Read The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers Online
Authors: Hugh Cook
Two pleasures now await me. First, to sign my name to the redacted version of this Text. Second, to watch the public chastisement of Oris Baumgage, Fact Checker Minor, who was caught this afternoon when he was intently studying a copy of the Book of Flesh which he had illegally abstracted from the Inner Library in total defiance of both Law and Regulation.
Not for the first time, I am given to wondering what will happen to this poor world of ours when it finally falls (as it inevitably must) to such a feckless and delinquent younger generation. In the time that remains till such a disaster, you can be assured that I will exert myself manfully to ensure that order and discipline prevail.
Given under my hand on this the evening of the twelfth day of the fifth month of the 15,436,794th year of Din Civil. Drax Lira.
Redactor Major.
Torklos doskvart.
[Explicitum est.]
AFTERWORD
Of course it was not as simple as that, for, though the Originator felt free to write ‘here we end’ at the terminus of his Text, and Drax Lira felt equally free to write ‘explicit’ at the end of his, the chain of causality did not end where they abandoned their study of the same.
Even the events which they did study were not nearly as simple as they appear in the Text above, for reasons which a little contemplation will make obvious. Even the most naive reader will have realised by now that the Originator was quite mad, was confined in the Dromdanjerie during the events of which he later told, and thus had no first-hand knowledge of the actions he treats with.
The Originator’s sources were therefore inevitably hearsay, gossip, guess and supposition, which leads to an equally inevitable blurring of some of the action.
Naturally Shabble is seen in sharp focus, for Shabble had free run of the Dromdanjerie, and was wont to spend whole days at a time in conversation with the Originator, who was one of the few people on Injiltaprajura crazed enough to accept Shabble’s insane stories of the Golden Gulag and the horrors which preceded the living nightmare of the Days of Wrath.
(The fact that most of Shabble’s stories were true makes no difference to the fact that it was quite insane for anyone to accept them without collaborative evidence, for, despite their actual veracity, such outre recollections were outwardly no more probable than the nightmare imaginings of Slanic Moldova, he of the many torments. While Ivan Pokrov could have confirmed the general outline of Shabble’s stories, he always declined to do so, for he was ever reluctant to confess his own
immortality lest he be tortured for the secret of the same.)
Shabble’s influence unfortunately led to the Originator taking all of Shabble’s claims at face value, which has led to the inclusion of one or two outright lies in the Text. Most outrageous of Shabble’s untruths are the claims that the Golden Gulag laboured for fifty thousand years to produce genius in the form of Shabbies, and that the Gulag ‘relied heavily upon Shabbies for expertise of all descriptions’.
In point of fact, the prototypical Shabble was designed and built in a toyshop in the backwaters of the Musorian Empire. Then, in an effort to capture a tiny share of the buoyant market for children’s toys, 78,923,423,911,236 Shabbies were manufactured for distribution through the Nexus. Naturally at that stage the Shabbies concerned did not have the power to project flame or generate fireballs.
Unfortunately, while the Shabbies were not positively dangerous, toys with such an advanced sense of humour proved unsaleable. Or, to be precise (such, after all, is the duty of a historian) the Shabbies sold well, but queues of angry parents subsequently besieged the sales points with complaints of all descriptions. Worse, so many parents sued that many a cosmos found its legal system collapsing under the weight of extra work. The response of the Nexus Council was prompt: a General Interdict on the manufacture and sale of Shabbies.
This did not stop the Golden Gulag buying a job lot of thirty million Shabbies on the black market. The freewheeling free-dealing Rinprofen Rum thought these second-hand children’s toys would make cheap Analytical Engines, and acquired all three million for an ouday of only a hundred thousand Basic Datum Points.
A mistake!
Because Rinprofen Rum soon found—
But that is another story, and a long one. It is worth noting, however, that Rum managed to survive the resulting debacle, and was indeed alive and well and living on Untunchilamon during the times with which the Originator has dealt.
Shabble knew as much.
But Shabble never betrayed Rum to the Originator.
