Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, Januarius, I was always a skipper, and I’ll skip and choose here. But perhaps I’ll balance that out by having some parts of it repeated again and again.”

  Januarius O’Grogan, dead about a hundred fifty years, appeared to be about thirty years old. I had not yet learned to make the slight mental jog to bring the years of Klepsis and of Gaea-Earth into accord, so my estimates of apparent ages of persons was very rough. I believe that he appeared to be about the age he was when the Commission in Lunacy was convoked. He was of the age that he had been when the things being recreated took place. So would they all be. And now half a dozen other persons began to take on an appearance and shape and substance there in the walk-in tomb.

  “Why not have the whole thing in the courtroom where it was originally held?” I suggested. “I believe that Brannagan’s Royal Ghost could as easily convoke buildings and rooms as he can convoke people. And as historian, I would very much like to be present in an authentic courtroom of this planet Klepsis a little less than two hundred years ago.”

  “No, Historian, there was no courtroom on Klepsis in the early days. What need would peaceful pirates such as ourselves have of a courtroom? There were no courts of law then, for the reason that there was no law on Klepsis then. My father-in-law, Christopher Brannagan here, who had run Klepsis pretty much unchallenged until the time of the Commission, believed that law (like literacy) was an evil and a snare.”

  Januarius O’Grogan was not at all of the flaming orange-yellow-red descent, as was Brannagan, as was Tharrala Thorn. Januarius was one of the fountainheads of the black-haired and olive-skinned strain in the family. But his ghost carried his years better than did Brannagan’s.

  “There were no courtrooms on Klepsis then,” the spacious Januarius went on. “The hearings on the lunacy case were held in this very place, in this cultish cave as it was then. It has since been regularized, by a few blocks of limestone, into this walk-in tomb and monument of Christopher Brannagan. So, we are met in the original place of the Commission. And even in the old days it had several purposes. It was one of the secret entrances to the treasure cavern. We were already dazzled by that gold.”

  “But was there already gold here before it was brought here by the Eleven High Pirates of Klepsis, they who were your own sons and daughter?”

  “Yes, Historian, yes,” Januarius told me. “It was primordial gold. I have even heard that the minted gold was here first, and that the cavern was formed around it by geological processes. It was primeval gold. And my own flighty children, for all the shiploads of it that they brought here, did not increase the amount of it by more than five percent.”

  “But who did put the first gold here then, Royal O’Grogan?” I asked. The sketchy ideas I had formed of the middle history of Klepsis were scattered by O’Grogan’s statements. “The Great Brannagan and his followers were the first humans to come to Klepsis, and there are no stories of early Brannagan gold, nor of early O’Grogan gold, for that matter.”

  “It was the dragons who first put it here, Historian,” the greatest of the O’Grogans told me in his intricate voice. “The old Klepsis dragons (they were of the species Draco Rufus) mined and minted it here for many thousands of years, apparently. They had quite a number of mints here on Klepsis. Examine for yourself the titles and images and mottoes that are on most of the gold coins down in the treasure caverns. You will find that almost all of that gold is of dragon mintage.”

  “Please, my love,” Princess Thorn whispered in my ear. “You will have to learn to catch them on the fly. Don’t let them bounce and dribble. This greatest of the O’Grogans is a great kidder.”

  “You, renowned Januarius O’Grogan, are a crooked-faced kidder,” I said, to put Thorn’s advice into effect immediately. I pretended that I could see right through him without the aid of Princess Thorn, who was now officially marrow of my marrow.

  “Nay, no kidder, man,” the O’Grogan told me. “I am a liar pure and simple. This cult-cave, this walk-in monument, was also, long ago, the lodgehouse of the Royal Kangaroos Liars Association, a fraternal group. Thrice was I named Liar of the Year by them. We met here twice a month and told high lies and boozed and ate. Indeed, the Commission in Lunacy itself was held under the Sign of the Kangaroo. There was no other sign to hold it under.”

