Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  ‘At dawn? Have you not looked around you? There is no dawn,’ said Descharge. ‘Only a perpetual twilight. With every minute we wait our shipmates move closer to death!’

  ‘Of course, of course. I want to aid them as much as you do. But let’s not act impulsively. Let’s take a few hours to nut out a strategy.’ Those around him murmured in agreement. But the salty old Descharge smelled his thoughts, wet and ugly: ‘All dead. That mystic. That Devil Girl. That trousered whore. That morbid pup and his man-giant. Sunk in bloody water. Pulled to their depths by dark hands. The giant rats have gnawed away their lips already. And that madman Descharge wants to take us out there again. We will pay tongue service to him, then tie him down. We can pilot off this moon without him. Then we’ll force the boy to use his magic fingers to take us back to our own universe. We’ll be heroes there. I’ll be made a Knight’s Surgeon.’

  When the boy tried to leave the ship he was knocked out with chloroform and thrown in the brig. ‘We cannot allow someone with his mechanical expertise to leave again,’ said the surgeon. ‘Now get a bucket of water and clean away that chalk.’

  The mutineers pounced that night, moving quietly through the quarters with a rag soaked in more of the surgeon’s chloroform. Descharge, a canny sailor, was waiting behind his door. He fought bravely and killed two sailors, but was struck on the back of the head with a lead bust of the Queen. He was thrown in the brig with Roberto and several loyal sailors. The prisoners felt the ship lift away. As Descharge woke, groggy, he heard laughing, cheering. He heard G. Scatolletto shout, ‘I still have two bottles of Effervesco in my cabin!’ Descharge’s head had been severely dented. His ribs had been busted by the sailor’s boots. He heard the popping of corks on deck and knew they were doomed. ‘I never thought they’d get the ship working,’ he said. ‘I underestimated them.’

  It only took an hour for the first argument to break out on deck. Oh yes, it doesn’t take long when no one is clearly in command. Shatterhands’s voice came through the loudest. ‘It isn’t that way, it’s this way! You’re holding the compass upside down! Am I to be always surrounded by idiots? Give it to me!’

  Then the unmistakable sound of a compass smashing on the deck. ‘You fool! Now look what you’ve done!’

  Then came panic. They heard screams. ‘It’s a creature! We’re inside a creature! Oh, the teeth!’ There was a tremendous groan as the craft beached upon a slimy molar.

  ‘Well I never,’ said Descharge drily. There was much more yelling, then somehow they seemed to break free and for a while there was quiet. Then another fight. ‘We cannot land at the city!’ yelled Shatterhands. ‘They’ll ask to see our manifest. They’ll ask too many questions.’ A child, Peter Braika, came below decks for a barrel of water and said, ‘They don’t know what they’re doing. The cook is holding his sextant backwards. They want to make the jump home to our universe.’

  Descharge shook his head. ‘Roberto is the only one who can make the old man’s engine work. And it would take most of our power. We would be stuck without engines, and God knows where.’ In any case he knew Roberto wouldn’t cooperate. The boy sat on the wooden floor, facing straight ahead, his eyes burning holes through the wall opposite. His adversaries had had the sense to put him in a non-electrified cabin in the guts of the ship, in a cage normally used to hold livestock. They had taped rubber gloves to his hands and tied his arms behind his back.

  Descharge weighed his options. He wasn’t dead or badly crippled. His cage had a lock he could pop in seconds if he had to. He’d been trained to survive at sea with few or no rations. His one ally was a boy who doubled as a quantum super-computer, and who had blueprints for most technology in his head, and who, if given the opportunity, could raise havoc with his hands.

  It wasn’t long before they came for the boy. They came slowly down the stairs like monks: the surgeon, the cook and several of the larger sailors. Shatterhands approached the cage. ‘Now that we are in open space we wish to make the jump back to our own universe. You know it is the only correct decision.’

  ‘If I live to see my Empire,’ said Descharge, ‘you’ll hang.’

  ‘You won’t live to see your Empire,’ said Shatterhands. ‘Of that I’m certain. Tell the boy we want him to jump us home.’

