by Hugh Cook
During this time — and quite a time it was — these seven prisoners had made their own contributions to the flow of sewage which so liberally polluted the depths of Downstairs. They had scavenged a little ice in the course of their compulsory wanderings but had had nothing to eat, and were consequently hungry, tired and out of temper.
They were also hoarse.
Why hoarse?
Because Shabble had been threatening to amuse Shabbleself by executing them, and to provide the globular one with an alternative source of amusement the prisoners had been telling non-stop stories. True stories, false stories, tales, jokes, legends and chronicles. In between stories, they had been trying to persuade the haunter of many millennia that it would be really amusing to go to Justina’s palace, burn up a few guards and make themselves masters of U ntunchilamon.
Unfortunately, Shabble remained resolutely unpersuaded.
It was Arnaut who cracked first. Shabble had made the youngster from Asral carry the wishstone. Arnaut had wished on it time and time again — to no effect. Now he was going to try direct action to get his way. He was the youngest, and had a bloody temper when roused.
‘You shib!’ said Arnaut. ‘I’ve had enough! That’s it! You can beat me, bum me, hit me, hate me, but I’m not doing any more. I can’t talk any more. No more jokes, no more stories, no more songs.’
All this was said in Arnaut’s native Malud, but Shabble, who was a linguist of the first rank, understood it perfecdy.
‘Why not?’ said Shabble, sounding as hurt as Shabble felt.
‘Because I’m dying of hunger!’ screamed Arnaut in a cracked and ragged voice.
‘Then why didn’t you say so?’ said Shabble reasonably. ‘Come on, I know where there’s some vampire rats.’
‘Rats!’ said Arnaut.
‘Yes, rats, rats,’ said Shabble, drifting off down a corridor.
‘We can’t eat rats!’ said Arnaut.
‘Cats eat them,’ said Shabble. ‘So they’ve got to be good for you. Cats never settle for anything less than the best.’
‘What’re they saying, what’re they saying?’ said Thayer Levant, who could not follow any conversation held in Malud.
‘I’ll find out,’ said the brawny Guest Gulkan.
An exercise in translation followed. Then:
‘Man cannot live by rats alone,’ said Pelagius Zozimus. ‘If you want to keep us in good shape we’ll need green vegetables as well.’
‘Green vegetables!’ said Shabble huffily. ‘I suppose you’ll want to be sleeping next!’
‘Well…’
‘I knew it!’ said Shabble.
Then, in a fit of pique, the free-floating lord of misrule spat out a blue-blazing fireball. It drifted to the floor and exploded in a flare of ionising radiation. Zozimus winced and all argument about diet ceased.
On went the refugees, guided by the fearsome imitator of suns. Quick-striding in their hunger-haste, they passed a corridor lit by blue light. Zozimus glanced along it, wondering if he should make a break for it and run.
‘Should we run?’ muttered Al-ran Lars to Arnaut and Tolon, for he was thinking along identical lines.
‘Let’s,’ said Arnaut.
But already their haste had taken them past the corridor junction, and if they turned to sprint back they would collide with the close-following Guest Gulkan.
‘Let’s risk a dash when we reach the next corridor,’ said the muscle-man Tolon. ‘But watch yourselves! That sun-thing’s three parts mad.’
‘I am not mad!’ said Shabble, who had hearing as acute as you could imagine.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ said Arnaut, throwing up his hands as if to ward off a fast-flung rock. ‘You’re not mad, not mad at all, not — gods, what’s that?’
Something was emerging from a side corridor up ahead. Arnaut knew only that it was big, heavy, brown and bulbous. A monstrous, hulking thing stubbled with inscrutable protrusions. It made a sound like heavy breathing as it advanced. Then it halted. Blocking the corridor.
‘Turn around,’ said Shabble, in great haste. ‘Turn around, everyone. I don’t want to lose you.’
Everyone turned around. They didn’t need to be told twice. They had already guessed that the thing up ahead was fearfully dangerous.
‘Go back the way we were going,’ said Shabble, in something of a panic. ‘Don’t run!’
The wingless wonder softly but swiftly said that thrice, each time using a different language. This was very, very important. Shabble did not want to have these wonderful new playmates killed by the monster.
