Orbit 15 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Odd letter,” said Charles Cogsworth. “And just what is a lustrum year?”

  “The year from one Tom Fool’s Day to the next,” Gregory said.

  Aloysius had just drawn the Tom Fool card. This is not the same as the Fool card (many persons do not play enough Pape Jaune to know this). The Tom Fool was in motley, but he sure wasn’t in it willingly. There was something world-deforming, world-splitting in the sulfurous fury of the Tom Fool in the year of his shame. He was a card almost too hot to handle. Yes, he was the Devil in bonds worse than chains, and he would force the incongruity of his position onto the world and rub the world’s face in it. Aloysius had never noticed the intensity of the Tom Fool card before, had never noticed that Tom Fool was the Devil in an awkward predicament. (There is a regular Devil card in the Pape Jaune pack, but that shows a Devil who is rather pleased with himself.)

  “Here’s another one that Epikt received from an uncertified person,” Gregory said. “It’s signed Damn or Dumb, an odd name in either case. It was mailed from the West or Improbable Coast of Florida. (The best of belief today is that Florida never had a West Coast.)

  “ ‘Epikt, this is from Guttmacher’s Pregnancy and Birth. “In 1313 Lady Margaret, Countess of Hagenau, was laid in with three hundred and sixty-five children, one hundred and eighty-two females, all baptized Elizabeth by the bishop of Utrecht, one hundred eighty-two males, all baptized John, and one ‘scrat’ (hermaphrodite), who remained unnamed and unbaptized.” I thought you might be able to do something with the above.’ “

  “What in blue hell would I do with three hundred and sixty-five children and me a bachelor?” the Johnny Greeneyes Epikt extension growled. This extension had just put down the Scrat card itself and he recognized it. “Unbaptized maybe,” the extension said, “but it took a name to itself. It walked and talked the day it was born, and it reigned in Rome for one year.”

  “The use of the word ‘scrat’ points out loud to eighteenth-century Oxford,” Glasser informed them. “It was something of a century of jokers in that place then, and many of their spoofs were intruded into serious books.”

  “Here’s another one,” Gregory said. “It also is from an uncertified person, a Cargo Repsky (why do all these names sound so Biercean?), and it reads:

  “ ‘Epikt, if you have ever heard of me, you have heard of me as the Mad Professor. But to the point of information. In certain fourteenth-century paintings there is an intermediate layer that is unaccountable; it is a sort of reverse burlesque of the painting itself. But the fundamental layer of the painting and the surface layer are valid and rational, and they are identical. This tricky intermediate layer can only be picked up by middle infrared light of about one hundred and thirty thousand angstroms, the so-called fools’ frequency. It really seems as if the old paint of the picture had been split and another picture accomplished between. These ghost or joker pictures are very salty burlesques, but they can be seen but once. After being brought out by the fools’-frequency light, they fade away forever, and the painting becomes a single-layer thing. Fortunately I have been able to get good photographs of a number of these out-of-place paintings.

  “ ‘And in certain statuary of the same fourteenth century, there may be seen smaller contrary forms within the solid true forms. The marble sometimes becomes transparent to reveal these inner carvings or moldings. The objects move, they writhe, they seem alive, and they are horribly funny (I choose my words carefully here). Then the marble will opaque itself again and the writhing inner images will vanish.

  “ ‘I have dated these inner images. They were not carved or cut. They were molded by hand in a somehow softened marble. They were molded by the hands of lepers, and the flaked-off flesh of the molders allows me to get a carbon date on them. All were done in the year 1313, the lustrum year, not the calendar year.’ “ “Epikt has guys write to him who are nearly as far off as some of the guys who write to me,” Valery said.

  There had been for some time now a heavy thumping on the roof of the Institute Building and in the roads outside. It was a rainfall of flaming ducks. They were dangerous: the roof of the Institute building wasn’t in very good shape anyhow.

  “Here’s another one,” Director Gregory Smirnov was saying. “It’s to Epikt and it’s from a certain Father Gassalasca Jape. It goes:

  “ ‘Epikt, do you know that in the year 1313 there was a complete turnaround in the empire city of the world, Roma in Italia? This turnaround was for one year. Even the name of the city was turned around and was spelled Amor, or love, for that year. It was a fishy kind of love, though, and with a Babylonian sort of fishiness. The falsified view of the city was true for that one year, and it was the Whore of Babylon who sat on the seven hills. This was the mystery woman whose roots go down to Hell, and part of the mystery about her was that she was not really a woman. But she did rule in Roma; she did set up a court of love, of false love, in that city that was the city of the world. Epikt, I wonder if you could bring your great mechanical and animal and ghostly talents to bear on this, to draw back the veil from the mystery? The effect of it still lingers in the world as a miasma. It must be dispelled.’ “

  “We do get some odd correspondence,” said the Epikt extension that was got up as the Ancient Scribe. “Are you running them through our main brain, Gregory?” This Epikt extension had just drawn the Whore of Babylon card and was studying it with some wonder. No, she was not quite a woman, not as she on the Queen of Cups card was, not as she on La Grande Mere card was.

