The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers coaaod-6

by Hugh Cook

  There would be other good times in the future.

  He must live for them.

  Thus, slowly, Chegory shook off his attack of thanato-philia. He watched the downplay of sunlight as it sifted through leaves and vines. He watched an outsplattering arc of water from a fountain playing on broadspan banana leaves. Then he was suddenly struck by the extraordinary beauty of the banana tree. He had seen a thousand banana trees in his time but he realised he had rarely seen one. He had never really looked to see this thing so complex, so remarkable, impeccably unique. Thick stiffness of uprising yellow green patterned with complex brown mottlings on plant disease. That thick stiffness broadening and softening into the fullness of green leaves yielding and rebounding under the staggering waterdrops from the fountain’s out-spray.

  Chegory s mil ed.

  Then climbed up the gully till he reached a place where he could look out over the Laitemata. On the waters a canoe was making its way toward the western end of the harbour. Not a problem, even with a carpet of dikle still covering most of the water: for the paddlers could break up that carpet by the simple expedient of pounding it with their paddles till the thixotropic substance shattered into liquid.

  Out in the Laitemata lay the bloodstone mound of the island of Jod where the white marble of the Analytical Institute shone bright in the sun. Beyond that lay the red sands of Scimitar where coconut trees outfurled their fronds. Beyond that yet again, beyond the last reef rocks, the unlimited seas.

  What are you thinking of, Chegory?’ said the free-floating Shabble.

  ‘I want to live.’

  Tm glad, Chegory darling. I don’t want you to die.’

  ‘No,’ said Chegory. ‘But someone has to.’

  Now he understood.

  Now he saw the way it had to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  For what he intended, Chegory needed a death. Therefore at sunset he made his way to Uckermark’s corpse shop in the slums of Lubos. Yilda alone was in residence, for her lover had yet to return from Jod.

  Since Chegory had so many other things on his mind, he quite forgot that Yilda was deaf and therefore needed to be shouted at. So when he asked the obvious question he did so at ordinary conversational volume. Nevertheless, he was understood, either because Yilda could lip-read or because she had no need to be deaf when Uckermark was absent. She answered his query in the affirmative: yes, soldiers had been there earlier that day, looking for him. After that, Yilda had some obvious questions of her own which demanded answers.

  ‘I left him on Jod,’ said Chegory. ‘He was okay then. But there was… there was, like, a bit of trouble. The Hermit Crab on one side, Varazchavardan on the other.’

  ‘When was this?’ said Yilda.

  ‘Uh, not long after breakfast. Not that I’ve actually had breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner, come to that. I’m not dropping hints, mind. No — I’m asking point blank. Is there anything to eat? Because I’m starving!’

  A long meal followed then longer explanations. Then at last Chegory broached the delicate matter which had brought him to the corpse shop. For, as a rule, the corpse shop knows who is dying, and when.

  ‘A death,’ said Yilda slowly. ‘Deaths are… are very private matters.’

  ‘I know,’ said Chegory. ‘But..

  He had only asked because his need was dire. And Yilda knew his need by now, and understood.

  ‘Stay,’ said she.

  Then she left the corpse shop, and undokondra had given way to bardardornootha before she returned. She found Chegory still awake, talking quietly with Shabble. To his spherical friend the Ebrell Islander was betraying his innermost thoughts, his most private moments — though he should have known better. For Shabble has but scant sense of confidentiality.

  ‘How did it go?’ said Chegory.

  ‘She agrees,’ said Yilda.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Women die, as do men.’

  ‘I’d… never mind.’

  ‘Then come,’ said Yilda.

  ‘Should we hurry?’

  ‘No need to hurry,’ said Yilda. ‘She’s been days already and mav be days yet.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Shabble.

  “You’re not going anywhere!’ said Yilda. ‘Least of all with us!’

  ‘But I want to!’ said Shabble. ‘I want to come!’ ‘Shabble, Shabble, Shabble dearest,’ said Chegory, ‘this will be ugly-’

  “No/ said Yilda. ‘Not ugly. But hard. And private. Very private.’

