by L. T. Hewitt
“That’s lovely,” Arthur commented. “But getting back to the original train of thought, it doesn’t matter about Who made which mistakes with which prophets (I’m not pointing any fingers here…) because this all happened in the past,” Arthur said. “The future,” Arthur corrected. “All this happens in the future. You’re going to make mistakes in the future. So, I guess it really does matter, then.”
“I hate to break it to you, but no-one gives a Cotton Sock,” Quack blasphemed.
“But this means You have the potential to stop these mistakes from ever happening.”
“You clearly know nothing about paradoxes. Now I know why the future Quack sent you back in time.”
“Did He send me here so the present/past You can teach me all about them? And the many other wonders of the world?”
“No, it was to get rid of you.”
“You clearly know nothing about time travel,” Arthur said. “I will be still be there in the future.”
“That’s what you think,” Quack muttered under His breath.
“It just means I’ll be slightly older when I’m in the future that used to be my present. One year older, to be precise.”
Quack pricked up the sides of His head. It would have been far more noticeable and useful if He in fact had ears, but you can’t have everything. Unless, of course, you’re a god, in which case You probably won’t be organised enough to create the necessary matter for pinna. “Do you mean to say,” said Quack, in a panic, “that there’s a point in time when there are two of you in the world?”
“Yes,” he replied mischievously. “In fact, there are points in time when there a great deal of Arthur Cardigans dotted around. Although it’s debatable whether or not they are really the same as me.”
“Stop talking gibberish. Especially when it’s offensive to Me.”
“My point is that You have a habit of being selfish, closed-minded, ignorant, unreliable, thoughtless, cheap, simplistic, fortunate – but in a way that means you leave everything to chance and to the last possible Centihaca – abusive, resource-wasting, idio—”
“When you go into compound adjectives you can make anyone look like a villain. But it’s your making Me look like the bringer of a terrible dystopia that concerns Me most.”
“Ooh, ‘dystopian’. That’s a good adjective to use. Now I need something to combine it with.”
“Just stop it, will you?”
“Do I have to? The list goes on.”
“Just stop it,” He repeated. “I’m the only person you can talk to right now and it just so happens I’m the god of your planet.”
“All right,” Arthur groaned, resigning himself to this horrific fate. “If there’s no-one else to talk to, You’ll have to do for now.”
“How about starting with your work experience as soon as possible,” Quack started.
“That’s not quite what it is,” Arthur mumbled, but this was lost on the god. “It’s more like life experience.”
“I want you to perform a very special task for me. It’s something terribly meaningful that will change the future of some important people.”
“That sounds good. Oh no,” Arthur groaned in realisation. “This is going to involve elderly ladies, isn’t it?”
Chapter 30
“How can this have happened? We were following the compass the whole time.”
“Well your compass must be wrong, then!”
Dave thought about this. His compass had been given to him second-hand by the hospital. Where had they gotten it from? It had been pointing in a steady direction. Dave turned the compass around and the needle swung so it was facing the same way again. It must work properly. That is, assuming the compass points to the magnetic top of the planet on Glix.
“Where exactly is this compass meant to point?”
“Nekken,” Crazy Dave, Clint, and Clein all responded.
The Space Chicken, however, carefully examined the compass. “I believe this to be a West Shovian compass and thus points to the nearest magical location.”
“Is Wales magical?”
“No, nowhere’s magical. It’s a load of over-hyped fairy stories. These compasses are completely faulty and street merchants just try to flog them off to whomever they can. For all we know, the point could have been directing itself towards Crazy Dave this whole time.”
“Is Crazy Dave magical?”
“Exactly,” the Space Chicken agreed, leaving Dave slightly baffled. “Just a load of nonsense.”
“Stop!” yelled a voice in front of them.
