Kathein hushed them while she fiddled with quick fingers. She waited and told them not to move, then pulled out a glass plate bound in black paper. “Parts of your crystal contain visions as well as words,” she said to Oelita. “Koienta!” she called to a servant, “develop this silvergraph. I’ll soon have to be leaving. I must dress for the party.”
Koienta bowed to Oelita. “Our thanks for preserving the crystal,” he said as he passed her, squeezing by the shelves of bottled red eyes, his attention devoted to the black-wrapped glass. His was the ritual of one who has to believe every scrap of dogma he has been taught. It made her uncomfortable.
While Kathein gestured and touched, preparing a new glass plate, she politely explained her obsecrations-to-God. Oelita listened without trying to understand something that could have no logic. Joesai grinned, thinking she was being impressed. It was the ignorant men who were always so sure they were right!
Much later, when Koienta brought the printed silvergraph to Kathein, the physicist stared for long heartbeats, flickers of horror crossing her face from the reflected light of the paper. Silently she handed the silvergraph to Oelita, while Teenae craned her neck to see and Joesai watched faces.
“What is it?” asked Teenae.
“God has been speaking to us this day!” exclaimed Kathein.
Oelita saw a still image of two rotting men hung up on thorned wire over mud. It was labeled at the bottom with readable numbers and almost readable words.
Two of 150,000 who died at Vimy Ridge, 1916.
Where could such a picture have come from? Oelita scanned her mind, her memories, her logic — and found nothing. It was like putting her foot on a familiar step in the darkness, ready for the pressure of the stone, and finding nothing. The fall was dizzying.
“There are a quarter of a billion words in your crystal and thousands of pictures. All like this,” said Kathein, leading them away. They waited while she dressed. Oelita did not speak. Joesai, smug, did not need to know what she thought. Teenae remained terrified by that one single peek through the Eyes of God. The silence broke only when the rustle of Kathein’s gown descended the stairs. She appeared in brilliant silken blues, bare breasted, the platinum filigree of mask inlaid upon the noble cicatrice carved into her face.
Together they went to the Palace. The ballroom was filled by excited Kaiel scarfaces who loved parties with themes. The Forge of War, what little was known of it, provided an awesome theme.
Musicians were dressed in garb copied from the silvergraphs, resplendent in painted papier-mâché helmets, gaudy uniforms and breastplates of brass. Baron von Richthofen played oboe in red uniform, black cross full upon his chest, red goggles obscuring half his serrated face. Achilles, in great plumes of desert fire, tuned the strings of his ellipsoidal gourd. Hitler and Stalin, in black and yellow pinstriped pantaloons, thumped the organ drums.
Through the main entrance, blazing green and red Vatican Guards protected the arrival of the whisky kegs with proud halberds. Then across the ballroom strode the armored and scowling samurai, Takeda Shingen, alias Aesoe, a dagger in his belt so comically long that its tip almost dragged upon the floor, carrying a yellow and pale blue banner atop a pole that read in vertical script: “fast as wind; quiet as forest; fierce as fire; firm as mountain.”
In agitation, Oelita swept over to a table where a neat pile of silvergraphs had accumulated, each pinned to a tentative translation. Painfully she began to read a page, referring to the translation when it became incomprehensible. Once she had to ask one of the hovering linguists to help her guess at meanings and odd grammatical structures.
Thinking there was just one (killer clansman), he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same (ghoulish) state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. They must have had their faces upturned when (the sunfire lit); perhaps they were (suppressor of engined-sailplane) personnel.*
* From Hiroshima by John Hersey.
She picked up another of the sheets.
They were ordered to lay down their (killing tools) and then were (butchered without intent to eat). Only the Caliph’s life was preserved as a gift for (killer priest) Hulagu who made his entrance to the city and palace on (fifteenth sleep cycle of second moon cycle of Riethe year). After the Caliph had revealed (by force of pain) to (the war game-winner) the hiding place of all his treasure, he too was put to death. Meanwhile (butchering without intent to eat) continued everywhere in the city. Those who surrendered quickly and those who fought on were alike (murdered). Women and children perished with their men. One Mongol found, in a side street, forty newborn babies whose mothers were dead. As an act of mercy he (killed) them, knowing that they would not survive without mothers to suckle them. In forty days some eighty thousand citizens of Baghdad were slain.
What was this? this geyser of paper from some demon world come to spray and scald them? Oelita didn’t believe a word of it — but when she did, for just a moment, she was horror-struck by such unimaginable immorality.
How could anyone eat eighty thousand people in forty days? The bodies would rot; the leather would go brittle in the sun, untanned. To murder a man was horrible enough, but to murder a man and his relatives, too, so that there could be no Funeral Feast, that was unthinkable!
Her heart was pounding as she watched ten Chanters file into the room in mudbrown cloaks wearing their voice amplifier masks in strange goggled shapes with gross noses.
“Chlorine masks from the Great War,” said the linguist who had been helping her.
The Chants began, telling in thunderous sinusoidal rhythm of the God of the Sky delivering His Getans from some mystery too frightening to look upon. The wooden instruments faded in; the strings began to tell of warrior and fire while Hitler and Stalin beat upon their organ drums and the horns wailed. The Chants muted to moaning, one voice alone holding a delicate melody. Then out of nowhere three naked Liethe sprang through, their child-smooth bodies boneless in their leaps.
They attacked each other, circling, lunging, stepping aside, flying over one another like bodies being juggled. Six daggers appeared magically in their hands while they stalked enemies, making alliance and betrayal in deft moves. The blows began to sound as screams. Each touch pulled forth a streamer of red silk like spurting blood that attached to wrist or shoulder or hip or ankle, proliferating. They fought among streamers, and now the streamers lurched and shuddered as the weaving motions boiled the blood that enveloped the dancing bodies.
The crimson silk lost strength, fluttering, swirling, diving, dividing into three stained bodies now topped by silver skull-masks. A jerk. A lurch. A stagger. A final battle to wound the already dying, to use one’s fading strength for destruction, then death throes among the mourning musicians. Only a glance of flesh did the audience get of Liethe slipping away, shucking their costumes in a convulsion that slowed and flowed down the steps into an empty red heap upon the floor.
Aesoe was stamping his feet. The Kaiel began to shake the building with their collective stamping until the naked girls, still in their skulls of silver metal, ran out from where they had disappeared, bowed, and ran away again.
Oelita turned from the spectacle. The pressure was building up within her to panic level. Her attempt to form an explanation for these impossible words was circling in failure. A hoax? Were the Kaiel building up a lie about Death to justify a coming bloody conquest of Geta?