Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Tarshish is a world that is difficult to come to by ordinary means. Does anybody here know how to get to Far Tarshish, which may not be very far? Does anybody know how to get four hundred shiploads of heavy equipment into tight orbit around this Tarshish? Does anybody know the mystery of Tarshish, why it is not counted among the humanly inhabited planets, since many persons, several of them in this room, live there?”

  Almost everybody I knew on Klepsis was in this cavernous hall. We were in the Januarius O’Grogan Memorial Lecture Theatre of Science and Inquiry, a large hall down in the bowels (“We’re actually in the ileum—the third and last region of the smaller gut,” Thorn whispered to me in one of her informative asides) of Ravel-Brannagan Castle. We were there because the Empress Predilect (“Aunt Angela says that beats being an ‘Empress Elect’ any day, especially when she hasn’t been elected by anybody except herself,” Thorn gave me the further explication) Angela Gilmartin-Ravel-Brannagan had ordered all of us to be there.

  The O’Grogan Memorial Theatre was built like a supper club, with two dozen or so twelve-person banquet tables readied for the banquet. Most of us were already seated at the tables. There were already heaps of the “My God What Grapes!” grapes on the tables which would insure happy hallucinations for all of us. There were very large piles and platters of roasted leftover whale. They’d be eating leftover whale for a week around the Castle. There was buckwheat bread and hippopotamus butter, Lobsters à la Margaret Summertime, Red Raider Rum, “Old Bubbly” (I liked this alcoholic drink, but I don’t know what it’s made of), shark meat, cork island ox, gamecock, ocean-cock, baked ibek hump, Tarshish blood-bread and sunflower-oil butter, blackbird bang-dish, onion delight, gang-plank pot-luck, Sheba McSherry salad.

  Myself and Princess Thorn, Titus the Historian, Flobert Traxley the Man Who Talked to Dragons, Doctor Luke Gilmartin, Bancroft Romal, Isadora Ragsley, Clarence Pinnacle, Gold Coast O’Mally, Terpsichore Callagy, Kate Blithespirit the Amazon from Camiroi, and the world-mover Malabu were at one table.

  At the table right next to us were our friends Jerome Whitewater, Bartolomo Portuguese, Hektor Lafcadio, Fairbridge Exendine, Sebastian Jamaica, the green-eyed Sparaticus; and the friends we knew only through the sound duct at Kaye Spencer’s Hay Meadow—Oliver Roundhead of Astrobe, Decimus Gormley the nonhuman from World Abounding, Aloysius Shiplap from Gaea-Earth, Sidonia Sopher from Tarshish, Alex Braveheart from Camiroi, and Becky Breaksticks from Dahae.

  The sixth of those great scientists through the sound duct, the asteroid Pythagoras, was not at this near table. She was at the Notables Table along with Brannagan’s Ghost, the Head Green Robe of Saint Klingensmith, the Tarshish storyteller, and with Princess Placidia-Ravel-Brannagan-Thorn. Placidia was the sister of the newly executed Prince Franco and of the probably still-alive-and-plotting Prince Henry. She was also the mother of my Princess Tharrala Thorn-Tyrone, though she would not speak to her daughter because of the unspeakable sin, about which she knew nothing, however, not even the name of it.

  The Trumpet Master of Klepsis was also at the Notables Table. He was the chief of the One Thousand Royal Trumpeters, which group really had only about one hundred blowing-and-working trumpeters. The other nine hundred Royal Trumpeter sinecures and prebends were held by non-horners and they were awarded for various services to the realm. The terms “Brass Slush Fund” and “Brass Feeding Trough” referred to these nine hundred.

  The other six persons at the Notables Table were not known to me, though they were clearly notables. One at least of the six was a ghost. One at least was a nonhuman. And one of them was a ‘beggarman either blind or crippled.’ It was the law that a ‘beggarman either blind or crippled’ must sit at the Notables Table at every high banquet.

  A touch of the droll was evinced at another nearby table where the five space-jumping tawny Intelligent Royal Bears from Astrobe were seated with seven other entities even more droll than were they.

