by Adam Roberts
‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s a piece of luck.’
She hauled the ’lock open, and scrambled aboard with Landrove and the droid. Masticatetobacco was still asleep.
The Rebel Yell He Said More More More IV took off and circled the heavily tilted city to see what had caused the damage.
‘My city!’ lamented Landrove. ‘My beautiful City! Still – it’s probably for the best, seeing as how I had, immediately prior to the City’s destruction, decided to throw my lot in with the Rebelend.’
‘Isn’t that Luke?’ asked Leper. ‘Dangling from that strut?’
She flew the craft in, much more skilfully than the Imp-Emp-Imp pilots had been able to do, and sent Landrove to the dorsal airlock to collect him. Then she steered the spaceship down and away.
Almost exactly at the moment she cleared the lip of the City, the Imp-Emp-Imp shuttle’s engines burnt out. Their screeching whine died away and the craft lost all power. The mighty City above them groaned, shifted, screeched and then toppled past the point of no return. It fell straight down, crashing down upon and carrying the City’s many thousands of innocent citizens to their surely certain death many miles below. But, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes. You can’t, after all, make an omelette without killing a few thousand people here and there, as Gandhi, I believe it was, once said. Or was it Pol Pot? It was definitely an Asian politician of some stature. But anyway—
‘Thank Thog we were able to rescue you,’ cried Princess Leper, turning in the pilot’s seat to embrace Luke, and then thinking better of it when she smelt the combination of custard and rotting fish that adhered closely to him. ‘Urgh!’ she said.
‘Thank Thog? Thank the Farce, rather,’ said Luke. ‘That was a wholly Farcical episode, I’d say. Now, is this rebel spaceship fitted with a shower, or bath?’
‘No,’ said Leper.
‘Ah,’ said Luke as his rank stench began to fill up the close confines of the cabin. ‘Then this may prove to be a rather long flight.’
As they soared into the aching blackness of space, Imp-Emp-Imp cruisers converged, their laser bolts pulsing through the void. With a series of desperate manoeuvres Leper flung the Rebel Yell He Said More More More IV through a complex trans-spatial vector of escape, before triggering the hyperspace drive and removing them from the scene altogether.
Once in hyperspace, Leper was able to relax. She sat back in her pilot’s chair. ‘Luke!’ she cried. ‘The most important thing of all – perhaps even more important than our extremely fortuitous escape.’
‘Yes?’ returned the foully-reeking young Jobbi. ‘What?’
‘RC-DU2! Hand said he’d given him to you! That little droid contains the Great Secret – if we can only download it I feel sure that victory against the Imp-Emp-Imp would be assured. But if we lost it, we would suffer the most appalling setback. Please,’ she pleaded, ‘please tell me that you left the droid on Swamp World in the custody of the great Jobbi master Yodella – please don’t tell me that you brought it pointlessly back with you to Floating City, and that it now lies crushed and smashed to smithereens in the wreck of that unlucky conurbation?’
Luke swallowed. ‘The former,’ he said.
Princess Leper breathed a sigh of the purest relief, a great shuddery jiggly sigh. ‘Thank Thog!’ she cried. ‘Then let us set co-ordinates for Swamp World . . .’
‘Or,’ said Luke, his brow furrowing, ‘do I mean, “latter”? I’m always getting those two confused. The second one – that’s what I meant. Crushed, smithereens, that one.’
‘Oh,’ said Princess Leper.
