Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I’m not sure, girl, I’m just not sure,” I said. There did not even seem to be a town here at Klepsis Third Port. Most of us got through customs easily enough. All that the customs workers seemed to be looking for were “flagrant felons” whose records had got there ahead of them. The customs workers flagged seven of these conspicuous felons out of line, and an ambulatory judge convicted them and sentenced them to death on the spot. Then a customs worker came to the judge and reminded him that the gallows had places to hang only six persons at one time.

  It was proposed that the seven felons play Tarshish roulette with a seven-shot revolver with only one of the cylinders loaded. That way, if they all shot at their heads in turn, one of them would be killed by the pistol shot and the other six would be hanged.

  “That would be fair to everyone,” the judge said.

  “Fair, yes, but would it be sporting?” one of the felons asked. “How about us playing sudden-death poker: the winner takes all and goes free, and the other six hang?”

  “Oh, I suppose that would be all right,” the judge said, so the seven blatant felons were set down to play sudden-death poker with each other and with fate. We all begged to remain and watch, even those of us who had already passed through customs. And we were allowed to watch.

  A couple of the felons were cravens who had no business playing sudden-death poker at all. But five of the fellows knew what they were doing. It was a superior game, and they dropped out one by one to their fate. But those who had lost still watched the narrowing-down of the game with great interest. Finally the two most impressive of the criminals were head-to-head with the heaped-up wealth of all of them between. And then the most impressive of them won. He was a man with a compelling look and a peculiar authority in his voice. He won it all. He went free with a stunning loot, for all seven of them had been well-heeled. And the other six of them were hanged on the gallows to flute music.

  “I don’t know where I want to go to investigate art,” Terpsichore Callagy said. “There being no towns on Klepsis complicates things. Will I find art in the meadows or in the little houses of people I don’t even know?”

  “I don’t know where I want to investigate coded technology,” Conchita O’Brian said. “If they don’t have towns, do they even have technology? Do they even have codes?”

  “And I don’t know where I want to go to hunt for history,” I said. “History really begins with towns and writing. Can one have history without both of those things?”

  “I do know where I want to go to hunt for gold,” Gold Coast O’Mally said. “I have more than one hundred buried-treasure maps, and I want to go where they indicate. The map that most fascinates me is, I believe, the one for the site nearest this Klepsis Third Port. If I had someone who was familiar with these waterways just to the south and west of us—”

  “I am totally familiar with all of them,” said a man with a compelling look and a voice with peculiar authority. “Just let me see that sketch for the veriest moment. Ah yes, I know exactly where it is. We’ll take a boat immediately, and we’ll be there before the setting of the Beta Sun. Well, come, come, let us not tarry!”

  I seemed to recognize this man, and yet I did not. It was as if I had known him when he was poor and did not quite recognize him when he was rich.

  “Will there be a boat going in that direction at this hour?” Gold Coast O’Mally asked. “There are boats at the dock at the end of that inlet. I’ll just go see about passage.”

  “Oh, I’ll buy the biggest of those five boats,” said that man with the compelling look and the peculiar authority in his voice. “I seem to be pleasantly in funds this afternoon. In fact, I feel like celebrating, so we will make a gala voyage of it. And if all four of you are not adroit seamen, I’ll make you so within an hour.”

  Things went very fast then, suspiciously fast as it seemed to me. The compelling and joyful man had bills of million-thaler denomination—many of them. And the money of Klepsis is more valued than that of Gaea or Astrobe or any of the worlds. The man had pockets full of million-dollar bills, that’s what he had. He bought the finest and largest of the boats with hardly any ceremony at all.

  “Yes, Prince,” a man said to him, “I have always preferred to deal in cash myself.” And the cash was paid, and the boat was bought as easy at that. The man who had been called “Prince” then hired a crew of twelve seamen who seemed to be alert and knowledgeable. “Yes, Prince,” one of them said. “It will be wonderful. It’s been three years since I’ve sailed under you.”