  It was a little bit after the fall of the “twilight of night.” There was no “dark of night” on Klepsis because one or the other of the more distant Centauri Suns—Sun Proxima or Sun Alpha—were always in the sky (I heard that this was a Proxima night), and at least one of the moons was always in the sky. The banquet was going apace, not being hampered by toastmasters or ceremony. There were about a hundred persons in the Januarius O’Grogan Memorial Lecture Theatre of Science and Inquiry.

  Then the Empress Angela rode in on a hippopotamus with a slave in chains, looking fearful and unhappy and yet quietly dignified, tied to the tail of the behemothish beast. You could have heard a shipload of hardware drop, so quiet did it become for a moment. The Empress was in scarlet for mourning. She was not in mourning for her husband Prince Henry, who was probably still alive and plotting against her. She was not in mourning for her dead lover Prince Franco, for he had not been her lover though many people believed that he had been. She was not in mourning for her father who was long dead, nor for her mother who was still alive, nor for her children of which she had none. And those were the only relationships for which a woman could go into mourning on Klepsis. The Empress was clad in mourning-scarlet because she felt like mourning and because she looked so good in scarlet.

  She slid off the hippopotamus very heavily. She did indeed have more than fifty kilograms of gold woven into her gown, and she also had a very heavy and rather barbaric golden crown on her head. All in all, the weight she was carrying in gold was more than the weight of a man. The barbaric golden crown had been that of Sheba McSherry, her grandmother-in-law.

  The Empress then began to speak in a queer voice that was full of implied threats.

  “Instead of warning you about my arriving on a hippopotamus, I will tell all of you an anecdote about my grandmother-in-law Sheba McSherry whose crown I now wear, whose crown is now mine. She once arrived at a banquet in this very hall mounted on a hippopotamus that was the grandmother of this hippopotamus of mine. The hippopotamus immediately disgraced herself. And the banqueters laughed. Sheba McSherry (may her soul be as turbulent in death as it was in life) immediately ordered that the hippopotamus hokey should be served as the final course of the banquet. And she immediately ordered that two score of headsmen with gleaming double-bladed beheader’s axes should stand at waiting in this very banquet hall. At the close of the banquet she asked every diner with great solicitude how he liked that final course of the banquet. And every one of them said that he had never eaten anything like it. And yet I believe that it was overpraised.

  “I am declaring tomorrow to be the ‘First Day of Klepsis.’ I am declaring the history of Klepsis to begin tomorrow with my coronation. My many-times grandfather Christopher Begorra Brannagan, onetime autocrat and tyrant of Klepsis, whose ghost is in this hall tonight, once stated: ‘While I still stir, then we remain in our time of legend and prehistory on Klepsis. But when I can no longer walk, even as a ghost, then the history of Klepsis may begin.’ Old Christopher, if you stir henceforth, stir quietly and be unobserved about it, for the time of legend and prehistory on Klepsis comes to an end. If you will still walk, then walk unseen, for the history of Klepsis will begin with white dawn tomorrow morning, and you will not stand in the way. The two historians present will please take note of this: the history of Klepsis begins at dawn tomorrow, and the annals you intend to write should also begin at that time.

  “Oh, I’d have liked to be a legend myself. I believe I’d have made a good one. But I declare the time of legends to be over with and the time of life to begin. We will live now as people, and not as wraiths before our time.

  “Clocks and watches have never caught on with us here on Klepsis, though persons from Astrobe and Camiroi and Gaea-Earth and World Abounding have carried them to our world and have even tried to introduce their use here. But they did not catch on here because clocks and watches measure time, and time on Klepsis will not begin until tomorrow morning. I order now that twelve watches and clocks be brought to Klepsis and offered for sale. I predict that
they will all be sold within a month, and that perhaps others may be required.

  “This slave that I have brought at the tail of my hippopotamus is the last slave who may ever be brought to Klepsis. I bought him just this afternoon, and no others may ever be bought or sold here. This slave is a master mathematician from one of the worlds out of the back door of Klepsis, from the Tarshish side of the universe. Since he is a slave, he must solve such mathematical problems as are given to him, or his well-being and life are forfeit. He must solve the problem of the Doomsday Equation. He must give us a more complete and more correct version of the equation, a version from which the Doomsday Element has been removed.”

