Unlikely Stories Mostly Read online

  It was then we started calling our empire the great wheel. Surveyors noted that the roads tended to rise the further from the capital they got, which showed that our city was in the centre of a continent shaped like a dish. It became common for our politicians to start a speech by saying This bowl of empire under this dome of heaven … and end by saying We have fought uphill all the way. We shall fight on till we reach the rim. This rhetorical model of the universe became very popular, though educated people knew that the hollow continent was a large dent in the surface of a globe, a globe hanging in the centre of several hollow globes, mainly transparent, which supported the bodies of the moon, sun, planets and stars.

  The republic was controlled by a few rich families who worked in the middle of an elected senate, but one day it became clear that whoever commanded the army did not need the support of anyone else. A successful general proclaimed himself emperor. He was an efficient man with good advisers. He constructed a civil service which worked so well that trade kept flowing and the empire expanding during the reign of his son, who seems to have been a criminal lunatic who did nothing but feed his worst appetites in the most expensive ways possible. It is hard to believe that records tell the truth about this man. He was despised by the puritan aristocracy who filled the civil service, but loved by common citizens. Perhaps his insane spending sprees and colossal sporting events were devised to entertain them. He also obtained remarkable tutors for his son, men of low and foreign birth but international fame. They had made a science out of history, which till then had been a branch of literature. When their pupil became third emperor he knew why his land was heading for disaster.

  Many nations before ours had swelled into empires. Nearly all had collapsed while trying to defeat a country, sometimes a small one, beyond the limit of their powers. The rest had enclosed the known world and then, with nothing else to conquer, had gone bad at the centre and cracked up through civil war. The emperor knew his own empire had reached a moment of ripeness. It filled the hollow continent to the rim. His roads touched the northern forests and mountains, the shores of the western sea, the baking southern desert and the wild eastern plains. The perimeter tribes lived in these places but we could not civilize them. They were nomads who could retreat forever before our army and return to their old pasture when it went away. Clearly the empire had reached its limit. The wealth of all civilization was flowing into a city with no more wars to fight. The military virtues began to look foolish. The governing classes were experimenting with unhealthy pleasures. Meanwhile the emperor enlarged the circus games begun by his father in which the unemployed poor of the capital were entertained by unemployable slaves killing each other in large quantities. He also ordered from the merchants huge supplies of stone, timber and iron. The hub of the great wheel (he said) would be completely rebuilt in a grander style than ever before.

  But he knew these measures could only hold the state for a short time.

  A few years earlier there had appeared in our markets some pottery and cloth of such smooth, delicate, transparent texture that nobody knew how they were made. They had been brought from the eastern plains by nomads who obtained them, at fourth or fifth hand, from other nomads as barbarous as themselves. Enquiries produced nothing but rumour, rumour of an empire beyond so great a tract of desert, forest and mountain that it was on the far side of the globe. If rumours were true this empire was vast, rich, peaceful, and had existed for thousands of years. When the third emperor came to power his first official act was to make ambassadors of his tutors and send them off with a strong expeditionary force to investigate the matter. Seven years passed before the embassy returned. It had shrunk to one old exhausted historian and a strange foreign servant without lids on his eyes — he shut them by making them too narrow to see through. The old man carried a letter to our emperor written in a very strange script, and he translated it.

  THE EMPEROR OF THREE-RIVER KINGDOM GREETS THE EMPEROR OF THE GREAT WHEEL. I can talk to you as a friend because we are not neighbours. The distance between our lands is too great for me to fear your army.

  Your ambassadors have told me what you wish to know. Yes, my empire is very big, very rich, and also very old. This is mainly because we are a single race who talk the same language. We produce all we need inside our borders and do not trade with foreigners. Foreign trade leads to warfare. Two nations may start trading as equals but inevitably one grows rich at the expense of the other. Then the superior nation depends on its enemy and can only maintain its profits by war or threats of war. My kingdom has survived by rejecting foreign trade. The goods which appeared in your market were smuggled out by foreigners. We will try to stop that happening again.

  If your people want stability they must grow small again. Let them abandon empire and go back inside their old frontier. Let them keep an army just big enough for defence and cultivate their own land, especially the food supply. But this is useless advice. You and I are mere emperors. We both know that a strong class of merchants and generals cannot be commanded against their will. Wealthy nations and men will embrace disaster rather than lose riches.

  I regret that I cannot show a way out of your difficulty. Perhaps the immortal gods can do that. Have you approached them? They are the last resort, but they work for the peasants, so people of our kind may find them useful.

