by Jack Vance
“None.”
Joaz raised his eyebrows once more. “How do you justify this?”
“Since any desired number of conjectures can be formed, the denominator of any probability-ratio is variable and the entire concept becomes arithmetically meaningless.”
Joaz grinned wearily. “Of the conjectures which to this moment have occurred to you, which do you regard as the most likely?”
“I suspect that the Demie might think it desirable that I come here to stand.”
“What do you achieve by standing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then the Demie does not send you here to stand.”
To Joaz’s assertion, the sacerdote made no comment.
Joaz framed a question with great care. “What do you believe that the Demie hopes you will achieve by coming here to stand?”
“I believe that he wishes me to learn how Utter Men think.”
“And you learn how I think by coming here?”
“I am learning a great deal.”
“How does it help you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many times have you visited my study?”
“Seven times.”
“Why were you chosen specially to come?”
“The synod has approved my tand. I may well be the next Demie.”
Joaz spoke over his shoulder to Phade. “Brew tea.” He turned back to the sacerdote. “What is a tand?”
The sacerdote took a deep breath. “My tand is the representation of my soul.”
“Hmm. What does it look like?”
The sacerdote’s expression was unfathomable. “It cannot be described.”
“Do I have one?”
“No.”
Joaz shrugged. “Then you can read my thoughts.”
Silence.
“Can you read my thoughts?”
“Not well.”
“Why should you wish to read my thoughts?”
“We are alive in the universe together. Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.”
Joaz smiled skeptically. “How does knowledge help you, if you will not act upon it?”
“Events follow the Rationale, as water drains into a hollow and forms a pool.”
“Bah!” said Joaz, in sudden irritation. “Your doctrine commits you to non-interference in our affairs, nevertheless you allow your ‘Rationale’ to create conditions by which events are influenced. Is this correct?”
“I am not sure. We are a passive people.”
“Still, your Demie must have had a plan in mind when he sent you here. Is this not correct?”
“I cannot say.”
Joaz veered to a new line of questioning. “Where does the tunnel behind my workshop lead?”
“Into a cavern.”
Phade set a silver pot before Joaz. He poured, sipped reflectively. Of contests there were numberless varieties; he and the sacerdote were engaged in a hide-and-seek game of words and ideas. The sacerdote was schooled in patience and supple evasions, to counter which Joaz could bring pride and determination. The sacerdote was handicapped by an innate necessity to speak truth; Joaz, on the other hand, must grope like a man blindfolded, unacquainted with the goal he sought, ignorant of the prize to be won. Very well, thought Joaz, let us continue. We shall see whose nerves fray first. He offered tea to the sacerdote, who refused with a shake of the head so quick and of such small compass as to seem a shudder.
Joaz made a gesture signifying it was all the same to him. “Should you desire sustenance or drink,” he said, “please let it be known. I enjoy our conversation so inordinately that I fear I may prolong it to the limits of your patience. Surely you would prefer to sit?”
“No.”
“As you wish. Well then, back to our discussion. This cavern you mentioned—is it inhabited by sacerdotes?”
“I fail to understand your question.”
“Do sacerdotes use the cavern?”
“Yes.”
Eventually, fragment by fragment, Joaz extracted the information that the cavern connected with a series of chambers, in which the sacerdotes smelted metal, boiled glass, ate, slept, performed their rituals. At one time there had been an opening into Banbeck Vale, but long ago this had been blocked. Why? There were wars throughout the cluster; bands of defeated men were taking refuge upon Aerlith, settling in rifts and valleys. The sacerdotes preferred a detached existence and had shut their caverns away from sight. Where was this opening? The sacerdote seemed vague, indefinite. Somewhere to the north end of the valley. Behind Banbeck Jambles? Possibly. But trading between men and sacerdotes was conducted at a cave entrance below Mount Gethron. Why? A matter of usage, declared the sacerdote. In addition this location was more readily accessible to Happy Valley and Phosphor Gulch. How many sacerdotes lived in these caves? Uncertainty. Some might have died, others might have been born. Approximately how many this morning? Perhaps five hundred.
