Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  About twenty persons voted yes.

  “Who votes no?”

  Nobody voted no.

  “It is the law, then. Write it down, Speaker of the House Becky Breaksticks. Now we need a willing person to serve as Absolute Master of the Treasure Caverns with Plenipotentiary Powers.”

  “I will serve in that post,” Becky Breaksticks said.

  “Now we need to have a little law and order,” the Empress said. “If anybody exhibits uncitizenly conduct, let the Master of the Dungeons put that person in the Castle Dungeon that is named the Whispering Room. But let the Master of the Dungeons be a little circumspect about this because the Whispering Room will hold only one hundred persons. Who votes yes?”

  Three or four persons voted yes.

  “Who votes no?”

  Nobody voted no.

  “It is the law,” the Empress said. “Write it down, Speaker of the House Becky. Now we need a strong-minded volunteer to serve as Master of the Dungeons, one who can make up her mind quickly and firmly as to who should be thrown into the dungeon and who should not be, one who would not be swayed by the screaming and carrying on of those caught in uncitizenly conduct. The Master of the Dungeons will have absolute power in enforcing her decisions.”

  “I will serve in that post,” Becky Breaksticks said.

  “Now we come to the problem of the renegade Prince Henry who has escaped to the border backlands and is no doubt trying to gather malcontent people to attack us. He may even have gotten hold of a boat and gotten to Tarshish. Let it be enacted that if he comes to attack us with a force of ruffians, we will shoot the tails off all of them with large-and medium-bore weapons. Who votes yes?”

  About fifty persons voted yes.

  “Who votes no?”

  Nobody voted no.

  “It is the law,” the Empress said. “Write it down, Becky. Now, I believe that we should enact a Freedom of Information Law to show that all of us are in favor of both freedom and information. Let the Freedom of Information Law be enacted, and pursuant to it, let the Princess Thorn-Tyrone, my dubious niece, be compelled to tell us what her unspeakable sin was, since we are all curious about it, and since it is information that we should be allowed to make free of in accord with this law. Who votes yes?”

  There was some tittering, but nobody voted yes.

  “I vote my three votes yes,” the Empress said. “Who votes no?”

  Three persons, myself, Thorn, and Terpsichore Callagy, voted no.

  “Oh, a good law has just failed to pass,” the Empress lamented. “Maybe we haven’t chosen the perfect form of government yet. Let us go for another one. Let it be enacted that the peg-legs no longer be accorded special treatment on Klepsis, unless they lost their legs accidentally. If they had a leg taken off to take advantage of the regulations on Klepsis, then let them not be allowed to take advantage of the regulations on Klepsis. Who votes yes?”

  About a dozen persons voted yes.

  “Who votes no?”

  Four of us, myself, Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally, and two other persons, all of us peg-legs, voted no.

  “That’s a regrettable thing,” the Empress said. “I like it best when the laws are unanimous. I say, If you can’t have unanimity, forget it! This law does not pass because of the objections of four measly peg-legged persons. Well, we have set up a government, and that’s something. But if it lasts less than a day (due to our world lasting less than a day after time begins with us) what have we gained? Quasimodo will die tomorrow if he doesn’t die tonight. And all the worlds will collapse and die at the same time unless somebody finds a way to break the doom. Oh, somebody please find a way to break the doom! Try even harder than this slave-mathematician tries. You’ll all die as dead as he will tomorrow if you don’t find the answer.

  “Sit over the banquet tables as long as you wish, good people. Sit all night, for all that I care. But rattle your brains while you sit here. Very many of you people do have brains, and almost all of us Klepsis people have intuition, which is almost as good.

  “Klepsis has been a covenanted piracy for two hundred years, two hundred years which we now decide not to count in our chronology. We lived a bloody and colorful legend, and it is not now to be counted against us. The result of our living so timelessly and vague is that those two hundred years do not count. They did not happen. I hereby declare them to have been non-years. We were clowns. And then we were clowns who weren’t funny any longer. But I do hope that the First Day of Klepsis can bide all day.

