Emphyrio

by Jack Vance

  Lamps flared on, signaling intermission; Ghyl turned to his father, hoping for but not expecting an opinion. It was Amiante’s tendency to turn his feelings inward. Even at the age of seven Ghyl sensed an unorthodox, almost illicit, quality to his father’s judgments. Amiante was a big man, slow of motion in a fashion which suggested economy and control rather than ponderousness. His head was big and brooding, his face wide at the cheekbones and pale, with a small chin, a sensitive mouth characteristically twisted in a musing half-smile. Amiante spoke very little and in a soft voice, although, stimulated by some apparently trivial incident, Ghyl had seen him erupt words, spewing them forth as if they were under physical pressure, to halt as suddenly, perhaps in mid-sentence. But now Amiante had nothing to say; Ghyl could only guess his feelings in regard to the misfortunes of Lord Bodbozzle.

  Looking around the audience, Ghyl noted a pair of Garrion in a splendid livery of lavender, scarlet and black leather. They stood to the rear of the hall, manlike but non-human, hybrids of insect, gargoyle and ape, immobile but alert, eye-bulges focused nowhere but observing all. Ghyl nudged his father. “Garrion are here! Lords watch the puppets!”

  Amiante turned a brief glance over his shoulder. “Lords or lordlings.”

  Ghyl searched the audience. No one resembled Lord Bodbozzle; no one radiated that near-visible effulgence of authority and financial independence which Ghyl imagined must surround all lords. He started to ask his father whom he presumed to be the lord, then stopped, knowing that Amiante’s only response would be a disinterested shrug. Ghyl looked along the rows, face by face. How could lord or lordling not resent the crude caricature of Lord Bodbozzle? But no one seemed perturbed…Ghyl lost interest in the matter; perhaps the Garrion visited the pageant by their own inclination.

  The intermission was to be ten minutes; Ghyl slipped from his seat, went to examine the stage at closer vantage. To the side hung a canvas flap; Ghyl pulled it open, looked into a side-room, where a small man in brown velvet sat sipping a cup of tea. Ghyl glanced over his shoulder; Amiante, preoccupied with his own inner visions, paid no heed. Ghyl ducked under the canvas, stood hesitantly, prepared to leap back should the man in brown velvet come to seize him, for somehow Ghyl had come to suspect that the puppets were stolen children, whipped until they acted and danced with exact precision: an idea investing the performance with a horrid fascination. But the man in brown velvet, apart from a civil nod, seemed uninterested in capturing Ghyl. Emboldened, Ghyl came a few steps forward. “Are you the puppet-master?”

  “That I am, lad: Holkerwoyd the puppet-master, enjoying a brief respite from my labors.”

  The man was rather old and gnarled. He did not appear the sort who would torment and whip children. With added confidence Ghyl—not knowing precisely what he meant—asked: “You’re…real?”

  Holkerwoyd did not seem to find the question unreasonable. “I’m as real as necessary, lad, at least to myself. There have been some who have found me, shall we say, evanescent, even evaporative.”

  Ghyl understood the general essence of the response. “You must travel to many places.”

  “There’s truth indeed. Up and down the great North Continent, over the Bight to Salula, down the peninsula to Wantanua. All this on Halma alone.”

  “I’ve never been from Ambroy.”

  “You’re young yet.”

  “Yes; someday I want to be financially independent, and travel space. Have you visited other worlds?”

  “Dozens. I was born beside a star so far that you’ll never see its light, not in the sky of Halma.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I often ask myself the same. The answer always comes: because I’m not somewhere else. Which is a statement more sensible than it sounds. And isn’t it a marvel? Here am I and here are you; think of it! When you ponder the breadth of the galaxy, you must recognize a coincidence of great singularity!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Simple enough! Suppose you were here and I elsewhere, or I were here and you elsewhere, or both of us were elsewhere: three cases vastly more probable than the fourth, which is the fact of our mutual presence within ten feet of each other. I repeat, a miraculous concatenation! And to think that some hold the Age of Wonders to be past and gone!”

