BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue010 Read online

  “How?” repeated Kreisler. “Smoke and mirrors! Why? It is in my nature. Do not look further into my tricks; to men of my kind it is forbidden to reveal our secrets. Further questions you must pose to him.” And he pointed a quavering finger toward the cloaked figure at the hideous white organ.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “My crowning achievement!” Kreisler said, his mocking smile flitting about his lips. “He is the Clockwork King. Ask him anything at all to do with the past, the present, or what is to come; ask him any secret of God or woman, and he is so designed that he must answer you with the truth!”

  “How is this possible?” Theodore asked.

  Kreisler tilted his head. “By my art,” he said. I did not trust him. But Theodore laughed.

  “Well, Ernst!” he said. “Have you anything to ask His Majesty?”

  “I have not.”

  “Then I shall pose him a question.” Theodore strode down the aisle between the rows of silent unmoving musicians and climbed to the dais and the complex coils of the organ pipes. He bent to speak to the Clockwork King, and as he did the King raised his cloaked head to face my friend.

  “The King is the heart of this city of automata,” Kreisler whispered to me. “Him; and the organ. The key to this great work.” Then Theodore gasped.

  He had straightened up from the Clockwork King, and raised a hand to his face. A moment he stared at nothing, and I began to run toward him. He shook himself, and strode stiffly down the aisle to meet me.

  “What happened?” I demanded. “What did you ask him?”

  “No, that must remain between His Majesty and myself,” Theodore said. “But go, Ernst. Ask a question. You’ll not be disappointed.”

  He waved me on toward the dais. I paused, watching him, but he only waited for me to move. In the end I turned and made my way to the cloaked machine. As I approached, it raised its head to me, and I looked into its face with surprise. I had expected a skull beneath the black hood, picture of death. But its head was a round mirror. I wondered if that was, after all, the truth of death. Then my image in the glass of its face wavered and vanished; and for a moment in a fever I saw the face of Olympia. I started. The thing turned away from me. I leaped toward it, stepping in close to whisper into the fabric of its hood where its ear might have been.

  “Shall I do what Theodore suggests?” I whispered. “Shall I ask Olympia his ruinous question?”

  And the Clockwork King gave me the answer I knew to be true.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  II.

  Beyond the long windows the night was dark, but in the castle of Count H— there was light shining through the thousand crystal shards of immense chandeliers. It glinted from the polished marble floor, from the delicate oils of framed portraits, from a golden pot worked with a relief of snakes eating each others’ tails. All the court had come to see the Prodigy, and we sat in the elegant hall in our elegant finery upon elegant chairs and conversed in elegant echoing whispers.

  Except myself. I did not speak. Olympia was not there. And in thinking of her I was too dreadfully calm for speech.

  There was a stir; a child with a toy sword was making his way toward the clavier set before us. Heads under heavy periwigs tilted to see him. He wore a lilac jacket cut to his size, bravely trimmed with double gold braid-work, above a moiré jacket of the same hue. His eyes were large and quick; and he smiled as though we were the most natural scene in the world for him. He bowed to us. This was the Prodigy, named the Beloved of God.

  Then he sat before the clavier. He set his hands on the keys. He began to play a wild barcarole. And deep within me I felt a shiver.

  He played like an infant god. His speed, precision, and dexterity were beyond any I had heard; more than that, his music held a passion such as no child ought ever to have known. But who other than a child could have known such emotion, unmediated by adult sense or reason? Yet, yet, the more he played, the more I understood, the more he made me understand how alive this music was to pattern, to meaning. Here was paradox, all ardor in all order, played upon a toy by a child!

  As he played on, a small saintly smile upon his face, I felt myself break into a sweat, my limbs a-tremble, fingers dancing upon my knee. His art raised and perfected my passion within me; and yet the clarity of his skill heightened also my intellect so that I could the more perfectly comprehend my love, and love therefore with a more perfect and complete emotion than any I had ever known. Again in that, a paradox: for my reason was in abeyance, as though I were in communion with a Power which opened to me the deepest recesses of my soul; and there in the most profound part of myself I found the image of Olympia. I cannot say truly how long it lasted, seeming at once infinite and a transient moment, like the wink of an angel.

