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THE END OF THE GREAT CONTINUITY

I, Jallow Yphantidies, formerly Grand Consistor for the city of Hanging Dog, am solely responsible for the demise of the Great Continuity across the wide ekumen of Crossfoyle.

This confession has not been extorted by torture enacted by any of the Great Continuity’s old partisans, but freely given simply to set history on a sound footing, should any future record-keepers arise, in the wake of the forced forgetting. That aboriginal night of smoke, fire and chaos which heralded the death of one immemorial reign and the birth of a shapeless future was utterly my design. My motivation for triggering the grand apocalypse? The impossible happiness of a woman who despised me.

In this I was utterly inconsistent with my own Template, and this failing is the crime that still weighs most heavily on me.

The morning of the day I first met Margali Gueths had not been a particularly demanding one.

As always, my ekumen-sponsored landau awaited me outside the large bluestone manse on Vestry Street in the Saltman district, an imposing residence of many cornices and gables, accorded to him who inhabited the office of Grand Consistor.

Such an appointment lasted a lifetime, as did most such high offices. I had held the title for the past twenty years, and expected to hold it for a good number of decades more, having come to the position at the relatively youthful age of thirty-five. Everything in my Template had pointed toward my ascension to this post, and my continuance in office. And most certainly I would do nothing to veer from that consistency.

I ascended the landau, and the driver immediately flicked his whip at the rumps of the harnessed theropods. With meaty exhalations, the beasts lumbered off, their dirty claws clattering on the cobbles, drawing the coach at a pleasant pace through the summertime streets of Hanging Dog.

All about me, the city hummed like a hive of war-bugs in its early-morning busyness. Droshkies and cabriolets, bearing elegant ladies and prosperous gentlemen, streamed down the stony streets. Massive lorries stuffed with goods and drawn by huffing megatheres trundled sturdily along. Tradespeople and servants thronged the sidewalks. Storekeepers unrolled their awnings against the sun, set out signboards, and established pyramids of produce and pottery, ziggurats of books and bolts of fabric. I could smell random whiffs of manure, lamp-oil, and fish.

My large breakfast sat pleasantly in my stomach. The summer-weight robes of the Grand Consistor felt like a comforting blanket. I began to grow drowsy, without a care in my head.

Little did I know what awaited me that day.

Transiting through the Pangstraine, Nurbar and Whitechurch neighbourhoods, we arrived eventually at the immense circular colonnade that enclosed the stupendous Plaza of the Great Continuity. There I disembarked; my landau, its beasts and driver, departing for the government stables until needed.

Crossing through the serried stone Guardians of Continuity—the tall carved pillars of the colonnade were expertly shaped into the likenesses of those legendary icons—I experienced yet again the undying sense of majesty and permanence, of rightness and perfection, which the institution of the Great Continuity represented. Here, at this crucial nexus within our city and at identical sites across the ekumen, the wisdom of the principles of continuity were disseminated, cherished and upheld. The theories that had sealed our nation’s stability found here a tangible representation.

Beyond the pillars stretched an unimpeded acreage paved in veined marble. Already at this hour, the humid heated air here had begun to waver with distortions. The city of Hanging Dog was located in a broad fertile valley hosting extensive farms and orchards and small villages. But the mountains along our western edge invariably dumped moisture from the ocean-saturated winds arriving from the east.

Centred in the plaza was the Palace of Continuity, an imposing old stone pile several stories in height that I had come to regard as my second home. (Or perhaps my true home.) Heterogeneous in the extreme, due to numerous faddish additions over the centuries, the thick-walled building and its brocade-curtained rooms offered the prospect of coolness. I hurried across the plaza, eager for relief.

I was not alone of course. Scores of supplicants in varying degrees of dress streamed toward the public entrances of the Palace, eager for adjudications, adjustments and arbitrations regarding their individual Templates. These petitioners would be dealt with efficiently by the vast bureaucracy, legions of clerks and counsellors trained in the logic and rigours and precedents of continuity.

It was only the rarest of extraordinary circumstances that would bring a case to my individual attention.

