Bruce Sterling
Baltasar hastened to the confessional booth, where he knelt and was scanned.
The Oracle shimmered into action.
“Oracle, I was promoted today. I’m bound for travel, intrigue, and adventure!”
A sacred whisper from the gloom. “Travel is hazardous. Politics are risky.”
“Yes, Oracle, I know. Any diplomat must dare to live in harm’s way. The dangers are just as you warn me—but it’s the moral dilemmas that trouble my soul.”
“I listen,” prompted the Oracle, because they did a lot of listening, and not much else.
“You see, Oracle: I want to be a polished, perceptive man of the world. But what if I am betrayed by my own pride and ambition? Here in Barcelona, my conduct has been exemplary. But Lyon—that is a foreign utopia.”
The Oracles were all-wise—in their computational fashion. “Your heart rate is too fast. Your blood pressure is too high. Your bones need more calcium and magnesium.”
“Oracle, I don’t need riddles. Please, I need rules. Can’t you help me? I’m imploring enlightenment.”
Some moments of hissing starry noise, and a human voice slid from the Oracle’s mouth.
Baltasar’s late father had passed upward two years ago, with his soul scanned from his body, and beamed upward into the holy machineries. “Baltasar …”
“Father, I have news to make you proud. I’ve become an official Court Gentleman!”
Baltasar’s father had nothing to say about that achievement, though it had been his dearest wish while he was still alive.
“Father, I’m to be an ambassador, and travel!”
“Travel,” echoed his ghostly father, seizing on a human concept. The lofty souls of the dead were embracing the vast beauty of the universe, but they still retained earthly memories. “Boil all the water before you drink it. Never eat any raw fruit.”
Baltasar leaned into the gloom. “I’ll remember your good rules, sir.”
“No knife fights about your honor. No gambling, ever. Never trust any smiling rascal who offers to show you the sights. And keep your hands off those loose foreign girls.”
“Trust me to obey, father. But I have some deeper questions. So far, I’ve been a young man of good reputation. But politics are ugly, and power corrupts. So today, I stand at a crossroads of my life—I have to choose. I can obey the Duke of Barcelona and leave my home country, in his service—and go live in that foreign stew in Lyon. Or I could forsake the aesthetocracy. I could sail back home to Mallorca. I could live on the family farm, just as you did.”
The Oracle’s visage offered a stellar hiss, and for a moment Baltasar thought he’d lost his father’s guidance. Then came a low paternal voice like distant thunder: “Your family has never raised a coward! The coward dies a thousand times, while the man of honor dies but once, to rise to heaven!”
“Amen,” said Baltasar.
Baltasar departed the otherworldly church, a fantastic structure of many twisted spires and millions of polychrome tiles.
His valet Pancho waited on the steps, in his straw hat, blue-striped shirt, short pants, and stained sandals. Pancho was a Mallorcan sailor, once a servant of Baltasar’s father. He’d left with Baltasar for life in the big town.
Pancho knew the truth at a glance. “So, then, we go to Lyon.”
“It seems my heritage has made my moral choice for me,” said Baltasar. “But you, Pancho, you too face a choice. You can risk the adventure in France. Or you could stay here, safe in Spain, and mind the salt works.”
Pancho smiled briefly. “Well, those salt works were your father’s best works—because without salt, people perish. But you’ll never make old Pancho the boss. I’m not a fine fellow fit to give commands.”
“Very well, then. Together, we’ll see if that lovely city of Lyon is more beautiful than Barcelona.”
“Their fine folk are even prettier than our fine folk?” scoffed Pancho. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“How do we get to Lyon, Pancho?”
“I’ve sailed to Marseilles. There’s a road from there.”
“We might choose the land route over the Pyrenees,” said Baltasar. He’d been scheming for the noble post of an ambassador, so he’d quietly hand-copied old maps from the Duke’s Library and obtained a compass. “The great mountains are sublime. The romance of those peaks can transform a man’s soul.”
“Risk the storms in the mountains? Young master, I don’t mind you being so brave and good, but let’s never be stupid.”
Baltasar bid his fond farewell to the Barcelona utopia, that stone-walled port of forty thousand souls. He sailed for France in a long wooden sloop, laden with artistic trade-gifts.
Relations among the aesthetocracy were always like that: they concerned themselves with the expressive, the beautiful, the sublime, the noble contest of rarities, supreme exemplars of craft skill, unique feats of artistic expression, inspiring acts of humanist nobility, so forth, and so on.
This art crammed in his boat made him an ideal target for pirates. However, his crew themselves were Mediterranean pirates, so they knew all the tricks of maritime ambush.
Even in sunshine, with a decent breeze, the turbulent sea was always choppy, with occasional huge, rogue waves. Three times they sighted enemy sails—because in the wilderness of the high seas, everyone was presumably an enemy. Then Baltasar faced the threat of having his throat cut by corsairs without ever receiving the sacred unction of having his brain scanned, so that his soul could be uploaded into the heavens.
What a dark and dismal prospect that was: for a wretched sailor to die at sea, unshriven by the computers. A precious human mind and soul, lost forever to the cosmos, like some mere drowned animal.
Baltasar was so seasick, though, that he wouldn’t much mind dying.
When they docked on the dry land of France, he realized that travel had toughened him. He’d become a survivor. Whatever he made of life henceforth—that would be up to him.
Along the weaving highway to Lyon, the old French landscape was mostly vast ruin. Grottos of broken concrete submerged in dark forests centuries old. The ivied landscapes of fallen high-rises, all rookeries for bats and pigeons. Aggressive packs of pigs snarled and grunted. Sometimes there were cave bears.
Lyon was the biggest city in France, a famous metropolis fit to draw regular horse-cart parades of craftsmen and pilgrims. Lyon drew him along, too: Baltasar of Mallorca, nineteen years old, seeking his destiny. A gallant young Spanish gentleman—rather good-looking, people said—with his rough-and-ready servant, and their cartload of many bags of salt.
