Majipoor Chronicles

Slowly, numbly, Lavon descended from the platform.

He felt dazed and flushed. Something seemed broken within him. A ring of blurred figures surrounded him. Gradually he discerned eyes, mouths, the patterns of familiar faces. He started to say something, but no words would come, only sounds. He toppled and was caught and eased to the desk. Someone's arm was around his shoulders; someone was giving him wine. 'Look at his eyes,' he heard a voice say. 'He's gone into shock!' Lavon began to shiver. Somehow — he was unaware of being lifted — he found himself in his cabin, with Vormecht bending over him and others standing behind.

The first mate said quietly, 'The ship is moving, captain.'

'What? What? Hasz is dead. Galimoin killed Hasz and I killed Galimoin.'

'It was the only possible thing to do. The man was insane.'

'I killed him, Vormecht.'

'We couldn't have kept a madman locked on board for the next ten years. He was dangerous to us all. His life was forfeit. You had the power. You acted rightly.'

'We do not kill,' Lavon said. 'Our barbarian ancestors took each other's lives, on Old Earth long ago, but we do not kill. I do not kill. We were beasts once, but that was in another era, on a different planet. I killed him, Vormecht.'

'You are the captain. You had the right. He threatened the success of the voyage.'

'Success? Success?'

'The ship is moving again, captain.'

Lavon stared, but could barely see. 'What are you saying?'

'Come. Look.'

Four massive arms enfolded him and Lavin smelled the musky tang of Skandar fur. The giant crewman lifted him and carried him to the deck, and put him carefully down. Lavon tottered, but Vormecht was at his side, and Joachil Noor. The first mate pointed toward the sea. A zone of open water bordered the Spurifon along the entire length of her hull.

Joachil Noor said, 'We dropped cables into the water and gave the dragon-grass a good jolt of current. It shorted out their contractile systems. The ones closest to us died instantly and the rest began to pull back. There's a clear channel in front of us as far as we can see.'

'The voyage is saved,' said Vormecht. 'We can go onward now, captain!'

'No,' Lavon said. He felt the haze and confusion lifting from his mind. 'Who's navigator now? Have him turn the ship back toward Zimroel.'

'But-

'Turn her around! Back to Zimroel!'

They were gaping at him, bewildered, stunned. 'Captain, you're not yourself yet. To give such an order, in the very moment when all is well again — you need to rest, and in a few hours you'll feel—'

'The voyage is ended, Vormecht. We're going back.'

'No!'

'No? Is this a mutiny, then?' Their eyes were blank. Their faces were expressionless. Lavon said, 'Do you really want to continue? Aboard a doomed ship with a murderer for a captain? You were all sick of the voyage before any of this happened. Don't you think I knew that? You were hungry for home. You didn't dare say it, is all. Well, now I feel as you do.'

Vormecht said, 'We've been at sea five years. We may be halfway across. It might take us no longer to reach the farther shore than to return.'

'Or it might take us forever,' said Lavon. 'It does not matter. I have no heart for going forward.'

'Tomorrow you may think differently, captain.'

'Tomorrow I will still have blood on my hands, Vormecht. I was not meant to bring this ship safely across the Great Sea. We bought our freedom at the cost of four lives; but the voyage was broken by it.'

'Captain—'

'Turn the ship around,' said Lavon.

When they came to him the next day, pleading to be allowed to continue the voyage, arguing that eternal fame and immortality awaited them on the shores of Alhanroel, Lavon calmly and quietly refused to discuss it with them. To continue now, he told them again, was impossible. So they looked at one another, those who had hated the voyage and yearned to be free of it and who in the euphoric moment of victory over the dragon-grass had changed their minds, and they changed their minds again, for without the driving force of Lavon's will there was no way of going on. They set their course to the east and said no more about the crossing of the Great Sea. A year afterward they were assailed by storms and severely thrown about, and in the following year there was a bad encounter with sea-dragons that severely damaged the ship's stern; but yet they continued, and of the hundred and sixty-three voyagers who had left Til-omon long before, more than a hundred were still alive, Captain Lavon among them, when the Spurlfon came limping back into her home port in the eleventh year of the voyage.

FOUR Calintane Explains

Hissune is downcast for days after that. He knows, of course, that the voyage failed: no ship has ever crossed the Great Sea, and no ship ever will, for the idea is absurd and realization of it is probably impossible. But to fail in such a way, to go so far and then turn back, not out of cowardice or because of illness or famine but rather from sheer moral despair — Hissune finds that hard to comprehend. He would never turn back. Through the fifteen years of his life he has always gone steadily forward toward whatever he perceived as his goal, and those who faltered along their own routes have always seemed to him idle and weak. But, then, he is not Sinnabor Lavon; and, too, he has never taken life. Such a deed of violence might shake anyone's soul. For Sinnabor Lavon he feels a certain contempt, and a great deal of pity, and then, the more he considers the man, seeing him from within, a kind of admiration replaces the contempt, for he realizes that Sinnabor Lavon was no weakling but in fact a person of enormous moral strength. That is a startling insight, and Hissune's depression lifts the moment he reaches it. My education, he thinks, continues. All the same he has gone to Sinnabor Lavon's records in search of adventure and diversion, not such sober-minded philosophizing. He has not found quite what he sought. But a few years afterward, he knows, there was an event in this very Labyrinth that had diverted everyone most extremely, and that even after more than six thousand years still reverberates through history as one of the strangest events Majipoor has seen. When his duties permit, Hissune takes the time to do a bit of historical research; and then he returns to the Register of Souls to enter the mind of a certain young official at the court of the Pontifex Arioc of bizarre repute.

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?'