Venus on the Half-Shell

14 OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD

The queen and her granddaughter were fluent and charming talkers. Simon spent many an hour, lying side by side with them—though not at the same time—his tail entwined with theirs. But neither of them had the answer to his primal question.

Nor did anybody else he met in the capital city. Finally, he asked to have a chance to meet the great sage Mofeislop. Shintsloop, The Great Tail Himself, said he had no objections. He was so cooperative that Simon wondered if he was glad to get rid of him. Maybe he suspected something, though if he did he showed no resentment. Simon had not yet learned that a Dokalian could control his facial muscles but could not keep his tail from expressing his true feelings. If he had, he might have noticed that Shintsloop’s tail was held straight out behind him but twitched madly at its end.

Simon sent another messenger to the ship to ask Chworktap if she wanted to go on the trip with him. The messenger returned with a piece of paper.

Simon smiled. She got very upset when she thought that he might regard her as a machine. But if it would gain her something to admit that she might be, she would not hesitate. This was so human that it certified her as a human.

The trip on the railroad took four days. At the end of the line was a wall of yellow bricks two hundred feet high, stretching as far as Simon could see. Actually, it surrounded the Free Land and was a work equivalent to the Great Wall of China. It wasn’t as long but it was much higher and thicker. It had no gates, but it did have brick staircases on the outer side every mile or so. These were for the guards, who manned the stations on top of the wall.

“How many men would it take to guard the prisons if the criminals were put into them instead of being sent into the Free Land?” Simon said.

His escort, Colonel Booflum, said, “Oh, about forty thousand, I suppose. The Free Land is a great saving for the taxpayer. We don’t have to feed and house the prisoners or pay guards or build new prisons.”

“How many soldiers are used to guard these walls?” Simon said.

“About three hundred thousand,” the colonel said.

Simon didn’t say anything.

He climbed to the top of the wall with Anubis behind him and Athena on his shoulder. Three miles away was the inevitable tower of the Clerun-Gowph. Beyond it for many miles was the top of Mishodei Mountain, his goal. Between him and it lay dozens of smaller mountains and an unbroken forest.

Simon and his pets got into a big wickerwork basket and were lowered by a steam winch. When he climbed out of the basket, he waved goodbye to the colonel, and set out. He carried a pack full of food and blankets, a knife, a bow and arrow, and his banjo. Anubis also carried a pack on his back, though he didn’t like it.

“A lot of people have left here intent on seeing the wise man,” the colonel had said. “Nobody has ever come back, that I know of.”

“Maybe Mofeislop showed them the folly of returning to civilization?”

“Maybe,” the colonel had said. “As for me, I can’t get back to the fleshpots soon enough.”

“That reminds me, give my regards to the queen dowager and the princess,” Simon had said.

Now he entered the Yetgul Forest, a region of giant trees, pale and stunted underbrush, swamps, poisonous snakes, huge cat-like, bear-like, and wolf-like beasts, hairy elephantlike pachyderms, and men without law and order. Anubis, whimpering, stuck so close that Simon fell over him a dozen times before he had gotten a mile. Simon didn’t have the heart to kick him; he was scared, too.

When he got to the foothills of the vast Mishodei Mountain six weeks later, he was still scared. But he was much more fond of his pets than when he had started. Both had been invaluable in warning him of the presence of dangerous beasts and men. Anubis had sense enough not to bark when he smelled them; he growled softly and so alerted Simon. The owl quite often flew ahead and hunted for rodents and small birds. But when it spotted something sinister, it flew back and landed on his shoulder, hooting agitatedly.

Actually, the big beasts were only dangerous if they came upon a human suddenly. Given warning, they would either take off or else stand their ground and voice threats. Simon would then go around them. The only animals that were a genuine peril, because they did not have much sense, were the poisonous snakes.

The pets detected most of these in time, except when Simon awoke late one morning to find a cobra-like snake by his side. Simon froze, but the owl flew at it, hit it, knocked it over, and Simon rolled away to safety. The cobra decided that it was in a bad place and slithered off. Two days later, the owl killed a small coral snake which had crawled by the sleeping Anubis and was on its way to Simon.

The most dangerous animal was man, and though Simon saw parties of them ten times, he always managed to hide until they had passed by. The males were scruffy-looking, dressed in skins, hairy, bearded, gap-toothed, and haggard-looking, and the children were usually snot-nosed and rheumy-eyed.

“Excellent examples of the genuine Noble Savage,” the colonel had said on the trip down. “Actually, most of the Free Landers are not criminals we’ve sent in but their descendants. The majority of criminals we do drop into the Land are killed by the tribes that roam the woods.”

