by Travis Perry
In my case, the fever was left unchecked by the healers’ potions because my father believed the healers were dragon-oil sellers, which meant they lied about what was in their potions. Nobody around Elysium had seen a dragon in decades. Still, the potions were all we had, and so my fever raged and raged until I had putrefaction of the head region. Ever after, I’ve been given to intermittent blindness and the great ability to tell marvelous lies, the degree of which no man in Elysium Fields has ever heard.
When I was a young man, my father, Elder Albrecht, naturally taught me rope making, as the Albrecht family had been involved in this fibrous trade for many a generation. Though a focus on textiles didn’t automatically lend others to perceive the romantic nature of ropes, they were not only romantic, but philosophical. Ropes were useful. The soldiers used them for rappelling exercises that generally built their physiques to romantic proportions. Ropes could also be used for the tying up of enemy forces, including female conquests, which was a local, but ancient practice of bride-kidnapping, currently outlawed. Ropes could also be used for the punishment of the guilty at hanging ceremonies.
“We are a family of tensile strength,” Father explained to me. “We may pull others along with us, but we must never push against the natural order of things.”
Having reveled in this romantic and philosophical trade throughout my tender years, it was my duty to expand the romance. That was what lying was all about—expanding the romance. No, I never pushed against the natural order of things. Instead, I possessed a deeper understanding of the natural order of things than the commoner tradesmen wherewith I found myself surrounded. Because of that, during times of blindness, I fashioned ropes and knotted them; each knot was a lie that paradoxically became the truth.
My most infamous lie, of course, was the one about the Fountain of Youth that existed approximately halfway to the summit of Elysium Mons. So the legend went, according to me, the Fountain of Youth sprang from the once violent activity of the now dormant volcano. Early Christian pilgrims knew of it; that was the reason they mounted their horses and disappeared into the Land of Elysium. Where were they now? Having been given the gift of eternal youth without end, they continued onward to the peak, where their new lungs could breathe the thin air and their new skin could withstand the cold temperatures. And there they remained to this day in a settlement no man but believers in the Fountain had ever reached. That was one fat knot, a real dandy!
But what good was it for me to sit in a corner, temporarily blinded, fashioning truth in the form of knots? While it was true that gossip caught on quickly in my village, the small audience that gathered to hear my “knots” weren’t enough. A prophet is never appreciated in his home town, especially if it’s an unincorporated one. The locals called this unincorporated town the “Rebel Coast” but they didn’t know wherefore, as nobody in the vicinity had rebelled against the govment in known history. Also, there is no coastline for miles. I invented a true lie explaining the history of the Rebel Coast, which is now taught to children who are advantaged enough to be educated.
A lack of a wide audience for my lies created a great swell in my soul—what I likened to el gran oleaje—that simultaneously created a need to make paper out of the very same fiber I had once used for rope making. And so I made paper products with the zeal of an inventor, and I bound these papers with a needle and thread and hence created The Encyclopaedia Elysium, which I will continue to reference in this true testament. It was my masterwork of paradoxical truths, as well as the True History of the Elysium people of the great planet Mars.
Nevertheless, and despite all this greatness, Father wasn’t pleased with my pursuits. We were a family of tensile strength. That meant we made ropes, not paper. Still, Father listened to Mother when she explained what she had learned during her gossip and tea session with the local healers. La gran fiebre assaulted the body and mind in such a way that the damage was irreversible. It was best to leave well enough alone and allow me, pobrecito, to continue in my passions, lest the putrefied phlegm in my system lead to further choleric sensations in my being. As we were a village of phlegmatics, too much choler could lead to unrest or even—let no man utter the word—revolution. So Father, against his better judgment, let me be to make my paper.
