The Pale Roses lfteot-1 Read online

  He staggered, panting with the effort, to another part of the tower, and then he lowered her with a sigh to the floor. He realized that he had not prepared a proper bedroom for her.

  Fingering his chin, he inspected the dank stones, the cold obsidian which had suited his mood so well for so long and now seemed singularly offensive. Then he smiled.

  "She must have beauty," he said, "and it must be subtle. It must be calm."

  An inspiration, a movement of a power ring, and the walls were covered with thick carpets embroidered with scenes from his own old book of fairy tales. He remembered how he had listened to the book over and over again — his only consolation in the lonely days of his extreme youth.

  Here, Man Shelley, a famous harmonican, ventured into Odeon (a version of Hell) in order to be re-united with his favourite three-headed dog, Omnibus. The picture showed him with his harmonica (or "harp") playing "Blues for a Nightingale" — a famous lost piece. There, Casablanca Bogard, with his single eye in the middle of his forehead, wielded his magic spade, Sam, in his epic fight with that ferocious bird, the Malted Falcon, to save his love, the Acrilan Queen, from the power of Big Sleepy (a dwarf who had turned himself into a giant) and Mutinous Caine, who had been cast out of Hollywood (or paradise) for the killing of his sister, the Blue Angel.

  Such scenes were surely the very stuff to stir the romantic, delicate imagination of this lovely child, just as his had been stirred when — he felt the frisson — he had been her age. He glowed. His substance was suffused with delicious compassion for them both as he recalled, also, the torments of his own adolescence.

  That she should be suffering as he had suffered filled him with the pleasure all must feel when a fellow spirit is recognized, and at the same time he was touched by her plight, determined that she should not know the anguish of his earliest years. Once, long ago, Werther had courted Jherek Carnelian, admiring him for his fortitude, knowing that locked in Jherek's head were the memories of bewilderment, misery and despair which would echo his own. But Jherek, pampered progeny of that most artificial of all creatures, the Iron Orchid, had been unable to recount any suitable experiences at all, had, whilst cheerfully eager to please Werther, recalled nothing but pleasurable times, had reluctantly admitted, at last, to the possession of the happiest of childhoods. That was when Werther had concluded that Jherek Carnelian had no soul worth speaking of, and he had never altered his opinion (now he secretly doubted Jherek's origins and sometimes believed that Jherek merely pretended to have been a child — merely one more of his boring and superficial affectations).

  Next, a bed — a soft, downy bed, spread with sheets of silver silk, with posts of ivory and hangings of precious Perspex, antique and yellowed, and on the floor the finely tanned skins of albino hamsters and marmalade cats.

  Werther added gorgeous lavs of intricately patterned red and blue ceramic, their bowls filled with living flowers: with whispering toadflax, dragonsnaps, goldilocks and shanghai lilies, with blooming scarlet margravines (his adopted daughter's name-flower, as he knew to his pride), with soda-purple poppies and tea-green roses, with iodine and cerise and crimson hanging johnny, with golden cynthia and sky-blue truelips, calomine and creeping larrikin, until the room was saturated with their intoxicating scents.

  Placing a few bunches of hitler's balls in the corners near the ceiling, a toy fish-tank (capable of firing real fish), which he remembered owning as a boy, under the window, a trunk (it could be opened by pressing the navel) filled with clothes near the bed, a full set of bricks and two bats against the wall close to the doorway, he was able, at last, to view the room with some satisfaction.

  Obviously, he told himself, she would make certain changes according to her own tastes. That was why he had shown such restraint. He imagined her naive delight when she wakened in the morning. And he must be sure to produce days and nights of regular duration, because at her age routine was the main thing a child needed. There was nothing like the certainty of a consistently glorious sunrise! This reminded him to make an alteration to a power ring on his left hand, to spread upon the black cushion of the sky crescent moons and stars and starlets in profusion. Bending carefully, he picked up the vibrant youth of her body and lowered her to the bed, drawing the silver sheets up to her vestal chin. Chastely he touched lips to her forehead and crept from the room, fashioning a leafy door behind him, hesitating for a moment, unable to define the mood in which he found himself. A rare smile illumined features set so long in lines of gloom. Returning to his own quarters, he murmured:

  "I believe it is Contentment!"

