The Far Arena

by Richard Ben Sapir

  'Eugeni, it is safe. It is safe. It is correct. It is safe. Don't scream. Don't scream. Don't scream. You are safe. It is a product. We produce that light. It is a product. A safe product. Don't scream, Eugeni.'

  I slam an elbow into her giant stomach. It surrenders quickly, unlike a barbarian. There is someone standing at the door: a cannibal priest. And he is joined by another cannibal priest in white. They may be savage, but they cannot fight. One drops with a kick into his groin. I push it hard for he is so big. One would think he is unprepared. They will not get this fattened dinner without combat.

  They moved slowly for those who like human flesh. I lunge upward to smash him in the face. The bone breaks under my hand. The other throws his own yellow-haired hands in front of his big-toothed face.

  I am in a corridor with the entire ceiling aflame. Yet the people do not burn. I hobble through it, my bare feet on marble, the coarse, white toga flying about me. Marble, blessed marble for my bare feet. Stone I know of, touch I remember, feel that is mine, of my life.

  The corridor smells strange of that sharp incense. Suddenly, a metal door with no hands or pulleys opens like a giant mouth. Inside are people held in a small cubicle. They look strange in multicoloured tight tunics, some priests with cloth badges around their necks. And then something stranger up ahead.

  I had seen writing in strange language on Olava's parchment The forms of the letters were Roman, but the words had not been. Yet this word on a red board above a portal was in Roman language. It said, as clearly as though inscribed in the stone of the very Forum itself, 'He leaves'.

  I go through it. Strange iron stairs going up and down. I go down. More stairs. I go down. More stairs and more stairs and these I go down. These barbarians are awash in iron. Iron for stairs. What wealth! At last there is a portal with a door that has a square of glass in it.

  I push through this door into a large room with very bright flames. Light... like limbs of brightness on the ceiling. People in strange non-white vestments stare at me.

  I see a tree. Through a portal with doors of glass, entire doors of glass, I see a tree. I run to it, careful that the glass of the doors does not cut me. Across a smooth road I run, and my feet touch grass in the cool dusk. The bitter incense is gone and I feel cold in my loose, white robe, but I feel good.

  A low roar from above. A giant fat pilum with iron wings and iron body comes down from the sky, bellowing like bulls. It breathes fire from its wings. I run to the tree and cling to the bark of the trunk, making my body small beneath the bare boughs with their beginning buds. I will hold. If it takes me in its mouth, yet I will hold. I will hold as it swallows me, and all I shall remember will be holding.

  It passes over me and goes away. And I cling to the tree, even as I get cold out here in the coming night.

  'Eugeni. Do not be afraid.' It is Olava. She is behind me and above me.

  Nineteen

  Lew had the answer, but, even as he explained it, he knew it was only a matter of time before he would not be able to sustain the scientific seclusion he needed most of all.

  'You see,' said Lew, ‘what we hope to achieve is a physical, low-temperature cure for emotional illness.'

  'Cure, Dr McCardle?' a university official asked suspiciously.

  'Not exactly a cure, but a treatment rather. You have physical surgery on the brain, you have analysis and various other therapies, this is cryonic therapy. Cure was an inappropriate term.'

  ‘I have heard stories.'

  ‘You mean sexual excesses by a Houghton executive?' 'Things to that effect, and also that he came in frozen in a block of ice.'

  Lew laughed. 'As for being frozen in a block of ice, you can touch him yourself. He's living. So much for that story. As for the sex story, back in America they think of Scandinavians as being sexually promiscuous. This whole story came about because indeed he was undressed, suffering frostbite in major portions of the body. What Dr Petrovitch found was a simultaneous altering of the mental state. We at Houghton think this might be an important breakthrough. That's why we fund it. That's why we give it support. That's why we support you. It's no secret that today oil companies, because of the energy crisis, are considered in some quarters as scavenger ghouls. We need to be involved in the betterment of all mankind, and we at Houghton think mental illness is the great crippler of man.'

