The Anome

by Jack Vance

  “And to say the most?”

  Etzwane only shook his head. “Why did you cut open the Roguskhoi?”

  “I was curious as to their physiology.”

  Etzwane gave a laugh which held a shrill note of wildness. He cut the laugh short. For a period there was silence. The trap moved down the starlit valley. Etzwane had no notion of how far they had come, how far they must go. He asked another question: “Why did you take the torcs?”

  Ifness sighed. “I had hoped you would not ask that question. I cannot provide you a satisfactory answer.”

  “You have many secrets,” said Etzwane.

  “All of us keep covert certain areas of ourselves,” said Ifness. “You yourself for instance: you have evinced dissatisfaction with the Faceless Man, but you do not reveal your further intentions.”

  “They are not secret,” said Etzwane. “I shall go to Garwiy; I shall buy a Purple Petition; I shall argue my views with as much clarity as possible. Under the circumstances the Faceless Man must take notice.”

  “One would think so,” Ifness concurred. “But let us assume the contrary, what then?”

  Etzwane squinted sidewise at the stiff yet casual silhouette against the blazing Schiafarilla. “Why should I trouble myself with remote eventualities?”

  “I agree that over-planning sometimes limits spontaneity,” said Ifness. “Still, when there are but two cases of equal probability, it is wise to consider contingencies in both directions.”

  “I have ample time to form my plans,” said Etzwane shortly.

  Chapter IX

  In the dead middle of the night they came down out of Mirk Valley. A few dim lights flickered from the terraces of the temple; a breeze brought the sweet-acrid whiff of galga mingled with vile odors of charred wood and hides.

  “The Chilites will worship Galexis until their drug runs out,” remarked Ifness. “Then they must cry after a new goddess.”

  They passed into Rhododendron Way, an avenue breathless and dark, haunted by remembered sounds. The foliage was black overhead, the road a white glimmer below. The cottages stood with doors ajar, offering shelter and rest; neither of the two suggested a halt. They continued on through the night.

  Dawn came as a glorious cascade of orange and violet across the east; as Sassetta curveted into the sky the trap entered Carbade. The pacers walked slowly with heads drooping, considerably more weary than the men.

  Ifness drove directly to the hostler’s and relinquished the conveyance; the torcs and the weapons he wrapped into a parcel and tucked into his jacket.

  Etzwane would return westward; at Brassei Ifness had stated his destination to be in the east. Etzwane said, somewhat ponderously, “We go our different ways. I can’t ignore the fact that you have helped me a great deal. I give you thanks, and I must say that I leave you in a better spirit than I did on a previous occasion. So then, Ifness, I bid you farewell.”

  Ifness bowed courteously. “Farewell to you.”

  Etzwane turned and strode across the square to the balloon-way depot. Ifness followed in a more leisurely fashion.

  At the ticket-seller’s window Etzwane said in a crisp voice, “I want passage by the first balloon to Garwiy.” As he paid the fee, he became conscious of Ifness standing behind him, and gave a curt nod which Ifness returned. Ifness went to the wicket and arranged balloon passage for himself.

  The balloon south to Junction would not arrive at Carbade for another hour; Etzwane paced back and forth, then crossed the square to a food-vendor’s stall, where he found Ifness. Etzwane took his meal to a table nearby, as did Ifness, after murmuring a conventional excuse to Etzwane.

  The two ate in silence. Etzwane, finishing, returned to the depot, followed somewhat later by Ifness.

  The slot began to sing: a thin high-pitched whirring which told of the approaching dolly. Five minutes later the balloon came trembling and swaying down to the loading platform. Etzwane rose to his feet, leaving Ifness looking pensively from the depot window; he entered the gondola and settled himself upon the bench. Ifness came in behind him and took a seat directly opposite. Etzwane could ignore his presence no longer. “I thought you were continuing east.”

  “An urgent matter takes me elsewhere,” said Ifness.

  “To Garwiy?”

  “To Garwiy.”

  The balloon rose into the air; riding the fresh morning wind, it slid up the slot toward Junction.

  During Etzwane’s time Frolitz had taken his troupe to Garwiy but seldom, and only for short periods; the folk of Garwiy preferred entertainments more dramatic, more frivolous, more urbane. Etzwane nonetheless found Garwiy a fascinating place, if only for the marvel and grace of its vistas.

