Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “And then I transferred it all to Quasimodo here. He was taking so much work off my hands that I thought he might as well take this too. I couldn’t have transferred it to just any other person, but I believe I could have transferred the thing to the special person in ten billion.”

  “The qualities of Quasimodo do not seem to be the qualities of yourself, Old Unicorn,” Bancroft said. “What qualities do you believe that he had to make him receptive to the power?”

  “Total compassion, total goodness, total aptitude for all things, and the wish to serve all his fellow creatures—a good bag of talents. No, they are pretty much opposite to my own talents, but they work well.”

  “Do you believe that this holding of all persons in your mind means that you hold them as imaginary creatures in your mind only, and that they are not real persons?”

  “Oh, in most cases, yes, but not in all. There are probably several dozen valid persons in the universe at all times. The rest are imaginary.”

  “Do you believe that the worlds will end when Quasimodo dies, because of the fact that the worlds are only imaginings in his mind?”

  “No. I believe that the worlds will end when he dies, but they’ll end for another reason entirely. The fact of the point and the person being identical and being the third focus of the construct that is the humanly inhabited universe has little to do with that person being an omniscient, a know-all. The mathematics of the Doomsday Equation, besides being the most elegant mathematics of any equation ever, are clear on that point. It would not matter whether the person who was the point did not even know the names of the members of his own family: when he died, the universe would die also. It would seem that real elegance would dictate that the person who was the point should be an idiot or a halfwit, but this requirement is served equally in Quasimodo’s being deformed and abridged in body.

  “Once a kinetic three-dimensional ellipse has learned to live with itself, it cannot change fundamentally. If the third focus dies, then the universe and all the people in it will die also. Hang On as long as you can, Quasimodo.”

  “No. I’m ready to go now. Somebody tell me the way out, tell me the way out.”

  “Isn’t there any way to break the premise of the construct and the equation, Autocrat Brannagan?” Isadora Ragsley asked.

  “Several ways, lass, but all of them seem a little bit impractical. One of them is to move an exterior planet into the construct. But planet-moving isn’t easily done. There is one man who has the equipment to do it, so he believes, and he is avid to try it. Come to think of it, that man arrived on Klepsis this morning. Arrived, yes, and with four hundred shiploads of equipment. But the betting is seven-to-five against him being able to do it.

  “No, omniscience in the person-who-is-the-point isn’t required. The Doomsday Equation is most clear on that. The omniscience is only a hook to catch the imagination of the rabble, and I’d rather it weren’t caught.”

  “What do you know about the ‘what-is-its’ or the ‘lost twins’?” Clarence Pinnacle asked.

  “Almost nothing. It has been said that I am such, but I never believed it. I have always been a single personality, with the gift of bi-location it’s true; with the gift of astral projection, it’s true; with the gift of planetary jumping, it’s true; with the gift of projecting giant illusions, it’s true. Several of you here were inside the giant brain that I projected last night, one that was very well done and was quite a few kilometers in each direction, but it was still no more than an illusion.

  “I look at my own body and bones every day as they lie in their transparent glass coffin, and yet I do not believe that there is any real difference between Brannagan the dead man who lies there and Brannagan the Ghost who walks and talks. No twin am I. But there may be such twins.

  “Prince Henry the Pirate and Prince Franco the Outcast may be such twins. Or they may be a single person as I am. Or they may be (but I doubt this very much) two distinct persons. You can find out which is the case almost immediately, though, by close observation. A Castle revolution has just gone into its final phase here. Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel-O’Grogan-Brannagan has just toppled her husband Prince Henry the Pirate. She’ll, of course, have him whipped to death at the tail of the magnificent donkey until he is dead. She believes in observing all the old customs. If you can do so, observe Prince Franco the Outcast while this is going on. If great welts rise on his back for every whip stroke that Prince Henry receives, then they are the same and a single person. If only small welts arise, then they are twins, a primary and a what-is-it. If no welts at all rise, then they are two distinct persons.”

  “What was the business of the steel traps in the walls that came alive, as it were, and almost did us to death?” Isadora Ragsley asked.