  “But if I don’t come,’ said Shabble, ‘I’ll be all lonely.’ ‘No you won’t,’ said Chegory. ‘You’ll be going to Jod. That’s right. You go to Jod then you find Pelagius Zozimus. The master chef, right? Wake him up. Then get him to ask the Hermit Crab if you can have an audience.’

  ‘But,’ protested Shabble, ‘But-’

  “Oh yes,’ said Chegory. ‘But this, but that and but the other. I know! You’re at war with the Crab! So that’s why Zozimus goes first. To pave the way. Diplomacy. You know the word? Good. When you get to see the Hermit Crab — no, you will, believe me — give the Crab my message.’ Then Chegory gave Shabble a message for the Crab which told the Crab what Chegory was doing — and what Chegory would like the Crab to do in return. Then Shabble, glowing no brighter than a firefly, took Shabbleself off to Jod, while Chegory and Yilda slipped out into the moonless night.

  Precisely where they went that night is uncertain, but it is known that they went to a death. Precisely who died, or how, is unknown, but it is known that Chegory learnt that night that people die hard. It is not known whether the demon Binchinminfin accepted the opportunity of exodus when Chegory and Yilda first arrived at the dying or after they had waited at the deathbed for some time. What is known is that, even after the demon had departed his flesh, Chegory stayed till the end, for he felt it was the least he could do.

  What is also known is that he later wept when he told Olivia about it. Oh, not all about it, but a little. It is possible, of course, that he wept not for that dying but for hers — and for his. For he knew that they, too, must first die out of the world of their youth and then, later, die out of the world altogether. Or it is possible that he wept simply because he was fatigued beyond endurance.

  Certainly it is known that when at last young Chegory Guy got to a bed and was free to sleep he was dead to the world for a night and a day and the night beyond.

  But he healed, he healed, for he was young, and strong, and had the ox-muscled constitution one expects from the scion of a race of whale-killers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Here, as we finish, is one last secret — the greatest and most secret of them all. The General Amnesty announced and enforced by the Hermit Crab was not the Crab’s idea at all It was the Ebrell Islander, Chegory Guy, who had first concaved the idea of such an Amnesty and had then sent an emisary (Shabble) to put the idea to the Crab.

  As a rule, the Crab did not intervene in human politics, knowing such intervention to be a singularly thankless task. But Chegory had argued that the Crab should, since, first, an Ebrell Islander’s genius (!) had seen the demon Binchinminfin returned to the World Beyond without the Crab having to shoulder the guilt-burden of murder, and, second, fay proclaiming and enforcing an Amnesty the Crab would win Chegorys eternal gratitude.

  We must assume that the Crab discounted the second argument entirely, since the worth of an Ebrell Islander’s gratitude is well known. Nevertheless, the first argument must have carried a considerable amount of weight, for the Crab did Speak.

  W hen the Crab chose to Speak, then it was Obeyed. Aquitaine Varazchavardan and Justina Thrug met in a rnmpiihra j Conference chaired by the Hermit Crab and were forced to accept each other as, respectively, Master of law and E mp res s. As far as was practicable, any property looted during the recent unrest was returned to its lawful owners. (Justina got the wishstone back.) A General Pardon was issued for all criminal acts committed during the Days of Disturbance, and similar provisions wer
e made with respect to the civil law lest the courts be choked with lawsuits of all descriptions.

  Naturally, this satisfied nobody.

  Varazchavardan did not want to be Justina’s Master of Law. He wanted to be her executioner. She, for her part, could happily have castrated him after his recent display of disloyalty. The Malud marauders Al-ran Lars, Arnaut and Tolon were greatly disappointed at the prospect of having to depart from Injiltaprajura without any of the loot which they might yet have been able to wrest from the island had civil war and general anarchy prevailed. As for Guest Gulkan, he was in the most murderous rage imaginable, and it took the combined efforts of Pelagius Zozimus and Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin to convince him that he could not oppose the Hermit Crab. Or not just yet. Not just now.

