Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  Can you know what it was like? His father was nowhere to be seen. That evening a message came through on the home telegraph machine.

  Baby wolf. Stop. Have diverted towards the moon where your aunt and uncle have their house. Stop. With luck they still live. Stop. Your nanny, Danni, is with me. Stop. Follow when you can. Stop. The world is in chaos. Stop. But I know you have the wherewithal. Stop. I know you have the balls. Stop. Check for money in the safe and destroy the folder in my office marked ‘Critical Heat’. Stop.

  *

  There was no money in the safe. There was little food in the house. He was smart enough to know not to drink the public water. He snuck out at night for scraps and drain water. He ate nothing but soup for that whole year. Whatever he could find went into the soup. He became very good at making it. He could make it in the dark. He had to. When they came to put the marker on the door of their home they smelled soup and were bewildered.

  ‘Ghost soup!’ they cried and never came back.

  It was such a fiercely miserable time that he can hardly take it even now.

  But he kept a good ship. He rose at dawn to clean and dress. Then he did his studies. Then he went out. He went below the house, through the cellar, the sewer, and into darkness. He went deeper than anyone dared. He went down to where Princess Malvia rested, still clutching her dead lover’s paintbrush and her husband’s sword. He went down among the royal bones, where no one ever dared to go, and found treasures. Then he went up into slums. The merchants were astonished to see a well-to-do child in an expensive coat rising from the Fathoms, brushing a fleck of filth from the sleeve of his jacket and saying, ‘How much for this iron cross, sir? It is very old.’ But no merchant would trade with an orphan. At best he managed to swap some of his treasures for sacks of rat-gnawed food. So he went up. To the markets where he scurried below the grills and scavenged onions that had rolled away unseen. Start with the onions and be patient. Then he went up. He went into the morphium dens to find the rags dropped between the boards and he sold them to the rag-men. He soon realised that a sackful of these scraps could fetch more than a brass funeral urn which had taken him a whole morning to scavenge. The rags could be sold to paper pressers who would turn them into creamy sheets to make the very books which each day were still piling up at his door. Whenever he came home he found a new stack of these end-fruits in his delivery bay, sent by publishers far away who still had no idea that the Black Cloud had descended on Carnassus. A treatise on military strategies; the complete works of Shiva Danzig; Wolff ’s famous book on probability. He could have sold these books for a small fortune. But he did not. No matter how empty his stomach got.

  He learned, too, that if he offered a morphium-soaked rag to a desperate fool with no credit at the dens he could get the shirt from off his back as well. And so his business trebled.

  Then he went up. He went up into the night-dens. He used his knowledge of the laws of chance and probability to sell advantage to the gambling men. He made better money than he did hunting rags and old treasures. He went up. As dawn broke he would go to the chapel and give the priest a coin to say a prayer for him. The priest would take his money and buy booze, and he never said a single prayer for the boy. ‘What will happen to all these lonely people?’ the urchin would say to himself as he wandered home. ‘How does the universe keep making them? The old lady who picks up rice in the church after a wedding: why is she so lonely? It could be because she screams bad words at children. Ah well.’

  At night the noises became consuming. The cries of the desperate. The gnawing of the rats. He had retreated to the attic and walled himself in with his books. They blocked out the noises, and let not a thread of lamplight out. There were barely enough scraps for soup. His belly was a cave.

  It occurred to the boy at that time that every volume he added only illuminated another which was missing. It seemed as if every single answer bred a hundred questions. Gradually, his studies turned from the concrete and technical – what is light? What is the organic structure of the plague organism? – to the abstract – what is pain? Why is it necessary for a human being to suffer the plague of loneliness and despair, and can it, like a disease of the body, be cured? Am I alone, truly? And if so, can this loneliness be plotted on a graph? Was it, in fact, his own experiments with the Forbidden Geometry which had brought the Black Cloud to Carnassus, and brought his loneliness with it?

