A Farce To Be Reckoned With

by Roger Zelazny

  They stopped in front of him. In the most delightful French accent, the blonde said, "You there! Have you seen him?"

  "To whom do you refer?"

  "That naughty Pietro! He promised to dance with me and Fifi here."

  "I haven't seen him," said Babriel, resisting the urge to cross himself because he thought the ladies might find it offensive.

  "He must be around here somewhere," the blonde said. "Come, Fifi, let's hunt him down and punish him."

  She gave Babriel a certain look that sent a shiver down him from the crown of his head to the nethermost extremities of his toes. "Why don't you come, too?" she said to mm.

  "And you always do what you're supposed to? How boring!"

  Laughing, the girls swept on into the next room, down the corridor, and out of sight. Babriel mopped his brow and tried to get another look at the manuscript. This time he managed to read the title. The Legend of the Seven Golden Candlesticks.. And then the sound of footsteps alerted him and he moved away from the table.

  Aretino came in, his beard in disarray and his doublet unfastened, his hose hanging halfway down his shanks. His fine linen shirt was stained, probably with wine. He walked with a decided list to starboard, and his eyes were bloodshot and bleary, the eyes of a man who has seen too much too often but still seeks to see more. He carried a half-filled wine sack in his hand, and his step was none too steady.

  With some difficulty, the poet came to a stop in front of Babriel, and with owlish dignity demanded,

  "Who the Hell are you?"

  "A student," said Babriel. "A poor student from Germany. I've come here to Venice to bask in the bright sunshine of your genius, dear master, and to buy you lunch, if I may be so presumptuous. I am your greatest fan in all the country north of Aachen."

  "Are you indeed?" said Aretino. "You like my stuff?"

  " 'Like' is a paltry word, dear master, to express what I feel toward your oeuvre. Men call you the Divine Aretino, but even that is to damn your genius with faint praise."

  Babriel was not a flatterer by nature, but he had been around enough, in both high circles and low, to know how to handle the lingo. He only hoped he wasn't laying it on too thick for credence. But Aretino, especially in his present state, found no expression of his talent too fulsome.

  "You speak well, my boy. I'll say that for you." Aretino paused to suppress a hiccup. "I'd love to have lunch with you, but it'll have to be some other time. I'm right in the middle of a party now in celebration of my new commission. Where in Hell are my guests? Up in the bedrooms already, I'll warrant. But I'm not far behind!" And so saying he staggered toward the door.

  "Might I inquire, dear master, as to the nature of your new commission? Your wellwishers all over Europe would be so interested to hear."

  Aretino stopped, thought for a moment, then came back into the room and picked up the manuscript from the table. Tucking it under his arm, he said, "No, no! I am sworn to secrecy on this matter. But you and the rest of the world will be astonished, I promise that. The scale of the enterprise alone… But not another word." And so saying he walked out of the room, moving quite well save for the odd lurch or two.

  Chapter 3

  Rushing back to Heaven, Babriel went directly to the suburbs where Michael had his split-level ranch house. He burst in on the archangel in his study, a fine, well-lighted room where he had laid out his stamp collection on a rosewood table under a Tiffany lamp and was going over it with magnifying glass and tweezers. The blond angel's sudden appearance caused a gust of wind to arise, and the stamps danced merrily in the air. Babriel rescued a Capetown Triangular before it blew out the window, and he put a paperweight atop it to keep it safe.

  "Terribly sorry," Babriel murmured.

  Babriel babbled about Aretino's manuscript, its title, its first line, together with the information that the poet was celebrating a new assignment, and, from the look of the celebration, a well-paying one.

  "Seven Golden Candlesticks,," Michael mused. "It does not ring a bell. But come, let's consult the computer that the Heavenly Department of Attractive Heresies has recently installed."

