Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage

by R. A. Lafferty

  “‘How did it all happen to me?’ you ask. ‘How did I come to be Scheherazade?’ Oh, I read an advertisement in a magazine and I was totally hooked by it. The ad read: ‘Here is the job that has been waiting almost twelve centuries for the right person to fill it. You may be that right person. Travel to exotic spots in both time and space. Write mainly for one person only, the highest ruler in the world, one who is the master of a dozen kingdoms. Write True Literature in the Perfect Conditions for it. Write masterpieces that will be acclaimed as such for a thousand years. Live in the most enchanting city that has ever been on earth. In this job you will wear diamonds and pearls, and your name will be known to all educated persons everywhere.’ So I answered the ad in Writer's World, and I got the job.

  “It didn't bother me too much when they blindfolded me and pushed me down on the back seat of the car and sat on me to keep me hidden while we rode to my embarkation point. Nor was I very much shook when they told me ‘We won't guarantee to get you back here when the job is finished, if it is ever finished. All we will guarantee is that if you are marooned, you will be marooned in an interesting place.’ ‘That's good enough for me,’ I said. ‘If I will write masterpieces that will be remembered for a thousand years, the details don't matter.’ And after a short (I thought) and bumpy ride from my embarkation point to my destination, I was doubly delighted when they removed my blindfold and I immediately saw that I was in Magic Baghdad of the Ninth Century.

  “When they branded me as ‘slave’ with a white-hot iron, I said ‘Oh, how delightful! I bet none of the girls at home have ever been branded ‘slave’. I bet none of them have ever been hung up by the wrists and given fifty lashes with the knout.’ They didn't hang me up by the thumbs because writing was to be my job and I needed my thumbs unbroken to hold either a stylus or a quill. There is the knout there hanging on my wall. I bought it with my first pay check for a souvenir. Isn't it a beauty! They still come in every evening and string me up and give me fifty lashes, and it is the high point of my day. I was delighted with my job, and I still remain delighted with it after more than two and a half years.”

  Scheherazade did wear diamonds and pearls on this job, a diamond in each ear, and a pearl in her navel. She wore little else, but in the eternal summertime that is Baghdad she needed little else.

  “I am in Baghdad,” Scheherazade spoke in her throaty, dreamy chuckle. “I am drenched in Magic Baghdad. I can look down into its streets and alleys from all four sides of my ‘garret’ here. I am drenched in its uncommon common people and in their rich color of everything. There are at least four colors in Baghdad that are found nowhere else in the world. They send me up bowls of barley soup and trays of Syrian pastry. They want to fatten me up to the style here, but I remain chubby only and not really fat. That is a thing that bugs out my employer, the Boy-Caliph Harun al-Rashid. I'm married to him, of course, but so are one thousand other girls. He thinks that I would be perfect, perfect, if only I were fatter, fatter.

  “And I really do write immortal masterpieces here; that's the main thing. I’ve written nearly a thousand of them. I'm the ideal chronicler of the Baghdad Scene.”

  “Why the goats?” I asked her.

  “Oh, for parchment and vellum to write on. And for milk from the old mother goat. The beasts are great friends of mine, and I model many of my characters on them. ‘People of Baghdad’ and ‘goats of anywhere at all’ have minds that are very much alike. I'd rather I didn't have to kill them to get the skins, but so far science hasn't found a better way.

  “I get my ink from a squid in the fountain below. He is a cranky old male, and he stings me viciously once a week when I milk him for the ink. I model some of my characters on him too. Did I tell you that Baghdad People and squids have minds that are very much alike? My masterpieces are always in that most limited of editions, a single manuscript copy only; and it is always given to the Boy-Caliph, the Caliph of all the world. He has it read out loud, though, and the story-tellers memorize it and tell it all over the Caliphate. This is a refining process. My masterpieces aren't nearly as good when they leave my hand as they become after they’ve rolled off the tongues of a hundred storytellers; and my reputation wouldn't be as high if it were based on my own words rather than on my words as refined by the storytellers. I wrote, for instance, a series of adventures: ‘The Voyages of Slattery the Sailor’. I named my lead character after a Joe Slattery who used to ship out of Galveston the year I lived there. Wow! Could he ever tell those salt-water lives and lies! But the story-tellers changed the name to ‘The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor’. Somehow their adapted name goes better.”