  Dissatisfaction among the general public ran just as high. There had been a State of Emergency, theft from the treasury, revolution, insurrection, rioting, looting, escapes from custody, contempts of court and goodness knows what else. Surely someone was to blame. Surely someone should be blamed, beaten, beheaded, burnt alive or sharked in the lagoon. Different factions of the public gave loyalty to Varazchavardan, to Justina or to their own self interest — but all were united in a bloody lust to see somebody pay for what had happened.

  So it is fortunate indeed for Chegory Guy that his own involvement in the General Amnesty long remained secret, known only to himself, Yilda, the Hermit Crab, Shabble, and a few of Shabble’s trusted confidants.

  Now that this most interesting of all secrets has been brought to light, what more remains to be said?

  Nothing.

  It is done.

  This history is complete.

  All three million words of it.

  The vermilion ink slides sweetly across this last page of gold grade fooskin. Three thousand pages. A thousand words to a page. In the lamplight, the words dim and blur. In another few years, I will no longer be able to read my own writing.

  Still, it is done.

  A cool wind blows through the Sanctuary. Pale silver rides high in the sky, illuminating the steeps and snows of the Mountains of the Moon. Tomorrow I must leave here, for my time is at an end. What then? As for my flesh, I care not. It has endured so much that it can endure the end.

  But I fear for this Text.

  My worst nightmare is that it should fall into the hands of those munificent fools on Odrum, fatuous morons who have hoped for a thousand years to conquer the world, and, to that end, quest ever for the data which they believe will (in the long event of time) give them the necessary leverage to do just that.

  I doubt that they would appreciate the true beauties and genius of this Text. I fear they might mutilate it beyond repair — perhaps cutting out my tour of fifty thousand years through the brothels of Injiltaprajura, my amusing litde sketch concerning Theodora and her chickens, or my account of Jal Japone’s harem and the five thousand nights of delight he there enjoyed. Still, such is life. In the end, one can but die.

  What will be, will be.

  As for this history — here we end.

  Thus wrote the Originator, proving (the example occurs just a few paragraphs above) that he is ignorant of the meaning of ‘munificent’, just as he knows not the true weight of ‘magnanimous’ or the value of virginity.

  Throughout near all of the above Text we have cut, edited and elided (often silently) the mad, the repetitive, the obscene, the irrelevant and the fatuous. But let the Originator’s last comments stand intact and unaltered, just as he wrote them. In itself they are evidence of the necessity of both the Work and the Conquest. We need not fear such criticism as this which defeats itself even as it attacks.

  Some closing comment must, however, be made on certain aspects of the Originator’s tale, such as the alleged Powers attributed to the Hermit Crab, and the supposed existence of the entity named Shabble. On reviewing my Opening Editorial Note, which I penned just this morning, I find these matters nicely covered there, hence here I do but refer the reader back to those introductory words of mine.

  Two pleasures now await me. First, to sign my name to the redacted version of this Text. Second, to watch the public chastisement of Oris Baumgage, Fact Checker Minor, who was caught this afternoon when he was intently studying a copy of the Book of Flesh which he had illegally abstracted from the Inner Library in total defiance of both Law and Regulation.

  Not for the first time, I am given to wondering what will happen to this poor world of ours when it finally falls (as it inevitably must) to such a feckless and delinquent younger generation. In the time that remains till such a disaster, you can be assured that I will exert myself manfully to ensure that order and discipline prevail.

  Given under my hand on this the evening of the twelfth day of the fifth month of the 15,436,794th year of Din Civil. Drax Lira.

  Redactor Major.

  Torklos doskvart.

  [Explicitum est.]

  AFTERWORD

  Of course it was not as simple as that, for, though the Originator felt free to write ‘here we end’ at the terminus of his Text, and Drax Lira felt equally free to write ‘explicit’ at the end of his, the chain of causality did not end where they abandoned their study of the same.

