Man of the World by Robert Gibson

19: a happy childhood

Luminarium - west

The suburb named Ganeshan, in which Midax Rale grew up, was a social backwater, agreeably and peacefully second-rate.
  His father, Ultrisk Rale, would have done better for himself (in career terms) a couple of miles away in the centre of Dranl, for the East Coast provincial capital was the greatest trading city of the continent of Larmonn.
  Dranl hummed with prosperity, buyers swirling through the picturesque muddle of its commercial quarter, floods of sightseers lapping around its dignified public buildings. By contrast, Ganeshan was quiet. Nevertheless it, and other suburbs, shared in the prosperity of the metropolis – a prosperity based upon its ideal position on the trade-route across the Zard Ocean to Heism.
  Ultrisk Rale was happy in his humdrum middle-class conformity, his white-collar job in Ganeshan. Would-be “head-hunters” who had known him at college were well aware that he was capable of more. He had had offers of employment, not only from organizations in the city centre, but from much further afield: he might have relocated all the way to the continental capital, Thilpar, a thousand miles into the interior of Larmonn, and trebled his salary – if he had wished to. Yet he and his wife were happy to bring up their son in placid obscurity, where life could be lived at a gentle pace. The unpretentious tree-lined streets of Ganeshan, the taken-for-granted local shops, the greenery in overlooked copses and dells, the scattering of weed-choked wastes, the outcrops of moss-covered cliff left behind by the ancient shifting shoreline of the Zard – all these ordinary idylls were storable reserves of golden memory in the fortress of the infant mind.
  One fine late autumn evening Midax, aged six, scampered off to play outside as usual. “Just for fifteen minutes, mind!” his mother said.
  “Awright!” he shouted back. And he ran to meet some neighbours’ children who, likewise, had been let out a quarter of an hour before bedtime. Their mothers knew that the little ones were nearly tired out, and that they would go to bed more willingly if they were completely tired out.
  Midax and his friends played “tig” among the tree-stumps in a vacant patch which they called the “muffs”, overgrown with fluffy dandelion clocks and bindweed. Jumping over the stumps and roots, they blew the dandelion fluff at each other. Then came a moment when Midax happened to glance up at the western sky.
  “Look at that!” he gasped.
  He had felt awed by sunsets before, but this one was extra special. It was like an unearthly, luminous landscape floating in the sky. It was utterly tremendous if you took it seriously, and the little lad knew of no way not to do that.
  “Humm – yeah,” said Fadron Ganol, his staunchest friend.
  Midax did not have the words to say any more. He had seen the lack of interest in Fadron’s glance at the sky.
  The sun was sinking, Midax knew, and the vision would not last long. But all the more did it summon him to those floating shining mountains, with their blaze of toppling grandeur. Without question he surrendered his heart and soul to that realm of splendour – nothing mattered in comparison with that, and it planted a flag of undying allegiance in his young mind. He would never be the same again. Henceforth, he knew something, though what it was he knew, he did not know at all.
  The next day was a week-end. His mother and father took him on a trip to the Kalbeck Forest. There he spent a happy day trying unsuccessfully to climb trees. Once he saw a lizard. All in all, it was a good outing. Exciting, even. And yet – it had nothing to compare with the previous evening’s ecstasy. The sight of the sunset clouds had quietly and profoundly changed Midax for ever. Yet it was a change that could not be remembered for long on the surface of his mind. Mostly, his consciousness had to forget it. You could not live your life if you were dazed all the time.
  Only when they were driving back that evening, along the dusky edge of the forest, with Midax snuggled in the back seat and looking out of the car window at the windy Gonesh Plains between forest and sea, did something of the mysterious splendour return, with a silent voice – but calling from where? From out there somewhere, yet (he sensed, uncomprehending) also from inside him. As if there had squeezed into his insides a message from the soundlessly whispering sky of evening, bigger than the ordinary daytime sky –
It so happened that next day his father handed him a gift: a globe of the world.
  “Shall I teach you some geography, Midax?”
  The boy had never heard the word before, but he said, “Yes, Dad.”
  He was only vaguely attentive, out of politeness, while Ultrisk began to point out the countries on the globe. “This is Larmonn, this is Vevtis, this is the Zard Ocean between them…” Names. Colours. They did not seem to mean much.
  Ultrisk thought, He’s a bit too young for this, after all. Mustn’t push him.
  Father and son were sitting contentedly on a sofa in the lounge. The room as usual was huge to the child’s eye, a room full of comfortable shadows and mysteries that weren’t scary because Mum and Dad were there. Time stretched ahead, days and nights to infinity, the nights marred occasionally by nightmares which, however, had no power to infect the day… Midax’s attention wandered back to the globe, which his father twiddled idly.
  His mother came in and she and Dad began to chat, with good-humoured disappointment at Midax’s lukewarm reaction to the globe. “You can never tell what’ll interest them,” Kmee said. “Look at him now,” she added shortly afterward, for Midax had gone to another chair and had buried his nose in an illustrated children’s encyclopaedia. “That same old page 69, I’ll bet.”
  Ultrisk leaned over to see.
  “You’re right.” It was, indeed, that page again. The page with the clouds. “Can you say them all out, Midax?”
  The child shut the book and recited, “Culumus... I mean cumulus…”
  “Yes, go on! Show your mum what you said last time.”
  “Cirrus, stratus, um… cirro-stratus…”
  “Great! Well done!”
  “And… cumulo-nimbus!”
  “You’re going to be a meteorologist, Midax!”
  “What’s that?” asked the lad shyly, suffused with love and pride at the genuine admiration in his father’s voice.
  “A weather-man.”
  “No,” said Midax thoughtlessly.
  Aside to his wife, Ultrisk chuckled, “He’s not going to be one because he already is one. Instead of getting him a globe, I should have got him a wind-sock.”
  She replied calmly, “He’ll see the point of the globe one day.”
  Midax meanwhile again grasped his beloved page 69 and once more gazed hungrily at the pictured clouds, like an explorer who sees but cannot reach an unknown shoreline.