The Triple Goddess (118 page)

Villian’s chief accountant M. Bezlianus totted up the project’s cost, and informed the august ruler that if Gloria did not give it up within six months, he would be compelled to start pink-slipping staff. Revenues from Gaul and the irksome Britannia had fallen off drastically, and the Imperial coffers were running low. One could keep a mistress for a year, Bezlianus said, on what it cost for a six-ounce bottle of the perfumed Phoenician oil and medium tube of ambergris cream that Villian’s slave slathered on his master’s depilated body, before he set off on each of his courting excursions.

Though the unguents smelt suspiciously of cooking oil and floor wax, the merchant swore that the Phoeny stuff contained a potent pheromone from the glands of musk deer that grazed in the Gardens of the Hesperides, and carried an endorsement from Venus herself.

And then there was Q. H. Flaccus, the immortal Horace. Horace had an exceedingly high opinion of his own talents, and was meanness itself when it came to negotiating prices for his compositions. When M. Bezlianus told him how much further the poetaster had upped his price one week, Villian ordered his chief accountant to cancel, deep-six, ice, and kill the pension that he had previously hinted to the poet he might confer upon him in recognition of his genius.

In umbrage, Horace threatened to accidentally on purpose confuse his dactyls with his spondees in his compositions…blunders by which, he said, lesser poets had turned off many an educated and beautiful woman whom they were looking to impress…unless he were from now on paid in gold at the rate of one
aureus
per word, plus two more for the copyright.

Six months later, an inebriated Flaccus was heard to boast in the public baths that he had purchased a thousand-acre farm and fifty slaves with what he had made for one hour’s work a week, composing doggerel that would not have turned the head of a servant-girl, let alone enable Gorgeus Georgius to get laid by the most notoriously frigid girl in Rome.

Chapter Six

Supplying the Exeat Institute with its Slaves was the Farm. The Farm was an internment camp where Central’s Department of Humanity under Friesia Bolsov 1210C billeted those who had offended or refused to comply with Central’s decrees, pending acceptance by Bonvilian 4285J into his supply pool of Slaves to be drawn upon as required for use as Impatients on Ward One at the Exeat Institute.

Those who, upon examination, were found to be physically corrupted and of no use for snuffing in the name of science were exterminated, processed to remove artificial or inorganic material, and composted by the gardeners who tended the plantings at Central members’ homes. Hydrangeas loved them.

One day Director Bonvilian made a routine visit to the Farm, to select a Slave donor for a cerebellum on which to perform a phrenal enhancement, or reconditioning, of the brain. He wanted to measure the role that ratiocinative functions played in notional temporality: in layman’s terms, in creating the imaginative figment of Time. Einstein had passed windy judgement, without offering conclusive proof, that “the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion”; and T.S. Eliot, as Exeat Institute Superintendent Laszlo knew, made a similar poetic observation.

But scientifically the concept had never been tested except in the most rudimentary manner. In the field of physics it had long been known that if one were to position oneself above a black hole in space, where the mass density was a thousand times greater than that of the Sun, the gravitational field would be strong enough to cause the pace of Time to slacken. Also, when electrons and protons were propelled to nearly the speed of light by high-energy accelerators, their internal clocks slowed and, relative to Earth Time, placed them in the future. And in the field of quantum mechanics, atoms and subatomic particles, or quarks, had been used to demonstrate that, as space breaks down over extremely short distances, so does Time to the point where neither exists.

Bonvilian would have sent an assistant to make the selection for cerebellum harvesting from a group of recently certified Slaves, but in this instance it was essential that the organ come from an individual displaying a particular type of intelligence; and he wanted to evaluate the candidates himself because such tests were not part of the normal admittance screening process.

Having narrowed the field of Slaves to four finalists, 4285J was alone in a small room on the viewing side of a one-way mirrored wall, watching and eavesdropping upon the unsuspecting quartet. In order to reach a decision, he needed to concentrate on the mental reflexes and deductive reasoning powers of each, while they conversed naturally with each other.

