The Romance of Atlantis (3 page)

Lamora, the bloated capital, felt vastly superior to its sister states. Life here was hectic, gay and abandoned. The other provinces called it the sewer of Atlantis, but to the Lamorans it was the center of the earth. Here abounded the most famous poets, artists, philosophers, the most accomplished mountebanks, the most profound scientists, the most beautiful courtesans. Its luxury was famous from the icy glaciers of Althrustri to the warm tropical waters of Letus. Each year, thousands of Althrustrians had seeped into the country, almost as an advance invasion force, lured by the wealth and comforts and opportunities of this favored land. Life was not hard and grim in Atlantis as it was in Althrustri, and laws here were more benign and tolerant. From other lands, too, the poorest class of immigrants flowed into Atlantis, the adventurers, the paupers, the incompetent, the biologically inferior, having found existence too strenuous in their own country.

Lazar, during the latter years of his life, had been concerned by this inferior bloodstream seeping across his borders. He had advocated a rigid immigration law, which would screen applicants for admission. But influential manufacturers, greedy for new markets, successfully protested this rigidity. Atlanteans demanded too large a wage scale, and profits were hardly more than two hundred percent. Lazar had spoken to Salustra about his proposed reform months before his death, but she had never mustered the votes to push the measure through the Council.

Salustra had been thinking about many things, none of them remotely touching the Noble Consul Lustri, of the Eighth Province, or anything that he was saying now. Her eyes rested upon him with a detached curiosity. Lustri was a handsome young man of the purest aristocracy, prominent in the licentious life of the city. He had great charm, a magnetic smile. His wealth was reputedly as limitless as his debaucheries. Rumor had it that he was the Empress’ lover. But if so, she was already tired of his limited repertoire. Her nimble intellect demanded a kindred spirit. Lustri was a charming playmate, a delightful lover, a stimulating companion, but he could never breach the wall behind which Salustra suffered the isolation of the great.

She now caught a few words that Lustri was saying. He was standing before her throne, his dark eyes fixed upon her with confident boldness. Nobles and Commoners alike regarded him enviously. The Empress, they thought, could deny him nothing. Lustri represented the most dissolute elements of the turbulent Eighth Province, which experienced more crimes of violence than all the other provinces collectively. Each province made its own local laws, subject only to national statutes, and was authorized to raise taxes for the national treasury and to furnish a certain quota of men for the army.

There were two large cities in Lustri’s state, and neither the national nor the local police body could effectively maintain order, as the poor were practically in a state of revolt. Because of widespread corruption of public officials, taxes were often extracted only by force, and rebellion, sparked by poverty, smoldered close to the surface. Tax monies were squandered illicitly, diverted from legitimate public projects.

Roads had fallen into disrepair, thousands stood idle in the cities; vast agricultural regions lay fallow. The dissolute aristocracy found it impossible to gather taxes for the national treasury. They had induced Lustri, as their representative, to plead with the Empress for an emergency moratorium on taxes. The neighboring Ninth Province was industrious and prosperous, and the lords of the Eighth Province proposed that a larger tax be imposed on their more fortunate neighbor to make up their deficiency.

Lustri argued his case well, his smiling eyes fastened eloquently, as though sharing some special secret, on her Imperial Highness. As he smiled, he painted her a pathetic picture of the economic miseries of his Eighth Province. His lips openly called for a little more time; some understanding of the Eighth’s problems and a larger imposition, only temporarily, to be sure, on the Ninth Province. Meanwhile, his eyes conveyed another message to this beautiful woman, as he remembered the hours when her bosom had been pressed to his, and he had felt the accelerated beat of her heart. He recalled the scent of her hair, the softness of her lips, and his glance let her know that. He was sure that she too remembered.

As he was speaking, one man in the Assembly had risen indignantly, restrained only by the forceful urging of his comrades. He was a tall, spare, middle-aged man, his blue eyes startlingly pale in a deeply tanned face. He was the Commoner from the Ninth Province.

