The Prehistory of Klepsis

“History is the peopled worlds. History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.”

Today I want to sort out the events preceding Long John Tong Tyrone's planetfall in Annals of Klepsis. Readers will know that part of the game is making sense of the novel's onslaught of events and prehistory. As one reads, that history begins to fall into place, and Klepsis's generations come into view. To clarify all this for myself, I have divided the post into two parts: the first sets out the periods of Klepsis's prehistory; the second reconstructs its generations.

Before Brannagan's arrival, Klepsis is a black box. We learn from the O'Grogan ghost, who calls himself a liar pure and simple, that the dragons Draco Rufus mined and minted cavern gold for thousands of years. Of a hundred cavern coins that Fairbridge Exendine examines, fifty-six bear the impression of royal dragons.

The Tarshish storyteller takes us back to the beginnings of travel between worlds. First came tumbleweed thistles, then fish, though not whales. Remember that Brannagan has to import whales into the freshwater oceans aboard his Folly Ships. The larger prey birds followed, then coneys, chipmunks, beavers, bears, and monkeys. At last came the short-tailed humans of Tarshish, whom God mistook for monkeys. They learned to jump whole ships between worlds until God forbade it. Now only the pirate ships jump, each with a gifted short-tail aboard. Fairbridge Exendine, who exists in a parallel form in "World Abounding," adds a later astronomy of his own: plants and animals reach new worlds about a thousand years before humans, and some old elephants and mules on Klepsis were born on other worlds and migrated without human aid.

Christopher Begorra Brannagan is fifty when he first brings life, his own, to Klepsis, after years on Gaea-Earth and the other worlds. He is the son of Dame Delfina and Barlow Brannagan. His birth certificate records a single birth, but it is probably wrong. His twin is central to the novel's doubling, which also appears in Franco and Henry and in the many twin births on Klepsis.

An apprentice doctor notices the second birth. The twin is vague from the first. Dame Delfina names the what-is-it Chrysanthus Bygosh Brannagan. At three weeks, he climbs to a third-story window; at four months, he reads his father's engineering books.

As a young man, Christopher works in smelting and designs smelters. On his first trip to Astrobe, he performs as a stage magician. He loses his left leg and explores the Trader Planets, where he suffers discrimination for his wooden leg and for being Irish. From this comes the oath of the billion thalers and the promise of free passage for one-legged Irishmen that we encounter at the beginning of the novel. The Septuagint Bible at Castle Brannagan and the great En-Arche bell are fruits of his early piracy.

Brannagan arrives and founds Klepsis about two hundred years before the novel opens. John Summers belongs to the landing party. The planet has borne other names: Crazy Deer, Drunken Bird, and Dancing Fish Planet. The first settlers are the dregs of space, and the government is a Covenanted Piracy from the start.

Brannagan buys Quasimodo at a slave market and makes him the nearest thing to an executive he ever has. He calls in phantoms to people Klepsis. Later, he tries to remove them, but ghosts are hard to get rid of, as any Lafferty reader knows. A third of Klepsis remains phantom.

During this period, Brannagan builds the Smelters of Klepsis and his earliest ship on Klepsis, the Beloved Harpy, later renamed the Dina O'Grogan. He builds the seven Folly Ships to bring the right whales to Klepsis. Construction begins on the Castle, with its wired strong room, and on the En-Arche tower, with its unrung bell. Later generations will add to the Castle.

Brannagan also begins the Tarshish deception. Shortly after becoming Autocrat, he counts the world in his head for the Planetary Board and arrives at 3,005,928. Klepsis has no law, and Brannagan preaches the joys of illiteracy. He marries Margaret Summertime, the widow of Summers, who gives her name to the notorious grapes of Klepsis. Their daughter, whom others call Summers's, marries Januarius O'Grogan of Tarshish. With this marriage, the second generation is established.

We are now less than two hundred years before Long John Tong Tyrone's arrival. Januarius O'Grogan is about thirty. Brannagan loves him more than anyone except his wife, but O'Grogan betrays his father-in-law by convening the Commission in Lunacy. It convenes in the cult cave under the Sign of the Kangaroo. Brannagan refuses to let them tape the hearing.

