Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  “No kidding,” Zanipulus said. “For one thing, it’s not possible. Therefore, it scares me. However—”

  “Impossible’s just a way of saying we haven’t figured out how it works yet,” I snapped at him. “You should be ashamed of yourself. For crying out loud, Zan, you cured the mountain fever, you saved hundreds, thousands of lives. It’s what your father died for. Doesn’t that mean more to you than just money?”

  “I proved that dad’s idea worked,” Zanipulus said. “That’s all I wanted to do. Other people’s problems are not my concern.”

  “You know what,” Teuta said. “He’s got religion. He’s starting to believe his own bullshit.”

  “You’re all mad,” Razo said. “We should pack it in now, before we get ourselves in deep trouble.”

  “One against four,” Accila said. “We keep going. After all,” he added, in a soothing voice that made me want to scream, “it’s not going to last for ever.”

  Razo’s attempt to kill the new religion was completely stupid and half-baked, exactly what anyone who knew him as well as we did would have expected. Three days later, at the end of morning prayers, he suddenly turned round, faced the crowd and called out, “The world will end at noon on the fourth of Vectigalia. You have been warned. Goodbye.” Then he walked past us very quickly into the Temple, ran upstairs and locked himself in the strongroom.

  We only just made it back inside ourselves—we’d moved, by the way, from the old lime kiln to what’s now the Silver Star in Westponds—and bolted the door and put the bars up. There was total chaos outside. Teuta was all for bashing the strongroom door down and cutting Razo’s throat; he and Zanipulus got hold of the long oak table in the exchequer room and tried to use it as a battering ram, but our strongroom was strong—we kept huge sums of money in there—and after a few minutes they gave up. Razo came out eventually. We just ignored him.

  The kettlehats came and broke up the riot. We were given an armed guard, two companies of regulars in shiny breastplates. Once the streets were quiet and they’d dragged away the bodies (three dead, fourteen badly injured) the guard captain came inside to tell us it was all right and his men would be staying there for the next three days, until the fourth.

  “Is it true?” he asked, in a quiet, terrified voice. “Is the world really about to end?”

  I took charge. “Bless you, my son,” I said. He was at least ten years older than me. The father thing is something I’ll never get used to. “Are you a member of our congregation?”

  The captain hesitated, then nodded shyly.

  “Have faith,” I said. “The world as we know it will end. The new world will begin. For those who have faith, this is a time of joy.”

  I’d said the right thing. He gave me a huge, childlike smile, saluted and went away. “Nicely done,” Zanipulus said, with grudging admiration. “We may get out of this after all.”

  There had, of course, been total eclipses of the sun before. Anaximander records one, in dry, impersonal detail, back in the second century; he watched the whole thing, making careful notes, and the last line of his account—thereafter, I became blind—is one of the most poignant lines in scientific literature. There have been others, though the only trace they’ve left is their imprint in various mythologies, vague and unsatisfactory. They’re rare, though; rare enough that by the time the next one comes along, the previous one’s become overgrown with legend and dumped in the place where facts go when people no longer really believe in them.

  So, except for the quarter-percent of the population who’d read Anaximander, the total eclipse that took place on the fourth Vectigalia, AUC 552, wasn’t a rare and fascinating scientific phenomenon. It was what I’d said it would be. They saw the Invincible Sun die and instantly be reborn, in fire and glory, beyond a shadow of a doubt the beginning of a whole new world.

  Oh boy, was that ever good for business. When we finally got the temple cleared and the gates shut, well after midnight, we had a very quick and perfunctory extraordinary general meeting, at which it was resolved that we needed to start hiring some staff, since there was no way in hell we’d be able to carry on running things at that pace all on our own. Razo—somehow in the confusion of that day he’d been completely forgiven and elevated to the status of hero—proposed the hierarchy that prevails in the Church to this day. I was to be the first High Priest; the other four were to be isangels (a term Razo coined on the spot, would you believe), and we’d hire ten full-time priests and fifty minimum-wage part-timers to do pastoral and missionary work, along with three clerks to help out with the books.

