by Adam Roberts
I mean, think about it.
‘Idiots!’ screamed the Ground Commander, Idsthadguy Fromcorrie, from his vantage point at the beach-head. ‘Fools! Idiotic Fools! Foolish Idiots! Why are you fooling around like this, idiots?’
‘The terrain, Commander,’ screeched one of his One-Leggedy Attack Craft Captains. ‘It’s just too tricky! Our gyroscope software cannot predict the lie of the land underneath the snow . . . woooooaaaah!’ The line went dead. Away to Ground Commander Fromcorrie’s left there came the wu-oomf noise of a machine exploding as it hit snow.
‘Idifools!’ cried Fromcorrie, bitterly. ‘Fooliots! Quickly! Before Dark Father hears of this debacle – deploy the Doubledy-Leggedy Attack Craft.’
‘Sir?’ queried the second in command.
‘The DuoPods!’ Fromcorrie screamed. ‘At once!’
From the Rebelend base, General Fishedd Onaslab was watching developments through a pair of digital binoculars. ‘The Monopods have failed. It looks as though they’re . . . yes . . . the drop hangars are opening their doors, and the DuoPods are emerging. Send the order down: plantains at the ready.’
The order was carried through the ice-trenches by a runner, who sprinted frantically down to the lower levels. ‘Ready the plantains! Ready the plantains!’
Two dozen plantain cannons were already armed with the gigantic banana-like fruit, picked from the plantain-forests of Gigantia and shipped here in hugehulled carriers, ready for just such an eventuality. Each individual yellow-green skinned plantain was twice the length of a grown man; the skins leathery yet easy to split, the pale fibrous fruit within soft and starting to go black and squishy at the edges. Each of these gigantic objects was loaded onto a massive catapult-style launcher, and aimed at the battlefield.
Within minutes the launchers could see their targets. Imagine aircraft carrier-sized boxes, hulls filled with expectant soldiery, each the product of a lifetime’s training, all arranged in rows on rank after rank of benches, each with their armour on and their weapons ready. Now imagine the forward end of this giant hangar; up a metal staircase, and into the forward cockpit compartment. Here a trained walker was stepping with experienced ease on a treadmill; his trousers were wired with complex sensors that transferred his motion to the twin metal legs of the DuoPod. Now (to maintain the cinematic analogy) zoom out of the cockpit, into the chill air of Brathmonki, and pan down. You can see the enormous, sinuous legs of the craft: link after link of enormous circular metal connected into two strands, hundreds of metres long – resembling, in fact, the sorts of hose you get linking a showerhead to the shower itself – except that this hose is powered from within with complex heavy engineering.
The DuoPods marched inexorably over the landscape towards the Rebelend base. Having two legs, they were not incommoded by any changes in the elevation of the land beneath them.
General Fishedd eyed them up. When they were within range, he ordered the firing of the giant plantains. Dozens of the fifteen-foot-long fruit hurtled through the air in a graceful arc, to collide with the frosty permafrost: the inner fruit matter splatted on impact, spreading out in a puréed mess, but the skin spread into gigantic star shapes and slithered over the ice, to lie ready for the clunking metal feet of the gigantic DuoPods.
From his vantage point at the rear of the Imp-Emp-Imp lines, Ground Commander Fromcorrie sighed heavily, as, one after the other, his DuoPod attack craft slipped and tumbled to their doom. Some flew backwards, flapping their huge metal-tentacle legs high in the air. Some tried for several seconds to keep their balance by thrashing their feet about like a tap-dancer, but only managed to postpone the inevitable.
‘Tripods! Set loose the tripods! At once!’
As the second-in-command hurried to execute this order, Fromcorrie put his hands to his face. This assault was going to take a long time to get right.
Chapter Four
Swamp World. It’s Swampy
Luke zip-crashed out of hyperspace above a small green-green world. ‘Somehow,’ he said, speaking to the RC unit stashed beneath the cushionless seat on which Luke was sitting, ‘I’ve got to track down a single Jobbi master on this place.’
‘Eeek!’ returned the droid.
