The Poison Oracle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Note on Translation

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  THE

  POISON

  ORACLE

  Peter

  Dickinson

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  The Poison Oracle copyright © 1974 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved. First published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton, London. First Small Beer Press edition published in 2013.

  “Peter Dickinson in conversation with Sara Paretsky” © 2013 by Peter Dickinson and Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com

  www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickinson, Peter, 1927-

  The poison oracle / Peter Dickinson. -- Small Beer Press edition, First edition.

  pages ; cm.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-065-7 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-066-4 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PR6054.I35P6 2013

  823’.914--dc23

  2013018819

  First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  Text set in Minion.

  Cover image “Chimpanizee” © 2010 by Mark Alastair (mark-alastair.co.uk)

  Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by the Maple Press in the USA.

  Note on Translation

  THE LANGUAGE OF the marsh-people cannot be translated directly into an English word-for-word equivalent. All the sentences that appear here are paraphrases. I have used archaic word-orders to do this, because the language is somewhat of that nature; colloquialisms do exist, but are used only when speaking to children, or occasionally when wishing to imply that an adult is behaving in a childish manner. For those who are interested, here is a specimen of how the language actually works: The formal greeting on page 52 “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow” consists of the single word-accretion Kt!urocharha’ygharlocht!in. This accretion has three roots of relationship: -och- comes twice and implies the relationship of property rights, linking in the first case Kt!u which is the locative of K!tu, a wallow, with -ar- which is the first person root unmodified by any clan stop; the -r- in this section is meaningless, a euphony insert. The second -och- links -gharal- (the plural form of garal, a buffalo) with -t!in which is the second-person-singular suffix tinh, modified with a ninth-clan stop and closure. The central relationship of permission is expressed by -ha’y- where the y is a breathed uvular semivowel modifying the normal permissive root -ha//- to show that the permission is not to be taken for granted as this is merely a formal greeting.

  I have also translated the Arabic into slightly formal English, as that is how the language is usually spoken in Q’Kut, compared with the rest of the Arab world.

  One

  1

  WITH AS MUCH passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window. He thought she looked incredibly beautiful, leaning against the heavy wire mesh on the far side, and watching the main group with that air of surprise which Morris knew to mean that she was apprehensive. She looked healthier than most of the others; her coarse black hair had a real sheen to it, and her eyes were bright with vitality.

  The others were in a listless mood, though they ought by now to have got over the shock of their arrival; only Murdoch’s baby showed much life, making little exploratory forays away from his mother. Sparrow was gazing with sullen intensity at the air-conditioner; perhaps its thin whine got on his nerves; he couldn’t know how carefully it had been adjusted to produce a temperature and humidity at which he would thrive. The rest merely lolled and slouched. The darkening caused by the one-way glass in the observation window softened the concrete tree-trunks and metal branches, and gave the whole scene the look of a forest glade. Morris was both pleased and disturbed by this illusion of nature.

  “Sparrow looks pretty unintelligent,” murmured the Sultan. “

  “I don’t know,” said Morris.

  “In fact I think he looks decidedly thick. Thicker even than Rowse.”

  “You can’t judge them by Dinah—she’s exceptional.”

  “So what? If she chooses one of the thick ones . . .”

  “It doesn’t work like that. The odds are she’ll be completely promiscuous—she’s just made that way. When she has kids you’ll never know who the fathers were.”

  The Sultan knew this perfectly well, but something in his heredity or culture made it hard for him to imagine a set-up in which the males were dominant but did not have exclusive rights to individual females. (Morris had to keep explaining the point to him.)

  “Then we ought to start weeding out the thick ones,” he said. Morris recognised in his tone the dangerous moment when a notion was about to harden into a fiat.

  “We don’t know which are the thick ones yet,” he protested. “I’ll try to set up a few tests, if I can think of how to do it without mucking up the whole idea. We’ve got plenty of time—Dinah won’t reach puberty for at least a year, so . . .”

  “Can’t we speed it up, my dear fellow? Listen, down in the marshes they know a few things that your puritanical scientists have never caught on to. Some of the local aphrodisiacs . . .”

  “Certainly not,” snapped Morris.

  When the Sultan sighed several hundred-thousand-poundsworth of rubies shifted on his gold-robed chest, and the folds and dewlaps of his large face took up the lines of tragedy. Only the little, hard eyes remained bright. Morris stared sourly at his employer. There were not many amusements in Q’Kut, but the Sultan managed to keep himself happy; and one of his favourite games nowadays seemed to be forcing Morris to draw the line somewhere and then tricking him across it. There’d been the ridiculous business of drugging the white rhino to take shavings off its horn; and rebuilding several cages to make this concrete glade and then filling it with near-wild animals; if he now insisted on doping Dinah’s feed with nameless filth there was only one way of preventing it, and that was for Morris to give up his ten thousand dollars a month and take Dinah back to Bristol. Supposing the Sultan would let him out of the country. Or her.

