While all this was going on, my wife the Grand Dame had been whispering with Scheherazade in a very suspicious manner. And now, while Scheherazade waited for Mamun to state his further needs, I heard Scheherazade whisper in a sort of aside to my wife:
“I'm sure you can find just about what you want at a hundred different places on Cork and Bottle Street just around the corner from here. In Baghdad, almost every street you can think of is just around the corner.” Then my wife the Grand Dame went out of the palace, possibly to Cork and Bottle Street. But whatever was she looking for?
“Horseback riding,” Mamun the Great said to Scheherazade. “I must gallop a royal Arabian horse an hour every day.”
“You are high on Arabian horses only because you have never seen a newer day nag. No, only four days a week may you enjoy yourself on a royal Arabian horse. And three days a week you may ride a newer day nag of North Chicago Stock at the North Barrington Naggery and Riding Academy. I'm anxious for you to improve yourself and upgrade your tastes. I'll put down an hour a day for your riding anyhow. What else, my corked-and-bottled lover?”
My wife the Grand Dame returned to the Mamun-Bash in the palace; and she set a sort of uncorked flask against and outer wall of the plush palace room where we were reveling. Why did this inconsequential doing of hers seem somehow reminiscent and portentous?
“I'll have to carouse with my old friends the horse-and-camel soldiers who were such staunch supporters of mine in the frontier battles,” Mamun the Great told Scheherazade. “It's for old fellowship and all that, you know. Man stuff and all that. We eat and drink and have medium-bloody fights, and become friends again. We tell high lies and show off our knife and axe throwing and collect new scars. I use the word carouse in the loosest possible sense, and it'll take about six hours a day of untrammeled freedom to get all that carousing in.”
“Yes, all right, dear,” Scheherazade said. “I grant you the free time gladly. Six hours a day. And what other free time do you require?”
“One hour a day out for wrestling,” Mamun said. “I believe I am the best wrestler for my weight in any time or place. One hour a day for playing chess, one hour a day for playing backgammon with the champions, one hour a day for an outrageous-glutton meal, one hour a day for playing a flute in a flute band, one hour a day for reciting my poetry to whatever crowds may be dragooned into listening to it (but the compulsion must not be too obvious). An hour a day for press conferences and media appearances. Now how many hours does that make out of the twenty-four?”
“That totals up to twenty-seven hours out of twenty-four, dear. That makes you overdrawn by three hours at a bank that does not permit overdrawals. So on the last seven items you will do each of them only once a week instead of once a day. So that will account for twenty-one out of the twenty-four hours. That leaves you only three hours daily as a prisoner in the bottle. And you can easily pass those three hours in sleep or meditation and hardly be bothered by them at all. Do you agree, my love? — as if you had a choice.”
“I do not agree that I should be called a prisoner in the bottle for even three hours a day, though I will spend three hours a day in this straited place. To maintain a fiction that I am not a prisoner, I want the cork fixed so that I can lock it from the inside. Then it will be my unique place of refuge rather than my prison.”
“Agreed, my love, agreed,” Scheherazade said.
Scheherazade and the bottled Caliph Mamun the Great took off for a later time and a more westerly land in one of the Almost-Anything space ships. And the off-world spies took off for their own worlds in similar ships newly fashioned by the artisans. Some of the devils would indeed get to their worlds, and they must combat them there. The Earth had had endemic devils for many millennia and had built up a certain resistance to them. But the devil-invasions would be epidemics as they came to the worlds that did not have the devil experience.
My Good Wife and I would ourselves go in another Almost-Anything ship in just a moment. And then this episode would be finished.
Epilog Of Sea-Weed And Hope
My Wife The Grand Dame of the Musics stood in the circular entrance of the mysterious room and spoke to somebody inside.
“Wait there just a short moment, my darling,” she said. “I'll just go and slip into something skimpier. No, my husband doesn't suspect a thing. I’ve put spells and charms on him so that he can no longer hear very well or see very well or think very well. But they weren't necessary: he was pretty far gone anyhow. It's really an act of charity to dump him. In just a moment, my inexpressible love.”
