by C. L. Moore
I'd read enough about the alternative futures theory to understand him without much trouble, though he took it for granted that I knew somewhat more than I did. I had to pull him up now and then and get a fuller explanation. But briefly, this is what happened at the point of split-off between Earth and Malesco, away back in the Claudian times of first-century Rome.
Up to the end of the reign of Caligula there was no Malesco. As a world it had never existed, never even been thought of. Our past and its were identical. But when Caligula died something definitive happened and there was a split between Malesco and Earth. Instead of Claudius a man named Rufus Agricola mounted the Roman throne. After that men with unfamiliar names ruled Rome until it fell to the barbarian invaders and its own inept policies.
In our world a religion which Caligula had persecuted spread until it controlled all of Europe. In Malesco a religion Caligula had encouraged spread instead like wildfire until it submerged every other faith. It was an extremely practical religion, originating in Egypt, and it had ruled all Malesco ever since until the present day.
Its name was Alchemy.
Alchemy had made a Utopia of Malesco and there is nothing worse than a Utopia, though very few people seem to realize it. Only in Butler's Erewhon and Huxley's Brave New World is it suggested that the standard Utopia can be a version of hell itself.
For in most Utopias it's taken as a matter of course that the stability of the community is the goal of mankind. Private happiness is unimportant, rigid caste systems are enforced and total paralysis of society is the prime condition without which the Utopia wouldn't last half an hour.
Maybe Alchemy's coming out of Egypt had some connection with what happened to Malesco because Egypt for two thousand years was the most rigid "utopia" in history. Like Egypt, Malesco reached a peak of growth early in its career. And like Egypt its priesthood got so firm a hold upon the government that though all growth ceased long before, the society continued in a sort of deathless rigor mortis far beyond the normal life-span of a civilization.
Malesco for the past five hundred years had stood dead still, a society frozen into stasis and operated solely for the benefit of the priesthood and that of whatever conqueror briefly seized control. The priests let the tides of rebellion wash over the country, carry a conqueror to a throne and maintain him there until somebody else pushed him off—but it was the priests who manipulated all the wires and collected all the benefits.
There was conflict between church and state, of course. But in Malesco the powers of science were with the church, for Alchemy was based on practical science. In Malesco, Galileo would have been a priest, not a heretic. Gunpowder once conquered vast countries. In Malesco, only priests of Alchemy could possibly have discovered the uses of gunpowder; the only textbooks on chemistry were in the temples.
As in Egypt, for a long, long time there was no promise of relief even in the hereafter for the hoi polloi. Only the priests and the kings could expect to survive and enjoy the benefits of heaven.
About three hundred years ago, while in our world America was being colonized and Shakespeare was getting drunk at the Mermaid Tavern and Eastern Europe was falling piece by piece into the hands of the Turks, Malesco had a worldwide revolution. The priests for the first time found themselves face to face with a real problem.
Malesco is a smaller world than ours. A lot of it is ocean and a lot more unexplored wilderness. But on every inhabited continent there were tremendous waves of terrorism as the common man got mad enough to let himself go. They weren't very wise or intelligent men because they'd never been allowed to be.
They had no more knowledge of self-control than so many angry children because they'd never been trusted with self-control. When they ran wild they instituted a reign of terror all over Malesco, taking out their anger and frustration on each other when no priests were handy.
It was just what you'd expect—look at the French Revolution—and it made a very ugly blot in Malescan history. The blame was all the priests' and they easily managed to shift it right back on the revolutionists.
And the priests, as usual, found a clever way to pacify the people and still get their own way. The same thing happened in Egypt. A profound social revolution was neatly transferred to the plane of religion and solved there without making a ripple in the course of real human living. If it hadn't actually happened in Egypt, you'd find it hard to believe it could happen anywhere outside the pages of romance.
