No one knew where the expression “Destroyer” came from; the official title was “Witness of Yölah,” which skeptics transformed into “Yölah’s Fool.” “Destroyer” certainly emerged because long ago, in those obscure times dominated by the Enemy and the hordes of Balis, the Witnesses of Yölah systematically applied torture by impalement to nonbelievers, which did indeed destroy the sufferer just as a lumberjack’s wedge splits the trunk of a tree. Regular attendants at the court gave the Destroyers another, gentler name, on the basis of their imprecations: Father Woe or Brother Woe, given the fact that all their tirades began with “Woe to ye who . . . !” or “Woe to those who . . . !” In fact, quite simply, they spoke the way the mockbis did when they were calling for a Holy War. The great Destroyers—and some of them were so good at their calling that they moved even the accused—were declared to be “Friends of Yölah and Abi,” a title which entitled them to the greatest privileges. In light of his name, knowledge, and energy, Koa was sure to make a triumphal entry into that pantheon, and earn a great deal of money and respect; but there it was, he had chosen to be poor and rebellious, and, basically, to live in uncertainty.
At the end of their meeting, the two friends decided to pursue their first idea: they would go looking for Nas and seek his help. If they failed, they would see where they stood: Koa would either vanish into the ghetto, melt into a devastated suburb or . . . confront his destiny and destroy to his heart’s content.
Time was of the essence; the hearing was fixed for the eleventh day of the next moon. This was inauspicious, for it fell on a day when people went mad, to celebrate the annual DCR, Day of Celestial Reward; there would be more disappointed souls than chosen ones, the tribunal would be overrun with crowds, and the road to the stadium would be more thronged and swarming than ever. There would be nothing tidy about the shameless woman’s stoning, she’d already be ground to bits by the time she was halfway there. Considering one thing and another, the judges clearly wanted to amplify the chaos and woe, with a view to reaping considerable benefit, and everyone knew what that meant: they wanted to be noticed by an Honorable, perhaps the Great Commander himself, why not Abi while they were at it, and to be raised one day to the dignified rank of “Friend of Yölah and Abi,” the first rung on the ladder to ennoblement. Yet another rung and they would receive the right to possess a stronghold, a court, and a militia, and the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the mockba during the Great Thursday Imploration, in order to harangue the community.
And so, two weeks before the fateful day, early in the morning, at the hour of the mockba crier, carrying their bundles and armed with richly stamped documents testifying to their condition as honest civil servants on a secret mission to the Ministry of Archives, Sacred Books, and Holy Memories, Ati and Koa crossed the last boundaries of their neighborhood; their hearts were pounding fit to burst, but off they headed, straight for the Abigov. They even had a map, sketched for them by old Gog, the guardian of archives, who seemed to recall that one day, not long before the third Great Holy War, or just afterwards, when he was working as personal messenger boy to the ômdi, his excellency the Bailiff, he had gone with him to the Abigov, and had seen such marvels there, impressive buildings like granite mountains with endless corridors and tunnels that vanished into the subterranean night; indescribable machines, some as noisy as cataclysms and others that were ever so stressful, just blinking and jangling in a sort of never-ending countdown; file sorters and networks of pneumatic tubes more complex than a human brain; industrial presses that spat out the Holy Gkabul and Abi’s poster in millions of copies; and everywhere, on their own or in teams, there were masses of people, all highly focused and stiff in their gleaming burnis: visibly, they belonged to a transcendent species. They were inhabited by a cold wisdom, but perhaps it was just extinguished madness, ash after fire. They did not speak, looked neither to the right nor to the left, each one did exactly as they were told. Life in them was cold, absent, at best residual, in any case very basic; habit had settled in instead and had created a very precise system of automatic interaction. It was these robots who made Abistan work, but they were not necessarily aware of the fact; their sense of smell was not strong enough to sniff out such things, and they never saw the light of day: the religion they served and the rules of the System forbade it. Between labor and prayer they had just time enough to hurry to the tunnels that would take them back to their kasbahs. The local siren sounded only once, and the convoy wouldn’t wait. Outside their routine, from which they never deviated, they were lumpish and blind. If they stumbled or strayed, they were discharged from service and discarded or scrapped. As potential misfits they would worry their colleagues, neighbors, and loved ones, who in turn would become misfits. Through this method of preventing contagion, the ranks thinned rapidly, as worry and awkwardness were epidemics in themselves. That is how things were in Abistan; the country had its destiny, it believed in Yölah and Abi in this faithful, intransigent way, which incited it to believe ever more fervently, ever more blindly.