My wife rushed away from there, apparently in some sort of turmoil. And I rushed through the circular doorway to throttle the false person inside the mysterious room. But there was nobody in the room. I turned, and I faced a cork-stopper that had just been rammed into place. And a sad truth dawned on me. Oh, the sad truth was rammed into my face at the same time the cork of the bottle was! But I collected myself quickly.
“Suppose we take the Scheherazade-Mamun agreement as a model for our own agreement,” I called to my wife who was the one who had rammed the cork into the bottle. “And then we'll see how we can improve the agreement. She was a little bit harsh in her terms, I believe.” I spoke this bravely to my wife who held the bottle in her hand after she had corked it.
“Suppose we don't make any agreement at all, Sindbad Copperbottom,” my wife said in a voice that made my blood run cold. “What does it indicate to you that I am holding a little bottle in the palm of my hand and that you are on the inside of that bottle?”
“I don't know what it indicates exactly,” I said, feeling uncomfortable in my mind.
“It indicates that I’ve outgrown you,” she said. “That happens to people, you know.”
“No, no, no!” I cried out (it is very hard to cry out with effect when one is corked inside a bottle), “we were made for each other. I am the Alpha Male. I am the Great Sindbad than whom none can be greater. And you are my wife the Grand Dame, the so-called ‘Woman without equal’, though that phrase may need some qualification. How and when could things have changed between us?”
“There is no ‘how’ to the way things change between people,” my Grand Dame said in a new and crisp voice that I found a little bit less than pleasing. “And the first ‘when’ was when you were beshorn of your totemic Sea-Weed by a mechanical doll, so you ceased to be both the Alpha Male and the Great Sindbad. And the second ‘when’ was when you just now fell for the old bottle trick immediately after you saw Mamun the Great fall for it. You were thrice feeble-minded to fall for it under such conditions, and it astonished me completely. I set it up only for a pleasant joke and I surely had no idea that you would fall for it. That was the last straw that demoted you to being the back-end of a camel. You’re dead, Sindie, you’re dead now to all practical purposes.”
Oh, was there ever such a ‘Long Loneliness of a Master Mariner’? At home my Wife the Grand Dame loved that sad song and she used to pay it on the harpsichord.
Was there ever such a shipwreck as mine is now!
I am shipwrecked in a bottle no more than six inches long, and I'm not even sure what world I'm on now. I asked my wife, but she said, “To a gooper fish, or to a prisoner in the bottle, it does not matter what world he's on.” This bottle which is now my abode — my wife carries it around with her in her hafiza, and so I am in total darkness most of the time (except for a luminescence of my own). I can often hear my wife exchanging jocularities with her male and female friends (she seems to have very many new male friends now), but there is no way that anyone could hear me though I roar and thunder from the bottom of my brave heart. Sometimes she takes the bottle out and shows me to one of her new gentlemen friends.
“It is a Sindbad toy,” she says. “I obtained it when I was in Baghdad of Earth-World in the time period that is known as the Arabian Middle Ages. It is an animated toy and it is made to simulate the emotions of fury and despair. Sindbad-the-Sailor
in the legend was a do-everything-wrong anti-hero.”
“I'm familiar with the Sindbad Legend,” the gentlemen friend said. “Wouldn't it be a good comic touch if you put an iota of toy Sea-Weed at his bifurcation. One of the attributes of Sindbad was that he had Sea-Weed growing on him.”
“I would rather not go into the totemism of the Sea-Weed,” my wife said. “It has disappointing associations.”
That little conversation of those two cut me to the heart. That I should be mistaken for an animated toy!
I receive three pinches of fish-food a week. Well, I rather like it, but only three pinches a week leaves me a little hungry. At night my wife takes the bottle out of her hafiza or ‘purse’ and sets it on a shelf. My wife likes to sleep in the dark, but I am developing a luminescence of my own as is the case of many Ancient Mariners. It is green, the green of a ship's wake in an iodine-tinged sea at night, and it shines out of my eyes. By this luminescent light of my own eyes I am able to see to write in my journal during my long night in the bottle.
