Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘You look rough,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘Rich coming from you. You still not want to press charges?’

  ‘I’ve other ways of getting back at Mr Gerry Conlon and his porno video operation.’

  ‘OK, I can give you two minutes,’ Roisin Dunbar says, opening the door to interview room three. Gillespie slides the disk across the formica-topped table to her and starts to talk. It takes more than two minutes but Roisin Dunbar isn’t watching the clock any more.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says when Gillespie has finished. She makes a call upstairs on the intercom. ‘Boss, I’ve got Andy Gillespie down in interview room three. I think you should hear what he has to say. Oh, and bring Littlejohn too, if he’s still around.’

  ‘I’m on a pay and display,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘I’ll pay your ticket,’ Dunbar says.

  Willich comes into the room, Littlejohn following. Gillespie notices Dunbar’s expression. It says she’s going to enjoy making Littlejohn eat shit. He doesn’t like it. Littlejohn is a smug beardy bastard who wanted Gillespie for a devo serial killer, but Gillespie doesn’t want anyone to have to eat police shit. He takes a deep breath and tells it all again and then sits back and listens to the police lay into Littlejohn about how he was so sure that the killer couldn’t be a Sheenie, couldn’t possibly be, biologically impossible, wasn’t that it? And here’s the man you profiled for us as prime suspect telling us he knows who the killer is. It’s not nice. It’s not good to hear. Police are supposed to be noble and upright and heroic, and not vicious bitches when they get it stuck up them. Not people. Not men and women.

  Willich bangs out of the room with the disk. Two seconds later, Dunbar goes after him. Littlejohn and Gillespie are left in interview room three, sitting on adjacent sides of the God-ugly table.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Gillespie says after a time.

  Littlejohn looks at him.

  ‘Xenology is not an exact science,’ he says.

  Gillespie smiles.

  ‘I need your help,’ he says after another time.

  ‘Are you sure you can trust it, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘What do the police know?’

  ‘What, indeed?’

  ‘Do you speak Hot Narha, Mr Littlejohn?’ Gillespie asks.

  ‘I know its grammar and syntax and vocabulary and I could name you fifteen classical song cycles composed in it, but speak it? I take it you do.’

  ‘I’ve learned some of the words, but I can’t speak it.’

  ‘You know,’ Littlejohn says, ‘there’s something decidedly not kosher in the world when I spend years setting up the first xenology department in Ireland, learning a language with seventeen tenses, seven genders including two potential forms used exclusively for pubescent children, five modes and which completely up-arses itself twice a year into an entirely different language, and you swallow something and wake up with it in your head the next morning, word fucking perfect.’

  ‘You mean, a wee glipe like me,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Like you say, it’s not a fair world.’

  Littlejohn smiles and Gillespie realizes that he is trying to be friendly. This is as nice as he gets.

  ‘I heard something in Hot Narha today, but I don’t know what it means.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Sacrifice of Fools,’ Andy Gillespie says. Littlejohn frowns.

  ‘Give me that again.’ Gillespie repeats the phrase. ‘Your accent is flawless. Who taught you Hot?’

  Gillespie cups a hand against the breast pocket of his jacket.

  ‘It’s just the way they do it,’ Littlejohn says. ‘Care to introduce me to him or her for a few advanced language lessons? This expression, where did you hear it?’

  ‘From Saipanang Harridi.’

  ‘You didn’t tell the officers.’

  ‘It wouldn’t mean anything to them. Does it mean anything to you?’

  Littlejohn shrugs, sighs.

  ‘It’s a very formal mode. Hot Narha is a nightmare of modes: they’ve got modes for addressing sexual partners and non-sexual partners, and each has a different gender form. This is in Hot Dream Mode, the spiritual language the hahndahvi speak in the kesh cycle.’

  ‘It chimes with other words in my head, but I can’t make any sense out of them.’

  ‘I’d need to check back at home. It does sound vaguely familiar though, I might have come across it in one of the eddas, or maybe a research student brought it up in a meeting. You think it’s important?’

  ‘It cost him a lot to say it.’

  ‘You know better than me, their motivations are nothing like ours. We understand each other more by luck than affinity.’

