Beneath Ceaseless Skies #178 Read online

  Issue #178 • July 23, 2015

  “The Scale-Tree,” by Raphael Ordoñez

  “The Insurrectionist and the Empress Who Reigns Over Time,” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE SCALE-TREE

  by Raphael Ordoñez

  Zeuxis, the flying artist and geometer, and his wife, Helen, lived in Enoch, the world-city that surrounds the sea on three sides like a giant omega. They dwelt alone on a deserted street and had no one to help them.

  Every day they went up to the mossy crown of the tower they lived in, one of thousands of pinnacles and spires comprising the coast-long downtown, and prayed for their long loneliness to end.

  One evening as the sun was sinking toward the molten-gold bosom of the sea, resting its quaking crown on a cloud-wrack, they burned two lumps of resin on the brazier, pale yellow for princes and dusky red for death. The decayed spire loomed over them like a cloaked green goddess, a disheveled dryad with bones of stone and no tree to call home.

  Twice Helen climbed up and dropped down on the smoke-column. Then she said, “Let’s go downstairs.”

  They knew one another, and Helen gave birth to a son. He had golden skin and golden hair and eyes like twin jades. They named him Phoenix.

  They knew one another again, and Helen gave birth to a daughter. Her skin was pale and freckled and for hair she had curling masses of red. They named her Philomena but called her Mena.

  Father, mother, sister, brother: they were a family in Enoch.

  * * *

  A strange voice awoke Zeuxis one dawn. He opened his eyes. Pink light filtered through the lace curtains. The crumbling crowns of nearby towers were green-gold flames against a rose-gray sky.

  “Yes? What was it?” he said, not certain he hadn’t been dreaming.

  Helen stirred but said nothing.

  He rolled over. Mena stood in the doorway. Her hair was a subdued aureole in the roseate glow of the room behind her.

  “Was that you, my princess?”

  “Never call me princess,” she said.

  He sat up and slid his feet into his slippers. “May I inquire why not?”

  “They’re afraid of things. I love gorgons and chimeras and everything scary.”

  “Ah.” He rose and began shuffling toward the lavatory. The big four-poster bed took up most of the room; the rest was full of clutter and rickety furniture. The plaster walls were hung with paintings and diagrams and emulsion images. An unwound clock sat atop the dresser.

  “I am a queen,” said Mena, following him. “You may call me queen.”

  “Good morning, queen.”

  “Good morning!”

  The nephridium lamp threw its sickly light against the white-tiled walls of the lavatory. Zeuxis stopped the drain, filled it with a ewer of collected rainwater, and washed his face.

  “I wish I could go with you today,” Mena said.

  “I wish you could, too. But you can’t, little queen.”

  “Why not?”

  He turned and picked her up. “What if they thought you were a pretty little statue and wanted me to sell you?”

  “Well, you would just say no.”

  He knit his brow. “That would depend on what they offered me.”

  “No!” she said, patting his forehead. “Do not say that you would sell me as a statue! Tell me you would just say no!”

  He set her down and ran his fingers through his scraggly beard. “Well, I don’t know. Think of all the paint I could buy.”

  “You’re only joking me.”

  He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “Soon you can come with me. Is your brother awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s very quiet. What’s he doing?”

  “Counting.”

  Together they went into the next room. It was almost bare of furniture. There was a washstand and a big wardrobe. A mattress lay on each side of it.

  Phoenix was sitting cross-legged on top of the wardrobe. His golden face and green eyes were calm, serious, and beautiful. “Babu,” he said.

  “Get down from there,” said Zeuxis.

  “Two gnomons is four, a square. Three gnomons is nine, another square. Four—”

  “Get down from there.”

  “—is sixteen. So, if you keep adding gnomons, you keep getting squares. Is that right?”

  “Down, I say. Off! Off! Right now! But don’t just—”

  But Phoenix had already taken a flying leap. He landed on the mattress, bounced backward, and knocked his head in the corner where the wardrobe met the wall. “Ow!” he shouted.

  “Well, what do you expect?”

  “Was I right?”

  “Get dressed. Yes. Hurry up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out. You’re coming with me.”

  “Hurray!” he shouted, leaping around the room, while Mena tried to tell him the things she was going to do that day. He threw the wardrobe doors open with a bang and began to strip. Suddenly he froze and faced his father. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to try to sell some pictures.”

  A look of betrayal came into the boy’s face. “I hope no one will buy them.”

  “It’s very possible that they may.”

  “Then I won’t see them again!” Angry tears welled up in his eyes.

  “Little boy,” Zeuxis said gently, placing his hand on his son’s head and running his fingers through his hair, “we’ve talked about this. I’m a painter. This is what I do. Our family needs the rods.”

  “What a lovely morning,” a sleepy voice said. The children turned. Helen was standing in the doorway.

  “Today is the day the gods have made,” said Zeuxis. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

  * * *

  The steam lift had stopped running ages ago, so Zeuxis and Phoenix took the stairs down from storey to storey. It had once been a beautiful building, with brown and white tile floors, wrought-iron fixtures, wooden wainscots, and cobweb-festooned gas chandeliers. Zeuxis carried his portfolio under his arm; he was wearing a long coat and a black cap.