  “All old castles have sleeping traps of one sort or another. Before this was the Room of the Death Masks, still more before it was the Sleeper’s Room, this was the Room of the Covenant, the room where the eleven high covenanted pirates met at long intervals. And they were spied on by some of the slickest spies in the universe. The spies would come inside the walls and spy through the eyes of the ‘idol masks,’ those of false gods that the pirates had collected on their travels and set as decorations in these walls. It was the lass Dina O’Grogan herself who had the traps built by the finest trap-builder of the worlds. They are under voice control and mind control by anybody who has real authority here. Prince Henry had them under only hazardous authority and control, for his whole reign was quite hazardous. They are really an anachronism now, a sort of souvenir of the old days.”

  A little while later, after we had had many more of our questions answered, and had been told that many more of them were unanswerable, Brannagan’s Ghost summoned his own gang into the Sleeper’s Room: the Green Robe, the Seneschal Fidelis (the dripping man), Doctor Luke Gilmartin, and Flobert Traxley (though Brannagan had no real need of this latter; Brannagan could talk to dragons himself). They’d keep the rabble out of there and not let them bother Quasimodo in his dying.

  “And you five others here, you of a slightly more beloved rabble, you leave this room also,” Brannagan’s Ghost told us. So Princess Thorn and I, and our three companions of the traps, left the Sleeper’s Room.

  There had indeed been a palace revolution in the Castle.

  It had really been decided during the sharp gunfighting of the night before when the bravos of Princess Angela had nearly wiped out the bravos of Prince Henry the Pirate. But there had been a lot of details to work out after that, and Princess Angela had been working them out slowly and methodically.

  Prince Henry had kept his own dozen guards, and they had even been arresting traitors and dragging them out to be executed all the early part of that day. The executions, however, had not taken place.

  “My myopic husband has always had trouble reading the handwriting on the wall,” the Princess Angela was reported to have said. But now the workers were taking down the long bell pull rope from the Henry Bell Tower. If Prince Henry ever rang the bell in his tower again, he’d ring it as a ghost, and ghosts do not need bell pulls. Other workmen had begun construction on the Angela Bell Tower. And a magnificent donkey of royal mien had been tethered, with tethers of steel, on one of the execution knolls. The handwriting on the wall was getting bigger.

  Then Prince Henry was arrested during a particularly arrogant outburst, was handcuffed, and was brought to the tail of the donkey. The handcuffs of the toppled Prince were then knotted into the tail of the magnificent donkey who came from World Abounding. Oh, they do have some prize animals on World Abounding!

  Princess Angela (“Call me Queen. I do not do this wrenching thing to remain a Princess,” she said), Queen Angela of Klepsis looked harassed and angry and even a little bit evil in her triumph.

  “I will give the people of Klepsis an honest but flamboyant rule,” she said. “The people deserve the royal touch in their royalty. I shall ride on a hippopotamus. It is a great waste to have a herd of royal
hippopotami and none of them ever ridden. I will wear scarlet gowns with fifty kilograms of gold woven into each of them, and that will be when I’m wearing old clothes. I will change the name of the eighth month of the year to Angela. It’s such a pretty name! And that is only a start. I will go elegant always. I will call tomorrow (my coronation day) The First Day of the Worlds.”

  “Empress Angela,” an exuberant and young billionaire named Malabu Worldwinger from World Abounding addressed her. “Would you, as Empress, sign these purely routine landing and takeoff permits? Oh, they will become collector’s items, the first official signing of the Empress. The permits are for four hundred shiploads of heavy equipment. Actually they have already landed, but I’m told that I need a permit for such a large armada. I am Malabu Worldwinger, but many persons call me Malabu Worldmover because my business is moving worlds. I intend to move the Planet Tarshish into a new orbit.”