  His boyhood was a period of such pain and hardship that even now, if you ask him to talk about it, his eyes will cloud over and he will flatten his beard with the palms of both hands and look about the room as if searching for a familiar friend. It took me a long while to get him to describe those years.

  Load up the cannons, bring your chums,

  It’s fun to sing and drink ye rums,

  She’s over-bored and self-assuuuuuuuuured.

  …We know a dirty word – Oi!

  ‘Smells Like Sea Spirits’ – traditional shanty

  MERCENARY

  Bounty hunters are not fierce. Bounty hunters are not cruel. The best don’t have a lust for blood. For the hunter, retrieving is a business. They find, they kill, they get paid. It is a job. They don’t do it for pleasure. They are like the shark, or the tiger, or the tiger shark: for them, the hunt is the road towards the meal.

  Six bounty hunters were hired by the Man in the Shadows to hunt and destroy a fugitive child in possession of a top-secret file. A simple task, no? Hiatus. The Medusa. San Dusty Von Furstenberg. Klaus Bugle. Penny Dreadful. And a new hunter, one that none of the others had even heard of, one who refused even to give over his name, but who came highly recommended by certain shadowy groups whose knowledge and power distort the envelope of believability.

  The Well Dressed Man had left Carnassus in his private ship and set a course for deep space. He went with a fully stocked library, fourteen cases of finest Effervesco (an exquisite sparkling wine made exclusively on the wine-producing moons of Champagnos XT471), a caged bird, his prized viola, and the knowledge that, after a sequence of bizarre events, all five of his rivals were dead.

  Hiatus, the youngest hunter, had accidentally fallen from the balcony of his 785th-floor penthouse apartment in Belgravus. San Dusty Von Furstenberg had, for reasons understood only by himself, handed his silver pistols to a ‘mark’ and encouraged him to shoot a peach off his head. The Medusa had somehow managed to pull an eight-by-six-foot wall-mounted mirror shaped like a swan on top of herself. Klaus Bugle, famous for his skill with knives, fatally injured himself with an antique letter knife while opening an envelope. The envelope was addressed to ‘Stab Yourself ’ and the sheet of expensive letter paper inside was blank and unmonogrammed. Penny Dreadful, arguably the most renowned of the small group (and arguably the best in the Holy Neon Empire), decided, in an astonishing act of fair play, to message her home address to every mark, crime boss and fellow hunter in the galaxy. She was able to stay alive for a very respectable forty-five minutes before she fell from the Perfume Bridge in a hail of poison darts.

  So now this Well Dressed Man found himself the only remaining mercenary from the star group hired to delete a top-secret file, and the child who carried it. The fact that he was now the only hunter on the case didn’t make his chances of finding them any greater (they were, after all, two very small things in a very big universe), but it did make the chances of him taking the full share of the very generous reward very likely.

  All he had to do was follow the trail and be patient. His instincts never lied. Just that morning, as he’d been meditating on images of the fugitive, another image had spontaneously popped into his head. It was a bird of prey, and its wings were wide and white. ‘An owl? How strange.’ In moments of quiet he could discover great truths.

  From the journal of H. Q. Gossipibom, poet

  Though it has been four days since the horrible incident my heart has hardly stopped its pounding. This ship seems to be a ship of grand horror and misfortune: staffed by fools, bound for hell. And that
woman we rescued has a malicious streak, I can see. I would not trust her.

  *

  From the diary of Miss Maria Fritzacopple

  I have been rescued, and now am on a ship called the Necronaut. It is a ship which seems to be setting sail for madness. It is packed with awful specimens, none so much as the surgeon. He wanders slowly all around with steepled hands and steely eyes, and watches all as a cat watches fish in a bowl. And then there’s the old man, who rants to himself upon the observation deck. The crew are plotting his death, but the captain is on guard and he has the bosun onside. No one with any sense will cross the bosun. This man-giant towers above everything but intellect, and his body is a hellish canvas. Two spitting beasts are locked, necks entwined, in combat on his chest. An eagle, black and terrifying, rises from his back, a cluster of arrows in its talons. His arms show signs of dark and forbidden magic, such as those you’ll find in the old heathen gospels. His right shoulder declares ‘Mother’, and for that I’ll give him credit, and I won’t describe the rest, suffice it to say that I will be asking the captain to ensure that each man locks his washing stall when he is in it. I cannot understand how some women are attracted to such low beasts. Certainly, if you could take some magic sponge and carefully wipe away his adornments then I could, perhaps, see some attraction.

