punchbowls, that attract pollinating flies by counterfeiting the carrion reek of rotting meat.
The brilliantly-decorated domes and spires that overtower the campus are more numerous all the time; they come in all colors excluding only white, color of mania, and black, color of true love. The use of black and white is restricted in the subterranean dominions of the whrounims.
Although they maintain the Madrasa, the whrounims neither teach nor study, nor even appear there, and speculation about these unknown benefactors, their motives and even their physical nature, is rife.
Evidently, whrounim marriages are solemnized by cross-transplanting scalps. The whrounims are surgical wizards who regard every newborn child as raw material. To retain the anatomy one had at birth is considered barbaric, and every adult whrounim is an anatomical collage of micrografts from dozens of others.
They exchange tissue only from among themselves (Nardac tells deKlend), to avoid rejection.
Do they die? (he asks) Or do they simply keep freshening themselves up with new material, indefinitely?
I’m not too sure ... (she says) But what’s the difference? How can they tell who they are, finally?
But there are many things you are not allowed to do, (she adds cryptically after a moment) The whrounims have all sorts of rules for us.
I don’t see any whrounims here (deKlend says)
I wouldn’t know if there were or not. I’ve never seen one.
Didn’t one summon you to the school personally? One did me.
Nardac glances at him.
Was it a tall, silent fellow? With an off-puttingly self-satisfied expression?
Yes, that’s him.
He’s no whrounim (Nardac says complacently) That was —
She breaks off, turning aside to sneeze violently. Once. Twice. Three times.
Here it comes aga —
Four times. Five times.
Oh!
deKlend gazes around himself. Peal of smile ... the bell ... the knell smile ... the unspooling ribbon of haloes of holes, a ribbon from above admit sunlight into the dark tower ... a complicated asterisk of smoke from the bowl ... the sun appears at the groin of each arch as he passes. The toll of the bell breaks out here , then vanishes, to reappear way over there , rising in a fading crescent of sound, passing secretly through space so its continuation is like an answering bell responding from the distance.
Nardac rubs her nose with her talons.
He’s the precentor. Adrian.
She sniffs, fighting off another sneeze.
He rings the triangle every day at the beginning of session.
From a group of students nearby comes an answering sniff, like a sound of ripping paper. The whisky-like smell of the canal flips once over him and drifts away with the echoes.
He didn’t open his mouth, did he? (she asks, suddenly uncertain)
No. I remarked on that.
That was him. Adrian never opens his mouth if he can help it.
She screws her features up a little in distaste.
Worst case of tongue thrush you’ve ever seen.
The path narrows, and deKlend has to draw in too close to Nardac.
Why do they bother with the school? (deKlend asks) What’s the point, if they don’t attend it themselves?
He wrote a book you know — what’s that? Oh, there are as many opinions about that (Nardac says) as there are people here. Personally, I think it’s a sort of whim.
deKlend takes in the facts without following them too closely.
No one seems to know what whrounims look like. It’s not that they possess no racial characteristics — just the contrary, in fact. The whrounims give the lie to the notion that different racial characteristics arose among human populations as they divided and took up habitation in the world’s different climates and terrains. Among the whrounims, babies are born exhibiting the entire range of human characteristics, of all possible so-called races. They maintain that this is in keeping with the archaic, original nature of mankind; that even within small, isolated communities, the earliest human populations were, they say,
The brilliantly-decorated domes and spires that overtower the campus are more numerous all the time; they come in all colors excluding only white, color of mania, and black, color of true love. The use of black and white is restricted in the subterranean dominions of the whrounims.
Although they maintain the Madrasa, the whrounims neither teach nor study, nor even appear there, and speculation about these unknown benefactors, their motives and even their physical nature, is rife.
Evidently, whrounim marriages are solemnized by cross-transplanting scalps. The whrounims are surgical wizards who regard every newborn child as raw material. To retain the anatomy one had at birth is considered barbaric, and every adult whrounim is an anatomical collage of micrografts from dozens of others.
They exchange tissue only from among themselves (Nardac tells deKlend), to avoid rejection.
Do they die? (he asks) Or do they simply keep freshening themselves up with new material, indefinitely?
I’m not too sure ... (she says) But what’s the difference? How can they tell who they are, finally?
But there are many things you are not allowed to do, (she adds cryptically after a moment) The whrounims have all sorts of rules for us.
I don’t see any whrounims here (deKlend says)
I wouldn’t know if there were or not. I’ve never seen one.
Didn’t one summon you to the school personally? One did me.
Nardac glances at him.
Was it a tall, silent fellow? With an off-puttingly self-satisfied expression?
Yes, that’s him.
He’s no whrounim (Nardac says complacently) That was —
She breaks off, turning aside to sneeze violently. Once. Twice. Three times.
Here it comes aga —
Four times. Five times.
Oh!
deKlend gazes around himself. Peal of smile ... the bell ... the knell smile ... the unspooling ribbon of haloes of holes, a ribbon from above admit sunlight into the dark tower ... a complicated asterisk of smoke from the bowl ... the sun appears at the groin of each arch as he passes. The toll of the bell breaks out here , then vanishes, to reappear way over there , rising in a fading crescent of sound, passing secretly through space so its continuation is like an answering bell responding from the distance.
Nardac rubs her nose with her talons.
He’s the precentor. Adrian.
She sniffs, fighting off another sneeze.
He rings the triangle every day at the beginning of session.
From a group of students nearby comes an answering sniff, like a sound of ripping paper. The whisky-like smell of the canal flips once over him and drifts away with the echoes.
He didn’t open his mouth, did he? (she asks, suddenly uncertain)
No. I remarked on that.
That was him. Adrian never opens his mouth if he can help it.
She screws her features up a little in distaste.
Worst case of tongue thrush you’ve ever seen.
The path narrows, and deKlend has to draw in too close to Nardac.
Why do they bother with the school? (deKlend asks) What’s the point, if they don’t attend it themselves?
He wrote a book you know — what’s that? Oh, there are as many opinions about that (Nardac says) as there are people here. Personally, I think it’s a sort of whim.
deKlend takes in the facts without following them too closely.
No one seems to know what whrounims look like. It’s not that they possess no racial characteristics — just the contrary, in fact. The whrounims give the lie to the notion that different racial characteristics arose among human populations as they divided and took up habitation in the world’s different climates and terrains. Among the whrounims, babies are born exhibiting the entire range of human characteristics, of all possible so-called races. They maintain that this is in keeping with the archaic, original nature of mankind; that even within small, isolated communities, the earliest human populations were, they say,
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