The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  With their hands on their heads, Leper and Hand were led back to the Sterntrooper compound. All around them they could see the white-armoured troops, gathering together the dead bodies of Tedibehrs in great heaps, or marching in order through the woods to seek out the last survivors.

  Leper and Hand were taken inside the base. ‘Our orders are to take you up in the Great Glass Elevator to the Death Spa,’ the Sterntrooper captain said. ‘Dark Father wants to have a word with the both of you.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Leper. ‘What does he want?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably wants to know which way up you want to be tortured.’ The Sterntrooper chuckled at his own words.

  The line sounded vaguely familiar to Leper; but she couldn’t place it.

  She and Hand were made to stand to one side, still with their hands on their heads, whilst the victorious Sterntroopers secured the area, and reported back to their commanders.

  ‘Looks like this is it, kiddo,’ said Hand.

  ‘The end,’ agreed Leper.

  ‘Since we’re going to die,’ said Hand, a lump visible in his well-proportioned throat, ‘there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for the longest time . . .’

  ‘Wait,’ said Leper.

  ‘No, that’s not it. It’s—’

  ‘No,’ said Leper. ‘I was saying wait. I’ve had an idea – a brilliant idea!’

  ‘Can’t you just hold on for a sec with your idea?’ Hand replied, peevishly. ‘This thing I’ve been waiting to say to you for the longest time . . . it won’t take long . . . and it’s not easy for me to put it in words . . .’

  ‘But this may save us, and save the whole Rebelend . . .’

  ‘You see, I’ve been summoning the courage, and now I think I . . .’

  ‘Behind us!’ hissed Princess Leper. ‘There’s a control panel, within reach . . .’

  ‘. . . it’s only three little words,’ Hand went on. ‘But they’re the three most important . . .’

  ‘. . . out of the corner of my eye,’ said Leper, turning her head a fraction, ‘. . . I can see the forcefield regular control toggle . . .’

  ‘. . . the truth is, I’ve felt this way for a long time now . . .’

  ‘. . . I think, if I wait until the Sterntroopers are looking the other way . . .’

  ‘. . . since we’re going to die now for sure, there’s no point in keeping it to myself any longer . . .’

  ‘. . . I could turn the traction beam intensity toggle to full . . .’

  ‘. . . and I know there’s no guarantee that you feel the same way, but . . .’

  ‘. . . which would effectively quadruple tractor beam strength . . .’

  ‘. . . if there’s even a tiny chance, then I could never forgive myself for not saying something . . .’

  ‘. . . bringing the Death Spa crashing down . . .’

  ‘. . . frankly I love . . .’

  ‘. . . into the moon of Endors-Gaim . . .’

  ‘. . . you, and I always will, I yearn to embrace you and cover you with kisses . . .’

  ‘. . . destroying it! What do you think? . . .’

  ‘. . . Eh? I’m sorry,’ said Hand. ‘I wasn’t really paying attention. What were you saying?’

  ‘Honestly,’ said Leper, crossly. ‘Do you think it’s worth a chance?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ said Hand, his heart leaping up and a big beaming smile lighting his attractively proportioned face. ‘I’m so glad you feel the same way!’

  ‘You do? But it might provoke a Sterntrooper to shoot us both dead.’

  Hand looked at the soldiers. ‘Could they be so mean-spirited? We’ve only got a few hours to live anyway.’

  ‘Mean-spirited? What do you mean?’

  ‘I think they’d understand,’ said Hand.

  ‘Understand? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ve been in love,’ said Hand. ‘I’m sure they know what it means to hold a beautiful woman in their arms . . .’

  ‘What are you on about? Stop babbling, Hand, and tell me what you think: shall I make a grab for the toggle?’

  ‘Fantastic idea,’ said Hand, immediately, his eyes wide with astonished delight and gratitude. ‘Go for it! Boy, I had no idea you were so keen . . .’

  Leper shimmied left and, to Hand’s puzzled disappointment grabbed the forcefield regulator control button on the panel behind her, yanking it to the ‘maximum’ position.

  The two nearest Sterntroopers spun round, but it was too late: the damage was done. As Leper and Hand leapt left, they opened fire; but the laser bolts missed their targets and instead collided with the control panel, exploding it and – by a freakish chance only possible in a parody of life (you might say) – locking the tractor beam in ‘maximum’ position.

  With a mighty shuddering groan, the giant equipment began tugging the half-built Death Spa to its destruction.