In the space of only a day or two, the friends had acquired a solid confidence, going from one street to the next as if there were no borders, no taboos, no rules of good neighborly behavior. They were amazed to discover that the people were just like the inhabitants of their own S21 neighborhood, with the exception of their accent; here they spoke in a singsong way, there the language was guttural and jerky; in other neighborhoods it might be nasal, whistling, or breathy, and it all revealed a great secret: behind the apparent uniformity of people and things, the people were in fact very different, and when they were at home, among their family and friends, they spoke other languages besides abilang, just as they did in the S21. Their accent betrayed them, as did their smell, their gaze, and the way they wore the national burni; but the official inspectors, Civics, Volunteer Law-enforcing Believers, Volunteer Militia, and Patrollers affiliated with the police or the free guards could not hear those false notes in their accents, as they themselves were local, and confined to the same zone. The Vs surely could, they had so many powers—but did they really exist?
Ati and Koa were protected by their official permits, covered in very official stamps, but all the same—careful, careful—they tried as best they could to adopt the accent and manners of the land, or played sick and mute, or even the dunce who was hard of hearing.
All things considered, it was the street that deserved credit: it was a living chaos, you wouldn’t recognize your own brother there. The inspectors were in constant demand, wearing themselves out, running this way and that, letting go of one prey to catch another, and in the end they added nightmare to confusion.
As strangers, Ati and Koa attracted attention the way a magnet attracts a nail. There they were, surrounded once again by a group of inspectors. The crowd came running and formed a circle around them. They didn’t want to miss a thing, and did not hesitate to prompt the inspectors with the right questions. But all in all the interrogation remained very conventional: Ati and Koa knew it off by heart.
“Hey! Hey, you, strangers . . . yes, you . . . come this way.”
“Greetings, brothers, honorable inspectors.”
“In the name of Yölah, Abi, and the Great Commander, not to forget the Honorable of our fiefdom, salvation be upon them, who are you, where have you come from, and where do you think you are going?”
“Praise be to Yölah, Abi, and our Great Commander, not to forget your Honor, we are civil servants of the State on a confidential mission, we have come from S21 and are bound straight for the Abigov.”
“S21? What is that?”
“It is our neighborhood.”
“Your neighborhood? And where is it?”
“That way, to the south, three days’ walk from here . . . but maybe only one hour as the crow flies.”
“Birds have no neighborhood that I know of. And in holy Qodsabad there is no other neighborhood than ours, the H43. So you have
come from another city. What is your business at the Abigov?”
“We are taking private files to the Ministry of Archives, Sacred Books, and Holy Memories.”
“And what is the Abigov?”
“It is the government, the Just Brotherhood, and everything else . . . ”
The crowd was vigilant, and came in at the right moment: “Hey, inspector! Ask ’em for their papers, search ’em, there’ve been a lot of thefts in the neighborhood these days.”
The inspectors took things in hand.
“Show us your papers, your travel permit, your Booklet of Worth, and the enrollment card for the mockba.”
“Here you are, brave and tireless inspectors. Our cards were examined by your mockba, where we said our morning prayer, and where we will spend the night in meditation and fasting.”
“I see you have good ratings and are in the top ranks for your prayers, that’s a good sign.”
The crowd renewed their attack: “Watch out, they’re clever, ask them to recite the holy Gkabul . . . and search them, by Yölah!”
“Let’s see, then: recite verse 76 of chapter 42, title 7, of the Holy Gkabul.”
