by Adam Roberts
‘Excellent, this is,’ said Yodella. ‘Well, you have done, Amidships. Come with us you must, to the planet Gstritis, to be able to confirm for Tax Office purposes the rebate liability per-head allowance protocols for our soldiery.’
‘You intend to declare your entire army against your tax liability?’ said Amidships, in a matter-of-fact voice.
‘Deed, in,’ said Yodella.
‘Very well. This will be my final assignment to the Jobbi order. After this my indenture will be at an end.’
‘True this is,’ said Yodella. ‘Ay-iiiiii! Ay-iiiiiii! Ay-iiiiii!’
Pkme was given a cabin aboard the lead destroyer of the Galactic Federal Consolidation battle fleet. She was on the same corridor as Wobbli K’nobbli, Jane Seespotrun and Master Yodella, and only a little way from Councillor Palpating himself.
During the flight Pkme could not help realising two things. One was that the Councillor – one of the most influential politicians in the Galaxy – was very interested in young Janey. The old politician had spent a great deal of time with the young Jobbi, talking with him, listening to him gush. The other thing she could not help noticing was that Jane Seespotrun had developed a crush on her of an embarrassingly intense sort.
Shortly before landing on Gstritis, she passed him in a corridor, on her way back to her quarters to retrieve her tax manuals.
‘Pkme!’
‘Janey! How are you! We haven’t really had a chance to talk on this flight, have we?’
‘I’ve been pretty busy,’ said Seespotrun. ‘Chancellor Palpating has been helping me perfect my skills with the Farce.’
‘He’s a very dedicated man.’
‘He’s ace,’ said Jane with great passion. Then, as if conscious of having said too much, he blushed strawberry-red and looked away. Pkme tried an ‘I’ll see you later, Janey, only now I’ve got to . . .’ But, as if he had arrived with brutal suddenness at the moment of long-delayed action, Jane lurched forward and grabbed her elbow.
‘I really fancy you, Pkme,’ he blurted. As soon as he had spoken he blushed purple, and looked to one side. ‘I wrote you this poem . . .’ He held out a rather tattered piece of flimsy; it looked as though it had been crumpled and smoothed out several times. Upon it was written:
I am a worm, you are the sun
I love you Pkme, you are my everyone
I love you like the stars and the moon
If you could love me back that would really be a boon.
Oh! Pkme! Tell me your answer true!
Do you love me as I love you!
Do you?
Say you do!
Ooo!
Do-be-do-be-doo!
Me and You too!
Our love could be a glue
(to bind us together, I mean).
‘Oh, Janey,’ said Pkme, reading the words. ‘That’s sweet. I’m really flattered – really I am. But . . .’
‘Oh don’t say “but”—’ squealed Jane, putting his hands to his face and stomping through a three-hundred-sixty degree turn right there.
‘Janey, I’m very fond of you, I really am, but . . .’
‘No, don’t say “but”—’ shrieked Jane. ‘Don’t finish that part of the sentence! Don’t crush my hope, don’t crush my heart! Leave me with hope.’
‘Jane,’ said Pkme, softly but firmly. ‘I’m thirteen years older than you. That’s just too big a gap . . . really. You’re very nice, you really are, and maybe in ten years . . . I don’t know.’
‘Then there is hope!’ cried Jane, crossing his arms over his chest, and adopting a facial expression somewhere between agony and happiness.
‘It would be much better if you stopped putting me on a pedestal and went out with a girl your own age . . . don’t you think? I’m sure the right girl is out there for you somewhere.’
Jane looked abashed, and then his face started to crumple in lines and clenches. Rather than cry before her, he turned on his heel and loped away along the corridor.
Later that same day, Pkme was sipping a solitary coffee in the ship’s canteen when Wobbli K’nobbli joined her.
‘Are you ready for the coming battle, Madame Tax Assessor?’ he asked, punching the code for a thimble of coffee into a passing Float-o-mat Drinks Dispenser.
‘It won’t be my first,’ she said. ‘But hopefully it will be my last.’
‘A death wish, Ms Amidships?’ said Wobbli, horrified.