  The emperor was startled by the last words of this intelligent and powerful man. Several countries in the empire worshipped him as a god but he was not religious. The official religion of the state had been a few simple ceremonies to help it work as smoothly as possible. An old proverb Religion is the wealth of the conquered described our view of more exotic faiths. But the religions of conquered people had recently become fashionable at the hub, even with very wealthy citizens. These religions had wide differences but all believed that man had descended from someone in the sky and were being punished, tested or taught by having to toil in the world below. Some faiths believed that a leader would one day come down from heaven, destroy all who opposed him and build a kingdom on earth for his followers. Others bowed to prophets who said that after death the ghosts of their followers would enter a walled garden or city in the sky. These politically stable goals appealed to the emperor. He consulted priests in the hope that unreason would answer the question which reason could not.

  He was disappointed. The priests explained that the eternal kingdom was achieved by sharing certain beliefs and ceremonies, following certain rules, and eating or avoiding certain food. Those who obeyed the priests often enjoyed intense feelings of satisfaction, but even if the whole empire adopted one of these faiths the emperor did not think it would be less liable to decay and civil war. Many priests agreed with him. “Only a few will enter the heavenly kingdom,” they said. The emperor wanted a kingdom for the majority. He sent agents to consult prophets and oracles in more and more outlandish places. At last he heard of a saint who lived among the perimeter tribes in a wild place which no bribe could persuade him to leave. This saint’s reputation was not based on anything he taught, even by example, for he was an unpleasant person. But he had cured impotence, helped someone find a lost legacy and shown a feeble governor how to master a difficult province. Most people who brought him problems were ordered rudely away but his successes were supernaturally startling. The emperor went to see him with a troop of cavalry.

  The saint was small, paunchy and bow-legged. He squatted before a crack in a rocky cliff, grinning and blinking mirthlessly, like a toad. The emperor told the soldiers to wait, went forward, knelt before the saint and talked about the problem of empire. After a silence the saint said, “Are you strong?”

  The emperor said, “My life has been easy but my health is excellent.”

  The saint felt the emperor’s pulse, examined the insides of his eyelids then said gloomily, “You are strong enough, yes, I can help you. But I won’t enjoy it. Give me some gold.”

  The emperor handed him a purse. The saint stood up and said, “Fetch wine and
oil from your men and come into my house. Tell them they won’t see you till tomorrow evening. Make that perfectly clear. If they interrupt us before then you won’t learn a thing. Let them pass the time making a litter to carry you in, for when you reappear you will be in a sacred condition. The expression of your face will have completely changed.”

  Nobody had spoken to the emperor like that since he was a small boy and the words made him feel strangely secure. He did as he was told and then followed the saint into the crack in the rock. It led to a cave they had to stoop to enter. The saint struck a flint, lit a twisted rag in a bowl of fat, then picked up a wooden post. His dwarfish body was unusually powerful for he used the post to lever forward a great boulder till it blocked the entrance and shut out all daylight. Then he squatted with his back to the boulder and stared at the emperor across the foul-smelling lamp on the floor between them.

  After a while he said, “Tell me your last dream.” The emperor said, “I never dream.”

  “How many tribes do you rule?”

  “I rule nations, not tribes. I rule forty-three nations.” The saint said sternly, “Among the perimeter people a ruler who does not dream is impossible. And a ruler who dreams badly is stoned to death. Will you go away and dream well?”

  The emperor stared and said, “Is that the best you can say to me?”

  “Yes.”

  The emperor pointed to the boulder and said, “Roll that thing aside. Let me out.”

  “No. You have not answered my question. Will you go away and dream well?”

  “I cannot command my dreams!”

  “Then you cannot command yourself. And you dare to command other people?”

  The saint took a cudgel from the shadows, sprang up and beat the emperor hard for a long time.

  The emperor’s early training had been stoical so he gasped and choked instead of screaming and yelling. Afterwards he lay against the cavern wall and gaped at the saint who had sat down to recover his breath. At last the emperor whispered, “May I leave now?”

  “But will you go away and dream well?”

  “Yes. Yes, I swear I will.”

  The saint groaned and said, “You are lying. You are saying that to avoid being beaten.”

  He beat the emperor again then dropped the cudgel and swigged from the wine-flask. The emperor lay with his mouth and goggling eyes wide open. He could hardly move or think but he could see that the saint was in great distress of mind. The saint knelt down, placed a tender arm behind the emperor’s shoulders, gently raised his head and offered wine. After swallowing some the emperor slept and was assaulted by horrible nightmares. He was among slaves killing each other in the circus to the wild cheering of the citizens. He saw his empire up on edge and bowling like a loose chariot-wheel across a stony plain. Millions of tiny people clung to the hub and to the spokes and he was among them. The wheel turned faster and faster and the tiny people fell to the rim and were whirled up again or flung to the plain where the rim rolled over them. He sobbed aloud, for the only truth in the world seemed to be unending movement, unending pain. Through the pain he heard a terrible voice demand:

  “Will you go away and dream well?”

  He screamed: “I am dreaming! I am dreaming!”

