Chimera Read Online Free PDF

Sherry’s opinion that while women and men might in some instances come together as human beings, wives and husbands could never. The Genie argued, for his part, that no matter how total, exclusive, and permanent the commitment between two lovers might turn out to be, it lacked the dimensions of spiritual seriousness and public responsibility which only marriage, with its ancient vows and symbols, rites and risks, provided.
    “ ‘It can’t last,’ Sherry said crossly. The Genie put on her finger a gift from his fiancée to her namesake’s mother—a gold ring patterned with rams’-horns and conches, replicas of which she and the Genie meant to exchange on their wedding day—and replied, ‘Neither did Athens. Neither did Rome. Neither did all of Jamshid’s glories. But we must live as if it can and will.’
    “ ‘Hmp,’ said Sherry, who over the years had picked up a number of your brother’s ways, as he had hers. But she gave them her blessing—to which I added mine without reservations or as if’s —and turned the ring much in the lamplight when he was gone, trying its look on different hands and fingers and musing as if upon its design.
    “Thus we came to the thousandth night, the thousandth morning and afternoon, the thousandth dipping of Sherry’s quill and invocation of the magic key. And for the thousand and first time, still smiling, our Genie appeared to us, his own ring on his finger as it had been for some forty evenings now—an altogether brighter-looking spirit than had materialized in the book-stacks so long past. We three embraced as always; he asked after the children’s health and the King’s, and my sister, as always, after his progress toward that treasury from which he claimed her stories were drawn. Less reticent on this subject than he had been since our first meeting, he declared with pleasure that thanks to the inspiration of Scheherazade and to the thousand comforts of his loving wife, he believed he had found his way out of that slough of the imagination in which he’d felt himself bogged: whatever the merits of the new work, like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, he had gone forward by going back, to the very roots and springs of story. Using, like Scheherazade herself, for entirely present ends, materials received from narrative antiquity and methods older than the alphabet, in the time since Sherry’s defloration he had set down two-thirds of a projected series of three novellas, longish tales which would take their sense from one another in several of the ways he and Sherry had discussed, and, if they were successful (here he smiled at me), manage to be seriously, even passionately, about some things as well.
    “ ‘The two I’ve finished have to do with mythic heroes, true and false,’ he concluded. ‘The third I’m just in the middle of. How good or bad they are I can’t say yet, but I’m sure they’re right. You know what I mean, Scheherazade.’
    “She did; I felt as if I did also, and we happily re-embraced. Then Sherry remarked, apropos of middles, that she’d be winding up the story of Ma’aruf the Cobbler that night and needed at least the beginning of whatever tale was to follow it.
    “The Genie shook his head. ‘My dear, there are no more. You’ve told them all.’ He seemed cruelly undisturbed by a prospect that made the harem spin before my eyes and brought me near to swooning.
    “ ‘No more!’ I cried. ‘What will she do?’
    “ ‘If she doesn’t want to risk Shahryar’s killing her and turning on you,’ he said calmly, ‘I guess she’ll have to invent something that’s not in the book.’
    “ ‘I don’t invent,’ Sherry reminded him. Her voice was no less steady than his, but her expression—when I got hold of my senses enough to see it—was grave. ‘I only recount.’
    “ ‘Borrow something from the treasury!’ I implored him. ‘What will the children do without their mother?’ The