The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘The whole universe?’ said Amidships. ‘A single person? And we are the inner workings? It’s . . . incredible.’

  ‘This battle between the forces of Order and the forces of the Farce – it’s not an ethical battleground, my dear; it is something more straightforward than that. It is the battleground between health and disease. The one side is smoking, drinking, partying, having promiscuous, unprotected sex – fun, yes, but it leads to death. Health is less fun; it is order, discipline, routine, eating your greens, taking the stairs rather than the elevator. Less fun. But it is life.’

  ‘I,’ said Amidships, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to say anything, my dear. I don’t even expect you to change, my dear. I don’t expect you to betray your friends. You didn’t choose to be a germ, any more than I chose to be an antibody. That’s just the way it is. But now that I have seized control, I shall manufacture white blood cells and fight the infections on all fronts. I shall reclaim this body for health. And although you cannot help but oppose me, you must pray that I succeed. For if I fail, then the entire cosmos will die, and with it every consciousness inside it.’

  ‘But the science fiction . . . the twentieth-century comedy . . .’

  ‘The things that our cosmic body cares about. The shaping forces in his, or her, mind. Merely the metaphorical grammar of our cosmic body’s thoughts, the grammar that determines our existence.’

  Amidships stared into space. She tried to disbelieve Palpating, but somehow she could not. She felt the truth of his words; they chimed with something she had always known.

  ‘That was a long speech, for me,’ he croaked. ‘My voice is almost gone – soon it will be gone altogether. That is the price I pay for my new position. I wrestle with infectious agents, and it’s given me a shocking sore throat. But you understand now why your husband felt he had no choice but to join the Dark Side. Unlike you he is not trapped by sentimental attachment to agents of disease.’

  ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ said Amidships, in a cowed voice, ‘It’s not every day that a person learns the secret of the cosmos.’

  ‘Indeed, not.’

  ‘But why fight? Killing and oppressing people,’ Amidships said. ‘Why not just tell the citizens of the cosmos the true nature of reality?’

  ‘They would not accept it, in the mass. They live within the logic of the metaphor, so they must be fought within the logic of the metaphor. How else could it be? If I were to inform your handsome Jobbi friend Wobbli K’nobbli that he is actually a manifestation of arthritis affecting the joints of the cosmic being – do you really think he would simply say “how terrible, I must lie down and die”? Of course not. It is not in the nature of the disease elements to simply give up. They must, I’m afraid, be actively defeated. And you, my dear: you must choose whether you intend to tell your young child the truth, or to keep her in ignorance. She will grow up to embody a disease, you know; so if you force her to accept the truth it may erode her identity and destroy her. But knowing what you know, can you hide the truth from her?’ He got to his feet. ‘Goodbye my dear. I’m sorry to say that we won’t meet again.’

  Coda

  ‘Oh Master,’ said Dark Jane, as he fitted the black skull-helmet onto his head. ‘Do you believe we can defeat the incursion – the infections? Can we save the cosmic body?’

  ‘Of course we can, my young friend,’ whispered Palpating. His voice was almost entirely gone now – his throat painfully rasped and sore. His words sounded like paper slipping over paper. ‘Of course we can. With you at my side, organising the forces of counter-infection, we will purge the cosmic body of disease.’

  ‘Sorry—’ said Seespotrun. ‘I didn’t quite catch that . . . your voice is very low.’

  ‘I know,’ breathed Palpating. ‘I will soon have no voice at all; and then I will need to develop some different way of communicating with you. But for now, my young apprentice, let us go to work.’

  ‘I am confident,’ mumbled Seespotrun, fitting the mask into place. ‘Wait,’ he added, ‘this plastic is muffling my words.’ He fumbled round the back of the helmet for an amplifier switch. ‘AH,’ he said, finally. ‘THAT’S BETTER. NOW – AH YES, MASTER. I AM CONFIDENT WE WILL DEFEAT THE FORCES OF INFECTION.’

  ‘We must,’ said Palpating. ‘Or the cosmic body will literally sicken and die. We need a co-ordinated and centralised attack. But do not be anxious, my young friend. I intend to provide strong leadership.’

  ‘PARDON?’ said Seespotrun.

  ‘Oh look. I’ll write it down.’ He pulled a piece of black rewritable plastic from a nearby drawer, and scribbled upon it:

  He grinned, and flipped the rectangle over:

  The Va Dinci Cod

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Sponsored by Coddy Delight®, the cod-flavoured fruit drink. Serve it to your children, and serve them right.

  By

  A. R. R. R. Roberts

  (writing as Don Brine)

  FACT

  This is a work of parody. Nevertheless, all the facts contained within this book are in fact, factually speaking, factitious. Some scholars dispute the existence of Eda Vinci. But again some scholars are just disputatious. Otherwise everything in this book is a fact. Even the jokes are factual jokes. Factual jokes are better than docudramatic jokes, and much much better than fictional jokes. On that we can all agree.