  ‘He won’t do it.’

  ‘Just ask him.’ The surgeon tossed a piece of chalk into the cage. Descharge grabbed the chalk and scrawled ‘RIPS?’ on the floor. The boy hocked noisily and laid a hunk of phlegm upon the letters.

  ‘He says “No”.’

  ‘I thought he might be obstructive,’ said Shatterhands. ‘Bring the slavey.’

  Her name was Mikalla Lott; she was nine. She had a round face and round eyes which always made her look astonished. One of the sailors brought her shivering forward. Shatterhands took the girl by the shoulders and turned her to face Roberto. He bent at the waist to kiss her head, and whispered, ‘This will soon be over.’ He took an instrument from his pocket – a special tool used by anatomy lecturers to peel skin away from the muscle of a cadaver. He held the instrument up so that Roberto could see it. He did not need to tell Roberto what the instrument was. He did not even need to show the boy pictures of what the instrument could do. The pictures were all in his head. ‘These are desperate times, boy. Tell him these are desperate times.’

  *

  Around fourteen hours after the mutiny (by Descharge’s estimate) they made the jump.

  Miss Lenore

  Perfume River Suites

  From an Admirer

  My Dear,

  So here you are at last. You thought you could flee to another universe to escape me, but there is nowhere you can go I wouldn’t find you. I can’t tell you what I had to go through to get here. I won’t bore you. I have been waiting for you in this city for, it seems, an age. I’ve been keeping myself busy by cleansing the city of a few of its less well-presented citizens. It is a service I provide free of charge. This letter, for example, was kindly written for me by one of the palace guards just before he threw himself from the walls. I do find the guards’ uniforms so, what’s the word? Garish.

  In any event, you are here now. You have finished with those lesser monsters: the flesh-eating plants, the mountain-sized worms, and now you are ready for the ultimate beast. Me. We will meet soon. In the meantime I am having ever so much fun. The human mind is a jaunty fairground which I never tire from playing in.

  Do take care.

  W.D.M.

  [Letter written in blood and found slipped beneath the door of the recipient’s suite.]

  DAYS OF THE DEAD

  Lenore returned to her suite exhausted, bewildered. They had only been here three days and she already wanted to leave. It was the month of the Festival of the Dead, when the gates to hell are opened to allow spirits to return to the earth; when the souls rise and walk again among the living, allegedly. The city was hung with flowers and painted skeletons, and the people sent a constant stream of floating lanterns into the burning sky.

  They had been ushered back to their residence when word arrived that there had been another strange self-killing. Jonselm Valder, great-nephew of the Emperor and designer of the controversial new City Police uniform, had fallen to his death from a restaurant viewing platform, plunging down through the cloud of red lanterns, meeting the stone pavement with a smack which woke the sleeping guards. Though there were at least fifty other diners present, no one claimed to have seen a thing. What had compelled him to leap from the platform? How was it that none of the other diners, even his fiancée, Claratte, had seen a thing?

  Lenore at least saw these seemingly random killings for what they were: the entrée to a banquet of blood and death. She saw the black ships descending through the clouds, lit by the broad moon behind them. She saw fire raining from the skies, the pristine streets below torn open in fiery gashes. She saw … snow? Could that be right? She saw snow in the steamy jungle. She saw an elegantly dressed stranger, the Lord of Death. She saw it all. />
  She commanded these thoughts to leave. ‘Go off, dark thinkings!’ she said. Lenore smelled a clean wooden floor in a huge bathroom filled with marble and glass. Lenore ignored the bloody smell of the bloody note lying on the desk in the next room, even though its scarlet letters clawed at the door of the bathroom like a mad hound. The note slipped under the door – a note which, of course, she could not read – was written in a web of bloody swirling curlicues of the kind favoured by the lunatic poet or the egotistical vampire. She blocked it out. She sank into the fragrant water and imagined she was in a universe all her own making, a universe she commanded.

  Something was awakening in Lenore. She returned to her room, to her old clothes, now clean and folded – although not entirely free of mud and worm, but close enough. It would fade.

