Emperor of Gondwanaland (42 page)

Walking easily down the broad boulevard of the Rue d’lsly, with its majestic European-style buildings nearly a century old, Camus felt his spirit begin to expand. If only he had time for a swim, his favorite pastime, life would begin to taste sweet again. But he could not permit himself such indulgences, not, at least, until after the emperor’s visit. Flanked by sycamores, the Rue d’lsly boasted parallel sets of trolley tracks running down its middle. At one point the tracks bellied outward to accommodate a pedestaled statue of Professor Blondlot, holding aloft the first crude N-ray generator.

Camus enjoyed watching the cool-legged women pass, the sight of the sea at the end of every cross-street. From an Arab vendor (license prominently displayed) he purchased a glass of iced lemonade flavored with orange-flowers. Sipping the cool beverage, Camus was attracted to a public-works site where other onlookers congregated. From behind the site’s fence spilled the edges of a crackling glare. Camus knew the source of the radiance. N-ray construction machinery was busy slicing through the earth to fashion Algiers’s first metro line, running from Ain Allah through downtown and on to Ain Naadja. Camus looked through a smoked-glass port at the busy scene for a moment, then continued on his way. He hoped the new metro would not mean the extinction of the nostalgia-provoking trolley cars, and made a mental note to arrange some subsidies for the older system.

A few blocks farther on, Camus arrived at his destination.

In the doorway of the restaurant, his usual place, stood Céleste, with his apron bulging on his paunch, his white mustache well to the fore. Camus was ushered into the establishment with much to-do and seated at his traditional table. He ordered a simple meal of fish and couscous and sat back to await it with a glass of cold white wine. When his lunch came, Camus consumed it with absentminded bodily pleasure. His thoughts were an unfocused kaleidoscope of recent problems, right up to and including Rhinebeck’s visit. But eventually, under the influence of a second glass of wine, Camus found his thoughts turning to his dead parents. He recalled specifically his father’s frequent anecdotes surrounding the elder man’s personal witnessing of the birth of the empire.

The year was 1914, and the Great War was newly raging in Europe. Camus’s father was a soldier defending France. Far from his tropical home, Lucien Camus and his comrades were arrayed along the river Marne, preparing for a titanic battle against the Germans, and fully expecting to die, when the miracle happened that saved all their lives. From the rear lines trundled on their modified horse-drawn carriages some curious weapons, guns without open bores, strange assemblages of batteries and prisms and focal reflectors. Arrayed in an arc against the enemy, the uncanny weapons, upon command from Marshal Joffre himself, unleashed deadly purple rays of immense destructive power, sizzling bolts that evaporated all matter in their path. The German forces were utterly annihilated, without any loss of life on the French side.

After this initial trial of the new guns, the Great War—or, as most people later ironically called it, “the Abortive Great War”—continued for only another few months. Impressive numbers of the futuristic weapons were deployed on all fronts, cindering all forces who dared oppose the French. The Treaty of Versailles was signed before the year was over, and the troops of the Triple Entente occupied Germany, with the French contingent predominant, despite objections from its allies England and Russia. (Just four years ago, Camus had watched with interest the results of the very first postwar elections allowed the Germans. Perhaps now the French civil overseers in the defeated land could be begin to be reassigned to other vital parts of the empire.) The transition from Third Republic to empire was formalized shortly thereafter, with the ascension of the emperor, the dimwitted, pliable young scion of an ancient lineage.

Of course, the question on all tongues at the time, including Lucien’s and his comrades’, concerned the origin of the mystery weapons. Soon, the public was treated to the whole glorious story.

Ten years prior to the Battle of the Marne, Professor Rene Blondlot had been a simple teacher of physics at the University of Nancy when he became intrigued by the newly discovered phenomenon known as X-rays. Seeking to polarize these invisible rays, Blondlot assembled various apparatuses that seemed to produce a subtle new kind of beam, promptly labeled N-rays, in honor of the professor’s hometown of Nancy. At the heart of the N-ray generator was an essential nest of prisms and lenses.