  A month swooned by. Werther lavished every moment of his time upon his new charge. He thought of nothing but her youthful satisfactions. He encouraged her in joy, in idealism, in a love of Nature. Gone were his blizzards, his rocky spires, his bleak wastes and his moody forests, to be replaced with gentle landscapes of green hills and merry, tinkling rivers, sunny glades in copses of poplars, rhododendrons, redwoods, laburnum, banyans and good old amiable oaks. When they went on a picnic, large-eyed cows and playful gorillas would come and nibble scraps of food from Catherine Gratitude's palm. And when it was day, the sun always shone and the sky was always blue, and if there were clouds, they were high, hesitant puffs of whiteness and soon gone.

  He found her books so that she might read. There was Turgiditi and Uto, Pett Ridge and Zakka, Pyat Sink — all the ancients. Sometimes he asked her to read to him, for the luxury of dispensing with his usual translators. She had been fascinated by a picture of a typewriter she had seen in a record, so he fashioned an air car in the likeness of one, and they travelled the world in it, looking at scenes created by Werther's peers.

  "Oh, Werther," she said one day, "you are so good to me. Now that I realize the misery which might have been mine (as well as the life I was missing underground), I love you more and more."

  "And I love you more and more," he replied, his head a-swim. And for a moment he felt a pang of guilt at having forgotten Mistress Christia so easily. He had not seen her since Catherine had come to him, and he guessed that she was sulking somewhere. He prayed that she would not decide to take vengeance on him.

  They went to see Jherek Carnelian's famous "London, 1896", and Werther manfully hid his displeasure at her admiration for his rival's buildings of white marble, gold and sparkling quartz. He showed her his own abandoned tomb, which he privately considered in better taste, but it was plain that it did not give her the same satisfaction.

  They saw the Duke of Queens' latest, "Ladies and Swans", but not for long, for Werther considered it unsuitable. Later they paid a visit to Lord Jagged of Canaria's somewhat abstract "War and Peace in Two Dimensions", and Werther thought it too stark to please the girl, judging the experiment "successful". But Catherine laughed with glee as she touched the living figures, and found that somehow it was true. Lord Jagged had given them length and breadth but not a scrap of width — when they turned aside, they disappeared.

  It was on one of these expeditions, to Bishop Castle's "A Million Angry Wrens" (an attempt in the recently revised art of Aesthetic Loudness), that they encountered Lord Mongrove, a particular confidant of Werther's until they had quarrelled over the method of suicide adopted by the natives of Uranus during the period of the Great Sodium Breather. By now, if Werther had not found a new obsession, they would have patched up their differences, and Werther felt a pang of guilt for having forgotten the one person on this planet with whom he had, after all, shared something in common.

  In his familiar dark green robes, with his leonine head hunched between his massive shoulders, the giant, apparently disdaining an air carriage, was riding home upon the back of a monstrous snail.

  The first thing they saw, from above, was its shining trail over the azure rocks of some abandoned, half-created scene of Argonheart Po's (who believed that nothing was worth making unless it tasted delicious and could be eaten and digested). It was Catherine who saw the snail itself first and exclaimed at the size of the
man who occupied the swaying howdah on its back.

  "He must be ten feet tall, Werther!"

  And Werther, knowing whom she meant, made their typewriter descend, crying:

  "Mongrove! My old friend!"

  Mongrove, however, was sulking. He had chosen not to forget whatever insult it had been which Werther had levelled at him when they had last met. "What? Is it Werther? Bringing freshly sharpened dirks for the flesh between my shoulder blades? It is that Cold Betrayer himself, whom I befriended when a bare boy, pretending carelessness, feigning insouciance, as if he cannot remember, with relish, the exact degree of bitterness of the poisoned wine he fed me when we parted. Faster, steed! Bear me away from Treachery! Let me fly from further Insult! No more shall I suffer at the hands of Calumny!" And, with his long, jewelled stick he beat upon the shell of his molluscoid mount. The beast's horns waved agitatedly for a moment, but it did not really seem capable of any greater speed. In good-humoured puzzlement, it turned its slimy head towards its master.