Episode Six
RETURN OF THE SON OF JOBBI RIDES AGAIN
THE IMPERIAL EMPIRE OF THE IMPERIUM SUFFERED A TERRIBLE BLOW WHEN THEIR MIGHTY DEATH SPA WAS DESTROYED BY REBELEND ACTION. BUT, BEING DETERMINED, AND, ALSO, RATHER LACKING IN IMAGINATION, THEY HAD IMMEDIATELY BEGUN CONSTRUCTION OF A SECOND DEATH SPA, EVEN MIGHTIER THAN THE FIRST. THIS MEGAWEAPON WAS TO BE POWERED NOT BY PRECARIOUS BLACK-HOLE PHOTON-SHEARING TECHNOLOGIES, BUT RATHER BY A SERIES OF MUCH MUCH SAFER CENTRAL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS. REALLY VERY MUCH SAFER, HONESTLY. NO CHANCE OF THAT EXPLODING BECAUSE, SAY, THE MAIN REACTOR IS HIT BY A CAREFULLY AIMED BLAST FROM A SPACESHIP’S MAIN LASER CANNON. OR, INDEED, BECAUSE THE REACTOR STAFF, BORED ONE AFTERNOON, START MONKEYING ABOUT WITH THE CONTROLS FOR NO VERY GOOD REASON, LOSING CONTROL AND THEREBY PRECIPITATING A CATASTROPHIC MELTDOWN EXPLOSION AND RADIATION POISONING THAT LASTS DECADES. NO, SIR. DARK FATHER WAS OVERSEEING THIS PROJECT PERSONALLY. BY THE WAY, I WAS GOING TO MENTION, HE ESCAPED FROM THE TUMBLING CHAOS OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FLOATING CITY. NO ONE ELSE DID, REALLY, BUT HE MANAGED IT. EVEN THOUGH HE WAS INSIDE THE CITY WHEN IT FELL, I KNOW, I KNOW; BUT HIS, UM, I DON’T KNOW – POWERS OF THE FARCE HELPED HIM ESCAPE. NO, I’M SORRY, I CAN’T BE MORE SPECIFIC THAN THAT. I JUST CAN’T I’M SORRY. THE IMPORTANT THING IS THAT HE GOT AWAY. MEANWHILE, IN A FASTNESS DEEP IN THE DESERTS OF TATUONWEINER, HAND SOMEMAN’S PAPERWEIGHTED BODY SITS ATOP A VERY LARGE PILE OF PAPERS BELONGING TO AND OTHERWISE PERTAINING TO THE BUSINESS INTERESTS OF NOTORIOUS GANGSTER AND LOCAL CELEBRITY, PIZZA THE HUTT.
Chapter One
Tatuonweiner. Remember there?
It was late forenoon on Tatuonweiner. The sun glowered down on the desert sands; light pouring through the hazy air like molten copper mixed with gold. Mile after mile of barren desolate waste. Kilometre after kilometre. Rather more kilometres than miles, indeed, because kilometres are shorter than miles. There is a particular proportion that governs the conversion of one of to the other, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it is. I’ve got a notion that it is the same proportion as exists between the number of letters in the words ‘mile’ and the word ‘kilometre’, which would certainly be a handy mnemonic, wouldn’t it, and which would mean that four-ninths of a mile make one kilometre and vice versa. By vice-versa I mean ‘nine-fourths’, which makes, unless I’ve added it up wrong, two-and-a-quarter kilometres to a mile. Having written that out it doesn’t look quite right. I wouldn’t, if my life depended on it (and who knows it might) swear that there are two-and-a-quarter kilometres to a mile. Less, I’d say. Or fewer. Perhaps the mnemonic is two completely different words – ‘toupee’ and ‘lawnmower’ for instance. But perhaps not. I wonder if it would be possible for the authorities to fix the proportion of ‘mile’ to ‘kilometre’ at four-to-nine? That would simplify life a great deal. Don’t you think?
Anyway, sun beating down, desert wastes, measuring-unit after measuring-unit of desolation – and then the traveller comes upon the squat stone towers of Pizza the Hutt’s lair, deep in the desolatest desolation. These stumpy redstone protrusions are only the uppermost portions of a vast underground complex of echoey caverns, shadowy halls, and dungeons deep. Deep dungeons, I mean.
And at the heart of this lair Pizza the Hutt himself was moving towards his throne – the vast, circular, slug-like, slug-coloured body, a good ten metres across, undulated across the floor leaving a trail of foul hydrogenated slime, before ascending to his special podium. His cronies cackled and laughed. Pizza himself laughed with a noise of bubbles of foulness bursting in a cesspool, a deep-throated huh! huh! huh! huh!, which, I hasten to assure you, is exactly what bubbles of foulness bursting in a cesspool sound like. I wouldn’t recommend you try to double-check that piece of information, you could only do so by lowering expensive recording equipment into a cesspool which would probably spoil it, best just to take my word for it.
Pizza the Hutt’s body was a towering mass of red and brown pustules, hideous blisters with a vast matted quantity of congealed yellow pus-like slime on top. His eyes were two pepperoni-like circles, positioned somewhere to the fore of his massive fat-loaded body; his mouth a bulbous crack in his glazed yellow-brown skin. Rarely has so foul and disgusting a creature crawled on the surface of any world; a loathsome spotted beast, a self-confessed tax-avoider, a scrounger-parasite and mafiosi worm, slimy refuse and utterly beneath contempt – indeed, beneath even the contempt we feel for
things that are beneath contempt. This monster spent his days sliming his way around his endless lair, planning and plotting his gangster projects, imprisoning and murdering, ordering others to be imprisoned and murdered, and generally being loathsomely loathly. Mad drivel streamed endlessly from his disgusting, pudgy cheese-slavering lips. Not that I’d want to prejudice you against this life form before you’d even met him. You’ll make up your own mind, of course; judge him by his actions. It would indeed be shallow to judge him merely on his appearance. All Pizzarians looked like him, after all. It wasn’t his fault that he looked a certain way. It’s the content of his character, not the pustulated nature of his skin that is important here. Honestly.
