by Paul Park
At six o’clock the streets were cleared of traffic, except for the bicycle rickshaws and the occasional private cars. And the kids would play stickball and kick-the-can until it got too dark to see, and then the streetlights would go on among the canopies of leaves, and they would shine among the leaves and turn them a peculiar, livid shade of green. At the same time the restaurants would have opened up their doors, and the rotten garbage and tar smells of the streets would be infiltrated slowly with the odor of hot oil, ginger, and cayenne. Then at nine o’clock the youngest children would go off to bed and many of their mothers and fathers would go with them; from then on until far into the night all these commercial, downtown sections of the city would be relinquished to the artificial intrigues of unmarried boys and girls—artificial because in that weather only one outcome was ever possible. Nevertheless in some cases the ritual could last for hours, and would include much bold hot staring and much cold indifference, the boys dressed in imported sneakers, pants cut slippery and tight around the crotch, and rayon shirts; the girls in high heels, stockings, black denim shorts, and halter tops that left their midriffs bare. In those days also it was the style for girls to wear long, embroidered shawls and orchids in their hair—these shawls were part of numerous dances of the period, when at midnight in the public bandshells, groups of music students from the university would unpack their instruments, and the asphalt esplanades would fill with lithe, expectant couples. In September of the sixteenth phase of summer, one band especially was popular in Charn, and it included a trumpet man who was, or had been, or seemed to be, an antinomial. He was both blind and mentally deranged, for he couldn’t dress himself or talk; he had to be dragged out to the stage but once there he would play for hours, blowing till he burst, the trumpet like a toy in his huge hands, for he was almost eight feet tall and his enormous yellow hair made him look taller still.
* * *
On the evening of September ninth, a pockmarked graduate student named Deccan Blendish stood in a crowd in Durbar Square to watch the first public interrogations of that season, a victory, if it can be called that, for a certain extreme faction in the school of law. Seven men and women sat on a metal scaffold at one end of the square, while tape recordings of their confessions were broadcast over loudspeakers. The seven had been dismissed in student papers as an “assortment of reactionaries and assassins.” But the Free Word, still at that time the most prominent independent daily, had been more thoughtful, and had pointed out in an editorial that all but two of the prisoners had been accused of spiritual offenses: divination, sodomy, transmigration, consubstantiation, sorcery, etc. To see them indicted on charges of this kind (the paper claimed) was reminiscent of the ancient Starbridge days. To which the Law Review had retorted in a special article that it was to prevent the reoccurrence of the Starbridge tyranny that these measures had been adopted, and that several of the prisoners had pleaded guilty to the crime of “Starbridge revenantism.”
A gang of first-year law students had broken into the offices of the Free Word, but had been arrested before they could do much damage. And on the ninth of September the interrogation proceeded as scheduled. Deccan Blendish left before the end. It was enough to see the prisoners, bruised and dazed and drugged, being strapped into their chairs above the crowd. It had been enough to hear, from loudspeakers set on poles throughout the city, the broadcast of the self-evaluation sessions—jumbled and inaudible for the most part, except for one, which followed Deccan Blendish as he turned and pushed his way through the gaping mob of children, out of the square, up through the streets to his own lodgings. In front of his own building he fumbled for his key, and listened once again to the proud voice that spread out from the loudspeaker on the corner, reciting its litany of absurd crimes. The prisoner had pleaded guilty to nine counts of anal intercourse with the devil Angkhdt, guilty to having seen a vision of the devil Abu Starbridge in a dream, guilty to having attended thirteen secret subterranean meetings of the Cult of Loving Kindness, guilty to having caused through sorcery an outbreak of cholera in the river ward, guilty to having poisoned several important wells. His strong voice held no remorse; in his study on the third floor Deccan Blendish could still hear it.