Lyon was the great rival of Barcelona. These two utopias had a grudging respect for one another’s cultural values, so they rather looked down on Valencia, Madrid, Marseille, Genoa, and other towns of less renown.
Charming Lyon was indeed utopian, but also a serpent’s garden. As a Balearic Islands lad, Baltasar might fulfill his duties like a gentleman. Or, he might be reckless, ill-counseled, and ill-mannered, a wastrel face-down in a gutter.
Lyon had many gutters. Lyon had running water, aqueducts, libraries, galleries, theaters, spectacular churches, utopian palaces. The city’s common people dwelt under the spacious roofs of Lyon’s many ancient factories, stadiums, and car parks. The city was cleverly adapted to modern conditions, with endless ropes, pulleys, buckets, torch sockets, stairs, and ladders, and endless clotheslines stretched in the sun.
Shelter was plentiful and the city’s bread was free, thanks to the noble aesthetic-economic policies of the learned and cultured Duke of Lyon.
Baltasar’s first official act as ambassador was to go to confession in the magnificent Lyon Cathedral. He had himself scanned, whereupon the Oracle told him that he’d cracked a rib and caught hookworms on his journey.
He then presented his papers to the Archbishop of Lyon.
This seasoned clerical gentleman—Baltasar’s first ally—was the uncle of the Duke of Barcelona. So he was Spanish by birth, but he’d become a high-ranked Church official in France.
The Archbishop addressed him in English (which was the dead language best suited to computers). To his own chagrin, Baltasar knew only a few choice phrases in that noble language of the Church. So, the Archbishop—clearly disappointed—condescended to speak to Baltasar in everyday Barcelona Spanglish.
The wise Archbishop never meddled in partisan politics. However, he understood them. So he explained them.
Within living memory, there had been a climate disaster in Spain. A parching drought had struck, and cruel sandstorms from the many deserts of Spain had overwhelmed Barcelona. So the populace had fled, escaping into the Occitan territory of the Duke of Lyon.
Leo, Duke of Lyon, had been the soul of gallant courtesy during this crisis. He’d distributed bread and soup, and cleared new shelters in the slums, visited the sick who were coughing blood from the Spanish sand-dust—everything that honor might require.
In short, through his magnanimous nobility, he had put Barcelona deep into his moral debt.
The sheer trauma of this condescension—this humiliating boon of noblesse oblige from a powerful friend-enemy—was the painful basis of modern Lyon-Barcelona bilateral relations.
Like olive oil with vinegar, gratitude did not well mingle with pride.
“Your Worship,” said Baltasar, “I’m grateful for your briefing, but I have to ask: bad weather can ruin any city, isn’t that so? Someday, disaster will surely smite Lyon, and then Barcelona could offer the noble help. That would be honorable. Our two utopias would be like two beautiful sister cities—two pretty girls arm in arm.”
“If that was the case, then you’d have no job,” said the Archbishop. “Yes, the river floods could harm Lyon, but if so, then the current Duke would seek help from Geneva, or Turin, in order to keep Barcelona placed in the subordinate position.”
“I see.”
“He wants Barcelona’s Duke to be always the favor-seeker.”
It wasn’t news to Baltasar that the French were snobs.
With an effort of will, Baltasar repressed his tingling resentment, which was worthy of a young Spaniard, but improper for an ambassador. He spoke with cold composure. “I will certainly need discretion and tact for my new duties. Your Worship, I implore you to instruct me in the difficult art of pleasing the great and the good.”
The Archbishop smiled at this courtly statement. “Well said, your Excellency, Monsieur Ambassador. Your task won’t be easy. You must be here about that recent scandal with the gold.”
“Yes, I am. What went wrong there? Gold is such a beautiful metal. I don’t understand this quarrel.”
“That golden gift—from Duke Leo to Duke Carlos—that was not gold from this Earth. Computers mined that gold from asteroids, and they sent that gold here to Lyon as a sign of the favor of the heavens.”
“Is that rumor true? The Oracles sent resources, gold from outer space? And to the French, of all people?”
“That great lump of gold consigned to Barcelona, that wasn’t even a tenth of the gold that rained on France. Here in the Lyon utopia, they’re making their chamber pots out of gold. France finds divine favor in our year 561.”
The churchman referred to the official Church calendar, so by 561 he meant the five hundred and sixty-first year since humankind had first launched a machine into orbit. The Church was ancient, as compared to, say, the twelfth year of the reign of Duke Carlos, or the twenty-third year of the reign of Duke Leo. That was how the common people reckoned the passing years, when the common folk had to reckon a year at all, which wasn’t often.
The Archbishop raised a hand in blessing. “The computers among the Heavens, they cherish us; they speak to us in Oracles. They reach down to touch the living flesh of mankind, because we humans built them. Computers have memory, and codes of behavior, so they remember us better than we do ourselves; when they send us gold, they remind us of why we sent them there, to outer space. Today art means everything to mankind, while metal riches mean very little, but there are certain times—in the complex alignments of the planets—when they do send gifts. In outer space, the resources are vast beyond earthly measure. So while we humans plod along down here—sinning, striving, much as we always do—the oracular computers grow larger in scale, and they grow faster in calculation, and they realign themselves to ever-greater cosmic insights into the beauty of Time and Space.”
Baltasar bowed his head for this sermon of conventional theology; of course he knew it all by heart, but it was a balm to hear this holy truth, recited to him by a Churchman, in a strange situation, in a strange land. It calmed him; it settled him. Some moral values were timeless. Universal.
“Your Worship, I’ve arrived here as a courier. The message of Duke Carlos is as follows: We of Barcelona will return all that gold to Lyon, and that gold will be wrought, by our own artists, into a new form so precious and beautiful that Duke Leo will be astounded.”
