Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  When the Great Empress prohibited all private transportation by wheeled vehicles, many people said she was crazy. Even I, who knew her well by then, looked at her in astonishment and asked her what could be the use of so absurd a measure.

  “They increase delinquency,” she answered. “They’ve increased divorces and confinements for mental instability.”

  “I confess I don’t understand you, ma’am,” I said. “What have wheeled vehicles got to do with all that? What you ought to do, surely, is institute measures against delinquency, divorces, and insanity.”

  “And increase the size of the police force and extend their powers?” said she. “Make it even harder for people to get a divorce? Encourage doctors to study and treat the mad? How stupid. You wouldn’t be a good ruler, my dear friend, though I hope my sons will be. All we’d get by that would be more policemen full of pride and brutality, more lawyers full of red tape, more doctors full of fatuity, and hence more criminal assaults, more divorces, and more nut cases.”

  “And by prohibiting private transportation—?” I inquired.

  “We’ll see,” she told me.

  She was right, of course. Cars and private planes disappeared. Only those who absolutely had to travel more than twenty kilometers were allowed to use public transportation on wheels. Most people walked, or rode donkeys, or, if they were wealthy, had themselves carried in litters. Life slowed down. People didn’t get anxious, because it wasn’t any use. The big centers of buying and selling and banking and industry disappeared, where everybody used to crowd in and push each other and get cross and curse each other out, and small shops opened, little places in every neighborhood where every merchant and banker and businessman knew his customers and their families. The big hospitals that used to serve a whole city or even several cities all disappeared, since an injured person or a woman in childbirth couldn’t travel a long way quickly any more, and little health centers opened that people could walk to and where every doctor knew her patients and had time to chat with them about how the weather was, how the river was rising, how the kids were growing, and even how they felt. The big schools disappeared, where the students were only a number on a form; now the teachers knew why their students were the way they were, and the kids got up without a big rush, walked hand in hand a few blocks without anybody having to escort them, and got to class in plenty of time. People stopped taking tranquilizers, husbands didn’t yell at their wives or wives at their husbands, and nobody knocked the kids around. And bad feelings cooled down, and instead of getting a weapon in order to take money off somebody else, people used their time for something other than hatred and meanwhile began to work to change things, now that there were no rapid vehicles and distances had grown longer. Even the cities changed. The huge cities where a person felt solitary and abandoned came apart, every neighborhood separating itself off into little centers, each one almost a city, self-sufficient, with its schools and hospitals and museums and markets and no more than two or three bored, sleepy policemen sitting in the sun and sipping a lemonade with an old neighbor retired from business. The little cities didn’t grow and didn’t feel any need to increase their area and population, but along the long road that separated one from the next new towns grew up, just as small, just as quiet, full of gardens and orchards and the low houses of people who knew each other and teachers and doctors and storytellers and good-natured policemen. The roads got narrower and better and along them rolled the only busses that were permitted, which were free, but which you couldn’t use unless you were going to visit your old aunt who lived more than twenty kilos away, or were transporting foodstuff from one city to another, or going to a party given by a distant friend. I won’t say there were no more crimes, failed marriages, or insanity. There were, there still are, but few, so few that each one has plenty of people paying attention to it, worrying about it, trying to help, so that criminal tendencies, divorce, and insanity are a misfortune nowadays only for the individuals who suffer from them. And the Great Empress smiled in satisfaction and I admitted to her she’d been right and told her the history of Sderemir the Borenid.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know a lot of people say the world is complicated. The ones who say so are the ones who are kept anxious all the time by their work or their family, by a move or an illness, a storm, anything unexpected, anything at all; and then they make bad choices and when things turn out badly they blame it on the world for being complicated and not on their own low and imperfect standards. Why don’t they go further? Why say ‘the world is so complicated’ and stop there? I say the world is complicated, but not incomprehensible. Only, you have to look at it steadily. Isn’t it true a person’s shoulder hurts sometimes because they’ve got a disorder in their stomach? And then what does a stupid doctor do? Orders massage of the shoulder. What does a wise doctor do? He takes time to think about it, watches the patient carefully, gives him some medicine for his stomach, and the pain in his shoulder goes away. Better yet, he explains to his patients what they have to do to keep their stomach from getting out of order. One day his patient’s going to get old and die, just like himself, just like us, and one day, incredible as it may seem, the Empire’s going to die, and how foolish people are who whine about it, and whine about how complicated the world is. A seamstress’s room is complicated too, but even at night, with the lights out, she can reach out in the darkness and find the yellow thread, the needles, the pincushion. We couldn’t, because we don’t know the order things are in, in the seamstress’s room. And we can’t see the order the world is in. But all the same it’s there, right under our eyes.”

