Crap Kingdom (19 page)

Sitting on the throne was the man in the crimson armor from Tom’s vision: the Ghelm King.

He was young for a king, maybe in his mid-forties, though Tom was notoriously bad at judging the ages of people over eighteen, and for all he knew, the Ghelm aged at a different rate from Earth people. He had a beard, but it was brown and manicured, in stark contrast to the Crap King’s tangled white monstrosity. He didn’t look mean or evil or even mad. He looked at his subject and then at Tom. Tchoobrayitch dismounted and his Elgg trotted to the back of the room. Tom’s Elgg lowered its head and Tom dismounted. Instead of heading for the back of the expansive throne room, his Elgg padded up toward the king. It came around to his right side and hopped up, landing with its front paws on one arm of the throne and its back legs still on the ground. The king nested his chin on his right fist and leaned in, toward the Elgg. It began whispering in the king’s ear, its mouth displaying the full range of articulation that a human’s mouth had, its tongue flicking in and out as it told the king something.

It was disturbing to see a creature Tom had assumed did not have the power of speech suddenly betray the fact that it could talk, and especially to see it do it so conspiratorially. What was it saying? More disturbing: Tom had been naked on that thing. He’d presumed it wouldn’t mind, because it was an animal and therefore didn’t draw any distinction between clothed and not clothed. But it could talk, and talking meant culture, and culture probably meant a general dislike of having naked kids climb all over you. There was a very real possibility that right now it was saying to the Ghelm King,
This kid was naked when I found him, and then he just climbed on me like that, like it wasn’t a big deal. I know! Eww, right? What a gross kid!
Tom just couldn’t catch a break when it came to kings.

The Ghelm King nodded. The Elgg took its legs off the throne and joined its friend at the back of the room. The king smiled. He looked at Tom.

“Hello, son! What is your name?”

“Tom,” Tom said.

“Tom!” the king said. “I am King Doondredge Anyetteese-Krx. You may shorten it to Doondredge if you like, when addressing me.” The Ghelm kingdom, Tom thought, was definitely big on having long names that didn’t get much shorter even when you shortened them. “This is one of my Out-of-Orb Lieutenants, Tchoobrayitch, though I presume you’ve met. And those,” Doondredge gestured to the back of the room, “are the Elgg. They are hearty creatures and also have the gift of being remarkably perceptive. Excellent judges of character. The one that brought you here after finding you on a routine patrol tells me, having looked you in the eye and employing its innate biological ability to tell a great deal about a person by doing so, that you would be an excellent candidate.”

“A candidate for what?” Tom asked.

“I’m surprised you hadn’t guessed,” Doondredge said. He raised an eyebrow. “For Chosen One.”

24

“YOU NEED A
Chosen One?”

“Yes, of course! Nearly all cultures have a story that speaks of an unlikely outsider who will come to their aid in a time of great need. Our culture is something of a curator of other cultures, and across worlds, we have seen that this is the case.”

The Ghelm were Crap Kingdom’s enemies, Gark had said so. The first time Tom had fled the clutches of an Elgg, it had chased him down and shown him a vision where the Ghelm were burning Crap Kingdom and enslaving its people. Maybe that vision wasn’t a threat, though. Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was really his destiny to save the people of the nameless kingdom by being the Ghelm’s Chosen One, and somehow brokering peace. It seemed complicated, but who said prophecies were clear-cut? The only clear-cut prophecies came on pieces of printer paper, and those were the kind of prophecies that put Kyle in charge.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Recall, if you will, the visions you saw when our Elgg made contact with you this evening. Realize that they can be, and shall be, very real, should you do the very simple thing I ask of you.

“We are an adventurous people, Tom. Unlike some races, we are not content to merely pine for a lost and glorious age, stewing in our own filth. We venture forth. We view the Vortex on which our city rests as our birthright, and we have built our society around exploring the worlds it grants us access to.”

As he spoke, the floor, which had seemed solid a second before, revealed itself to be translucent, and the dark, stationary clouds that had given the glass floor the appearance of being made of stone or marble began to part. Through the orb’s bottom, the gaping mouth of the Vortex came into view.

“This is no piddling portal, blowing open and closed at odd times, offering us passage to merely one world. We believe it to be the main inter-world artery, and we believe a controlling cosmic entity entrusted such a magnificent prize to a race strong enough and smart enough to defend it, to exploit it, to use it for a great and glorious end: nothing less than a total takeover of the All-Worlds.

