Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  “I’m sure your phantoms are marvelous,” said Jef, pretending to yawn. “I’m going back to the Palace now, I have a family meeting … You stay well.”

  Jef did not appear for the next night of the Venus seminar. Julian’s house and yard were densely packed, because word had gotten out about the magic lantern and its stunning effects. The little house roiled and surged with metalsmiths, sculptors, mural painters, orators, men of medicine, men of the law … Even a few women had dared to show up, with their brothers or husbands as escorts.

  Practical Jeffrey had sent his apology for leaving the school, written in his sturdy, workmanlike calligraphy. He’d also shipped along a handsome banquet, and, as a topper, a wooden keg of the finest long-aged corn liquor. All the other students were hugely impressed by Jef’s farewell gesture. Everyone toasted him and agreed that, despite his singular absence from the proceedings, Practical Jeffrey was a gentleman of high style.

  So the second night started lively and, lavishly lubricated by Jef’s magnanimity, it got livelier yet.

  This night, the students put on a series of dramatic skits, performed in Old Proper English. These episodes involved the myths and heroes of remote antiquity: the Man who walked on the Moon, the Man who flew alone across the ocean, the Man who flew around without any machines at all, and was made of steel, and fought crime (he was always popular).

  These theatricals were an unprecedented success, because the crowd was so dense, and so drunk, and because the graceless Dandy William Idaho was not there to overact and spoil anything.

  Three of the masked Men in Red graced the scene with their presence, which made life three times more dangerous than life had been the night before. Julian watched them, smiling in his best mellow fashion, to hide his pride and his dread.

  All his glamorous, shining young men, striking their poses on the tiny stage, with their young, strong, beautiful bodies … Maybe it could be said that Julian had saved them from deadly danger. It might also be said that he was fiddling as the city burned.

  Julian knew that a settling of accounts was near. A time of such tension needed only one provocation. An obscure clash by night, a sudden insult offered, an insult stingingly returned, and Dandy William Idaho had been beaten senseless in the street. Bili was crushed, spurned, trampled on, and spat upon. Bili had never been the kind of kid you could hit just once.

  Then the troubles started. Bitter quarrels, flung stones near glass houses … The police restored order through the simple pretext of attacking the foreigners. Everybody knew that the foreigners in the city were thieves, because so many had been forced to be thieves. No one of good sense and property was going to defend any thieves.

  The police richly enjoyed the luscious irony of the police robbing thieves. So the police kicked in the doors of some of the wealthier foreigners, and seized everything they had.

  Julian spent the night of that seminar activating an electrical generator. Electrical generators had been true fetish objects for the remote founders of Selder. Periodically, as a gesture of respect to antiquity, some scholar would disinter an old generator and rebuild another new generator in the same shape. So Julian owned a generator, packed in its moldering, filthy grease. It had elaborate, hand-etched schematics to explain how to work it.

  This electrical night was not nearly so successful as the earlier seminar nights. After much cursing and honest puzzlement, the students managed to get the generator assembled. They even managed to crank it. It featured some spots of bare metal that stung the bare hand with a serpent’s bite. Other than that, it was merely an ugly curio. The generator did not create any visible mystical powers or spiritual transcendence. Society did not advance to a higher plane of being.

  Next day, the emboldened police repressed some of the darker elements of the old regime. These arrogant time-servers were notorious for their corruption. So the police beat the fancy crooks like dogs and kicked them out the door, and the crowd cheered that action, too.

  People spoke quite openly of who would be serving in the Other Man’s new regime, and what kind of posts they would hold.

  The Favorite for the post of Godfather acted the fine gentleman: He urged calm, made dignified noises, and temporized. In the meantime, the gate guards had been bribed. Exiles poured into the city. The sentence of exile had been the merciful punishment of the late Godfather’s later years. Now it became clear that the Godfather had merely exported resentments to a future date. These exiles—those among them who survived—had become hard, weathered men. They knew what they had lost. They also knew what they had to regain.

  So there were more clashes, this time with gangs of hardened cutthroats. The Favorite pulled up his stakes and fled in terror.

  Julian spent that night explaining how to use electricity and virtuality to connect the soul of Man with the planet Venus.

  There was a large crowd for his last hermetic ceremony, and not because it was such an interesting topic. People had fled to Julian’s refuge because the city was convulsed with fear.

  It had always been said of the people of Selder that they would shed their own blood rather than lose one drop of water. Like many clichés, that was true. The smothered resentments of a long, peaceful reign were all exposed to the open air. That meant beatings, break-ins, and back-alley backstabbings.

  The elections were held in conditions of desperate haste, because only one man was fit to restore order.

  To his credit, the new Godfather took prompt action. He averted anarchy through the simple tactic of purging all his opponents.

  Julian surrendered peaceably. He had rather imagined that he might have to. The grass that bent before the wind would stand upright again, he reasoned. The world was still scarred with the windblown wrecks of long-dead forests.

  Prison was dark, damp, and dirty. The time in prison weighed heavily on a man’s soul. Julian had nothing to write with, nothing to read. He never felt the sun, or breathed any fresh air.

