Year's Best SF 17

The Master of the Aviary BRUCE STERLING

Every Sunday, Mellow Julian went to the city market to search for birds. Commonly a crowd of his adoring students made his modest outing into a public spectacle.

The timeless questions of youth tortured the cultured young men of the town. “What is a gentleman’s proper relationship to his civic duty, and how can he weasel out of it?” Or: “Who is more miserable, the young man whose girl has died, or the young man whose girl will never love him?”

Although Julian had been rude to men in power, he was never rude to his students. He saw each of these young men as something like a book: a hazardous, long-term, difficult project that might never find a proper ending. Julian understood their bumbling need to intrude on his private life. A philosopher didn’t have one.

On this particular market Sunday, Julian was being much pestered by Bili, a pale, delicate, round-headed eccentric whose wealthy father owned a glass smelter. The bolder academy students were repelled by Bili’s mannerisms, so they hadn’t come along. Mellow Julian tolerated Bili’s youthful awkwardness. Julian had once been youthful and awkward himself.

Under their maze of parasols, cranes, aqueducts, and archery towers, the finer merchants of Selder sold their fabrics, scissors, fine glass baubles, medications, oils, and herbal liquors. The stony city square held a further maze of humble little shacks, the temporary stalls of the barkers. The barkers were howling about vegetables.

“Asparagus! Red lettuce! Celery! Baby bok choy!” Each shouted name had the tang of romance. Selder’s greenhouses close-packed the slope of the mountain like so many shining warts. It was for these rare and precious vegetables that foreigners braved the windy mountain passes and the burning plains.

Mellow Julian bought watercress and spinach, because their bright-green spiritual vibrations clarified his liver.

“Maestro, why do you always buy the cheapest, ugliest food in this city?” Bili piped up. “Spinach is awful.”

“It’s all that I know how to cook,” Julian quipped.

“Maestro, why don’t you marry? Then your wife could cook.”

“That’s a rather intrusive question,” Julian pointed out. “Nevertheless, I will enlighten you. I don’t care to indulge in any marriage ritual. I will never indulge in any bureaucratic ritual in this city, ever again.”

“Why don’t you just hire a cook?” persisted Bili.

“I’d have to give him all his orders! I might as well simply cook for myself.”

“I know that I’m not very bright,” said Bili humbly. “But a profound thinker like you, a man of such exemplary virtue … Everybody knows you’re the finest scribe in our city. Which is to say, the whole world! Yet you live alone in that little house, fussing with your diet and putting on plays in your backyard.”

“I know people talk about me,” shrugged Julian. “People chatter and cackle like chickens.”

Bili said nothing for a while. He knew he had revealed a sore spot.

Mellow Julian examined the sprawling straw mat of a foreign vendor. All the women of Selder adored seashells, because seashells were delicate, pretty, and exotic. Mellow Julian shared that interest, so he had a close look at the wares.

The shell vendor was a scarred, bristle-bearded sea pirate. His so-called rare seashells were painted plaster fakes.

Julian put away his magnifying lens. He nodded shortly and retreated. “Since you were born almost yesterday, Bili,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I would urge you to have a good look at that wild, hard-bitten character. This marketplace has never lacked for crooks, but this brute may be a spy.”

Bili pointed. “There’s even worse to be seen there, maestro.”

Huddled under a torn cotton tarp were five dirty refugees: black-haired, yellow-skinned people in travel-torn rags. One of the refugees was not starving. He was the owner or boss of the other four, who visibly were.

“They shouldn’t let wretches like those through the gates,” said Bili. “My father says they carry disease.”

“Every mortal being carries some disease,” Julian allowed. He edged nearer to the unwholesome scene. The exhausted refugees couldn’t even glance up from the cobblestones. “Well,” said Julian, “no need to flee these wild invaders. My guess would be that somebody invaded them.”

“They’re some ‘curious specimens,’ as you always put it, maestro.”

“Indeed, they most certainly are.”

“They must have come from very far away.”

“You are staring at them, Bili, but you are not observing them,” said Julian. “This man is in the ruins of a uniform, and he has a military bearing. This younger brute must be his son. This boy and girl are a brother and sister. And this older woman, whom he has dragged along from the wreck of their fortunes … Look at her hands. Those hands still have the marks of rings.”

The ruined soldier rose in his tattered boots and stuck out his callused mitt. “Money, water, food, house! Shelter! Fish! Vegetable!”

“I understand you,” Julian told him, in a fluent Old Proper English. “I’m touched that you’ve taken the trouble to learn so many nouns. So. What is your name, sir? My friends call me Mellow Julian Nebraska.”

“You give me money for her,” the soldier demanded, pointing. “You take her away, I buy shelter, water, food, fish, vegetable!”

“I have some money,” offered Bili.

“Don’t get hasty, Bili.”

“But I think I understand what this foreigner is saying!” said Bili. “Listen! I want to try out my Old Proper English on him. I buy this woman. You take my money. You eat your fish and vegetables.” Bili pointed at the boy and girl. “You feed these children. You wash your clothes. You comb your hair.” He glanced at Julian. “That’s the right English word, isn’t it? Comb?”

“It is,” Julian allowed.

“You wash yourself in the public bath,” Bili persisted. “You stink lesser!” He turned to Julian triumphantly. “Just look at him! Look at his eyes! He really does understand me! My lessons in the Academy of Selder … That dead language is practical! I can’t wait to tell my dad!”

“You should no longer call this city ‘Selder,’ Bili. The true name of your city is ‘Shelter.’ ‘The Resilient, Survivable, Sustainable Shelter,’ to list all her antique titles. If your ancestors could see you speaking like this—in their own streets, in their own language—they’d say you were a civilized man.”

“Thank you, maestro,” said Bili, with a blush to his pale, beardless cheeks. “From you, that means everything.”

