by Hugh Cook
Meanwhile, another financial crisis was taking place on Untunchilamon, albeit a minor one. The officials of the Inland Revenue had learnt that Shabble’s Cult of the Holy Cockroach was tithing its adherents. The Cult was not demanding ten per cent of the congregation’s income. Or twenty. Or thirty, even. No. Shabble was going for the whole thing. A full 100 per cent.
Agents from the Inland Revenue fronted up at the Xtokobrokotok to protest. Shabble’s lawyer, the redoubtable corpse-master Uckermark, gave them a stern lecture on the rights and freedoms of religion.
‘You don’t understand,’ said an earnest revenue agent. ‘If people give all to religion, there’s nothing left to be taxed.’
‘Oh, I understand perfectly,’ said Uckermark.
‘You mean,’ said the revenue agent, warming to his task, ‘you understand this Shabble’s religion to be no more than a tax dodge.’
‘No more than a tax dodge?’ said a scandalized Uckermark. ‘That’s blasphemy.’
‘Blasphemy?’ said the revenue agent. ‘Against a cockroach? Who cares?’
‘The law cares!’ said Uckermark. ‘This is no ordinary cockroach. This is the Holy Cockroach. Furthermore, His Cult is a Protected Religion. It has the favour of the High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral. So to blaspheme against the Holy Cockroach is as bad as blaspheming against Zoz Himself. You’ve already said enough to endanger your life. I suggest you say no more unless you have urgent business to conduct with your ancestors.’
The revenue agents lacked Uckermark’s specialized knowledge of ecclesiastical law, but research soon demonstrated that Uckermark was right. So the revenue agents had recourse to Nadalastabstala Banraithan-chumun Ek. The High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral was far from pleased to see them, and even less pleased once they had explained their mission.
‘You petty money-grubbing omolkiomomooskipis,’ said Master Ek in open contempt. ‘Your grudgery is an open disgrace. It is fitting for worshippers to give freely to their faith.’
‘But,’ said a revenue agent, the same one who had argued valorously with Uckermark, ‘the Cult returns half of all monies to the donors as charity.’
‘That is only reasonable,’ said Master Ek. ‘If the donors have pauperized themselves by their generosity to their church they must surely have need of such charity.’
‘Then let them give less to start with,’ said the revenue agent. ‘For charity doles escape all taxes, You see, most of these people are in the upper income bracket. Their tax rate is set at nine dalmoons in the dragon. But as it is, they pay a dragon to the cult to earn five dalmoons in charity. Every dragon thus paid saves the giver four dalmoons, while the revenue wins not a damn in taxes.’ ‘It’s a laundering operation,’ said another agent. ‘Explain it to me again,’ said Master Ek.
It was a great many years since he had bothered to add or subtract. He had accountants to do that kind of drudgery.
The revenue agents were pleased with Ek’s enthusiasm for enlightenment and gladly assisted with his continuing education. Master Ek proved to be exceptionally interested in the details; indeed, the sharp-eyed priest had smoked his way through three cigarettes before the agents were finished.
‘Now I understand,’ said Ek at last. ‘As a reward for their devotion, the worshippers have their effective tax rate cut from ninety per cent to fifty, thus saving themselves four dalmoons in the dragon.’
‘Precisely,’ said one of the agents.
Ek lit a fourth cigarette, drew deeply on that source of narcotic delight, blew a smoke ring then said:
‘You have my gratitude. You have revealed to me a cure for the growing impiety of Injiltaprajura. What serves for a Protected Religion will serve for the Source.’ One particularly young and impressionable revenue agent, unable to control himself, gave vent to a moan of anguish.
‘You do that well,’ said Master Ek with interest. He was something of a connoisseur of moans, groans and other expressions of anguish; and here, he realized, was a unique talent. ‘Have you ever considered a career as a human sacrifice? If you do, we have an opening available. The Festival of Light is scarcely a month away. Just think! Very shortly you could be kneeling at the feet of Zoz himself. Actually ... I have a mind to declare a mass sacrifice. As High Priest upon Untunchilamon I do have that privilege. How many of there are you? Let me see . . .’
As Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek began counting the assembled revenue agents, they said their adieus and fled.
