by Adam Roberts
‘HAS HE? WHY, EXACTLY?’
‘It’s his driving test. Landcraft Monday–Tuesday, spacecraft Wednesday–Thursday. It’s no good complaining, Mr Father, I already promised the time off. I need him to drive the van. What with the wiring problems, and the re-ordering, not to mention the colour chart – the colour chart misunderstanding, shall we say?’
‘I TELL YOU IT’S NOT MY FAULT,’ said Dark Father. It sounded, from his voice, as if they had been over this ground before. ‘MY HELMET VISUAL INPUT SOFTWARE SOMETIMES INTERPRETS NAVY BLUE AS FLAMINGO PINK. I CAN’T HELP THAT.’
‘It don’t matter whose fault it is,’ said Boba, smoothly. ‘Unless you’re prepared to leave the walls pink, we’ll have to repaint. And Derek’s taken the paint gun off to another job – won’t be back for another seven days. ’Course, if you was prepared to leave the walls pink . . . ?’
‘ON A TERRIFYING DEATH SPA? I DON’T THINK SO. IT WOULD HARDLY INSPIRE TERROR, NOW, WOULD IT?’
‘It is quite a shocking pink . . .’ Boba said, hopefully, as if trying to persuade Dark Father.
‘HARDLY THE SAME THING.’
‘They are related terms, though, aren’t they though? Shock and awe, and all that?’
‘I’M SORRY MR BOBA, I’M NOT BUDGING ON THIS ONE.’
‘Well, it’s up to you. It’s your Death Spa, Mr Father. You’re paying for it. I’m only saying it’ll add time to the schedule.’
Luke had heard enough of this. He came round the corner, and saw the man with whom his father was conversing: a jowly, tubby humanoid, who was writing on an interactive scrawl pad with a stumpy pencil.
‘Father,’ said Luke, stepping from the shadows. ‘We meet again.’ With a flick of his thumb he lit up his lightsword, a searing white light.
Dark Father, wordless, pulled his own lightsword from his belt and pressed the ‘on’ button at its base. Its red light glowed malign and fierce.
The two Jobbi knights, father and son, squared off, legs a little apart, weapons before them, circling one another.
‘Right’ said Boba the Builder, looking from one to the other. ‘I can see you’re busy right now, Dark Father, so if it’s all the same with you I’ll just take a quick – tea break.’ He spoke these last two words at a higher pitch than the rest of the sentence, and drew the vowels out rather after this fashion, ‘teee breeeaak’, because he was running as fast as he could towards an exit as he spoke and the effort distorted his words rather.
Father and son were left alone.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, Father,’ said Luke. ‘But you and I have some unfinished business.’
‘YOU HAVE COME FOR THE DROID,’ said Dark Father in his usual menacing way. ‘THE EMPEROR HAS FORESEEN IT.’
‘I may, or may not, have come for the droid,’ said Luke, circling Dark Father with his lightsword before him.
‘NONSENSE,’ replied his Da. ‘YOU BELIEVE THERE TO BE A GREAT SECRET HIDDEN INSIDE THE DROID. THAT IS WHY YOU HAVE RISKED EVERYTHING TO TRY AND RETRIEVE IT.’
‘Well,’ said Luke. ‘Maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe. You’ll get no clues from me. Maybe – or maybe not. But, let’s, for the sake of argument, go with maybe for a minute. You know about this Great Secret?’
‘OF COURSE.’
‘Ah. I suppose it terrifies you – the thought that I might recover the Great Secret and carry it back to the Rebelend. Then we would be able to defeat the Imp-Emp-Imp utterly and rid the cosmos of your tyranny.’
‘OR NOT,’ said Dark Father.
He swiped at Luke, his red-gleaming lightsword cutting through the darkness. Luke responded by making three ‘S’ shapes and three ‘Z’ shapes in the air with the tip of his blade. The two men danced around one another, angling and swivelling to keep their swords between them and their adversary. Dark Father waggled his lightsword over his head so rapidly that, for an eyeblink, it looked as though there were half-a-dozen blades there. Luke backed up a flight of metal stairs, with Dark Father cautiously following, until they were both on a raised platform. A balustrade ran round this, with regularly-spaced giant metal petals sprouting up from it.
‘You don’t fool me, Father,’ said Luke. ‘I mean, father,’ he added. ‘I know that if you had truly downloaded the Great Secret from the droid then you would have used it to crush the rebellion. Ergo, you do not know the Great Secret.’