Not missing any of this drama, the Empress raised her hand, and Lustri paused. Her manner was gentle and almost detached. As if ignoring the Commoner, she nodded to the Noble, Gatus, from the Ninth Province, kinsman to Lustri, and he came forward eagerly, kneeling gratefully to touch Salustra’s golden slipper with his forehead.

“My Lord Gatus, thou hast heard the plea of the Lord Lustri,” she said. “What hast thou to say to this? Art thou and thy people willing that this should be so?”

Gatus looked at her closely, but her gaze was inscrutable. Lustri smiled inwardly, a confident and triumphant smile. He tried to catch the eye of the Empress for a secret glance of appreciation, but she did not look in his direction.

Gatus hesitated for a moment, apparently perplexed, then bowed in assent. Immediately, Publius, the Ninth Commoner, with an angry cry, broke from his comrades and sprang before the Empress’ throne. His eyes flashed with righteous scorn as he glanced at the faintly smiling Gatus and Lustri. “Most gracious Majesty, I protest this rapacious assault on my people!” cried the Commoner. “We work too hard to be the object of such a conspiracy by the Nobles.”

Salustra looked at the Commoner with surprise. Several Nobles stepped forward to join Lustri and Gatus, and, like their fellows, they held their hands lightly on their ceremonial swords, ready to avenge this boorish affront to their Empress.

Salustra motioned them back with a languid hand, leaving Lustri and Gatus and the Commoner standing before the throne.

She beckoned first to the Commoner. “Publius, come forward, and tell me why I should not impose this tax upon thy more prospering people.”

Lustri, supremely confident, toyed with the jeweled hilt of his sword. Gatus, smiling uneasily, traced the juncture of two marble sections in the floor with a nervous foot.

Publius stretched out his hands passionately. His voice rang with righteous wrath. “How unjust,” he deplored, “for the industrious to pay the piper for the indolent. Why then should any man strive or labor, to what purpose?”

The Empress sat musing, her eyes fixed on the floor. She looked at neither Lustri nor Publius. Suddenly, she smote the side of her throne with her palm, her eyes flashed. “I deny the petition of the Lord Lustri,” she said in a clear voice.

A subdued murmur, like a gathering wind, passed over the Assembly. The Nobles eyed each other in amazement:

malignant glances previously concealed by fear were cast at the discomfited Lustri, who was staring at the Empress with dazed, unbelieving eyes.

Lustri was visibly trembling, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He put out a quavering hand in a gesture almost of supplication. As she watched him with veiled eyes, her mouth curled a little.

“But most gracious Majesty,” began Lustri in a subdued voice scarcely above a whisper. “I would implore further consideration. There must be a mistake!”

The Empress’ hand moved slowly to her throat, and her slim fingers played with the gem there. She gave him a glance that reduced him to an awareness of the gulf between them.

“I have considered,” she said dispassionately. “I do not understand why industry and prosperity should be penalized for inferiority and criminality. That is all.”

Lustri looked stricken. “That is all?” he whispered, moistening his lips.

The Empress coldly inclined her head.

His face the color of chalk, Lustri bowed and withdrew to a bench, where a group of frozen-faced Nobles moved slightly away from him.

As though Lustri had never existed, the Empress took up a roll of parchment which lay in her lap and read it with a frown. “And now the rest,” she said sharply. “Gatus, and thou, Publius, we grant you permission to build a provincial road joining the national road. You will impose taxes sufficient for the project. The national funds may be drawn on to ten percent of the local levies.”

The routine business of the day proceeded. Salustra’s mind swept over various proposals; she listened to the counsel of others, and made her decision. Her judgment was final. And so the day’s trivial business was concluded.

For a decade she had ruled Atlantis, and during that time she had done her best to roll back an inevitable tide.

Keen observer that she was, she knew the hour of decision was fast approaching for her country. In the back of her mind at all times were the rugged barbarians to the north. As a student of history, she knew that when a nation begins to decay inside, it is ripe for conquest from without.

Atlantis obeyed but did not love her. She had no room for sentimentalism. She knew, as her father had known, that men respect the hand that cracks a whip and discount gentleness in a sovereign as weakness. She knew that in the early history of a civilization men are simple and self-reliant, that nations sprout from the seeds of an older civilization, grow, wax vigorous, virile and superstitious, and finally absorb the decaying organism that gave them birth.

