“How many rebels, or criminals, are now present in the population compared to the number a thousand years ago?” Simon said. “On a per capita basis?”
“The same,” the colonel said.
“And how do you explain that after all the selective straining out?”
“Human beings are contrary creatures. But give us another thousand years, and we’ll have a criminal-free society.”
Simon said nothing more about this. He did ask why the Dokalian society was so advanced technologically in many respects yet still used bows and arrows. Why hadn’t gunpowder been invented?
“Oh, guns were invented five hundred years ago,” the colonel said. “But we’re a very conservative people, as you may have noticed. It was thought that guns would introduce all sorts of disturbing innovations in society. Besides, they’d be too dangerous in the hands of the rabble. It doesn’t take much training to use a gun. But skill with the sword and bow takes many years of training. So guns were outlawed, and only the elite and the most stable of the lower classes are educated in the use of swords and bows.”
Despite this resistance to innovations, the steam engine had been accepted. This had resulted in a general disuse of the horse. Horseflies and the diseases they carried had almost been eliminated, and the streets were no longer full of horseshit. But the invention of the internal combustion engine had been suppressed, and there was no gas and noise pollution from automobiles and trucks.
On the other hand, the drop in casualties from horsefly-borne sicknesses was more than made up by traffic accidents.
Simon pointed this out.
“Progress, like religion, must have its martyrs,” the colonel had said.
“One could say the same about regress,” Simon said. “What do you do with your traffic criminals? I’d think that you’d send so many of them here that there wouldn’t be room, even in that vast forest.”
“Oh, those responsible for traffic casualties aren’t felons,” the colonel had said. “They’re fined, and some are jailed, if they don’t happen to be rich.”
“Well,” Simon said. “Couldn’t you greatly reduce the murders and the maimings on the highway if you instituted a rigorous examination, physical and psychological, of drivers?”
“Are you kidding?” the colonel said. “No, you aren’t. Less than one-tenth of the people would be permitted to drive. Good God, man, the whole economy would crumble if we did that. How did your politicians ever get your people to agree to such drastic measures?”
Simon had to admit that they hadn’t passed any such laws until after cars were no longer much used.
“And by then, nobody cared, right?” the colonel said.
“Right,” Simon had said, and he had wished that the colonel would quit laughing.
It was with such thoughts, humiliating though they were, that Simon kept up his courage. The Yetgul Forest was getting thicker and gloomier with every mile, and the path was so narrow that bushes and branches tore at his clothes with every step. Even the birds seemed to have found this area undesirable. Whereas before he had been cheered by many dozens of differing calls, whistles, cheeps, and songs, continuing through the day and half the night, he was now surrounded by a silence. Only occasionally was this broken, and when it was, the cry of a bird startled him. There seemed to be only one type, a sudden screech that sounded to him like a death cry. Once, he glimpsed the bird that was responsible, a large dusty black bird that looked like a raven with a rooster’s comb.
What especially depressed him were the bones. From the beginning he had seen scattered skeletons and skulls of men and women. Sometimes, they were spread out on the trail; sometimes, their gray or white bones peeped out from under bushes or leaves. Simon had counted a thousand skeletons, and there must be three times as many whose bones were hidden in the brush off the trail.
Simon tried to cheer himself with the thought that anybody who could inspire so many to defy death just to talk to him must be worth talking to.
But why would the sage have isolated himself so thoroughly?
That wasn’t difficult to figure out. A sage needs much more time in which to meditate and contemplate. If he or she has visitors beating at the door, clamoring day and night, the sage has no time to think. So Mofeislop had built his house in the most difficult-to-reach place on the planet. This assured him solitude. It also assured that whoever did get to him would not be bringing trivial questions.
At the end of the third week, Simon came out of the dark woods. Before and above him were steep and warty slopes with patches of grass and clumps of pines here and there. Above these circled hawks and vultures. Simon hoped these were not hanging around because the pickings were so easy.
The third peak beyond, by far the tallest and the most jagged, was the end of his journey. Simon, thinking of all the climbing he had to do, felt discouraged. Then out of the clouds, which had been thick, dark gray, and as joyless as an eviction notice, the sun emerged. Simon felt better. Something on the tip of the third peak had batted the sun’s rays in a line drive straight into his eyes. This, he was sure, was a window in the house of Mofeislop. It was as if the sage himself was heliographing him to come on ahead.
A week later, Simon and Anubis crawled up the final slope. Lack of food and oxygen was making his heart thump like a belt buckle in an automatic drier, and he was breathing like an old man with a teenager bride. Athena, too tired to fly, was riding on his back, her talons dug in with a grip as painful and unrelenting as a loan shark’s. He could not spare the energy to drive her off him. Besides, the talons had a value. They were reminding him that he was still alive, and that he would feel so good when the pain was gone.
Above him, occupying half of the two-acre plateau on top of the peak, was the house of the sage. Three stories high, thirteen-sided, many-balconied, many-cupolaed, it was built of black granite. The only windows were on the top floor, but there were many of these, small, large, square, octagonal, or round. From the center of the flat roof a tall thick black chimney rose, black smoke pouring from it. Simon envisioned a big fireplace at its base with a pig turning slowly on a spit and a kettle boiling with a thick savory soup. By it the sage waited, to feed him food first and then the answers to his questions.
To tell the truth, Simon at that moment did not give a damn about the answers. He felt that if he could fill his belly, he would be content throughout all eternity. The rest of his life, anyway.
Simon pulled himself over onto the lip of the plateau, crawled to the huge door, oak and crossed with thick ironwork, heaved himself up slowly—the owl fell off him—and pulled the bell cord. Somewhere inside a cavernous room, a big bell tolled.
“I hope he’s not gone,” Simon said to himself, and he giggled. Starvation and the thin air were making him silly. Just where did he think the sage would be? Stepped out to pick up cigarettes at the corner drugstore? Gone to the movies? Attending the local Rotary Club luncheon?
His long wait at the door did give him time to wonder how the sage had managed to get this house built. Who had hauled the heavy stones up the mountain? Where did Mofeislop get his food?
Simon pulled the cord again, and the bell boomed again. After a few minutes, a key turned in the monstrously large and rusty lock, and a giant bar thudded. The door swung out slowly, creaking as if Dracula’s butler was on the other side. Simon felt apprehensive, then reassured himself that he had been conditioned by watching too many old horror movies. The heavy door bumped against the stone wall, and a man shambled out. He did not look at all like the Count’s servant, but it was no relief to see him. He resembled Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant or perhaps Lon Chaney Senior in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His spine curved like a freeway on-ramp; he was bent over as if he had just been kicked in the stomach; his hair foamed like a glass of beer; his forehead slanted back like the Tower of Pisa; his supraorbital ridges bulged as if they were full of gas; one eye was lower than the other and milky with a cataract; his nose was red and crumpled, like a dead rose; his lips were as thin as a dog’s; his teeth were those of a moose that has chewed tobacco all his life; his chin had decided in the womb to give up the ghost. And he wheezed like an emphysematic at a political convention.