  Chapter Nine

  The very last and final final showdown between Luke Seespotrun and Dark Father, honestly. I know I’ve said it before, but this really is the last of it, at least as far as those two are concerned

  Luke ran down the steps, and picked up a two-by-four from a pile of as yet unused timber. Dark Father, only strides behind him, tried a cutting blow with his lightsword, but Luke’s parrying blow shivered the blade into innumerable fragments. ‘Ha!’ cried Luke, swinging a blow of his own that caught Dark Father on the side of his black helmet. It made a curiously bell-like sound.

  The Emperor had also come down, carrying his black rectangle before him:

  Luke read this, and turned to look at his father again just in time to see that he too had picked up a plank of wood. The next thing he knew was the crushing pain of this piece of wood as it impacted with his face. The force of the blow pushed his lips back into the rictus of a grin. Light dazzled his eyes. There was a ringing sound in his ears. One after the other, his front teeth disengaged from his gums and clattered to the floor like Scrabble tiles.

  The Farce saved him. He swayed back just as Dark Father swung round with a second, killer blow: he felt the swish of wind as it missed his nose by millimetres. Used to a less weighty lightsword, Father was himself unbalanced and staggered. This gave Luke just enough time to shake his stunned, mostly toothless head, and swing his own two-by-four.

  Luke and Dark Father fought through room after room, all unfinished, unplastered or unpainted. They fought past piles of bricks, and stacks of timber; past cardboard boxes filled with tins of paint and great cartwheels of wound cable. All the way they were followed by the grinning form of the Imperial Emperor, whose boards indicated that he was enjoying the spectacle very much.

  They passed from residential and office spaces deeper into the Death Spa. Here, similarly in various states of unreadiness, were the gigantic machinery and complicated devices of the giant artefact. They fought, thwacking one another with planks, against a background of a number of huge cogged gearwheels – twenty feet in diameter, turning slowly in the process of some unimaginable operation.

  Luke paused, to catch his breath. He looked from the grinning face of the Imperial Emperor to the dark mask of his master.

  ‘IF YOU DO NOT SERVE US,’ said Dark Father. ‘YOU WILL DIE’

  ‘You would kill your own son?’

  ‘YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE.’

  ‘Threatening my life will not make me betray my friends,’ said Luke hotly, and indeed a little priggishly, if we’re honest.

  ‘VERY WELL. PERHAPS I NEED TO USE A DIFFERENT SORT OF PERSUASION. JOIN US OR – I WILL KILL NOT YOU BUT YOUR SISTER.’

  ‘You monster!’ cried Luke. He rushed forward, but Dark Father used the power of the Farce to have his right foot skid on a small pool of spilled paint, slip sharply forward whilst his left foot snagged and slipped back, such that he hit the ground very painfully, unwillingly adopting that position known as ‘the splits’. The pain was excruciating. Luke dropped his plank.

  ‘YES—’ said
Dark Father. ‘YOUR SISTER. PERHAPS I SHALL CUT HER IN TWO WITH THE JAGGED EDGE OF MY LIGHTSWORD – WHAT DO YOU THINK? YES – THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NOT SO MUCH A SISTER AS TWO HALF SISTERS. HA! YES . . .’

  Luke groaned, picking himself up with some caution. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  Dark Father stopped. ‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN?’

  ‘That joke. That was terrible.’

  ‘NO IT WASN’T. IT WAS WITTY AND POINTED.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Dad,’ said Luke. ‘Let’s be honest. It really wasn’t. That was just rubbish. That’s the kind of joke that somebody without a sense of humour thinks is funny.’

  ‘I HAVE AN EXCELLENT SENSE OF HUMOUR,’ announced Dark Father, his voice betraying the rising anger in his breast.

  ‘But clearly you haven’t.’

  ‘SILENCE!’ roared Dark Father.

  ‘Look,’ said Luke. ‘All I’m saying is that the half-sister gag was rubbish. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. You still have many skills – lightsword fighting, for instance. Or remote tracheal crushing, I understand you’re very good at that.’

  ‘DO YOU DARE,’ said Father, his voice low and pregnant with terrible menace, ‘DO YOU DARE TO SUGGEST THAT I LACK A SENSE OF HUMOUR?’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Luke, ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Dad, but you know it’s the truth.’

  Dark Father’s breathing became increasingly pronounced. He was evidently on the verge of some huge explosion of anger. Luke steeled himself. But when it came the explosion was of a very different sort.