  "Forgive me, Mongrove! I take back all I said," announced Werther, unable to recall a single sour syllable of the exchange. "Tell me why you are abroad. It is rare for you to leave your doomy dome."

  "I am making my way to the Ball," said Lord Mongrove, "which is shortly to be held by My Lady Charlotina. Doubtless I have been invited to act as a butt for their malice and their gossip, but I go in good faith."

  "A Ball? I know nothing of it."

  Mongrove's countenance brightened a trifle. "You have not been invited? Ah!"

  "I wonder … But, no — My Lady Charlotina shows unsuspected sensitivity. She knows that I now have responsibilities — to my little Ward here. To Catherine — to my Kate."

  "The child?"

  "Yes, to my child. I am privileged to be her protector. Fate favours me as her new father. This is she. Is she not lovely? Is she not innocent?"

  Lord Mongrove raised his great head and looked at the slender girl beside Werther. He shook his huge head as if in pity for her.

  "Be careful, my dear," he said. "To be befriended by de Goethe is to be embraced by a viper!"

  She did not understand Mongrove; questioningly she looked up at Werther. "What does he mean?"

  Werther was shocked. He clapped his hands to her pretty ears.

  "Listen no more! I regret the overture. The movement, Lord Mongrove, shall remain unresolved. Farewell, spurner of good-intent. I had never guessed before the level of your cynicism. Such an accusation! Goodbye, for ever, most malevolent of mortals, despiser of altruism, hater of love! You shall know me no longer!"

  "You have known yourself not at all," snapped Mongrove spitefully, but it was unlikely that Werther, already speeding skyward, heard the remark.

  And thus it was with particular and unusual graciousness that Werther greeted My Lady Charlotina when, a little later, they came upon her.

  She was wearing the russet ears and eyes of a fox, riding her yellow rocking horse through the patch of orange sky left over from her own turbulent "Death of Neptune". She waved to them. "Cock-a-doodle-do!"

  "My dear Lady Charlotina. What a pleasure it is to see you. Your beauty continues to rival Nature's mightiest miracles."

  It is with such unwonted effusion that we will greet a person, who has not hitherto aroused our feelings, when we are in a position to compare him against another, closer, acquaintance who has momentarily earned our contempt or anger.

  She seemed taken aback, but received the compliment equably enough.

  "Dear Werther! And is this that rarity, the girl-child I have heard so much about and whom, in your goodness, you have taken under your wing? I could not believe it! A child! And how lucky she is to find a father in yourself — of all our number the one best suited to look after her."

  It might almost be said that Werther preened himself beneath the golden shower of her benediction, and if he detected no irony in her tone, perhaps it was because he still smarted from Mongrove's dash of vitriol.

  "I have been chosen, it seems," he said modestly, "to lead this waif through the traps and illusions of our weary world. The burden I shoulder is not light…"

  "Valiant Werther!"

  "…but it is shouldered willingly. I am devoting my life to her upbringing, to her peace of mind." He placed a bloodless hand upon her auburn locks, and, winsomely, she took his other one.

  "You are tranquil, my dear?" asked My Lady Charlotina kindly, arranging her blue skirts over the saddle of her rocking horse. "You have no doubts?"

  "At first I had," admitted the sweet child, "but gradually I learned to trust my new father. Now I would trust him in anything!"

  "Ah," sighed My Lady Charlotina, "trust!"

  "Trust," said Werther. "It grows in me, too. You encourage me, charming Charlotina, for a short time ago I believed myself doubted by all."

  "Is it possible? When you are evidently so reconciled — so — happy!"

  "And I am happy, also, now that I have Werther," carolled the commendable Catherine.

  "Exquisite!" breathed My Lady Charlotina. "And you will, of course, both come to my Ball."

  "I am not sure…" began Werther, "perhaps Catherine is too young…"

  But she raised her tawny hands. "It is your duty to come. To show us all that simple hearts are the happiest."

