This
story, translated into English by Mary Copple-Tosic, with an additional bit of
copy editing by my friend and colleague Chris Gilmore, was published in Interzone Issue 144 June
1999. It's the story of a Royal Astronomer who's offended the Church by
making a pronouncement that conflicts with their beliefs. Unfortunately,
he's living at the time of the Inquisition, and knows only too well what
happens to heretics. Not that he has been tortured or anything - he has
only too freely admitted his guilt. However, he will be burnt at the
stake if he does not renounce his belief and findings. On his last night
in gaol, he finds that he has been joined by a mysterious visitor in the dark,
who appears to be of high church rank - or is he the Tempter?
This story opens dramatically enough with a dream - the narrator finds himself
in the role of a young monk trying to flee his buggering brothers, only to fall
in the midden pit upon his escape. If that was not bad enough, he has to
dive further into the pit to escape the attentions of a demon with piercing
eyes -
"He
tried to withdraw before them, boring even deeper into the womb, to the very
cervix, but his persecutor was relentless. The thin membrane surrounding
his refuge burst the moment when, having no further refuge, he braced his back
against it. He fell out - into reality"
-
while this womblike imagery is fascinating, this escape would appear only to
serve as a more dramatic opening to the story. This section is redolent of The
Name of the Rose: "every day the cooks threw the unusable entrails of
slaughtered animals through a small trapdoor of planks prematurely rotted by
contact with foul waste." Although this opening seems redundant
compared with the rest of the story, the Astronomer does recall to mind his
dream when the Tempter asks "Yet what harm has she [the Church] ever
done to you?" The suggestion would appear to be that the Astronomer
was the young monk in a previous life. Yet the monk instinctively
shrank from the demon. Could it be that what the Tempter naturally leaves
out of his persuasion is that if the Astronomer decides to renounce his
findings to avoid the flames of the stake, surely that means that he will be
condemned to eternal flames in hell? However, given a church as
cruel and unjust as this one, the Tempter does not really need to persuade too
hard. Indeed, when the Astronomer's name is revealed to be 'Lazar'
at the end, one is immediately reminded of the more famous Lazarus who Christ
raised from the dead. I believe that the Astronomer will certainly
renounce his heresy, since the Tempter is so much nicer, for one thing.
The Tempter's ultimate tool is to send the Astronomer to the future, to prove to
him that one day the monastery will become an astronomical observatory.
These speeded up days and nights seem to be nicked from The Time Machine,
although there is no mannequin present. The device of seeing how the
future or the past will look like, is something that has also been used
quite effectively by Dickens in The Christmas Carol, and in Capra's It's a
Wonderful Life. The 'future' is evidently the 1990's onwards - yet the
Tempter says that this future is "almost three hundred years from
now". I thought that the Inquisition had very much ran out of steam
by the 1690's, if not before then, so Zoran Zivkovic looks to have made an
error here. Although this story is very enjoyable, Zoran Zivkovic has
evidently used some archetypal devices here, and this story is not particularly
innovative.
Authortrek Rating:
8/10
Kevin
Patrick Mahoney
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