  The Gentrifaction are a frightening trio of painted monsters. Hideous, fatuous and cruel. The poet was shrieking on the deck today that someone stole his watch. One of the children said, ‘This watch, sir?’ and the poet snatched it, saying, ‘Of course this watch. Did you pilfer it from my quarters?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the child, ‘you left it on the ledge outside the botanist’s window.’

  Tonight I saw the most frightening thing of all.

  When I was returning from the stalls I heard the poet arguing with someone in his quarters, but his antagonist was a voice I had not heard, high-pitched, gurgling and ghostly, like the final whisper from a sick man’s throat.

  ‘You call yourself an artist?’ the voice softly said. ‘You have the nerve to cast yourself among the greats? You are nothing.’

  ‘Oh stop, I care not for your critiques tonight.’

  ‘Oh no, you never do. You are content to churn out slimy verse unfit for dogs to piss on.’

  ‘Oh stop, brother, enough.’

  … Brother?

  ‘You can’t call the feckless sputum that bilges from your pathetic brain poetry. He who writes the shipping news has a finer pen than you.’

  ‘Oh stop, I beg you!’

  ‘And here you prepare for bed, like a man who has earned his rest. You think you have done enough to sleep?’

  ‘Oh, Alfredo, no. Please let me rest. I’ve worked so hard today, and I promise tomorrow you’ll see my masterwork. I am in pain!’

  I noticed then a shaft of light coming from a small slit in the curtains of his room and crept carefully up, being careful not to wake the boards outside. The poet was sprawled on his bed, a pen in his left hand, a glass of liquor in his right, his sheets were wet with tears and ink. His shirt was unbuttoned and drawn back, and on his side, just above the protruding bone of his hip, was a face, a twisted, toothy face with straggled tufts of hair. A brother, no doubt, one who partly formed with him inside the womb.

  ‘Pain? Pain?’ That voice, so sick and nasty. ‘Oh, Herbert, if only you knew the pain of living day by day upon the hip of mediocrity.’ And as Herbert began to quietly weep, I swear the creature turned his eyes and bore straight into mine, taking the breath from out my very soul, and it was all that I could do to stop from screaming out. I ran as quick as I could back to my room, and I locked the door, and I lay awake all night, with my mind churning and my heart racing, just as the poet must do every night of his poor, sad life.

  And so here we are: on a ship of fools piloted by a dangerously unstable teenager and carrying a host of monsters and rum-addled hypochondriacs.

  I have not even asked yet where this ship is headed.

  I will tomorrow.

  *

  From the journal of Captain Lambestyo

  The months we’ve spent at sea feel like years and I cannot explain it. I have always loved the sea, but this boat is being driven by dark forces. A big amount of our rum has become unstable. And what I mean is it is liable to explode when exposed to heat or heavy bumps. You would almost swear the makers of this rum WANTED us to blow up. When I said we were to dump our dangerous tonic into space there was almost a mutiny. Someone wrote: ‘The captain is a bad man!’ in the galley. I strapped the ringleader, Mylie, to a strut and left him there two nights, even when he cried and said, ‘I hate you! I wish I had ne’r been born!’ Then I took pity and cut him loose, and there was not any talk of mutiny again. Although we still have all the rum.

  And then there is this mysterious woman we found. I went to interrogate her today, but she said that twice was enough. So I took my wine and left.

