Theatre of the Gods (2 page)

But don’t believe him. Or at best believe only some of what he tells you. The strange and impossible stories. How he escaped a gang of mind-pirates by lining his hat with foil and singing love songs. How he lived in the stomach of a dinosaur plant, surviving on rations found in the pockets of decomposing sailors. All lies. And then the most fantastical story: how he agreed to undertake a voyage beyond this universe for the glory of the Empire. How he went to the next universe with a boy who couldn’t hear, and a girl who couldn’t see. How he lost the brave deaf boy, and the cunning blind girl, had to watch as they were cast into a black hole, their very atoms pulverised by unfathomable forces. How he returned to this universe alone, to live a broken man, in this house, on this orphan moon, to tell these stories – of which perhaps one on every page is a complete and utter lie. You should read every single word in this book, and think very hard, because it is a good story, and because every single word, even these very words, are true.

*

It is no lie that M. Francisco Fabrigas possessed one of the most brilliant and inventive minds of his age. He mastered seventy-eight languages and claimed to dream in forty-six – though he seldom slept more than one or two hours in a night. He had a photographic memory, a phonographic memory, and a bibliographic memory – he never forgot a single thing he read. He invented the X-ray photokamera, the four-dimensional compass, the radio-chronomatic receiver (a device with which you can hear the past – which is useful if you want to settle a thousand-year-old argument). He patented an anaesthetic hat for inducing sleep in patients and loud children, as well as
a device for communicating with human babies (which, in the end, only proved that babies know very little about anything, and an awful lot about nothing). He was also the first human to realise that there were other universes – most likely an infinite number – and that it might be possible for people to travel there. He was the first to go beyond the membrane of his universe and return alive. Where he went after that has been a profound mystery.

After fruitless years spent trying to solve the mystery of M. Francisco Fabrigas, I became desperate. I was down to a single clue – obscure, laughably speculative – but I followed it anyway, and it led me all the way to a remote and deadly region of space. There I was caught in a solar storm and forced to crash-land on an orphan moon. And how fateful that I did. I found myself near a wrecked mansion above a disused uranium mine beside a sea lorded over by mighty serpents. The mansion was vast and crumbling, its roof torn open, its windward wall split like a serpent’s gullet, disgorging ancient furniture and priceless rugs down the face of a cliff. Upstairs in the master bedroom I found the doors to the balcony open. Two elegantly dressed skeletons still sat there in their rocking chairs, staring out to sea.

The stair wood sang like crickets as I went into the cellar vault, expecting to find nothing, but finding in the darkness, surrounded by the rotting casks and family urns, an old, old figure (though with the passing of the years he was now more beard than man). I cannot forget a thing about him: his great height, his formidable presence even in that decaying state – and those legendary eyes: eyes that seem to be looking out from the dawn of time, and on towards infinity. For days I could not get him even to acknowledge my presence. Eventually he rose from his stupor, looked around him and said, ‘This is not my house. How did I get here?’ and as if in answer the breakers smashed upon the stones below, and the serpents cried, just as they’d done for endless centuries.

After weeks of effort I was able to fully break him from his trance
and encourage him to tell me his version of a tale I knew well from other sources: the story of the Great Crossing – the first time a human being was able to leave his own universe, and return. I carefully took down every word he said, every curse and every mutter, the whole rambling adventure: the brave deaf boy, the cunning and beautiful blind girl – though he was continuously interrupting his own story to cry, ‘Lies! It’s all lies! What is life but a web of lies!’ I bore witness to his great suffering. Over the course of weeks, as he retold his story, the old man became more unstable, particularly as his tale reached its terrible conclusion, with the casting of the two innocents into the jaws of a black hole. Certainly, the old man never
saw
these children torn to bits by the forces of the abyss. He watched only as they fell, arms in the shape of a plane, towards the gnashing jaws of space. He could not watch the last bit. He had to look away and bite his finger …
nghn!
But if there’s one thing we all know it’s that no person can survive being thrown into a black hole. That’s simply the way things are. Oh, I know what you’re thinking now: this is just an author’s trick. We think they’re going to die at the end, these beautiful children, but in a final twist they’ll both be saved. Listen to me very carefully. Come closer so I can lower my voice to a whisper as I tell you: that … will never … happen. There is no way that some brave fool will sweep in, scoop the children up in his strong arms. This isn’t like the moving cinemagraphs where the heroes live, the villains die, and everyone has cake. This is life.

One night, during a terrible storm which threw itself against the mansion, I challenged the old master on a point of fact – a contradiction between two versions of events. The ancient man flew into a rage, suddenly accusing me of plotting to distract him from his studies. In a fury, Time’s Traitor seized my notes, intending to throw them on the fire. I managed to snatch most of them away and leap through a window as he hurled antique clocks and vases after me. I hid for several days.

*

Upon my return I found the mansion empty. There was no sign of any craft landing there, no footprints around the house or on the shore. On his table I found, held in place by an oily stone from the shore, a brief note:

If the ages say something about me, let it be this:

That within this common shipwrecke I, above all life’s servants, was uncommonly placed to observe the secret beauty hid in ordinary things.

If they say something else, let it be that I was handsome.

M.F.F.

The story of M. Francisco Fabrigas and the Great Crossing is a strange and wonderful tale and I’ve done my best to present it as it was told to me by the old master. I have spent an ungodly amount of time fleshing out his confessions, following the path of the
Necronaut
and its crew of misfits, speaking to eyewitnesses, hunting down fragments of journals and news stories, checking and rechecking every detail, and compiling a meticulous account of this historic human voyage through the Omnicosmos. For what it’s worth, I believe the old man really did undertake an expedition to the next universe, aided by a handsome deaf boy and a beautiful and cunning blind girl. He failed, of course, and the children died horribly. But I hope you enjoy this story anyway. For as I said earlier, practically every word is true, others less so, and some, like these, are not true at all.