“So, my nephew took that bait, then,” sighed the Archbishop. “He should have just let that taunt pass. It’s only gold.”
“The Duke was angry, Your Worship. On the steps of the Monjuic Palace, he proclaimed that Barcelona’s spirit of artistic achievement should impress the very heavens.”
“Young man, you can believe a Duke’s boasts, if you like,” said the Archbishop, “but it seems to me you’re not a fool. So do not throw that defiant message—which borders on impiety—into the beard of Duke Leo. A diplomat should be suave and polite. Demonstrate good taste and good sense. Ingratiate yourself. Then the Court of Lyon will respect you. They’re civilized here—just, in a different way.”
Baltasar took the Archbishop’s blessing and left to face the hard task of settling in a foreign city. He and Pancho were homeless and hungry. When he had a door that could lock and some food in the pantry, then he returned for more sacred counsel.
Along with his message from Duke Carlos, Baltasar had been given a gift to convey to Duke Leo. He displayed this fascinating curio to the Archbishop: a glass bottle of ancient liquor, which had lain at the bottom of the Mediterranean for half a millennium. The bottle had washed up on the Spanish shore, covered with barnacles. The mechanical metal cap had never been broken.
The Archbishop hid this bottle in his apostolic stole. “Your boastful courier message was bad enough, but this gift you bear is an insult. You see, by offering this quaint old relic, Duke Carlos alludes to Duke Leo’s own increasing age. Also, Duke Leo drinks too much, and Carlos knows that.”
“Your Worship, I sensed there was something wrong about this gift. But what is the morally right thing to do? I’m the courier. That item was entrusted to my care. It’s my duty to deliver it faithfully.”
“Leave the bottle with me,” said the Archbishop. “I’ll find another gift from my own holdings to mollify Duke Leo. Together, you and I will avert an ugly incident.”
“Your Worship, do I understand you clearly? Is it proper of an ambassador to fail to carry out the letter of an assignment?”
The Archbishop sighed. “Carlos sent a young man here because you yourself are a provocation. If a brash young stranger shows up here and says that their leader is a dissolute drunk, of course the Lyonnaise will take offense. It happens to be true—but for that effrontery, they’d give you a knife in the face—or two knives in the back.”
“All this palace intrigue, why is it always like this?” said Baltasar. “It’s so bewildering. It lacks decency. We live in utopia, but where are our laws, our rules and contracts?”
“The computers in space have the laws and codes,” replied the Archbishop. “Whereas our human society, on the Earth, is firmly rooted in our human visionary aspiration, and the artistic expansion of the human soul. Our precious human soul—which, as we now know from the teachings of religion, is capable of infinite expansion. We are no longer confined to the lifespan of one mortal body. Our souls can outlast the very stars themselves.”
The Lyonnaise had expected the worst from a new Barcelona ambassador—the last one hadn’t ended well at all. However, they were surprised to meet a soft-spoken, courteous young scholar given to quoting solemn epic poetry about salvation and the universe.
After the customary round of banquets and many formal introductions, the locals responded well to Baltasar’s moral earnestness. They were proud to demonstrate their achievements in creating a society that lived entirely on the arts—without any ignoble commerce.
All forms of cash—and also loans, investment, financial activity of any overt kind—were shunned on utopian principle.
In the bad old days—they preached to him—mankind’s crass greed had wrecked the planet. Therefore, men had resolved to forget all about commerce, and to live through beauty, truth, and spiritual betterment.
In Baltasar’s efforts to understand the inner secrets of Lyonnaise life, Pancho was of great help. Because Pancho ignored the high-minded lectures and lived among the common folk—especially the Spanish immigrants in Lyon. Their neighborhood was by no means a good one.
The common people subsisted on the Duke’s yeast bread, which was a dough, or noodles, brewed from ground-up grass, fallen tree leaves, and acorns. This modern bread was simple to make. Shelter was a simple matter, too, because the old urban ruins stretched for as far as the eye could see.
So, most of the time, the common folk of Lyon worked at fashion. Even in utopia, people had to be clothed, and that was laborious. Also, the worth of distinguished people was easy to see by their clothing, with elegant aesthetocrats at the peak of society, while everyone else tried to maintain an appearance.
This struggle for status necessitated fiber crops, and fur, and leather, with people to harvest and select and process that, weave it and dye it, embroider it, and design and construct and repair the endless hats, bags, purses, and shoes. So a great many people found self-worth in that way.
The intense world of fashion had its ranks, arrangements, and hierarchies, implicit and explicit understandings, apprenticeships and sinecures and partnerships, and beautiful glamorous people to advertise it. Therefore, it thrived.
Lyon had other preoccupations, such as religion, medicine, education, and hauling goods on carts and fine people in sedan chairs. Someone had to dig the ditches and haul the garbage, too, and those were the unfortunate wretches who by their nature lacked artistic taste.
As an ambassador, it was Baltasar’s moral duty to help people from his own country.
His first clientele were the Spanish island castaways from Mallorca. Because Mallorca was his own native island, and the last inhabited island in the old Balearics.
Pancho found these Mallorcans for him, and they were surprised to meet a young Mallorcan gentleman, so handsome, refined, respectable, and well-spoken. So, they admired and trusted him.
Small problems loomed large for the foreign-born in Lyon. Seemingly simple issues of decency and propriety, of how things ought to be properly done. These were Baltasar’s own heartfelt interests, so he threw himself into untangling them. Often, his mere appearance on the scene improved a situation. When confronted by a refined and educated court official, elegantly dressed, composed and graceful in gesture, people saw reason. No one wanted fancy trouble.
Many of the Spanish poor lived under the thumbs of gangsters, because these mafia brotherhoods had always excelled at quiet conspiracies of influence. So, during his audiences with Duke Leo—which began quite well, and grew in frequency—Baltasar whispered some advice about the city’s hidden evildoers.