  Lew paused for proper solemnity.

  'Perhaps someday, because of the work we do here, people won't go nmning around exposing their entire bodies to the snow. Some may think it amusing that a person is so mentally disturbed he will disrobe in winter weather. I don't. Neither does my company.'

  'I don't either,' said the university official. 'Not at all. I hear he speaks a strange language.' 'No,' said Lew. 'Italian. A dialect.'

  'Yes. Well, of course. Of course. Good. And continue the good work. We hope the work, uh, continues. Yes. Thank you,' said the official. It had gone down. This time.

  Lew found Semyon on the sun porch, exulting, describing the damage done to the hospital attendant.

  'Do you know what it took to throw a punch like that, Lew, twenty-two days after consciousness and thirty-seven days after the first brain wave? Lew, our Eugeni is beautiful. I was so proud, Lew.'

  'Our scientific seclusion is being jeopardized, Semyon. Severely. I have only one solution.'

  'If only I could smoke, I'm so excited. I feel sorry for the injured attendant but, Lew, do you know what goes into throwing a punch like our Roman did? Eh? Are you aware of the human body? Everything has to work.'

  'Go ahead and smoke.'

  'Here? We have agreed this is forbidden.'

  'He's seen electric lights and an airplane. Do you think it's going to shock him to see you smoking?'

  Petrovitch lit up, inhaling with deep satisfaction. Outside it was dark, but for the blinking lights of the airplanes coming into the nearby airport. Now he noticed them. Now everyone noticed them. Now he realized they should have taken out the light switch instead of taping it over. Now everything was clear.

  'What we need now, Semyon, is total seclusion. We can get a cabin with everything you need. He's physically perfect, you've got to admit that. Then we continue our research in proper seclusion.'

  'I don't know. I don't like to be spread out. Thanks to you, we're just beginning to enjoy having everything in one building.'

  'What about the blood? Have you isolated the poison yet? What happens when people start hearing about the eternal life fluid you've got here? If you think people acted funny about cryonics before, I'll wager you can't keep a sample free and clear. And then you'll never find out what it is.'

  'We know what it is. It's a glycerol compound. I've had that for days. It's a sort of cellular antifreeze.' ' 'I thought it was poison.’

  'Absolutely. They would use this as a drug in ancient days, as a very effective poison. I want our Roman to verify he was given poison. But he was reluctant to talk about it, and we decided not to press the issue.'

  'Do you want the storm of publicity while you delicately try to determine the exact compound, the exact formula used in the ancient world?'

  'We know it better than they do. We know exactly what glycerol compound was used. That's not what remains to be discovered. What we're doing now, and with discretion I can assure you that, is having various laboratories check out the rate of thermal reduction. In other words, at what exact point does the temperature stop the killing process. This is being done with organs, cells, et cetera. Sort of farming it out, so to speak, with, of course, discretion. No one knows the magnitude of our achievement. When the results come in, we feed it into our computer, and we get the probable time and temperature. You see, there is a point at which different cells will accept this formula. It is the point we are looking for. It is not the solution. It is the point. I don't think notoriety could hurt us now. I don't want it, but it is beyond the stage of damage.'

  'That's too bad for Olava,' said Lew.

  'Why?' asked Semyon, a su
dden chilling to his warm glow.

  ‘I thought that in a cabin, Olava might let her hair down a bit. I think she likes you, but living at Saint Sabina's with all those nuns feeding her horror stories about Russians ...'

  'How do you know she likes me?'

  'I don't. I just sort of sensed something.'

  'What did you sense?'

  'Nothing, Semyon. Look, she's a nun. She's probably a lesbian as you said.'

  'No. No. Many normal people are nuns. Olava is a nun. What makes you think she likes me? I know professionally she respects me.'

  'Sort of a feeling, Semyon.'

  'No,' said Petrovitch. He dismissed this with all the finality of a beggar with his hand open saying it was the last chance to give.

  ‘I think so, Semyon, and I think she could use a vacation. She hardly sleeps. She works all the time. She's all business. I think that poor girl needs a rest, or we may have a mental patient for real.'

