She was small and pretty, like a child indeed at first glance, but Moltas could not guess her age. The platter was heavy, her thin arms in danger of trembling. Asta was known to enjoy the sterile delights of maintaining a harem of Muson women, his Empress being no more to him than a breeder of sons for the dynasty; and rumor had it that any of the girls who survived a few months of his pleasures were given to specially favored members of the ruling clique, as marks of the Emperors esteem—disposable, in fact, like towels.
“Moltas”—the Emperor sighed with staged patience—“what do you want, man? A year ago, we recollect, we offered you a Treasury post—no sinecure, responsible work you could have done very well.”
“Majesty, I felt that an elective post was a trust I could not abandon. My talent is in the framing and interpretation of law.”
“We know that’s what you say. Law and policy, hey?”
A tricky question. In theory, the Assembly might still debate imperial policy; in practice, the Emperor disregarded it. The Emperor proposed measures; if the Assembly did not ratify them they still became law, humorously described as Statutes of Misipa A.D.—Assembly Dissenting. But should the Assembly adopt measures unwelcome to the Emperor, his veto was final. The Assembly was a ghost, a graveyard of honor. One power remained to it, an intangible—the strangely passionate, inarticulate veneration the people still held for it as a symbol of an older time. Even in these sour years memory would not quite die, and A.D. laws were resented—blindly and ineffectively, yet the resentment was real, and the ruler of an explosive people could not wholly disregard it. Moltas said with an evasiveness Asta would understand, “Majesty, the Assembly’s position on policy seems to require a day-to-day definition.”
Asta smiled clammily and let that pass. “Well—not long ago, we offered you a title. Because we wished to make use of your unquestioned talents on the Advisory Council. You declined. We have been very patient with you, Moltas.”
“I felt, Majesty, that a transfer to the Advisory Council would place me out of touch with the people, the citizens—”
Asta leaned forward, waggling a schoolteacher’s forefinger. “Are you proposing to instruct us concerning the people, Ian Moltas? Don’t you understand even yet that the people have one true friend, one only—the Emperor? Why do you think we are known as the Humanitarian, the Light-Bringer of Sol-Amra?”
Moltas thought: off and running. This could take half an hour.
It was less than that, but the sentences rolled on like chariot wheels, and a vision appeared of the world as Asta saw it: the Misipan Empire expanding to the utmost, old Velen beyond the Southern Sea crushed, occupied, absorbed as far as the jungles at the lower rim of the world; the northern lands punished for their arrogance by Misipan crossbow and phalanx, Katskil industry harnessed to the Misipan chariot, Misipan law and custom and religion extending at last to all the limits of the earth—one state, one shining whole, dissent unknown and the Humanitarian sitting on top of it. “The state, Moltas—what is there but the state? Do you talk to us of the people, when our vision alone can see them as they are? Ants in a colony, leaves of a tree that perish to enrich the earth.” Asta broke off, tightly smiling. “We forget you live on a diet of oratory. To business. We have a special project in mind, Moltas, and we are convinced that there are few other—ants—in the Empire who could do it as well as yourself. We are correct in thinking that you are much concerned with the welfare of the Musons? Even to the point of desiring certain changes in the ancient laws? This is true, sir?”
“It is true, Majesty. I think everyone knows it. Of course, the present temper of the times—”
“My dear Moltas, damn the times. Great men—and deities—make the times. I am the times, Ian Moltas. Now, we have in mind a definitive study of the entire institution of Muson slavery—a work of true scholarship . . . done under our auspices, of course, but without any interference with your scholarly efforts—to serve as a basis for intelligent recommendations leading to improvement. We are quite aware of—let us say, inequities, even cruelties, I’m sorry to say; and you ought to understand that the welfare of the Musons has always been close to our heart. Now we propose that you undertake this study—no restrictions of course, all facilities, any type of assistance you wish, in addition to our promise to give the closest consideration to any recommendations you make.” The tiger invites me to his den for this tainted tidbit—why? What does he want, that requires bringing me here after midnight, when he himself is red-eyed from lack of sleep? “We have looked into the difficulties, Moltas, and find no legal objection to your assuming this task while retaining your status as Deliberator, with leave of absence.”
