Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “We have got to find cover,” I said. “We are unarmed, and we are in the line of fire. The line of fire is everywhere. Where can we go?”

  “Into the whale,” Thorn said.

  FIFTH CANTO

  Tales of Tarshish

  The empty hulk or the shell of the whale (if it might be so called) made a perfect, though somewhat greasy, theatre. It was partly open at the top, and the stars might be seen. It was open where we entered in the belly, but that was not a large entrance. The walls of the carcass were tolerably sound, still two meters or so thick with meat, and the bone structure was intact. Bullets and exploding pellets from the Ricco-recoil handguns and other weapons thudded powerfully against the fleshy-fatty walls of the whale, but few of them penetrated into the inner cavern.

  There were a hundred or so persons inside the whale, two thirds of them children. Half a dozen whale-oil lamps were burning and flickering, and a number of devilfish torches. People still munched and swallowed pieces of the whale in which they were assembled.

  In this theatre-in-the-whale, a Tarshish storyteller was the whole program. He was a grizzled and lined, but powerful man. Was he blind? Of course. All good storytellers are blind. But he was one of the new blind-men-who-can-see. He was technically blind, yes. But he wore one of the expensive and sophisticated Eumolpe Pierce-Brain Light-Harvester arrangements as a heavy glass-and-metal mask over his eyes. This gave him a measure of surrogate or artificial sight. The prods of the thing did pierce into his brain, and they did offer him a simulacrum of sight. “The Pragmatic Equivalent of Sight” is the way the Eumolpe device was advertised.

  The Tarshish storyteller was beginning another story just as Thorn and I got settled in the crowded theatre-in-the-whale:

  “This is the way they tell it:

  “The first things that jumped were tumbleweed thistles. As they rolled over the prairie land of one planet, they would pick up seeds and spores of all sorts of plants and trees, and nits of insects, and even nests full of eggs of the smaller birds. Then one of these tumbleweeds, rolling along on one planet, would immediately be rolling along on the surface of another planet around another sun maybe even in another system. This is the way that the distant planets were populated with plants and insects and small birds.

  “Then it happened to the fish. Fishes would be swimming along in creeks or lakes or oceans or seas or rivers of one planet, and then they would be swimming along in the corresponding waters of another planet. So were the waters of all the planets populated with fishes, except the whales, which were too big to jump.

  “Then the larger prey birds got into the act and petitioned that they might as well go to other planets as migrate, summer and winter, on just one world. They made a very great noise about it, and it was finally allowed. ‘For the hardness of your hearts it is permitted to you, but in the beginning it was not so,’ God said. Then all sorts of animals, coneys, chipmunks, beavers, bears, monkeys, got the same grudging permission. And finally the short-tailed humans of Tarshish got it by a mistake. God, for a moment, forgot that they were humans and thought that they were monkeys.

  “These short-tailed humans of Tarshish learned to jump ships when they jumped. A ship with even one of these short-tailed humans on it could be sailing along on the waters of one planet, such as Tarshish, with a dozen humans of the regular sort on it, and then it would be sailing along in the waters of an entirely different planet. This was before spaceships had been invented. When God noticed that this was being done, He said ‘No more of that, no more of that; I forbid it.’ Everybody obeyed this prohibition except the pirates, for the pirates will obey nobody. Then it was only the pirate ships, with always one short-tailed human from Tarshish on each of them, that would raid and scuttle in the waters of one planet, and would then evade pursuit by armored ships by jumping to another planet and sailing along in its placid waters just as if nothing had happened.

  “That is the story. That is the end of the story. This is the way it has always been told.”

  I liked the story. We historians say that there is history deeply hidden in every good story, but what history was hidden in this one? Thorn, strangely, said that it was all true.

  “Yes, the pirates in my ancestry, the Eleven High Pirates of Klepsis, used to jump their ships by means of a gifted short-tailed human on each of them. They did, Long John my love, and it was by means of such tricks that they were able to bring so many shiploads of treasure to Klepsis.”