In America, a physicist named Robert Wood had tried to duplicate Blondlot’s experiments and failed to replicate the French results. He journeyed to Nancy and soon concluded, quite erroneously, that Blondlot was a fraud. Seeking, in the light of his false judgment, to “expose” the Frenchmen, Wood had made a sleight-of-hand substitution during a key demonstration, inserting a ruby-quartz prism of his own construction in place of Blondlot’s original. When, as Wood expected, Blondlot continued to affirm results no one else could see, the American planned to step forward and reveal that a crucial portion of the apparatus was not even consistent with the original essential design.

Ironically and quite condignly, the ravening burst of disruptive violet energy that emerged from the modified projector when it was activated incinerated Wood entirely, along with half of Blondlot’s lab.

Accepting this fortuitous modification, the scorched but unharmed Blondlot was able to swiftly expand upon his initial discovery. Over the next several years, he discovered dozens of distinct forms of N-rays, all with different applications, from destructive to beneficent. Eventually his work came to the attention of the French government. When hostilities commenced in June of 1914, the French military had already secretly been embarked on a program of construction of N-ray weapons for some time. Under the stimulus of war, the first guns were hastily finished and rushed to the Marne by September.

Now, forty years later, N-rays technology, much expanded and embedded in France’s vast navies, armies, and aerial forces, remained a French monopoly, the foundation on which the ever-expanding empire rested, and the envy of all other nations, which waged constant espionage to steal the empire’s secrets, spying so far completely frustrated by the DGSE. Not the Russian czarina nor the British Marxist cadres nor the Chinese emperor nor the Ottoman pashas nor the American president had been able to successfully extract the core technology for their own use. And as France’s dominion grew, so all these aforenamed nations shrank.

So much did every schoolchild of the empire learn. Although not many of them could claim, as Camus could, that their fathers had been present at the very first unveiling of the world-changing devices.

Camus’s ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of Céleste at his table. The plump proprietor coughed politely, then tendered a slip of paper to his patron.

“A gentleman left this earlier for you, m’sieur. Please pardon me for nearly forgetting to deliver it.”

Camus took the folded sheet of note paper and opened it. Inside was a simple message.

Dear Sisyphus,

Meet me tonight at the dance hall at Padovani Beach. I have a proposition that will change your life, and possibly the world.

Camus was dumbstruck. How did some stranger come to address him by his unrevealed sardonic nickname for himself? What unimaginable proposition could possibly involve Camus in world-altering events?

Camus summoned Céleste back to the table.

“What did this fellow look like?”

The restaurant owner stroked his mustache. “He was an odd duck. Completely bald, very thin, with odd smoked lenses concealing his eyes. But most startling was his mode of dress. If he’s wearing the same clothes when you see him, you won’t be able to mistake him. A queer suit like an acrobat’s leotard, made of some shiny material and covering even his feet, poked out of the holes of a shabby Arab robe that seemed like some castoff of the souks. At first I thought him part of the circus. But upon reflection, I believe that no circus is in town.”

Camus pondered this description. This stranger was no one he knew.

Camus thanked Céleste, folded the note into his pocket, paid his bill, and returned to the office.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a stuporous fog. Camus consumed numerous cups of coffee while attending in mechanical fashion to the never-ending stream of paperwork that flowed across his desk. All the caffeine, however, failed to alleviate the dullness of his thoughts, the dark befuddlement that had arrived with the stranger’s note. Merseault called on the televisor once. The governor-general wanted to ensure that his counterpart from the French Congo was bringing all the native women he had promised to bring during the upcoming festivities. Merseault had a weakness for Nubians. Camus promised to check.

At eight o’clock Camus bade his equally hard-working secretary goodnight, and left the palace. Two streetcar rides later, he arrived at Padovani Beach.

