ERNEST DOWSON

A Last Word

1899

"You have begun another fashion I fear, my dear." The Iron Orchid slid the sable sheets down her smooth skin and pushed them from the bed with her slender feet.

"I am so proud of you. What mother would not be? You are a talented and tasty son!"

Jherek sighed from where he lay on the far side of the bed, his face all but hidden in the huge downy pile of pillows. He was pale. He was pensive.

"Thank you, brightest of blossoms, most revered of metals."

His voice was small.

"But you still pine," she said sympathetically, "for your Mrs. Underwood."

"Indeed."

"Few could sustain such a passion so well. The world still awaits, eagerly, expectantly, the outcome. Will you go to her? Will she come to you?"

"She said that she would come to me," Jherek Carnelian murmured. "Or so I understood. You know how difficult it is sometimes to make sense of a time traveller's conversation, and I must say that it was particularly confusing in 1896." He smiled. "It was wonderful, however. I wish you could have seen it, Iron Orchid. The Coffee Stalls, the Gin Palaces, the Prisons and all the other monuments. And so many people! One might doubt a sufficiency of air to give life to them!"

"Yes, dear." Her response was not as lively as it might have been, for she had heard all this more than once. "But your recreation is there, for all of us to enjoy. And others now follow where you led."

Realizing that he was in danger of boring her, he sat up in his pillows, stretching his fingers out before him and contemplating the shimmering power rings which adorned them. Pursing his perfect lips he made an adjustment to the ring on the index finger of his right hand. A window appeared on the far side of the room and through the window sunshine came leaping, warm and bright.

"What a beautiful morning!" exclaimed the Iron Orchid, complimenting him. "How do you plan to spend it?"

He shrugged. "I had not considered the problem. Have you a suggestion?"

"Well, Jherek, since you are the one who has set the fashion for nostalgia, I thought you might like to come with me to one of the old rotted cities."

"You are most certainly in a nostalgic mood, Queen of imaginative mothers." He kissed her softly upon the lids of her ebony eyes. "We are last there together when I was a child — you are thinking of Shanalorm, of course?"

"Shanalorm, or whatever it's called. You were conceived there, too, as I remember." She yawned. "The rotted cities are the only permanency in this world of ours."

"Some would say they were the world." Jherek smiled. "But they do not have the charm of the Dawn Age metropoli, ancient as they are."

"I find them romantic," she said reminiscently. She threw jet arms around him, kissing him upon the lips with her mouth of midnight blue, her dress (living purple poppies) undulating and sighing. "What shall you wear, to go adventuring? Are you still in a mood for those arrowed suits?"

"I think not." (Privately, he was disappointed that she still favoured blacks and dark blues, for it indicated that she had not completely forgotten her relationship with doom-embracing Werther de Goethe.) He considered the problem for a moment and then, with a twist of a power ring, produced flowing robes of white spider-fur. His intention was to create a contrast, and it pleased her. "Perfect," she purred. "Come, let's board your carriage and be off."

They left his ranch (which was purposely preserved much as it had been when he had tried to prepare a home for his lost love, Mrs. Amelia Underwood, before she had been projected back to her own 19th century) and crossed the well-tended lawns, where his deer and his buffalo no longer roamed, through the rockeries, rose bowers and Japanese gardens which reminded him so poignantly of Mrs. Underwood, to his landau of milky jade. The landau was upholstered inside with the skins of apricot-coloured vynyls (beasts now long extinct) and trimmed with green gold.

The Iron Orchid settled herself in the carriage and Jherek seated himself opposite, tapping a rail as a signal for the carriage to ascend. Someone (not himself) had produced a lovely, round yellow sun and gorgeous blue clouds, while below them rolled gentle grassy hills, woods of pine and clover-trees, rivers of amber and silver, rich and restful to the eye. There was miles and miles of it. They headed in a roughly southerly direction, towards Shanalorm.

They crossed a viscous white and foamy sea from which pink creatures, not unlike gigantic earthworms, poked either their heads or their tails (or both), and they speculated on its creator.

"Unfortunately, it is probably Werther," said the Iron Orchid. "How he strives against an ordinary aesthetic! Is this another example of his Nature, do you think? It certainly seems primitive."

They were glad to have the white sea behind them. Now they floated over high salt crags which glittered in the light of a reddish orb which was probably the real sun. There was a silence in this landscape which thrilled them both and they did not speak until it was passed.

"Nearly there," said the Iron Orchid, peering over the side of the landau (actually she had absolutely no clear idea where they were and had no need to know, for Jherek had given the carriage clear instructions). Jherek smiled, delighting in his mother's enthusiasms. She always enjoyed their outings together.

Caught by a gust of air, his spider-fur draperies lifted around him, all but obscuring his view. He patted them down so that their whiteness spread across the seat and at that moment, for a reason he could not define, he thought of Mrs. Underwood and his brow clouded. It had been much longer than he had expected. He was sure that she would have returned by now if she could. He knew that soon he must visit the ill-tempered old scientist, Brannart Morphail, and beg him for the use of another time machine. Morphail had claimed that Mrs. Underwood, subject as anyone else to the Morphail Effect, would soon be ejected from 1896 and might wind up in any period of time covered by the past million years, but Jherek was sure that she would return to this Age. After all, they were in love. She had admitted, at long last, that she loved him. Jherek wondered if Brannart, determined to prove his theory flawless, were actually blocking Mrs. Underwood's attempts to get to him. He knew that the suspicion was unfair, but it was already obvious that both My Lady Charlotina and Lord Jagged of Canaria were playing complicated games involving his and Mrs. Underwood's fates. He had taken this in good part so far, but he was beginning to wonder if the joke were not beginning to pall.