Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  So O’Grogan’s Ghost told me. But did O’Grogan’s Ghost also have a double-jointed tongue? It was when O’Grogan’s Ghost was in this pensive mood that Titus Livius the Historian and Fairbridge Exendine the Penny Philosopher came to him with a suggestion for disposing of the stowaway and spy, Grand Marshal Golconde of the Paravata Defense League.

  “The Paravata Defense League would be warlike if only it had something to be warlike with,” Titus Livius the Historian said. “If they have the secret of planet-jumping they will be making raids everywhere with their spaceships. A ship could raid and return to its home base almost before it started.”

  “All right, you two do as you suggest, then,” O’Grogan agreed. “Use the leaky lifeboat for it, though. It is of no use to The Dina O’Grogan, but it will only have to hold together for about six seconds. And use the aft mind-stripper.”

  Titus and Fairbridge took the most obscure of the three short-tailed humans, put him in the leaky lifeboat, took the Grand Marshal, ran him through the mind-stripper (they have these only on unscientific worlds like Klepsis), put him in the lifeboat too, lowered it into the saltless sea, and pushed it off.

  The short-tailed human grinned and waved, and then the lifeboat with its two occupants disappeared completely from Klepsis World.

  “In six seconds it will appear in the luxury lodge of the Paravata Defense League, in a fishpond in their great meeting hall, a small and sinking lifeboat with the Grand Marshal Golconde, totally insane, in it. And with the other occupant a little sideshow monster. What will they think?” said Titus Livius Morrison-Bryce the Eminent Historian.

  “I am worried,” Doctor Gilmartin told me. He was a living man and not a ghost, a grandfather or great-uncle of the reigning Princess Angela. Alive he was, but he had come to look a little like a ghost, from associating with them so much, especially with Brannagan’s Ghost.

  “When Brannagan’s Ghost gets tired of the fun of being a prisoner in chains, he is likely to do some wild thing. He can raise sea-tempests, you know, violent ones that could easily destroy a ship of this size. He is not God, but he knows many of the little God-tricks. He can say to the winds and the waves, ‘Rise and roar,’ and they will do it. And then he can say, ‘Be calm again,’ and they will be calm.”

  “Have you seen him raise tempests, or have others told you of this?” I asked the doctor.

  “Others have told me of it, but they are such ones as I believe. Of course, since the epiphany of the Doomsday Equation we can think in no other context than that of the equation.”

  “What is the Doomsday Equation?” I asked.

  “You are an historian and you do not know the Doomsday Equation? Its revealing is certainly the most important historical event of the century, just as it is the most important philosophical and eschatological event.”

  We had been moving on a clear night ocean, but now strange floes (not of ice) were suddenly floating in it. And with the floes there came a queasiness, a lightness, a giddiness. There had been a change in everything, but either it was not a rapid change, or it was so subtle that it took us a while to realize that it had happened. But we were lighter now; there was no question of that. And the air pressure was much less. The ghosts realized it first (they are as sensitive as canaries to ambient changes), especially the lookout ghosts in the crow’s nest.

  “Jump ahoy! Jump ahoy!” he cried down from the low sky (a low overcast was part of the change). “Sea’s gone strange, sky’s gone strange. Jump ahoy!”

  “I believe that we are breathing pure oxygen now, and not enough of it,” Doctor Luke Gilmartin said.

  “First Engineer, report to the Instruments Room,” somebody yelled over the ship’s speaker in a light-hearted voice, even a kidding voice. “World gravity is on the fritz, down to a tenth. First Engineer, come and repair world’s gravity.”

  Almost everybody laughed at this, but the gravity was surely only a fraction of normal. The ship rode very much lighter and higher in the water, and it bounced and skipped dangerously.

  “What is it, what is it?” the Eminent Historian Titus Livius Morrison-Bryce asked me.

  “Let’s just go see,” I said. I got a bucket and a rope. I dunked the bucket into the ocean and pulled it up again. “Taste it, Titus,” I said, and he did.

  “It’s salt water,” he announced in a moment, “and all the seas and oceans of Klepsis are fresh water. It baffles the brain, but I say that we are no longer on Klepsis.”