“That’s easy enough, it says: “I, Abi, the Delegate by the grace of Yölah, hereby order that you submit honestly, sincerely, and totally to the inspectors, whether they are from the Just Brotherhood, the Apparatus, the Administration, or the free initiative of my loyal believers. Great shall be my wrath against those who act, hide, or conceal. So be it.”
“Good, good. You are good, honest believers. Do you have any money to give us, before we validate your travel permit and let you continue on your way? We accept relics if they can be converted to cash.”
“We are poorly paid civil servants, we can only offer you two didis and a talisman from Sîn, it will protect you from tuberculosis and the cold, it will surely buy you a caramel or a honey fritter.”
And so it went, their journey across Qodsabad: truth be told, there were not many good things, given how vast it was, or its status as a multimillennial city, a thousand times holy: a constant exhausting press of crowds, obligatory stops at all the mockbas along the way, inspections at every intersection, pious ceremonies one after the other, improvised jamborees of aspiring pilgrims, from time to time spectacular brawls and arrests, of Regs, madmen, or fugitives; and also a host of depressing sights: condemned people being led to the stadium, convoys of prisoners headed for the camps and forced labor; and then there were the obligatory stops at the nadirs (if, exceptionally, the Great Commander was live on- screen). In front of posters of Abi, and there were thousands of them, the custom was to recite a little verse then back away; and let us not forget the beggars, it was exhausting trying to keep away from them, the place was crawling with them and the law required giving every one of them a little something—a didi, a crust of bread, some salt, a saleable relic, or for lack of anything better, some item they could exchange or sell.
On the whole Ati and Koa were doing well: their fake papers were better than authentic ones. The crowd may have denigrated them, but they had no trouble convincing the forces of law and order. While the Civics were more irksome than others, it was out of ignorance: those poor devils ought to be put out of their misery—they didn’t know how to read, let alone understand, you had to explain, repeat, articulate, and every other sentence congratulate them on their excellent, surpassing piety. With a travel permit mandating them to go to the Abigov on State business, Ati and Koa had every right to look down on the Civics and tell them to sweep the street ahead of them, but they refrained from doing so: a sudden reversal of fortune was always possible, and their revenge would be terrible.
The main thing was to continue on their route and keep their wits about them, all the way to the Abigov, whose famous, dazzling Kïïba could be seen from all four horizons like a rising sun. It was still a three-day walk from there.
Along the way, the two friends discovered the city and did not miss a thing. In fact, it was nothing more than replicas of their own poor neighborhood, as far as the eye could see, but the various parts, brought together in this disjointed way, in an atmosphere of the beginning or end of the world, constituted a realm of absolute strangeness. Old Gog had warned them, with a shiver: “We’re better off in our neighborhood, people know you here, you have things to do, and there will always be someone to bury you. Out there, who’s gonna pick you up, who will keep the dogs off?”
Qodsabad was beyond imagining, a vast expanse turned upside down, where there reigned an unchanging order that left nothing to chance. The impression that emerged from this paradoxical organization was that of a final, universal disaster, transformed by the madness of things into a promise of heavenly paradise, where believers would find an exact replica of their life on earth. The Great Holy War, therefore, would be waged in every world, Here below and There above, and happiness would always be an unachievable aspiration on the part of humans, be they angels or demons. To believe in Yölah under such conditions required more than a miracle: it took the power of a fantastic publicity machine to make dream and reality one. But once you were caught in the phantasmagorical web, Qodsabad was a home like any other: one day you could feel as wretched as a rat and the next day as glad as a lark, and so life went on, not totally disappointing; everyone had a fifty percent chance of dying happy.