The priests simply promised the people that if they would be good and go home they could look forward to seeing Paradise, too, some day after they were dead. It worked. The Egyptians accepted the Osiris cult without a murmur and went on building pyramids. The Malescans went right on under the heavy yoke of the Alchemic priesthood and accepted the promise of New York as their future Paradise.
At that point in the story I choked over my supper and Coriole had to pound me on the back. He also showed symptoms of telling me another joke which my contretemps reminded him of, but I shut him off quickly.
"Go on," I urged. "I want to hear more about Paradise."
Coriole went back to the egg he'd been eating. The blue patterns on the shell gave it a festive Easter-egg look and apparently the shell was edible too. He was crunching it between his teeth in a way that gave me gooseflesh.
"You're sure," he inquired, crunching, "that nobody in your world knows about Malesco? Because from the very first we've known about Earth. The split wasn't very sharp at first. The priests, the clairvoyants and oracles and people like that made contact very easily.
"We figured out about what happened long ago. From then on the priests kept telling us that Earth had taken the right path and we'd taken the wrong one and were going to be punished for our sins."
He dipped the egg in sugar and tossed what remained of it in his mouth with a flourish.
"The letter A," he said, "is the symbol of the mundi mutabili, the variable worlds. You've noticed it in the city, I expect. The priests make an A with their fingers and thumbs when they talk about New York. The apex of the letter represents the point where Malesco and Earth divided.
"The two shanks are the separate, diverging paths as the worlds draw apart. The crossbar, of course, represents the bridge by which the virtuous go to their reward in Paradise. It's also the bridge by which you and Clia and Jimmerton came to Malesco."
He grinned at me suddenly. "Would you like to see Paradise?" he asked.
"I would."
Coriole got up, shaking crumbs from his orange towel and fiddled with one of the gilt-numbered dials under the screen.
A large glowing A dawned slowly on the wall. Then it faded, music swelled impressively in the little room and a priest's voice began to chant some solemn words I couldn't understand very well. I imagine it was archaic Malescan, but I caught the name of New York repeated several times. j
Then the clouds which had been rolling luminously over the screen cleared and a shining city took place. I leaned forward. We were looking down at an angle from several thousand feet up and, sure enough, we were looking at New York.
I could see the Battery and the fringe of wharves lying out in the rivers all around the lower edges of the city. I could see Central Park making a flat rectangle of green in the distance and the tall midtown buildings stuck up like monoliths above the patterned streets.
I could even see the angle Broadway makes out of the welter of the Village, and down at the tip of the island a magnificent cluster of dazzling white skyscrapers shot out continuous streamers of gold light.
It seemed a little odd that the Eiffel Tower should be standing in the vicinity of Chatham Square and something like the Pyramid of Cheops cast a huge triangular shadow across the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge. But otherwise the city was unmistakable.
"I don't seem to remember," I told my cousin dubiously, "that the City Hall has a halo like that. And the Empire State isn't really gold-plated, you know. And—"
"I believe you," Coriole said.
"This isn't a real reflection of New York. It's something the priests worked up for public release."
"But how did the Eiffel Tower get there?" I asked. "That's in Paris."
"Don't quibble. It's sacrilege to question the Alchemic version of Paradise."
"As a matter of fact," I said, eying the streets of Paradise with fascinated attention, "I've been wondering why they picked New York at all. It's such a young city, historically speaking. Why, three hundred years ago when you had your uprising it wasn't even called New York."
"Oh, Paradise used to be London," Coriole explained. "Then there was a shake-up in the priesthood and after that all the best people went to New York when they died. Only the priests are reincarnated in Paradise, you know. Did I tell you that?
"Reincarnation is the keystone of the religion. You've got to work your way up by virtuous living until you get reborn a priest. When a priest dies—flash!—he finds himself driving up Fifth Avenue in a golden chariot drawn by dragons. It's a fact!"
I looked at him narrowly, wondering if this were another of his terrible jokes.
"You'd like to see it?" he asked, leaning toward the screen.
"No, no, I don't think I could stand that," I told him hastily.
