The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  Condé smiled at me, as if to say that the ball was in my court.

  The one part of his performance that had never rung true—and he’d made the mistake of repeating it—was this “little hobby” line of his. If this driven, hawk-faced man had anything to do with archaeology, it would be on an imperial scale, like the European pirate-scholars who’d raped whole dynasties from Egypt in classical times. Without challenging his story, I pried for some truth. “Where does Velasquez here fit in? Is he really from the Commission on Non-Human Artifacts?”

  Condé waited a moment for Velasquez to reply. Then he sighed. “Yes. ‘Flunky’ was not quite fair. Bunny was the aide-de-camp to the Swathe’s last sub-commissioner.”

  “Have you thought of using the Commission? Surely that’s the most direct way to stop progress at the dig. You know, tell Mehta’s people they’re working too fast, endangering the artifacts, have to proceed more carefully, and so forth. Amateurs would have to do as they’re told.”

  Condé’s eyes glowed. I didn’t like his smile. “Yes, I thought of that. The sub-commissioner himself was too risky to bribe, too closely allied to Del’s political party. But I’ve managed to grease the right palms to have him recalled. The post will be vacant until his replacement arrives.”

  “Then, wouldn’t it be natural for his assistant to act in his place?” I asked. “Since he does seem to be on your payroll.”

  Condé nodded. “Citizen Velasquez has gambling debts so huge that he can look to no one but me for help. You’ve hit on the same plan I have, Park. Except that you don’t know Bunny.” As Condé went on about him, Velasquez’s lip curled unreadably. “He’s not stupid or anything, and I’ve convinced him that he has to play the aide, lend a little verisimilitude, but he’s not capable of carrying off the main con by himself. It would take guts, you see, sunplunger’s guts. He doesn’t have them. More importantly…he just isn’t an actor.”

  “No good,” I said. “No. I don’t need money that badly.”

  “You can act. I flew out to see you perform as soon as I read the labor exchange’s report. You’re good enough. And that old-fashioned accent of yours is a bonus. A lot of lesser Column posts are held by old-school types.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’m not an actor myself. When I said I was prepared to frame you for theft, I meant it.” He raised his hand to the console again. “I can have a Tribune here in ten minutes. The Shadowmen can start working you over within two hours. Or I can call it off, and you can earn a fat, painless fee on Newcount Two. You can be the new sub-commissioner, with all the perks of Column officialdom. In and out before anyone could possibly discover you’re a phony, screwing up their dig without actually shutting it down—Del might complain to the Column if you went that far. But currently, the distinguished senator isn’t even on the planet. Fooling his underlings will be a piece of cake. I hope you can see that, because you’ll have to decide right now, while you’re in my control. What’s it to be, Park?”

  Fifteen minutes later I left the office, shaken and sweating, as Condé cracked his knuckles cheerfully at my side.

  The play’s director had arrived, and stood with Hans and that gang around the floating mask.

  “Art is what survives,” the director was saying complacently, “and Larkspur is immortal.”

  Fools who impersonate Column officials, on the other hand, are invariably put to death.

  Chapter Three

  You go to bed and you dream your pallid, hazy dreams, and maybe now and then one frightens you, but you can wake up and know instantly, by the density and intensity of sensory detail, that you are back in reality, and safe. How I envy that, who lost all certainty long ago, asleep between the stars. If your dreaming self should happen to think, “This is just a dream!” you wake up. Poof! But I never do, not since the suspend-sleep tanks failed—or did they?—a decade or century ago⁠…

  Thunderclap. I was falling in stormy darkness, through rain that I could hear but not feel, protected in an invisible bubble from the lightning and the wind. Not alone; a trapped animal moaned at my side, the sort of blatant symbol that gives my dreams away but does not end them; I felt the whimpering creature’s warmth but could not see it. Falling, falling, helpless, and I knew it was a dream, I could consciously compare it to the other sense-perfect dreams that haunt me—the recurrent ones I’ve sometimes thought of numbering and writing out, like Stephen Vincent Benét—and still I was at its mercy, falling, wanting to scream, braced for the impact I could not avoid.