  But the music did stop, and I drew a labored breath. The court around me applauded politely and returned to their whisperings behind their fluttering fans. The performance continued as the Prodigy performed tricks. He played with a single finger. With the keyboard covered by a cloth. He called for the audience to provide him with musical phrases and from them elaborated complex fugues. It was all much stranger than the clockwork city.

  But then the performance ended. I knew it was time, then, to seek the true Olympia. What did I after all feel? Hope, dread; it was a monstrous joke that the one cause could inspire both emotions at once. Olympia, I thought.

  I arose to go to her, but it seemed in my agitated state that I was hemmed in by idiot conversation. No, Countess, I really had no opinion whether the Fischer von Erlachs or the Hildebrandts were the greater family of architects. Yes, a pity that the Russians could not be counted on in the war, and surely the Prussians would take advantage of our lack of unity. Indeed, I had been to the fair-ground of the automata, and though there were some points of interest the overall effect seemed to me quite trivial. No, sir, I am not Theodore; it is a common error, for we are of an age, and have a similar bearing... perhaps a small resemblance in some minor features....

  Then I was through them, and done, and I found my way to the bedchamber I sought.

  I entered without a knock, and found her regarding herself in a full-length mirror; not intent upon herself, but upon something not obvious to my sight. I watched her twice over, in reality and in the glass: her hair more golden than gold; her face an irregular pearl in the fineness of its curves, and its luminescence; her body at once the summation of earthly promise and the gateway to heavens beyond hope. Yet hope I did. “You are here,” I said aloud.

  She turned to me, wordless.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “Olympia, I have a question.” Olympia; how I felt the pressure and movements of my own lips, forming the syllables of her name. In such foolish trivia does love make of us a satire on ourselves.

  “Ask,” she said.

  “Olympia,” I said, “I love you, and am of good birth, and hope to attain a fair inheritance. Olympia, I ask you, will you be my wife?”

  “No,” she said. I trembled, and felt myself struck by lightning.

  “Then—” I said, faltering, “then—”

  I rushed to her, and took hold of her wrists, though she tried to draw back. Her flesh! There was a crashing in my ears. I could not blink.

  “I must ask you something,” I said, and halted.

  “Will you?” she asked; and in the neutrality of her voice, the banality of it, I found a source of anger which drove me to demand of her that which Theodore had given me to ask.

  “Who was it,” I asked, “who provided Claude-Adrien Helvétius with the heresies published in his terrible book De l’Esprit, that was condemned by the Sorbonne, banned by the Crown of France, denounced before the Parlement of Paris, and finally burnt in public?”

  She laughed, an easy silver laugh. She drew her arms back from my nerveless fingers. “Never trust another man’s question, even if he’s the very image of your self. Your friend Theodore bent his efforts to discovering my secrets, but found no more than I wish
ed. The heresies of Helvétius were Helvétius’s alone. Now, for your presumption, I must require something of you.”

  “Anything!” I cried. “Olympia, I will do anything for you. Ask it.”

  She said: “Kill Theodore.”

  I drew back. She strode by me without a look. “How could I do such a thing?” I whispered.

  She paused at the door. “But you must.”

  “Will you be mine, if I do?”

  “I am not to be bought; especially by an act of murder.”

  “Then—”

  “I am not without knowledge myself.” She smiled, sad and impudent. “I know who first debauched the Lady G—, now the court’s most notorious whore. I know who tampered with the firing-pin of the dueling-pistol of the Count F—, so that it misfired and caused the Count’s death. I know who waylaid a messenger bound for the Bishop of C— so that certain gambling debts could not be paid and the respectable curate was compelled to eternal damnation for the sin of self-murder.”

  “Theodore, all of them,” I said.