Close to the Palace, my course deviated from the masses, as I headed for my private entrance.

There I encountered one of the familiar doormen. I had never bothered to learn his name over the many years of our brief morning ritual, but his ruddy, sweaty, bulbous-nosed face was as well-known to me as my cousin Pim’s. In his elaborate braided uniform he was obviously sweltering.

“Welcome, Grand Consistor.”

“Don’t you have a cool drink handy?” I asked, as he nodded me inside.

“No, sir. Begging your pardon, the iced-tea cart is late this morning, Grand Consistor.”

“That certainly won’t do. I’ll attend to this matter immediately. Meanwhile, buck up!”

“Yes, sir! Very good, sir!”

Inside the private stairwell leading directly to my chambers, blessed coolth descended on my own glistening brow. I could feel the sweat in my thick beard begin to chill down.

Yards of shelved books, just a fraction of the extensive corpus of continuity studies, greeted me intimately as I entered my high-ceilinged office, as did the attractive, neat surface of my polished wood desk, the overstuffed ottoman and several leather chairs, and the paintings on the walls, including my favourite: Glassco’s classic Nymph Vaulting Auroch, depicting a bare-breasted young girl and her ceremonial bovine dance partner.

I went immediately to the annunciator on my desk and depressed a key. “Goolsby! Are you there?”

The voice of my assistant, Goolsby Roy, answered immediately. “Never far off, Grand Consistor. Welcome to the Palace this fine oven-like morning. How can I be of service?”

I explained about the guard and the delayed commissary cart. Goolsby promised to repair the lapse immediately, and administer the proper disciplinary actions as well.

With that task off my mind, I settled down to the day’s routine business.

First I pored over a dozen abstracts, prepared by Goolsby, of recent papers in continuity studies. I was disappointed to find the various theses rather shallow and myopic. And these emanated from major figures in the field!

Once more I was struck by the long interval since I had last been surprised by a truly intriguing paper. The savants who worked to explicate the laws of continuity had of late entered a period of mere refinement, I felt. Real discovery of new principles, or even of major extensions of old laws, had ground to a halt. I was forced to consider acknowledging that perhaps the science of continuity, after centuries of intense study, had reached its apex. Perhaps from here on out, it would be all trivial elaborations of the well-known.

Template Formation. Climacteric Deviance. Communal Cross-linkage. Societal Channeling. Isolate Invariance—

How boring! Necessary, yes, even essential to the daily maintenance of society—but no sense of mysteries being revealed.

But no—I could not yet bring myself to forecast a future of stasis for the discipline to which I had devoted my life.

My own talents lay not in original research, but rather in synthesis and application and interpretation of results obtained by others. The imposition of orthodoxy, the establishment of the canon. These were the skills of the Grand Consistor. Otherwise, I surely would have been labouring with all my wits to expand the core of our discipline.

My unrewarding studies occupied me till lunch. Mealtime creeped up to take me unawares. The first notion I had of the hour occurred with the entrance of Goolsby Roy. Dressed in his yellow livery, my rail-thin assistant, his pale complexion and sparse, straw-coloured hair making him resemble the protagonist of Nando Pfing’s The Poet’s Queer Quandry, carried a tray. Plates topped with metal domes from which issued hints of steam and fragrance suddenly demanded all my attention.

Goolsby set the tray down on my desk, a sardonic smirk on his saturnine face. “For once the cooks have managed not to render the veal into something resembling a child’s rubber teething ring. Enjoy, Grand Consistor.”

I fell to my meal heartily, listening all the while to music from the Palace’s orchestra piped in over the annunciator.

After Goolsby came to remove the disordered tray, I composed several letters in response to high-level queries from Lessor Consistors who oversaw regional branches of the Great Continuity, in every district and city of the Crossfoyle ekumen. Just as I was inditing the last one, Goolsby reentered my chambers. He looked unnaturally flushed and discomposed.

“Grand Consistor, I beg your pardon in advance. There is a most persistent woman with an incredible—”

He paused to gather his wits, and address the problem formally.