“We have, for countless generations, been assembling a force of warriors bred from every race, of every sentient species the Vortex has cycled us into contact with. The time is drawing near when that force will have reached a state of readiness, of toughness forged in permanent war, to stage this attack. This time will draw near faster if I have a skilled protégé by my side. The attack will go more smoothly, will be less costly in terms of lives, will leave more intact societies for us, the conquerors, to manage. And that management, the new cross-world order, leagues stronger than the loose cooperative that is in place now, will only be possible if it is done in partnership with someone with the qualities described to me just now by our Elgg friend there. I need someone like that, Tom. Someone I can entrust with many, many, many worlds.”

Tom thought:
This is amazing.

Then he thought:
This is evil.

Still, he wanted to know:
What are the All-Worlds?
There were more universes than just this one and Earth’s? Why did it have to be this guy telling him all of this? It was all exactly what Tom would have wanted to hear a month and a half ago staring up at his ceiling, but he had to hear it from a guy who was very probably evil. And this evil guy was promising Tom a part in all of it. A huge part. Leader not just of a bunch of people in what was essentially a junkyard in the middle of a barren plain, but of many, many, many worlds.

Could he maybe just look at the worlds? Did he have to do all the evil stuff, too?

“All you need to do to take part in our glorious destiny is this: Tell me the words to bring down the Wall.”

Okay. Now there was no doubt about the evilness.

Doondredge didn’t want Tom to be the Chosen One at all. He only cared about Tom because he thought he was from Crap Kingdom and therefore knew the words to make the Wall disappear. But how had he known to say the “Chosen One”? How had he known what Tom wanted to hear? Then he realized:
the Elgg
. It hadn’t been reading Tom for qualities of strength and bravery; it had been scanning his weaknesses, and then showing him an instantly generated 3-D movie based on those weaknesses.

It was that easy. Any fantastic creature could look him in the eyes and tell how much he hated that Kyle had what he had, because it had once been Tom’s but Tom hadn’t known how to appreciate it. And it took Kyle getting it, and loving it, and earning it, to make Tom see what he’d done wrong, and the more he burned with envy, the further away he got from ever getting anything like it again.

Now that Tom knew Doondredge was certain he would betray his friend, he was determined not to. Tom wondered, though: Would he have sold Kyle out if it wasn’t just a trick Doondredge was playing, if it was all real? He didn’t know, and now he would never know, but the fact that there was even any possibility that he might have done it, under the right circumstances, made him feel like the jet-black Vortex he could still see through the unclouded glass floor was actually inside his chest, and always would be.

“I don’t know the words.”

“I find that hard to believe. Every denizen of that wretched kingdom knows them; it’s the one thing you people care about.”

“I’m not even from there!”

“Really? Where are you from?”

It was asked so innocently that Tom was almost about to respond, but then he thought about the Ghelm marching through and enslaving everyone in his suburb and how pissed at him everybody would be if that happened. He stayed quiet.

“Wherever you claim to be from,” the king said, “I know you’ve heard the words, because I’ve seen . . . this.” The king waved. The Elgg Tom had thought of as his stepped in between him and Doondredge. The tiny lightning storms underneath its skin began to crackle and congeal until a clear image appeared. On this Elgg-mounted biological screen, Tom could see bushes and grass and scrub rushing by. It was like someone had made a first-person shooter level out of Crap Kingdom’s outskirts. He noticed bounding feet at the bottom of the image: it was an Elgg’s point of view. And then Crap Kingdom appeared, and so did two figures on its border: Gark and Tom, forever ago. They got huge in the frame quickly as the Elgg pursued them. Then Gark and Tom were on the other side of the Wall, and the Elgg’s eye camera smashed into the invisible barrier. It bobbled there momentarily, watching Gark holding onto Tom, making sure his freshly discovered Chosen One was all right. Then the image dissipated, the lightning dancing off in a thousand different directions beneath the thing’s skin.

“Yeah, so, I’ve heard it. I can’t remember it, though. Honestly.” It was the truth. He was pretty much born without a memory for anything but the name of obscure planets in the Star Wars universe and lines in plays. If a piece of information was actually of any real-world value, it would not stick to his brain.

“You’ve heard it before,” Doondredge said, “but you can’t remember it.”

“That’s right,” Tom said.

“Just as long as you’ve heard it, we can make you remember.”