  The voice said, “But not well. You are dreaming the disease. Now you must dream the cure.”

  And the emperor had a general impression of being beaten again.

  Later he saw that the boulder had been rolled aside. Evening sunlight shone through the entrance. The saint, who had cleaned the bruises with oil, now made him drink the last of the wine. The emperor felt calm and empty. When the saint said, “Please, please, answer my question,” the emperor shook with laughter and said, “If you let me go I will pray all the gods to give me a good dream.”

  The saint said, “That is not necessary. The dream is now travelling towards you. Only one more thing is needed to make sure it arrives.”

  He beat the emperor again and the emperor did not notice, then he picked the emperor up and walked from the cave and laid him on the litter prepared by the soldiers. He said to the commanding officer, “Carry your master carefully, for he is in a very sacred condition. Write down everything he says because now his words are important. And if he recovers tell him not to apologize for what he bribed me to do. Giving men dreams is my only talent. I never have them myself.”

  The emperor was carried to the hub in slow stages for he was very ill and often delirious. At the first stopping-place he dreamed of the axletree. He saw the great wheel of empire lying flat and millions of people flowing down the roads to the hub. From the hub a great smooth shaft ascended to the sky and ended in the centre of the sun. And he saw this shaft was a tower, and that everyone who had lived and died on earth was climbing up by a winding stair to the white light at the top. Then he saw this light was not the sun but a flame or a flame-shaped opening in the sky, and all the people were passing through and dissolving in the dazzling white.

  For a month after his return the emperor saw nobody but doctors and the architect of the city’s building programme, then he called the leaders of the empire to his bedside. His appearance shocked them. Although he had reacted against a libertine father by tackling the worries of government he had been a robust, stout, stolid man. His body was now almost starved to a skeleton, the lines of care on his face were like deep cracks in an old wooden statue, his skin, against the bank of pillows supporting him, looked livid yellow; yet he regarded the visitors with an expression of peculiar levity. His voice was so strong and hollow that he had to rest between sentences, and at these moments he sucked in his lips and bit them as if to prevent laughter. He waited until everybody was comfortably seated before speaking.

  “My political researches outside the rim have damaged my kidneys and I cannot live much longer. I have decided that for a few years most of the empire’s revenue will be used to build me a tomb. I invite you to form a company responsible for this building. Your time is precious, I don’t expect you to give it for nothing, and, if things go as I plan, work for this company will double your present incomes. If anyone dies before the great work is complete the salary will go to his successor.”

  He rested until expressions of regret, loyalty and gratitude died away then indicated some architectural drawings on the wall near the bed. He said, “Here are the plans of the tomb. The basic shape is a steep cone with a ramp winding up. It is designed so that it can be enlarged indefinitely. I have not indicated the size of the completed work. Yourselves or posterity can decide that. My body will lie in a vault cut into the rock below the foundation. It will be a large vault, for I expect my descendants will also lie there.”

  He smiled at the heir to the throne then nodded kindly at the others.

  “Perhaps, gentlemen, you will make the tomb so big that you will be able to bury yourselves and your families in chambers adjacent to mine. Indeed, I would like even quite humble people who help the great effort to end under it, although their graves would naturally be narrower and less well furnished than ours. But you will decide these things. As to the site of the structure, it will be in the exact centre of the city, the exact centre of the empire. Has the high priest of war and thunder anything to say?”

  The head of the state religion shrugged uneasily and said, “Sir, everyone knows that spot is the most sacred in the empire. My temple stands there. It was built by the hero who founded our nation. Will you knock it down?”

  The emperor said, “I will rebuild it on a grander scale than ever before. The space above the burial chambers will be a pantheon to all the gods of our heaven and empire, for a great building must serve the living as well as the dead, or nobody will take it seriously for long. And my tomb will have room for more than a mere temple, even though that temple is the biggest in the world. Look again at the plans. The temple is the circular core of the building. Vast stone piers radiate from it, piers joined by arching vaults and pierced by arched doors. The spaces between the piers can be ma
de wide enough to hold markets, factories and assembly rooms. These spaces are linked by curving avenues ascending at a slope gradual enough to race horses up. As you know, when I came to the throne I swore to rebuild our city on a grander scale than ever before. And what is a city but a great house shared by a community? The wealthy will have mansions in it, the poor can rent apartments. Parks and gardens will be planted along the outer terraces. And you, the construction company, will have your offices in the summit. As this rises higher the whole administration of the empire will move in beneath you … But a dying man should not look so far ahead. What do our businessmen say? Can they supply the materials to build on an increasingly large scale for generations to come? Can they provide food for a steadily enlarging labour force? I ask the heads of the corn and stock exchanges to give an opinion. Don’t consider the matter as salaried members of the construction company, but as managers of the empire’s trade.”