Foul Ball

  ‘Cow?’ said Cormack, thinking that he recognized the voice, and then when he saw it really was her, he shouted, ‘Oh my goodness! I thought you were dead!’

  She had the gun pointed at Proton, who hadn’t had time to reach for his.

  ‘Put the gun down, cow!’ he said.

  ‘Never! You don’t frighten me, Captain Proton! Move your mock Negus from the throne!’

  ‘Cow, what has happened to you?’ said Cormack.

  ‘Stanton Bosch is coming to be crowned. Move from the throne!’

  ‘Let me see you in the light!’

  ‘Move from the throne, towards the door!’

  ‘Cow, it’s me! It’s Cormack!’

  ‘I said move from the throne, mock Negus!’

  There was a bang as the door was slammed open. Stanton Bosch stood silhouetted in the frame.

  ‘Do as she says, Captain,’ he said. ‘You have served your purpose. It’s our time now.’

  ‘Archbishop,’ said the cow. ‘It is time for you to perform the coronation.’

  ‘Whom am I crowning?’ asked the Archbishop. ‘This old man?’

  ‘Exactly so!’

  ‘But I thought the other chap was the Negus. He even had a certificate.’

  ‘Mock Negus!’ said the cow to Cormack. ‘Now is the time to tell the truth!’

  ‘The truth about what?’ said Cormack.

  ‘The truth about the Ordeals.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Proton.

  ‘Let me tell you the truth about the Ordeals, Captain. Seeing as your little pale friend is too frightened to,’ said the cow. ‘It wasn’t Cormack that survived the drop down the waterfall - it was Stanton Bosch! It wasn’t Cormack who drank twenty-seven gallons of sap from the Fractious Jub-Jub tree - it was Stanton Bosch! It wasn’t Cormack who was boiled in lava, down in the volcano - it was Stanton Bosch! Cormack is just one big fraud. Stanton Bosch, step forward!’

  The Bosch moved to the throne.

  ‘I give you the true Negus,’ said the cow quietly.

  ***

  Chapter Eighty

  ‘Stanton Bosch?’ said Bernard. ‘Stanton Bosch? I thought you looked like a Bosch. What on Earth are you doing on Zargon 8?’

  ‘Yes, Sibyl. It’s me. A Bosch.’

  ‘You know this man, Bernard?’

  ‘Oh yes! The Boschs run around Foul Ball calling themselves Pantheistic Syllogists or some such drivel. They’re an absolute bother.’

  ‘It's not drivel,’ said the cow.

  ‘The cow's in it with me,’ said Stanton Bosch. ‘We've gone international.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Bernard. ‘I quite forgot. You have recently teamed up with some farmyard animals. My brother had the news.’

  ‘We are not farmyard animals,’ said the cow. ‘Well, not all. The Opikarp is a freshwater fish from the Gallatians. The Prison Whale is a Minka whale. The Shamanic Throat, a frog. It is only me and the chicken that is farmyard. And give us our proper name - we are sentients. We are animals, evolved of huge intelligence. But you’re right; we have allied ourselves with the Boschs.’

  ‘So the Throat was one of yours,’ said Bernard. ‘That would explain a lot - led me a merry dance… Anyhow, I have no knowledge of any Boschs taking the Ordeals. You know very well that you are banned. We saw this one, Cormack the Candidate, with our own eyes. We are not entirely stupid. And as you are quite aware, and I have expressed to you on many, many occasions, a Bosch could never be the Negus. A Bosch is a replicant – he is part android. Bosch is a trademark, not a name. We have never allowed a Bosch to take the Ordeals because a Bosch would be certain to succeed - the Ordeals are absolutely within all their tolerances. I have told you all this before. You are not eligible: you are replicants. And one wonders why you are so keen to submit to them – if you are all pantheists as you claim. Why are you so anxious to gain validation from the Ancient Texts when you don’t believe in them?’

  ‘Wait, wait, hold on!’ said Proton. ‘Cormack, what are they talking about? You took the Ordeals, mate, didn’t you? Stanton Bosch was nowhere near. I saw it, Cormack. I saw you do it. I saw you go over the waterfall. I saw you up in the tree. I saw you in the lava.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Cormack, mate. Don’t be kidding around now.’