They all visually searched the vicinity (a search involving physical, you know… movement was too much like hard work for humans under 30, and too much pressure upon the physical bodies of humans 30 or over. Prophets are just inexcusably lazy) in an attempt to find the body that accompanied said voice, but all they found was a frog the same size as a domestic Siamese cat that was sitting in the same position as a typical Siamese cat with the same evil glare.
“I know all your secrets! I have followed you around for many days now and have listened in on the conversations you thought were behind closed doors. Spreading international mysteries in a public restaurant? And pretty much every public place, for that matter. Do you not stop to think about who may be following you as you wander across this country? What were you thinking? I hold the power and knowledge of every single thing about the Cantaloupes!”
“Actually,” said Dave, “I don’t think we had quite decided on a name for them yet—”
“Shut up! I have the command of your word ‘elderbeard’!”
The Space Chicken’s phone rang and he answered this time. He handed it to the frog. “It’s for you.”
“Hello?” the frog answered, more than slightly puzzled by the entirety of a paradisiacal telephone call, despite all the telephone conversations he had eavesdropped upon. “Okay… Thanks… What should I use instead? ...Just a full stop? Oh, I did rather like exclamations… Okay, I’ll try to do that more often.” He handed back the phone.
After some dark green blushing, the frog got over his initial embarrassment and resumed his monologue. “I know of the rifts and of the switches. I know of the Quack. I know of the cockerel egg. And most—”
A man wearing a black bowler’s hat, a suit and shades and carrying a black violin case walked past and scooped up the frog. “Come along, Sam.”
Dave was now more confused than he had been in a couple of days. “Did anybody else just see that happen?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Clint, “a frog just sat in the middle of the road before being picked up by a really weird-looking guy.” He laughed. “Yeah, I saw that.”
“No…” Dave started, and then decided it was pointless.
“I saw it,” the Space Chicken said quietly to him. “And heard it.”
“Why is it just us?” he asked.
“I’m a prophet; I can translate anything – language or otherwise. So can Quack and my mum and probably so can the Egg. You may have other reasons you understood that frog, but I don’t know.”
“So I’m not just seeing things?”
“I don’t think so.” He laughed. “Maybe you are. Maybe we all are. Maybe we’re just too old to understand things anymore and are hallucinating with tiredness. Or maybe something was put in our tea again.”
Dave really felt that he should have been offended by this, but he wasn’t. The Space Chicken knew you would take it in your stride, he thought. He knew you weren’t too stuck-up and egotistical to pretend you weren’t aging and not vain enough to even care how old you are.
Don’t get too arrogant.
Oh no.
I THINK THAT’S VERY GOOD OF YOU TO SAY THAT, DAVE. ‘IT IS OBNOXIOUS TO PRETEND YOU DON’T AGE AND FOOLISH TO CARE YOU DO.’ HM, I MIGHT USE THAT MORE OFTEN.
Thank you.
“I must be hallucinating now,” stated the Space Chicken. “I could swear I can see a gigantic boat in the field ahead of us.”
Dave lo
oked ahead. “You can.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s rather odd.”
“Let’s go and investigate then, shall we?” said Clint.
“Sure,” said Dave. “Nothing can take us that much farther away from the Fez now.”
Chapter 31
They ran over the hill and into a field filled with ears of corn. There, in the middle of it all, stood the magnificent ark. It seemed to be an average boat – albeit a very large one – but for the many technological items clinging to its sides. It was accompanied by a smaller vehicle and a group of people in fancy dress. And a familiar face.
“Hello,” said a lady in a form of white robe. “Have we met somewhere before?”
“Yes, of course,” said Dave, “you were the leader of our FezFans class back in Carpe Yolu. How are you now, Oprah?”
“How do you know my name? I’ve never met you before in my life. I am Ms Oprah No. Here is my gang of musicians, with whom I am about to travel around in this, the Most Incredible Spaceboat.” She gestured passively towards the giant ship parked behind them. “Thus far, we have been travelling in the Speedvan.” She pointed towards the other vehicle – a campervan with small, plane-like wings. “Anyway, to make a long story short, we have a spare Speedvan; you can take it if you like.”