Unaware of the game of Russian roulette that they were about to play, the Slaves were gathered around a folding canvas table in a sparsely furnished room—no luxuries were permitted at the Farm—concentrating on trying to complete the Jumbo crossword puzzle on the back page of
The Daily Censor
.

The four individuals on the other side of the glass were the newly minted Stink, Scrap, Scrag, and Sputum. Because it was a group effort to solve the crossword puzzle, it was the perfect forum for Bonvilian to note how each candidate approached solving the clues. Stink, Scrap, Scrag, and Sputum were friends, which was common amongst those who had been thrown together under such adverse circumstances.

Bonvilian bit into his luncheon sandwich.

It was a bigger mouthful than he would have taken had he not been distracted, for the twin slices of granary bread contained a salty black spread called Tarnish. Tarnish was thick and resinous, and a mutant descendant of Marmite, which every toddler was required to eat and like, if it wanted to get its Gerber puréed apricot baby food to follow. In an attempt to disguise the taste, Bonvilian had tried mixing it in the laboratory with fruit and vegetable extracts to make a compôte, and following it with a spoonful of honey or marmalade. But he succeeded only in compounding the obnoxiousness, and there was something about the reaction of saliva enzymes with a combination of Tarnish and marmalade that took the skin off the roof of one’s mouth.

The foul admixture, which was even higher than Marmite in free radicals, vitamins E and C, and beta carotene, was certainly not what the Earl of Sandwich had in mind, when he was inspired to ring for his servant and order him to rustle up the first of his eponymous snacks. Tarnish had been created by a lowly and much vilified research assistant at Catering called Buccal McCavity 9482V, may he drown in a vat of the poisonous stuff—actually, he did, was hauled out, and the batch bottled as vintage. Central’s chief food and nutrition officer, Drusilla Crapo 6601H, had recently started insisting that all top personnel consume a quantity of Tarnish every day; with Central’s sanction, so there was nothing one could do about it, and spot checks were conducted by roving wardens with breath-testing kits.

Rumour had it that Crapo never touched Tarnish herself; with the greatest regret, she said, because it brought her out in a rash...she was allergic to everything but caviar.

The Slaves had just begun to grapple with Fifteen Across of the crossword puzzle: “Despite humorous ribbing, handicapped potentate vows to return,” (4,3,1,3,1,3,4).

Bonvilian did not know what the solution was: for all his genius there was something about the wiring of his brain that made him no good at puzzles, and he was not inclined to acquire the skill through a mechanical practice of familiarization. The clue itself was of no interest to him, nor the answer—it had probably been composed by a T Class or lower—only the way that the Slaves went about considering it and who would be the first to solve it by most intelligently processing input from amongst the group.

‘“Potentate,”’ said Scrap; ‘I’m going to infer masculinity, so no queens, princesses, infantas, or begums. Emperor or king, of course, spring to mind, but it sounds middle- or far-eastern to me. Some exotic cove with a harem who snacks on Turkish Delight, and sherbert.’

Bonvilian longed for some sherbet to cleanse his palate of the wretched Tarnish, which was even worse tasting than that other yeast extract derivative, Bovril.

Sputum said, ‘OK, take your pick of, let’s see: sultan, caliph, khan, khedive. Sheikh, shah, aga, amir. Vizier, pasha, bashaw, bey. Tsar, Mogul or Moghal or Mughal, Maharajah. Nawab or nabob. Satrap, sharif. Nah, most of those are a stretch. It could be a Roman emperor we’re looking for, however, with plenty to choose from. Which of them were, quote, handicapped, unquote?’

Stink said, ‘Or an African emperor; what about Idi Amin? Was he physically handicapped as well as a mental case? He certainly had a weight problem, and was mad, like that murderous dictator in the play by Alfred Jarry,
Ubu Roi
. Amin had over two hundred thousand people killed. He went into exile, presumably “vowing to return”. Yeah, Idi’s a strong candidate.’

‘Sorry, folks, n-n-not my era,’ said Scrag. ‘I did m-modern history at Hatfield P-Polytechnic with a minor in b-botany. No use at all.’

