bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2007) — Spring/Summer 2007 // Printemps/Été 2007, pp. 40–43
“So two haggises are cooking in the oven,” said Chief MacBannock, “and one says, ’Boy, it sure is hot in here! And the second one replies, ’Whoa! It’s a talking haggis!’” He glanced around expectantly, but the others around the table just looked perplexed.
Peevishly, he added “According to recent research, people are more likely to laugh if a joke is told by an authority figure.” Attila McGee began laughing so hard that he spilled his retsina, and even the imperturbable Bugbyte O’Nanotek cracked a smile. Ace logician Ludwig Liebnitz raised an eyebrow and murmured, “I hope Don Gordo gets back soon.”
“I AM back,” said a large wine barrel that had just been placed beside him. “I ran over some loafers in the square and had to hide, but now I’m stuck in here.
Fortunately, the vintner delivers to this taverna. Also, it wasn’t a bad vintage.”
Only 48 hours had passed since the five had found themselves chained to the wall of a faux-medieval dungeon tapestried in motley, still drowsy from the narcotic gas that had immobilized them in the elevator of the hotel and from the mind-numbing banality of the Centre’s management retreat. Emerging from the shadows was a tall rotund man in impeccable Armani and the makeup of a clown. “Greetings, friends,” he said, “I apologize for the restraints, but take it as a compliment to your proven skills at — how shall I say? — forceful communication. Let me introduce myself as the Deathclown.” “Corny,” said Attila, “although it would make a good name for a heavy metal band. Not as good as Tungsten Tongue of course, but…”. He stopped abruptly and sagged, out cold.
The clown smiled as his henchman stepped back and re-pocketed the lead-weighted rubber chicken. “I make the jokes here, even the bad ones. But to business. Those of you still conscious will have noticed the iron and opal collar rivetted around each of your necks. Stylish — it looks especially fetching against your ebony leathers, Ms. O’Nanotek — but also deadly, I’m afraid.” He brandished a small, flat jewelled device. “This shockingly rococo PDA has been modified with two extra buttons. One will kill you all, no matter where in the world you are — you know how hard it is to escape a BlackBerry – whereas the other will set you free. Any attempt to contact your agency for help or to remove the chokers by force will make them explode — such a mess, deary me. And all because there is something that only you can do for me. Isn’t that too, too charming?”
Shorn of verbiage, the clown’s story was non-linear but not without interest, thought Bugbyte at the time. Earlier that year, kayaking nonchalantly down the Ottawa to escape a misunderstanding involving the Papal Nuncio, a rabid walrus and 17 gallons of marshmallow syrup, his eye had been caught by a curious stone that a raccoon was washing in the river. It was a crystal of shifting colour, with edges that the eye couldn’t quite follow. Soon he had it on a chain around his neck. Shortly thereafter, he left his job with a run-down circus to become a small-time celebrity criminal, appearing regularly on reality TV shows and committing lesser felonies to keep himself in cash. He dreamed of more — world-threatening schemes to put him in a league with Sleazewagon, Goldfinger, Voldemort and Cheney — but he somehow lacked the final spark. Recent contacts from an anonymous source had however spoken of a hidden counterpart crystal, whose reunion with the one he already held would allow him to realize his evil dreams.
“My source sent me this guidebook to Cyprus with five tourist sites highlighted, and a piece of paper with this gibberish on it.”
NI DRIRELHNAK TIG SROBNID LASREH, PR ONYR T ENZRE.
NI ULFBTHHNLI TIG DETUR, PR ONYR ASR HCI.
NI ULIURTONID LASREH’ MTCOAH, PR ONYR ASR INDSA.
NI TIDRE TIG MCEK, PR ONYR ASR GRTG.
NI FLGRHAK TIG SCFNONAK, PR ONYR ASR RTEAS].
NI ALORETIUR, PR ONYR ASR HRT.
TBBRTE TH KLC TER,
LE PR TH KLC TBBRTE.
<Make right what is wrong for the lovers in Bacchus’ abode.>
“I have no idea what the first part means, and Bacchus has far too many abodes full of lovers in trouble or about to be so. So rather than stressing my poor tired braincells, I thought I’d call in the experts. And here we all are.” He smiled the way that makes you check your wallet. A clamour arose from the prisoners: demands to be set free, defiance of his proposal and (from Don Gordo) requests to send out for pizza with extra garlic and anchovies. Then Bugbyte’s steely voice rode over the noise. “You know, people, I think we should go along with this. He has us over a barrel — his technology is as baroque as his turn of phrase, but these collars are what he claims. And I am sure we can come to some accommodation with him once the second crystal has been found.” She blazed the others a look forbidding contradiction. The clown looked her over and said, “I am, I confess, amused that you expect to be in a position to bargain. But if you all agree…. Well, it’s far too toasty outside for me to tramp around with you — and one’s makeup does tend to run in the heat — but the collars will let me know where you are. TTFN. I’ll be in touch.” Five minutes after he swept out, the chains automatically fell away.
