by Rhys Hughes
The spell which lurked in the crumbling manuscripts was less specific than he had assumed. Once chanted correctly, it summoned to one place and time all the incarnations of the operator. Not merely those of the past but also every future self. Possibly it was a sin to conduct the ritual. More likely Belperron’s crime was his ambition, his desire to create a private empire. The brutality of this scheme was so great, its evil so deep, that it negated all his previous good karma. It returned his soul to the bottom of the evolutionary mound. His next incarnation, the one destined after his death, was far below the merely human. And all the subsequent incarnations were gradual improvements on this lowest being, a slow return to the long climb back to fish, reptile, dog, ape, barbarian. Recorded history is not so very old. All the past heroes he had ever been were with him in the house, but so were all the base creatures he would become. There were only several hundred of the former, but millions, even billions, of the latter.
The future of Belperron was longer than his past. But only for his soul, not his current body. During the hour which followed the successful implementation of the spell, the past heroes who formed his invincible army were devoured, stung, bitten, strangled or crushed to a second death by the enormous variety of beasts also present. There was no escape. The exits were locked. A rider who passed the house saw it shake on its foundations and assumed he was witnessing a tremor. He did not pause. The shadow of a crocodile passed across an upper window. The wicks were out and smoking, so this hideous profile must have been cast by a more surprising source of light, a knot of fireflies or glow-worms. Much later, when looters came to raid the house, they found only a jumble of rotting carcasses in peculiar combinations. The stench of millennia chased them out. Belperron himself had died of the plague. A single germ had entered his bloodstream and multiplied. It was an almost infinitely debased version of himself.
Jellydämmerung!
“Out, vile jelly!”
King Lear III.7
A party should never be like that.
It should be like this:
Take an inspired setting. The lawns of a large house in a wealthy country, and the time: the start of a successful decade in a risky and intriguing century. There is a host with a pretty wife, but his arms are around the even prettier daughter of his principal guest, the President of the World Bank. He is dancing or telling jokes, possibly both. When he winks there is general applause, for he is certainly the most popular man on the planet, or at least in this hemisphere, which is mostly ocean, sherry and japes.
There are no clouds here, but plenty of storms above the dwellings of his neighbours, all shut tight, doors and mouths. None of them have been invited, so this is almost a perfect celebration of his promotion, long overdue. As he twirls and jives, he adjusts the cables and ropes which hold him to the fertile earth. Pulleys and grapples creak with the strain, much of it emotional. To maximise his joy, a minor adjustment of incident can now be made.
“Anyone for croquet?” he cries suddenly.
The servants drop their trumpets and rush into the house to collect the mallets and hoops. Also the jars holding the heads of his rivals, every single one since childhood. These are unsealed with a satisfying hiss and tipped onto the sweet grass. The smell of vinegar, the tap of seasoned wood on pickled nose.
That’s how it should be. But it wasn’t . . .
Not by a long stretch.
The sacking of Rome by the Huns is a teachable fact; the sacking of Maxim Sergeyevich Popov by his employers less so. Yet who is to say which event has had a greater impact on the fate of humanity?
The house was small and tatty and there was only a dirt yard out back, and the country was going bankrupt, and someone had interfered with the calendar, and they still hadn’t owned up, and the wife wasn’t pretty and no Presidents were present. In their place was Mr Genserico and he wasn’t drinking his wine.
“You know why I wanted to speak with you?” he asked Maxim, who nodded and fidgeted with his confidence.
“Yes, sir, and that explains this lavish spread.”
Mr Genserico pinched a hair out of his glass and pouted. “Parties aren’t really my thing,” he said sharply, “but even if they were I think this one would be inappropriate.”
“Why is that, sir, if you please?”
But the wife, standing near, not being a danceable daughter, angled her lips in front of the discussion and blurted: “You mean there’s no salary increase with his promotion?”
“Hush, dear!” warned Maxim, casting a grapple and hauling himself forward to catch Mr Genserico’s reply.
“Promotion? Heavens, the company is barely able to avoid liquidation in the current economic climate. On the contrary, we are forced to implement serious cuts to reduce the cost of our overheads. Only essential staff will be retained. I can’t say how brutal we must be to remain solvent, but a start has to be made somewhere. I’m sorry, Maxim, but I’m going to have to let you go.”
“After all he’s done!” squealed the wife, but she stood back at a safe distance, partly because being let go from this company had a different meaning than in other organisations. Maxim closed his eyes. Mr Genserico opened his jacket to reveal an enormous pair of scissors, almost shears, slung from his neck and glinting on his chest. He grasped the handles and lifted them.
A dozen snips and the mooring ropes were severed. A flash and Maxim was hurtling out of the yard, into the sky, which was cloudless save for over his house, and far away toward the northern horizon, a dwindling puppet, a speck with freezing teeth, a frown of disbelief channelling the wind across his brow in eddies visible as friction burns.
“It’s still a company to inspire pride,” added Mr Genserico, as he replaced the scissors and buttoned up his jacket, “and maybe future generations will want rubber bands again. Who knows?”