  But even when I can’t wake up, there is an out. If I can’t get back to reality, I try history. I have a poet’s trick memory. I can bring back details in almost lifelike profusion. I can close my dream-self’s eyes and escape to that era before the survey, to my student days, when I held the passing moment cheap⁠…

  ◆◆◆

  “Daydreaming again?” Even with the morning sun blazing back from the mica of the Great Plaza all around us, Summerisle seemed to glow with his own mysterious source of power. One never noticed the color of his eyes—only that they were bright. “You can get lost in dreams, Odysseus,” he went on, even though the waiter hadn’t yet gone back inside the cafe. Master of the Nexus University chapter of the Kanalist fraternity, Summerisle didn’t consider its pseudonyms the slightest bit corny himself.

  I tried to catch the waiter’s reaction, but it was hard to read. His face was very black, classically African, and faintly familiar. He looked as if expecting something from me, but then left us.

  “I was lost in a dream,” I admitted. “A dream of falling. But since when have we been known as realists, O Daedalus?” Summerisle’s ritual name, as mine was Odysseus. Domina Wintergrin having been initiated as Eurydice, I would have preferred to be Orpheus, but Summerisle had insisted that among the transient undergraduate members there must always be one Odysseus, and the pseudonym was especially apt for one who might someday become a Master in his own right. And he had judged me correctly; now, after three years, I was second only to him as a student and custodian of the chapter’s traditions.

  “You talk like an outsider,” he said. “Mysticism isn’t about dreaming, it’s about being more awake than other people. While you daydream, the real world is waiting for you. Of course, if you’d rather go back to picturing future generations enraptured by a revival of Larkspur’s Cyrano⁠…⁠”

  I was irritated. “I’m not that conceited. I look forward to the day when my undergraduate plays are buried in a single volume marked ‘Juvenilia.’ If I didn’t know I can do a great deal better, I’d never write another line.”

  “Oh, now,” Summerisle said. “The Enchanted Isle has greatness in it.”

  “Of course you and I think so,” I said. “It’s a hymn to Kanalism, and the rest is stolen from the greatest dramatist in Ur-Linguish. It’s…academic, like all my others.”

  For the first time, I had his real attention and sympathy. “It will move them, Evan. I once asked you to be the poet of a Kanalist Renaissance, and…you haven’t let me down. If anything could bring our so-called Reformers back into the fold, it is your play. Only a few days away now, and everyone plans to attend.”

  I hadn’t meant to expose my post scriptum blues, my pre-performance jitters. But I couldn’t recapture the elation I’d felt the night I’d finished writing; I didn’t even want to discuss it, instead muttering, “We shouldn’t talk about chapter business here.”

  “On the contrary,” Summerisle said. “This is the perfect setting. Look around. Don’t you see anything familiar?”

  I didn’t get it. I’d assumed he’d chosen this meeting place precisely for its distance from the university and all the people there who had been our brothers and sisters once. But Summerisle never said anything without a reason. I took a good look at the old government buildings around the plaza’s circular rim.

  “I give up.”

  “You’re resting your foot on it.”

  I drew back my boot from the base of
the small fountain that marked the north compass-point of the plaza’s circle.

  “This old relic?” I said—but then, “Wait a minute. It’s the same style as⁠—⁠”

  “No,” Summerisle said, shaking his head, “not just the same style. It’s the twin of the fountain at the end of our Labyrinth. Two hundred years ago, the architect of the plaza was a brother Kanalist. He smuggled this piece into his design as a way of secretly infusing the planet’s government with our ideals—from the very fount.”

  “It’s not quite the same as our fountain,” I insisted.

  He sighed with exasperation. “No esoteric markings, of course. It had to be secret. The man on the street doesn’t know that we’re his friends, that half the signers of the Alignment Charter were Kanalists; he thinks we’re a sinister conspiracy of the superrich.”

