The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘What did you do on your homeworld of Tapov?’ I asked, by way of making conversation.

  ‘We danced,’ Lexanco said, simply. ‘Everything, our religion, culture and economy, is entirely based about the continual performance of the sacred dance. Tap dancing, from which our world gets its name, is one key component; but there are many other forms of the sacred dance. It has been my one consolation, in the many years of darkness, that I have been able to keep my body in shape and my thighs and buttocks trim by dancing the sacred dance.’

  ‘Trim,’ I said, nodding. ‘Thighs. Hmm.’

  ‘The point of the dance is to capture the sacred oneness of the cosmic principle of movement - stars and planets dance in their orbits, the very atoms out of which we are composed dance with quantum finesse and intricacy. By acting out the ritual with our own bodies, we connect with this core harmony of reality,’

  ‘Buttocks,’ I said. ‘Yes. Trim. Hmm. Thighs.’

  ‘I was apprenticed to a minor dance troop in my home town,’ she reminisced. ‘Every morning I practised the dance moves, moving arms and legs in carefully choreographed motions.’

  ‘Trim,’ I said.

  To be honest my mind wasn’t really on what she was saying.

  ‘Wait!’ she cried! I was snapped from my reverie. ‘Look!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh Prose, you were right! Do you see?’

  She was pointing at the base of the wall. There, in the fabric of the ground, was an indentation. It was shallow, no more than ten inches deep, but it was surely deep enough for the possibility of escape. Some scratch in the TARDY floor out there, in here grown to the size in which an adult might - just - wriggle free.

  We both got down on all fours to peer more closely at this dent. ‘Do you think it reaches all the way through to the outside?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ she replied. ‘To squeeze through. Shall I go first?’

  ‘Be my breast,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Guest,’ I said, rather too loudly. ‘Be my guest. Be my, be-be-be—I said guest, definitely.’

  She gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I shall go through first, and you can follow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lay on her front and wriggled into the shallow indentation. Her head went under the base of the wall, but then she stopped. For some moments she lay there squirming and jiggling. It took me a moment to realise that she was calling to me. My mind was on something else. I can’t, um, remember what exactly.

  ‘Prose!’ came her muffled voice, for perhaps the fourth time.

  ‘Eh? What? Eh?’ I said, startled. ‘What! I am listening, honestly I am.’

  ‘For the last time pull me out . . . I can’t get through.’

  I took her ankles in my hands and heaved her back. She emerged gasping. ‘I can see the light,’ she told me. ‘The dent goes all the way under the helmet - all the way to the outside!’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Alas I cannot fit. My chest area is too ample to permit me to squeeze through. But you, Prose, are a man, completely lacking the more built-up or developed tissue around your ribcage. I feel sure you could get through.’

  ‘Yes! I shall go at once!’

  ‘And when you get to the outside of the helmet, you must promise to lift it up - carefully, straight up. Do you understand?’

  ‘To free you. Of course.’

  ‘I’ll walk towards the centre of the helmet now,’ she said. ‘So that I am as central as possible when you lift the helmet. I don’t want you to snag me as you pick the thing up!’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.

  ‘Then we are but minutes away from freedom,’ she cried, delightedly. ‘For both of us!’

  ‘No more delay,’ I promised. I dropped straight down to my belly and wriggled like a tadpole. My head went under the wall, and my shoulders and chest followed, my arms by my side. I propelled myself by pushing with my feet, and by a generally wormy process of wriggling, inching forward. There was indeed light at the end of this shallow tunnel, as Lexanco had said: in fact the tunnel deepened as I passed into it, becoming broader and wider. Soon I was able to crawl. I passed underneath several dozen metres of helmet-wall above, the tunnel deepening all the time. Before long I was able to stand upright, and as soon as I could I was running for the light - a widening smile-shaped space of brightness directly ahead.

  I leapt—

  —and landed, tumbling and rolling, inside the control room of the TARDY itself. I was free!

  I came to rest against the far wall of the machine, with its curious pattern of inset circular alcoves, like gigantic exploded bubblewrap. ‘Lexanco!’ I cried. ‘I’m free!’

  I got to my feet, and there was the Dr. He was standing on the other side of the helmet in one of the doors.