‘ERGO?’ queried Dark Father. ‘THAT’S FANCY TALK.’
‘Since studying with Yodella I have learned many things.’
‘AND YET YOU HAVE NOT LEARNED THE NATURE OF THE GREAT SECRET?’
‘Well, maybe I haven’t. But it’s not as if you know it either.’
‘BOY, I HAVE KNOWN THE NATURE OF THE SECRET SINCE BEFORE YOU WERE BORN!’
‘Vain boasting and idle words,’ scoffed Luke. He leapt forward, swinging the blade before him. Dark Father, unflinching, stood his ground, holding his lightsword up to intercept Luke’s blow. The two ’swords met with a great clash. Their two lights extinguished simultaneously as shards of glass flew in various directions.
Luke, wary of getting glass in his eye, darted backwards. His lightsword was now less like a gleaming shaft of hard light, and more like a narrow broken bottle. Naturally, the weapon was now more dangerous than before, but it required a different style of fighting to wield it. In place of the former elegant swordsmanship, the two warriors now circled one another more warily, occasionally jabbing the sharp ends of their jagged weapons forward.
‘You seem to be wheezing and panting, father.’
‘WHEEZING?’ gasped Dark Father. ‘AND PANTING?’
‘And panting, yes.’
‘I’M JUST REALLY EXCITED BY THE DARK SIDE OF THE FARCE,’ said Dark Father. ‘SO EXCITED THAT I GET A LITTLE BREATHLESS, ACTUALLY.’
‘If you truly knew the nature of the Secret, then why would we even be fighting in this manner? You would surely just use the Secret to destroy me?’
‘YOU REALLY HAVEN’T A CLUE AS TO WHAT SORT OF SECRET IT IS, DO YOU?’
‘I do!’ said Luke, his pride stung. ‘I mean, I can imagine the sort of thing it’s likely to be.’
‘REALLY? WHAT SORT OF THING DO YOU THINK THE SECRET TO BE?’
‘I don’t know. The key to some tremendous, Galaxy-destroying power, maybe? The square root of minus one? The magic word that summons a powerful genie to do your bidding?’
‘IT’S NOTHING LIKE THAT,’ said Dark Father.
‘Like you’d know,’ scoffed Luke. But his scoffing was a little less scoff-ful now. Could Dark Father be speaking the truth?
‘DID YOU EVER WONDER, SON,’ he boomed, ‘WHY I CONVERTED TO THE DARK SIDE OF THE FARCE?’
‘Not really,’ said Luke.
‘DID YOU, PERHAPS, THINK IT WAS CONNECTED TO THE SECRET OF WHICH YOU SPEAK?’
‘Pah,’ said Luke. ‘We’re talking about a secret that was hidden inside the databases of a toilet droid. How could that provoke a young Jobbi knight to convert to the Dark side?’
‘DO YOU KNOW WHO HID IT?’
‘No.’
‘YOUR MOTHER.’
‘Again with the family-related revelations? They’ve lost the power to shock me on that front, I can tell you that right now.’
‘THERE WAS A REASON WHY SHE HID IT, YOU KNOW.’
‘Alright, then,’ Luke challenged. ‘Why not tell me what the secret it? If you know it, why not just come out with it? Tell me what it is!’
‘ALL IN GOOD TIME. WHEN YOU HAVE ACCEPTED YOUR DESTINY. THEN I SHALL BRING YOU BEFORE THE EMPEROR AND HE SHALL TELL YOU.’
‘Yah,’ said Luke in tones of mockage and jibery. ‘That’s just another way of saying that you don’t know.’
‘NO, IT’S NOT.’
‘Oh yes it is.’
‘OH NO IT’S . . . LOOK, SON, I DON’T WANT TO GET INTO A SLANGING MATCH WITH YOU. SURRENDER YOUR WEAPON AND COME WITH ME TO THE IMPERIAL EMPEROR. HE WILL EXPLAIN THINGS MORE FLUENTLY THAN I AM ABLE.’
‘Or, alternat
ively,’ said Luke, sprinting forward, his jagged-edged shaft of broken glass at arm’s length in front of him, ‘why don’t I – not.’
Dark Father sidestepped. Luke collided at speed with the waist-high railing that circled the platform. All the breath went out of his lungs with a noise that was an exactly halfway between an oufff! and an urgh! He swivelled forward, dropping his lightsword and only a desperate scrabbly grabbing at the balustrade prevented him toppling after it. He was dangling over the edge, looking nervously down. He seemed, perhaps by the power of the Farce, to be hanging over a deep well-shaft, leading down into the distance. To fall or relinquish his hold would mean certain death.