Over time, I discovered the remnants of texts in the scholarly library of the local Iglesia Bautista—texts that were part of the history of the Christian people long before the era of magic Earthian technology and, consequently, long before the era of Mars. The local church authorities kept these texts as records of earlier thoughts and practices, though they generally discouraged following after those who were called santos. They didn’t know precisely wherefore they discouraged it. That history was lost to all of us. Nonetheless, the texts were still there to be perused if a man left his signature on the tablet at the church library altar.
In the year of our Lord 3013, my eighteenth year, my name was to be found repeatedly on the library altar log. In fact, during the harvest, when farmers were bringing in crops and tradesmen were plying their goods to the farmers, my name was the only one to be found. There were also a number of ghost images of my name, as the weight of the library seemed to hold one of my numerous unspoken lies: No, I never entered the library at night to steal books during those hours in which my sight was wonderfully whole. No, I never did learn to use a pick in the spring-loaded barrel lock meant to keep people like me out.
In the village of the Rebel Coast, nobody had the luxury of rebelling against their lot, as the harsh winter weather would eventually settle in, leaving the citizens scrambling for their bread. Rebellion is a hobby for the insane of any struggling population. And the Great Fever made me insane. To wit, I had Mother as my witness. But among the population were also the rich and comfortable, such as the govnor himself, who had no reason to rebel, as he was in charge and received the best of the farmers’ bounty regardless of whether he rebelled or complacently sat at his table devising plans for the military under his charge.
It was during that fateful year that I first read the words of St. Jerome. St. Jerome struck me with a clear vision, my intermittent blindness notwithstanding. St. Jerome brought clarity to the blindness, owing to what the scholars of old had labeled “Polemics.” For me, the binaries set down from this ancient saint established one man’s truth as the correct version of the world and mankind. My truths were not lies, after all. They never had been. As St. Jerome preached:
“‘I said in my alarm, “Every man is a liar!”’ Is David telling the truth or is he lying? If it is true that every man is a liar, and David’s statement, ‘Every man is a liar’ is true, then David also is lying; he, too, is a man. But if he, too, is lying, his statement: ‘Every man is a liar,’ consequently is not true. Whatever way you turn the proposition, the conclusion is a contradiction. Since David himself is a man, it follows that he also is lying; but if he is lying because every man is a liar, his lying is of a different sort.”[1]
There was the crux: my lying was of a different sort. As I sat there on that glorious Sabbath day, on that afternoon when the farmers set about bringing in the harvest after the service let out, I felt the painful truth of my life. I felt it seeping into my knees as I knelt before the rows of books. I felt it as the sun’s rays lit on my face and across my white-gloved hands.
With one of the library’s sets of kid gloves, I turned the pages of the recorded St. Jerome sermons. This book was ancient by Mars standards, and the herringbone stitching holding the book bands in place were loose and in need of patching. But the words inside were far more ancient. A fair number of tomes were brought to Mars in the early colonization days, and the works of the early saints were among the number. Due to the harsh, dry climate, those original books had been studiously recopied onto new paper with new binding to preserve them. If the originals still existed, they were kept far away from the public because they would crumble to dust under the most delicate touch, despite the use of kid gloves.
And just as I finished for the afternoon, the ultimate pain hit me: my blindness. I had overtaxed my eyes, and now the words blurred and danced across the leaves. I could so easily descend into darkness; I suffered from many moments of complete darkness. Still, though, the blindness seemed predestined. I had learned what I had come to learn. I had discovered my destiny. I was a liar of a different sort.
I was a saint, a poet, a man made in the image of kings and prophets. The Iglesia Bautista considered all Christian men following after Jesucristo to be saints, but in those ancient of days, saints were special. They were polemic; they spoke in dualities. At least, saints of the order of Jerome spoke in polemics. Others were riddlers, men who fashioned rompecabezas in the same manner that I fashioned ropes and knots and leaves for my Encyclopaedia Elysium.
I rose from the place I’d been kneeling, stumbled over a stool, ran into the corner of a bookshelf, and heard the librarian, who perpetually sat at his desk copying new works for the library, cough loudly in scribish disdain.