“Majesty, are there other conditions?”
Asta caught the little slave’s buttock and jerked her body to emphasize his words. “See, darling, see how they mistrust me, these everlasting politicians! Notice it, darling? Never fails.” She achieved a dutiful giggle, trying to keep her tray of fruit from spilling. A ripe plum rolled and splattered on the floor by Asta’s foot. “Clumsy idiot bitch!” The Appointed of Sol-Amra sent the girl staggering to the floor with a blow on the breast; a wave of his arm fetched a guard from the anteroom to pick her up and carry her out of sight. “Some of ’em aren’t worth training,” Asta said, “but she may do well enough at the farm. Seems healthy. I forget, Moltas,” said the Emperor, who never forgot anything, “do you keep a Muson stud?”
Ian Moltas counted to eight. His marriage had not been blessed with children; he thanked God for it. “No, Majesty, that is a project I have never attempted.”
“You might find it illuminating for the study we hope you’ll undertake. Pity they’re so long-lived and come so late to fertility—makes it difficult to experiment with bloodlines. Well, well, you mentioned conditions. Yes, honored Deliberator, we are attaching one condition, and if you suppose the gods themselves could rule men without a little horse-trading, honored Deliberator, your lifetime in politics has been spent in vain. Tomorrow a measure of considerable importance will be presented to the Assembly. It will not be well received, but it happens to be vital to larger considerations of Empire, and an A.D. law, honored Deliberator, will not do! Now, we have noted that some seventeen of the thirty-nine Deliberators have consistently opposed our best efforts toward the welfare of Misipa—obstructionists, reactionaries, selfish old men without vision. Perhaps a dozen others genuinely understand the necessities of the empire that must soon govern the world. The rest—waverers, sheep, pliable old men, whom you could sway in the direction of enlightenment. Tomorrow we wish to have your vote on the right side.”
“The Emperor would allow a definitive study of Muson slavery to depend on a single political action of one Deliberator?” And Moltas wondered whether the guards would be in for him. He had spoken his unforgivable words in a mild voice; it was even possible that Asta was too stupid to understand all the implications.
Asta had not failed to understand. As he bent forward a flush of blood grew up around his eyes and receded; his voice also was soft. “You may have missed the point, Deliberator Moltas. We ought to have said: we prefer to have your vote on the right side—but don’t exaggerate your importance . . . What is your final answer?”
“Majesty, if I may, I should like to consider my answer overnight. Then my vote in the Assembly can be taken as my answer.”
“I see. Very well.” Asta relaxed, sighing with histrionic patience. “Perhaps you should remember that your vote is not in any way necessary—no more necessary, after all, than the Assembly itself or the continued health of its members. You may go.”
###
Elkan was waiting to open the door, a ritual service he valued. “Elkan, when you spoke with Misur Brun before you brought him up to me, did he mention where he was staying?”
“Yes, sir. The Sign of the Fox, on Dasin Street. It’s cheap but respectable.”
“Curious fellow. And what a curious thing is a scale of values! The palace is in a poisonous mood,
Elkan, and the Assembly may not survive tomorrow.”
Elkan stood with folded hands; but when Moltas said no more, he took a torch from a bracket and went ahead to light the Deliberator’s way up the marble stairs. “Sir, I ventured to set up another table in the museum.”
“Ah, thank you!” Passing through the archway into the museum he saw Elkan’s work at once, for the sphere of the world stood on the new table, and before it was the two-faced image. At each end of the table burned a lamp, and all other lamps were extinguished; thus the slave had said: Here is the world, and here is man, and here is an imperfect light. “Thank you and good night, Elkan.”