  "Possibly…"

  "You must. The world must have examples, Werther, if it is to follow your Way."

  Werther lowered his eyes shyly. "I am honoured," he said. "We accept."

  "Splendid! Then come soon. Come now, if you like. A few arrangements, and the Ball begins."

  "Thank you," said Werther, "but I think it best if we return to my castle for a little while." He caressed his ward's fine, long tresses. "For it will be Catherine's first Ball, and she must choose her gown."

  And he beamed down upon his radiant protegee as she clapped her hands in joy.

  My Lady Charlotina's Ball must have been at least a mile in circumference, set against the soft tones of a summer twilight, red-gold and transparent so that, as one approached, the guests who had already arrived could be seen standing upon the inner wall, clad in creations extravagant even at the End of Time.

  The Ball itself was inclined to roll a little, but those inside it were undisturbed; their footing was firm, thanks to My Lady Charlotina's artistry. The Ball was entered by means of a number of sphincterish openings, placed more or less at random in its outer wall. At the very centre of the Ball, on a floating platform, sat an orchestra comprised of the choicest musicians, out of a myriad of ages and planets, from My Lady's great menagerie (she specialized, currently, in artists).

  When Werther de Goethe, a green-gowned Catherine Gratitude upon his blue velvet arm, arrived, the orchestra was playing some primitive figure of My Lady Charlotina's own composition. It was called, she claimed as she welcomed them, "On the Theme of Childhood", but doubtless she thought to please them, for Werther believed he had heard it before under a different title.

  Many of the guests had already arrived and were standing in small groups chatting to each other. Werther greeted an old friend, Li Pao, of the 27th century, and such a kill-joy that he had never been wanted for a menagerie. While he was forever criticizing their behaviour, he never missed a party. Next to him stood the Iron Orchid, mother of Jherek Carnelian, who was not present. In contrast to Li Pao's faded blue overalls, she wore rags of red, yellow and mauve, thousands of sparkling bracelets, anklets and necklaces, a head-dress of woven peacock's wings, slippers which were moles and whose beady eyes looked up from the floor.

  "What do you mean — waste?" she was saying to Li Pao. "What else could we do with the energy of the universe? If our sun burns out, we create another. Doesn't that make us conservatives? Or is it preservatives?"

  "Good evening, Werther," said Li Pao in some relief. He bowed politely to the girl. "Good evening, miss."

  "Miss?" said the Iron Orchid. "What?"

  "Gratitude."

  "For whom?"

 
"This is Catherine Gratitude, my Ward," said Werther, and the Iron Orchid let forth a peal of luscious laughter.

  "The girl-bride, eh?"

  "Not at all," said Werther. "How is Jherek?"

  "Lost, I fear, in Time. We have seen nothing of him recently. He still pursues his paramour. Some say you copy him, Werther."

  He knew her bantering tone of old and took the remark in good part. "His is a mere affectation," he said. "Mine is Reality."

  "You were always one to make that distinction, Werther," she said. "And I will never understand the difference!"

  "I find your concern for Miss Gratitude's upbringing most worthy," said Li Pao somewhat unctuously. "If there is any way I can help. My knowledge of twenties' politics, for instance, is considered unmatched — particularly, of course, where the 26th and 27th centuries are concerned…"

  "You are kind," said Werther, unsure how to take an offer which seemed to him overeager and not entirely selfless.

  Gaf the Horse in Tears, whose clothes were real flame, flickered towards them, the light from his burning, unstable face almost blinding Werther. Catherine Gratitude shrank from him as he reached out a hand to touch her, but her expression changed as she realized that he was not at all hot — rather, there was something almost chilly about the sensation on her shoulder. Werther did his best to smile. "Good evening, Gaf."

  "She is a dream!" said Gaf. "I know it, because only I have such a wonderful imagination. Did I create her, Werther?"

  "You jest."

  "Ho, ho! Serious old Werther." Gaf kissed him, bowed to the child, and moved away, his body erupting in all directions as he laughed the more. "Literal, literal Werther!"

  "He is a boor," Werther told his charge. "Ignore him."

  "I thought him sweet," she said.