  But the prince appointed the four of us, Terpsichore Callagy, Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally, Conchita O’Brian, and myself, Long John Tong Tyrone, to be ship’s officers. We boarded ship only with what little baggage I had. We were quickly under power. We were out of that inlet and on the winding and devious oceans of Klepsis.

  But it was not till we were well on our gala voyage that I realized who the compelling and authoritative man, the Prince, the new boat owner, was. He was the seventh felon, he who had won the sudden-death poker game from the other six well-heeled felons and had then been given his freedom because there was no room for him to be hanged on the gallows.

  Why had I not known him before? Because he had filled up with a new power when he had come out from under the gallows of death, and that had changed him a little.

  “I am going home, and that is a great pleasure to me,” he said, “though not everything will be pleasant at home when I get there.”

  SECOND CANTO

  To Ravel-Brannagan Castle

  The ocean seemed to shout, “My name is adventure.” I heard it, and I believe that others did. There was a briskness and cleanness about the oceans of Klepsis that was not to be found in the oceans of other planets. One reason for this was that it was a freshwater ocean, the only one known on all the seventeen habitable worlds. There was also a narrowness about it that was not to be found in the oceans of other planets. This was because of the peculiar geography of Klepsis, because of the Ninety-Nine Continents of this world. These continents were really tentacled islands, of long extent down their peninsulas, but not of great area. Klepsis was, as any normal planet must be, three-quarters ocean in its area. And yet, from shipboard, three-quarters of that ocean area would be in sight of land. There were no real continents on Klepsis, and almost all of the transportation and travel on Klepsis was by water. The water itself looked like land for great extents, because of the floating “cork islands,” their color-drenched meadows grazed by flame-pelted “cattle.” Most of these “cattle” were really sheep, or goats, or deer, or chamois, or camels. And yet there was such a thing as the “cork island ox,” very wild.

  This pirate-planet Klepsis had never gone through the era of wooden ships. There were no trees on Klepsis for ship’s timber, but there was a wealth of metallic ore, whole iron mountains and iron islands, and magnesium meadows. There was the memory, or at least the legends, of an interval of stone ships, but they could not be verified. Metal ships seem to go back to the beginning, even if there were stone ships at that same early time.

  The iron and magnesium and lead and tin and other metals were easily smelted with the hot-burning peat and coal and lignite in the Brannagan Smelters. Christopher Brannagan had been a smelting man and a designer of smelters before he found his true calling in space piracy and settlement. The secret of the wonderful magnesium-steel with which Brannagan had built his ocean ships was an additive known as “sulfur-and-secret,” the exact composition of which really was secret. The secret of the wonderful magnesium lattices with which Brannagan had built his space ships was this same sulfur-and-secret additive with an inert substance blended in for the sole purpose of doubling the price to non-Klepsis purchasers. The sulfur-and-secret additive had also been introduced by Brannagan into the sperm of Klepsis men of the heroic class, probably as part of an initiation rite. And it did result in ocean-and-space ships and ocean-and-space men who were without equal.

  “I don’t know how it is ac
complished today,” one of the seamen said to me, “but it is accomplished. I have only to look at myself to see that I am superior to the men of other planets, and yet I am a poor peg-leg who was born not on Holy Klepsis but on Gaea-Earth, as were you.

  “I am Jerome Whitewater. I have heard from one of your company that you, Long John Tong Tyrone, have come to Klepsis hunting for history. You have been told by now, I am sure, that there is no history on Klepsis. Yet, if we are going where I think we are going, to a Prodigious House that calls itself a castle, to a Prodigious Monument, to a Prodigious Cave; if we are going to that region, we will find something nearer to history than can be found anywhere else on this planet. History, of course, is a state of mind. You are supposed to say ‘What isn’t?’ there, Long John. But really, you will come to the smell of history at least.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I can feel the very rocks of this world stirring and groaning as if they were ready to break open and let history seep out.”