‘No – what I meant was that this assignment will mark the end of my indenture as a tax official. After it is complete I can return to my world and the utter obscurity of ordinary existence.’
‘Ah,’ said Wobbli. ‘I see. Are you keen to disappear from public view?’
‘Not at all,’ sighed Pkme. ‘I would love to stay on Metropolanet, to become involved in real politics, perhaps to become a senior official – even (although I know this is impossible) ruler of the Galaxy. But there’s no chance of it. The only pathway would be to become the Councillor of Ya!Boo!; and that would take twenty years of campaigning and political glad-handing on my home world; and even if I became Councillor I would be right at the bottom of the pecking order of the Galactic Federal Consolidation. I’m doomed to live out my days as a nothing, a nobody.’
‘I sympathise,’ said Wobbli. ‘I too am doomed to obscurity.’
‘But you are a Jobbi!’
‘A very junior one. I have many enemies on the Jobbi Council, who will ensure that I never achieve a very high level in the order. In a year or so I will be sent on a semi-permanent secondment to a dead-end world at the back of beyond, and so the council will be rid of me. I’ve even visited the world in question: Tatuonweiner. You were there, of course. You know that it’s an utterly miserable place. There I shall live my lonely, monk-like life, probably in some sort of desert hermitage.’ Wobbli sighed. ‘Still,’ he added, trying to lift his own spirits. ‘A Jobbi knight is not supposed to crave glory, so I’m sure I’ll be happy.’
They both looked out through the viewing port. ‘Sir Jobbi,’ Pkme asked. ‘Will this battle be dangerous, do you think?’
‘It will. The evil Lord Tyrannical is masterminding opposition to the Jobbis, and he has created a vast army.’
‘Lord Tyrannical?’
‘Yes. He used to be a Jobbi, you know. But I think he found it hard going at the Jobbi Academy, what with a surname like that. There was a certain amount of ribbing, and eventually he decided to go with the flow and convert to the Dark Side.’
‘Is he very powerful?’
‘Oo, yes. But we have Yodella with us; he is a great master of the Jobbi arts. And there’s Jane Seespotrun – he may be young, but he’s phenomenally gifted. A prodigy when it comes to pratfalls and creative slapstick, and well beyond his years in truncheon work.’
‘He—’ said Pkme, uncertain whether she should reveal this fact, ‘he – declared his love for me, you know.’
‘He never!’ said Wobbli, grinning with surprise. ‘Blimey. When?’
‘Earlier today. Wrote me a poem.’
‘A Jobbi is not supposed to be indulging in those sorts of . . . passions you know,’ said Wobbli. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said I was flattered, but that I didn’t think of him that way. He’s still only a kid.’
‘He is,’ agreed Wobbli. ‘Although one day he will grow up, and then he’ll become one of the most powerful Jobbis in the Galaxy.’
‘One day,’ said Amidships, nodding.
Chapter Two
In which this portion of the adventure is, rather rapidly, brought to a conclusion. I’m only allowed so many pages, you see. Keep the costs down, they said. Philistines
Gstritis was a barren, red-rock world, striated across its surface with caverns, crevasses, crevices, in which vices were created, asses were craved and ‘cav’, the local currency, was earned. The Fans-of-Tron had constructed a vast robot army in a giant crater, with the help of the local winged aliens. These beings, shaped like man-sized Daddy-long-legses, or Dadd
ies-long-legs, or whatever the plural is, were savage and violent.
There was a great deal of fighting. Sadly, I don’t really have time to go into this fighting (see above), although there was an awful lot of it. Great big spaceships swooping close to the ground, scattering laser fire like sparks from a sparkler; smaller, vespine spaceships following arabesque flight paths, locked in dogfights with other vespine spaceships. Thousands of foot soldiers, some cloned, some robotic, fought fiercely. Battle sowed new black clouds in the sky from horizon to horizon.