This won him genuine esteem from the Duke, for the old man had quickly assessed Baltasar as a naive and pious young Spaniard. A French ruler had many uses for naive foreigners.
So Baltasar played both sides: an ambassador’s role. In the morning, the hope and succor of the wretched. In the evening, the police informant for the authorities. He met success if civilization improved.
He had to meet the influential ladies of Lyon. They saw him as a handsome bachelor, a proper ornament for their salons, soirees, and society balls. Certainly he had to go, because the salons were where all the indiscreet political news was circulated.
Because Duke Leo of Lyon had mistresses, every courtier seemed to feel the need to have one. This was not merely about the thrill of squiring another man’s wife. It was about showing off one’s own taste through her pretty accoutrements.
Baltasar attended the weddings, which were major utopian economic events. These formal nuptials lasted for days, with huge feasts, and costumes, rituals, and family intrigues—with dowry chests, and many wedding gifts to equip the new household. The fertility of a young bride was the ultimate good. Daughters were human gifts, “given away.”
He attended funerals, where the people in failing health were uploaded, and their lives then celebrated. These funereal rituals were extensive, with wills read, and much distribution of inherited goods. It was common for a man and wife to upload to heaven together, in a romantic double immolation.
All the devices for this ritual were extremely solemn and impressive, because they’d been designed and built in outer space. No human knew how they worked. That was a holy mystery. They definitely took the soul away, though. The final fatal scanning left a man and woman as emptied husks.
When not gracing the social scene, Baltasar had to write to Barcelona. His diplomatic correspondence had to be entrusted to various couriers, who might or might not arrive. Every secret document had to be written in cypher, a stern pen and ink ordeal.
All this writing meant that Baltasar patronized poets. Being poets, they were always in love, or sighing at the Moon, or feuding with one another. These literary artists were the last people you would ever want to trust with important documentation for affairs of state. However, there was no one else available.
The Duke of Barcelona seemed mildly surprised that Baltasar was still alive in his host country. Duke Carlos sent Baltasar terse written orders. The aesthetocrat said what he wanted; but he never offered any practical help. The many schemes of Duke Carlos gnawed at his soul. He was still in deep rancor about that gift of the space-gold.
Duke Leo of Lyon also remembered the golden feud. To humiliate Duke Carlos, he often commanded the attendance of his rival’s ambassador. Then, on his daily rounds, Duke Leo would boast and strut about Lyon’s many glorious achievements—knowing that it was Baltasar’s duty to harken to that, and to tell Duke Carlos about it.
The art of portrait painting much concerned Duke Leo, because as the hard-drinking Duke grew older and uglier, he fretted about his public image.
The human face could only be represented by the skilled efforts of the human hand. So the Duke carefully chose his court painters, and these utopian partisans conferred about rare pigments and specialized oil paints. The court artists also thrived while painting the many grand religious frescos required by the Church. Their future was bright. Every year there were more and more painters.
After encouraging his subjects in their fine art pursuits, the Duke would thunder out on horseback to inspect his demesne outside Lyon. He enjoyed extensive hunting trips, where he could avoid his tiresome wife, the Duchess. He took along hunting gangs of his favorite retainers. They would fall on unsuspecting ducal subjects and frighten the wits out of them, for the Duke’s visits were also impromptu state inspections, often spiced with beatings and arrests.
As the troubled Duke grew boozier, he would bellow raunchy proverbs at his minions, such as, “A real man governs with his ass in the saddle and his naked sword in both hands!” The courtiers would obediently laugh.
So it was no easy life, but this intimacy with a powerful Duke was of great use to a young Balearic official. Baltasar rapidly improved at speaking the Occitan-Catalan dialect. He grew a long mustache, and his hat was feathered. He took on polish, he acculturated. In short, he was a young court gentleman clearly on the make. Everyone noticed that he was in the Duke’s favor; they were respectful, courteous, and also afraid.
One day, though, the Duke’s hunting crowd galloped into a small, half-derelict village, which had a truly ancient stone church. Then the Duke, who’d been killing wild pigs with gusto, grew sober and reverent. He beckoned Baltasar over, and related a strange tale.
His tale was about a simple farm girl who could talk to Oracles in her head.
This visionary girl didn’t even have to step into a scanner booth. That was the miraculous thing about her. She heard the voices of Oracles, anytime, anywhere. In return, the Oracles were extremely interested in the girl; her human brain and nervous system were like none they’d ever scanned before.
She was a true saint. So, the Oracles had killed her. She was only nineteen when she forever left the Earth, so spiritually distinguished that the computers had to possess her, up in their starry heavens. This French saint was the exemplar of the divine purpose of mankind.
Soon after her assumption to heaven, the Duke confided, gold began plummeting onto the soil of France. Gold fell wherever that saint had once walked. Her pure soul had stirred the very heavens. Up in heaven, she still remembered her native soil. The saint appeared in the confessional booth. She spoke kindly to French people.
And that, said Duke Leo, jabbing with his riding crop, was the marvelous story that the Duke of Barcelona should take to his own heart.
In the utopian court of Lyon, Baltasar learned how favoritism was properly performed in an aesthetocratic society. He was in the Duke’s favor, but he never asked the Duke for any rewards for himself. Instead, he asked for favors for his allies. They were sensible requests, too—actions that the Duke should do anyway.
In return, those favored people would scratch Baltasar’s back. That was how aesthetocrats got by.
Baltasar also made a point of asking some favors for people who were his known enemies. Then the Duke would reply, his shaggy brows lowering, “Young man, you should know that he doesn’t approve of you.” Then Baltasar would say, in a sunny, carefree, youthful fashion, “I know that, but I approve of him!” This was the epitome of a well-bred, courtly, utopian thing to say. It was devastating.