Reconvening in the hotel, Bugbyte filled in the others. “You all know GEODE,” she said, the silicon-based life-form who has betriended me? Well, while Deathclown was faffing off, GEODE contacted me through my online shades. That crystal is a tesseract — the 4D analogy of a cube. It shouldn’t even exist in our universe and wearing it is a lot more dangerous than he thinks. A doorway to other places, it is warping his whole being. The only thing holding up the emergence of another global arch-villain is his residual decency, believe it or not. The other tesseract, the one hidden here in Cyprus, will resolve that dilemma — but not the way he expects. Instead, it will completely reverse the moral polarity of the existing crystal and make him a powerful force for good. Of course the darkside crysta would never allow that to happen if he was forewarned. So GEODE acted as the clown’s mysterious source to lead him into a trap. But even my neolithic ally doesn’t know the exact location of the second crystal, beyond the few ancient clues provided to the clown in modern guise. So that’s where we come in – and why we have to play along.”
A moment’s silence was broken by Liebnitz. “OK, I see your reasoning. The encrypted message shouldn’t be hard to decipher — it uses a simple substitution system you can crack by counting the number of each letter in the ciphertext and applying the standard trequency distribution for English — E the most common letter, for example, with T/R/A/I/N as well as L/O/S/H also up there and TH the most common diphthong. I’m willing to bet that the five sites marked in the guidebook are linked in some way to the words boxed at the end of certain lines of plaintext. What I suggest is that we each comb one site for something like the missing crystal.” Bugbyte nodded. “I can help there. GEODE couriered me these special sunglasses that will make the crystal – or anything connected with it — seem to light up when you look at it though them.”
And so it was, two evenings later, that the five met in the taverna to trade the results of their separate excursions. Their conversation was covered by the mingled roar of happy topers and the worst bouzouki player on the island. “OK,” said MacBannock as Don Gordo brushed off pieces of barrel-stave, “what have we got?”
Everyone had found something. MacBannock himself had a garnet that had fallen to the floor when he tried to shake the hand of a manikin representing a Lusignan knight in the old castle at Famagusta. Bugbyte, strolling the beach where Aphrodite was said to have emerged from the waves, found an aquamarine pebble almost invisible in the water. Liebnitz, visiting the museum of the whirling dervishes, picked up a small piece of marble apparently fallen from the tomb of the order’s last leader. Attila, lost in a maze of corridors within the walls of Kyrenia castle, came upon a hidden chapel; a ray of sun from a window high in the dome lit up some ornate grillwork in the floor, under which a golden-yellow citrine gleamed. And Don Gordo fell into an excavation trench in the ancient site at Khirokitia and came up clutching a mud brick, which crumbled in his hand to reveal a small flint bead. All five stones lit up in GEODE’s sunglasses, but none resembled the tesseract crystal. “So what do we do with them? Where do we take them?” MacBannock asked the others.
Attila had been studying the guidebook. “I think I know the answer to the second question.” he said. “Bacchus is the Roman name for the Greek god Dionysus, and in the ruins near Paphos lie the foundations of a mansion named after him, famous for its mosaic floors. The stones we found are all tesserae, the little blocks that make up a mosaic. I’ll bet, if we go to the House of Dionysus, we’ll find a place where they fit.” “Sound divination,” said Bugbyte. “I think I can even tell you which mosaic. And by the way, GEODE has just passed me the word that tonight, with the planet Venus rising over the horizon right under the full moon, is the best time for activating the tesseract — a time when the doors of change stand ajar.”
The five agents, still serenaded by the worst bouzouki player in Cyprus, walked in the dusk through the ruins to the House of Dionysus. The site was enormous, but Bugbyte took them to a small plot halfway down the eastern wall. “Here you are,” she said. “A mosaic of Pyramus and Thisbe, the ili-starred Greek lovers who gave Shakespeare the idea for Romeo and Juliet. But the mosaic-maker has put in a different Pyramus — this is a river god of the same name but completely different appearance. A hoary old man — the wrong lover. And if you look closely, you’ll see that a line of six tesserae is missing around his neck. We have five of them.”
“And I have the sixth,” said the bouzouki player. They spun around, to see him yank off a rubber mask and reveal the face of the Deathclown. “I thought you might be nearing the climax of our little morality play, and I SO wanted to be nearby when it happened. Well done, I must say.” Liebnitz replied drily, “Glad you could finally take that mask off. It must have been very hot and we were beginning to worry. Oh yes, we knew it was you. Along with the roar of the crowa in the taverna, there was also the smell of the greasepaint. Why else would we have let you tag along?”
