'I was astonished, for it spoke with my own voice. It maintained its superiority over the others by virtue of being the keeper of my memory. The skull, you see, cannot contain the years. Memory fades or is destroyed in periodic bouts of madness and self-disgust. Before this happens the best must be consigned to some archive. Luck or perhaps an instinct brings me to that room every hundred years or so, to be relieved of the burden. In that column of ivory light reside the dry fragments of all my former selves, like a cache of earthenware shards in the foundations of an old house. I learned this with horror (and with what horror have I contemplated it since!): an emotion that was as nothing to the misery with which I confronted the incompleteness of the record itself… For more than ten millenia this machine has lodged beneath the estuary – gaps have now appeared in its own memory! Something in the machine is broken; many times too I have lost the material before it could be transferred; and there have been, it seems, deliberate deletions. A decade is missing here, there a century has slipped quietly away, leaving no clues. At the beginning of the record (if it can be said ever to have had one) only tantalising glimpses remain to imply a period half as long again as its entire span! What remains is like a tapestry holed and flimsy with age (torn too, here and there, in senile rage), through which one must stare forever at the great void. In each new incarnation I must learn afresh how to operate the machinery. That is not hard. But to understand my purpose in being here at all… I can review ten thousand years, but I have no identity beyond that which I can scrape together in any one incarnation. I am, in short, nothing but what you see before you, an old man who has wandered into the City from the past…
'The years I have spent in that cavern burn me! The machines with their strange lights and their voices like dead leaves; the sour underground air; the Past rampant. I watched it all, on windows that formed out of the empty air at a word of command! – Saw myself from many angles – A hand extended, a new robe, speaking to a crowd, watching my first awkward creation as it hawked above the waters. I watched the Afternoon, of which I shall not speak, with its madness. I learned: but I have still not learned who or what I am, and from vague clues must build up a fleeting image, a memory which slips away even as it forms. Worse, my present memory is becoming unequal to the years. I become uncertain of my own name. Soon I shall find it hard to remember why I owe you an explanation of all this, or of myself. The void reaches out.
'Do not pity me, my lady. I have pity enough for myself.
'Months passed. I learned. The machines cared for me. They passed their secrets on to me, willingly. During the long hopeless nights I sought an image of myself in the foxed mirror of the past; but by day I learned to interrogate the natural world. I became an inexpert ear cupped to that silence which has overcome the Earth since the end of the Afternoon. Where once the air sang, now only thin electrical noises came from my instruments, like the cries of dead children. When Tomb the Dwarf disarmed the great brain in the Lesser Rust Desert, I overheard. Lights flickered in my cavern. All over the empire clusters of signals faded abruptly – the Chemosit going out like corpse candles. Later I followed his triumphant progress across the continent, Alstath Fulthor with him. From site to secret site they went, awakening the Reborn Men. For a while the aether was full of voices. Then, as the tragedy became apparent and the rebirth complexes shut themselves down one by one, silence fell again. It lasted until ten or eleven years ago when I picked up the first of the transmissions that have brought me'here.
'I could hear it only when the Moon was in the sky. It came as a hollow whisper, filling the stony sub-estuarine chambers. It was a strange, unreliable, inhuman voice, speaking a dozen made-up languages. Had it not so obviously belonged to a man I might have taken it for the monologue of some stranded alien demiurge, leaking accidentially into the void between Earth and her wan satellite. I cannot tell you how it excited me, that voice! Feverishly, I interrogated my machines. They knew nothing, they could not advise me. I answered it, on all wavelengths: nothing!
'Septemfasciata, it whispered, over and again: Guerre! Guerre! The machines remember every syllable. Dai e quita Ia rnerez… . a hundred years in the cold side of the Mloon… the veiny wing … “the heaven whose circles narrowest run” … I saw the garden that lies behind the World. There the cisterns turn against the men … nomadacris septemfasciata … colonnesfleuries (douloureux paradis!), temps plus n'adore… Oh, the filmy wing! Cold ravages me… And then, dreadfully loud: Sepiemfasciata! The outer planets! Mlethven!
'For a year I suffered this monologue, with its meaningless warnings, its references to a search for “the metaphysical nature of space”, to madness and death between the stars. I tired of its chuckled obscenities and cabalistic circumlocutions, its mad prophecies. I despaired of making any sense of it, and began to believe that the Moon had been infiltrated by some vast corrupt cosmic imbecile. Attemps to make contact were fruitless: there was never a break in the flow in which to admit of my existence. It ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I rushed to the machines – nothing but an empty hiss. For three days the cavern was silent and dark. The machines would not respond to me. It was as if the ending of the monologue had been a cue. I sensed that they were not so much dormant as fascinated; their attention was focused elsewhere. On the fourth day a purple mist sprang up, a pure and sourceless illumination; through this there danced excited rods and lampyrines of light, spinning, whirling, and interpenetrating in a mad quick ballet. I had never seen them so agitated. They spilled from the cavern and out into the surrounding corridors, whispering hysterically their single message.
'Something had detached itself from the Moon and was now making its way toward the Earth.
'I have never heard that demented lonely voice again. But every lunar month since then has seen a fresh launching, a new landing. I have watched them, my lady! They are like puffs of white smoke issuing from the Moon's bony grin; they are like clouds of pollen. They fall to Earth here in the Empire. I do not know exactly where. My instruments are confused, their findings incomplete and contradictory. They report interference, of a kind not encountered in ten thousand years of operation. But listen: yesterday I spoke with Alstath Fulthor the Reborn Man, in his house above the Artists'Quarter. From him I learned that some unknown force is harrassing the Reborn communities in the Great Brown Waste. We have agreed – as he would tell you if he were here – that these events must be linked. And though my instruments cannot agree on its location or its origin, they report that a city is being built somewhere in the north and west of Viriconium.
'My lady, it is not being built by men.'
Cellur's eye is like a bird's, ironical and bright; his profile aquiline. It was different when we thought him human. His expression betrays so little now that we know he is not. Having delivered himself of his revelation he drinks some wine and looks about him to gauge or enjoy its effect.
The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap. At her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, his mouth open and his knife forgotten in his hand; he is actually trying to remember something, but it will not come to him until a day or two later. Fay Glass, of the vanished House of Sleth, what is she trying to remember? It is immaterial. She sits singing to an imperturbable sculpture of steel and white light dug up long ago in the ruins of Glenluce, while Galen Hornwrack stands apart – wounds griping, expression cynical and amused. (It's clear he has forgotten the events of the Bistro Californium, and thinks the old man mad.) Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, bright primary colours flecked for a moment – like flawed but vital ores – with the reflected uncertainties of the room.