by Bill Adams
Next scene. When Theodore and the other leaders of the Carbonari arrive, Manfred reveals his princely identity to the astonished Theodore, and bids them all join him for dinner. Far from punishing them for their revolutionary activities, he is thinking of abdicating his power to a council of citizens, and wants the Carbonari to convince him that they are worthy of becoming that council.
The discussion that follows is talky but entertaining, as Manfred plays the cat with a number of different mice. When the democrats preach, he seems to agree that the land needs no prince or emperor, and there are moans from behind the curtain like metal armor under stress. But before the Carbonari become too complacent, he slyly turns them against each other, revealing the various selfish interests that will compete for power in a pure democracy.
Theodore, who has been writhing uncomfortably throughout, pipes up. By this point the audience knows that he is secretly of royal blood and has planned to use the revolution to become an absolute ruler. Now he argues that maybe there is a compromise between tyranny and anarchy: a constitutional monarchy. For a moment, the debate seems to go his way. But then the oldest and most principled of the Carbonari leaders, a saintly Abbot—played by Toshiro Ishigara—proposes that the natural solution is for Prince Manfred to become the first president of the new republic. Wasn’t he a republican in his student days?
MANFRED:
Ah, Father, I have had those earthly visions,
And noble aspirations in my youth,
To make my own the minds of other men,
The enlightener of nations; and to rise
So high the fall back down might be a thrill…
A childish fancy, nothing more.
ABBOT:
Why so?
MANFRED:
I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who means to sway; and soothe, and sue
And scan all time, and pry into all space,
And be a living lie, who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean—and such
The mass are. I disdain to mingle with
A herd. Who leads the pack is still a dog.
The lion is alone, and so am I.
Having insulted or alienated everyone present, living and dead, Manfred announces that more serious matters preoccupy him, but that the Carbonari may return to their homes—and wait. He goes up to his study to learn the spells for the night’s new summoning.
The Carbonari leave, uneasy. Theodore exchanges words with a few of them, suggesting that violent revolution is still the only way. He is left behind; his bitter soliloquy is interrupted by Bel-Imperia, who has been spying on the whole meeting through a secret passage. Seeing in Theodore a natural leader, she feels him out—literally—and proposes to help him assassinate Manfred in return for a place next to Theodore’s throne. This perverse courtship scene, though punctuated by more comical groans from the armored ghost when his widow misbehaves, is too long by half. But at least I wasn’t in it, and could leave early for the day.
I had urgent business at the palace.
◆◆◆
The Doge was out, though one of his many sons said hello and offered me the hospitality of the place. But when I attempted to go to the Pretender’s suite, I was stopped on the staircase by Arn, one of the stupider but more amiable Hard Men—the clown who’d set fire to his mustache the night after the Maelstrom. I knew that the Hard Men took turns guarding the floor above in this wing, but I had never seen one of them here before.
“The Boss needs a little privacy right now, friend,” Arn said. “You understand.”
“Therapist?”
He nodded.
“Okay,” I said, “I probably shouldn’t interrupt that, even though he told me to come straight from the rehearsal. What room should I avoid?”
“They’re in the Boss’s bedroom,” he said. “I don’t guess you could hear through the door—but, no, I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to let anyone in the suite at all while the doc’s there.”
I tried to look insulted, and he shrugged and said, “Sorry,” again, adding, “There’s an empty guest suite down there if you want to wait until the doc leaves.”
“Fine.”
I knew there were six suites off the Pretender’s corridor; his own and five left vacant for security reasons. Of the six on the floor immediately below, the two facing each other in the middle were Julia’s and Domina’s. The others had been vacant the night before, so the one that had a glowing cyberlock on the door now was almost certainly Doctor Lao’s. My skeleton coder gave me entrance in seconds.
I didn’t find any juicy clues there, however. The doctor was apparently a man of average height and weight who liked simple clothes in dark colors. He traveled without medicines, intoxicants, weapons, data cubes, or creature comforts. The only personal touch was a slim wood-pulp book: Marcus Aurelius, in the original Greek. A Stoic, then; most likely a high Kanalist.
Time to listen to him. I plugged my skeleton coder into the room’s intercom jack and told it what I wanted.
When I had first arrived on Venezia, the coder had found the palace’s comm system impenetrable. That was because the room comms had been taken off the public net, La Rete, and routed through a very smart, highly protected virtual switchboard. But now I was on the inside of that firewall. I still had to assume that any attempt to mess with the Pretender’s own private intercom would trigger alarms, but what about the comm in the foyer of the suite? It was a negligible room, without even chairs to sit in, and, like Arn, I didn’t think a person standing there could hear distinctly through the Pretender’s bedroom door. Not a person.
The skeleton coder contacted the foyer intercom in the guise of a comm test-and-repair program. It turned the comm’s receiver on and slowly turned up the gain to max, filtered out the ferocious background hum, and amplified the remaining voice-range signals. If anyone had been speaking anywhere else in the suite, it would have been impossible to winnow out the faint voices from the bedroom, but of course Arn had kept everyone else out. And my cybersabotage tool was specifically designed to facilitate taps of all kinds. As soon as I approved the targets, it was able to clean up the voices amazingly; I could make out more than the words, I could recognize the Pretender’s timbre and intonation:
“…can’t remember it at all.”