The two friends stood out, and so all along the way curious passersby rushed up to them and plied them with questions, always the same, perfectly banal: “Who are you, dammit, where do you come from, where are you going like this?” People did not understand how someone could leave their home, their mockba, and their cemetery, where their family were buried, other than to go on a pilgrimage or to fight in a Great Holy War; they’d never heard of a neighborhood called S21, or of the famous “Seven Sisters of Desolation” which formed the border and separated it from the ghetto—which many people had heard of, by reputation. They lived in M60, H42, or T16 . . . which Ati and Koa had never heard of, and they thought that their own neighborhood was all there was to Qodsabad the holy. The ghetto did not worry them much, since they did not know where it lay hidden; what was terrifying to them was Balis and those accursed Regs who by night kidnapped children and believers to perform witchcraft with their blood. All, however, shared that fine Abistani quality, hospitality, and it was as natural as could be that they invited the voyagers to come and pray with them at their mockba and to join in volunteer activities, thus adding substantially to their tally of points, with a view to the upcoming R-Day. They also offered them food and drink, and the money they asked for in exchange was simply a courtesy, tit for tat, generosity met with generosity. But in the presence of the forces of law and order, whether it was a war tactic or simple human weakness, they set aside their kindly disposition and heaped abuse on strangers.
As Ati and Koa drew closer and closer to the Abigov, the pyramid of Kïïba began to unveil its majestic, fantastical grandeur. With every step they took in that direction the pyramid gained two siccas in height, and before long the tip vanished into the incandescent depths of the heavens. From this close up, you had to crane your neck horizontally to see the summit.
At last they had nearly reached their goal: only one neighborhood left to cross, A19, an unbearable shambles of the kind that used to exist around medieval domains—shabby creatures living one on top of the other in narrow, insalubrious slums fit to drive a leper away. The reason for this lies in the history of slums, if there is one. People camped out at the edge of the city to hire out their services to the rich lords, building their fine houses, putting up ramparts and dungeons to ensure their safety, and once the work was done they found themselves back outside where they started, caught in the trap. Being a slave without a master was worse than anything. Where could they go next? The family was getting bigger, they’d forged ties with their neighbors, as poor as they were, “If you leave here you die”; so between unemployment, odd jobs, and ass
orted trafficking they’d settled into a long-term provisional existence, piling sheet of metal upon sheet of metal, plank upon plank, using wattle to stop up the drafts, just so they’d feel cozier, as if they were at home, and they prepared their children to take over from them. A19 was only at a very primitive stage of development, as neighborhoods went; some day they’d have proper permanent houses, and streets with gutters and overflows, and squares for markets and celebrations, and shelters for tramps, and masses of inspectors.
The two friends walked straight through, astonished they were able to do so without being stopped or pulled over every third step.
Once they’d left the last slum behind, the governmental city—the City of God—appeared before them: enormous, titanic. None of it was on a human scale; people had been working for God, here—and Yölah was the greatest—for all eternity, all infinity. It was a human endeavor, but it surpassed all human understanding. One surprise took their breath away: the City of God was enclosed by a wall as high as a mountain, of a thickness of several dozen siccas! How on earth would they get over it, confound it! Gog hadn’t mentioned it at all. There had been gaps in the archivist’s memory, and this was a major one. The other explanation was that the wall had been put up after Gog’s visit. He was barely fifteen years old when he went to the Abigov, and the little messenger boy for the Bailiff, running faster than his shadow, didn’t see everything; now he was a doddery old man, with little control over his memory. So much had happened since then—invasions, Holy Wars, including a nuclear one, the mother of all battles, which had unleashed upon the planet the greatest swarm of bandits and mutants in all of human history; there had been grandiose revolutions and titanic repressions that had engendered madmen and vagrants in the millions; there had been famines and worldwide epidemics that had devastated entire regions and caused millions of wretches to flee before them. Extreme climate change had taken care of the rest, radically transforming the geography of the planet—nothing was where it used to be—oceans, continents, mountains, and deserts had all been whirled out of place as never before through all the geological ages, and all in a single human lifespan. Yölah the almighty was not enough; it also took a wall of this dimension to protect the Just Brotherhood and its disciples. All that was left alive from that era when Gog visited the Abigov for his pleasure was Abi, but he was the Delegate, immortal and immovable. And there was Gog, an insignificant mortal, nearing his end.
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