Now Then (v1.0) - John Brunner, page 8
Her voice trailed away, and her eyes searched Faulkner’s face in puzzlement. He couldn’t answer her. His teeth were suddenly chattering with a rattle like a Geiger counter.
IMPRINT OF CHAOS
I
He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.
Still, there was nothing to choose as regards rigidity between his particular set of laws and those others. And one rule by which he had very strictly to abide was that at set seasons he should overlook that portion of the All which had been allotted to him as his individual responsibility.
Accordingly, on the day after the conjunction of four significant planets in that vicinity, he set forth on a journey which was to be at once the same as and yet different from those many which had preceded it.
It had been ordained that at this time, though not at any other time, he should keep to commonplace roads, and with goodwill enough—he was not the kind to rail against necessity—he so arranged his route that it wound and turned and curved through all those places where he had responsibility, and ended within a short distance of where it had begun. It ended, to be precise, in the city called Ryovora—that place of all places in his domains where people had their heads screwed on the right way.
He did this with an excellent reason. In Ryovora, at the end of his journey, he could be certain beyond reasonable doubt that he could look on his work and feel pleased.
Therefore, on a sunny morning when there were birds singing and few clouds in a sky filled with the scent of flowers, he began to trudge along a dusty road towards his first destination.
That was a great black city upreared around a high tower, which was called by its inhabitants Acromel, the place where honey itself was bitter. It was sometimes a cause of mild astonishment—even to him of the many names and the single nature—that this most difficult of cities should be located within a few hours’ walking of Ryovora. None the less …
Before him, the road began to zig-zag on the slopes of a hill, between grey-leaved bushes. A local wind raised dust-devils among the bushes and stamped out the footprints of those who had gone before. It was under that hill, he remembered, that he had incarcerated Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes, to whom memories of yesterday were hateful; some small power remained to Laprivan, and he perforce had to use it to wipe yesterday’s traces away.
He took his staff in his hand—it was made of light, curdled with a number of interesting forces—and rapped once on an outcrop of bare rock at the side of the pathway. “Laprivan!” he cried. “Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes!”
And the dust-devils ceased their whirling. Resentfully, they sank back to earth, so that the dust of which they were composed again covered the bared roots of the grey-leaved bushes. Most travelers assumed that the leaves were gray from the dust of passage, or from their nature; it was not so.
Laprivan heaved in his underground prison, and the road shook. Cracks wide enough to have swallowed a farm-cart appeared in its surface. From them, a great voice boomed.
“What do you want with me, today of all days? Have you not had enough even now of tormenting me?”
“I do not torment you,” was the calm reply. “It is your memory that torments you.”
“Leave me be, then,” said the great voice sullenly. “Let me go on wiping away that memory.”
“As you wish, so be it,” the traveler answered, and gestured with his staff. The cracks in the road closed again; the dust-devils re-formed, and when he looked back from the crest of the hill his footsteps had already been expunged.
The road wound on, empty, towards Acromel. For some distance before it actually reached the city it ran contiguous with the river called Metamorphia, a fact known to rather few people, because although it seemed that this was the same river that poured in under the high black battlements of the city, it was not the same, for 70 good and sufficient cause. It was the nature of the river Metamorphia to change the nature of things, and consequently it changed its own nature after flowing a certain distance.
He paused on a stone wall overlooking the dark stream and meditatively regarded objects that floated past. Some of them had been fishes, perhaps; others were detritus of the banks—leaves, branches, stones. Those which had been stones continued to float, of course; those which had been of a floating nature sank.
He broke a piece of stone from the crumbling parapet of the wall, and cast it down. The change it underwent was not altogether pleasant to witness.
He raised his eyes after a while and saw that there was a girl on the other bank, who had come forward out of a clump of trees while he was sunk in contemplation. She was extremely beautiful. Moreover,’ she had taken no pains to hide that fact, for she was dressed exclusively in her long, lovely hair.
“You are also aware of the nature of the river,” she said after regarding him for a while.
“I am aware that the nature of the river is to change the nature of things, and that consequently it changes its own nature.”
“Come down with me, then, and bathe in it,” said the girl.
“Why should you wish your nature changed? You are beautiful.”
“I am beautiful!” cried the girl passionately. “But I am without sense!”
‘Then you are Lorega of Acromel, and your fame has spread far.”
“I am Lorega of Acromel, as you say.” She fixed him with her honey-colored eyes, and shrugged the garb of her hair more closely around her. “And how do men call you?”
“I have many names, and one nature. You may call me Mazda, or anything you please.”
“Why have you no single name if, as you claim, you have but one nature?”
“The name matters little if the nature does not change.”
She laughed scornfully. “You speak in empty but resounding phrases, Mazda! If your nature is unchangeable, then let me see you descend into the water of this river!”
“I did not say that,” said the traveler peaceably. “I did not say my nature was unchangeable.”