  ‘Where the bloody gecko did you come from?’ he exclaimed. He had a look best described as ‘startled’.

  ‘Doctor! I was trapped inside the helmet!’

  ‘What helmet?’ said the Dr crossly. He had, evidently, just woken up from his nap. When I say woken up, I mean, was in the middle of the slow and crotchety process of waking up. He glowered blearily at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Meeting Lexanco had impressed itself so deeply upon me - love fountaining from my heart and filling my chest - that I couldn’t think, for a moment, how I had gotten inside the helmet in the first place. ‘Linn,’ I said, and it came back to me. ‘Linn and I decided to go outside and complete the mission whilst you were asleep.’

  ‘But the air would be poison to you,’ the Dr snapped, rubbing his left eye. ‘I told you that.’

  ‘We found two helmets inside the console there,’ I explained. ‘Breathing apparatus. We were going to put them on and . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ the Dr demanded, grouchily. ‘What helmets?’

  He took a step forward.

  Oh! That fatal, sleepy stride! How I wish he had stayed put - how I wish now he had carried on napping in whichever TARDY antechamber he had gone to. Or, at the very least, if only he had put his foot forward with less forcefulness; if he had tiptoed, or shuffled, rather than flinging his whole leg, like a championship Strider competing for the Striding Cup.

  ‘Doctor! No!’ I cried. Or do I only imagine that I cried out in this Bond-like fashion, in the nightmares that have haunted me since that day? Was I not, rather, struck dumb with the horror of what was happening right in front of me? Is this my subconscious prompting me to do something, to try and prevent the inevitable? Those nightmares! They plague me still!

  The Dr’s foot connected with the helmet, still lying on the floor in the middle of the control room. Inadvertently the Dr booted it. It flew, with the force of a well struck football, in a fast, straight line; skimming a little way above the floor. It struck the far wall, and bounced back, turning in the air; ricocheting off the central panel, and then rolling to a halt. It turned, and turned, and then clonked upright, rattling briefly on its rim before settling back on the floor.

  ‘My toe!’ cursed the Dr. ‘Who left that damn thing there in the middle of the floor?’

  But I was frozen to the spot in shock. ‘No!’ I gasped. ‘No!’ I rushed to the helmet and gingerly, very gingerly, I lifted it up. There was nothing - a nothing that for the briefest flickering instant fed my hopes (of course, it was absurd - but hope, as love, can subsist upon absurdity). But then, with the very slightest sensation of weight shifting inside the thing, she came tumbling out. She fell, collapsing through the open bottom of the helmet to slump onto the floor of the TARDY - full sized at last—but—dead, as dead as could be.

  I howled.

  ‘Will you keep it down?’ hissed the Dr. ‘Not only have I got a bit of a headache, but— now—I’ve hurt my toe.’

  How many times have I replayed, in my mind, Lexanco’s last seconds of life? The beautiful Lexanco, the first woman I ever truly loved? Di
d she suffer? Did she even have time to register what was happening?

  I imagine her walking dutifully towards the centre of the helmet, as we had agreed, looking forward to the moment when I would lift the device off her. But that never happened. Instead she must have seen the far wall of the helmet suddenly hurtling towards her. If the Dr, in the outside world, inadvertently kicked the helmet with enough force to propel it at, say, twenty miles an hour at the far wall, then on the inside it must have moved with a speed of several thousand miles an hour. Perhaps that solid wall of so many tonnes of metal, dashing towards her at the speed of a hyperbullet, had struck her before she had the chance to register what was happening. Perhaps she died in a blissful ignorance. I can only hope so.

  Still stunned, terrified that a like accident might happen to Linn, I tremblingly lifted the second helmet, to reveal her standing, looking cross, and saying ‘you took your time . . .’ But once I saw that she was safe I could no longer hold myself up. I collapsed on the floor of the TARDY sobbing like a shower attachment. I mean, in case that this simile does not paint a clear picture in your mind, a shower attachment through which water is flowing. Luke-warm water, of course. Body-temperature water, in fact. I know people talk of ‘crying hot tears’, but that has never convinced me. It’s not as if human tear ducts have the capacity to add heat to the saline fluid that passes along them. So: the point of the simile is to stress how many and forceful were my tears. Hence, shower attachment.

