Collected Short Fiction, page 176
The Neo-Scientists enslaved others but dreamed about the stars and the mysteries of life. The Luddites had a free, wild, wonderful existence free of most ordinary cares, but their life was only for men and it was always the same, one day to another. Maybe that was the way life was meant to be, the pilgrim thought.
The Empire was a joke. It did not seem like a joke when one was part of the court or near the Imperial seat where the Emperor’s word was absolute. But beyond a radius of twenty-five to fifty miles people lived pretty much as they chose.
Then there were the villagers, most of them farmers. There probably were more of them than of any other kind. They raised their crops and their livestock, they went to the schools provided by the witch-doctors, occasionally a bright youngster would go off on a pilgrimage and never come back, and they were under the protection of the powerful but uncommitted witch-doctors.
The witch-doctors were the key to the situation, as the pilgrim analyzed it. They held power but they did not use it. They did not interfere. They helped when they were asked. They taught. They gave advice. They provided what was good for the body, good for the soil, good for the livestock, good for the mind. Maybe. But they did not interfere. They let the Emperor collect his taxes—if he could. They let people kill each other if they wanted to, love each other if that was the way their tastes inclined.
The pilgrim had never known them to lie, personally or through their teaching devices which gave answers and asked questions through some strange magic, just like a person. Occasionally both said things that were enigmatic or incomprehensible. Sometimes, later, some of these statements might make sense when he had learned something else.
The question: where did the witch-doctors get their powers? Did they, in reality, have some magic formula which brought natural forces under their command, some intercessionary power with the spirit world, if there was a spirit world.
Or, the pilgrim thought, were the witch-doctors like the Neo-Scientists? Were their powers completely natural, though beyond the scope of ordinary man, rather than supernatural? Did they manufacture and control machines?
If this was so, and the pilgrim was beginning to think that it was so, why were witch-doctors not set upon and destroyed by the Luddites and every other right-thinking person who remembered the time of starvation and the time of troubles. Both caused by the machine and the century during which it ruled the world. Why were they not killed like the occasional, aberrant Neo-Scientists who arose and had their brief day and were destroyed.
One reason: they did not glory in their machines like the Neo-Scientists; they built no monuments.
Another reason: they did not explain; they called it magic.
Magic is acceptable; science is detestable.
The pilgrim felt an excitement growing in him: this was a truth that the witch-doctors sent out pilgrims to find. Magic is acceptable; science is detestable.
There was one catch: what did the witch-doctors gain by it? The pilgrim’s excitement faded. There must be a profit; there must be a motive. Were the witch-doctors satisfied merely to do good so that others might live better lives? Did they get their return from the gratitude and admiration of the people, from their sacred positions, from the power to teach and preach? The pilgrim shook his head. Such saintliness was beyond belief. None of those motives were enough, not for him and not for any man, much less the thousands scattered in their villas across this empire and perhaps, who knows, across other lands as well, even to the mysterious Russias and the Chinas across the oceans that no one had heard from since the time of troubles.
And then the pilgrim’s elation arose again. Perhaps the answer to the question of motivation was a second truth, or a complementary part of the first truth, and when one had learned this, one had learned the truth that one became a pilgrim to find.
Because there was, in the tradition of the pilgrim itself, some kind of return. This was, the witch-doctors said, the only way to become a witch-doctor. If you became a pilgrim and learned the truth, you became a witch-doctor.
Therefore—a pilgrim is a witch-doctor’s way of making another witch-doctor, just as an egg is a chicken’s way of making another chicken. But equally as true, a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg, and isn’t therefore a witch-doctor. . . .
That was the wrong track. The question: what do witch-doctors do? They serve, said the witch-doctors. But that led back only to the village where the process began again. Do witch-doctors do anything else? Yes. They must. But if so, what—and where?
The pilgrim would have liked to pursue this line of reasoning farther, because he thought it was getting him somewhere, but the cart jerked to a halt.
“Out, pilgrim!” said the sergeant.
The pilgrim remembered another sergeant and wondered where he was now with his squad. He looked around. The city hall was an old brick and stone building. It must have been old at the time of starvation, the pilgrim thought, but it had survived the time of troubles better than newer structures, and its brick tower still ascended high above its stone front steps.
“Up! Go on up!” the sergeant said, yanking his arm. “The captain’s waiting for you.”
The pilgrim shrugged and walked up the worn steps and through two curious wrought-iron doors and up another short flight to a large room with tall windows on either side. All the windows but one had been broken many years ago and had been boarded up, but one miraculous window still admitted light. In front of its fading glory sat an officer behind an old desk, his sword laid across it still in its scabbard, scribbling away with a quill pen at a piece of paper.
The pilgrim looked around as they waited for the captain to complete his writing chore, and he noticed for the first time that the ball of witch fire had followed them into the building. It perched on a railing not far from the captain’s desk, and the captain noticed it as soon as he looked up.
