Hugh Cook - The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

Some people who are in perfect health (and some who are not, such as some who have suffered strokes or varying degrees of severity, or who have been mutilated, or who are under the influence of certain unethical drugs) habitually express themselves by means of a smile which does not run the full length of the mouth, and which can therefore accurately and literally be termed ‘crooked’. Some people can do this with ease, just as some people can wiggle their ears.

Chegory Guy could not have wiggled his ears to save his life (except by the expedient of grasping the said ears with his hands and causing them to move by an application of manual pressure). He was completely bereft of innate ear-wriggling talent, just as he was born without poetic potential. Nevertheless, since he had a fair degree of control of the voluntary muscles which supervise the lips, he could no doubt have managed a crooked smile if his life had been at stake. However, he did not. Indeed, he rarely (if ever) did anything so unnatural as smiling crookedly. Even after the most diligent research, it has proved impossible to find a single witness [The Originator appears to have succumbed to a fit of what Kerkransolifski Bodo has so neatly termed ‘that painful accuracy which makes all Truth impossible’. To preserve the communicability of that which the Originator has elsewhere managed to capture in phrase, and to lessen the incidence of repetitive strain injury among our scribes, an exercise in pedantry which extends for no less than ten thousand words has here been deleted. By Order, Sptyx Rhataporo, Surveyor of the Office of Overview.]

[What, pray tell, is wrong with pedantry? I applaud the Originator’s outbreak of accuracy and must severely deprecate Rhataporo’s unwarranted excision of the same. Brude, Pedant Particular.]

After Chegory Guy had confessed to his true identity Log Jaris conducted a gentle interrogation which soon told him all he needed to know about his young visitor. Then the bullman took down an amphora and poured mugs of foaming brown fluid for himself, the fisherman and Chegory.

‘What’s this?’ said Chegory, looking into the mug with the deepest of suspicion.

‘Something for the pain,’ said Log Jaris.

‘The pain?’ said Chegory.

‘To exist is to suffer,’ said the bullman. ‘Learned philosophers proved this way back in the dawn of human history, whereupon the greatest genius of the day was assembled to provide a remedy. That remedy you have before you. Drink! For by drinking we prove ourselves true students of the higher philosophy.’

Chegory had never heard anyone espouse such a doctrine before, though it is certain the dogma was not the bullman’s original invention; indeed, it is rumoured that the Korugatu philosophers of far-distant Chi’ash-lan first evolved a similar theory over a thousand years ago, and have laboured mightily ever since in an attempt to refine it by practical research.

‘This is a drug, isn’t it?’ said Chegory.

‘You would worry about that?’ said Log Jaris, with open amusement. ‘You, a crazed adventurer who daily dares life and limb Downstairs for the sole purpose of indulging a craving for zen? Will what’s in this mug turn your insides out or split your skull to spill your brains upon your feet?’

‘No, but-’

But it was liquor, surely.

‘Make a choice,’ said Logjaris, with less amusement than before. ‘Are you my friend or my enemy? My guest or my prisoner? Come, boy, it’s not bub, it is but beer.’

Then Chegory gathered his courage, and did what he needed to do if he was to survive. He lifted the mug of beer to his lips. He drank. What was the alternative? To be trampled to death by the bullman, surely. To be battered and gored, pulped and destroyed. Nevertheless — was that not the better course? For is not addiction to drink a fate far worse than death? And was not young Chegory well-launched upon such a fate? For he had been boozing in the lair of Firfat Labrat just the day before, and now here he was drinking up large in a scurvy speakeasy in the worst of low company imaginable.

But Chegory lacked the courage to die. He wanted to live, to escape from this place of evil, this hell-hole with its amphorae filled with liquid death, these all-too-jolly fishermen who had already succumbed to the sly seductive wiles of unholy chemical combinations. He wanted to walk once more beneath the clean sky. To walk again in the sunlight. To be pure, and law abiding, and at peace with himself and the world.

So drink he did.

Remember he was but a poor ignorant Ebrell Islander whose philosophical tutoring had been neglected entirely. He had yet to learn that ends seldom justify means, thus he did not realise that his hopes of escaping to a life of purity and peace were doomed when, to secure his survival, he adopted means that were foul, unclean, unlawful, destructive, polluted and corrupt, and evil, immoral, unethical and incontinent, and vile, dirty and sickening to boot. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that by sharing the bullman’s beer he did indeed enhance his short-term chances of survival, and of escaping from the speakeasy with both his life and his hide intact.

‘You don’t look happy,’ said Log Jaris. ‘What’s wrong? Is there something the matter with the beer?’

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Chegory, with a touch of desperation. ‘I mean, what I said — Shabble, the soldiers, Varazchavardan, the whole thing — you think that’s some kind of joke?’

‘Oho, we have us a most unhappy little fellow here!’ said Log Jaris. ‘Why, from the way he talks, you’d think him up to his neck in sharks already. Yet the worst he’s dared already. What’s worse than zen? Naught that I know of. The rest is but trouble in trifles. Don’t worry about it! Soon enough it’ll all blow over.’

‘It can’t, it won’t, I’m done for, there’s nowhere to hide.’ Thus Chegory, in something of a wail.

‘Can’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘You’re very free with your can’t and your won’t. How comes this can’t and won’t so freely from a strong man like you? Have you not legs you can run with? If bad comes to worse then surely your legs can carry you. Jal Japone will welcome you surely. After all, you’re the son of Impala Guy.’

Chegory was infuriated by the jesting tone which had entered the bullman’s voice. He wanted to pour out his protests in a flood of incoherent anger. Instead, he restrained and controlled himself. He said merely:

‘Not Zolabrik. Not ever. I’m not running away.’

‘Oho!’ said Log Jaris. ‘A hero indeed! Yet it wishes to live regardless. Very well! A change of face will do it. Do what I did, my bloodskinned friend. Hide your face forever by means of transmogrification.’

‘By means of what?’ said Chegory. ‘You mean you weren’t — you chose — you — you-’

Log Jaris laughed.

‘I wasn’t born like this,’ said he. ‘In truth I’m a man of Ashdan descent. My hometown was Pondros Yermento, which-’

‘I know, I know,’ said Chegory, cutting him off. ‘I’ve lived with Ashdans long enough, you know, they talk Ashmolea no end.’

‘Well, if you know you know,’ said Log Jaris, more than a little offended by Chegory’s interruption.

‘He’s only a boy,’ said a fisherman. ‘Don’t be hard on him.’

‘I’m not being hard on him!’ said Log Jaris. ‘I’m offering him escape. Anonymity forever! The secret of transmogrification.’

‘I’ll worry out my own problems,’ said Chegory.

Thus he failed to learn about the transmogrification machine Downstairs which, if he had dared to use it, might have turned him into dragonman or dog, centaur or merman, satyr or rundicorn, giant or dwarf. Or — better yet — he might have kept his born proportions while losing his skin of Ebrell Island red. He might have come out black like the Ashdans, or white like the leucodermic Varazchavardan. He might have emerged in an elegant shade of grey like the Janjuladoola of Ang, or in the pink- tending-to-pallor of the natives of Wen Endex. Or bark-brown like many of the peoples of Argan, or strangulation blue like the scholars of Odrum.