  Anyway, I cried.

  Chapter Ten

  THE GENESIS, DEUTERONOMY AND BOOK OF TOBIT OF THE GARLEKS

  It was a dark and stormy night on the planet of Skary. At the same time it was a bright and sunny day. That’s the thing with planets: it’s night and day at the same time on any given planet. Planets, with their offensive roundness, thumb their noses at the simple rule that night follows day in chronological order. There’s a reason for that chronological order, you know. It helps keep the timeline straight. This is one of the reasons why Time Gentlemen hate planets.

  The TARDY materialised at dusk. It assumed the shape of a Skaryish Police Megaphone: a tube not unlike an alpine horn, although roughly twice as large. The Dr, Linn and I emerged from the round open mouth of the horn: it was like stepping out of an ivory cavemouth.

  The air outside was cool. In the distance the landscape retained some of its beauty: purple-coloured mountains serrated the horizon; dark blue trees, tall as church spires, waved and hushed in the evening breeze. The sky was plum. But nearer at hand was evidence that a large scale war was being fought. We were standing upon a plain of churned mud, with so many craters that it looked like a stretch of brown bubble wrap in which all the bubbles have been popped. The stumps of wrecked trees, like burnt down fuses, poked up here and there. Away to the left a broken tank was half buried in dirt: one of those old style tanks on which the tank-tracks went all the way around the body in a giant parallelogram. Either it had been blackened by fire, or else somebody had gone to a lot of trouble with a tin of black paint and a brush. I assumed the former explanation was the more likely.

  ‘Well,’ said the Dr, looking around himself. ‘Here we are. The Planet Skary. The Skary Planet. A war has been being fought here . . .’ He paused. ‘Is that right? Has been being? It sounds a bit odd to me.’

  ‘No, I mean yes.’ I said. ‘I think that’s right.’

  ‘Perhaps it should be will have had been being? I get my tenses mixed up sometimes.’

  ‘It’s to be expected,’ said Linn, reassuringly. ‘What with all the confusions of time travel and everything.’

  ‘I suppose so. Anyway. Long war. Lo-oo-ong war. Between the Dhals and the Kababs. Over food. Specifically, over the correct way to prepare food.’

  At this mention of food Linn scoffed. ‘Nobody fights wars over such a thing!’ she said, scoffish.

  ‘Your scoff,’ said the Dr, ‘is misapplied. There are plenty of worlds in this galaxy where wars have been fought over much less. And actually the peoples here on Skary have a genuine disagreement. The Dhals think food should be a bland, healthy pap. The Kababs think food should be highly flavoured, dripping with saturated fat and terribly terribly bad for you. The Kababs also smoke.’

  ‘The Dhals don’t smoke, then?’

  ‘Oh they do. But they smoke herbal cigarettes.’

  ‘Are they better for you?’

  ‘No. Worse. And foul-tasting. But, you know. They’re herbal. Anyway, so, it’s a radical clash of cultures. Centuries of war.’

  ‘Remind me why we’ve come here?’ Linn asked.

  ‘To make one of the largest corrections to the grammar of cosmic history ever to have been attempted by any Time Gentlemen,’ said the Dr proudly. ‘To undo the greatest of evils. Come - the Kabab base is westward from here. Destiny calls us.’ He put his head back and started striding purposefully over the wasted land. His left foot went into the mud and didn’t come out, even though his right foot was already advancing its stride. Accordingly he went straight down, forward, face-first into the mud, like a fairground target hit with a pop gun.

  Linn and I helped him to his feet. ‘You need to take care,’ I said. ‘What with all this mud, you know.’

  ‘I do,’ the Dr agreed ruefully. He tried to wipe the mud from his face, but succeeded only in smearing it more thoroughly. ‘Am I clean?’ he said, looking up at us. ‘I have a date with destiny. Don’t want to meet destiny all grubby.’

  ‘Clean,’ I said, not wanting to discourage him. ‘Ish.’

  ‘Did you say Ish, or shh?’ the Dr queried, a little querulously.

  ‘I said ish.’

  ‘You see, clean—shh, would mean that I should shut up about being clean,’ the Dr said. ‘Which would in turn imply that I was pretty dirty, actually.’