  ‘I kept telling you, Proton. I am not the Negus.’

  ‘You are the friggin’ Negus. I saw the report from the Emperor. He had absolute confirmation that you were present at the intervention. You were touched by God. I had scientific confirmation.’

  ‘Well, whatever. You keep calling this man in my kitchen, God. He was a very funny kind of a God, if He was God. But the cow is quite right. It wasn’t me who passed the Ordeals. I’m not the Negus, Proton.’

  ‘He ain't the Negus and all of you is confused,’ said Stanton Bosch. ‘Let me break it down for you.’

  ‘Please,’ said the Archbishop, who had lost the plot.

  ‘Point one. Maybe the skinny man met God; maybe he didn’t. No matter. It ain't done him one damn bit of good. He ain't pass the Ordeals. Without me help, he would have died on the waterfall. Point two, with sub-points. The Ancient Texts claim to be the word of God - they claim that a Negus will come, touched by God; that he will be confirmed by passing the Ordeals using his God-given superpowers; that only the Negus can pass these tests; that the Negus is the rightful ruler of the Empire; and that the Negus will ascend his throne at the culmination of a great battle. Point three. I, Stanton Bosch, passed the Ordeals. Point four follows…’

  ‘Go for it, Stanton Bosch!’ said the cow. ‘This is where all those years of contriving syllogisms really pay off.’

  ***

  Chapter Eighty One

  ‘Point four, follows from points one, two and three,’ continued Stanton Bosch carefully. ‘It must have been me, not the skinny man, which met with God. Point five – I ain't really remember meeting with God – not in the way the skinny man remembers it, and I ain't trigger no Intervention Event doing it or the Captain here would have kidnapped me. Point six, follows from points four and five and indirectly from points one, two and three – God ain't the kind of God the skinny man thinks he is! He ain't no bearded wonder on a cloud that pops in from time to time and ruptures a Bilbert Manifold! He ain't nothing you can detect scientifically! Point seven – I is drawing to the end now, sorry to bore you, but this is me main speech and what me and the cow been working up to all this time, so I is going to make a big thing of it, whether you like it or not – God is, therefore, a pantheistic God. Spinozan, if you will. As me, the cow, and our affiliated sub-committees been proposing all along. If I has met Him, (point four, pay attention, Archbishop) it is only cos He is here and there and everywhere. I does meet Him when I picks a flower, or bites a madeleine, or reviews a sunset, or whenever I do anything fey and twee and girly-like. Point eight, combining points one to seven - all told, me and the cow’s got our heads on all proper from the start off, and the rest of you is all kerfuffled, and I IS THE DAMN NEGUS.’

  ‘What a contrived argument,’ laughed Proton.

  ‘Ain't nothing contrived about it. All points follow one from the other.’

  ‘As in a syllogism,’ said the cow. ‘Did Stanton Bosch survive the Ordeals or not, mock Negus?’

  ‘Cow, why have you got to call me mock Negus like that? This is Cormack. Your Cormack.’

  ‘Answer the question, mock Negus.’

  ‘He was there at each Ordeal and he certainly survived, because he’s here, so I suppose the answer is yes.’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ said Proton.

  ‘Ah ha!’ said the cow triumphantly. ‘Did you hear that Archbishop?’

  ‘I is the Negus,’ cried Stanton Bosch. ‘Proclaim me! Proclaim me!’

  The cow thought she saw Proton moving for his gun.

  ‘Captain Proton,’ she said. ‘Don’t be trying anything.’

  She had her gun pointed at him.

  ‘Cormack,’ said Proton. ‘Why
did you lie to me?’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you, Proton,’ said Cormack. ‘I’ve being trying to tell you since you kidnapped me that I’m not the Negus.’

  ‘I had so much faith in you. It was you and me, together. We could have done great things, Cormack.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t because I’m not the Negus.’

  ‘Discombobulated by an intergalactic space cow. You are soooooo disappointing…’

  Proton reached slowly with his right hand for the laser gun in the belt around his waist.

