Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Quasimodo, my unusual friend,” Thorn still quizzed him, “are all the people of all the worlds only imaginings in your mind?”

  “I don’t think so. My mind has become pretty barren ground lately. But, yes, all of them are in my mind in complete detail, the billions of people on Gaea-Earth and on Camiroi and on Astrobe, the millions and hundreds of millions of people on the other fourteen inhabited planets. I know every hair on the head of every one of them, every pore in the skin of every one of them, every bacterium in the entrails of each one of them. I know every cell in every body of them, I know every thought in every brain of them. This is so. I do not imagine these things about my imaginings. They are clear and troublesome facts. But that is not what you asked me. You asked whether they were only so many imaginings in my mind, and I don’t think so. Are the images in a mirror only images in that mirror, or may they not have primary forms outside of the mirror also? For a reflection, may there not be something to be reflected?”

  I was able to make out the face and body of Quasimodo then. Oh, of course he was ugly. He had grown two hundred years old in his ugliness. He was a humpbacked and ugly dwarf, with a giant inside him threatening always to break out. Because of this ugly appearance, Christopher Brannagan had bought the little monster at a slave market those two hundred years ago. Then the Brannagan had discovered that the twisted dwarf had a giant mind, the most spacious and balanced mind ever to be met with. And so Quasimodo had become the nearest thing to an executive that Brannagan ever had during the decades when he was autocrat of the Planet Klepsis.

  The rats chittered a warning to their friend Princess Thorn, so all three of us were silent.

  Prince Henry the Pirate came into the Sleeper’s Room with a dozen of his thugs and a giant tracking-and-smelling-out dog. He looked angrily at the stoneworkers preparing a plaque for a death mask.

  “Whose death mask will that be?” Prince Henry demanded hoarsely.

  Two of the stoneworkers were mutes, but the third one answered, “Yours.”

  “There will be no death mask for me any day soon!” the Prince swore. “Stop the work on it at once.”

  “We may not,” said the speaker—one of the stoneworkers. “We are under preternatural compulsion to do this work for the newest death mask.”

  Prince Henry turned to his thugs and to the big dog.

  “Find the traitors, death-dog and death-men,” he ordered them. “In the death masks on the wall, death-dog. Tell us which ones are served by traitors. They’ll not come out of the walls, for the narrow ways are now everywhere guarded. And we’ll have them here.”

  The big dog (Kynegos was its name, I learned later—Kynegos the Hunter) went to plaque after plaque of the death masks. He growled viciously at one, and two of the thugs pulled the death mask off the wall, and two others pulled the unfortunate person out of the wall. It was a media person, that was clear, either from Gaea-Earth or from Astrobe, of a species sometimes called ‘documentary reporter.’ And into a spiked iron collar that person was locked, to be taken out and killed in just a while. Another and another spying person was pulled out of the walls when found by the dog Kynegos. This was indeed a death-dog. It came to the death mask of Juda through the eyes of which I looked into the dog’s eyes, and I was gripped by total fear.

  I heard his growl muscles tighten, but he did not growl. Neither did he break into happy greeting as he wished to do when he recognized Thorn next to me. He showed remarkable restraint, for a dog—for anybody. He moved on to the next plaque, and to the next. He growled again at another mask, and one more investigating media person or investigating scientist was pulled out of the wall and clamped into an iron collar. In all, nine of them were pulled out of the walls, fitted with the spiked iron collars, and taken out to be killed, either quietly or with great show. And their only crime was trying to investigate, and perhaps prevent, the end of the worlds.

  Oh, the fine minds and the fine persons of the nine who were to be destroyed! But what of the twenty-five billion persons, most of them fine persons of fine minds also, who might be destroyed on Doomsday Morning, who would all be destroyed if the Doomsday Equation should prove correct and should be effected?

  Prince Henry the Pirate and his bravos left with their victims, and in a few moments the rats in the walls chittered their all clear to their friend Thorn. We resumed our questioning.

  “Quasimodo, my friend,” Thorn said, “do you believe that things are moving towards a crisis with you?”