And in the midst of Pizza’s Great Hall, in which he sat in state with his back to the warren-like complex of ovens at the heart of his evil complex – in this hall, perched atop an absolutely enormous pile of papers, tax demands, fan-letters, junk-mail and the like, sat Hand Someman, encased as he was in a huge hemisphere of crystal – Pizza the Hutt’s trophy!
But Hand’s friends had not given up on him. One by one they had come, to parley with Pizza, to beg or negotiate, and finally to attempt to bribe. They might have had more chance of success had they all come at once; but that thought only occurred to them after they were all incarcerated in Pizza’s foulest dungeon.
First came Landrove Afreelanda to beg for Hand’s release, and for anything else that occurred to him. Well, I say ‘came’. In fact he was delivered to Pizza’s door, trussed up like a chicken, because nobody really liked him, treacherous little git. But Landrove certainly did a great deal of begging, on a variety of fronts, mostly to do with himself, before finally Pizza chucked him in a dungeon.
Then came See-thru Peep-hol-bra, the robot, to negotiate for Hand’s release, and for Landrove’s too, since his friends now felt bad about the whole chicken-trussing manoeuvre. ‘Great Pizza,’ announced C3U-πP, standing in the gangster’s Great Hall, ‘I have come to negotiate with you for the release of Hand Someman.’
Pizza paid no attention to his negotiating, but instead appropriated the robot as his own property, using him as a translator (since Pizza could not speak English, but only Pizzalingua, whereas most of his underworld contacts spoke only Galactic Standard, not Pizzalingua). This arrangement worked well for a while, until Pizza discovered that, rather than faithfully translating his words, See-thru was in fact altering the gist of what Pizza intended to communicate.
So, for example, when the head of the terrifying GLC (the Gangster Lovegrub Clan) sent representatives to Pizza’s fastness to negotiate mutually advantageous terms for the divvying up of gambling earnings from the Mountain Casino of Monte Casino, Pizza told them: ‘[I accept your proposals. Let us not quarrel, your family and mine; let us come to an honourable understanding. We will share the money on a fifty-fifty basis, deducting all expenses according to the same ratio]’, See-thru translated this as ‘I have lusts for your shins, your knees and shins. Let us throw chub and bass and herring in the air in great profusion and support the candidacy of only bald women in local elections. Dwarfs are the source of most rivers.’ Since he didn’t speak Galactic Standard, Pizza was unaware of what was being said in his name. But of course, Little Jimmy Lovegrub was horrified, disturbed and not a little puzzled when his representatives reported back to him. Anxious not to lose face he ordered a tactical nuclear strike against the Casino. What with the many deaths, and the radioactive fallout, casino receipts were down that year.
On another occasion, instead of giving a particular Galactic policeman instructions of how to collect his bribe, See-thru gave him instructions to ‘open a tin of peaches using only his forehead or Pizza the Hutt will send vagabonds and, um, camels I think it is, to replace all your clothes with dogfood’. Finally, Pizza received a Universal Translator for his birthday, and when he played back his security tapes via the device he understood the deception that had been practised. ‘[Why?]’ he bellowed, through the U.T. ‘[Why did you do these terrible things? Did you not realise it would rouse my ire?]’ ‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ replied a terrified See-thru, throwing himself face down on the floor before his rageful master. ‘Please don’t disassemble me! I’m not a translator. I’m a dictionary and a thesaurus. There’s a difference. I think I understood about one in seven of your words. I did my best.’
See-thru joined Landrove in the dungeon, whilst Pizza the Hutt wracked his evil brain for the most painful death he could inflict on his metal prisoner.
Princess Leper tried next, bringing a modest bribe with her and promising the evil Hutt more if he agreed to release Hand, See-thru and Landrove. Pizza the Hutt laughed in her face ‘[Huh! huh! huh!]’ and made her his prisoner.
