by M. A. Foster
—That raises more questions than foul play. It is not the most simple explanation.
—Occam’s razor, eh? Yes, I know about it. Well, that all depends upon what you know about environments, like Aceldama.
—They were parts of it?
—No. It can’t hold a steady state in the world we perceive. No, they are, or were, or will be, real enough, real flesh and blood. It took them . . . or takes, or will take; and puts them out, under some control. Since there’s a strain involved from the original, all it has to do is relax, as it were, and they return to the place from whence they came. I regard it as a most sinister symptom that this happened—it has dispensed with indirect controls.
—That’s not logical! If it could do that, then it could just reach out and pick who it wanted and transfer them here.
—Wrong. First, it doesn’t have fine control enough to work like that at a distance. Only here, and then, not all the time. Second, you would know it, and resist, which would make the transfer operation in Cucany worthless . . . No, it’s as I’ve told you, it’s control is very crude, and cruder with distance. When it came, I tried to perceive it, and saw a little—I am half in the shadow-world, anyway. It’s been doing this for centuries, trying to lure the right type here. It made mistakes, you see. It helped the Klesh stay more intractable than they actually were, which frightened the others off, and it hemmed me in. . . .
—I suppose you will say that it made up Flerdistar and Clellendol and the Spsom as well.
—No—but it’s been attracting them for a long time. I suppose you could say that it’s kept an issue alive, that without which, there would be no Flerdistar, and without her and her family group, no expedition to Monsalvat . . .
—But the space-stresses, the storms . . .
—You got here in one piece, didn’t you? And the ship you came in was broken, wasn’t it? I tell you, you must exercise caution! It wants strife. What we provide for it isn’t enough . . . you see, when I was alive, what I did to Monsalvat was instill a certain order into things; that remained, at least. It stopped me too soon, but in actuality it was just right—for us. To you, Monsalvat seems chaotic, but to me it’s actually quite orderly now, much better than the old days. At least I did that! But for it, it’s boring, like it was before the Klesh came! No, I’m sure of it: it is leading you into a trap. You must not set these Lagos off. I see repercussions that will echo across time. It’s prodding you, even though it can no longer perceive you directly: that is a measure of its urgency. Even at the risk of serious consequences to itself. It brought you here to set things back as they were, and that must not be.
—Still the Hanged Man?
—I am what I am. And you must be as true to yourself. The Fool can bring any consequences, and The High Priestess possesses uncorrupted original wisdom. Already Flerdistar can feel your influence on this world, though she’s a pastreader—she’s getting backscatter from the future . . .
—I can refuse to act!
—Fool! That’s an action as well! Then you’ll be led into one situation after another, until you do the right thing . . . you lose all initiative along that path, which means that you’ll do what it wants. And don’t think that it will save you after it has used you to ignite the change it wants—you’re just a catalyst. You have value until the moment, and afterwards, nothing. It doesn’t care if it kills you in the process or not.
—What about you?
—What so? It has already discovered what we know, that I can’t do anything anymore. So it is with all men out of time. We are all creatures of our own times, and none other . . . think of the irony of the entity: it brings me back, and I’m useless for this world, this now-world. Then it turns out that the vehicle is stronger than the cargo. Then it loses both of us in the interference we create. Now it is tampering with reality to the extent of its powers, even when there is potential there to destroy it. You can be anything you want: you can be Monsalvat’s deliverer, or you can be an Emperor of Hell, for a short time.
—We already have Brotherhood of Mankind, out there where I came from. It hasn’t done us much good, so it seems.
—Cain slew Abel, in the oldest story, and so much for Brotherhood. Your ancient Kleshlike forebears had the right idea. But peoples can work together, once they have the vision. So lead us! Finish the thing I tried to start! And we will go out and return to Man and teach, and all men will grow strange and wonderful—it’s our diversity and our mutability that is our selfness—we’ve chased rainbows of ideology for millennia, but they have been wrong! All we have to be is ourselves, and work together. We all have different shapes, but we have congruent dreams; it will be that way, no matter how odd we become. Look how far Derques have gone.