Their next stop was the pink palace, where they petitioned the Empress Justina for assistance.
‘Oh,’ said she, ‘but there’s nothing I can do. It’s not my island any more. It’s the Crab’s. Why don’t you talk it through with Dui Tin Char? Taxes are his job, not mine.’
‘We would,’ said one of the agents, ‘but he’s on Jod.’ ‘Well!’ said Justina. ‘Then what’s the problem? You’re a healthy young man. And the day’s not that hot. It’s easy enough to find. Down to the end of Lak Street then turn left. First bridge to the right. Can’t miss it. Off you go! Come along now. I’ve got work to do.’
‘What work?’ said one of the agents. ‘We thought you had been replaced by the Crab.’
‘Replaced but not unemployed,’ said Justina. ‘I’ve all manner of commissions to do. Why, only today I got a message from Master Ek. He’s got a festival coming up, the Festival of Light, and there’s an unaccountable shortage of sacrifices. He wants me to help him find some. What are you doing next month?’
The revenue agents did not stay to answer.
They fled.
Once safely distant from Justina, they huddled together in their headquarters and conspired and caballed at length. To no effect whatsoever. For, since Justina and Ek both refused them help, there was nobody they could turn to for assistance. Except the Crab.
And that risk they were most certainly not prepared to run.
None of those cowardly agents was even prepared to dare the dangers of the harbour bridge and venture to the island of Jod for a consultation with Dui Tin Char.
Tin Char, head of Injiltaprajura’s Inland Revenue, was labouring on Jod as a slave. He worked in the kitchen under the vigilant eye of Pelagius Zozimus. And, three times a day, he helped take meals to the Crab.
Chegory Guy and Olivia Qasaba were always in attendance on that dignitary. Indeed, they even shared its meals. They sipped at tiny bowls of centipede soup while the Crab gravely sheared through huge loaves of cassava bread, dipped them in tureens of the same savoury concoction then fed itself with the sodden mass that resulted. They shared the Crab’s grilled flying fish, roast pig and cat-monkey pie.
And, after meals, Chegory and Olivia worked their way through huge heaps of state papers piled upon desks outside the Crab’s cave. Two lanteen sails had been rigged up as awnings to protect this makeshift office from the whims of the weather.
To Tin Char, it looked as if the Crab truly was running Injiltaprajura, with the Ebrell Islander and a young Ashdan lass acting as no more than the Crab’s secretary-slaves. To reinforce this illusion, Olivia had obtained some white paint, and with it she had written upon the Crab’s carapace (in Janjuladoola):
I AM THE LORD EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE.
Olivia had also made the Crab an ‘imperial hat’ of the kind affected by those ancient rulers of whom we read in the pages of the famous Hero Sword Sagas. It was a most magnificent hat of purple paper, with seven yellow streamers descending from its peak; and, glued atop the Crab’s carapace, it looked truly imposing.
Had Tin Char dared engage the Crab in conversation he would have learnt that the Crab professed a total lack of interest in the rule of Injiltaprajura; but, with the memory of the dislocation of his arms undimmed by time, Tin Char spent no more time in the Presence than was absolutely necessary.
Then, on the day on which the run on the N’barta began, Chegory Guy casually informed Tin Char that the Crab meant to have the head of the Inland Revenue for dinner the next day.
‘I am honoured,
’ said Tin Char, doing his best to conceal his apprehension.
‘It is a great honour,’ agreed Chegory. ‘So please don’t chew any betel nut between now and the granting of that honour. I don’t think it makes any difference, but the Crab swears it spoils the flavour of the flesh.’
‘The flavour?’ said Tin Char, doing his best to delay comprehension.
‘The flavour, yes,’ said Chegory. ‘So no betel nut. But coconuts, that’s OK, oh, and even a little alcohol, I know it’s, um, a drug and all that, but one day’s drinking won’t hurt you any, not that it matters in any case when the end’s so close.’
Tin Char, having by now understood the nature of the Crab’s invitation to dinner, pretended to faint. He was carried to the infirmary attached to the Analytical Institute, and from there he made his escape shortly after midnight.
Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik was Tin Char’s destination. He durst not stay in Injiltaprajura, for the Crab or the Crab’s agents would surely haul him back to Jod to be consumed at banquet by that anthropophagous monster.
