Chegory Guy was a knifefighter. Perhaps that is not entirely accurate. If truth be told, he had never been in a knife fight in his life. Yet it is still far from misleading to describe him as a knifefighter since he owned a number of blades and had been trained to kill with them. Furthermore, he trained with his weapons on a daily basis, practising feinting, shifting, slashing and slicing, stabbing and hacking.
Once you know this, you will not be surprised to hear that he was an Ebrell Islander. These people are, of course, notorious for their violence. Such generalisations are, or so we are told by the Ashdan liberals, odious, untrue and misleading; nevertheless, it would be hard to make sense of the world without them, and in the case of Chegory Guy they make a great deal of sense.
This dangerous young man dwelt in the fair city of Injiltaprajura (or, shall we say, the bloodstone-complexioned city of Injiltaprajura?). To be precise, he was domiciled in the Dromdanjerie.
The Dromdanjerie.
What and where?
What is easy. The Dromdanjerie is the lunatic asylum of Injiltaprajura. It is a huge building fabricated from the native bloodstone of Untunchilamon. It has 2 kitchens, 27 showers, 44 stench holes, 6 high-security cells and 19 dormitories. One of the many fountains sourced Downstairs has been linked directly to the plumbing. This provides unlimited fresh (potable!) water for the showers with their floors of glistening green tiles, for the sluice rooms, for the kitchens gay with sun-faced representations of flowers, and for swabbing out those filthy dormitories so drearily painted in institutional brown and grey.
The Dromdanjerie, then.
What of it?
Does my acquaintance with the place seem too intimate? If so, know this: the Brin think me normal enough. Though what is ‘normal’ if one metabolises silicon, as do the Brin? Never mind. Enough of that. Let us not return to it again. Let us return to Chegory Guy. And to the action:
As Shabble was sliding down a drainpipe to escape the massive energy drain which threatened Shabbleself’s very' existence, the Dromdanjerie was waking. All the lights had gone out, waking those many who could not sleep in the dark. They screamed as if they had swallowed acid. They raved as if fresh-returned from hell. This set off most of the others. The dogs in the Dog Worshipper’s Temple at the back of the Dromdanjerie began barking and howling. So, with uproar rising to heights unendurable, the staff of the Dromdanjerie was waking.
Chegory Guy was not on the staff — he was in fact a rock gardener who worked on the island of Jod — but as he boarded in the Dromdanjerie’s staff quarters he too was wakened by the racket.
He kindled fire, then helped light (or, as the case may be, relight) lanterns by the dozen. Jon Qasaba took the first dozen, and, carrying them on a bablobrokmadorni stick, strode away into the depths of the bedlam. Guy loaded a second bablobrokmadorni stick for Qasaba’s daughter.
Olivia.
Olivia Qasaba. She of the uncertain moods, at one moment a playful gamine, then on an instant a sophisticated ice lady, as remote and as distant as the stars. A female creature who was suffering that confusion of the blood which besets a girl who is in the process of becoming a woman. There are several symptoms of this confusion, the most notable being a propensity for slamming doors and a tendency to burst into tears upon provocation which should by rights produce (at the very most) no more than the briefest of scowls.
Chegory Guy was at least in part responsible for her erratic emotional weather. What did he do? He was there! That was enough. Sometimes Olivia wished to romp with him like a boy at play with a peer, giving expression to simple high spirits and the natural ebullience of youth. At other times, she imagined him as an ardent suitor into whose arms she could swoon in a waking dream of passion.
Either way, Chegory disappointed her, for he daily grew more remote. Why? Because he had a nice regard for his own safety. He sensed her confusion. (He sensed it: but to most of the other people in the Qasaba household that confusion needed no sensing whatsoever, as it was clearly written in the girl’s every action.) He feared that if he let her within his guard, she would one day go further than she was ready to, and would then scream rape. Or, alternatively, that she would go hardly any distance at all, and that he would then yield to temptation and rape her in truth.
Why did the young man take this business of rape so seriously? He was not one of those earnest young philosophers who pass through a phase of diligent asceticism at the age of eighteen. No: it was a survivor’s caution which governed his flesh.
Chegory Guy was, as we have said already, an Ebrell Islander. By breeding at least, though not by birth. Yes, though Chegory Guy had been born on Untunchilamon, his parents had both been of Ebrell Island stock. Now the Ebrell Islanders are a race of drunkards, knifefighters and fornicators cursed by a genetic tendency to wanton dissipation. You doubt this? Are you then one of these Ashdan liberals who hold that hereditary traits are but illusory, and who believe (or at least claim to believe) that all things are possible for all people? Read on! And you will be enlightened.
The Ebrell Islanders had long been a troublesome minority on Untunchilamon. They had always been for the most part unemployed. Gambling, drug abuse, violence and venereal disease were rife amongst them. They were customarily involved in smuggling, theft, prostitution, extortion and organised crime. They were a cancerous blotch upon civilisation.