  The Tarshish storyteller began another one.

  “This is the way they tell it:

  “Tarshish has no mean civilization. It is the nexus of the whole cosmos, the world that is the bellwether of all the worlds. When the call ‘Awake! Awake!’ comes (as it will come some morning soon), somebody on Tarshish will awake immediately. The other worlds do not even know that they are asleep, so how could anybody on them harken to the cry ‘Awake! Awake!’?

  “The civilization on Tarshish is more intuitive than are other civilizations. As befits sleeping persons, we operate entirely by intuition and we do not use any reason at all. This is not a handicap to us, although we of Tarshish are as unconscious and unborn as so many machines. We build things in our sleep, in our unborn state. Spaceships, for instance, can be built entirely by intuition, just as easily as a Wanken’s Wasp builds its nest entirely by intuition. In neither case is conscious science or technology or engineering used. And we on Tarshish, we who are entirely unconscious and unborn, we build better spaceships than do persons of any other planet.”

  “Storyteller, if you’re completely unconscious, you don’t even know that you’re here,” a superior young boy who had “born on Klepsis” written all over him protested.

  “That’s right,” the storyteller agreed. “I do not know that I’m here. I do not know that I’m talking to you. I’m pretty sure that you’re not here, little boy. I do not hear or understand your question, but I answer it by intuition. We of Tarshish do not know anything else, but we do know that we’re unconscious. Other persons on other worlds do not know even that much. There is no thing anywhere that is conscious, that knows where it is and what it does. There is no such thing as life, or matter, or planet, or space, or time, or mountain, or river. There will not be any of these things until time and space and matter begin. And none of these things has begun yet.”

  “You penny Socrates, you halfpenny Klunkhausen, I am conscious,” said a second little boy. “Here I am, and I know I am here. Here on Klepsis, all of these things have begun. Life on Klepsis began five generations or two hundred years ago. And the universe itself began at least fifty years before that, for Christopher Brannagan was fifty years old when he first brought life, his own, to Klepsis.”

  “No, no,” the storyteller argued, almost as if he had heard and understood what the little boy had said. “These ideas that the worlds already exist or have existed for a long time are all wrong. On the Planet Skokumchuck they insist that the universe is four hundred years old, on Aphthonia that it is eight hundred, and on Astrobe that it is twelve hundred years old. And on Gaea-Earth (get this, people!) they maintain that the universe is two thousand, two hundred years old. And they say that they are now living in the year twenty-two hundred. But all of these things are only imaginings in minds that don’t even exist. The universe has not begun yet.”

  “Well, when will it begin, storyteller?” a third little boy asked.

  “In just a moment, little boy, in just a moment,” the storyteller said. “Since there are no intervals of time before time begins, everything that happens in the preexistence is just one moment from the beginning. So time, and all that goes with it, will begin in just a moment.”

  “You are laughing at us, you farthing Fripple,” a little girl said. “Your face is straight, but your stomach shakes and bounces, so I know that you are laughing at us.”

  “That is impossible,” the storyteller insisted. “Since I have neither face nor stomach, I cannot be laughing either internally or ext
ernally. There is no laughter yet. There is nothing yet. Not till the ‘moment’ comes.”

  “And what is it that will happen when the ‘moment’ arrives?” the girl demanded. “What happens when things all begin?”

  “Oh, it will be a grand race then. The great command that will be given at the beginning of time can be translated as ‘Wake Up’ as well as ‘Let There Be Light.’ And, no matter how close the race is, one thing somewhere will wake up before anything else does. Then that one thing will be the only thing in existence, the beginning-thing of the world. All things else will be no more than items in the mind of that first thing that wakes up. So, all of us here (no, not here, there is nobody here), so all of us, in just a moment, will be no more than items in the mind of a dog, or a bird, or a grasshopper, or a swamp, or a parasite in the stomach of a fish. For this one first-to-awaken thing will be the only thing, and all else will be but imaginings of that thing.”