In a side action the Daddii-longus-legii aliens captured Wobbli, Jane and Amidships and carried them away from the battle to a huge gladiatorial arena. Here they planned to kill these three, acting on the orders of the sinister Lord Tyrannical. They chose a markedly inefficient method of execution. Instead of simply cutting off their heads, or shooting them with guns, they tied them to posts and released giant reptiles into the arena to devour them. Jane’s command of the Farce was more than enough for these beasts. He accidentally got free of his shackles, and tried to hurry to lend assistance to Pkme. Instead of reaching her he clumsily ran into the pole to which he had been tied – with such force that he knocked it over. The pole, lying on the ground, had a spar projecting at right angles from its top. The closest giant reptile, lumbering across the ground towards Jane’s supine body, trod on this up-sticking spar with a forepaw, causing the pole to pivot and lurch upwards, rather as a garden rake might do, thereby braining the monster and knocking it into unconsciousness. The second and third lumbering monsters did exactly the same thing.
At this point the Jobbi army arrived and rescued them all. It was almost too Farcical to be believed.
After his forces lost the fight in the stadium, Tyrannical leapt upon his hoverbike and zipped away over the desert. Wobbli, Pkme, Jane and Palpating boarded a hoverchopper and zoomed after him. They swerved and ripped through the sky. Tyrannical flew into a cave, and his pursuers followed.
Inside they came across the patrician Lord of Evil struggling to get off his hoverbike. ‘I seem,’ he told them, ‘to have got my boot snagged in this stirrup.’
‘You are our prisoner now, evil Tyrannical,’ said Wobbli, stepping forward with his lightsword at the ready.
‘Are are prisoner?’ queried the Dark one.
‘Are,’ repeated Wobbli, enunciating more clearly, ‘our – prisoner.’
‘Very well,’ Tyrannical replied, sighing. ‘The game is up. It’s a fair cop. You have me bang to rights. I surrender.’
Jane unsnagged Tyrannical’s boot from the stirrup and Wobbli fitted him with forcefield handcuffs.
‘You shall pay, Tyrannical, for your evil,’ Wobbli announced.
‘I’m sure I will,’ Tyrannical replied, calmly. ‘Although what you call “evil” seems to me the necessary path.’
‘Pah!’ scoffed Wobbli.
‘Pah!’ scoffed Jane.
‘You both live according to the morality of the Jobbi Order,’ observed Tyrannical. ‘But when one has seen through to the true nature of the cosmos – as I have – then such a code seems . . . somehow irrelevant. You know what I mean, Palpating, don’t you . . .’
The Councillor, who had been standing in the shadows, stepped forward. ‘Hello there.’
A rather awkward silence settled on the group.
‘So,’ said Tyrannical, after a while. ‘It’ll be prison for me, will it?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Palpating. ‘You have plotted against the Galactic Federal Consolidation. You and your mysterious “Fans-of-Tron” organisation.’
There was another silence.
‘I mean,’ Palpating added. ‘You have.’
‘I have,’ agreed Tyrannical.
There was another pause. It stretched, sagged, and became very awkward indeed.
‘The weather on this planet is . . .’ Wobbli began.
‘I’ve got a question,’ said Pkme, at the same time.
They broke off together.
‘After you,’ said Pkme.
‘No, no, you first, please,’ insisted Wobbli with a forced smile.
‘Well,’ said Pkme. ‘I was just wondering . . .’
Everybody was looking at her. A little intimidated, she trailed off.
‘What?’ prompted Tyrannical.
‘It’s just a stupid question,’ said Pkme, blushing a little. ‘I was wondering why your mysterious organisation is called Fans-of-Tron.’
Everybody looked at Tyrannical.
‘It’s not a stupid question at all,’ he replied, affably. ‘It’s a very good question. I’m just not sure you want to know the answer to it.’
‘Well now that I’ve asked it . . .’ said Pkme.
Tyrannical looked, slowly, from face to face. ‘I will happily answer this question,’ he said. ‘But I warn you – it will change everything for you.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Wobbli, stepping forward. ‘You’re saying that if you tell us, in straightforward terms, why your gang is called what it’s called, then our whole perspective of the cosmos will change?’
‘Yes,’ said Tyrannical, quietly.
‘Well go ahead,’ said Wobbli, grinning disbelievingly. ‘I’m eager to hear what you have to say.’
For several minutes Tyrannical was silent. Finally he said, ‘You remember Tron, of course? The visual artwork?’