"All right," Coriole said. He paused and his grin faded. "It's funny when you look at it objectively like this," he went on, "but it's tragic when you consider how many generations have lived and died in what amounts to slavery, with no more reward than the prospect of an impossible after-life like that to keep them quiet. In one way maybe the Alchemists are right, though. Earth can't have gone any farther astray than we. Perhaps theirs was the better course after all."
"I doubt it," I said; "The Industrial Age was bad enough but the Atomic Age looks pretty grim too, from where I sit." It reminded me of something. "What about industrialism in Malesco?" I asked. "You've got a mechanistic civilization, but the people seem to take some perfectly obvious gimmicks awfully seriously. That projection of Lorna on the clouds, for instance—"
"You know how it was done?" Coriole leaned forward suddenly, his pale blue eyes shining. "Do you know?"
"I know one way. There may be others."
"Then it was no miracle?"
I snorted. Coriole's freckled face wreathed itself in smiles.
"We need you, cousin," he said. "The priesthood has controlled all the devices for what you call 'mechanistic society' ever since they began to appear. These things are officially known as miracles. Everything a man can't do with his own bare hands or tools he can make himself out of raw materials is classed as a miracle.
"If you punch a button and a hidden bell rings—that's a miracle. This screen that brings pictures out of the air is a miracle. Nobody but an Alchemist is allowed to question how they work. You see?"
I sat back and tried to picture life in New York operating by miraculous subway, miraculous taxis, miraculous electric power. I couldn't do it.
"And the people put up with that?" I asked incredulously.
Coriole shrugged.
"People put up with a lot," he said. "Now and then they stage a revolution and thrones change hands, but it never shakes the hold the priests have. That revolt three hundred years ago came nearest to it, and you know what happened then.
"The people have been trained to be fools for too long to outwit the priesthood. About a generation ago, though, something did happen that had the Hierarch worried for a while." He paused and looked at me quizzically.
"What happened?"
"My father came to Malesco," Coriole said. "He must have been a great man, Jimmerton. I wish I'd known him better."
I looked at him in silence, thinking of the red-headed boy who had been growing up in Malesco all the while I was growing up in Colorado, each of us learning the language and customs of Malesco and cherishing the memories we had of Jim Burton, who had vanished out of both our lives.
"Go on," I said. "What happened?"
"He came through from Earth during one of the Equinoctial Ceremonies. Stepped right through the Earth-Gates into the Temple while the Hierarch was chanting about New York. The people were all worked up to a great pitch of emotion and they were ready to accept Jimmerton as a god from another world.
"If the Hierarch had had any sense he'd have let them do it. But he began yelling about red-haired devils and the priests dragged Jimmerton off to jail."
Coriole looked wistful. "Those were the days," he said. "I wish I'd been alive then. I wish somebody'd been ready to grab the opportunity when it came. The people of Malesco were wild. They'd have risen against the Alchemists in one mass if they'd had any leadership at all. But they didn't.
"There were people among the jailors who weren't afraid of the consequences, though. My grandfather was one of them. So was my mother. They smuggled Jimmerton out and took him to one of the East Bay villages and people made pilgrimages to see him. Oh, those were great days!
"The priests couldn't keep the news quiet. And they couldn't catch Jimmerton, either. They tried hard. They tried for ten years. Jimmerton lived in the mountains and organized his followers for an all-out attack on the Alchemists. They say he never slept twice in the same place for months at a time.
"My mother traveled with him and helped with the organization and training. I was born in a fishing boat on the Gonwy within sight of the Alchemists' campfires at the height of a campaign against the revolutionaries."
He paused again, his face darkening with introspection in the way I'd seen Uncle Jim's face darken so many times when he sat silent, thinking about things I couldn't imagine. Now I knew. And this time I realized that all my wild fancies about the hero from Earth battling against fearful odds were not so wild and fanciful after all.