  “If Tarshish moves, can Klepsis long stand still?” the Empress Angela asked. “I didn’t even know that Tarshish has an old orbit. The ‘If Tarshish moves’ thing is a sort of proverb from the old times. Its meaning isn’t known. All right, I’ll sign the permits. But don’t let every world-mover think I’ll sign their permits just for the asking. I like to be called Empress. I hereby declare myself to be the Empress Angela indeed. I hereby declare that every deck of cards hereforth made on Klepsis shall have an empress in each suit, the empress card to be worth a king and an ace together.”

  “Far Tarshish is a hidden planet that I will have to locate before I can move it to a new orbit,” Malabu commented. “Do you know where Far Tarshish is located, Empress Angela?”

  “You’ll know when you get there. It’s the only place that is even more bush than Klepsis.”

  Prince Henry at the donkey’s tail looked frightened, but also somehow resolute.

  “Why, Angela, why?” he asked as she came to the knoll of the execution.

  “You ask why, Henry? The Princess Thorn sinned an unspeakable sin once, and nobody knows what it is. I wonder whether I, as Empress, can compel her to tell me? But you have sinned unspeakably hundreds of times, and I do know what most of those sins are. For your vile and cruel executions, for your traffic in slaves, for your commissioned piracies (your ancestors and mine at least performed their piracies themselves), for your frauds, for your outright robberies, for your rapes and sadisms and perversions, for your tortures; and most of all for your incredible vulgarities, for these things I replace you and obliterate you.”

  “Surely there is something good in me.”

  “You have a brother who is more good than bad. He is the closest thing to good in you.”

  “Have you no forgiveness?”

  “Seventy times seven times I have forgiven you, and as to your offences against me I would forgive them forever. But for your offences against others, against whole populations, I can no longer forgive you, nor is it my place to do so.”

  “Imprison me then, Angela, but do not kill me. There really is a hidden thing that will change the matter when it comes to light.”

  “The hidden things around you are better not brought to light, Henry. Do you want a Green Robe before you go? Your sins do need shriving.”

  “Yes, I want that, but not at a donkey’s tail.”

  “There is no other way. You are tethered to the donkey, and you will die tethered to it.”

  “But this is a highly intelligent donkey, Angela. He will hear and understand all the black sins that I confess. Yes, and he’ll tell them too. This donkey can speak more than one hundred words, and he can make several hundred sign-language signs. I’ll not have him listening while I confess.”

  “Attendants, bring two kilograms of medium-hot beeswax,” the Empress Angela commanded. “Well, quickly, quickly! Does it take forever to bring as common a thing as beeswax?”

  The beeswax was brought almost immediately, and one kilogram was poured into each ear of the intelligent donkey. Then the Green Robe came, and the Empress Angela withdrew a short distance.

  “Did I not know it impossible in Prince Henry, I’d almost believe that there was a touch of intended humor in that last set-to,” the Empress confided to one of her aides. “But with Prince Henry, of course, humor would be impossible.”

  I myself was learning the real tricks of the historian, tricks I had not learned when I majored in historiology in school. The magnifying monocle, and the ability to read mouth which I had been learning for the last few hours, these were invaluable historical tools. They gave me the content of almost all conversations and comments up to the middle distances.

  Thorn and I and Bancroft and Isadora and Clarence had been looking for Prince Franco everywhere. We called out for him often, thinking that he might have gone vague but might still be quite near. He would not likely miss something as interesting as the execution of his brother Prince Henry.

  Then we saw him, coming furtively out of the hard-to-see Wine Door of the Castle. Coming furtively? Prince Franco? How unlike him! We saw him coming out of this unsuspected door of the Castle, and he seemed to be in a great hurry to get somewhere. He looked very distraught, but also excited, as though filled with a secret pleasure. Well, his brother was about to be put to death, and perhaps he still had some filial feeling for that monster.

  “Wait, wait, hold, hold, Prince Franco!” Princess Thorn called out, and Prince Franco waited, though for a moment it actually looked as though he would run away from her.

  “Prince Franco,” Isadora said. “We are investigating the relationship of a twin and a ‘lost twin,’ and of a twin and a what-is-it. We want to see how one will react to the other in a moment of crisis. This is all very scientific, and we want you to help us. We want to see whether welts will rise on your back when your brother is whipped to death.”