“A petitioner has been shunted up through all the proper channels until reaching your office. The first such instance this year, as you well know. Although her petition is incontestably invalid—more so than any other I have ever encountered—she has refused to accept any lower dispensations. She insists on seeing you. Today. Immediately.”

I pondered this development. Not completely unprecedented, this woman’s claim on my attention seemed to have disconcerted Goolsby inordinately.

“Is there any other detail you’d care to convey, relating to this petitioner?”

“I—I prefer that you examine her yourself, Grand Consistor.”

“Very well. By all means, send her in.”

Goolsby stepped out, and within moments my visitor was striding boldly in.

I apprehended a woman of nearly my own age. Plainly, she had been possessed of a striking beauty during her youth, a beauty which had not entirely fled her with the arrival of middle-age. Tall, dark-haired, her complexion darkened by sun and freckled, she wore an expensive outfit that betokened good taste but also a desire to stand out in a crowd. A short gold vest over a blouse coloured green as the sky; a calf-length skirt printed with geometrical tilings that formed confusing illusory patterns; and a pair of sandals that laced all the way up those otherwise bare calves. She carried a slim satchel of the finest lizardskin. Her violet eyes flashed like gemstones. Her painted lips were quirked in an expression of disdain.

Thus, my first encounter with Margali Gueths, the woman who was to destroy the Great Continuity.

Coming right up to my desk, the woman drew to a halt, almost quivering with the fervour of her errand.

“You are Jallow Yphantidies.”

This was no question, but rather an assertion I was being challenged to deny. Her usage of my personal name rather than my title was a shocking breach of decorum. But I chose to stifle my indignation and respond politely. From the first, something about this woman’s intensity intrigued me. Perhaps my exhibition of good manners could establish our intercourse on a more congenial plane.

I arose and extended my hand. “Indeed, you have found the man whose loving parents christened him thus. But more formally, I am known as the Grand Consistor.”

She did not shake my hand. “Rest assured that I care neither for the man nor the office. But the latter is the obstacle in my way, and I sought to shatter the façade by addressing the human behind it.”

What fire and pluck! I calmly withdrew my proffered hand and said, “And you have done so. Now, if you’ll please take a seat, perhaps both the man and the office can consider the matter that brings you here.”

As if suspecting manacles ready to spring from the armrests, she occupied a chair adjacent to my desk, and I too sat.

“May I know your name, madame?”

“Margali Gueths. I am a widow. My husband was Juvian Gueths.”

“The smilodon-fur magnate. Of course…. Please accept my condolences for his passing.”

Margali Gueths waved away my sentiment. “Save your vicarious sorrow, Mr. Yphantidies. Juvian was a poor excuse for a husband. He had a mistress in every city of the ekumen. Bad enough, but he also kept me on an exceedingly short leash. My social duties were manifold, and my pleasures few and far between. I cherish his death as my chance finally to be free.”

“I regret to learn of this prior discomfort in your life, Mrs. Gueths. But assuredly, with your portion of the estate, you will now be equipped to enjoy yourself.”

“Ah, but that is precisely the rub, Mr. Yphantidies. I am not willing to settle for a portion of the estate. I intend to have it all. Gueths Furs, Traplines and Entrepôts will not pass from my hands. I intend to control my husband’s enterprises, not pass them on to someone chosen by the Great Continuity.”

I sat stunned. My reluctant tongue failed to provide any words that could meet this blunt statement of rebellion. Ultimately, I fell back on a scientific approach.

“Mrs. Gueths. I assume your satchel contains the documents relating to your case….”

“Yes.”

“May I see them, please?”

She extracted a thick sheaf of papers and handed them over. The familiar cream-coloured bond and coloured stamps of official Continuity documents radiated an almost tangible reassurance to me. I swivelled my seat and partially reclined in my high-backed chair to peruse them. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw Margali Gueths continue to seethe.

Here in my hands were summaries of the Templates of both Juvian Gueths and his wife. Columns and columns of figures across dozens of characterological categories. I focused immediately on the codes relevant to business acumen. Acquisitiveness, entrepreneurship, prescience, steadfastness, compromise…. From there, I turned my attention to other graphs, diagrams and family trees. Daguerreotypes and clippings from public records. Test results. Affidavits from friends, family members and acquaintances. And still, only the hundredth part of what Continuity knew about this couple.

