by John Crowley
“I will do all I can,” said the President pro tem. “I will find who has done this—I suppose I know who it was, if it wasn’t me—and dissuade him. Teach him, teach him what I’ve learned, make him see…”
“You don’t yet understand,” the angel said with careful kindness but at the same time glancing at her wristwatch. “There is no one to tell. There is no one who went beyond the rules.”
“There must have been,” said the President pro tem. “You, your time, it just isn’t that far along from ours, from mine! To make this world, this city, these races…”
“Not far along in time,” said the angel, “but many times removed. You know it to be so: whenever you, your Otherhood, set out across the time lines, your passage generated random variation in the worlds you arrived in. Perhaps you didn’t understand how those variations accumulate, here at the sum end of your journeyings.”
“But the changes were so minute!” said the President pro tem. “Deng Fa-shen explained it. A molecule here and there, no more; the position of a distant star; some trivial thing, the name of a flower or a village. Too few, too small even to notice.”
“They increase exponentially with every alteration—and your Otherhood has been busy since you last presided over them. Through the days random changes accumulate, tiny errors silting up like the blown sand that fills the streets of a desert city, that buries it at last.”
“But why these changes?” asked the President pro tem desperately. “It can’t have been chance that a world like this was the sum of those histories, it can’t be. A world like this…”
“Chance, perhaps. Or it may be that as time grows softer the world grows more malleable by wishes. There is no reason to believe this, yet that is what we believe. You—all of you—could not have known that you were bringing this world into being; and yet this is the world you wanted.”
She reached out to let the tossed foam of the fountain fall into her hand. The President pro tem thought of the bridge over the Zambezi, far away; the tossed foam of the Falls. It was true: this is what they had striven for: a world of perfect hierarchies, of no change forever. God, how they must have longed for it! The loneliness of continual change—no outback, no bundas so lonely. He had heard how men can be unsettled for days, for weeks, who have lived through earthquakes and felt the earth to be uncertain: what of his Fellows, who had felt time and space picked apart, never to be rewoven that way again, and not once but a hundred times? What of himself?
“I shall tell you what I see at the end of all your wishings,” said the angel softly. “At the far end of the last changed world, after there is nothing left that can change. There is then only a forest, growing in the sea. I say ‘forest’ and I say ‘sea,’ though whether they are of the kind I know, or some other sort of thing, I cannot say. The sea is still and the forest is thick; it grows upward from the black bottom, and its topmost branches reach into the sunlight, which penetrates a little into the warm upper waters. That’s all. There is nothing else anywhere forever. Your wishes have come true: the Empire is quiet. There is not, nor will there be, change anymore; never will one thing be confused again with another, higher for lower, better for lesser, master for servant. Perpetual Peace.”
The President pro tem was weeping now, painful sobs drawn up from an interior he had long kept shut and bolted. Tears ran down his cheeks, into the corners of his mouth, under his hard collar. He knew what he must do, but not how to do it.
“The Otherhood cannot be dissuaded from this,” the angel said, putting a hand on the wrist of the President pro tem. “For all of it, including our sitting here now, all of it—and the forest in the sea—is implicit in the very creation of the Otherhood itself.”
“But then…”
“Then the Otherhood must be uncreated.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You must.”
“No, no, I can’t.” He had withdrawn from her pellucid gaze, horrified. “I mean it isn’t because…if it must be done, it must be. But not by me.”
“Why?”
“It would be against the rules given me. I don’t know what the result would be. I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine.”
“Rules?”
“The Otherhood came into being,” said the President pro tem, “when a British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, was shot and killed by a young man called Denys Winterset.”
“Then you must return and stop that killing.”
“But you don’t see!” said the President pro tem in great distress. “The rules given the Otherhood forbid a Fellow from returning to a time and place that he formerly altered by his presence…”
“And…”
“And I am myself that same Denys Winterset.”
The angel regarded the President pro tem—the Honorable Denys Winterset, fourteenth President pro tem of the Otherhood—and her translucent face registered a sweet surprise, as though the learning of something she had not known gave her pleasure. She laughed, and her laughter was not different from the plashing of the fountain by which they sat. She laughed and laughed, as the old man in his black coat and hat sat silent beside her, bewildered and afraid.
VI. THE BOY DAVID OF HYDE PARK CORNER
THERE ARE DAYS when I seem genuinely to remember, and days when I do not remember at all: days when I remember only that sometimes I remember. There are days on which I think I recognize another like myself: someone walking smartly along the Strand or Bond Street, holding the Times under one arm and walking a furled umbrella with the other—a sort of military bearing, mustaches white (older than when I seem to have known him, but then so am I, of course), and cheeks permanently tanned by some faraway sun. I do not catch his eye, nor he mine, though I am tempted to stop him, to ask him…Later on I wonder—if I can remember to wonder—whether he, too, is making a chronicle, in his evenings, writing up the story: a story that can be told in any direction, starting from anywhen, leading on to a forest in the sea.
I won’t look any longer into this chronicle I’ve compiled. I shall only complete it.