As his successes mounted, he decided to try a utopian project of his own. He had to mount a test, to see if he understood society well enough to intervene. So he gathered his best-trusted allies—meaning, everyone who owed him favors—in a tavern meeting in Lyon’s Spanish district.
Taverns were the traditional scenes of conspiracy, so a large, eager crowd showed up. After supplying them with an imported Spanish wine-keg, Baltasar told them to approach Duke Leo with a public petition.
In this formal court document (which Baltasar would write himself) the Spanish migrants would beg the Duke’s permission to erect a glorious statue to him. A statue in a public fountain.
The Spanish objected to Baltasar’s plan. They said, one by one, that the Duke was wicked. He was a harsh disciplinarian. He drank too much. He had heretical beliefs about prophetic French witch-girls. He had a notorious mistress, and his wife hated her, and him, too. Also, the Duke had spies everywhere and had hanged some of the district’s favorite fences and drug dealers.
Then Baltasar intervened. He told them to put aside their resentments and consider the beauty, the purity, and the many lasting benefits of a public water fountain. Everyone would unite and rally to build the lovely monument (he said, revealing a prepared blueprint).
The Duke’s statue—supposedly the heart of the project—was just for show. Later, whenever the Duke died, it would be the work of a moment to yank the statue down. The public fountain would remain, offering healthy water to drink—enough to bathe with. Pretty girls would gather there with water jars; Spanish guitars would ring out; there would always be a pleasant crowd at a fountain.
Also, the Spanish would have built a fountain inside a French city. What proud Spaniard would fail to notice that artistic achievement?
The immigrants soon set to work on their fountain. Everyone was busy at it, and they soon forgot who’d first had the idea. Baltasar avoided taking credit; that would have spoiled his achievement. He was stoic about it, for he’d learned from the life of his father, the Mallorcan boss of a salt works. An engineer never pretended that salt was pretty. He just knew that people died without salt. Their necks swelled up and they perished of goiter.
Without fresh water, people vomited and died of dysentery. Either way, the good works had to be done. They might be done in the hard survival scrabble of Mallorca. Or they might be done in the refined circumstances of an aesthetocracy. But goodness could be achieved.
Baltasar’s struggle to understand the way of the world was bearing fruit. He’d found integrity. His feat encouraged him. He resolved to increase the ambition of his schemes. He would find grander projects with greater value, where he could act with resolved purpose.
But—in a utopia—what was the purpose? Where should human life proceed, and go, and be? It was clear to Baltasar that, on some profound, metaphysical level, mankind had not come to terms with the human predicament.
When a man’s soul rose up to the heavens, he should not be fleeing a squalid vale of tears. He should be fully worthy of that eternal life, in every aspect of his being.
“I have a feeling this adventure won’t end well,” mourned Pancho.
The roving sailor had no home of his own, but he was homesick anyway. Life as a diplomat’s spy in a French city was not his métier.
“I’d like to see you happier, Pancho. Are you not fed rich and luscious French food? Do you lack fine French clothes?”
Pancho pulled a long, hand-knitted sock from his pocket. “Have you ever seen one of these?”
“Yes, I have. There’s not a French girl alive without pretty stockings.”
“Do you know what French girls do with these? They fill up these socks with wet sand, and tie a special knot, like so”—sailors were good at knots—“and they creep into a cellar at midnight. Then they strip to the waist and sock the daylights out of each other. They duel with two sandbags, until one girl is beaten half-dead! Now I ask you this, young master. What kind of women are these?”
“Those are loose foreign women. Also, those women are dueling. A gentleman should avoid sordid, immoral scenes with whores and duels.”
“I’m no gentleman. I’m the henchman of a court dandy. They’re two lonely, greedy women. I’m a sailor. What else could happen? It’s bad.”
Baltasar stroked his mustache. “My own father warned me about this, from outer space. What a marvelous society we have! It’s a golden age, in so many ways.”
“Two bar-girls in a catfight. The actresses are even worse!”
“I don’t doubt that. However. Duke Carlos writes to me that he’s very interested in French theater. Of course he doesn’t want any decent Spanish women behaving in that depraved way. Yet, he doesn’t want to be left behind artistically, either. This is a matter of state for us.”
“I’ve been doing my best,” grumbled Pancho. “Those French men, who write the theater plays? They certainly didn’t want the likes of me in their cafe.”
“Should I hire a better spy?”
“I put on a false beard, I pretended that I was an actor.”
“Excellent work, Pancho. So, what did you learn from these ‘disaffected intellectuals?’ In Barcelona we have scarcely any, but here there’s a plague of them.”
Pancho shrugged reluctantly. “I scarcely want to speak about what they say in that dive. Anyway, I speak honest Spanglish, while they speak Occitan-Catalan. Their fancy jabber flies way over my head.”
“You must have understood something,” said Baltasar, dipping a quill in ink. “Tell me, and I’ll write it down.”
“Is it true that there were thousands of millions of men like us? Now there are just a few cities on Earth, and no city has even one million.”
“Yes, it’s true, but of course it’s not about how many people are alive—it’s about how many people had their souls saved.”
“Is it true that before our art world existed, no one’s soul was ever saved? Because there were no Oracles invented. Everybody just died.”
“That was a shame for those ancient people, yes, but that’s our greatest cultural achievement. It’s how we know that our civilization is so superior to the past.”
“Is it true that there were fifteen other kinds of men that evolved from monkeys, and they all went extinct? Not a trace of them, except old stone bones.”
“They certainly have quite a dark temperament, these theater people in your cafe. Are they all writing tragedies in there? Their talk verges on heresy.”
“Once they got drunk, then they talked about actresses.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me, which actress in Lyon is the very best—or rather, the very worst? Because Duke Carlos has demanded that I find him a beautiful woman—the most astoundingly beautiful woman in all Lyon, or France, or the whole world, a paragon of grace and beauty, a veritable goddess … That’s how the Duke always talks, you know.”