At this juncture the sacerdote was swaying and Joaz was hoarse. “Back to your motive—or the elements of your motives—for coming to my studio. Are they connected in any manner with the star Coralyne, and a possible new coming of the Basics, or the grephs, as they were formerly called?”
Again the sacerdote seemed to hesitate. Then: “Yes.”
“Will the sacerdotes help us against the Basics, should they come?”
“No.” This answer was terse and definite.
“But I assume that the sacerdotes wish the Basics driven off?”
No answer.
Joaz rephrased his words. “Do the sacerdotes wish the Basics repelled from Aerlith?”
“The Rationale bids us stand aloof from affairs of men and non-men alike.”
Joaz curled his lip. “Suppose the Basics invaded your caves, dragged you off to the Coralyne planet. Then what?”
The sacerdote almost seemed to laugh. “The question cannot be answered.”
“Would you resist the Basics if they made the attempt?”
“I cannot answer your question.”
Joaz laughed. “But the answer is not no?”
The sacerdote assented.
“Do you have weapons, then?”
The sacerdote’s mild blue eyes seemed to droop. Secrecy? Fatigue? Joaz repeated the question.
“Yes,” said the sacerdote. His knees sagged, but he snapped them tight.
“What kind of weapons?”
“Numberless varieties. Projectiles, such as rocks. Piercing weapons, such as broken sticks. Cutting and slashing weapons such as cooking utensils.” His voice began to fade as if he were moving away. “Poisons: arsenic, sulfur, triventidum, acid, black-spore. Burning weapons, such as torches and lenses to focus the sunlight. Weapons to suffocate: ropes, nooses, slings, cords. Cisterns, to drown the enemy…”
“Sit down, rest,” Joaz urged him. “Your inventory interests me, but its total effect seems inadequate. Have you other weapons which might decisively repel the Basics should they attack you?”
The question, by design or chance, was never answered. The sacerdote sank to his knees, slowly, as if praying. He fell forward on his face, then sprawled to the side. Joaz sprang forward, yanked up the drooping head by its hair. The eyes, half-open, revealed a hideous white expanse. “Speak!” croaked Joaz. “Answer my last question! Do you have weapons—or a weapon—to repel a Basic attack?”
The pallid lips moved. “I don’t know.”
Joaz frowned, peered into the waxen face, drew back in bewilderment. “The man is dead.”
Chapter VII
Phade looked up from drowsing on a couch, face pink, hair tossed. “You have killed him!” she cried in a voice of hushed horror.
“No. He has died—or caused himself to die.”
Phade staggered blinking across the room, sidled close to Joaz, who pushed her absently away. Phade scowled, shrugged and then, as Joaz paid her no heed, marched from the room.
Joaz sat back, staring at the limp body. “He did not tire,” mutte
red Joaz, “until I verged upon secrets.”
Presently he jumped to his feet, went to the entry hall, sent Rife to fetch a barber. An hour later the corpse, stripped of hair, lay on a wooden pallet covered by a sheet, and Joaz held in his hands a rude wig fashioned from the long hair.
The barber departed; servants carried away the corpse. Joaz stood alone in his studio, tense and light-headed. He removed his garments, to stand naked as the sacerdote. Gingerly he drew the wig across his scalp and examined himself in the mirror. To a casual eye, where the difference? Something was lacking: the torc. Joaz fitted it about his neck, once more examined his reflection, with dubious satisfaction.
He entered the workshop, hesitated, disengaged the trap, cautiously pulled away the stone slab. On hands and knees he peered into the tunnel and since it was dark, held forward a glass vial of luminescent algae. In the faint light the tunnel seemed empty. Irrevocably putting down his fears, Joaz clambered through the opening. The tunnel was narrow and low; Joaz moved forward tentatively, nerves thrilling with wariness. He stopped often to listen, but heard nothing but the whisper of his own pulse.