The precise data conveyed its meaning swiftly to my trained eyes. But I lingered over the documents rather longer than I needed to, hoping to wear Margali Gueths down further. But I could soon see that my tactic was backfiring, as the fiery woman only grew more exasperated with my dilatory perusal. I turned to face her, and handed back her papers. I stroked my beard meditatively before speaking.

“Mrs. Gueths, I will not insult you by simply reiterating the cold facts that I’m certain you’ve already heard from a dozen of my subordinates. Simply put, there is nothing in your Template which fits you to manage a business. Continuity demands—”

The sharp report of her small fist on the surface of my desk caused me to jump. But it was her words that drained the colour from my face.

“Templates and Continuity be damned! No one knows the operations of my husband’s business better than I! Studying those operations was the only dry and dusty hobby I was ever allowed. I’ll be cursed if I allow myself to let all that torturous study go to waste now, just because your tinpot organization thinks that it can predict my failure! I’m tired of spending my life jammed into one of your little boxes!”

Margali Gueth’s attractive bosom was heaving, her face flushed. I felt some small empathy for her, but the feeling was drowned in my larger indignation at her blasphemy against the Great Continuity.

“Mrs. Gueths, no one is attempting to jam you into a box of our making. The parameters of your daily life are innate and inherent in your own character. They have been forming themselves since your birth, and are by now, at your advanced age, practically immutable.”

Margali Gueth’s scowl informed me that perhaps my choice of the term “advanced age” to describe her current station in life was impolitic and gauche. I sought to recast the argument in more abstruse terms.

“All that the Great Continuity does is quantify and codify the implicit patterns and tendencies of an individual’s life, and attempt to offer some guidance.”

“Guidance! You call issuing demands and orders that interfere in the most intimate portions of a person’s life mere ‘guidance?’”

“The Great Continuity boasts no enforcers, no Continuity Police—”

“No, of course not! All of society is your enforcement tool. Any nail that sticks up gets instantly hammered down.”

“Mrs. Gueths, please. Consider your words. Consider our nation’s history. You are forgetting the inefficiency and dangers that preceded the establishment of the Great Continuity. When any individual could impulsively follow any path, whether he or she was constitutionally fitted for it or not, society was like a machine composed of random, ill-adapted parts. Waste, confusion, frustration, hostility reigned. Since the establishment of the Great Continuity, our ekumen has become a smoothly operating organism that conduces to the maximum happiness for the largest number.”

“And what of those who disagree with their classifications, with your ‘guidance?’ Those who wish to follow their deeper, unchartable impulses?”

“They must correct their behaviour, for the good of all.”

Margali Gueths leaned in closer to me. I could smell her sweat.

“Your system insures the maintenance of the status quo. There is no room for change or innovation or social movement.”

I began to lose my temper. “A ridiculous charge. Was I, for instance, born into an ancient lineage of Grand Consistors? Of course not. My parents were a draper and a seamstress. My own particular talents were identified early on, as is the case with all children, and I worked hard to cultivate them.”

“Ha! You were chosen by the elite and groomed as their pliable tool.”

I began to splutter. But before I could address this absurd accusation, Margali Gueths launched another assault.

“You are just trying to limit me because I am a female! You don’t want a woman running a sizeable business, having all the privileges of a man!”

“Now you’ve reached the heights of illogic. There are numerous women entrepreneurs. What of Velzy Spindler?”

“The milliner? She owns three shops in Hanging Dog. I doubt she grosses in a year what Gueths Furs nets in a day. No, it’s obvious to me now. Your Great Continuity is dedicated to keeping women in a subservient position. That is why I am being stymied in my quest for simple justice.”

She concluded her tirade and slumped back in her chair. Her expression, blended of wrath and despair, challenged me to refute her.