  Gillespie thinks of Ounserrat Soulereya, soaked to the bones but doggedly pushing on through the rain. Twenty miles to home, and she won’t even slow down. Pride isn’t it, nor anger. Humiliation, despair, arrogance. Human names, human feelings.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Littlejohn continues, ‘I’m neither use nor ornament here. You can see what the Northern Ireland Police Service think of me.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘Life’s a learning curve or it’s a flat line, my friend. Come back to my place and I’ll see what I can find about your Sacrifice of Fools. At least it’ll show these smug police bastards I’m still good for something.’

  ‘Could we go by way of McAusland’s car hire?’ Gillespie asks. ‘I’ve ten minutes before I go into an extra day.’

  Gillespie could see himself living in Littlejohn’s house. Big early Victorian terrace backing on to the Botanic Gardens, but the wall tall enough to prevent the cider drinkers from throwing their bottles over. High ceilings. Big rooms. He likes the plaster mouldings, and the little glass cupola on the return. So what if it leaks? This is a house that suits the rain. Looks good in it. Upstairs living room. Dining room at the front. Class. He could go some of this. Not like those executive estates out at Upper Malone, with two feet between the red-brick mansions so they can feel detached and islands unto themselves. Arranged in closes and cul-de-sacs. Pseudo California. They don’t suit the rain. They look like surfers caught in a downpour. You’d think we’d been colonized by the Americans, not the Shian.

  But he can see himself in this place, yes, if things had turned out differently from how they did.

  ‘Drink?’ Littlejohn’s study is at the back of the house, looking out on to a closed yard cluttered with rusting gardening tools and terracotta planters filled with the rotted straw of last summer’s annuals. A red plastic bird feeder half full of peanuts swings from the washing line. ‘Not much else than gin, but there might be some beer at the back of the fridge.’

  ‘Beer would be good.’

  Gillespie studies the study while Littlejohn rummages in the fridge. He’s always wanted a room furnished with books. One wall, nothing but books. The books on Littlejohn’s wall are all about the Shian and look new. New subject, new books. He leans over the shelf and sniffs. He’s always loved the smell of fresh book. Lamps are lit against the gloom; that’s the way to light a room, Gillespie thinks. Photographs on the wall facing the books. His graduation, her graduation. Their wedding. Kids, growing through baby shots and school photographs and high days and holidays. Did girls really dress like that in the nineties? Were boys’ hair-cuts that grim? Memory is kind, photography brutal. Their graduations. Their weddings. Their baby shots. On the desk beside the computer, a silver-framed photograph of a handsome woman.

  ‘When they went we discovered they were all we had in common,’ Littlejohn says, handing Gillespie a tin of Caffrey’s and a glass. ‘Classic empty nest syndrome. Just because you can describe it to five decimal places doesn’t prevent you from becoming a victim.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘Don’t be.’ He sets his gin on his desk and himself behind the computer. ‘This could take a while. I may have to uplink to the Fifteenth Fleet Colonial Library and it’s difficult getting satellite time booked.’

  ‘I
sn’t that expensive?’ Gillespie pops and pours his beer and watches the head surge out of the creaming liquid.

  ‘Appallingly. However, best efforts of my children and my wife’s lawyers notwithstanding, I am fucking rolling in it. More than I know what to do with.’

  Gillespie sits back in the cat-clawed chair and sips his beer and watches the rain outside the window and Littlejohn moving across the plane of streaked grey, fetching a book here, a file there, a magazine somewhere else. The click of the mouse is loud and metallic. The screen lights Littlejohn’s face. Fifteen minutes pass. Half an hour.

  ‘Nothing in the main dictionaries, but I wasn’t really expecting anything,’ Littlejohn says. ‘We learn enough new words and phrases and modes to bring out a new dictionary every other week. The formal mode might make it worth having a juke at religio-social studies. The trouble with these people is that they cut right across our established academic disciplines.’

  Back to the mouse-clicking. Gillespie picks a book off the shelf. It’s not everywhere he feels comfortable enough to read. This house, this room, this man, are the life he once imagined. Alternative Andy Gillespie. The book’s a survey of the better known Shian hahndahvi. It’s a popular work, with plenty of pictures. Gillespie flicks over the glossy pages. They smell good. He pauses over some of the more bizarre avatar masks. Imagine these things walking in your dreams. An open-mouthed face, painted with white spirals.