“We must never forget that we descend from a great people. They made their mistakes—we all do—but someday, we’ll surpass them.”

“I’m going to buy this woman,” Bili decided. “I can afford her. The Selder Academy doesn’t cost all that much.”

“You can’t just buy some woman here in the public street!” said Julian. “Not sight unseen, for heaven’s sake!”

Julian untied the mouth of his scholar’s bag and rustled through the dense jumble within it—his watercress, spinach, scarf, pipe, scissors, string, keys, wax tablet, and magnifying glass. He pulled out one ancient silver dime.

Julian crouched beside the cowering woman and placed the time-worn coin into her blistered hand. “Here,” he said, “this coin is for you. Now, stay still, for I’m going to examine you. I won’t hurt you. Stick out your tongue.”

She gripped the coin feverishly, but she understood not one word.

“Stick out your tongue,” commanded Julian, suiting action to words.

He examined her teeth with the magnifying glass.

Then he plucked back the slanted folds of her eyelids. He touched both her ears—pierced, but no jewels left there, not anymore. He thumped at her chest until she coughed. He smelled her breath. He closely examined her hands and feet.

“She’s well over forty years old,” he said. “She’s lost three teeth, she’s starving, and she’s been walking barefoot for a month. These two youngsters are not her children. I dare say a woman of her years had children once, but these are not them. This brute here with the leather belt, which he used on her legs … He’s not her husband. She was a lady once. A civilized woman. Before whatever happened, happened.”

“How much should I pay for her?” said Bili.

“I have no idea. This is no regular auction. The Godfather is a decent man, he prohibited all that slave-auction mischief years ago. You’d better ask your father how much he thinks a house-servant like her is worth. Not very much, I’d be guessing.”

“I’m not buying her for my house,” said Bili. “I’m buying her for your house.”

A moment passed.

“Bili—,” Julian said severely, “have I taught you nothing with my lectures, or from the example of my life? I devote myself to sustainable simplicity! Our ancestors never had slaves! Or rather, yes they did, strictly speaking—but they rid themselves of that vice, and built machines instead. We all know how that ugly habit turned out! Why would I burden myself with her?”

Bili smiled sheepishly. “Because she is so much like a pet bird?”

“She is rather like a bird,” Julian admitted. “More like a bird than a woman. Because she is starving, poor thing.”

“Maestro, please accept this woman into your house. Please. People talk about you all the time, they gossip about you. You don’t mind that, because you are a philosopher. But maestro, they talk about me! They gossip about me, because I follow you everywhere, and I adore you! I’d rather kneel at your feet than drill with the men-at-arms! Can’t you do me this one favor, and accept a gift from me? You know I have no other gifts. I have no other gifts that even interest you.”

After Mellow Julian accepted Bili’s gift, Bili became even more of the obnoxious class pet. Bili insisted on being addressed by his antique pseudonym Dandy William Idaho, and sashayed around Selder in a ludicrous antique costume he had faked up, involving “blue jeans.” Bili asked impertinent, look-at-me questions during the lectures. He hammed it up after class in amateur theatricals.

However, Bili also applied himself to his language studies. Bili had suddenly come to understand that Old Proper English was the language of the world. Old Proper English was the language of laws, rituals, boundary treaties, water rights, finance arrangements, and marriage dowries. The language of civilization.

That was why a wise and caring Godfather took good care to see that his secretaries wrote an elegant and refined Old Proper English. A scribe with such abilities could risk some personal eccentricities.

Julian named his new servant House Sparrow Oregon. Enquiries around the court made it clear that she was likely from Oregon. War and plague—they were commonly the same event—had expelled many of her kind from their distant homeland.

Deprived of food and shelter, they had dwindled quickly in the cruelties of the weather.

Sometimes, when spared by the storms, refugees found the old grassy highways, and traveled incredible distances. Vagrants came from the West Coast, and savages from the East Coast. Pirates came from the North Coast, where there had once been nothing but ice. The South was a vast baking desert that nobody dared to explore.

Once a teenage boy named Juli had left a village in Nebraska. Julian had suffered the frightening, dangerous trip to Selder, because the people in Selder still knew about the old things. And they did know them—some of them. They knew that the world was round, and that it went around the sun. They knew that the universe was thirteen thousand, seven hundreds of millions of years old. They knew that men were descended from apes, although apes were probably mythical.

They had also built the only city in the known world that was not patched-up from the scraps of a fallen city. Created at the sunset of a more enlightened age, Selder was a thousand years old. Yet it was the only city that had grown during the long dark ages.

The court of the Godfather was a place of sustainable order. The council-of-forty, the Men in Red, were its educated, literate officials. They held the authority to record facts of state. They knew what was meet and proper to write, and what was of advantage to teach, and what should be censored. They had taught Julian, and he had worked for them. He had come to know everything about what they did with language. He was no longer overly fond of what they did.

House Sparrow Oregon had no language that Julian understood. To test her, Julian inscribed the classic letters of antiquity into his wax tablet: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS.

In response, Sparrow timidly made a few little scrapes with the stylus. Crooked little symbols, with tops and bottoms. They were very odd, but she knew only ten of them. Sparrow was nobody’s scholar.

Julian was patient. Every child who ever entered a school was a small barbarian. To beat them, to shout at them, to point out their obvious shortcomings … what did that ever avail? What new students needed were clear and simple rules.

This aging, frightened, wounded woman was heartsick. She had lost all roles, all rules, and all meaning. She was terrified of almost everything in Selder, including him.

So: it was about a small demonstration, and then a patient silence: the wait for her response. So that Sparrow’s dark eyes lost their cast of horror and bewilderment. So that she observed the world, no longer mutely gazing on it.

So: This is the water. Here, drink it from this cup. It’s good, isn’t it? Yes, fresh water is good! The good life is all about simple things like clear water.