Before Tin Char escaped to the deserts of Zolabrik, he had time sufficient to tell a couple of his most trusted friends of the ordeal he had endured as a slave of the Monster of Jod. And by noon the next day the tale was all over Injiltaprajura, its details confirming to one and all that the Crab truly had made itself wazir.
‘What happened to that Tin Char fellow?’ said the Crab on the morrow.
‘Oh, him,’ said Chegory. ‘I think he’s gone to stay with his mother-in-law.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the Crab, digesting this, and simultaneously digesting a very large chunk of moray eel. ‘I wish I had a mother-in-law. Or even a mother, come to that.’
‘Never mind,’ said Olivia, saddened by the desolation in the Crab’s voice. ‘You must have had a mother once. That’s something, at any rate.’
‘No,’ said the Crab sadly. ‘I never had a mother.’
‘But you must have!’ said Olivia. ‘Your own little mother, running around under rocks and things. Then she met a daddy crab and they fell in love. So they got married. There was a feast, of course. They had shrimps, seaweed, sea anemones, all kind of things. Then they set up house together and had little crabs of their own, dozens of them maybe. There must still be lots of them left. Brother crabs, sister crabs, uncle and aunt crabs. Maybe none of them can talk, but they’re out in the harbour somewhere. So don’t feel lonely. You have got a family, really. They look just like these little crab shells I brought for you, and that’s a fact.’
The Crab sighed.
Its sigh sounded like a drowning diver bubbling helplessly deep, deep beneath water.
‘I wish it was true,’ said the Crab. ‘I wish I really did come from the sea. Or from the land, at the very least.’ ‘Well, you must have,’ said Olivia. ‘I mean, you’re either a land crab or a sea crab. You must be one or the other. That’s logical.’
‘I’m neither,’ said the Crab. ‘I wasn’t born on the land, and I wasn’t born in the sea either. I was born in the fires of the local sun.’
‘No,’ said Olivia, ‘you can’t have been, you silly. The sun’s too hot. Your legs would have been burnt off the moment you were born.’
‘I didn’t have legs,’ said the Crab. ‘Or ears. Or eyes. Or a stomach, even.’
‘You mean,’ said Chegory, ‘you were a deformed baby?’
‘I was no kind of baby at all,’ said the Crab. ‘I was born as a . . . a perturbation of chance and change. That’s how my people live. We live by ... by changing chance. Modifying local probability. But a star’s the place for that, not a planet. So when I had to flee the sun, I had to find a form for myself as soon as I landed on the planet. Do you understand? Sun? Star? Planets?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Olivia. ‘The sun’s a sea urchin and the planets are the pieces of kumera. That’s how old Pokrov explained it. Then Artemis Ingalawa came along and told him to stop playing with his food.’
‘The sun?’ said the Crab. ‘A sea urchin? Child—’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Olivia Qasaba impatiently, though it was one of her days for playing the child to the hilt. ‘I’m a mature adult. Of course I know the sun’s not a sea urchin. It’s a sustained thermonuclear reaction converting the light to the heavy. Hydrogen to helium and so forth. You end up with iron. Or the star goes bang, one or the other. Gravity. Energy conversion. Inverse square laws. All that. And the planets, greasy old planets, rocks and stuff, Jof, Nan, Bruk, Hikorla-barus. Then Skrin, which is what we’re standing on. Then Pelothiasis, Mog, Ompara, Belthargez.’
All this said Olivia, and only good manners prevented her from saying rather more. She resented having her sea urchin whimsy so casually destroyed. And resented, too, being patronized - albeit by a Crab. She had spent much of her life in the study of the higher sciences, including Thalodian Mathematics itself, and therefore took umbrage at being lectured on basics.
‘Jof?’ said the Crab. ‘You call a planet thus? Those other names . . . what were they? Nan? Hokarbrus?’
‘Hikorlabarus,’ said Olivia.
‘Those are no planet names,’ said the Crab. ‘You stand in error, for the local astronomers call the planets—’
‘We know,’ said Olivia, most definitely in no mood for another lecture.
‘Those names Olivia quoted are Shabble’s names,’ explained Chegory.
‘Shabble’s names?’ said the Crab.
