Hugh Cook - The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

The party began to get lively. Logjaris and Uckermark broke into song. A very strange song with a chorus in which they imitated dog, cock, cat and seal. Much to the bemusement of Chegory Guy, who had never seen a seal in his life, nor heard of one either.

In the end, most of the men had consumed so much of this toxic substance known as alcohol that they had reached the vomiting stage. It is very strange, but people who should know far better will often spend good money — excellent money, the best that work can buy — to go through this experience of overloading their systems with potent poisons. They will do this not once but repeatedly — which supports the theories of the eminent philosopher Stupa, who holds that to exist is to suffer, and that human beings are constructed in such a way that they value suffering above all else.

At last Chegory could stand the company of these drunks no longer. He left them, and Ivan Pokrov found him much later sitting alone on the rocks outside.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Pokrov.

‘What isn’t?’ said Chegory. ‘You — this is craziness! A demon in the palace and all you — all you do is get drunk!’

‘I’m not drunk,’ said Pokrov. ‘The others are, but I’m not.’

‘But you’ve been drinking that, that alcohol stuff, haven’t you?’

‘What" of it?’ said Pokrov.

‘It’s against the law!’ said Chegory.

Pokrov laughed. Softly.

‘It is!’ insisted Chegory. ‘And for good reason! It rots you, doesn’t it? It kills you, right? Isn’t that so?’

There was a pause while Pokrov thought his way around the problem. Then the analytical engineer said:

‘You want to be perfect?’

‘Well,’ said Chegory, ‘I don’t want to kill myself, that’s for sure!’

‘We are mortal, you know,’ said Pokrov.

By using this inclusive ‘we’, Pokrov was perpetrating a half-truth, for technically Pokrov was immortal. He would never die of old age. Yet he could be killed.

‘We’re mortal?’ said Chegory. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

Ivan Pokrov responded by giving him the first and most annoying of the Seven Unsatisfactory Explanations:

‘When you’re older you’ll understand.’

‘No,’ said Chegory, ‘that’s not good enough. You can’t get out of it just like that. What the hell are you on about? Drinking, that’s drugs and stuff. What the hell’s that got to do with mortality? Hey? Come on, man, what is this crap?’

‘When I say we’re mortal,’ said Pokrov, ‘I mean we can’t live free of risk.’ That was true. It was as true of himself as it was of Chegory. ‘So your — your obsession with health is — not exactly misplaced, I wouldn’t say that. But — let’s say it’s, well, overstated. You’re in danger of becoming a fanatic.’

‘Oh, that’s all crap/ said Chegory. ‘You’re trying to tell me we should — what? Take poison? Because — because what? Because everyone dies? Is that any reason to hurry along to get killed?’

‘You are a bit fanatical about this,’ said Pokrov.

‘Fanatical!’ said Chegory. ‘Is that what you call it? I’ll tell you what I call it! I call it serious! And why? Because when you’re a stinking Ebby, man, you better be serious, because people are out to kill you, that’s why, you can’t fuck up because then you’ve had it, man, just one mistake and that’s it, wham! You never lived with, with people hunting you, you walk in the street and you hear, well, things, people say things, that’s it, then you want to smash them smash them smash — bones, you could smash, blood, I could smash — I could kill some bugger! That’s serious, man! Then now, okay, now there’s a demon, there’s all hell running loose, and you, you’re, it’s like — I mean, what’s going down here, man? You think this is some kind of joke? Lives on the line and you, you crazy shits, you just sit around, you just get smashed, and me — serious, why not? There’s people I — well, care for, okay? But, oh, I’m an Ebby, right? So it’s not serious for you, oh no, suddenly you’re this great big adult, I’m a kid or something, mortality, all that crap, what’s that supposed to prove?’

Thus Chegory Guy.

In brief.

In truth, he soliloquised long, so full of hate, rage and frustration that at first he never noticed Ivan Pokrov’s departure. When he realised the analytical engineer had walked off, abandoning him without apology, he was so full of fury that he was ready to kill someone.

There was only one thing to do.

Chegory did it.

He hunted out his favourite sledgehammer and expended his rage by smashing some much-hated boulders to pieces, sweating in his violence until his body and emotions were exhausted entirely, and, reeling with fatigue, he sought some place to sleep.

Dawn came to the island of Jod. The dark of night flowed into freshets of blood as the sky haemorrhaged. A bruised and bloated carbuncular sun oozed from the crimson horizon like a bloodclot incarnadine forced from a full-fist wound by slow but remorseless alluvial pressures. Red glowed the bloodstone of the streets of Injiltaprajura. Red was the brooding coral strand which fringed the Laitemata. Red were the beaches of Scimitar and red was the seaweed of the bloodstained lagoon.

But white was the Analytical Institute. The marvellous building uprose upon Jod like a cool confection of ice and snow, a manifest miracle in this mosquito-tormented clime of sweat remorseless and fevers oppressive.

Unfortunately, within this building of beauty was a scene of the utmost depravity. In Ivan Pokrov’s quarters a number of comatose bodies lay slumped in a stuporous sleep hard to distinguish from profound concussion. The owners of those bodies had given themselves to a profound, shameless debauch of the flesh. They had overindulged in obscene and poisonous drugs and were now suffering the consequences.

Among those who lay there as if dead were the wizards Pelagius Zozimus and Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin. Once their apprentice days are behind them wizards seldom get drunk, for when they become intoxicated these masters of the mirific run risks far greater than those faced by lesser beings. However, these two had got as thoroughly wasted as the rest of them.

Even the cutthroat Thayer Levant had drunk himself into a helpless stupor, despite his highly developed sense of self-preservation.

This was the scene which confronted a sober and bad-tempered Chegory Guy when he came in from the servants’ quarters where he had grabbed a little sleep in the last part of bardardornootha. He relieved his emotions by kicking everybody in sight. A few groans greeted this performance. But nobody was actually roused to consciousness by Chegory’s endeavours, and the groans were but sleeptalk complaints from the dim depths of drug-bewildered nightmares.

Then Chegory found Shabble, who was hiding in a fish tank, pretending to be a stone. Chegory grabbed hold of the feckless one. Shabble was cold and inert in his hand.

‘Wake up,’ said Chegory, tossing Shabble into the air.

The globular one described a perfect parabola. Plunged toward the floor. Then snapped into sun-bright life and swept upwards in a tight, flight-delighting spiral.

‘Hello, Chegory!’ said Shabble happily.

‘Hi.’ said Chegory' moodily.

Then picked up a scimitar which one of the sleepers had plundered from the pink palace the night before. While he waited for his comrades to rouse he practised a few head-lopping strokes.

Pelagius Zozimus was first to wake. He woke from force of habit. He was a master chef, after all, and one of the burdens of a cook’s life is the necessity to rise before long before others are awake. Think of this when next you seat yourself in your dining room to banquet upon that delicate concoction of snake’s eggs and the flesh of half a dozen different serpents which there awaits your delight. It didn’t get there by itself, you know!