Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “I am only one. It is easier to hide one.”

  “Hide, how?”

  “People see what they expect to see. It takes only a minor influence to bend space around oneself, to keep oneself unseen.…”

  “Like the walls around this place that Padre Josephus spoke of,” Carolyn said.

  “Like that, yes.”

  “But you could hide us that way.”

  “No. Not all of us. I could only … make things hazy. It wouldn’t be good enough.”

  “You understand that we have to see.”

  Sovawanea shook her head sadly. “I understand that you think you do. Isn’t my word enough?”

  “No,” said Agnes. “It isn’t. At this moment we could be talking to a demon who is seeking to undermine the word of the Church. My Church. Which is allied with Webster. Shall I take your word for it that the Alliance is evil? Or shall I keep in mind that we are fallible? That we may be wrong.”

  Carolyn said, “I agree. We have to know what is happening. And why.”

  Sovawanea teetered on her long, clawed toes. “If you are very good. Very … obedient. If you think only quiet thoughts, no matter what you see.…”

  Carolyn stared around her at the others, and they at one another doubtfully. It was Jessamine who said firmly, “We must know. Mustn’t we?”

  After a long pause Sovawanea nodded. “I suppose you must. Sophy needed to see. You probably need to see, as well.” She went to the stove and opened the door, disclosing the glowing coals within. “Come close around me. We must hold hands, so that we travel together.”

  She wore a chain and pendant like the one Tess wore. Now she took it from about her neck and set it on the floor in front of her. The pendant had a faceted stone set within it that spun and glittered in the firelight.

  She said, “Look at the sparkle and try to think of nothing very much. When you feel yourself going, do not fight against it.”

  “Going?” whispered Ophy.

  “This device does not look like a bus, so we must align ourselves in the direction of movement. Look at the light. Let it show you the way.…”

  They looked as she directed, weary from too much happening, too little sleep, too much apprehension, finding it surprisingly easy not to think of anything much. Their eyes remained fixed on the glitter, unable to leave it. Sovawanea spoke, her voice murmuring in the sibilant, softly melodic tongue of her people. The glitter coalesced, became a glow that crept toward them, like water. The glow expanded in a plane, making a gleaming pool around them. Then the circle turned on its diameter, making a sphere, and within this bubble of light they were gathered up and moved. Through the substance of the light they could see the world flowing beneath them like a river, a liquid running, desert and mountains and rivers, cities alight, dark untenanted spaces sweeping by like dark water.

  Carolyn looked from face to face, seeing variously apprehension or fear or wonder or eagerness. Aggie’s face was expressionless; her eyes were tightly closed. She kept them closed as time went by, opening them only when their movement slowed, as the world halted beneath their feet.

  They stood in a circle of ashen fire on a barren hillside where a throat of darkness gaped into the earth. All around them were mountains, dire and menacing under a lowering sky that spread a mat of filthy cloud upon the jagged horizon. These were badlands, volcanic lands, tortured and drear and black. In one direction a contorted road wound into a distant valley, marked along its length by guard posts and gates; in the opposite direction that road ended in a pair of heavy doors. The tunnel between the doors was guarded by a partially lowered portcullis, where a few visored, anonymous men moved restlessly in and out, like ants crawling through the teeth of a skull. On the portcullis were broad convex bosses graven with a symbol: a spider’s web with a thunderbolt at its center.

  “Look upon this place,” said Sovawanea. “This is the Redoubt. This is the place of your enemy. Here your spider lairs.”

  “Where are we?” Carolyn murmured.

  “Almost on the Canadian border. The builder of this place took some trouble to confuse its location. The Canadians think this is U.S. soil, the Americans think it is Canadian. As a result, neither bothers it. Look here at our feet, where we stand in this gray circle. We will step out of this circle, the circle will remain, and in order to return we must come to this circle once more. Hold the location in your mind so that you can find it.”

