Envoy Extraordinary

"Are you too young, I wonder? Or do you find as I do, that when you read a book you once liked, half the pleasure is evocation of the time when you first read it? You see how selfish I am, Phanocles! If I were to read the eclogues I should not be transported to a Roman Arcady. I should be a boy again, preparing the next day's passage for my tutor."

Phanocles was recovering.

"A poor return for reading, Caesar."

"Do you think so? Surely we selfish men comprise all history in our own lives! Each of us discovers the pyramids. Space, time, life-what I might call the four-dimensional continuum-but you see how illadapted Latin is to philosophy! Life is a personal matter with a single fixed point of reference. Alexander did not fight his wars until I discovered him at the age of seven. When I was a baby, time was an instant; but I pushed, smelled, tasted, saw, heard, bawled that one suffocating point into whole palaces of history and vast fields of space."

"Again I do not understand you, Caesar."

"You should, for I report on an experience common to us both. But you lack my introversionor shall I say selfishness? -see how prone an uninterrupted Emperor is to parenthesis! -and therefore you cannot distinguish it. Think, Phanocles! If you can restore to me not the gratification of an appetite, but a single precious memory! How else but by the enlargements of anticipation and memory does our human instant differ from the mindless movement of nature's clock?"

Phanocles glanced up at the constellation that hung so near and bright that they might have thought it deepened by a third dimension; but before he could think of anything to say the dishes were in place. The covers were lifted, and the sweet steam came with them. The Emperor closed his eyes, held his head forward and breathed in.

"Yes--?"

Then is accents of profound emotion:

"Yes!"

Phanocles ate his trout quickly, for he was hungry, and wished that the Emperor would give him a chance to drink too. But the Emperor was in a trance. His lips were moving and the colour came and went in his face.

"Freshness Levels of shining water and shadows and cataracts from the dark rock on high.

"It comes back to me. I am lying on a rock that is only just as big as my body. The cliffs rise about me, the river runs by me and the water is dark for all the sun. Two pigeons discourse musically and monotonously. There is pain in my right side, for the edge of the rock cuts me: but I lie facedownward, my right arm moving slowly as a water-snail on a lump of stone. I touch a miracle of present actuality, I stroke-I am fiercely, passionately alive-a moment more and the exultation of my heart will burst in a fury of movement. But I still my ambition, my desire, my lust-I balance passion with will. I stroke slowly as a drifting weed. She lies there in the darkness, undulating, stemming the flow of water. Now-! A convulsion of two bodies, sense of terror, of rape-she flies in the air and I grab with lion's claws. She is out, she is mine--"

The Emperor opened his eyes and looked across at Phanocles. A tear trickled on his cheek exactly above the untasted fish.

"-my first trout."

He seized a cup, spilt a drop or two on the floor then held the cup up towards Phanocles.

"To the pressure cooker. The most Promethean discovery of them all."

After a while he mastered his emotion and laughed a little.

"I wonder how I am to reward you?"

"Caesar!"

Phanocles gulped and spluttered.

"My explosive--"

"I take no account. of the steamship. She is amusing but expensive. I must admit that the experimentalist in me was interested in her atrocious activities, but once is enough. You must make no more steamships."

"But Caesar!"

"Besides, how can you find your way without a wind?"

"I might invent a mechanism which pointed constantly in one direction."

"By all means invent it. Perhaps you could invent a movable arrow that pointed constantly to Rome."

"Something that would point to the North."

"But no more steamships."

"I--"

The Emperor waved his hand.

"It is our Imperial will, Phanocles."

"I bow. "

"She was dangerous."

"Perhaps one day, Caesar, when men are free because they no longer believe themselves to be slaves--"

The Emperor shook his head..

"You work among perfect elements and therefore politically you are an idealist. There will always be slaves though the name may change. What is slavery but the domination of the weak by the strong? How can you make them equal? Or are you fool enough to think that men are born equal?"

He was suddenly grave.

"As for your explosive-it has preserved me this day and therefore the peace of the Empire. But it has cost the Empire a merciless ruler who would have murdered half a dozen people and given justice to a hundred million. The world has lost a bargain. No, Phanocles. We will restore Jove's own bolt to his random and ineluctable hand."

"But they were my greatest inventions!"

The first trout had disappeared, cold from the Emperor's plate. Another had descended and again he immersed his face in its fragrance.