  “If we are going where I think we are going,” the seaman Jerome Whitewater continued, “we will find another strong and throbbing thing that is often associated with history.”

  “And what is that?” I asked him.

  “Bloodshed, mortal bloodshed,” he answered me. “Our shipowner, Prince Franco the Outcast, isn’t a bloody man, but he is a catalyst for bloody happenings. Before the second moon shall rise tonight we are likely to see bloodshed and bloody death.”

  Jerome Whitewater went aloft into the ship’s rigging then. He climbed well, in spite of being a peg-leg. He began to unfurl a sail. The sails on the Klepsis ocean ships are furled in a manner that I have never seen on any other world. The Klepsis ships are a combination of sail and propeller and underwater jet. The oceans of Klepsis are everywhere populated with winds and crosswinds, and these winds are a basic fuel.

  I was really picking up quite a bit of the things that history is made of from the seamen, and I was not convinced that there was no history on Klepsis.

  This was the winelike ocean that the poet Omer (or Homer) of earlier Gaea had sung about. But how did he know about it? Was the Aegean still a freshwater sea when he composed his epics? Had it only recently left off being a lake, and were there as yet only narrow passages from it to the Mediterranean? On Gaea, the Baltic Sea (on the shores of which I spent a part of my boyhood) is a small freshwater ocean. But such bodies of water are rare. Saltwater oceans have dozens of colors, but only freshwater bodies are ever genuinely wine-colored.

  The flying fish of the Klepsis Ocean are clearly not related to the flying fish of Gaea-Earth. They are brighter-colored; they are like pulsating fire; they are toothed and will fight you; and they are meatier. The seamen shot them with bow-and-arrow, and they pulled them in by the cords that were attached to each arrow. I did not see any seaman miss a shot. They pulled in seventeen of the fat fish, for there should be seventeen of us to supper on the ship. And name of the ship was The Dina O’Grogan.

  The sense of visual proportion was violated on this narrow ocean. For one thing, it was not nearly as narrow as it seemed. We saw dolphins leaping in schools, but one of the sailors said that they were not dolphins at all, but right whales. I studied them through the glass and decided that they were indeed those huge Gaea cetaceans.

  “Christopher Brannagan brought seven right whales from Gaea-Earth,” the seaman Bartolomo Portuguese told me. “For this he built seven spaceships (the bottle-nosed Brannagan’s Folly Ships) at very great expense. He did it because he wanted whales on his world. And of course, he could use the Folly Ships for other things after the whales were hauled. These Folly Ships paid for themselves many times and are still in use. And the whales have filled the oceans and are the most valuable crop on Klepsis. Besides that, they unclogged the oceans of Klepsis, for these were originally choked by their overgrowing vegetation. Know you that whales do much better in freshwater oceans than in saltwater oceans. This is the only chance they’ve had to prove it, but they’ve proved it resoundingly.”

  A young man on a cork island blew a whistle at us, and we pulled alongside. He had a cork island heifer, tethered and hobbled, for sale. Our authoritative ex-felon shipowner bought it; and we brought it on board with a sling to slaughter it and barbecue it. The young man had a crumpled newspaper. I asked him if I might have it, for I had seen no newspaper since I had been on Klepsis. He gave it to me readily enough.

  “Take it and read it, as much as you can, before it disintegrates,” he said. “I did all of it myself except a few quips that my wife told me to put in it before I left this morning. She said that she felt it in her liver that the Ink-Stained Wretch would come by my cork island today, and my wife has the most dependable liver of any person I ever knew. She’s better than bird entrails.”

  “What is the date of this?” I asked him, for I could find no dateline on it at all.

  “The date is today,” the man said. “Can anything be done on any date except today? As to the actual date, I haven’t enough education to calculate it. Few around here have.”

  “It is just about to crumble into dust,” I said. “It’s eaten up with acid.”