My name is Denys Winterset. I was born in London in 1933; I was the only son of a Harley Street physician, and my earliest memory is of coming upon my father in tears in his surgery: he had just heard the news that the R101 dirigible had crashed on its maiden flight, killing all those aboard.
We lived then above my father’s offices, in a little building whose nursery I remember distinctly, though I was taken to the country with the other children of London when I was only six, and that building was knocked down by a bomb in 1940. A falling wall killed my mother; my father was on ambulance duty in the East End and was spared.
He didn’t know quite what to do with me, nor I with myself; I have been torn all my life between the drive to discover what others whom I love and admire expect of me, and my discovery that then I don’t want to do it, really. After coming down from the University I decided, out of a certain perversity which my father could not sympathize with, to join the Colonial Service. He could not fathom why I would want to fasten myself to an enterprise that everyone save a few antediluvian colonels and letter writers to the Times could see was a dead animal. And I couldn’t explain. Psychoanalysis later suggested that it was quite simply because no one wanted me to do it. The explanation has since come to seem insufficient to me.
That was a strange late blooming of Empire in the decade after the war, when the Colonial Office took on factitious new life, and thousands of us went out to the Colonies. The Service became larger than it had been in years, swollen with ex-officers too accustomed to military life to do anything else, and with the innocent and the confused, like myself. I ended up a junior member of a transition team in a Central African country I shall not name, helping see to it that as much was given to the new native government as they could be persuaded to accept, in the way of a parliament, a well-disciplined army, a foreign service, a judiciary.
It was not after all very much. Those institutions that the British are
sure no civilized nation can do without were, in the minds of many Africans who spoke freely to me, very like those exquisite japanned toffee boxes from Fortnum & Mason that you used often to come across in native kraals, because the chieftains and shamans loved them so, to keep their juju in. Almost as soon as I arrived, it became evident that the commander in chief of the armed forces was impatient with the pace of things, and felt the need of no special transition to African, i.e., his own, control of the state. The most our commission were likely to accomplish was to get the British population out without a bloodbath.
Even that would not be easy. We—we young men—were saddled with the duty of explaining to aged planters that there was no one left to defend their estates against confiscation, and that under the new constitution they hadn’t a leg to stand on, and that despite how dearly their overseers and house people loved them, they ought to begin seeing what they could pack into a few small trunks. On the other hand, we were to calm the fears of merchants and diamond factors, and tell them that if they all simply dashed for it, they could easily precipitate a closing of the frontiers, with incalculable results.
There came a night when, more than usually certain that not a single Brit under my care would leave the country alive, nor deserved to either, I stood at the bar of the Planters’ (just renamed the Republic) Club, drinking gin and Italian (tonic hadn’t been reordered in weeks) and listening to the clacking of the fans. A fellow I knew slightly as a regular here saluted me; I nodded and returned to my thoughts. A moment later I found him next to me.
“I wonder,” he said, “if I might have your ear for a moment.”
The expression, in his mouth, was richly comic, or perhaps it was my exhaustion. He waited for my laughter to subside before speaking. He was called Rossie, and he’d spent a good many years in Africa, doing whatever came to hand. He was one of those Englishmen whom the sun turns not brown but only gray and greasy; his eyes were always watery, the cups of his lids red and painful to look at.
“I am,” he said at last, “doing a favor for a chap who would like your help.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“This is a chap,” he said, “who has been too long in this country, and would like to leave it.”
“There are many in his situation.”
“Not quite.”
“What is his name?” I said, taking out a memorandum book. “I’ll pass it on to the commission.”
“Just the point,” Rossie said. He drew closer to me. At the other end of the bar loud laughter arose from a group consisting of a newly commissioned field marshal—an immense, glossy, nearly blue-black man—and his two colonels, both British, both small and lean. They laughed when the field marshal laughed, though their laugh was not so loud, nor their teeth so large and white.
“He’ll want to tell you his name himself,” Rossie said. “I’ve only brought the message. He wants to see you, to talk to you. I said I’d tell you. That’s all.”
“To tell us…”
“Not you, all of you. You: you.”
I drank. The warm, scented liquor was thick in my throat. “Me?”
“What he asked me to ask you,” Rossie said, growing impatient, “was would you come out to his place, and see him. It isn’t far. He wanted you, no one else. He said I was to insist. He said you were to come alone. He’ll send a boy of his. He said tell no one.”
There were many reasons why a man might want to do business with the commission privately. I could think of none why it should be done with me alone. I agreed, with a shrug. Rossie seemed immediately to put the matter out of his mind, mopped his red face, and ordered drinks for both of us. By the time they were brought we were already discussing the Imperial groundnut scheme, which was to have kept this young republic self-sufficient, but which, it was now evident, would do no such thing.
I too put what had been asked of me out of my mind, with enough success that when on a windless and baking afternoon a native boy shook me awake from a nap, I could not imagine why.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my bungalow?”