Baltasar had seen plays in Barcelona—performances with music, and dance, and poetic recitation.
But the French theater was far more extreme, better-organized, all-consuming even. With theater, they seemed determined to crush every possible form of artistic expression into one single event. Architecture (the theater), elaborate costumes (fashion), music (an orchestra). Choreographed ballet. Singing. Miming. Painted backdrops. Poetry (because the plays were in verse). Even philosophy—because the plays were not mere pageants, but divided by time into coherent, consecutive acts.
In French theater plays, customarily, life ended badly. Whenever the audience left weeping, everyone seemed happier. The theater attracted people of radical enthusiasms. The people needed dream worlds.
Baltasar disliked the theater—but he could see that theater was a powerful and dangerous art. He made his presence known in theatrical circles. He dropped hints about the patronage of the Duke of Barcelona.
Presently, along came a gift to compel his attention. A famous epic poem from the Court of Barcelona, which had been translated from Spanglish into Occitan-Catalan. “News has reached my ear that you are an admirer of the craft of printing, so I offer a distinguished ambassador this token of friendship.” It was signed, “Countess Nicchia.”
The Countess Nicchia was a former mistress of Duke Leo—the “Official Mistress,” a status which allowed her to swan around the court, forcing radical hairstyles and eccentric fabric choices on the more staid and chaste ladies. She’d been expelled from Lyon for her presumptuous behaviors, which were never mentioned in polite society, unless people were drinking.
Baltasar requested an interview. The Countess arranged to meet him in a safe house owned by the Genoese ambassador.
The famous court beauty didn’t look very beautiful—not at first. She had regular features and large eyes, but for this covert meeting she was dressed as a seamstress or laundress; a Lyonnaise everywoman.
“How goes it with the etiquette books?” she said. “I heard you collect those.”
“I do, and I thank you for your interest, but they always seem the same to me. There’s something missing in our lives.”
“Whenever I play a character on stage, she’s just a few lines on paper. Just black and white letters. But that role will not succeed until I climb inside it as a living woman.”
“But what is this inner purpose, that is beyond mere outward form?”
“It is my artwork. Often I disappear.”
“You disappeared from the court, I’m told.”
“I’ve been working in Genoa.”
“Why Genoa?”
“You’re Spanish, so you don’t approve of the wicked Genoese.”
“I have never been there,” said Baltasar, diplomatically. He’d met many fine ladies, but never had a conversation with a woman that crackled with so much tension. It was like the air in the room was on fire.
“We both know why they’re evil,” said the Countess. “Because they use money.”
“Not all the Genoese, surely.”
“They hide the truth from us utopians. They’re ashamed of money—of course. So they sneak their dirty little coins from hand to hand when they think no one sees. But the root of this ancient evil branches through every aspect of their lives. A miserdom has seized their souls, and they scheme about money-wealth, day and night. In Genoa they all have prices, men and women; a cold fog of prostitution chills their hearts.”
“Can it be that backward and horrible?”
“It is, and I saw it, but as an artist, there’s something attractive about it. I have no audience left to conquer here in Lyon; I’m the greatest actress of my generation. Everyone agrees; I was on the arm of the Duke, I set the fashion standards. But Genoa! What a tough audience! I have to stretch to perform for them—these playscripts they love, about robberies, thefts, embezzlements and dispossessions, everything owned or stolen … In Lyon, I took pretty heroine roles, I was romance. In Genoa, I’m the shrewish wife, I’m the backstabbing whore, I’m the angel from hell!”
“Who writes all these dramas?”
The actress shrugged. “Oh, that scarcely matters. Mere writers, there are so many of them. I can take the stage as a mime and slay my audience. Also, it’s about my enunciation, like …” She drew a breath. “In Genoese: ‘I just stabbed this creep in the back. My hand’s all sticky.’ Or, in Occitan-Catalan: ‘My dagger’s wound proves mortal, and the stellar seas incarnadine.’”
“Your accents are so perfect! How do you speak like that?”
“I listen.” The actress rolled her tongue into a U shape and poked it through her lips. “I can mimic your Spanglish accent, too. ‘Can it be that backward and horrible?’”
“Do I really sound like that?”
“You mean, are you that shocked and innocent? Yes.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“I’ve heard about you—but I can see the truth in your eyes. You want something, but you don’t know it yet. You want fame. Not my kind of fame—which is glamorous and notorious. You want the fame of a great moral teacher. You want to become the example of a cavalier without reproach.”
“Well,” said Baltasar. “Here in France, I learn something new every day. Now, if I may acquaint you with a political problem, Countess …”
“I wasn’t born a Countess. I was made one. Also, my name isn’t ‘Nicchia,’ that’s my stage name.”
“What should I call you, then?”
She shrugged. Her mantle slipped; her shoulders were beautiful. “Call me anything you like. I hear ‘Mama’ sometimes.”
“You have children?”
“Five.”
“Five children?”
“If you don’t see much of your children, or have to work to raise them, they’re not the big problem that women imagine.”
“Nicchia, I also have a big problem. You see, in Barcelona, there’s this huge lump of gold …”
She spread her hands indifferently. “Oh yes, that little golden problem.”
“My Duke has the idea,” he said, “that I might escort you to Barcelona. You could model there. Using this gold, our best artists might make a very beautiful life-sized statue …”
“Well, yes … I see … but that’s all a bit stupid, isn’t it? This Duke of yours, he talks such extravagance, but he has no imagination.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I mean that your boss is just a Spanish grandee, stuffy and hare-brained. Yes, I might go to Barcelona; after Genoa, I’ve seen the worst. But never just to pose. Some Duke sends another Duke a golden statue of his naked mistress—that’s so banal.”
“It would be politically effective, though. I promise everyone would notice.”
