Theatre of the Gods (41 page)

Controller of the mortal worlds.

The dead and forsaken call my name.

The lost and broken cry out for my mercy.

The empty and forgotten dance before my idols,

Dance, dance, dance!

See this Empire I have built.

Is it not pretty?

I am Calligulus!

Son of Zep
,

Son of Mat
,

Child of the darkness of the bottomless abyss,

And the fires of the infinite sun.

Zep rules!

UP

In space there’s no such place as ‘up’. No up, no down, no sideways, no forwards, no backwards. When a rocket takes off, a rocket such as the one our friends are in, it’s convenient to say that the rocket is travelling up, when really it isn’t. The best we can say is that the rocket is travelling ‘away’. Away from ground, away from friends, and into the unknown at a frightening speed. In another sense it can also be said to be travelling ‘up’ and ‘away’ from all other possible events. But this is a complex subject.

It has been weeks since I last sat down to write because I have been away getting the old man’s mail. I went because I wanted to see if anyone else was trying to reach him in his mansion on this deserted moon beside the sea guarded by fearsome serpents. Sending mail here is no simple matter. We are countless billions of light-years from anywhere populated, and we have no electricity, so sending electronic messages is out of the question. The only thing that really works is telepathic monkeys. Ours is Fergus, a fine monkey who lives in a small hut on the far side of the moon, the side which gets the best signals from the outer worlds. You’d like him, you really would. How the system works is this: the individual who wants to send a letter dictates it to a mind monkey on their world. Then the mind monkey sends it telepathically to Fergus who writes it down. It isn’t a perfect system. For a start, for it to work all the monkeys must have met. This is called ‘entanglement’, and it is vital to any psychic-monkey mail
service. Also, the messages are never written down exactly as the sender intended. But no matter, it’s a lot better than trans-dimensional homing squirrels. That system was very messy, and sometimes deadly, though
always
adorable.

The main problem with this system is that every time I want to get the mail I have to make a journey of several weeks following a narrow trail through a stony wilderness, along narrow ledges, skirting chasms of despair. At one point I have to sneak past a mud-dragon who has been sleeping for 700,000 years. In all that time he hasn’t even twitched, they say, but there’s a first time for all things.

When I finally reach Fergus’s hut he’ll come out and hand me whatever has been sent, and a tin of hot soup, for which I am very grateful. This time, all that was waiting for me was a note from a communications company saying, ‘Are you currently happy with your mind-monkey coverage?’ And underneath, Fergus had scrawled, ‘Yes!!?? x.x.’ He eyed me carefully as I read it. I guess I should have known that there wouldn’t be any real mail. No one, after all, even knows the old man is alive. But I do like to get out once in a while.

EXIT WOUNDS

They seemed to travel ‘up’ for ‘hours’.

Then there was a heavy sound, a cross between a thud and splat. It was a
thplat
, definitely, and it seemed to sound their end. Then the engine cut out and there was silence. Everyone opened their eyes and saw that their craft was falling over a bright terrain of crumbling mountains. The chute had opened. That was good. Below they saw an amazing sight: it was a creature, serpentine, fat and burning emerald green in the sunshine. The creature was so vast it defied belief, and so ugly it defied it a second time: it had folds of skin, red, orange, yellow, green, and great scarlet pustules all along its flanks, each as large as a volcano, each erupting with yellowy pus. Its eyes were black and cloudy; it had a row of spiny fins along its back. It had one back leg upon the side of a volcano, and one of its forelegs planted square in the middle of the remains of a mid-sized village. A deep canyon in the jungled earth showed where the dragon had made its slow, merciless progress, while ahead of it – just a few hundred miles on – was a madly gleaming city built around a set of mountain peaks. Just behind the creature’s eyes was a blowhole – probably for breathing or expelling gases – and just behind the blowhole was another hole, red and frayed at the edges, a hole made by the rocket which had just punched through its tiny brain like a high-powered bullet.

‘I knew it!’ shouted Fabrigas. ‘We were inside a beast the whole time!’

Below, the beast was writhing in its end. This brand-new hole would be terminal. It reached up into the sky and snapped at the empty air with its long, terrible teeth, before falling back and coming to rest with its head upon an active volcano; the plume of burning gas and rock began to scour the flesh away from its skull.

‘It must have grabbed us in its jaws as we flew towards the planet from the moon. This would explain why there were so many crashed ships in there. At last, a solid reality to put our feet upon!’ And then, as if to mock the man of reason, the whole scene below them vanished like a dream – the serpent, the city – and they found themselves drifting down towards a silvery forest.

‘What madness is this?’ said Fabrigas.

FORBIDDEN, FORGOTTEN

They landed with a soft bump because the land was covered in a layer of crimson moss. The trees were short conifers whose needles were silver, smooth and shiny as wire. The glade they landed in became a valley which channelled the moss down in a red river to a broad, scarlet plain under a sky as rough and grey as soldiers’ coats, singed bright orange at the horizon. There was no animal life, it seemed; no birds or insects called to them. There was only the calm, eerie ring of a billion needles rubbing together. It was so strange and beautiful that they sat there for a full minute before the captain said, ‘So. We missed the hole?’

He left the capsule cautiously, his heavy boots sank deep into the plush, red carpet. ‘This bothers me,’ he said to no one. He wandered to the edge of the clearing, put his hands on his hips, and peered down the long valley. The others waited with steepled fingers. He wandered out of sight and was gone for a full five minutes before he ambled back, paused, strolled to the hatch, frowned and said, ‘We make camp.’

*

There was no food to gather, no critters, no mushrooms, no toadstools. There was nothing to make shelter with, and no need anyway, since the evening – if it was an evening – was warm and pleasant.

