The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT THE PRISONER LOGGED UNDER THE NAME OF OLD BONY K’NOBBLI IS IN FACT A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT INDIVIDUAL, A PERSON NAMED WOBBLI BENT K’NOBBLI; AN OLD JOBBI MASTER AND ONCE MY TRAINER IN THE WAYS OF JOBBI.’

  ‘Extraordinary. How did you ever deduce that?’

  ‘I FELT HIS PRESENCE. ALSO I RECOGNISED HIS MUGSHOT.’

  ‘Oh – there goes another one!’ Another fruitless assault along the trench had ended in explosion and death for its hapless Rebelend pilot. The Grand Muff clapped his hands together delightedly.

  ‘I MUST CONFRONT K’NOBBLI. HE IS STRONG IN THE FARCE.’

  ‘Well good luck with that, old friend,’ said o’ Tartan. ‘How about we meet up for a fondue later? To celebrate our victory?’

  ‘EXCELLENT.’

  ‘My quarters, at twenty-hundred hours?’

  ‘I’LL BRING SOME CRÈME DE MENTHE.’

  ‘And I will unroll the Twister mat. I might give it a wipe down, actually, after last time. Goodbye for now, my friend!’

  Dark Father strode impressively from the bridge.

  Chapter Twelve

  Exciting Denouement

  The group made their way along a brightly-lit corridor, and then through a sliding door into a wood-panelled room.

  ‘It’s a dead end,’ cried Someman. ‘Quick – back the way we came.’

  They hurried en masse back out into the corridor; but it was too late. The far end of the corridor was packed with Sterntroopers. They had all taken up firing positions, some on their knees, some on their fronts, the ones at the back standing up.

  And through this mass of trained soldiers stepped Dark Father.

  ‘It’s Dark Father!’ ejaculated Luke. ‘He killed my father, did Dark Father! I don’t even know who my father was, except that he was himself Dark, and ended up killed by Dark Father, in some mysterious manner!’

  ‘Evil Dark Father,’ cried Princess Leper. ‘I will put an end to your evil-doing right now.’ She stepped to the front of the group, lowered her laser pistol, and fired directly at the towering black-clad figure.

  Her shot flew wide. She fired again and again, and each time the laser bolt missed its target. Dark Father made no attempt to avoid the shots; he merely stood, arms folded, wheezing slightly.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Leper said. ‘He’s only twenty feet away, but I can’t seem to hit him.’

  ‘He is too strong in the Farce,’ said Old Bony, stepping forward. ‘Clumsiness, maladroitness and dyspraxia surround him like an evil forcefield. You will never muster enough co-ordination to fire accurately. This is a fight none of you can win. You must leave it to me.’

  ‘Bony!’ cried Luke. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Give us a quick leg up,’ he muttered to the young man. In a trice Luke had lifted his frail frame up to the ceiling, from where, with deft though gnarled fingers, the venerable Jobbi knight unscrewed one of the fluorescent lightbulbs from its fittings, power nubbin and all.

  ‘Ow,’ he said, when he was back on the floor. ‘This is hot.’

  ‘Bony!’ cried Luke, again, in an agony of anticipation. ‘Be careful!’

  K’nobbli inched forward, holding the gleaming metre-long lightbulb in front of himself.

  ‘Dark Father,’ he said.

  ‘WOBBLI BENT,’ said Dark Father. ‘IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME.’

  ‘Ages,’ agreed Bony.

  Dark Father unfolded his arms, reached inside his own robes and drew out a fluorescent tube of his own. When he activated this it glowed a pinky-red. He stepped forward as well.

  ‘That’s a nice red colour, Dark,’ taunted K’nobbli. ‘Planning on developing some photographic plates, are you?’

  ‘DO YOU DARE BAIT ME?’

  ‘Man, you are ugly,’ baited K’nobbli, thereby confirming that indeed he did so dare.

  ‘WHEN LAST WE MET,’ said Dark Father, ‘YOU WERE THE MASTER. NOW I AM THE MASTER. I AM A MASTER OF BAITING, AS WELL AS A MASTER OF LIGHTSWORD-PLAY – BY WHICH,’ he added, shifting his weight from dark foot to dark foot and coming closer towards K’nobbli, ‘I MEAN LIGHTSWORD-PLAY. AS OPPOSED TO LIGHT-SWORDPLAY. ON THE CONTRARY. MY SWORDPLAY WILL BE HEAVY, A HEAVY FATE FOR YOU.’