  “Can we talk some more about what you were telling me last night?” asked Phoenix.

  “What?”

  “That man. The sage.”

  “Oh, yes. Eiron the polyhymnist. Yes. Well, let’s see. So after he left his mountain and went wandering, he met an auraiad atop a sleeping volcano in an inner-city pumice desert. This auraiad told him that the cosmos is like a shell folded in on itself. Each place consists of two leaves that are almost, but not quite, the same.”

  “How can they be almost the same?”

  “What happens in one affects the other. A natural affinity keeps the stars and planets paired.”

  “Then are there two universes?”

  “No, but it’s not easy to explain. You see, if you were to fly to the uttermost antipodes of the cosmos—impossible, of course, but supposing you did it—then you would arrive back where you started, but in the other leaf. If you kept on in the same direction then you’d eventually get home again, in the leaf you started from.

  “The leaves were separated long ago because the nephelim, who were made to guide creation, fought terrible wars against one another instead, spoiling the earth. The seraphim therefore divided the leaves, consigning the bad spirits to this one.”

  “We live in the bad one?”

  “Yes, so the polyhymnist says. Husbandry of life was forsaken here, so it’s been allowed to stagnate, while the other continued to grow and change. The children of men came originally from
the other leaf.”

  “How do you mean it grew and changed?”

  “All life is connected. You come from me, and I from my father, though I never knew him, and he from of old. The same is true of every creature. All spring from a common corpuscle in some dim unguessable aeon. Somehow that divine spark contained within it every eft and ammonite, every scale-tree and stinkhorn that has ever been.”

  “Mama calls it the tree of life.”

  Zeuxis nodded. “To me it’s more like a great river, which flows in one direction, yes, but with whorls and eddies, and no lines between the streams and undercurrents and secret springs.”

  They reached the lobby, which was shrouded in dust and greenish gloom, and crossed to the foyer. The huge iron doors were slightly ajar. They slipped between them into the street.

  It was an uninhabited district, but the smell of refuse hung heavy in the humid air. The noise of tramping crowds and steam engines drifted faintly from far away. They went toward it, picking their way around heaps of junk and rotten masonry. The towers’ broken windows watched them like empty eyes.

  “How is it different?” Phoenix asked. “The other leaf, I mean.”

  “In the other leaf there are creatures that fly.”

  “Like dragonflies?”

  “Yes, but red-blooded beasts, too. They are brightly colored, and have long, beautiful scales that are soft like hair. And they sing to wake the dawn. Plants there have lovely delicate organs, a bit like sea anemones.” He raised his hand and opened it, palm upward. “These organs last only a few days, then die.”

  “Why?”

  “To make room for others. Also, in some plants, the organ produces a body that can be plucked and eaten as meat, or pressed for blood more delicious than anything we have in this world.”

  “Do the people there know about us?”

  “No. Why would they? They live in the world made for men. They have everything they need. There’s nothing to make them wonder what’s on the other side. Perhaps some of them don’t even know there is another side.”

  “Why are there men here at all?”

  “Once, long ago, two of the ghulim, beast-men who have no souls, awoke to themselves, and became the first man and the first woman. They had two sons, twins. One of the sons spilled the life-blood of his brother, and was consigned to this leaf, together with his family. But for the love they bore toward their kin, the murdered one’s sons and daughters pled to be allowed to follow them here, and their wish was granted. From the murderer’s children sprang the goblins and the cyclopes, the phylites and the helots.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They are said still to survive in the waste spaces and forgotten corners of this sphere, persecuted and destitute but content with their lot, a sin-offering for their kin.”

  They went on in silence, each lost in his own thoughts, holding hands.

  After a while they reached a more populous neighborhood. The streets there were crowded with phylites, the great ones of Enoch. They were graceful and tall, with limbs swathed in colored silk, skin covered with ornate tattoos or dyed blue or saffron or pink, cheeks pierced by delicate ruby-strung chains.

  Those of the same phyle were almost indistinguishable, while those of different phyles didn’t exist to one another. They walked unhearing, unseeing, eyes shuttered from within. There was no one to notice a tramp leading a boy down the street, weaving in and out of shops, past revolving doors of apartment foyers, markets, dealers of jewelry and machines, theaters, perfumeries, accounting houses, glittering shrines and fanes, all scenes of silent bustling activity.

  One by one, father and son visited the curio shops and junk dealers, trying to sell Zeuxis’ pictures. His most popular offerings were the images he’d captured while soaring over streets and touched up with pigment. No one wanted his paintings or diagrams.

  “Good,” said Phoenix. “I don’t care about those others.”

  “Still,” Zeuxis replied, “I must try. The gods are kind to those who make the most of what they’re given. Who knows but that some poor phylite might see a picture of mine one day and be drawn to it?”

  “But what about when the people who buy them die? They’ll just sit in empty apartments and fall apart.”