  In all the human universe there was no city like Garwiy, which was built of glass: blocks, slabs, prisms, cylinders of glass: purple, green, lavender, blue, rose, dark scarlet.

  Among the original exiles from Earth had been twenty thousand Chama Reya, a cult of aestheticians. On Durdane they vowed to build the most magnificent city the race had yet known, and so dedicated themselves. The first Garwiy persisted seven thousand years, dominated in turn by the Chama Reya, the Architectural Corporation, the Director Dynasties, the transitional Super-directors, and finally the Purple Kings. Each century brought new marvels to Garwiy, and it seemed that the goal of each Purple King was to daunt the memory of the past and stupefy the future. King Cluay Pandamon erected an arcade of nine hundred crystal columns sixty feet tall, supporting a prismatic glass roof. King Pharay Pandamon ordained a market pavilion of startling ingenuity. In a circular lake curved glass hulls were joined to form twelve floating concentric rings, each twenty feet wide, separated by bearings, so that each ring floated free of those to either side. On these floating ways, merchants and craftsmen established a bazaar, each booth isolated from its neighbor by a panel of colored glass. In a sub-surface way around the lake, a hundred bullocks pulled the outside ring into slow rotation, which through the agency of the water surrounding the hulls, gradually impelled the inner rings to rotations. Every six hours the bullocks reversed the rotational direction of the outer ring, and presently the rings all rotated at various speeds in different directions, presenting a succession of shifting colors and shadows: this the market-bazaar built by King Pharay Pandamon.

  During the reign of King Jorje Shkurkane, Garwiy reached its peak. The slopes of the Ushkadel glittered with palaces; at the Jardeen docks glass ships unloaded the wares of the world: fibers, silks, membranes from North Shant, the meat-products of Palasedra, salts and oxides from the mines of Caraz, for the production of glass. All sixty-two cantons contributed to the glory of Garwiy; the Pandamon Bailiff was a familiar sight in the far corners of Shant. During King Kharene’s unlucky reign, the South revolted; the Palasedran Eagle-Dukes crossed the Great Salt Bog, to spark the Fourth Palasedran War, which terminated the Pandamon Dynasty.

  During the Sixth Palasedran War, Palasedran bombardiers established themselves on the Ushkadel Ridges, from where they were able to lob air-mines into the old city. Fountain after fountain of antique glass spurted high into the sunlight. At last the Warlord Viana Paizifume launched his furious uphill assault, which subsequently became the substance of legend. With his cataphracts destroyed, his Elite Pikes dazed and leaderless, his Glass Darts cramped against the base of the cliff, Paizifume destroyed the Palasedran host with a horde of crazed ahulphs, daubed with tar, set afire and directed up the Ushkadel. Victory was a poor exchange for Garwiy shattered; the deed brought the Palasedrans a permanent legacy of distrust and bitterness.

  Viana Paizifume, from Canton Glirris on the east coast, refused to allow another Pandamon upon the Purple Throne and called a conclave of the cantons to form a new government. After three weeks of bickering and caprice, Paizifume’s patience was exhausted. Mounting to the podium he indicated a platform on which a screen had been arranged.

  “Beyond that screen,” decreed Paizifume, “sits your new ruler. I will not tell you his name; you will know him
only by his edicts, which I shall enforce. Do you understand the virtue of this arrangement? When you do not know your ruler, you will be unable to plot, wheedle or suborn. Justice at last is possible.”

  Did the first Faceless Man actually stand behind the screen? Or had Viana Paizifume invented an invisible alter ego? No one knew then or ever. However, when at last Paizifume was assassinated, the plotters were immediately apprehended, sealed into glass balls and suspended on a cable running between a pair of spires. For a thousand years the balls hung like baubles until one by one they were struck by lightning and destroyed.

  For a period the Faceless Man enforced his commands by means of a coercive corps, which gradually assumed improper prerogatives and stimulated a revolt. The Conservative Counsel quelled the revolt, disbanded the Coercive Corps and restored order. The Faceless Man appeared before the counsel in armor of black glass, with a black glass helmet to conceal his identity. He demanded and was conceded greater power and greater responsibility. For twenty years the total energies of Shant were expended in the perfection of the torc system. The Magenta Edict decreed torcs for all and stimulated further strife: the Hundred Years War, which ended only when the last citizen had been clamped into his torc.

