Ati had opened himself to these questions at the sanatorium, when doubt began to creep in and he watched his co-religionists living out the little life they had left in a state of total unconsciousness and inertia. What was it that turned a creature filled with the essence of the divine into a base, blind larva: now there was a question. Was it the power of words? The fact remained that in that medieval fortress, there at the end of the world with its unimaginable borders, the sounds of things and of life had a strange substratum, made of old, unresolved mysteries and stale violence; over time it had transformed patients into erratic phantoms who truly did levitate just above the ground as they wandered through the labyrinth, moaning and wheezing; then between two illuminations, or as a faint shadow slipped past them, they vanished as if by magic. It was during the very frequent power outages that Ati noticed that the sound system went on producing noise—except that it did not take that noise from some magnetic memory or some providential magneto, but from people’s heads, where their words, laden with the magic of prayer and scansion and repeated unto infinity, had become embedded in their chromosomes and modified their code. The stockpiles of sound in people’s genes went from their bodies to the ground, and from the ground to the walls, which began to vibrate and modulate the air according to the frequencies of prayers and incantations, the thickness of stone adding a lugubrious echo to the requiem. The very air was transformed into a sort of sickly sweet, pungent mist that drifted through the depths of the fortress and acted more powerfully upon the inmates and penitents than any hallucinogen. It was as if all this improbable, obscure populace lived inside a prayer to the dead. That is the force of infinitesimal movement: nothing can resist it, no one realizes a thing, and all the while, tiny wave after tiny wave, angstrom after angstrom, this movement shifts continents beneath our feet, and in the depths it traces fantastical perspectives. It was while observing these phenomena that defied comprehension that a revelation came to Ati: sacred language was of an electrochemical nature, and no doubt it also had a nuclear component. It did not speak to the mind: rather, it disintegrated it, and out of what remained (a viscous precipitate) it fashioned good passive believers or absurd homunculi. The Book of Abi said as much, in its hermetic fashion, in the first title, chapter 1, verse 7: “When Yölah speaks, he does not say words, he creates universes, and these universes are the pearls of light radiating around his neck. To listen to his word is to see his light and become transfigured in the same instant. Skeptics will know eternal damnation: verily it has begun for them and for their descendants.”
Koa had followed another path. He had initially taken an advanced course in abilang at the School of the Divine Word, a prestigious institution open to the deserving, and Koa was more deserving than most because his late grandfather had been the famous mockbi Kho, of the Great Mockba in Qodsabad, renowned for his sermons, whose magnificent shock formulas (like this remarkable war cry: “Let us go to our deaths that we might live in happiness,” since adopted by the Abistani army as a motto for their coat of arms) had raised innumerable contingents of good and heroic militiamen during the previous Great Holy War. Koa, still prey to a certain juvenile rebelliousness that was aimed at the oppressive figure of his grandfather, subsequently went to set himself up as a professor of abilang in a school in a devastated suburb, and there, as if a field lab had been placed at his disposal, he was able to see for himself the power that sacred language had over the minds and bodies of young pupils, although they had been born and raised speaking one of the common and clandestine languages of their neighborhood. While everything in their environment seemed to doom them to aphasia, degeneration, and a drifting life of dissension, after only one short trimester of learning abilang they were transformed into ardent believers, well-versed in dialectics and already unanimous judges of society. And this squawking, vindictive brood declared their readiness to take up arms and conquer the world. Indeed, even physically they were no longer the same; they already resembled what two or three terrifying Holy Wars would make of them: squat, stooped, scarred. Many thought they knew enough now and didn’t need any more lessons. And yet Koa had not even breathed a word to them about religion and its planetary and celestial aims; nor had he taught a single verse of the Gkabul, other than the common salutation: “Yölah is great and Abi is his Delegate,” which was, after all, among happy people, simply a somewhat grandiloquent way of saying hello. Where did the mystery come from? Koa had another, more personal question: why had the mystery not affected him—he who had been born into abilang and the Gkabul, and knew them inside out, and whose forebear was a past master of mass mental manipulation? Of his two questions, which one was more dangerous: that was what he had to determine, for a start. At last he understood that when you light a fuse, you must expect something to happen. Even if you cannot see it, there is a certain continuity in the progression of ideas and the organization of things: a bullet fired from a window is a dead man at the other end of the street, and time that passes is not emptiness, it is the link between cause and effect. On the last day of the school year, poor Koa handed in his notice as if he feared for his life among those pupils; then he went back to the city and started looking for a stable job with decent pay. He did not know the secret of language, and never would, but he knew how immensely powerful it was.
What had become of his pupils? Were they good, honest mockbis, lauded martyrs, admired militia, professional beggars, or wanderers and blasphemers who ended up at the stadium? Koa did not know; what went on in the devastated suburbs was still very uncertain, they were worlds unto themselves, surrounded by walls and precipices; their population changed several times over in a lifetime. Everyone had their share of disease, poverty, war, calamities, and misfortune, and even of success, which carried off the clever little schemers and set them up with the enemy; no one was spared, they all died in the end, but since just as many arrived from the other side—displaced, exiled, relegated; migrants, refugees, renegades, failures too—no one realized a thing, those extraterrestrials were all so alike, whether they were from here or elsewhere. Like everywhere, whether they were humans or chameleons, they took on the color of the walls, and there were leprous walls, and others that were worm-eaten—that was the whole tragedy of the thing. This was how Koa’s cynical side expressed itself.