I'd just got at them from the wrong end. Things like that do happen, in just the way Coriole was recounting. You don't often find the dashing hero with the muscles of a giant, swinging a six-foot sword against overwhelming odds while the heroine quails lushly in the background, inspiring him to superhuman efforts. That much was phony.
But entirely unromantic-looking men like Jim Burton actually do find themselves in desperate situations sometimes and engage in pure melodrama to escape. I was glad the heroine had been a brave and intelligent woman who didn't waste her time quailing in corners. I didn't think Uncle Jim had indulged in any fake heroics, either.
Our own segment of current history is full of tales like his, men who lead guerrilla warfare against intolerable situations and strike no dramatic poses while they're doing it. I couldn't imagine Uncle Jim striking poses.
"What happened then?" I asked again.
"Oh, Jimmerton was defeated, of course," Coriole said, and sighed. "What did you suppose? They caught up with him finally. I was just old enough to remember him afterward. He and my mother were resting in a mountain village after a long campaign. I was having a nap that afternoon under a tree by a spring behind the house. I remember it very well, really."
He sighed again.
"There was a miracle," he said bitterly. "The whole village—well, no use going into all that. The real miracle was that both Jimmerton and I did escape. But he never knew about me. I was badly burned and buried under a sort of avalanche the explosion started.
"An old shepherd dug me out and brought me back to life three days after I was buried. When I could ask questions again I learned Jimmerton had gone back to Paradise. What really happened, do you know?"
I shook my head. "He never talked about it. He taught me Malescan and told me a little about the city, how it looked, what the people were like—not much. He was ill for a long time, you know. Maybe he was injured in the—miracle."
"I suppose he was. My mother was killed and of course he thought I was dead, too. He must have given up after that. If he'd come back—" Coriole was silent a while.
Then he said heavily, "Well, maybe I'll finish the job he started. Maybe you and I together can do it. What do you say, Burton?"
I blinked at him stupidly. "How do you
mean?"
He made an impatient gesture. His pale eyes were cold and eager.
"You know the things we need to know. You're from Paradise too, but you're not a puppet like Clia. You could teach us—"
"I'm an actor, Coriole," I said firmly. "That's all—just an actor. I don't know how to whip up an atom-smasher out of an old washtub and a jury-rigged cigarette lighter. There's nothing I could teach you."
"You can count, can't you?" he demanded in a sort of desperation. "You know the Arabic numerals through zero, don't you?"
I nodded mutely, staring at him.
"I don't," he said. "I can't. We aren't allowed to use Arabic numerals. It's a treasonable offense to learn them. All we have are Roman numerals and you can't work out anything but the simplest types of problems with that clumsy system. Do you have any idea what that means?"
I did, dimly. I nodded again, remembering what I'd read about the invention of zero and all the mathematical intricacies it had led to. With the old numerals multiplication and division themselves had been tremendous undertakings. With Arabic numerals the man in the street could learn arithmetical tricks only Roman scholars could perform—and that laboriously.
"I see what you mean," I said. "I don't know much about modern technology, but I do know how closely the development of physics, for instance, ties in with mathematics. I can see your problem. Those Alchemists are pretty smart boys."
"I've got a good organization now," Coriole said, still with the strange cold eagerness that rather repelled me. "Here's the setup. I won't go into details but I got in touch with a lot of Jimmerton's old lieutenants and we learned by his mistakes.
"We've got to strike at the heart of the Alchemists—at the Hierarch himself. We can't win by nagging at the outskirts, the way Jimmerton had to. I've got men in key positions everywhere. Like Falvi, you know. He's one of the top men in Alchemy."
I nodded dubiously. For my money Falvi was a broken reed so far as conspiracy went. But it wasn't for me to say so.
"The people are with us," Coriole went on, his cold violence making every word crackle. "Clia's coming was a setback. For a while we hoped we could use her, but the priests got there first. They're terribly cunning. They never miss a bet. And they'd learned their lesson when Jimmerton came through."