‘From the twentieth century?’ clarified Pkme. ‘Of course. We were taught it at school. It’s a great literary classic.’
‘You remember what it is about, though?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ said Tyrannical. ‘Well.’ He was silent for a further minute. When he started speaking again there was something different in his voice; something almost throbbing with significance, an almost hypnotic tone.
‘Look at the galaxy in which we live,’ said Tyrannical, addressing his small audience. ‘Just look at it. Does it seem real to you? Of course not.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Jane.
‘What do I mean? Come. It’s too obvious. You know the classics of Old Earth culture? Of course you do; we all do. They are the masterworks that shape our schooling, the word-art and the visual-art from the Golden Era, the twentieth century.’
Nobody could see what this had to do with anything. After a long pause Pkme said: ‘of course.’
‘You know the Bond movies and the advertisements for fruit in tins, and most of all you know the Star Treks and the Dunes, the science fiction?’
‘Naturally,’ said Wobbli. ‘We are all of us cultured people, educated in the classics.’
‘Well then, you must know the Matrix films.’
‘Of course.’
‘They provide the key – to the true nature of this so-called reality.’
‘I don’t see what you’re trying to insinuate . . .’
‘You don’t? When it is so obvious? When it is so obvious that this so-called world which we inhabit, in which we run around and bump into one another, is nothing but a tissue of quotations from the works of science fiction? Pick a world, from the many worlds in our Galaxy. Metropolanet is from Asimov’s Foundation. Tatuonweiner is from Herbert’s Dune. This person quotes – without even realising it – from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These spaceships have exactly the contours of ships from Babylon 5. Those aliens are exactly like the ones in Predator. Is there anything in our world that doesn’t have an antecedent in science fiction? Yes, there are some things. Are those things original to our cosmos? No, they are not original to our cosmos: they are drawn from another set of artworks from the Golden Age: from Monty Python, from slapstick comedy, from Bennihil. Is there anything else? No – nothing else. Everything in our world is derived from one of those two sources. Our world is a science-fiction template, modified by a twentieth-century comic sensibility. Don’t you see it?’
Nobody said anything.
‘I suppose,’ Tyrannical went on, ‘that familiarity has drawn its usual veil over our eyes, and our m
inds. Our noses are pressed so close up against the canvas of quotation and allusion that we no longer see it for what it is any more. Yet what it is, is inescapable. We cannot avoid the truth.’
‘What truth?’ asked Wobbli.
‘That we are living in a virtual reality, an artificial world constructed out of the orts and scraps of twentieth-century science fiction, flavoured by bits and pieces of comedy.’
‘That’s preposterous,’ blustered Wobbli.
‘Is it, my young Jobbi? I don’t think it is. Palpating knows that I speak truly. He has known for a long time.’
Everybody looked at Palpating.
‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ said the Councillor, in his soft voice. ‘Tyrannical is quite correct. Our world is a complex illusion, a detailed programmed reality.’
‘It seems that our consciousnesses are trapped in this second-hand reality,’ said Tyrannical. ‘As in Philip K Dick, or as in the Matrix, our bodies are elsewhere whilst our minds roam about this virtual Galaxy. And this imaginary world – which so many of us take for real – this programmed world seems to have been designed, cobbled together I would say, by somebody who really, really likes the twentieth-century science fiction and comedy. This programmer has drawn on what he, or she, knows and likes, and looked no further.’
‘But – why?’ asked Pkme, in an anguished voice.
‘Ah,’ said Tyrannical. ‘That is indeed the most pertinent question. It is also the question hardest to answer adequately. Our – programmer, let us call him – our jailer, perhaps – we know he has read H Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy and seen 2001 and Metropolis; we know he loves Dune and Asimov and E E “Doc” Smith’s interplanetary superweapons. We can deduce all this from the cosmos in which we find ourselves, this Galaxy in which every SF cliché is rolled up together to make a textured reality. But the one thing we cannot deduce is – why. What did we do to find ourselves imprisoned in this reality?’ Tyrannical shrugged. ‘Perhaps you know, Councillor Palpating? For I confess I do not.’