Now, this is our bucket in which we bring the water home. Come with me, to observe this. There is nothing to fear in this street. Yes, come along. They respect me, they will not harm you.

You see this? Every stranger living in Selder must learn this right away. This is our most basic civic duty, performed by every able-bodied adult, from the Godfather himself to the girl of twelve. These waterworks look complex and frightening, but you can see how I do this myself. This is a water-lever. It holds that great leather bucket at one end, and this stone weight here at our end.

We dip the great bucket so as to lift the dirty water, so that it slowly flows in many locks and channels, high back up the hillside. We recycle all the water of this city. We never spill it, or lose its rich, fertile, and rather malodorous nutrients. We can spill our own blood in full measure here, but we will never break our water cycle. This is why we have sustained ourselves.

After we heave this great bucket of the dirty civic water—and not before!—then we are allowed to tap one small bucket of clean water, over here, for our private selves.

Now you can try.

Don’t let those stupid housewives hurt your feelings. We all look comical at first, before we learn. Yes, you are a foreigner, and you are a curious specimen. That is all right. In the House of Mellow Julian Nebraska, we embrace curiosity. Our door is always open to those who make honest inquiries. We house many things that are strange, as well as you.

Now for the important moral lesson of the birds. Yes, I own many birds. I own too many. Some are oddly shaped, and special, and inbred, and rather sickly. Quite often they die for mysterious reasons. I cannot help that: It is my fate to be the master of an aviary.

Yes, the name I gave you is Sparrow, just like that smallest bird hopping there. These are my pigeons, these are my chickens, these are my ducks. In antiquity there were many other birds, but these are the surviving species.

One can see that to care for these birds suits your proclivities. When you chirp at them in your native language, they hear you and respond to you. As Sparrow the bird-keeper, you have found new purpose in the world. We will have one small drink to celebrate that. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? It isn’t pure clean water, but a moderate amount of sophistication has its place in life.

Now that you have become the trusted mistress of the aviary, it is time for you to learn about this cabinet of curiosities. Being a scholar of advanced and thoughtful habits, I own a large number of these inexplicable objects. Old drawings, fossil bones, seashells, coins and medals, and, especially, many arcane bits of antique machinery. Some are rare. Most are quite horribly old. They all need to be cleaned and dusted. They break easily. Be tender, cautious, and respectful. Above all, do not peel off the labels.

My curiosities are not mere treasures. Instead, they are wonders. Watch with the students, and you will see.

Students, dear friends of learning and the academy: Tonight we study the justly famous “external combustion engine.” Tonight we will make one small venture in applied philosophy, revive this engine from its ancient slumbers, and cause it to work before your very eyes.

And what does it do? you may well ask me. What is its just and useful purpose? Nobody knows. No one will ever know. No one has known that for three thousand years.

Now my trusted assistant Sparrow will light the fire beneath the engine’s cauldron. Nothing sinister about that, a child could do it, an illiterate, a helpless alien, yes, her. Please give her a round of applause, for she is shy. That was good, Sparrow. You may sit and watch with the others now.

Now see what marvels the world has, to show to a patient observer. Steam is boiling. Steam travels up these pipes. Angry steam flows out of these bent nozzles. This round metal bulb with the nozzles begins to spin. Slowly at first, as you observe. Then more rapidly. At greater speed, greater speed yet: tremendous, headlong, urgent, whizzing speed!

This item from my cabinet, which seemed so humble and obscure: This is the fastest object in the whole world!

Why does it spin so fast? Nobody knows.

It is sufficient to know, young gentlemen, that our ancestors built fire-powered steaming devices of this kind, and they wrecked everything. They utterly wrecked the entire world. They wrecked the world so completely that we, their heirs so long after, can scarcely guess at the colossal shape of the world that they wrecked.

You see as well, little Sparrow? Now you know what a wonder can do. When it spins and flashes, in its rapid, senseless, glittering way, you smile and clap your hands.

In the summer, a long and severe heat came. The wisdom of the founders of Selder was proven once again.

Every generation, some venturesome fool would state the obvious—why don’t we grow our crops outside of these glass houses? Without those pergolas, sunshades, reflectors, straw blankets, pipes, drips, pumps, filters, cranes, aqueducts, and the Cistern. That would be a hundred times cheaper and easier!

So that error might well be attempted, and then disaster would strike. The exposed crops were shriveled by heat waves, leveled by storm gusts, eaten by airborne hordes of locusts and vast brown crawling waves of teeming mice. In endless drenching rains, the tilled soil would wash straight down the mountainside.

In the long run, all that was not sustainable was not sustained.

Brown dust-lightning split the angry summer sky. Roiling gray clouds blew in from the southern deserts and their dust gently settled on the shining glass of Selder. There were no more pleasant, boozy, poetic star-viewing parties. People retreated into the stony cool of the seed vaults. When they ventured out, they wore hats and goggles and wet, clinging, towel-like robes. They grumbled a great deal about this.

Mellow Julian Nebraska made no such complaint. In times of civic adversity, it pleased him to appear serene. Despite this unwholesome heat and filth, we dwell in a city of shining glass! We may well sweat, but there is no real risk that we will starve! Let us take pride in our community’s unique character! We are the only city of the world not perched like a ghost within the sprawling ruin of some city of antiquity! Fortitude and a smiling countenance shall be the watchwords of our day!

Julian sheltered his tender birds from the exigencies of the sky. He made much use of parasols, misting-drips, and clepsydra. The professor’s villa was modest, but its features were well considered.

Dirt fell lavishly from the stricken sky, but Sparrow had learned the secret of soap, that mystic potion of lye, lard, ashes, and bleach. Sparrow spoke a little now, but not one word of the vulgar tongue: only comical scraps of the finest Old Proper English. Sparrow wore the clean and simple white robes that her master wore, with a sash around her waist to show that she was a woman, and a scarf around her hair to show that she was a servant. Sparrow would never look normal, but she had come to look neat and dainty.