  Ongtith, guardian of paths and fords. This avatar occupies a central place in the Shian Dreaming, and existed in proto-forms thirty thousand years ago, when, at the end of the Shith Glaciation, she led the Old Hunters into the newly habitable north. In the historical period, this hahndahvi guided the nomadic nations across Sounyok, the continental forest, and is associated with both astronomy and the reading of forests signs. Frequently appears to new adults as they embark on their wanderjahrs, and thus has a secondary aspect as the guide of the young. Huge renditions of the Ongtith mask are painted on the ablation shields of Shian interstellar vehicles.

  Her environment in the Dreamplace is always the forest clearing, her associated symbols are the fire, the staff, the petoun, the scent-laying stick, and the bare footprint. Her manifestations are as a female dressed in white. She is always barefoot and bareheaded and never speaks. If addressed directly, the hahndahvi will disappear. Though a guide, she is an ambiguous figure, she can lead both to and away from a situation, and her destinations may not always be those the dreamer might consider most beneficial.

  Please rub the scratch-and-sniff panel at the bottom of the page for a sample of her identifying perfume.

  Gillespie holds the book up to his face. It’s hard to make anything out over the glossy paper and printer’s ink, but then he catches it and for a moment the book unfolds around him and he’s standing in that clearing among the dark red trees and the light of a different sun is falling through the leaves and a creature in white is beckoning him down a path that curves away into darkness. Then he’s back in the big scruffy chair and it’s raining and the table lamps are lit and all he can smell is himself.

  He shivers.

  Another mask: a Shian face with wooden skewers sticking out of its nose and its head hair. Plouterhai: the Questioner. Spirit of Penetrating Inquiry. Penetrating inquiry all right, up its nose. This your one, Ounserrat Soulereya? The patron saint of lawyers? What would the hahndahvi, ex-con, ex-grease-monkey, Narha-speaking amateur knight-advocates be? I’m sure there’s something suitable, way down in the really obscure dream creatures, the bottom nine thousand that have about three followers each. What kind of mask would it wear? Dazed and confused, and under-shaved. Pouchy around the eyes, too much chin. Half an inch of stubble all over. Tired. That most of all. I know exactly its characteristic scent.

  ‘No luck then?’ Gillespie asks. Littlejohn grunts and waves a hand. Deep into it. Warmed within by beer and without by zero-point electric central heating, Andy Gillespie dozes in the big tatty chair. It’s been a long time and much happening since rashers and sausage and two eggs in the cheap hotel on the canal.

  And Eamon Donnan, he thinks. What came to you out of the flapping things that live in the folds of the sacred space? What stepped out of your life into your dreams? Was it something you made up out of your memories and hopes and fantasies, or was it made-to-measure, an off-the-peg deity? How did you learn to dream? Whose tit did you suck it from? And when the hahndahvi came to you, did it know what it saw? Or did it say, get away from me weird half-thing, I don’t recognize you?

  He settles into the chair and almost dreams of open-mouthed, staring-eyed, spiral-painted masks of Ongtith hurting through space. He’s woken by the consciousness that there is a face looming over him. Littlejohn.

  ‘I think we have something.’

  The mask of the Littlejohn hahndahvi is worried.

  The desk is covered in printouts. A starship icon in the top corner of the computer screen shows he’s uplinked to the Fifteenth Fleet Library at ten pounds a minute. Open windows all over the screen. He fetches fresh drinks from the kitchen. ‘This is going to take a bit of telling.