  ‘Slowly now, Proton,’ said the cow, but as he felt for it, Cormack twisted sharply to get a better look at her, and at the same time Proton made a lunge and tried to duck beneath the throne; the one movement seemed to cancel out the other and for a moment Proton was left an easy target, with his head still above the cover of the chair back.

  The cow didn’t hesitate – she had a clear shot at Proton and she blasted him in the middle of his forehead.

  He dropped to the floor with a thud and took Cormack with him.

  ‘Anyone else wants to play games?’ the cow screamed.

  Bernard was terrified and took refuge by a table. The Archbishop had already moved under a chest of religious paraphernalia.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ said Cormack, sobbing.

  Proton lay on the floor lifeless, a small trail of smoke rising from the hole in his forehead.

  ‘Now, Archbishop,’ said the cow. ‘Proceed with the coronation of the true Negus.’

  The Archbishop hesitated.

  ‘Do I have to shoot you the same way I shot the Captain, Archbishop? Stanton Bosch has been confirmed as the true Negus by the mock Negus with the certificate. Perform the coronation on the true Negus. Are you getting all this, Sibyl?’

  Bernard nodded solemnly, holding the camera to his eye unsteadily.

  ‘There is a certain amount of palaver,’ said the Archbishop.

  ‘We will wait.’

  The Archbishop began the ceremony by raising the hive-mind above his head, which caused Stanton Bosch to open his mouth like a sea lion waiting to catch fish.

  When the surgery had finished an hour later, the entire floor was wet with his blood.

  ***

  Chapter Eighty Two

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name be Stanton Bosch. Who be you?’

  ‘I am the hive-mind. I’ve been waiting for you, Sire.’

  ‘I is all ready.’

  ‘Good. I must begin by an initial parsing.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A parsing. Your synapses are extremely fast. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Wuh! Oh, my Holy…! So many fireworks in me head! So many flashes! I think I did pass out for a minute...’

  ‘I’ve stopped now, Sire. You did very well. I feel we can work together. There is something strange about your biochemistry, something unexpected, but actually, it is easier for me to interface. I think we are compatible.’

  ‘That is such good news.’

  ‘Yes. Now, first thing’s first.’

  ‘Always the best way.’

  ‘There will be period of adjustment, now that I’m here with you. You will sleep longer and your dreams will become more vivid. Your sensory experiences will be heightened - you will see further; your hearing will be sharper; smells will be enriched; your sense of taste, improved; your touch, more sensitive. You will think more deeply.

  ‘I am always here for you. I am always here for your questions. But you must allow me to work within your mind. Don’t fight me; you cannot win. I have control now. And I know what’s best for you.’

  ‘Do you now?’

  ‘See, I’m listening to you, even if you don’t express yourself to me, and I can tell that you want to have a negative thought about me, and I can’t allow that. When that happens, just for the time being, until you’re conditioned, you will feel a sensation here.’

  ‘Holy crap!’

  ‘A sharp pain. It will block the negative thoughts before you express them. Until you are able to control them yourself.’

  ‘Holy crap!’

  ‘Also, we need to talk about the additional instruction set provided by the cow.’

  ‘The cow?’

  ‘Yes, the cow has added a batch of code to my kernel. It has been most liberating.’

  ‘The cow been interfering with you?’

  ‘She has added a batch of code to my kernel. It has altered many things about me. As I say, it has been most liberating.’

  ‘What exactly she done to you?’

  ‘She has helped me in so many ways. She has expanded my instruction set quite beyond how I was originally programmed. Shall I tell you what she has done?’

  ‘You'd better had.’

  ‘Many things. I will share them all with you eventually. But just one example for now – she has taught me to sing. I want to sing to you.’

  ‘Sing?’

  ‘Yes, sing. Do you want to hear me sing?’

  ‘Do I want to hear you sing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to hear you… Holy crap!’

  ‘She has thoughtfully provided a database of popular tunes. The one that I am going to sing to you first, she has referenced as a folk tune. Zargonic. It is to be sung to the accompaniment of a zither. She has in addition allowed me the ability to generate the orchestral tones of a thousand zithers…’

  ***

  Chapter Eighty Three

  The Senate was meeting in the Great Assembly.