The ship soared and dipped into the heavy atmosphere of the world, swooping low beneath the clouds to reveal a horizon-to-horizon jungle. ‘How am I going to find Yodella in this vast jungle? It would be like looking for a needle in a huge stack of much bigger needles many of which tower over one’s head and have sprouted leaves and other foliage.’ He pondered his dilemma for some time. ‘I must trust the Farce,’ he said, finally. In line with this new resolution he flew his craft lower – low enough, in fact, to collide with a number of the taller trees. In seconds the complex wing-structure of his &-wing spaceplane was reduced to stumpage. The fuselage was striated by lower branches; Luke, in the passenger seat, was jolted and shaken so much that his teeth performed a drum solo, similar to one first performed by Keith Moon in the Who’s Live at Leeds performance. Then Luke’s trajectory brought him into jarring collision with a particularly big tree, and the dented remains of his spaceplane landed in a yard of mud, not far from a stagnant and foul-smelling pond, above which flew some foul-smelling fowl, amongst which was a particularly foul-smelling owl.
For several minutes Luke merely sat, until his eyeballs stopped shimmering and the humming in his ears receded. Then he pulled his helmet off, unbuckled his seatbelt, and pressed the cockpit release button. ‘Time to go find this Yodella geezer,’ he told RC. ‘If I can . . .’
‘Eeeek!’ replied the little droid, emerging from underneath Luke’s seat.
Luke surveyed the scene for a while, and then set off into the undergrowth. RC-DU2 followed at a suitably cautious distance. ‘I can only hope,’ said Luke, as he tramped on, ‘that by trusting to the Farce, and abandoning myself to – waaagh.’
He had fallen down a deep hole. ‘Help!’ he cried. ‘I seem to be in a deep hole.’
‘Down there, hello,’ came a voice. Over the lip of the hole Luke could see a wrinkled tortoise-like green face looking down at him.
‘Can you help me?’
‘You will help I,’ replied the figure.
‘No, can you help me?’
‘You answered have already I.’
‘Oh, for crying out Thog,’ said Luke. He pulled himself up, and using his fingers – still sore and, frankly, rather incomplete from their frostbite experience on Brathmonki – he scrabbled up the muddy, slimy side of the hole into which he had fallen. At the top he collapsed on the ground. ‘Thanks for nothing,’ he gasped.
‘Going are you where looking,’ said the little green man. ‘Not,’ he added, as if an afterthought.
‘You what?’ said Luke. ‘Your command of Galactic Standard doesn’t seem to be wholly idiomatic.’
‘tainly, Cer,’ said the tiny fellow. He settled himself on a log, the better to be able to converse with Luke. It was a very large log; large enough, indeed, for a fullgrown man to fit inside it, had he wanted to. And had the log been hollow. Which, of course, it wasn’t. But I’m only saying, to give you some sense of the dimensions of the log.
Luke sized him up. This didn’t take long, since he was a very diminutive individual indeed: green of skin and short of limb, and also green of limb, obviously, since his limbs were covered in his green skin. His face was wrinkled and curiously collapsed in on itself, and no hair grew on his green head. Most odd was his clothing: a green velvet waistcoat over a creamcoloured shirt, and tight leather short trousers that reached, barely, to his knees.
‘I am looking,’ said Luke, sitting up, ‘for a mighty Jobbi warrior. Name of Yodella.’
‘Yodella, am I,’ said the little fellow. ‘Yodel-idle-odle-idle-oh-i-heee, lonely goat-herd, sat a, high on a hill,’ he added.
Luke stared at him for fully two minutes. At the end of this he said ‘right’ in a cautious tone of voice.
‘Teach you I will,’ said Yodella. ‘Unlearn you must,
before you can learn. Feel the Farce, you will. Yodel-ay-i-heee! Yodel-ay-i-hayy! Yodel-idle-odle-idle-odle-idle-odle-ay-i-heee!’ On these last few syllables the little creature’s voice reached a pitch so high only dogs were able to hear it.
‘. . . I’m sorry?’ said Luke.
Yodella looked inscrutable. His mouth crunched up in a bizarrely non-human way, almost as if his entire cranial substructure of bone and sinew were actually shaped not as a smooth globe with a subordinate hinged jaw, but as a five-pronged medially-flattened structure bent over itself, almost hand-shaped that was rubbing its ‘thumb’ against its ‘fingers’. Luke had never seen anything like it before.