The voice of the therapist was cool, measured—and hauntingly familiar. “It was when you were finishing The Enchanted Isle. You and Domina broke into the secret part of the temple and learned the path through the initiation maze, so that you could encode it in verse—”
“I know all that. I know it, but I don’t remember it.”
Though recognizable, the Pretender’s voice didn’t sound quite right, hollow and halting. “I remember the facts, as though I read them in a book, but I can’t see Domina naked there, I can’t…bring back a single moment. It’s all a story, with big gaps, and the edges of the gaps don’t fit together. I sometimes think I would rather forget it all and be no one than be like this. I’m like…a character in a play. I seem to be real, when everyone is watching me. But between those times, waiting to go back onstage, I’m not…really…there.”
The therapist, not without sympathy, but still measured and logical: “It’s a mistake, a common mistake, to think that a healthy person has their whole life stored in memory. It’s simply not true. There isn’t a person on this planet who could tell you what he did from dawn to dusk on the sixth day of last year. Unless that was a special day, and even if it was, even if he was able to recall the special part in great detail, he would not be able to continue replaying the hours since then like a recording. No one can.”
“You…always say that.”
“It’s true. We remember a lot of abstracted facts about the past, some of them wrong, and a much smaller number of vividly reexperienced moments—and those are largely wrong, as you’ll find if you compare notes with anyone else.” I felt a chill so strong, the gyal-wa mask
crawled against my face to adjust to it; my body had recognized the therapist’s voice, even if my mind couldn’t quite name him yet. “Only the present moment is real. Everyone’s past is false and incomplete. Yes, yours is worse than most, you have suffered memory loss and distortion. But you make it worse by mourning a perfect memory that no one has.”
“Then why do you…feed me all these things I’ve forgotten? Do you think I’m better off remembering Domina Wintergrin? Is anyone going to…test me on my knowledge of Shakespeare?”
“I thought a more complete past might help you feel secure in reality.”
“Do you want to know my…reality? The whole universe seems to be…about me, a play about me. And yet there is no role in the play for me. What does it matter if it’s a dream…or real…if there’s no role for me…”
“You are even more tired now. You are exhausted. You have taken these depressing and defeatist thoughts out and run them to exhaustion. The next time you encounter them, they will seem weak and easy to defeat. You will be stronger. You will awake after a refreshing sleep, stronger and more optimistic about playing your role in the scheme of things. You are sleeping now, lightly at first, but settling ever more deeply into a state of peace and satisfaction. Sleep well.”
I knew Doctor Lao now. For I’d been hypnotized by him myself, a long long time ago, a time of initiation. I unplugged from the jack, but left his door open, stayed in his room, and waited for his return. A few minutes later he was at the door, fingering the open lock, the inactive alarm. Forty or fifty years older than I remembered him, but not the hundred years that had passed elsewhere. Gaunt, erect, lantern-jawed, with flashing eyes that belied the stoic features—eyes like the sea, maybe green, maybe not. Changelessly changeable.
He said nothing about my invasion of his room, merely leaned against the doorjamb and asked, “Who are you?”
“That is the question, isn’t it, Master Summerisle?” I pressed the trigger points on my face and peeled off the gyal-wa mask. “You tell me.”
Chapter Fifteen
He didn’t actually stagger, but he didn’t uphold the reputation of the Stoics, either. Dead white, he slowly lowered himself into a chair, and it was a long time until he spoke.
There followed the strangest conversation of my life. From the beginning, I was torn in two directions. This was my Master, Summerisle, the only wholly good man I’d ever known—almost my adopted father. I wanted to embrace him, confide in him, join whatever his cause was. But I didn’t understand what I’d just heard him doing—cold-bloodedly brainwashing the Pretender into accepting my identity as his own. How could the Summerisle I knew justify something so cruel? I could feel the sneer of distrust on my face, but I couldn’t control it. Summerisle would know that the real Larkspur might always come back. But he’d want to be sure it was me. I waited for his first move.
“If I were to call you Odysseus—” he began.
“I’d call you Daedalus. But that’s no proof; ask me something hard.”
“Where were we the last time we saw each other, and what did we speak of?”
“Before I begin, is there any danger of our being interrupted?”
He shook his head. “But put your gyal-wa back on.”
“You’re familiar with these masks, then?” I asked, replacing mine.
“It’s one of the ways we survive. Though nowadays, my real face is safely forgotten. But there is also plastic surgery, biosculpting. So I ask you again: if you are who you appear to be, where did we meet, and what did we speak of?”
I leaned back in the couch. “Don’t worry, I remember. It was the Great Plaza of Nexus City. Next to the fountain. We spoke about a number of things. It was a few days before the premiere of The Enchanted Isle; you still hoped that my play would convert the Columnard rebels in the university temple, bring them back to Old Rite Kanalism. I had lost that optimism. We discussed the origins of our order. You gave me the traditional story that Kanalism was very ancient, that the Masters concealed esoteric secrets of great power. I scoffed, though I now know everything you told me was true. About the White Book, you said—”
His eyes flickered, but when I stopped he looked casual and said, “Go on.”