  ‘Is that the best you can do, baiting-wise?’ said K’nobbli. ‘That’s rubbish. That’s hardly baiting at all.’

  ‘MY SWORD WILL DO THE TALKING.’

  ‘You can’t defeat me, Dark. If you strike me down I shall become even more powerful.’

  Dark Father seemed to think about this for a moment. ‘AH – HOW DOES THAT WORK, EXACTLY?’

  ‘It’s one of the mysteries of the Farce.’

  ‘BUT IF I STRIKE YOU DOWN YOU’LL BE DEAD.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘IN WHAT SENSE ARE THE DEAD MORE POWERFUL THAN THE LIVING?’

  ‘I’d rather not go into specifics,’ said K’nobbli, circling his foe with his lightsword.

  ‘MORE POWERFUL IN THE “LYING MOTIONLESS ON THE FLOOR, SLOWLY DECOMPOSING” SENSE OF “POWERFUL”?’

  ‘I might return in spectral form to haunt you.’

  ‘OOO, I’M SCARED,’ said Dark Father in the tone of voice of somebody not scared. ‘WILL YOU BE ABLE, PHYSICALLY, TO INTERACT WITH ME IN ANY WAY? WHEN YOU RETURN AS A SPECTRAL VERSION OF YOURSELF?’

  ‘. . . No,’ conceded Bony, shortly.

  ‘SO WHY EXACTLY WOULD I BE WORRIED BY THIS DEVELOPMENT?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said K’nobbli, as if he was considering the question for the first time. ‘Look. Can we discuss this later?’

  The old Jobbi knight lurched forward and brought his gleaming blade of white light down towards Dark Father’s head. But Father was ready with the parry, swinging his own red-gleaming lightsword round to intercept the blow.

  The two blades clashed with a mighty clashing sound. Instantly both lights went out, and broken glass scattered to the floor.

  ‘Oh, botheration,’ said K’nobbli, looking disconsolately at the ruined lightsword in his hand.

  ‘Oh I don’t believe it,’ gasped Hand Someman in an infuriated voice, from his vantage point at the far end of the corridor. ‘They’re useless, those lightswords.’

  But at that precise moment, Dark Father jabbed forward, burying the sharp end of his broken fluorescent light tube in K’nobbli’s chest. The razor-sharp shards of glass cut through the old man’s torso like something very sharp being rammed forcefully into something comparatively soft.

  Everybody gasped. Time seemed to freeze for a moment.

  ‘So that’s how it’s supposed to work,’ gasped K’nobbli, looking down at the fatal wound in his own chest. Then he collapsed to the floor.

  ‘Quick,’ screamed Leper. She hauled Luke back through into the dead-end sauna, and punched the door release. The heavy door slammed down, just as the first Sterntrooper laser bolts crashed into it. Leper aimed her own pistol at the door release, fired, and fused the locking mechanism.

  ‘That ought to hold them,’ she said, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Old Bony is dead!’ said Luke, aghast. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Believe it,’ said Someman. ‘Those lightswords are plain stupid qua weapons.’

  There was the sound of pummelling on the far side of the door, interspersed with occasional though ineffective laser fire, and the odd muffled shout of ‘Oi! Watch out, nearly had my eye out with that.’

  ‘They can’t get in,’ panted Hand Someman. ‘But we can’t get out.’

  ‘Checkmate,’ agreed Luke, nodding his head.

  Princess Leper looked at him. ‘Don’t you mean stalemate?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Luke, nodding vigorously.

  ‘Damn!’ said Leper, pacing about the sauna room. ‘Trapped. We’re no closer to finding those droids. And the Death Spa is about to unleash its terrible fitness ray upon the flabby, slack, unprepared naked SF authors on the planet below. They won’t stand a chance. To say nothing of the Rebelend.’

  She fl
ung herself furiously onto one of the wooden benches. ‘At least the banging on the door has stopped.’

  Luke took a seat beside her. ‘What shall we do now?’

  ‘I’m working on that,’ said the Princess.

  Luke sat for a while. Then he started whistling. He stopped when Leper gave him a fierce look.

  After a while he said: ‘I can’t believe Old Bony has gone!’

  ‘It is a shock,’ said the Princess.

