“The Vaults,” I said, “underlie the whole plaza above us, and are in a state of constant expansion, spreading out further and further from the Palace. We are well below the lawful level of any other structural foundation. Here we have the complete files on every extant citizen of Hanging Dog, files of which you have seen only the smallest redaction. Each citizen claims a certain number of feet upon the shelves, based on their age, of course. We also continue to maintain all the files of the dead, from the establishment of the Great Continuity to the present. They come in very useful at certain times.”
“I— This is monstrous! It’s a combination of ossuary and prison.”
“Such is your uninformed view, Mrs. Gueths. But perhaps you’d like to see your own file… ?”
This offer startled her. She hesitated. But I knew she could not resist. No one could. She bravely tried to rationalize her reaction.
“This is only my right, I suppose. Everyone should have this opportunity. It should not be something offered only to appease a noisy protestor. Very well, show me my file.”
“Allow me to see your Template synopsis once more, please.”
She passed over the papers from her satchel. I memorized her file number, and we set off.
The labyrinth was laid out logically, and the shelves clearly marked. But still I found myself experiencing a sense of disorientation and timelessness amidst the flickering lamplight. Subtle winds from the ventilation ducts conveyed the illusion that we walked through some artificial forest. Surely Margali Gueths, totally unfamiliar with this environment, must have been experiencing even greater deracination.
After some fifteen minutes of walking, we reached the proper shelf. The shelves were filled with uniform chunky albums bound in black buckram. Their spines bore only alphanumeric designations.
“Yours is there.” I pointed to a shelf up above head height. “You’ll have to use a ladder.”
I indicated a wheeled ladder that ran on a rail. Margali Gueths gamely began to climb. I averted my eyes for a moment, so as not to take advantage of the sight of her shapely calves beneath her long skirt. But then I realized the foolishness of such a nice gesture, given what she was about to encounter in her file.
Margali Gueths came to a halt on a high rung. She pulled down her first album. This action too was predictable: people always felt a nostalgic attraction to their infancy and youth.
The woman cracked the album and began to page through its contents.
At first her expression was fond and serene, as she encountered artefacts and tokens of her long-departed childhood. But this serenity soon vanished, replaced by flushed indignation. Margali Gueths slammed shut the album, reshelved it, then took one from considerably farther down in her sequence. She hastily opened this binder, flipped through its pages, then plucked from it a single large daguerreotype.
The brief flash of the print that I received from my vantage revealed a tangle of -bare fleshy limbs, plainly belonging to more than two persons.
Margali Gueths hastily descended the ladder to stand before me. Gazing at me contemptuously, she snapped the daguerreotype in half with a crisp crack, then snapped the fragments in half, before stuffing them into her satchel, reclaimed from the floor.
Her voice quivered with rage. “How dare you!”
I had anticipated a slightly different first question. But I should have realized that Margali Gueths would choose not to trifle with practicalities, but would rather challenge the moral right of the Grand Continuity to keep such files.
“Not ‘How was this done?’ That is generally what people ask, once they discover the degree to which their lives are transparent. You continue to surprise me, Mrs. Gueths.”
She only glared. “Don’t attempt to placate me, Mr. Yphantidies.”
“I assure you, I would never consider insulting your intelligence with flattery, Mrs. Gueths. But you must allow this unimaginative functionary to follow procedure, and answer the expected question first. That image from your life—one of many, many such—was obtained via the Panocculus, an auditory and viewing machine that allows unimpeded remote access to any spatial location, no matter what conventional barriers exist. The Panocculus is the rock upon which the Grand Continuity rests. Its existence, while not precisely a secret, is not generally touted, and unknown to the hoi polloi. A woman of your class, however, is permitted such knowledge.”
Margali Gueths snorted derisively, but I continued nonetheless.
