Theatre of the Gods (14 page)

‘So best of luck with this,’ said Lambestyo, and left. Sailors were beginning to gather on the deck.

*

Fabrigas fled to his quarters, where he found Carrofax waiting patiently. ‘Well, that seemed to go very well.’

‘Yes, what of it?’ He locked his door. ‘They had to find out sooner or later. To get to the next universe you must die in this one. I have solved the problem of death-perception.’

‘And that is how the engine works?’

‘It could be.’

‘So then why share the information? A tactical error, sir, I think.’

‘It isn’t a tactical error. It is the best available truth. I have no real idea how the engine works.’

‘And why not tell them that?’

‘Tell them that I’m taking them billions of light-years away to use a piece of technology I don’t even understand? Ridiculous. They’d laugh me off the ship.’

‘As opposed to setting you on fire and throwing you off the ship?’

‘Let them try me if they wish. I think they’ll find me hard to kill.’

‘As you wish. Have you figured out which one is the Queen’s spy yet?’

‘I have my suspicions,’ said the old man as he spread some papers on his desk and pretended to set to work. He really didn’t like it when Carrofax teased him.

‘I could tell you if you wished.’

‘I do not wish. If I require your assistance I will ask for it.’

‘As you wish.’ Carrofax smiled. Fabrigas stared harder at his notes. He did not need to look up to know that his servant was smiling at him. And that it was the
particular
smile he used when he knew things the old man did not.

‘Am I breaking your concentration?’

‘Yes, in fact you are. If you don’t mind I have some important navigation work to do.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Important navigation work?’

‘It is so.’

‘Important navigation work which involves studying blueprints for the ship’s plumbing?’

Fabrigas blinked twice at the sheet of paper on his table, then pushed it aside. ‘Don’t you have something better to do?’ But when he turned round his servant had vanished and he was once more alone.

DARK-SPACE AUTOBAHN

They sailed on into the darkness, through days and weeks, and on towards a nightmare.

There are many frightening sights at sea, particularly in the morning, when seaman are known to yell, ‘Don’t look at me, I’m a hideous monster!’ and, ‘Kiss me not neither, for I have dragon’s breath.’ At night, when the ship lights are dimmed and all is black and all is quiet, the mind can begin to play tricks on you. Sometimes the men can also play tricks on you. Many captains, even, are fearful wags who love to play pranks: like wedding a man to a sea cow, or putting a sleeping man in an oily sack and yelling: ‘Jack’s been eaten by a whale!’ Captain Lambestyo was not one of those captains. He hated practical jokes. A ship was a serious place for serious business. So it annoyed him greatly that the rest of the fleet had decided to play a series of maritime pranks on the
Necronaut
and its teenage captain, the Necronaut.

First, the fleet had conspired not to respond to any of his radio messages for a whole day. Lambestyo thought his receiver was broken, and only twigged to the trick when he heard giggling. Then, when he’d asked for spare machine parts, the supply ship had sent over a crateload of man-knickers. Lambestyo had flown some as flags.

Today was a bold new joke. The fleet had sent a signal to him that they would shift to a new heading. Then, at the appointed naval hour, when Lambestyo swung his vessel onto a new tack, he’d found
himself cruising on alone. The rest of the fleet had continued on the old tack. It would take days of hard sailing to catch them. They were mocking him, but he would have his vengeance, he said, and as he said it he had no idea how right he was.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, the crew endured the loneliness and tedium of space. There is little to do in deep space but play pranks and gossip. Groups came to gather in the same spots every day. The sailors slacking from their chores would slump down in the shadow of the navigation deck, out of sight of their captain’s window, and they would talk of past agonies. ‘See this?’ one sailor would exclaim as he held up four imaginary fingers. ‘Let’s just say that you shouldn’t mess with the sucker-crabs of the Azulian Sea.’

‘That’s nothing,’ another would say, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a set of long scars. ‘Fire rats. Got inside my spacesuit while I was chuting into a war zone to rescue my squadron from a grove of carnivorous moles. I was the only survivor.’