“Then why don’t you let the descendants come into your society?” Simon said. “They’re not guilty. Surely you don’t believe that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children?”

“That’s a nice phrase,” the colonel said. He took out his notebook and wrote in it. Then he said, “There’s been some talk in parliament of rescuing the poor devils. For one thing, they’d be a source of cheap labor. But then they’d bring in all sorts of diseases, and they would be difficult to control and expensive to educate.

“Besides, they are the descendants of criminals and have inherited the rebellious tendencies of their forefathers. We don’t want those spreading through the population again. After all, we’ve spent a thousand years extracting the rebels from the race.”

“How many rebels, or criminals, are now present in the population compared to the number a thousand years ago?” Simon said. “On a per capita basis?”

“The same,” the colonel said.

“And how do you explain that after all the selective straining out?”

“Human beings are contrary creatures. But give us another thousand years, and we’ll have a criminal-free society.”

Simon said nothing more about this. He did ask why the Dokalian society was so advanced technologically in many respects yet still used bows and arrows. Why hadn’t gunpowder been invented?

“Oh, guns were invented five hundred years ago,” the colonel said. “But we’re a very conservative people, as you may have noticed. It was thought that guns would introduce all sorts of disturbing innovations in society. Besides, they’d be too dangerous in the hands of the rabble. It doesn’t take much training to use a gun. But skill with the sword and bow takes many years of training. So guns were outlawed, and only the elite and the most stable of the lower classes are educated in the use of swords and bows.”

Despite this resistance to innovations, the steam engine had been accepted. This had resulted in a general disuse of the horse. Horseflies and the diseases they carried had almost been eliminated, and the streets were no longer full of horseshit. But the invention of the internal combustion engine had been suppressed, and there was no gas and noise pollution from automobiles and trucks.

On the other hand, the drop in casualties from horsefly-borne sicknesses was more than made up by traffic accidents.

Simon pointed this out.

“Progress, like religion, must have its martyrs,” the colonel had said.

“One could say the same about regress,” Simon said. “What do you do with your traffic criminals? I’d think that you’d send so many of them here that there wouldn’t be room, even in that vast forest.”

“Oh, those responsible for traffic casualties aren’t felons,” the colonel had said. “They’re fined, and some are jailed, if they don’t happen to be rich.”

“Well,” Simon said. “Couldn’t you greatly reduce the murders and the maimings on the highway if you instituted a rigorous examination, physical and psychological, of drivers?”

“Are you kidding?” the colonel said. “No, you aren’t. Less than one-tenth of the people would be permitted to drive. Good God, man, the whole economy would crumble if we did that. How did your politicians ever get your people to agree to such drastic measures?”

Simon had to admit that they hadn’t passed any such laws until after cars were no longer much used.

“And by then, nobody cared, right?” the colonel said.

“Right,” Simon had said, and he had wished that the colonel would quit laughing.

It was with such thoughts, humiliating though they were, that Simon kept up his courage. The Yetgul Forest was getting thicker and gloomier with every mile, and the path was so narrow that bushes and branches tore at his clothes with every step. Even the birds seemed to have found this area undesirable. Whereas before he had been cheered by many dozens of differing calls, whistles, cheeps, and songs, continuing through the day and half the night, he was now surrounded by a silence. Only occasionally was this broken, and when it was, the cry of a bird startled him. There seemed to be only one type, a sudden screech that sounded to him like a death cry. Once, he glimpsed the bird that was responsible, a large dusty black bird that looked like a raven with a rooster’s comb.

What especially depressed him were the bones. From the beginning he had seen scattered skeletons and skulls of men and women. Sometimes, they were spread out on the trail; sometimes, their gray or white bones peeped out from under bushes or leaves. Simon had counted a thousand skeletons, and there must be three times as many whose bones were hidden in the brush off the trail.

Simon tried to cheer himself with the thought that anybody who could inspire so many to defy death just to talk to him must be worth talking to.

But why would the sage have isolated himself so thoroughly?

That wasn’t difficult to figure out. A sage needs much more time in which to meditate and contemplate. If he or she has visitors beating at the door, clamoring day and night, the sage has no time to think. So Mofeislop had built his house in the most difficult-to-reach place on the planet. This assured him solitude. It also assured that whoever did get to him would not be bringing trivial questions.

At the end of the third week, Simon came out of the dark woods. Before and above him were steep and warty slopes with patches of grass and clumps of pines here and there. Above these circled hawks and vultures. Simon hoped these were not hanging around because the pickings were so easy.