  “Look,” said Morris. “The whole point of this experiment is to simulate natural conditions as nearly as we can. I was against it, as you know, but now we’ve set it up I’m going to do my damnedest to make it work. But who’s going to pay the slightest attention to our results if it comes out that half our apes were high on local dope?”

  “I have read that male gorillas have a very low sex-drive,” said the Sultan. His reading was patchy and his memory more so, but a point like that was likely to stick in the mind of a man conscious of the twenty-six children in his women’s quarters, and the unimpeachable impotence of the eunuchs who guarded them.

  “Chimpanzees are different,” said Morris.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Murdoch’s baby looks quite bright.”

  “They usually do.”

  “W
hat shall we call him? I am so out of touch.”

  “Berlin?” suggested Morris.

  “He must be getting on. Isn’t there a psychologist with a name like a Dutchman?”

  “Eysenck? He isn’t Oxford. I suppose you could endow a chair for him, but . . .”

  “The camera, man!” snapped the Sultan.

  Morris pressed the starter button of the fixed camera which covered about two-thirds of the grove, then checked how much film there was left to run; when he looked again through the window he saw that Murdoch’s baby, in one of its forays, had strayed within Dinah’s reach and she had grabbed it. Now she had it face down across her thigh and was beginning to peer and finger among the hairs along its spine. Through the glass they could not hear its little whimpers, but Murdoch’s scream was clear enough as she rose from her torpor and rushed over at Dinah, who with equal speed, still holding the baby, flung herself up the wire mesh and leaped for one of the central trees. Murdoch followed her route and, having both arms free, had almost caught up when Dinah swung to the next tree, dangled for an instant from one of the metal branches, and simply dropped. She fell heavily on Sparrow’s back, let the baby fall and clutched to steady herself at Sparrow’s neck.

  Certainly Sparrow was in a nervous state. He shot across the floor just as if he were starting a male chimpanzee’s charging display, but with Dinah still clinging to his back like a rucksack with one strap broken. Murdoch snatched up her baby and rushed with it to the furthest end of the cage, where she stood for a while chattering angrily at the group, until she settled to possessive grooming of the much-groomed infant. Meanwhile Dinah had let go of Sparrow, who, having reached the end of the cage and tried in vain to wrench a metal branch from a concrete tree, came charging straight back at her, swinging his right arm as if he were twirling a club.

  By all jungle rights she ought to have cowered out of his way, probably presenting her rump to him. But as the main relationship in her life had been with Morris her experience of male domination had been, to say the least, mild. Besides she always had a tricky temper when you removed from her a toy with which she had not finished playing, and no doubt that was how she thought of Murdoch’s baby; so she stood her ground and hooted back at Sparrow. Morris hardly noticed the glass of the window slide up.

  Sparrow halted in the middle of his charge and began to bounce up and down, chattering back. Now both arms were swinging, and Dinah was losing confidence. Suddenly, close at Morris’s ear, there came a sharp whoof, and in the same instant Sparrow made a three-foot leap, straight in the air. When he landed he stood stock still, peering with horror at the shiny dart that now protruded from his right thigh; a wary hand came down and plucked it out. He inspected it with glazing curiosity for several seconds before he crumpled to the floor.

  Dinah, still snickering with fury, came forward and pissed on the fallen body, a reaction of a sort that Morris had never seen from her before—nor did he remember reading about it in any of the literature. Rowse, whose lethargy had been partly alleviated by the drama, came slowly over and grunted warningly at Dinah, who this time had the sense to retreat. Rowse pinched Sparrow experimentally three or four times, then returned to the group with the express purpose of dislodging old Cecil from his place against a tree and thus establishing himself as leader of the group. The window slid shut. Morris stopped the camera and turned to the Sultan, who was standing with the squat spring-gun cradled on his arm, waiting smugly for applause. Behind him his enormous black bodyguard, Dyal, grinned with simple pleasure. And behind him the stuffed gorilla they used for target practice grinned too, with simulated fury.

  Morris’s fury was real.

  “Christ!” he said.

  “You must mean ‘Allah!’” said the Sultan.

  “I mean,” said Morris slowly, “how the hell do you expect Dinah to integrate naturally with the group if every time there’s any kind of confrontation her opponent collapses at her feet? This experiment is your idea, not mine, so for God’s sake get it into your head that the whole point of putting her down there at all is to let her begin to find her place in the social hierarchy. You want her to mate and have a baby. How’s that going to happen if every time a male looks at her he suddenly falls flat on his face?”

  “It was a good shot, don’t you think?” said the Sultan. “He was bouncing up and down, but I got him just in that big vein that runs down inside the thigh. In fact it was a perfectly beautiful shot. He went out like a light, didn’t he?”

  “It was a complete fluke,” said Morris.

  “Oh, come, these guns aren’t as inaccurate as all that.”