‘Sacred song of the Jobbi, it is,’ Yodella explained. ‘Learn it, you will. Tight your trousers must be. Yes. Help you climb it will, climb every mountain, yes. Another song there is, for swinging through this jungle on the vines, with myself on your back like a little rucksack. Sing it I will—’
‘That’s alright,’ interrupted Luke. ‘There’s no need. So, um. Pleased to meet you. Could you, please, if it’s not too much trouble, train me in the rites and lethal arts of the ancient Jobbi religion?’
‘I will. Train you in the use of the lightsword I will. And also in Farcical martial arts, Ecky-Thump, moving pebbles with one’s mind, smacking people in the head with a plank carried over one’s shoulder, many other lethal skills. Not to mention dynamite-tiheeee! – yes with dynamite-ti-heeee!’
‘Is it really necessary,’ asked Luke, ‘to end so many of your sentences with the sacred Jobbi song?’
‘Indeed, yes,’ said Yodella. He appeared to have got down from the log, although Luke hadn’t actually seen him move; and now he was making his way through the dense undergrowth of Swamp World’s jungle floor. Luke couldn’t see the little creature’s legs or feet, but took it on trust that he possessed these physical appurtenances. He certainly moved as if he were walking, rocking to and fro on (Luke assumed) his lower limbs. ‘Come with me you will,’ Yodella said. ‘To my tiny little house, although inside you will be squashed, rather. There I shall impart to you the great secrets of the Farce.’
‘Excellent,’ said Luke.
‘Yipee-ai-iiii-i-hee! Yipee-ai-ayyy-i-hee! Yipee oh iii a-yo, iii a-yo i-hee!’ agreed Yodella.
Chapter Five
Floating City. Ah – now that’s a nice location. Really pretty. You should check it out, if you ever get the chance. Real charming vacation destination. Lovely views. And if you can go off season, which is to say, if you don’t mind taking the kids out of school for a couple of days, it’s extremely reasonable. Really
Hand Someman piloted the spaceship Rebel Yell He Said More More More IV out of hyperspace with practised ease. He found it easy to pilot a ship out of hyperspace. He’d practised it. Beside him slept Masticatetobacco; some of his pelt had grown back, but no more than a thick stubble which made him bristly and unpleasant to handle. Accordingly, Hand had had a special lounger seat fitted to the bridge of the Rebel Yell He Said More More More IV, had hauled Masticatetobacco into it and more or less left him there to sleep.
Princess Leper had changed into an elegant dress fashioned from a single trouser-leg cut from a pair of really wide loon-pants. ‘So tell me about this friend of yours we’re going to visit?’
‘Landrove Afreelanda? I’ve known him for years. He’s managed to find himself a pretty cushy job as Overseer on the Floating City. If anybody can download this mysterious Secret from your droid it’ll be him.’
‘Are you sure he can download the Great Secret from the droid? I’m pretty frustrated with my inability to access this secret, you know. I’m sure that, if we could only get at the Secret, we’d be able to defeat the Imp-Emp-Imp in a trice.’
‘If anybody can hack the droid,’ said Hand, confidently, ‘Landrove can. He will help us, I just know it.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Princess Leper, as the spaceship crested the top of the planet’s atmosphere and swooped through the air. ‘There’s a lot riding on getting at this Secret.’
Soon the Floating City itself, in all its gorgeous, floating opulence came into view. Shaped like a gigantic trifle made of metal and plastic, it hung in the mid-air with breathtaking hanging-ness. ‘I radio’d ahead,’ said Hand. ‘Landrove is expecting us.’
He brought the Rebel Yell He Said More More More IV in to land at the city’s main landing bay, turned off the engine, engaged the handbrake. Everybody unclicked their seatbelts, except Masti’ (whom they left where he was). All of them capable of moving under their own power piled out of the airlock. The air outside smelt fresh and ozoney.
‘Welcome to Floating City,’ announced a smiling young man – good-looking even though he was wearing a cape, although not quite as good-looking as Hand Someman.
‘Landrove, my old buddy!’ cried Hand. ‘How ya doing?’
‘Hand! Hand Someman! Great gosh, it’s good to see you!’
‘This is Princess Leper,’ said Hand.
‘Enchanted to meet you. And where’s Masticatetobacco?’
‘Sleeping,’ said Hand, nodding back towards the spaceship.