—I’ve heard of Derques, but not seen one.
—What?
—No, I remember them. I’ve seen them, somewhere, but I can’t place it . . . yes, I remember them: they are odd Humans who walk on their hands and swing their bodies between their arms. Their legs and feet are atrophied and used as hands. They are not native to Kepture, but are sometimes brought here from . . . ah, Ch . . . Chengurune. Now it’s coming . . . I can remember: men with robes and cowls atop a hill, in the wind, there’s a pack of them, moving restlessly, and the men show them some scrap of cloth. They take it, show it to each other, holding it with their feet, which are hands. They are ugly brutes, grimacing and grunting, capering about; their shoulders are grown into their necks, and their faces are long; ugly, ugly. Now they begin to bound off down the trail, swinging both arms at once, and using their arses as a third foot, tossing bits of dirt in the air in their excitement. They are hunting someone! A fugitive; he escaped me and I set the Derques on him . . . That’s not my memory!
There was no answer from Cretus.
—Gone hiding again? No matter, that: if I can remember Derques, I can remember the rest of it, what I need to know to buy free. . . .
It was a little like trying to remember something he had forgotten, and also a little like trying to visualize numbers while working a mathematics exercise in his head. And a little unlike anything else. At first, he got results, but it was uncontrolled: a flash image, this, that. He remembered things Cretus had thought memorable, the details we all remember without trying to do so. Meure remembered the color of afternoon sunlight on a sun-heated wall of stucco, amber-colored, a time when the city was just coming alive, and he, Cretus, anticipated nightfall and its darkness-blessed opportunities for larceny and vice. He remembered Nomads by a campfire deep in the fens, mysterious figures in dark robes who muttered among themselves in an incomprehensible jargon. He remembered a great battle, the end of it, men surrendering, others counting the fallen, while he stood on a hill overlooking a wine-dark sea, and one of the captains struggled up the hill and reported that it had gone just like he had said, and he saluted, not without a trace of awe, and returned, and he looked out over the violet sea into the unknowable Northern Ocean, and the deep blue light that flowed over it.
There was no key, it seemed. He could not control the chains of association. Things fell into his head, and fell out again, leaving disconnected echoes of themselves; the harder he reached, the more random the memories came, and the more erratic the duration of each scene became. Some were just instants—others lasted minutes, so it seemed. Still others were disconnected pictures, that made no sense at all.
Then there was a long one, a scene that must have made a deep impression on Cretus, for it lasted long and was recalled in meticulous detail. It was simple, in its own way—a view of a city through an open window, but there was something odd about it. Meure strained, a great force of will, and managed to halt the changeover of the memories. Now he had one. But there was an oddity about it, and he, Meure, didn’t know what it was. Now he remembered as if it were his own, and he tried to see what was so extraordinary about this scene. Cretus remembered it as odd, alien.
The architecture of the city was unconventional, but that was not it. Tha
t didn’t bother Cretus at all. But it bothered Meure: it was a city of slender towers, all set at different heights, all composed of ornate rococo cupolas set atop columnar bases of differing degrees of slenderness. Between some of the structures airy walkways were stretched, seemingly defying gravity, for he could not see how they were supported; there was traffic moving on the ways as well, but he could not make out any details of the figures. They were dark blots, moving, apparently walking or gliding with a motion rather like dancing, or skating, all without haste, very esthetically, as if Time had no substance. The creatures seemed manlike in general shape, but they were oddly jointed. Men? Meure couldn’t tell. But Cretus wasn’t bothered at all. He accepted that.
It was day, in the city. The sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky, he could see it through the window, backlighting the scene . . . and it was a single star. That was what Cretus thought was the most alien feature of the scene he was looking at. It must have been a scene from his early use of the Skazenache: another world, perhaps another time, future, past, who knew. Now he had the association he wanted, a key to the vault within.