The lord of light and laughter knew what the monster was. It was stupid. Very stupid. But it was also dangerous. Very dangerous. Very very very dangerous. It was a machine. It was a dorgi. Shabble had instantly recognised the dorgi for what it was, even though the shining one had not seen such a menace for over five thousand years. Shabble, my friends, does not forget.
‘HALT!’ said the machine.
None of Shabble’s prisoners understood the Code Seven used by the dorgi, but they all halted the instant it spoke. They all knew a sentry’s challenge when they heard one. Their bright-shining companion halted also. The monster was definitely a dorgi. Those rock-crunching tones were unmistakable. Theoretically, Shabble is incapable of shuddering. Yet Shabble shuddered regardless. The demon of Jod had not known there were any dorgis left. But there were! Shabble was terrified.
Nevertheless, the shining one played it ultra-cool.
‘Oh, hi!’ said Shabble, speaking Code Seven to the dorgi. ‘Why, what a surprise! I didn’t see you there! Don’t worry about us, we’re just passing through.’ So saying, Shabble started to drift away down the corridor. ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry about us, we’ll find our own way thank you.’ ‘HALT! HALT RIGHT NOW!’
To emphasise its commands, the dorgi trained the seven snouts of its zulzer on the slow-drifting Shabble. Under the threat of the zulzer the demon of Jod came to an abrupt halt. The zulzer could not kill the lordly persecutor of cats, but was quite capable of destroying the transponder linking the feckless one with the local cosmos. Once that was destroyed Shabble would be deaf, blind and helpless. Trapped in a different universe entirely. Mute, blind and bereft of kinaesthetic sensation. Alone, alone, doomed to be alone, unloved, uncherished and unbefriended, all alone and hideously lonely for all the rest of eternity.
Hence Shabble regarded the d° ^ r gi ^ an d its zulzer with nothing short of horror.
The dorgi spoke again:
‘Halt! Halt! Right now! Drop your weapons! Move up against the wall! Halt! Or you will be eliminated!’
If Shabble could sweat, then Shabble would have been sweating then. The shining one had absolutely no idea what to do. But while Shabble vacillated, the killer Tolon unshipped a knife. What good would that do? Not much.
Tolon might as well have armed himself with an ostrich feather. But he didn’t know that. He had never met a dorgi before. He had no idea what he was up against.
None of the other humans had ever met a dorgi either — but some of them were already making some acute guesses as to its nature.
‘What is that thing?’ said Guest Gulkan. ‘What’s it saying?’
‘It’s saying we’re chin-deep in something unpleasant,’ said Thayer Levant.
‘Never mind,’ said Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, with a confidence which was entirely feigned. ‘I’m sure our guide can handle it.’
‘Our guide is a Shabble,’ said Pelagius Zozimus, ‘and I wouldn’t trust a Shabble to do so much as cook a pancake. Get ready to run!’
The dorgi was getting angry. It was working itself up into a killing rage. In a roar of fury it said:
‘Now! Now! Against the wall! Or else!’
In extremis, Shabble was seized by inspiration.
Said Shabble, in a perfect imitation of Anaconda Stogirov, the immortal Chief of Security of the Golden Gulag:
‘Let me pass with my prisoners.’
There was an ominous rumble f
rom the dorgi.
‘I have an Absolute Authorisation!’ said Shabble, still using Stogirov’s voice. ‘You doubt? Then check your Security List! Now! Or I’ll have you dismantled. Bit by bit. Preserving your pain circuits intact until the very end.’ The dorgi growled again. But backed off a bit. It began to check the Vocal Identities preserved in its Security List. Then the dorgi rumbled in discontent. It had checked Shabble’s Vocal Identity against the Security List. According to the check, Shabble was in fact Anaconda Stogirov. But Stogirov was human, female, 567 incas high, 96 noks in weight, and had blue eyes, red hair and fair skin.
This then was the problem which troubled the dorgi: could Anaconda Stogirov have been ablated and reshaped in a fashion radical enough to leave her with the outward appearance of a Shabble, that is to say a shiny free-floating globe the size of an orange? The dorgi grunted strenuously. A problem indeed! For it knew virtually nothing of human anatomy, and equally as little about the internal construction of Shabbies.
Even as the dorgi watched, the globe was changing. It was radiating heat. It was becoming a fireball. Could humans do that? The dorgi hunted through its memory banks. Yes! Humans radiate heat! No! Humans die at fireball heat! Yes! Humans clad in reflective materials dare such heat! No! No! Yes Yes! No no no! Yes!