He only stared down at me, as though it were he who could not think why I should be there before him. Questions in his own language got no response either. At length he backed out the door, clearly wanting me to follow; and so I did, with the dread one feels on remembering an unpleasant task one has contrived to neglect. I found him outside, standing beside my Land Rover, ready to get aboard.
“All right,” I said. “Very well.” I got into the driver’s seat. “Point the way.”
It was a small spread of tobacco and a few dusty cattle an hour’s drive from town, a low bungalow looking beaten in the ocher heat. He gave no greeting as I alighted from the Land Rover but stood in the shadows of the porch unmoving: as though he had stood so a long time. He went back into the house as I approached, and when I went in, he was standing against the netting of the window, the light behind him. That seemed a conscious choice. He was smiling, I could tell: a strange and eager smile.
“I’ve waited a long time for you,” he said. “I don’t mind saying.”
“I came as quickly as I could,” I said.
“There was no way for me to know, you see,” he said, “whether you’d come at all.”
“Your boy was quite insistent,” I said. “And Mr. Rossie—”
“I meant: to Africa.” His voice was light, soft and dry. “There being so much less reason for it, now. I’ve wondered often. In fact I don’t think a day has passed this year when I haven’t wondered.” Keeping his back to the sunward windows, he moved to sit on the edge of a creaking wicker sofa. “You’ll want a drink,” he said.
“No.” The place was filled with the detritus of an African bachelor farmer’s digs: empty paraffin tins, bottles, tools, hanks of rope and motor parts. He put a hand behind him without looking and put it on the bottle he was no doubt accustomed to find there. “I tried to think reasonably about it,” he said, pouring a drink. “As time went on, and things began to sour here, I came to be more and more certain that no lad with any pluck would throw himself away down here. And yet I couldn’t know. Whether there might not be some impulse, I don’t know, traveling to you from—elsewhere…. I even thought of writing to you. Though whether to convince you to come or to dissuade you I’d no idea.”
I sat, too. A cool sweat had gathered on my neck and the backs of my hands.
“Then,” he said, “when I heard you’d come—well, I was afraid, frankly. I didn’t know what to think.” He dusted a fly from the rim of his glass, which he had not tasted. “You see,” he said, “this was against the rules given me. That I—that I and—that you and I should meet.”
Perhaps he’s mad, I thought, and even as I thought it I felt intensely the experience called déjà vu, an experience I have always hated, hated like the nightmare. I steeled myself to respond coolly and took out my memorandum book and pencil. “I’m afraid you’ve rather lost me,” I said—briskly I hoped. “Perhaps we’d better start with your name.”
“Oh,” he said, smiling again his mirthless smile, “not the hardest question first, please.”
Without having, so far as I knew, the slightest reason for it, I began to feel intensely sorry for this odd dried jerky of a man, whose eyes alone seemed quick and shy. “All right,” I said, “nationality, then. You are a British subject.”
“Well, yes.”
“Proof?” He answered nothing. “Passport?” No. “Army card? Birth certificate? Papers of any kind?” No. “Any connections in Britain? Relatives? Someone who could vouch for you, take you in?”
“No,” he said. “None who could. None but you. It will have to be you.”
“Now hold hard,” I said.
“I don’t know why I must,” he said, rising suddenly and turning away to the window. “But I must. I must go back. I imagine dying here, being buried here, and my whole soul retreats in horror. I must go back. Even though I fear that, too.”
He turned fr
om the window, and in the sharp side light of the late afternoon his face was clearly the face of someone I knew. “Tell me,” he said. “Mother and father. Your mother and father. They’re alive?”
“No,” I said. “Both dead.”
“Very well,” he said, “very well”; but it did not seem to be very well with him. “I’ll tell you my story, then.”
“I think you’d best do that.”
“It’s a long one.”
“No matter.” I had begun to feel myself transported, like a Sinbad, into somewhere that it were best I listen, and keep my counsel: and yet the first words of this specter’s tale made that impossible.
“My name,” he said, “is Denys Winterset.”
I have come to believe, having had many years in which to think about it, that it must be as he said, that an impulse from somewhere else (he meant: some previous present, some earlier version of these circumstances) must press upon such a life as mine. That I chose the Colonial Service, that I came to Africa—and not just to Africa, but to that country: well, if anything is chance, that was not—as I understand Sir Geoffrey Davenant to have once said.
In that long afternoon, there where I perhaps could not have helped arriving eventually, I sat and perspired, listening—though it was for a long time very nearly impossible to hear what was said to me: an appointment in Khartoum some months from now, and some decades past; a club, outside all frames of reference; the Last equipment. It was quite like listening to the unfollowable logic of a madman, as meaningless as the roar of the insects outside. I only began to hear when this aged man, older than my grandfather, told me of something that he—that I—that he and I—had once done in boyhood, something secret, trivial really and yet so shameful that even now I will not write it down; something that only Denys Winterset could know.
“There now,” he said eyes cast down. “There now, you must believe me. You will listen. The world has not been as you thought it to be, any more than it was as I thought it to be, when I was as you are now. I shall tell you why: and we will hope that mine is the last story that need be told.”