The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  This was Professor Marchpane, the inventor and metallurgist. He was dressed in an old uniform that gave no hint of his prominence in the company or in the university. In this way he contrasted with Cathartes, who always wore his dissertation ribbon and his various insignia. When he reappeared out of the cubicle he was wearing a starched shirt and linen pants.

  “You do seem to have a hold on him,” said Marchpane.

  Cathartes smiled. “I’m using what I have at my disposal.”

  “Quite.” Marchpane crossed his hands behind his back. “I appreciate your expertise in this,” he said. “I appreciate your help in these . . . spiritual matters. I’m not sure I saw what I was supposed to see.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Quite.” Marchpane stepped over to the desk. He picked up the envelope of photographs. Shuffling through them, he also hesitated at the photograph of Paradise. “Why did you bring him here?” he asked.

  Cathartes shook his head. “I gave my evidence to the police, and I was done. Kurt Sofar is in charge of the plantation now. I was looking for a fast way back. I never thought that I’d be stuck here while they fixed your damn machine.”

  “Ah yes, our helicopter. But what about him?”

  “I was doing him a favor. After all, he had made the actual find.”

  “Ah yes, the find,” said Marchpane. “You never told me what his theory was.”

  Cathartes shrugged. “It’s not even that original. It’s just another hope that science will conform in some way to mythology. You’ve heard the story of a monkey called the hypnogogic ape?”

  Professor Marchpane raised his eyebrows. He often answered questions in this way.

  “Yes,” Cathartes said after a pause. “He became convinced of the existence of this creature. It was part of his research—all from secondary sources, but he came to the Treganu site to look for it. Unsuccessfully. And he was sick too—he was already sick. As he got weaker, he got more obsessed, especially as the site was changing; his failure to find traces of the creature seemed one more proof of its powers of illusion.”

  “So?”

  “So he has a theory. His theory is that this creature is earth’s only true indigenous primate. He thinks we’re all descended from it. He thinks it’s the source of our capacity for deception, which, according to him, distinguishes us from other mammals.”

  Marchpane looked up from the photographs. He had rearranged them in a careful block; now he laid them down upon the desk. “Interesting,” he said. “And what about the skull?”

  “He believes the skull to be the relic of some godlike creature, which in prehistoric times was able to mate successfully with this ape. Who knows how, but anyway, he’s quite a gifted draftsman. He’s made all kinds of diagrams from what he claims to be the fossil record. You know the sort of thing. Just a piece of jawbone an inch long, and he’s reconstructed an entire skeleton.”

  “Interesting,” repeated Marchpane. “And am I right in thinking that this creature . . . ?”

  “Came from the moon,” Cathartes interrupted. “Of course it came from the moon. It came down from Paradise in a chariot of gold. Can you see why this is dangerous and reactionary? How it’s just another version of the same reactionary nonsense?”

  Marchpane pressed his lips into a line. “I would like to see the diagrams,” he said.

  Cathartes shrugged. He produced a key from his pocket and then walked around the desk. Sitting in the trainer’s chair, he reached down to unlock the left-hand bottom drawer, and then he pulled it open. He lifted out a metal box, which he placed on the desk.

  “I’ll show you the whole thing,” he said. There was a combination lock above the box’s hasp; he entered three numbers and flipped open the top.

  “Here,” he said, taking out a sheaf of drawings.

  Marchpane pushed aside the photographs and newspapers, and made a space for them upon the surface of the desk. Then he laid them out with his long, pale hands. He ran his forefinger down the paragraph or so of text that explained each one, his lips moving as he read.

  Each drawing showed a skeleton, and then beside it a naked figure, sometimes in profile. Each one was labeled at the top: TREGANU, STARBRIDGE, CAUCASIAN, ANTINOMIAL, DUAURVEDIC, and a few more.

  Notations along the right-hand margin described differences in bone structure, hair growth, pigmentation, average size, brain capacity, dentition. Occasionally these differences were illustrated. Three or four circles decorated the bottom of each page, containing close details of fingers, tailbones, teeth.