Let the scribe disdain me. Little did he know that I had learned of my destiny that day. Little did he understand the importance of my encyclopaedia. There were scribes, and then there were encyclopaedists, and it was clear who had the higher calling—the one writing original texts that would someday be copied by the likes of dry dusty scribes. And the new section I would now add in my encyclopaedia, on the lives of modern saints belonging to this planet—this planet!—trumped the various products of the other tradespeople. What were smiths? I asked myself as I made my way out into the main street of Rebel Coast. I heard their hammering, though my sight was so dim at that point I couldn’t make head nor hair of the actual men.
They will be punished someday for working on the Sabbath, instead of studying the Holy Scriptures. I gasped at my own thought and stopped in the middle of the street.
“Simon, you simpleton, move aside,” I heard a man shout. I recognized the voice as that belonging to a local beet farmer. I heard the clomping of horse’s hooves and, in fact, felt the heat and smell of the beast dangerously close to me. I stepped sideways, feeling vulnerable.
Did the world not understand what I had just concocted? It was my first polemic: These people will be punished someday! I made my way toward my parents’ home, my fingers itching to scratch out an entry for polemics in my masterwork. I needed more leaves, far more than the available textiles could afford me. Father would put his foot down, as our livelihood stemmed from rope, not paper.
My heart sank. Not only was my own father set against my genius, but my episodes of blindness were occurring with greater frequency every day. So be it. Circumstances existed. But the fate of a saint overruled ordinary existence.
As I turned down the lane where the local tradesmen lived, my eyes detected the blurred red of the houses. Elysiums built their houses from mud bricks molded and packed tight to withstand the heavy winds that tore across the landscape in the wintertime. I counted the blurs on the left hand side: one, two, three. I was home.
I stumbled in the front door, and the fragrance of Mother’s stew wrapped me up like a warm blanket. She would always support me. When she realized I had fallen into another spell of blindness, she guided me to the table with her work-worn hands and placed a steaming bowl of her cabrito borscht before me.
Through the dimness, I made out the figure across from me. Ah, it was Luana, the beautiful, the brave. I loved Luana to the point I could contain neither the cholera nor the melancholia welling up in my soul when she was present. There was only one problem; well, there were two. Luana was a spinster farmer, fifteen years my elder, who had inherited the totality of her father’s farmland upon his death because she was an only child. That was not one of the problems, although truth be known, an intermittently-blind madman such as I wouldn’t make a practical farmer-husband. The problems were, rather, these: She didn’t love me and had no intention of sharing her fortune with any man.
At that point, she was too old to be convinced. And how I longed for her faded beauty, captured in her wise gray eyes and her ringing laughter. She was everything I wasn’t—independent, strong, and practical.
She was so decidedly practical that when she needed to take a room in town for business purposes, she took it with us because of Mother’s reputation as the best cook in the village.
“Well greetings to you, too, Master Simon!” Luana called out, banging her palms flat on the tabletop such that the table rocked and my stew slopped over the side.
“Luana,” I said, the melancholy dripping from my mouth, “when will you become my bride?”
“Perchance you’ll have to capture me, like the Elysium men of old. Do you imagine you can handle it, Simon? Are you strong enough?” And then she laughed again. “No, Master Simon, the only reason to marry is to produce heirs, and I’m old and dried up, and you’ve been damaged by fever.”
To Luana, I was nothing more than a grand joke. Owing to that, my phlegm regions dried up even further, and the melancholy seeped its black bile into my heart, leaving the cholera to rise to my head. This was an unbalanced combination. My cheeks flushed deep purple, and I couldn’t sap the heat out, not even after scratching out polemic after polemic throughout the night. Father would be angry over the extravagant use of expensive lamp oil. Little good the work did me, anyway.
So I turned to recording the true stories of the Elysium saints. This was my final purpose, as given to me by St. Jerome.