He was a student of primatology. Books and articles were spread out in piles upon his desk. He sat down in front of his old typewriter and switched on his desktop lamp. But the small buzzing of the loudspeaker reached him even here; he put his hands over his ears. Then to distract himself, he reached out to the center of the desk and picked up the book that was lying on the largest pile of papers. It was one of the foci of his research, a rare volume of the aphorisms of the “master,” an anonymous and obscure sage.
This book had appeared mysteriously in Charn twenty months earlier, when a certain kind of careful humanism had been in vogue. It had enjoyed a tiny popularity, and at that time the author was supposed to be a prominent Caladonian essayist and lecturer, who had died the same month that the book appeared. Lucius Piltdown (formerly with the UC Department of Philosophy, now also deceased) had written the definitive paper on the subject, in which he had cited stylistic and internal evidence.
Deccan Blendish had another idea. The book had been a favorite of his mother’s. The volume in his hand had been her gift to him. She had told him not to believe the professor’s paper, which had been reprinted in the introduction to the book. In him also, something had rebelled against the fat, self-satisfied visage of the essayist, whose photograph had appeared as a frontispiece. Halfway through his first reading he was able to formulate his first objection: The essayist had lived in Caladon for his entire life. But in the master’s book, every metaphor was drawn from nature or from simple agriculture. It was not the product of a city mind. It could not be the product of a city intellectual, even one who had possessed (as Professor Piltdown dutifully claimed) a lifelong interest in botany.
Later, after reading it again, Deccan Blendish had acquired other clues. By the time he had started on his thesis, they had achieved a certain force: Some of the varieties of plants and animals that the master mentioned had a limited territorial range. And one especially, described in the section that he was leafing through the book to find, to see if it could distract him, or at the very least could offer him some consolation for what he had witnessed in the square. Here it was:
“No, my friend,” said the master gravely. “What you have said is neither true nor just nor wise nor sensitive, nor even kind. In this matter you are like the monkey in the sand, our predecessor, which can disguise itself with lies. You have tried to fill our minds with rainbows. But do not be downhearted. Never be downhearted. For the truth is like . . .”
He let the book sag to his lap. Surely he was right. Surely this passage was a reference to the so-called “hypnogogic” ape, that elusive and quasi-mythical creature that had figured so prominently in the folk legends and scientific speculations of the past.
Surely he could not be wrong. On the wall above his desk he had thumbtacked a square piece of ikat fabric, and next to it, one of the most recent survey maps. He had drawn a circle on the map eight hundred miles northwest of Charn, a circle with a radius of fifty miles. Now he cast the book upon the desk. He stood up. He had an appointment with his thesis adviser at seven o’clock the following morning, and as he paced to the window and then back, he marshaled his arguments in his mind. But soon his enthusiasm led his mind away, off on the same tangent—the hypnogogic ape! Which Parthian Starbridge (Spring-Summer, 00011) had claimed, perhaps erroneously since he had never seen one, was of all primates the most anatomically similar to man. Which had been reported at intervals during every summer except this one since the beginning of contemporary records, and never outside a certain fifty-mile radius. Which no one had ever succeeded in capturing or dissecting. Which nevertheless had been accepted in some circles as the “missing link” in man’s evolutionary chain. Which had the apparent ability, unique among animals, to alter the perceptions of both predators and prey. Whi
ch may, in fact, now be extinct. Which more than likely never had existed. The reference to which, in the master’s manuscript, was probably proof of Piltdown’s theory—the damned joke of the damned essayist from Caladon.
Outside his window the loudspeaker buzzed and twittered, a wordless, static sound. He stood immobile, listening, and then opened the window, for the heat inside his room had grown oppressive.
Standing with his nose pressed against the gauze mosquito screen, he looked down into the narrow street toward the corner. The streetlight had come on. Behind him on the map above his desk, in the middle of the fifty-mile circle, a colored push-pin marked a tiny dot, the site of a small village.