A space verifax arrives from Dame Delfina, now ninety-eight. Only its front is read. The reverse, which would explain the history of Brannagan's twin, goes unread, and further sheets are never transmitted. Joshua Thorn indicts Brannagan with a flaming bill of particulars, calling him a man of rabid insanity with a haunt attached. Thorn urges that Brannagan be killed that day. Instead, Brannagan kills Thorn with one blow of his hand in the courtroom.

The Commission judges Brannagan a lunatic and a forgotten twin. He rejects its judgment. The twelve good men then garrote him by stages. Six are never heard from again. O'Grogan saves Brannagan from execution and has him marooned instead. O'Grogan takes power as Director of the World Named Klepsis.

This is the Robinson Crusoe period, with Brannagan as Crusoe and Quasimodo as Friday. Brannagan is left to die on the most desolate island of the most desolate asteroid in the universe, a place so obscure that God does not have it listed. His keepers again underestimate him. They expect him to survive no more than a day or two. He lives there for seven years and, by his own account, stays sane.

Thorn's report says Quasimodo spends part of this time with him, and the replay of the marooning shows the dwarf there too, unseen by the kangaroo court. Something happens between them. My theory is that Quasimodo becomes what the Doomsday people will later code-name the Horseshoe Nail during this period, since we are told that occult power passes between him and Brannagan.

Brannagan returns to Klepsis apparently unchanged, except that his peg leg is now made of ivory horn. How has he escaped? O'Grogan thinks the lost twin rescued him. Brannagan tells O'Grogan that he has shed the holding of all persons onto another. The metaphysical rules of Klepsis have changed. Brannagan prefers the new arrangement, with Quasimodo taking so much work off his hands. Quasimodo goes on a special mission and becomes the Sleeper in the Castle, blinded and forbidden by law to wake.

We do not know when Brannagan dies; the text gives no date. The stairs come down from his watchtower, and his body lies in a coffin blown as a single glass bubble. His ghost retains one monocle; the other, he says, was lost somewhere along the way.

Directorship of O'Grogan and Great Age of Piracy. Januarius O'Grogan rules as Director and gives his name to the mountain. Through him, black hair and olive skin enter the Brannagan family. The third generation consists of thirteen children in House Brannagan. Twelve are Margaret's by birth; Joseph is hers by adoption.

All the sons except Juda and Joseph become pirates, as does their sister Dina O'Grogan. The eleven form the Eleven High Covenanted O'Grogan Pirates of Klepsis. They meet at long intervals in a room where Dina has set traps for anyone spying through the eyes of the idol masks. This generation commands the eleven tall ships of Klepsis, which jump between worlds with a gifted short-tail aboard each.

The third generation becomes the terror of Klepsis's oceans and continents, ravaging the seas of almost every other planet. Yet Januarius says that the treasure they bring home adds no more than five percent to the primordial gold.

Dina stands out even among these pirates. Her crews are the most savage, and she is the most fearless captain. Ruben ravages World Abounding nine times. Levi keeps thirteen wives. Nefthal puts ten thousand to the sword. Simeon buries ten thousand chests, and the Gold of Gad becomes proverbial on Klepsis. Issachar and Zabulon die young; Aser gives up piracy. The Tarshish deception continues. Januarius dies about one hundred fifty years before Long John Tong Tyrone's arrival.

Juda O'Grogan-Brannagan, the only gentleman in the family, marries Rose Lunaria and rules Klepsis in name. The eleven pirates, his brothers and sister, bully him but agree to cache their treasure with him for a tithe. Rose appoints the tax collector who sleeps at his station for more than a hundred years and orders more nard every nine. Juda and Rose have a son, John Hethite, who marries Sheba McSherry.

The third generation begins to die off. Seven lie in guarded side passages of the caverns. Levi, Bluebeard the Pirate, becomes a leper in his last decade and rots under the nard. The storyteller's tale attaches a bride and a rotting little boy to him. During this period, Prester John makes the Deviced Dogs. Eleven guard the passages. Adventurers discover the Brannagan caverns, mark their way with coins, and die there. We are told that Juda's death is irregular and comes betimes, just over a hundred years before Tyrone's arrival.