  The Conspiratus Opi Dei is a ‘real’ organisation; or, if it isn’t, then it ‘really’ ought to be. Some people might deny that it exists. But they would do that wouldn’t they? That’s just the sort of thing some people do. Anyway, I just bet there really is a hidden conspiracy at work, somewhere. And why would you deny it, unless you are one of ‘them’?

  The secret sign of the Cod, nuzzling its snout against the National Gallery and swishing its tail with the twisting and turning of the Thames, is visible in any map of central London.

  Annagrammotology is a ‘real’ academic discipline.

  As for the interpretation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa contained in Chapter 14 – I invite you to check the definition of the Latin word mōnaulēs in any reputable Latin Dictionary. Just make sure it is a reputable Latin dictionary. Lewis and Short is very good. Professor Snakeoil’s Compendious Latin Dictionary, Home Aroma-therapist and Boggle Aid less so. Much much more on the significance of fish in Christianity and Philosophy can be gleaned from Queer Fish by John Schad, also sometimes known as ‘John Shad’, a scholar who – despite appearing as a character in Nabokov’s Pale Fire under the name ‘John Shade’ – is real, and not made up by me at all. In the slightest. Really.

  PROLOGUE

  Jacques Sauna-Lurker lay dead in the main hallway of the National Art Gallery of Fine Paintings, in the heart of London, a British city, the capital of Britain, with a population density of approximately 10,500 people per square mile and a total population of approximately seven million people, unless by ‘London’ you include the Greater London Area, which has a population of about twenty million people and a slightly lower population density per square mile.

  The National Gallery of London is one of the most beautiful of the many Art Galleries and Museums in London, and Jacqu
es Sauna-Lurker had been curator of its many beautiful paintings and valuable sculptures for twelve years. He was a well-known and widely admired man, a great scholar, and a friend to the arts.

  But now he had been brutally slain. A three-foot-long codfish had been inserted forcefully into his gullet, blocking both oesophageal and tracheal tubes.

  This was no ordinary murder.

  His assassin was not motivated by greed, simple malice, or the need to rid himself of a blackmailer. No, this assassin was a fanatical devotee of a mysterious cult, working out the fell purpose of his sinister, shadowy superiors. The killer had killed before, and would kill again.

  This killer had no compunction about killing. This killer knew that, to compunct at the crucial moment, would be out of the question. And, as he often said, failure was not a word in his vocabulary. He would often add that he had no use at all for the word failure. Although, come to think of it, he did have a use for that word, as a necessary component in the sentence ‘no use at all for the word failure’. But I don’t want to go off the point.

  This man, known only by the nom-de-plume or as we say in English ‘feather name’ of ‘The Exterminator’ (except to those who knew his real name, and who tended to use that instead) was slinking suspiciously through Trafalgar Square, perhaps the most famous of all London’s great squares, built between the 1820s and 1840s in celebration of Nelson’s naval victory of Trafalgar. One interesting fact about this celebrated London UK landmark is that it is not, in fact, square. It is an elongated trapezoid of topographically unconventional appearance. Few tourists notice the fact that ‘square’ is inaccurately applied in this case, which is one reason why I feel it is worthwhile pointing the fact out.

  Even fewer tourists, at nine pm on that fateful day (the letters ‘pm’ stand for ‘post meridian’, which is Latin for ‘after mid-day’), noticed the hulking figure of ‘The Exterminator’ making his surreptitious way out of a side door of the London Gallery of Fine Paintings and slinking slinkily away.

  The Exterminator.

  He was satisfied with his day’s work. He did not consider what he had done to be murder. To him it was merely extermination. He did not even consider it extermination with extreme prejudice, because, as a generally liberal-thinking individual, he disliked the very notion of prejudice. And yet extermination was his stock-in-trade. Total extermination. In a sense, his nation was indeed not England but Extermi. Do you see? Not that there is any such country as Extermi, of course. It’s just a figure of speech. Indeed, there are no countries in the whole world that begin with the letters ‘ex’, which is an interesting observation. The closest we have is ‘Estonia’, which would be useful if the character were called ‘The Estoninator’. Which he isn’t, of course. In fact, now that I come to think of it, ‘E’ is strangely underrepresented in the world geographical lexicon - there is, for instance, not one single American state whose name begins with an ‘E’. And most of the countries which begin with an ‘E’ only do so in a sort of cheat: ‘El Salvador’ for instance, where the ‘El’ means simply ‘The’. Or ‘East Timor’, where, I mean, obviously the country is Timor, and ‘East’ is a geographical locator. This is also the case with ‘Equatorial Guinea’, and indeed ‘Ecuador’, since that word is merely the Spanish for Equator, and ‘Equator’ (since it runs all the way around the world) can hardly be called a country as such. That leaves only Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia. And Egypt. Oh, and England, obviously. And looking at that list, with second thoughts, perhaps there are plenty of countries that begin with an ‘E’.

  I may have become a little distracted. To return to my main theme, the sinisterly slinking figure of The Exterminator, flitting across Trafalgar Square. This dedicated assassin felt no remorse after his exterminations, for he did not regard his victims as anything more than cockroaches. Just filthy insects. It was good to eradicate them from the face of the globe. God was pleased with such work. It made him feel pure and cleansed, as if raised to a higher spiritual level. He considered what he had done and was pleased. ‘And so,’ he said, speaking softly to no-one in particular, ‘I’m off to a brothel to celebrate.’