“Do we need it?” Dave asked the rest of the group.
“Well, seeing as we now have a long way to go – through two countries – I think we definitely need this,” Clint said angrily.
“Thank you very much for this gift,” Clint said politely to Oprah.
The Space Chicken climbed into the driver’s seat of the Speedvan to check how well it functioned. “Wow. This is good,” said the Space Chicken, seeing all the buttons, levers and extra, unnecessary compartments in the Speedvan.
“Hey, Space Chicken,” said Dave, “can you drive? You could drive us to BongVe Bong. If you wouldn’t mind, of course,” he added, remembering how testy Clint got at his foolish tongue.
“Well, I do have a driver’s licence,” he replied, “and I could drive.” Dave allowed his hopes of reaching the Fez soon to rapidly soar, forgetting a key requirement of motor travel. “But, unfortunately, I don’t have any hands.”
“Clint, Clein, can you drive?” asked Dave. “Please,” he added, as if that might help change their driving skills.
“No. Mum keeps trying to get us to drive, but I don’t see the point,” Clint explained.
“The lessons would be easy, though,” Clein added. “Only one of us would need to attend and the other person could stay at home and still mentally receive the same information.”
“I did think about that,” said Clint. “But I wasn’t sure you’d have been willing to go to lessons while I stayed at home and slept.”
“I wouldn’t have been,” said a confused Clein. “You’d be going to lessons for me.”
“Why on Glix would I go to the lessons?”
“This is just like school all over again,” Clein huffed.
Dave sighed. It would have to be up to him, then. “I have a provisional licence. I can drive if somebody watches me.”
Just then, they experienced a pulse rippling through the air, like a splash through time. A purple blob of an unspecific, gelatinous matter appeared in the air near Oprah. It increased in size rapidly and they came to realise it wasn’t so much a blob as an absence of something. It drained their energy and they found themselves repulsed by it. Dave wondered if this was a normal occurrence on Glix, if violet and indigo and magenta and heliotrope always came from nothing, or if swirling holes naturally crept up into existence every other day of the week. But, seeing the sapped faces on the people of Glix, he knew that this was far from ordinary. The energy stolen by this thing seemed to slow down time. Dave feared the nothing, with its intense rays of light thieving him and his friends of life. It was soon twice the size of the Speedvan – or would be if it had abided by the laws of dimensional reality – and Dave couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do other than get away from it. With the massive lack of movement he felt throughout his body, Dave was sure his thoughts were faster. This infuriated him, however, as he was thinking non-stop of different ways he could get away from this strange anomaly, but couldn’t achieve any of these as quickly as they appeared and disappeared. After what could have only been half a second at maximum, Dave settled on a solution to almost all their current problems: get in the Speedvan.
“Everybody get in the Spaceboat!” called Oprah, not as slowly as anyone might have imagined. The musicians piled into the ship as hastily as they could and Oprah rushed to the helm, still quite slowly. But after that they didn’t move; they merely waited. Waited for their next big adventure.
The purple hole – which by now had hints of blue within its inexistence – started sucking the wind in from around them. All the leaves climbed up the air and dashed past their faces. Everybody had an equal balance of mental hatred of the thing and physical attraction towards it. This just made the group hate it more. Which, by a combination of the increasing force and the psychic equilibrium, caused the winds to intensify. By this time, the gap in reality was massive, and the Space Chicken realised that nothing could possibly stop it.
“Get in the car!” he yelled. “I’ll supervise you, Dave, if you drive.”
Dave stepped into the driver’s seat and almost immediately jumped on the accelerator. The whole gang had slowly rushed in just before he entered, and they drove off to the English horizon. After a minute that felt shorter than the preceding seconds, they were no longer at risk of getting sucked into the hole.
“What was that?” asked Clint.