  “I believe that I will die very soon, yes. I can feel the vitality running out of me as from a leaking bucket, and that bucket is about empty. Perhaps I’ll die this night, or sometime before morning. This is night, isn’t it?”

  “No, it is only a little bit after noon,” Thorn said. “Do you want the Green Robe to come to you?”

  “Oh, he was here, about an hour ago. And he gave me the sacraments of the dying, but he said that he preferred to call them the ‘sacraments of the living.’ So do I.”

  “Do you feel that, when you go, you will take millions and billions with you?” Thorn asked.

  “If I do, it sure will be crowded on what they call ‘the narrow way,’ the contorted path out of this world. No, I don’t feel that it will be so. But as to thinking it out, I can no longer think, and once I considered myself a great thinker. My mind is shot. Do the billions of people who live in my mind know that things are getting very much worse? I believe that there are defects in the Doomsday Equation, but my mind has lost much of its mathematics. It is a bird-brained business, literally. We may be saved, though, by a multiplicity that the Doomsday Equation does not know about. I am not alone in this curious state.

  “There are two other persons in the universe whose minds also contain all things and all persons in the universe, including myself and each other of them. My own mind does have firm and total knowledge of every person and most things of the worlds, of the inmost thoughts of all the people, of the inmost thoughts of the animals, of the awkward green and brown thoughts of the plants. And my mind also has firm and total knowledge of the minds and persons of the other two entities who also have firm and total knowledge of it all. The Doomsday Equation does not know about these other two persons.”

  One other person, a second other person, a third other person, a fourth other person, had come through the space between the walls somehow and had found seeing and listening spots at four of the death masks. Did they know that each other were there? Did they know that we were there?

  “Quasimodo my friend,” said Thorn, talking carefully now, for she knew that several unknown (but probably sympathetic) persons, besides myself and Quasimodo, were listening, “would it not be possible that these two other persons are also imaginings of your mind, and that their detailed knowing of all persons in the universe is also an imagining of your mind? The Doomsday Equation, after all, did identify you with the tertiary focus of our construct. It did not identify them.”

  “It would be possible, yes, but barely possible,” the malformed humpbacked dwarf said. Quasimodo himself was a paradox, an anomaly, a beautiful personality (though now much eroded with the approach of death) in an ugly, or at least a grotesque, body. “There is another possibility—that I have been dead these two hundred years and am in purgatory and suffering the deliriums of purgatory, and all of you persons are indeed no more than the imaginings of one of the other poor souls. This really answers more of the questions than does any other possibility.”

  “But in that case, we would be nothing at all, and the worlds would be nothing at all,” I protested. “That is hopelessness itself.”

  “No, no, no,” the poor suffering dwarf contradicted. “That does not follow at all. There may well be beautiful universe after beautiful universe, valid and bountiful and blessed. These universes may be populated with countless suns and planets, and with innumerable humans and other species living spacious and happy lives in more intricate detail than anything we can even think of—happy, enchanted,
moving towards the Beatific Vision. But all those fortunate universes upon universes and all their happy and transcendent people would not have any point of contact with any of you, not anywhere, not ever. You would all be totally nonexistent and without the possibility of existence; and so would I who dreamed you be without existence of any sort.”

  “That is the most dismal possibility of all of them,” I protested.

  “What, would you not like there to be hundreds of billions of brilliantly happy people just because you could never have any part of their brilliant happiness?”

  “No, I don’t believe that I would,” I said. “How is that selfish of me? If I have no being or attributes, then I cannot have selfishness either.”

  The rats were chattering urgent warnings, their most puzzled warnings, their we-don’t-know-what-it-is-but-something-bad-is-about-to-happen warnings.

  There were metallic noises between the walls, noises of metal coming together with other metal.

  “Oh, oh, it’s got me!” a voice wailed.

  “Oh, leggo, leggo,” another voice howled.

  “Not with a bang but with a steel spring!” a third voice spoke in agony.