  “What’s more, it was high-grade hooliganism. You’re a bloody trigger-happy . . .”

  His anger tailed away in the knowledge that it would be an error actually to call the Sultan a wog to his face. His Pacific Majesty got a kick out of a relationship in which Morris was the only man in all Q’Kut who could speak to him without subservience, but he also possessed a generous ration of his race’s cunning for avenging an insult.

  “I really must protect my investment,” said the Sultan. “After all, I am paying Dinah ten thousand dollars a month.”

  “You are paying me!”

  “Of course, of course, my dear fellow. I do apologise. I’m a bloody trigger-happy wog. Hello! What gives?”

  From the doors of the zoo a wheezy flute tootled. Dyal made a clucking noise in his throat and strode off down the inspection gallery. The Sultan handed Morris the empty spring-gun, picked up the old one which he used for practice, swung round and fired from the hip at the stuffed gorilla. Instantly the dart (also an old, expended one) was there, glistening in the middle of the bare, heroic chest. The Sultan reloaded and fired again. By the time Dyal returned the gorilla was wearing a precisely spaced row of darts from his windpipe to his midriff, like buttons on a fancy waistcoat. Dyal whispered a few words. The Sultan nodded. Dyal waved to the jet-black eunuch who had appeared by the doors, then strode away to the gorilla to retrieve the darts.

  The eunuch beckoned to someone out of sight. After a brief pause a white-robed Arab crawled round the corner on hands and knees. He paused, raised his splendidly bearded head and looked down the vista to where his master stood. Doggedly he lowered his head and crawled forward. Long practice had made him expert in the knack of not kneeling on his beard.

  By Morris’s side the spring-gun whoofed. He turned and saw that Dyal was now decorating the gorilla’s chest with a neat row of medals, while the Sultan watched critically. Their backs were towards the crawling man.

  “For God’s sake!” whispered Morris.

  The Sultan turned and looked unimpressed at the new arrival.

  “Can’t you let him off?” whispered Morris. “My nerves won’t stand it! He’ll have a heart attack before he gets here!”

  “What will you bet?”

  “For Christ’s sake! OK, for Allah’s sake!”

  “We’ll make a believer of you yet,” said the Sultan. All the same he called in ultra-gracious tones to let the man know that he was, this once, permitted to approach his sovereign with the gait of a fellow human. The man rose, bowed deeply and came impassively forward. Looking at him Morris was conscious that he had somehow managed to lose yet another minor engagement with his employer. Akuli bin Zair, major domo of the Palace and effectively Prime Minister of Q’Kut, was not exactly an enemy of Morris’s, but he was not the man to appreciate any departure from ancient custom. Although they had never had any conversation apart from the stateliest compliments in classical Arabic, Morris knew bin Zair to be a bigoted opponent of any kind of Westernisation, especially when it took the form of research into the linguistic abilities of unclean beasts. He would certainly not have come to the zoo unless he had important and urgent business to transact, and Morris wanted no part of that. It was clearly time to withdraw.

  “B
e seeing you,” he whispered, and withdrew—backwards, because bin Zair’s eyes were on him, and there was no point in offending the old gnome. And anyway it was good practice for court functions.

  The palace was a fantasy, so the zoo was a fantasy inside a fantasy. The palace was square in plan—so far, so rational—but each floor was wider than the one below it, so that seen from a distance across the desert dunes the building looked like an inverted ziggurat, a giant’s teetotum perched on its tiny podium, ready to topple at a breath of wind. In fact it was a fantasy of reason. That is to say the architects maintained that its absurd shape was the rational solution to building a palace in the appalling conditions of Q’Kut. It never rained in the Sultanate; the strongest wind of the locality could barely animate an anemometer; the nearest earthquake zone was a thousand miles away; so what could upset the balance? On the other hand, built as it was, each floor gave shade to the one below from the flogging sun, and the roof offered the widest possible expanse to the solar panels that provided much of the energy for the palace’s gadgetry. And supposing the Arabs or the marshmen revolted, there was a remarkably small perimeter to defend at ground level. But despite all these good reasons you had only to look at the thing and see it was absurd.

  The spindle of this teetotum was the lift-shaft. If you were a woman or a eunuch you entered at ground-level a lift whose doors opened only into the women’s quarters. If you were a man you used the lift that backed on to this, and could reach any other section of the palace. If you were a white rhino, you used the big bleak service lift, which had doors at either end and so could reach any part of the palace—but the arrival of the current rhino had strained the machinery and it was still waiting repair. There was also a stairway running beside the lifts, but as the architects had lacked the ingenuity to prevent this from passing through the women’s quarters it was barred by locked doors at several points. The zoo occupied a third of the top floor of the palace, so when the men’s lift was out of order Morris could only reach his work from his living-quarters, two floors below, by being blindfolded and led stumbling up several flights by scimitar-toting eunuchs. Luckily this lift was going through a good patch.