  “There’s another solution,” said Isadora Ragsley from Paravata, speaking confidentially and almost conspiratorially to the other eleven of us at the table. “We can destroy one of the planets of our construct to save the rest. Do all of us here belong to WEAP? Oh, I see from your look of incomprehension that one or two of you do not. WEAP is ‘Wholesome Excision of Ailing Planets.’ Any planet can be destroyed from any other planet, of course, instantly and with negligible power consumption. All WEAP members carry a ‘trigger’ upon them at all times. The technology of it presents no problem at all. We could destroy any one of the planets (any one except Klepsis, that is) before the death of the person-who-is-the-point on Klepsis, and so we would deform and nullify the Doomsday Equation. We’d pull the fangs from it. Klepsis cannot be destroyed, for it contains the third focus of the construct, but the other sixteen planets are fair game. Let us get one trusted person from each of the other sixteen planets and cut cards for it. Low card is the planet to be destroyed. This will change the construct and avoid its collapse and destruction.”

  “We’ll do it,” Bancroft Romal agreed with total enthusiasm. “We’ll start assembling the sixteen persons immediately. I’ll represent Gaea-Earth. Clarence here can stand for Analos. Isadora is Paravata. Kate Blithespirit is Camiroi; that’s a good start right here. And the technology is so easy! It’s quite difficult to move a planet to another orbit, but anybody can destroy a planet, instantly, and from any distance.”

  “We’ll do it, we’ll do it!” we all agreed.

  “I do not wish that the first day of World Klepsis should be the last day also,” the Empress Angela was continuing, “but that will be the case if we do not escape from the inexorable Doomsday Equation. Let me tell you something that has been kept a secret (Oh, I see from the look on your faces that it has been kept secret from hardly one percent of you): that when Quasimodo (code name the Horseshoe Nail) dies, the construct of our suns and humanly inhabited worlds will die also; that sad fact has been known for twenty years. The worlds will die because Quasimodo is identical with the point that is the third focus of our kinetic three-dimensional ellipse. And a kinetic three-dimensional ellipse cannot exist without its third focus. For the last twenty years there have been monitors on Quasimodo, and all his interior and exterior functions have been logged and transmitted to Astrobe where they are appraised to the smallest detail. Twenty years ago, the analysts on Astrobe named tomorrow as his death day. Really, those analysts are that good! And for twenty years the experts on Gaea-Earth and Analos and Camiroi and Astrobe have been seeking a solution for the dilemma of our system. Time runs out for our system or construct just when time begins for Klepsis. We are at the last minute of the last hour now.

  “We want fast answers. We’re almost at the point where we don’t care whether they are good answers or not, just as long as they are fast. Slave, slave-master-mathematician, provide a fast answer at once, by my coronation hour tomorrow morning, or die! Oh, there are doubtful answers springing up all over the place; we must encourage them for what virtue might inhere in them. There is a man in this hall who believes that, by physically adding another item to the Doomsday Equation, the doom of the equation can be forestalled. Malabu Worldwinger, go at once and do what you think you can do! There are four hundred intuitive space-jumpers waiting beside your four hundred ships that are loaded with heavy world-moving equipment. They will take them and put them in close orbit around Tarshish, and at the same time around everything else that seems too closely related to Tarshish. If you can take the doom out of the equation by adding to it, do it. There is something about Tarshish that you don’t understand at all, but we’ll leave you in the dark about that. It may be that your project will succeed for all the wrong reasons.

  “Several other persons present believe that they can do something about the Doomsday Equation. I say do it, then. The Asteroid Pythagoras believes that she can do something about this, but she comes to the whole business with tainted talons. Nevertheless, if you can do it, bird-person, do it! The woman Becky Breaksticks from Dahae believes that she has the solution to the problem. Effect that solution then, Becky.