  And then a frightening moment …

  ‘Who is here? I’m not ready as yet.’

  She heard a woman’s voice say, ‘He cannot hurt you.’

  Then, as quickly as the sensation came – the presence of a woman with wild thorns tied in her hair and black ash upon her lips – it left, it took the letter too, it erased the smell of the victim’s blood even, and nothing lingered.

  NEEDLE IN THE HAY

  He had tracked her all across the galaxy to Akropolis. Certain minds gave off very strong signals, and her signal was stronger than any he’d seen. It was strong enough to follow from billions of miles away, through countless trillion other dreaming consciousnesses. He now knew exactly what ship she was on, what small room she was in even. What tiny winged mammals shared that small space. He knew she had the file with her. When he arrived he found nothing. No ship. No bounty. Just the wreck of a civilisation dressed in still-smoking flotsam of a ruined fleet, its death-smoke pulled into fantastical curls by the force of a nearby nebula. Failure. He was just a few days too late by the sense of things. She was gone, and the file with her.

  He went below to his withdrawing room, sat down in his leather chair, and was still for several hours. As savagely still as a predator floating on the surface of a swamp. That still. His eyes were open and inscrutable. At last he stood promptly and smoothed his perfectly tailored trousers. Then he viciously smashed several of his most treasured possessions. And that was it: fury disposed. She was gone and he had lost her. There was nothing left to do but go back to his employers and explain that he had failed. Yes. And yet he waited. Days passed in silent meditation. His ship’s magnetic systems kept him still against the frightening currents of the midnight seas. He waited. Why was he waiting? Because he felt something coming through the night. He felt a great monster moving towards him through the tumbling reaches. Something vast and merciless was rising from the deep to greet him. So he waited. Days became weeks. A kind of madness began to gnaw his arm. His left arm, below the shoulder. It started as a dull nagging feeling. No person could stand to sit in a silent capsule for so many days without beginning to feel a sickness spreading from their arm, across their shoulder, and down towards their heart. True, if any mind could withstand the pulsing grip of space-madness it was this one. And yet here he was: silently succumbing. He lost hours. He would go to sit down with a book and come to his senses standing in his dining compartment with a smashed hourglass and pockets full of sand. He passed the limits most could stand and went beyond. His own mind was torturing him. Oh, the irony.

  But something was coming, he could feel it. And one day he opened his eyes and there it was: an imperfection in the blackness which began to resolve itself into a city. A kind of city. It was a mess of floating palaces whose black edges caught the sunlight from the nebula and cast a dwarfing shadow across the ruins of Akropolis.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Well Dressed Man as he removed the intricately folded newspaper crown from his head. ‘The Pope. Why wouldn’t he be here?’

  *

  ‘What is this place?’ said the Pope. He stood on the flight deck in his red jumpsuit with white stripes down the side, a silver cap upon his head. He called it his ‘action suit’.

  ‘It is the remains of the battle, Holiness. And beyond is the ruins of Akropolis,’ said Cardinal Mothersbaugh, the Pope’s long-suffering aide. ‘It is the most ancient set of ruins in the known –’

  ‘I don’t like it. Spooky.’

  ‘It is, Holiness. If you will return to your seat –’

  ‘Command chair.’

  ‘If you’ll return to your command chair we can activate the Ring and clear away the debris before our crossing.’

  ‘Yes, clear away all this,’ said the Pope as he flicked a chubby finger across the ancient ruins of Akropolis.

  ‘As you wish, Holiness.’

  The Pope’s fleet was surrounded by a ring of powerful force generators called, imaginatively, the Ring of Truth. The Ring of Truth was designed to send out a powerful shock wave to clear the district of all debris. It was specifically meant to smash away broken ships from a battlefield, thus revealing active enemy vessels, or those simply playing dead. The Pope’s engineers had realised that it could also be used to sweep debris from the jump-zone before they made the crossing to the next universe. Not that they believed in such things.

  In his ship, the Well Dressed Man saw a bright blue bubble expand from the Pope’s ships, blowing away the remains of Akropolis, of the great exploratory fleet.