  Her whispering voice grew sharp. “Listen to me. Aggie, whether you trust me or not, you must listen. Here it is night. They do not expect us. Because they do not, and because we will dress ourselves in their clothing, they will not think of invaders, but you must do nothing to attract attention to yourself. They would hear us if we spoke, therefore do not speak. Listen. Look. Hear and see for yourself. I will do nothing to impede you. I will try to cover us, to veil us from their sight, but it will work only for a short time, only so long as we do not touch them, so long as we hold our emotions at bay. If you feel strongly, he who lairs here may feel that emotion and track upon it as a dog does a scent. You must remain calm, no matter what you see or hear.”

  She stepped out of the circle, and they followed her, walking slowly, carefully, hiding behind the nearest stones as the visored men came in or out of the entry. An interval came when no forms moved beneath the portcullis, and they followed Sovawanea’s darting form as she slipped beneath the iron teeth. Inside was a long, broad corridor, almost a road leading into the mountain. To their left was a short corridor with doors opening along it. They skulked past the first few rooms where they heard men speaking inside, then slipped into one that was dark, silent, and empty. They saw it only in the light that came in from the corridor, a dressing room, clothing hanging on racks, showers at the rear, urinals and toilets to one side. The uniform included loose trousers, boots, a light long-sleeved tunic that fell to the knees, an ornamental breastplate, and a visored helmet. It took longer for Ophy and Carolyn to find trousers short enough not to drag on the floor than it did for the rest of them to get dressed.

  “Anonymity is one of the tenets of the Alliance,” murmured Sovawanea as she thrust her arms through the sleeves of the tunic. “All the men here are Webster’s servants. It works to our benefit that he does not bother to distinguish among them.” She cursed briefly in her own language at the boots as she stuffed them with pieces torn from one of the tunics. Her feet were too thin for the footwear to stay on otherwise.

  They went back to the wider entry hall and turned left, into the mountain, walking quietly down the broad though ill-lit tunnel, passed by an occasional little cart that came spinning by in either direction. Scores of smaller tunnels opened out on either side. The one they walked along was long and straight, vanishing into nothing at its end. Carolyn was reminded of the endless concourses of some badly designed airports before they began to hear a distant reverberant clamor, voices echoing in a large room. They felt the effort of the walk. Partway, Sovawanea took the boots off and carried them, and Bettiann bit her lip to keep from groaning at the pain in her legs.

  The clamor became louder, gradually differentiating itself into separate voices whose converse echoed in some great enclosure. The hallway expanded before them to reveal a domed space like some great old railway station, lofty, dust moted, and full of shadows. Here the mosaic floor was patterned with the spiderweb and the thunderbolt, and high on one vaulted wall, almost within the dome, another mosaic made a huge portrait of a man who held the world in his hand, like a ball. Behind him was the web once more, and a carved motto: Through Alliance, Power.

  “Webster,” whispered Carolyn, staring at the huge image. “Just as I saw him, forty years ago.”

  Here there was constant noise, an ebb and flow of movement and talk. Sovawanea thrust her feet into the boots once more and led the group out of the way of a group of men who came across the huge space, escorted by a docent who gestured and explained.

  “What would you like to see next?” the docent demanded
of his flock as they went past.

  “Webster said we should see the vaults,” one of the men replied in a heavily accented voice. “We need to see for ourselves whether the plan can be fulfilled.”

  The docent nodded. “The vaults are our proof of final victory over the enemy who has sapped our strength and weakened our natures; the vaults are the manifestation of our manhood and the assurance of our immortality as a people. The vaults are restricted to authorized personnel only, but visitors such as yourselves are allowed to observe them. Come.”

  “Follow them,” whispered Sovawanea. “Though you are not ‘authorized personnel,’ this victory, this manifestation, this assurance is what you have come to see!”

  Leaving a sizable gap between them and those they followed, they went into a side tunnel and then onto an escalator. The place reeked of oil and chemicals. There was no traffic on the way down and the lights were dimmed. They descended one level, then another, three, four, five levels. At the bottom they heard the voices of the men, which they followed into a side tunnel, keeping in the shadows. The corridor they were in ended in a pair of tall doors.