‘Shabble, you know,’ said Chegory. ‘You’ve met Shabble, haven’t you? Shabble’s a priest now. The Cockroach, that’s what it’s all about. But anyway, Shabble talks lots about the sun, the planets, all that stuff. Pokrov only said about it that once, the time with the sea urchin. On Ingalawa’s best tablecloth! But Shabble talks about it often, going to the sun and all that stuff.’
‘Shabble went to the sun?’ said the Crab.
‘In a ship,’ said Olivia. ‘A special ship. Maybe Shabble knows where you could find a ship like that. You could go back to the sun. Would you like that? If that’s where you came from, maybe you’d be happier there.’
‘No,’ said the Crab with infinite sadness. ‘I can never go back. There was a ... a religious argument, you see.
I espoused a heresy. I had to flee for my life. If I go back, they’ll kill me.’
‘A heresy?’ said Chegory. ‘What was it?’
‘My ... my theory of time,’ said the Crab. ‘I held that time must have had a start. For how could infinite time have passed? You know the mathematics of infinity?’
‘Intimately,’ said Chegory.
Unlike Olivia Qasaba, Chegory Guy had been defeated by the intricacies of Thaldonian Mathematics; but he had mastered simplicities such as infinity with ease.
‘Well then,’ said the Crab, ‘infinity by definition has no end. But time past has most definitely ended, for here we are in the now. It follows that there cannot be infinite amounts of past time - that is, history. Therefore, there must have been a start. A start implies a cause. Which means we should have shared the sunspin, not dividied it.’
‘The sunspin?’ said Chegory. ‘You’ve lost me.’
The Crab did its best to explain, but, though the intricate ramifications of its heresy may have been obvious to a sun-born creature, they were virtually impossible for a planet-bound creature to understand. The Crab began to get frustrated.
‘Never mind,’ said Olivia consolingly. ‘We understand the important things. You were born in the sun and you can’t go back. You came here and became a Crab. That’s all right. There’s lots of good things about being a Crab. I mean, you’ve got the most marvellous appetite. Look at how much you eat! Do you ever get indigestion? Of course not. Better still, you could rule the world if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said the Crab.
‘Why not?’ said Olivia.
‘Because it would mean an enormous amount of work for no reward,’ said the Crab.
‘But you could have . . . well, palaces and things,’ said Oli
via.
‘I could have a palace now if I wanted one,’ said the Crab. ‘I don’t have to live in a cave, you know. I could move into the Analytical Institute. But there’s no point. Not when you’re a Crab. This body, you see, it’s . . .’
The Crab did not elaborate. It had no need. The drawbacks of being a huge Crab was obvious. One was too big to enter most buildings and too heavy for most boats. One could take no pleasure in soft chairs or padded beds. One’s uses for compliant human flesh were strictly constrained by anatomical awkwardness.
The list of drawbacks could be extended.
‘So you want to be human,’ said Chegory.
‘That’s all right,’ said Olivia Qasaba. ‘You will be, won’t you? Justina said as much. She promised to find you this organic rectifier. It’s magic, that’s what it is. It’ll make you a body as good as mine.’
‘If it exists,’ said the Crab.
‘But of course it exists!’ said Olivia. ‘You mustn’t be like that. Look, why don’t you really make yourself wazir? It would be much safer for us. We could ... we could look for this rectifier thing ever so much harder.’
‘Leave the poor Crab alone,’ said Chegory. ‘It doesn’t want to be troubled about organic rectifiers and things, not today.’
Olivia had the better brain, but Chegory possessed a greater degree of empathy with the Monster of Jod, and understood more of its bitter, stoical outlook. From past conversations, Chegory knew the Crab had been lied to by many humans in the past. Many promises had been made to it - promises which had subsequently been broken. Wizards and sorcerers alike had promised to turn it into man, child or woman; but all had failed. The Crab had been disappointed so many times it did not feel it could afford to trust any such promises ever again.
This Chegory knew; and Olivia could have benefited from his knowledge. But, unfortunately, the Ashdan lass took exception to the Ebrell Islander’s tone of voice, and this led to a quarrel. Which left them both upset, and Olivia in tears. Though they soon got over it, and had quite repaired their relations by nightfall.