Oh, Shabble is capable of manifold betrayals, never doubt that. After all, Shabble betrayed Ivan Pokrov’s genesis to the Originator, and told of Pokrov’s crimes against the Gulag. But then, Shabble disliked Pokrov heartily. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you hold a grudge if you were a Shabble and Pokrov kept bullying you to help design Analytical Engines, do accounts and work out income tax, when you really wanted to be hooning round the island chasing flying fish and scaring cats? Of course you would.
So Shabble gaily betrayed Pokrov’s secrets, just as Shabble revealed nearly all of Chegory Guy’s most intimate confidences to the Originator.
What’s more, when Rinprofen Rum told Shabble of the trials and tribulations he had undergone, Shabble had no hesitation in retailing Rum’s stories to the Originator. But that Rum would not have minded. What mattered to Rum was the secret of his identity, and that Shabble ever kept secret. Since Rinprofen Rum was ever Shabble’s most special friend, the delinquent toy never told the Originator that the conjuror Odolo was in fact an immortal survivor from the days of the Golden Gulag.
By now you will be asking: precisely how and when did Shabbies acquire the ability to throw forth flame?
The answer is simple. Shabble’s brain is a sun which is located in a separate cosmos of its own. This solar mass is to Shabble what our own brains are to ourselves: a thinking apparatus devoid of any sensory connections. As we cannot feel our own brains, so Shabble cannot feel the solar mass on which Shabble’s existence depends. In Shabble’s private cosmos there is a Solar Organiser, an intricate device which connects Shabble’s thought processes to the transponder through which Shabble’s sensory inputs are processed, the transponder which is Shabble’s sole manifestation in whichever human universe dear Shabble happens to be located.
The Solar Organiser has the ability to feed energy from Shabble’s solar mind through to the transponder which is, in effect, Shabble’s body. These sun-transponder units were first developed for military applications, so they were originally designed to be able to throw flame, generate fireballs, and withstand a fair degree of combat shock. They can also absorb heat as easily as, they can project it and can camouflage themselves at will, disguising themselves as spherical mirrors or as balls of old iron, or turning red, green or blue as the situation demands.
When a toymaker produced the first Shabble from the original Sword, it was necessary to make the sun-transponder unit safe for the nursery. So each Shabble was sent out into the world with the energy flow turned down to minimum. However, the energy flow controllers built into Solar Organisers are prone to positive drift. They were designed this way when the military experts of the Musorian Empire found that manufacturers were incapable of the exquisite quality control necessary to ensure that an exact and unchanging amount of energy was always available to the transponder.
There would always be a drift, either positive or negative, and in a military context a negative drift was intolerable. So the energy flow controllers of the Swords were designed to have positive drift. They could not be redesigned (the expense would have been prohibitive) just because a toymaker wanted to make a few Shabbies out of a basic Sword design. But this was not seen as a problem, since with the energy flow turned down to minimum a Shabble would be perfectly safe in a child’s hands, and adjustments to ensure safety would only have to be made every twenty years or so.
Hence - many millennia later - the pyrotechnical abilities of the demon of Jod.
What else needs to be added to the Originator’s Text and the Commentary of the redactors of Odrum? Much could be added. But let us content ourselves with just a glimpse, the smallest glimpse, of the celebrations organised by the Empress Justina (she was a diplomat, and thought it wise to show approval of the Hermit Crab’s decisions) to celebrate the General Amnesty.
‘Let there be a General Prescription!’ she cried.
And a General Prescription there was, with alcohol freely available to one and all, leading to a consequent excitation of the mood of all concerned, an excitation much helped by banqueting, music and dancing.
‘Tintinnabulate the tindnnabula!’ commanded the Empress Justina.
Tintinnabulation proceeded. One tintinnabulum after another was struck, and tintinnabulary peals rang out across the city.
Chong! Jong! Jung! Yong! Chan-gantachong!
Pigeons exploded to the sky. Bats in the belfries wept red blood. And young Chegory Guy closed with Olivia, closed to her sweetness, to her heat, and yes she said yes she said yes.
THE END
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THE WISHSTONE AND THE WONDERWORKERS
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