Harry Cavendish Read Free

cow.” Freshly mown straw, it was. Smelt like heaven.
    ‘Now, I says to Desmond. The first premise is pantheistic in that it asserts God moves through nature, and is one with nature, and nature and God are the same thing, and the second premise must be opposed to that one, and the two must form the only possible alternatives, so that we can affirm the disjunct classically. Hence, I need a second premise along the lines of, ooh… I says, now here’s where it gets tricky – maybe God being a Zargon… Now, Desmond wasn’t happy with that premise at all, quite rightly, because the two premises together don’t represent the only possible alternatives… And that’s when they started: “Here pretty, pretty cow. Here pretty, pretty cow”…with the rustling of the straw. To stop the dangerous conversation. The syllogisms, you understand. And they led me far, far I tell you, Cormack. It is Cormack, isn’t it? With their wicked straw and vigorous rustling. Right into the mouth of a Zargonic Prison Whale. And here I is. With you. That last part - coming through the stomach lining up there. That was not pleasant I can tell you.’
    Cormack listened to more in the same vein for a while, and went back to sitting on the floor with his head in his hands.

Chapter Four
    The Emperor of the Zargons was now at his bath, lying in the topmost tub of a cascade of tubs in the vast Imperial Bathroom that stretched a full five hundred yards along a flank of the Imperial Palace. The water was very hot, steaming like a bouillabaisse, and filled with unguents and crystals and perfumes and salts.
    He was enjoying himself hugely, scouring his back with a loafer and singing folk songs to the silent hive-mind.
    It was one of his great pleasures to come here and bathe. His office was burdensome, the people that surrounded him tiresome, the great duties and responsibilities of State hung on him heavily, but in the Imperial Tub he could relax and be at one with nature, nude and utterly alone, excepting his throat cable and his hive-mind.
    The mind was within its box, perched besides him, buzzing fearfully, frightened of electrocution.
    ‘Don’t pull so hard on the cable now, Sire,’ the million nano-bots said. ‘If our box were to fall into your tub, the results would be catastrophic.’
    ‘You would blow up.’
    ‘And you would be electrocuted.’
    He continued his song but with less vigour now, the hive-mind having disturbed his good mood.
    After some exaggerated movements with the loafer, so as to confuse the hive-mind into thinking he might snag the throat cable, he rose with a sigh from the tub and rubbed down the small Imperial Personage with the small Imperial Towel he had left on the floor earlier. When he was dried, he pulled on his purple stockings, the Imperial Codpiece modelled for a conch shell that hid a winkle, the long robes of green and gold - the vain trappings of State, as they seemed to him now, in his forty-eighth year - mere baubles and rags.
    His mind, or at least the part of it that he controlled, returned with displeasure to the serious matters of State.
    ‘What have we done with that McFadden creature?’ he said at last. The thing had been bothering him.
     
    He was so excited that someone else had got a message from God, a confirmation of his sanity as it were, and then, when the McFadden creature hadn’t talked, it was so disappointing.
    ‘He is in the Prison Whale.’
    ‘Is he talking?’
    ‘Only to the cow.’
    ‘There’s a cow?’
    ‘The Prison Whale insisted on consuming a cow as a complement to the main course. We had to comply.
    The Whale has such a sensitive digestion and is so gigantic. We didn’t want it to break from its moorings.’
    ‘I did so want to hear what God had told the McFadden creature.’
    ‘Yes, I did too. We all did. Always good to hear from God. And the burn on the McFadden creature resembles exactly the mark that is mentioned in the Ancient Texts, Sire.’
    ‘So he could be