Was Margali Gueths a simple egomaniac, a selfish, mercenary individual looking to justify herself with spurious and superficial logic? Or was she sincerely confused, operating out of a true sense of injustices done to her? After a moment’s reflection, I chose to believe the latter interpretation. That judgement allowed me to put aside any sense of personal affront, and work toward what was best for this woman and society.

Surely this woman’s unhappy marriage must have fostered a sense of life’s unfairness in her. But she was mistakenly transferring this personal grievance to a larger system that did not merit such an attack. It was up to me to persuade her of the wrongness of her perceptions.

I decided to attempt a tactic I had seldom had occasion to employ before.

Standing, I said, “Mrs. Gueths, I would like you to accompany me elsewhere in the Palace, where I can show you something that might convince you of the inaccuracy of your statements.”

This offer obviously proved unexpected. She stood up hesitantly. “I—I can’t imagine what that thing could be.”

“That is precisely why you need to see it with your own eyes. Are you game?”

My last question stiffened her spine and caused her pride to flare. What a woman this was! If only I—

But even the Grand Consistor is subject to the dictates of his personal Template.

“Of course I’m game. Lead on, Mr. Yphantidies, lead on!”

I conducted Margali Gueths to the door of my office, swinging it open for her—just in time to catch Goolsby Roy hurriedly reclaiming his desk chair in the anteroom. Plainly he had been eavesdropping. I could hardly object, since it was precisely such fussy attentiveness that made him such a good assistant—and the habit formed a well-known part of his Template.

“Mr. Roy, please field all matters that arise. Mrs. Gueths and I are going to the Vaults.”

Goolsby’s eyes widened. “Very good, Grand Consistor.”

I conducted Margali Gueths out of the anteroom, whereupon we found ourselves at the head of the busy Travertine Staircase, up and down which dozens of Continuity employees scurried, their arms full of documents.

We went down, saying nothing to each other. My underlings gave respectful nods of their heads as they encountered me. But the deference seemed not to impress Margali Gueths with my stature, but rather render her more disdainful of me.

On the ground level, we crossed three wings of the Palace and approached a door guarded by two doormen. They let us pass, and we descended further, down and down and down a set of steps more utilitarian than the noble public spaces. Here, the employees we encountered were all young messengers shuttling the documents that the more senior Adjudicators and Consistors had requested. Every last one of them practically fainted at seeing their Grand Consistor in their midst. Their reactions made Margali Gueths grin and chuckle ironically.

But her humourous attitude evaporated when we debouched from the stairwell and into the Vaults.

The barrelled ceiling of the Vaults, upheld by an army of regularly spaced pillars, reared some fifteen feet above our heads. No walls interrupted this measureless cavern, but the ranks upon ranks of dark wooden shelving, cresting some distance short of the roof, had a similar effect.

We looked down one aisle. Its terminus was invisible, dwindling to a vanishing point.

“The Vaults,” I said, “underlie the whole plaza above us, and are in a state of constant expansion, spreading out further and further from the Palace. We are well below the lawful level of any other structural foundation. Here we have the complete files on every extant citizen of Hanging Dog, files of which you have seen only the smallest redaction. Each citizen claims a certain number of feet upon the shelves, based on their age, of course. We also continue to maintain all the files of the dead, from the establishment of the Great Continuity to the present. They come in very useful at certain times.”

“I— This is monstrous! It’s a combination of ossuary and prison.”

“Such is your uninformed view, Mrs. Gueths. But perhaps you’d like to see your own file… ?”

This offer startled her. She hesitated. But I knew she could not resist. No one could. She bravely tried to rationalize her reaction.

“This is only my right, I suppose. Everyone should have this opportunity. It should not be something offered only to appease a noisy protestor. Very well, show me my file.”

“Allow me to see your Template synopsis once more, please.”

She passed over the papers from her satchel. I memorized her file number, and we set off.

The labyrinth was laid out logically, and the shelves clearly marked. But still I found myself experiencing a sense of disorientation and timelessness amidst the flickering lamplight. Subtle winds from the ventilation ducts conveyed the illusion that we walked through some artificial forest. Surely Margali Gueths, totally unfamiliar with this environment, must have been experiencing even greater deracination.