Therefore, when Chegory Guy was but nine years of age, the wise and magnanimous Wazir Sin had organised a pogrom against the Ebbies. The slaughter had been efficient in the extreme, and only a few of the underpeople had escaped into the wilderness. Among those few were the nine-year-old Chegory Guy, his father, his uncle Dunash Labrat and his cousin Ham.
Strangely, the slaughter of the Ebrell Islanders failed to end unemployment, crime and prostitution in Injiltaprajura. Wazir Sin was vexed. He decided he had not gone far enough. So he drew up a Program of Purification. First he would hunt down any and all Ebbies who had fled into the Wastelands. Then he would slaughter the few survivors of the Dagrin — the aboriginal race of Untunchilamon. Then he would kill the crippled, the insane, the mutant, and anyone over the age of seventy. Then he would But it is pointless to detail further this Noble Experiment, for it was not to be. Before the saintly Wazir Sin could enact his visionary program, the horrors of Talonsklavara threw the Izdimir Empire into disarray. The Yudonic Knight Lonstantine Thrug took advantage of the confusion, overthrew the innocent Sin, then murdered that upright imperial servant. Two years later, Thrug was imprisoned in the Dromdanjerie when his mounting insanity had reached the point where it had become undeniable. His daughter Justina installed herself in the belfried palace at the top of Lak Street and proclaimed an amnesty so general that its provisions extended even to the few remaining Ebrell Islanders.
Some of the Ebrell Islanders who still survived in the wilderness returned to Injiltaprajura. Dunash Labrat came home to reclaim his properties, which had been managed in his absence by his wife. Though Chegory Guy’s father stayed in the heartland of the Scorpion Desert, Chegory himself came back to Injiltaprajura with his uncle (the aforesaid Dunash Labrat), and began an apprenticeship as an apiarist. This was aborted when young Chegory proved to be allergic to bee stings. Thereafter he took various forms of irregular employment until at last he landed himself a steady job on the island of Jod.
On Jod, Chegory came into contact with Ivan Pokrov, and thus met Pokrov’s friend Jon Qasaba. An Ashdan. An Ashdan liberal, in fact. Jon Qasaba and his sister-in-law Artemis Ingalawa found the civilisation of Chegory Guy to be a project which appealed to their hopelessly optimistic liberal tastes. They collaborated with Ivan Pokrov on this civilisation experiment, arranging for Chegory’s working day to end at midday so he could study throughout the afternoon while still drawing his pay from Jod’s Analytical Institute. Soon enough, Chegory was boarding with Jon Qasaba in the Dromdanjerie’s staff quarters, and was thus thrown into daily contact with the nubile Olivia.
Is there any need to further elaborate the reasons for Chegory’s caution? He was a member of a despised minority which had recently been almost hunted to extinction on Untunchilamon. By reason of his race, people would expect him to rape, kill, cheat, steal and lie, and also to indulge in the worst forms of drug abuse. Therefore he acted always with the greatest of caution, avoided compromising situations, and showed his thorns to Olivia.
This delicious young damsel, seeking friendship at least (and sometimes thinking she might be seeking more), found his remoteness hard to endure.
By now you may be asking: how are such things known? How have the dynamics of Chegory’s relationship with Olivia been discovered? How can we be sure that this is how it was?
Why, because there is such a thing as gossip, of course. You must realise that institutions (prisons, armies and asylums) are great places for gossip, because there is intimacy, the cheek by the jowl, the free speaking of the loquacious in front of those so familiar they have become invisible, and because there is time. Time to study hints, to theorise on fragments.
And if most of the witnesses to these events were mad, what of it? The intellectual powers of the insane are no weaker than those of people fool enough to accept the status quo. You may doubt this. But reflect! Suppose one has done something heinous. Suppose one has raped one’s brother, burnt down a temple, embezzled half a million dragons or finally settled accounts with one’s mother-in-law. What is smarter? To throw oneself on the mercy of the court, and get oneself executed? Or to discover that one is in truth insane and really indulged in delinquency because one was, for example, frightened by a goldfish in early youth.
Believe me, unless one is truly demented it takes a lot of calculated intellectual discipline to maintain one’s madness in the face of the implacable investigations of that most scholarly of all therapists, Jon Qasaba.
Suppose one has yet again been hailed to the Drom-. danjerie’s interview room, there to face the tenth interview in as many days with the formidable Qasaba. The ever-resourceful Ashdan thinks he has at last found a clue which will explicate one’s behaviour. He enters. He seats himself. He shuffles through a great heap of notes, observations and laborious speculations. Then he looks one in the eyes (he is still ignorant of the fact that my people consider such eye-to-eye contact extremely rude) and he says:
‘Why did you use an axe to kill your mother-in-law?’ ‘Because I wanted her dead.’
‘Yes, yes, I know that. But why an axe? Why that particular implement and not another?’
In the teeth of such a question, what is one to do? One’s natural reaction will be to laugh. Or voice one of the quips which come so easily to the tongue:
‘What was I supposed to use? A toothpick?’