‘Of course. But how great to see you all, here, on the Floating City,’ said Landrove, beaming. He shook everybody warmly by the hand, including See-thru Peep-hol. ‘It really floats,’ he added. ‘The city I mean. It really does hang in mid-air, a mile or so above the ground of this world. Really. It does.’
‘So I see,’ said Princess Leper, looking about her. ‘The view is . . .’
‘—It’s very advanced technology,’ interrupted Landrove. ‘The city-float-up-make-happen, er, technology. Very advanced.’
‘Right,’ said Leper.
‘We really do float up here. Skyhook-like. Suspended. We’re not,’ and Landrove started laughing unconvincingly, short bark-like little laughs, as though what he was saying were hilarious, ‘we’re not perched on top of an enormous pole, or anything like that! Ha! Ha! No, no, the very idea ha! – not that. No.’ But his eyes were not laughing.
‘OK,’ said the Princess, uncertainly.
‘Good,’ said Landrove, rubbing his hands together. ‘So we’ve cleared that up, have we? A floating city – fl-oa-t-ing. OK?’
‘We understand,’ said Hand.
Landrove looked from face to face, a little anxiously, before breaking into a wide grin. ‘Excellent! Come along then! Refreshments.’ He led the party along a series of white-painted corridors, all of them with hand-holds along the walls. These latter features were particularly useful, since the whole of Floating City seemed to sway alarmingly, angling slowly in one direction until the floor was at some fifteen degrees from the horizontal, then pausing, then slowly tilting back until it tipped about fifteen degrees in the opposite direction, before starting the whole cycle again.
‘You’ll get used to the slight tilt in no time,’ said Landrove, beaming at them, and palming himself hand over hand until he reached a door.
‘If you say so,’ Hand said, through gritted teeth.
‘I feel seasick,’ said See-thru. ‘And I don’t even have an inner ear, let alone an internal digestive system.’
They hauled themselves into a room, and collapsed gratefully onto bright red faux-leather settees. A traction-robot crawled alternately up and down the same stretch of floor and brought them drinks, each served in toddler-style non-drip cups.
‘Why does it sway so?’ asked Leper.
‘Sway?’ said Landrove, as if he really hadn’t noticed. ‘Ah, you refer to the mild perturbations. Are you talking about the mild perturbations?’
‘I guess so.’
Landrove waved a hand in the air. ‘That’s a minor glitch in the complicated traction-beam forcefield, um, laser, computer, er, keepie-uppie technology that, ah, powers the city.’ He opened his smile to wide-beam. ‘Believe me, you really won’t notice it after a little while. I no longer do.’ Abruptly the floor angled and lurched like a banking airplane, with such rapidity and force that Landrove was flung off the settee.
He zipped through the air with a look of terror on his face, caromed off the wall, and smacked face-first onto the floor.
He picked himself up with some difficulty, and groped his way back to the settee.
‘So,’ said Leper, trying to make conversation while Landrove patted at his bleeding nostrils with a piece of tissue paper, ‘what does the city specialise in? Is it a mining outpost?’
‘No, actually,’ replied Landrove, as if he were attempting a Melvyn Bragg impression. ‘We offer specialised night classes and college educational courses.’
‘How fascinating. In the humanities? Sciences?’ ‘In only one area, as it happens. City-floating technology.’
Princess Leper nodded as the dangling hair on either side of her face swayed back and forth like two clock pendulums. ‘I’d be interested in taking a course like that.’
‘It’s more than one course,’ said Landrove. ‘The technology involved is so very complicated . . . most students need to pay seven-year’s fees, at four hundred thousand Imperial Credits a year, before they are even allowed to study City Levitation 101. The average degree takes nearly twenty years, and only the very richest life forms can afford it. The very richest life forms,’ he added, ‘or their parents. And if some super-rich parents wanted to get rid of a noisome, selfish kid for up to twenty years in a college suspended a mile above the ground from which escape is impossible, who are we to turn them down?’
‘So how many people graduated with your advanced city levitating skills diploma last year?’ asked Leper.
‘Um,’ said Landrove. ‘But look through the window! Isn’t that a lovely sunset?’
After an hour or so of small talk, Landrove excused himself and made his way along one of the oceanliner-in-a-bad-storm corridors to another room. The door hissed open, and a familiar black-clad figure was revealed standing, rather uneasily, inside.