  Ghyl nodded dubiously. “That story about Lord Bodbozzle—I’m not so sure I liked it.”

  “Eh?” Holkerwoyd blew his cheeks. “And why not?”

  “It wasn’t true.”

  “Aha then. In what particular?”

  Ghyl searched his vocabulary to express what was hardly so much as an intuition. He said, rather lamely, “A man can’t fight ten Garrion. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Holkerwoyd, talking aside. “The lad has a literal mind.” Back to Ghyl: “But don’t you wish it were so? Is it not our duty to provide gay tales? When you grow up and learn how much you owe the city, you’ll find ample dullness.”

  Ghyl nodded wisely. “I expected the puppets to be smaller. And much more beautiful.”

  “Ah, the captious one. The dissatisfaction. Well then! When you are larger, they will seem smaller.”

  “They are not stolen children?”

  Holkerwoyd’s eyebrows puffed like the tail of a startled cat. “So this is your idea? How could I train children to gambols and artless antics, when they are such skeptics, such fastidious critics, such absolutists?”

  Ghyl thought it polite to change the subject. “There is a lord in the audience.”

  “Not so, my friend. A little lady. She sits to the left in the second row.”

  Ghyl blinked. “How do you know?”

  Holkerwoyd made a grand gesture. “You wish to plunder me of all my secrets? Well, lad, know this: masks and masking—and unmasking—these are the skills of my trade. Now hasten back to your father. He wears the mask of leaden patience, to sheathe his soul. Within he shakes with grief. You shall know grief too; I see that you are fey.” Holkerwoyd advanced, making ferocious gestures. “Hence! Hup! Hah!”

  Ghyl fled back into the hall, resumed his seat. Amiante turned him a brief quizzical glance, which Ghyl avoided. Many aspects of the world were beyond his understanding. Recalling the words of Holkerwoyd he looked across the room. Indeed, there in the second row: a small girl with a placid woman of middle-age. So this was a lady! Ghyl examined her carefully. Pretty and graceful she was beyond question, and Ghyl, in the clarity of his vision, saw also a Difference. Her breath would be tart and perfumed, like verbena or lemon. Her mind moved to unfathomable thoughts, wonderful secrets…Ghyl noticed a hauteur, an ease of manner, which somehow was fascinating… A challenge…

  The lights dimmed, the curtains parted, and now began a sad little tale which Ghyl thought might be a message to himself from Holkerwoyd, even though such a possibility seemed remote.

  The setting of the story was the puppet theater itself. One of the puppets, conceiving the outside world to be a place of eternal merriment, escaped the theater and went forth to mingle with a group of children. For a period there was antic and song; then the children, tiring of play, went their various ways. The puppet sidled through the streets, observing the city: what a dull place compared to the theater, unreal and factitious though it was! But he was reluctant to return, knowing what awaited him. Hesitating, delaying, he hopped and limped back to the theater, singing a plaintive little commentary. His fellow puppets greeted him with restraint and awe; they too knew what to expect. And indeed at the next performance the traditional drama Emphyrio was presented, with the runaway puppet cast as Emphyrio. Now ensued a play within a play, and the tale of Emphyrio ran its course. At the end, Emphyrio, captured by the tyrants, was dragged to Golgotha. Before his execution he attempted to deliver a speech justifying his life, but the tyrants refused to let him speak, and inflicted upon him the final humiliation of futility. A grotesquely large rag was stuffed in Emphyrio’s mouth; a shining axe struck off his head and such was the fate of the runaway puppe
t.

  Ghyl noticed that the lord-girl, her companion and the Garrion guards did not stay for the finish. When the lights came on, showing white staring faces throughout the audience, they were gone.

  Ghyl and Amiante walked homeward through the dusk, each occupied with his own thoughts. Ghyl spoke. “Father.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the story, the runaway puppet who played Emphyrio was executed.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the puppet who played the runaway puppet also was executed!”