Julian’s enemies—and he had made some—said dark things about the controversial philosopher and his mute exotic concubine. Julian’s friends—and he had made many—affected a cosmopolitan tolerance about the whole arrangement. It was not entirely decent, they agreed, but it was, they opined, very like him.

Julian was not a wealthy man, but he could reward his friends. His small garden was cool in the stifling heat, and Sparrow had learned to cook. Sparrow cooked highly alarming meals, with vegetables cut in fragments, and fried in a metal bowl. This was the only Selder food that Sparrow could eat without obvious pangs of disgust.

His students ate these weird concoctions cheerily, because healthy young men ate anything. Then they ran home in darkness to boast that they had devoured marvels.

The wicked summer heat roiled on. It was the policy of the finer folk of the court to dine on meat: mostly rabbit, guinea pig, and mice. Meat spoiled quickly.

When he fell ill, there were rumors that the Godfather had been poisoned. No autocrat ever died without such claims. But no autocrat could live forever, either. So the old Godfather perished.

On the very day of the old man’s death, the dusty heat wave broke. Vast torrential rains scoured the mountains. Everyone remarked on this fatal omen.

It was time for the Godfather’s cabal to retire into the secret seed vaults, don their robes and masks, and elect the successor.

Julian’s students had never seen a succession ritual. It was a sad and sobering time. Men who had never sought out a philosopher asked for some moral guidance.

What on earth are we to do now? Console the grieving, feed the living, and lower the dead man into the Cistern.

What will history say of Godfather Jimi the Seventh? That the warlike spirit of his youth had matured into a wise custodianship of the arts and crafts of peace.

Then there were others with a darker question: What about the power?

There Mellow Julian held his peace. He could guess well enough what would happen. There would be some jostling confusion among the forty masked Men in Red, but realistically, there were only two candidates for the Godfather’s palace. First, there was the Favorite. He was the much-preened and beloved nephew of the former Godfather, a well-meaning idiot never tested by adversity.

There was the Other Man, who had known nothing but adversity. He had spent his career in uniform, repressing the city’s barbarian enemies. His supporters were hungry and ambitious and vulgar. He would not hesitate to grasp power by any means fair or foul. His own wife and children feared him. He was stubborn and bold, as Julian knew, because he had once been Julian’s classmate.

Who would complain if a professor, in a time of trouble, retired into his private life? No rude brawling for the thinking man, no street marches, no shouted threats and vulgar slogans. No intrigues: instead, civility. The cleanly example of the good life. Food, drink, friends, and study. Simplicity and clarity. Humanity.

Humanity.

“Tonight,” said Mellow Julian, in his finest Old Proper English, “as scholars assembled in civil society, we shall study together. The general theme of our seminars is remote from all earthly strife. Because she is shining, she is gorgeous, she is lovely, she is the planet Venus. In all her many attributes.”

Hoots and cheers and claps.

“Young men,” said Julian, “I do not merely speak to you of the carnal Venus. You will recall that your ancestors sent flying machines to Venus. Electrical machines, gentleman, and they had virtual qualities. The people of antiquity observed Venus. And Mercury. And Mars. And Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. It is written that they sent their machines to observe moons and planets that we can no longer see.”

Respectful silence.

“We do not deny that Venus has her venereal aspects,” said Julian. “What we want to assert—as civic philosophers—is a solid framework for systematic understanding! What is a man, what is his role in the universe, under the planets and stars?

“Consider this. If a man has a soul, then Venus must touch that soul. We all know that. But how, why? It is not enough to meander dully through our lives, vaguely thinking: ‘Venus is the brightest planet in the heavens, so surely she must have something to do with me.’ Of course the vibrations of Venus affect a man! Can any man among you deny that we live through the vibrations of the sun? Raise your hand.”

Being used to rhetorical questions, they knew better than to raise their hands.

“Certain students of our Academy,” said Julian, “have chosen not to attend this course of Venusian seminars. They felt that they needed to be together with their families in this difficult season … In this perilous moment in the long life of our city. Yet when we, as scholars, by deliberate policy … when we remove ourselves from the unseemly dust and mud of our civil strife … from all that hurly-burly …”

A hand shot up in the audience.

“Yes, Practical Jeffrey of Colorado? You have a question?”

“Maestro, what is hurly-burly? Is that even a word? Hurly-burly doesn’t sound very Old Proper English.”

“You make a good point as usual, Practical Jeffrey. Hurly-burly is an onomatopoeic term. That word directly arises from the sonic vibrations of the natural universe. Are there other questions about onomatopoeia, or the general persistence of some few words of Truly Ancient Greek within the structure of Old Proper English?”

There were no such questions.

Julian gestured beyond the row of chairs. Sparrow rose at once from her cross-legged seat on her mat.

“You gentlemen have never witnessed a device remotely like this one,” said Julian, “for very few have. So let me frame this awful business within its rhetorical context. How did our ancestors observe Venus? As is well known to everyone, our ancestors tamed the lightning. On top of the wires in which they confined that lightning, they built yet another mystic structure, fantastic, occult, and exceedingly powerful. Their electrical wires, we can dig up in any ruin. No traces of that virtual structure remain: only certain mystical hints.

“So we know, we must admit, very little about antique virtuality. But we do know that virtuality moved vibrations: It moved images, and light, and sound, and numbers. Tonight, for the first time in your lives, you will be seeing a projected image. Tomorrow night—if you see fit to return here—you will see that image moving. With sounds.”

Sparrow bent her attention to the magic lantern. Julian arranged the makeshift stage. It was a taut sheet of white cotton, behind a flooring of bricks.