The two comrades went about their business in several ways. They attended the mockba assiduously, studying the Gkabul, listening as the mockbi commented on the legends of Abistan, inflated a thousand times over; they observed the flock as it went into a trance the moment the criers urged them to prayer with the salutation “Hail to Yölah and to Abi his Delegate,” echoed in chorus by the response-givers and the mass of praying figures, all in an atmosphere of intense contemplation and discreet suspicion. Behind it all lay a sort of incredible magic trick: the more you watched, the less you understood. A principle of uncertainty governed the believers; often they didn’t know whether they were alive or dead, or whether, at that moment, they themselves could tell the difference.
They also studied at each other’s houses, when it was possible to circumvent the vigilance of the neighborhood civic committees, known as the Civics, who had the sovereign power to invite themselves in whenever they suspected any new activities might be starting. And conversation between friends after work was really too much of a new thing: only the Chitan could inspire such idleness. The Civics were visible from afar in their green burnis with fluorescent yellow stripes, but they were not above using tricks to catch any lookouts unaware, and this was why the inhabitants constantly felt afraid, even when they’d double-bolted their doors. “Open in the name of Yölah and Abi, this is the Civic Committee from here or from there!”: that was the sort of call no one ever wanted to hear. No one knew how to stop the machine: a summons led to an interrogation, and then one day you ended up at the stadium, with your back to the truncheon or under a hail of stones.
It must be explained that the Civics were vigilante committees fo
rmed by citizens and approved by the authorities (in this case the Service of Public Morality of the Ministry of Morality and Divine Justice and the Bureau of Civil Self-Defense Associations of the Ministry of Public Force), who aimed to punish any deviant behavior in their neighborhood, to police the streets, and to ensure law and order was maintained; some of them were greatly appreciated, such as the Good Behavior Civics; others were despised, particularly the Anti-Idleness Civics. There were countless different committees, but many were ephemeral, seasonal, and had no verifiable purpose. They gathered in designated premises, the Civics barracks, where they rested, trained, and planned their raids on the neighborhood.
When all was said and done, Ati and Koa preferred wandering around the devastated suburbs, where a shred of freedom still reigned, too tiny to be of any use, and you need a lot of freedom to start attacking the secrets on which unshakeable empires are founded. And indeed, this was rebellion of the purest kind: they’d reached a point where they actually thought they might go one day to live in the ghettos of death, those faraway enclaves where ancient populations had survived and clung doggedly to old heresies that had disappeared even from the archives. “I gave them life and they turned their backs on me to join my enemy, the Chitan, the wretched Balis. Great is my wrath. We will drive them back behind high walls and we shall do everything to make them die in the most horrible way”: thus are they described in the Book of Abi.
It seemed impossible to find a way into these territories: soldiers patrolled relentlessly along the vertiginous walls that sealed them in hermetically, and they would shoot on sight. And you also had to make it through the minefield and the impermeable barrages of chevaux de frise that cut off the ghetto from the city; you had to dodge radar, cameras, watchtowers, dogs, and, what was absolutely inconceivable, the Vs. It was not simply a matter of rigorously sealing off a pestilential territory, like during a quarantine; it was vital to protect believers from the deadly miasmas of the Chitan. So to the heavy weapons was added the incommensurable power of prayers and maledictions.
Yet there was no lack of channels for making one’s way discreetly to the ghetto. They were the work of the Guild, the clan of merchants who supplied the ghettos illegally—at a high price, obviously, through dense networks of underground tunnels that were defended, so it was said, by Chitanous troglodytes whose ferocity knew no bounds. The two friends finally took the plunge: as matters stood, they might as well. They had used up all their savings, down to the last didi. After two years of forced infirmity, Ati had scant resources, so he had to sell a few good relics he’d obtained from the pilgrims he’d met in the mountains of Sîn.