He would rather not have noticed it, the pilgrim thought. He would rather have stared overbearingly at the prisoner, but he saw the witch fire first and said, “Get that out of here!”
“How would I do that, captain?” the sergeant asked.
The captain was thin and red-haired and choleric. “Then get yourself out of here.”
“This pilgrim is pretty good with a quarterstaff,” the sergeant said. “Beat up a mercenary pretty good with it.”
“Well, he doesn’t have a quarterstaff now, does he?” the captain asked.
“What I meant, captain, was he might be good with other things, his fists, maybe.”
“I can take care of anything he has in the way of exotic skills,” the captain said. “Get out.”
As soon as the sergeant had departed, the captain said, “The quality of non-commissioned officers you get these days is appalling. You’ll have to pay a fine for brawling in the streets, you know. That will be two gold pieces.”
“Which you will pocket,” the pilgrim said. “Forget all that, captain. I’m on a special mission for the Emperor.”
“And who might you be,” the captain drawled, “to be doing a special mission for the Emperor?”
“My name is Leonard Kelley.”
“Head of the Emperor’s secret police,” the captain completed for him. “And what is the nature of your mission, pilgrim?”
“That’s my business, and the Emperor Bartlett’s.”
“I suppose you have identification.”
“Of course. In my belt.” He fumbled beneath his clothing for the belt, undid the buttons on it, and drew out nothing. He fumbled around in the empty pocket, thinking that he had not looked into it for several months, remembering the morning he found the belt beside his blanket. “I’ve lost it. Someone’s stolen it.”
“You’ve lost it,” the captain said, resignation in his voice. “Pay the two gold pieces.” “I can give you corroborative information about the Court—”
“I’ve never been to Court, pilgrim. It would be amusing to see you trying to impress me, but I don’t have the time. Pay the two gold pieces.”
“Why would I try to make you believe a lie that could so easily be disproved?”
“People tell me the damnedest things, pilgrim. I’ve given up trying to guess why they do it. Pay the two gold pieces.”
“Pilgrims have no money.”
“I was afraid so. Why does that absurd sergeant keep bringing you beggars in here? Sergeant!”
The sergeant trotted into the room followed by four of his squad.
“Give this pretentious pilgrim a caning—five should be enough—no, make it ten. And then throw him out.”
For a moment the pilgrim thought of making a fight of it, but he thought again and decided against it. He shrugged his shoulders and went with the sergeant to a dingy cellar. It once had been something more than a cellar. It had had carved wood panels on the walls, but most of the panels had been wrenched away. Now there were cuffs fastened to the wall.
Two of the soldiers slipped his hands into the cuffs and fastened them. The sergeant removed his robe and tore his shirt down his back. He stepped back and chose a sturdy cane from a basket of them. He made it whistle through the air in preparation. Then, counting aloud in a voice like a grunt, he began to apply the cane to the pilgrim’s back. Against his will, the pilgrim grunted, too, as the cane landed and then moaned and before the tenth was applied howled a little.
The soldiers released him from the cuffs and the sergeant handed him his robe. Gingerly the pilgrim adjusted it over his bleeding shoulders and stepped out into the street.
“Remember,” the sergeant said. “No brawling.”
The pilgrim thought he would remember.
The streets were dark. Curfew had rung while he had been in the captain’s office, and the streets were deserted as well. The pilgrim shivered, and the involuntary movement made his back hurt anew. He had to get away quickly, he knew, but which way and where?
“Pilgrim,” someone said. “Kelley!”
The pilgrim started and turned his whole body to face a particularly impenetrable area of darkness.
“It’s me, Susannah.” The girl came out of the darkness into the patch of light cast from the window above, where a candle flickered and the captain, no doubt, was working on his interminable reports which one day, he hoped, would get him to Court.
“You did take the identification,” the pilgrim said.
“Yes, and then I had no way to get it back without telling you, and I didn’t want to do that. Anyway, I thought a captain in the Emperor’s secret police ought to have a taste of the Emperor’s justice.”
The pilgrim eased his shoulders into a more comfortable position. “I have,” he said ruefully.
Susannah made a crooning sound and moved forward as if to remove his robe.
“Never mind. We’ve no time. In about fifteen minutes the captain is going to send his troops after me.” “But you’ve already been punished.”
“He is going to reflect that I may be Captain Leonard Kelley after all. And he is going to consider that I will remember him when I get back to those who know me. And he will suspect that I will see he is taken care of in the nicest possible way. Rather than take that chance, he would rather kill me now.”
“Follow me,” Susannah said, and she led him through dark streets, between ruins, and up the beginning slope of a hill.
In the distance, as they climbed, were the sounds of a horse stomping and a cart rattling as it moved forward and back and a distant voice shouting imprecations. “He was not a very bright officer,” the pilgrim said. “It was more like twenty-five minutes.”
“There’s a little village on the other side of this hill,” Susannah said.