‘IT SEEMS YOU ARE AT MY MERCY,’ said Dark Father sinisterly, peering down at him. ‘SURRENDER OR DIE!’
‘Surrender to you? To become your slave?’
‘IT IS YOUR DESTINY.’
‘My destiny to become your slave? Never!’
‘THE IMPERIAL EMPEROR HAS FORESEEN IT.’
‘You keep saying that.’
‘IT KEEPS BEING TRUE.’
‘Yeah, well. So, anyway,’ Luke asked, conversationally changing the subject, ‘I’ve a question for you. Is it true that your name used to be Jane Seespotrun?’ He was trying to scrabble his legs up approximately to the level of his armpits and use them to lever himself along the balustrade to move himself away from the shaft directly below him.
‘THAT NAME NO LONGER MEANS . . .’
‘Kind of a girl’s name, isn’t it?’
Dark Father’s breathing seemed to have become even more audible. ‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’
‘I’m just wondering why my Dad was named after a little girl, that’s all.’
‘THAT’S IT,’ boomed Father. ‘I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR INSOLENCE. YOU ARE GROUNDED.’
‘Grounded?’ asked Luke. ‘In the sense of . . . ?’
‘IN THE SENSE,’ said Dark Father, ‘OF THE GROUND WHICH WILL SHORTLY BE RUSHING UP TOWARDS YOU WITH LETHAL SPEED.’ He brought the jagged edge of his lightsword sharply down onto Luke’s knuckles. With a sharp ‘yow!’ Luke let go his grip, and instantly he was falling through nothingness. The ground, though distant, was rapidly coming closer. As he tumbled away he screamed up at his father’s diminishing figure ‘I hate you! I’m not your slave! I hate you . . .’
Chapter Six
So: how was the battle going, down on the moon?
The battle was not going well down on the moon.
The Sterntroopers, to be frank were making short work of the Tedibehrs. Their laser rifles and pistols tore through the diminutive ranks, ripping stitching and tearing limb from tiny limb. The Tedibehrs tried to retaliate, but their weapons were largely log-based in concept. They tried rolling logs down slopes at the Imp-Emp-Imp battlecraft. The flaw in this thinking was that rolling logs move relatively slowly and make a lot of noise; the Imp-Emp-Imp Multipods were fitted with automatic laser cannons designed to shoot down shells and missiles travelling very much more rapidly and quietly. They made short work of the logs.
Other log-based attack strategies included: logguns, in which a slightly smaller log was loaded into a hollowed-out bigger log, and fired by setting fire to a third log located at the base of the bore. This cannon was, as perhaps you can intuit from this brief description, perhaps the most useless weapon ever used in warfare. The Tedibehrs also tried using logs suspended, pendulum-like, on jungle creepers, which might have been more effective had the Tedibehrs had more strength in their stubby limbs to pull them back far enough such that releasing them gave them a crushing momentum. I’d say, talking roughly, that pulling back the logs to an angle of at least fifty degrees would do it. The Tedibehrs managed four degrees.
They did not give up on their master strategy of a log-based assault. They carved the ends of logs into sharpened points and tried ramming the Imp-Emp-Imp Multipods; but even with a hundred Tedibehrs carrying these logs it was hard to get up any speed.
Meanwhile the Tedibehrs were suffering horrendous casualties. Little lifeless Tedi bodies littered the forest. There was stuffing all over the ground, pouring out of many gaping wounds. A few survivors were trying, though fatally wounded, to crawl away, several with limbs attached to their torsos by only a few stitches. There was widespread scuffing and baldness. One tiny Tedi crouched over the body of a fallen comrade, his paws covered in sawdust, his stumpy arms raised to the skies as he cried ‘Why?’
From their position at the rear of the assault Princess Leper and Hand Someman watched the utter catastrophe of the Tedis’ frontal assault. ‘Well,’ said Leper, ‘I’d say that was about as complete a military failure as it’s possible to imagine.’
‘Agreed,’ said Someman. ‘So what do we do now?’
Sixty Imp-Emp-Imp Octopods, each of them twelve metres high and hideously beweaponed, were smashing through the woods on all sides. Ground troops rushed from cover to cover, spraying the area with high-power laser fire. The last of the Tedibehr army was fleeing through the undergrowth, often becoming immolated by pursuing troops, and giving off noxious smoke as they died.