  'You didn't say why you specifically thought she liked me,' said Petrovitch. it's no on the cabin?'

  if Olava thinks it would be a good idea, I could go along with it. Exactly why do you think she is attracted to me?'

  With Petrovitch's conditional approval, McCardle broached the idea to Sister Olav and got a wall thicker, harder, and more impenetrable than anything even a Roman engineer could build.

  It was impossible at this time to expose the patient to any further confusion such as moving.

  'Dr McCardle,' whispered Sister Olav, who had dismissed the nurse and taken over the night attendancy herself, 'our cultural parachute has broken. I am going to explain everything as soon as he wakes. This is not time to go gallivanting about. Impossible.'

  The building was called a hospital where people went to get well from diseases. Yet there was no wine or cheer here, only whiteness I was not to go anywhere without Lewus or Semyonus or Olava. But if I did, I should show people a plaque pinned to me when I got lost. They assured me I was not a slave. There were no slaves any more. I should answer questions as well as I could. I could have whatever I wanted. But I should not wander alone and, if I felt any illness, I should tell them immediately, especially the physician Semyonus.

  I had slept in the ice of the North for nearly two milliennia. And they, through science, awakened me. All my friends were dead and so were my enemies. My son was dead and if he had issue, they were dead as were the children of their children, and their children's children: grown old and dead and decomposed so that not even their dust remained to mark their passing. No one was alive who knew their names, nor was anything they felt or thought or did remaining except by some artefact, if that. And even then, people would not know them, nor even their names.

  The endless legions that ruled the world were gone. Time had done completely what no foreign general dared fancy in his wildest hopes. The senate was gone. The emperors were gone. There was no patrician class or plebeian class and, most of all, there were no more slaves. Only some stone remained.

  Olava wanted to know about my daily life, the physician Semyonus about anything I might have eaten at the German Sea, and Lewus just wanted to know how I felt and kept advising me that I shouldn't speak to anyone but Olava. Both the physician Semyonus and Lewus spoke through Olava. Other women, those who did slave work but were not slaves because there were no more slaves, wore cosmetics. Olava did not.

  My thigh healed well. It was not beyond belief that Semyonus had studied in Egypt. He said he had not, but in a workers' paradise where all men owned everything and there was justice and hope and security for all. I asked why he did not stay there, and Olava translated with a smile. Lewus's smile was a mask over worry. Even on a barbaric face, one could tell when a smile ended too quickly or stayed strong too long as though following orders.

  In many different ways, the physician Semyonus kept asking me what I ate or drank the day before the German Sea. And I repeated how the cohort marched me to the sea, stripped me, and left me to fight the cold. He said he had found a poisonous substance within me. How did I get it?

  'A man dying of cold does not record his menu of the day,' I said. 'It was legion food, not peacock's tongue.' If Macer chose to save me pain who was I to risk his career?

  Of course, if I were to believe everything, Macer was centuries upon centuries dead. And today growling monsters in the sky are chariots with a new form of power, and the burning ceilings were another form of power. And waste was flushed away by the flick of a handle that sent it into a plumbing system superior to Rome's - for the barbarians no less. And there were no more slaves. Of course, I would believe what I would believe, and until then, less than a fortnight ago, a Roman tribune showed me mercy, and I would not betray him now.

  They brought me to a porch with much glass and screens of iron, where the sun, blessed sun, unchanged, warmed me as it had always warmed me. We sat on chairs with supports that went up to the shoulder and I ate cheese and small hard cakes with salt and drank water.

  'How did you feel about killing other people?' she asked. She always wore the black robe of her cult. She was a sort of virgin priestess.

  'I didn't kill people,' I said.

  'Didn't you say you killed more than twelve score in the arena T 'In the arena, yes. If you want to call that killing.' 'What do you call it?' 'The arena.'

  'You do not consider that killing?’