The clown scowled under his painted grin and the jewelled PDA flashed in the moonlight. “Enough. It would still give me a real charge to kill you, so no tricks. The second tesseract must be locked under that pavement, with the line of tessera as the key. But what order do we place them in the gap?” Liebnitz considered a minute and said, “From left to right, the same order as the boxed words in the ciphertext, based on the places we found them.” Bugbyte nodded surreptitiously. The five agents then bent one by one over the mosaic and inserted their finds. With each insertion, the night seemed more electric. Finally, the clown dropped to his knees and pulled the crystal from around his neck. Trying to slide it into the remaining open slot, he met a strange resistance and had to bear down with all his weight. Suddenly, the crystal twisted in his hand and dropped into the gap.
The Pyramus mosaic shifted, its thousands of pieces whirling and reforming into the image of a handsome youth. The clown was still scrabbling frantically at the floor when a cage of actinic blue began to weave around him, a cube with too many edges. He paled and gasped, his hand clutching his throat, his eyes darting trom side to side. The light grew so bright that the watchers could no longer see him, only hear his panicked breathing. Then the cage vanished with a sudden soundless flare, to reveal a slender figure with a small quizzical smile, high cheekbones and silver eyes. He glanced down at the PDA, looked over at them and said, “This isn’t what I expected — suddenly, I’m one with Herne and Loki. And I don’t know whether to kill you or not.” He paused. “So I’ll push a button at random — you’ll know the result soon enough.” Closing his eyes, he tapped the keyboard, then tossed the machine into the darkness. “Meanwhile, I leave you this night of metamorphosis.” So saying, he dropped a Silver globe to shatter on the ground and vanished in the ensuing glare. The others froze. After an endless moment, their collars all cracked open and fell to the ground. Cries of relief filled the air.
“So the second tesseract was not the twin of the first, but a light-sculpture binding change,” said MacBannock. “That makes sense. But something is still wrong. Leaving our fate to chance was not the act of an evil man, I grant you, but neither was it that of a good one. I begin to think we’ve been had.” As he spoke, shadowy changes began to come over the five. “I don’t think GEODE was entirely honest with you, Bugbyte. I believe that the clown was changed, not from bad to good, but to something else.” At his side, her figure seemed to soften, her gaze deepen and a scent of flowers began to fill the room. Liebnitz ripped open the collar of his shirt, a wineskin appeared in his hand and grape leaves in his hair.
“He spoke of Loki and Herne the Hunter,” MacBannock went on, stroking a beard he had not sported minutes before. “As well as the bad and the good, you know, there is also the wild. Those who divide the world in Manichean terms, whatever side they are on, see the wild as chaotic, unpredictable and therefore dangerous to order. Others see wildness as freedom. I believe our transformed friend Will be a power in the world, but not an easy ally.” Attila and Don Gordo had become twins, lithe and muscular, who were mock-fighting gleefully. Bugbyte gave a low sensuous laugh and said, “GEODE presents his compliments on your deductions, Chief, although he is surprised they came from you. He wasn’t sure we would cooperate if we knew the truth. But what is happening to us?”
MacBannock waved a cigar in the air, where it was ignited by a small lightning bolt. “For this night, because we have assisted the metamorphosis of a god, we are granted our own temporary idealization. Tomorrow, I will again be comically inept, but tonight I share a modicum of wisdom. Just as you wear your passion on your sleeve for these few hours, while Liebnitz forgets his passion for logical clarity. Tomorrow Felix will again be brilliant but feckless and Don Gordo will again be Don Gordo — but right now they are strong and joyful and fearless and they roister with Homer’s warriors. Let it be so, and Gods grant that we forget in the morning what we had this evening.”
Liebnitz staggered up, peered blearily into his face and cried out, “Whoa! It’s a talking haggis! But there’s such a thing as knowing too much, old man. Even if grayness descends again tomorrow, we can still ignite Homer’s wine-dark sea tonight. You don’t usually hang with the helots, but let me tempt you and this goddess with the euphoria of here and now. Strike a fire to be remembered when we are one with Hector and Ulysses!”. So linking arms, the five strode down to the shore, where there was wine and laughter and friendship and Venus rising from the sea.
After all that, can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by deciphering the encrypted message? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by October 15, 2007. The winner will receive a book prize autographed by A Aalto. Not necessary to win the contest, but can you also cite the source of the message and indicate the correct order of the six tesserae (including the tesseract) from left to right? a
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2007) — Spring/Summer 2007 // Printemps/Été 2007, pp. 40–43. Read the rest of this issue →