  Dark Father drew a shuddering breath into his lungs and bawled ‘OH WHAT’S THE USE – IT’S TRUE, IT’S TRUE, I KNOW IT’S TRUE.’ He dropped his weapon and slumped down to sit cross-legged on the floor. ‘I KNOW YOU’RE RIGHT,’ he sobbed. ‘I’VE GOT THE WORST SENSE OF HUMOUR IN THE UNIVERSE! I’M A FAILURE AT HUMOUR! WOE! WOE! WOE!’

  This completely threw Luke. ‘Oh,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘Hey. C’mon Dad, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘IT IS!’ howled Dark Father.

  ‘Really, it doesn’t matter . . . hey, are you actually crying?’

  ‘BOO HOO!’ cried Dark Father. ‘NOBODY UNDERSTANDS HOW MISERABLE I AM! I SPEND HOURS ALONE IN MY SPACIOUS QUARTERS PRACTISING WITTY ONE-LINERS AND THROWAWAY OFF-THE-CUFF REMARKS. I STUDY ALL THE CLASSICS . . . TWO RONNIES, FRASIER, CARRY ON . . . BUT IT’S NO GOOD!’

  This wrongfooted Luke a little. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘Hey.’

  ‘WAAAH!’ cried Dark Father.

  ‘Hey, c’mon,’ said Luke, embarrassed. ‘There there. Really – it’s not the end of the world, is it now?’

  ‘AH, BUT IT IS! LAUGHTER IS EVERYTHING. YOU’VE GOT TO LAUGH, HAVEN’T YOU?’

  ‘I don’t see that,’ said Luke. ‘Sometimes – sure. But all the time? There are occasions when laughter is plain inappropriate.’

  ‘BUT . . .’ said Dark. ‘BUT IF I CAN MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH . . . THEN THEY WILL LIKE ME.’

  ‘Oh, piffle. Nobody actually likes comedians. People like regular people, not clowns. Clowns are fine in performance, but in regular life they’re just tiresome.’

  ‘DO YOU THINK SO?’ asked Dark Father, tentatively.

  ‘Of course I do. I tell you what else, Dad: you may be ultimate evil, and all that, but I like you.’

  ‘YOU DO?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re my Dad aren’t you? There you go. Blood thicker than water, and all that.’

  The expression on the Imperial Emperor’s face made it clear that he was finding all this talk tiresome. He flipped his black rectangle round:

  Dark Father looked at his master, and got slowly to his feet. Signs of impatience became more pronounced on the Imperial face. The rectangle flipped:

  Distantly, the sound of the piano music could still be heard. Though the sound was very muffled, it sounded rather like Scott Joplin.

  In a trice Dark Father was at the Emperor’s side. He grabbed the diminutive figure, lifted him bodily into the air. As the black rectangle fell away, Luke just had time to make out the words:

  Dark Father hurled the Emperor onto a conveyer belt and watched as he moved sharply through a hatchway. The next thing that Luke saw was the Imperial body being crushed and mangled by the giant cogwheels, passed in a sinuous path into the bowels of the machine, carried round the top of the first giant cogwheel, and then underneath the second. In moments he had disappeared from view.

  ‘Where does that go to?’ Luke asked.

  ‘INTO THE BOWELS OF THE NUCLEAR REACTOR. THE INSERTION OF A FIGURE SO PROFOUNDLY POWERFUL WITH THE FARCE INTO THE POWER SOURCE WILL BE SURE TO RESULT IN EXPLOSIONS, DISASTER AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THIS DEATH SPA. WE MUST LEAVE AT ONCE!’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Luke.

  Meanwhile, down on the moon, the Imp-Emp-Imp base had been thrown into confusion by the quick thinking of Princess Leper. The control machinery was exploding under the strain of hauling the Death Spa.

  Darting through the main entrance, Leper led Hand. They ran together across the runway towards an Imp-Emp-Imp shuttle parked on the far side.

  Hand in hand with Hand, Leper hurried up the gangway. ‘We’ve got to get off this world,’ she gasped as they made their way to the cockpit. ‘The crashing of that Death Spa will act as a total extinction event.’

  ‘Tough news for the Tedibehrs,’ said Hand.

  ‘What? Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about them. Ah well,’ she said, strapping herself in and priming the launch motor, ‘their sacrifice will not be forgotten in the mighty struggle against tyranny et cetera. Come on!’

  Aboard the Death Spa itself, Luke and Dark Father staggered along the shaking corridors, avoiding falling columns and bits of plaster. ‘What’s happening?’ Luke cried.

