Prophet Margin (4 page)

I should be delighted if you would accept my invitation to attend this year's forum - not as a sideshow but as the Personal Guest of I, Marteh Gumption, the galaxy's foremost authority on Tribal Culture and the producer of this decade's most enduring filmic recreations of historical society.

I await your affirmation with copious anticipation,

Yours,

Marteh Gumption,

Prod/Dir. "
HOW: A Red-Skinned Epic
"

Prod/Dir. "
Wee Three Kings: The Lives of Trivalvic MiniCommunities
"

Prod/Dir. "
A Tribe of One: Split-Personalities of a Kratchian G'Bong
".

Wulf scowled and pocketed the letter. Its dainty language continued to perplex him, and he remembered showing it to Nathaniel "BigThink" Oddboy - the Doghouse's resident two-brained mutant - for a more down-to-earth translation.

Being paid for, as Oddboy had put it "just showin' yer ugly sneckin' mug" seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Wulf had, of course, discussed the offer with Johnny - half hoping his partner would talk him out of it. Alas, Alpha's pragmatism was as infamous as his unfeasibly bulbous helmet, and he'd fully endorsed the plan to earn extra cash.

"We could do with some new electronux," he'd said, "and they're advertising number five cartridges in this month's
Blasters 'n Lazcells
."

Wulf had not been reassured. Johnny grinned.

"Hey, you'll do fine, big fellah. Shake some hands, tell some tales, go home with the readies. No sweat."

Back in the bar on Sebraxus, Wulf picked up his empty tankard. "No sweat," he mumbled, "only lots of der bullsneck..."

Half a galaxy and a four-day journey from the Doghouse, he'd arrived at the Kentucky Fried Holiday Inn halfway through his host's opening speech, just in time for the details of his founding culture to be mauled in public. "Nose of der sphinx... pah!"

He was not a happy man.

"More mead!"

Abruptly, the bar began to fill.

The low-level mussitation of sombre drinkers was punctured by the shrieks, warbles and ozone-discharges of too many aliens in too small a space. Clearly the lecturehall had closed for the day.

Amongst the mêlée of discordant sounds Wulf caught the name "Marteh Gumption" with depressing regularity. He scowled - a countenance perfect for scuppering attempts by groups of fainthearted palaeontologists at sharing his table.

Given how few people were prepared to occupy the personal space of a drunken Viking, Wulf was amazed when a dull little figure in a hood approached with a pair of drinks, slipping onto the seat opposite. He was about to unleash a scathing barrage of razor wit upon the hooded fool - or at the very least to threaten to smash his head unless he went away - when he noticed that one of the drinks in the man's hands looked an awful lot like mead.

"You must be Wulf," the man said, passing over the tankard.

"Don't have to be if I don't want to be," he mumbled, caught off his guard.

A human hand extended across the table. Wulf stared at it. "Pleased to meet you," the hood said.

Wulf shrugged - an almost tectonic event - and gripped the hand, immersing its manicured fingers in a hamlike clench. "So," he said, not letting go, "who are you, man-with-der-girly-hands-who-buys-strangers-drinks?"

The spare girly hand twitched aside the edge of the hood, flashing a bright glare from a set of perfect teeth and a face so plastic it might easily have melted in the heat.

"Name's Gumption," he said, grinning blindingly. "Marteh Gumption. Chap who invited you. Terribly sorry for all this, ahaha, cloak and dagger nonsense. It's so blasted tedious being famous." The man sighed with the air of one who had decided his life was quite the most miserable in existence.

Wulf's eyes, the newcomer couldn't help noticing, had narrowed.

"Um..." Gumption said, coughing politely. "I-I wonder whether I might... ow... I might have my, ahah, hand back... It's just that you have quite a strong grip and-"

"Why do you not tell me," said Wulf, all trace of a slur miraculously gone, "about these... How did you call them? 'Horrific and savage' peoples?"

"Ah..."

Something popped lightly in the man's hand.

"Aaah... ahah... You s-saw my speech, then? Good, ow, good. Y-yes, you see I'm plan-"

"Also, why do you not be telling me about how der Atlantis was lost? I am very very interested in that."

"Yes, well... you see, what I'm planning is-"

"You mind if I am asking you der question, mister history man?"

