I felt the weight of the cold dark misery of that place come down over me, and wondered how it must affect those who were not protected, as I had been, by my talismans. My mind kept darkening, as if it were full of mist that thickened, but then thinned again; and I was repeating to myself over and over what I had to do.
And it all happened quickly. Into my cell crowded the dark priests, any number of them, and I was hurried along corridors in a press of people and then up some steps, and was inside one of the temples. It was massed with slaves at the lower end, standing in ordered ranks and companies, each with their guards. I caught a glimpse of our poor Colony 9 animals, chained together, lifting their hairy faces and bewildered blue eyes at what they saw at our end of the temple. The black-clothed ones, males and females, were in their ranks on either side of a great reclining statue of stone. Where its belly should have been was a hole, and from it came the smell of stale blood. Oh, the smell of that place! That in itself was enough to quench any sense I retained.
Behind the evil statue—for its visage was horrible, an evil face above gross swollen limbs—was a high plinth. On to this I pushed, stood there swaying and faint. I saw before me the squat dark interior of this temple, with its stone gods, I saw the massed slaves, I saw the priestly caste who used and fed off them—all this bathed in a ruddy ugly light that suffused the place. A savage wailing began from the black-clothed ones. It was a hymn. I was holding on to my senses, but only just… I could imagine what it was they were seeing—a white wraith, or phantom, with its glittering fleece of hair, in a white wisp of a dress, on which red light flickered… and then the light on my hands turned green, there was a green glow where the blood glow had been. My mind told me that this was a signal. I fought for the words I had to cry out, at last they came to me—as I saw a knife raised in the hand of a priest aimed for my heart, I called out, “Death to the Dead… Death to the Dead…”
There was something else I had to do, and I could not remember. The knife still held above me, its blade glittering green. I jumped backwards off the plinth, fell into something that yielded and then gave way altogether. I heard a clang of stone on stone above me. There were people around me were and they were lifting me and carrying me. My part in this escape having been done, I slept or went into a trance.
And yet it was not a complete oblivion, for I was conscious of urgency, of flight along low dark passages, and of Rhodia’s voice. And I was talking to her, asking questions, which were answered, for as the dark in my mind lifted, and I began to see that we were coming out from deep underearth places into light, the information I had been given was making a clear enough picture.
Rhodia was not a native of the priest-ruled city, but of Lelanos, which was not very far from here. Not far, that is, in distance…
She had caused herself to be captured and made a slave. Her capacities had quickly raised her to a position of trusted wardress of captives who were to play a leading part in the sacrificial ceremonies. Many were the unfortunate ones whom she had guarded, cared for, and seen lifted up on the plinth above the blood-filled stone god. No, she had not been able to save any of these, not one of the important victims, though she had managed to spirit away a few, not many, of the lesser slaves. Her task had been to position herself ready for my capture, so that she could save me. She… she… I was making myself use this word, as I saw a dim light begin to fill the passages we fled along, and as I saw her, Rhodia, this strong, tall, handsome female, running along beside me where I was being carried in the arms of a male slave. I had to say she, think she—yet in my half-trance or sleep, in the almost complete dark of the deep earth, I had been able to feel only Nasar, his presence had been there around me.
What is that quality in an individual so strong, so independent of looks, sex, age, species—independent of the planet “he” or “she” or originates from—that enables one to walk into a completely dark room, where one had not expected anyone to be, and to stammer out—a name! It doesn’t matter what name! Nasar. Rhodia. Canopus.
Yes, it has happened to me. More than once.
But it has only to happen once for it to become impossible ever after to do more than salute an appearance, or the distinctions of a race or a sex, while recognising that other, deeper truth. I had known this unique and individual being as Nasar, the tormented man in Koshi. And so the associations of my brain made me want to name her “Nasar.” Had I met this being first as Rhodia, then other names would come just as reluctantly to my tongue.
The light was growing stronger, and I kept my eyes on Rhodia, reaching out with my sight, as if there was some truth there I could not grasp. She was Nasar, and she was not; he was Rhodia, but he was not… whatever was there inside that female shape was deeply familiar to me. But beyond this puzzle something else. There was a bleached look to her, and she had a pallid and even repelling aspect at moments when the light fell more strongly at the angle of a passage. I wondered if she had been struck lightning, or had some disease… In the dungeons, and in the room with the eight men, I had not seen her clearly, either from the dimness of the light, or because of pressure from anxious thoughts.
So disquieting did I find these glimpses of her that I tried to turn my attention from her, and instead reviewed what I knew about recent events so to make some kind of coherent picture.