  Yes, said the storyteller, the Empire will die, like her, but it will die remembering her. Idraüsse V is a good emperor, as good as other emperors the Empire loved and respected. There will be others, I don’t say there won’t be, and young storytellers will recount their deeds and words. And there will be wise, kind empresses, who will stand on the palace balcony and make people weep for love of them. But there couldn’t be a second empress capable of pacifying and enriching the greatest Empire mankind has ever known, capable of despising power, of walking the streets unprotected, of secretly summoning a young storyteller to her rooms so he can teach her what she doesn’t know, of founding a sound, strong, wise dynasty.

  “Yes,” said the empress, “I never get angry any more, and when night comes I’m tired out. No more foolish talk now. Good night.”

  And the Streets Deserted

  The storyteller said: The emperor decreed that a city be founded. There were countless cities in the Empire: sacred cities, industrial cities, warrior cities, forbidden cities, wise ones, monstrous ones, maritime, ruined, hidden, licentious, stinking, forgotten, nascent, damned, peaceable, and dangerous cities. But the emperor, fourth of the Kiautonor dynasty, was a lascivious and ostentatious man. Recently he had purchased, in a town on the border of the Southern lands, some went so far as to say in a village on an island deep in the heart of the South, this last being improbable for reasons known to all, a new concubine. An Assistant (Third Class) of the Inner Chamber reported, before they pulled out his teeth, cut off his tongue, and sent him to beg in the streets of the port as a traitor, that the girl was very young girl, dark, thin, and that she was shut up in a windowless, lampless building in an hexagonal pavilion in the Garden of the Three Black Tyrants, and given nothing to eat but wild joca meat and chopped rafilia stalks to keep her lively and ardent. People believed him because nobody had seen her, although everybody heard her screams, night after night and sometimes in daytime, which confirmed the rumor, already become legend, concerning the immense size of the emperor’s member, and the other rumor that never did become a legend concerning the almost abnormal smallness of the girl. And the emperor, fourth of the Kiautonor dynasty, decided one day to leave the Empire a monument to this acquisition which had given him so much pleasure, and so decreed that a city be founded. He called into his presence one autumn morning a certain minister, to whom, scorning protocol an
d hierarchies, he gave the order, talked a bit about beauty, briefly, since he wasn’t familiar with the subject, described more by gestures than by words how monumental and imposing it was to be, sent the functionary off, and almost immediately forgot about the city which didn’t yet exist.

  The functionary, a nobleman, a hard worker, a widower, an unbeliever, aged by attacks of Ohmaz’s Disease, was the Minister of Aerial Cults as well as being temporarily in charge of the Rites of the Flame since the death of the Priestess, possibly by suicide. His name was Senoeb’Diaül, and he knew nothing about cities. For which reason he brought together in his office an architect, an engineer, a sculptor, a geographer, a painter, an astronomer, a mathematician, a storyteller, a general, and a priest, and told them what their job was: By summer, the city must be built, resplendent, magnificent, and inhabited.

  We will not go into details (said the storyteller) about the preparatory work, which like any project in its first stages was confused and uncertain, so that reading the reports aggravated the illness of the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül, each attack becoming longer and more frequent. We will say only that on the first morning of winter the expedition set off to found and build the city that would bear the name of the little, young, dark-skinned concubine, who by the way was already dead, destroyed by fever and injuries. The long, slow-moving procession of vehicles, animals, men, and machinery departed at dawn from the imperial capital, and nobody saw it go save a beggar and a prostitute or two and a suicide perched on the cupola of the central tower of the Chamber of Foreign Commerce.

  The journey was difficult. They had to cross three provinces, one deep in snow, the next storm-beaten, and the next ever hotter, passing through eight cities, twenty-five towns, and three military posts. They arrived at last, on the thirty-seventh day of winter, at the Valley of Loôc. The location was not only adequate, it was ideal. So much so that the nobleman promised to recommend that the emperor give the geographer, the astronomer, and the architect to the emperor a seat in their respective Academies and a medal with at least three ogives. The Edibu River thundered down out of the Twin Peaks, reaching the valley with only a pleasant murmur, and ran shining through the green plain in a curve that touched the valley’s rim. The sea wind lingered on the slopes and let warm rains fall, and then the sun would rise, to set very late in the far gap between two mountains.