"Ow God no, ahah, ask away... Just do give me back that hand, eh, there's a g-"

"What sort of der helmet were der Vikings being wearing?"

"W-what? Ow, ow, ow--" The hand crackled like bubblewrap.

"Helmets. What did they look like?"

"W-well, ahaha, as any fool knows, they w-were round..."

"Yes..."

"A-and hard..."

"Good so far."

"And they had an enormous pair of horns sticking up from their oh sweet sneck my hand god no aaaaaaaa-"

Wulf let go, raising his tankard in a contemptuous glug, ignoring the whimpers from across the table.

"You," he said, synthetic mead dribbling from his whiskers, "are not being der real historian."

At which point Marteh Gumption, lip wobbling like cellulite in an earthquake, burst into tears.

The reason that Wulf knew that Gumption was a fraud was ridiculously simple: helmets with horns poking from either side are a really, really bad idea. Simple adjustments can cause serious damage, an innocent sneeze can turn the unfastened helmet into a deadly missile, doorways become impassable and, quite apart from anything else, they look completely and utterly stupid.

Vikings did not wear horned helmets.

In actual fact, despite their impracticality and historical inaccuracy, Wulf's tribe had for a short time been in possession of not only a selection of spiky headguards but, even worse, a range of iron helmets with stupid little metal wings poking above the ears.

In Wulf's defence the period in question had coincided with a serious temporal incursion into the ninth century by a gang of mutant criminals hellbent upon screwing with history and a few spontaneously generating helmets had been the last of his worries. Tanks, helicopters, goblins - all manner of bizarre and inexplicable items had popped into existence, most of them being ludicrously rationalised as evidence of the gods' anger. The strangest apparition of all - a brightly painted demon with glowing eyes and a firestick at its hip - had turned out to be a Mister John Alpha Esq, which just went to show that not everything in ninth century life could be easily explained as a product of "magic".

It was during the episode with the weird-eyed-demon, the helicopters and, yes, the pointy-snecking-helmets, that Wulf was accidentally transported fourteen hundred years forwards in time. As you do.

Since then he'd learned that vehicular engineering was based upon solid mechanical principles, that freakish demons were called "mutants", that firesticks were called "guns", and that no self respecting Viking would be seen dead in a horny helmet unless the laws of time and space were so snecked that he had no idea what he was doing.

To put it another way, the subject of helmets with horns had always been something of a sore-point for Wulf Sternhammer.

It took Marteh Gumption a while to calm down. Wulf watched the entire show of snivelling and tear-blotting with disgust that punched through the pity barrier and out the other side.

"Y-you're absolutely right..." the man said, when his voice had settled. "It's all fake. I-I made it all up."

"All of what?"

"Everything! I'm just a..." his voice lowered "a screenwriter."

Wulf stared. Gumption had the air of a man describing a bad habit that marked him out as deviant. "I... I had a string of flops," he muttered, gazing at the tabletop. "It was the special effects, that's what did it... S-so I thought, well... they can't argue if it's all based on true stories, can they?"

"I think I am seeing where this is going." Wulf pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting a headache. Just when you thought the twenty-second century couldn't get any weirder.

"S-so I had a little reformative surgery and came back as... as Marteh Gumption, expert on Native American society."

"Ah. Skraelings. Met some, one time."

"Well, I mean, it seemed perfect. There aren't any of the buggers left, you see - not since the SkinWars fragged all their, ah," (he mimed a pair of quotation marks in the air) "'rosavayshuns'. Anyway, I paid some people to engage the last expert or two back on earth in... in... conversation, and-"

"You had der real ones killed?"

"No! No! I just had their brains wiped."

Wulf shook his head, draining the last of his mead. "Go on."

"W-well, that's it, really. Choose a subject that's going to... to gratify an audience. Loads of violence and primitive cultures doing, hur hur, primitive things - then make sure there's no one around to contradict you.
Bang
. Instant movie success!"

Wulf sighed. The headache was getting stronger.

"And now you are wanting to make movie with der Viking, as cool as der cucumber?"

"Yes!"

"With der pointy hats und der raping und der pillaging?"

"Yes!"

"Und you are thinking you can be buying the silence of Wulf Sternhammer with your lots-of-credit-moneys?"

"No!"

