The House of Rumour (48 page)

And as we continued to investigate these torments we were possessed with a feeling that it was we who were being questioned. But if some entity had become our inquisitor, we could not comprehend the nature of this vile interrogation. A few of us demanded that a confession might be offered so that the agony might end. Elsewhere a rumour spread of a man among us who had endured the forty hours of la veglia without ever having revealed his secret. When challenged no one actually knew this person by name, only at some second or third remove as is common in the reporting of gossip. It made no sense in any case as it would not be possible to endure such hideous treatment at the hands of anyone in the City of the Sun.

Indeed, it was decided that the source of the nightmares was another realm entirely since their barbarity was inconceivable to our dominion. They must be a communication from another world, a distant star or planet. We do not doubt that there are worlds beyond our own and account it foolish to believe otherwise. So while our astrologers scanned the heavens for any new disturbance in the cosmos, others of us in Wisdom proceeded to our Great Library.

This treasure house often appears neglected amid all the palaces in Heliopolis and it is true that so much of our experience is read through life that we have scant need of it. The world is our book and our city a sublime school whose very walls form pages of knowledge (as children we learnt the alphabet from its walls as we walked around it). There may be endless volumes, copied with countless errors, but we can read from the one true original. The guardians of the Library have been working for many years on the Great Encyclopedia, and even they confine their individual study to a mere handful of books in a whole lifetime. It is said that it is not the reading that matters so much as the rereading. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day? And as we count the world our book, might not other worlds be other books, strange and unprecedented?

So it was in the unfamiliar sections of the Great Library that we decided to search for evidence of life beyond our own reality. Guided by its guardians, we began an examination of works of speculation. The countless books consulted on this matter included: Lucian of Samosata’s True History, which describes journeys to the moon, the sun and the morning star; Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes, which contains similar references; Al-Farabi’s Al-Madina, al-Fadila featuring an ideal state; the Arabic grimoire the Picatrix, which contains an account of the miraculous City of Adocentyn with a central sun temple that projects planetary colours from its lighthouse; the Letter of Prester John
,
which reports an Earthly Paradise and various mirabilia: endless possibilities of other worlds and also the disturbing prospect of non-existence. We were particularly perplexed by Thomas More’s Utopia whose very title means ‘no such place’.

But while we in Wisdom seemed lost in futile scholarship, a vernacular narrative was emerging outside the confines of the Library. The whispered story of the man who had endured the worst of all tortures and kept silent had continued to circulate. Though we are loath to give credit to any rumour or heresy, in desperation we picked at any meagre fruits of the grapevine. And though no one had yet named or given any description of this supposed man, the nomenclature of his persecutors had been sporadically voiced as the ‘Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition’.

It did not take us long to establish the nature of this body. Though we found many references to various holy inquisitions, this one was said to have been founded by the great hierophant of a city called Rome, a place distant in time and space. Many great philosophers were punished by this organisation. One who claimed rightly that the earth goes around the sun was shown their instruments of torture and forced to recant; another who wrote of a plurality of worlds in an infinite universe, of every star being a sun with its own planets, was burnt alive.

In time our attention was drawn to the life of the rebellious monk Tommaso Campanella who as a novice had been briefly imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition for offences ranging from composing a blasphemous sonnet to harbouring a familiar demon under the nail of his little finger. He went on to engage in practices forbidden in that land: natural magic, astrology and the belief in heliocentrism. He led a revolt in the South that was both a revolution against worldly authority and an evocation of a great cosmological shift in the heavens, a
mutazione
in the local dialect of the rebels, that would bring about a paradise on earth. Guided more by the inspiration of portents and prophecies than practical strategy, the uprising was quickly suppressed.

Campanella was imprisoned once more and tortured more severely. His one defence against the penalty of death was to assert that he was insane, but in order to prove this he would have to face a dreadful ordeal. The test that the Inquisition used on one claiming madness was forty hours of la veglia. His torturers would watch all the while for signs that he was feigning his lunacy and wait for him to call out in confession. Tommaso Campanella survived. It seemed we had found our rumoured man.

If we felt something of a respite in locating the cause of our mental anguish, this relief did not last long. Soon came a foreboding of a deeper disquiet. Campanella was imprisoned for twenty-six years or more in appalling conditions of deprivation, yet his literary output during this time is remarkable. In the darkness of his cell he wrote or dictated in secret, risking further punishment by smuggling manuscripts out into the world. Many of his works were confiscated and destroyed; we examined what remained in the Great Library with awe and astonishment.

We know not whether the world was made from nothing or from the ruins of other worlds, but we certainly think that it was made and did not exist from eternity. We worship the sun and our unnamed creator and we do not question our origins. So it seemed a superstitious conjecture that many of Campanella’s sonnets appeared to be reworkings of our ancient folk-songs and that his philosophy of a sentient world was identical to ours. In his book on metaphysics he writes that man lives in a double world: according to his body, he exists in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains; according to the mind, he is contained by no physical space and no walls; he is in heaven or earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind’s thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. We found a description of hermetic magic that he practised to ward off the ill effects of the sun’s eclipse: in a sealed room two lamps and five torches were lit and hung to represent the planets and the signs of the zodiac – just as they are in our own solar temple.

