Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  Indeed there was a strong and constant murmuring that could be split into the sounds of dozens of different activities and conversations, if only we had the discriminating ears for it. And most of us did have that equipment.

  “Doesn’t Prince Henry know that we can hear everything down in this room?” Conchita asked. “He said that this was called the Whispering Room, and he said that he didn’t know why. Is this audibility something that can be turned on and off?”

  The Castle was filling up with guests so that it seemed that even its famous hospitality would be strained. And many of the arriving guests were commenting on their host as soon as they were in their rooms. They were impressed by the luxury of their rooms and suites, yes, though several of them affected to find elements of bad taste in the excessiveness of that luxury.

  “It is plain bush. Nay, it is cheesiness to overdo it this way,” one voice said. “Oh, it’s cheap, cheap, to go so expensive.”

  And then there was a voice that we knew, or thought that we knew, speaking apparently to several different groups. It was either the voice of Prince Henry or that of Prince Franco, who had gone vague before our very eyes on the ship The Dina O’Grogan. The voices of the two brothers were identical when their moods were similar. It was either Prince Henry being agreeable for reasons of policy, or it was the regular voice of Prince Franco.

  There were voices and noises from the castle grounds and from its verdant gardens and fields and waterfronts. There was the coded whistling of ships’ whistles, which most of the seamen amongst us could understand. There was a clanking and ringing of iron mixed with a rebellious babble of voices. The giant crewman, the big escaped slave Sparaticus, said that it was the noise of the arrival of groups of slaves in chains. Then, seemingly within the castle again, there was an interesting dialogue.

  “Prince Henry,” said one very much displeased voice, “the last time this happened, just one third of a year ago, you gave me your absolute oath that it would never happen again.”

  “Cave iusiurandos praedorum, ‘Beware the oaths of pirates,’” said the voice that had to be that of Prince Henry. “You do know, do you not, incompetent Ambassador, that Dog Latin is the diplomatic language on Klepsis? It gives us a touch of elegance, you know. No, no, we are not to be trusted at all. But this slave-sale-and-gala this evening is, for reasons of falling profit, the last slave sale that I will ever hold at Ravel-Brannagan Castle or anywhere else on Klepsis. I’ll hardly break even tonight. I give you my highly qualified oath that it’ll be the last one, Ambassador.”

  “Declare the previous one to be the last one and the one tonight to be canceled, Prince. You know that slavery by any name is strictly forbidden in every democracy, oligarchy, regency, tyranny, kingdom, benevolent dictatorship, plutocracy, and people’s republic in all seventeen of the habitable worlds. Strictly forbidden, Prince. And any government that permits it can be occupied and placed under trusteeship.”

  “The government of Klepsis is not any of those types you have named, Ambassador. Our government is a covenanted piracy. And it would not be easy to occupy us and place us under a trusteeship.”

  “But you, personally, have signed the no-slavery agreement!”

  “I personally sign almost every paper that comes to my hand, Ambassador. I sign the things out of my desire to live in peace with all mankind and quasi-mankind. I spend a pleasant half hour every day signing official-looking papers.”

  “But you have subscribed to all the basic freedoms.”

  “Yes, Ambassador, to all of them. I am the only ruler in all the worlds who has subscribed to the ultimate freedom. And the ultimate freedom is the freedom to own slaves. There is no freedom more ultimate than this, to own and traffic in the buggers. You know, Ambassador, that I have a good double for you, to take your place if anything happens to you. He is an actor from Camiroi, where acting is one of the fine arts. Now, go! Go out and mingle with the people, Ambassador. Go out and be seen everywhere at the slave-sale-and-gala. And smile, damn you, smile. Your very life depends on how sweetly you smile among the people tonight.”

  Then the conversation between Prince Henry and the Ambassador became more bitter, but also less audible. And finally it was heard no more.

  “I wonder whether people throughout the castle can hear us here in the strong room, since we are able to hear them so well?” Gold Coast O’Mally asked.