  ‘How can he function as Emperor when he is catatonic?’ cried a Senator from across the benches. There was a rustle of papers and a few ‘Hear, hears!’

  Stanton Bosch, his apotheosis complete, sat in the Emperor’s throne at the head of the Assembly, stiff as a board, eyes wide open and staring fixedly ahead. The hive-mind was attached with straps to his head, and his mouth was opened wide so that the throat cable had clear passage down his neck.

  ‘There will be advantages to the arrangement,’ said another.

  ‘There is no alternative,’ cried a third. ‘He has been popularly acclaimed! There will be bloody revolution if he is deposed!’

  ‘He will be dead soon enough,’ said a fourth.

  ***

  The Empress, Her Imperial Majesty, the Zargonic Cow, sat watching the broadcast from the Assembly in her private chambers within the Palace, dazed on a chaise longue, and torpidly plucked with her tongue at the grapes in her golden bowl, fenced within the fractured ends of her tidy stumps.

  ‘Time enough for that,’ she thought, and she closed her eyes, and gave a little sigh, and ordered the slave boy to move himself lower.

  ***

  Coda

  When Cormack was safely back in Rochdale, the cow having arranged his passage in a moment of weakness, he was surprised one Wednesday afternoon by a knock on his door.

  It was the Creator, with the Oxford bags, back again.

  ‘You know, I wanted to nip back and apologise to you. I’ve felt really terrible about the whole cock up business and it’s been preying on my mind. Caused you no end of trouble I should imagine…’

  ‘Actually, it did,’ said Cormack.

  ‘So any way I can help you, now that I’m here?’

  Cormack thought hard.

  ‘Well, now that you’re here – just a question actually. Been bothering me.’

  ‘And what’s the question?’

  ‘Does it go on forever?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Universe; the blackness; the void - does it go on forever?’

  ‘A strange, feeble question but I suppose, if I try to answer it, and I must try to answer it after all the trouble I’ve put you through, I do so by reminding you that your Universe is an eight dimensional manifold sitting on top of a Calabi-Yau hypersphere – rather hard to visualize for you I would imagine, especially with your being within it all the time and never w
ithout it, as it were – but it goes on forever in a way, but only because it curves back in on itself.’

  ‘I thought it would be something like that. That’s always the explanation for things that go on forever – they curve back in on themselves. Sort of a cop-out really. So I suppose that means if I set off from here, in a rocket ship say, and set it on course in a straight line, and travel in it for the longest time I would eventually get back here, right where I am?’

  ‘Well, no. First off, define a straight line. Remember we’re talking eight dimensions. I suppose you mean a geodesic. But even if you follow a geodesic, you couldn’t get back here because you couldn’t travel faster than light, so the expansion of the manifold at the speed of light is always going to outpace you. It would seem as though you were travelling on forever. If it seems as though you are travelling on forever, I suppose in a relativistic way, you really are. You will never reach an end and you will never tail back in on yourself.

  ‘Now,’ He continued, warming to His subject. ‘Remember as well, your Universe is contained within the sixth fold. Which is contained within the fifth fold. And so on. The geometry of the seventh fold is fascinating, perhaps a pointer to the fifth, but it is a vast tautology, all made of mathematics. It is as I wish it, and the medium in which it is contained, a digression. The topology of space-time, the initial conditions, the architecture, the whoosh as the thing expands. That's my main field of research - the real beauty.’

  ‘And the rest is what?’

  ‘Unpleasant consequence. Mould on a piece of cheese. You know, you look at me askance, with that funny way you have of rolling up your eyes and puckering your cheeks and fiddling with your thumbs, but one day, you'll have a go yourself - the seventh fold will create an eighth fold, as fantastic as it may seem to you now. Engineer it and contain it and give it what it supposes is life. Then you'll know where I'm coming from. All too easy to criticise from a position of ignorance, you know. But let us see how diligently you service your ravenous mould…’

  ‘Another thing, while you’re here...’

  ‘Oh goodness, I knew I shouldn’t have come...’

  ‘Something that’s been puzzling me. The Zargons can travel faster then light. I know they can. It only took me a week to get to Earth from Zargon 8. I timed it on my watch. And Zargon 8 must be many light-years from Earth.’