Annals of Klepsis Read online

  “You are not an ordinary seaman,” I said.

  “I was once, Long John. Then, three years ago, I said to a friend, ‘I’d give my right hand to find a new life and get out of this rut.’ ‘I know how you can give your left leg and find a new life and get out of this rut,’ he said. ‘Really, I have an item about it here.’ So I gave my left leg and became a peg-leg to get my passage paid to Klepsis, because I was tired of being ordinary. And Klepsis isn’t an ordinary world. It is often grotesque, but change is easy here. Situations develop faster here than on any world except Camiroi. In a prehistoric world like this, things may happen without any preparation at all. For instance, we now sail into a little area where it is raining without clouds. The cloud buildup is skipped. Clouds are only warehouses for holding water anyhow, and why should the water not fall at once when the proper spirit moves it?”

  And it did rain on us without clouds, for a distance of about two sea miles as we sailed obliquely through the meta-storm. Yes, the weather appeared to be quite offhand about things on Klepsis, irresponsible even. But the people were even more so.

  Friendships and enmities could be formed quickly and with no preparation at all. The natural scenery could change instantly, and the artificial scenery (that of human construction or arrangement) was subject to sudden change and invention. For instance, we now came abruptly to the Regions of Manors or Mansions or Castles. We had just rounded the headland of one continent, and the buildings made an incredibly ornate shore on the next continent. Oh, what wealth! What decay! What new decay still under construction!

  “Oh yes, you have never come onto this vista before?” Prince Franco the Outcast, our shipowner, said to me. “It is elegant decay, is it not?”

  “A thing we have often said about you, Prince,” the seaman Jerome Whitewater said with easy impertinence.

  “They are like the Old-South Plantation Houses of the former Confederate States of America of Gaea-Earth,” I said. “And at the same time they are Palm Beach, they are Newport, they are Money Manors. They are the epitome of the nouveau riche. More than that: it’s as if they had been nouveau riche for two hundred years, growing brasher all the time.”

  “Not bad, not bad,” the unordinary seaman Jerome Whitewater commented. “And you have the two-hundred-year time era almost exactly right.”

  “They are like the houses of British dukes and Italian princes,” I said, “and they are set in gardens that are a mixture of the high English and the high Italian. They are Castles in Spain, especially in Estremadura. On Camiroi they would be symbols of inferiority and bad taste. But here they represent a taste that is taken in giant bites. They are like the ancient Haik Castles in high Armenia, also on Gaea-Earth, castles so huge that each of them, sticking its head out of the snow, is mistaken for the remnants of Noah’s Ark, each of those castles at the head of a mountain valley, each of them formerly drawing tribute from that entire valley.”

  “Not bad, not good,” commented our princely shipowner, that man with the compelling look and the peculiar authority in his voice. “We come now to the finest and largest of these Haik Castles, Mr. Tyrone, that in which I was born and raised, the one that shall be my own when I come into my kingdom. Seaman Whitewater, take charge of the landing, and then represent yourself as the owner and captain of this ship. I myself will become ‘vague’ for a little while.

  “And you four ship’s officers, Terpsichore Callagy, Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally, Long John Tong Tyrone, Conchita O’Brian, let me explain what I mean by becoming ‘vague.’ I will tell it in my leisurely fashion, for there is no hurry about it. I am a lord of time, and I will not allow there to be a hurry.

  “When human male twins are born on Klepsis, one of them will usually have what is either the gift or the weakness of becoming ‘vague.’ This is so, no matter what the original descent of the twins, whether their ancestors were from Gaea or Astrobe or Analos or wherever. So this trait, though there are traces of it on the original worlds, must be partly borrowed from the ambient here; and I suspect that my ancestor Christopher Brannagan had something to do with putting it into the ambient, so that others might have the gifts that he had somehow acquired. To be able to go vague is really to be a sort of biological freemartin, but how does such biology get into a twinned person here? How, if it wouldn’t get into him if he were born on one of the other planets? I believe that the trait turns up in one out of thirty thousand male twins on Gaea-Earth, and in three out of four sets of male twins here.