‘Ha!’ another would say. ‘I have one compound word for ye: were-kittens …’ And it would go on like this, all day, an endless reel of woe and strife. Our captain would never join in, because the one time he did he made a man cry.

Sometimes their voices would drop very low and you would know that they were talking of another kind of agony: the wounds of the heart.

‘Oh, Lauraneath, I knew her. Oh, such a girl as you would ever meet. Oh, if I could describe her you would weep the seas. Oh, the tragedy! She drowned after draining back a keg before a charity swim.’

‘Women. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’

‘Words of wisdom, Lloyd, words of wisdom.’

Meanwhile, on the other side of the deck, the Gentrifaction would gather at the crack of noon. G. De Pantagruel, G. Scatolletto and the poet Gossipibom would stand in the corner of the deck where the golden starlight bouncing in through the glass shields from the
sails gathered in a lovely puddle. And there they would speak of their own tragic ailments.

‘I have, for an age, had my tissues made from Omnogyptian fibres by the finest papersmith in the High Orient. But oh! How it would chafe sometimes, especially if I had dined on fibrous foods.’

‘Ah! Do not start me up, dearest,’ said Scatolletto, ‘for I have chafed rudely for years and only found relief through silk kerchiefs for which I paid a pretty penny.’

‘I once stole a lady’s velvet glove and got relief,’ said Pantagruel.

‘But what are we supposed to do? Find a lady to seduce each time we wish to ease our sluice?’

‘Why no, dear sir, I simply had a thousand such gloves made to order. And it was worth every note.’

‘But dear sir, why go to the trouble of having them made as gloves? Why not just buy the material by the bolt?’ said Gossipibom.

‘My dearest, I tried, but I could not get the same result. There is something about wearing a lady’s glove which brought about an optimal degree of relaxation. And the control! Oh!’

‘My word! You
wore
the glove?!’

‘I did, my friend. I wore that glove. And I
loved
it. I have dabbed myself with all kinds of things: silk sheets, fine tapestries, a child’s soft toy, but I have found none better under these stars than a lady’s velvet glove.’

And it would go on like that all day. They were perhaps three of the most despicable individuals ever to be born, and it should give you great comfort to know that before this book is finished they will all die horribly. ‘Tell the people they all die horribly!’ old Fabrigas is shouting at me now, in that basement on that orphan moon. So there you have it.

Fabrigas hid himself in his cabin, away from the idle gossip and the talk of mutiny. Nine weeks into the journey there was a knock at his door and when he opened it the ship’s communications chief, Lotango, was there with a telegram.

‘Telegram, sir!’

‘Telegram?’

‘So.’ It was strange because this ship did not have the equipment to receive telegrams. The telegram read:

Fabrigas. Stop. You are sailing into danger and madness. Stop. Paint the 62,500th hexagram of the Water Star around your ship and you will have protection. Stop. Over. Out.

He screwed up the telegram and slumped back in his seat. ‘Now why the heck would I paint a sign from the
Third Book of Transmutations
on my ship? It is a sign of attraction. It makes no sense.’

There was another knock at his door. ‘Another telegram for you, sir!’

‘What the …’

It makes perfect sense. Stop. Why should you question our methods? Stop. Paint the hexagrams and save your people. Stop. It is that simple. Stop.

‘Where are these telegrams coming from!’

Lotango shrugged.

*

No one could understand why the old man would suddenly start painting mysterious symbols on his ship. The general consensus was madness. The Gentrifaction was ablaze with gossip. ‘I hear he is a black magician. I hear they are symbols of dark magic.’

‘He is bearded. Never trust the beardy. They cast their beardy spells and listen to their beardy music and are profoundly insolent.’

‘And he’s a vegetarian – of
all
things.’

‘We should play an excellent prank on him. My cousin was a
vegetarian. We made him a mud pie composed of garlic, asafoetida and castoreum in quantity, and of turds that were still warm.’

*

They sailed on. And under.

From the journal of Captain Lambestyo

I hate these things. I never know what to write. Whatever. We are flying through the dark-space shipping lane and the rum has already turned the men mad. They are muttering about how sick it makes them, some complain that it is beginning to give them soft hands and girlish thoughts.