  “So is the day itself,” the young man said. “You are an off-planet person, so let it be known to you that things that are not of outstanding importance may be printed only on paper that will self-destruct by the following night. This prevents our world from being choked by its own paper. The only things of possible importance in my paper are some of my wife’s jokes, but I do not understand them, nor do other people. Even the Nine Imperial Gazettes of Klepsis are printed on paper that will last for only four days. The Ink-Stained Wretch prints the Imperial Gazettes too, but he takes about an hour longer for one of them than for a little paper like mine.”

  “The morgues of the newspapers of Klepsis must be slim pickings then,” I said, “especially for an historical man such as myself. But your paper does not show the place of printing, either.”

  “Yes it does. See! ‘The Ink-Stained Wretch Printery,’ that is the place of printing. It is on a little boat that travels constantly, so naturally the bearings of the place of printing cannot be given. He comes around every day or week or month to the cork islands of this neighborhood and prints for us such little newspapers as we wish to have. This keeps us from slipping all the way back into the slough of illiteracy.

  “This is my own newspaper that I sometimes have the little old Ink-Stained Wretch man to print for me; it consists mostly of local news and jokes and report of the fish and the whale runs. And always there is at least one paid advertisement. If I do not have at least one paid advertisement, I will not have my newspaper printed. ‘There will be a paid advertisement today,’ my wife said, ‘about the slaves.’ My wife is smart. The little old Ink-Stained Wretch always picks up the advertisements and the money for them and brings them to the people who sometimes have newspapers printed. The money from the advertisement is always the same as the cost of having the paper printed. So the little old man simply moves the money from the right pocket of his pants to the left, and I barely get a glimpse of it while it is being moved. There is only one paid advertisement in the paper that you hold in your hands, but it is a good market advertisement. It’s about a sale.”

  The advertisement—it struck my eye immediately—started off with a garish headline:

  BIG OLD-TIME SLAVE SALE TONIGHT AT RAVEL-BRANNAGAN CASTLE

  And below this was the text of the advertisement:

  This is the first big sale here since early spring. This is a prime crop. There are one hundred fifty-two genuine human persons from Gaea, Astrobe, Camiroi, Tarshish, and some of them from Klepsis itself, most of them young and talented and attractive. There are forty-three short-tailed human persons from Tarshish and the other hidden worlds. And there are more than two hundred intelligent and hardworking humanoids from the furthest reaches. There will also be storytellers plying their trade, and barbecue and fireworks. And possibly there will be fireworks of another sort. If you lik
e a good scuffle, you’ll love this. This is an authentic slave sale like they used to be.

  Yes, that was a startling advertisement for this day and age, even for Klepsis. Or so it seemed to me. Slave trading was strictly forbidden even on the Trader Planets.

  “Where is Ravel-Brannagan Castle?” I asked the seaman Jerome Whitewater, who had now finished unfurling the sails and had landed lightly on the deck like a cat—like a cat with one wooden leg.

  “I believe that it will be our destination tonight,” he said. “They say that you’re interested in history. Isn’t that rather in the class with the ignorant things like astrology and cockfighting? What do you find so interesting about history, Long John?”

  “History is the peopled worlds,” I lectured him in my schoolteacher manner. (I was once a substitute schoolteacher for one year.) “History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.”

  “Unadorned clarity is pretty bland,” Whitewater said. “I always loved a little obscuring fog with it, a little mist, a little blown foam and froth, a few torrents of shouting rain. I suppose that’s why I like Klepsis. Clarity is kept under control here. I always like whole skies unbottomed to let out the distorting lightning and thunder to overwhelm us. You will find a much stronger meteorology here than on Gaea-Earth. You’ll find weather to scare you. It is weather to form barbarians by. Clarity is the penny whistle of single and shrill voices. I want the mystery and un-clarity of orchestras, monumental and mountainous and rhapsodied, and not very good. And I want a great number of them. As to God and His last morning, He already has everything stacked in His favor. Do not help Him by handing Him the history of ourselves. Let Him guess!”