  “Some of the animals on World Abounding are able to go vague, and we know that father-and-founder Brannagan brought many sorts of plants from World Abounding to Klepsis. There is a sort of ghostliness about a twin who can go vague. And the vague twin will always outlive the normal twin, a fact that gives me pleasure in my own case. But will a vague twin outlive a normal twin by two hundred years? Do you believe that possible?”

  “No,” I said, and the other three ship’s officers also said no. We were in a little captain’s room off the wheelhouse.

  “Christopher Begorra Brannagan, the founder of Klepsis, was twins,” said the authoritative ex-felon and prince. “That is the most loosely kept secret on Klepsis. There were two of him, so it’s said. But even after these two hundred years, it remains neither verified nor unverified. In the Brannagan case, the special archemodal case (for Brannagan was born on Gaea-Earth and not on Klepsis), the two twins were essentially the same person. It may be so with all these special male twins born on Klepsis. In a monumental grave by our landing that we come to very soon, the bones of Christopher Brannagan may be seen in their coffin through its clear onyx glass. And all the bones of the left leg are there, along with all the other bones of the body. But the perhaps-ghost of Brannagan lives in the same monumental grave, and it is the ghost that has a wooden left leg, substantial and unghostly.”

  “May he be blessed by all peg-legged and deep-colored Irishmen forever,” black-faced Gold Coast O’Mally said piously and seriously.

  “Sometimes I sit on the stones with him in the tomb and talk to him, to the ghost of him,” the Prince said. “I give him Bandicott cheroots of hallucinatory weed to smoke, and he smokes them: and they are smoked. I question whether a ghost needs hallucinatory weed to hallucinate more than he is already doing, but he likes to smoke them. I give him Tarshish Gin Slings to drink, and he drinks them: and they are drunk. Can a ghost consume things of substance? He knows who I am, who everybody is. He knows that I am his great-great-great-grandson. He insists that I am so in the true bloodline, though in the conventional accounts of the family I am so only through the interlopers John Summers and David Ravel in the first and fourth generations of Klepsis.”

  As we came into the channel to the docks, there was one of the buoys with a scarlet-on-yellow message printed, “Something good will happen to you today.” But the next buoy had the painted message, “Something not necessarily good will happen to you tonight.” Providential buoys, but were they to be believed?

  “What is the name of the biggest house that we come to now,” I asked, “the one in which you say you were born and raised, Prince?” I was impressed by the height of the building, by the six very tall watchtowers, and by the other tower still taller and stranger than the six. I was impressed by the Italian gardens with their water pastures and their herds of hippopotami, and by the English gardens with their herds of elephants. I was impressed by the violet and lavender and purple and red fields, which I knew were colored by their growing “Summertime” or “My God What Grapes!” grapes. No castle ever offered a more beautiful prospect from the sea.

  “It is Ravel-Brannagan Castle,” the Prince and ex-felon said. “Gaze on it. Let yourself enter into it. Let it enter into you. You are the historian, Long John. Ravel-Brannagan Castle contains all the history that there is on Klepsis, and it isn’t in an easy form. This Castle is Klepsis. Everything else on this planet is extension of it.”

  We were nuzzling into a little quay. A large right whale was berth
ed in the slip next to us. It was sedated and grinning and happy. It would be the main dish at the gala that night.

  “What is your own official name, strange Prince?” I asked the shipowner.

  “Oh, I’m Prince Franco Ravel-O’Grogan-Brannagan the Outcast, First Earl of Klepsis, Grand Duke of Tarshish, Honorary Citizen of Gaea, Astrobe, Camiroi, and Analos, sometime student of Georgetown University on Gaea and of the Collegium Omnium on Analos. I am the twin brother of Prince Henry Ravel the Pirate, who is now the illicit ruler of Klepsis. I am under sentence of death by my brother. And now I will lay me down on this cot in this little room off the wheelhouse, and I will go vague. Leave my clothes just as they are on the cot here. I will go out from them, and later I will come back into them. There are persons who do not mind returning from vague naked in the midst of crowds; but they are vulgar, and I am not.”