  “I am Sindbad,” I said with a touch of pride.

  “I don't think so,” Scheherazade murmured doubtfully in her pleasantly fuzzy voice. (All Baghdad voices have this touch of fuzziness in them.) “The real Sindbad has Sea-Weed growing on him in the private regions of his body. Hold him, Blue Moon, and I'll just have a look! Well, I look and I look, but what do I see? Well, it is, and it isn't. The Sea-Weed is genuine, but I believe that it's an implant job. And I believe that you did it, Blue Moon. Oh, this isn't Sindbad. This is some sort of forgery.”

  “If my husband isn't Sindbad, then there isn't any Sindbad,” my delightful wife Blue Moon maintained. “These are the same Sea-Weeds that grew on the Original Sindbad. I extirpated them from him and fixed him so he could never grow Sea-Weed again. I doubt if he realizes the extent of his disaster yet. And then I implanted the genuine Sea-Weed into my husband John Thunderson. As a result of that, he has become the real and genuine Sindbad, for the Sea-Weed is growing on him in very healthy fashion. If my husband the Master-Spy John Thunderson isn't Sindbad, then there isn't any Sindbad anywhere.”

  “The death of a character!” Scheherazade cried with a sad smile and a pang in her voice. “Only a masterpiecer knows that her characters are real and that they die real deaths. Oh, did you hear the latest edict of our latest Caliph Al-Amin? He has ordered that slaves be flogged no more, and that former slaves be flogged no more either. After today there will be neither slaves nor former slaves, you know. The whole idea of slavery will be forbid and must be forgotten. I'm not sure that the people will accept this. I'll miss it myself. I may have to hire some person to flog me, and the flogger will probably charge a high price for it since it'll be forbidden and illegal.”

  “I'll miss it too,” said my wife Blue Moon, “but I’ve been missing it for some hours now. My husband, this wonderful man here, doesn't understand about things like that. In this he has been neglecting me.”

  There is a fountain here, and a pool where the life-bubbles rise to the top and may be caught in nets. But if ever a ruler or Caliph is too prodigal of the life-bubbles, then the fountain may run dry of them and produce them no longer. Then what will the people do? Then how will justice be served?

  Legends of the Persian Gulf. Moisha El-Gazma.

  “When I came to Baghdad, one of the first things I noticed was that the Earth is very thin here,” the Masterpiecer Scheherazade said. “The Earth is very thin, and the demons are very near. They come up out of the ground and out of the rivers almost at will, and they have free run of the place. I already knew about that stuff. I was into devils and demons the year I lived in Los Angeles. Oh, it was the devils who introduced the floggings and the Syrian cookies too. It's all fun, but it wears a little bit thin, even as the Earth does here. The new Caliph Al-Amin is right to ban the slaveries and the floggings. He'll be right if he bans quite a few other things. But I'm not sure that the people will accept his reforms. The magic of Baghdad is black magic, and it is tainted through and through. But, as a sort of magician-ess, I am hooked on it.”

  “I love it,” Blue Moon said. “I don't think it's a taint at all.”

  “I love it too, and of course it's tainted,” Scheherazade said. “The Syrian cookies (they’re made of poppy flour, you know) what have they done to me? The stuff is in so many forms. You are hooked on it too, my dear Blue Moon? Now the
fact is that there is very little of this stuff on the other worlds. Gaea-Earth here is really the Pandora World, the Pandora Box, the world of the legend that has so many depths. And the truest and deepest of them is the one that goes all the way to the center of the Earth. This world is the Pandora Box, and all the devils from all the other worlds were brought here and imprisoned in the center of this world. I'm not sure whether this was before people were made or afterwards. Do either of you know what load that wagon being pulled by four donkeys in the lane below us is carrying?”

  “It looks like iridescent slime, at the same time beautiful and repellent,” I said.