  The last two pages were unlabeled. One showed the ape—a small squat-legged primate with an anxious furry face. The other showed a human body, heroically muscled. Its head was disproportionate, deformed, with a protruding jaw.

  “I see,” murmured Professor Marchpane. He raised his eyebrows. “And the model?”

  Cathartes lifted it out of the box, still in its nest of paper. “Here,” he said, raising the skull. Marchpane placed an interrogatory finger on the manuscript.

  “It is the Bekata Codex of the Song of Angkhdt,” explained Cathartes. “It disappeared from the temple at the same time.”

  “Ah,” murmured Professor Marchpane. He took the skull into his hands, and then lifted it up to stare at it face-to-face.

  “It’s interesting,” he said, “what a seductive explanation this could be. It explains, for example, the sexual character of the text, as well as the sexual emphasis in the iconography.”

  “Of course,” answered Cathartes, a hint of impatience in his voice. The professor was turning the skull in his thin hands, examining the minute carvings.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  Cathartes shrugged.

  “Ah.” Marchpane lowered the skull again, and his face took on a soft expression. “My grandfather once told me how Paradise was a new arrival in our system. He didn’t explain. But he told me stories of a perfect world. There were no men yet, just smaller animals. He used to make up stories about them.”

  “It is an ancient myth,” said Cathartes coldly.

  “No doubt. But that’s the point, you see. Now I’m an engineer, but I know enough astronomy to understand what a peculiar science it is. Peculiar in this way—there seems to be a separate explanation for everything that has to do with Paradise, a separate category of natural law. All of the nine planets describe simple, regular orbits, or at least they would, except for the gravitational effect of this one rogue. But Paradise—I once saw my teacher compute on the blackboard the time and date of the next apparition—this was a long time ago, when I was just a student. It was inconceivably complicated—he posited literally hundreds of small epicycles, as well as many strange fluctuations in speed and gravitation. And even then his calculations were off by a few hours.”

  As he spoke, he patted the top of the distorted skull, and then replaced it on the desk. “Who can explain it? Who can explain the strange lack of consensus in our history from season to season, year to year? The reports of even trained observers differ wildly, and I have read some which swear the moon has phases like the other planets; others which claim that it itself is a source of light, and that it moves around us like another sun. Now the other night it appeared clear to me that I was witnessing a reflective effect only. So what am I to make of that? Can I dismiss for that reason the statements of so many other observers . . . ?”

  “And why not?” demanded Cathartes. He leaned forward in his chair. “Why can’t you conclude that eyes diseased by superstition and religion cannot observe properly? For example, people from the period tell many stories about the sugar rain, which falls here at the end of spring. They describe how it is like snow or glass or fire or ice or stone or acid falling from the sky. They analyze its chemical composition. They fill book after book with speculations. Yet we know for a fact that it is only rain. Its force and its duration make men lose their objectivity.”

  “I see,” said Marchpane. “Still it was not so very long ago.”

>   But Cathartes was angry. He leaned forward, and his handsome face was flushed. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Explain yourself—what do you mean to say about it?”

  “Nothing at all. Only that cleverer men than I have speculated whether Paradise was quite a . . . natural phenomenon.”

  He was staring out past Cathartes’s shoulder. Outside the window, the sky had gotten dark. The exercise room was provided with electric lights set into the ceiling. At seven o’clock they had turned on—automatically, unobtrusively. As the day had darkened they had grown brighter, maintaining always the same level of illumination in the room. It was a steady, yellow, shadowless, pervasive light.

  A lamp stood on a corner of the desk. Now Professor Marchpane turned away from it. He stepped over to the bank of windows and stared out into the night. He spread his delicate thin fingers out against the glass.

  “You told your spy I wanted to see him,” said Cathartes after a little while.

  “Yes. He’s off in fifty minutes. We’re going to meet him.”

  “After dark?” Cathartes frowned.