  “No,” said a voice that I did not immediately recognize. After all, there were several crewmen from The Dina O’Grogan whom I had not yet heard speak. “No, it is all done with one-way amplifiers. No sound from your strong room can reach the outside, except to one place. Nobody outside of your strong room, except myself, can hear you at all. I built it that way when I built this castle.”

  “Who are you? What voice is yours?” I asked. “Are you not one of our party? Are you not in our strong room? Where are you then?”

  “I am a voice crying in my monument, and I will not be stilled. But now I will turn off the amplifiers, for you will be going to more comfortable quarters at once.” And the murmuring sounds from everywhere ceased. “Come talk to me in my tomb after the storytelling is finished tonight,” the voice said.

  “We don’t know who you are or where your tomb is,” I complained.

  “You will know; you will know in good time,” said the voice.

  People came to the door of our strong room then and opened it. It was the Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel with an armed party. The water rushed out of our room when they opened the door, and it drenched them.

  “Ah well, there’s no way to deal with a moisty and pauky situation without getting wet,” the Princess said. “There has been a mistake, a deliberate mistake made by my husband, Prince Henry. You must have better quarters than this. These are completely unacceptable for you good people. Come along, and you really shall have sixteen rooms, one for each of you, rooms of true luxury and convenience. Aye, and a great entertainment hall, and a game room also. I would beg the pardon of all of you, except that persons of my high position never beg.

  “But the truth of it is that you are a nuisance to me. You may bring on a confrontation before I am ready for it. No matter. I can’t let honest people languish in a dungeon, or be taken out of it and killed.”

  We were taken to very fine quarters, and we could find no fault with them at all. In every hospitality guest room of Ravel-Brannagan Castle there was a little font hanging on the wall, and in it was money for the guest who happened to be low in funds. A guest must not be embarrassed. In the princely room that was assigned to me, there was a princely sum of twenty thousand Klepsis thalers. To me, a poor scholar in history, this was an extraordinary sum. I put the twenty one-thousand-thaler bills into my pocket before my luck should somehow evaporate. The picture of Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel was on the one-thousand-thaler bills just as it was on the gold coins. And so also was the script that this princess was the most beautiful woman on Klepsis. Well, she had made a beautiful gesture anyhow, if ‘twas she who did it.

  The sixteen of us gathered in the great entertainment hall and game room that pertained to our sixteen rooms. Comparing our experiences, we found that we had all done about equally well with the money left in the rooms so discreetly for guests who might be in need.

  We found tables heaped high and lavishly with “My God What Grapes!” grapes, and we stuffed ourselves on them. We mixed drinks for ourselves at the well-stocked wet bar. We played darts there, and we shot pool. We picked up the news broadcasts from Aphthonia, or World Abounding. There was only a thirty-eight-minute lag in the radio-wave transmission from World Abounding to Klepsis at this season. All the planets of the Sun Beta hold rather tight orbits.

  I went into the library. It hadn’t many books in it, and the dust of two hundred years was on those few that were there. There was a Septuagint Bible. However had it come there? There was the Rule of Saint Klingensmith, a little devotional booklet. There was the Big Book of Pirates for Boys, from Gaea-Earth.
There was a book Spaceship Building by the Natural Intuitive Method, by none other than Christopher Brannagan, the founding father of Klepsis. And that, believe it or not, was the total of the books in the Castle Library. I went back to the big entertainment hall where the others were still gaming and talking.

  “When there’s a circus in town, it sure is hard not to have at least a glimpse of the circus parade,” Kate Blithespirit the Amazon commented with a certain wishfulness.

  “Since slavery is totally wrong, it would be very wrong for us even to steal a look at the slave sale,” Conchita O’Brian chided her.

  “Since we are all in a position of peril here at Brannagan Castle, I believe that it behooves us to be as informed as possible about our surroundings,” Sparaticus declared. “You are saying, gracious lady, that we should not notice a burglar who is fiddling at our front door, since burglary is quite wrong?”