  “Ooooooohhh.” That horrible sound seemed to come from myself. “I am caught in steel springs at my ankles, my wrists, my throat. There is no breaking this steel grip. I’m caught, I’m caught!”

  A fiend had rigged these torture traps, but how had he gotten into place behind the death masks without activating them? Or how could they have been set and sprung later? Oh, the setting of triplex bear traps is an art in itself. The fiend, whoever he was—and he had to be Prince Henry—was playing me like a keyboard, with a terrible tightening of the steel bonds, first at the ankles, and I could feel the bones crunch. Then the pressure on my ankles lessened, but it set in horribly at my wrists till I believed that my hands would be severed from my arms. Then, slackening at my wrists for a little, it intensified at my neck, so that I was being strangled as surely as if I were being hanged on one of those hasty gibbets. Then, when the strangling pressure lessened on my throat, I babbled a little childish verse, for my strangling had addled my wits:

  “Bleed my toe and bleed my head.

  Dead-Man’s Reeve, pronounce me dead.”

  At that, the silvery laughter of Princess Thorn rang through the Sleeper’s Room as well as the rat galleries between the walls:

  “Oh, bless you for that, my love. I was feeling a little low myself, what with the intense pains and all. If you can still make comic verses under torture, then I’ll not give up either. We’ll fight loose yet, but how? Awuuu—”

  Thorn ended with a strangling note as her throat bonds were tightened again to strangle her. But she was an indomitable woman.

  “How shall we be loosed? Oh, let me count the ways!” came the voice of one of our fellow prisoners, and I immediately recognized it as that of Bancroft Romal, the Voice of Up-Beat Science from Gaea-Earth. “If mathematics doesn’t work, there’s always magic.”

  “The dragons haven’t any word for ‘magic,’” Thorn spoke in a bruised sort of voice, her throat bonds being released a little. “Isn’t that odd of them?”

  “Whence do you have that information, Princess Thorn?” Bancroft asked in his up-beat but pain-racked voice. “I collect curious facts like that, but I haven’t at the moment the means to jot it down.”

  “I have the information from Flobert Traxley, the Man Who Talks to Dragons. He was one of my instructors in Castle School right here in this Castle. I studied middle mathematics and stoics and dragonry from him.”

  “I wish I’d studied stoics from somebody. I need it now. Oh, oh, oh!” another of the betrapped fellows was moaning in her pain (she was a female). “How will we get out of this? There is a palace revolution, or a Castle revolution going on at the moment. It’s been going on for twelve hours. But how will that help us? Palace revolutions aren’t magic. We have the word, but we haven’t the magic.”

  “‘Comes like magic in a pint bottle,’” a third of our fellows quoted in pain. “Anybody got a drink?”

  “He comes like magic in a much larger bottle than that!” Bancroft Romal spoke with a lilt of hope. “I’ve heard recordings of the footfalls of all the great rulers of the planets. His are unmistakable, push kluk, push kluk, push kluk. There are no other footfalls quite like his in the universe.”

  The rats began to chatter with their “somebody’s coming, somebody’s coming” warning. Then—well I didn’t believe it either but I heard it—all those rats in the walls fell silent. Then, flop, flop, flop, they fell flat and began that very soft rat snoring of deep sleep.

  “Who is he who commands the winds and the waves and the rats also?” Thorn asked rhetorically. “But can he command steel traps too? He is my many-times grandfather, and he comes, he comes!”

  And with his push kluk, push kluk, push kluk footfalls (the real leg and the wooden leg) Brannagan’s Ghost came into the room. He didn’t come through the door. He came through the wall very near the door, but he left the wall undamaged where he came through. “Damn!” he said, “I missed that door again. I’m coming closer though.”

  “Many-times grandfather, get us loose from this,” Thorn cried.

  “‘A redder berry on the thorn.’ Tell me, many-times granddaughter Princess Thorn, what was your red unspeakable sin? It’s one of the few riddles that I haven’t unriddled yet. You’d be surprised at the folks who speculate about it in the ghostly realm. ‘What sin could possibly be unspeakable?’ they say. ‘What evil could be beyond evil?’ Get you loose, you ask? Sure I can get you loose. I’m still the King of the Castle, and it’s still my favorite game. This seems like no more than a half-Bandicoot job to me. I should have a stub here somewhere. Epetheta, be thou opened!”