  'Where people make fortunes, where whole political groups stake their future, where entire legions scour the world for animals and captives, and where spectacles unimagined in more barbaric places occur. People died of course, but I would not call a good match killing, any more than I would call harvesting wheat stealing from the ground.'

  'Are you angry?’

  'I am a bit annoyed suffering the stupidities of a barbarian who insists I am not a slave.' 'You are not a slave, Eugeni.' 'Then farewell. I go.'

  'But no one here speaks your language but me.' 'One chain or another, this freedman sits here to do your bidding, master.' 'I wish you wouldn't do that.' 'I am sorry, but it is the truth,' 'Please don't do that.' 'Truth is truth.' 'No. What you're doing.' ‘I am sitting.' 'No. That.' 'What?’

  She nodded to my loins. I removed my hand that had been stroking them. I wore tight white pants, fastened by a lever that pulled up, and a white shirt. The round latches on the blouse were called buttons, and when you learned to slip them into the hole sideways, they fastened easily.

  'Good,' she said, but suddenly she looked perturbed again and asked that I stop stroking my loins. This I did not understand, since I could understand her objection if it were her I were touching, not me.

  'I have slaves, or had slaves, they were sold, and they could touch whatever part of themselves they wished, Olava.'

  She explained it was custom in her civilization not to touch certain parts in public. I asked if I could touch my knee. It was acceptable to touch the knee and face also.

  I could see the chariot clearly through the glass. It was far off and made of shiny steel. Its steel wings did not move, and it made smoke behind it. People rode inside, like in a ship's hold, I was told. It stayed up without falling except when something went wrong. It always let the people out once they wanted to get out. It never let them out when it was high up. Men steered it from inside.

  'You have not mentioned your early life, Eugeni. How did you become a gladiator?'

  'I was a slave,' I said. The machine run by men that went through the air disappeared. It was not burned by the sun because it was too far away. The lights from the ceiling were operated by a lever that was very simple. I pulled it, and the ceiling lit, yet not so brightly because it competed with sunlight. Lest a slave be above the ceiling watching to manipulate a hidden torch, I brushed my hand lightly over the lever not touching it. No light. Then appearing to walk away, I suddenly pushed the lever, and the light went on simultaneously. The light was not done with slaves.

  'You said you knew how to read and write.'

  'My mother was Greek,' I said.


  'Was she born a slave?'

  ‘No, and neither was I.'

  'You sound angry.'

  ‘I am not angry. Anger is a luxury no man can afford.’ 'How did you become a slave?'

  She asked this as though she talked to while away the morning hours. I could not believe the presumption of the woman, unless of course a barbarian is a barbarian, never to understand. Then again, perhaps in her mind this question was just another one of a thousand questions asked me. It occurred to me then that Domitian might truly be a genius. Given a man with hidden fortunes, given my former political value in the cauldron of Roman politics, and given Domitian's cunning, why not this awesome charade just for me? That might be the key to all of this.

  It was logical. Why waste a gladiator of my public worth in some petty vengeance at the German Sea? My death alone could be a fortune. Given that it was a charade, how did Domitian make all this work?

  Probably I was in a drugged state. The poison given by the officer was on Domitian's orders. It made my mind susceptible to manipulation. I had seen a young girl lift a heifer under this sort of influence. It happened in Capua.

  I concealed my excitement with a yawn. This would explain the interest of the physician Semyonus in what I ate before the German Sea. He wanted to make sure I was fully drugged lest I realize where I was. I could be in Rome for all 1 knew. The march to the German Sea could have been in my mind.

  And why do all this, Domitian? To remove my cunning, to strip it away neatly so that I babble away as to what I love and hate and fear and as to where my secret monies are ? What a wonderful way to find out that I would trade it all for Miriamne and Petronius. What a wonderful way to make me a slave. What a brilliant thrust. Perhaps it was because I had acquired instant cunning or that, if I were not born with it, I would not have lived so long. But my attack against him should be instantaneous. And against it, Domitian had to be defenceless. The more he believed he succeeded against me, the deeper I would cut.