  Carolyn caught herself yawning. Ophy stumbled.

  “Careful,” murmured Sovawanea, looking alertly about herself.

  “Sleepy,” murmured Carolyn. “Why?”

  “There is an influence here, something in the air. Keep your minds on where you are and what we’re doing.”

  The visitors had turned aside at the tall doors and had vanished through a lesser side door. Briefly the women could hear feet hammering on a metal stair. Sovawanea waited until the door had swung shut behind them, then led them to the tall doors, where she fingered a keypad. A small door within the larger one opened just enough to allow them through, one at a time. It remained open as they entered, like so many sleepwalkers.…

  They had come into cavernous space grayed with distance and obscured with cold mist.…

  Agnes thought she recognized the place. She had dreamed of this place! Here was the terrible wall, tall and gray and thick. Somewhere the last workmen were packing up their trucks and hosing down their tools, leaving a gray foam like a cancer on the green meadow. The wall was pockmarked with cells, each cell with a door, each door with a grate, and at each grate a sister, thin hands clutching the iron, hands reaching through the bars, hands silently begging for release.

  Aggie shut her eyes, shivering, felt herself being driven, her hands tied behind her. What was it the person had said to her? “The cell at the end is for you, Reverend Mother. To close you in. To close all of you in, where you belong.…”

  She remembered the sisters pleading with her as she went by, their eyes begging, their hands extended. In the next-to-last cell was Sister Honore, who opened her bloody mouth to show the Reverend Mother she had no tongue.

  “They do not speak,” she said aloud.

  “They do not speak,” someone said to Faye, who had dreamed this dusty aisle, this hazed interior, piled with sculptures on every side, all covered with fine gray dust. Women’s forms lay all about her, some stocky, some slim, some close-capped, some with flowing hair, some with matronly breasts, some sylphlike, some swollen in pregnancy, all women. Faye turned in distress, breathing the dust, feeling the decay, crying out in complaint:

  “They should be standing, on pedestals, high and beautiful where the sun can touch them. They should speak to the heart. Why are they silent? Why do they lie so still?”

  “Why are they all lying so still?” Ophy repeated as she took a chart from the foot of a bed that stood in an endless line of beds in a great ward, huge as a stadium. All the beds held women. Some of the women were pregnant, the covers belled upward over the swollen forms. All of them were unconscious, all of them were tied to the beds, their hands bound to the railings, their feet tied to the iron footboards. “Why are they restrained? What is this writing? I can’t read this writing! What is wrong with these women?”

  “The doctor knows,” said the person following her. “He will take care of them.”

  “But I’m a doctor. I want to take care of them!”

  “No. You’re a woman. They’d never let you be a doctor.”

  Ophy eluded clutching hands and went to the head of the bed to look down at the sleeping face. It was her own face.

  Her own face, Bettiann saw, in the mirror. All these thousands of mirrors showing her own face, a thousand different Bettianns, but all Bettiann, nonetheless, the whole world reflecting herself, she here inescapably confronting herself, unable to avoid herself, like being caged up with herself.…

  Caged up, thought Jessamine. Here all her animals were, caged up in little tiny cages. Lily, all the other females, caged in these tiny, inhumane cubicles, alone, deprived, unable to learn or to be complete.…

  Carolyn, who saw more clearly than the others because her dream had been a different dream from theirs, heard someone saying her name very softly, over and over. “Carolyn!”

  It was Sovawanea, her lips at Carolyn’s ear. “Your friends are slipping away from us. He is here, somewhere, summoning you, confusing you. Your friends are lost in their own terrors, their own evil dreaming. They must awaken! They must see what is here!”

  Carolyn reached out blindly to grasp an arm, which she pulled toward her until she found herself looking into Ophy’s fearfully vacant face. She shook Ophy, hissing at her. “Ophy! Come out of it!” shaking her even harder until Ophy’s eyes focused once more. Then she reached again, and again, finding another of them, thrusting the form at Ophy or Sovawanea, grabbing another to shake or slap until the woman woke once more.