After some fifteen minutes of walking, we reached the proper shelf. The shelves were filled with uniform chunky albums bound in black buckram. Their spines bore only alphanumeric designations.

“Yours is there.” I pointed to a shelf up above head height. “You’ll have to use a ladder.”

I indicated a wheeled ladder that ran on a rail. Margali Gueths gamely began to climb. I averted my eyes for a moment, so as not to take advantage of the sight of her shapely calves beneath her long skirt. But then I realized the foolishness of such a nice gesture, given what she was about to encounter in her file.

Margali Gueths came to a halt on a high rung. She pulled down her first album. This action too was predictable: people always felt a nostalgic attraction to their infancy and youth.

The woman cracked the album and began to page through its contents.

At first her expression was fond and serene, as she encountered artefacts and tokens of her long-departed childhood. But this serenity soon vanished, replaced by flushed indignation. Margali Gueths slammed shut the album, reshelved it, then took one from considerably farther down in her sequence. She hastily opened this binder, flipped through its pages, then plucked from it a single large daguerreotype.

The brief flash of the print that I received from my vantage revealed a tangle of -bare fleshy limbs, plainly belonging to more than two persons.

Margali Gueths hastily descended the ladder to stand before me. Gazing at me contemptuously, she snapped the daguerreotype in half with a crisp crack, then snapped the fragments in half, before stuffing them into her satchel, reclaimed from the floor.

Her voice quivered with rage. “How dare you!”

I had anticipated a slightly different first question. But I should have realized that Margali Gueths would choose not to trifle with practicalities, but would rather challenge the moral right of the Grand Continuity to keep such files.

“Not ‘How was this done?’ That is generally what people ask, once they discover the degree to which their lives are transparent. You continue to surprise me, Mrs. Gueths.”

She only glared. “Don’t attempt to placate me, Mr. Yphantidies.”

“I assure you, I would never consider insulting your intelligence with flattery, Mrs. Gueths. But you must allow this unimaginative functionary to follow procedure, and answer the expected question first. That image from your life—one of many, many such—was obtained via the Panocculus, an auditory and viewing machine that allows unimpeded remote access to any spatial location, no matter what conventional barriers exist. The Panocculus is the rock upon which the Grand Continuity rests. Its existence, while not precisely a secret, is not generally touted, and unknown to the hoi polloi. A woman of your class, however, is permitted such knowledge.”

Margali Gueths snorted derisively, but I continued nonetheless.

“Within the Palace, vast banks of Panocculus machines, manned around the clock by an army of trained operators, ceaselessly collect data on the citizenry. But not, of course, for any ignoble or trivial purposes. The operators are bound by the most stringent oaths and penalties from disclosing what they witness. They only record. These frozen moments and conversational transcripts simply help quantify what standard testing already reveals. Your Template is collated not just from cold, abstract data, but from the rough and tumble of your most intimate and commonplace moments. So you see, when the Great Continuity asserts, for instance, that you, Margali Gueths, are incapable of assuming the mantle of your husband’s business, our judgement is based on the deepest knowledge of your behaviour and capabilities.”

Silence reigned for a brief moment before Margali Gueths spoke again. “Surface. It’s still all only surface observations. I am not just the sum of my recorded actions, Mr. Yphantidies. No one is. There are infinite depths to every living person, depths which the Great Continuity can never reckon nor fathom.”

“This is metaphysics, Mrs. Gueths. And a sane polity cannot be built on metaphysics.”

She did not choose to refute this obvious statement, but instead again demanded, “How dare you, in any case?”

I began to frame an answer, but then stopped. Surprising myself, I said, “Mrs. Gueths, would you allow me to attempt to justify the Great Continuity’s existence under more relaxed circumstances? Perhaps we might share dinner together this evening?”

Taken aback, she hesitated, then said, “Very well. You know my address. Be there promptly at eight.”

She spun about and strode off then with utmost certainty. Plainly, she had memorized our path, or the Vault’s whole coordinate system.