  Julian’s best friends in the underground cell were small insects. Over a passage of ten centuries, cave insects had somehow found the many wet passages beneath the city. Most of these wild denizens were smaller than lice, pale, long-legged, and eyeless. Julian had never realized there were so many different breeds of them. The humble life sheltered within the earth had suffered much less than the life exposed to mankind on its surface.

  At length—at great length—Julian had a prison visitor.

  “You will forgive Us,” stated the Godfather, “for trying a philosopher’s well-known patience. There were certain disorders consequent on Our accession, and a great press of necessary public business. Word has reached Our ears, however, that you have been shouting and pleading with your jailers. Weeping and begging like a hysterical woman, they tell Us.”

  “I’m not a well man now, your eminence. I cannot thrive without the vibrations of the sun, the stars, and planets.”

  “Surely you didn’t imagine that We would ever forget a classmate.”

  “No, sir.”

  “They tell Us you have been requesting—no, sobbing and pleading—for some literary material,” said the Godfather. He nodded at his silent bodyguard, who passed a sheaf of manuscripts through the carved stone pillars of the cell. “You will find these documents of interest. These are the signed confessions of your fellow conspirators.”

  Julian leafed through the warrants. “It’s good to see that my friends kept up their skills in calligraphy.”

  “We took the liberty of paging through the archives of our predecessor, as well,” said the Godfather. He produced a set of older documents. “You will recognize the striking eloquence of these death sentences. You were in top form back then. These documents of state are so grandiloquent, so closely argued, and in such exquisite English. They killed certain members of my own family—but as legal court documents, they were second to none.”

  Julian sighed. “I just couldn’t do that any longer.”

  “You won’t have to do it,” the Go
dfather allowed. “You wrote such sustainable classics here that We won’t need any new death sentences. We can simply reuse your fine, sturdy documents, over and over.”

  “It was my duty to write sentences,” said Julian. “Sentences are a necessity of statecraft. Let me formally express my remorse.”

  “You express your remorse now,” remarked the Godfather. “At the time, you were taking great pride in your superb ability to compose a sentence.”

  “I admit my misdeeds, sir. I am contrite.”

  “More recently, you and your friends were plotting against Our election,” said the Godfather patiently. “As a further patent insult to Our dignity, you had yourself crowned as the ‘President of the United States.’ There are witnesses to that event.”

  “That was a diversion,” said Julian. “That was part of a magic ceremony. To help me electrically reach the virtual image of the planet Venus.”

  “Juli, have you become a heretic, or just a maniac? You should read the allegations in these confessions! They are fantastic. Your fellow conspirators say that you believe that men can still fly. That you conjured living phantoms in public. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “People talk,” said Julian. “In a cage, people will sing.”

  “You dressed your slave as a golden goddess and you made people worship her.”

  “That was her costume,” said Julian. “She enjoyed that. I think it was the only time I’ve ever seen her happy.”

  “Juli, We are not your classmate any more. We have become your Godfather. It is unclear to Us what you thought you were gaining by this charade. In any case, that will go on no longer. Your cabal has been arrested. Your house, and all that eerie rubbish inside it, has been seized. In times this dark and troubled, We have no need for epicene displays. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now tell Us what We are supposed to do with you.”

  “Let me go,” said Julian, sweating in the stony chill. “Release me, and I will sing your praises. Some day history will speak of you. You will want history to say something noble and decent about you.”

  “That is a tempting offer,” mused the Godfather. “I would like history to say this of me: that I was an iron disciplinarian who scourged corruption, and struck his enemies with hammer blows. Can you arrange that?”

  “I can teach rhetoric. Someone will say that for you, and they’ll need great skill.”

  “I hate a subtle insult,” said the Godfather. “I can forgive an enemy soldier who flings a spear straight at me, but a thing like that is just vile.”

  “I don’t want to die here in this stone cage!” screeched Julian. “I can write a much better groveling confession than these other wretches! A man of your insight knows that confessions are nothing but rhetoric! Of course they all chose to indict me! How could they not? They are men with families to consider, while I am foreign-born and I have no one! We’re all intelligent men! We all know that if someone must die, then I’m the best to die. I’m one against four! But surely you must know better!”

  “Of course I know better,” said the Godfather. “You imagined that, as men of letters, you were free of the healthy atmosphere of general fear so fit for everyone else. That is not true. Men of letters have to obey Us, they have to serve Us loyally, and they have to know that their lives are forfeit. Just like everyone else.”

  “ ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the hood,’ ” said Julian.

  “You always had a fertile mind for an apposite quote. We are inclined to spare you.”

  Light bloomed in the dampest corner of Julian’s mind. “Yes, of course, of course I should be spared! Why should I die? I never raised my hand against you. I never even raised my voice.”

  “Like the others, you must write your full and complete confession. It will be read aloud to the assembled court. Then, a year in the field with the army will toughen you up. You’re much too timid to fight, but Our army needs its political observers. We need clearly written reports from the field. And the better my officers, the worse they seem to write!”