  The Prince did lie down on the cot. Then he disappeared from out of his clothes, and they went slack and saggy on his departure from them. Prince Franco had disappeared. That is what he had meant by “going vague.”

  “Look, look,” Terpsichore cried out in delight. “It is Queen Zenobia, the Barbarian Queen. Who says there is no art on Klepsis? She is sheer primitive and barbaric art!”

  A party came on board our ship as soon as we were tied up at the little quay. This party was led by the most beautiful woman on Klepsis. And how could one be sure that she was the most beautiful of them all? I had a new and local gold coin in my pocket, and I looked at it. Yes, she was the one. Her face was on all the ten-thaler gold coins of Klepsis, and her nomenclature, “Princess Angela Gilmartin Ravel, the Most Beautiful Woman on Klepsis,” was on all of them too. She was the most beautiful woman because the coins said that she was. That’s how we knew it. But it seemed to me that she had a little more class than a “Queen Zenobia the Barbarian.”

  “She looks about eighteen years old,” I said to Jerome Whitewater, who was seeing to the landing as well as playing the roles of captain and shipowner.

  “It is all those baths in hippopotamus milk that keep her young and glowing,” Jerome said. “But she is about eighteen, in Klepsis years. That would make her about twenty-six in the years of Gaea-Earth.”

  “Hello, Whitewater,” Princess Angela said as she came on ship. “I am glad that you are working for Prince Franco once more. Where is he? I knew that he had bought the ship and was on it. A wing-weary parley bird told me so. He has owned this ship before. I have been on it before. Franco, Franco, are you in the little captain’s room here behind the wheelhouse? We must plot together. It is all yours if only you will reach out for it. It really falls of itself. Franco, my secret love, your clothes are here but you yourself have gone vague. How could you, when you know that it breaks my heart to miss you? Franco, Franco, you know that Prince Henry is only my husband and you are all the world to me. And you have never touched me. This must be settled. I swear that it will be. After the coming encounter, there will be no more of Prince Henry and his horrible cruelties. There will be only one of the twinship left alive, weird yourself!”

  THIRD CANTO

  Oh, Hospitality Most Strong!

  “I am not sure that you are welcome here,” Prince Henry Ravel the Pirate was saying to the bunch of us who had come off the ship The Dina O’Grogan. “All of you are creatures or partisans of my despicable brother False-Prince Franco the Outcast. His smell is all over the bunch of you. I have been wondering what I would supply for additional entertainment at the slave sale and gala that I am hosting tonight. My problem is solved. The public execution of the sixteen of you will be that additional entertainment. Sixteen is a good square and solid number, and sixteen executions will allow me room for creativity and innovation.”

  “You will not do this, Prince Henry! Curse your whole damned planet if you do!” Conchita O’Brian cried out in sudden fury. “There is the flag of the Ambassador from All the Planets flying over your Castle, and that indicates that he is present under your roof. And you have signed every sort of treaty in favor of civilized behavior. And besides, the Hospitality of Klepsis is an institution that you may not violate. The blood of all your hospitable ancestors would boil in your veins if you would do so. Now, you will assign sixteen good rooms to the sixteen of us, out of the six hundred guest rooms that are in that Ravel-Brannagan Castle yonder. And you will give us everything that we ask for. We have come to be guests in this princely house of Klepsis. Treat us as guests. Have us shown to our rooms at once.”

  Prince Henry looked exactly like his brother, Prince Franco. Only the disposition was different. I’d have believed they were the same person if it had not been for Prince Franco’s recent talk about his being a twin.

  “Peg-leg girl with a false moniker,” Prince Henry said furiously to Conchita, “I know the homely anecdotes of my ancestors, and you know them not. Each of us of my line has broken the hospitality a few times, out of anger or out of irony, or just for the plain truculence of it. The blood of my ancestors has boiled in my veins many times, and I still live. Not to your rooms will I have you shown, but to your room, to one room only for the sixteen of you.”

  And then this Prince Henry turned and spoke to a servant: “Show them into the strong room, into the strongest room of them all, called the Whispering Room, though I never knew why. Sometimes I hear screams of people long since dead coming out of that room, but my ears do not bend low enough to hear whispers. Use whatever force you need to put them into that strong room.”

