Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “What did you say to your mother?” I asked him.

  “I said, I really don't want to do it. I'm scared. I hate to be hurt. The innkeeper...” He hesitated. “Well, I am a bastard,” he said. He turned his back to me and lowered his tunic a little, and I could see old welts in the firelight. I burned with rage, but I held myself back, for anger is one of the seven deadly sins. Truly, my one night's sin was being visited on the next generation. But if my son was willing to be cut, I reflected, at least the cycle of penance would end. “It's all right, really. I don't mind getting whipped that much. I'm used to it. It's like I can't do anything right for him.”

  “Sit here beside me, Guillaume of Tiffauges,” I said. He obeyed. His closeness terrified me. “Did your mother say that you should undergo this operation?”

  “She said that it was entirely my decision.”

  “And what is your decision?” I dared to caress his hair for a brief moment. This time, alone with me, he did not flinch.

  “I told her that I will do it if you command it, mon pére.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are my father,” he said.

  And I saw that he knew, he knew it with utter certitude, as I knew of the existence of heaven and hell. “Who told you this?” I said. “Your mother swore to me she would never speak of our—”

  “She didn't betray you, mon pére. I found out for myself.”

  “But how?

  "He told me, mon pére.”

  Should I now say that the boy wept, and told me how he had dreamed for so many years of knowing his father, that he had imagined him a crusader, a warrior, a hunter, a prince, a troubadour, a sorcerer, but never in his wildest dreams a priest? Should I tell how his tears broke down my reserve at last, and how I embraced him and felt at long last the joy of an untainted love?

  I may not say these things. Because, at that time, they did not happen. Rather I answered him very simply, “Then I do command it.”

  And he said, “I will do what you tell me, father.” And he got up, and planted a single dry kiss upon my tearless cheek, and he left me.

  I thought of the pain I was about to inflict upon him. But I thought also of God the Father, who must have known full well what pain our Lord his Son would have to undergo; I thought also of Isaac, consenting to the knife with joy because it was his father's will; and only then, only when there was no one to see me, did I give way to tears. I cried myself to oblivion, and before dawn they found me there, and woke me for the ride back up to the chateau, so I could say mass.

  * * * *

  As the “gentle persuasion” portion of the investigation was now over, it seemed more appropriate to continue in the dungeons. The use of torture is never to be undertaken without proper reflection. After all, anxious as they were to obtain a conviction, the Inquisition did not torture Joan of Arc.

  The dungeons were the dark heart of Tiffauges. It was there that Bluebeard once made a pile of the decapitated heads of the children he had murdered, so that he could compare them to see which was the most beautiful. It was here that the Marshall of France kept his captives, lured to the castle by the promise of a place in the chapel choir or a position as page in his service. It was here that he sated his lusts, culminating always in a gore-drenched, erotically charged slaughter.

  No torture unto death would, of course, be practiced by us. Indeed, the papal instructions are very specific, for we may not even shed one drop of blood during the Question. Bloodletting is the domain of the secular arm; our concern is only with the soul.

  Only a single session of torture is permitted by church law, though one can by unwritten custom extend that session over many periods if need be.

  I entered the dungeon they had selected, one with no light but torchlight, and an odious damp, with vermin underfoot—for it is important to produce in the Questioned person the feeling of utter hopelessness, so as to hasten his confession. Jean the Torturer had already set up the strappado. The Inquisitorial chair had been brought down, and a rich rug placed to receive it and the desk, at which Brother Pierre already sat, with his notes and quill at hand, making the initial log entries by candlelight.

  Guillaume the Monster had been stripped of his clothing, for the shame of public nakedness is often enough to induce a confession. Naturally, I averted my eyes, for it is not seemly for a spiritual man to behold such things; but curiosity made me look anyway, and when I did I could not help but stare.

  The greenish cast of the skin was made more reptilian in the dungeon's smoky light. They had already tied the cords to the shoulders, and attached the weights to his feet, but the torturer was waiting for my signal before beginning the actual excruciation.