  And then there are the children whom we found eating our precious bats. A burned-out urchin and a girl with no past. It makes perfect sense. Doesn’t it? No, I am being sarcastic. The boy cannot tell us his name, so we have called him Roberto. Roberto makes me fearful. He is a boy who is always in motion. Always are his eyes restlessly moving, looking for danger, or something to mess with. He is always interfering with the old man’s things. He seems to have the plans for every instrument stuck inside his head. The old man stands back with his hands on his hips and laughs with delightment when the boy is able to operate a complicated device. But the fool doesn’t laugh when the boy pulls out his Magic Eighth Ball. This is a very popular novelty device that when you shake it gives an answer to a question you have: Will I find love? Where is my hat? Etx. He always has it out, and when he does the old man yells at him, saying, ‘Roberto, put that piece of nonsense away!’

  He has also a pet starfish. How strange is this? It is small and greenish gold with flecks of silver which catch the light. I see him talking to it. He cannot even hear!

  The other day I yelled at him on deck for getting under my boots. Later that evening I went to use my radio receiver and I found that the frequency had been locked to a channel playing experimental sea shanties. I hate experimental sea shanties.

  Right now, I hate everything.

  *

  From the diary of Miss Maria Fritzacopple

  We have finally managed to catch up with our fleet. This evening the fleet commander, Descharge, came across for dinner. He has announced that as it is the day of the crossing tomorrow he will stay with us tonight, then return to his ship before we jump. I assume that I will travel back to the Empire with the waste ships. First I must take care of one or two things.

  During dinner the surgeon called Fabrigas to task, saying, ‘Sir, you do not eat the pork?’

  He replied, ‘No, I am vegetarian.’

  To which the surgeon sniffed: ‘But surely you, as a man of science, would know the health issues associated with eschewing meat.’

  ‘Health issues?’ he replied. ‘My boy, I am more than a thousand years old.’ And everyone laughed.

  ‘But what of the study by the esteemed researcher Hammond May-Clarkson which proved that a lack of meat causes a man to lean towards a feminine disposition?’ said Shatterhands.

  ‘I have read it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘All it proved was that too much meat rots the brain.’

  All laughed again.

  ‘And so,’ said the cook wryly, ‘you take out all your frustrations on these poor vegetables.’

  ‘If the plants wish to seek their revenge and dine on me, then I welcome it,’ he replied.

  ‘But to eat meat is the natural order,’ said Descharge. ‘It is why we have incisors,’ and the delicate servo motors in his fingers whirred as he tapped his own long incisor.

  ‘I have nipples, too,’ said the old man, ‘yet I’m hardly tempted to let babies suckle at me.’ More laughter. ‘If it is the natural order,’ continued Fabrigas, ‘then it is
an order which is costing us a great deal. We snuffed four great suns last year to get the energy to power the factories that make the meat for the Empire. More than a billion children work in the meat factories.’

  ‘When I was a boy I did my time in the factories, now look at me,’ said the cook, as he shoved a large spoonful of peas into his maw.

  ‘You must have sympathies, certainly,’ said Descharge to Fabrigas, his lips pulling back across his teeth. ‘After all, you yourself were an … orphan, if my intelligence is correct?’ He had chosen the word carefully, cruelly. To use the word ‘orphan’ is to suggest an absolute lack of status. An orphan is all but a non-person in the Empire. Without at least one parent, who would pay for the mechanical augmentations which make a person truly unique? The old man withered visibly under the question. ‘An orphan from another universe,’ continued Descharge. ‘Or so you claim. A cosmic orphan, no less.’

  ‘I had an aunt and an uncle who had a uranium mine on a moon in the outer reaches of my own universe. We went there when I was a boy and played beside the sea. My father gave their daughter two pet serpents he had brought back from one of his trips. I tried for a long time to find the moon again. Perhaps I still have family there. I would very much like to find out one day.’

  The surgeon, sensing the sudden cloud across the room, cut in: ‘In any event, these slaveys are well cared for. Without the Workhouse Act they’d starve as orphans. Is that preferable? When the young bee is old enough to serve it does so. That is a natural order.’