  “You become too familiar,” Prince Franco said. “You’ll not bare my back, but you will see how I react to Prince Henry’s death-flogging. Oh, you’ll see, you’ll see!” Somehow this didn’t seem quite like the Prince Franco we knew.

  As soon as the Green Robe of the order of Saint Klingensmith had confessed Prince Henry, strongmen began to flog him with long whips. And there was no way they could flog the man without flogging the magnificent donkey also. So the Prince would be kicked to pieces by that big beast that could kick lions to pieces.

  Prince Henry was almost broken in two by the first volley of hammer-hooves. The whip would always set one of those giant World Abounding donkeys to a kicking that was absolutely lethal.

  “Goodbye, Angela,” Prince Henry spoke out of broken lungs and broken throat, in the last words he would ever speak, “I always cared for you, Angela, but I couldn’t tell you so. The circumstances wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Henry,” Empress Angela said, “this is so strange. You’re not—”

  Prince Henry’s back and neck were broken by the next volley of hooves, and the two sorts of whiplashing almost took his head off.

  But Prince Franco had gone into spasms of hilarity. There had never been such rotten laughter as his. He seemed to be out of his mind, and he giggled dirty doggerel:

  “Oh, Hank and Frank, the brothers rank!

  It’s fact that both the brothers stank!”

  Another volley of hooves from the giant donkey did take Prince Henry’s head completely off.

  “This is the joke beyond all others,” Prince Franco chortled. (How could this be the Prince Franco whom we knew?) “Die, my fool brother, kicked to pieces by a donkey and broken by the long whips, die! Oh, do you realize how funny you look with the parts of you being kicked in every direction? I must run now, but even if they catch me, it’ll be worth it to see you done to death like this.”

  And Prince Franco—How could this be our resourceful friend, Prince Franco?—was off at a high run towards the thickets north of O’Grogan’s Mountain, running hard and still laughing like a madman.

  “Oh! You’re dead! How horrible!” Empress Angela cried out. “Oh, stop the flogging! G
et him loose from the animal, what’s left of him! Oh, dead man, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not Prince Henry! You’re, you’re—Oh, oh, oh!”

  “Stop that running Prince, whichever one he is!” one of the strongmen of the Empress called out with loud authority. “Stop him, stop him!”

  “Why does Prince Franco have to run when he can simply go vague and be beyond any pursuit?” I asked stupidly.

  “Because that isn’t Prince Franco running. It’s Prince Henry,” Thorn cried. “And Prince Henry doesn’t know how to go vague. Oh, catch him, catch him!”

  “Oh, oh,” the new Empress Angela was crying over the pieces of the kicked-to-death man. “You’re not Prince Henry! You’re Prince Franco! Why, why, why did you take his place? Why, why, why did you die for him?”

  Three men covered with rock dust, two of them mutes and one of them voiced, came out of the Castle and began to make the death mask of the dead prince.

  “Which name will we put on it, Empress?” the voiced one asked.

  “I, I don’t know. Let it go for a while. I’ll think of something.”

  TWELFTH CANTO

  Lords and Commons of This Realm

  A few of us were listening to Malabu Worldwinger, the exuberant young billionaire from World Abounding.

  “I can move anything,” Malabu boomed in his omnipotent voice. “On Gaea-Earth, on the tomb of a Polish priest named Niklas Kopernik, there are the carved words: He moved the Earth and made the Sun stand still. When I was a boy I wished that I could have those words on my tomb also. Now I’ll settle for a better epitaph, one that I’ve earned: He could have moved them both.

  “I am in the business of moving worlds. Though so far I have moved nothing larger than a medium-sized asteroid, it has only been for lack of opportunity. But now it seems to be a mathematical necessity that Tarshish or some comparable planet be moved to a new orbit within the construct of the four suns and the seventeen humanly inhabited planets. Such a moving may alter the Doomsday Equation so that our construct will not collapse and perish when its third focus perishes. I welcome the challenge. I have the equipment to do the job. I can move any ordinary-size world to a new orbit, if only I can find that world.