  ‘Princess,’ said Luke, turning to her. ‘Old Bony told me about you.’

  ‘What?’ she snapped. ‘What about me?’

  ‘About your – you know. Your leprosy.’ Luke shook his head sorrowfully. ‘That’s a dreadful shame. It’s a nasty disease.’

  ‘It’s not nice,’ said the Princess, tight-lipped.

  ‘Is it the – you know – the cause of those things?’ He nodded in the direction of her head. ‘Those growths on the side of your head?’

  This seemed to anger Princess Leper even more. ‘Don’t you know anything at all? Are you the most ignorant individual in the quadrant? Leprosy is a disease of human beings caused by the bacillus mycobacterium leprae, which is characterised by lesions of the skin and superficial nerves. Destruction of the peripheral nervous system can result in a loss of sensation, which, when combined with progressive general degeneration of bodily tissue, often results in the extremities becoming eroded, although not in my case. Other symptoms can include a loss of skin coloration, inflammation of tissue beneath the skin. My leprosy, you’ll be glad to hear, is kept well at bay by nanotechnology implants; it is arrested at an early stage. Leprosy as a disease does not,’ she added, fiercely, indicating the growths on both sides of her head ‘cause anything like these.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Luke. ‘I stand corrected. Sorry. So – what are those, er, things then?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ she snapped.

  ‘OK,’ said Luke.

  ‘Hey, Princess,’ called Hand. ‘Our situation just got a lot worse.’

  Leper and Luke got to their feet. There was no mistaking it: scalding steam was pouring in through a vent at the back of the sauna. In seconds it had filled the whole room, opaquing vision, filling lungs with a choking hot whiteness.

  ‘They plan to steam us,’ cried Leper. ‘They can’t get in here, so they plan to steam us to death.’

  ‘Great Thog!’ swore Hand Someman. ‘The swine . . .’ He waved his arms, but there was no dispersing the steam. It was hot as boiled soup in the little wooden room, and still the boiling white clouds were pumping in. ‘I’m sweating,’ he gasped. ‘I’m seeing spots in my eyes. I can feel the core temperature of my body rising . . . it’s horrible.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Princess. There was despair in her voice. ‘A few minutes of this and we will literally cook in our own juices. What a terrible way to die!’

  ‘Curse them!’ cried Hand Someman.

  The Princess slumped back on her bench. ‘I might as well die sitting down,’ she said.

  It was then that Luke had his brilliant idea. It was the first, although not the last, of his life. What is more, he had it at exactly the right moment.

  ‘Wait!’ he called. ‘Don’t give up hope – we can escape from here!’

  ‘How?’ asked Leper.

  ‘Yeah, kid,’ said Hand. ‘What you got in mind?’

  ‘We can crawl through the vent – the vent through which the steam is currently pouring.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said Hand. ‘It’s hot enough in here – can you imagine how hot it’s going to be in that vent? To crawl towards where the steam is being generated? That’s insane. That would only hasten our deaths.’

  ‘Not,’ said Luke, dramatically, ‘necessarily. We have one weapon at our disposal that the Imp-Emp-Imp will not be expecting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can get naked!’ he cried, jubilantly.

  There was silence in the little room for the space of a full minute.

  ‘Right,’ said Princess Leper, drawing the syllable out to three or four times its usual length.

  ‘I’m serious, guys!’ said Luke, pushing his way to the back of the sauna, where the steam was thickest, and starting to unbutton his pants. ‘My whole life has prepared me for this moment. Without clothes we won’t get quite as hot. We should survive long enough to wriggle down the steam duct and away from the whole sauna complex. Come on – I was raised by Swedes. I understand nakedness.’

  ‘Well,’ said Princess Leper, dubiously. ‘I suppose it’s worth a shot. I’m prepared to try, provided you all promise not to – you know. Look.’

  ‘What about Masticatetobacco? He can’t undress, he’s covered in hair.’

  ‘We can shave him,’ said a now naked Luke, fumbling in the billowing steam at the wall. ‘There is a bank of personal grooming equipment on this wall, including clippers. But come on – hurry. We don’t have very long.’

  It took only one minute to shave the whole Woozie, although it took several more minutes to cram his slumbering form into the steam duct and kick it down. Hand Someman, naked, went next, pushing his co-pilot in front of him. Luke tried a ‘ladies first’ on Princess Leper, but she wasn’t having any of it: so he went next, and she clambered in after him.