  “And isn’t that true—now?” I said. “If Kostain and Von Bülow have their way, our chapter will publicly come out for Reform. And what a reform! The entire human sphere to be run from a central government like one of the Column worlds. Chartered monopolies, oligarchy, and to hell with liberty.”

  Summerisle’s gaunt face suddenly looked its fifty years. “If I really believed that…but the other chapters will never join that movement if ours repudiates it; they’ve always looked to us. And we can still turn around the Reformers in our ranks.”

  “But if they choose to call themselves the true Kanalists,” I countered, “who would believe otherwise? Haven’t Kanalists always argued against the state?”

  “Not limited states like the Alignment,” he said. “An endless war against all government would only be another form of slavery. We do accept the normal human desire for organization, a state, even rulers.” He looked as earnest as if I were the one who had to be convinced.

  “But to safeguard the important thing, individual liberty,” he went on, “there has to be a circulation of rulers. Natural leaders must be free to rise from whatever level they’re born into, to replace incompetents born into the ruling class. Otherwise, right-wing dictatorships build on entrenched power, left-wing dictatorships on the frustration that results. But where power circulates freely, right and left check and balance; the apolitical majority is left in peace.

  “That’s why our predecessors placed such an emphasis on recruiting the younger ruling classes. On getting them to join the search for natural leaders among the underprivileged—who also became members, grateful to their new patrons. You, for instance, a rude colonial. Cliquish, I admit, but it’s made for peaceful transitions of power, and something like meritocracy, for so many centuries⁠—⁠”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Not the ‘many centuries’ again. I realize that all secret societies have done the ‘ancient origin’ bit. The Rosicrucians and the Masons pretended to have built the Pyramids. But don’t you think the true history of Kanalism would be more interesting than the one we’ve made up?”

  “The true history?”

  “Spare me. Four, even three hundred years ago, no one had ever heard of Kanalism. It must have arisen among refugees, on one of the melting-pot worlds. There was an Earthborn Polish enclave on Volkhaven, for instance, called Sewer-Town—and ‘sewer’ is ‘kanal’ in Polska. Some place like that, where people would want to say, ‘We’re not just refugees without a world, we’re a Folk, we have a Tradition.’ So they synthesized something out of memories of Earth’s Western Civilization, a mash-up, but why should we be ashamed, since it was something good? Wouldn’t it give Kanalism more legitimacy to drop this Minoan Crete myth and search out our real roots on Volkhaven, or Bonaventure, or Cath⁠—⁠”

  Summerisle raised his hand for silence. “I applaud your skepticism and your research, but there are things you don’t know. An older tradition, passed down to me by the last Master of our chapter, and I believe in it.”

  “Where is it?” I asked. “All you received from the old Master was your ring, the scarfpins, and…oh, come on! The Book?”

  We called it the Vice Book. Kanalist initiates were not hazed, but they were required to meet with the Master, in a drug-induced semi-hypnotic state, to confess their most harrowing sin or personal secret, which was added to a Book that only the Master might read. Every cult from Roman Catholicism to Chinese Communism has had some confession ritual to level down, and bind together, its followers, but⁠…

  “Wasn’t it you who thought that there was something un-Kanalist about our confessional?” Summerisle said. “You were right. It’s a relatively recent practice. And unique to our Nexus University chapter. A tradition started only a few hundred years ago to conceal the real value of the Book from other chapters, which do not have one.”

  “We have the only Vice Book?”

  “The only complete history of the Kanalist order from its founding,” he said slowly and with satisfaction, “including secrets, esoteric lore of great power, for which humankind is not yet prepared.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “So ours is the only true chapter, and you the only true Master, is that it?”