  “Thorn, please turn my hippopotamus out into the water pasture. Only a member of the royal family knows how to handle a royal hippopotamus. She’ll refuse to go with a commoner. Do you want to receive the title Mistress of the Hippopotami, Thorn?”

  “No, but I’ll put old Aunt Rhodie here out in the water pasture,” Princess Thorn said.

  THIRTEENTH CANTO

  Doomsday in the Morning

  When white morning touched the top of O’Grogan’s Mountain, there were already many people on that low mountaintop. Some of them were carrying their possessions in suitcases and backpacks. Well, some of their homes were already under the water of the raging ocean, and many of the people felt nervous about things. Klepsis had received several slight nudges, and whenever a planet is nudged, its human population feels a pang of alarm.

  “The mountaintop is only about a hundred meters high here, but it may be that the tidal wave, the world wave, will not rise higher than this,” said Bartolomo Portuguese who was from Tarshish. “The continents are close together on this part of Klepsis, and the tidal waves might not rise as high here as they do on other worlds when they go into their death throes. I’ve got off three dying worlds just in time, and I’ll get off this one too, though I don’t know how I’ll do it. I didn’t know how I was going to do it in the other three cases either. Oh, isn’t there some way to call off your dog, Empress, to call off that stupid Malabu Worldwinger before he wrecks this whole world?”

  “I will call off nobody,” the Empress Angela stated firmly. “It may be that he will save us from doomsday even if he kills half of us doing it. And he is so exuberant and full of hope that I just hadn’t the heart to explain the relationship of Tarshish and Klepsis to him.”

  “The earthquakes will get us if the tidal waves don’t,” Titus the Historian said. “The quakes are already splitting O’Grogan’s Mountain while we stand on it here. It won’t be tolerable for long. It isn’t at all safe to stand here now. And the wind is blowing some whole people away. There go two more of them now, blowing through the air, hand in hand. What is the relationship of Tarshish and Klepsis that Malabu doesn’t understand and I don’t understand either?”

  “I don’t believe that the earthquakes this morning are quite as bad as they were in the Days of the Great Comet when I was a little girl,” the Empress Angela commented. “But then, it’s well known that ‘Earthquakes in Childhood’ are remembered as worse than they were.”

  “That’s another tune that Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan sometimes plays with the little hammer on the bell in his bell tower,” my Princess Thorn said. “I’d forgotten about that one. ‘Earthquakes in Childhood,’ that’s one of the prettiest and most nostalgic of all that he plays.”

  There was much morning lightning, strange grumbling lightning that hit and bounced off the ground and hit again.

  “It is planet-displacement lightning,” the Asteroid Pythagoras said. “We get a lot of it on our asteroids. Our own asteroid is almost always being displaced by some force or other. As this planet rolls (and I believe that it has already rolled about fifteen degrees off its old axis) its magnetism is badly disturbed. This is disturbed-magnetism lightning, but not all of it. Part of it is sheer doomsday lightning.”

  Well, the earthquakes and the cyclonic winds and the strange lightning and the ocean that shouted and climbed out of its bed had already been evincing themselves for several hours. And there was the illusion that the lightning was scrawling prophetic words
and messages as it crawled and rambled about the skies.

  “Some of those things that the lightning is doing are pretty good,” said Terpsichore Callagy, who was herself an amateur poet. “They are clever. And they rhyme.”

  “They are atrocious,” Becky Breaksticks contradicted. “The bon mots are outright plagiarisms, and the rhymes are impure.”

  The slovenly sky seemed impressively near and was full of smoke and sulfur and small rocks. Everywhere on land there were prodigies, as there are every time that a world ends. A cork-island ox began to speak and to prophesy.

  “See what the ox can do with the Doomsday Equation,” Oliver Roundhead jibed good-naturedly. “Everybody else is working on it, and nobody has been able to do anything new with it this morning.”

  “Doom, doom, new-broom doom.

  Doomsday, doomsday, big bang boom.”

  Thus the cork-island ox prophesied.

  “Why, the ox is an idiot!” Oliver exclaimed. “He’s probably right, though.”