  And so, after a moment of astonishment, the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül ordered that the ceremony commence. The priest intoned the prayer, the Office for the Seventh Day of the Ascension of Queiah, in honor of the minister:

  “We are those who have remained,” he said, “and those who shall not follow Thee on the ways of the wind that is born in the mouths of Thy sons, for the twelve chains of guilt prevent our movement. When Thy widowed wives have given birth and Thou arrivest at the Precincts, send ozone, O Queiah, to Thine acolytes that they may set us free, O Queiah, to follow Thy footsteps, O Queiah!”

  With the final invocation, the engineer gave the nobleman the golden pikestaff, which he stuck into the soft earth. From the top of it flamed the ferocious banner of the Empire. The city had been founded.

  During the rest of winter and all spring the stonecutters and masons worked ceaselessly; the architect emended plans, the priest offered prayers, the engineer and the mathematician calculated, the storyteller summed up, the astronomer studied, the sculptor carved, the geographer measured, the painter ground his colors, the general kept watch, and Senoeb’Diaül suffered. Every fortnight a messenger left for the imperial capital with a memorandum for the emperor. At the palace he was given a recompense and a day off, and the memorandum was read by the Second Secretary of the Assistant (Fourth Class) of the Sub-Manager of the Maintenance Section of the Ministry of Southern Provincial Affairs and carefully filed under the letter . The emperor presided at the festival commemorating the Treaty of Hondarrán, planned a punitive expedition to be sent against the Southern nations, invented new titles for his first-born son, hunted with prohibited weapons in the woods of Jiznerr, and had no idea that in the Loôc Valley a city was growing.

  The city stretched out to cover the plain on both sides of the Edibu River. It was built of pink marble and yellow wood with blue windows. Six avenues crossed it, three running north-south and three east-west; all the other streets were semicircular, following the curve of the river. In the intersections of the avenues stood statues of white stone, each symbolizing a victory of the Empire, and where the curved streets met the avenues, onyx fountains bearing figures of small girls in bronze and gold shot up sprays of cold water from the deep wells. There was a stadium, seven temples, a library, two theaters, three inns for travelers, a hospital, nine schools, ten restaurants, and a cemetery. Outside the walls on the south side was the red light district, and inside the walls on the north side, the military barracks. Along the riverbanks ran two esplanades joined by a bridge every three blocks. The houses were low, and looking in through the deep doorways one saw at the end of the dark corridor the inner garden and the slender pillars of the balconies. Flowers grew on roofs and vines festooned the walls. The heart of the city was a great open square flanked by the houses and official buildings of the city government, the museum, the archives, and the court house. In the middle towered a bronze effigy of the emperor standing on a slain tiger, his brow lifted to heaven, sword and scepter in his hands. Around it was a garden of exotic plants, with stone benches and sunshades of particolored silk.

  On the first day of summer, the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül moved into the mayor’s apartments, and that night for the first time in a long time he slept easy, the first time since that autumn morning when he had bowed before the emperor.

  And now certain personages appear who heretofore seemed to have nothing to do with our story: the empress, for example, and one of her sons, and the suicide on the tower of the Chamber of Foreign Commerce, and some others, as we shall see.

  The empress had been very pretty, very delicate, and very stupid. The years had given her beauty, strength, and sagacity, three virtues of which the last was the most valuable. She had come to the palace very young, with many other girls of the nobility, and had been chosen by the old empress to be the prince’s wife. She had borne sons and daughters, she had put on the crown in a ceremony that she then had thought moving and that now seemed to her, at most, a bore. She never raised her voice, and had seen to it, first by instinct, then by intention, that the emperor knew nothing about her. The emperor had long ago deserted her, for which she thanked several obscure gods, in order to dedicate himself to annexing territories, hunting, and buying new women. They saw each other only at certain official functions. The empress felt no pity for the emperor’s concubines because she could not and would not feel pity, and because in her youth she had suffered the same torments they did, and if she had had any pleasure, denied it now. But the affair of the thin dark girl, and the founding of a city to celebrate this scandal of screams and frenzy, had turned her indifference to scorn. The girl was dead and forgotten, yes, but the city lived.