Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“There is a warning that should be given here,” Director Gregory Smirnov was saying. “We must recognize that this year which we are going to study is a recompensing year, a lefthanded year (a sinister year in the real sense of the word), a contorted year. It is my own belief that one cannot enter a contorted year, even vicariously and experimentally, without himself becoming contorted.”

“With us, who can tell?” Valery asked. That was true. They all had that look about them as if their faces and bodies had, just for a moment, melted like wax and then set again. They of the Institute had always had a little or a lot of that look; this day they had it a lot.

“I win!” Valery cried triumphantly, and she played the Wheel of Fortune card resoundingly. The wheel on the picture card was actually turning, and this was more than optical illusion. When it came to rest, the pointer of the fortune wheel pointed to the name Valery (nobody had noticed before that the names of all of them were printed fine on that card), so Valery had won.

“I will have to discover the old rules and find out how this game was really played,” Aloysius Shiplap said with a touch of sourness. “The game seems to make up its own rules as it goes along.”

“The old rules say that I am always supposed to win,” Valery declared, “and that is the way it is really played.” She overturned the card table, and it was like clattering thunder. It was a very heavy table, not really a card table at all. None of the rest of them except the gigantic Director Gregory would have been able to overturn that weighty thing. The Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt gathered up the valuable pack of Pape Jaune cards. Pape Jaune, the Yellow Joker or the Yellow Dwarf, but who was Pape Jaune really?

“It’s too nice a day to be inside this stinking Institute,” Valery announced. “Oh, I’m sorry, Epikt! That’s almost the same as saying that it’s too nice a day to be inside that big stinking brain of yours, and really I like your big stinking brain. But let’s be outside for a while.” And they burst out like a cloud of April flies. (Some of the rare April flies are people-sized; do not forget that.)

“I wonder if the record-setting lady in the lying-in shop has had her scrat yet?” Valery asked the world.

“I’ll go see,” said the Ancient Scribe extension of Epikt.

“Oh, springtime, springtime!” Valery cried, catching hold of both Aloysius Shiplap and her own unoutstanding husband Charles Cogsworth. “Oh, to be young and foolish in the springtime! I wish that it might last all the year.”

“Of course it will,” Aloysius said. “I thought you knew that.”

And Gregory and Glasser walked on that unkempt ridge that rises above the Institute, and talked about various business while the flaming ducks still pelted down.

“What they are,” said Gregory, “is pieces of the sky. They break off and fall and catch fire. Ultimately the sky is made up entirely of ducks, though scripture mistranslates them as quails. It is because of this composition that we often hear the term ‘duck sky.’ “

“I sure never heard such a term,” Glasser said.

“But scripture does not mistranslate,” the Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt said. “Quails they are, the quails of the flesh-pots. Huge, it’s true, but quails. We have the holy words for evidence: ‘We loathe our manna, and we long for quails.’ “

“That’s Dryden. He’s not scripture,” Gregory admonished.

“He is to me,” the Epikt extension said, “and I speak ex cerebro, from the brain itself.” (But Epikt had, from the human viewpoint, odd literary tastes.)

“Everybody accepts the blasted burning birds,” Glasser said querulously. “Nobody questions them at all today. But I never saw such a thing as this shower of flaming ducks in all my life. What can possibly cause such a phenomenon?”

“Ah, the fellows flew too close to the sun,” Director Gregory explained it.

“ ‘Clement V was pope from 1305 to 1314,’ “ Gregory read from a tape spewing out from a section of Epikt’s brain, from the correlating section. “ ‘And he was pope in Avignon, not in Rome. There was no pope in Rome in those years.’ “

“And John XXII did not become pope till the year 1316,” came another tape from another section of Epikt’s brain, from the explicatory section.

“He’d have been three years old then,” Valery mumbled. “So he matured quite early, but not as early as some members of his family did.”

“Project the whole disputed year of 1313, Epikt,” Director Gregory ordered.

“Impossible,” the machine groaned from its depths. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Project it in the context of only one city then, the town of Amor which had been and would be Roma,” Director Gregory said.

“Oh, all right,” the machine Epikt agreed glumly. “It will be sketchy, though, and not from any fault of mine. There is something inherently sketchy about the persons and events themselves. Whether they were real or not, the things that happened didn’t have much depth to them.”

This is Epikt’s account of the disputed year in the context of the city of Amor.

The year itself was subjectively much longer than one year. The subjective sun rose and set several thousands of times during that compensating year. Indeed, though it was all one unmomentous moment, it was half a dozen decades on its own, less real level. Yet it can be measured, from one All Fool’s Day to the next, and it takes the place of only one objective year.

Of the ruler in Amor during the disputed year, there was less than met the eye. She was small; she was insignificant. She warred against significance and meaning.

Joan Hedge-Green was born on All Fool’s Day (sometimes called New Year Day) of the year 1313. She was but one of an exceptionally large birthing. She was not baptized, although an attempt was made. The water boiled or vaporized away on her approach, and the salt turned to putrid flame: thereafter she was not touched by either salt or water in all her short life. Her brothers at the same birthing had all been baptized John, and she took for herself the equivalent name Joan. She had nothing whatever to do with her sisters of the birthing.

Though she was grammatically feminine, she was a perfect hermaphrodite, a jape, a scrat. She was sometimes called the Pape Jape or the dwarfish jape on account of her small stature. She had deformities, but their nature is not known. She walked and talked on the day of her birth, but in no other way was she remarkable.

She left her hometown on the afternoon of her birth. She left by diabolical conveyance or vehicle, the black-wing express over the randy roads of the low sky. By one account she went to Roma in Italy. By another, she went to the town of Amor, “between the Germanies and Spain.” By a third account, the two towns were the same. She went there, and she set up an antirule or an antireign.

But she did set up court there. She issued coin of the metal known as fool’s gold. The sovereign coin was the sannio, and the system was tredecimal (to the base thirteen).

Joan’s forecourt was known as the Fleshpots of Egypt. (The Egyptian was but one of the motifs of the court; there was also the Babylonian and the Phoenician and others.) She fed her folk on fowl flesh; this was the roasted flesh of giant quail (all of them capons) that fell flaming from the low sky. She fed them on false-fish from that part of her court called the Rivers of Babylon. She fed them on a cheese so rank that it stood by itself, and came on command. She fed them on holy cow; and on unborn calves and colts, on unborn lambs and kids, on unborn cubs and children, all of which were roasted in that part of her court called the Ovens of Moloch.