  “It’s the jump, the biological planetary jump, the short-tailed jump,” said Fairbridge Exendine the Penny Philosopher from the Trader Planet Emporion. “It is a biological change as much as a change in convoluted space. Plants and animals, and the lower animals more than the upper, do migrate from planet to planet and to asteroids. Usually when humans arrive at a new world they will find that plants and animals of the Gaea-Astrobe-Camiroi families have already been there for about a thousand years. They feel impelled to ‘get the planet ready.’ But some of the higher animals may have been on the new world for only about fifty years. Some of the older elephants and mules on Klepsis (there is real evidence of this) have even been born on other worlds and have migrated to Klepsis without human aid. Plants and animals do not have spaceships. They jump through the hiatus, they jump through the bush, they jump through the jungle. And when humans do make the planetary jumps, (they do it very rarely, and usually are either illuminati or pirate groups) there is a very strange symbiosis or parasitism as a side effect. They pick up green mementos on their jump. For instance—”

  Fairbridge Exendine pulled up his seaman’s sweater. Green leaves and fronds were growing from his belly.

  “I always thought that was a tall story, Fairbridge,” Titus the Historian said. “How do you do it?”

  “I do not do it. It is done to me, just as it is done to you. I went along on a jump from planet to planet, or probably from planet to asteroid. I feel much lighter, but I’ve been in no-weight space a lot and it doesn’t bother me. I smell salt spray, and there are green mosses and spoors growing on my body. That’s the way it was done to me. How was it done to you, Titus?”

  “To me? Let me see,” Titus said. Titus was dressed more formally than was the Penny Philosopher, so it took him longer. But when he finally bared his belly, yes, green leaves and fronds were growing on it. So were they on mine.

  “If we jumped, so did the ship,” Titus said. “That makes it a spaceship, I suppose. But regular spaceships don’t pick up green goop. Maybe it’s because they go too slow, or don’t go through a biotic medium.”

  “Yes, when I dipped the bucket, I noticed—” I began. We all went to the rail and examined the side of the ship. The whole hull of the ship was bosky, bushy, green-leafed and green-fronded and even green-boughed. And the stuff on the ship was a meter thick.

  “There is no great mystery about it,” Bartolomo Portuguese said. “Of course, I’ve jumped before. The Penny Philosopher says that it is usually members of either the illuminati or the pirate groups who make the jumps, and I’m a member of both. Moreover, I’m a short-tail. It is only a quick parasitical growth that fastens on us as we go through it on a jump. We couldn’t jump without picking up some of it. Jump space is fantastically populated—with botany. My God, what botany! The interstellar dust that some astronomers write about is interstellar botany. You will find that many old pirates cultivate and affect this green growth on themselves.

  “The pirate ships have always been great jumpers—the pirate ships of Tarshish and Klepsis especially. They would coast along in their own poor backwaters, and then in an instant they would be in the richer waters of another planet and bearing down on unsuspecting prey. They would rob and scuttle. And then, when they had a shipload of wealth, they would go away again by the hiatus road. If an armada should get on the trail of one of them and be about to overhaul it, the ship would disappear from that world completely and appear on its own world, or on some other world. The eleven great pirate ships of Klepsis (of whi
ch this is one) made such jumps routinely. And The Dina O’Grogan on which we ride made more such jumps than any of them, for the ship’s captain, Dina O’Grogan herself, was the most fearless of the eleven great pirate-captains. Moreover, she was a short-tail, though that was secret. She made the space-bustle popular for a while with ladies of the pirate families. Her brothers admitted that she was the most fearless. My own grandfather sailed on this Dina O’Grogan many times in the great age of piracy. I myself am of the sixth generation of pirates,” said Bartolomo Portuguese.

  “Where is Quasimodo?” chained-to-the-mast Brannagan’s Ghost howled loudly, and his happy voice suddenly had blade-steel in it. “Why is he not with me? I need his advice.”

  “Christopher, you know that Quasimodo is still alive,” the O’Grogan called across to Brannagan’s Ghost. “He is alive, but in restricted sleep. He cannot come to you as flesh, and he cannot come to you as ghost. You know such things, Christopher. Collect your wits, please, and do not be calling out like the lunatic you have been proclaimed.”