  “The wall,” Agnes moaned.

  “You are not seeing what’s here!” Sovawanea whispered. “You are seeing what he wills for you through your own fears. Look again!”

  Holding each to the other, they looked again. The images in their minds shivered and broke; the wall, the cells-cages-beds, the statues, the mirrors, all changed, shifted, becoming something else.

  “Look at what they are,” murmured Carolyn in a voice of despair. “You see what they are? Just like the prison. Where they were keeping Lolly.…”

  On either side they rose, tier after tier of them, extending upward into the mist-filled space above, each pod a tiny cell, a tiny cage, a little bed. The bodies inside were still as sculptured forms behind the mirrored faceplates in which the women found their own images superimposed over the faces of the girls who slept there, the young girls, the thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands of young girls.…

  The meaning of it came slowly, a creeping dread, a swelling certainty, and they turned to one another in horrified and sickened perception.

  “Don’t feel,” said Sovawanea, her voice trembling on the edge of a terrible sadness. “It is no different for them than it has always been for many women. They do not speak, they do not act. Whether they wish it or no, they will be used to make babies. That has always happened to many. In some times and places it has happened to most. Don’t let yourself feel, or he will find you. He notices women who feel! He feeds upon their feelings.…”

  She tugged them toward a stairs at one side of the great room, and they climbed upward. From below the place had seemed labyrinthine, but from above they could see it was laid out in an orderly grid, level upon level, aisle after aisle, an enormous storage cavern where black-clad warehousemen strode up and down behind wheeled carts, where lights glowed green and red, where chill air flowed in from ducts high on the wall to fall in layers of ghostly fog across the dark floors.

  High in the vault to their left a vacant balcony festooned in gold and black gave upon an open arch. On the opposite wall, in a glass-fronted booth over the tall doors, the sightseers looked down and nodded approvingly as their guide gestured and explained.

  Sovawanea said: “When I was here before, Webster stood on that balcony, gloating over this … greenhouse. Here in this place is the seed crop he will leave behind when he takes his last great feasting on terror and torture and moves on
. Above us are the rooms and apartments of the men who will survive, and here are the wombs needed for reproduction. Perhaps in several millennia, when the world has been repopulated, Webster will return again.”

  “How long?” whispered Carolyn. “How long have they been building this?”

  “It has been building for hundreds of years, starting with a great natural cavern, but they only began stocking it with females a few years past. Alliance members send their children to the Redoubt when they are only three or four. The boys attend the Institute. I saw where they keep the girls. They are not taught anything. They are merely fed, bathed, given exercise, raised so until puberty, at which time they are culled. The enemy does not want either rebellion or thought bred into his followers, so any who show signs of independence or unusual intelligence are culled.

  “Those selected for breeding are brought here to sleep their lives away. There are over three hundred thousand pods in this chamber, all filled with the female offspring of Alliance members. Here they will be bred and here they will bear, here they will lactate, and here they will be disposed of when their reproductive life is over. They feel nothing, they say nothing, they care nothing. Even this is not good enough for some members of the Alliance, who are now working on an advanced type of pod, a kind of dummy that will look and feel like a woman, that will hold the reproductive organs of a real woman, allowing the rest of the real women to be discarded.”

  As they went back down the stairs, they leaned out to look more closely at the faces in the pods—empty faces, without experience, without expectation.

  “No pain there,” said Carolyn, echoing Josh. “No need for learning.”

  Jessamine murmured, “No need for equal pay, equal rights, equal anything.”

  Sovawanea added, “What Sophy called the Hail Mary Assumption is here made manifest, Aggie. This is what she saw when she came here.”

  The men in the aisles beneath them muttered as they passed, pausing in their work to talk among themselves, their voices rising in irritated and quarrelsome tones. Twos and threes of them followed the wheeled carts along the aisles, some taking sleeping bodies away, some bringing sleeping bodies back.