  “Not at all. Every individual Kanalist is his own spiritual sovereign. I do happen to have the one original Book, but my Master’s ring—like every chapter-master’s ring—is only a copy of the original. If they were all destroyed, nothing essential would be lost. If all the Masters were corrupted, Kanalism itself would remain pure. ‘The sun is new every day.’ The entire Kanalist order could be reconstituted on the authority of the original Master’s ring. And that ring is waiting; it will always be there, where Kanalism really started. Near the Labyrinth, in a mountain cave, on the isle of Crete, on Earth. That’s the truth, Evan.”

  Summerisle wouldn’t lie, but I didn’t know what to make of this.

  “Earth is gone, Master. Our chapter has sold out, and the others are following its lead. We’ve told them they’re the enlightened ones, and now they want to rule the human sphere.”

  “ ‘The sun is new every day,’ ” he repeated, pointing upward. “We may yet turn them around. Perhaps your play will do it. Perhaps my Book.”

  “Oh, you have some bit of ‘esoteric lore’ that⁠—⁠”

  “I was thinking of the vices recorded there. It would mean breaking a dozen oaths, but I do hold the power of blackmail over many of the Reformers.”

  I was astounded. But on second thought: “People wouldn’t give up galactic hegemony for a bit of kiss-and-tell, Master.”

  He smiled sadly. “The scions of the great families have more interesting secrets than yours, Evan. Among the personal peccadilloes are perversion, rape, and manslaughter. Then there’s the illegal trade or stolen patent or fraudulent deed behind the family fortune. And finally the political stuff: assassinations, treasonous alliances, crimes their parents and grandparents would kill to keep buried. Not everyone is so unlucky, of course; but there are key members of the cabal whom I could destroy—and they know it. But they also know I’d be violating everything I hold sacred if I did it.”

  “And can you do it?”

  He sighed. “I think not. I’ll fight them, if I have to, but not that way. And you, Odysseus? What will you do if your play fails?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I began.

  “Daydreaming, you mean⁠—⁠”

  “And I’ve found the perfect solution,” I said. “I’ll join a navy survey.”

  Summerisle didn’t reply; he furrowed his brow and looked absently at the fountain. I had to explain myself.

  “Don’t you see? In time, this Reform extremism will divide into factions and destroy itself, like all campus movements. Working people in the real world have too much sense to give up the Federal Alignment. Meanwhile I’ll go on a long survey tour, and come back wealthy to a world that’s forgotten both big government and my early plays. And I’ll be making a statement by doing it, too. The navy is Federalist, and I’ll stand with it.”

  He turned back to me. “You’re Odysseus, and must wander,” he said. “You’re a poet, and must dream. But if you can
’t tell dreams from reality, you will wander forever. ‘The waking follow a common path, but the dreamer enters a universe of his own.’ ”

  “Heraclitus, by way of Plutarch. I know, I know—both early Kanalists. Save it for the freshmen.”

  He wasn’t diverted from his course. “You play the tough guy who wants to make a fortune and build a new career, but I see the daydreams behind this. A shipboard emergency; the captain gone; everyone looking to you; the fate of the ship, of the Alignment, of the universe itself hanging on your coolness and quick wits. It’s the child in you, Evan, which we all love—but it can lead you into danger. Are you serious about this plan?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Then there’s something you should know. I can’t name names, because of the oaths I’ve taken, but among the confessions in the Vice Book I have pieced together a story. The navy is steadfast for the Alignment, it’s true. In part that’s because the cream of its officers are sent to Nexus U. for advanced studies, and our chapter of the fraternity often recruits them and molds their ideals. But that cuts both ways. Just as the oligarchs of the Column worlds have infiltrated our chapter this past year, there is a power-seeking cabal within the navy that has been trying to do the same thing for over a century. They are known only as the Few, and they would put the human sphere under a military dictatorship. Sometimes we convert them, sometimes they convert us. I believe that eighty or ninety years ago, a Master of our chapter allowed the Few access to some of the most powerful secrets in the Book, and that they have been exploiting this forbidden lore ever since.”