‘Then you are a coward. None the less, come down with me and bathe in this river.”
“I shall not. And it would be well for you to think on this, Lorega of Acromel: that if you are without sense, your intention to bathe in Metamorphia and thus change your nature is also without sense.”
“That is too deep for me,” said Lorega unhappily, and a tear stole down her satiny cheek. “I cannot reason as wise persons do. Therefore let me change my nature 1”
“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveler. And at that moment a great piece of the bank detached itself and fell with a huge splashing into the water. A wave of this water soaked Lorega from head to foot, and she underwent, as did the earth of the bank the moment it entered the river, changes.
Thoughtfully, the traveler turned to continue his journey towards Acromel. Behind him, the welkin rang with the miserable cries of what had formerly been Lorega. But he was bound by certain laws. He did not look back.
Before the huge black gate of the city, which was a hundred feet high and a hundred feet wide, two men in shabby clothes were fighting with quarterstaffs. The traveler leaned on his own staff and watched them batter at each other for fully a quarter of an hour before they both found themselves too weak to continue, and had to stand panting and glaring at one another to recover their breath.
“What is the quarrel between you?” said the traveler then.
“Little man in black, it concerns us, not you,” said the nearer of the two. “Go your way in peace.”
“Wait!” said the other. “Ask him first if he likewise is bent on the same errand I”
“A good point!” said the first, and raised his great cudgel menacingly towards the traveler. “Speak, you!”
“First I must know what your errand was, before I can say if mine is the same, or not,” the traveler pointed out.
“A good point,” said the first, who threatened him.
“Know that I am Ripil of the village called Masergon-”
“And I,” interrupted the other, “am Tolex of the village called Wyve. Last week I set forth from my father’s house, he having six other sons older than I-”
“As did I!” Ripil broke in. “Exactly as did I! I am Ripil, stranger—you will have good cause to remember that name.”
“All men will!” said Tolex contemptuously. “They will remember your name to laugh at it, and when boys scribble it on walls with charcoal old women will spit on the ground before the wall!”
Ripil scowled at him. “Booby! Possessed of unbelievable effrontery! Go your way before it is too late, and the people of this city hang you in chains before the altar!”
“Your errand, then,” said the traveler, just in time to forestall a renewal of the fighting.
Tolex gave him a huge but humorless grin. “Why, it’s all so simple! This idiot called Ripil came hither thinking to make his fortune, dethrone Duke Vaul, and claim the hand of Lorega of Acromel—as though a dunder-headed village boy could do more than dream of such glories.”
“And your own errand?”
“Why, I have come to make my fortune and be chosen as heir to Duke Vaul, when naturally I shall be given Lorega’s hand.”
And the traveler, not unexpectedly, burst out laughing. In a moment, Tolex began to laugh also, thinking that it was Ripil’s foolishness which had caused the joke, and Ripil, his face black like a storm-cloud, caught up his quarterstaff and began to belabor him anew.
The traveler left them to it, and went forward into the city.
II
In this city called Acromel there was a temple, crowning the black tower about which the city clustered like a single onyx on a pillar of agate. In this temple, before the idol of the god Lacrovas-Pellidin-Agshad-Agshad, Duke Vaul yawned behind his hand.
‘Take her,” he said to the chief priest, nodding his large black-bearded head to his left. The priest bowed to the hard slippery floor and signaled his minions. In a moment the consort who had shared Vaul’s life for fifteen years, and until that moment had also shared his throne, was 73 hanging from the gallows in front of the altar, her life’s blood trickling on to Agshad’s hands outstretched like a cup to receive it.
And still that was not enough.
Duke Vaul knitted his brows until his forehead was creased like a field trenched to grow vegetables, and drummed with his thick fingers on the arm of his ebony chair. He looked at the idol.
This way, he saw Agshad, mouth open, eyes closed, hands outstretched and cupped with blood filling them. On the left, Pellidin, who shared Agshad’s body but not his head or his limbs, was portrayed wringing the life from three persons of indeterminate sex—indeterminate, because Pellidin’s vast hand had compressed their three bodies into a gelatinous mess and left only their legs and arms sticking out like the legs of a beetle. On the right, Lacrovas held a sword in his two hands, and behind, Agshad—the second Agshad—kept his hands clasped together in an attitude of devotion. Duke Vaul always preferred to have his throne placed on this side of Agshad.
Below the dais on which his throne was set, priests and acolytes by the hundred, including sacrificers, men expert in every art of human butchery, wove their lives of movement into the correct magical patterns. Their chanting ascended eerily towards the domed roof of the temple, along with the stink of candles made from the fat of those who had hung earlier in the chains before the altar.
But if even his own consort did not suffice, what would?
On impulse, Duke Vaul signaled to the second chief priest,’ and pointed a finger at the chief priest. ‘Take him,” he said.
And that was no good, either.