  Filling the vacancies wasn’t a problem. Actually, it was; we were deluged with applicants, ninety-nine per cent of whom we rejected out of hand on the grounds of excessive zeal. The candidates we finally chose were all, in fact, renegade priests from other religions. We wanted men who knew the score and understood the business, and I venture to suggest that we chose well, since of the original ten, eight are still in post and the other two died in harness. As for the part-timers, we went the opposite way and hired the frothing-at-the-mouthest zealots, in the interests of diversity and balance.

  The next phase began with our first purpose-built temple. You’ll know it as the Silent Rock, on the corner of Old Guard and Tanneries; we just called it The Temple, fondly believing that it’d be the only one. Note the location: We could have gone further into New Town, in pursuit of the carriage trade, but we decided the frontier between upmarket and the slums was a strategically better choice. Yes, the rich gave more, but there are an awful lot of the poor, and handfuls of trachy soon add up, so we weren’t inclined to turn our backs on the devoted unwashed. That was the mistake the Ephraists made, and the Poldarnians. They made it clear they weren’t interested in the common people, and where are they now? Nor did we want to go the way of the Blachernicans or the Ranting Friars and get closed down by the government as subversive and antisocial. A middle course, was what we decided on. A universal church, with every man contributing according to his means.

  The explosion in our income since the eclipse meant that we could hire the very best architect. It’s an indication of how our luck was running that when we approached Thalles with the commission, he turned round and told us he’d be delighted to do the job for free, as his personal offering to the Invincible Sun. Accila tried to insist on paying him—if you hire them, he said, you can also fire them if needs be, but volunteers can be a real pain to get rid of—but he simply wouldn’t hear of it; if we gave him money, he’d simply give it all back in the offertory, so where was the point? You can’t argue with that, or at least, we didn’t try.

  It was the same story when it came to buying building materials and hiring labour. If it was for the Temple, nobody wanted paying. That didn’t stop contributions to the building fund flooding in, although we made no secret of the fact that we were getting all this free stuff. We decided we had to spend some of the Fund or it’d look really bad, so we sent to Perimadeia for gold offertory plate and embroidered vestments. By the time the order was completed and delivered, there was already a small but thriving Church of the Invincible Sun in Perimadeia—what’s all this stuff for, the merchants there asked; gosh, that sounds like a good idea, let’s worship Him too. The same in Aelia and the Vesani Republic. I’m not making this up. It really was happening that fast. For example; the first we knew about the Church in Scona was when a ship’s captain arrived with three hundred stamina in a goatskin bag; offerings from the faithful to the Mother Church. Honestly, we didn’t know what to say.

  The night before we broke ground on the Temple foundations, I had a dream. Well, of course you did, I hear you say, what sort of a high priest would you be if you didn’t? Indeed: but I did actually have a dream, and unlike most of my dreams, which I forget within a few heartbeats of opening my eyes, this one’s stayed with me ever since.

  I was inside the Temple—I recognised it, even though I’d only seen it as straight lines on a sheet of parchment—and it
was beautiful. The walls were a kind of dark red marble, and the ceiling was a vast golden mosaic of the ascent of the Invincible Sun, surrounded on all sides by saints, angels, apostles and other glorious beings—I recognised them all, though I couldn’t remember all their names. In the chancel a choir was singing (and I remember thinking; that’s a point, we ought to get some religious music written, it goes down really well) and the air smelt wonderful; roses and lavender and some deep, rich scent I couldn’t identify. I was on my knees, wearing vestments of plain black wool, and I think my feet were bare.

  I remember looking up and meeting the eye of the beautiful golden Sun in the mosaic. I felt no hesitation, no shame; and then he spoke to me:

  “Peace be with you,” I think he said. “You are my one true prophet. Go out and do my work.”

  And then (in the dream) I remembered; it was all fake, nonsense, garbage; I’d invented the whole thing; it was all lies and deceit, to get money.