“That’s the first place the soldiers would look for us.”
“Of course. But right up on top of this hill, where according to legend there once was a university which was burned at the start of the Lowbrow Rebellion, is the villa of a witch-doctor.”
“And you think he will take us in?”
“Why not?”
“The captain of Emperor Bartlett’s secret police?”
“A pilgrim. We all have pasts.”
“Not like mine. I’ve even burned witches.”
“The witch-doctors always have known who you are and what you want, right from the first moment you started studying with the witch-doctor near Denver.”
“And what did I want?”
“To find out as much as possible about the witch-doctors so the Emperor could use their powers to enlarge his empire.”
The pilgrim made a sound of dismay or humor.
“True?” Susannah said.
“True enough,” he admitted.
“And now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “five seen many ways of life, and there is much to be said for each of them.” “Anyway,” Susannah said, “we’re not going to the villa. He’s gone.”
“Where then?”
“Why?”
“Why else? To pray.” And without further conversation she led the pilgrim up the hill to his salvation.
VII
The villa was identical with all the others, low, sprawling, lighted, potent. Behind it was the domed chapel, standing like a silo in the night.
Susannah led him to it, for the pilgrim had a strange reluctance to enter the building. She urged him through the doorway. There was nothing new about it. Both of them had entered similar chapels in other places at other times, separately. Susannah pressed a button that closed the door behind them.
“Well, they can’t get at us; that’s for sure,” the pilgrim said. “But we can’t get out either, and they’re likely to post a guard out there until we get hungry enough to come out.”
“I think the truth is here, somewhere, if we can only discover it,” Susannah said.
She motioned him up a ladder to the meditation room. They sat in the two padded chairs and meditated.
“A pilgrim is a witch-doctor’s way of making another witch-doctor,” the pilgrim muttered.
“What did you say?”
The pilgrim repeated it. “Just something I thought of.”
“What else did you think of?”
“Why are witch-doctors?”
“Yes,” Susannah said. “Go on.”
“What do they do besides serve others? Because they must do something. They do something human. Right?”
“Or witch-doctorish.”
“That’s the same thing, a kind of special humanness. And where do they do it? Everywhere that we have seen them they live alone. Perhaps somewhere else on this world they are all witch-doctors together, and they do something.”
“Something wonderful.”
“Or something terrible.”
“Never.”
“If we have seen all there is to see—there may be stranger ways of living, but we must think that what we have seen on our travels represents what is typical—then the witch-doctors must do what they do somewhere not on this world.”
“Yes,” Susannah said.
“We have found the truth.”
“We have found the truth.”
“They say,” Susannah said, “that when a pilgrim has found the truth he should press the button in the meditation room of a chapel, and if he has truly found it he will ascend to heaven. And if he has not found it he will die.”
“That is what they say.”
“Shall I press it?”
“Press it!”
Susannah pressed the button in front of her. As she did so, a jolt rocked them back in their chairs. Metal straps closed around their arms and legs and waists and pulled them tightly into the chairs.
But they were pulled tighter still by some other force. It tugged at all the parts of their body, their cheeks, eyeballs, face, arms, legs, inner organs. . . . And it tugged and tugged for an eternity. Suddenly eternity was over, and they floated in their straps, sickeningly free of pressures but oppressed by a new sensation of falling.
Then the force tugged them back once more into the cushioned chairs for another eternity and released them once more and they floated again and they vomited. The vomit floated in globules in the air about them.
“Congratulations,” said a voice without a body, a voice which sounded a little like the voice of their witch-doctor, whoever he might be, and a little like the voice of God. “You have found the truth, or by accident you have placed yourself in great jeopardy. The next few minutes and hours will determine whether you will find what you have been seeking or you will be dead.”
The metal cuffs released them from their seats, and they, too, floated in the air. It was a bit like the gymnastic exercises he had performed in the witch-doctor’s school.
“You now are in orbit around the earth, which means you are out in space where there is no air, nothing to breathe, no food, nothing to eat, and either no heat or too much heat, and you will freeze or burn.
“In the lockers around this room, which now are open, is equipment which you must use if you are to survive. If you have an unconquerable fear of machines or an unreasonable prejudice against them, you are doomed. Your life depends upon the proper use of these machines. You also must depend upon what my voice tells you, for you have only two other referrents for this kind of environment: your schooling and your native and conditioned adaptability.”
Susannah and the pilgrim were becoming a little better accustomed to the novel sensation of free fall. The globs of rejected food and fluids, however, were a nuisance as they brushed into them and the globs spread over their bodies. Susannah found an open container and lid in one of the lockers and chased the larger globs around the room until she had most of them captured. She discovered that if she kept the container in forward motion the contents would remain at the bottom but if she forgot they would float out again. The pilgrim found a cloth and swatted at the remainder until the air was reasonably clear. Then container and cloth were pushed into a receptacle marked “wastes.”
