Theatre of the Gods (64 page)

Suddenly there was a dramatic flash of light and Roberto stumbled inside the bubble. The air at once smelled of electrical burning. Roberto realised his short hair was standing high on end; Lenore’s was too.

‘Roberto, what have you done?’

But Roberto had done nothing. A voice said, ‘Hello, children.’

‘Who’s there?’ Lenore could sense nothing about their new guest, and Roberto could not describe to her the man he saw materialise on the platform with his hands neatly crossed in front of him. He was dressed in a fine morning suit. His skin was pale, he had pointy ears and two small horns on his head and his eyes burned like candles. ‘Don’t be afraid, Roberto. I won’t hurt you.’ And as if to prove the point he raised a palm and stopped a burning hunk of wreckage just inches from the boy’s bubble. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’ Time had slowed; the scenes of violence and destruction all around them wound
down like a stalled watch.

‘I’m very sorry to startle, but I thought we should meet briefly before you leave. My name, children, is Carrofax.’

DEMON

On the platform the demon had coalesced into a shape that almost looked solid. ‘Child,’ said Carrofax, ‘you must be very tired.’

‘I am a bit tired – now that you mention it,’ replied the girl. ‘But am I finished yet? No.’

‘Oh no!’ laughed the demon. ‘Oh no, if there’s one thing you’re not it’s finished. If your journey is one of ten thousand miles then you have not even taken the first step. You are about to embark on a great adventure, one which will make all this seem like a Sunday tea party. And your little friend, too.’ The creature turned his fiery eyes on the boy, and Roberto scrambled back in his bubble. There was nothing in his head to prepare him for seeing his very first phantom.

‘It’s very important that what’s in this boy’s nut gets to the right people. It’s the only way to defeat Calligulus. But if you’re to succeed then I must give you both something to help you on your way.’

‘But you can’t interfere with the world,’ said Lenore. ‘You’ll be punished, foolish man!’

‘Let that be my problem,’ the demon replied. ‘I have weighed up the pros and cons, the ins and outs. I think, in the end, it will be worth the sacrifice.’

*

Fabrigas couldn’t even bring himself to wonder where the Black Widow had vanished to. He stashed the box containing the Forbidden Zone in his cloak, then ran to the small balcony on the far side of the pressing room and raised a sleeve against the strobing glare. Through the gas bubble around the balcony he could see the burning hulks dissolving under the force of the black hole, while the unconquerable arms of the Sweety merrily bashed the larger hulks to pieces. The whole lot, he knew, the Sweety too, would soon tumble into the black hole, along with the platform which held the two children he had sworn, albeit half-heartedly at times, to protect. Suddenly, the palace to which the platform was attached lurched violently, all the priests but one were thrown over, and that one was only saved because a small figure on the platform sent out a claw of blue energy to wrap itself around the priest’s ankles. Fabrigas cried to the empty space between them: ‘My children! My children!’

It was an outpouring which surprised even him.

‘It’s no use, old friend,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You’ve helped these children as much as you can. They have to look after themselves now.’

‘Carrofax. What happened to your ears, and your horn?’

‘I can’t hear you, old friend, because I no longer have ears, so let me anticipate your likely questions. I gave one of my horns to the girl and my ears to the boy. With those ears he’ll be able to hear a pin fall a billion miles away, and with my horn the girl will be able to travel there before the pin has even come to rest. Among many other things. They will need these things.’

‘But you can’t interfere with the material world!’

‘Please don’t interrupt. I can’t hear you, remember? The next thing you’re likely to ask is how I can interfere in this universe. The answer, obviously, is that I cannot, on pain of a fate worse than death. I now have to return to the ectoplasmic dimensions, where I’ll face trial for my crimes. It is likely that we’ll never see each other again.’

‘But, Carrofax! I can’t live without you! You are my best friend!’

‘I have no idea what you just said, but I’m sure it was very moving.
I know how much you must be suffering, old friend, to make such companions in such short time, and to lose them all. And now to lose me too. I can tell you now that your sacrifices will have benefits you could not possibly imagine. You might even have saved your species. And eternity knows they are worth saving. Just. I, on the other hand, have a less glorious fate awaiting me. Goodbye, young man, it was a pleasure serving you.’