  “I mean to expose him.”

  “Can I do nothing to save him?”

  “You may slay him,” she said, and left the bedchamber.

  I could think only of how wrong had been the advice of the Clockwork King.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  III.

  I staggered home in a daze, the castles and churches of V— whirling half-unseen about me. Theodore was waiting at my house.

  “And?” he asked as soon as he saw me. “And?”

  “You were misled, Theodore,” I told him. He stood as I walked past him to the high hearth which was the centerpiece of the sitting-room; the green stone fireplace, the mirror above it a solid slab of glass and quicksilver, surrounded by wood worked into serpent-shapes and grinning gnomic faces. Upon the mantle were a pair of empty brass candlesticks with marble bases. I picked one up. It was very heavy.

  Theodore took a step towards me. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  I inspected the candlestick, searching for a flaw. There was none. “Theodore... ah, but how long has it been that we’ve known one another? As long as I can remember, it seems.... But no, no. I recall it now, years ago when I met you, I was a student, you became my shadow; lengthening to gain for me all things by all means, shrinking to insignificance when unneeded; you have done well for me, allowed me to make my way in the world, and what then if you have done evil? For it was only when I met you that I became fully healed of my childhood delusions.”

  “Ernst, what do you mean?” demanded Theodore. “I know nothing of these delusions.”

  I turned to him, clutching the candlestick in my right hand while my left played about its base. “When I was a boy I fell ill, once, and lay in this room; I remember fixing upon the reflection above the mantle-piece, how it seemed, then—when every sane part of me was overwhelmed, leaving awake only those dim forms which lurk in the depths of every mind—that the mirror showed the way into another place, a fairyland in which the vain material things of this world were metamorphosed, made strange, become the implements of all glory, art, desire. Even once I had recovered from the fever I believed in this other world; until I met you, and then it all seemed the most obvious madness. But now... now I think that what I saw in the glass was, after all, a reflection; a reflection from inside my soul. It is a true world, Theodore, awaiting our entry; if we have the courage.” My hand traced the heavy brasswork of the candlestick, and for a moment I said nothing.

  “Ernst,” said Theodore. “You must tell me what transpired between you and Olympia tonight.”

  “She knew of your inquiries after her secrets,” I said. “She’s laid you a false trail. More: she knows about the Lady G—, the Count F—, the Bishop C—. And she will reveal all.”

  “What!” Theodore cried. “That—that—then you, what did you do?”

  “Do?”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “What was there to say?” I swung the candlestick through the air so that its base fell heavily into my left palm. “Nothing could dissuade her.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “What, indeed,” I murmured. I held the candlestick in both hands for a moment. Then I set it down upon the mantle. “Theodore—you must go. You must flee the court.”

  “Flee,” he repeated. “I’ll see her dead first.” I snatched up the candlestick and whirled around. He was gone; I heard my door slam. He was gone.

  I went to my bed, and at once the cruel Sand-man flung his grains in my eyes, and I slept, and dreamt:

  I chased the Queen of Elves through a deep and shadowy forest. Though I ran as fast as I could she was always out of my reach, dancing to the music of a wild barcarole; her face was the face of Olympia. At last I came upon the ruin of a city. Every black bird that fluttered from stone to stone and every rat that crawled among the dust and every wolf that skulked in the shadows was an automaton. And their master, coiled around the spires of a broken palace, was a dragon pale as leprosy, pale as a skeleton left unburied for a hundred years, pale as the horse of death. The Queen of Elves ran into the city with a laugh. Her actions were not determined or mechanical but born of freedom; and, enticed by her liberty into madness, I ran after her.

  I chased her through an ancient graveyard where a ghost watched us and brooded; I knew that this was the ghost of the man that had betrayed this city to the dragon, and he had the form of Theodore. I chased Olympia past a fallen monument, which had once been a statue of a gnomish figure with a brass crown and the ironic grin of Johannes Kreisler. I chased her at last into the dragon’s palace, which was also a cathedral, for things blur into each other in dreams. I reached out to catch her. Then the dragon roared, with the sound of an organ bellowing a tremendous note, and the building began to collapse. Masses of stone fell as walls of iron and copper and jade and amber rose to replace them. Olympia, the Queen of Elves, danced up the falling stones to a heaven which returned my gaze upon me.