There still was no presence, but a voice seemed to whisper bodilessly in his mind, “This is the world Erspa, a planet located in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, a hundred million years in the past. It was the first time I tried to see another world inhabited by sentient beings, but neither Human nor Ler. I was astounded at the appearance of their sun. It looked incomplete, unfinished, naked. I have seen different shapes of living, reasoning flesh, but nothing so odd as that first time.”
The voice faded. Now Meure had one association, and he pursued it. Now the images stayed longer, and were clearer, but they become very odd indeed. Meure saw empty planets illuminted by the violet glare of giant stars, doomed to oblivion hardly before decently cooling off. He saw things that swam, and others that flew; still others loped, strode, or hopped. Then, after many of the odd scenes had gone by him, he remembered seeing a Klesh, in the light of a single sun. Now he had the association he had been looking for, and he followed it, watching every scene closely, pressing for the conclusion.
He got the whispered rumor immediately, and it stunned him so much he almost lost the chain-thread he was following. But before he had time to digest the import of it, the source of the rumor Flerdistar had tracked across space and time, he skipped a score of similar images, that were Cretus’ tracks back into the past, and then the final scene came without warning, and unfolded to Meure, as it had to Cretus. Everything was there, nothing was left out. And the oddest thing about it was that the memory was of a person telling the true story, as if to an audience. Perhaps it had been Cretus’ viewpoint that had left that impression. But the memory was of someone talking directly to Cretus. And then Meure understood everything about the curious history of the Ler, and the Warriors, and the travails of the Klesh.
He was so surprised (for it was, actually, a simple story, despite its details), that he said, aloud, “So that’s what it was, all the time.”
Flerdistar, wrestling with a sweep much too large for her, turned and said, “What did you say?”
And with his mind still flickering and reverberating with the spillout of the memories of Cretus the Scribe, he looked at the Ler girl as if awakening from a deep sleep, and answered, “It was nothing. Nothing at all.” And it was true: it was nearly nothing, considered in comparison with an uncountable number of acts, intentions, initiations, beginnings. Nearly nothing! But the consequences of that one act had left standing waves across time. Meure felt disoriented and deconceptualized. Nothing he had learned to assume about the consequentiality of acts, about the value of actions, had remained true after what he had ‘remembered’ from the memories of Cretus. He felt the conceptual universe shift along some unknown axis, adjusting to the new information, integrating it, although now it was the rest of what he thought he knew that shifted, rather than the new data. And then, prepared, initiated, ready, the realization following the exposure came rumbling through his mind, and he did not try to inhibit it, or deflect it. It, too, was a simple thing, almost nothing, but with consequences. It was: living creatures, being imperfect, unfinished, possess a flaw in their perceptions and reasonings which permits them to assign an entirely unrealistic set of weighted values upon their acts, so that what they think is a major decision, actually has close to zero value in the reality which includes the dimension of Time, and acts which seem unimportant, or even virtually nonexistent, assume major significance in that dimension. Oh, there was nothing wrong with the Theory of Causality—things were caused, all right—that was true beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was just that all reasoning creatures tended to assign the wrong values to the wrong acts. It was true, what the old stories had suggested, their authors half guessing even as they approached the real truth—that the death of a butterfly out of its sequence would determine the results of an election, and the form of government, and whether millions of those creatures would live or die, millions of years after the inconsequential butterfly. That the way a wind blows on a certain day would set the course of an empire spanning Time. That an enormous commercial enterprise, spanning whole planetary systems, would vanish overnight, engulfed by its competitors and its creditors, because one insignificant manager of one operation could not manage his own mouth.