‘But, Carrofax!’ The old man’s eyes bulged with tears and they soon shone brightly in his beard.

‘No protests. Close your eyes now,’ said the demon. Fabrigas blinked twice, then dutifully closed his eyes. ‘Try to … become limp? Did I say that correctly?’ Then Carrofax drew a deep lungful of air and gave a single breath so powerful that Fabrigas found himself flung far into space, far away from the ship, the black hole, far away from everything.

HANDS OF TIME, CLAWS OF SPACE

Roberto still had the bosun by the ankles with a tendril of electromagnetic energy, but it is never easy for a boy to hold a giant. You try it. The bosun looked up at the boy’s tiny face and said, ‘I like your new ears. Smashing.’

‘I like them too,’ said the boy from within his blue bubble. ‘I can hear your heart beating very fast.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the bosun, ‘very fast, always has. You’d best focus all your energy on helping your friend now.’

‘Roberto! What happens?’ said Lenore, from within her blue bubble. The tendril of electricity connecting their twin protective spheres was now stretched to breaking.

‘I don’t want to leave you, giant.’ The boy’s eye’s sparkled with tears.

‘Well, don’t think of it that way. Think of it as me leaving you. There isn’t nearly enough room in that big blue bubble for a hulk like me. You have to get your two balloons together and look after each other. You have to stick together in this life. That’s all it’s about. There’s no big secret. Now do us a favour, will you? While we’re talking, head over there and stop that silver watch from going over.’ Roberto looked and saw a silver watch that had fallen from the bosun’s pocket. It was slowly quivering its way to the edge of the platform. ‘It’s terribly precious to me, you see.’

‘But I’ll need to let go of you to grab it.’

‘You’ll have to soon anyway. You can’t hold me, I’m far too burly. I’m huge. The watch is yours, my naughty nut. But if you ever do find yourself in a mountain town called Grendel, on Persuvius, and if you happen by the watchmaker’s there, would you pop in and give it to my father? And tell him his son is thinking of him.’

So Roberto nodded twice, turned to save the watch as it teetered on the edge, and when he looked back the bosun was gone.

*

On a moon called Persuvius, in a town called Grendel, there is indeed a watchmaker’s workshop. There is a watchmaker there, a widower, whose family were all killed, whose only living son had vanished and could never come home. His watches are the finest there is, and they mark the passage of time in every measure imaginable.

THE CREATURE INSIDE

What makes a human a human? Is it a heart? Skin? A functioning spleen? Legs which take you walking through the fields? Fingers which clutch and caress? Eyes which see the heavens, and weep when they lose a dear, dear friend? I have often pondered this question as I walk my dreamy death through life. We are such a strange and wonderful species that I’m sometimes lost for words to describe us. Though not often.

Also then, so long as I have you here, answer me this: if it is true that the human creature has no eternal soul, if she is but a brief blink in existence, if she is nothing more than the sum of her fleshy parts, and if those parts can be replaced with mechanical pieces, then what is she? Her memories? Ah, but her memories are fragile fictions. Is she then the choices which will compose her natural life? Possibly. But if she is just this and no more – a fleshy decision-making machine, something born only to die – then what makes her decide to rise from her bed each day? What gives her life purpose? And what compels her to make her choices good? Perhaps, in the absence of any immortal judgement – or perhaps even in the presence of such judgement – she must become her own pure idea of what is right, and what is wrong. Perhaps in this sense she becomes not a ‘self ’ at all, but rather an effect. Perhaps rather than being defined by the physical object she seems to represent, this raw lump of meat and metal she is for the brief time of
her life, she can be defined simply by what she leaves behind when she departs the stage for ever.

*

The Pope sat in his plush, private escape pod and watched as his fleet burned. His escape pod was larger than many ships, and it had everything he might need to last through an emergency. ‘The battle is lost, Holiness,’ Mothersbaugh had said as he’d ushered him to the door of the escape pod. ‘We must get to a safe distance.’

‘Get your own pod!’ the Pope had cried as he’d hit the button to close the door on his cardinal’s startled face.