  But it wasn’t these and several other little arguments that were tossed into the pot that brought us out of there and to the spacious Castle grounds and gardens. It was, more than anything, the calliope band that brought us out there. Sure, it was gross. Sure, it was in bad taste. Sure, it was so bush that it could only have happened on Klepsis World. But one hundred steam calliopes, from more than a dozen different continents, all playing at top steam together (no, no, not playing together, but all playing at the same time, not in the same time), playing the rowdy-dow circus music from half a dozen worlds—well it stirred something primeval in our blood. And, besides the calliope band, it was the nose-bursting aroma of the whale being barbecued whole that brought us out there. This was the right whale, and it weighed 136,000 kilograms or 150 tons. Whalers are very conservative and still refer to a whale in tons. Well, 150 tons of whale barbecued whole sets up an aroma like nothing else in any of the worlds. Oh, the smell of it, the smell of it! The Polynesians on Gaea-Earth have the legend about various people offering sacrifices of fatlings of cattle and sheep and such. The odors ascended to God, and He accepted them in good humor, and He granted small favors to show that He appreciated the sacrifices. Then He was enraptured by the towering and powerful smell of a great fat whale roasted whole by some Polynesian persons of extreme piety.

  “Because of this,” God said, “you People of the Whale will never have to work or toil again. For you the coconuts will fall off the trees; for you the taro roots will jump right out of the ground; for you the wild pigs will run directly into your snares; for you the fat fish will leap into your outrigger canoes till they fill them nearly to sinking; for you the bananas will grow without toil; for you a dozen island fruits of which I do not immediately recall the names will burgeon and thrive.”

  “Well, that’s what God said in the legend,” I defended it, for I was the one who told this simile. “I am an historian and historians cherish legends. Some of them are only two short steps from history.”

  Oh God, the smell of it, the smell of it! Ten thousand fat pigs roasting would hardly equal it. And as a matter of fact there were, not ten thousand, but about one hundred eighty fat pigs roasting for the gala.

  This was all much larger than we had supposed. The advertisement that I had read in the disintegrating newspaper had mentioned one hundred fifty-two genuine human persons from Gaea, Astrobe, Camiroi, and other places; forty-three short-tailed human persons from Tarshish and the other hidden worlds; more than two hundred intelligent and hard-working humanoids from the farthest reaches. But that was only the list offered by Ravel-Brannagan Castle itself. Prince Henry of Ravel-Brannagan Castle was hosting a slave sale like they used to have, and his own list was only one of about a hundred. Oh, there was something like ten thousand genuine human beings to go on the slave blocks, and further numbers of not quite genuine humans. It was a grand assembly of clanking and ringing iron, and of roaring and ululating human voices.

  And there were the touts, like those at the racetracks on Dahae Planet, telling us for a small fee where we might find the very best of the slaves taken from the top ones of all the lists. So naturally, we paid the touts their small fees and went to top block, where the top stock was offered.

  What, what, there was big Sparaticus enslaved again! How had they caught him up into the slave network again, and on what warrant? But no, Sparaticus was still in our company. Then, who was the other one who looked so exactly like him, of the same huge size and of the same passionate look?

  “Oh, it is only a scurvy brother of mine,” Sparaticus spoke with some scorn, and the enslaved Sparaticus hung his head. “He is worthless. He will not work, and he has no talents. It costs a fortune to feed him. But, because he is my own blood brother, I will offer ten Klepsis thalers to have him out of bondage.”

  “Ten thalers for him,” said the auctioneer. “Do I hear a higher bid?”

  “Ten thousand thalers for him,” said a rough man. And both the Sparaticus in chains and the Sparaticus in our company groaned.

  The auctioneer offered ten slaves at one time. He got several bids on one of the slaves, then let the bidders think about it for a while as he opened the bidding for the next, and then the next slave after him.

  There were several beautiful women among the offerings. Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally, Otis Landshark, Jerome Whitewater, and Bartolomo Portuguese all got in on the early bidding for one or other of the beauties. Terpsichore Callagy and Kate the Amazon Blithespirit bid on attractive or exuberant male slaves. And I, I did not bid on any of the beautiful women offered. I bid on one who was not quite beautiful, who was not quite superb, who was sultry rather than flaming, who was hang-head rather than imperial. Well, she looked at me, so I bid for her. I bid a thousand thalers. I bid five thousand for her. Then I bid twenty thousand. And another man bid twenty-one thousand. The auctioneer let it dangle and went on to the next slave. But I surely did not have twenty-two thousand thalers to top that last bid.