  As I grew used to the dimness, I stood up to examine him more closely, hoping for some sign that would allow me to avoid torture. For example, a clear supernumerary nipple could indicate his involvement in witchcraft; a circumcised membrum virile would signify that he was a Jew. We could have proceeded straight to the conviction.

  But this monstrosity possessed no nipples at all, nor anything resembling a reproductive organ. His chest was a pattern of scales. Below his waist, his legs began. The scale pattern continued straight down.

  He said, “You seem surprised, mon pére.”

  “You are ... you are a natural eunuch! And without even vestigial nipples ... you are neither male nor female ... were you female, you could not suckle a child ... were you male, you could not engender a child ... you are an abomination!” The horror of it was unspeakable. Such prodigies are always killed at birth.

  “Perhaps my kind does not require this type of reproduction,” said Guillaume the Monster. “We are already aspects of the One.”

  “So you claim to be without original sin?” I said.

  “What is sin?” said the monster.

  “Do you not honor God?”

  “Who is God?” he asked me.

  “God is everything.”

  “Then am I God?”

  I could listen no more. I gave Jean the signal to hoist him up. As the weights left the ground I could hear the crack of the shoulder joints dislocating. “You mock God?” I shouted. “You claim to be in a state of grace?”

  He writhed, and a serpentine hissing escaped his lips.

  “More weights!” I screamed. “You will confess!”

  “To what shall I confess?”

  “That you are a heretic! That you claim to be free of sin, a state the Church alone is empowered to bestow through the holy rite of confession and absolution! Confess!”

  “I am not a heretic. I am from another world. I am lost. Send me home.”

  “And how shall that be, when you claim that your home is in heaven?”

  “I have already told your son how I may go home! There are two ways; the first is for me to communicate with the mother ship. The device is under the ice! You have but to wait until the spring thaw is complete and—”

  At the mention of my Guillaume, I became more furious. With what corruptions had he been feeding my son? I commanded the torturer to add more weights, while every croak, every hiss was carefully noted down by Brother Pierre. The arms were already quite out of their sockets; the muscles were tearing; the monster's eyes bulged and he appeared to gasp. But what I did not hear were cries of pain. And so I hardened my heart and told Jean the Torturer to add weights until there were far more weights than any human could bear, which proved that Satan was behind his unnatural resistance, and which inflamed my fury still more.

  “Confess that you have denied the sacraments! That you're a Jew! A witch! That you have had carnal knowledge of Satan! That you're a Cathar! A Waldensian! You have but to admit to a single heresy and I will cease tormenting you!”

  It was at that moment, with my emotions aroused to fever pitch, that our captive's arms tore loose and he fell to the floor with a crash. It was horrible, especially as the rats began scurrying over him. A greenish sap began to ooze from the sockets. The arms flailed back and forth
as though independently alive.

  “We're spilling blood!” I gasped, horrified that we had broken the papal regulations. “Jean, you must stanch it quickly!”

  “I don't understand,” said the torturer. “I haven't applied enough pressure to rip off any limbs.” He was upset; a professional should know his craft better than to make such a bungle of things; I could tell that he was utterly appalled at himself. Quickly he found some rags so that he could prevent too much blood from touching the ground, which is the actual letter of the law we were violating. There was some straw in the dungeon—it was the prisoner's bedding—and he threw it over the heretic to try to absorb some of the gore.

  But Brother Paolo said, “It is green, Father Lenclud. It is not blood.”

  The severed arms swung back and forth and now began to sizzle and char, and an acrid green smoke began to fill the dungeon. I ordered more torches to be lit. We had to see what we were doing. A foul green fluid was spurting over our faces. I saw that Brother Paolo was right. This was not blood. It had neither the consistency nor the characteristic stench. Jean the Torturer had not broken the law.