Watching her go, I was impressed, despite myself, and despite my reverence for the Great Continuity she despised.

The Gueths residence occupied an entire block of Eldorada Street in the Minvielle District, sharing the neighbourhood with the manses of such famous families as the Pybuses, Streutts, and Cavenders. A district of wealth and attainment, won from capricious fate by adherence to individual, familial and societal Templates. A dignified hush broken only by the insect whine of klickits swaddled the street.

The night had brought some surcease from the heat, although the humidity remained. My civilian clothes, while not as comfortable or as familiar-feeling as my official robes, proved quite adequate to the weather.

My landau discharged me at the front entrance to the Gueths residence. The driver descended and prepared to feed his theropods while he waited. I could smell the bloody meat that was their customary fare. Lamps to either side of the Gueths’ double doors shed their radiance against the night. I climbed the steps and rang the bell.

To my surprise, Margali Gueths herself opened the door. She was dressed demurely, in browns and greys. Her handsome face remained composed in a neutral expression.

“Come in, please, Mr. Yphantidies.”

I entered.

“I have dismissed all my servants for the evening. Our meeting did not strike me as a formal affair. Before leaving, Cook laid on a cold buffet that should be refreshing while we continue our discussion.”

She conducted me through several well-appointed chambers to a dining room. I noticed several paintings by Glassco on the walls, but not my favourite. I took a seat indicated to me, while Margali Gueths stopped by a sideboard bearing an assortment of decanters.

“Will you have a drink?”

“Can you make a Cubeb Slosh? That would be most refreshing.”

“Of course.”

With chilled drink in hand, I contemplated my hostess, now seated. Despite her initial formality and reticence, I could tell that she was eager to resume our former dispute.

After sipping my drink, I said, “You asked me how the Great Continuity could sanction its intrusions into the lives of the ekumenical citizenry. The answer is simple. Our organization is following its own Template. It is not only individuals who must obey their predestination and innate disposition, but also institutions, and society as a whole. Having come into being, the Great Continuity simply follows the dictates of its nature. We do as we do because we can—and must. To ensure our own survival, just as would any person.”

Margali Gueths looked at me incredulously. “Your arguments are entirely circular! You are using the unproven notion of Templates to justify enforcing Templates! Hasn’t this paradox ever occurred to you before?”

I waved away her juvenile objection. “This is all discussed and dealt with in Beginner’s Heuristics. If you had academic training—”

Margali Gueths surged impulsively to her feet. “This whole evening is a waste! I was foolish enough to imagine that if I got you out of your fortress—out of your formal shell—then you might be able to see the injustice being done me, how your Great Continuity wants to strip me of all that is my due. But instead I find that I have invited a hollow man into my house. Or rather, a ragbag man stuffed with the mouldy hay of preconceived ideas!”

Margali Gueths’s passionate tirade in her own defence, even though I was its butt, rendered her more alluring in my eyes than any other woman I had ever known. Betrayed by this unwonted feeling, and perhaps a little intoxicated from the Slosh, I chose to speak freely.

“Mrs. Gueths, I am not insensible to your character, and your righteous appeals. If matters were different, so forceful is your nature, I might— Well, I might even now be contemplating the establishment of a certain level of intimacy between us.”

This statement stopped Margali Gueths in her tracks as she paced the chamber. “So. Having seen those shameful images from my file, you take me for a loose woman? Well, what if I am? What if I chose to palliate my loveless marriage with certain wild assignations? Am I not just following my Template, according to you?”

“Indeed. And I don’t pass judgement on your actions. One of our prime tenets in the Great Continuity is that there is really no good or evil, moral or immoral—at least not as conventionally defined—but only adherence to or violation of one’s Template. No, my attraction to you stems solely from what you have shown me of your nature in person.”

She was silent for a time. “Assuming I would even begin to imagine consenting to such a relationship between us, what prevents it on your part?”

I sighed. “My own Template. When I was five years old, I received my first results on the Amatory Scale, and was deemed incapable of forming mature bonds with the opposite sex. Subsequent readings only confirmed this. Thus I have been precluded from any intimate relations. It is a regrettable defect, I suppose, but one that I have learned not to be troubled by.”