Rhodia’s main concern, when I was taken prisoner, was to make sure that the talismans should not fall into their hands: very evil use would been made of them. For, in spite of their efforts, Grakconkranpatl had not once managed to steal any of the articles that had, for this time, Canopean effect.
Her second concern—and I was expected to understand and to agree with this order of priorities—was to get me away. She had caused the priests to believe that I had powers they would be wise to fear. They believed I had made the ornaments vanish by use of these powers. But they had not been of one mind, the group of Overlords, or Chief Priests, whom I had seen: they had almost decided to take me out of their city and leave me to make my way back to my own kind if I could—if I could. But I had actually been seen arriving “from the heavens.” They could not cause the memory of this to vanish from the minds of their enslaved peoples. So it had been given out that I was an enemy, drawn to the city and into their hands, by their cunning powers. Enemies were always publicly sacrificed. If I simply vanished, never to be seen again, this could weaken the powers of this caste, who ruled by fear. So in the end it had been decided to cut the heart from my breast, in the temple, had been always been done. But Rhodia had strengthened their doubts.
When I was pushed up on to the plinth they were all apprehensive. There was a point in the ceremony when the priests shouted and sang to their “Gods” that they were the Dead, identifying themselves temporarily with the sacrificed ones who would almost immediately in fact be dead: the victims were in some ambiguous and rather unsatisfactory way—to a rational mind—the same as those murdered them. My call, Death to the Dead, condemned the entire priestly caste. Behind the idol was a stone that moved on levers, used for purposes of trickery and illusion in the ceremonies. As my threat momentarily froze the priests and then made them run from where I stood bathed in the unexpected green ray, Rhodia and her accomplices turned the stone, and pulled me down into the rooms underneath the temple proper. This was the most dangerous part of the escape, for of course those clever priests were not likely to remain confused for long. It was, for a few moments, speed that had to save us. There were passages under the buildings of the city, running everywhere below the tunnels used by the slaves. These were complicated, and none known to all of the priests: a tyranny is always self-divided, always a balance of competing interests.
It was this that saved us, the jealous knowledge of mutually suspicious sects. But Rhodia had learned of every one of the passageways. As our band fled deeper and further, the guards of the priests were running parallel to us at times, or above us, and they might very well come on the right turning by accident and encountered us—but Rhodia knew of a very old and disused system of tunnels, made long ago by slaves who had tried to dig their way to safety and had been caught. Once we found the entrance to these we were safe.
We found ourselves on the side of a high mountain, in a little cleft among rocks, screened by bushes. Far below us was the priests’ dark city. And I saw those poor slaves who had come with us fling themselves on the sun-fed earth and kiss it and weep. And when they lifted their faces, of that faded red-earth colour, to the sun, I fancied that I saw health come into that starved skin even as I watched. And as Rhodia watched, standing aside, waiting for them to be past their first convulsion of delight.
She caught my questioning thought and said to me: “These are the slaves I was able to talk to, and who I was able to trust.”
It was an obvious, a simple, thing to say. She could have said nothing else! Yet it struck me so painfully then, the strength, the inexorableness of the laws that govern us all. Down in the chilly dim prisons under the priests’ city, slaves who—some of them—could remember nothing else, having been born there, had been able to respond to some quality that they—recognised? remembered?—in a fellow slave who was better than they only in as much as she was able, so it must often seemed to them, to torment them, stand in authority over them… But they had seen, felt something in her, listened; and because of some—chance?—qualities in themselves, had been found reliable. Trustworthy. And so it was they who now kissed the earth on the free mountainside, and lifted their faces to the sun. For the first time in their lives, for some of them. It was a thought enough to chill the heart—my heart that, if it were not for Rhodia, would now have been lying in a pool of blood in the idol’s hollowed-out belly. And she knew what I was thinking and smiled. And for the first time I caught from her a physical memory of Nasar, and his derisive angers. It was Nasar, for that moment, sharing with me an appreciation of our grim necessities… so strongly there that I could have been back him at the top of the tall cone with the snow flying past.
And then I saw her quelling the emotions of her charges, and urging them to their feet, and pointing out over the slopes of the mountains to the north. For they were to go one way into the forests, for safety, and she and I another. When they had gone off, some fifty or so, turning to smile and hold up their arms to her in thankfulness and farewell, she came to me and, rummaging in the folds of her garments again, produced the ornaments and told me to put them on. As I did so, first the band on my thigh, then the girdle of cool starstones, and then the bracelets, and lastly the necklace, it was as if my mind cleared, my thoughts steadied, and even a short moment after my old state of mind had been banished by the secret strengths of the ornaments, it seemed as dreadful and inconceivable a place or state of being as the dungeons of the city now seemed. I looked at Rhodia with clarity and steadiness of thought and saw her straight. Again, my thought was that she was suffering from some horrible disease, like a leprosy. She had a faded, drained look, as if she had been dusted with ashes. I not seen anything like it before. The face, the hands, what was visible of her arms and legs, were all dried up, and had a shrivelled look, as a corpse sometimes does. And the hair on her head, which by race was a vigorous glossy black, had white in it.