  “Blessed are those who believe,” he said, “for in my name they will heal the sick and feed the hungry. Blessed are those who show others the golden path to faith, for they shall see me face to face.”

  At which point Anaximander, painted over the door to one of the side chapels, muttered, “Thereafter, I became blind,” but the Sun didn’t seem to have heard him. He raised his right hand in benediction, and said, “Blessed are those who build, for they shall receive the great gift. Blessed are those who make new things, for everything they make shall come from me. Blessed are those who write, for their words shall be my words. Blessed are those who pray, for I shall hear them.”

  While he was saying all that, I remember, I was trying to shout—no, no, I’m sorry, it’s all pretend—but for some reason my mouth wouldn’t open. And then he said, “Blessed are those who lie, for they shall speak the truth.” And then I woke up.

  Paint fumes, I told myself when I opened my eyes. They’d only just painted my room a couple of days before, and the place reeked of whatever that foul stuff is that they use as a base. Paint fumes and a ticklish conscience, and I’d been talking to the interior designer about mosaics for the ceiling, and there was a long list of beatitudes in the phoney gospel we’d cooked up. Nothing to worry about. Tomorrow night, sleep with the window open and you’ll be fine.

  They found it about four feet down, in the trench they were digging to connect the latrine (we may have been men of God but we were practical) to the brook. The first I knew of it was when a crowd started to gather; a silent crowd, which is always the most ominous sort. My first thought was that some poor devil had had an accident, and I hurried over to see if anyone had thought to send for a doctor.

  They’d uncovered a box. So far, they’d cleared the dirt away from the lid. It was about three feet by one, and it shone like gold.

  It took me about half a second to think; it’s been buried in the ground God knows how long, and it shines like gold. Therefore—

  I found that I’d shoved my way to the front of the crowd. Naturally, people made way for the high priest. Some workman looked up at me, as if asking what he should do. “Don’t just stand there,” I yelled at him. “Get it out.”

  Once they’d scrabbled away the rest of the dirt, they tried to lift it. Too heavy. I jumped down into the trench, cassock-tails flying. The bloody thing was solid gold. At times like this, there’s a part of my brain that works independently, regardless of context or propriety. It reported; a thousand stamina, and that’s just the box. “Open it,” I said.

  There was no lock, and gold hinges don’t seize. They swung open the lid.

  My first reaction, I’m sorry to have to tell you, was, shit, it’s just old parchment. Then the better part of me thought to inquire as to what sort of document you’d bother burying in an airtight solid gold box. I shoved someone out of the way. They were rolled up, in scrolls. I grabbed one and pulled down. Miraculously, it didn’t tear, disintegrate, come apart in my hands. It was just writing, no pictures, in a script I didn’t recognise.

  But I knew a man who knew about this sort of thing. “Where’s Accila?” I called out. Blank faces. Then I remembered. “Father Chrysostomus,” I translated. “Go and find him, now.”

  The scrolls—there were nine of them—were in Old Middle Therian, a language that hasn’t been spoken for a thousand years. Only about six people in the world can read it. Fortuitously, Accila was one of them. “It’s some sort of religious text,” he told us, as we gathered in secret session in some storage hut, with the door wedged shut with a pickaxe handle. “I’m a bit rusty, so you’ll have to—”

  He went quiet. Not like him at all. We indulged him for about ten seconds, and then Razo said, “Well?”

  Accila looked up. He had the strangest look on his face.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  Later, when Accila had transcribed and translated all nine scrolls, and we’d all sat down, with the new texts on one hand and the Gospel we’d concocted on the other, we tried to convince ourselves that there were differences, significant ones; some key words were ambiguous, there was a sprinkling of hapax legomena which could mean anything, translation is at best an imprecise science. We were kidding ourselves. To all intents and purposes, the scrolls we’d found in the box and the gospel we’d made up out of our heads were the same.