  “By the way,” Bancroft Romal confided to several of us, “our other plan is all set. The planet to be destroyed, if it comes down to that, is Gaea-Earth. It can be done instantly, but it will be done only as a last resort. I believe that we’ll have at least a three-second warning when the worlds wind down to their end. A human death is always a kick, counter-kick, and then quietus. The whole takes about three seconds. We’re plugged into Quasimodo’s data as it is handled and interpreted on Astrobe. There is always the long-shot chance that the situation may be saved otherwise. Oh, I love to shave a thing close! I’m the trigger-man, you know. I’ve got the trigger wired into my brain, and you might say that I’ve got Gaea-Earth in my pocket. I can destroy that old world right now on half-a-second’s notice.”

  A pack of bush-baby barbarians and sand-spit skulkers (these were tribes of humans that had gone feral) were making their way up the north flank of O’Grogan’s Mountain. They had guns, but they weren’t good guns. Fifty years of rust shone orange on them in the morning light. They had three wobble-wheeled wagons pulled by oxen. They were carrying a gruesome head on the end of a long lance. As they came a little nearer, it was seen that it was the head of Prince Henry the Pirate, the recently fallen ruler of Klepsis.

  “Stop the earthquakes, stop the cyclones, stop the lightning fires, stop the gobbling oceans,” these feral people jabbered, and several of their leaders stepped forward from the others.

  “We do not attack you. We do not invade you,” they said with sly sincerity. “The crooked-tongued Prince said, ‘Come and invade them with me, and you will have meat and gold, and heads to kick like footballs.’ And we said ‘Yes, we will,’ but we lied, or at least we don’t remember now whether we meant it or not when we said it. But when the earthquakes started and the lightning began to set all the fires in our bushes, we figured we had better get on the right side of things. We cut off his head then, and we bring it to you now. Stop the earthquakes, high lady. Stop the winds, stop the lightning, stop the gobbling ocean. It is worse on us because we live in the lowlands. And give us gold if you have some. He promised us gold.”

  “Oh, all right,” the Empress Angela agreed. “Becky, let them load their three wagons with as much gold as they want. If their eyes are bigger than their wagons, though, and their wagons break down from the weight of the gold, they must leave wagons and gold and oxen all there. The head? Oh, just put it down anywhere. I don’t save them, really I don’t.

  “Doesn’t yesterday seem like a long while ago, though? Oh, so much has changed since yesterday. You people go back to your bushes and your sand-spits now. I’ll stop the earthquakes and the winds and the lightning and the rampaging oceans. Yes, I give you my word that I’ll stop them.”

  “How long will it take to stop them?” one of the sand-spit skulkers asked.

  “About half a day. No more than that.”

  “Can’t you do it quicker than that, high lady?”

  “Shore-man, it took the sky thirty years to brew that lightning. It took the wind-master forty years to raise winds that big. It took the land sixty years to raise up those rock-splitting earthquakes. And it took the ocean ninety years to build up for such a rampage. And should I be able to stop all of them in less than half a day?”

  “We guess not. But can we use the other mountain, the Issachar Mountain to the west to stand on? We haven’t any mountain in our bush or sand-spits.”

  “Yes, go stand on Issachar Mountain,” the Empress said, “and I’ll stop the earthquakes and cyclones and lightning and rampaging oceans for you as soon as I get time to do it.”

  All the bush-baby barbarians and sand-spit skulkers went off towards Issachar Mountain in the west then, except for the wagoners who had gone with Becky.

  There was an exploding noise. The David Watchtower separated itself from Ravel-Brannagan Castle and fell as a giant falls. Well, it had been weakened by the fires of the night before last, but there was still something providential about its fall.

  After a little while, the wagoners of the barbarians went walking towards Issachar Mountain without their wagons or oxen. Their eyes had indeed been bigger than their wagons, and Becky had been a merciless dealer.