Yours in greatness,

V. V. S. Volcannon

ENCOUNTER

Two encounters in deepest space. The first, terrifying enough; the second, far too terrifying for those involved.

The
MOS-DEF
, a research vessel on a mission to find a species of space leech thought to contain plague antibodies, finds not a leech. Their leader, a doctor, a passionate man who has given his entire life to this mission, stands for thirty-nine nautical hours on the observation deck. He does not move. His men bring him chocolate, he will not drink. His men bring him blankets, he cares not for warmth. Finally, when the doctor calls back that he can see a giant squid, the crew prepare to sedate him.

They are all surprised to find a live squid just off their bow (though not as surprised as the squid). The beast is vast, pinkish-blue, and gazes at them with sad, wet eyes. It floats calmly, its tentacles wave softly. When the ship pulls close with nets it surrenders like a baby. When the squid is examined, the barnacles and starfish scraped from its soft flanks, the scientists determine that there is nothing at all strange about the squid. Except that it isn’t from our universe. Our space cannot support a beast like this. Which is in itself, they have to admit, very strange.

The squid has nothing to say.

But to the second and far more terrifying event. Three years later, in another dark region of space, the
Vangelis
, a warship thrown off course when its navigation equipment malfunctions, discovers a ship.

It is a galleon – the kind built for sailing on terrestrial seas, yet somehow cast adrift in space. Its sails are shredded by the ages, but its rig is set for a steady sea wind (though of course there is no sea wind where this ship has found itself). When the crew of the
Vangelis
venture aboard they find the boat deserted. There are bowls of food on the table, a pot of soup still on the stove, all preserved by the icy cold of space. They can make no sense of the language in the ship’s log, or in the passengers’ journals, or in the children’s picture books they find, and the maps in the navigation room are a guide to seas unknown. There is no explanation for what the ship is doing in this part of the universe – or for what it was doing in this universe at all. ‘A ghost ship!’ someone cries. He is an idiot. The truth is far, far stranger.

In the storage bay the crew find a small girl frozen in a block of ice.

*

There is near-mutiny at the captain’s suggestion that they bring the ship home. Captain Descharge has to whip two men before anyone will agree to go near the frozen creature. A skeleton crew stays aboard, some blubbing quietly, some clutching holy books, and none able to look upon the ghastly cell of ice. And well they should be terrified, for within that icy sepulchre it is possible to see the corpse at rest, her pale hands enfolded ’cross her chest. Her eyes are open, her breathless lips a dreadful blue. She is dead, most certainly. Most certainly.

And yet …

*

Her death is incomplete. For if you would happen to walk up to that silvery block, put a hand upon the ice, or (for the heavens forbid)
put your ear to it, you would hear, faintly, the knocking of a living heart.

Tests reveal that the girl has been suspended in the ice for as little as ten thousand average human life spans, and as many as a million. The royal physicians thaw her slowly, slowly, as word drips and trickles out around the Empire, passing from lip to lip in ghastly croaks. ‘A girl. Frozen in ice but not dead! It is an omen, most certainly. The end is coming!’ Each day an inch of water pools around the foot of the physicians’ steel table, and every drop is kept, because these doctors know it can be put in bottles and sold to the wealthy for unholy sums.

As the ice falls away, as the bergs shatter on the hard tiles, the heart beats soft and regular, the outline grows distinct, those fine, small features, the slightly pointy nose, the large and limpid eyes … open … and that sickly green complexion. One day she lies before them on the table, fully thawed, and they can see her breathing fast and shallow. She smells of roses (the thorns, not the petals). These men of science are aghast. ‘Is she even human?’

One evening, just as the night nurse has finished her checks, when the whole annexe is quiet, she turns to the basin to wash her hands, then turns back to find the girl standing there before her, hair afloat, eyes ablaze. The scream is heard throughout the complex. In the morning the nurse has vanished. She has fled the clinic, the hospital, gone back to her home world. She will later be committed to an asylum and live out her days freezing crickets into cubes of ice.

*

She stands but a few feet tall in her hunting boots. She wears a handsome hunting coat. The greatest physicians of the Empire arrive and line up to examine her. They bring instruments. None can explain her origin, or how she survived the ice. ‘She is made entirely from meat!’ exclaims Dr Racosta. The girl points to Racosta’s right coat
pocket and giggles. He is cajoled into removing a cupcake wrapped in a silk napkin. ‘I am, I am the talisman,’ she brightly burbles at the startled master-surgeon. This alien creature knows their communal language, the Internomicon. Or she has absorbed it in a few days just by hearing it spoken.

After a thorough examination – to which she submits with a terrifying serenity – she is declared fit and normal (though the cruel ice has robbed her vision). While being examined by a famous doctor called Mexisi, the girl turns to him and burbles, ‘You treat me so roughly, you do, Mexisi.’ ‘You are my patient and I will treat you however I like,’ declares Mexisi. ‘Now I must take some of your blood.’ The girl says nothing. Her blood is palest purple. The needle leaves a pretty violet bruise. The doctor holds the vial up to the light, laughs, his hand glints; outside the spheres outshine the stars, and twelve hours later Mexisi falls dead from heart failure.

*

It is discovered that this girl has a phenomenal sense of smell. She can describe to a person what the last soul they met had for breakfast just by the faint traces of breath left on their skin.