  Brannagan’s Ghost pulled half a Bandicoot cigar from one of his ghostly pockets, stuffed it in his mouth, said, “Hello, Quasimodo,” and bent over that blind and dying dwarf. And Quasimodo raised an ill hand with a lighted fuzee in it, lit the half-cigar for Brannagan’s Ghost, then gave the wan hand the ‘magician’s flip,’ and showed the hand empty of fuzee. “Hello, Brannagan,” the dying dwarf said. “Get me loose from this too. Death I don’t mind, but this bestial dying is killing me.”

  From the half of a Bandicott cigar, Brannagan’s Ghost blew those smoke clouds which were high art to him, those transcendent burlesques. He blew caricatures of all of us, and I recognized two other of our fellow prisoners of the traps from their portraits in smoke. They were Isadora Ragsley, that mistress of particle explication from the planet Paravata; and Clarence Pinnacle, the pioneer in eschatological algebra, from Analos. Smoke caricature is a fragile art, but out of a real master’s mouth it is astonishing.

  (A fifth person caught in a trap had apparently died.)

  “Fun is fun, many-times grandfather, but when will you get us loose from this, from this, ah, from, from—” Thorn began by demanding peremptorily, and then trailed off in confusion.

  “Oh, your shackles have already been removed,” Brannagan’s Ghost spoke grandly. “Tell the rats they can wake up now. Almost everything in this Castle is amenable to me. And come into the room. It’s drafty between the walls there. There’s a door from the between-the-walls run into this Sleeper’s Room here. It’s right under Issachar O’Grogan-Brannagan’s death mask there.”

  We all came into the room, and then we held high confab.

  “Old tainted patriarch,” Bancroft Romal began in his friendly way—

  “Watch him, Bancroft, he can charm the birds out of the trees,” Isadora Ragsley said about old Brannagan.

  “But there are no trees on Klepsis,” Clarence Pinnacle answered.

  “Old discredited tyrant, what is your own strong view?” Bancroft asked. “Will the worlds all end today or some day soon? And will Klepsis be the first one of them to end?”

  “I have no idea,” Brannagan’s Ghost answered. “It is not given to me to know the day nor the hour. But the Doomsday Equation
is sound, as far as it goes. What it predicts will happen. What it seems to predict will seem to happen.”

  “Did you once hold all the persons of the universe as imaginings in your mind?” Clarence asked.

  “Oh, absolutely. I always knew that I held millions and billions of them in my mind, but I hadn’t realized that it came to the totality. Then I received a request from the Planetary Board (this was when I had been the Tyrant and Autocrat of Klepsis for only a short time) for census figures on Klepsis. ‘This will be a mess,’ I said. ‘I don’t have time to go around and count everybody on Klepsis. And if I appoint someone else to do it, we will no longer have a one-man government here.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll just run them all through my mind and count them as I do it. I believe that I know them all and if I pay attention I’ll not miss a one of them.’ I did so, and I came up with a total human population of 3,005,928 for Klepsis. ‘While I’m at it,’ I said, ‘I might just as well give them the populations of the other sixteen planets also.’ I did it. The other planets went ahead and took their own counts at great expense, but when they were “compared with mine, the members of the Planetary Board said that mine were a little bit over. But they were not. The official counts were a little bit under. The official counters of the other sixteen planets missed a few persons, but try and tell them that.”

  “How do you account for your receiving this power when nobody else has ever received it?”

  “Why do you say that nobody else has ever received it, Clarence Pinnacle? Probably many persons have received it. But it’s true that it comes to only a small minority. In my own case it came to me because of my towering ego and conceit, my arrogance, my outlandish presumption, my roominess, my intellectual capacity, my boundless curiosity. It came to me because I reached out my hands and my mind and took it. I swept all people into me.