A seditious memory threatened our right of permanence. Our provenance at once became momentary, fleeting, obscure. When we finally unearthed Campanella’s greatest work, The City of the Sun
,
it was with recognition rather than enlightenment that we discovered its pages to be blank. We knew at once what we had always known: that we are his book, his great vision of an ideal world.

The nightmares come no longer; the reality that conjured us has passed, as will all things. Tommaso Campanella composed our happy city from the depths of his suffering; our bright existence was conceived from hellish darkness. We cannot exist but as shadows of an imagined sun, letters that crawl like insects across this page. But we console ourselves that for our creator, words are not merely cyphers for the thoughts they represent; they have a power of their own; they are analogues of a divinised cosmos, evocative, charmed, incantational.

Larry came to visit in the afternoon. Mary-Lou didn’t know what to say when he asked her what she thought of the story. He had been so keen for her to read it that she had imagined it might reveal something urgent and emotional, some deep truth about himself. Instead it was some sort of conceptual parable. Clever and well crafted, maybe, but dry as dust. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she told him, hoping that he would not detect the hesitancy in her voice. ‘It’s a great conceit.’

‘Well, Campanella’s notion of the world as a book, it’s something like the hologram theory.’

Mary-Lou recognised a nervous crease of a smile. Larry had always looked like this when he thought he had come up with a good idea.

‘But I don’t understand,’ she went on, annoyed at him now. ‘You said you wrote it for me.’

‘Don’t you remember? That series you did for
Superlative Stories
. You never finished it.’

‘Christ. “Zodiac Empire”. I’d forgotten all about that.’

‘And remember Nemo was obsessed with Campanella? I suppose they both had this idea of cosmic heretical socialism.’

‘Maybe you should have dedicated it to him.’

‘I wanted you to have it.’

‘Thanks, but—’

‘It’s about all those ideals we used to have.’

‘So you finish a series I wrote for a pulp magazine that paid a cent a word.’

‘Yeah, it’s dumb, I know.’

‘What is it, some sort of closure?’

‘Oh, please, Mary-Lou. Don’t you hate that word? No, I just wanted to revisit the sort of stories we used to believe in. As I get older I think about those times a lot.’

‘When we were young and had all those dreams.’

‘Yeah, and, like I said, ideals. And, you know, you were my ideal, Mary-Lou.’

‘Oh Christ, Larry. I really wish I wasn’t.’

‘Well, it’s the truth.’

‘Right.’

‘And we still need ideals, don’t we?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, do we?’

Larry felt frustrated by the way the conversation was going. Couldn’t they just talk about the story he had given her? He had thought there was some point to it. What he had learnt from their strange century: that utopia can come from suffering; that suffering can come from utopia.

‘You used to believe in so much, Mary-Lou,’ he said.

‘Yes, and then I became a cynic. A hard-nosed television producer.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Good, because, like I said, I don’t regret my life.’

‘Not even Jack?’

‘Oh, please, Larry.’

She glared at him with a sudden feeling of resentment. Why had he brought this up again? That far-off world of the past. It was a distant planet yet it still held an influence, a faint gravity of sadness.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just—’

‘Do we really have to go through all of this?’

‘You still find it hard to even talk about him.’

‘Maybe I just don’t want to. All this stuff about ideals.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yeah, okay.’ Mary-Lou got angry. ‘Okay, let’s talk about all the dreams that never came true.’

‘Yeah,’ he retorted. ‘Why not?’

‘All the idealistic communes that never worked, the revolutions that failed. Let’s talk about how you still feel guilty because Sharleen went and drank the fucking Kool-Aid.’

‘Hey!’ Larry called out and held up a hand.

He glared back at her. Mary-Lou closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

‘Jesus, Larry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Really, it’s—’

‘I don’t know where that came from.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No.’ She opened her eyes. ‘That was a horrible thing to say.’

‘Maybe it needed to be said.’

‘No, it didn’t.’

‘Well.’ He shrugged.

‘Look, maybe you are right about Jack. Maybe I never did get over it.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

‘But I got through it. That’s what I did. That’s what we all did. Those of us left.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And maybe you want to live in the past. I don’t blame you. We had better dreams back then. Some grand cosmic vision of the City of the Sun, or whatever. You want to go back to those times when we used to sit in Clifton’s and talk about that future. Well, here we are in the year 2000 and we’re old and worn out. And all we talk about is the past. Even all that space stuff, it’s in the past, Larry. I want to talk about the real future, not some hypothetical idea of it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean me and you.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got precious little time left, Larry. And I’m tired of that boy from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, still desperate for my approval.’

‘Christ.’ Larry winced. ‘I’m sorry, Mary-Lou.’

‘Look, don’t act all hurt. I mean it about me and you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We know each other so well. Too well, maybe. But we still get on in our own particular way. And I’ve really liked spending time with you.’