Memoirs Found In a Bathtub (2 page)

Most of the Neogene, we fear, will forever remain shrouded in mystery, for even chronotraction methods have failed to provide the most fundamental details of the social life at that age. Any systematic presentation of those few moments of history which we have been able to re-create goes well beyond the limits of this introduction. So we will limit ourselves to a few remarks in the way of background to the “Notes.”

The evolution of ancient beliefs underwent a curious bifurcation. In the first period, the Archeocredonic, various religions were founded upon the recognition of a supernatural, nonmaterial principle, causative with respect to everything in existence. The Archeocredonic left behind permanent monuments—the pyramids of the Early Neogene, the excavations of the Mesogene (the Gothic cathedrals of Lafranss).

In the second period, the Neocredonic, faith assumed a different aspect. The metaphysical principle somehow merged with the materialistic, the earthly. Worship of the deity Kap-Eh-Taahl (or, in the Cremonic palimpsests, Kapp-Taah) became one of the dominant cults of the time. This deity was revered throughout Ammer-Ka and the faith quickly spread to Australindia and parts of the European Peninsula. Any connection, however, between the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl and the graven images of the elephant and the ass found here and there throughout Ammer-Ka does seem somewhat doubtful. It was forbidden to utter the name itself, “Kap-Eh-Taahl” (analogous to the Hebrew interdiction); in Ammer-Ka the deity was generally called “Almighty Da-Laahr.” But there were many other liturgical names, and special monastic orders devoted themselves entirely to an appraisal of their changing status (the Mer-L-Finches, for example). Indeed, the fluctuation in the accepted value of each of the many names (or were they attributes?) of Kap-Eh-Taahl remains an enigma to this day. The difficulty in understanding the true nature of that last of the Prechaotic religions lies in the fact that Kap-Eh-Taahl was denied any supernatural existence, was therefore not a spirit, nor was he even considered a being (which would help explain the totemistic features of that cult, so unusual in an age of science)—he was, to all extents and purposes, equated with assets, liquid, fixed, and hidden, and had no existence beyond that. However, it has been shown that in times of economic decline, sacrifices of sugar cane, coffee, and grain were made to placate the angry god. This contradiction is deepened by the fact that the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl did possess some elements of the doctrine of incarnation, according to which, the world owed its continuing existence to “sacred property.” Any violation of that doctrine met with the most severe punishment.

As we know, the epoch of global cybereconomics was preceded, at the close of the Neogene, by the rise of sociostasy. As the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl, mired in complex corporational rites and intricate institutional rituals, began in the course of time to lose one territory after another to the followers of secular sociostatic management, there arose a conflict between the lands still ruled by that antiquated faith and the remaining world.

Up to the very end—that is, to the formation of the Earth Federation—the center of the most fanatic devotion to Kap-Eh-Taahl was Ammer-Ka, a land governed by a series of dynasties of Prez-tendz. These were not high priests of Kap-Eh-Taahl in the strict sense of the word. It was during the Nineteenth Dynasty that the Prez-tendz (or Prexy-dents, in the nomenclature of the Thyrric School) built the Pentagon. What was it, that first of many granite leviathans, that stern edifice which ushered in the twilight of the Neogene? Prehistorians of the Aquillian School considered the Pentagon’s tombs for Prez-tendz, analogous to the Egyptian pyramids. This hypothesis was discarded in the light of subsequent discoveries, as was the theory that these were shrines to Kap-Eh-Taahl, where crusades were planned against the Heathen Dog, or strategies devised to ensure his successful conversion.

Lacking the firsthand information needed to solve this puzzle, undoubtedly the key to an understanding of the whole final phase (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Dynasties), our historians turned to the Temporal Institute for help. The Institute’s full cooperation made possible the application of the latest technological developments in chronotraction to the task of penetrating the riddle of the Pentagons. We sent 290 probes into the far past, tapping 17 trillion erg-seconds from the time wells that orbit the Moon.

According to the theory of chronotraction, movement back in time is practicable only at a considerable distance from objects of great mass, since their proximity consumes staggering amounts of energy. Consequently, sightings of the past had to be taken from probes placed high in the stratosphere. Their sudden appearance and disappearance in the sky must have mystified the people of the Neogene. Prodoctor Two Sturlprans maintains that the projection of a retrochronal probe would show up in the past as a bulging disc, not unlike two horizontal saucers floating rim-to-rim through space.

Chronotraction yielded an abundance of data, including authentic photoshots of the First Pentagon soon after its construction. This building, indeed a pentagon, each side measuring 460 feens, was a veritable labyrinth of steel and concrete. Histognostor Ser Een estimates the corridors ran about seventeen to eighteen of their
mylz.
The entrances were guarded day and night by over two hundred priests of lower rank. Further time delving, prompted by the chronicles excavated in the ruins of Waa-Sheetn, led to the discovery of the Second Pentagon, a much less imposing structure than the First, as most of it lay beneath the ground. Certain passages from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon. This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated camouflaging and enormous reserves of food, water and compressed air. However, after systematic chronoaxial soundings were taken over the entire length and breadth of twentieth-century Ammer-Ka and revealed not a trace of any such structure, most historians accepted the thesis that the Waa-Sheetn chronicles spoke of the Third Pentagon in a figurative sense only, that the building was raised purely in the minds and hearts of the faithful, and that the propagation of the legend was designed to uplift the flagging spirits of those few remaining followers of Kap-Eh-Taahl.