  “I noticed as much.”

  “Did he run away too?”

  Amiante heaved a sigh, shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps puppets are cheap…Incidentally, that is not the true tale of Emphyrio.”

  “What is the true tale?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Was Emphyrio a real man?”

  Amiante considered a moment before replying. Then he said: “Human history has been long. If a man named Emphyrio never existed, there was another man, with a different name, who did.”

  Ghyl found the remark beyond his intellectual depth. “Where do you think Emphyrio lived? Here in Ambroy?”

  “This is a problem,” said Amiante with a thoughtful frown, “which some men have tried to solve, without success. There are clues, of course. If I were a different man, if I were once again young, if I had no…” His voice dwindled.

  They walked in silence. Then Ghyl asked, “What is it to be ‘fey’?”

  Amiante scrutinized him curiously. “Where did you hear the word?”

  “Holkerwoyd the puppet-master said I was fey.”

  “Ah. I see. Well then. It means that you have about you the air of, let us say, important enterprise. That you shall be remarkable and do remarkable deeds.”

  Ghyl was fascinated. “And I shall be financially independent and I shall travel? With you, of course?”

  Amiante laid his hand on Ghyl’s shoulder. “That remains to be seen.”

  Chapter III

  Amiante’s shop and residence was a tall narrow four-story structure of old black timbers and brown tile facing on Undle Square to the north of the Brueben Precinct. On the ground floor was Amiante’s workshop, where he carved wooden screens; on the next floor was the kitchen where Amiante and Ghyl cooked and ate, as well as a side room in which Amiante kept a desultory collection of old manuscripts. On the third floor Amiante and Ghyl slept; and above was a loft full of unusable objects, too old or too remarkable to throw away.

  Amiante was the most noncommittal of men: pensive, almost brooding, working in fits of energy, then for hours or days occupying himself with the detail of a sketch, or perhaps doing nothing whatever. He was an expert craftsman: his screens were always Firsts and often Acmes, but his output was not particularly large. Vouchers, therefore, were not plentiful in the Tarvoke household. Clothes, like all the merchandise of Fortinone, were hand-made and dear; Ghyl wore smocks and trousers stitched together by Amiante himself, even though the guilds discourage such ‘fringe encroachment’. Seldom were there coins to be spared for sweets, and none for organized entertainment. Every day the barge Jaoundi pushed majestically up the Insse to the holiday village Bazen, returning after dark. For the children of Ambroy this was the most delightful and hoped-for excursion imaginable. Once or twice Amiante mentioned the Jaoundi excursion, but nothing ever came of it.

  Ghyl nonetheless considered himself fortunate. Amiante imposed few restraints. Other children no older than himself were already learning a trade: at guild-school, in a home workshop or that of a relative. The children of scriveners, clerks, pedants, or any others who might need advanced reading and writing skills were drilled to second or even third schedule. *« In Fortinone and across the North Continent five schedules or systems of writing were in use:

  1. A set of twelve hundred and thirty-one pictograms derived from ancient interplanetary conventions, taught to all children.

  2. A cursive version of the pictograms, used by tradesmen and artisans, with perhaps four hundred additional special forms.

  3. A syllabary, sometimes used to augment the pictograms, sometimes as a graphic system in its own right.

  4. A cursive form of the syllabary, with a large number of logographs: the system used by the lords; by priests, ordained saltants, lay leapers, expostulants; by scriveners and pedants.

  5. An archaic alphabet, with its many variants, used with archaic dialects or for special effects, such as tavern signs, boat names and the like.» Devout parents sent their children to Infant Skips and Juvenile Hops at the Finukan Temple, or taught them simple patterns at home.

  Amiante, whether through calculation or perhaps absentmindedness, made no such demands upon Ghyl, who came and went as he pleased. He explored all Brueben Precinct, then, growing bolder, wandered far afield. He explored the docks and boat-building shops of Nobile Precinct; clambered over hulks of old barges on the Dodrechten mud-flats, eating raw sea-fruit for his lunch; crossed to Despar Island in the estuary, where there were glass factories and ironworks, and on several occasions continued across the bridge to Breakman’s Point.