She wasn’t looking, so he poured away his wine over a decaying croquet hoop, believing it to be a bonsai bower, out of season.
As Maxim flew, he thought: now I’ll never be powerful enough to crush my rivals! It was a snapping shame, considering he was the company’s best salesman in the whole of Australia and had expected to stretch his vocation around his entire life, preventing his purpose, whatever that was, from bursting. Rubber bands are also good for securing certain types of important parcel. Useful things.
The company had protected him like a parrot which knows how to bark. Cheaper than buying a real dog, but toothless. TWANGS R US was no longer prepared to reward loyalty, success, expanded service.
Employees were traditionally chosen at the gates of the womb, before they could understand the concept of indolence. One end of a giant band was looped around the child’s skeleton, the other fixed to the exact spot where it was born. A metal spike was hammered deep into the ground, through wood and stone and soil, sometimes into rooms directly below, for infants can be delivered on more levels than in ways. Even atop tombs and sewers.
They learned to crawl and walk in working hours, always in a straight line. When they reached a responsible age they had already posted themselves abroad. The progress of their lives and careers had tangible tension. The rubber band could be strummed higher up a major scale as it slowly stretched. The point came when they were no longer strong enough to pull against this force. But they dare not give up, for that would mean an instant return to a culture no longer their own. This fear kept them going, aided with guy-ropes and anchors.
Maxim’s alienation and achievement were approximately 6000 miles.
The slackening of the band around his spine as it contracted was a relief at least. He had forgotten how relaxation felt. A vector like his colleagues, his force was finally diminishing as it gobbled its inherent direction. Mostly his inertia propelled him now, far across the equator to Vladivostok.
The ships were rusting under the cranes, some of which dropped pieces of themselves onto the ruddy decks. Many vessels were piled high with the metallic dust of crumbled lifting-gear. In the Chudesnista café, sailors lou
nged in striped shirts and tasselled berets. A piano tinkled outside. The talk was of submarines and whores.
One the roof of the café, more men sat at a long table. A feast was spread before them, a match for Maxim’s imagined party. On the grandest chair sat a figure vaguely familiar, maybe from pictures or lies. Here the talk was of high finance and wide mergers. But eating was the order of the afternoon and most minutes were devoted to seconds. All the food was cunningly constructed from gelatine.
There was a single free seat at the other end of the table, and it was onto this that Maxim landed, for here he had been born. The sailors below were still recommending brass periscopes and his mother. She had played the piano, maybe still did, right now.
Maxim couldn’t be sure: he had never seen her.
Nor his father, unless the company had legally adopted him, which was likely. He sat trembling, the spike between his knees, driven down into the kitchens of the café, where it was used as a sort of inverted skewer for storing peppers and plums. It was hot against his thigh, for it was currently cooking a kebab.
The peppers and plums up here were sickly sweet, replicas, delights for the satiated palate. He stammered:
“Forgive my intrusion. I don’t speak Russian.”
“?? ?????? ? ??? ???????????? ??? ????? ?????????? ??? ?? ?????” said the man next to him.
The evident leader of the group leaned closer, elbows in trifle, to scrutinise Maxim with porcine eyes. He remarked:
“Not a spy. Industrial sabotage perhaps?”
“I was made redundant,” answered Maxim, “from a global rubber band monopoly, TWANGS R US, earlier today.”
“You do speak Russian!” accused his neighbour.
“Only that single letter. But I was a superb salesman, a real champion of the deal. It’s so unfair that I was let go! And I was led to believe I was going to be promoted. All the things I might have be able to afford! No use weeping over them now, I suppose. Even if my tears reach them they’ll only get wet. But the experience has made me very nervous. Feel the pulse in my neck.”
“A most irregular request! Thus we decline.”
“No matter. It would burst clean out of my cardiovascular system if this rubber band wasn’t holding it inside.”
The swinish leader threw down his silk napkin and declared: “You’ve already convinced me to buy one! With such talent maybe you ought to work for us? This banquet can double as your welcome dinner to our company. It’s not a firm but a wobble. We work flexible hours. We are a globule, I mean global, jelly monopoly.”
“An inspired setting after all! Hurrah!”
They toasted him with molten jelly in vast brandy glasses, handing him one as curvaceous as a proper mistress or improper wife. Can a toast be moulded from gelatine? Yes, for any deceit is possible, and in olden days, teacups were fabricated from crinoline, houses from hills, health from leeches, even profits from whimsy.
“?? ?????? ? ??? ???????????? ??? ????? ?????????? ??? ?? ?????!”
Another voice broke through the moment of redemption. A figure had climbed the stairs to the roof. It was Mr Genserico again and his jacket was open, billowing awfully.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Maxim,” he began, “but TWANGS R US are forced to make even broader cuts than anticipated. Now we have to let the furniture go, and we own all of this.”
The feasters kicked back their chairs and stood up, recoiling to the edges of the roof, grasping the railings. But Maxim was too tardy. Still lagged by his flight, he sat meekly as Mr Genserico severed the cords holding his seat in place.
It returned to its point of origin.
They watched him go with it. “Was he a promising fellow? Can’t honestly say. Meeting adjourned.”
