Weaveworld

flies, disclosed with the same delight as its companion glories.

But death did not interest Cal; the woman did.

Can’t do anything tonight – de Bono had said – except love,

and Cal knew it now to be true.

But love as he’d known it above ground was not appropriate here. The woman in the sphere needed no sweet-talk; her company was offered freely. The question was: how did he express his desire? He’d left his erection behind on Venus Mountain.

He needn’t have concerned himself: she already knew his thoughts. As his eyes found her a third time, her glance seemed to draw him down into the midst of the dance. He found himself executing a slow, slow somersault, and settling into place beside his mistress.

As he attained this spot, he realized just what function he had here.

The voice on the mountain had called him Mooney, and that name had not been chosen in vain. He had come from above as light, as moonlight, and here he had found his orbit in a dance of planets and satellites.

Perhaps, of course, this was simply his interpretation. Perhaps the imperatives of this system pertained as much to love and snow-storms as to astronomy. In the face of such miracles conjecture was fruitless. Tonight, being was all.

The presences made another circuit, and he, lost in the sheer delight of this preordained journey, tumbling over and over (no heels or head here; only the pleasure of motion), was momentarily distracted from the woman he’d seen. But as his orbit took him out in a wide arc he once more set eyes on the planet she haunted. She emerged even as he watched, only to be lost in cloud again. Did he perform the same rites for her, turning from humanity to abstraction and back again at the blossoming of a milky cloud? He knew so little of himself, this Mooney, in his singular orbit.

All he could hope to comprehend of what he was he had to discover from the spheres upon whose faces he shed his borrowed light. That was perhaps the condition of moons.

It was enough.

He knew in that moment how moons made love. By bewitching the nights of planets; by stirring their oceans; by blessing the hunter and the harvester. A hundred ways that needed only the unbound anatomies of light and space.

As he thought this thought the woman opened to bathe in him, to spread her cunt and let his light pleasure her.

Entering, he felt the same heat, the same possessiveness, the same vanity as had ever marked the animal he’d been, but in place of labour there was ease, in place of ever imminent loss, sustenance; in place of urgency the sense that this could last forever, or rather that a hundred human lifetimes were a moment in the span of moons, and his ride on this empyrean carousel had made a nonsense of time.

At that thought a terrible sense of poignancy swept over him. Had all he’d left above on the mountain withered and died while these constellations moved steadily about their business?

He looked towards the centre of the system, the hub about which they all described their paths – eccentric or regular, distant or intimate; and there, in the place from which he drew his light, he saw himself, sleeping on a hillside.

I’m dreaming, he thought, and suddenly rose – like a bubble in a bottle – less moon than Mooney. The dome of the cavern – which he vaguely realized resembled the inside of a skull – was dark above him, and for an instant he thought he’d be dashed to death against it, but at the last moment the air grew bright around him and he woke, staring up at a sky streaked with light.

It was dawn on Venus Mountain.

3

Of the dream he’d had, one part was true. He had sloughed off two skins like a snake. One, his clothes, lay scattered around him in the grass. The other, the accrued grime of his adventures, had been bathed away in the night, either by dew or a fall of rain. Whichever, he was quite dry now; the warmth of the ground he lay upon (that part also had been no dream) had dried him off and left him sweet-smelling. He felt nourished too, and strong.

He sat up. Balm de Bono was already on his feet, scratching his balls and staring up at the sky: a blissful combination. The grass had left an imprint on his back and buttocks.

‘Did they please you?’ he said, cocking an eye at Cal.

‘Please me?’

‘The Presences. Did they give you sweet dreams?’

‘Yes they did.’

De Bono grinned lewdly.

‘Want to tell me about it?’ he said.

‘I don’t know how to –’

‘Oh spare me the modesty.’

‘No, it’s just I … I dreamt I was … the moon.’

‘You did what?’

‘I dreamt –’

‘I bring you to the nearest thing we’ve got to a whorehouse, and you dream about being the moon? You’re a strange man, Calhoun.’

He picked up his vest, and put it on, shaking his head at Cal’s bizarrity.

‘What did you dream of?’ Cal enquired.

‘I’ll tell you, one of these times,’ said de Bono. ‘When you’re old enough.’

4

They dressed in silence, then set off down the gentle slope of the mountain.

XI

A WITNESS

1

hough the day had dawned well for Suzanna, with her miraculous escape from Hobart, it had rapidly deteriorated. She’d felt oddly cocooned by night; with the dawn came nameless anxieties.

And some she could name. First off, the fact that she’d lost her guide. She had only the roughest idea of the direction in which the Firmament lay, so elected to make her way towards the Gyre, which was plainly visible at all times, and make what enquiries she could along the route.

Her second source of concern: the many signs that events in the Fugue were rapidly taking a turn for the worse. A great pall of smoke hung over the valley, and though there’d been rain in the night, fires still burned in many places. She came upon several battle sites as she went. In one place a fire-gutted car was perched in a tree like a steel bird, blown there presumably, or levitated. She couldn’t know what forces had clashed the previous night, nor what weapons had been used, but the struggle had clearly been horrendous. Shadwell had divided the people of this once tranquil land with his prophetic talk – setting brother against brother. Those conflicts were traditionally the bloodiest. It should have come as no surprise then, to see bodies left where they’d fallen, for foxes and birds to pick at, denied the simple courtesy of burial.

If there was any sliver of comfort to be drawn from these scenes it was that Shadwell’s invasion had not gone undefied. The destruction of Capra’s House had been a massive miscalculation on his part. What chance he’d