  South of Brueben, toward the heart of old Ambroy, were the precincts most thoroughly demolished in the Empire Wars: Hoge, Cato, Hyalis Park, Vashmont. Snaking over the forlorn landscape were rows and double-rows of houses built of salvaged brick; in Hoge was the Public Market, in Cato, the Temple; elsewhere were vast areas of broken black brick and mouldering concrete, ill-smelling ponds surrounded by slime of peculiar colors, occasionally the shack of a vagabond or noncup.*«Noncuperatives: non-recipients of welfare benefits, reputedly all Chaoticists, anarchists, thieves, swindlers, whore-mongers.» In Cato and Vashmont stood the gaunt skeletons of the old central towers, preempted by the lords for their eyries. One day Ghyl, recalling Rudel the puppet, decided to test the practicality of the exploit. Selecting a tower, the property of Lord Waldo the Flowan*«The lords derived their cognomens from the public utility fiefs which constituted their primary holdings. These, in the language of the time, were Spay, Chaluz, Flowan, Overtrend, Underline and Boimarc: communications, energy, water, transit, sewerage, trade.», Ghyl started to climb the structure: up the diagonal bracing to the first horizontal girder, across to another diagonal, up to the second horizontal, and the third, and the fourth: up a hundred feet, two hundred feet, three hundred feet, and here he stopped, hugging the girder, for the distance to the ground had become frightening.

  For a space Ghyl sat looking out across the old city. The view was splendid, in a still, melancholy fashion; the ruins, lit at an angle by the gray-gold sunlight, showed a fascinating wealth of detail. Ghyl gazed off across Hoge, trying to locate Undle Square…From below came a hoarse harsh voice; looking down, Ghyl saw a man in brown trousers and flared black coat: one of the Vashmont welfare agents.

  Ghyl descended to the ground where he was sternly reprimanded and required to state his name and address.

  Early the following morning a Brueben Precinct welfare agent, Helfred Cobol, stopped by to have a word with Amiante, and Ghyl became very apprehensive. Would he be rehabilitated? But Helfred Cobol said nothing about the Vashmont tower and only made gruff recommendations that Amiante impose stricter discipline upon Ghyl, which Amiante heard with polite disinterest.

  Helfred Cobol was stocky and barrel-shaped with a pudgy pouchy head, a bump of a nose, small gray eyes. He was brisk and business-like, and reputedly conceded special treatment to no one. Still he was a man of wide experience and tended not to interpret the Code too narrowly. With most recipients Helfred Cobol used a breezy manner, but in the presence of Amiante he was cautious and watchful, as if he found Amiante unpredictable.

  Helfred Cobol had hardly departed before Eng Seche, the cantankerous old precinct delegate of the Wood-carvers’ Guild came by to inspect the premises, to satisfy himself that Amiante was conforming to the by-laws, using only the prescribed tools and operations, making use of no jigs, patterns, automatic processes or multiple production devices.
He remained over an hour, examining Amiante’s tools one by one, until finally Amiante, in a somewhat quizzical voice, inquired precisely what he sought.

  “Nothing specific, Rt. Tarvoke*«Rt: abbreviation for Recipient, the usual formal or honorific title of address.», nothing especial; perhaps the impression of a clamp, or something similar. I may say that your work of late has been peculiarly even of finish.”

  “If you wish, I can work less skillfully,” suggested Amiante.

  His irony, if he intended such, was lost on the delegate. “This is counter to the by-laws. Very well then; you are aware of the strictures.”

  Amiante turned back to his work; the delegate departed. From the slope of Amiante’s shoulders, the energy with which he plied mallet and chisel, Ghyl realized that his father was exasperated. Amiante finally threw down the tools, went to the door, looked across Undle Square. He turned back into the shop. “Do you understand what the delegate was saying?”