“Look, you can torture me all you want, I’m not gonna know what it is!” It was the bravest thing Tom had ever said, but it was only brave by accident.

“Oh no no! It’s nothing so sinister as torture. It’s simply that we have the ability to allow you to recall things you don’t know you know.”

“Uhm, no, that’s okay actually. I don’t think I want to tell you what it is.”

“You can want to tell me or not want to tell me. It has little bearing on whether you actually will. Tchoobrayitch?”

“Yes?”

“Awaken the Retriever.”

The Retriever was not, as Tom had hoped, a friendly golden retriever who would lick Tom’s face until he said, “Yep, you know what? I remember!” But it also wasn’t a giant spiderlike creature who emerged from a pit and shoved its proboscis through Tom’s brain, so that was good. The Retriever was a short, tired-looking man in his sixties, though again, Tom was not a good judge of adult age. When the crystal doors of the man’s work chamber flew apart to admit Doondredge, Tom, and Tchoobrayitch, he was yawning.

Doondredge indicated that Tom should have a seat in a chair that was as plain-looking as a chair could be in a kingdom where pretty much everything was made of smoke-filled glass. He wished that the words to trigger the soul-swap and return to his body on Earth would just pop back into his head, but he knew that now that he really needed them, they’d be further away than ever. Maybe he could ask the Retriever to retrieve them for him while he was rooting around in his memory.

With a combination of great care and extreme boredom, the Retriever produced a glass face mask with tubes emanating from it. The tubes trailed back into a case that looked not entirely unlike the Igloo cooler that served as the king’s throne back in Crap Kingdom, except it was made of glass and filled with white steam. The Retriever placed the mask on his own lap and looked up at Doondredge.

“The words to bring down the Wall,” Doondredge said.

The Retriever nodded.

“We are extremely proud of this little bit of technology. We’ve only just perfected it,” Doondredge said to Tom. “The principle is simple: a bit of memory is enhanced into clarity by making all other memories in the brain slightly less clear. Since this obscuring process is spread over the whole of memory, typically the subject cannot tell anything has happened at all, and the rest of their memories are more or less intact. Now, if we give you this light treatment, will you still be inclined to tell us the information we’ve made clear for you? Or will only a Tom who has been made to forget everything he’s ever known except for that one bit of knowledge be open to sharing it with us?”

If he agreed to tell them what they wanted to know in order to save his memory, but then ended up refusing to tell them once it was over, they might torture him, or kill him. But if he said he wouldn’t tell them, they’d turn his brain into mush. He should say no, he would never tell them. Of the two bad choices, that choice was the brave one.

The Retriever did not seem to care either way. He placed the mask on Tom’s face. Tom wondered how it would stay on, and then he found out. It attached itself right to his eyeballs. It hurt a ton. He tried to say, “I’ll never tell you.” His own hot breath shot up into his forced-open eyes and he was not sure if anyone out there could hear him. If you were brave but no one could hear it and it didn’t matter anyway, did it still count?

Gas filled the mask. It was not easy or pleasant to breathe. His eyes burned. But for some reason he didn’t focus on the pain. Suddenly he could only think of Gark and the Elgg and the Wall. Maybe it was because whenever you tried not to think of something, you of course ended up thinking about it. So he tried not to think about not thinking about it. He actually tried to focus on his pain and his discomfort and his fear. He found he couldn’t stay panicked or pained, he could only think about Gark and the Elgg and the Wall. He could see it all clearer and clearer. He could see it and hear it and smell it and even taste the metallic taste he got sometimes in his mouth when he ran faster and breathed harder than he was used to. It was all so clear. Then it was too clear. It was clearer than it had been when he’d been there. He felt superhuman. He could hear Gark’s heart beating, the Elgg’s many lungs breathing fast at different intervals. He could hear his own blood in his own veins. He knew the number of hairs on Gark’s head. Then he knew the number of hairs on the head but could not identify the person whose head they were on. Then he could not tell the difference between the thing chasing him and the thing saving him from the thing chasing him—they were all just things. And then everything he saw became a blur of things, none of which was distinct from any other. Then he forgot the word
things
. Then he forgot himself.

And then finally, his mind was a fog, endless and complete, and standing in the center of that infinite fog, the only clear thing, clearer than anything he’d ever known or heard or remembered, were the words SLOWWAVE TRUEPANTS, towering in the fog, lit up for all to see.