  “If time does begin for us here on Klepsis, for us who have had only pre-time before, the bell in the En-Arche Bell Tower of this Castle will ring of itself without bell rope and without hands. So it was when the rough material of the cosmos was made in the pre-time of the Big Bang, a bell hanging without stanchion in a void was rung without activation and without hands. Oh, there’s real evidence of that. It’s in all the latest astronomy books.

  “When time begins on Klepsis tomorrow, several of the anomalies will be swept away, just as our legends and prehistory will be swept away. This business of having things that are separated by two hundred years happen simultaneously will no longer be accepted. I believe we’ll all like the new ways better. After so many decades, it becomes a little bit childish to continue to live in legend.

  “And now I will set up a government here on Klepsis. I do not believe that our world should continue to be a covenanted piracy. I believe that we should have a consulting legislature, so I hereby declare you one hundred one persons here present in this hall to be that legislature. Each of you will have one vote, and I will have three. Some of you are visitors to Klepsis, and that is the way I want it. You belong here now. You may not leave here ever, save only Malabu Worldwinger and others who may be leaving on short, special assignments for the saving of the universe. Let the trumpets blow in acknowledgment of our establishing a consulting legislature.”

  The trumpets did blow loud and clear. What trumpet master would not have his trumpeters standing by and ready when such a trail-breaking assembly was going on!

  “Anybody can propose a law here!” the Empress announced. “Now. Right now. I give you time to propose one. One, two, three. That is a long enough count. Since you fail to do so, I will now propose several laws for Klepsis. You will approve them by ringing voice vote; or, if you wish to be tedious, there can be objections to them, and then we will vote by tally count.”

  This Angela, who had been the most beautiful woman on Klepsis only yesterday (and I looked at a gold coin from my pocket with her picture on it to verify how she had looked), was not beautiful nor even pretty now. She was in a sort of travail, and she had to give up something for it.

  “It is hard for a people to move from prehistory into history, and from legend into the approved tedium of a current world, especially a rock-headed people such as we have been on Klepsis,” she was saying in a measured way. “We were the dregs of space on Klepsis, the marooned and the transplaneted and the escaped. We were mostly of the criminal class, and we set up a pirate royalty here. It was a little bit like dogs setting up a royalty. Many of you here are of Piratical Klepsis from birth. Others of you have come here with cloudy pasts. I recommend that all persons have patience with all other persons, and that killings and maimings be kept to a bare minimum during our period of transition. Who votes yes?”

  About a dozen people called out “Yes.”

  “And who votes no?”

  Nobody voted no.

  “It is the law then,” our new Empress said. “We will call it the ‘General Purpose Tolerance Law.’ If anybody has a pencil and a piece of paper, let’m write it down. It will be the first governmental document on our worl
d. Old Brannagan’s Ghost over there used to scribble things on paper sometimes, but this is not the same thing. Whoever writes it down will be the Speaker of the House, the second highest office on Klepsis, after that of Empress.”

  “I have pencil and paper. I write it down. I will be the Speaker of the House in perpetuity,” Becky Breaksticks spoke firmly and suddenly in a quick power grab.

  “Here’s another law,” the Empress Angela said. “Oh rats, these things are too heavy! I’d as well be carrying the hippopotamus on my shoulders.”

  My Princess Thorn went to her aunt the Empress (who was only one year older than herself), took the heavy golden barbaric Sheba McSherry crown off her head, set it on a table loaded with leftover whale, took two dozen strings of gold ornaments off the shoulders of the Empress and laid them on the same table, then brought a big chair for the tired Empress to sit on. That stuff had been very, very heavy.

  “Let it be a law that each of the roughly three million persons on Klepsis shall be co-owner of all the treasures in the treasure caverns. This being so, the gold will be of no particular value among ourselves, and all transactions will be carried out by barter and by the new flintstone coins to be made at the Ballydehob Flint Quarry, each such flint-stone coin to have the picture of the Empress Angela on it,” the Empress spoke in her new enacting voice. “I believe that persons will be less avid and greedy for flintstone coins than for gold coins. And we enact that nobody shall take the worthless gold out of the caverns except by special permission of the Master of the Caverns who shall have absolute control of them and everything in them. See, by such a simple law as that we can be unburdened of our wealth. Who votes yes?”