  “Oh, what are you talking about, Januarius?” Christopher Brannagan’s Ghost called back, in happy spirits again. “Here is Quasimodo now. He was just about other business for a few moments.”

  So O’Grogan, and possibly the other ghosts of the kangaroo court, could not see Quasimodo. But some of us living ones could see him plainly, now and then, as he came and went. But there was an elusive element about the little hunchback. Was he really the “sleeper” back in the Castle?

  And now we were in the hot doldrums of whatever world we were on.

  “Somebody knows where we are and where we are going,” the Historian Titus said. “This is not a random buffeting of the elements. This would be an intolerable place, for as much as half a day. A person would die in this within half a day. The O’Grogan here knows where we are and where we go.”

  “On one level I know, yes,” O’Grogan’s Ghost agreed. “I only hope that I know enough of our navigation to get us back to Klepsis.”

  “These strange doings are partly to my liking,” Titus Livius Morrison-Bryce the Historian said with pleasure. “With historians at least it is always good fishing in muddy waters. I was summoned to Klepsis to advise a leading man who had once been the autocrat and ruler of that world. It happened that he was no longer a leading man but a lunatic ghost instead. He mistreated me, and among other things he had me buried alive. And yet I believe that all things I encounter in the Klepsis context will go in my favor. They will add spice as well as substance to my work. I have decided, since I am already here (though, for the moment, the ‘here’ does not seem to be Klepsis) to write a total history of the planet. What have you decided to do, Duke Tyrone, you who attempted for a while to preempt my place?”

  “I have also decided to write a total history of Klepsis,” I said. “That was my original idea of coming here. When I heard that it was a ‘planet without a history’ I decided to write a history of it. Nobody summoned me to come.”

  “My own work will be titled, simply and professionally, The Annals of Klepsis. What will your work be titled, Duke Tyrone, if indeed it ever does come into being?”

  “My own work will also be called, simply and professionally, Annals of Klepsis,” I said.

  “The difficulty about writing the history is that there are parallel lines two hundred years apart, and they are meeting constantly,” Titus said. “Klepsis really has not had any history, we know. It has had something else entirely. Oh, I love these ‘My God What Grapes!’ grapes. It was thoughtful of somebody to provide them.”

  “Brannagan’s Ghost spoke to me in much the same way earlier in the night,” I said. “He told me, and I quote: ‘While I still stir and walk and talk, even in my ghost form, then Klepsis will remain in its time of legend and prehistory. But when I can no longer walk and talk, even as a ghost, then the history of Klepsis may begin. My fear is that the earlier chapters of it may be inferior history.’”

  “Interesting, interesting,” said Titus. “But the earlier chapters of it will be inferior history only if written by an inferior historian. I’m happy that I’m not such. And Brannagan will not be able to walk and talk, even in ghost form, for very long. His marooning is a form of execution. I can’t say that I’m sorry. As an historian I am totally objective, but as a man I am a little bit subjective about the fact that he consigned me to be buried in my coffin and to wake up screaming in it.”

  Flobert Traxley, the man who talked to dragons, joined us. It had been getting hotter and stuffier and harder to breathe by the minute.

  “It will not be safe for the Brannagan to be marooned anywhere on this planet,” Flobert said. “This is really one of the Dragons’ Asteroids, and dragons on their asteroids immediately and completely eat every human they come upon.”

  “Well, that is part of Brannagan’s sentence,” the O’Grogan said. “We didn’t intend him to live more than a day or two at most. Damn, I hope it’s sufficiently removed here. It’s not even in our part of the galaxy. I believe that the things and the creatures here will become the imaginings of his mind and will take our places there. They, not we, will perish when he dies. I believe that we will have gone clear out of his mind and out of the zone of destruction. I’ll not worry about Brannagan, though I love him like a brother, the insufferable monster!”

  “I wasn’t worrying about Brannagan. I was worrying about the rest of the universe,” said Flobert Traxley.

  “Island Ahoy!” sang out the ghost-lookout in the crow’s nest. “Damnedest island I ever saw, Ahoy!”