  “And what about when I die? Eh? I think of it every day, little boy. Will my pictures be collected and treasured when I’m gone? It’s not likely. But I’ll tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “We’re conduits. When we stop the outflow, no more can flow in, and we stagnate. We die daily to live. It’s the flow that matters, not the possession of what’s not really ours anyway. Remember that.”

  They walked on silence, while the rest of the world whirled around them.

  Their last stop was well back from the street. They had to cross a neglected court and descend a flight of steps to a half-basement. The shop was situated between the phylites’ world of sunny streets, soaring towers, and the high-piled honeycombed foundation, the helots’ world down below.

  It was a musty, suffocating labyrinth. Phoenix wondered who could possibly want so many thousands of porcelain idols, chipped kraters, clocks without pendulums, cracked glass plates iridescent with age, seatless wooden chairs, and faded emulsion portraits of people long dead. Furtive phylites picked through the wares like fallen angels at a discount market.

  The shopkeeper, Granny, glared at the boy from her counter, her pink eyes glittering with malice. She was large, stooped, and flabby, her pallid skin scored by a network of hairline cracks, like a grub that had never gotten around to pupating.

  Her man—too young to be a husband and obviously not a son—sat a little behind on a stool, leaning back on a shelf. He was big and tall and had strong-looking hands. One of his eyes was much larger than the other.

  An overused tone-stick rotated relentlessly in the player, screeching a treacly tune.

  “Take a look at these,” Zeuxis said, opening his portfolio on the counter.

  Granny flipped through the pictures. “No. No. No. Hmmm. No.” She looked up. “The whole thing for a rod.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Zeuxis said, starting to gather them up.

  “That’s all they’re worth,” said Granny.

  Phoenix stamped his foot. “That’s not true!”

  “Quiet, my boy.” As Zeuxis closed the folder, a loose picture slipped out of a pocket and slid down the counter. It was a portrait of Mena, abstracted from nature by the pith of his brain and given form by his hands, a vision of delicate, sensitive beauty.

  The man leaned forward and took it up before Zeuxis could reach it. He wetted his plump lips with his tongue, breathing heavily. “You painted this?”

  “I don’t know how it got in there. Here, I’ll—”

  “Is this—is this from your imagination?”

  “Yes, more or less. Let me—”

  “It’s my sister!” Phoenix shouted.

  “You have a beautiful little sister,” the man said. “I’ll pay ten rods for this.”

  “No, thank you,” said Zeuxis. “It’s not for sale.”

  “Fifteen, then.”

  “This is going to get expensive for me!” Granny chortled.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not for sale.” Zeuxis snatched it back and thrust it in the portfolio. “Come, my boy.”

  * * *

  They got back to the apartment in the afternoon. “Any luck?” asked Helen, looking up from the mechanical reading console.

  “Seven rods,” said Zeuxis. He tossed his hat on the bed and dropped the purse on a table.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to survive.”

  He shrugged and walked to the window. “As we always do, I suppose.”

  “That’s very well for you to say! If you would only let us join the Collective...”

  “The divine machine, the headless god with a million eyes and a million hands. Yes, that would solve everything, wouldn’t it? But there’d be nothing to survive for. Anyw
ay, it’s quite impossible, as you well know.”

  “Did you sell any of your paintings?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  “You’re not going to want to hear this, but if you could just do more—”

  “I would, but I can’t. I have to obey the spirit that sustains me. I have to go back and forth. One thing feeds another.”

  She went back to her reader. “I never have understood it. We mortals just aren’t capable of understanding it.”

  He spread his hands hopelessly. “Are we going to argue again?”

  She didn’t reply.

  For a while he stood there, watching her. “All right,” he said. “I’ll try to do more emulsion images. You’re right. I’m out of them now, so I suppose I’ll go take some aerials.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  He got his camera ready and popped his leather helmet down over his head. A loud thump came from the children’s room. “Ow!” Phoenix cried. He started shouting while Mena calmly tried to explain something. Then she screamed, too.

  Zeuxis went to the door. “What’s going on in here?”

  “Mena just—”

  “But he wouldn’t—”

  All at once they saw that he was wearing his helmet.

  “Are you flying?” asked Mena.

  “Are you flying?” asked Phoenix.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we watch you?” they asked with one voice.

  “I suppose so.”

  They began bounding around the room with glee.

  Zeuxis led them up to the highest storey. There he left them while he went back and forth between darkroom and roof with his camera and the parts to his flying machine, carrying them up to the pavement that surrounded the topmost spire.

  “Come on,” he said from the top of the stairs. Phoenix and Mena ran up and out into the sunshine, capering joyously.

  The tower’s mitered crown was weathered almost to the point of obliteration and overgrown with huge mosses. Its arched openings gaped blackly like clustered mouths overhung with locks of verdure. Zeuxis sat on a carved sailbeast and assembled his flier.

  When he was done he dropped his coat to the pavement, slipped into the harness, and stepped up to the parapet. Two pairs of gauzy wings extended from his shoulders. Spires and terraces rose like islands out of a shadowy sea all around, piles of white and gray stone stained yellow and streaked with orange and black. His face was lit with the golden glow of the rooftops below.