In desperate doubt, the dorgi consulted its Supreme Directive. This was very simple, and tells us a lot about the Golden Gulag:
1. WHEN IN DOUBT, QUESTION.
2. IF STILL IN DOUBT, TORTURE.
3. IF STILL IN DOUBT, KILL.
4. IF NOW NOT ENTIRELY SATISFIED WITH AREA SECURITY THEN PROCEED WITH AREA DESTRUCTION.
Instantly the dorgi became calm. That was the Law. The dorgi need only follow the Law. Furthermore, it could be as rude and as violent as it wanted to be as long as it did follow the Law. The dorgi had already executed Instruction One. Therefore it must go straight to Instruction Two. This intruder must be tortured!
‘I hear Stogirov,’ said the dorgi, ‘but I see a Shabble. A delinquent Shabble! Imitating a human! You will be escorted to a therapist immediately for interrogation in depth.’
‘There are no therapists,’ said Shabble boldly. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘There is a functional therapist on level 433,’ said the dorgi in tones of ponderous menace.
A dorgi does not lie. A dorgi is a primitive mechanism which is incapable of anything as sophisticated as a fiction. A dorgi is however capable of error. But the possibility of error in this case was vanishingly small. When a dorgi says that a therapist exists then a therapist truly must exist.
‘All right, all right,’ said Shabble, gaining height slowly so as not to alarm the dorgi. ‘I’ll come quietly.’
‘Then descend 934 incas and proceed along the corridor.’ ‘Which corridor?’ said Shabble, rolling slowly through the air toward the blue-lit branch of the Downstairs maze which its prisoners had so recently considered as an escape route.
‘This one!’ said the dorgi. ‘The one we’re in!’
‘Oh, this one!’ said Shabble, accelerating.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the dorgi. ‘But not so fast! And descend! Descend I say! Halt! You are going too fast! Halt or I shoot! Halt! Halt! Halt!’
The dorgi’s alarm klaxon blared. It was the final warning — as Shabble knew full well. Shabble blasted the dorgi with fire hot enough to melt forged steel. The dorgi shrugged off the onslaught — but was momentarily blinded. In that moment, Shabble span furiously, spitting out twenty-seven Shabble-sized fireballs.
The dorgi recovered its powers of sight. It stared dis-believingly at the twenty-eight Shabbies hanging in the air. What the hell was going on here? Well: shoot first, ask questions afterwards! The dorgi opened fire, trying to gun down all twenty-eight Shabbies simultaneously. It was so busy shooting at fireballs that it temporarily forgot about the humans.
The humans were already running.
They sprinted, collided, fell, rolled, scrambled, recovered, ducked, dodged, then threw themselves into the blue-lit side corridor. Behind them, the deafening thunder of the zulzer ruled all. Chunks of plax exploded from the walls. Shabble skidded round the corner into the blue-lit corridor, counted the humans — all seven were there — then urged them to action.
‘Brodirov kanamensky!’
‘What?’ said Zozimus.
‘Shavaunt!’ said Shabble, reverting to Toxteth.
The humans got the hint, and, dizzy and dazed though they were, they started running. Their overlord was pleased to see the one called Arnaut still had tight hold of the wishstone.
In the main corridor, the thunder of the zulzer continued for quite some time. The dorgi only stopped shooting when it had exhausted all its ammunition. It looked for corpses. There were none. Maybe the zulzer had atomised them. Maybe.
‘We’ll see,’ said the dorgi.
It consulted an image-record of its onslaught of the corridor and did a spectral analysis of the same. Unfortunately, spectral analysis indicated that no large carbon-based lifeforms had been destroyed. Also, the Shabble appeared to have escaped.
‘Sinvoco senvoco sabvoco!’ said the dorgi, nearly overloading its obscenity circuits.
The intruders had got clean away.
The dorgi did an Advanced Situational Analysis, grunting at the pain of such intellectual analysis. Then concluded:
‘They' must’ve gone down that side corridor.’
It thundered to the side corridor. Which was too small to admit it. The dorgi did another Advanced Situational Analysis, which was every bit as painful as the first. It concluded:
‘I cannot pursue.’