  “Eleven thousand thalers,” Sparaticus said when the auctioneer came back to his brother again. “Oh, why do I do it? I know him. He is worth no money at all.”

  “Eleven thousand thalers,” the auctioneer said. “Do I have a better bid?”

  “Twenty thousand thalers for that big one,” the gruff man said. And both Sparaticus and his brother-in-chains groaned in their wretchedness. The crewman Hogson Roadapple went to Sparaticus and gave him something.

  “Twenty-one thousand thalers,” Sparaticus bid.

  “Thirty thousand thalers for that big one,” the gruff man said. And both Sparaticus and his brother-in-chains groaned again.

  There were intervals in the bidding for slaves (about a hundred bidding blocks were going on at a time). In the intervals there were short calliope concerts. There were equestrian exhibitions. There were some really sensational bits of advertising and entertainment that broke the flow of the sales. Now there was the announcement that a man would leap without a parachute from an airplane twenty thousand meters high. Without a parachute? What would he use, then? Twenty thousand meters is very high. Klepsis people began to fit telescopic monocles into their eyes, and a kind lady loaned me such a monocle. I got a good focus on the kicking man just as he left the plane. And he hurtled down, down, down!

  “Without a chute how will he handle it?” I cried in alarm.

  “Oh, they have it all calculated exactly,” the kind lady said. “Did you never see an advertisement like this before? They have the plane’s speed and direction calculated, the wind drift at the various levels, the timing of his leaving the plane (he did not jump, of course, he was pushed), even the hysterical threshing of the man in the air (they have all his probability-reaction patterns). It is all calculated. And he will hit almost exactly in the middle of the glowing red X that is painted on the beach. Whoosh, you can hear the whistling of his coming through the air even now, although he is falling much faster than sound. That is known as the Whittlesby Phenomenon.”

  The man did hit almost exactly in the middle of the glowing red X that was painted on the beach. He hit so hard that he splashed.
Then he actually exploded. And there was not left unbroken of him a bone upon a bone.

  “But, but, but it killed him!” I blurted.

  “Sure, it killed him,” the kind lady said. “Do you expect a man to fall twenty thousand meters and hit like that and walk away from it? Give my monocle back to me. You sound like some kind of gooney bird.”

  “But, but, but why?” I cried out.

  “It’s an insurance company advertisement,” the kind lady explained. “It will tie in with the slogan The Happy Valley Insurance Company Hits the Spot Every Time. I don’t believe that insurance will ever catch on here on Klepsis, though. In insurance, as I understand it, you pay somebody else to take risks for you; and taking risks is about the most fun of anything I know of. But some of the big insurance companies from Astrobe are making pitches here. They think that because we are all so rich on Klepsis we will be easy pickings. I bet we’re not. There is the widow of the dead man now. I know her; she never was much. And there is the insurance company promoter and salesman. They are going to make a pitch-and-talk together on that little platform there. Hear that whistle blowing! That is from the time the man hit the ground; it started to blow then. The insurance man is supposed to hand the check to the widow within one minute of the time the man hit the ground. That’s when the whistle will stop blowing. It’s going to be close, but I bet he’ll get the check made out in time. He’s making it seem closer than it really is.”

  It was very close, but the insurance man did get the check made out and presented to the widow within one minute of the man hitting the ground. The whistle gave a still stronger blast, and then it fell silent. A burst of many-colored fireworks was set off. It was a very effective insurance advertisement, and yet several persons told me that insurance would never catch on with the people of Klepsis World. This seemed strange to me, as insurance was big on all the other worlds I knew of. Would the people of Klepsis really prefer to take risks themselves? Did they indeed find the taking of risks to be more fun than anything they could think of? What a strange mind-set they did have! I went to my slave girl, the one I had been bidding on.