She saw how I stared, and she said: “Sirius, you are looking at the physical aspect of the Shikastan Degenerative Disease.”
“Rohanda has become so decadent?”
“Now, by halfway through their lives, sometimes even sooner, they start to show signs of decay. This is a process that accelerates generation by generation. They have even forgotten that this is recent thing with them.”
I could not at once recover from the horror of it. I was trying to imagine what it must be like for these unfortunates, trapped inside their enfeebled defective bodies, and I was wondering if it was not possible for Canopus, with their knowledge of the techniques of how to discard bodies at will, to aid the poor creatures.
She sighed, and then gave her short characteristic Nasar-laugh. “There are other priorities. Believe me. We have other, and most urgent, things to do.”
“Necessities,” I said, meaning to joke with her.
And she acknowledged my intention with a smile, but said, “Yes, indeed, Sirius—necessities!”
And on this familiar note we began our journey eastwards through the alleys and passes of the mountain chains along the coast. We went up and we went down, but it was without haste. We were not in danger, she said. This was because “our greatest danger is also our protection. On this occasion.” And when I pressed her to elucidate she gave me a long strong look from eyes that I saw had around their black pupils colourless edges, the tax of Rohandan age—a look that made me think of the whisper: Sirius, be careful!—which seemed to sound, now, all the time, somewhere in my deepest self. She said only: Your greatest danger. Yours, Sirius.” And would not say any more on the subject. Though she talked willingly and at length about the city we were going to.
We walked for several days through thick and pleasant forests. We did not hurry. I got the impression that this pace was for my benefit. So I could absorb—instruction. From her. From Nasar. From Canopus. I did not mind. I was in her, their, hands. Very different was my state of mind now from my angered self-esteem when I had had the chance to be with Canopus, in the person of Klorathy, in those faraway days of the unfortunate “events.” I was trying to listen. To adjust. But now, looking back, I see that I was trying over and over again in every way I knew to find out about Canopus itself, its organisations, its ways of managing itself, its planets—and while I did this Rhodia patiently returned the subject to Grakconkranpatl, to Shammat, and, several times, to the eighth man of those priests. It was not, I see now, that she repeated his name, which was Tafta, so that Tafta recurred through our talk, but that she kept bringing me to points and places where I had to think of him. He was strongly in my mind. I could feel his presence there. Just as, wrapped shivering in my stone cell, Nasar had rung in my mind, so that the name could not help but come to tongue, so, now, as we walked through those magnificent forests, the great snowy mountains at our backs, the feeling or sense of that man kept coming back. I found myself thinking of him, and what he was, when I recognised his particular and unique pulse in my mind: disturbing, harsh, yet nothing near the cold evil of the priests.
And when she brought me back to this point, Tafta, the smiling, handsome, and enigmatic savage, it was always with the long dark stare of warning that I recognised.
We able to look down on Lelanos from a height—and what a difference from the other city! The same bluish-grey stone was used, but lightened with a glistening white quartz and thin bands of red, so that the place had a lively charm about it. As I moved about Lelanos in the days that followed, I often thought I had glimpsed a pattern or even several interlocking patterns in the way the buildings were set out, but I never grasped it wholly, and this was one of the things that I omitted to ask Rhodia, and then it was too late. At any rate, to view it from above, there was variation, and informality; there were no frowningly dominant buildings; no temples; no threat of stone, and rock, and earth being used to imprison or weight the tender—and so brief—flesh of Rohanda.
And from what I had heard from Rhodia of its governance, there was nothing to fear from it.
This was its history. On this site, a small plain ringed by low and friendly mountains, had been several tribes of creatures at that level where their physical needs ordered their lives, and these needs had not been given a religious or “higher purpose” recognition. In other words, they were considerably lower even than the Lombis before their culture was disturbed by our use of them. They fished, hunted, ate, mated, slept.