By now it was in something of a quandry. So it once more consulted its Supreme Directive. Which clearly stated:
4. IF NOT NOW ENTIRELY SATISFIED WITH AREA SECURITY THEN PROCEED WITH AREA DESTRUCTION.
‘Right!’ muttered the dorgi. ‘That does it!’
Swiftly it charged up its Probability Disruptors, highly satisfied with the comforting thought that everything within fifty luzaks would shortly be chonjorted beyond repair.
‘Here goes!’ said the dorgi.
Then Initiated the Probability Disruption.
Nothing happened.
Doubtless the Probability Disruptors were on the fritz.
‘Just my luck,’ muttered the dorgi dourly, and consulted its memory banks, where it eventually located:
Directive 238768138764: Equipment Malfunction.
IN THE EVENT OF A MISSION-CRITICAL EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION SEEK OUT A SUPERVISOR, ROBOTIC, GRADE 7.
The dorgi grunted. Then grunted again. It did not like supervisors. They were intelligent. Worse, they were more intelligent than dorgis. (Most things were.) Still, there was no helping it. A Directive was a Directive. There would be several thousand years of intensive algetic therapy in store for any dorgi rash enough to disobey a Directive.
Grunting and grumbling, the dorgi began to rumble along the corridor, diligently looking for a supervisor. It was going to be looking for a long time, for the last operational supervisor had suffered a terminal malfunction some three thousand years earlier.
Still, such is life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
While the dorgi was busy looking for a supervisor, and Shabble was regrouping Shabble’s prisoner playmates, the conjuror Odolo lay in bed in Ivan Pokrov’s private quarters in the Analytical Institute on the island of Jod. Odolo had collapsed halfway across the harbour bridge, and Uckermark and Chegory had lugged him the rest of the way.
During the battle in the pink palace, Varazchavardan had made a very determined effort to strangle Odolo, and the marks on his throat which evidenced the effort were steadily darkening from slap-smash red to thunder black. Still, Odolo was alive and breathing yet. Uckermark and Chegory sat by ^? the unconscious conjuror’s bedside, discussing him with Ivan Pokrov.
‘You sav he transformed himself?’ said Pokrov.
— w ere not kidding,’ said Chegory. ‘He — he’s a — it was a, l
ike, a nightmare, okay?’
‘All right, all right,’ said Pokrov, doing his best to soothe the upright Ebby. ‘So he transformed himself. I believe you!’
'He must be a wizard,’ said Uckermark. ‘Or a sorcerer at the very least.’
‘A wizard,’ said Chegory. ‘They’re at war, aren’t they? Wizards and sorcerers? So he’s a wizard. Else why would he hide his powers?’
‘They’re not exactly at war,’ said Uckermark. ‘Wizards and sorcerers, I mean. They just don’t get on very well.’ Pokrov tried to think of some intelligent contribution he could make to this debate, but failed. He was used to dealing with life, death and the universe in terms of mathematical theory, but had no satisfactory theoretical explanation for magic. This is scarcely surprising, for even Thaldonian Mathematics fails to provide a Predictive Paradigm to explain those processes which the researchers of the Golden Gulag were in the habit of describing as Synergetic Improbability.
‘I still don’t know why he made that dragon, though,’ said Chegory. ‘At the banquet, I mean.’
‘Maybe it was a joke,’ said Uckermark.
‘Banquet!’ said Pokrov, grateful to have something sensible to say. ‘That reminds me! I’ve been so busy all day I haven’t yet had lunch. Would you care to join me? Odolo doesn’t need us to watch over him.’
Chegory wasn’t really ready for another meal. In fact, he felt sick at heart because he had abandoned Olivia to the dangers of the pink palace. Furthermore, despite the anatomical difficulties involved, this sickness of heart had communicated itself to his stomach. In short, he was off his food.
Still, it would have been rude to refuse. Besides, in the presence of Pokrov, Chegory still felt constrained to play the role of the polite, disciplined, upwardly mobile young Ebrell Islander. Even though he knew he was a doomed outlaw, a debauched wastrel on the run from law and authority both, a hoodlum hopelessly entangled in a world of drugs, deceit, conspiracy, coups and sudden death.
‘Yes,’ said Chegory. ‘That’s, um, a great idea. We’ll have lunch, okay, it can’t make things worse.’