Now he folded and unfolded his arms. These were events he simply could not fathom, and what he could not fathom need not exist, and that was just the end of things. He frowned; his plush chair made crunching sounds as he impatiently moved his weight from one side to the other, and banged his feet against the front. Then he pushed the intercom button.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is anyone there? Answer me.’ His prayer travelled out into the universe and died.

He waited.

‘I am very hungry!’ There was no reply. The Pope sighed.

Soon he heard a noise. It was a loud bump followed by a snuffling sound and it came from the cupboard where he kept his shoes. The Pope loved his shoes. ‘A man,’ he often said, ‘should be judged second by his moral fibre, third by his shoes, and first, of course, by the gods.’ And that was why he had ordered that a certain amount of his emergency food and water be removed and replaced by a rack containing forty pairs of shoes. Now there were snuffles coming from his shoe cupboard. ‘A stowaway!’ said the Pope, ‘On
my
escape pod!’ He stood and marched stiffly to the cupboard door, flung it open, and said, ‘So!’

The creature inside the cupboard was much larger and much more
fond of shoes than even he. She was a golden beast with hazel eyes and a white muzzle, and though her long, fluttering lashes could be confused, by some, for instruments of flirtation, her bared black claws and deafening roar were unambiguous.

She saved his fine boots – still attached to his feet – for last.

*

Fabrigas the younger was still sitting in his crippled spaceship, watching the smouldering embers of the battle between two armies, the universe’s largest monster and its greatest battle fleet, all at the mouth of a super-black hole and thinking …

‘Life is very strange.’

He could see the narrow walkway with the platform at the end. It looked like the long silver spoon his mother had used to feed him soup when he was ill. At one end of the platform he saw the last and largest priest fly off into space as the boy, shrouded in blue, called after him. He saw the girl still in the middle of the platform, a shadow in her own blue cloud. He saw the two bubbles float along the platform and become one.
Pplopf!
The two children now floated inside a single sphere of light as the palace crumbled around them. How strange it was. Like a little play so far away, so silent and dreadful. He wasn’t quite sure what to do now. His ship, like much of the debris from the battle, had become caught in one of the armpits of the Sweety and it made him sad to be there. But there he sat. What was to be done? What was this all about? And what was the point of it all? And what had happened to his older self?

And before he could fashion any kind of answers, and just as the command station collapsed silently under its own weight, he saw something new to be surprised at. He saw the brightly glowing blue sphere shoot off from the station’s spindly platform like a shot from a cannon, leaving an arcing cobalt trail in space.

Then, in a blink, it stopped.

‘Well, that looks like something you don’t see every day,’ said Fabrigas the younger.

*

Lenore and Roberto, racing towards the black hole at many, many thousands of miles per second, were astonished to find their path intercepted by the slender, curling frond of sticky blubber. They were stuck fast to the end of a tentacle whose owner was lost in the smoulder. But they were no longer shooting through space towards the black hole at many, many thousands of miles per second, and this was good.

‘What is happening, Roberto?’

The boy said nothing. He could hear the beating of a heart as loud as steel moons colliding. They felt themselves float gently up until they bobbed within their silky bubble before a great unblinking eye.

‘Well, hello, Mister Squids, and how are you today?’

The creature blinked, twice; the shock wave from its unfurling eyelids made the tiny bubble quiver.

‘Thank you very much for stopping us. And from our hearts we are grateful. You seem sad to be here, though. Are you sad?’

They felt the heavens and the creature groan around them.

‘It is painful to be sad. And it is sad to be painful. We are all alone today as well. We come from far away and are orphans too. We have lost all and there is no one to look out for us now and it seems that everybody alive in any place would like us dead. We have none within the universe except each other.’

The creature sighed again and disturbed eternity with his sadness.

‘But to have each other is not so bad. Would you like to be our friend and go on an adventure with us? It is time for the next part of our journey and we could use some strong arms to protect us.’

The creature blinked again. The bubble sang.

‘But you must promise us to stop smashing things. It is sad that
you have lost your lady friend. But there is no reason to go bashing and breaking your way across the universe. Do you promise now?’