  “Oh yes, we’re running them through your main brain, Epikt,” Director Gregory said.

  (For those who came in late, Epikt, or Epiktistes, was a Ktistec machine, the most marvelous one in the world, the only one in the world so far. The Institute for Impure Science was mainly built around the stupendous mechanical brain of Epikt, the many thousands of cubic meters of it. For convenience’ sake, Epikt usually maintained a few mobile extensions of himself, being sessile in the main part of his apparatus. These mobiles might be in any form from the clownish human to the hangdog canine. They could talk and get about; they could carry on their functions; they were droll, and sometimes they seemed a little stupid. Well, which of us does not?)

  “There is a warning that should be given here,” Director Gregory Smirnov was saying. “We must recognize that this year which we are going to study is a recompensing year, a lefthanded year (a sinister year in the real sense of the word), a contorted year. It is my own belief that one cannot enter a contorted year, even vicariously and experimentally, without himself becoming contorted.”

  “With us, who can tell?” Valery asked. That was true. They all had that look about them as if their faces and bodies had, just for a moment, melted like wax and then set again. They of the Institute had always had a little or a lot of that look; this day they had it a lot.

  “I win!” Valery cried triumphantly, and she played the Wheel of Fortune card resoundingly. The wheel on the picture card was actually turning, and this was more than optical illusion. When it came to rest, the pointer of the fortune wheel pointed to the name Valery (nobody had noticed before that the names of all of them were printed fine on that card), so Valery had won.

  “I will have to discover the old rules and find out how this game was really played,” Aloysius Shiplap said with a touch of sourness. “The game seems to make up its own rules as it goes along.”

  “The old rules say that I am always supposed to win,” Valery declared, “and that is the way it is really played.” She overturned the card table, and it was like clattering thunder. It was a very heavy table, not really a card table at all. None of the rest of them except the gigantic Director Gregory would have been able to overturn that weighty thing. The Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt gathered up the valuable pack of Pape Jaune cards. Pape Jaune, the Yellow Joker or the Yellow Dwarf, but who was Pape Jaune really?

  “It’s too nice a day to be inside this stinking Institute,” Valery announced. “Oh, I’m sorry, E
pikt! That’s almost the same as saying that it’s too nice a day to be inside that big stinking brain of yours, and really I like your big stinking brain. But let’s be outside for a while.” And they burst out like a cloud of April flies. (Some of the rare April flies are people-sized; do not forget that.)

  “I wonder if the record-setting lady in the lying-in shop has had her scrat yet?” Valery asked the world.

  “I’ll go see,” said the Ancient Scribe extension of Epikt.

  “Oh, springtime, springtime!” Valery cried, catching hold of both Aloysius Shiplap and her own unoutstanding husband Charles Cogsworth. “Oh, to be young and foolish in the springtime! I wish that it might last all the year.”

  “Of course it will,” Aloysius said. “I thought you knew that.”

  And Gregory and Glasser walked on that unkempt ridge that rises above the Institute, and talked about various business while the flaming ducks still pelted down.

  “What they are,” said Gregory, “is pieces of the sky. They break off and fall and catch fire. Ultimately the sky is made up entirely of ducks, though scripture mistranslates them as quails. It is because of this composition that we often hear the term ‘duck sky.’ “

  “I sure never heard such a term,” Glasser said.

  “But scripture does not mistranslate,” the Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt said. “Quails they are, the quails of the flesh-pots. Huge, it’s true, but quails. We have the holy words for evidence: ‘We loathe our manna, and we long for quails.’ “

  “That’s Dryden. He’s not scripture,” Gregory admonished.

  “He is to me,” the Epikt extension said, “and I speak ex cerebro, from the brain itself.” (But Epikt had, from the human viewpoint, odd literary tastes.)

  “Everybody accepts the blasted burning birds,” Glasser said querulously. “Nobody questions them at all today. But I never saw such a thing as this shower of flaming ducks in all my life. What can possibly cause such a phenomenon?”

  “Ah, the fellows flew too close to the sun,” Director Gregory explained it.

  ~ * ~

  2

  This is the year on the end of the rope.

  This is the year when Joan was Pope.

  “ ‘Clement V was pope from 1305 to 1314,’ “ Gregory read from a tape spewing out from a section of Epikt’s brain, from the correlating section. “ ‘And he was pope in Avignon, not in Rome. There was no pope in Rome in those years.’ “

  “And John xxii did not become pope till the year 1316,” came another tape from another section of Epikt’s brain, from the explicatory section.

  “He’d have been three years old then,” Valery mumbled. “So he matured quite early, but not as early as some members of his family did.”

  “Project the whole disputed year of 1313, Epikt,” Director Gregory ordered.

  “Impossible,” the machine groaned from its depths. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Project it in the context of only one city then, the town of Amor which had been and would be Roma,” Director Gregory said.