  Naked, slick with sweat, panting and feeling as if his eyeballs were about to explode with heat, he wriggled down the duct. Luckily the duct was mostly angled downwards, so passage was not too hard. To begin with it got hotter, but after they passed a grille in the floor through which the steam was issuing, it began to get easier. The steam cleared quickly and the air temperature became more bearable. Soon enough Luke could see well enough to look ahead of him; whereupon he caught a glimpse of Hand Someman from a rather unflattering angle. ‘Ur!’ he cried. He looked away as quickly as he could but the sight remained, somehow, burned on his retina.

  And then, abruptly, they were all free of the duct.

  They tumbled, one after another, into a vast inner metal cavern. Row after row of cars stretched in all directions.

  Princess Leper found a sign printed on very thin plastic that said ‘Level 14,566, Rank 345. Remember Your Location!’ By dint of much heaving and yanking, she managed to haul this off the wall and, by tearing rips in two opposing sides, she was able to wrap it around her naked body and fix it as a sort of lampshade-cumtoga. It was not very functional, since she had to keep a hold of it with her left hand to stop it falling off, but at least it was a form of clothing. Luke and Hand had to remain utterly naked. Masticatetobacco was still asleep; the strange thing was that, shaved as he was, he now resembled a rather handsome, if very tall, man.

  ‘We seem to be in a car park,’ Luke observed. ‘A car park of gargantuan size.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Leper. ‘A place this size – it’s as big as a whole planet after all – that’s a lot of commuters. Not to mention the visitors, the people who don’t actually work here. They’ve all got to have somewhere to park their cars.’

  ‘But – cars?’ said Luke.

  ‘You’re forgetting how big this Death Spa is. It’s planet-sized. How else you going to get around from place to place upon it or within it? You going to rely on public transport? Of course people bring their cars. Come on – we can’t stay here. If they figure out where that duct in the sauna room goes, they’ll be right on us.’

  The group set off together, Hand still dragging Mastic’ behind him.

  Forty minutes later they were exhausted, and becoming more and more infuriated. ‘This goes on forever,’ Leper complained. ‘I’ve never seen so many cars. Cars, cars, cars.’

  ‘Like you said – what’s the population of a place like this likely to be? Something like a trillion people live on Earth, but that’s just the surface: this place has its surface and all the lower levels, right through to the core. The population may be millions of trillions. And of course they all want their cars.’

  ‘Well,’ said Luke. ‘Thinking logically, there’s going to be a balance,
isn’t there, between the number of people and the number of cars. If a large proportion of the inner space of the Death Spa is given over to parking, then people can’t live there. So there must be a balance. There are probably only a few billion actually living here.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded the naked Hand Someman. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Over there,’ said Leper, pointing with the hand she wasn’t using to hold up her rudimentary item of clothing. ‘There’s a light in the distance. Come on.’

  Twenty more minutes brought them to a truly spectacular sight.

  They were at the extreme inner edge of the car-parking level across which they had been walking. There was a low balustrade, and on the other side a dizzying vista of level after level, stretching away below – and above – into the far vertical distance. The sheer immensity of the sight was gobsmacking; so many layers curling round in myriad arcs, tightly packed one on top of the other. The perspective made the levels further away look like sheaves of paper. The central space around which these millions of car-parking levels were arranged was as big as a planetary sky; it was even possible to see faint clouds floating in the space. And far, far below them, below the lowest of the car-parking levels – in, Luke estimated, the exact centre of the Death Spa – was what looked like a curled and brilliant ball of lightning. It gleamed and flashed, lighting up the stacked storeys of the carpark with dazzling electric blues and whites.

  ‘The Death Spa’s power source,’ Hand said, peering over the brink. ‘It’s a folded black hole. They use the event horizon to generate shearing pressures that break photons into usable energy. It’s spectacular, and very efficient – nothing else would do for a device this size. But it is inherently unstable. It can only process photons – they’re massless, you see. Anything with mass would break through the operative layer and collapse the whole system.’

  Princess Leper was looking incredulously at Hand Someman. ‘Thank you for that little lecture, professor,’ she said in a mocking tone of voice. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’m getting tired of trudging around with this wearisome piece of plastic wrapped about me. Can we please find some clothes?’