• • •
Hence, this is the true story of St. Simon, as told by the most famous liar in Elysium—indeed, in all the history of Mars. Soy yo!
I heard Luana’s challenge to kidnap her as the men of old used to do. Oh, yes, I heard it. It registered in both my heart and mind. Additionally, my mother was present at the uttering of the challenge. Much later, she was brought in for a witness in the high court of Elysium, as the govnor had decided the times called for incorporating the Rebel Coast for the trying of crimes, the likes of which the locals were unsuitable to judge.
But that’s beginning the story at the end. One night, not long after Luana had uttered her now famous challenge, I wrapped several of the strongest ropes available in the workroom across my shoulder and crosswise down to the opposite waist. With my warmest winter clothing layered underneath the ropes, a store of dried goods in various pouches, and a tool belt complete with a pick and a knife, I set out into the night.
Luana’s farm was several miles out of town, but I could easily travel at night, as I was used to moving about in the dark. My sight was currently working as best it could—for what it was worth. It was worth something, as it convinced me this was truly my purpose. This pilgrimage was meant to be. Of course, it wouldn’t be sanctioned by the Iglesia Bautista, but that wasn’t unusual for a saint. Saints bypassed any vestige of extant authority, of which there was very little in the local church bodies anyway. Each church operated off of what they called the democratic process. It was a concept of majority rule that had existed in various societies on the old Earth, but it was not how Elysium operated, as it was under the govment of five chieftains and one govnor, all of whom inherited their positions.
I made my way as quickly as I could, my hands covered in my best gloves, as nighttime in any season could become treacherously cold in this region. For that reason, the most successful gardeners had built what they called “greening houses” to keep the vegetables with a lower cold tolerance secure from the shrill winds. The poorer farmers settled for growing radishes and beets. Luana, as a wealthy farmer, had a number of greening houses tended by her day workers, who were generally younger offspring of area farmers or tradespeople. I spotted the frame of one of her greening houses long before I arrived at the red brick farmhouse. As the distance between the two buildings allowed me to rally myself and still my beating heart, it didn’t seem far at all. In fact, I wished it had been longer.
With my breath now coming in short bursts, I slowed down to short tiptoeing steps. Surprise being the only real we
apon at my disposal, I couldn’t risk giving myself away. I could see a lamp burning from a window that had not yet been shuttered. As it was difficult to keep a house warm without shuttering the windows, this was a bizarre oversight. Nobody in the village would allow their lamps to shine out into the night. I took it as yet another sign that this was a pilgrimage blessed by God—as that was what it was, a pilgrimage. And pilgrimages were blessed by God if they were worth anything at all.
I crept to the window, peered in, and found what I expected: Luana at a table, alone. She had a clay mug by her elbow, steaming, which she ignored while she studied a pile of unbound leaves. Contracts? Bills of receipt? Both, perchance. She was all business, up to her lovely elbows in practicality.
She was my opposite; this I’d already acknowledged. I needed her. She needed me. She simply didn’t know it yet. This pilgrimage was meant to convince her.
I circled around to her back door, which was secured with a barrel padlock, just as I’d hoped. For unrecorded reasons, I knew how to pick a barrel lock, which I now did in silent eagerness. God was with me. The springs depressed, and the lock gave way. And in an instant, I was inside Luana’s dark kitchen.
After my eyes adjusted to the new depth of darkness, I stole around the shapes of furniture and slid softly along the floor tiles—actual floor tiles! Nobody in the village possessed the wealth for such a luxury, settling for packed earth. Compared to the houses in town, this one was comfortable and well-fitted; however, it was ultimately just a small farmer’s cottage. Luana had never built onto the original structure, as she lived alone. Yes, she lived alone. And this made my pilgrimage that much easier. Certainly, the govnor, who had once courted Luana, ordered his riders to regularly patrol her greening houses as they brought him much fealty wealth. But I was little worried about them because I was clearly being protected by a higher authority.
