their ease, convincing them that she was sincerely interested in hearing of the latest techniques.

  It was always a nuisance when the old agent retired and some youngster took over. As she moved deeper into vast old age it became ever harder to establish any sort of useful relationship with the new ones until several seasons had gone by. But that had not been a problem when Caliman Hayn had turned up two years ago. He was a young human, thirty or forty or fifty years old—anyone short of seventy seemed young to Aximaan Threysz these days—with a curiously blunt, offhand manner that was much to her liking. He showed no awe for her and did not seem interested in flattering her. “They tell me you are the farmer most willing to try new things,” he said brusquely, no more than ten minutes after they had met. “What would you say to a process that can double the size of lusavender seeds without harming their flavor?”

  “I would say that I am being gulled,” she said. “It sounds considerably too good to be true.”

  “Nevertheless the process exists.”

  “Does it, now?”

  “We’re ready to put it into limited experimental use. I see by my predecessors’ files that you’re known for your willingness to experiment.”

  “So I am,” said Aximaan Threysz. “What sort of thing is this?”

  It was, he said, something called protoplast augmentation, which involved using enzymes to digest the cell walls of plants to give access to the genetic material within. That material then could undergo manipulation, after which the cellular matter, the protoplast, was placed in a culture medium and allowed to regenerate its cell wall. From that single cell an entire new plant with greatly improved characteristics could be grown.

  “I thought such skills were lost on Majipoor thousands of years ago,” Aximaan Threysz said.

  “Lord Valentine has been encouraging some revival of interest in the ancient sciences.”

  “Lord Valentine?”

  “The Coronal, yes,” said Caliman Hayn.

  “Ah, the Coronal!” Aximaan Threysz looked away. Valentine? Valentine? She would have said the Coronal’s name was Voriax; but a moment’s thought and she recalled that Voriax was dead. Yes, and a Lord Valentine had replaced him, she had heard, and as she gave it more thought she remembered that something odd had happened to that Valentine—was he the one who had had his body exchanged with another man’s? Probably that was the one. But such people as Coronals meant very little to Aximaan Threysz, who had not left Prestimion Vale in twenty or thirty years and to whom Castle Mount and its Coronals were so far away that they might just as well be mythical. What mattered to Aximaan Threysz was the growing of rice and lusavender.

  The imperial botanical laboratories, Caliman Hayn told her, had bred an enhanced clone of lusavender that needed field research under normal farming conditions. He invited Aximaan Threysz to collaborate in this research—in return for which he would agree not to offer the new plant to anyone else in Prestimion Vale until she had had the chance to establish it in all her fields.

  It was irresistible. She received from him a, packet of astonishingly immense lusavender seeds, great shiny things as big around as a Skandar’s eye, and planted them in a remote corner of her land, where there was no likelihood of their cross-pollinating with her normal lusavenders. The seeds sprouted rapidly and from them came plants that differed from the usual kind only in having stems of a thickness two or three times normal. When they flowered, though, the ruffled purple blossoms were enormous, as broad as saucers, and the flowers brought forth pods of awesome length, that at harvest time yielded huge quantities of the giant seeds. Aximaan Threysz was tempted to use them for the autumn planting, and cover all her acreage with the new kind of lusavender in order to reap an amazing bumper crop next winter. But she could not, for she had agreed to turn most of the oversize seed over to Caliman Hayn for laboratory study in Mazadone. He left her enough to plant perhaps a fifth of her land. This season, however, she was instructed to mix the augmented plants among the normal ones to induce interbreeding: the augmented characteristics were thought to be dominant, but that had never been tested on so large a scale.

  Though Aximaan Threysz forbade her family to speak of the experiment in Prestimion Vale, it was impossible for long to keep the other farmers from learning of it. The thick-stemmed second-generation plants that sprang up everywhere on her plantation could hardly be concealed, and in one way and another, news of what Aximaan Threysz was doing spread through the Vale. Curious neighbors wangled invitations and stared at the new lusavender in amazement.

  But they were suspicious. “Plants
like that, they’ll suck all the nourishment from the soil in two or three years,” some said. “She keeps it up, she’ll turn her place into a desert.” Others thought the giant seeds surely would yield tasteless or bitter lusavender-meal. A few argued that Aximaan Threysz generally knew what she was doing. But even they were content to let her be the pioneer.

  At winter’s end she harvested her crop: normal seeds, which were sent off to market as usual, and giant ones, which were bagged and set aside for planting. The third season would tell the tale, for some of the big seeds were of the pure clone and some, probably most, were hybrids between normal and augmented lusavender; and it remained to be seen what sort of plants the hybrid seeds would produce.

  In late winter came the time for planting rice, before the floods arrived. When that was done, the higher and drier lands of the plantation received the lusavender seeds; and all through the spring and summer she watched the thick stems rising, the huge flowers unfolding, the heavy pods elongating and turning dark. From time to time she broke open a pod and peered at the soft green seeds. They were large, no question about that. But their flavor? What if they had no flavor, or a foul one? She had gambled an entire season’s production on that.

  Well, the answer would be at hand soon enough.

  On Starday came word that the agricultural agent was approaching, and would arrive at the plantation, as expected, on Twoday. But the same report brought puzzling and disturbing news: for the agent who was coming was not Caliman Hayn, but someone named Yerewain Noor. Aximaan Threysz could not understand that. Hayn was too young to have retired. And it bothered her to have him vanish just as the protoplast experiment was nearing its end.

  Yerewain Noor turned out to be even younger than Hayn, and annoyingly callow. He began at once to tell her how honored he was to meet her, with all the usual rhetorical flourishes, but she cut him off.