  “Oh, all right,” the machine Epikt agreed glumly. “It will be sketchy, though, and not from any fault of mine. There is something inherently sketchy about the persons and events themselves. Whether they were real or not, the things that happened didn’t have much depth to them.”

  This is Epikt’s account of the disputed year in the context of the city of Amor.

  The year itself was subjectively much longer than one year. The subjective sun rose and set several thousands of times during that compensating year. Indeed, though it was all one unmomentous moment, it was half a dozen decades on its own, less real level. Yet it can be measured, from one All Fool’s Day to the next, and it takes the place of only one objective year.

  Of the ruler in Amor during the disputed year, there was less than met the eye. She was small; she was insignificant. She warred against significance and meaning.

  Joan Hedge-Green was born on All Fool’s Day (sometimes called New Year Day) of the year 1313. She was but one of an exceptionally large birthing. She was not baptized, although an attempt was made. The water boiled or vaporized away on her approach, and the salt turned to putrid flame: thereafter she was not touched by either salt or water in all her short life. Her brothers at the same birthing had all been baptized John, and she took for herself the equivalent name Joan. She had nothing whatever to do with her sisters of the birthing.

  Though she was grammatically feminine, she was a perfect hermaphrodite, a jape, a scrat. She was sometimes called the Pape Jape or the dwarfish jape on account of her small stature. She had deformities, but their nature is not known. She walked and talked on the day of her birth, but in no other way was she remarkable.

  She left her hometown on the afternoon of her birth. She left by diabolical conveyance or vehicle, the black-wing express over the randy roads of the low sky. By one account she went to Roma in Italy. By another, she went to the town of Amor, “between the Germanies and Spain.” By a third account, the two towns were the same. She went there, and she set up an antirule or an an-tireign.

  But she did set up court there. She issued coin of the metal known as fool’s gold. The sovereign coin was the sannio, and the system was tredecimal (to the base thirteen).

  Joan’s forecourt was known as the Fleshpots of Egypt. (The Egyptian was but one of the motifs of the court; there was also the Babylonian and the Phoenician and others.) She fed her folk on fowl flesh; this was the roasted flesh of giant quail (all of them capons) that fell flaming from the low sky. She fed them on false-fish from that part of her court called the Rivers of Babylon. She fed them on a cheese so rank that it stood by itself, and came on command. She fed them on holy cow; and on unborn calves and colts, on unborn lambs and kids, on unborn cubs and children, all of which were roasted in that part of her court called the Ovens of Moloch.

  She gave her folk break-bone bread, and maid bread, and giant bread, and love loaf. She gave them wasp honey and hornet honey. She gave them blood pudding and offal (“Love each other and eat offal” was one of her high mottos) and bad wine. A visitor in Amor Town that year (there was no such town in any other year) reported that most of the courtiers did know the difference between good wine and bad wine, and that they preferred the bad. Joan gave her people sulfur for condiment, salt being forbidden to them. She gave them heifer milk.

  And Joan provided her people with hemp and with hoppy-poppy, with gobbling mushrooms and with ragged dream-weeds, with all the unreality seeds and substances and oils, with the aromatic and reason-wrenching plant known as smoke-poke the anti-incense; and the anti-incense raised its smoke not to heaven but to the low sky. These things were dispensed in that part of Joan’s court known as the Ships of Tarshish.

  The visitor to Amor, the one just mentioned, had asked several of the courtiers, “Do any of you know of any giant nearby who has disappeared or been slaughtered?” “Yes, there was one,” the courtiers told him. “Our Papess Joan had him blown up with the new blowup powder from China. There may have been others, but now there will be no more giants. Pieces of them will smash down from the low sky whenever the weather is right. These are what we call giant bread.”

  So the courtiers had plenty to eat and drink and smoke and inject. They had more than enough, for they finished nothing at all. They were grinning, nervous, ecstatic, jerky courtiers, robust of ear, but somewhat deficient in all other parts.

  The city of Amor was built lightly, loosely, insubstantially, unpattemed and unstructured. It had solved the cursed necessity of having buildings and such materialities, for its buildings were very short on material. They were false-front and false-middle erections. The buildings were built of cardboard.

  (“But they didn’t have cardboard then,” the avid annalist said. Had they not? Disputed years are not in sequence. They have what they have. But no, the annalist was correct. They didn’t have cardboard in Amor.)

  The buildings, the whole town, was built of
bark and willow withies. They were tricky, and they were almost grand. It was an architecture almost without weight. White and gray clay was smeared on the bark, and behold! there was the appearance of regal marble. All were gilt with fool’s gold in whorled design, and at the same time all were in motley. Yes, the buildings, the buildings were in clown-suit getup of all light colors, with their own rakish royalty about them, and their precociousness. There was no maturity about them: they did not desire maturity. And at the same time there was nothing of the childlike: they sure did not desire children. There was the taut interruption, the jerk back from the momentous. (“That no thing come to term!” was another of the high Amor mottos.)