Serpents and Stairways

Chapter VII - Part 3

It did—he traded the gum to the boys for a pair of unworn kidskin gloves in a narrow box. On the inside of one he found a label Ms D. Maxwell. Makes sense: the chief secretary never married, which meant that the girl was illegitimate. Naturally, the daddy wouldn't allow her to take his name.

Unfortunately, that was the extent of Michel's discoveries—even if the children had seen anything out-of-ordinary, the veil robbed them of those memories, as it always did when the Inside or its inhabitants were involved.

Michel used to think often of this phenomenon, which is usually called the Veil—trying to deduce its enigmatic principles, the mystery of its memory-devouring mechanism. He knew that scientists had been toiling at its secrets since the dawn of days and till days present. But the results were contradictory: the veil simply refused to be consistent. Tell one man about something on the Inside, and he'll forget all about it. Another will remember it as a tall tale—a fable dreamt-up by a child, poet, or a lunatic.

Michel himself, in childhood, conducted naturalist research: small practical experiments on the veil and fellow children alike. Once, he had caught a boschian insect on the swamps—a locust-sized mosquito with pupilblack like photographic film wings that looked membraned from afar. He kept the insect in a plywood box with three round looking holes in its sides.

Some didn't see the creature at all, others mistook it for a regular bat: Jean—a five-year-old daughter of his father's elderly lawyer visiting them for business—leaned over the box. She squinted one eye, bringing the other closer to the hole, peered inside and suddenly went stiff, for the first time seeing something that went so against everything she'd known before. For a second, the girl's body was paralyzed—she cowered, shrinking. A scream began to form in her little bird-like throat, but by the time it had actually rang out, the veil had already transformed her experience of the insect into something common. Still scary. Still dangerous. Still associated with blood. She yelled, and immediately burst out laughing.

"Oh no, I'm so sorry!" the girl said, putting her hand over her mouth, "Poor bat, I must've awoken it. They sleep during the day, right?"

Right...

One could assume that the effect of the veil was personal in every case, but it was not! If a creature—the very same boschian insect, for instance—was observed by a group of people, then the memory (or rather the lack of memory—researchers called it displacement) of it would match up exactly.

A wonder of nature, destructorly inconvenient for criminalists.

Michel cut off the label, put the box with gloves into his pocket, and headed to Silen—he had a hypothesis to test.

He'd already been here on a few occasions, and every time wondered—what could anybody find in this place? In its essence, Silen was hardly a city at all—no more than ten thousand people resided here, even if automatons, homunculi, and an endless flow of tourists from all around the world, eager to know what it's like to live amongst their own kind, made its population seem denser. This impression was also supported by the tall marionette-built towers—their empty apartments were lit on schedule, making each seem occupied.

The place could not be called completely charmless: a refined central district of some sprawling city, with an assortment of shops and cafes, surrounded with technologically advanced factories and decorous research facilities instead of the usual grime of outskirt catacombs. Then again, mountains—what can be more captivating than skyscrapers on mountains? And its enchanting stained glass, the delicate interweaving of arches, and windows in lace of metalwork: for a bystander, Silen looked like a New Year's tree toy.

But segregation, voluntary or one you're forced into, could never lead to any good, and Michel never doubted that sooner or later people would grow bored of playing with Silen. And then its entertainments would be rolled up and put into a box, the stained glass would burst under the trembling fingers of mountain storms, the production lines would be reduced to bolts, and the forest would consume these lands.