“I have a feeling,” said the Space Chicken, “that that was a Cantaloupe.”
Chapter 32
Dave did his best to try to remember all the few rules that Calvin had taught him in the limited lessons he had had before gallivanting off after the Fez. He was now gaining back his speed and, possibly, losing his brainpower. Drive on the right, Dave thought. Just like they do in America. Actually, what was it he said? ‘In some parts of East America…’ What does that even mean? All the things that that could imply— Look at the road! Pay attention, you fool, or you’ll never drive again.
They had been driving just a matter of metres down the street to England and Dave was already thinking that he couldn’t understand the controls.
“Oprah and the boat got sucked into the Cantaloupe,” said Clein, after having turned around in his seat at the back of the car to take a look.
“The whole boat?” asked Dave.
“Yep.”
Dave was looking around the Speedvan at all the buttons and levers and lights that littered the dashboard. Out of an instinct he could no longer control, Dave began to fiddle with some of the mechanisms. There was a twang from above them and the sound of rushing wind.
“What was that?” asked a concerned Space Chicken.
Dave was equally concerned, perhaps more so. “I don’t know. That can’t be good… Oh well,” he concluded, and continued to fiddle with buttons.
“What in the name of Quack’s Quills are those?” asked the Space Chicken, pointing to Dave’s fingers.
“Ha ha, very funny,” said Dave in the patronising yet playfully co-operative way that friends enjoying humourous banter usually did. Or, at least, Dave and his friends at home had used it. He wasn’t sure if they were really friends. “They’re fingers. We all have them except you.”
“Not, not your fingers, those things on the end of them.”
Dave didn’t know what the Space Chicken was thinking of, so he went for the best option and continued to play the fool. “You mean my fingernails?” he asked, laughing.
“Is that what you call them?”
Dave’s smile faded. “Fingernails?”
“Those little, white things stuck to the tips of your fingers.”
“Yes,” replied Dave, confused. “They’re fingernails. Everybody has them.”
“What are the
y, some sort of fashion accessory?”
“No, they just grow. Everybody has them,” he repeated.
“Not on Glix, they don’t,” the Space Chicken said, forgetting he was duty-bound not to alienate the alien.
Dave drummed them on the dashboard to prove a point. His little finger hit a small purple button.
“Clint, Clein, Crazy Dave, can you help me explain to the crazy, crowing Cockerel what fingernails are?”
They all appeared puzzled. Apart from Crazy Dave, who was playing noughts and crosses with himself on his own forehead. He was losing, and – in opposition to the opinions of the rest of the human race – this was far more interesting to him than a person with a different anatomy.
“I can’t say that rings a bell,” Clint responded. “Would you just remind me what they are: food, clothes, plants, animal, mineral…?”
Dave shrieked as he saw the end of Clint’s fingers. No nails, no bleeding graze, no place where nails should be. Those foreign fingers were rounded off at the ends, so that they looked exactly the same when facing in any direction.
“Why haven’t you got any‽” he shouted.
“I don’t know,” Clint grumbled. “I’m just not really that into style.”
Dave was lost for words. Surely everybody grows fingernails? Back on his home planet everybody had. It was just a natural process that happened daily. Finally rediscovering his tongue, Dave decided to take the scientific route. “But it’s down to evolution, isn’t it? Apparently – if you believe that sort of thing – we have fingernails where we used to have claws.”
“You had claws? This story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“We all used to have claws, but as we don’t use them to hunt anymore, we don’t need them.”
“Is this some sort of superstition you believe in, Dave?” said Clint. “Because I’m usually quite skeptical about stuff like that.”
“It’s not superstition,” he declared. “We used to be wolves and fish and other animals.”
“Are you feeling okay, Dave?” asked Clint.
“I certainly don’t remember being anything other than a human,” Clein commented.
“All humans evolved from other animals. Scientists say this happened over hundreds of millions of years.”
“Well, no animal has been around that long, has it?” said Clint.