The old-beard has told everyone he plans to kill them. So that is good. I was just thinking to myself, ‘Oh, things are far too easy on this journey. What we need is a good mutiny.’ The men are angry even though this mission has a 99.9 per cent chance of death. He has taken away their 0.1 per cent chance of life, and they don’t like it.

The fleet has played a practical prank on me by telling me a wrong heading. I totally knew it was a prank, but I sailed away anyway, because I wanted to be alone.

PS Tried some of the ship’s rum last night and now I want to peel my own face off. Maybe I was too hard on the men.

That is all I want to write because my arm is tired.

*

From the journal of M. Francisco Fabrigas

These are dark times. We have been sent off course by means of a practical joke and are now struggling to catch up with our fleet. We are in a dark region of Interspace and the men want
me dead. I should probably not have described my engine using the metaphor of a violent death, even if life itself – that is, the idea that our life is divided up into a series of discrete events, one following after the other from birth to death – is itself no more than a useful metaphor. I should have said that my engine was like a chicken or something. Fortunately, certain chilling events over the past few days have arrived to distract the men from mutiny.

We passed today through a strange energy cloud of unknown composition and instantly all the slave children became ‘possessed’. It was only the juveniles, a fact I cannot explain. In their bunk rooms below decks, beds were floating, eyes were bulging, heads were spinning, bitter excrescence was oozing from juvenile orifices, the tiny pink tongues were lolling and gabbling in a dialect only Carrofax, with his superior education in languages, could comprehend:

‘We are legion.

‘You are damned.

‘We come here from the hinters where we found not what we sought,’ they said. Among other things.

I went to the captain’s cabin to alert him and found him floating in the air and saying, ‘Do not come into these reaches.

‘Do not knock upon this hatch.

‘You are on a ship of fools,

‘Bounded for hell.

‘Pain shall be your sustenance,

‘Fear, your biscuit,

‘Peace, your enemy.’

So that happened. I had to deal with the situation myself by painting more hexagrams.

When at last it was all over the children slumbered like soldiers and the walls were covered in purple excremental goo and automatic poems scrawled in juvenile blood. It certainly wasn’t
a pleasant scene. The captain wandered down for a look, then shrugged and returned to his room. Nothing seems to bother him. Although I have perceived his mood darkening. This is the nature of these parts.

Because we have strayed from the fleet we were boarded by Royal Customs and Enforcement officers near Balfour. They said it was to hunt for an escaped girl and a possible accomplice. The bosun whispered to the captain, ‘Let us hope they don’t find the piñatas,’ which I did not understand. Of course we have no piñatas. Then the inspectors lined up all the children and examined them. The chief looked into every child’s face and held up a swatch of a particular shade of green for comparison, but none of the children’s faces matched the shade, except for a boy called Sneevlit who suffers from the sea-walms, and he was excused. Having made a lazy search of the ship, they left.

That is the last contact we will have with the empires. We have left the spheres of civilisation and are travelling into parts I never thought to return to even in my direst man-mares. We are at the end of civilisation; the beginning of infinity.

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY

Everything you think you know about the universe is wrong. You imagine, I’m sure, that the universe is
full
of things: burning suns, bright meteors, steaming comets. It might surprise you to know that the universe is mostly nothing. No light, no matter, no mercy for the soul who finds himself there. It is only upon venturing into these reaches that the sailor realises that being smashed up by a comet, or burned up by a sun, is not the ultimate nightmare. The ultimate nightmare, dearest reader, is to find yourself alone, in the hungry, hungry dark, where not a sound is heard, and not a wink of light is present.

As they sailed on into the black reaches of infinity, a mood a few steps short of madness set in.

There is a little girl standing in a doorway filled with light. Fabrigas sees her open her mouth and pull a winged creature out. Then she squeals like a bat and vanishes.

Captain Lambestyo sees Commander Descharge dressed as a washerwoman say, ‘Look. Look what you have made me
become
. If you don’t destroy your maker you will surely die,’ before he wakes, sweating, and discovers he has wrapped his sheets around his throat.