The third peak beyond, by far the tallest and the most jagged, was the end of his journey. Simon, thinking of all the climbing he had to do, felt discouraged. Then out of the clouds, which had been thick, dark gray, and as joyless as an eviction notice, the sun emerged. Simon felt better. Something on the tip of the third peak had batted the sun’s rays in a line drive straight into his eyes. This, he was sure, was a window in the house of Mofeislop. It was as if the sage himself was heliographing him to come on ahead.

A week later, Simon and Anubis crawled up the final slope. Lack of food and oxygen was making his heart thump like a belt buckle in an automatic drier, and he was breathing like an old man with a teenager bride. Athena, too tired to fly, was riding on his back, her talons dug in with a grip as painful and unrelenting as a loan shark’s. He could not spare the energy to drive her off him. Besides, the talons had a value. They were reminding him that he was still alive, and that he would feel so good when the pain was gone.

Above him, occupying half of the two-acre plateau on top of the peak, was the house of the sage. Three stories high, thirteen-sided, many-balconied, many-cupolaed, it was built of black granite. The only windows were on the top floor, but there were many of these, small, large, square, octagonal, or round. From the center of the flat roof a tall thick black chimney rose, black smoke pouring from it. Simon envisioned a big fireplace at its base with a pig turning slowly on a spit and a kettle boiling with a thick savory soup. By it the sage waited, to feed him food first and then the answers to his questions.

To tell the truth, Simon at that moment did not give a damn about the answers. He felt that if he could fill his belly, he would be content throughout all eternity. The rest of his life, anyway.

Simon pulled himself over onto the lip of the plateau, crawled to the huge door, oak and crossed with thick ironwork, heaved himself up slowly—the owl fell off him—and pulled the bell cord. Somewhere inside a cavernous room, a big bell tolled.

“I hope he’s not gone,” Simon said to himself, and he giggled. Starvation and the thin air were making him silly. Just where did he think the sage would be? Stepped out to pick up cigarettes at the corner drugstore? Gone to the movies? Attending the local Rotary Club luncheon?

His long wait at the door did give him time to wonder how the sage had managed to get this house built. Who had hauled the heavy stones up the mountain? Where did Mofeislop get his food?

Simon pulled the cord again, and the bell boomed again. After a few minutes, a key turned in the monstrously large and rusty lock, and a giant bar thudded. The door swung out slowly, creaking as if Dracula’s butler was on the other side. Simon felt apprehensive, then reassured himself that he had been conditioned by watching too many old horror movies. The heavy door bumped against the stone wall, and a man shambled out. He did not look at all like the Count’s servant, but it was no relief to see him. He resembled Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant or perhaps Lon Chaney Senior in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His spine curved like a freeway on-ramp; he was bent over as if he had just been kicked in the stomach; his hair foamed like a glass of beer; his forehead slanted back like the Tower of Pisa; his supraorbital ridges bulged as if they were full of gas; one eye was lower than the other and milky with a cataract; his nose was red and crumpled, like a dead rose; his lips were as thin as a dog’s; his teeth were those of a moose that has chewed tobacco all his life; his chin had decided in the womb to give up the ghost. And he wheezed like an emphysematic at a political convention.

However, he had a personality as pleasing as a blind date’s.

He smiled and said “Welcome!” and he radiated good will and jolly fellowship.

“Doctor Mofeislop, I presume?” Simon said.

“Bless your little heart, no,” the man said. “I am the good doctor’s secretary and house servant. My name is Odiomzwak.”

His parents must really have hated him, Simon thought, and he warmed toward him. Simon knew what it was to have a father and a mother who couldn’t stand their child.

“Come in, come in!” Odiomzwak said. “All three of you.”

He reached out to pat Anubis, who lolled his tongue and shut his eyes as if very pleased to be petted. Simon decided that his apprehensions had been wrong. Dogs were known to be reliable readers of character.

Odiomzwak took a flaming torch from its stand by the door and led them down a narrow and long hall. They came out into a giant room with black granite walls and a tile mosaic floor. At its end was the great fireplace Simon had imagined. The roasting pig wasn’t there, but the kettle of steaming soup was. Near it stood a tall thin man, all forehead and nose, warming his hands and tail. He was dressed in furry slippers, bearskin trousers, and a long flowing robe printed with calipers, compasses, telescopes, microscopes, surgeon’s knives, test tubes, and question marks. The marks were not the same as those used on Earth, of course. The Dokalian mark was a symbol representing an arrow about to be launched from a bow.

“Welcome, welcome indeed!” the tall man said, hastening to Simon with his hand out, fingers spread. “You are as welcome as food to a hungry man!”

“Speaking of which, I am famished,” Simon said.