“Within the Palace, vast banks of Panocculus machines, manned around the clock by an army of trained operators, ceaselessly collect data on the citizenry. But not, of course, for any ignoble or trivial purposes. The operators are bound by the most stringent oaths and penalties from disclosing what they witness. They only record. These frozen moments and conversational transcripts simply help quantify what standard testing already reveals. Your Template is collated not just from cold, abstract data, but from the rough and tumble of your most intimate and commonplace moments. So you see, when the Great Continuity asserts, for instance, that you, Margali Gueths, are incapable of assuming the mantle of your husband’s business, our judgement is based on the deepest knowledge of your behaviour and capabilities.”
Silence reigned for a brief moment before Margali Gueths spoke again. “Surface. It’s still all only surface observations. I am not just the sum of my recorded actions, Mr. Yphantidies. No one is. There are infinite depths to every living person, depths which the Great Continuity can never reckon nor fathom.”
“This is metaphysics, Mrs. Gueths. And a sane polity cannot be built on metaphysics.”
She did not choose to refute this obvious statement, but instead again demanded, “How dare you, in any case?”
I began to frame an answer, but then stopped. Surprising myself, I said, “Mrs. Gueths, would you allow me to attempt to justify the Great Continuity’s existence under more relaxed circumstances? Perhaps we might share dinner together this evening?”
Taken aback, she hesitated, then said, “Very well. You know my address. Be there promptly at eight.”
She spun about and strode off then with utmost certainty. Plainly, she had memorized our path, or the Vault’s whole coordinate system.
Watching her go, I was impressed, despite myself, and despite my reverence for the Great Continuity she despised.
The Gueths residence occupied an entire block of Eldorada Street in the Minvielle District, sharing the neighbourhood with the manses of such famous families as the Pybuses, Streutts, and Cavenders. A district of wealth and attainment, won from capricious fate by adherence to individual, familial and societal Templates. A dignified hush broken only by the insect whine of klickits swaddled the street.
The night had brought some surcease from the heat, although the humidity remained. My civilian clothes, while not as comfortable or as familiar-feeling as my official robes, proved quite adequate to the weather.
My landau discharged me at the front entrance to the Gueths residence. The driver descended and prepared to feed his theropods while he waited. I could smell the bloody meat that was their customary fare. Lamps to either side of the Gueths’ double doors shed their radiance against the night. I climbed the steps and rang the bell.
To my surprise, Margali Gueths herself opened the door. She was dressed demurely, in browns and greys. Her handsome face remained composed in a neutral expression.
“Come in, please, Mr. Yphantidies.”
I entered.
“I have dismissed all my servants for the evening. Our meeting did not strike me as a formal affair. Before leaving, Cook laid on a cold buffet that should be refreshing while we continue our discussion.”
She conducted me through several well-appointed chambers to a dining room. I noticed several paintings by Glassco on the walls, but not my favourite. I took a seat indicated to me, while Margali Gueths stopped by a sideboard bearing an assortment of decanters.
“Will you have a drink?”
“Can you make a Cu
beb Slosh? That would be most refreshing.”
“Of course.”
With chilled drink in hand, I contemplated my hostess, now seated. Despite her initial formality and reticence, I could tell that she was eager to resume our former dispute.
After sipping my drink, I said, “You asked me how the Great Continuity could sanction its intrusions into the lives of the ekumenical citizenry. The answer is simple. Our organization is following its own Template. It is not only individuals who must obey their predestination and innate disposition, but also institutions, and society as a whole. Having come into being, the Great Continuity simply follows the dictates of its nature. We do as we do because we can—and must. To ensure our own survival, just as would any person.”
Margali Gueths looked at me incredulously. “Your arguments are entirely circular! You are using the unproven notion of Templates to justify enforcing Templates! Hasn’t this paradox ever occurred to you before?”