The famous dance hall situated in this location was an enormous wooden structure set amidst a grove of tamarisk trees. Jutting with awnings, the building’s entire seaward side was open to the maritime breezes. With the descent of darkness, the place came alive with the violet-tinged N-ray illumination from large glass globes. (Suitably modulated, N-rays could be conducted along copper wires just like electricity.) Couples and single men and women of all classes streamed in, happy and carefree. Notes of music drifted out, gypsy strains recently popular in France. Camus wondered briefly why the intriguing “jazz” he had heard at a reception at the American embassy had never caught on outside America, but then realized that Rhinebeck’s tirade about the unidirectional flow of culture from France outward explained everything.

Inside, Camus went to the bar and ordered a pastis and a dish of olives and chickpeas. Halfheartedly consuming his selections, Camus wondered how he was to meet the writer of the note. If the stranger remained dressed as earlier described, he would be immensely out of place and immediately attract notice. But Camus suspected that the meeting would not occur so publicly.

For an hour, Camus was content simply to admire the dancers. Their profiles whirled obstinately around, like cut-out silhouettes attached to a phonograph’s turntable. Every woman, however plain, swaying in the arms of her man, evoked a stab in Camus’s heart. No such romantic gamine occupied his life. His needs were met by the anonymous prostitutes of the marine district, and by the occasional short-term dalliance with fellow civil servants.

Finally Camus’s patience began to wear thin. He drained his third pastis and sauntered out to a deck overlooking the double shell of the sea and sky.

The stranger was waiting for him there, sitting on a bench in a twilit corner nominally reserved for lovers, just as Céleste had depicted him.

The stranger’s voice was languorous and yet electric. His shrouded eyes disclosed no hints of his emotional state, yet the wrinkles around his lips seemed to hint at a wry amusement. “Ah, Albert, my friend, I was wondering how long it would take you to grow bored with the trite display inside and visit me.”

Camus came close to the stranger, but did not sit beside him. “You know me. How?”

“Oh, your reputation is immense where I come from, Albert. You are an international figure of some repute.”

“Do not toy with me, m’sieur. I am a simple civil servant, not an actor or football hero.”

“Ah, but did I specify those occupations? I think not. No, you are known for talents other than those.”

Camus chose to drop this useless line of inquiry. “Where exactly do you come from?”

“A place both very near, yet very far.”

Growing impatient, Camus said, “If you don’t wish to answer me sanely, please at least keep your absurd paradoxes to yourself. You summoned me here with the promise of some life-altering program. I will confess that I stand in need of such a remedy for the moribund quandary I find myself in. Therefore state your proposition, and I will consider it.”

“So direct! I can see that your reputation for cutting to the heart of the matter was not exaggerated. Very well, my friend, here it is. If you descend to the beach below and walk half a kilometer north, you will encounter a man sleeping in the dunes. He looks like a mere street Arab, but in reality he is a trained Spanish assassin who has made his laborious covert way here from Algeciras and on through Morocco. He intends to kill the emperor during your ruler’s visit here. And he stands a good chance of succeeding, for he is very talented in his trade, and has sympathizers in high places within your empire.”

Camus felt as if a long thin blade were transfixing his forehead. “Assuming this is true, what do you expect me to do about this? Do you want me to inform the authorities? Why don’t you just go to them yourself?”

The stranger waved a slim hand in elegant disdain. “Oh, that course of action would be so unentertaining. Too pedestrian by half. You see, I am a connoisseur of choice and chance and character. I believe in allowing certain of my fellow men whom I deem worthy the opportunity to remake their own world by their existential behavior. You are such a man, at such a crucial time and place. You should consider yourself privileged.”

Camus tried to think calmly and rationally. But the next words out of his mouth were absolute madness. “You are from the future then.”

The stranger laughed heartily. “A good guess! But not the case. Let us just say that I live in the same
arrondissement
of the multiverse as you.”