He spoke the words with a gentle astonishment, like truths he had just understood.
Then he raped her.
When Skid-Blade returned to the shore where Virgil waited, it carried a new Flapping Eagle. Virgil listened to his account, then said: -You really must do something about your imagination, you know. It’s so awfully lurid.
With the help of Virgil Jones, it wasn’t difficult for Flapping Eagle to extricate himself from the web of Dimension-fever. They constructed their escape simply: Flapping Eagle closed his eyes and, while Virgil danced the Strongdance, willed himself to awake. It was, in the end, as anticlimactic as that, now that the battle was over. Flapping Eagle had become stronger than the inner dimensions.
Long experience, however, adds to strength a certain sensitivity to nuance and wrongnesses; so that as they neared consciousness (as their separate consciousnesses drew closer and closer together, almost touching for an instant, before separating) it was not Flapping Eagle, but Virgil Jones who became aware of a third presence, a third consciousness, also rising.
An instant before the blackout that spanned the fragment of time in which he was restored to himself, Virgil touched the intruder and knew it.
Wakefulness. He was naked, his clothes piled where he left them, on Flapping Eagle’s chest, the greenwood surrounding them, his body still describing the methodical, circular perambulations of the Strongdance. He felt the dead weight of exhaustion in his limbs, but forgot it in his anger.
– Where are you? he shouted. Where?
The “voice” of the unseen Gorf came calm from the woods.
– Greetings, Mr Jones.
Virgil dressed rapidly.
Flapping Eagle awoke with a splitting headache. The words where am I? formed on his lips for the second time on Calf Island; he dismissed them with a wry twist of the mouth. Where is anywhere? he asked himself.
Nevertheless, it was Calf Mountain; the slope of the forested ground told him so. And the cry of the dimensions, for the Effect remained, even though he had mastered it…a nagging in the corners of the eyes, ears and mind. Soon it would become like a mild tintinabulatory infection of the ear; he would become unaware of its presence except in moments of utter stillness. Now, it remained an irritant, niggling at him, a whining reminder of the world’s infinite cavities.
He stood up and found himself alone. A moment of panic; he shouted Virgil’s name into the clearing. Then, collecting himself, he heard the voice in the forest. Virgil’s voice, low and angry. He crept towards the sound with the stealth of his childhood.
In the forest, Virgil Jones was remonstrating with an old acquaintance.
XXVI Out of Order
– AS YOU PERCEIVE, said the “voice” of the Gorf, I stayed.
– The hand of the born interférer, said Virgil, can never resist a superfluous gesture or two.
– Pot and kettle, replied the voice. Mote and beam.
– The acquisition of rudimentary idiom, said Virgil, confers no freedoms. Any intellect which confines itself to mere structuralism is bound to rest trapped in its own webs. Your words serve only to spin cocoons around your own irrelevance.
A thing that happened to Virgil Jones when he was angry: his speech became involuted and obscure. It came of a horror of displaying his loss of self-control. When he was angry, he felt weakest, most easily outwitted; so his speech wound around itself those very cocoons he ascribed to the Gorf.
He was more angry than he could remember. Much of it, he told himself, was reaction. He had put himself through a rigorous physical and mental examination; his very survival had been at risk; it was reasonable, he argued inwardly, for any human being to react overmuch to provocation after all that.
He knew, also, of another thorn. He had felt good on his recent travels; he had felt as he had once felt. Then. Ago. Before. To he plunged from that high confidence into his present weakening choler was intolerable. Which thought only served to make him more angry. The circle was vicious.
The overlarge tongue played about his mouth; a bead of saliva worked its way down to the cleft in his chin; his hands, in the pockets of his crumpled coat, worked feverishly. He sat on a fallen branch of an unknown conifer; it felt rough beneath him. He kicked morosely at a cone, glaring at the invisible creature, as if to scald him with a look.
Silently, crouched behind a clump of trees, Flapping Eagle listened to his guide talking into the void and apparently receiving answers. (The “voice” of the Gorf is only audible to the being it addresses.) He thought: Virgil Jones, there is more to you than meets the eye. And since there was a large quantity of Virgil for any eye to meet, that was a compliment.
The third protagonist sat equably, ten yards or so from Virgil, resting against a tree, his sensory aura quivering slightly. He had had no fears of this confrontation; it had amused him to meet Mr Jones again, and had given him a clue to the final Ordering he was now anxious to discover; but Virgil’s last words rankled, as they were meant to. Irrelevance, indeed.
– Are you aware, Mr Jones, he said haughtily, of my status as an Orderer?
Mr Jones said nothing.
– I see you are, continued the peevish voice. In which case you will no doubt recall the Prime Rule of that noble calling.
Mr Jones looked innocent. Now that he had penetrated the Gorf’s (thick) hide, he felt his own anger cooling.
– Possibly I should remind you, snapped the Gorf. Possibly it will induce you to refrain from these allusions.
– If memory serves, interposed Virgil Jones, the Prime Rule of Order is to eschew all irrelevance. Please correct me if wrong.
There was a brief pause. Then: -You are not wrong, came the reply.
– So, said Virgil Jones, may I be permitted to accuse the Master of a cardinal infringement of his own rules?
This time the silence was aghast.
– Grounds, said the Gorf tersely. Your grounds, please.
– First: that by your intrusion into the personal dimensions of another being, inviolable except in dire emergency, you committed an act not merely irrelevant to those dimensions, but actually dangerous. Even the most skilled of the Masters cannot toy with another’s dimensions without risk. In this case the risk was enormous.
The Gorf said: -If you believe I meant him harm, you underestimate my skill. Having intuited his role, as a participant in the Final Ordering, it would be grossly bad play to distort that Ordering by a wilful act. I merely set him a puzzle to deepen his knowledge of the dimensions. Consider: if I had not done so, if he had fought off the fever instantly, he would never have conquered his monsters. How can this be irrelevance?
Virgil considered.
– There’s some truth in that, he said. But we don’t know if he needed to overcome those monsters. Now that it has happened as it happened, even he will say he did. But he might not have, had it been otherwise. Your defence rests on an unproveable first principle.
– The onus of proof rests with you, came the answer.
Virgil returned to the attack.
– Second: that, having no place whatsoever in the Final Ordering of the Island, you have been irrelevant ever since you perceived that fact, and stayed. There is no reason for you being here; the Island did not include you in its conception, so by your own rules it would be a distortion if it were to use you in any Ordering process. Nor do we have any need of observers. What do you say to that?
The silence lasted for several minutes. (Flapping Eagle, eavesdropping on half the eerie debate, half-thought it was over). Then the Gorfs voice sounded, slow and heavy.
– That was the correct move, Mr Jones. You should not have let your irritation get the better of your judgement at first. The first was a wasted move, which deprives you of perfection. Nevertheless, a score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score.