At their office at city hall they fabricated a license under a false name and went before the local agency of the Guild, posing as merchants who wanted to do some good business with the ghetto. And one evening just after the watchman had passed on his round, they slipped out and soon found themselves standing by a fairly large well, cleverly camouflaged in the rear courtyard of a dilapidated house next to an ancient cemetery famous for all the bad rumors that circulated about it. A homunculus with perfect night vision was waiting for them; he immediately sat them in a gondola, pressed on a buzzer and two levers, and the vehicle began its dizzying descent into the bowels of the earth. More than ten hours later, after multiple detours through a cyclopean ant colony, which led them under the rampart and the minefield, they emerged into the ghetto known as The Renegades, the most extensive in the country; its very name could cause a sensitive believer to faint, and threw authorities into fits of hysteria. It was morning, and the sun was shining on the ghetto. The enclave sprawled over several hundred square chabirs to the south of Qodsabad, beyond the place known as The Seven Sisters of Desolation, a chain of seven misshapen and furrowed hills that ran along the edge of Ati’s neighborhood. The Renegades, whom the people referred to as the Regs, called their world Hur, and they were Hurs. Koa thought these words must be declensions of hu, a word from the habilé dialect, an ancient idiom that a few dozen people still spoke, badly, in the hinterlands to the north of Qodsabad, and which Koa had studied briefly. Hu or hi meant something like “house,” “wind,” or even “movement.” So Hur would be the open house, or the territory of freedom, and Hurs were the inhabitants of freedom, men who were free as the wind, or men carried by the wind. Koa remembered having learned, from an old habilé native, that his distant ancestors honored a god called Huros or Hurus, whom they represented as a bird, a royal falcon, which is indeed the image of a free creature flying on the wind. With time, and the erosion of things, Huros became Hurs, which led to Hur and hu. But the man didn’t know why, in those forgotten times, words could have two syllables like Huros, or even three like ha-bi-lé, or even four or more, up to ten, whereas nowadays all the languages you could find in Abistan (all clandestine, in case one needs reminding) only contained words with one syllable, or two at the most, including abilang, the sacred language with which Yölah had founded Abistan on the planet. While some people might have thought that over time and with the maturing of civilizations languages would get longer, and gain in significance and syllables, quite the contrary had happened: they had gotten shorter, smaller, reduced to collections of onomatopoeias and exclamations, quite sparse on top of it, words that sounded like primitive shouts and groans and in no way allowed for the development of complex thought or the access to superior worlds that thought would provide. At the end of ends, silence will reign, and it will weigh heavily, it will carry all the burden of things that have disappeared since the world began, and the even heavier burden of the things that never came to light, for want of sensible words to name them. This was a passing reflection, inspired by the chaotic atmosphere of the ghetto.
It may not be the topic at hand, but a short aside is necessary for the sake of History: many things were said about the ghettos and their trafficking. If they had muddled everything up in order to prevent everything, they wouldn’t have done things any differently. It was said that behind the Guild there lurked the shadows of the Honorable Hoc of the Just Brotherhood, director of the department of Protocol, Ceremonies and Commemorations, a massive personality who organized and governed the life of the country, and of his son Kil, known as the most enterprising of all the businesspeople in Abistan. In certain milieus there were even people who dared to suggest that the ghettos were an invention on the part of the Apparatus. The theory went that an absolutist regime could not exist and remain in power unless it controlled the country right down to its most secret thoughts—which was impossible to do, because in spite of everything they might invent in the way of control and repression, someday a dream would manage to take form and escape, and then opposition would be born, just where it wasn’t expected, and it would be reinforced through secret struggle, and the people, who are naturally inclined to lend their sympathy to those who combat tyranny, would support that opposition, provided victory seemed a credible hypothesis. If power was to preserve its absolute nature, it must make the first move and create the opposition itself, then have true opponents embrace it, people whom it would create and train if need be and whom it would then protect from their own opponents—extremists, dissidents, ambitious lieutenants, presumptive heirs eager to get things over with, all of whom would crop up out of nowhere as if by some miracle. A few anonymous crimes here and there would help support the war machine. To be one’s own enemy is a guarantee of victory no matter what. Of course it was difficult to arrange, but once it was under way it ran itself, everyone would believe what they were made to see, and no one would be free of suspicion and terror. In fact, many people would die from blows they never even saw coming. For people to believe and cling desperately to their faith, war is necessary—real, never-ending war, with countless casualties and an enemy no one can see, or who can be seen everywhere without being seen anywhere.
The absolute Enemy, against whom Abistan had been waging one Holy War after another since the Revelation, had thus an even more important vocati
on, that of making it possible for the religion of Yölah to occupy the length and breadth of heaven and earth. No one had ever seen that Enemy, but he truly did exist, in fact and in principle. If he had ever had a face, a name, a country, or borders with Abistan, it had been during those dark times before the Revelation. Who knew what he was made of? Every day the NeF reported on the war in breathless communiqués which the people read and discussed avidly, but as Abistanis never left their neighborhoods, and the country had no maps on which to visualize the combat zones, it might have seemed to some that the only true reality of war was in the NeF communiqués. It was frustrating, but as every tree is known by his own fruit, they knew the reality of war through the commemorative steles that dotted the landscape to honor great battles, bearing the names of the soldiers who had fallen as martyrs. The names of the disappeared, whose bodies were sometimes found, scattered here or there in a ravine, a river, or a mass grave, were posted in city halls and mockbas. The losses were terrible, and were ample testimony to the people’s attachment to their religion. Prisoners came to a sorry end; it was said that the army consigned them to camps where they soon died. Merchants told stories of how they had seen endless cohorts of captives along the roads being led to one or another of those destinations. Ati himself could testify to it: in Sîn he had seen soldiers thrown into ravines with their throats cut, and on the road home the terrifying spectacle of an endless column of prisoners being towed by an army motor brigade.
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