  We were immediately surrounded by a crowd of husky servants. Three of them took each of us, one for each of our arms and one to follow after with an electric cattle prod. We put up only sporadic resistance and generally went along with them easily, all of us except a very tall and strong seaman named Sparaticus. Ah, but they put six men on each of his arms, and behind him went three men with a cattle prod so heavy that the three of them could barely carry it. “It is not a cattle prod, it is an elephant prod,” one of those tough men said in answer to a question from the seaman Fairbridge Exendine. “And this elephant of a man will learn to step lively when it is behind him.”

  We were taken through a giant cellar of Ravel-Brannagan Castle to a still lower cellar. We were herded into a large enough iron room there (crowding was the one thing we could not complain of), and the iron door and darkness swung shut behind us. Then we heard bolt after bolt slammed into its cylinder, and lock after heavy lock being turned against us. It was as dark in there as midnight, midnight on Gaea-Earth, which is the only one of the worlds that has only one sun and one moon.

  Among the sixteen of us locked into that room were the four new visitors to Klepsis:

  Terpsichore Callagy, who was into art.

  Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally, who was into gold and treasure maps that showed the way to buried gold.

  Long John Tong Tyrone (myself), who am into history.

  Conchita O’Brian, who said that she was into coded technology (but I had already begun to suspect that “coded technology” was only a code for what she was really into).

  And then, with us in our lockup, were the twelve seamen from the ship The Dina O’Grogan:

  Jerome Whitewater, a peg-leg who was clearly a partisan of Prince Franco.

  Otis Landshark, who was an adventurer from the Trader Planet Apateon.

  Kwong Ti, a Sino who was born right here on Klepsis.

  Karl-the-Great Orka, who was a treacherous man from Astrobe.

  Bartolomo Portuguese, a pseudonymous man from Far Tarshish and other places.

  Hektor Lafcadio, the “Greek God” from World Abounding (Aphthonia). Hektor looked as if he had been carved heroically out of ruddy-tan marble, and he also talked as if he were, which is to say that he didn’t talk very much.

  Kate Blithespirit, the “Amazon” from Camiroi, though she was not at all typical of that very intellectual planet. She was really too blithe for it.

  Fairbridge Exendine, the penny philosopher from the Trader Planet Emporion.

/>   Frank Shea, a peg-legged black man from the planet Gaea-Earth.

  Sebastian Jamaica, another Klepsis native.

  Sparaticus, a giant escaped slave from Far Tarshish.

  Hogson Roadapple, an undistinguished person from Hokey Planet.

  If that is not twelve of them, then I have forgotten some. There was a lot of varied experience among the bunch of us, and probably there were reserves of real talent.

  “We are really a crosscut of all types,” Terpsichore ventured to say.

  “Aye,” Bartolomo Portuguese gave her the answer. “We are a crosscut, from the small end of the log. If our execution is to be the added entertainment feature of the slave sale, I’ll bet it will be good entertainment at least. I’ve been in death cells before, and I’ve been dragged out of them to my execution before. And in both of those cases I put on a memorable show. I’m well-voiced, and the proper words and rants are given to me in my hour. It was sort of an anticlimax in each case when my execution was changed to marooning-without-hope-of-escape on a desert world. I never stay marooned for very long.”

  “Water is rising about us here in the darkness,” said Hektor Lafcadio the Greek God in a small and fearful voice. He was called the Greek God because of his beautiful and heroic appearance. But that appearance was now hidden by the darkness, and his voice was not at all heroic. “We’ll be drowned here without ado.”

  “No, we will not be,” the seaman Otis Landshark gave the opinion. “There would be no entertainment for the multitudes for us to drown here in the darkness. We will be worried and tortured here with much ado among ourselves. And then we will be led out to give our entertainment.”

  “Talk less and listen more, all of you,” Conchita O’Brian told us. “This stone strong room with its iron reinforcing is the perfect sounding fork for everything that goes on in the Castle and on its whole estate. Listen!”