  Meanwhile, Guillaume the Monster was writhing on the stone floor among the vermin. A cacophonous babble issued from his lips. Doubtless it was some appalling witchery such as the Lord's prayer backward. Indeed, clearly there was necromancy afoot, because the creature's shoulder sockets were quivering, vibrating, and small green stalks were pushing their way out through the flesh ... he was growing a new pair of arms, as though they were the tails of a lizard! I simply stared. The babble resolved itself once more into words:

  “I am not a heretic. I am from another world. I beg you, send me home. I can wait until the spring thaw is complete. Or you can set off my internal monitor to signal the ship....”

  Words they may have been, but it was still nonsense.

  “His body magically repairs itself,” said Jean the Torturer, and I was reminded of the tale of the hydra, who grew more heads whenever one was chopped off.

  “But,” said Brother Paolo as he watched Brother Pierre finish a sentence of his transcript with a flourish of his quill, “the regeneration of the flesh, and the fact that his body contains no blood to be spilled, opens up, by the legal constraints imposed by the papacy, a loophole in the process of excruciation....”

  I understood at once. Without blood, without any permanent destruction of the flesh, there was no legal limit to the violence that could be inflicted upon this monster in the interests of saving his immortal soul.

  Much relieved, Jean the Torturer immediately strung him up again and, secure in the knowledge that he was committing no excommunicable crime, brought out more extreme instruments of pain. The scourgings, lashings, and burnings made us all wince, but the creature's stubbornness continued to inflame me, and by late afternoon I had almost taken complete leave of my senses. His stubbornness caused almost a reversal in our roles; for where normally the accused would be pleading for mercy after a few hours’ torment, it was the Brothers and I who were so worn out by the monster's equanimity that we were begging, pleading, cajoling the creature to try to get even the vaguest confession.

  Half a dozen pairs of arms swung from the rafters. Piles of straw were soaking up puddles of greenish phlegm.

  Jean's art had punctured the monster's skin in several places. There were holes through which we could see the workings of his innards, and now, as he lay, his skin pulsating, yet another pair of arms pushing forth out of his sockets, his words were hoarse and accompanied by a bizarre whistling as breath passed through the many extra channels in his flesh. And he continued his talk of coming from the sky, and returning there, and incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about his mission and about his internal sensors. We must have made some kind of an impression, surely! For his voice wheezed, and it seemed to me that I saw some weariness in his eyes.

  I was about to declare an official continuation of the session until the next day, when the door of the dungeon creaked open, and my son Guillaume entered the torture chamber.

  “Church business is not to be interrupted!” Brother Pierre shouted, and threw a cape over the monster. But I knew that Guillaume had already seen.

  “Mon pére,” he said, “I have come as you commanded, to receive the operation.”

  There was a dead silence. Under the cloak, the monster twitched and fibrillated. Guillaume looked up at the ceiling, where the creature's many pairs of severed arms still dangled. The cloak slid off the monster's face and we could all see his eyes, peering back and forth with a discomfiting watchfulness.

  Guillaume looked at me and raised his arms in a gesture of remonstrance, and I said simply, “What can I do, Guillaume? He won't confess.”

  “Mon pére,” Guillaume said, “You could have asked me. I know what will make him confess.”

  “Child, there is a manual of instruction composed by His Holiness himself about these matters. We deviate from it on pain of eternal damnation. Leave these things to us. Come upstairs, now, into the light. We'll talk of your operation and of your future. Forget what you've seen.”

  “But mon pére,” he said, “my mother tells me you have an expert, who will wield the knife deftly and who will give me as little pain as he can. Who is he?”

  “I,” said Jean the Torturer, who in an ideal world would have preferred to be known only as Jean the Barber.

  And he held out hands of welcome, hands from which oozed the heretic's green rheum.

  * * * *

  The torturer had not, of course, brought a gelding knife. He had to make do with an instrument that had that same day sliced leeks in the castle kitchens.

  I wanted the cutting to occur in a room as distant as possible from the squalor of Guillaume's former life. The peasants looked askance when I requisitioned the Marshall's own bedchamber, and commanded that clean linens be set out, and a goose-down pillow; but they could not argue with me, for I represented the Church, and the Church had jurisdiction over the chateau for the present.