  A fork-tongued, two-faced liar and pirate was this famed Januarius O’Grogan, and at the same time he was one of the most pleasant and personable men that I have ever encountered. Indeed the Sign of the Kangaroo was still prevalent in the cave or tomb, spreads and dazzles of primitive and leaping art and calligraphy. And under the same sign the review of the Commission would now be held.

  But had O’Grogan in fact lied when he told about the dragon gold? Or had he only lied in saying that he lied? I had seen the Sign of the Dragon on several of the gold coins in the cavern. The Klepsis kangaroo is not related to that of Gaea-Earth. It is really a variety of Drexel’s dragon, a man-sized hopper. Were the Klepsis kangaroos the same as the Klepsis Draco Rufus dragons? Well, a kangaroo lodge would still be a kangaroo lodge, and a kangaroo court would still be a kangaroo court very like those found in the boondocks areas of Gaea-Earth.

  “Why the reconvening of the hearings now anyhow, Christopher?” O’Grogan asked his father-in-law, Brannagan. “It’s been fifty years since you had the last replaying of the mummery. I thought that you were past such things.”

  “I feel that my years, even my second set of years, are coming to an end,” Great Brannagan’s Ghost said. “And. Januarius, beloved pup, this will not be a replay. This time I want originality and invention and examinations and arguments. This time, of course, I want a different conclusion to be arrived at, though of course I do not want a directed verdict. This time I want to get to the reality of the matter. And I’ll get to it too, no matter how much I have to shake up the cast of participants.

  “Let all of you now take oaths to delve into the reality of the matter. I am in the hands of all of you. But be warned of this: though I am in the hands of all of you, if you displease me in this your final verdict, I’m likely to bite off the hands of all of you right to the wrist.”

  I couldn’t help it then. I knew that O’Grogan was a kidder, but I had to go and find out something. Quietly, when none of them was looking at me, I went down through the hidden door in the floor of the tomb and then through the underground windings into the treasure cavern. And, very quietly there also—for I could hardly explain what was on my mind—I took gold coins from about twenty different chests that had been opened, about a hundred coins in all.

  “How are things going, Duke and Historian?” Terpsichore asked me as she came up on me quietly. I realized that I would not have to explain anything to any of them. We were ourselves a sort of covenanted band now and we all trusted one another.

  “It is very smoky up there, Terpsichore,” I said, “and very spooky. It’s all full of ghosts.”

  “So is it here,” she said a bit fearfully. “Not all of the chests are full of gold and gemstones. Some of them are full of bones. We know them by the groaning. We open one from which a groaning comes, and we find it full of bones, the bones of eight or ten persons all jammed together, broken and unbroken. The bones talk a little bit in their several voices, but they are incoherent. But I have discovered my own treasure house here. It isn’t the gold, though much of it is made out of gold. Long John Duke of Tyrone, there is art here above my fondest imaginings, art from every world, and also dragon art.”

  “How about the dragons themselves?” I asked in an attempt at a light-hearted voice.

  “Bartolomo Portuguese and Sebastian Jamaica saw a dragon cub. They tried to catch it, but they couldn’t.”

  “It’s well they didn’t. Convince them that they should leave the things alone if they see more of them. The mother dragons are likely to take mortal retribution on anyone who chases their cubs.”

  I went back out through the twisted maze passages and up through the floor of the walk-i
n tomb again. One of the nondescript evoked ghosts was giving testimony.

  “I will read into the transcript a space verifax of a deposition by Dame Delfina Brannagan, the mother of Christopher Brannagan, as to her son, which verifax has just been received from Gaea-Earth in response to my questions sent to her. She writes quite a good hand for a ninety-eight-year-old lady, and she writes thus:

  “‘My son, Christopher Begorra Brannagan, was of single birth. Had I had twins, I would have been the first to know it, would I not? Or at least I would have been the second one to know it, after the attending doctor. And I had the word of the doctor that I had given birth to a single child. Christopher was not a twin, though he was big enough for two. He was a singleton, as the birth certificate signed by the attending doctor indicates.’ Well, that is what Dame Delfina writes. It seems to be conclusive.”