  The waters of the saltless ocean (“Brannagan’s Ghost still complains, whenever anything goes wrong on Klepsis, that it is because the people coming to Klepsis do not always bring sacrifices of salt to pour into its oceans,” Princess Thorn said quite seriously), the waters of the saltless ocean had now completely surrounded Ravel-Brannagan Castle and inundated it clear up to the fourth story. It was still rising very rapidly and stormily. And the animals began to gather. Frightened by the rising water, some of them having been drowned by it, flocks and mobs of animals almost crowded the people off the mountaintop.

  The Tarshish storyteller was there with us on the top of the mountain.

  “Story-man, what is a good ending for the present story?” Titus asked him.

  “I get most of my stories from my dreams, and from old legends. I have dreamed, many times and oft, everything here exactly as it has been happening. I dream it up to the point where the slave-mathematician is struck by lightning, and then my dream will stall and go no further. I only hope that the world won’t stall and go no further forever. The old legends on it are pretty much the same. The endings of them are very weak and contrived. I just don’t know how this episode is going to end.”

  Then there was a series of very loud meteorological explosions, from about a kilometer high in the air. And there was now a different feeling in the mountain-ground under us. We could also see and hear and feel a change in the tidal wave, the world-wave.

  “Malabu is not simply rolling the planet now, trying to get hold of it,” Alex Braveheart stated. “He has begun to move us slowly and relentlessly out of our orbit. Will we break up now, do you suppose? What odds will somebody give me that we don’t break up?”

  “Malabu is moving Klepsis out of its orbit?” I asked in amazement. “But he is supposed to be moving Tarshish. What is the matter with him?”

  “Oh, for that matter, it is Tarshish that he’s moving,” Alex said. “They are oddly related. Tarshish is the what-is-it of Klepsis. Tarshish is the Lost Twin of Klepsis. Tarshish is the psychological under-mind of Klepsis. There are so many people who don’t know that Tarshish and Klepsis are the opposite parts of the same planet, the opposite aspects of it. It was Brannagan himself who began the deception, and it was O’Grogan and his pirate children who kept it up. They had all their rivals in piracy running around through all the skies looking for Far Tarshish, which would be at the same time a treasure planet and a hellhole, an ideal combination for the pirates. And persons, shipmasters and haulers of people, those who did know the where of Tarshish, would take their travelers on a sedated and long-way-around course, orbiting each sun—Proxima, Alpha, and Beta—in turn while going from the Tarshish half to the Klepsis half of the same little ball. But there was truth in the deception. Tarshish is at the same time a hell
hole and a treasure place, to at least the extent that Klepsis is.”

  Oh, it was a sick dizziness now. Our orb was being moved, and it resisted being moved. Big rocks were floating in the air, detached from their basis and unable to decide which of all the contrary forces to follow. The tidal wave, the world-wave, confused by the change of impetus, shot up many hundreds of meters into the air in narrow needles of water.

  “Why did people let Malabu go then, and go under the pilotage of four hundred space-jumping short-tailed intuitives, to arrive at a place where he would do violence to this very world?” I asked.

  “We let him go because it was silly-season with us,” Alex said. “We let him go because we didn’t think he could move a world of this size. Or rather, we wanted to see whether he could move such a world or not. And he can, a little bit at least.”

  “Well, there’s a fast-looking little spacecraft stabled on the west flank of O’Grogan’s Mountain just over there,” Oliver Roundhead said, “and it looks exactly like mine. I must have spotted it there to thwart my silly inclinations. I think I’ll just take a quick spin to the other side of the planet and call Malabu off his task. The changed rotation, and now the slightly changing orbit, have set up so much electrical and magnetic interference that there is no way we can get through to him on expresso or radio or vox-fox.”

  Oliver Roundhead took the fast-looking craft and zoomed off so rapidly that he simply melted away.

  “Oh, this is heady, this is heady!” the Asteroid Pythagoras cawed. “We have such meteorological explosions and manifestations as these on the asteroids, and we love them. Sometimes one of our asteroids will bounce along in the empyrean like a rubber ball. And we have just such idiosyncratic lightning on our own asteroids. I’m homesick for all of it, and this is all like a big gust from home. I will just go up for a while and zigzag with the lightning and explode with the explosions.”