‘Gosh, that was clever,’ he said. ‘How did you think of that?’
‘I always shut my eyes when I’m frightened,’ said Ptraci.
‘Good plan.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to find out. I think going away from here could be an amazingly sensible idea. How do you make a camel kneel, did you say? I’ve got any amount of sharp things.’
The camel, who had a very adequate grasp of human language as it applied to threats, knelt down graciously. They scrambled aboard and the landscape lurched again as the beast jacked itself back on to its feet.
The camel knew perfectly well what was happening. Three stomachs and a digestive system like an industrial distillation plant gave you a lot of time for sitting and thinking.
It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.
It’s not generally realised that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human’s hand and eye co-ordination, a chameleon’s camouflage and a dolphin’s renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there’s any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.[21]
They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.
And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, was called You Bastard.
And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.
You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger[22] differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients…
Ptraci hit him across the head with her sandal. ‘Come on, get a move on!’ she yelled. You Bastard thought: Therefore H to the enabling power equals V/s. cudcudcud Thus in hypersyllogic notation . . .
Teppic looked behind him. The strange distortions in the landscape seemed to be settling down, and Dios was . . .
Dios was striding out of the palace, and had actually managed to find several guards whose fear of disobedience overcame the terror of the mysteriously distorted world.
You Bastard stood stoically chewing. . . cudcudcud which gives us an interesting shortening oscillation. What would be the period of this? Let period = x. cudcudcud Let t = time. Let initial period . . .
Ptraci bounced up and down on his neck and kicked hard with her heels, an action which would have caused any anthropoid male to howl and bang his head against the wall.
‘It won’t move! Can’t you hit it?’
Teppic brought his hand down as hard as he could on You Bastard’s hide, raising a cloud of dust and deadening every nerve in his fingers. It was like hitting a large sack full of coathangers.
‘Come on,’ he muttered.
Dios raised a hand.
‘Halt, in the name of the king!’ he shouted.
An arrow thudded into You Bastard’s hump.
. . . equals 6.3 recurring. Reduce. That gives us ouch . . . 314 seconds . . .
You Bastard turned his long neck around. His great hairy eyebrows made accusing curves as his yellow eyes narrowed and took a fix on the high priest, and he put aside the interesting problem for a moment and dredged up the familiar ancient maths that his race had perfected long ago:
Let range equal forty-one feet. Let windspeed equal 2. Vector one-eight. cud Let glutinosity equal 7 .
Teppic drew a throwing knife.
Dios took a deep breath. He’s going to order them to fire on us, Teppic thought. In my own name, in my own kingdom, I’m going to be shot.
Angle two-five, cud Fire.
It was a magnificent volley. The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.
The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.
The landscape began to distort again. This was clearly not a place to linger. You Bastard looked down at his front legs.
Let legs equal four .
He lumbered into a run. Camels apparently have more knees than any other creature and You Bastard ran like a steam engine, with lots of extraneous movement at right angles to the direction of motion accompanied by a thunderous barrage of digestive noises.
‘Bloody stupid animal,’ muttered Ptraci, as they jolted away from the palace, ‘but it looks like it finally got the idea.’
. . . gauge-invariant repetition rate of 3.5/z. What’s she talking about, Bloody Stupid lives over in Tsort . . .
Though they swung through the air as though jointed with bad elastic You Bastard’s legs covered a lot of ground, and already they were bouncing through the sleeping packed-earth streets of the city.
‘It’s starting again, isn’t it?’ said Ptraci. ‘I’m going to shut my eyes.’
Teppic nodded. The firebrick-hot houses around them were doing their slow motion mirror dance again, and the road was rising and falling in a way that solid land had no right to adopt.
‘It’s like the sea,’ he said.
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Ptraci firmly.
‘I mean the sea. The ocean. You know. Waves.’
‘I’ve heard about it. Is anyone chasing us?’
Teppic turned in the saddle. ‘Not that I can make out,’ he said. ‘It looks as-‘
From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.
It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do. He felt a pressing urge to be a long way away from it. Even a dumb creature like the camel seemed to have the same idea.
You Bastard was thinking: . . Delta squared. Thus, dimensional pressure k will result in a ninety-degree transformation in Chi(16/x/pu)t for a K-bundle of any three invariables. Or four minutes, plus or minus ten seconds
The camel looked down at the great pads of his feet.
Let speed equal gallop.
‘How did you make it do that?’ said Teppic.
‘I didn’t! It’s doing it by itself! Hang on!’
This wasn’t easy. Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci. No matter where he tried to put his hands, they encountered warm, yielding flesh. Nothing in his long education had prepared him for this, whereas everything in Ptraci’s obviously had. Her long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume.[23]
‘Are you all right?’ he shouted above the wind.
‘I’m hanging on with my knees!’
‘That must be very hard!’
‘You get special training!’
Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. Knee joints clicking like chilly castanets, You Bastard thrashed up the sloping road out of the valley and windmilled along the narrow gorge that led, under towering limestone cliffs, to the high desert beyond.
And behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.
You Bastard sped along the gorge, his neck stretched out to its full extent, his mighty nostrils flaring like jet intakes.