I waved away her juvenile objection. “This is all discussed and dealt with in Beginner’s Heuristics. If you had academic training—”
Margali Gueths surged impulsively to her feet. “This whole evening is a waste! I was foolish enough to imagine that if I got you out of your fortress—out of your formal shell—then you might be able to see the injustice being done me, how your Great Continuity wants to strip me of all that is my due. But instead I find that I have invited a hollow man into my house. Or rather, a ragbag man stuffed with the mouldy hay of preconceived ideas!”
Margali Gueths’s passionate tirade in her own defence, even though I was its butt, rendered her more alluring in my eyes than any other woman I had ever known. Betrayed by this unwonted feeling, and perhaps a little intoxicated from the Slosh, I chose to speak freely.
“Mrs. Gueths, I am not insensible to your character, and your righteous appeals. If matters were different, so forceful is your nature, I might— Well, I might even now be contemplating the establishment of a certain level of intimacy between us.”
This statement stopped Margali Gueths in her tracks as she paced the chamber. “So. Having seen those shameful images from my file, you take me for a loose woman? Well, what if I am? What if I chose to palliate my loveless marriage with certain wild assignations? Am I not just following my Template, according to you?”
“Indeed. And I don’t pass judgement on your actions. One of our prime tenets in the Great Continuity is that there is really no good or evil, moral or immoral—at least not as conventionally defined—but only adherence to or violation of one’s Template. No, my attraction to you stems solely from what you have shown me of your nature in person.”
She was silent for a time. “Assuming I would even begin to imagine consenting to such a relationship between us, what prevents it on your part?”
I sighed. “My own Template. When I was five years old, I received my first results on the Amatory Scale, and was deemed incapable of forming mature bonds with the opposite sex. Subsequent readings only confirmed this. Thus I have been precluded from any intimate relations. It is a regrettable defect, I suppose, but one that I have learned not to be troubled by.”
Margali Gueths collapsed on a chaise. Her expression mingled horror, bemusement and—most injurious—pity.
Suddenly she began to cry and laugh by turns, tears and guffaws blending into an unholy symphony that pierced me like a hot wire.
“I— I can’t believe— All your life— Never to have— Just because— Madness, madness!”
A frosted dignity suffused my brain. I attained a standing posture.
“Madame, I am leaving now. Our discussion is at an end.”
Margali Gueths wiped snot from her nose. How had I ever imagined her attractive?
“Of course. Or course it is. I will never allow my life to be blighted as you have allowed yours to be. The Great Continuity has hold over me no longer.”
Somehow with no passage of time that I could recall I found myself standing outside. The stars overhead appeared to me like gaping moth-holes in the shoddy fabric of the universe.
I climbed back into my landau. But I did not return to Vestry Street.
Rather, I went once more to my office, there to initiate the reformation of Margali Gueths.
The brazen woman had confiscated and destroyed a single daguerreotype from the Vaults.
But there were many more.
It was not necessary to disseminate certain information and imagery from her file to any actual scandal sheets. Those tabloids were a blunt instrument useful only for amusing the proletariat. Anonymously circulating the material among her peers was a more subtle and sufficient means of ruining her standing, and thus frustrating any attempt on her part to circumvent the Great Continuity’s disposition of Juvian Gueths’ estate.
In only a month, Margali Gueths’ ambitions to take her husband’s place had been rendered impotent.
And that was when she chose to hang herself.
My ultimate emotional convulsion—the spasm that violated my Template and caused the end of the Great Continuity—attendant upon the suicide of Margali Gueths was not immediate.
By the time I learned of her demise, some weeks after our disturbing dinner, I had regained my equanimity. No longer did her sobs and guffaws and taunts haunt my sleep. I had become utterly convinced of the correctness of my actions. In fact, very seldom did her case even cross my conscious mind. I had acted with all diligence and propriety, obeying the dictates and duties of my office, of my own Template.
Just as she had. Just as she had.
Almost a year after her suicide, I sat once more in my office, on a hot summer’s day. Lunchtime rolled around. Goolsby Roy entered, carrying a meal tray. The odour of veal reached my nostrils.
