BRRR RETURNED to the interrogation parlor, but Yackle wasn’t there. She was in chapel, listening to liturgical music about flights of angels escorting the lucky dead to their rewards, a good rest among them.
The well of dark in which Yackle lived was something unlike what her companions assumed. Her blindness sometimes seemed to have little to do with vision. It seemed instead a kind of lack of desire, or of the desire that she imagined others felt. She experienced anticipation without the expectation of release—rather like what she assumed the libido of a eunuch might feel like. Or the spiritual ambitions of, say, a bedbug.
So in the chapel, as the maunts prayed for the drowned EC Messiars, Yackle didn’t listen to the devotional longing of the spinsters around her. She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith—the only article of faith, and out of her reach!—though the notion of an Afterlife filled her with revulsion. Imagine the boredom of an Afterlife! All that undifferentiated yowling of praise. Yet the maunts, who had feared rape and murder or at any rate inconvenience by an occupying army, seemed ready to warble their hopes that forgiveness and everlastingness be granted to their predators. They were good women. They were nuts.
Rather than pray, Yackle trained her memory to recall the faded frescoes of angels that had adorned the higher reaches of the chapel walls and the vaulted ceiling. For all she knew, the images had been whitewashed over by now, angels having gone out of fashion somewhat—but beyond the hedge of her blindness Yackle could picture the paintings well. Gamine female angels in trailing robes, arching their ankles and pouting their mouths as if in perpetual erotic bliss. Wings like mattresses—imagine being an angel prettily taken against the soft resistance of her own feathery appendages. The male angels hardly less vulnerable.
How tedious to be an angel: So much holy vigor, and all directed to the Unnamed God who, without form or name or provable substance, could hardly be expected to enjoy the attentions that angels seemed eager to supply.
Probably those images had been whitewashed over. While the mission settlement of this outpost was conveniently distant from the spiritual governance of the EC, the self-appointed Holy Emperor of Oz had wielded his influence upon the varied religious and agnostic traditions of the nation. Probably the bosomy nymphs and rosy-bottomed angel boys above had been banished beyond the cloud of unknowing, a lime wash swirled with a brush. Oh, the happy memories that the soft-bristled brush must cherish!
She was working herself into a state of agitation.
She tried to concentrate for a moment on the music.
But sacred music—another anomaly. If in the Afterlife every good thing coexists eternally, then music cannot exist. Music is the stuttering of adjacent noises in sequence—stress, discord, complaint, resolve: then release—and sequence means timing. If the sound of music is simultaneous, all notes sounding at once, forever, then it is just sound. A mothy blur of noise. A sea of aural fuzz.
“Yield up, yield up,” sang the maunts, in a dirge written, surprisingly, in waltz time. Yackle remembered it and tapped her toes.
“Yield up your souls
To singe the air.
Yield up, and mount the heavenly stair.
Yield up, yield up,
You’re almost there.
You’ve dropped your bones in the sod.
Yield up, yield up, yield up your souls
To the darksome, nameless disappearance:
The heart of the Unnamed God.”
When Sister Doctor approached the podium to offer a eulogy for the dead soldiers, Yackle stood up and rambled away.