  He led Babriel down the hall to his workroom, where, beside the Gothic file cabinets and the Romanesque desk, there was a computer terminal of the cubic design called modern. The archangel sat down at the console, clapped a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, and typed in various identifying words. He did other things with the keys, and soon data was flowing, black and green, down the screen in a rushing stream. Babriel blinked, but it was all going by too rapidly for him. Michael seemed to have no difficulty scanning the information, however, and he soon nodded and looked up.

  Objections had been raised as to the suitability of computers in Heaven. The main argument in their favor pointed out that they were mere extensions of quill pen and stone tablet, both sanctioned for use in portrayals of spiritual places for purposes of signifying the Idea of Information. The computer was inherently no different from earlier writing technologies, and it had the virtue of taking little room in which to store a lot of information—unlike stone tablets, which could grow quite unwieldy and brought with them the attendant need of reinforcing the floors of the places where they were stored. Even parchment papers, though light by comparison to stone tablets, had their problems, not least of which was their destructibility.

  "What did the computer tell you?" Babriel asked.

  "It seems there is an old gnostic legend about Satan giving Adam seven golden candlesticks with which to find his way back to Eden."

  "Did he ever get there?" Babriel asked eagerly.

  "Of course not!" Michael snapped. "Don't you think you'd have heard about it if he had? Don't you realize that all of mankind's history is based on the fact that Adam didn't get back to Eden, and that he and every other man are still striving for it?"

  "Of course, sir. I didn't think."

  "If the Enemy is playing around with a story from the earliest days of creation, when the ground rules were set up to run the interaction between men and spirits, that is a matter of considerable interest to us.

  Seven golden candlesticks!"

  "Did they ever exist?" Babriel asked.

  "Probably not."

  "Then presumably they don't exist today and can do us no harm."

  "Don't jump to conclusions," Michael said. "Myths are the damnedest things. If those candlesticks did exist, they could cause a lot of trouble in the wrong hands. The risk is so terrifying that I think we must assume they do exist until proven otherwise, and even then we must remain cautious."

  "Yes, sir. But if Azzie had the candlesticks, what would he do with them?"

  "And what about me, sir?" Babriel asked. "Shall I get back to spying on Azzie?"

  The archangel nodded. "You're getting the idea," Michael said.

  Babriel hurried back to Venice. But a hurried search, and then a more careful search, convinced him that Azzie was no longer in that city.

  Chapter 4

  Azzie had been called to Hell in a peremptory fashion. His head was still spinning as he stood in Satan's sitting room in the white clapboard house where the CEO of Hell did much of his business.

  A demon in blue suit and rep tie came out. "His Excellency will see you now." And just like that, Azzie was in the chambers of Satan. Satan's place looked like a Long Island sitting room in a fancy house in one of the best suburbs. There was nothing particularly Satanic about it—just golf trophies, hunting prints, and a smell of fine old leather.

  Satan had all the elaborate Hellish stuff, the torture instruments, recordings of Black Masses, all the stage trappings, but they were in a different part of the house, which he kept for official business.

  Satan was smallish, "with neat, prissy features, balding, bespectacled. He could take on any appearance he pleased, but he generally favored an unassuming look; at the moment he wore a yellow dressing robe with a paisley ascot tied around the neck.

  "Ah, Azzie, it's been a long time! I haven't seen
you since you were in my class on the ethics of Evil, back in the good old university days."

  "Those were the good old days, sir," Azzie said. He had always been impressed with Satan. Satan was one of the main architects and theoreticians of Evil, and he had been the demon's role model for many years.

  "Now, then," Satan said, "what's this I hear about you putting on a play?"

  "Oh, yes," Azzie said. "It's true." He thought Satan would be pleased with his initiative. Satan was always telling the young demons to get out there and do something bad.

  Azzie said, "I got this idea for an immorality play from watching one of the other kind. You see, sir, our opponents are always trying to prove that good actions are the only way to get good results. That's propagandistic and quite untrue. My play is going to show how absurd their notion is."

  Satan laughed, but there was something pained in his expression as he said, "Well, I wouldn't exactly say that! The opposite of Good is not exactly Bad. You will remember, I pointed this out in my classes on basic infernal logic."