Then Julian ventured through the small crowd to the aviary, where he had seen an ominous figure lurking.

This unsought guest wore a red robe, with a faceless red hood. Everyone was cordially pretending to ignore the Man in Red. Even the youngest students knew that this was how things were done.

“Thank you for gracing us with your presence tonight,” murmured Julian.

“I haven’t seen that magic lantern in forty years,” said the Man in Red.

“It consumes a very special oil, with a bright limestone powder … rare and difficult,” said Julian.

“Are you willing,” said the Man in Red, “to pay the rare and difficult price for your failure to engage with the world?”

“If you’re referring to the cogent matter of the succession,” said Julian cordially, “I’ve made it the policy at these civil seminars to discuss that not at all.”

“If the Other Man takes command of the Palace,” said the Man in Red, “he will attack you. Yes, you academics. Not that you have done anything subversive or decadent! No, I wouldn’t allege that! But because your weakness invites attack. Since you are so weak, he can make an example of you.”

Julian now had a quite good idea who the Man in Red was, but Julian gave no sign to show that. “I refuse to despair,” he said, smiling. “This is merely a change of regime. The world is not ending, sir. The world already ended a thousand years ago.”

“Our world,” said the Man in Red, “this world we both enjoyed under the bounty of the previous Godfather, does not have to end. It’s true that the Other Man has the force of numbers on his side—because he’s forged an ignoble alliance of the greedy and the stupid. But it’s not too late for a small, bold group to preempt him.”

“If there is trouble,” said Julian, “my students will come to harm. Because my students are brave. And bold. And idealistic. And exceedingly violent. You can start a brawl like that. Do you think you can end it?”

“You could rally your students. These young men of fine families … Many about to lose their sinecures from the old man’s court … They trust your counsel. They adore you. Some of them more than they should, perhaps.”

“Oh,” said Julian, “I don’t doubt I could find you one bold, bright, expendable young fool with a cloak and a dagger! But may I tell you something? Quite honestly? I spit on your cynical palace intrigues. I do. I despise them. They repel me.”

“You quarreled with the old regime, Julian. The next regime might be kinder to you.”

“I live simply. You have nothing that I want.”

“I can tolerate a man of integrity,” said the Man in Red, “because the innocent men are all fools. But a man who reasserts his integrity—after what you did?—that is a bit more difficult to tolerate.”

“Don’t let me be difficult,” said Julian. “You must have many pressing errands elsewhere.”

“To tell the truth, I envy you,” admitted the Man in Red, with a muffled note of sadness behind his red fabric mouth-hole. “All of us envy you. We all tell each other that we would love to do just as you did: put aside the pen, take off the robes, and retire to a life of the mind. Oh yes, you do make that sound mild and humble, but this private dreamworld of yours, with these sweet little birdcages … It’s much more exciting and pleasurable than our grim, sworn duties. Your life merely seems lighthearted and self-indulgent. You have found a genuinely different way of life.”

“My friend, yes I have, and I believe … I know that all of life could be different. Despite the darkness of the world it ruined, humanity could still transform itself. Yes, humanity could.”

“You even have found yourself some creature comforts, lately. One of your minions bought you a mistress. I’m not sure I understand the appeal of that—for you.”

“I rather doubt I’d understand the appeal of your mistress, either.”

“I don’t understand that myself,” sighed the Man in Red. “A man imagines he’s cavorting like a rooster, while all the time he’s merely bleeding wealth. A mistress who cares nothing for you is an enemy in your bed. A mistress who does care for you is your hostage to fortune. A pity that my warnings were so useless. Good evening, sir.”

The Man in Red left, with serene and measured step. The crowd parted silently before him as he approached, and it surged behind him as he left.

Julian filtered through the crowd to Sparrow, where she knelt by the lantern, cautiously unwrapping fragile slides of painted glass.

He gripped her by the arm and dragged her to her feet. “Sparrow will sing tonight!” he announced, pulling her toward the stage. “Sparrow will sing her very best song for you! It’s very curious and unusual and antique! I believe it maybe the oldest song in the whole world.” He lowered his trembling voice. “Go on, Sparrow. Sing it, sing …”

Sparrow was in an agony of reluctance and stage fright.

Julian could not urge her to be brave, because he was very afraid. “This is the oldest song in the whole world!” he repeated. “Gentlemen, please try to encourage her …”

In her thready, nasal voice, Sparrow began to choke out her mournful little wail. Although her words meant nothing to anyone who listened, it was clearly and simply a very sad song. It was something like a sad lover’s song, but much worse. It was a cosmic sadness that came from a cold grave in the basement of the place where lovers were sad.

The lament of a mother who had lost her child. Of a child who could find no mother. A heartbreaking chasm in the natural order of being. A collapse, a break, a fall, a decay, a loss, and a lasting darkness. It was that sad.

Sparrow could not complete her song. She panicked, hid her face in her wrinkled hands and fled into a corner of the house.

Julian set to work on the magic lantern.

His student Practical Jeffrey came to his side. Jef spoke casually, in the local vulgar tongue. “Maestro, what was that little episode about? That was the worst stage performance that I’ve ever seen.”

“That was the oldest song in the whole world, Jef. And now, you have heard it.”

“I couldn’t understand one line of that lousy dirge! She’s a terrible singer, too. She’s not even pretty. If she were young and pretty, that might have been tolerable.”

“Don’t let me interfere with your pressing quest for a young and pretty girl, Jef.”

“I know that I didn’t understand all that,” Jef persisted, “but I know that something has changed. Not just that the old man is finally dead, or that the antique world is so rotten. We have to force the world to rise again in some other shape … For me, this was enough of that. I’m leaving you, maestro. I’m leaving your academy for good. I’ve had enough of all your teaching and your preaching, sir. Thank you for your efforts to improve me. I have to get to work now.”