So stood the official version of our historiography when the young Prognostor Wid-Wiss began his archeological career.

Wid-Wiss reexamined all the available materials and published a treatise in which he maintained that, as the power of the Prez-tendz began to wane and their dominions diminish, they resolved to build a new seat of government, one far from all populated areas, somewhere in the mountainous regions of Ammer-Ka and hidden deep beneath the rocks, that this last refuge of Kap-Eh-Taahl might be inaccessible to the uninitiated. Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task was twofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly, to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path.

But Wid-Wiss’s treatise was pooh-poohed by the experts; it clearly ran counter to most of the known facts. Critics like Supergnostors Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlsto and Pisuovo of the Martian School of Comparative Paleography pointed out the many contradictions in Wid-Wiss’s chronology.

For example, the Last Pentagon had been built, according to Wid-Wiss, only a few decades before the papyr catastrophe. But if this Third Pentagon had really existed, argued the critics, the Prez-tendz within would have surely taken advantage of the postpapyr anarchy and attempted to conquer the world in the very first days of the Chaotic. And even had such an attempt to overthrow the Federation been thwarted, some trace of it would have survived in the oral tradition. Yet our historiography notes nothing of the kind.

Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, claiming that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the “heretics” and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be completely sealed off from the outside world. So the underground Moloch isolated itself from the rest of humanity and endured to the Chaotic without the least knowledge of what was taking place on the surface of the earth.

This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely. So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagon may have possessed scanning devices on the outside. He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action. It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by impenetrable walls but by the very nature of its internal organization. From that time on it thrived exclusively on the myth, the legend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy—the heresy within.

Our Histognostors answered these arguments with a stony silence. But Wid-Wiss did not give in. For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains from end to end. Just when almost everyone had forgotten him, his stubbornness was dramatically vindicated. On 28 Mey 3146, the head archeological team, having cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex shield, cleverly camouflaged, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon.

Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods. In the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world, the Pentagon of the Last Dynasty succumbed to a natural disaster. A slight shift in the mountain’s granite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it came into contact with magma. The building’s concrete protective shell could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior from top to bottom. And so that strange anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz became a giant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered.

It is not our task to describe here the tremendous archeological wealth of the Third Pentagon diggings. We refer the interested reader to the many volumes devoted specially to that subject. Only a few remarks remain to be added to this introduction to the “Notes.”

The “Notes” were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities. In me of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr—the “Notes”

The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The “Notes” portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission’s reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness.

Our historiography has not yet passed final judgment on the “Notes” commonly called, for the location of their discovery, “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.” Then too, no agreement has been reached as to when and in what order certain parts of the manuscript were written. The Hyberiad Gnostors, for example, consider the first twelve pages apocryphal, an addition of later years. But the reader will hardly be interested in such technical matters. Let us then be silent and allow this last message from the Neogene, the Era of Papyrocracy, to speak to us in its own voice.

…I couldn’t seem to find the right room—none of them had the number designated on my pass. First I wound up at the Department of Verification, then the Department of Misinformation, then some clerk from the Pressure Section advised me to try level eight, but on level eight they ignored me, and later I got stuck in a crowd of military personnel—the corridors rang with their vigorous marching back and forth, the slamming of doors, the clicking of heels, and over that martial noise I could hear the distant music of bells, the tinkling of medals. Now and then janitors would go by with steaming percolators, now and then I would stumble into rest rooms where secretaries hastily renewed their make-up, now and then agents disguised as elevator men would strike up conversations—one of them had an artificial leg and he took me from floor to floor so many times that after a while he began waving to me from a distance and even stopped photographing me with the camera-carnation in his lapel. By noon we were buddies, and he showed me his pride and joy, a tape recorder under the elevator floor. But I was getting more and more depressed and couldn’t share his enthusiasm.

Stubborn, I went from room to room and pestered people with questions, though the answers were invariably wrong. I was still on the outside, still excluded from that ceaseless flow of secrecy that kept the Building strong. But I had to get in somewhere, find an entry at some point, no matter what. Twice I ended up in a storage cellar and leafed through some secret documents lying about. But there was nothing there of any value to me. After several hours of this, thoroughly annoyed and hungry as well (it was past lunchtime and there wasn’t even a cafeteria to be found), I decided to take a different tack.

I recalled that the highest concentration of tall, gray officers was on the fourth level, so I headed there, opened a door bearing the sign
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
and entered an empty reception room, from there went through a side door marked
KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING
and into a conference room full of moldering mobilization plans. Here I ran into a problem—there were two doors. One said
NO ADMITTANCE
, the other
CLOSED
. After some deliberation I decided on the second door—the correct choice as it turned out, since this was the office of General Kashenblade himself, the Commander in Chief. I walked in, and the officer who was on duty at the time led me to the Chief without asking any questions.