  I had them gather plenty of wood for the fireplace. I even went so far as to order Jean the Barber to bathe, so that my son would not see the spattered traces of the monster's excruciation upon his hands and face. And I had extra candles brought in so that he would not wake up in the dark, and be frightened. The finest silver basins were brought in to catch the blood and to hold water to lave the wound.

  Guillaume was terribly afraid. We held him down, I by the arms and Brother Paolo by the legs. I gave him a stick to bite on. I could not look into his eyes, could not gaze on the terror which was being inflicted by my will alone. The barber lifted the boy's tunic and sliced and Guillaume started screaming almost before the knife touched flesh, and he went on screaming. We held him fast. I did not realize there would be so much blood. I squeezed my eyes shut as the boy screamed and the torturer turned barber sliced, steadily and methodically, until the boy's scrotum was completely severed. Then, working as swiftly as he could, he applied bandages and a salve, wrapping as Guillaume screamed himself into a frenzy and, at last, exhausted from it all, sunk back onto the bloody sheets.

  “You can let go of him,” said the barber. “It is done.”

  I realized I was still gripping the lad's arms tight. I relaxed, but he clung to my wrists and murmured, “Papa, papa.” And then he fainted.

  The others looked away. I knew then that they knew, they all knew. “I will sit with him,” I said.

  “Yes, you must,” said Jean. “The first hours are critical. He is in so much pain that his soul cannot decide whether to flee his body. It isn't only the physical pain, mon pére; it's the feeling of eternal loss. He doesn't even want to come back ... but you can give him something to hope for, to live for.”

  And all of them left me, and I sat alone, by the side of the bed, listening to him moan. I could not sleep. I did not know whether Guillaume slept; he twisted and turned, and sometimes his eyes opened; he never let go of my hand. The one Guillaume I had meant to hurt, and not the other; un
wittingly I had caused their fates to be reversed. I prayed; oh, how I did pray. “I'll give my immortal soul,” I whispered, “if he will only pull through.”

  Toward midnight, he seemed to quieten. I wiped the sweat from his brow. He stirred. At last, he opened his eyes. He said, very softly, “Don't you want to know how to get him to confess?”

  I said, “Don't think of it, my son.”

  “You hurt me,” he said. But he said it without rancor. I loved him for that.

  “I know,” I said. And squeezed his hand.

  “I don't mind,” he said. “It's what you wanted.”

  I said, “The pain will go away.”

  He said, “I did what you wanted. So now, I'm going to ask you to do something I want.”

  “Anything,” I said softly.

  “He will confess if you promise that you will burn him at the stake,” Guillaume said.

  “Don't say such things,” I said. “There's no need for you to become involved in—”

  “No, Papa, please listen. I will tell it to you exactly as I heard it, because I don't understand it, but he made me memorize it yesterday, when I gave him water. He may not seem to be in pain, but he is desperate. He can wait until the thaw to retrieve his communication device, but there is another way for him to go home, another, more desperate way. He has a sensor embedded deep inside him. It's not a machine, it's a part of him because he's connected to all the others. It's as if they only have one soul between them, he told me. If his vital signs suggest that he's in imminent danger of death, it will start to transmit ... he told me they're cold-blooded. Extreme heat will set it off.”

  “You are delirious,” I said. “You're speaking nonsense.”

  “But promise me that you will tell him you'll burn him at the stake.”

  The boy was clearly maddened by his agony, but I knew I had to promise. I did so. He squeezed my hand again, and finally drifted into slumber.

  * * * *

  In the morning, I did what my Guillaume had asked me, and the monster immediately, to my astonishment, confessed to an entire litany of heresies. I fell to my knees and thanked God that I no longer needed to have recourse to torture. I swore then that, though I had promised to burn the creature, I would give him a final chance to repent and accept the mercy of strangulation; I owed him that much at least, for it was because of him that I had learned what it is to love a child.