Julian glanced up. He was not much surprised by Jef’s news. “You should stay to see this magic lantern, Jef. Projected images are extremely dramatic. They are very compelling. Really, if you’ve never seen one, they are absolutely wondrous. People have been known to faint.”

“I’m sure your phantoms are marvelous,” said Jef, pretending to yawn. “I’m going back to the Palace now, I have a family meeting … You stay well.”

Jef did not appear for the next night of the Venus seminar. Julian’s house and yard were densely packed, because word had gotten out about the magic lantern and its stunning effects. The little house roiled and surged with metalsmiths, sculptors, mural painters, orators, men of medicine, men of the law … Even a few women had dared to show up, with their brothers or husbands as escorts.

Practical Jeffrey had sent his apology for leaving the school, written in his sturdy, workmanlike calligraphy. He’d also shipped along a handsome banquet, and, as a topper, a wooden keg of the finest long-aged corn liquor. All the other students were hugely impressed by Jef’s farewell gesture. Everyone toasted him and agreed that, despite his singular absence from the proceedings, Practical Jeffrey was a gentleman of high style.

So the second night started lively and, lavishly lubricated by Jef’s magnanimity, it got livelier yet.

This night, the students put on a series of dramatic skits, performed in Old Proper English. These episodes involved the myths and heroes of remote antiquity: the Man who walked on the Moon, the Man who flew alone across the ocean, the Man who flew around without any machines at all, and was made of steel, and fought crime (he was always popular).

These theatricals were an unprecedented success, because the crowd was so dense, and so drunk, and because the graceless Dandy William Idaho was not there to overact and spoil anything.

Three of the masked Men in Red graced the scene with their presence, which made life three times more dangerous than life had been the night before. Julian watched them, smiling in his best mellow fashion, to hide his pride and his dread.

All his glamorous, shining young men, striking their poses on the tiny stage, with their young, strong, beautiful bodies … Maybe it could be said that Julian had saved them from deadly danger. It might also be said that he was fiddling as the city burned.

Julian knew that a settling of accounts was near. A time of such tension needed only one provocation. An obscure clash by night, a sudden insult offered, an insult stingingly returned, and Dandy William Idaho had been beaten senseless in the street. Bili was crushed, spurned, trampled on, and spat upon. Bili had never been the kind of kid you could hit just once.

Then the troubles started. Bitter quarrels, flung stones near glass houses … The police restored order through the simple pretext of attacking the foreigners. Everybody knew that the foreigners in the city were thieves, because so many had been forced to be thieves. No one of good sense and property was going to defend any thieves.

The police richly enjoyed the luscious irony of the police robbing thieves. So the police kicked in the doors of some of the wealthier foreigners, and seized everything they had.

Julian spent the night of that seminar activating an electrical generator. Electrical generators had been true fetish objects for the remote founders of Selder. Periodically, as a gesture of respect to antiquity, some scholar would disinter an old generator and rebuild another new generator in the same shape. So Julian owned a generator, packed in its moldering, filthy grease. It had elaborate, hand-etched schematics to explain how to work it.

This electrical night was not nearly so successful as the earlier seminar nights. After much cursing and honest puzzlement, the students managed to get the generator assembled. They even managed to crank it. It featured some spots of bare metal that stung the bare hand with a serpent’s bite. Other than that, it was merely an ugly curio. The generator did not create any visible mystical powers or spiritual transcendence. Society did not advance to a higher plane of being.

Next day, the emboldened police repressed some of the darker elements of the old regime. These arrogant time-servers were notorious for their corruption. So the police beat the fancy crooks like dogs and kicked them out the door, and the crowd cheered that action, too.

People spoke quite openly of who would be serving in the Other Man’s new regime, and what kind of posts they would hold.

The Favorite for the post of Godfather acted the fine gentleman: He urged calm, made dignified noises, and temporized. In the meantime, the gate guards had been bribed. Exiles poured into the city. The sentence of exile had been the merciful punishment of the late Godfather’s later years. Now it became clear that the Godfather had merely exported resentments to a future date. These exiles—those among them who survived—had become hard, weathered men. They knew what they had lost. They also knew what they had to regain.

So there were more clashes, this time with gangs of hardened cutthroats. The Favorite pulled up his stakes and fled in terror.

Julian spent that night explaining how to use electricity and virtuality to connect the soul of Man with the planet Venus.

There was a large crowd for his last hermetic ceremony, and not because it was such an interesting topic. People had fled to Julian’s refuge because the city was convulsed with fear.

It had always been said of the people of Selder that they would shed their own blood rather than lose one drop of water. Like many clichés, that was true. The smothered resentments of a long, peaceful reign were all exposed to the open air. That meant beatings, break-ins, and back-alley backstabbings.

The elections were held in conditions of desperate haste, because only one man was fit to restore order.

To his credit, the new Godfather took prompt action. He averted anarchy through the simple tactic of purging all his opponents.

Julian surrendered peaceably. He had rather imagined that he might have to. The grass that bent before the wind would stand upright again, he reasoned. The world was still scarred with the windblown wrecks of long-dead forests.

Prison was dark, damp, and dirty. The time in prison weighed heavily on a man’s soul. Julian had nothing to write with, nothing to read. He never felt the sun, or breathed any fresh air.

Julian’s best friends in the underground cell were small insects. Over a passage of ten centuries, cave insects had somehow found the many wet passages beneath the city. Most of these wild denizens were smaller than lice, pale, long-legged, and eyeless. Julian had never realized there were so many different breeds of them. The humble life sheltered within the earth had suffered much less than the life exposed to mankind on its surface.

At length—at great length—Julian had a prison visitor.