‘You’re on the wrong track,’ said Sputum; ‘the guy who puts
The Censor
crossword together’s a nutter. You need a brain as addled as his to come up with the answers to his clues. You might be right an emperor as our “potentate”, but in my opinion we’re not talking about a person. There are Emperor penguins, for example, and a bloody great insect called an Emperor moth. Any takers for penguin or moth?’

‘I hate moths,’ said Scrap, ‘and I vote we switch to another crossword, the one in
The Diktatler
. It’s a tad less complicated than
The Censor
’s, which for propaganda and disinformation makes
Pravda
look like
The Christian Science Monitor
. It took us three days to get that anagram in last Sunday’s Jumbo, remember? “In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.” Answer: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

‘Whoever would have thunk that could be an anagram? Right bunch of bananas we felt when we saw the solution on Monday.’

‘Especially,’ said Sputum, ‘when we remembered that friend Scrag, the stuttering man, had quoted the lines only two days before, after they shot Snuff out of the human catapult through half a dozen gravity zones, picked him up, and stuck him full of needles to test his body mass. The sling followed by the arrow. But we can’t hope for serendipitous solutions.’

‘It was in p-poor taste,’ said Scrag. ‘I still feel b-bad about it.’

‘All right,’ said Scrap; ‘by way of penance, since we’ve started the Jumbo, let’s keep going rather than taking the easy way out. We’ll do
The Diktatler
’s next week if we’re spared. So what d’you say, Scraggy, is this one an anagram? You’re our anagram man.’

‘Unlikely—Scrappy—with a c-complicated clue like this one, and a s-solution of seven short w-words, n-n-nineteen letters, four, three, one, three, one, three, four. A verb somewhere, noun, pronoun, preposition, adverb, adjective.’

‘Thanks for narrowing the field. You may now leave the room.’

‘Come on, you two,’ said Sputum. ‘“Despite humorous ribbing, handicapped potentate vows to return.” “Return” is the usual obvious hint to turn a word, or part of one, around and read it backwards; but I don’t see that here unless it’s “sour” from the end of “humorous”, or the “tent” of “potentate”, or “rots”. Pretty feeble, all of them.’

‘There was that other one we had,’ said Stink. ‘Clue: “General sailing to ancient Britain, tiring of unsalted meat and no greens, sends his cook to sleep with the fishes.” Fact: Julius Caesar, invader of England in 55 BC. Factoid: Clupeoid, a fish of the family
Clupeidae
which includes the herring, sprat and anchovy. Answer: “Caesar salad”, which in a restaurant used to come, unless you asked for it not to, which I always did, with an anchovy, or salted fish, on a bed—hence “tiring” and “sleep”—of lettuce as in green salad.’

‘Anchovy,’ said Scrap thoughtfully; ‘there used to be a rather nice anchovy paste that one put on toast. It was called Patum Peperium, “The Gentleman’s Relish”. It came in a round white box.’

Bonvilian pinched his nose and swallowed another mouthful of his Tarnish sandwich.

‘Claudius!’ said Sputum. ‘Julius Caesar, Claudius. It
is
a Roman emperor, and I was leading us up the garden path with moths and penguins. Sorry. Old Claudius was handicapped, he limped, and he had a speech impediment that may have been cerebral palsy. He was married four times, number three he had put to death, and the last, Agrippina, was his niece and the mother of Nero. Like Julius Caesar, Claudius came to Britain, if only for sixteen days...I don’t remember whether he vowed to return or not. But our buddy Scrag here might be descended from him, with a stammer like his. No wonder you turned out the way you did, Scraggers.’

‘Up y-yours,’ said Scrag. ‘But th-thanks for the history lesson.’

Stink rolled his eyes. ‘Steady The Buffs, lads. Look, none of us here is exactly Mensa material, but we can at least be methodical. Now then: the solution is four, three, one, three, one, three, four. Nineteen letters in all, including two single-letter words that must be vowels, i.e. “a”s, or “i”s, or one of each. Could be “o”s but only if they’re archaic invocations or old poetry, which ain’t likely. And see, the sequence of number of letters is symmetrical: four three one; followed by a three letter word in the middle; then one three four which is the first three backwards. So the inclusion of “return” could be important after all.’