* * *
In the sixteenth phase of summer, Mr. Sarnath was living by himself at the top of the hill above the village in the trees. This was the expression that he gave to his sorrow and frustration; during his exile in Caladon and during his long journey home, he had gotten used to thinking that the master’s theories were self-evident, and that their application also was self-evident. While the old man was still alive it had seemed easy to believe. Now, not yet two thousand days after his death, there were changes in the village that sickened Mr. Sarnath and made it impossible for him to live there.
This was the first change: After the master’s death, no one ever left the village to take up a mission in Caladon or Charn. It no longer was the custom for the brightest students, male and female, to go out into the world to spread the teachings of the master. In the opinion of Canan Bey this custom had always been unfortunate—since the founding of the village twenty-seven people had gone out, and of them only Mr. Sarnath had ever returned. The size of the village had been diminished. Families had been disrupted, lives had been lost, and for no reason.
Until he died (said Canan Bey) the master had been under the illusion that the young people of the village had formed a school somewhere along the coast, were teaching dozens, hundreds of human children how to live peacefully, how to achieve happiness, how to destroy selfishness. And (continued Canan Bey) it had been the shattering of this illusion which had killed the master in the end, when he heard Sarnath confess that he had spent his exile as a customs officer in Caladon.
This suggestion was painful to Mr. Sarnath, for reasons that he did not share. Aloud, he pointed out that the master’s own father had been a postal inspector in Caladon City. Sarnath’s family had worked in customs houses long before the master was born. The tradition of their race was in the civil services—he was not ashamed of this tradition. Nor was it useful to pretend that wisdom could be attained and shared only in ideal conditions. The master had once said: “Anyone at all, at any time . . .” Nevertheless, after his death, no new students took the almond path out of the village. None seemed to want to go.
The second change was one that had immediate and tragic consequences, because it was as a result of it that the first outsiders visited the village—the first traders and travelers, the first agronomists. Mayadonna Bey, the oldest of the five members of the council, remarked one evening that it was against nature and against efficiency for everyone to labor at all tasks, that people were not gifted equally, and that they naturally enjoyed what they did best. He held up a square of fabric—dyed ikat in a complicated pattern—which had come from the loom of a woman in the village. He suggested that this woman and her family, because of the beauty of her work, should be exempted from all other village tasks, and that she should train others in her new technique.
Mayadonna was supported in this opinion by Canan and Langur Bey, opposed by the two others. Mr. Palam argued that most villagers had several hours of free time each day in order to pursue their inclinations or their gifts, but that nothing was more central to the master’s vision than that the work of the village be shared communally, as all else was shared. “ ‘In every task,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘no matter how minute, we find a small piece of ourselves. How then, in doing one thing only, can we hope to become whole . . . ?’ ” Nevertheless as time went on, more and more villagers seemed to spend all their time outdoors, while others labored in their houses. The flax field was expanded after a time, and it seemed that half of all households were engaged in the production of cloth, more than anyone could wear. After a time also, the first peddlers appeared, trading copper kettles, steel implements, and books.
* * *
That first square of fabric, which Mayadonna Bey had displayed before the council, was the one that Deccan Blendish had thumbtacked to his wall. He had bought it in a shop of curios and handicrafts, and he carried it with him on the train from Charn. He left the city on the morning of September twelfth, one of the first passengers on the new rail link to Cochinoor.
How quickly, once the process started, the forest was being opened up! His journey, over much of the same country that Mr. Sarnath had traveled so laboriously, took him twenty days. But even that was a long time for someone who had never been anywhere, and it included many hours of worry. He had no idea what he would find. His research on the Treganu unravelers had uncovered many contradictions. He had found portraits from the Caladonian civil service, from midwinter of the year 00015, which were horrible—revealing alien, grotesque, inhuman features. Yet forty thousand days later, by midsummer of the same year, the faces which stared out of the pages of official documents and travelers’ sketches were mournful, softened, regularized, not far out of the range of normal human variation.