  “It sure would seem so,” Brannagan’s Ghost declared, “but I’ve been bothered by something there ever since I heard it for the first time. It is almost the only conclusive evidence on my side that I am not a twin; the only document stating implicitly that I am not a part of that dreadful ‘forgotten twin’ phenomenon. In that phenomenon, one of the twins is very often insane and so is inclined to break all the laws of physics and nature. On the other hand, though it would probably go against me, I’d like to know what else my mother wrote. She never wrote just a short spate and then stopped. She was garrulous in tongue and in pen.”

  “But that’s all of it,” said the nondescript ghost. “See, that is the end of the paper.”

  “And what is on the reverse side of the paper?” Brannagan’s Ghost demanded.

  “It is illegal on all the worlds to write on the reverse side of a paper.”

  “I know it is, but my mother had a lot of illegal habits. Now, turn the space verifax over and read to the kangaroo court what is written on the other side of the paper. You neglected to do this at the original Commission hearing and I did not catch the neglect till I thought about it in a lonesome place many months later.”

  “Oh yes, there are writings on the other side. She writes:

  “‘My husband, Barlow Brannagan, wanted to get a second opinion on it, so he asked the apprentice doctor about it. The apprentice doctor said to him that there might have been a second birth but that it had “gone vague” immediately. The apprentice doctor said that he had told the attending doctor about it, but this person had said “Forget it. It can only be a ‘forgotten twin.’ With all the popular pieces like Forgotten Twins, Are They an Alien Invasion of Our World? it seems to me that we should ignore it. ‘Forgotten twins’ can only bring discredit to everybody involved. If a ‘forgotten twin’ does turn up in this case, we want to be able to say ‘He didn’t turn up here,’” so the attending doctor had answered the apprentice doctor and dismissed the case. The apprentice doctor stated further that he saw the second-born person or phenomenon standing in the doorway of the room a little while later, and that then this small person or phenomenon had simply walked away. This was in the days when it was still argued whether there was such a thing as a forgotten twin or a what-is-it, and when less than a dozen of them had been reported in medical history. My own opinion is that I did not give birth to a second son, but that I may have given birth to a what-is-it. It was three weeks after my giving birth that I saw the what-is-it again. He could walk and talk well then. More than that, he could climb into our third-story window to the room where Christopher was. Christopher and the what-is-it were already close friends then, as they would always be, but Christopher was very far behind the what-is-it in development. The what-is-it was frightfully precocious, too much so in some directions. It had already been stated by researchers that, if there were any such thing as a lost twin or what-is-it, it would always be erratic and irresponsible and insane, even though it would be personable and quite intelligent. It may have been so with ours, for he was the flightiest and at the same time the most advanced child that I had ever seen. By the time that he was four months old he was studying my husband’s engineering books and was asking questions about them, to some of which questions my husband could only answer, “I’ll look it up, I’ll look it up somewhere, I’ll try to find the answer.”

  “‘I named the lost twin or what-is-it Chrysanthus Bygosh Brannagan, which was the only name I could think of that went well with Christopher Begorra Brannagan, the name of our regular son. Chrysanthus Bygosh was with us all the time after that, visible and lively, when only members of our own family were there. But when strangers (to him) came, Chrysanthus would often go vague or invisible. As the years went by—’

  “That is the end of what Dame Delfina Brannagan wrote.”

  “There has to be another sheet to it,” Brannagan’s Ghost maintained. “Get on the vector transmission and trace it all the way back to Gaea-Earth if necessary. Get the further sheets of the space verifax, and have the clerk who failed to transmit them fired. Have his ears cropped too, if that can be done.”

  “It has been nearly two hundred years. Former Ruler Brannagan, since the verifax was received and first introduced into the evidence,” the nondescript evocation said. “The clerk who failed to transmit it is probably long since dead.”