  “Can a fish be only an imagining in the mind of a parasite that’s in its own stomach?” a grown man asked. “That’s against all geometry.”

  “Oh, absolutely it can,” the Tarshish storyteller insisted. “There is not any geometry and there will not ever be. The first thing, whatever it is, will not entertain any geometry in its mind.

  “That is the story, that is the end of the story, this is the way it has always been told.”

  “I have heard him before, on Thirty-Third Continent,” a man said. “He always tells that story, but I believe that it is no story at all.”

  Six persons with flutes played little tunes then, as a sort of intermission to the stories. One of the little tunes they played was “The World Begins Too Soon.”

  The Tarshish storyteller then told these stories:

  “The Bloodiest Piracy of the Ship The Dina O’Grogan.”

  “The True Story of Maybe Jones City. ’Tis Not What Maybe Believed It To Be.”

  “The Three Daughters of King O’Hara.”

  “The Weaver’s Son and the Giant of the White Hill.”

  “The Fisherman’s Son and the Gruagach of Tricks.”

  “The Thirteenth Son of the King of Tarshish.”

  “The Story of the First of the Three Ladies of Sikestown.”

  “The Young Man Whose Hands Were Cut Off.”

  “The Story of the Lovers Neameh and Noam.”

  “The Story of the Magic Horse.”

  “The Thirteenth Voyage of Es-Sinibad the Pirate.”

  “Irem the Tarshish Paradise.”

  “The Death of Pentheus.”

  “The Treasure Caves of Klepsis.”

  “The Stubborn Girl Who Was Crushed to Death by Elephants.”

  The storyteller explained that this latter story was new, and that he was telling it for the first time, and that it would get better with the retelling.

  After this, the storyteller declared a recess. I felt that this had been the best part of his repertoire. Anything after this would be a falling off.

  Through the holes in the top of the whale we could see bright fires burning and the reflections of them in the sky. The only thing around there big enough to maintain such fires was Ravel-Brannagan Castle itself.

  “But Brannagan Castle is built of stones and of bricks, and it has no wood except a few pieces of brushwood,” I protested. “How could stone and brick burn so brightly?”

  “Nay, Duke Tyrone,” a man said. “It’s mostly made of peat-bricks; and nothing, not even pieces of coal, burns as intensely as peat-bricks.”

  “How do you know my name and title?” I asked. “And how could there be peat for peat-bricks on Klepsis if there have never been any trees here? Peat is formed out of old and decayed trees. How could it have formed here?”

  “That is the sort of question that only an historian could answer,” said the man.

  “Ah, I think I’ll just go outside, come what may,” another man said. And half a dozen other men went out with him. “We have to be where things are doing,” they said. The fire and crossfire outside of the whale were still murderous, and several of the men who went out were immediately shot down. But none of that bunch seemed to want to return to the safety of the whale.

  For some time we had been aware of a strident screaming that entered even into the secluded interior of the whale. And, from the reflections in the sky as we saw them through the holes in the top of our whale-hulk, we knew that a taller and more crowning fire was burning now.

  A wounded man tottered into the whale. “It’s the David Tower that’s burning,” he said, “and it’s something to see. Oh, the horrifying reek and heat of it! And the strident and incredible screaming is that of the cranky ghost David Ravel who is caught in the tower and its veritable inferno, and he seems to believe that he is burning to death. He burned to death the first time, you know, the first time that the David Tower burned.”

  We heard digging under us.

  “They are mining the whale,” a fearful person said. “They will blow us all up in what we believed was a place of safety.”

  But the shooting outside was dying down like water turned off at a water tap.

  “What can the matter be?” I asked.