“You will forgive Us,” stated the Godfather, “for trying a philosopher’s well-known patience. There were certain disorders consequent on Our accession, and a great press of necessary public business. Word has reached Our ears, however, that you have been shouting and pleading with your jailers. Weeping and begging like a hysterical woman, they tell Us.”

“I’m not a well man now, your eminence. I cannot thrive without the vibrations of the sun, the stars, and planets.”

“Surely you didn’t imagine that We would ever forget a classmate.”

“No, sir.”

“They tell Us you have been requesting—no, sobbing and pleading—for some literary material,” said the Godfather. He nodded at his silent bodyguard, who passed a sheaf of manuscripts through the carved stone pillars of the cell. “You will find these documents of interest. These are the signed confessions of your fellow conspirators.”

Julian leafed through the warrants. “It’s good to see that my friends kept up their skills in calligraphy.”

“We took the liberty of paging through the archives of our predecessor, as well,” said the Godfather. He produced a set of older documents. “You will recognize the striking eloquence of these death sentences. You were in top form back then. These documents of state are so grandiloquent, so closely argued, and in such exquisite English. They killed certain members of my own family—but as legal court documents, they were second to none.”

Julian sighed. “I just couldn’t do that any longer.”

“You won’t have to do it,” the Godfather allowed. “You wrote such sustainable classics here that We won’t need any new death sentences. We can simply reuse your fine, sturdy documents, over and over.”

“It was my duty to write sentences,” said Julian. “Sentences are a necessity of statecraft. Let me formally express my remorse.”

“You express your remorse now,” remarked the Godfather. “At the time, you were taking great pride in your superb ability to compose a sentence.”

“I admit my misdeeds, sir. I am contrite.”

“More recently, you and your friends were plotting against Our election,” said the Godfather patiently. “As a further patent insult to Our dignity, you had yourself crowned as the ‘President of the United States.’ There are witnesses to that event.”

“That was a diversion,” said Julian. “That was part of a magic ceremony. To help me electrically reach the virtual image of the planet Venus.”

“Juli, have you become a heretic, or just a maniac? You should read the allegations in these confessions! They are fantastic. Your fellow conspirators say that you believe that men can still fly. That you conjured living phantoms in public. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“People talk,” said Julian. “In a cage, people will sing.”

“You dressed your slave as a golden goddess and you made people worship her.”

“That was her costume,” said Julian. “She enjoyed that. I think it was the only time I’ve ever seen her happy.”

“Juli, We are not your classmate any more. We have become your Godfather. It is unclear to Us what you thought you were gaining by this charade. In any case, that will go on no longer. Your cabal has been arrested. Your house, and all that eerie rubbish inside it, has been seized. In times this dark and troubled, We have no need for epicene displays. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell Us what We are supposed to do with you.”

“Let me go,” said Julian, sweating in the stony chill. “Release me, and I will sing your praises. Some day history will speak of you. You will want history to say something noble and decent about you.”

“That is a tempting offer,” mused the Godfather. “I would like history to say this of me: that I was an iron disciplinarian who scourged corruption, and struck his enemies with hammer blows. Can you arrange that?”

“I can teach rhetoric. Someone will say that for you, and they’ll need great skill.”

“I hate a subtle insult,” said the Godfather. “I can forgive an enemy soldier who flings a spear straight at me, but a thing like that is just vile.”

“I don’t want to die here in this stone cage!” screeched Julian. “I can write a much better groveling confession than these other wretches! A man of your insight knows that confessions are nothing but rhetoric! Of course they all chose to indict me! How could they not? They are men with families to consider, while I am foreign-born and I have no one! We’re all intelligent men! We all know that if someone must die, then I’m the best to die. I’m one against four! But surely you must know better!”

“Of course I know better,” said the Godfather. “You imagined that, as men of letters, you were free of the healthy atmosphere of general fear so fit for everyone else. That is not true. Men of letters have to obey Us, they have to serve Us loyally, and they have to know that their lives are forfeit. Just like everyone else.”

“ ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the hood,’ ” said Julian.

“You always had a fertile mind for an apposite quote. We are inclined to spare you.”

Light bloomed in the dampest corner of Julian’s mind. “Yes, of course, of course I should be spared! Why should I die? I never raised my hand against you. I never even raised my voice.”

“Like the others, you must write your full and complete confession. It will be read aloud to the assembled court. Then, a year in the field with the army will toughen you up. You’re much too timid to fight, but Our army needs its political observers. We need clearly written reports from the field. And the better my officers, the worse they seem to write!”

“Is there a war? Who has attacked us?”

“There is no war just as yet,” said the Godfather. “But of course they will attack Us, unless We prove to them that they dare not attack. So, we plan a small campaign to commence Our reign. One insolent village, leveled. You’ll be in no great danger.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“Yes, in fact, you are a coward, Julian. You happened to live in a time when you could play-act otherwise. Those decadent times have passed. You’re a coward, and you always were. So, make a clean breast of your many failings. We pledge that you too will be spared. You might as well write your own confessions, for your sins are many and you know them better than anyone.”

“Once I do that for you, you’ll spare my friends.”

“We will. We don’t say they will suck the blood of the taxpayer anymore, but yes, they will be spared.”

“You’ll spare my students.”

“Fine young men. They were led astray. Young men of good family are natural officer material.”

“You’ll give me back my house and my servant.”

“Oh, you won’t need any house, and as for your wicked witch … You should read the thunderation that rings around her little head! Your friends denounced you—but in their wisdom, they denounced her much, much more violently. They all tell Us that this lamentable situation is not your fault at all. They proclaim that she seduced you to it, that she turned your head. She drove you mad, she drugged you. She used all the wicked wiles of a foreign courtesan. She descended to female depths of evil that no mere man can plumb.”

Julian sat on his stony bench for a moment. Then he rose again and put his hands around the bars. “Permit me to beg for her life.”