  Garwiy never regained its Pandamon magnificence, but still was reckoned the first wonder of Durdane. There were towers of blue glass, spires of purple glass, green glass domes, prisms and pillars, walls of clear glass glinting and glittering in the sunlight. At night colored lamps illuminated the city: green lamps behind blue and purple glass, pink lamps behind blue glass.

  The palaces up the Ushkadel still housed the patricians of Garwiy, but these were a far cry from the flamboyant grandees of the Pandamon Era. They drew their income from country estates, from shipping, from the laboratories and workshops where torcs, radios, glow-bulbs, a few other electronic devices, were assembled, using components produced elsewhere in Shant: monomolecule conductor strands, semi-organic electron-control devices, magnetic cores of sintered iron-web, a few trifles of copper, gold, silver, lead, for connections and switches. No technician comprehended the circuits he used; whatever the original degree of theoretical knowledge, it now had become lore: a mastery of techniques rather than of principles. The workshops and factories were located in the industrial suburb Shranke on the Jardeen River; the workers lived nearby in pleasant cottages among gardens and orchards.

  This then was Garwiy: a metropolis of considerable area but no great population, a place of entrancing beauty enhanced by antiquity and the weight of history.

  The people of Garwiy were unique: hyper-civilized, sensitive to all varieties of aesthetic distinction but not themselves particularly creative. The Aesthetic Society, with a membership of patricians from the Ushkadel, administered civic functions, which the ordinary folk of Garwiy found right and proper. The patricians had the money; it was right that they should accept the responsibilities. The typical citizen felt no resentment of the patricians; he was equal before the law. If by dint of cleverness or energy he acquired a fortune and bought a palace, he was taken into the Aesthetic Society as a matter of course. After two or three generations as parvenus, his descendants might regard themselves as Aesthetes in their own right. This typical citizen was a complicated person: suave and civil, vivacious, fickle, frivolous and somewhat brittle. He was voluptuous, but critical; complacent but demanding; fashion-conscious but amused by eccentricity. He was gregarious, but introverted; knowledgeable regarding every green facet and purple glint of his wonderful city, current with the latest entertainments, uninterested in the rest of Shant. He was not deeply moved by music and had no great patience with the traditions of the druithines or the musical troupes; he preferred facetious ballads, songs with topical references, entertainers with eccentric antics: in short, all the manifestations detested by the musician.

  He regarded his torc as a necessary evil, and occasionally made a satirical reference to the Faceless Man, for whom he felt a half-contemptuous awe. Somewhere along the Ushkadel the Faceless Man reputedly lived in a palace; the question of his identity was a constant titillation for the man of Garwiy. He seldom if ever exercised his right of petition; this facility was reserved for the outlander, whom Garwiy folk liked to consider a yokel. He had heard mention of the Roguskhoi, and perhaps wondered at their peculiar habits, but his interest went little further. To the Garwiy man the Wildlands of the Hwan were almost as remote as the center of Caraz.

  The suns toppled south toward the winter solstice; Durdane at the same time entered that sector of its orbit where the suns occulted: a situation intensifying seasonal contrasts. Cold air from Nimmir brought autumnal winds to the north of Shant. The balloon Shostrel, leaving Angwin, spun down the Great Transverse at extraordinary speeds, out of the Wildlands into Shade, then Erevan, and past Brassei Junction, where Etzwane turned an expressionless glance west, to where Frolitz presumably anticipated his early arrival; through Cantons Maiy, Jardeen, Wild Rose, each jealous of its unique identity, and at last into Canton Garwiy. Down the Vale of Silence they veered at fifty miles an hour, along the line of clear glass tablets, each encasing the monumental effigy of a dynastic king. The poses were identical; the kings stood with right feet slightly forward, forefingers pointing at the ground, the faces wearing somber, almost puzzled expressions, eyes staring ahead, as if in contemplation of an astounding future.

  The wind-tender began to slacken his warps, the Shostrel sailed at an easier pace through the Jardeen Gap and into Garwiy Station. Brakes slowed the running dolly; a Judas was snatched to the guys so expertly that the balloon came to ground in a continuous even motion.

  Etzwane alighted, followed by Ifness. With a polite nod Ifness walked off across the station plaza, to turn into Kavalesko Passway, which led under a tower of dark blue glass ribbed with water-blue pilasters, and into Kavalesko Avenue*. Etzwane shrugged, and went his way.