  “If I know my dragons, something very strange and unpleasant is going to happen when the dragons eat Brannagan’s Brain,” Flobert still worried.

  “Iron-Mountain Island Ahoy!” the lookout called down to us. It became hotter and hotter. And then, quite suddenly, too suddenly, we were right alongside a bitterly hot, mountainous iron island that seemed to be composed entirely of sheer cliffs.

  Seamen from the top of the main mast threw grapples to the iron cliffs, and one grapple took hold. A line was run up from the top of the main mast to where the grapple had bit into the iron cliff.

  “Brannagan,” said the O’Grogan in a sad but reasonable voice. “Do us a favor. You who can climb like a Squallton’s squirrel, run up the mast and up the line to the cliff. We’d have a devil of a time getting you up there if you refused to go.”

  “Oh, I’ll go readily enough,” the Brannagan said. Men came to release Brannagan from his chains. But, with a clattering laugh, to show that he could have done it any time he wished, he broke the iron chains by sheer strength and was up the mainmast and up the line from it and onto the iron cliff, going like a Skokumchuck Planet squirrel.

  And Quasimodo, the humpbacked dwarf, who had a lot of physical giantism mixed with his dwarfism (a funny-shaped person he!), was up the mast and line and onto the iron cliff right after the Brannagan.

  “Fare thee ill, Brannagan,” the O’Grogan called up to him. “Thou’lt be alone for the short time you have left to live here. Even Quasimodo will not be with you. But then a disposed ruler doesn’t very much need an executive officer for his final moments alone. Fare thee ill, old fraud.”

  O’Grogan and the other ghosts of the kangaroo court really couldn’t see Quasimodo. And that dwarf was really in a very paradoxical position.

  “Fare thee well, all of you,” the Brannagan called down. “I am going to do a thing five minutes after you leave me marooned in this terrible place, but I will only be doing it in fun. I say that in advance so that none of you will perish from fright. I am going to scare all of you speechless, witless, liverless, breathless, hopeless. I am going to show you how easily I could destroy you. And then I am going to let you go. I will do this out of the goodness of my heart.”

  We pulled away from that scorching-hot iron island as quickly as we could. We tried all directions until we felt the wind in our faces.

  “Brannagan will soon perish,” Flobert Traxley said sadly. “He had
no water and no food, and he has no shelter from the terrible heat and glare. He will die of exposure and thirst, or he will be killed and eaten by dragons.”

  “I’ll bet it goes the other way,” said the Green Robe of the order of Saint Klingensmith. “The Brannagan will know how to kill a banquet-sized dragon. And Quasimodo will know how to make a banquet out of it.”

  Then we ourselves made a resolve not to die of the heat and weirdness, but to come back to our better place.

  “We will jump soon,” the O’Grogan said, “very soon. I do not know the second of any jump but I do know the minute. This is the minute.”

  We jumped almost immediately. We came into nearly total quiet, but there was a shrieking uneasiness on everything. We were on an ocean like none that we had ever seen. It was red and ocher in color, and it had a pushing flow to it as if it were being pumped. The ocean was strange, yes, and the sky. The sky! There wasn’t any sky; that was one reason for our shrieking uneasiness. We were totally enclosed. We were cut off from the sky by a rather low firmament, a steroma, an overhanging solidity.

  “We have misjumped,” said Bartolomo Portuguese, who knew about planet-jumping. “We are on neither Tarshish nor Klepsis. We are not on any of the commonly recognized planets. I have sailed on all of them, and none of them have ocean-scapes like this. This is a world impossible and totally wrong.”

  “It is impossible, of course,” said old Doctor Luke Gilmartin, “so I won’t even tell you what this new world so comically resembles.”

  Our ship was sailing down a rushing torrent. Then our ship was rushing up a torrent, pumped almost vertically into—into whatever was up.

  Utter fascination, utter fear, and the threat of utter extinction! It was depressing and deadly. There was not a blade of vegetation that we could recognize as such, and yet there were solidities all around us. There was no good way to tell the land from the water, for both of them seemed soft and soppy and semi-fluid. The mountains, the folding mountains over our heads, were of tan and gray and rose and dull slate color. They were the color of total despondency.