Tongue in cheek, they called her the Virgin Queen. She was a symbol of the final flowering of a dying civilization. To her subjects, she was Atlantis personified. They gossiped about her lovers, jesting that she chose only the strongest and youngest for her favors. On the intellectual side, scientists, philosophers, poets, artists found her a staunch friend. True worth did not languish unsung, even though she well knew that the brighter genius flames, the sooner it consumes itself.

“Better a day of radiant life than a century of darkness,” she often mused.

Frequently she repeated to herself the cynical words of her Emperor father: “To think is to begin to die.”

In an attempt to delay the decline, she had offered grants to Atlanteans of known ability to increase the size of their families, as one of the reasons Atlantis was dying was that men and women of accomplishment were practicing almost total birth control. It was so simple to sterilize either male or female with birth-control injections effective for six months that only the dull and the inferior, hoping to add excitement to their lives, were producing in excess of their death rate. There was another incentive as well. They could then apply to the national fund for additional welfare benefits. The very sensitivity of the superior conspired to hasten their end. Because they feared that they could not adequately insulate their children from a turbulent and debauched society, they refused to bear them. Salustra had attempted to persuade the ignorant and superstitious to practice birth control. But the religious groups headed by the priests protested loudly, and the ignorant and superstitious protested with them. What right had a mere temporal sovereign to order them to relinquish their divine right to spawn their feeble, mentally stunted, dependent, criminally inspired offspring?

Salustra had thought of invoking her archenemies, the members of the priesthood, to augment the birthrate among the upper classes by threatening them with untold future torments if they practiced birth control. Ironically, only the ignorant and the undesirables would listen to such absurdities.

Eventually, she hit upon a plan for penalizing aliens, paupers, dependent incompetents and inferiors for producing unrestrained numbers of children. She took them off welfare. Also, she prohibited unions of the diseased, the shiftless and the biologically inferior. She advocated intercourse between unmarried men of proven superiority and women of their choice, taking the children under the protection of the state. Illegitimacy was no disgrace. The priesthood, the pious and the righteous were outraged. But these Salustra squelched with a firm hand. “These children are the state’s,” she said. “Atlantis is their father and mother.”

Her enemies snickered openly. Advocating exceptional children, why did not she, the flower of Atlantis, set a notable example? The cream of a patriotic young manhood would be only too happy to cooperate for the public good. Salustra did nothing to dignify these sly barbs.

She rejoiced in her enemies, gauging the effectiveness of her laws by their opposition in certain quarters: the lords of industry, the indolent, the welfare recidivists and the criminal classes. Sometimes, obscene epigrams were scrawled on the walls of her Palace. Tales of her amorous hours were bandied about, encouraged by a malevolent priesthood. But the inarticulate majority trusted her cold intelligence.

She had few friends, and these stoutly maintained an attitude of belief in her virginity, as if to distinguish her from ordinary women. This naïveté annoyed while it amused her. She understood too clearly that they were mistakenly realizing in her the sentimental ideals of their own youthful fantasies. Clever and wise men were almost childlike in sexual matters. Only the cynical were totally emancipated from convention. “Cynicism is the boast of youth, the affectation of the mature, and the bitter tea of the aged,” she would say.

3

She was rubbing her eyes drowsily as Mahius stood watching with a solemn expression.

“Why so long a face, Mahius?” she said. “How could today add anything more disagreeable than yesterday?”

Mahius’ pained expression gave him the look of a squeezed-out sponge. “Majesty, the geologists report a huge rumble in the earth far to the north.”

She sat up in her bed and looked impishly at her First Minister. “Look the other way, old man, while I climb out of bed. I wear nothing but my skin these nights; it is so beastly hot without the central air-cooling system. Why cannot our Palace generators, which still feed our lamps, be stimulated enough to send cooling air into my chambers?”

Mahius replied lamely, as he cast his eyes to the floor: “These generators have very little power, Majesty, sufficient only for partial illumination, and one can only speculate when this feeble trickle of energy gives out.”