Fabrigas made coffee on his small stove. Miss Fritzacopple made soup with mushrooms the Ubuntu had given them and some herbs she had kept. Kimmy watched her stir the pot.

‘This place is disturbingly uniform,’ said Fabrigas. ‘These needles are all exactly the same length. It’s as if they’ve been made by machine. They remind me of the Festivus trees we had when I was a boy. We used to hang decorations on them, and on Festivus Eve Brother Love would come and leave presents for us.’

But no one had the energy to think about what Festivus was, or where they were, or what it meant. All they could do was let their tired bones sink into the soft earth and sigh.

*

Lenore woke to feel someone gently tickling her face, and she opened her nose to discover … What is that? … Butterflies!

A swarm of white butterflies had flown into the clearing; not just hundreds, or thousands, but
millions
of butterflies were floating up the valley in a shivery cloud. What a sight. Everyone ran around the glade, throwing up their arms and giggling. Except the captain. Soon they were lost in the cloud, not even knowing which way was which. They enjoyed themselves for almost an hour. Thousands of butterflies were soon spiked upon the ends of the conifer needles, so that in a few minutes the bare trees seemed to have sprouted exquisite foliage. Then, another sign of animal life: from nowhere, bright orange spiders ran down the needles and began to feast on the tender creatures. It was quite a slaughter.

The butterfly extravaganza continued for hours. The sun refused to set, the light remained soft and steady, the spiders grew fat. Everybody sat in silence and watched the never-ending drifts of snowy Lepidoptera. After a few hours the captain said, ‘I hate these damned butterflies,’ and no one bothered to disagree.

*

Then they were gone, as quickly as they’d arrived, and the clearing was once more deathly still and quiet.

‘I feel like I could just lie here for ever,’ said Kimmy. ‘The ground is so soft, I feel like I could go on listening to the music of the trees for days. It’s so beautiful.’

Fabrigas heard her and knew at once that she was right and that they should move on very quickly, without delay, right this second, let’s go. But then somehow seconds later he was thinking of something else. He was staring up at the trees and marvelling at the way the geometry of the needle-straight spines caused circles to pulse through his eyes.

*

Circles, upon circles, upon circles.

*

Fabrigas looked up. He’d been writing in his journal, but all he’d written was page after page of nonsense. But he looked up now because standing on the far side of the clearing was a man.

*

Miss Fritzacopple, wandering among the trees, could not make sense of any of it. She had a specimen jar in her right hand but nothing really to put in it. She’d pulled up a clump of red moss and plopped it in a jar, noting, as she did, that the earth below was a fine, pale sand, dry and uniform. The music of the needles had become a deafening chorus to her now. It ruffled her consciousness and made her think, as she stared at her arms and hands, that they were ugly: that they belonged to an alien creature. When she’d walked to the other side of the clearing and looked back at the hole in the mossy
ground it had looked like a terrified mouth screaming at her, so she’d put the divot back in its hole and patted it lightly into place. The bark of the trees was hard and white with calluses of black. When she pulled the bark away she found a raw, red wax. She pressed the bark back into place. Patted it lightly. She felt an urge to throw off all her clothes and wander like a child through this landscape, but she quickly checked herself.

She noticed something strange: the jar which had held the moss had a layer of golden goo in the bottom. She held it up, noted the tiny air bubbles. It looked so familiar. And then she did something so shocking that later, when she thought back on it, she’d shudder. She took her finger, dabbed it lightly in the goo and touched it to her tongue. She let out a cry of delight.

*

The stranger wore the remains of an expensive suit. It was the first thing that struck you. Despite the fact that both trouser legs had been shredded to the knees – as if by the claws of a wild beast – despite the fact that his jacket was stained and rumpled, and that one of the breast pockets was torn back so that a red nipple peeped out like a rising sun, you could tell that, originally, this had been his best suit. But now his long hair was slicked over with some kind of luminous goo, though without a mirror he’d created a parting as fiercely crooked as a lightning bolt. The stranger was mad-eyed and emaciated. The stranger had dead butterflies in his hair. The stranger said, ‘You have to leave!’

‘Who are you?’ said Fabrigas, snapping out of his reverie. The others swooned awake. Lenore had been dreaming that she was being eaten, piece by piece, by butterflies while a madman read her stories.

‘You have to leave! My God, you have no idea. If only you knew.

If only you could grasp the situation – My word, my God, is that the DX9100?’ and the man skipped alarmingly fast among them to where their capsule sat, embedded in the moss, its chute strung
along the needles like drying laundry. Kimmy noticed that she had cocoons hanging from her nose, her earlobes, the captain too. She plucked one off and showed it to him. He wrinkled his nose, then scrabbled at his head with both hands. The stranger was poring over their capsule, running his hands up and down its surface. Then he tapped the fuselage with a bony knuckle and listened as it boomed. Then he kicked it, hard, and listened again.

‘Hey!’ said the captain. ‘Would you mind not kicking our property? And who are you?’

The strange man’s head swivelled slowly, like a carnival clown, and he stared wide-eyed at the captain. Then, slowly, he began to walk backwards, like a man retreating from a dangerous beast; he raised his palms and stepped, slowly, one foot over the other, until at last he was safe behind a tree.

The captain and Fabrigas looked at each other, expressionless.

‘We can still see you!’ said the captain.

The strange man pulled his spine straight and buttoned his jacket. ‘What about now?’

‘Yes,’ said Kimmy. ‘We can see you very clearly.’

‘Right!’ said the stranger as he purposefully clapped his hands together. ‘I’ll give you thirty thousand rupits for the DX9200. I don’t have it on me,’ slapping his breasts, ‘but I’m good for it. I come from a fine family. Tin miners. Twenty thousand if I can take it now.’