Nasar caused himself to be born into a family that retained enough of the remnants of “an ancient and high knowledge,” as they put it, to see in this girl something superior. The family was a well-regarded one among a dwindling people living far to the north in the narrow peninsula that separated the Isolated Northern and Isolated Southern Continents—this land bridge, or channel, had often been under water, completely cutting off the Southern Continent, but the “events” had lifted it high above the ocean, and subsequent minor “events” had not succeeded in submerging it. There had flourished a Canopus-inspired culture that had degenerated, and these fast-vanishing people were all that remained. Their memories of the “ancient knowledge” were equated with female dominance, for a variety of reasons extraneous to this account. Rhodia was well treated, and when she told her parents of her needs, was given a company of the physically most striking young males and females of her people to go with her, and she travelled southwards looking for a place and race that would respond to her instruction.
It was easy to imagine how these handsome visitors must have struck the tribes. Rhodia’s people were a tall, broad, red-brown type, with large dark eyes, and flowing luxuriant black hair. They had all the ease of manner and confidence of their past high culture. The tribes were of a slight, shorter kind, with dark brown skin, small black eyes, sparse coarse black locks. The new arrivals wore handsome coloured cotton clothes; the tribes wore skins. The “Gods” were able to instruct them in a thousand skills undreamed of by them, and to cut it short, within a couple of their generations, but while Rhodia's people were still youthful, there was large, expanding city that had been set up according to her instruction, but was governed by themselves. All the visitors but Rhodia had returned to their own people. Rhodia was considered, still, a “God,” but lived as they did, had married one of their males, and her children were not set apart in any way from the other citizens. Lelanos was governed like this.
It was a democracy, elective. There was no written or formal constitution, since Rhodia had taught them that some of the worst tyrannies in Rohandan history had had “constitutions” and written laws with no purpose except to deceive the unfortunate victims and outside observers, There was no point in constitutions and frameworks of laws. If each child was taught what its inheritance was, both of rights due from it and to it, taught to watch its own behaviour and that of others, told that the proper and healthy functioning of this wonderful city depended on his or her vigilance—then law would thrive and renew itself. But the moment any child was left excluded from a full and feeling participation in the governance of its city, then she or he must become a threat and soon there would be decay and then a pulling down and a destruction.
I was much interested in this because of what I, Sirius, had observed, and often: when we took over a planet and ordered its rule, we always imposed a constitution that seemed appropriate to us; and this was safeguarded by every sort of threat and punishment. But never had any rule imposed by us stayed for long the same, without falling into anarchy or rebellion.
There were three safeguards used by Lelanos. The first was the governing body itself, which made the laws. This was elected by general suffrage, every person over the age of sixteen becoming eligible both to vote and to take office. Each officeholder had to lay bare his or her life to the examination of a body of citizens separately elected by the citizens. This was to prevent any individual from benefitting from office, and to see him or her dismissed at the first evidence of any falling away from high conduct. What these officeholders might not do included the use of servants—there were no slaves—who were treated in any slightest detail differently from members of their households; the improper use of sex by either male or female—that is, to dominate or degrade; and luxurious or greedy behavior. The individuals voted on to this Scrutiny, for so it was simply called, were considered the best and most honourable of all Lelannians, and to serve Scrutiny, the highest office.
The second safeguard was an independent judiciary, to keep the laws made by the governing body. The members of this arm of the State, too, were continually watched by Scrutiny, and their behavior was expected to be as beyond reproach as that of the rulers.
While it was not considered undesirable for an individual suited for the work to be reelected, even for the whole of a lifetime, onto either the governing body or the judiciary, the citizens who staffed Scrutiny were not allowed to serve more than one term of four years, though they might after retiring from Scrutiny serve either on the judiciary or the governing body.
The third safeguard was a jealously kept law that the currency used to facilitate the exchange of goods should never be allowed to acquire a self-breeding value. That is, the coins used were only and always to be used as a means of exchange and nothing else. If any individual or group of individuals was to fall into debt, then no interest could be charged, and the debt itself must be abrogated at the end of seven years. Rhodia had caused to come into existence a body of instruction, framed as tales and songs, to enforce the message that if once “money” was allowed to become a commodity on its own account, then the downfall of Lelanos could be shortly expected, because she or he who charged “interest” would control the supply of goods and of labour and a ruling class would become inevitable. The songs and stories were based on the histories of innumerable cities and cultures in Rohanda, the means of exchange had become king. Over and over again, so Rhodia said, Canopus had laid down laws and instruction forbidding the improper use of money and yet never had this been prevented for long. Shammat was too strong in these unfortunate ones who could never retain excellence.
“And does this mean,” I enquired of Rhodia, “that Lelanos can be expected to fall away?” For, walking towards it, and then into its outer suburbs, I was struck with the manifest health and sanity of the place, the absence of poverty and deprivation, the real and inbred democracy that ruled here—for one may see its opposite in signs of servility, fear, deceitfulness.