“We didn’t call it the White Book in those days,” I stressed. “Within our chapter, it was called the Vice Book. It was where you kept the personal secrets every member had to confide in you, under hypnosis, upon initiation. Our ‘vices.’ But that last morning we spoke together, you revealed to me that this was also the only record handed down from the founders of the order, something no other chapter had, and that it contained the founders’ secrets, those secrets of great power again, which you didn’t describe. You did say that the personal material, the vices, had great blackmail potential; but you’d sworn never to use the Book as a weapon, not even against my Columnard classmates. And you said that if necessary, if the Column revolution really broke out and our Federal Alignment fell, you knew a place where the Book could be hidden safely for centuries until another kind of Master came to claim it…All correct, so far?”
“Go on.”
“You even gave me clues, which I didn’t understand at the time. It was the fountain we were sitting next to, wasn’t it? That’s where you intended to hide the Book.”
“And was that all?”
“No, there was a warning. You told me I might not be safe, even on a survey voyage in the Alignment’s navy. You said that the Columnards weren’t the only threat to democracy—there was a secret society within the navy known as the Few. They’d been around for centuries, and eighty or ninety years before the time we were speaking, they’d sneaked a look at part of the White Book, and they’d been exploiting the secret knowledge ever since. You said they were capable of anything, even hijacking ships in order to build their own secret fleet, and murdering anyone who got in their way. And you thought they might be helping the Columnards, because a strong central government of the Column type would be a useful first step toward the military dictatorship they intended to establish. Master, I’m afraid I didn’t take any of these conspiracy theories seriously. But I was wrong.”
He sat erect now, engaged. “You have encountered the Few?”
“Yes. I wish I could be absolutely sure, because my memories of the occasion are somewhat surreal and nightmarish. But that’s what happened to the Barbarossa, that was the mysterious ‘accident.’ An officer named Helter turned out to be an agent of the Few, and he hijacked the ship. He sabotaged the suspend-sleep tanks. Everyone but Helter was trapped inside, and the officers were denied their periodic wakeups, to drive us insane.
“Meanwhile, Helter did something even stranger. He plunged us into praeterspace without programming a target star. That sounds bad enough—like it would send us to some random star anywhere in the universe. And you can’t just go from any star to any other, you know, you have to follow geodesics—if you get far enough from known space you might never find your way back. But what Helter did was even worse.”
Summerisle interrupted me. “How do you know what he did?”
“Some of the enlisted men did get wakeups. They kept their sanity and managed to break out of their sleep tanks. They found Helter in charge. He was hooking up the p-space drive to the shuttle as if he intended to abandon ship, and he didn’t have to explain himself because he’d code-locked the areas he was working in.”
“Abandoning ship? What was wrong with it?” Every question was a test.
“Maybe nothing. But the instruments on the bridge said that we had never reemerged into normal space-time. We seemed to be inside a—a new universe. Very small, and—collapsing at one end. And where it was breaking down you could see a single tiny star. I couldn’t believe it—I thought the instruments had gone crazy.
“The enlisted men had wakened me. They’d tried the other officers, but without reality checks the suspend-sleep dreams had driven them all insane. I was half-insane myself, kept hallucinating little things, but I
was at least lucid. And I was an officer; I had the access codes to get at Helter and stop him. They gave me a pistol and a knife and sent me after him. He let me in. He wanted my help. He said he’d done it deliberately, hijacked the ship and parked it in this place for the Few. He called it a ‘bubble universe,’ said it was created when we left space-time at a right angle—Master, you’ve got to tell me, I’ve been living with this for ten years, wondering if I hallucinated the whole thing or not. You know the alien technology in the White Book. Is there such a thing as a bubble universe, outside space and time?”
He seemed intent on reassuring me. “Yes. Your memories sound very accurate. It is the stolen secret of the Few. Think of it as an accounting problem: The physical constants that define the universe are directly related to the total sum of mass-energy in space-time. If you use a p-space drive perversely enough, you can force mass-energy out of the universe, but it must be paid back. Since mass-energy cannot exist except as part of space-time, a minimum necessary space-time inflates into existence to hold the temporary account. It’s a different space-time from our own—technically, it’s a hole in praeterspace—but the differences all cancel out; the information is perfectly translated. Within the bubble, you still seem to have a body whose molecules obey our laws of physics, and so forth.”
I tried to assimilate this. “Helter said it was tangent to space-time.”
Summerisle shrugged. “In a way. I don’t have the math, and neither do you. You’re still bound to one region of space—what looked like a tiny star to your instruments would be the mass-energy of our galaxy. And you’re not totally free of time—you can’t return to the universe earlier than you left. Instead, it’s like this.” He stopped to choose his words, wetting his lips. “The bubble universe is small in both time and space. If you’re inside it, you experience weeks or at most months before it collapses and its mass-energy is translated back into our universe. But that’s just subjective time. It doesn’t mean you return to the universe two weeks after you left. In fact, the bubble will last until the universe itself collapses, unless it’s unfolded sooner by someone within the larger universe who knows how.”