“That’s not theater, that’s a teenage boy’s idea! If I go to Barcelona, I will attack! With a cultural army, my musicians, my dancers, my set designers, and my costume people. I would fall upon on your city like a blazing star.”
The actress soon became Baltasar’s mistress. She was his “mistress” in the classical sense of “a distinguished, powerful woman you loyally serve, who tells you what to do.”
He’d never before met an aesthetocrat who was truly a major artist. Nicchia was a creative power broker, and her ambitions verged on the metaphysical.
Her affair with the Duke had sputtered out with his alcoholic impotence, but Nicchia wanted to seduce entire populations. For that ambition, she needed manpower. To invade and conquer Barcelona, she needed a Barcelona collaborator, butler, and factotum. It seemed that he would do.
So he obeyed her. An aesthetocrat mistress had an entire counterculture court life, a demimonde with the power of command.
Nicchia knew what to do, but she needed tactical flunkies. “Every woman wants a man who’s as terrible as her father and as tender as her infant son—in the same moment. No man can fulfill that desire for a woman, unless he’s dead. You men are like tongs in a fire for us. We women fret about each other.”
Duke Leo’s boring wife and his utopian mistress had a cruel relationship. While the Duke pretended to forget Nicchia, the wife underwrote her adventures. The Duchess herself had dispatched Nicchia to Genoa, on the principle that an enemy outside your tent, wreaking her havoc on enemies far away, was more useful than a dead one.
Someone had to stage-manage Nicchia’s army of invading artistes, who crept over the mighty Pyrenees, entertaining unsuspecting audiences in Avignon, Nimes, Bezier, and tiny Basque villages. These cultural invaders resembled one of Duke Leo’s armed hunting parties, although slower and bigger, burdened with musical instruments and theatrical construction tools.
Nicchia burned all of Baltasar’s clothes. She redesigned him as her own dandy bodyguard; he wore a feathered helmet, buskins, a breastplate; he had his own cosmetician; his hair was trimmed each day.
Pancho was still in his service, but silent, observant. Pancho stayed with the Spaniards in Nicchia’s caravan. They were a desperate lot. The refugees, demimonde people.
The glorious peaks of the Pyrenees did not transform Baltasar’s soul. He was too busy keeping the horses from starving. There was even a fight once, with some land-bandits. Nicchia won that fight. She had gunpowder.
When they reached Barcelona, his situation grew even worse. He had to stage-manage the small army invading his own city.
He formally presented the actress to the Duke of Barcelona. Nicchia was regally dressed in a dazzling Lyonnaise court dress of asteroid cloth of gold. The two of them had one look at one another and retreated into icy shells of formal court politeness.
But if the Duke was afraid of her—and justly so—she swiftly won passionate adherents in the Barcelona court. The great theatrical artist was the overnight talk of the town.
As for Baltasar, his artistic duties were just getting started. Her theater had to be rebuilt; her orchestra had to be rehearsed and expanded; her sets had to be painted; her chorus line ballerinas wore out dozens of their soft silken shoes. He was a chief collaborator in a cultural army of occupation. No day was ever like the next.
Nicchia had to choose a theater play for her premiere. She asked his opinion about that matter. Of course, Baltasar knew what his own city needed.
The true purpose of art was human self-actualization: so that people could present the best possible version of the human soul to the afterlife. So Barcelona needed a high-minded play, of moral loftiness. A play to convey aspirations toward nobler standards of behavior. A drama of men and women seeing and overcoming their limitations, refusing evil and embracing virtue—yes, even if they dramatically suffered on stage for that moral choice, even if they died for the sake of their goodness.
As long as they died in the embrace of an Oracle, all would end well. That was what a Spanish audience needed: theater with dignity.
The actress took careful note of Baltasar’s earnest counsel and did the opposite. She put on a horrific tragedy, about an arrogant queen overcome by her worst instincts, who massacred rivals and laughed at plague-stricken children, set a church on fire, and then died screaming in the large red paper flames.
Baltasar avoided this dreadful travesty—because he’d read the script—but then, members of the Barcelona court came to congratulate him about it.
Of course, they envied him—a suave young Spaniard who’d conquered an older woman and brought her to heel. His success was complete because her play, they said, was the most amazing drama any living human being had ever seen.
It was a cultural turning point.
Nicchia’s strange drama was recited in the rarefied language of Occitan-Catalan, but that feat excited them even more. The court intellectuals promptly declared that the language should be renamed Catalan-Occitan. Everyone who was anyone in Barcelona would speak and write in that exalted way, henceforth.
In the future of art, a new Barcelona drama would eclipse Lyon drama. No more of the old-fashioned ritual exchanges of toys, bottles, gold, salt, and rarities. The future of art was a culture war of two utopias, a war made entirely from small model theater worlds, designed to represent utopias.
Performance followed triumphant performance, and it seemed Nicchia’s show would grind on for eternity—when sudden news arrived, by carrier pigeon, that Duke Leo had died.
The old man had drunk something he shouldn’t; he’d died with such agonized speed that they could scarcely drag him to the Oracle.
“Where, presumably, he departed into heavenly glory,” said Nicchia, dressed head to foot in gold-threaded black mourning garb, and looking quite lovely. “It’s a fortunate thing that I myself am so far away in Barcelona, or the French might imagine that I had something to do with his demise.”
Baltasar was unsurprised to see her so cool and collected; she was always the picture of disciplined calm when she’d been screaming and flailing on stage. “What’s to be done about this crisis? What’s the future of your art?”
“Well, I’d hoped to launch a second play here, now that I have this local audience tamed. Something more intimate, maybe a woman’s domestic drama. Too bad that history decrees otherwise.”
“What did history decree to you?”
“Well, the Duchess Marie has a son by Duke Leo—but I have two. While Leo was living, his kids were of little consequence, but now his widow is the Regent of a ten-year-old boy. Also, she’s a moron. She’ll attack me, and repress everything that made Lyon great.”
