Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world.

“Let’s get on with it, good people,” Epikt rumbled the next day. “Me, I’m to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year 1323. Well, come, come, take your places, and let’s get the thing started.” And Epiktistes’s great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pooka-dooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke.

“Everybody ready to have his throat cut?” Gregory asked cheerfully.

“Cut them,” said Diogenes Pontifex, “but I haven’t much hope for it. If our yesterday’s essay had no effect, I cannot see how one English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect.”

“We have perfect test conditions here,” said the machine Epikt. “We set out a basic text from Cobblestone’s History of Philosophy. If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every other text, and the world.

“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world,” the machine Epiktistes said, “ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important.”

“Regard the world,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again. We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it.”

“Push the button, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov.

From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year 1323, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain country, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Aloysius asked.

“Let’s look at the evidence,” said Gregory.

The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.

“There is still the stick and the five notches in it,” said Gregory. “It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed.”

“The arts remain as they were,” said Aloysius. “Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red, and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes.”

“There’s still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else,” said Valery. “I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer.”

“All is not lost,” said Aloysius. “We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. ‘Don’t let them take the hickory nuts away,’ I prayed.”

They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked hickory nuts with stone fisthammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped by magic to change it.

“Epikt has failed us,” said Gregory. “We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the finest weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and placed all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?”

“Ask it, ask it,” said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world—the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius, and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube.

“What do we do now, Epikt?” Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose,” said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. “Is that any help?”

“It may be some help,” Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. “It is from an old (What’s old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes.”

“Let Epikt tell it,” said Valery. “He does it so much better than you do.” Valery went behind Epikt to the speaking tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking.

“The wife wastes one wish for a sausage,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery. “A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer’s stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest.”

“You can’t forget it, Epikt!” Aloysius cried in alarm. “The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!” And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“Oh yes, now I remember,” Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. “The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife’s nose. So things were the way they had been before.”

“But we don’t want it the way it was before!” Valery howled. “That’s the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins.”

“Take me as a mystic or don’t take me at all,” Epikt signed off.

“Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things,” Gregory said. “What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?”

“Willy McGilly was the folk hero,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, “and he made it out of slippery elm wood.”

“Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?” Aloysius asked.

“We gotta,” said Epikt.

“Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into—”

“Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?” Gregory asked excitedly.

“We sure will try,” said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. “I never did like those Avatars.”

You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec machine.

“Give me the word, Epikt,” Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slinger.

“Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!” Epikt howled.

Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery elm dart in his heart.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. “It must have. I’m here. I wasn’t in the last one.”

“Let’s look at the evidence,” Gregory suggested calmly.

“Damn the evidence!” Willy McGilly cussed. “Remember where you heard it first.”

“Is it started yet?” Glasser asked.

“Is it finished?” Audifax O’Hanlon questioned.

“Push the button, Epikt!” Diogenes barked. “I think I missed part of it. Let’s try it again.”