This is David Ravel's period. In a retelling of the story of David, Uriah, and Bathsheba, he murders John Hethite Brannagan and takes his wife, Sheba McSherry. He calls himself the Elegant Interloper. If you are keeping count, there are now two interlopers in the line: John Summers in the first generation and David Ravel in the fourth.

David builds the Castle's three north wings and adds a hundred cupolas. He also adds his name to what should be Brannagan Castle alone. He has the telescopes of the David Tower made in Germany, the finest in the Castle. He and Sheba have a son, the fifth generation.

Sheba arrives at a banquet in the great hall mounted on a hippopotamus. When it disgraces itself, she orders it served as hokey for the final course, with two score headsmen standing by. The David Tower burns for the first time, and David dies in the fire. As happens on Klepsis, the stairs come down. Construction of the Cloud Watchtower begins.

Cloud Ravel-Brannagan. Cloud is the loser of the Brannagan line, a do-nothing ruler. With Brigid Hearn, however, he has three children central to the novel's action: Placidia, the mother of Tharrala Thorn, and the twins Henry and Franco. They are the sixth generation.

Seneschal Fidelis, Brannagan's confidant, is whipped and stabbed, perhaps to death, by Cloud's servants. He is thrown into a vat of healing wine to heal himself if he can. Five other bodies float below him, each with its own story. In Thorn's account, Cloud throws Fidelis in himself. The Seneschal says that his healing takes fifty years; the event is also placed forty-nine years and an uncertain number of months before Tyrone's arrival.

About fifty years before the arrival, Brannagan's ghost replays the Commission for the last time. At five, at a time the book does not give, Prince Franco takes the cavern treasure. Cloud dies at some point. The stairs of his tower come down, and construction begins on the Henry Watchtower.

Prince Henry Ravel-Brannagan takes power. His reign is a sorry one. He places every prince on Klepsis except himself under sentence of death and casts out his twin, Franco. Franco is a college boy who studies at Georgetown and the Collegium Omnium. He sits with the ghost in the tomb.

Placidia marries the adventurer Tarquin Thorn, who is later murdered by one of her brothers. Tharrala Thorn is born in the Castle about seventeen Klepsis years before Tyrone's arrival. Franco is her godfather. She grows up with a Deviced Dog and the cranky old ghost. Henry marries Angela Gilmartin. Thorn commits the unspeakable sin; her uncle repudiates her, and she is driven into the wilderness. There, three years before Tyrone's arrival, she hears the Tarshish storyteller.

Twenty years before the arrival, the Doomsday Equation of the Asteroid Pythagoras has identified Quasimodo as the tertiary focus of the Particular Universe. Monitors watch him from then on, and analysts on Astrobe name the day of his death.

Henry's rule is bloody. It runs on executions, slave traffic, and commissioned piracies, even with the no-slavery agreement signed. An actor's double is kept for the Ambassador, and every prisoner's word is recorded in the Whispering Room. Ship-jumping on Klepsis ceases for many years.

In the months before Tyrone's arrival, several things happen: the previous slave auction takes place, Klepsis Clubs are the in thing on Camiroi, and the Five Royal Intelligent Bears jump. Two days before the novel begins, history is summoned to Klepsis, though the man summoned is the historian Titus Livius Morrison-Bryce; nobody summons Long John Tong Tyrone, whatever the ghost later claims. Thorn goes to Castle Ravel-Brannagan as a slave to find the historian, and gets her historians mixed up.

Long John Tyrone and the Flight from Apateon. Long John Tong Tyrone, our hero, approaches Klepsis. He is a probably Eurasian peg-leg who spends part of his boyhood on the Baltic coast, majors in historiology, and teaches as a substitute for a year. At some point, he hears of a planet without a history and decides to write one. He comes as one of the Peg-Legged Irishmen, taking advantage of Brannagan's old policy. With a small company, he lands at Klepsis Third Port on the twenty-eighth of Arpad, approximately two hundred years after the founding of Klepsis.

The family tree: