Pilgrimage v1 0, p.4
Pilgrimage v1.0, page 4
“A vote for what?” Liza asked.
“A vote to move, to leave early on Pilgrimage, to abandon the gallery.”
“Are they afraid of that ugly thing?” Hals asked.
“Not that one exactly. What Mara said was that they think there will be many more of them coming, and that they’re building barricades.”
“Where?” Liza asked.
“I don’t know, somewhere up front A long way in. She didn’t seem to know where.”
“Barricades,” said Hals. “I never heard of anything like that. What’s the point of barricades?”
“Do you really think we’re going to leave early?” Liza asked.
The three looked at each other, and they didn’t know. This was a change from the usual business of the Isocourt which was often so dull that the Magistors attended only because they were paid for it and barred from any other work during their year’s term. The irony—not entirely lost upon Brann—was that business of such mundane nature was carried out in the most splendiferous structure on the gallery. It occupied an area almost as great as the parkplat, just adjacent to it on the inward side of the gallery. Here again were the devices like those Brann saw in the post house, a hundred identical glass and metal desks about the pit, each with a soft chair, each with an array of contacts and lightless, functionless lamp lenses. There was hardly even curiosity anymore as to the reason for such complex devices. Brann wondered at their inert intricacy, at the darkened glassite oblongs in the center of each desk and the identical darkened oblongs of great size which fronted the circle of the first platform. The Isocourt Hall was a dome with the Magistors’ circle at the bottom and three successive platforms circling above. Its acoustics were excellent and even without amplification (perhaps a part of the nonfunctional desks), every word said by the Magistors could be heard, while whispers on the platforms carried no distance at all. The color of it awed Brann, something that climbed the spectrum as it did the dome; reds and yellows below to a deepening blue, intensely cobalt at the apex. It seemed to be the color of the night sky, impossibly distant and remote. Brann wondered what it had been like for those who had never seen the real sky, who knew nothing of real distance, to come into the dome.
In the center was the pit, floored with a yielding material which seemed impervious, yet had been worn, especially along its circumference, so that there was a circular depression about it and the remainder undulated where long, used paths had been worn. There was a space beneath this floor through which the folk as children were taken on tours by masters of the gallery school. There was dim light, very green, and the walls leaned away like the bottom of a bowl. They were covered with translucent and dark channels like the network of human veins. Some channels were not dark, sometimes single veins lit with vari-colored pulses, sometimes whole patches were alight. It was, said the masters, a brain of sorts, in which the pulsings were the last vestiges of senile thought. What it thought about no one knew, and the room smelled of the same acid stink that had come from the broken cables beneath Brann’s house. The possible thoughts of that brain had been the source of more than a few nightmares for Brann and other children.
All he could understand of it was what Grandmother Ebar said, that the tailend of the city was running down—had been for centuries—and was falling into ruin. “The Stractors,” she said, “are like scavengers; they save what they can.” But he put all this into the same mythical context in which elevators ran up and down the shafts in a blur and folk spoke from house to house and even tier to tier from Frontend to Tailend by devices that operated on something similar to light. The Stractors still retained the secret, Ebar said. The Post Guild also (but weren’t the devices in the postplat dark like those of the Isocourt?). The tag-ends of such technology—Ebar’s word—still created things such as the dancing metallic dolls and the power carts—from the ancient blueprints and materials stocked, Ebar said, not from anything created today. “That is why Tailend is dying, and why the city sloughs it away,” Ebar said.
Vardan took Magistor Sala’s place in the pit There were fireworks, as Mara had said.
“Friend Sala speaks with wit,” Magistor Vardan began, “but he uses little wisdom. We have reports, Friends. On this tier, seven galleries frontward, the folk are indeed building a great barrier against the strange things of the interior. I didn’t bring this creature, this poor thing, here for show. I simply had it brought here as an example. Seven frontward such things are commonplace. Nor are they all so mild and frightened as this one. They are genuine scared seven frontward. We have reports from them, Friends, folk injured, houses, shops damaged, folk dismembered, stranger things still, more horrible…
“From what source, Vardan?” Magistor Ger Gerebah asked.
“What source, Friend? We have it by post, by letters from there. You have seen them, Ger, as have all the others.”
“We are to move because of letters,” she said. “Do you all hear that? Because of letters? Who has been there to verify it?”
The Magistor Presiding tapped his wand against a sound board. The note, in the clear acoustics of the chamber, crowned and silenced Magistor Ger. “Friend Ger,” he admonished, “Friend Vardan has the pit Please wait your turn.”
Vardan paced the circumference of the pit, staying (perhaps dramatically) away from the dwarf. Though all voices in the dome sounded with equal volume, Vardan’s had a timbre, a bass and vibrant quality that made it seem louder than all the others. Brann didn’t like Vardan, who as the Secretary of the Guild of Engine Makers, had talked convincingly to Brann’s father about Brann’s potential as a guilds-man.
“He never says what he means,” Brann whispered to Hals and Liza. “He won’t keep your confidence either. I told him that I was considering not joining the Engine Makers and he went to tell my father immediately.”
Liza sneered, “He’s such an ugly one. How does a man so skinny have such a big voice? He looks like a little monkler.” She chittered and postured, imitating one of the lemuroid animals, the principal denizens of the parkplat. “Yeep, yeep, yeep, yeep, yeep!” she went and she bounced on her seat until another spectator told her to shush. But they all laughed, stifling it only when an officer looked their way.
“Let’s go,” Hals said. “This is boring.”
“If you want, Hals. I’m staying,” Brann said. He couldn’t say why. The argument was fierce, but fiercely polite, couched in polite and irritating phrases. But there was something here. Brann wasn’t certain he could explain it. It defied an orderly and gradual breakdown of Tailend. It was more intense, a swifter, more substantive breakdown, affecting not just the gallery, but the folk, and folk of galleries frontward—if Vardan was right. Things should be newer as you went frontward, better, stronger, more useful. He became restless listening to this polite debate, edgy and nervous. But he stayed. Liza stayed, too, and Hals, who didn’t want to leave alone.
Those who seemed to support Magistor Sala—who stated that he would not vote to go on Pilgrimage early—were a minority. Mara was not in the minority. It angered Brann. He wanted to tell her that she was stupid, wanting to leave. There was a recess for a few minutes while the Isocourt conferred among themselves. Liza and Hals watched Brann as he raced down the ramp and confronted Mara (after all a Magistor) with waving hands and a bewildered look. From there beneath the first platform no voices carried. Mara smiled and shrugged; perhaps she agreed. Brann came back up the ramp and said nothing at all to them, except that he hunkered as Liza had, and he imitated the monkler, pointing at Vardan, or at Mara perhaps, and going, “Yeep!”
There was a group among the Guild of Health which understood the processes of the mind who, if they were put to worry over this problem, could perhaps have said why a people who had resided in one fixed location for 1200 years would plan to leave their home on a minor provocation. But no one asked this question. Well, Brann had asked, but in a circumscribed context; he would never have questioned the concept of the Pilgrimage, only its precipitous application here. The question had not been asked, because no one dreamed of asking it. If there was an answer, it lay with the brittleness of a society that had not been threatened in 1200 years.
What was the matter with them, Brann asked Grandmother Ebar. “Here’re some strange folk. This one isn’t dangerous. He couldn’t hurt anyone. But do you know they all voted, except for Magistor Sala and Magistor Ger Gerebah and maybe four or five others. They all voted for an early Pilgrimage. They’re going to put it to a general poll, they said.”
Ebar nodded slowly, she rocked slowly, looking out the leaf-framed window. There were streaks of sun on her, spots between the shadows of the leaves, moving as she moved. “Did you ever watch storm clouds build in the mountains?” she asked him. “Have you watched it begin to rain?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s a very strange thing, very unusual. Quite a new concept, the rain.”
“But there’s always been rain, Grandmother.”
“Only for you there has.”
“No, Grandmother, for all of us.”
“Not true, I never saw rain as a child. It was miles to Tailend then, long ways through galleries very different from the one that burned. Rain was a word in books, a fiction of the Masters in school. Do you know that the folk have lived in this gallery more than twelve centuries? How long do you think they have seen rain7”
Brann didn’t know; he hadn’t thought about it.