He sat before the world in the half-dark, and though the idea of a round earth was perverse, grotesque, even ridiculous, somewhere there might be a truth in it. The sun moves in the heavens, does it not? The sun and the moon? Suppose those orbs are vastly greater than they appear to us. Then imagine some being existing on the surface of one of them: would not our sphere—our sphere—seem to his eyes as does the sun or the moon to ours? But if all things are in motion—
It is too much. If all things move and flow—if nothing is ever stable, but all creation is journeying—
Someone entered the museum with a rustling of a skirt—Keva, who would be distressed at his wakefulness. “Ian, aren’t you coming to bed? (The banquet was a deadly bore, deadly.) How can you go on without sleep?” He leaned his head back against her breast. “Oh, I suppose it’s politics, politics. I wish you wouldn’t take so many cares on yourself. No rest?”
“Trouble brewing for the Assembly itself. It may blow over.”
“Don’t let things distress you so much.”
“It’s my life, Keva.”
“You went to the palace, Elkan told me.”
“Asta wishes me to make a scholarly study of Muson slavery.”
“Why, that’s wonderful!—isn’t it? You’d be relieved from the Assembly? And it’s something you want to do, isn’t it?”
“A condition is attached. And the study itself would end in nothing but one more recommendation.”
“I see. I suppose I see.”
“What do you see, my dear?”
“I see that in order to satisfy some—some impossible standard of virtue, you’re about to throw the Emperor’s offer back in his face, never mind if it means your neck, your neck—I can’t understand you. I never did understand you. This room, all those old things, dead things—oh, I see you brood and don’t know where your mind is. Ian, we must live in the present, isn’t it so?”
“It’s a flash between infinities, a place to be happy and sad. It’s not true that the present is the only place we know. I must look beyond, both ways. I can’t change myself—”
“Ah, no more, let’s not talk about it. Don’t stay up much longer, Ian—please? My God, it’ll be dawn in an hour or two.”
“I’ll come to bed soon, Keva.”
“What’s that absurd round thing?”
“A toy perhaps. Age of the Sorcerers. Go and rest, Keva.”
When he was alone again, Moltas remembered how some of the stars move, or seem to, like the sun and moon. One lamp was still burning at the palace, a busy, baleful eye; beyond it, the serenity of the dark.
###
The morning came heavy with wet heat and a hint of storm. In the lobby of the Assembly Hall lounged five of the Mavid with sword and dagger and riot club, neat in their black loincloths and tunics, pointedly disregarding the arriving Deliberators. By every tradition they had no right there; by an even older and graver custom, weapons were forbidden in the Assembly Hall. Moltas felt on his arm the touch of a friend, Amid Anhur; liver spots showed on the crinkled hand—Amid was old, too old, like many here. An evil of the day, no fault of Asta’s, that only the rich could afford to try for election in this land that still believed itself to have a representative government, under an emperor who meant to restore the Republic any day; and few of the young were rich. Amid said, “I suppose we must ignore the vermin, Ian? Merely a squad of the wolf’s personal fleas.”
“How long can we hold out?”
“A day—a week—a year.”
“How many of us still possess our souls?”
The building was the work of the middle Republic; Amid Anhur stared at a groove in the threshold of the inner doorway, worn there by more than two hundred years of passage of Misipa’s lawmakers. “A year ago I think I could have said twenty-four. Now, Barshon and Menefar dead—possibly of natural causes. The younger Samis murdered in a tavern, the Mavid not curious about his murderers, while his father remembers he has one more son. See Cannon there, pretending not to know I nodded to him. You and I are not safe to know.”
“Come to my house this evening. I’ve bought a curious thing.”
“Another antiquity? What about today, Ian?”
“This thing is timeless. I beg you come, have dinner with us. Keva would be happy to see you.”
“Oh, I will come, gladly,” said the old man, and they entered the hall. “We should concern ourselves with timeless things—while we have a little time.”