  ‘I had to go right back to the Geduldehanna, the epic poems of the founding of the Nations. They aren’t exactly religious texts because the Shian don’t have a religion, as such, but they’re the most ancient documents their race possesses; they’ve been preserved unchanged for ten thousand years, and before that they were passed down for God knows how many thousands more years as oral literature. They’re a sort of snapshot of the Shian in transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to a technological culture. There are hundreds of the damn things, each Nation has at least one, and each is a thousand pages long; they make the Mahabharata look like a shopping list. And they’re bloody difficult to read, hahndahvi step in and out of them, you can never be sure whether we’re in the physical world or the Dreamplace, and the literary styles fluctuate between modes and Hot and Cool Narha, according to the season in which they’re set. Which is just to say it’s a bitch of a job, so you’ll properly appreciate the magnitude of my discovery.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Let a man tell his tale, will you? I went to the Corrosoun Geduldehan, which is one of the oldest stories in the cycle. The Corrosoun Nation’s fallen a bit from glory over the millennia, but they were one of the most powerful of the early Nations in Central Great Continent, which is the birthplace of Shian civilization as we know and love it today. Basically, it’s this incredibly long and complex and quite unnecessarily detailed account of the establishment and defence of the Corrosoun hunting demesnes against the neighbouring Huskravidis, whom history has treated more favourably than their ancient rivals. I went to this cycle because it’s the only one that makes any mention of something we would call war.’

  ‘I thought the Shian didn’t fight wars.’

  ‘They don’t. Not as we fight wars. Nations don’t mobilize against Nations, they don’t even have nations as we recognize them.’

  ‘I know this.’

  ‘Sorry. Lecture mode is a tough infection to beat.’

  ‘War is displaced rape, and their sexual make-up makes rape impossible for them.’

  ‘You sound like me.’

  ‘I should. I got it from an Irish Times article you wrote about a year back.’

  ‘I used to say something similar about serial killing too.’

  Gillespie smiles wryly, apologetically.

  ‘I’m a scientist,’ Littlejohn continues. ‘If the facts don’t fit the theory, you’re supposed to throw out the theory.’

  ‘Supposed.’

  ‘We’re human. We like a familiar universe around us, that we know how it works, even the nasty stuff, like killing each other. And then these folk come and we don’t know how things work any more. They’ve rewritten the rules on everything else, why not murder?’ Littlejohn downs half his gin in one swallow. ‘When you were a teenager, you know, full of idealism and putting the world to rights and wouldn’t it all be very much bet
ter if only we did this instead of that, did you ever think wouldn’t it be great if, instead of fighting wars, like, say, the Gulf War, or even the Second World War, someone had just quietly blown away Saddam Hussein or Hitler before they started fucking things up, and then there wouldn’t even be a war? One death to prevent millions?’

  ‘Most of my teenage years were talking about girls or football or cars.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I mean, sure, everyone’s thought of it, like if they’d killed off Gerry Adams, or Paisley. Or McIvor Kyle. Jesus God.’

  ‘For some people it’s more than just a good idea,’ Littlejohn says. ‘Now listen to this. Two passages from the Corrosoun Geduldehan. The first is in Cool Narha; I’m translating roughly: “Then the Hold of, ah, Good Killing by the Waterhole made war with the Hold of Fifteen Trees” — the text specifies a species of tree but it won’t translate. “They met at the open place and they fought until the close of the day with sundry weapons.” This is a shit translation.’

  ‘I think that should be “the green before the skinning hut” instead of “open place”, and “edged blades” for “sundry weapons”,’ Gillespie says, coming round the desk to peer over Littlejohn’s shoulder. Littlejohn bristles a moment.

  ‘I bow to your superior knowledge of the vernacular. It goes on…’

  ‘ “Many eyes were taken by the Good Killing Hold”,’ Gillespie translates. ‘ “The people of Fifteen Trees were shamed and did not leave their Hold for hunt or kesh or journeying for a year and a lesser moon. The earth was drunk with blood. Birds gathered in that place to gorge for many days, and the hahndahvi came to live there so that all who passed through that spot were visited for many nights by ominous dreams.” So they do have war.’

  ‘Where were you when I was doing my doctoral thesis?’ Littlejohn asks. ‘They have war in the same way as South American Indians or tribal people in Borneo do: small group to small group. Hunting parties clashing, conflict of demesnes, stuff like that. Small scale, like Scottish inter-clan warfare. Or our own home-grown ethnic head-hunting. More a vendetta than a war. You haven’t heard the second one. This is from a Hot Narha passage, written either during, or about, incidents that took place during, a kesh cycle.’