  Marchpane stared out past his own reflection, out into the night. “He’s in the pit. It’s never dark.”

  “But is it safe? What kind of man is he?”

  “He’s a spy.”

  The glass under his hand was vibrating—a steady rhythm from the mine. Marchpane stared out past the reflection of his eye.

  “Shall we go?” he said after a little while.

  Outside the window Carbontown was burning in the darkness. Below and to the left, five conical smokestacks rose beside a long, low building—the top level of a nine-tiered gallery. Long streams of fire blew out of each stack, twenty, thirty feet into the air, alternating with putrid clouds of ash.

  The gallery spilled down over the steep slope toward the mine. A yellow glare was pushing through its nine rows of slitted windows. It was a livid, constant glow. But over the course of a few minutes the color shifted somewhat, became deeper, blacker, redder, according to the cycle of the Marchpane convection. The building housed the famous blast furnaces of Carbontown, rebuilt and improved, now operating around the clock, through all the twenty hours of the day.

  Light streamed also from the cars of the cog railway, which climbed up toward the gallery from the mine. At the terminus the ten-acre off-loading pit was full of fire, because here also was collected the raw slag from the furnaces. From above Marchpane could see the tenders in their helmets and their insulated suits, standing in a line upon the concrete rim of the containment reservoir, raking off the distilled brandy-glass.

  As always, he was astounded by the scale of it. Seven thousand men and women lived and worked in Carbontown. From where he stood he could see how all the pieces moved together—the furnaces, the railway bringing up the raw shards from the pit, the excretion unit, and the final product being loaded in the platforms—as if the mine were just a single mechanism, tended by its miniature crew.

  But in another sense the view was insufficient, he thought later, when the elevator had deposited Cathartes and himself at the building’s base. As the metal cage had sunk down through the scaffolding, Marchpane had felt the temperature rise. In the trembling guywires he had felt the churning of the engines. Yet even so he was surprised, as always, by the intensity of the noise and heat which closed around him and enveloped him as the doors slid open and he stepped outside into a world of harsh sensation. He had perceived only light from the window of the exercise room. Infants in a mother’s womb, thought Marchpane. He felt the sweat rush to the surface of his skin.

  With them walked a single overseer, armed with a rubber truncheon and a gun. Cathartes was grinning for some reason, and the light was shining off his teeth; as they moved on down the concrete maidan, past the heliport, past the security post, Marchpane felt his clothes grow limp and damp. His saturated collar curled away from his wet neck; they were walking through a fine hot drizzle, which was partially the blowoff from the stamping press and partially a genuine piece of weather. Overhead the clouds were low, and they reflected back some of the fire from the stacks. They reflected back also some of the noise from the press—a hollow booming all around them.

  They took the escalator down toward the collection pit. Again, every meter of descent brought with it a corresponding rise in temperature. At the bottom, the heat was stifling, the humidity terrific. Marchpane felt it as a solid force, pressing against his body from all sides. It required all his energy and strength to cleave a passage through. Cathartes was smiling, and Marchpane was amazed to see his hair still dry, his uniform still crisply pressed. Marchpane, as they hurried past the slag pools, felt the sweat pour from his face, and he was squinting, and blotting his eyes with his wet sleeve. The overseer said something that he couldn’t understand above the noise from the crushing bins. But Cathartes heard it and made some response.

  * * *

  Professor Marchpane was the managing chief engineer at Carbontown. He was also, as his own bad luck would have it, the only member of the Board of Directors not to have attended the September Conference of Metallurgy in Charn, whose dates had corresponded to the mayor’s celebration. They had gone to protest the new production schedule, which had made conditions so unsafe.

  Later, people would speculate that if a different man had been left in charge of the facility, perhaps the miners would not have dared to go on strike at such a crucial time. Perhaps the mine would not have fallen to the Cult of Loving Kindness.