  “It is a wagon-load of life-bubbles,” Scheherazade said. “These strange bubbles rise to the surface of a fountain-pool in the rivers just outside the Walls of Baghdad. There are more then ten thousand of them on that wagon, and they will be used for the changing of the Caliphs. When a person is to be executed, either by hanging or beheading or being torn about by wild horses, the judge, (in his infinite compassion) will sometimes allow one of these life-bubbles to be bestowed on him. Then he will live a total life, ninety years long, a packed and eventful and most pleasant life. He will have progeny and pleasure and fulfillment, and he will have this wonderful life all in ten seconds before he is executed. This is in compensation: a longer and fuller life given to him in place of a (usually) shorter and skinnier life taken away from him. But there are some people who are uneasy about these pleasant and intruded bargains, and they call them ‘Devil's Gifts’. These life-bubbles are found nowhere except in the one fountain-pool on this one world, Gaea-Earth. And perhaps they are devilish, for our world has been called ‘The Devils’ Own World’.

  “All the ten billions of devils, winged demons, cloven-foot clooties, pandemoniums, Ifrits, Morlocks, Ainsprids, Djinns, from all the seventeen worlds were imprisoned in the center of this world, and their influence oozes out. But in every version of this true legend, the Pandora Box has a weak place where it may be opened. Sometimes it is opened only a crack, and sometimes it is thrown wide open. But the Magic City Baghdad the Holy is that weak place in the world, that crack where the devils climb out and ravage things again. The ones who sneak out first are gentle-seeming. Lady Narkos is one of them. She is gentle and insinuating. She lives in the Syrian cookies and in other things, in certain pipe smoke and in certain white powder; and we eat her body when we partake of any of her habitations. And the size-changing and shape-changing Ifrits seem to be comic characters; but they come from hell and thither they must return. Say, I could have a ship that sails through a reef into a different sort of ocean; and then it begins to sail under the land, and it goes down and down as though into a vortex, into the center-of-the-world sea full of devils. And I could have a   —  ”

  “What is this fuzzy jabber, Scheherazade?” I asked her.

  “Oh, it's my Masterpiece of this Day being born into my mind. I will call it the Twelfth Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor.”

  “But I am Sindbad,” I reminded her.

  “Let us not go into that again,” Scheherazade protested. She had violet-colored eyes. Has anybody else noticed that of her? “I wonder whether the new Caliph Al-Amin will take me for one of his wives,” she asked the world and herself. “If he doesn't, then I'm sort of out of a job.”

  This is myself, Master-Spy, Master-Several-Things, Essindibad Copperbottom, the one and only and original Sindbad, back again and in control of his High Journal. That's about all of that kid John Thunderson that I can take at one time. The drivel of this John Thunderson, who also uses the name Ali ben Raad, is a good sample of the thinking and drooling of the lower people. And yet this drivel has reflections of valid situations and facts in it. And Scheherazade bases many of her stories on such facts.

  But the Fact of the Day is that the new Caliph Al-Amin is issuing proclamations so rapidly that four different heralds have blown their voices, one after another. Harun al-Rashid never issued so many proclamations in all his years as Al-Amin has done in just part of one day. And he has also been giving philosophical orations:

  “Why are you here?” he asks the crowd. “Every one of you is here for a different reason, and not one in a hundred of you knows why he is here. Each one of you must figure out his reason for being, and then we will combine your reasons and find the commonwealth's reason for being. The God of the Prophets has not made anyone in vain. You lead vain lives at your own immortal peril. More wheat must be grown in the Two Rivers Region. You say: ‘we have no need to grow wheat: the Kurds bring us wheat in tribute’. But that is an arrangement which I wish to break. Yes, we receive honey from Tabaristan and quinces from Khorasan in tribute. We eat the dromedaries of Kora-Kum and the fat monkeys of Tibbu. We have narcotics from Hadhramaut and wine from Armenia in tribute. We have walnuts from Persia and hazel-nuts from Spain. And we use Spanish slave-soldiers to enforce our will in Barbary. We are like circus jugglers juggling apples (from the Black Sea Coast). But when we drop the first apple we will hear our death-knell ringing in our ear. Besides that, our juggling act is based on cruelty, and we shall none of us enter the Kingdom till we are purged of our cruelty.