Margali Gueths collapsed on a chaise. Her expression mingled horror, bemusement and—most injurious—pity.

Suddenly she began to cry and laugh by turns, tears and guffaws blending into an unholy symphony that pierced me like a hot wire.

“I— I can’t believe— All your life— Never to have— Just because— Madness, madness!”

A frosted dignity suffused my brain. I attained a standing posture.

“Madame, I am leaving now. Our discussion is at an end.”

Margali Gueths wiped snot from her nose. How had I ever imagined her attractive?

“Of course. Or course it is. I will never allow my life to be blighted as you have allowed yours to be. The Great Continuity has hold over me no longer.”

Somehow with no passage of time that I could recall I found myself standing outside. The stars overhead appeared to me like gaping moth-holes in the shoddy fabric of the universe.

I climbed back into my landau. But I did not return to Vestry Street.

Rather, I went once more to my office, there to initiate the reformation of Margali Gueths.

The brazen woman had confiscated and destroyed a single daguerreotype from the Vaults.

But there were many more.

It was not necessary to disseminate certain information and imagery from her file to any actual scandal sheets. Those tabloids were a blunt instrument useful only for amusing the proletariat. Anonymously circulating the material among her peers was a more subtle and sufficient means of ruining her standing, and thus frustrating any attempt on her part to circumvent the Great Continuity’s disposition of Juvian Gueths’ estate.

In only a month, Margali Gueths’ ambitions to take her husband’s place had been rendered impotent.

And that was when she chose to hang herself.

My ultimate emotional convulsion—the spasm that violated my Template and caused the end of the Great Continuity—attendant upon the suicide of Margali Gueths was not immediate.

By the time I learned of her demise, some weeks after our disturbing dinner, I had regained my equanimity. No longer did her sobs and guffaws and taunts haunt my sleep. I had become utterly convinced of the correctness of my actions. In fact, very seldom did her case even cross my conscious mind. I had acted with all diligence and propriety, obeying the dictates and duties of my office, of my own Template.

Just as she had. Just as she had.

Almost a year after her suicide, I sat once more in my office, on a hot summer’s day. Lunchtime rolled around. Goolsby Roy entered, carrying a meal tray. The odour of veal reached my nostrils.

Something broke open within me, a chrysalis all unsuspected that I had been growing, harbouring deep within me like some new extension of my soul. The exact concatenation of circumstances summoned up Margali Gueths’s first appearance before me, as vividly as if she were present.

I stood up and moved wordlessly past my startled assistant.

Down, down, down I went, to the Vaults.

Fire, of course, was an omnipresent worry where the records were concerned. Many preparations and drills against its dangers were in place. Sand- and water-buckets hung at intervals throughout the Vaults. Due to their antiquity, however, piped water was unavailable. So the fire which I ignited and then abandoned, once it was well underway but before it could entrap me, was brought under control before spreading all that far.

But the intense conflagration did succeed in causing a portion of the Vaults to collapse, opening a hole in the Plaza. Curious citizens of the lowest sort quickly swarmed around the smoky excitement. The doormen of the Palace tried to drive them back, but, vastly outnumbered and without weapons, failed. Soon daring and ambitious men and boys were scrambling down the smoldering rubble slopes of the pit, to investigate what lay below.

Soon files were being passed among the crowd. Files that proved every bit as incendiary as my matches.

Here I will leave off my eyewitness account, since I—or any individual—was unable to take in more than a fraction of the widespread chaos that followed. The insensate looting, the burning of property, the lynching, the destruction of the Panocculus machines— A veritable apocalypse that raged up and down the ekumen like a living beast for weeks. The social structures of centuries died, as easily as drowned kittens.

Yet somehow I survived the interregnum. Somehow I was reborn into an age that has abandoned all I once held dear and essential. Templates, the Great Continuity, order, stability—

Such concepts as inheritance and the Amatory Scale.

All vanished, in favour of impulsiveness and unpredictability.

And a chance, perhaps, for the first time, to love.