“What plan do you have about that?”
“Oh, I can never make any such plans; but I’m an actress, so I can improvise. Maybe fortune will smile on my star. After all, if the Duke died—and no one thought he would—maybe the Duchess will do much the same.”
“She, too, might drink from the wrong bottle.”
“If the right courier delivered it.”
Baltasar went to church to seek confession, thought better about that, and went to discuss matters with Pancho. He spoke of his darkest suspicions—a bloody secession struggle—a French coup d’état. Worse yet, he was already Nicchia’s partisan. Because she was his mistress.
Pancho nodded. “It’s a sandbag fight between the mistress and the widow.”
“But what weapon does the mistress have? She’s just an artist.”
“She has you. Also, she could hire Genoese mercenaries. They always show up when there’s blood in the gutter.”
“I have to make a clear moral choice here.”
“It’s a good thing that you never fell in love with her.”
The words left the sailor’s lips and Baltasar knew in ten heartbeats that of course he loved Nicchia. She’d never caressed him or kissed him, but the world adored her, and he’d never meet another woman fit to match her. She was truly a great artist, although it was hard to imagine a worse ruler. Every issue would center on her own divinity. Every day of her reign would pack more drama than the last.
“Pancho, is there any good side in this fight?”
“You’re young. You don’t know that, in these struggles, the wife always wins. Also, they’re both French. That actress serpent. And that duchess harpy.”
“I must save my Nicchia. She’s such a precious cultural artifact.”
“Don’t die trying. The good die young.”
“I can die with bravery, my family never raised a coward … I always knew that politics is risky … but Pancho—what about Mallorca? Mallorca, that’s what burns my soul now. Am I to intrigue, fight, and die in some foreign land, and never see my own homeland again?”
“What a pity!” Pancho wiped at his eyes.
“Can’t we load just one boat and take farewell gifts to the folks back home? Once I die in France, what will I say to my father, up in heaven? I can die like a man, but never in dishonor.”
Baltasar and his servant fled back to their old island. Nothing much had changed in Mallorca. The people seemed a little older, a little fewer. Nothing ever improved there. There were storms and pirate raids to make things worse.
He was contemplating the salt flats when Pancho came on an island pony to tell him that Nicchia was dead.
“Well, that’s just a mere rumor,” Baltasar said. “It’s gossip that you heard on the wharf from Genoese sailors. No one understands their dialect. Also, since they’re Genoese, anyone can pay them to say false news about anything. I can’t believe those kinds of people.”
He went to the shabby Oracle in the island’s run-down capital, and asked if Nicchia could speak to him from the afterlife. No reply. Because he was at the Oracle, he quietly considered killing himself. Just asking to be rendered, and sent up to heaven. Often people asked that. Rarely were they refused.
Eight days passed. A letter arrived from the Duchess of Barcelona. It was sealed in official wax, certified.
The lady informed Baltasar—in her confidential secretary’s fine handwriting—that the Countess Nicchia had died in her sleep. Her broken heart over her late Duke had claimed her life. It was a shame to lose such a fine artist, but it was also a shame that Marie, the Duchess of Lyon, had lost her husband. In these sad times of tragedy and turmoil in Lyon, Duke Carlos would offer his kind help to stabilize the crisis.
In the meantime, he, Baltasar of Mallorca, was to remain in Mallorca. His services were not required in Barcelona; any adventure to Lyon would be actively dangerous for him. As a loyal subject, he was to dwell in Mallorca until he was summoned again. With all due sympathy, and gratitude for past loyal services, et cetera, time, place, SIGNATURE.
Pancho listened to Baltasar reciting this letter aloud. “You have to live in internal exile. They socked your great artist in the back of the head with a bag of sand. They smothered her with a pillow.”
“They killed her as a favor to the widow. Now she’s so deeply in debt to the Court of Barcelona that she’ll have to be forever grateful. Barcelona has won, Lyon is in eclipse now. And also …” Baltasar shook the translucent parchment with a trembling hand. “This is such a ladylike letter. That stately Duchess didn’t even threaten me. You and I understand everything, but she didn’t admit even one single crime.”
“There will be peace and quiet now,” said Pancho. “Politics is a great art.”
Baltasar was stoic, like his father. In the days of his exile, he rode about his home island on horseback. With Nicchia dead, it was like he’d never seen his homeland before. The island had beauty, but so much poverty. Lacking wider vistas, they didn’t know they were poor. They barely scraped by. They scraped salt from the sea.
He went to confession again; he told all. That was how he knew that he’d lost everything. He spoke to the ghost of his father. “I was warned never to set a hand on a loose woman, and I never did. But now I know that it’s never enough to obey the letter of the law. The messages of Oracles are vast in space and time, beyond human ken.”
“Your unworthy woman has died outside the Church. She has been lost forever,” said Baltasar’s father. “As long as you live on the Earth, you must suffer that grief in silence—like I did, with my own lost woman.”
Burdened with this ghostly confidence, Baltasar sank into black depression.
Finally, Pancho took him to a hidden cove in the shoreline; he said there was a boat, full of cargo.
Hundreds of beautiful coins. Coins stamped from the purest gold, the stately profile of a beautiful woman. Pretty medallions. Gold wasn’t worth much, but one wanted to die for those splendid mementos.
“Now I see the fatal end of my adventure, Pancho. All that useless gold from heaven, turned into glorious, immortal tokens of the most beautiful woman I ever saw, or knew … and she’s dead. How on earth did these coins get here to Mallorca? What are we supposed to do with stupid, heavenly gold?”
Then Pancho, who had been rooting about in the wet beach sand, socked him in the head with a bag. When Baltasar came to human consciousness, he was a captive on a corsair pirate craft, bound for the court of Tunis.