“Of course you are,” Mofeislop said. “I’ve been watching your rather slow progress up the mountain through my telescope. There were times when I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

Then why in hell didn’t you send out a rescue party? Simon thought. He did not say anything, however. Philosophers couldn’t be expected to behave like ordinary people.

Simon sat down at a long narrow pine table on a pine bench. Odiomzwak bustled around setting the table and two bowls on the floor for the pets. The food was simple, consisting of loaves of freshly baked bread, a strong goaty-smelling cheese, and the soup. This had some herbs, beans, and thick pieces of meat floating in it. The meat tasted somewhat like pork with an underlying flavor of tobacco.

Simon ate until his belly creaked. Odiomzwak brought in a bottle of onion vodka, a drink for which Simon did not care much. He tasted it to be polite and then, at the request of the curious sage, played a few songs on his banjo. Anubis and Athena retired to the end of the room, but Mofeislop and Odiomzwak seemed to enjoy his music very much.

“I particularly liked that last one,” Mofeislop said. “But I’m curious about the lyric itself. Could you translate it for me?”

“I was planning to do so,” Simon said. “It’s by an ancient named Bruga, my favorite poet. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, you Dokalians don’t have TV, so I’ll have to explain what TV and talk shows and commercials are. Also, the identity of the three guests on the show and their backgrounds.

“This Swiss noble, Baron Victor Frankenstein, made a man out of parts he dug up from the cemetery,” he said. “Nobody knows just how he vitalized the patchwork monster, though the movie showed him doing it with a lightning bolt. The monster went ape and killed a bunch of people. The baron tried to track him down, and at one time he was chasing the monster across the arctic ice, though they didn’t have the dog-and-sled sequence in the movie version either.

“Lazarus was a young man who died in ancient times in a country then called Palestine. He was resurrected by a man called Jesus Christ. Later, Jesus was killed, too, and he resurrected himself. Before he was killed, however, his judge, Pontius Pilate, asked him, ‘What is Truth?’ Jesus didn’t reply, either because he didn’t know the answer or because Pilate didn’t hang around to hear it. Jesus was deified after this and one of Earth’s important religions was named after him. He was supposed to know if man was immortal or not. At least, in Bruga’s poem, it is presumed that he does know.”

“You were trying to tell me something when you sang that,” the sage said. “You were hoping that my message to you would not be disturbed or marked by commercialism or trivialities, right?”

“Right.”

“You’ve come to the right place, the right man. I alone in all Dokal, perhaps all the universe, know the Truth. After you have learned it, your quest will be over.”

Simon put his banjo down and said, “I’m all ears.”

“You’re more than that,” the sage said. He and Odiomzwak looked at each other and burst out laughing. Simon reddened but said nothing. Sages were famous for laughing at things other people were too imperceptive to see.

“Not tonight, though,” Mofeislop said. “You are too tired and thin to take the Truth. You need to be strong and rested, to put some meat on your bones, before you can hear what I have to say. Be my guest for a few days, restrain your impatience, and I will answer the question which you say this Jesus could not answer.”

“Very well,” Simon said, and he went to bed. But it was not well. Though exhausted, he could not get to sleep for a long time. The sage had intimated that he would have to be strong to take the Truth, which apparently would be strong stuff. This made him apprehensive. Whatever the Truth, it would not be comforting.

At last, telling himself that he had asked for it, no matter what it was, he drifted off. But the rest of the night seemed nightmare-shot. And once again the images of his father and mother slid closer to him while behind them crowded thousands of people, imploring, threatening, weeping, laughing, snarling, smiling.

His last dream was that the old Roman, Pilate himself, approached him.

“Listen, kid,” Pilate said. “It’s dangerous to ask that question. Remember what happened to the last man who asked it. Me, that is. I fell into disgrace.”

“I’ve always been disappointed because it wasn’t a rhetorical question,” Simon said. “Why didn’t he answer it?”

“Because he didn’t know the answer, that’s why,” Pilate said. “He was a fool to say he was a god. Up to that moment, I was going to tell the Jews to go screw themselves and let him go. But when he told me that, I believed that the most dangerous man in the Roman Empire was in my power. So I let him be crucified. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about the situation, and I realize now I made a bad mistake. The surest way to spread a faith is to make martyrs. People began thinking that if a man is willing to die for his belief, then he must have something worth dying for. They want to get in on it, too. Besides, martyrdom is the surest way to get your name in the history books.”

“You’re very cynical,” Simon said.

“I was a politician,” Pilate said. “Any ward heeler knows more about people than any psychologist with a dozen Ph.D.’s and unlimited funds for research.”

And he faded away, though his grin hung in the air for a minute, like the Cheshire Cat’s.