  "Yes, sir. I don't mean to put Bad in the position of meaning you don't have to do anything to be rewarded for it."

  "I should hope not!" Satan said. "That's not the position that Good takes. That's a fact of life whether you're good or bad."

  "Yes, sir," Azzie said. "I guess I didn't quite see it that way. I mean, can't I do a play that brings up some of the good features of Evil?"

  "Is it, sir? Yes, of course it is! I don't know, sir, I just got the idea that this would be a good thing to do.

  It's amusing, you see, and our opponents are so serious minded."

  "Do you mean to imply that we here in Hell are not serious minded? I can assure you that's not the case."

  "That's not what I meant, sir!"

  "I'd be rather careful about this idea," Satan said. "I don't want to order you outright to drop it. Why don't you put it on hold for a 'while? I'll try to find you some other assignment."

  "On hold, sir? I couldn't do that. I've already got people working on it," Azzie said. "I've made promises.

  I wouldn't want to stop my actors and go back on my word. Unless of course I am ordered to."

  "Oh, no, no," Satan said, "I'm not going to order you to stop. Wouldn't that make me a laughingstock—if I ordered one of my own demons to stop putting on a play extolling Hellish activities! No, my dear fellow, it's entirely your choice. Just remember, if it doesn't work out the way you are rather fatuously hoping it will, well, you were warned. We did ask if you wouldn't like to at least postpone it until you could think it over."

  Azzie was so shaken by all this that he left without asking after one of his main concerns: was the candlestick story really true? But he left determined to go on with his play, and to visit the one being he thought could help him with the matter, true or not.

  Chapter 5

  Azzie was determined now to find out whether or not the golden candlesticks actually existed. He had a plan either way: if they did exist, he would use them in the play he was going to stage for the edification of man and spirits; if not, he would find some craftsman who could make facsimiles.

  But he was hoping they did exist.

  Everyone in Hell knows that if you need an answer fast, you just go to The Man — Cornelius Agrippa, a figure of singular importance in recent centuries and still much discussed in the Renaissance. He lived in an ideal sphere that was neither spiritual nor material but had some odd makeup of its own that had not been defined yet. Agrippa himself had been surprised when it sprang into being, and he hadn't had time yet to assimilate it to his system.

  The system was based on a statement so self-evident as to appear obvious, yet it gave curious difficulties when he tried to prove or apply it: the cosmos and everything in it existed as a unity; as above, so below, and all parts of everything were interdependent. From this it followed that any one part could influence any other part, and that the sign or symbol of anything could influence the actuality of the anything that it stood for, since they were equivalent in the unity that linked all things. So far, so good. The trouble lay in trying to prove it. Although Agrippa could influence many things with many other things, he hadn't succeeded yet in influencing all things whenever he wished. Furthermore, he hadn't yet accounted for the presence of chance, which occasionally seemed to throw all his calculations astray in a manner that seemed random, therefore illicit in a plan-built universe, therefore actually something else. It was that and similar problems that Agrippa attended to in his high-roofed old house in that space that existed neither in the material sphere nor in the spiritual.

  "Is that really necessary?" Azzie asked, holding the retort that Agrippa handed him.

  "It is, if you want to convert it back again."

  "If that's what you want, why do it in the first place?" Azzie asked. The retort was starting to bubble in his hands, and the liquid inside had turned from transparent to ocher yellow shot through with green. "What is this?"

  "A sovereign throat remedy," Agrippa said. He was somewhat smaller than middle height, with a full philosopher's beard and mustaches, and he even wore payes like the Hasidic rabbis he sometimes talked to at the tavern in Limbo where they met for refreshments and learned conversation. He wore a long cloak and a tall peaked hat with a pewter buckle on it.

  "Why is an intellect like yours bothering to concoct throat medicine?" Azzie asked.

  "I try to remain practical," said Agrippa. "As for the operation with the gold, I seek to reverse the process of melting it down to a black vapor and sludge, and so be able to convert any black vapor to gold."