And Rhodia said only: “You will see for yourself.”
She had a small house towards the centre of the place, in a group of them set around a small square. She lived there alone now, for her children had grown and left. The house had two small rooms on an upper floor and two on the ground floor. She had lived in it since the city was built, and had resisted all pressures on her by her children to move into a larger house—and when she told me this, her eyes met mine with a mordant amused glance I remembered from Koshi. Oh yes, I was being told quite enough to make me suspect that my arrival here was at point in the city’s fortunes before a fall, or decline: and in the next few days it seemed to me that Rhodia was doing everything to impress on me, not only the charm, the health, the good sense of this place, but, at the same time, what was wrong with it. And I could not help wondering why she did so…
Looking back I see that everything conspired to put me into a high (or low!) but at least irrational and emotional condition. First of all, the contrast between this lovely civilised city with its horrible opposite across the mountains. Within a few days I had been taken from one to the other, and they illustrated extremes of what was possible on this planet: I had experienced, was still experiencing, within myself, these two extremes. And there had been the unhurried walk here, with Rhodia, or Nasar, and the way this presence—this Canopean reality—seemed to explore and challenge my deepest self. And there had been something else. I had traversed a zone of forest in no different from any other, but this in fact been the barrier zone between the Lelannian territory and that of Grakconkranpatl. For many centuries the evil and predatory city had been kept from attacking Lelanos because of rumours set afloat by Rhodia and then sedulously kept up that there was a zone or band of forest completely surrounding Lelanos that, if invaded or infringed, would result in the most savage reprisals.
Lelanos was a villainous place—so the rumours went—feeding on flesh and blood, ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy that would lay in ruins any attacking city. Every kind of chance or even contrived incident or event was pressed into service to give credence to these tales. When I heard some of them on our way to Lelanos, from a terrified tribesman who had been fed all his life on stories of the cruelties of Lelanos, I felt my whole self powerfully affected. The shiverings and shudderings of the poor wretch as he described Lelanos the horrible showed how skilful had been the work of Rhodia and her associates. This propaganda work, and nothing else, had kept Lelanos safe. The clever and cunning priests of the city that really was wicked, using every kind of deceit themselves, had not been able to penetrate the disguise of Lelanos… and there was something as disturbing here as there had been in the sight of the band of thirty freed slaves who of all the innumerable slaves of Grakconkranpatl were the only ones able to free them by use of some inward recognition of reality, of the truth. Standing on a slender tower in magically charming Lelanos, looking out over forests where I had travelled, knowing what they were and how they were seen by those outside Lelannian borders—this was enough to set me shuddering in something not far off awe at the strange capacities for self-deception of the Rohandan mentality. And awe was not an emotion that I easily accommodated!
No, I conclude now, but was not dispassionate enough to do so then, the sojourn in the cold dungeons, the deprivation of my protective devices, close contact with the Canopean—all this had unbalanced me. And still Shammat rang in my mind and pulled me towards it—towards Tafta, who was working on me powerfully, though I did not know it. I was beginning to react away from Rhodia. I found myself watching this strong old, or elderly, female, with her simple directness, her honesties, and I was seeing in them callousness, indifference to suffering, a refusal to use powers she certainly must have, as Canopus, to relieve the lot of these Rohandans.
It is strange thing that I, Ambien II, after many long ages of a Colonial Service that supervised the continual and often—as we had to know—painful adjustment of innumerable species, cultures, social structures, the fates of myriads of individuals, could now suffer as I did over this one city. For never had a culture seemed more valuable to me than did Lelanos, never had one been felt by me as a more remarkable and precious accomplishment, set it was among so much barbarity and waste and decline. I found I was wrung continually with pity, an emotion I literally at first did not recognise for what it was, so strange was it.
I would wander about the streets and avenues of this place, sometimes with Rhodia and sometimes by myself, and everything about these people hurt me. That they should have been brought to a such pitch of responsibility and civil awareness in such a short time… and from such unpromising material, merely a few barbarous tribes living only to keep alive… and that they should use each other with such alert and lively and free kindness… and that all this was the achievement of poor wretches who were so far gone with the Rohandan Degenerative Disease that hardly a whole or healthy specimen was to be seen among them… and that every one of them, almost from middle age, was struck as if with an invisible withering blast, leaving them enfeebled and bleached and shrunk… and that… and that… there was no end to the sights and sounds that could inspire me to pitying anger, to the need to protect and keep safe.