  1

  It was well after dark when Robert Donglan, the University of London’s foremost anagrammatologist, was woken by the sound of loud banging at his front door. He pulled himself out of bed and glowered at himself in the bedroom mirror. ‘Who can that be at this hour?’ he asked his reflection.

  It was nine pm. It said so on the bedside alarm clock. Robert had had an early night. Lacking anything that might be called ‘a life’, he had nothing else to do with his time.

  His reflection was that of himself, a tall, handsome, kindly-faced man, slightly graying at the temples, or as he put it in his charming English way ‘slightly greying at the temples’. The English spell certain words in a different way to Americans, although the fact that they spell gray ‘grey’ does not mean that they pronounce the word ‘gree-y’. I know because I once asked an Englishman, one time when I was staying in London, and he was able to confirm this by repeating the word, at my request, twenty or thirty times. He was a nice man, and I was hoping to jot his name down to acknowledge him in the acknowledgements of my book, but when I started thanking him for repeating the word gray over and over and began asking him another question he, kind of, ran away up Oxford Street. Ah well.

  As Professor of Annagrammotology at the University of London, Donglan was a senior and respected academic expert on codes and anagrams. Could that possibly be why the mysterious people downstairs were banging so noisily on his door? Could they want his help in solving some mysterious puzzle or baffling rebus? He would find out in a moment, by opening the door, and entering into a conversation with them, during which many questions would be answered; but first he had to finish looking at himself in the mirror.

  If he were to be played by an actor in a motion picture, and I’m not nagging here, just saying, it’s only a suggestion, then maybe a young Harrison Ford, possibly Russell Crowe if he could lose some of the weight. Or that chap in Ocean’s Eleven and Solaris. Not the original Solaris, of course, not that podge-faced Russian bloke, he’d be no good; he’s probably in his seventies now, anyway. I mean the remake. With whatshername, the English actress with the beaky (in a nice-looking way) face, Natasha, Anastacia, something like that. Not her, obviously; she’s a female, I mean the man, the leading actor. You know who I mean, very handsome. He could play Robert Donglan. Which I only mention here to help you, the reader, visualise the character, not to try to influence any casting decisions which as yet have not been made, the contracts not even negotiated, and it doesn’t have anything to do with this story anyway. He’d probably be too expensive anyhow. Just as long as it’s not that hideously ubiquitous Tom Hanks, with his huge sandbag please-punch-me face . . . anyway. Anyway, anyway. Hmm, hm, hoom.

  Dr Robert Donglan slipped into an expensive cotton dressing gown, which he had purchased from a chain store, and not stolen from a hotel at all, and padded downstairs. ‘Alright I’m coming,’ he declared.

  He opened the door, made of oak. On the far side was standing Inspector Charles ‘Curvy’ Tash of the C.I.D. He was accompanied by his sergeant. ‘Dr Donglan?’ the Inspector asked.

  ‘Yes?’ demanded Donglan. ‘What do you want? It’s gone nine o’clock.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ said the policeman, unperturbed. ‘But we have need of your expertise. There’s been a terrible crime - a murder - and you may be able to help us decipher certain incomprehensible messages left at the murder scene.’

  ‘Good gracious!’ exclaimed Robert. ‘How terrible! I’ll get dressed. A murder, you say? Where are we going?’

  ‘The National Gallery,’ said Inspector Tash. ‘The murder victim, Jacques Sauna-Lurker, has been killed in a most distressing manner.’

  In fifteen minutes Robert was fully dressed and sitting in the back of an unmarked police car. They sped through the narrow streets of Old London town, travelling sometimes in th
e bus lanes (as the police are permitted to do even when not driving buses) to avoid the rather congested traffic. In a short time they arrived at the National Gallery. Inspector Tash helped Donglan out of the car.

  There were half a dozen police cars parked outside the august stone entrance portico of the Gallery, some with their lights flashing. Stripey tape had been stretched across the doorway. Several uniformed policemen were standing to attention in front of this tape, wearing the distinctive dark blue costume of the traditional British ‘bobby’, including the prominent domed hard helmet, which form of hat has led the youth of Great Britain uniformly to refer to their police constables by the nickname ‘breastheads’. A small crowd of curious passers-by had gathered, and were gawping, although the police were not, obviously, permitting them inside the Gallery – for not only was it midnight and long after closing time, but the gallery was now a murder scene.

  ‘This way, Dr Donglan,’ said Inspector Tash, helping Robert duck under the tape, and leading him up the wide stone stairway and into the gallery.

  Donglan, Tash and the sergeant made their way through the echoily deserted, cavernous atria of the Gallery. It was eerie to be in such a large space at night, with only occasional pools of electric light marking the way, and shadowy darkness all around. But, unsettling as this was, it was as nothing compared to the lack of settle that Robert felt when he saw the dead body of Jacques Sauna-Lurker for the first time.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Robert gasped.