The Pardoner’s Tale

The Pardoner’s Tale

By Robert Silverberg

The wall that encircles L.A. is 100, 150 feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin, from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least 60 feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it – muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did 5000 years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build us, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall 60 feet high and 150 feet thick. Houston doesn’t Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A, is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles Wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

Pardoner's Tale. Photo by Elena

The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it, too. They just want to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied, as usual, with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a 15-foot high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m, in no hurry to have it happen again.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)