  ‘Fudge monkeys,’ he said. Or let’s pretend that was the curse he chose. The shock wave slammed into his craft, knocking him across the room into a bookshelf, and leaving him unconscious. But the powerful magnetic engines quickly righted his vessel, and when the seas calmed the observation crew aboard the Pope’s palace was astonished to see the small, elegant craft sitting in the middle of that spotless stretch of space.

  *

  When he first came to consciousness he could not work out where he was. He had suffered serious head injuries. His vision was blurred. He could see vague black shapes in front of him. The shapes were yelling things at him. The shapes were doing things to him, a part of his brain was telling him, and those things they were doing were causing him incredible pain. He became aware that he was hanging by his arms; he was stripped to the waist. Then he fell into darkness again, waking occasionally to find that he was already screaming, and that he was in more pain than he ever imagined was possible.

  There is no counting how many times across those days of pain he woke up, and fell back. But eventually he woke up for keeps. He found that his vision had cleared somewhat. He could see that he was in a cell. The cell had racks with torture devices of such startling imaginative brutality that the Well Dressed Man was almost impressed. He was still strung up by his arms. All but naked. But there was no one there to cause him pain. There was someone just outside the room, in the corridor. He could sense him.

  He summoned him.

  The door groaned open, and a fat, vicious-looking man in black leather trousers and a black leather waistcoat entered. ‘So,’ said the man, ‘you are finally ready to talk, I think?’

  ‘I am,’ said the Well Dressed Man. ‘But I think not to you.’

  ‘You think not?’ The fat man waddled over to his rack of treats and took down a device of hooks and screws whose function no one unfamiliar with the darkest art would be able to guess. The fat man knew what the instrument did. ‘Let’s just see if you’re ready to talk to me.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ said the Well Dressed Man. ‘Why don’t you go and see the Pope? Tell him God is here to speak with him.’

  ‘The Pope.’ There was no question in his voice.

  ‘Yes. I want you to deliver something to him.’

  ‘You want me to deliver something. To the Pope.’

  ‘Yes. I would like you to take him your eyeballs.’

  ‘My eyeballs.’

  ‘But first why don’t you release my arms? Oh, and go and get some of your friends. The ones who helped to torture me. We’re all going to have so much fun together.’

  *

  As I have made very clear, the P
ope does not abide other universes. ‘I abide them not!’ he said once, probably.

  The Pope had long ago set up a ‘Special Papal Inquiry’ into the question of multiple universes, but this had essentially involved visiting leading scientists, threatening them, bullying them into ‘confessing’ that it was all a load of nonsense, and, if necessary, sticking hot things in places where hot things are unwelcome. But the Pope had been forced, by circumstance, to soften his stance on Cosmic Abominations and allow technicians working for the Man in the Shadows to install RIPS engines on the holy palaces of the Fleet of the Nine Churches.

  And so, here he was: somewhere. ‘Why is it so foggy?’ said the Pope as he stared into the whiteness of the Ghastly Blank. ‘I hate fog. Make it stop.’

  ‘It is normal for it to be … foggy … when you travel to another … place,’ said Cardinal Mothersbaugh. ‘But it will clear soon, I’m sure.’

  ‘It had better. And why are all these butterflies here?’

  ‘Oh, these are gifts sent by well-wishers to cheer you up.’

  ‘I don’t like butterflies. Poison them. And let’s fire the cannons now, see who is out there in the fog.’

  ‘Let’s save that excellent suggestion for later today, Your Holiness. Look, that butterfly is the colour of your hat.’

  The Pope frowned. ‘And when will we find these people we are here to kill? When will our crusade begin?’

  ‘The spy aboard has left a trail. It should not be difficult to find them.’

  ‘Holiness,’ said a messenger entering the room, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, but it is urgent. One of your prisoners wishes to speak with you.’

  ‘Prisoner? I do not speak to prisoners. Go away.’

  ‘He says to tell you he is God.’

  ‘God? Which god?’ For the first time the Pope turned towards the messenger and beheld with horror the hollow cavities in his face, the tray he held, the pyramid of glistening, peeping spheres.