If my wife had remembered the journal (I have always kept it strapped to my body under my qamis) she would probably have taken it away from me. But I have it yet, and I write these words in it.
I am a buoyant person and I have not entirely given up hope, though I sure do come close.
My Grand Dame and I don't talk to each other much nowadays. And when we do talk our conversations are a little bit tart.
“The Book of Jasher says that ‘an acetous woman is like the leaf that the palmer-worm will eat and destroy,’ ” I quoted to her once for her corrections.
“The Book of Loos says that ‘Diamonds are a girl's best friend,’ ” she came back at me. “Hey Sindie, I'm really making it big with diamonds now. Do you remember how diamonds were dirt-cheap back on Earth-World during the Arabian Middle Ages? Now that I have a John-Thunderson type Almost-Anything Space Ship I can haul tons of diamonds every day from there to here where there is just no end to the market for good diamonds, and no limit to the price that one can get for them.”
“The Book of Bahr says that ‘The Love of lucre that outruns compassion is like fingernails still growing after the corpse is dead!” I told her.
“It's half-rations of fish-food you'll be on for a month on account of that, Sindbad Copperbottom,” she spoke sharply, “and I'm switching to a new and nauseous brand of fish-food just for you. This fish-food was developed to cut down on the over-populations in certain fish-bowls and aquariums. A mere pinch of it would eat holes in the stomachs of all but the most hearty of the fish and would reduce the bowl populations almost instantly. But it had one drawback. It had to be taken off the market because it also ate holes in the glass fish-bowls and aquariums. You'd never guess how cheap I got a box of it at one of those ‘Off-The-Market Super-Sale Stores’. Well, have fun, Sindie.”
Well, the food in this prison-bottle is clearly sub-standard.
I once had a bit of advice from an Ifrit who himself had spent ten thousand years imprisoned in a bottle. “When you find yourself miniaturized and imprisoned in a world a billion billion times too small, there is only one thing to do then: Think Big!” So I have been thinking big.
For some time I have been thinking big in my miniaturized condition. I have used parts of the Open-Ended-Analytics System of that dumb meddling kid John Thunderson. I have used some of the equations of the Dog Mathematician who had become a hit at the court of Mamun the Great in the hours just before our leaving. I used some of the Ancient Mathematics of the Magi, the Armenian one who sometimes lived in the Ark itself, the one we had talked to outside the Walls of Baghdad. And I borrowed some of the remarkable speculations out of Qabtaan Yousafir's ‘Mathematics for Navigators’, the only mathematics text I know of that is written entirely in verse. It is a book that I have found invaluable on several of my adventure-voyages. I realized, of course, that my problem with the bottle was a mathematical problem. I had to find the Evertion Equation, the one that would evert my bottle and leave me on the outside of it and put all the rest of the universe on the inside of it.
And I did discover that equation in a lightning blaze of cognition. I applied the equation, and it worked! I was on the outside of the bottle. I was elated. But my elation was short-lived.
I was on the outside of the bottle, freezing in absolute zero temperature and dying for lack of air. And all of the billioned-galaxy universe was cozy inside the bottle.
Naturally I rescinded the equation and returned the universe and myself to the previous status quo. What I had to come up with now was an equation that would put me outside the bottle and leave the universe outside the bottle where it already was.
Oh my stomach! I am driven by hunger to eat a little bit of the damnable fish-food, and I am driven by the horrible my-stomach-being-eaten-up feeling and fact to retch the fish food up again. And to add to my woes, I have sprained my ankle. I tripped on a rough place in the bottle where I had been retching up the fish-food and where the fish-food then had been eating a hole in the bottle.