Cretus had seen that, and the examples that were its foundation, in his view through the Skazenache, and for that reason had left his work incomplete, short of its great triumph. He didn’t care what his subjects might say, or historians from any planet or any period in time, before him or after him. That was truly inconsequential; what mattered to him were the things which seemed insignificant now, meaningless, valueless: the way a servant plied his broom; the way a low-ranking minister looked out the window; and even smaller things whose presence he could guess, but which he could not see. From that data base, he had concluded that it was time to disengage, that any of his idea at all be retained, for if he stayed where he was, not only would the idea fail, but its opposite would rise again in greater strength. For Cretus to hold on to his Empire to the end, no matter what, would have the consequence that Monsalvat would become so filled with pride and rage and alienation that no society at all would be possible, and that the Klesh of that planet would disintegrate, and die off, and one by one, gutter and go out. But to step off the stage, voluntarily, at that moment, would hold things somewhat as they were, and freeze them, for perhaps another to take up thousands of years in the future. He could only win by surrendering: that was what his study of consequentiality told him.
Now Meure understood Cretus very well. He understood what Cretus had done, half-consciously at that. He understood the nature of things, because he had seen an excellent example not to be denied. He had seen and understood the secret of the Klesh. He had seen that Cretus had used his knowledge to map out a rough outline of his unseen enemy, the Entity. And now Meure felt a greater weight than Cretus bearing down upon him; now he himself knew what Flerdistar had come light-years to find, but he did not know the consequences of giving her that information. Or, for that matter, of not giving it to her. But he felt the weight of his decision multiplying, magnifying itself in resonances across time and space: what he told her, and when, would have results. That much was certain. And that was the least of the decisions he had to make!
13
“There is no such thing as history. The facts, even were they available, are too numerous to grasp. A selection must be made; and this can only be onesided, because the selector is enclosed in the same network of time and space as his subject.”
—A.C.
THE DOUBLE SUNS of Monsalvat had sunk below the western rises leading to Ombur when Morgin announced that it appeared they would reach a section of the foreign quarter; how he knew was not apparent, as the city drifting past them had not seemingly changed, save to grow slightly more dense; in place of hovels and shacks, and seedy tumbledown sheds given over to all sorts of questionable enterprises,ther
e were now small blocks of flats, with lethargic inhabitants leaning out of frameless windows, staring into space. There were also what seemed to be small factories, scrap yards, dumps. Peddlers roamed the street, hawking various articles of food and commerce, with measured cadences, almost as if moving to a rhythm Meure could not either hear or imagine. It looked both dreary and impossible. The prevailing emotion was despair.
Now that the river had divided itself up into the myriad channels of the delta proper, the width of each stream was narrower, and they were drifting closer to the littered streets, and could see the inhabitants better. The Lagostomes in their city did not look any better than the ones he could remember from the incident alongside the vanished Ffstretsha: if anything, the ones who had come out after the ship had seemed to be better-dressed. They wore rags and tatters and castoffs whose original identity had long since been lost. Occasionally, one saw a rare individual in slightly better order, but that was seldom. A pervasive effluvia filled the air, of too many people, too long unwashed, mixed with all the substances which had been gathered by the Great River; waste, organic chemicals, other things not so readily identifiable.
Meure wondered what the others thought of it. For himself, he felt a great bottomless dismay; there was nothing in his experience or knowledge like this. Monsalvat seemed to be a way of life humanity had tried hard to forget. He said as much to Morgin, sharing one of the sweeps with the middle-aged Embasee.
Morgin ruminated long upon an answer, or perhaps whole families of answers. Finally, he replied, “I know Kepture and Chengurune by direct experience, Glordune by repute, which is adequate for my purposes, and Cantou by longing, which I do not expect to attain. Kepture is . . . rather harsher, shall we say, then Chengurune, but not quite so abrupt and unforgiving as Glordune. But these are differences of degree, not of kind. All peoples I have known seem to live lives of greater or lesser complexity, all deriving something valuable from the reality they inhabit. I have heard you off-worlders speak of things and thought that things sound more peaceable on your worlds, and it is a wonder to me, for even in Cantou, men strive and hate and slay. And in Glordune? Ah, that is beyond even some of us Aceldamans.” He shook his head, as if something was beyond his ability to describe it.