"Und y... No?"

"No."

"What then?"

Gumption's twitching eyes looked down into Wulf's empty tankard.

"I... I just wanted to buy you a drink," he said.

Wulf frowned, a wave of suspicion fighting the throbbing of his head. With almost glacial slowness it occurred to him that he couldn't remember
ever
suffering from anything as fundamentally wimpish as a headache. He tried to grab for his Happy Stick - the double ended warhammer propped nearby - and was bewildered to find it suddenly weighed far, far more than he could lift.

"Sneck," he said, toppling forwards into the heavily drugged dregs of his mead.

FOUR

On the eastern crust of the dungworld Shtzuth - an orb of ammonia-rich excrement left in a life-supporting orbit by the giganism YELR millennia ago - there was a farm.

Amongst the mouldfields and fleshgrub paddocks there was a patch of land where nothing grew, where the mouldcrops couldn't spread, where the grubs couldn't dig into the hard soil, and where even the temptation to raise buildings had been scuppered by the difficulty of digging foundations. The residents of Shtzuth called such spots of land Nutlumps, reasoning that
some
stellar matter had proved indigestible even to the gravitational intestines of the giganism.

In the centre of this irregular Nutlump, lying on his back with his eyes fixed firmly on the methane clouds and flocks of shitgulls above, was a boy.

His name was Roolán, he was seventeen, somewhat scrawny, and if he'd been in the habit of talking - which he was not - he might at that precise moment have opined that of all the many things in creation, two of the very worst were farms and shit.

He was staring at the sky because, ten kilometres above him, a pair of thrusters on a mind-breakingly enormous construction robot were flaring softly through the clouds.

In fact, from horizon to horizon the heavens were alive with rocket trails and signal lights, pilot beacons and drone codes. An omniamp flickered spectral green somewhere to the west: onboard one of the roadiecraft a technician was clearly fiddling with his lightboard.

Chryz Widdiso was coming to Shtzuth.

Never before had the world's farming communities been so united. Given the rarity of the faecal planetoid's fertile surfaces, most farm owners regarded each other with open hostility. No longer. In face of the hordes of music lovers, merchandisers, sideshows and supporting acts whose arrival was imminent - and in the instinctive human spirit of earning an obese profit - the farmers had gathered to properly plan exactly how to exploit the situation.

Widdiso performed once every thirty years. Spending the vast majority of his life sealed within a cryoclam, he remained ever young, ever handsome, and ever lucrative. He had, put simply, the greatest voice in the galaxy.

Back at the farmhouse, Roolán slouched through the kitchen towards his room, avoiding the wobbling mound of flesh and apron fabric he called "mother". So focused was his attention on his doorway that he failed to notice the slugcat coiled on the floor - until, that is, he trod on it.

The beast - with which Roolán had never seen eye-to-eye - leapt into the air with a yowl and a panicky squirt of hormone-spray, dislodging a cascade of hors d'oeuvres clearly destined for the planetwide catering effort. Their ornamental plates shattered, pigmented sweetmeats and mouldballs bouncing across the floor.

Roolán's mother turned from whatever culinary crime she was committing to find the three hundred gull's liver delicacies she'd spent the morning preparing splattered across the kitchen tiles, sprinkled with mould-based nibbles and cat's piss.

"Roolán!" she shrieked, jowls trembling. "Look what you've... You idiot! That took me... I've been... Idiot!"

Roolán endured the abuse with well-practiced patience, dipping his head in what he hoped was a convincing display of penitence. The slugcat, with a smug glance at Roolán, moaned.

"Oh, poor Slippo!" his mother wailed, effecting the female talent of slipping between fury and cuddliness in 0.8 seconds. "Are oo okay, ickle Slippo? Are oo okay? Oo-cha-woo-woo..." Roolán resisted the urge to vomit.

The woman peered up from beneath fatty brows and fixed Roolán with a glare. "Wait," she hissed, "until your father hears about this..."

This was a threat too far even for Roolán. "N-no! Plea-"

The house seemed to shake.

His mother's eyes widened like dinner plates, multiple chins quivering. Roolán slapped a hand over his own mouth, too late.

"
What
do you think you're doing?" she screamed, terrifying the slugcat into another ballistic spray of musk. "How dare you?"