Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,129
Nashir had suffered far less in the War of the Lilies than many of Ghezirah’s islands. In the vast lattice of habitation which surrounded Sabil, there were still huge rents and floating swathes of spinning rubble. Seventeen years is little time to recover from a war, but peace and youth and endless summer are heady brews, and lessons doled out in the Church classrooms by the rap of a mistress’s cane sometimes remain forever wrapped in chalkdust and boredom. Day after brilliant day in that backwater of a backwater, Isabel and Genya wandered deeper into the secrets of Cathedral of the Word’s cloisters and gardens. Day after day, they betrayed the secrets of their respective Churches.
The Cathedral and its environs are vast, and the farms and villages and towns and the several cities of Nashir which surround it are mostly there, in one way or another, to serve its needs. Beyond the ridge of the Isabel’s valley, standing at the lip of stepped gardens which went down and down so far that the light grew blue and hazed, they saw a distant sprawl of stone, glass, spires on the rising horizon.
“Is that the Cathedral?”
Not for the first time that day, Genya laughed. “Oh no! It’s just the local Lending Office…” They walked on and down; waterfalls glittering beside them in the distant blaze of, far greater, minaret than Isabel’s. Another day, rising to the surface from the tunnels of a catacomb from which it had seemed they would never escape, Isabel saw yet another great and fine building. Again, she asked the same question. Again, Genya laughed. Still, within those grounds with their wild white follies and statues a shrines to Dewey, Bliss and Ranganathan, there were many compensations.
As their daily journeys grew further, it became necessary to travel by speedier methods if Isabel was to return to her minaret in time to sing in the night. The catacombs of books were too vast for any Librarian to categorise even the most tightly defined subject without access to rapid transport. So, on the silk seats of caleches which buzzed on cushions of buried energy, they swept along corridors. The bookshelves flashed past them, the titles spinning too fast to read, until the spines themselves became indistinguishable and the individual globelights blurred into a single white stripe overhead. Isabel and Genya laughed and whooped as they urged their metal craft into yet greater feats of speed and manoeuvrability. The dusty wisdoms of lost ages cooled their faces.
They rarely saw anyone, and then only as faint figures tending some distant stack of books, or the trails of aircraft like scratches across the blue roof of the Ghezirahan sky. Genya’s training, the dances and the indexing and—for an exercise, the sub-categorising of the lesser tenses of the verb meaning to blink in sixty eight lost languages—came to her through messages even more remote than the tick of Isabel’s modem. Sometimes, the statues spoke to her. Sometimes, the flowers gave off special scents, or the furred leaves of a bush communicated something in their touch to her. But, mostly, Genya learned from her bees.
One day, Isabel succumbed to Genya’s repeated requests and led her to the uppermost reaches of her minaret. Genya laughed as she peered down from the spiralling stairways as they ascended. The drops, she claimed, leaning far across the worn brass handrails, were dizzying. Isabel leaned over as well; she’d never thought to look at her minaret in this way. Seen from the inside, the place was like a huge vertical tunnel, threaded with sunlight and dust and the slow tickings of vast machinery, diminishing down towards seeming infinity.
“Why is it, anyway, that you Dawn-Singers need to be blinded?” Genya asked as they climbed on, her voice by now somewhat breathless.
“I suppose it’s because we become blind soon enough—a kind of mercy. That, and because we have access to such high places. We Dawn-Singers know how to combine lenses…” Isabel paused on a stairs for a moment as a new thought struck her, and Genya bumped into her back. “So perhaps the other Churches are worried about what, looking down, we might see…”
“I’m surprised anyone ever gets to the top of this place without dying of exhaustion. Your apprentices must have legs like trees!” But they did reach the top, and Isabel felt the pride she always felt at her minaret’s gathered heat and power, whilst Genya, when she had recovered, moved quickly from silvery balcony to balcony, exclaiming about the