  Later historians, stretching taut the chain of circumstance that led up to the reconsolidation of Starbridge power in Charn, all would remark on the beginnings of the movement: how it seemed to grow up out of nothing, how except for a few crucial successes it could have dissipated just as rapidly. Three thousand days after these events, Prince Regulum Starbridge himself seemed to acknowledge this, when he took his oath of office in Durbar Square. In his inaugural address he expressed his gratitude not to General Mechlin Starbridge, not to the Reaction Corps, who in the last days of summer had defeated the New People’s Army on the tulip fields of Caladon. Instead he praised the martyrs of the Cult of Loving Kindness, which nevertheless he had by that time ruthlessly suppressed—Longo Gore (called “Starbridge”), Porphyry Demiele, Karan Mang. Then he spoke another less familiar name, and at the time it was considered lucky and conciliatory that a prince of the old blood could even put his tongue around the name of such a humble figure—Nanda Dev, a glass miner from Carbontown.

  It was this miner that Marchpane was seeking on the night of the sixty-seventh of September. Another more practiced administrator would have sent for him, would have had him summoned to the company offices. But Marchpane thought it was important to show himself among the miners from time to time, so that they could understand the human face of power.

  It was a bad decision. Already for the past week, since the appearance of the article in the Gazette, the mine had been alight with rumors of some big mythic discovery. At the same time, Marchpane had taken advantage of the absence of the Board to implement some new reforms. As he and Cathartes climbed down the concrete slope toward the terminus of the cog railway, they came in among a crowd of miners at their leisure, and some had been able to buy alcohol. They were dangerous, exhausted men, their bodies and their faces streaked with sweat and grease and wrapped in rags, their breath bloody with accumulated glass. They turned their bleared and drunken eyes to look at the two men, and then swung back to stare up at the company offices far above. The windows were all dark.

  Every miner knew about the changes of the past week. The security battalion had been reassigned. They were piling sandbags by the gate, they were camping in the woods; in consequence there were fewer in the mine itself. Now the overseers walked singly, or in groups of two. And there were rumors everywhere of some new hope, a young girl who had come down from Paradise the last night of the festival to walk on earth for a short time. The keys to Paradise were in her hands.

  Oblivious to this, o
blivious to the speculation in the faces that surrounded them, Marchpane and Cathartes continued on. At the terminus they took the elevator, though the cage was loaded with children on the seventh shift. They squeezed in among them—shard gatherers and seekers, their bodies and their limbs wrapped in strips of muslin, their little faces covered with black grease to guard against the dust. Some wore sloppy turbans pulled down over their ears, and a few lucky ones had plastic eyeguards and nose filters—too few, thought Marchpane, for the lips and nostrils and the eyelids of the rest were caked with scabs that would not heal. He made a mental note. On the first of every month, each family was reissued the protective gear they lacked, but it was obviously not enough. There was corruption and thievery, he knew. He had read the report—how men would steal a pair of goggles and then sell it back. The children were always the losers. Now they stared up at him with red, accusing eyes—how had it come to this? Conditions had not always been this bad. Not when the plans had first been drawn. Workers had moved here voluntarily; the cottages in Crystal Lip had been written up in Industry Today; they had been widely copied. Children had not been allowed to work until their families insisted. There had been a school.

  “It stinks in here,” whispered Cathartes.

  The elevator slid down straight into the stomach of the mountain. Through the bars of the cage, Marchpane saw among the layers of schist a seam of glass catch at the lamplight, and then another. They were small and few at first, glittering with pyrite and impurities. But as the cage moved down the shaft, the texture of the glass began to change. The seams were smoother, darker, richer. They mixed into one another, and from time to time Marchpane could see the fugitive reflection of his face as he pressed up against the bars.

  When the overseer rang the bell at Level 29, the doors opened on a sheer blue tunnel through the glass. This was Marchpane’s favorite section of the mine—the crystal heart of it, the only place where the pure schemes of the Board had not been dirtied by the needs and the desires of men. It was the access tunnel to the Ranbagh Lode: almost a thousand feet straight through into the pit, and Marchpane could hear the gas hammers of the miners as they labored on the face.