The drawings of the Treganu themselves, while tending toward the abstract, did not suggest anything monstrous. Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel anxious, and some of the most frequent reports—for example that they had no blood, but only a white powder sifting through their veins—were certainly bizarre. And yet the skeletal record did not preclude (to say the least) a common proto-human ancestor.
From Mayalung he had to walk three days over a new road, under an old rain, worrying all the way. Yet gradually all feeling subsided in the wet mud; on his arrival, if he hadn’t been so sick, he might have felt relieved. He might have been proud of his most optimistic predictions, proud of the preliminary sketches he had made of thin, frail, hairless, tailless men and women, with flat, impassive faces. But instead he felt a vague kind of regret, which time only made worse. By the middle of September he felt nothing but remorse that he had come. Though perhaps, rather than any presage of catastrophe, he was just disappointed not to be the first.
One evening, sick and disoriented, he stood on the veranda of the house of elders and watched the rain fall down upon the village in the trees. The veranda ran the circuit of the house, which was built on stilts above the level of the neighboring roofs. From where he stood he could see the whole village spread out in a circle around him: the small, simple houses of bamboo and palm, the different colors of the patchwork fields, the black shadow of the forest. Even under the grey sky the largest paddy was an intense shade of green, and in the middle of it, Deccan Blendish could see the leader of the team of agricultural consultants whose arrival in the village had preceded his. The man was standing under an umbrella, arms akimbo, legs spread wide. He was surrounded by a group of slighter figures, farmers from the village, huddled disconsolately in their wicker capes.
In back of Deccan Blendish, in the room that had once been the master’s and that now contained his statue and his altar, he could hear a murmured conversation. “It is because we work to separate the web of truth into its component strands,” said Langur Bey. “That is why they call us that. ‘Unravelers.’ It is not a word we use ourselves.”
The elders of the village sat cross-legged on a single mat in the middle of the floor, five old men in a line. Kurt Sofar, the youngest member of the team, squatted in front of them. As Blendish turned to watch him, he rolled down onto his rear. A black plastic notebook was open by his side.
“You understand what we are doing,” he said after a pause. “You understand the implication. I realize it must seem intrusive. Threatening. But I tried to explain. . . .”
“We were expecting it,” the old unraveler said gently. “It was inevitable—you want more than you have.”
“Again,” said Kurt Sofar. “That’s not the point. It is not a question of our own production, which is ample. We are thinking of the future. We anticipate enormous climatic changes in your children’s lifetime. What will you eat, when winter comes?”
The old man smiled. “We will be dead.”
Kurt Sofar scratched his leg. Dr. Cathartes, seated in his armchair, had a different response. Blendish watched him turn his head toward Langur Bey, an inquiring expression on his thick red lips. Always watchful for the devil’s mark, he was interested in the old man’s smile. “According to your religious faith,” he said. “In some circumstances is death considered beneficial?”
The old men sat in a line: Langur Bey, Canan Bey, Mayadonna, Palam, Sarnath. Their alien, chinless faces were so hard to read, yet Deccan Blendish sensed a terrible sadness there, a terrible sadness in their delicate, weak smiles.
“We have no religious faith,” said Langur Bey.
In the paddy field, in the rain, the agronomist was smoking a cigar. Turning to the rail again, Blendish watched him take it from his mouth, stare at the end of it, cast it away. “We’re straying from the point,” said Kurt Sofar. “As I told you—we’re trying to build up a big supply of food, to prepare for the cold weather here and elsewhere. We’re planning big repositories of grain that will be available to the entire region. The logistic problem is enormous and requires sacrifices. That’s a larger consideration which does not concern you. The fact is, by adopting the measures we have suggested, you’ll be able to triple your output of essential foods. That’s good for us and good for you.”
Canan Bey smiled. “We will be dead. Now I see—it is inevitable.”
Exasperated, Sofar slapped his knee. “It’s true—you may not live to see this program in effect. It may not benefit you directly. But maybe, just maybe, a decision you make now might make it easier for your children, when this land is under snow.”