  ‘THE DESTRUCTION PROCESS HAS BEGUN,’ gasped his father. ‘YOU MUST TAKE MY SHUTTLE AND FLY FROM THE MAIN HANGAR’

  ‘You’re coming with me!’

  ‘I AM AFRAID NOT, SON. I AM SUSTAINED ONLY BY THE FARCE, AND MY POWER WAS CLOSELY CAUGHT UP WITH THE MIGHTY FARCICAL POWER OF MY MASTER. WITH HIS DEATH I FEEL MY OWN POWER EBBING.’

  ‘Bummer,’ said Luke.

  They made it to the hangar before Dark Father collapsed. ‘TAKE OFF MY MASK,’ gasped the former Dark Lord of the Psmyth.

  ‘I’m not wearing your mask,’ replied Luke. But it was a feeble sort of joke, unworthy of the Farce, and they both knew it.

  With some difficulty Luke unhitched the black skull-mask, revealing a round, pudgy, white Oliver Hardy-like face inside. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘From you stature I was expecting you to be tall and thin. But it turns out you’re short and fat. I guess appearances can be deceptive.’

  ‘I am both together, both short, fat and pompous, and tall, thin and stupid,’ gasped Father. ‘It is one of the mysteries of the Farce . . .’ The hangar was rapidly turning into a fine mess around them.

  ‘You must go, son . . .’ Father wheezed.

  ‘Quick, before I do . . . can you tell me the Great Secret? Don’t let it die with you . . . pass it on to me . . .’

  ‘The secret is,’ Father said, in a strangulated tone, ‘. . . aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.’

  ‘Is what?’ pressed Luke. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means,’ said Father, a touch crossly, ‘that I’m dead.’ His eyes rolled upwards.

  And so he was.

  Luke flew the shuttle out of the main hangar just in time. In the rear-view mirror he saw the half-built Death Spa catch flame in a thousand places, even as it veered out of orbit and tumbled towards the surface of the wooded moon of Endors-Gaim. As his spacecraft was buffeted by waves of expanding gas and debris, Luke caught one stunning view of the collision: the Death Spa careering into the flank of the great moon, igniting its atmosphere in an apocalyptic firestorm that spread in a galloping wavefront of destruction away over the visible horizon, immolating everything in its path.

  ‘Phew,’ said Luke. ‘That was a lucky escape . . .’

  Chapter Ten

  Conclusive

  By the time Luke,
Leper and Hand got to the muster point it was nearly twenty-one hundred hours, and all the sandwiches had been eaten, and most of the wine drunk. But the three of them joined the gathering of soldiers and officers in the muster hall of the biggest of the Rebelend space cruisers.

  ‘We have triumphed!’ announced General Fishedd Onaslab. ‘We have defeated the evil Imp-Emp-Imp!’ Everybody cheered.

  ‘The Emperor is dead!’

  There was more cheering.

  ‘And Dark Father too! Let us not forget: Dark Father was the most evil dictator in the history of Galactic civilisation,’ General Fishedd blustered. ‘His name deserves to live in infamy! He was utterly evil.’

  ‘Well,’ said Luke. ‘It transpires he wasn’t utterly evil after all.’

  ‘No?’

  There was a general sensation in the hall.

  ‘No,’ said Luke, stepping up to the podium. ‘Granted he was responsible for the death of untold billions. And, yes, he was a torturer, a tyrant, and a military dictator. Yes he crushed the spirits and oppressed the societies of thousands of worlds, grinding all cultural and ethnic diversity beneath the faceless rollers of Imp-Emp-Imp conformity. True he worked with all his might for the ultimate unending triumph of evil. But – and this is the crucial thing – but at the last minute, he saved the life of his own son.’ There were gasps of astonishment. ‘I know, I know,’ said Luke. ‘It’s an almost unbelievably selfless and heroic thing to have done, but let me just reiterate: he saved the life of his own son. And that,’ Luke concluded, looking about him, ‘I think we can agree, means that he merits complete vindication, and can now be regarded, in fact, as something approaching a saint.’

  There was a general murmuring and nodding of heads. ‘How true,’ said Fishedd, ‘how very true that is.’

  ‘Let us erect an enormous statue to his honour!’ cried another.

  ‘He is a hero of the revolution!’ shrieked a third. ‘Let anybody who says otherwise be executed by executive revolutionary order!’

  And so it was that Dark Father, also known as Jane Seespotrun, became a shining light of revolutionary brilliance.