“Ten years. That’s no time at all. That’s nothing.” She squinted into the sunlight “Only when the rearmost galleries were dismantled and the tailend of the city came here did we see the outside, Farmy Fields, the mountains, rain. I was frightened to death the first time I saw it. My father and I and your great-grandfather, Loez, went to Tailend when I was twelve. We went to the verge and it was raining. There was a storm so that you couldn’t see the mountains, and the Farmy Fields were a green-brown blur like a watercolor, and lightning touched Tailend’s empty beams. Thunder rattled out over the valley. I became nearly hysterical, screaming at my father to take me back in, away from it”
“It was only a storm,” Brann said. “Were you really so afraid?”
“I was. It was different, nothing I had ever experienced before. My father was shaken. I don’t think he’d ever seen rain before, either. So he bundled me into his cloak and we ran back inside away from the rain. I’ve seen it often since in these last few years. It scares me still.”
“And it’s like that with the strange men?” Brann asked. “Are you saying that the Isocourt Magistors are afraid of them because they never have seen them before? They want to run? But isn’t the Pilgrimage something different?”
“It’s more complex than that, Brann,” Ebar said. “The life here in the gallery is static. It doesn’t change. We don’t know how to deal with change. The strange folk are change, one and the same. Their appearance means that things are breaking down somewhere. It means that it is no longer one single unchanging city all the way frontward.”
“I was thinking that, too, in the Isocourt hall; listening to them, I was thinking that exactly. But isn’t the Pilgrimage change? We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know anything about it at all.”
“Certainly we do, Brann. We’ve always had the Pilgrimage. It’s our refuge, our place of safety. How many have gone before us? How many, like the ones fleeing from the fire, have chosen early Pilgrimage when threatened with that which they didn’t understand? It’s an abstract hope, a thing of faith.”
“You don’t believe? You don’t think there’s anything to it, do you?” Brann asked her. What his grandmother was saying was a sort of heresy that surprised and shocked him. He said nothing and only watched her rocking there in the moving rays of light. His thoughts were moving like that now, toward and away from some realization. There was a moist earthy smell he always associated with this room of his grandmother’s house, something that made him think this was the way it smelled outside, past even the Farmy Fields where it must all be like the park. He expected strange things when he came here. Grandmother Ebar seemed fearless, entirely unafraid to say anything she wished. She was notorious for it (some in the family looked with displeasure on Brann’s frequent visits to crazy Ebar), but was this too far; was this more than she had any right to say? Hadn’t he thought the same things? Hadn’t he wondered at the Pilgrimage and the unalterable necessity for it? Against custom, he wondered where the pilgrims went. Had they ever been heard from since? He wondered at their sanguine acceptance of the Structors’ orders to move—which would come here soon if the precipitous vote to leave early failed. He had expressed this doubt to no one, keeping it even more secret than his wish to become one of the Post Guild. He did not know what would be done to him if he asked of it. There was no precedent, so there was no punishment…The folk did not doubt. The Pilgrimage kept the city alive somehow. All accepted it as something inseparable from life.
He left then abruptly while Ebar rocked. He left then running, down the stairs of her house and out onto the verge onto the reach of a beam, where he sat motionless as the squatting dwarf, contemplating the depth of his grandmother’s heresy and wondering if it was as deep as his own.
Hegman Branlee would have known. The church doors were always open for Brann as for anyone who came, so Hegman Branlee. Though not for Brann, certainly for the Hegman it was not difficult to see how the church and the Pilgrimage had become tied into a single unit. Wasn’t the Pilgrimage a sort of prophecy? Wasn’t it the ultimate extrapolation of a knowledge that there was a final end and a definite beginning to the city?
“It never dies,” said the Hegman. “This is the great marvel. As it is broken down so it is built up, as we leave so we return.”
Brann made to interrupt.
“Shush, shush,” said Branlee. “Do you think the city ends in a mindless, senseless dismantling by the Structors, that we rush off on Pilgrimage into blind oblivion and chaos? That there is a final end and no returning…Thank you, Friend Eza, I believe another chop would go down well with the bread…That there is a far face to the city, a Frontend as some call it? What a most disturbing vision. Then I assume you must postulate an inside and an outside to the city; lands stretching on into lands, far as the eye can see, isn’t it, young Brann?”