  “Howl, People of Baghdad! Roar in your wrath! And then you will turn to Lady Narkos for solace and justification. But the power of Lady Narkos is something I intend to break. Think about this, Citizens. Think about it, Freed-Men and Slaves. Every glob of thistledown that blows out of the desert has the name of one of you on it. You will also dry up and blow away unless you avert your minds. I will speak to you of these things and of other matters again in an hour or so. Make ready your minds for it! I myself have nothing to gain from these hard sayings. I myself, from this day forth, already own the world and all that is in it. We are ourselves balanced precariously over the pit of hell. If we stumble now, we will stumble forever. I did not know that things were so bad here. Had I known, I would have come sooner.”

  Those were indeed hard sayings for the people of Baghdad. But they broke on the ears as novelties, and the Baghdad people love novelties more than anything else in the world. The things would be pondered, but not accepted, until the new Caliph spoke of them again in an hour or so.

  They were also pondered by other-world people such as myself. On our own world of Kentauron Mikron we have planetary memory of great wars and battles, of decisions made and of categories attacked and defended, all before there were any human persons or even quasi-human persons on any of the worlds. I do not know how the pre-human things are remembered (‘The doukh-birds remember them for us,’ one savant says; ‘The alligators of the swamps remember them,’ say other students of the phenomenon; ‘The very sands and stones remember them,’ say still other persons), but remembered they are. And the blood of some of us remembers the events. For there are those on my world, and I am one of them, who feel strongly that we have some of the older-than-human blood in our bodies.

  And yet the dubious spirits and devils, except for a few Ifrit remnants, have been swept from all others of the Five Kindred Worlds, from all the others of the Seventeen Worlds for that matter, before the first people ever came from the hand of God. All of these dubious spirits and devils were imprisoned in the interior of one world, Gaea-Earth where I am at present, Gaea-Earth which is often called Hell Planet. Because of the close-packed demonry within, Gaea is the only habitable planet that has a hot core. But it seems to make no difference to it. Such scientists as there are on Gaea attribute all sorts of phenomena to the hot core: volcanoes, geysers, hot springs. But these things are really caused, not by the hot core, but by mountains rising and sinking, and by the rocks and the shields of the world rubbing together.

  But the oceanic under-minds of all of us are permeated by the spirits, either grubby or splendid, who walked our worlds before we were born, before the human species was born. The oceanic under-minds of all persons of all worlds have a fearful connection with the igneous underworld or within-world of Gaea-Earth. If the imprisoned creatures, titans, devils, do break out, we are all
threatened, no matter on what world we live. The outbreaking demons are shape-changers and size-changers and appearance-changers. And they often assume a good and gladsome look on their first breaking out.

  I believe that the charming Lady Narkos is one of the devils who broke out again in recent centuries, that she has an old habit of breaking out. I believe that the Boy-Caliph of the ever-changing surname, he who has now been born successively on almost all of the worlds, is another of them, a very mysterious other of them. All of us great spies were triggered into action by this outbreak-threat renewed in our century. (Perhaps it is renewed in every century.) We were alerted and we came to try to discover this break-out point and the proponents of the breakout. The confining doors of the great within-world prison can only be unlocked and opened from the outside. There are traitors who unlock the doors; and we great spies must find the traitors and the traitor-masters.

  About the middle of the afternoon of this his first day as Caliph, Al-Amin decreed that all the treasuries of the City should be opened and that each person of Baghdad would be given ten pieces of gold and also three gems: either diamonds, opal, pearl, ruby, emerald, sapphire, chrysoberyl, topaz, zircon, peach-blossom beryl, cats-eye, quartz, amethyst, garnet, aquamarine, jade, turquoise, lapis lazuli, malachite, morganite, scarlet amber, and any other species of jewels that are written in the Royal Book of Jewels (for Al-Amin the New Caliph did not remember near all the kinds of gems that were in the treasuries).

  Officials were set outside each of the one hundred doors of the main treasury building (twenty officials outside each door) to distribute the bounty, but it was soon seen that this would be too slow. Thereupon all the windows of the great buildings were thrown open, and sacks and barrels were thrown into the streets.