Something broke open within me, a chrysalis all unsuspected that I had been growing, harbouring deep within me like some new extension of my soul. The exact concatenation of circumstances summoned up Margali Gueths’s first appearance before me, as vividly as if she were present.
I stood up and moved wordlessly past my startled assistant.
Down, down, down I went, to the Vaults.
Fire, of course, was an omnipresent worry where the records were concerned. Many preparations and drills against its dangers were in place. Sand- and water-buckets hung at intervals throughout the Vaults. Due to their antiquity, however, piped water was unavailable. So the fire which I ignited and then abandoned, once it was well underway but before it could entrap me, was brought under control before spreading all that far.
But the intense conflagration did succeed in causing a portion of the Vaults to collapse, opening a hole in the Plaza. Curious citizens of the lowest sort quickly swarmed around the smoky excitement. The doormen of the Palace tried to drive them back, but, vastly outnumbered and without weapons, failed. Soon daring and ambitious men and boys were scrambling down the smoldering rubble slopes of the pit, to investigate what lay below.
Soon files were being passed among the crowd. Files that proved every bit as incendiary as my matches.
Here I will leave off my eyewitness account, since I—or any individual—was unable to take in more than a fraction of the widespread chaos that followed. The insensate looting, the burning of property, the lynching, the destruction of the Panocculus machines— A veritable apocalypse that raged up and down the ekumen like a living beast for weeks. The social structures of centuries died, as easily as drowned kittens.
Yet somehow I survived the interregnum. Somehow I was reborn into an age that has abandoned all I once held dear and essential. Templates, the Great Continuity, order, stability—
Such concepts as inheritance and the Amatory Scale.
All vanished, in favour of impulsiveness and unpredictability.
And a chance, perhaps, for the first time, to love.
FJAERLAND
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO
The ferry slid away, trailing thick, luscious ripples across the waters of the fjord. A not-unpleasant scent compo
unded of brine, pine and gutted fish filled the air. Most of the new arrivals were jostling into a sanitary, hermetic tour bus. But one man and woman set off on foot along a tiny paved road, pulling their wheeled suitcases behind them.
The village ahead seemed utterly deserted.
“They’re resting in peace,” said the man, pausing to light a cigarette, his angular face intent. He wore jeans, a pale shirt, an expensive anorak, and designer shades. “Dead as network television.”
“It’s Sunday, Mark,” said his companion. “It’s Norway.” She wore oversize sunglasses and low heels. A lemon-yellow silk scarf enfolded her crop of blonde hair, a soft red cashmere sweater draped her shoulders. She looked as if she wanted to be happy, but had forgotten how.
The stodgy crypt of a tour bus lumbered past them. The man offered the passengers a wave. Nobody acknowledged him. “Sweet silence,” said the man as the bus’s roar faded. “Like being packed in cotton wool.”
The woman looked around, studying the scene. “With the fjord and the mountains—anything we say feels kind of superficial, doesn’t it? The beauty here—it’s like a giant waterfall. And my soul’s a tiny glass.”
“We’re fugitives, Laura. They could gun us down any minute. That’s why everything seems so heavy.”
“Shove it, Mark!”
“Never hurts to face the facts. That big house up ahead, you think that’s a hotel?”
“I hope it’s a love nest for us,” said Laura with a sad little smile. “I’m ready to relax and be friends, aren’t you? It might help if I had a book to read.”
“You’ll be reading this,” said Mark, playfully tapping his crotch. “Page one.”
Laura tossed her head, mildly amused. A few steps later she stopped still and made a sudden extravagant gesture. “Lo and behold!”
Right beside the narrow road was an unmanned shelf of books—warped boards, a piece of stapled-down, folded-back canvas for protection from the elements—with a sign reading: Honest Books, 10 Kr. each. A gnome-shaped metal coin-bank was beside the sign.
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