Accordingly, he sent out the temple guard into the city at half an hour past noon of that day, and the guardsmen set about gathering the citizens into the yard before the temple. If it wasn’t a matter of quality, reasoned Duke Vaul, then it might perhaps be a matter of quantity. The second priest—now, of course, the chief priest by right of succession—had been consulted, and had given it as his considered opinion that a hundred all at once must have the desired effect. Duke Vaul, to be on the safe side, had ordained that a thousand should be brought to the temple, and had set carpenters and metalsmiths to work on the chain-jingling gallows to accommodate them.
The temple guardsmen worked with a will, all the better because they feared the lot might fall on them when Duke Vaul had used up his supply of ordinary citizens. Among those whom they brought was a small man in black clothing, who seemed to be consumed with uncontrollable laughter.
His laughter, in fact, was so great that it became infectious, and Duke Vaul noticed it as he looked down from his ebony throne across the floor of the temple. He rose to his feet with a bellow.
“Who is that idiot who laughs in the temple?” his bull voice rang out. ‘This is a serious matter, fellow! Chief priest, fetch him forth and make him stand before me.”
In a little while the black-clad traveler was brought, and made to stand on the floor beneath the dais. He bowed willingly enough when the rough hand of a guardsmen struck him behind the head, but the merry twinkle did not go from his eyes, and this peculiarity struck Duke Vaul at once.
He began to muse about the possibility of sacrificing one who did not take the Quadruple God seriously, and after a while spoke through the tangle of his beard.
“How do men call you, foolish one?” he boomed.
“I have many names, but one nature.”
“And are you laughing at these holy matters?”
“No.”
‘Then are you laughing at me?” thundered the Duke, heaving himself forward on his throne so that the boards of the dais creaked and squealed. His eyes flashed terribly.
“No! I laugh at the foolishness of mankind,” said the black-clad traveler.
“And in what way is this foolishness manifest?”
“In every way,” the small man said, and told the story of Tolex and Ripil, fighting before the gate of the city.
But Duke Vaul did not find this funny at all. He commanded that the temple guard should at once go in search of these two, and fumed while they were brought. When they arrived, however, it was as corpses that they were laid on the temple floor.
“Mighty Duke,” said the guardsmen respectfully, bowing their heads as one, and then let their spokesman continue.
“We found these two clasped dying in each other’s arms. Each bore one bloody cudgel; each has a broken skull.”
“Throw them into the river,” said Duke Vaul curtly, and resumed converse with the black-clad traveler.
“You arrogate to yourself the right to laugh at man’s foolishness;” he said, and gave a wicked grin. “Then tell me this: are you yourself so wise?”
“Alas, yes,” said the traveler. “I have but one nature.” “Then you can do what all my wisest men have failed to do,” the Duke said triumphantly. “See you this idol?”
“I could hardly fail to see it. It is a considerable work of—art.”
“It is said that a way exists to endow it with life, and that it will then set forth to lay waste the enemies of this city. In every way we have tried to bestow life on it; we have given it blood, which is life, from every kind and class of person. Even my consort, who but a few minutes ago sat on this throne at my side, now hangs with her throat gashed on that chain-jingling gallows before the altar. And still the idol will not come to life. We need it, for our enemies are abroad in every corner of the land; from Ryovora to the ends of the earth, they plot our downfall and destruction.”
“Some of what you say is true,” nodded the traveler. “Some? Only some? What then is false? Tell me, and it had better be the truth, or else you shall go to join that stupid chief priest who finally tired my patience! You can see what became of him!”
The traveler glanced up and nodded. It was perfectly obvious, what with the second mouth—the red-oozing one—the priest now had in his throat.
“Well, first of all,” he said, “there is a way to bring the idol to life. And second, yes, it will then bring down the enemies of the city. But third, they do not hide in far corners of the land. They are here in the city.”
“Say you so?” Duke Vaul frowned. “You may very well be right, for, knowing what a powerful weapon we wield against them—or will wield, when the idol comes to life—they may well be trying to interfere with our experiments. Good! Go on!”
“Do you wish me to bring the idol to life?”
“Can you do that? Then do it! But remember—if you fail, a worse fate awaits you than my chief priest suffered!”
“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveler wearily. All the laughter had gone out of him. With his staff he made a single pass in the air before the altar, and the idol moved.
Agshad in the attitude of devotion did not open his clasped hands. But Lacrovas swung his sword, and Duke Vaul’s bearded head sprang from his shoulders. Pellidin let fall the three crushed persons from his hand and seized the headless body. That he crushed instead, and the cupped hands of Agshad in the attitude of accepting sacrifice filled with the blood of the Duke, squeezed forth like juice from a ripe fruit.
And after that the idol stepped down from the altar and began to stamp on the priests.
Thoughtfully, having made his escape during the confusion, the traveler took to the road again.
Perhaps there would be nothing worse during this journey than what he had seen in Acromel. Perhaps there would be something a million times worse. It was to establish that that he undertook his journeyings.