  I looked at the gold coins which I had taken from the chests in the cavern, perhaps a hundred coins in all. I made a pile of them on a stone outcrop of Brannagan’s tomb, and I transferred each of them to another pile after I had examined it. The noble face of Brannagan himself was on two of the coins. The face of Januarius O’Grogan was on two of them. There were three gold twenty-guilder pieces from Gaea-Earth. There were six pirate-head coins from the Pirate-Emirate Asteroids. There were nine coins of San Simeon gold from Gaea-Earth (there used to be a ballad song about that gold bubble and how it burst). There were five of the Enrique d’Or gold coins from Golden Astrobe. There were twenty-one coins that I couldn’t identify, though the faces on them were human faces and the wording on them was in Roman letters. And the rest of the coins, fifty-six of them, had depictions of proud dragons on them. Had there indeed been whole dynasties of dragons on Klepsis who were intelligent enough to mint coins? The pictures were clearly of a dozen different dragons, and they all seemed to be royal dragons. These were not merely popular pictures. They were of strong dragon personages, each of them of strong and unique character.

  Did dragons still live in the dark and enchanted underground of Klepsis? Could any human person read the dragon writing that was on the coins?

  “Yes, there is a Chair of Dragon Studies at the Imperial University of Klepsis,” the excellent Princess Thorn whispered to me, taking up my thoughts as she often did. “No, the Imperial University is not at all well known. It is located in three dim and dusty rooms up in the attics of Ravel-Brannagan Castle. I attended it once when I was a youngster, and there were then two other students. I do not know whether the student body is larger or smaller now. I don’t know how many ‘Castle Kids’ there are now. But Flobert Traxley, ‘The Man Who Talks to Dragons,’ still chairs the dragon studies. I learned that just this evening. He can read the inscriptions on the coins.”

  “I will now take the bull by the ears,” said a ghost who was not at all nondescript. “I’ll present a flaming bill of particulars here. I am Joshua Thorn, for those of you who remember me not. I’ll not stick to the script of the original Commission hearings either. I’ve thought of additional things to say during my ghostly decades. Bat-brained Brannagan, the prisoner in the docket, must be toppled retrospectively to the time of the original trial; this for the salvation of the World Klepsis. Let us not say that it is impossible. There has been much good work done lately in the field of retroactive sequencing. I doubt whether you other ghosts have kept up with it.”

  “Brannagan is no prisoner, and there is no docket here,” O’Grogan said.

  “The man Brannagan is of a rabid insanity, and he has a haunt attached to him,” Joshua Thorn spoke in a kind of roar. “His insanity is virulent. There is nothing harmless or comic
about it. He has a one-legged haunt that is a shape-changer and a size-changer. This haunt knows almost everything, in books and out of them, but he used his information disgracefully for the harm and retardation of the World. And Brannagan himself is a total dolt. The haunt cannot be killed directly, but Brannagan can be killed. If we kill Brannagan today, which I heartily recommend, then I believe that the haunt will wither and die, as having no home to return to.”

  “Is this flaming orange-head of a man, this Joshua Thorn, an ancestor of yours?” I asked Princess Thorn.

  “Probably a collateral ancestor. I don’t believe that he lived long enough to settle down and establish a family. I don’t know whether that part of it will be reenacted here or not, but angry Brannagan killed insolent and accusing Joshua Thorn right in the middle of this improbable courtroom. And it was for that murder that Brannagan, saved from execution, was deprived of his office of Director of the World Named Klepsis and was marooned and left to die on the most desolate island of the most desolate asteroid in the universe. It was the O’Grogan who saved him from execution and had him marooned instead. It was also the O’Grogan who succeeded him as Director of the World Named Klepsis. It is a little hard to follow things here unless you already know what happened.”

  “As an example of the insanity of this smirking madman Brannagan, he maintains that the worlds have not begun yet, and that all of us are imaginary nonbeings,” Joshua Thorn was continuing his railing. “He says that he has some ideas as to whose imagination it is that we all non-exist in. He suggests, not too subtly, that it is his own imagination that we are all in and that if he is killed, then we will all blank out and be never-has-beens. Just for the hell of it, let’s kill him right now and see whether it works that way!”