Kalon Samis, month’s Moderator, called them to order, his voice flat and schooled and careful, perhaps in memory of a son. There should have been continuation of a debate on the silk tax, but a sheet of parchment was quivering in Samis’s fingers. “There is an imperial message which I am directed to read before the day’s business.” At the back of the hall a Mavid captain leaned against the bronze doors, his presence unprotested by anything more than angry glances and shocked disdain. “And gentlemen, my reading of this message is to be taken as a motion: formal debate may follow, but perhaps it should be limited. The message reads: ‘It is the Imperial intention that the Assembly recognize second and third cousins and cousins by marriage of the Emperor as full members of the Imperial household, entitled to serve not only on the Advisory Council by reason of nobility, but also as consultant members of the Assembly of Deliberators, each to have one vote.’ Now as I have said, debate should be limited.”
Moltas was on his feet. Some others would soon have broken the stunned and nauseated silence—already he could hear choked words and heavy breathing—but Samis recognized him with a feeble nod. “Deliberators of Misipa, there are occasions when men may find it best not to accept a kick in the groin with murmurs of polite thanks. It is my view—”
It was not difficult, so long as he was on his feet and following the momentum of his own expert and powerful voice. The Assembly had always enjoyed rounded periods and poetic thunder, a part of the style—antique perhaps, but there was a place for it. And now, if a man chose to risk binding himself to the cross in the marketplace with a rope of words, the Assembly would hear him out courteously while he did it. “The cousins, it is true, may find our little gathering a bore at times—dull debates, tax laws, arguments, so many things to interfere with scratching or lifting the tail of a close friend.” He introduced other jests and obscenities, although his ears told him that what little laughter responded was merely that of nervousness close to hysteria. Still, in a way they liked it—hanged men dance.
There was relaxation through the mass of well-known faces when he began to speak of the Republic. It was an Assembly cliché, to look toward that lost time with a nostalgia rendered harmless by futility. But then they understood that Moltas was not speaking in that manner. He was speaking of the Republic as if it were a living place almost within the here and now—over a hill; a day’s journey. He was asking them to think that what citizens have built once and lost, they may build again, a little better with good fortune. There were times, he said, when human effort appeared to generate nothing but suffering, error, confusion—but maybe even these times add a little to the sum of human understanding. “And there are times,” said Ian Moltas, “when the will to struggle against evil seems to be altogether gone. This may be such a time. If the Assembly perishes, there will be no light until, somewhere in the land, you see light from the fires of revolution—not you,
perhaps, for most of you will not be there. And now I say, only to a few of you: we need not be ashamed if sometimes there is nothing better to do for an idea than to die for it.”
The Assembly voted against Asta, twenty to eighteen. Samis abstained.
The Mavid captain was a trained speaker, too. He strode front, ignoring Moderator Samis, and waited for his correct instant of silence. “By decree of Asta; Appointed of Sol-Amra, Lord of the World, the Assembly of Deliberators now stands dissolved. You will not leave the boundaries of holy Norlenas, and will consider yourselves under the Emperor’s displeasure until he has examined certain charges brought against individual members of this body. You will leave the building quietly and go to your homes. That is all.”
No longer sustained by the courage of action, his thoughts fluttered like startled doves. Keva—what can I do?—she has relatives in the Imperial family—maybe—Elkan—there is the will—but he will go—money for Elkan—if only—Sign of the Fox in Dasin Street. Why, I will go and arrange with that fellow—might we not sail—you’ve got to meet big water on its own terms—
But the Mavid captain had a particular message for him, halting him on the steps of the hall, with two of his men, in case there should be difficulties. Moltas said, “Gentlemen, the world is a sphere.”
The captain said neutrally, “You are to come for questioning to the prison in the Seventh Ward.”
One of the men was very young, almost a boy. “I will come without resistance, of course,” Moltas said, but he wanted to address the boy. “You see, if the world is a sphere, life becomes interesting again—does it not? So much more to know. Do you understand?” The young face showed only alarm.
Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition Page 14