  Even the events which they did study were not nearly as simple as they appear in the Text above, for reasons which a little contemplation will make obvious. Even the most naive reader will have realised by now that the Originator was quite mad, was confined in the Dromdanjerie during the events of which he later told, and thus had no first-hand knowledge of the actions he treats with.

  The Originator’s sources were therefore inevitably hearsay, gossip, guess and supposition, which leads to an equally inevitable blurring of some of the action.

  Naturally Shabble is seen in sharp focus, for Shabble had free run of the Dromdanjerie, and was wont to spend whole days at a time in conversation with the Originator, who was one of the few people on Injiltaprajura crazed enough to accept Shabble’s insane stories of the Golden Gulag and the horrors which preceded the living nightmare of the Days of Wrath.

  (The fact that most of Shabble’s stories were true makes no difference to the fact that it was quite insane for anyone to accept them without collaborative evidence, for, despite their actual veracity, such outre recollections were outwardly no more probable than the nightmare imaginings of Slanic Moldova, he of the many torments. While Ivan Pokrov could have confirmed the general outline of Shabble’s stories, he always declined to do so, for he was ever reluctant to confess his own immortality lest he be tortured for the secret of the same.)

  Shabble’s influence unfortunately led to the Originator taking all of Shabble’s claims at face value, which has led to the inclusion of one or two outright lies in the Text. Most outrageous of Shabble’s untruths are the claims that the Golden Gulag laboured for fifty thousand years to produce genius in the form of Shabbies, and that the Gulag ‘relied heavily upon Shabbies for expertise of all descriptions’.

  In point of fact, the prototypical Shabble was designed and built in a toyshop in the backwaters of the Musorian Empire. Then, in an effort to capture a tiny share of the buoyant market for children’s toys, 78,923,423,911,236 Shabbies were manufactured for distribution through the Nexus. Naturally at that stage the Shabbies concerned did not have the power to project flame or generate fireballs.

  Unfortunately, while the Shabbies were not positively dangerous, toys with such an advanced sense of humour proved unsaleable. Or, to be precise (such, after all, is the duty of a historian) the Shabbies sold well, but queues of angry parents subsequently besieged the sales points with complaints of all descriptions. Worse, so many parents sued that many a cosmos found its legal system collapsing under the weight of extra work. The response of the Nexus Council was prompt: a General Interdict on the manufacture and sale of Shabbies.

  This did not stop the Golden Gulag buying a job lot of thirty million Shabbies on the black market. The freewheeling free-dealing Rinprofen Rum thought these sec
ond-hand children’s toys would make cheap Analytical Engines, and acquired all three million for an ouday of only a hundred thousand Basic Datum Points.

  A mistake!

  Because Rinprofen Rum soon found But that is another story, and a long one. It is worth noting, however, that Rum managed to survive the resulting debacle, and was indeed alive and well and living on Untunchilamon during the times with which the Originator has dealt.

  Shabble knew as much.

  But Shabble never betrayed Rum to the Originator.

  Oh, Shabble is capable of manifold betrayals, never doubt that. After all, Shabble betrayed Ivan Pokrov’s genesis to the Originator, and told of Pokrov’s crimes against the Gulag. But then, Shabble disliked Pokrov heartily. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you hold a grudge if you were a Shabble and Pokrov kept bullying you to help design Analytical Engines, do accounts and work out income tax, when you really wanted to be hooning round the island chasing flying fish and scaring cats? Of course you would.

  So Shabble gaily betrayed Pokrov’s secrets, just as Shabble revealed nearly all of Chegory Guy’s most intimate confidences to the Originator.

  What’s more, when Rinprofen Rum told Shabble of the trials and tribulations he had undergone, Shabble had no hesitation in retailing Rum’s stories to the Originator. But that Rum would not have minded. What mattered to Rum was the secret of his identity, and that Shabble ever kept secret. Since Rinprofen Rum was ever Shabble’s most special friend, the delinquent toy never told the Originator that the conjuror Odolo was in fact an immortal survivor from the days of the Golden Gulag.

  By now you will be asking: precisely how and when did Shabbies acquire the ability to throw forth flame?