But one cannot safely do either of these things. The mad are supposed to be serious and devoid of wit. So: will the truth serve? No. For the truth is too simple. It was pleasure, pure pleasure, to see the bitch smashed apart, to see her skull burst like a rotten cantaloup, to see great globs of blood [Here a lengthy descriptive passage has been excised. By Order, Drax Lira, Redactor Major.]
Anyone can understand this. Or should be able to. However, Jon Qasaba is so obsessed by his pursuit of arcane knowledge that he has lost touch entirely with the blatantly obvious. So one thinks long and carefully, then answers: ‘Weight.’
‘Weight?’
‘Yes, it… the axe, it… I mean, it was heavy. Oppressive. It was… there was a memory. I mean, what I’m trying to say is that there’s all these… these…’
‘Go on.’
‘It goes back to… to when I was little, that’s when the weight, the weight, the pressure, it first… or maybe it was before then.’
One observes Jon Qasaba writing. One deciphers his eager notation: Birth Trauma?!
When Q_asaba looks back, one is staring at nothing. Slowly, one says:
‘Blood, too. That comes into it. Somehow, it’s… there’s blood mixed up in this. The memories, I mean.’
You get the picture? This is the kind of intellectual endeavour it takes to remain suitably mad while one resides in the Dromdanjerie. So don’t write off the insane. While they are not necessarily totally accurate in their observations, who is? Would you trust Qasaba to author this history? Qasaba, who truly believes that Rye Phobos did what he did because his mother subjected him to the Second Indignity when he was aged but three? No, Qasaba- [Here the Originator libels Qasaba at length, then argues that the status quo itself is not necessarily sane. Hence (he says) that majority which dwells outside the lunatic asylum is possibly the group which is truly mad. Surely (I say) such argument is absurd. In terms of logic and the law, lunatics are by definition those incarcerated in lunatic asylums. What more need be said? Drax Lira, Redactor Major.]
Thus, to return to the question of the provenance of our facts.
Believe me, all this is known. Or most of it. Very, very little is surmise, and the logic of such surmise is inescapable. Truly, Olivia Qasaba was at the age of change, of ripeness, of hot juice and urgent dreams, that age when nine thoughts in ten are unspeakable because of their impropriety. In her days of youth and vigour she was domiciled in close quarters with Chegory Guy, and had no other appropriate target of sexual opportunity in sight.
Ergo, she was infatuated with him. Or, at a minimum, she was continually considering (perhaps continually rejecting, but definitely considering!) young Chegory as a potential sexual partner. For such is the nature of the blood. Such is the nature of the organism. And who can deny that the organism has, shall we say, at times a certain priority? When the flesh is gorged and the urge is upon them, even the wise must [Here by Order of the Redactor Major a gratuitous crudity of considerable obscenity has been excised. Also an unpardonable elaboration of that crudity, complete with the baseless attribution of regrettable personal practices to several of History’s more dignified Perpetrators.]
Let us have an equation, then, in the manner of the famous literary theorist Sinja Larthelme. Boy plus girl equals the necessity for diligent onlookers to be ever considering the probable consequences of propinquity.
Does that satisfy?
The followers of Sinja Larthelme will doubtless answer: no. The equation is too simple. Too true. Too close to life as it is lived. Too close to commonsense. They want different equations, elaborate expressions of curves and intersections, velocities and accelerations, subsets and matrices. They pretend to be in possession of a generalised mathematics of existence which (this is their conceit) treats with human disorder (chaos, coincidence, collision) in terms of a mode of discourse possessed of a logic as rigorous as that used to clarify the dance of the stars.
Which is a nonsense.
Because [To spare scribes, readers and overburdened library shelves alike, some seventy thousand words of impassioned exegesis have here been excised by Order of the Redactor Major.]
Well, where were we?
We were at the point where Chegory Guy was loading lanterns on to a bablobrokmadorni stick for Olivia. Once the stick was loaded, she followed her father into the depths of the Dromdanjerie to help calm the inmates. She walked with a firm, confident step. She knew the mad by name, and was used to dealing with their moods and panics. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that she had a lead-weighted cosh in her back pocket.
The daughter of an Ashdan liberal, yet she carried a cosh?
Well, yes.
Life in the Dromdanjerie does tend to inject a certain degree of realism into one’s actual behaviour whatever one’s ideological outlook.
Chegory Guy did not follow. Not because he was scared, but because Jon Qasaba had often explicitly forbidden him to venture into the dormitories. Instead, he lit more lanterns, then sat silent. Waiting. As he waited, he heard all the dogs of Injiltaprajura begin to bark and howl.
What did he think of as he sat there thus? We can only guess. Perhaps he thought of Olivia, of her heat, her nipples, the marginal hairs, the faint-breathing odour easing from her secret. He was young, was he not? So what else would he think about? And Olivia was worth thinking of, oh yes, she was worth it, very much worth it indeed.
But I never touched her, I swear it.