  ‘Ish,’ I repeated.

  ‘Cleanish?’

  ‘Cleanesque,’ I clarified. ‘Quasiclean.’

  ‘Cleanikins,’ suggested Linn.

  ‘Words,’ said the Dr ruefully. ‘When will somebody devise a less ambiguous mode of communication?’

  I think we both assumed this was a rhetorical question, but after several seconds the Dr repeated it, adding ‘eh? eh? do neither of you know?’ and then concluding ‘in the year thirty-one-forty-four in the Gala Galaxy. Do you know nothing, either of you?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Linn.

  ‘Come on,’ said the Dr. ‘This evil catastrophe won’t avert itself, you know.’

  We picked our way carefully through the craters and over the mud until we reached a low concrete structure surrounded by trenches. There we were greeted by several uniformed men carrying rifles. Or perhaps it would be more specific to replace the word greeted with the word grenaded. The first soldier tossed a grenade, which exploded a little way behind us and threw us into a heap at the feet of the soldiery. ‘Why did you do that?’ the Dr snapped at the tossy fellow, crossly. ‘There’s no call for that sort of behaviour!’

  ‘The grenade was by way of saying how-do-you-do,’ said the man who had pitched the thing at us.

  ‘Well,’ said the Dr, pulling himself to his full height. ‘This is my way of saying very well thank you.’ He slipped his hand in his pocket and pulled out the Moronic Screwdriver. ‘Hah!’ he cried. ‘Experience moronicity, you aggressive fellows!’ With a flick of his thumb he angled the screwdriver at the soldiers. ‘This will teach you to mess with the Doctor!’

  There was a high-pitched whine. One of the soldiers seemed to cock his head. Not in the way that a person might cock a gun - which is to say, it’s not that he reached round with his thumb and pulled his head sharply backwards with a resonant click. That would, evidently, be silly. Rather he tipped his head to one side.

  ‘An interesting device,’ I said to the Dr.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘It focuses moronness into a coherent beam. I’ll give them a minute or so, and then these guys should be easily moronic enough for us to slip past them. Look! See! It’s working.’

  �
�You know,’ the soldier was saying, in a strange voice. ‘Hmm, Intelligent Design, yes. That’s a very sensible explanation of things . . .’

  ‘You fool,’ came a voice from the left. An officer was stepping through a concrete doorway into the trench. ‘He’s moronicizing you. Quick! Guns out!’

  The Dr span about to focus the ray on this newcomer; but he was too slow. A pistol shot rang out. The bullet struck the screwdriver on its shaft, and the little device pinged out of the Dr’s hand to land in the pongy mud.

  ‘Hey!’ the Dr complained. ‘You could have had my thumb off there!’

  ‘Take them into custody,’ the Kabab captain ordered. The soldiers surrounded us at once, guns at the ready, bayonets pointing in towards us. The soldier who had spoken was shaking his head as if trying to dislodge something.

  ‘Take them to the Leader!’ the captain cried.

  We were marched at gunpoint into the heart of the Kabab concrete complex. Though, now that I come to think of it, I had rarely been in such a heartless place. So ‘the heart of the complex’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Core’ maybe. We passed many military men marching in the opposite direction, Kabab soldiers marching onwards, marching as to war, with the cross expressions of men about to go into battle and maybe get killed focused on those marching on before.

  ‘I’m assuming this isn’t good,’ Linn said to the Dr.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Dr, unconvincingly. ‘It’s all going splendidly to plan.’

  ‘They’ve captured us! They have us at gunpoint!’

  ‘Us, yes. But not the TARDY. This is why I landed it on the wasteland out there, and not inside this complex. To keep it safe.’

  We emerged into a large chamber. A number of cast iron and riveted doors were set into the far wall. The TARDY, still in its Skaryish Police Megaphone shape, was sitting in one corner. The Dr put his face in his hand.

  ‘That yours, is it?’ the Kabab captain said. ‘I thought so. My men found it in the middle of the battlefield, and brought it here. Good job they did, too: we’re about to begin a massive bombardment of the Dhal positions. Your . . . device . . . would have been smashed to smithereens. Smithered to smashereens. All smashed and smithed.’