"Unassailable Ant-Score"


    On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees

   Is it as plainly in our living shown,
   By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

     --Adelaide Crapsey



The vultcherub dove.

Its four wings folded, it plummetted toward its goal: the head of the caravan. From down there, all they could see at first was a tiny black dot. But they could hear it, whistling like a kettle, in the still desert air. Lord B---- scowled.

He had not come all this way to be smashed like a beetle with a hobnail boot. Accordingly he gestured to the pipers, who abruptly broke their threnody. The caravan halted, its farther segments coiling in bemusement, and the dirt wagons dug in their olivine wheels. Each of the bidromedaries blew into the nostrils of its follower with its nether head. A piper offered a note of query, far in the back. And the black dot had become noticeably larger.

"Lord B----," said Lord K----, "We are stopping before the time." This hexvark, like Lord B---- a master of discreet irony, had long sought to undermine his expeditional suzerainty. But Lord B---- replied, "Put the dirt wagons together." So they did.

The vultcherub, when it hit, exploded a whole wagon-load of dirt, burying itself even so in the underlying sand. They were able to save most of the dirt, and served a good sirloin of vultcherub carcass for the whole upper echelon hexvark crew.

They had advanced twelve weeks from the last ragged edge of the Annular Forest. Ahead lay only the East Pole, a stark eye-smarting land where nothing scoreable to hexvarkdom had ever been conceived. Until now.

Lord B---- was raised a good Cylindrist, as with most of his cohort; his crucial wreck of faith occurred only later, when his developing mind encountered, among other obscurities, the Vinarna Relation--and its attendant Map. "Let Stillness, not Desire, provide the Way." From the very first strophe he was hooked.

Bivouaced, they made tea, burning bricks of pounded bidromedary dung. The sun, which earth men have named Gliese 581, flowered profusely and crimson at such an unnatural altitude it made them uneasy. Although none of them really believed they were going to march off the edge of any such jejune Worldcylinder, to tumble into infinite Glare-Abyss, they still were not able to shake that psychic image, whose very sonoglyph spoke of vague but inescapable harm. Lord B---- was scraping out the bottom of his bowl with prehensile tongue fully extended. His one eye, half lidded in this perpetual brillig, was surrounded by a ring of sonar-spiracles. His snout had started to peel from sunburn. If one six-legged aardvark could be said to be more "portly" than another, Lord B----definitely veered in that direction.

"Life just teems with quiet fun," observed Lord K----. Not long afterward, they dug in for their nap, the emptied dirt wagons casting shade across their weary tunnel mouths.

Lord B---- dreamed. In his dream he was rising. Below him the caravan shrank to a dark line amidst vast pallid sands. Whether he was a cruising vultcherub, a wraith disembodied, or his own teardrop shape relieved of its waking mass, Lord B---- could not tell (or even ask!). --He was rising toward the sun. Now he could discern a definite curve to the horizon. This spin-locked world, like a sunflower always keeping its same face to the light, O Metaluna of Omni Hexvarkdom, he saw as a banded globular perfect wholeness. Which no hexvark had ever really seen, and few enough even hypothesized. Then it melted into a cylinder. And the cylinder melted back into a sphere, with the soundof a vultcherub falling through the crystalline air, mace-skull foremost.

Another bivouac. Their unvarying ant-nosh done, the two leaders had lit lettuce-cigars. "Ant-score nilpertains counting ants," quoted Lord K----. "Indeed," answered B----. "The very existence of countable ants actually interferes."

For, somewhere between wealth and holiness, the hexvarks' value of ant-score obsessed all truly righteous hexvarks, and urged most of their inessential designs. This expedition, funded in part by the Queen, and part by subscription, was no exception.

They thought to achieve an unassailable amount of ant-score by the feat of being the first to reach the East Pole.

How many weary weeks followed further, I will not say, but they journeyed until their tea could no longer be prepared, for the water boiled away by itself as soon as it was poured. On the bright horizon, something had begun to lift above the dazzling sands.

Speculation ran rife.

It proved to be a collection of rectangular steel and glass lodgings, abandoned and half buried, apparently the home of beings like themselves, judging from the shattered statues they were able to unearth. Not a trace of any scroll remained.

Now the sun stood directly overhead, so this defunct city must have been built at the exact subsolar point of Metaluna--on purpose. Did its ancient builders wish to emphasize their immense hubristic ant-score, such that even this inhospitable spot was not beyond their tongue-grasp? Or did they even care?

Lord K---- had succumbed, and there was none of his own echelon for Lord B---- anymore to converse with. When he had sufficiently explored the ruins, he gave order for the snake-warding pipers to resume.

Rather than solving the enigma of that nameless heap, burning in devout desolation exactly where the Vinarna foretold, he was bringing back to the Queen a second and more terrifying puzzle. In his stoutest box, concealed within Lord K----'s no-longer-unloading sleep-dirt, lay the one true treasure of this quest. It was a familiar object, though scorched and desiccated by its languish in the Leng Desert, after the city had fallen or been despoiled by plague or spell. It was a lampion, like any hexvark would carry into shade-side doings: a simple glass vase containing the skeleton of a glowfish.

Lord B----surmised that, once upon a time, Metaluna had not always turned toward its luminary at the present rate, but more quickly, so as to produce a weird alternation of light and dark.

In the umbrageous portion of those hexvarks' lives, they would have greatly appreciated the use of this toy, he figured.

Cylindrism was finished.

5-10-07 (1st draft)