‘What do we do now?’ echoed Leper. ‘We run away.’
‘Agreed,’ said Someman.
Chapter Seven
The final final showdown between Dark Father and Luke Seespotrun
Luke fell perhaps hundreds of metres, fully expecting to die. But at the base of the shaft he encountered not hard floor, but something rather different.
The shaft opened up into a large half-plastered room in which four of Boba the Builder’s workers were just sitting down to a nice cup of tea, some digestives, to be followed by a quick, relaxing bounce on a trampoline – after which, of course, they were planning on going back to work. They had set up the trampoline in readiness, and were now settling themselves down onto a few packing crates with their tea mugs in their hands. They were as surprised as anybody would be to hear the sound of a swiftly crescendoing yell of ‘arrrghh!’ as Luke’s falling body tumbled through an open trapdoor in the ceiling, boinged into the trampoline and reboinged up. He vanished as rapidly as he had come, his ‘arrrghh!’ now receding into the background.
The builders stared at the space where, briefly, Luke had appeared.
He hurtled upwards, his yell now more surprised than despairing, and in a trice he popped back up to the podium upon which he had previously been hanging. Desperately he scrabbled at the railing, caught hold, and held on.
‘YOU AGAIN?’ boomed Dark Father. He reached over, grabbed his son by the back of his shirt, and hauled him over onto the raised platform.
As he grovelled on the floor, Luke looked up to see a figure coming slowly up the steps.
‘NOW,’ said Dark Father. ‘MEET YOUR NEW MASTER . . . THE IMPERIAL EMPEROR OF THE IMPERIAL EMPIRE OF THE IMPERIUM.’
Luke gasped and looked up. He had, perhaps, been expecting a towering, intimidating figure, dressed in purple and gold and flanked by dozens of Praetorian Sterntroopers. But the thing that most struck him about the Imperial Emperor was how diminutive a figure he was – only a little over five foot tall. He walked steadily forward, supporting himself with a walking stick, although there were occasional blips in his movement, such as that he might twitch instantly forward by several inches, or his hand might leap without movement from his side to his chin – as if time itself were strained and cracked around him by his command of the Farce.
‘O GREAT ONE,’ said Dark Father, dropping to one knee. Luke was astonished; he had never before seen his father abase himself.
The Imperial Emperor was standing only a few feet from him. And, now that he was this close, Luke was amazed by how tatty his Imperial costume was: a worn black coat, a junk-shop bowler hat, trousers that were patently too big for him. Surely, Luke thought to himself, the most powerful being in the cosmos could command tailors to make him a better outfit? And surely a figure of such terror would carry a gold-topped ivory cane, perhaps carved from the thigh bone of a defeated enemy? But the Imperial Emperor’s cane w
as a skinny bamboo object that bent prodigiously whenever he put weight upon it.
Looking down at the kneeling figure of Dark Father, the Imperial Emperor adjusted the angle of his bowler hat by poking it with his cane. Then he whipped out a black rectangle, bordered neatly with an embossed repeating leaf pattern. In the middle words appeared, silver against the dark background:
Distantly, perhaps from some other room in the unfinished Death Spa, Luke thought he could hear the sound of jolly piano music.
‘I’ll never join you!’ he cried, mustering his dignity.
The Imperial Emperor put his head on one side, and spun the black rectangle he was holding right around. When the front was facing Luke again, he saw that the words had changed:
The Emperor flipped the rectangle again:
There was no time to waste. Luke leapt up, snatched the lightsword from the kneeling figure of his father, and rushed at the Imperial Emperor. With a devastating rapidity and grace the rectangle disappeared, and as Luke thrust the jagged glass as hard as he could at the Imperial chest the thin bamboo cane whipped up. Somehow it not only deflected the blow, but flipped the lightsword spinning into the air. Then, with astonishing speed and grace, the Emperor darted round behind Luke, kicked him hard in the behind, did a little dance, slid across the floor, and regained his original position.
Luke was slack-jawed with amazement.
Dark Father stepped up and snatched the spinning lightsword from the air. The expression on the Imperial Emperor’s face had become stern:
Both Luke and Dark Father read the words quickly, but had to wait for several long seconds before the Emperor flipped the card:
‘No!’ cried Luke.
Chapter Eight
Events take a dark turn down on the moon
Leper and Hand, down on the moon, were in the process of running away. Unfortunately for them, they weren’t very accomplished running-awayers. Within minutes the forces of the Imp-Emp-Imp had cornered them, disarmed them, and captured them.