“To spare her is not possible. We can’t publish these many eloquent confessions without having her drowned in the Cistern right away. It would be madness to let a malignant creature like that walk in daylight for even an hour.”

“She did nothing except what I trained her to do! She’s completely harmless and timid. She’s the meekest creature alive. You are sacrificing an innocent for political expediency. It’s a shame.”

“Should We spare this meek creature and execute you, and four friends? She was a lost whore, and the lowest of the low, as soon as her own soldiers failed to protect her from the world. You want to blame someone for the cold facts? Blame yourself, professor. Let this be a good lesson to you.”

“You are breaking a bird on an anvil here. That’s easy for you to do, but it’s a cruelty. You’ll be remembered for that. It will weigh on your conscience.”

“It will not,” said the Godfather. “Because We will kindly offer to spare the witch’s life. Then We will watch your friends in a yapping frenzy to have her killed. Your noble scholars will do everything they can to have her vilified, lynched, dumped into the Cistern, and forgotten forever. They will blame her lavishly in order to absolve themselves. Then, when you meet each other again, you men with a cause, you literati—that’s when the conscience will sting.”

“So,” said Julian, “it’s not enough that we’re fools, or that we’re cowards, or that we failed to defend ourselves. We also have to be evil.”

“You are evil. Truly, you are fraudulent and wicked men. We should wash you from the fabric of society in a cleansing bath of blood. But We won’t do that. Do you know why? Because We understand necessity. We are responsible. We know what the state requires. We think these things through.”

“You could still spare us. You could forgive us for the things we wrote and thought. You could be courageous and generous. That is within your great power.”

The Godfather sighed. “That is so easy for a meager creature like you to say, and so difficult for Us to do. We will tell you a little parable about that. Soon, this cell door will open. Now: When this door is opened, place your right hand in this doorframe. We will have this husky bodyguard slam this iron door on your fingers. You will never scribble one mischievous word again. If you do that, Julian, that would be ‘courageous and generous.’ That would be the bravest act of your life. We will spare the life of your mystic witch for that noble act.”

Julian said nothing.

“You’re not volunteering to be so courageous and generous? You can marry her: You have Our blessing. We will perform that ceremony Ourselves.”

“You are right. I don’t want her,” said Julian. “I have no further need for her. Let her be strangled in all due haste and thrown down the well. Let the hungry fish nibble her flesh, let her body be turned into soup and poured through the greenhouses. She came to me half-dead, and every day I gave to her was some day she would never have seen! Let me see that sunlight she will never see again. I hate this cage. Let me out of here.”

After his release from darkness, very little happened to Julian that he found of any interest. After two years of service, Julian managed to desert the army of Selder. There had been no chance of that at first, because the army was so eager, bold, and well disciplined.

However, after two years of unalloyed successes, the army suffered a sharp reverse at the walls of Buena Vista. The hardscrabble villagers there were too stubborn, or perhaps too stupid, to be cowed by such a fine army. To the last man, woman, and child, they put up a lethal resistance. So the village was left in ruins, but so was the shining reputation of the Godfather and his troops.

Julian fled that fiery scene by night, losing any pursuers in the vast wild thickets of cactus and casuarina. Soon afterward, he was captured by the peasants of Denver. There was little enough left of that haunted place. However, the Denver peasants sold him to a regional court with a stony stronghold in the heights of Vale.

Julian was able to convince the scowling peers of that realm that they would manage better with tax records and literate official proclamations. That was true: They did improve with a gloss of civility. They never let him leave, but they let him live.

After a course of further indifferent years, word arrived in Vale that the Godfather of Selder had perished in his own turn. He had died of sickness in a war camp, plague and war being much the same thing. There were certain claims that he had been poisoned.

After some further tiresome passage of years, the reviving realm of Selder began to distribute traders, bankers, and ambassadors. They were a newer and younger-spirited people. They were better dressed and brighter-eyed. They wrote everything down. They observed new opportunities in places where nothing had happened for ages. They had grand plans for those places, and the ability to carry them out.

These new men of Selder seemed to revel in being a hundred things at once. Not just poets, but also architects. Not just artists, but also engineers. Not just bankers, but gourmands and art collectors. Even their women were astonishing.

Julian had no desire to return to the damp glassy shadows of Selder. He had come to realize that a Sustainable City that could never forget its past could become an object of terror to simpler people. Also, he had grown white-haired and old.

But he was not allowed to ignore a velvet invitation—a polite command, really—from Godfather Magnanimous Jef the First. Practical Jeffrey had outlasted his city’s woes with the stolid grace that was his trademark. Jef’s shrewd rise to power had cost him a brother and two bodyguards, but once in command, he never set his neatly shod foot wrong.

In his reign, men and women breathed a new air of magnificence, refinement, and vivacity. Troubles that would have crushed a lesser folk were made jest of, simply taken in stride.

Men even claimed that the climate was improving. This was delusional, for nothing would ever make the climate any better. But the climate within the hearts of men was better. Men were clearly and simply a better kind of man.

Julian had never written a book, for he had always said that his students were his books. And with the passage of years, Julian’s students had indeed become his books. They were erudite like books, complex like books, long-lasting like books. His students had become great men. Their generation was accomplishing feats that the ancients themselves had never dreamt of. Air wells, ice-ponds and aqueducts. Glass palaces of colored light. Peak-flashing heliographs and giant projection machines. Carnivals and pageants. Among these men, greatness was common as dirt.

It was required, somehow, that the teacher of such men should himself be a great man. So the great men delighted in honoring Julian. He was housed in a room in one of their palaces, and stuffed with creature comforts like a fattened capon. His only duty was to play the sage for his successors, to cackle wise inanities for them. To sing the praises of the golden present, and make the darkest secrets of a dark age more tenaciously obscure.

Futurity could never allow the past to betray it again.