After perhaps a hundred yards the tunnel broke out into a natural cavern. Joaz stopped, stood indecisively, straining his ears through the gloom. Luminescent vials fixed to the walls at irregular intervals provided a measure of light, enough to delineate the direction of the cavern, which seemed to be north, parallel to the length of the valley. Joaz set forth once again, halting to listen every few yards. To the best of his knowledge the sacerdotes were a mild unaggressive folk, but they were also intensely secretive. How would they respond to the presence of an interloper? Joaz could not be sure, and proceeded with great caution.
The cavern rose, fell, widened, narrowed. Joaz presently came upon evidences of use: small cubicles, hollowed into the walls, lit by candelabra holding tall vials of luminous stuff. In two of the cubicles Joaz came upon sacerdotes, the first asleep on a reed rug, the second sitting cross-legged, gazing fixedly at a contrivance of twisted metal rods. They gave Joaz no attention; he continued with a more confident step.
The cave sloped downward, widened like a cornucopia, suddenly broke into a cavern so enormous that Joaz thought for a startled instant that he had stepped out into the night. The ceiling reached beyond the flicker of the myriad of lamps, fires and glowing vials. Ahead and to the left smelters and forges were in operation; then a twist in the cavern wall obscured something of the view. Joaz glimpsed a tiered tubular construction which seemed to be some sort of workshop, for a large number of sacerdotes were occupied at complicated tasks. To the right was a stack of bales, a row of bins containing goods of unknown nature.
Joaz for the first time saw sacerdote women: neither the nymphs nor the half-human witches of popular legend. Like the men they seemed pallid and frail, with sharply defined features; like the men they moved with care and deliberation; like the men they wore only their waist-long hair. There was little conversation and no laughter: rather an atmosphere of not unhappy placidity and concentration. The cavern exuded a sense of time, use and custom. The stone floor was polished by endless padding of bare feet; the exhalations of many generations had stained the walls.
No one heeded Joaz. He moved slowly forward, keeping to the shadows, and paused under the stack of bales. To the right the cavern dwindled by irregular proportions into a vast horizontal funnel, receding, twisting, telescoping, losing all reality in the dim light.
Joaz searched the entire sweep of vast cavern. Where would be the armory, with the weapons of whose existence the sacerdote, by the very act of dying, had assured him? Joaz turned his attention once more to the left, straining to see detail in the odd tiered workshop which rose fifty feet from the stone floor. A strange edifice, thought Joaz, craning his neck; one whose nature he could not entirely comprehend. But every aspect of the great cavern—so close beside Banbeck Vale and so remote—was strange and marvelous. Weapons? They might be anywhere; certainly he dared seek no further for them.
There was nothing more he could learn without risk of discovery. He turned back the way he had come: up the dim passage, past the occasional side cubicles, where the two sacerdotes remained as he had found them before: the one asleep, the other intent on the contrivance of twisted metal. He plodded on and on. Had he come so far? Where was the fissure which led to his own apartments? Had he passed it by, must he search? Panic rose in his throat, but he continued, watching carefully. There, he had not gone wrong! There it opened to his right, a fissure almost dear and familiar. He plunged into it, walked with long loping strides, like a man under water, holding his luminous tube ahead.
An apparition rose before him, a tall white shape. Joaz stood rigid. The gaunt figure bore down upon him. Joaz pressed against the wall. The figure stalked forward, and suddenly shrank to human scale. It was the young sacerdote whom Joaz had shorn and left for dead. He confronted Joaz, mild blue eyes bright with reproach and contempt. “Give me my torc.”
With numb fingers Joaz removed the golden collar. The sacerdote took it, but made no move to clasp it upon himself. He looked at the hair which weighted heavy upon Joaz’s scalp. With a foolish grimace Joaz doffed the disheveled wig, proffered it. The sacerdote sprang back as if Joaz had become a cave-goblin. Sidling past, as far from Joaz as the wall of the passage allowed, he paced swiftly off down the tunnel. Joaz dropped the wig to the floor, stared down at the unkempt pile of hair. He turned, looked after the sacerdote, a pallid figure which soon became one with the murk. Slowly Joaz continued up the tunnel. There—an oblong blank of light, the opening to his workshop. He crawled through, back to the real world. Savagely, with all his strength, he thrust the slab back in the hole, slammed down the gate which originally had trapped the sacerdote.