Oh, I had to solve the mathematical impasse presented by the tantalizing equation. After nine days and nights of unremitting thought, I did solve the mathematical impasse, and I was filled with joy, for a short while. I should explain to non-mathematicians that there are two ways of solving a mathematical impasse. One way is to discover the equation in question. And the other way is to prove conclusively that such an equation is impossible. I solved the impasse by the second way. It was a brilliant and elegant mathematical tour-de-force, but it left me still inside the bottle.
On this realization I fell into a deep despondency. And my despondency was made still deeper when I sprained my other ankle at that dangerous place where the fish-food had been eating a hole in the bottle. There was really a perilous spot there. Somebody could get hurt at that place, and the only somebody in the bottle was me.
Will this be the end of Myself the Great Sindbad? Will this Thirteenth Voyage be my last voyage, and will it end in failure? Why are lesser persons so much more fortunate than I am?
Take that dumb kid John Thunderson the False Sindbad! Every thing he touches turns to success. And now I hear that he is going to abandon the Sindbad role and become either of several comic strip characters. Yes, I do get a little bit of news here in my bottle, but I'll not confide even to this my journal how I get it.
Take the Spy Cato of Camiroi, take the Spy Alexander of Astrobe, both of them my inferiors in all ways, both of them now home safely and heroes in their home worlds. The unfairness of it all shocks me.
I fell into the lowest state of my spirits that I have ever fallen to. “Contemptible man,” I said to myself, “just look at you, just look at you!”
I saw one thing when I looked at myself closely, a thing that changed the entire situation.
Real and genuine Sea-Weed was growing on me again. I was the Real Sindbad once more. I was the Alpha Male again. And if the real Sea-Weed was growing on me now, then it was no longer growing on the usurper John Thunderson. I am the Real Sindbad again, and Hope Eternal springs up and overflows my breast.
Reader of this journal (and I believe that it will someday have a reader) know you that if you find the journal in this bottle and myself gone, then I am away safe and on the outside. And if you find the journal here and my bones here with it, that still will not mean that I am dead. I have some idea about stuffing off my bones to be able to pour myself through a sudden hole in the bottle, one too small for me to traverse with my bones intact. There is precedent for this. The old Pirate Captain, Redbeard the Snake, had once sluffed off his bones to slip out of a particularly tight situation. They called him ‘The Snake’ because of his slithering, boneless walk thereafter.
And, reader, if you find what appears to be an empty bottle here, look again. The journal is sure to be in some dim corner of the bottle, and it is quite small. Look for it. It's worth it.
I maybe able to get out by the hole in the bottle before I die of starvation or fish-food
poisoning, but it sure will be close.
Fish Food! Horrible and lovely Fish Food that I am unable to eat! Eat at the bottle, Fish Food, and do not stop eating at it. Eat the hole bigger and bigger. Today my Grand Dame will put my weekly ration of fish-food into the bottle, and I have high hopes that it will mean the breakthrough.
And now a little side light, the last which I will shine upon you, and then the journal will end.
Some time ago, when I was at the depths of my despondency, I found a dirty little thing in my pocket, and it was a fresh-water ark-shell. I'd have thrown it away, but how far away can you throw something in a bottle no more six inches long? Thunderson the False Sindbad must have given it to me. He believed that the ark-shells could be used as communicating devices. “If you have an ark-shell and know how to use it, then you can never be alone or friendless wherever you are,” he said. “Put it to your ear and listen to it. Put it to your mouth and talk into it. And you will be part of a universe-wide network of friendship, the great brotherhood of the Ark-Shell Show devotees. Really, it will work.”
In the depths of my despondency I tried it, and it did work. I became a part of that friendship and hobby and passion and ongoing drama. In fact, my Thirteenth Voyage in which I am still involved became an ongoing feature on the Ark-Shell Show. And I got feed-back from my fans, from my hundreds and thousands of fans in a dozen centuries and on at least seventeen worlds.
“Your real forte is comedy,” at least a hundred of them told me. “Your Thirteenth Voyage may be the funniest thing ever done, and you may be the greatest comedian ever.”
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 18