  I awoke, realizing that the art of the future could be made only by those that the present deemed mad.

  From beyond my window I heard screams, and distant gunfire. I looked out, and saw flames in the streets; V— was burning. In the city there was an army on the march.

  The automata had invaded the city.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  IV.

  The thought of Olympia came to me, and I felt then again the rage of emotion she inspired: love, yes, and loathing for her murderous command, for that agony of indecision I’d felt while holding the candlestick. I desired her, more than ever I’d desired any thing I’d known, her, her voice, her figure, her teeth, her hair, her name, the lightning that was in her eyes and beyond all other lightnings. I, her slave, knew I must find her, and save her from these automata, and then perhaps she might love me. So I went out into the city, driven by her image.

  I ran through the empty streets, avoiding all signs of motion, all sounds. The castle of Count H— was dark. I hammered at the door till a servant with an ancient blunderbuss shouted that the party of the court had fled to the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace. I dashed on.

  Automata filled the streets. They were searching for something, I thought; turning men and women out of houses, gathering up pistols and swords, taking prisoner confused bands of rake-hells and late-night celebrants of dubious deeds and other squires of the night’s body. In everything the actions of the automata were perfectly planned and supremely rational, without a single wasted motion. I saw some mechanicals familiar to me: Chaldeans, Confucians, and Semiramis now bearing a rifle over her shoulder; and there were other things, too, gryphons and unicorns and blue-skinned multi-armed Indian gods. Stranger somehow were the automata in the guise of ordinary men and woman, such as might almost have been everyday citizens of V—. But for the fact that they did not speak. And their curious habit of tilting their heads to the side at a certain angle, as though listening for a silent music.

  Once, I saw a collection of faceless mechanic
als working in an improvised outdoor foundry, shaping molten metals into copies of their own forms with automated caresses. I thought in terror of the rate of replication of the mechanicals, each of which on its own might make another self, their population doubling at will, never suffering loss due to accident or age, growing in perfect powers of two; then I thought of Olympia, and how Olympia and I could become one out of two.

  Nearing the Hofburg I heard a voice crying “Help! Help! Help me, for your living soul!” I whirled, to see a bedraggled Kreisler staggering down a narrow street toward me. “You! I know you!” he said. “Theodore! No—Ernst! Ernst, you must help me, Ernst. The Clockwork King has gone mad!”

  “What has happened?” I called to him in a whisper. He flung himself upon me and gabbled into my face.

  “The King! It’s all the King! All these others, mere extensions of his will! The King will conquer us all, for the sake of my question! And then—why, then the world is over, and there will be nothing under heaven but automation.” And he laid his head upon my shoulder in a swoon.

  I dragged him to an alley and did my best to revive him. When he began to show intermittent signs of consciousness I hauled him to his feet and set out with him for the Hofburg. Near any automata, I let my stride become as aimless as his own, and we passed as two drunkards. But meanwhile he had begun to gasp out his story, in whispers.

  “I made him,” Kreisler told me. “The King was my dream, and I made him a thing of the waking world; I made him, with his terrible organ, an organ of generation of thought, a device to answer every question, and I asked him my question, the question that consumes me, for I am an artist, Ernst, a poor one it may be, but an artist I promise you, and I asked him: Where is the art that shall perfect the world?

  “Art, Ernst, art the product of every desire, for lovers forge by their own heat within the furnaces of their brains the images that they desire, and in this they are the emblem of the artist, whose art must have at its base desire, desire to make a thing, to change the world, just as the lover must have his loved one and change what he loves by the addition of himself—and where is the love, the desire, that shall change the world so to perfect it? My question, Ernst, the only question that matters!