“But of course there are lands!” Brann exclaimed. What could the Hegman mean? “What of the Fanny Fields, what of the mountains?”
“Ah,” said the Hegman, “most disturbing. You interpret it incorrectly, young man. You begin from the most erroneous premise, that there is an inside and an outside to the city, a city and a planet, I suppose, upon which it rests…thank you again, Friend Eza, would it be too much trouble to pass the pitcher again? My glass seems to be dry once more…and all that of course is nonsense; lands stretching on into lands. The eye will fill what is empty, young Brann. If there were lands, there would certainly be folk to fill them, and if such folk then we would have seen them, true?”
“True,” Brann answered reluctantly.
Brann’s papa smiled, and his mama nodded agreement, and Brann watched not the Hegman but them instead, wondering all the time if they could truly believe what the man was saying.
“Have we seen such folk, Brann?” asked the Hegman.
“No,” said Brann. “But that doesn’t mean that they’re not there for certain. We know that there are folk up frontward, and we’ve never seen them either. How do we know they’re there? We get letters from them through the Post Guild. No one sees the front folk, no one has talked to them. But we get letters from them, and now there is going to be a poll to see if we move and go on Pilgrimage early, all because of folk we’ve never met or seen.”
“Brann!” his mama said sharply. “How can you speak that way to the Hegman?” She would have said more, would in fact have admonished him sharply, for in matters of the church both she and Brann’s papa were of one mind. Brann’s words shocked her and surprised his papa greatly.
“Leave it be, Friend Eza,” the Hegman told her. “He has a right to question. It is a right inherent in all our teaching. For if he doesn’t question, how will he hear the truth? Brann, have some folk of the mountains, or from the other side of the Farmy Fields been writing to you, sending you letters?”
“No,” said Brann. “Of course not.” His sisters tittered. He turned a mean face upon them and they stifled their noise but tittered silently on.
“Has anyone you know ever received a letter from outside the city?”
“No.”
“You’ve not received some secret communication from them? Some message brought by a bird, or perhaps a monkler has brought you one?” His sisters laughed out loud and Brann gave Sal a look in which death was writ large. But even brother Thod laughed and baby Nam too. He wanted to get up, to run away from the table, but adults did not do such things, and nothing would prove him more childish and incapable of further argument, than to rush away from the house in. anger.
“I don’t do this to mock you, young man,” the Hegman said. “This is not a thing to laugh at.” At once his sisters stopped laughing, mirroring the grave faces of Mama and Papa Adelbran. “There is the city, there are the mountains and the fields. They are one, and all beyond their unity is only the vision of things and this vision is nothing more than that, for the eye abhors emptiness and will fill it always. Certainly you may question, for there is nothing learned without it. But when you hear the true answer, you must stop questioning and begin to learn. Do you understand that, young Brann?”
“I suppose so,” Brann answered.
“Well then,” said the Hegman heartily, “that is that.” And he commenced shoveling the potatoes onto his plate with an extravagant gesture.
The times were very turbulent. So Papa Adelbran had invited Hegman Branlee for dinner, as a comfort and a spiritual reaffirmation. There were troubles. Of those on the gallery, a great majority was sure to cast ballots in favor of an early Pilgrimage. There were dissenters, very vocal—Magistor Ger Gerebah most of all—who said that this was a foolish overreaction. It was Ger Gerebah’s position that there was as yet no need to abandon homes and businesses on the gallery and run for the elevators in some mindless dash down to safety; she said that the Pilgrimage required planning, at least a year of readiness. So the Structors warned. She enlisted the aid of one of the pilgrims from tier 112, taking him around from meeting to meeting where he told of how much planning and how much preparation were needed before they left on Pilgrimage. But he was a butt of laughter at the meetings, a tall blond man speaking a language so incomprehensible that Ger Gerebah had to translate what he said. And the spectators laughed so loud and jeeringly that finally the man left, traveling down to rejoin his own family on Pilgrimage.