Then, evil monster that he was, he confiscated her clothes and dressed her in a metal bikini, although none of the Hutt hangers-on could work out why. After all, Pizza was a wholly alien dough-based life form. Princess Leper was a carbon-based humanoid. Pizza could no more find her sexually alluring than any given human male would find a female Pizzarian sexy. The number of human males who could get sexually aroused by a ten-metre pile of quivering pus and red slime is, let’s be honest, small. The number of decent, healthy, red-blooded Pizzarians who could be turned on by a one-and-one-half metre tall clump of arms and legs wrapped in a revoltingly pale, tight, smooth skin was even smaller. Still, for whatever reason, Pizza dressed her in the metal bikini, despite her complaints that it caught under her arms and that she was forced to suck her stomach in to prevent the metal waistband from digging in and chafing. Eventually Pizza threw her in the dungeon, to join Landrove and See-thru.
Finally Luke Seespotrun came in person, a young Jobbi knight of increasing power and ability, to free all his friends in one fell swoop.
‘[Huh! huh! huh! huh!]’ laughed Pizza the Hutt in his deep-throaty way, as Luke stood calmly before him. ‘[So, young Jobbi. Have you come to bargain and cajole, as did your unsuccessful colleagues?]’
‘I’m assuming,’ replied Luke, speaking clearly for the benefit of the U.T., ‘that you have grown bored with the crystal-confined Hand Someman, oh Mighty Pizza.’
‘[By no means!]’ chuckled Pizza the Hutt. ‘[Here – watch this.]’ He nodded to one of his henchmen, Krisss, a thirty-foot tall Muscle Beast from the Planet Woodenring. This mass of alien muscle stepped forward, picked up the crystal hemisphere in his huge claws and shook it, replacing it on the pile of paper afterwards. Around Hand’s motionless body, the seahorse and the seaweed, a flurry of artificial snowflakes swirled.
‘That’s very pretty,’ conceded Luke. ‘I didn’t know it could do that.’
‘[Isn’t it, though? It combines charm and sparkle, I think.]’
‘Yes. It’s not entirely logical though is it? – I mean, isn’t that supposed to be an undersea scene? Why is it snowing under the sea?’
‘[Nonsense!]’ boomed Pizza. ‘[Logic has nothing to do with it].’
‘I suppose so. Anyway – I think you’re going to be impressed with this. This is a Jobbi trick I’ve picked up. It’s called “the Voice” and what it means is that, using the power of the Farce, I can influence you to do as I wish, even though your mind may be set against the idea. It’s very good.’
‘[Huh! huh! huh! I assume you are referring to the celebrated Jobbi mind-trick known as “the Voice”. I warn you. “The Voice” only works on weak-minded fools. I am no weak-minded fool – I am very strong minded indeed. There are more than a hundred hot chillies diced and embedded in my skin. And not the piddly green chillies either – chillies so red they’re almost purple. That’s how strong I am. I scoff at your Jobbi “Voice” thuswise by laughing at it: Huh! huh! huh!]’
‘We shall see,’ said Luke, readying himself. He slipped into the Jobbi Voice. ‘Aw go on – pleeeeease? Please? Pretty please? Please let Hand go, go on – will ya? Please? Please? Go on. I want Hand, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I’ll scream if you don’t give him to me, I’ll scream and be sick, I want it, I-want-i
t-I-want-it-I-want-it-pleeeease? – I should warn you,’ said Luke, stopping the “Voice” for a moment to talk normally, ‘that I can go on like this for hours.’
Pizza had the gibbering Jobbi thrown into the dungeon with his friends.
‘So,’ said Princess Leper. ‘Here you are.’
‘Don’t sound so despondent,’ said Luke. ‘I have a plan.’
‘Oh what’s the point?’ cried Leper, in a miserable tone of voice. ‘The Great Secret is lost. Destroyed utterly when the RC unit who carried it was crushed in the destruction of the Floating City! Woe!’ she cried, vehemently. ‘Woe! Woe!’ she added, becoming a little, well, operatic to be honest.
‘Don’t be like that,’ said Luke. ‘I have good news about the fate of the droid. Well, there’s good news and bad news actually.’
Leper’s face lit up. ‘Can it be true? Is the droid still functioning?’
‘That’s the good news. The RC unit in question escaped the destruction of the Floating City.’
Leper’s face lit up. Not in the sense of her face literally catching fire, that would be silly. But in the sense of suddenly appearing much more cheerful. ‘Really?’
‘Indeed. Rebelend spies have confirmed that the RC unit escaped. That’s the good news.’
‘But how did he escape? He’s only a motile commode – how could he possibly get free from a plummeting mass of steel and concrete?’
‘It’s quite interesting, actually,’ said Luke. ‘Turns out that RC-DU2 can fly. He’s got these little rockets, two of them, that pop out of the side of his chassis. Two little sapphire jets of rocket flame and he can lift off the ground.’