  * The twelve avenues radiating from the Aesthetic Corporation Plaza were named for Chama Reya avatars.

  Frolitz customarily made resort at the Fontenay Inn, north of the plaza, beside the Jardeen, where the management provided meals and lodging in return for a few evenings of music. To Fontenay’s Inn Etzwane now betook himself. He called for stylus and paper and immediately set to work drafting the petition which he planned to submit on the following day.

  Two hours later Etzwane finished the document. He gave it a final reading and could find no fault; it seemed clear and uncompromising, with no sacrifice of calm reason. It read:

  To the attention of the ANOME:

  During my recent visit to the lowlands of the Hwan, in Canton Bastern, I observed the effects of a Roguskhoi raid upon the Chilite community Bashon. Considerable property damage occurred: a tannery and certain out-buildings were demolished. A large number of women were abducted and subsequently killed under distressing circumstances.

  It has become well known that the Wildlands of the Hwan are a haven for these noxious savages, who therefore are free to maraud and plunder at will. Each year they wax both in numbers and audacity. It is my opinion that all Roguskhoi now resident in Shant should be destroyed by a stern and unremitting effort. I suggest that a suitable militia be recruited, trained and armed. Coincidentally, a study should be made of the Roguskhoi, their habits, their preferred resorts. When all is prepared, the militia, using disciplined tactics, should penetrate the Hwan, attack and expunge the Roguskhoi.

  In broad outline, this is my petition. I realize that I propose a major governmental operation, but in my opinion such action is necessary.

  The time was late afternoon: too late to present the petition. Etzwane crossed the Jardeen and strolled through Pandamon Park, where the north wind sent autumn leaves scurrying past his feet. He came to the Aeolian Hall, a musical instrument of pearl-gray glass three hundred feet long. Wind collected by scoops was directed into a plenum. The operator worked rods and keys to let pent air move one, two, a dozen or a hundred from among the ten thousand sets of glass chimes. A person who
wandered the hall experienced audible dimension, with sound coming from various directions: tinkling chords, whispers of vaguely heard melody, thin glassy shiverings, the crystal-pure tones of the center gongs; hurried gusts racing the ceiling like ripples across a pond; fateful chimes, pervasive and melancholy as a buoy bell heard through the fog. On occasion the entire ceiling would seem to burst into sound.

  With the north wind at its full weight, Etzwane heard the hall at its best; at twilight he crossed the river and dined in one of Garwiy’s splendid restaurants, under a hundred pink and lavender lamps: an experience he had heretofore denied himself. The money he had hoarded over the years: what was its purpose? It represented grief and futility; he would spend it as fast as possible, frivol it away … His sober second-self quickly interposed a veto. He would do no such thing. Money so hardly come by should not be lightly dissipated … But tonight, at least, he would enjoy his meal, and he forced himself to do so. The courses were set before him by a pretty waitress. Etzwane considered her with somber interest; she seemed amiable, with a mouth that seemed always twitching on the verge of a smile … He ate: viands were prepared and presented to perfection, as they were nowhere else on Durdane … The meal came to an end. Etzwane wanted to talk to the waitress, but felt too shy. In any event she was of Garwiy, he was an outlander; she would consider him quaint. He wondered as to the whereabouts of Frolitz, even of the uncommunicative Ifness. In a fretful mood he returned to the inn. He looked into the tavern which was composed and quiet; no musicians were on hand. Etzwane took himself to bed.

  In the morning he visited a haberdasher, who fitted him out with new clothes: a white tunic with a high flaring collar, dark green breeches buckled at the ankles, black ahulph-leather boots, with silver-wood clasps. He had never before owned an outfit so dashing. He was not altogether convinced that the figure in the carbon-fume mirror was himself … A barber trimmed his hair and shaved him with a glass razor. On a sudden impulse, as if to defy the jeers from his under-brain, he bought a rakish little cap with a medallion of colored glass. The image of himself in the mirror aroused a complicated emotion: disgust and wonder for his own folly, with a trace of ebullience, as if whatever flamboyant traits he had inherited from Dystar were pushing to make themselves felt. Etzwane shrugged and grimaced; he had spent the money; now he must wear the cap. He stepped out into the blazing lavender noon-light; the glass of Garwiy flashed and glittered.