  “Is there a war? Who has attacked us?”

  “There is no war just as yet,” said the Godfather. “But of course they will attack Us, unless We prove to them that they dare not attack. So, we plan a small campaign to commence Our reign. One insolent village, leveled. You’ll be in no great danger.”

  “I’m not a coward.”

  “Yes, in fact, you are a coward, Julian. You happened to live in a time when you could play-act otherwise. Those decadent times have passed. You’re a coward, and you always were. So, make a clean breast of your many failings. We pledge that you too will be spared. You might as well write your own confessions, for your sins are many and you know them better than anyone.”

  “Once I do that for you, you’ll spare my friends.”

  “We will. We don’t say they will suck the blood of the taxpayer anymore, but yes, they will be spared.”

  “You’ll spare my students.”

  “Fine young men. They were led astray. Young men of good family are natural officer material.”

  “You’ll give me back my house and my servant.”

  “Oh, you won’t need any house, and as for your wicked witch … You should read the thunderation that rings around her little head! Your friends denounced you—but in their wisdom, they denounced her much, much more violently. They all tell Us that this lamentable situation is not your fault at all. They proclaim that she seduced you to it, that she turned your head. She drove you mad, she drugged you. She used all the wicked wiles of a foreign courtesan. She descended to female depths of evil that no mere man can plumb.”

  Julian sat on his stony bench for a moment. Then he rose again and put his hands around the bars. “Permit me to beg for her life.”

  “To spare her is not possible. We can’t publish these many eloquent confessions without having her drowned in the Cistern right away. It would be madness to let a malignant creature like that walk in daylight for even an hour.”

  “She did nothing except what I trained her to do! She’s completely harmless and timid. She’s the meekest creature alive. You are sacrificing an innocent for political expediency. It’s a shame.”

  “Should We spare this meek creature and execute you, and four friends? She was a lost whore, and the lowest of the low, as soon as her own soldiers failed to protect her from the world. You want to blame someone for the cold facts? Blame yourself, professor. Let this be a good lesson to you.”

  “You are breaking a bird on an anvil here. That’s easy for you to do, but it’s a cruelty. You’ll be remembered for that. It will weigh on your conscience.”

  “It will not,” said the Godfather. “Because We will kindly offer to spare the witch’s life. Then We will watch your friends in a yapping frenzy to have her killed. Your noble scholars will do everything they can to have her vilified, lynched, dumped into the Cistern, and forgotten forever. They will blame her lavishly in order to absolve themselves. Then, when you meet each other again, you men with a cause, you literati—that’s when the conscience will sting.”

  “So,” said Julian, “it’s not enough that we’re fools, or that we’re cowards, or that we failed to defend ourselves. We also have to be evil.”

  “You are evil. Truly, you are fraudulent and wicked men. We should wash you from the fabric of society in a cleansing bath of blood. But We won’t do that. Do you know why? Because We understand necessity. We are responsible. We know what the state requires. We think these things through.”

  “You could still spare us. You could forgive us for the things we wrote and thought. You could be courageous and generous. That is within your great power.”

  The Godfather sighed. “That is so easy for a meager creature like you to say, and so difficult for Us to do. We will tell you a little parable about that. Soon, this cell door will open. Now: When this door is opened, place your right hand in this doorframe. We will have this husky bodyguard sla
m this iron door on your fingers. You will never scribble one mischievous word again. If you do that, Julian, that would be ‘courageous and generous.’ That would be the bravest act of your life. We will spare the life of your mystic witch for that noble act.”

  Julian said nothing.

  “You’re not volunteering to be so courageous and generous? You can marry her: You have Our blessing. We will perform that ceremony Ourselves.”

  “You are right. I don’t want her,” said Julian. “I have no further need for her. Let her be strangled in all due haste and thrown down the well. Let the hungry fish nibble her flesh, let her body be turned into soup and poured through the greenhouses. She came to me half-dead, and every day I gave to her was some day she would never have seen! Let me see that sunlight she will never see again. I hate this cage. Let me out of here.”

  After his release from darkness, very little happened to Julian that he found of any interest. After two years of service, Julian managed to desert the army of Selder. There had been no chance of that at first, because the army was so eager, bold, and well disciplined.

  However, after two years of unalloyed successes, the army suffered a sharp reverse at the walls of Buena Vista. The hardscrabble villagers there were too stubborn, or perhaps too stupid, to be cowed by such a fine army. To the last man, woman, and child, they put up a lethal resistance. So the village was left in ruins, but so was the shining reputation of the Godfather and his troops.

  Julian fled that fiery scene by night, losing any pursuers in the vast wild thickets of cactus and casuarina. Soon afterward, he was captured by the peasants of Denver. There was little enough left of that haunted place. However, the Denver peasants sold him to a regional court with a stony stronghold in the heights of Vale.

  Julian was able to convince the scowling peers of that realm that they would manage better with tax records and literate official proclamations. That was true: They did improve with a gloss of civility. They never let him leave, but they let him live.