Robert Silverberg: Getting to Know the Dragon

I smiled. “Of course I know how ridiculous the whole thing is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to give it a try.”

“Ah,” Spiculo said, getting it at last. “Ah! So that’s it! The temptation of the unthinkable! The engineer in you wants to pile Pelion on Ossa just to find out whether he can manage the trick! Oh, Draco, Demetrius isn’t as crazy as he seems, is he? He sized you up just perfectly. There’s only one man in the world who’s got the hybris to take on this idiotic job, and he’s right here in Tauromenium.”

“It’s piling Ossa on Pelion, not the other way around,” I said. “But yes. Yes, Spiculo! Of course I’m tempted. So what if it’s all craziness? And if nothing ever gets finished, what of it? At least things will be started. Plans will be drawn; foundations will be dug. Don’t you think I want to see how an Aegyptian pyramid can be built? Or how to cantilever a palace thousands of feet down the side of this cliff here? It’s the chance of a lifetime for me.”

“And your account of the life of Trajan VII? Only the day before yesterday you couldn’t stop talking about the documents that are on their way to you from the archive in Sevilla. Speculating half the night about the wonderful new revelations you were going to find in them, you were. Are you going to abandon the whole thing just like that?”

“Of course not. Why should one project interfere with another? I’m quite capable of working on a book in the evening while designing palaces during the day. I expect to continue with my painting and my poetry and my music too.—I think you underestimate me, old friend.”

“Well, let it not be said that you’ve ever been guilty of doing the same.”

I let the point pass. “I offer you one additional consideration, and then let’s put this away, shall we? Lodovicus is past sixty and not in wonderful health. When he dies, Demetrius is going to be Emperor, whether anybody likes that idea or not, and you and I will return to Roma, where I will be a key figure in his administration and all the scholarly and scientific resources of the capital will be at my disposal.—Unless, of course, I irrevocably estrange myself from him while he’s still only heir apparent by throwing this project of his back in his face, as you seem to want me to do. So I will take the job. As an investment leading to the hope of future gain, so to speak.”

“Very nicely reasoned, Draco.”

“Thank you.”

“And suppose, when Demetrius becomes Emperor, which through some black irony of the gods he probably will before too long, he decides he’d rather keep you down here in Sicilia finishing the great work of filling this island with second-hand architectural splendors instead of transferring you to the court in Roma, and here you’ll stay for the rest of your life, plodding around this backwater of a place supervising the completely useless and unnecessary construction of—”

I had had about enough. “Look, Spiculo, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. He’s already told me in just that many words that when he’s Emperor he plans to make fuller use of my skills than his father ever chose to do.”

“And you believe him?”

“He sounded quite sincere.”

“Oh, Draco, Draco! I’m beginning to think you’re even crazier than he is!”

It was a gamble, of course. I knew that.

And Spiculo might well have been speaking the truth when he said that I was crazier than poor Demetrius. The Caesar, after all, can’t help being the way he is. There has been madness, real madness, in his family for a hundred years or more, serious mental instability, some defect of the mind leading to unpredictable outbreaks of flightiness and caprice. I, on the other hand, face each day with clear perceptions. I am hardworking and reliable, and I have a finely tuned intelligence capable of succeeding at anything I turn it to. This is not boasting. The solidity of my achievements is a fact not open to question. I have built temples and palaces, I have painted great paintings and fashioned splendid statues, I have written epic poems and books of history, I have even designed a flying machine that I will some day build and test successfully. And there is much more besides that I have in mind to achieve, the secrets that I write in cipher in my notebooks in a crabbed left-handed script, things that would transform the world. Some day I will bring them all to perfection. But at present I am not ready to do so much as hint at them to anyone, and so I use the cipher. (As though anyone would be able to comprehend these ideas of mine even if they could read what is written in those notebooks!)

One might say that I owe all this mental agility to the special kindness of the gods, and I am unwilling to contradict that pious thought; but heredity has something to do with it, too. My superior capacities are the gift of my ancestors just as the flaws of Demetrius Caesar’s mind are of his. In my veins courses the blood of one of the greatest of our Emperors, the visionary Trajan VII, who would have been well fit to wear the title that was bestowed sixteen centuries ago on the first Emperor of that name: Optimus Princeps, “best of princes.” Who, though, are the forefathers of Demetrius Caesar? Lodovicus! Marius Antoninus! Valens Aquila! Why, are these not some of the feeblest men ever to have held the throne, and have they not led the Empire down the path of decadence and decline?

Of course it is the fate of the Empire to enter into periods of decadence now and then, just as it is its supreme good fortune to find, ever and always, a fresh source of rebirth and renewal when one is needed. That is why our Roma has been the preeminent power in the world for more than two thousand years and why it will go on and on to the end of time, world without end, eternally rebounding to new vigor.

Consider. There was a troubled and chaotic time about eighteen hundred years ago, and out of it Augustus Caesar gave us the Imperial government, which has served us in good stead ever since. When the blood of the early Caesars ran thin and such men as Caligula and Nero came disastrously to power, redemption was shortly at hand in the form of the first Trajan, and after him Hadrianus, succeeded by the equally capable Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.

A later period of troubles was put to right by Diocletianus, whose work was completed by the great Constantinus; and when, inevitably, we declined yet again, seven hundred years later, falling into what modern historians call the Great Decadence, and were so easily and shamefully conquered by our Greek-speaking brothers of the East, eventually Flavius Romulus arose among us to give us our freedom once more. And not long after him came Trajan VII to carry our explorers clear around the globe, bringing back incalculable wealth and setting in motion the exciting period of expansion that we know as the Renaissance. Now, alas, we are decadent again, living through what I suppose will some day be termed the Second Great Decadence. The cycle seems inescapable.

I like to think of myself as a man of the Renaissance, the last of my kind, born by some sad and unjust accident of fate two centuries out of his proper time and forced to live in this imbecilic decadent age. It’s a pleasant fantasy and there’s much evidence, to my way of thinking, that it’s true.

That this is a decadent age there can be no doubt. One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance, and what better example of that could be provided than the Caesar’s witless and imprudent scheme for reshaping Sicilia as a monument to his own grandeur? The fact that the structures he would have me construct for him are, almost without exception, imitations of buildings of earlier and less fatuous eras only reinforces the point.