Hugh Cook - The Worshippers and the Way

"Joma?" said Hatch, challenging the silence with his sister's official name.

He was answered by the silence of spiderwebs, the prophecy of stone.

But then, these days his sister was not answering to Joma.

Instead, she was insisting on being called by the ridiculous name which she had taken when she entered upon her brief-lived marriage: Penelope Flute.

A slight splash told Hatch where to look. He strode into the bathroom and there found his sister immersed in a tub of water.

This annoyed him intensely. Hatch had scant tolerance for folly, so the lunacy of his sister's bathing habits had long been a source of ireful exasperation.

"Joma," said Hatch, endeavoring to suppress his vexation as he looked down on his waterlogged sister. "We have to talk."

"Do you not think," said Penelope, looking up at him from the bathtub, "that there is a certain degree of impropriety involved in bearding your sister in her bathroom?"

This was a question to which there was no established answer, since the Frangoni did not usually have baths, let alone bathrooms. When they wanted to wash then they went to the river just like everyone else, which was by far and away the cheapest and most sensible method of resolving the hygienic question.

"I do not consider," said Hatch, "that there is any impropriety involved in seeing my sister at any time when she is fully dressed."

Penelope was so dressed, for she had been fully clothed when she had immersed herself in her tub of water. This immersion was a part of her religious praxis, for Penelope was an Evolutionist.

Since dawn, the purple-skinned Frangoni female had been steeping herself in the water – which was decidedly muddy – in order to encourage her transformation into a fish. At the moment of the Changing of Forms, her clothes would become scales, hence she was careful never to get wet unless she was wearing them.

Penelope believed her transformation to a piscatorial mode of existence to be imminent, for thus she had been advised by her Perfect Master, whom she believed to be infallible. The Perfect Master in question was Edgerley Eden, a centaur who dwelt in Hepko Cholo, an urban enclave to the east of the Yamoda River. Eden claimed his own transformation into centaur shape to be proof of the coming General Evolution, of which he had knowledge (or so he said) thanks to his studies under an alleged Hermit Crab of Untunchilamon, an improbable individual said to be a philosopher a billion years old.

Now it was a matter of record that anyone who cared to pay the entrance fee could penetrate the Temple of Change in Hepko Cholo and gaze therein upon the horseflesh-manflesh configuration which constituted Edgerley Eden's corporeal form. Hatch had never been, but knew several reliable witnesses who had, including his own elder brother (Oboro Bakendra) and the ever-reliable Shona of the Combat College. On occasion, Hatch had also seen Eden from a distance when the centaur was promenading in the open sunlight, or bathing in the Yamoda.

Yet if Eden had truly chosen this centaur form of his own free will – which was what he claimed – then his choice was illogical in the extreme. For if the world was truly to be inundated by a Great Flood – which was what Eden taught, and what all Evolutionists believed – then it was hard to see how the possession of a horse's legs, belly and tail would be conducive to either happiness or survival. Unfortunately, this note of illogic had yet to strike Penelope herself, even though she had personally decided to meet The End Of The World As We Know It in the form of a catfish.

For his part, Hatch thought the whole of evolutionary theory to be but a total nonsense.

As for this alleged Hermit Crab, enlightened philosopher and Evolutionist extraordinary – well, Hatch had seen the crabs of both land and sea in the course of his peregrinations round Parengarenga, and was convinced that your average crab is no more enlightened than a scorpion. To imagine an unaverage Crab that gave lofty lectures on the Victory of Mind over Form was quite beyond his capacity.

In search of confirmation of his own scepticism, Hatch had consulted with the Combat College, which to his great satisfaction had given him an absolute assurance that there was no such thing as an intelligent crab, let alone a talking crab. This the Combat College had proved out by an exhaustive search of every available database. Crabs were recorded on a great many of the billions of worlds known to humanity, but not a single such animal had yet advanced to the stage of needing to learn its table manners.

Thus Edgerley Eden's Hermit Crab was confirmed as an impossibility.

As for Eden himself, a centaur in the flesh – why, there was no great mystery about that, since centaurs were common in the Permissive Dimensions. Indeed, on some worlds known to the Combat College databases, centaurs were almost as common as dragons. All in all, it was quite reasonable to presume that Eden had been born into a small population of centaurs existing somewhere within a lifetime's traveling distance of Dalar ken Halvar, for all that Eden claimed to have been born as a human on the Ebrell Islands, and to have ventured to Untunchilamon as a humanformed pirate.

Be that as it may, Penelope was certainly enraptured by Eden and his teachings, and donations consequent upon her devotion had led her into debt. There was also the cost of the bath and deliveries of bathwater to bear in mind. Outside of the Combat College, there was no such thing as running water in Dalar ken Halvar, so every drop used for every purpose had to be lugged from the Yamoda River, and such lugging was expensive if done in any great quantity.

"Joma," said Hatch, again challenging his sister with her lawful birthname.

"My name," said Penelope, with that studied female insolence which she had brought to such a pitch of perfection, "is Penelope.

That's my name. If you want to speak to me, then use it."

Hatch brought his wrist to his mouth then kissed it in the Frangoni manner, seeking thereby to moderate his anger.

"Penelope, then," said Hatch, still struggling to control the rage which threatened to upset his judgment as he looked down on the woman in the bathtub. "Penelope. We must talk."

Penelope closed her eyes. She had perfected this manoeuvre during a previous spasm of religious enthusiasm. Her last Perfect Master had believed (or had claimed to believe) that sleep is the better part of life, and that wakefulness is at best a necessary evil. One of his sidelines had been organizing orgies, since he had held orgiastic excess to be the best available soporific. (Hatch had argued about this, claiming that there was nothing to beat a good solid blow on the head for ensuring unconsciousness, but he had lost that argument, or at least Penelope had claimed he had lost it).

"Laa-mo," hummed Penelope.

It was the going-to-sleep mantra taught to her by her previous Perfect Master.

Hatch fished a sodden sponge out of the foot-bowl by the bath. He kissed it, then let it fall. Obedient to the basic laws of physics, the sponge accelerated under the gravitational pull of the planet, and, like a meteorite dragged in from the cold and vacuumous wastelands of outer space, it went hurtling down through the atmosphere until it slammed into Penelope's face.

"Wah!" said Penelope, waking up in great hurry.

"Don't fool around," said Hatch, allowing a hint of his anger to show, "because I'm not in the mood. You're in debt to the tune of half a hundred scorpions, which is just a fraction less than the worth of your flesh."

A scorpion was a gold coin issued by the Silver Emperor. It was exactly equivalent in value to the zeal issued by the Bralsh.

The zeal, however, was a small ring of nine-carat gold bearing interior and exterior banker's marks, whereas the scorpion was a thin coin with a milled edge, with a crown imaged on the face and, on the obverse, the pincer-wielding arachnid for which it was named.