Peter Dickinson: The Poison Oracle

Table of Contents

Note on Translation

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Epilogue

About the Author

THE

POISON

ORACLE

Peter

Dickinson

Small Beer Press

Easthampton, MA

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

The Poison Oracle copyright © 1974 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved. First published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton, London. First Small Beer Press edition published in 2013.

“Peter Dickinson in conversation with Sara Paretsky” © 2013 by Peter Dickinson and Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved.

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

www.smallbeerpress.com

www.weightlessbooks.com

info@smallbeerpress.com

Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dickinson, Peter, 1927-

The poison oracle / Peter Dickinson. -- Small Beer Press edition, First edition.

pages ; cm.

ISBN 978-1-61873-065-7 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-066-4 (ebook)

I. Title.

PR6054.I35P6 2013

823’.914--dc23

2013018819

First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Text set in Minion.

Cover image “Chimpanizee” © 2010 by Mark Alastair (mark-alastair.co.uk)

Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by the Maple Press in the USA.

Note on Translation

THE LANGUAGE OF the marsh-people cannot be translated directly into an English word-for-word equivalent. All the sentences that appear here are paraphrases. I have used archaic word-orders to do this, because the language is somewhat of that nature; colloquialisms do exist, but are used only when speaking to children, or occasionally when wishing to imply that an adult is behaving in a childish manner. For those who are interested, here is a specimen of how the language actually works: The formal greeting on page 52 “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow” consists of the single word-accretion Kt!uroch a rha’ygh ar locht!in. This accretion has three roots of relationship: -och- comes twice and implies the relationship of property rights, linking in the first case Kt!u which is the locative of K!tu, a wallow, with -ar- which is the first person root unmodified by any clan stop; the -r- in this section is meaningless, a euphony insert. The second -och- links -gh ar al- (the plural form of g ar al, a buffalo) with -t!in which is the second-person-singular suffix tinh, modified with a ninth-clan stop and closure. The central relationship of permission is expressed by -ha’y- where the y is a breathed uvular semivowel modifying the normal permissive root -ha//- to show that the permission is not to be taken for granted as this is merely a formal greeting.

I have also translated the Arabic into slightly formal English, as that is how the language is usually spoken in Q’Kut, compared with the rest of the Arab world.

One

1

WITH AS MUCH passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window. He thought she looked incredibly beautiful, leaning against the heavy wire mesh on the far side, and watching the main group with that air of surprise which Morris knew to mean that she was apprehensive. She looked healthier than most of the others; her coarse black hair had a real sheen to it, and her eyes were bright with vitality.

The others were in a listless mood, though they ought by now to have got over the shock of their arrival; only Murdoch’s baby showed much life, making little exploratory forays away from his mother. Sparrow was gazing with sullen intensity at the air-conditioner; perhaps its thin whine got on his nerves; he couldn’t know how carefully it had been adjusted to produce a temperature and humidity at which he would thrive. The rest merely lolled and slouched. The darkening caused by the one-way glass in the observation window softened the concrete tree-trunks and metal branches, and gave the whole scene the look of a forest glade. Morris was both pleased and disturbed by this illusion of nature.

“Sparrow looks pretty unintelligent,” murmured the Sultan. “

“I don’t know,” said Morris.

“In fact I think he looks decidedly thick. Thicker even than Rowse.”

“You can’t judge them by Dinah—she’s exceptional.”

“So what? If she chooses one of the thick ones . . .”

“It doesn’t work like that. The odds are she’ll be completely promiscuous—she’s just made that way. When she has kids you’ll never know who the fathers were.”

The Sultan knew this perfectly well, but something in his heredity or culture made it hard for him to imagine a set-up in which the males were dominant but did not have exclusive rights to individual females. (Morris had to keep explaining the point to him.)

“Then we ought to start weeding out the thick ones,” he said. Morris recognised in his tone the dangerous moment when a notion was about to harden into a fiat.

“We don’t know which are the thick ones yet,” he protested. “I’ll try to set up a few tests, if I can think of how to do it without mucking up the whole idea. We’ve got plenty of time—Dinah won’t reach puberty for at least a year, so . . .”

“Can’t we speed it up, my dear fellow? Listen, down in the marshes they know a few things that your puritanical scientists have never caught on to. Some of the local aphrodisiacs . . .”

“Certainly not,” snapped Morris.

When the Sultan sighed several hundred-thousand-poundsworth of rubies shifted on his gold-robed chest, and the folds and dewlaps of his large face took up the lines of tragedy. Only the little, hard eyes remained bright. Morris stared sourly at his employer. There were not many amusements in Q’Kut, but the Sultan managed to keep himself happy; and one of his favourite games nowadays seemed to be forcing Morris to draw the line somewhere and then tricking him across it. There’d been the ridiculous business of drugging the white rhino to take shavings off its horn; and rebuilding several cages to make this concrete glade and then filling it with near-wild animals; if he now insisted on doping Dinah’s feed with nameless filth there was only one way of preventing it, and that was for Morris to give up his ten thousand dollars a month and take Dinah back to Bristol. Supposing the Sultan would let him out of the country. Or her.

“Look,” said Morris. “The whole point of this experiment is to simulate natural conditions as nearly as we can. I was against it, as you know, but now we’ve set it up I’m going to do my damnedest to make it work. But who’s going to pay the slightest attention to our results if it comes out that half our apes were high on local dope?”

“I have read that male gorillas have a very low sex-drive,” said the Sultan. His reading was patchy and his memory more so, but a point like that was likely to stick in the mind of a man conscious of the twenty-six children in his women’s quarters, and the unimpeachable impotence of the eunuchs who guarded them.

“Chimpanzees are different,” said Morris.

“I’m glad to hear it. Murdoch’s baby looks quite bright.”

“They usually do.”

“What shall we call him? I am so out of touch.”

“Berlin?” suggested Morris.

“He must be getting on. Isn’t there a psychologist with a name like a Dutchman?”

“Eysenck? He isn’t Oxford. I suppose you could endow a chair for him, but . . .”

“The camera, man!” snapped the Sultan.

Morris pressed the starter button of the fixed camera which covered about two-thirds of the grove, then checked how much film there was left to run; when he looked again through the window he saw that Murdoch’s baby, in one of its forays, had strayed within Dinah’s reach and she had grabbed it. Now she had it face down across her thigh and was beginning to peer and finger among the hairs along its spine. Through the glass they could not hear its little whimpers, but Murdoch’s scream was clear enough as she rose from her torpor and rushed over at Dinah, who with equal speed, still holding the baby, flung herself up the wire mesh and leaped for one of the central trees. Murdoch followed her route and, having both arms free, had almost caught up when Dinah swung to the next tree, dangled for an instant from one of the metal branches, and simply dropped. She fell heavily on Sparrow’s back, let the baby fall and clutched to steady herself at Sparrow’s neck.