Joaz’s garments lay where he had tossed them. Wrapping himself in a cloak he went to the outer door, looked forth into the anteroom where Rife sat dozing. Joaz snapped his fingers. “Fetch masons, with mortar, steel and stone.”
Joaz bathed with diligence, rubbing himself time after time with emulsion, rinsing and re-rinsing himself. Emerging from the bath he took the waiting masons into his workshop, ordered the sealing of the hole.
Then he took himself to his couch. Sipping a cup of wine, he let his mind rove and wander. Recollection became reverie, reverie became dream. Joaz once again traversed the tunnel, on feet light as thistle-down, down the long cavern, and the sacerdotes in their cubicles now raised their heads to look after him. At last he stood in the entrance to the great underground void, and once more looked right and left in awe. Now he drifted across the floor, past sacerdotes laboring earnestly over fires and anvils. Sparks rose from retorts, blue gas flickered above melting metal.
Joaz moved beyond to a small chamber cut into the stone. Here sat an old man, thin as a pole, his waist-long mane of hair snow-white. The man examined Joaz with fathomless blue eyes, and spoke, but his voice was muffled, inaudible. He spoke again; the words rang loud in Joaz’s mind.
“I bring you here to caution you, lest you do us harm, and with no profit to yourself. The weapon you seek is both non-existent and beyond your imagination. Put it outside your ambition.”
By great effort Joaz managed to stammer, “The young sacerdote made no denial; this weapon must exist!”
“Only within the narrow limits of special interpretation. The lad can speak no more than the literal truth, nor can he act with other than grace. How can you wonder why we hold ourselves apart? You Utter folk find purity incomprehensible; you thought to advantage yourself, but achieved nothing but an exercise in rat-like stealth. Lest you try again with greater boldness I must abase myself to set matters correct. I assure you, this so-called weapon is absolutely beyond your control.”
First shame, then indignation came over Joaz; he cried out, “You do not understand my urgencies! Why should I act differently? Coralyne is close; the Basics are at hand. Are you not men? Why will you not help us defend the planet?”
The Demie shook his
head, and the white hair rippled with hypnotic slowness. “I quote you the Rationale: passivity, complete and absolute. This implies solitude, sanctity, quiescence, peace. Can you imagine the anguish I risk in speaking to you? I intervene, I interfere, at vast pain of the spirit. Let there be an end to it. We have made free with your studio, doing you no harm, offering you no indignity. You have paid a visit to our hall, demeaning a noble young man in the process. Let us be quits, let there be no further spying on either side. Do you agree?”
Joaz heard his voice respond, quite without his conscious prompting; it sounded more nasal and shrill than he liked. “You offer this agreement now when you have learned your fill of my secrets, but I know none of yours.”
The Demie’s face seemed to recede and quiver. Joaz read contempt, and in his sleep he tossed and twitched. He made an effort to speak in a voice of calm reason: “Come, we are men together; why should we be at odds? Let us share our secrets, let each help the other. Examine my archives, my cases, my relics at your leisure, and then allow me to study this existent but nonexistent weapon. I swear it shall be used only against the Basics, for the protection of both of us.”
The Demie’s eyes sparkled. “No.”
“Why not?” argued Joaz. “Surely you wish us no harm?”
“We are detached and passionless. We await your extinction. You are the Utter Men, the last of humanity. And when you are gone, your dark thoughts and grim plots will be gone; murder and pain and malice will be gone.”
“I cannot believe this,” said Joaz. “There may be no men in the cluster, but what of the universe? The Old Rule reached far! Sooner or later men will return to Aerlith.”
The Demie’s voice became plangent. “Do you think we speak only from faith? Do you doubt our knowledge?”
“The universe is large. The Old Rule reached far.”
“The last men dwell on Aerlith,” said the Demie. “The Utter men and the sacerdotes. You shall pass; we will carry forth the Rationale like a banner of glory, through all the worlds of the sky.”
“And how will you transport yourselves on this mission?” Joaz asked cunningly. “Can you fly to the stars as naked as you walk the fells?”