  “They’re running out of ammunition,” my Princess Thorn said. “Klepsis is like a banana republic, without the bananas that will not grow here. They do not think things through here. They plan poorly. Every civil war they’ve ever had here has collapsed for lack of ammunition. When we come into our power, my love, we will travel to worlds that have proper and sustained wars. Well, it’s back to the dagger and the short sword and the arrow and the piano-wire garrote, now. I’ve always liked the silent and deadly scuffle better, anyhow. Oh, poor Ghost of David Ravel the Elegant Interloper! He believes that he is in horrible agony. And so he is, subjectively. I don’t know why I feel such sympathy for the arrogant person, except that he’s my great-grandfather.”

  “David Ravel, the Elegant Interloper into the Brannagan Recension, is your great-grandfather?” I asked uneasily. After all, this was my family too now. I saw with disappointment mixed with pleasure that the Tarshish storyteller had fallen asleep.

  “Yes, my great-grandfather,” Princess Thorn said. “And I myself, in this latter day, have returned to my own house and home as an interloper. I lack only elegance to be an Elegant Interloper like my ancestor who is now screaming his long-dead throat out.”

  “I think you are elegant, Thorn,” I said awkwardly. And then I flushed with shame. Oh corn, oh corn, come and cover me up!

  “Really, that screaming is not elegant of him,” Princess Thorn complained with a certain embarrassment. “He is long dead. He is a ghost. And there is no way that a ghost could feel real pain.”

  I noticed that the sleeping storyteller cocked one ear at that.

  “I’ll waste no feelings on him,” Thorn maintained. “A ghost can no more feel pain than a stone or a hill or a river or a metal ingot can feel pain. A ghost can no more feel pain than a piece of machinery can feel it.”

  I noticed that the Tarshish storyteller cocked his other ear and woke up at this. The digging under our whale had become nearer and louder.

  “All these things do feel pain,” the storyteller said firmly. “And, being on a time scale that may be a billion-to-one to ours, they may feel a billion times as much pain as we do. But let me not forget to use the designated formula:

  “This is the way they tell it:

  “Imagine a soul in Hell. It is in everlasting agony, so everlasting that a billion years of it is only as one drop of water compared to the time-ocean of pain in store for it. Then imagine the pain if a human soul were concentrated into something no bigger than a mu-meson. The concentration of pain would be many billionfold what it had been before, and there are other subatomic particles that have even more capacity for pain than the mu-meson. I believe that subatomic particles do commonly feel pain trillions of times more intense than any human will ever feel. I believe that this concentrated pain is the motivation of the universe. If a
human would hop around so lively that he would be in as many as six hundred places at one time (see Bluffer’s Thirty-Third Equation) we would suspect that he was in great pain. If he writhed and staggered to such an extent that he went backward in time (and subatomic particles do often stagger backward in time), we would know that he was in agony.

  “And large things as well as small things may feel exquisite pain. Consider almost any mountain upthrust. What writhing agony must have brought it about! What screaming deep in the ground must have accompanied upthrusts as much as nine thousand meters high! Oh, the screaming planets and the hysterical mountains of them! A ghost cannot feel pain, you say? A ghost can feel more terrible pain than flesh can ever feel. It can feel the pristine pain undiluted by the body.”

  But the ghost of David Ravel the Elegant Interloper had stopped screaming. Somebody said that the Castle Boys Volunteer Fire Department had put out the fire in the David Watchtower.

  The digging below the whale was much nearer now. Soon there would be a breakthrough.

  “You say that a stone or a river or a metal ingot or a piece of machinery cannot feel pain?” the storyteller was continuing, but he was very sleepy. He was looking for an end.

  “Do not forget the designated formula,” I said.

  “That is the story. That is the end of the story. That is the way it has always been told,” Princess Thorn recited it for him.

  “Thank you,” said the Tarshish storyteller, and he fell into untroubled sleep.

  A sharp-bladed spade came up through the bottom of the whale. Then the black head and face of Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally came up through the bottom of the whale.

  “Oh, it’s Long John the Historian!” Gold Coast cried out. “Where have we come up?”

  “In the middle of the whale,” I told him. The children in the whale all gazed at him in glee. They had never seen a man come up out of the ground before, surely not a man like Gold Coast O’Mally.