  "That would make for a lot of gold," said Azzie, thinking of all the sludge he had seen in his lifetime.

  "So it would. But plenty of gold is what men want. And hermetism is above all a humanistic philosophy.

  Now then, what can I do for you?"

  "Did you ever hear," Azzie asked him, "of the seven golden candlesticks that Satan gave to Adam to help him find his way back to the Garden of Eden?"

  "It sounds familiar. Where's my owl?"

  Upon hearing himself called, a large snowy white owl with speckled wings flew down silently from his perch up near the ceiling where the walls angled in sharply.

  "Go fetch my scroll," Agrippa said. The owl circled the room once and flew out the window. Agrippa looked around puzzled, then his eye lighted on the retort in Azzie's hands.

  "Ah, give it here!" He bent over it and sniffed. "Yes, that ought to do nicely. If it's not throat medicine, it'll do for the mange. I am very close to a universal panacea that will cure all diseases. Now, let's see that sludge."

  He looked into his little furnace, where the gold had been bubbling. He frowned. "Even the sludge is now quite burned away. I could try to resurrect it from memory only, because the doctrine of universal correspondences posits no impossible conditions, and what the tongue can say the mind can conceive of and the hand can capture. But it's easier to start with fresh gold. Hello, here's my owl again."

  The owl flew to his shoulder. In his beak tie carried a large rolled parchment. Agrippa took it, and the owl returned to his overhead perch. Agrippa unrolled the scroll and read through it rapidly. "Aha!" he cried. "Here it is! The seven golden candlesticks do indeed exist. They are stored with all the other lost myths the world has known in the Cathar castle of Krak Herrenium."

  "Where's that?" Azzie asked.

  "In Limbo, due south from the zero meridian of Purgatory. Do you know how to get there?"

  "No problem," said Azzie. "Thank you very much!" And he was off.

  Chapter 6

  Babriel kept a close watch for Azzie's return. The angel had found quarters close to Aretino's house — a small place, for he didn't need much. He also acquired a servant, an old woman 'with sunken mouth and bright black eyes round as buttons. She cooked for him, the gruel of the righteous, which Babriel preferred above all other victuals. She washed his paintbrushes when he came home from his experiments in perspective, and in all w
ays looked out for him.

  Babriel might have missed Azzie's return to Venice, for the demon flashed down in the night like a thunderbolt and made straight for Aretino's house. But Agatha, as the old woman was called, had been keeping watch, and her whole family had been enlisted into the task. Her father, Menelaus, was the first to see the quickening of light in the 'western sky, and he went to tell Agatha. Lighting a candle, she went through the dark passages to where Babriel stayed, knocked on the door, and entered.

  "The one you seek is here in Venice, master," she said.

  "At last!" Babriel said. He wound a cloak around himself, as dark a one as he could find, and he went forth.

  Deciding to use the quality of subterfuge that he had heard so much about, Babriel climbed Aretino's trellis and came to rest on a small balcony outside a second-story window. Inside he could see Azzie and Aretino, but he could not make out their voices. Irritably he said, "Time for a miracle here," and with those words, a glowworm detached itself from its game of tag with its fellows and came over to him.

  "How do you do, sir? What can I do for you?"

  "I want to know what is being said inside."

  "Trust me, I'm the lad to find it out."

  The glowworm moved away, and after a while found a chink in the window frame. He buzzed in just in time to hear Azzie say, "I don't know what you have in mind, Aretino, but we'll try it. And we'll do it now!" And with that there was a flash of light and Azzie and Aretino disappeared.

  The glowworm returned and told this to Babriel, who decided he had been messing with complicated matters, because he didn't understand at all what had happened.

  Inside the house, just before the glowworm's arrival, Azzie had been saying, "I just dropped by to tell you I've found the candlesticks."

  "You have? Where are they?"

  "According to Cornelius Agrippa, they're stored in a castle in Limbo. I'll pop over there and make sure they're still available, and then set them up as prizes."