The rubber band around the chair must have been much stronger than the one about his bones, for it catapulted him toward the west without any argument from its molecular twin. Ice crystals formed on the rim of his brandy glass as he entered the stratosphere. He reached the apex of his curve and exhaled the last of his air. He was insensible for the rest of the voyage, until his final descent the following morning. Night flights were something he had always planned to avoid, because he didn’t trust black sky not to be solid. It didn’t and wasn’t matter, so he remained safe. Slowly he recovered his waking mind.
He had crossed China and Mongolia and the Central Asian Republics and Armenia, greater and lesser, into Europe. Now he passed over the Balkans and Italy, where the fin of a subsonic passenger jet sliced his original band. There was water below, blue and warm but speckled with discarded rubbish. He soon noticed the large balloon and the small ship. The first was level with his chair, at the altitude of a glance from a head on a broken neck; the second far below, linked to it by a string. The ship was flying the balloon: so it seemed, but appearances may be deceptive. His chair was also connected to the ship, which was plainly his new destination.
It was a metal vessel similar to those seen in Vladivostok, but in better condition. He plummeted, knuckles white on the armrests as the chair span, landing on the deck with a monumental crack. The integrity of the seat wasn’t compromised. That’s craftsmanship for you, and he felt the need to comment on this, aloud.
He was quickly contradicted by a man who emerged from a cabin and spat angrily: “No, this boat is the craftsmanship, and I’m its skipper. It houses the workshop of a master carpenter, and that’s me! I spend my time carving chairs and tables and wardrobes for TWANGS R US agents to sit on, eat off, thump and scrape.”
“Very commendable. But what happens after that?”
“Why, then I dispatch them across the world. My name isn’t Hassan Slobber, but that’s what I call myself.”
“What is that coastline there?”
The Captain scratched his head at the oddness of the question. “I’d say it was a natural feature separating land from sea. Why do you ask? Are you some kind of vulgar tourist? Don’t you appreciate quality bevelling when you see it? Have you no eye for detail?”
“What projects are you currently working on?”
“Sideboards and dressers, but production has been held up by a communiqué from head office. They want me to reduce output for the foreseeable future, due to a recess in international trade. I believe the world markets are having a rest.”
“I guess they deserve one,” sighed Maxim.
The Captain spat again. Saliva deliquesced on his chin like fake gems on a hot rock. “Aye, but what on? Answer me that, trespasser! Not on my chairs, that’s for sure!”
“A hard business, I agree. Softer in your position, if you include cushions. But tell me, do you have a sizable crew to assist you in your work? Who oils the lathes and sharpens the teeth of your saws? Have you considered using a rubber band for a transmission belt? Do you enjoy the services of a cook and navigator?”
“No, not one extra man. I toil alone.”
“Impossible! I hear somebody moving about in the hold. Now they are coming up a ladder. If it isn’t a crewman, who can it be? Is this a sea where the pirates are already aboard before they attack? That’s an analogue of my marriage, you know.”
Maxim and the Captain turned to regard this new intruder. First a head emerged from a hatch, then the body it was perched on. Nothing was broken on that frame. It lubbered across the deck, jacket snapping in the breeze like a sail or ambition.
“Mr Genserico! What’s the problem this time?”
“Mismanagement mostly, but we’re gradually sorting that out. Sorry to inform you that the business situation is much worse than we feared. We’re going to have to let our luxury manufacturing centres go. My apologies also to you, Captain Slobber.”
Two shiny blades reflected the sky and the balloon within it. A string was cut and the bag of hydrogen rushed up to the edge of space. For a moment, Maxim was tempted to laugh.
“That’s all? A very minor saving indeed.”
The Captain said softly: “The balloon was keeping us afloat. Now I commend my talents to the s
quids.”
Still clutching his glass, Maxim moved to the rails and looked over the side. One end of the band was attached to the keel of the ship. The other vanished into the depths.
As they were suddenly dragged to the seabed, he acted spontaneously. He inverted the huge glass and pushed it over his head. The smell of brandy jelly was unbearably pleasant. Down they sank, pulled remorselessly by a length of stretched rubber thicker than any Maxim had seen outside the speculative brochures of the Research Department. The growing pressure kneaded his chest like a slow punch from a cosmic fist, pushing the air out of his lungs into his improvised helmet, which tried to rise away from his shoulders but was kept in place by his ears, working as barbs. Condensation obscured his vision of the marine life which undulated past him: turtles and rays and crayfish.
He kept hold of the rails, paralysed by this dive, the first of his hitherto unexciting life. The Captain drowned somewhere beyond the reach of his sympathy. And that’s a salutary lesson for all of us. In any lifespan, there’s only a certain amount of pity which can be used. In your case that amount is x or y, in mine it’s z. Whatever the quantity, each subsequent gesture of compassion reduces that total by a single unit. Thus it’s not really wise to spend it on strangers. Else you may find that zero has been reached when you most need it: for yourself when stranded in an inhospitable situation, like Maxim. Now he wished his rubber band hadn’t been severed, for he would have preferred to return to Vladivostok.