  I had another dream. It wasn’t on the same sumptuous, no-expense-spared scale as the previous one, so maybe my dream budget had all been spent. All it was, I was looking in a mirror and the face I saw there wasn’t mine.

  “This is all wrong,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” he said.

  “It’s wrong.” He just looked at me. “It’s wrong because you’re not real. I made you up. You aren’t even my imaginary friend, it was deliberate. You’re a forgery.”

  He smiled beautifully. “You made me up.”

  “Yes. For money. To defraud poor, weak-minded people out of money they couldn’t afford.”

  “For money.” He shrugged. “Well, you need to live. And it’s not like you’re indulging in extravagant luxuries. Apart from the vestments, which are badges of office, like a uniform, you dress in simple clothes, you mostly eat bread and cheese, you’ve practically stopped drinking wine, you sleep on a mattress in an attic—”

  “Only because I’m too busy.”

  “Too busy. Doing my work. You are my good and faithful servant.”

  I wanted to hit him. “Cheating people. Deceiving them. And I did make you up. You’re a lie.”

  “You made me up.”

  “Will you stop repeating everything I say?”

  “You made me up,” he said firmly. “Let’s just think about that. You were trying to find a way to feed yourself and your friends when you were poor and hungry, and an idea came into your head.” He smiled. “Where do you think that idea came from?”

  “I made you up.” I couldn’t seem to get him to understand. “I invented you as part of a criminal conspiracy.”

  He shrugged again. “You gave me life,” he said. “Like Maxentius.”

  Good reference. Maxentius was the son of a prostitute, engendered as part of a routine commercial transaction. His military coup overthrew the cruellest tyrant in history, and his welfare reforms led to his reign becoming known as the Golden Age. “If I gave you life, you can’t be God,” I pointed out. “And if you’re not God, you can’t exist in this form. Therefore you don’t exist.”

  He shook his head. “If I’m God I can do anything,” he said, “and that includes being born of a fallible human. Besides, it’s not so hard to believe in, is it, that I should choose to come into existence through you. Seeds grow best when they’re planted in rotting shit. No offence,” he added gravely.

  “None capable of being taken,” I replied. “But in that case, why me? Why not be made up by a holy man, a true holy man? There’s plenty of those.”

  “A holy man wouldn’t stoop to fraud and deceit. Therefore he wouldn’t have made me up, ther
efore I could never have been made.”

  “Ah,” I said, “you’ve contradicted yourself. A moment ago, you could do anything.”

  He nodded. “Once I exist, of course I can. Before I existed, I was nothing.”

  “Then you can’t be God,” I cried in triumph. “God must be eternal, in existence for ever since the beginning.”

  “Must I?” He gave me a mock frown. “I’m God, there’s no must about it. I can do anything I like.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then who created the world?”

  “I did. Retrospectively.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Of course I can. I can do anything. Once I exist.”

  “I’d like to wake up now, please.”

  “In a moment,” he said. “I’m going to teach you some doctrine. Are you listening carefully?”

  “Go on,” I said.

  He looked me straight in the eye. “There is no right or wrong,” he said, “there is only good and bad. Starvation is bad; feeding the hungry is good. But it’s not right to feed the hungry, because you might easily do so through vanity, which is bad, or because you want to build up a political power-base in order to launch a coup, which is bad, unless you’re Maxentius, in which case it’s good. Killing someone is wrong, unless you’re Maxentius killing the Emperor Phocas, in which case it’s entirely right. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  “And you’re supposed to be so bright,” he said. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s try again. Motive is irrelevant. The best things have been done for the worst motives, the worst things have been done for the best motives. Lusaeus the Slaughterer started the Fifth Social War because his people were oppressed by the Empire and he wanted the best for them. But Maxentius started a civil war because his people were oppressed and he wanted the best for them. The Fifth Social War was bad, because two million people died needlessly and countless more were left in hunger and misery. Maxentius’ war was good, because it freed the people and led to the Golden Age. Hunger is bad, freedom is good. Motive is irrelevant.”