Tropic of Skorpeo

by Morrissey, Michael

  This book is dedicated to:

  Lewis Carroll, whose philosophically playful wit continues to inspire.

  William Shakespeare for his ingenious plots, high sense of drama, and wonderfully innovative language.

  Alfred Bester, grand master of the baroque science fiction novel, for his vivid characters and thrilling narration.

  Kurt Vonnegut for his bold and timely irony.

  Princess Juraletta was bored. She had been playing Zombies for day after tedious day, and had ended up falling asleep where she sat, eyelashes coiled like baby whips. Closed in slumber, her beautiful eyes vibrated gently as she dreamt about flying, her gullwing eyebrows arched as though by a generous uplift of wind. She had achieved the calm sought by insatiably discontent philosophers. The delicate transparent webs under her arms had clouded over – a sure sign tedium had worked its soft mischief. What was worse, when she woke and looked in the mirror, her eyes were as stingingly blue as Desdemonian violets.

  She was having an attack of Deep Purple.

  “Gorgon – I want to go Outside.”

  Gorgon shook her head violently, causing sixty-eight percent of her snakes to lift their heads and look around for someone to bite. “That is forbidden, Princess. Outside is a terrible place. It is full of conceptual weirdness, death, and mediocrity.”

  “What is mediocrity?” asked Juraletta.

  “The opposite of genius.”

  “Forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.” Juraletta unconsciously stroked her own hair as though to quieten down the gorgonic hissing serpents. “That’s all I ever hear.”

  “It’s for your own good, Princess.”

  “What if I don’t want things for my own good?” she said, for like many wilful young women she was often bored at the thought of what was good. “What if I want bad things – even wicked things?”

  “You are young, Princess,” Gorgon said patiently. “It is natural for you to be restless. Please remember, one day soon you will marry the Fissionable Duke and become Queen of Qwerty.”

  “And Queen of Venera?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I will be queen of the queen city of Qwerty and won’t have to play Zombies any more?”

  “My child, you will be too busy to play Zombies. You will have to help the Fissionable Duke run his empire. But don’t neglect your singing, my violaceous munchkin. You have a very sweet, piercing tone. Who knows where it could lead you?”

  “Can’t the Fissionable Duke help me run my empire?” asked Juraletta, ignoring Gorgon’s flattery.

  “Princess, you are only seventeen. The duke is old and wise. He’s a patriarch!”

  “Yes, I hear he looks at least a thousand years old. Did you petrify him, Gorgie?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Gorgie’,” Gorgon said with a frown. “It’s disrespectful. I may have to turn your armpits into shale.”

  Using her stony gaze, she had been turning impudent life forms into basalt for untold millennia. A concerted blink brought them back to life, though, curiously refreshed from their adamantine slumber.

  “Gorgie,” repeated the non-respectful Juraletta, “you know very well your stony glance doesn’t work on me. I am of purple blood. It’s unfreezable.”

  “I can always get one of my head serpents to bite you.”

  “My blood will make any snake choke,” laughed the princess.

  Gorgon knew this was true – lavished with illumined lilac, the royal epidermis made any reptile feel slightly nauseated. She sighed, and tried to think of a new game. For years, now, it had been Gorgon’s job to keep the princess amused and ensure that the heir to Qwerty did not become too bored. Paint a Snake, which consisted of daubing bright colours on each of her snakes’ heads so that they became angry and tried to bite one another, made up the bulk of her current repertoire. Of course, now that the princess was a young woman she was tiring of childish games and didn’t want to play Vampires, Ghouls, Evil Undead, or Zombies any more. Juraletta had told her just last week that she particularly hated Vampires because they were neither dead nor alive and had ugly pointed blood-stained teeth stuck in the middle of a maggot-coloured face crowned with narrow red eyes. Even a gorgon couldn’t argue with that.

  And yes, the princess was now in the final years of teendom. Her breasts (both at the front and at the back) had grown to quite unprincesslike dimensions. In a few days she would marry the Fissionable Duke and become a queen with responsibilities to her subjects, but in the meantime, she had to be kept amused. Young royalty yet to ascend to their reign of power were prone to attacks of incurable narcolepsy.

  “Can we play Hide and Shriek?” the princess asked, “or is that forbidden?”

  “What is Hide and Shriek?” asked the be-snaked one.

  “It’s easy, Gorgie. I close my eyes and you hide somewhere in the castle. When I find you, you shriek. And – if you like – your snakes can hiss as well.”

  Gorgon sneaked from the room, shutting the door gently behind herself. Juraletta opened her eyes, rolled them, and counted slowly to one hundred, then strode boldly in the opposite direction. She passed through an anteroom decked out in glowing amber and encrusted with emeralds as large as Halloween pumpkins, and from this forbidden zone she made her way along the Corridor of Peep, past the Portcullis of the Sacred Castle, and found a stone bridge over the River of Eternal Fire.

  Outside, all was a tangerine dream. A tier of suns – a brace of purple-red giants and one dwarfish yellow fellow that warmed the planet of Qwerty – hung in the sky. The lesser sun glimmered through the murk like the bulbous eye of a malignant cyclops. A lawn (though the princess had never before seen a lawn) stretched as far as she could see. The trees were trimmed into the shapes of animals – unicorns and ocelots, mammoths and capybaras – all lovingly manicured from the uncooperative Qwertian vegetation. She stepped carefully up onto a stool to have a closer look at a unicorn, which wobbled its horn.

  She looked down and saw that an extremely short, unshaven man with an outlandishly large head and protuberant eyes was trimming the unicorn’s horn. Neither his size nor the shape of his eyes was his weirdest feature, however – it was his skin, which wasn’t purple. Nary a tinge of mauve or murex, not a Lilliput of lavender, nor a pinch of prune. Not even a gruyère of gridelin. It was the colour of walnuts past their prime.

  “I heard that,” said the dwarf, semaphoring his left eyebrow.

  A telepathic dwarf with asymmetrical eyes and non-purple skin clipping a unicorn’s horn! Things were definitely strange Outside.

  “Not everyone has purple skin,” the dwarfish gardener continued. “Some of us chose not to. By the way, do you mind holding the horn? I find it hard to get just the right angle when I do my clipping, and I tell you it’s no joke being a gardener around these parts. I take it you are from around these parts? I haven’t seen a moisture bundle in the garden before. Do you have any right – or wrong – to be here? You may not have realised that these are private parts so if you weren’t allowed to be here, then I will have to –”

  “I have every right to be here,” said Juraletta. “And by the way I am not a moisture bundle, whatever that is – I am Princess Juraletta, and I am shortly to be a queen. You will then be my subject. So have a care, little fellow, or I might have to teach you a lesson you will not forget.”

  “So you’re a schoolteacher as well as a moisture bundle, and very possibly a VBLFE,” said the dwarf, as he snip, snip, snipped at individual leaves on the unicorn’s horn. “You know the trouble with schoolteachers? They’re know-alls. Now take me – I know most things though I don’t claim to know everything.”

  “You didn’t know I was a princess,” observed Juraletta, wondering what a VBLFE was.

  “I wou
ld have guessed sooner or later,” said the dwarf in his irritatingly confident voice. “You have a certain air of regal self-importance. To tell you the truth, I am a covert republican, so royalty doesn’t gouge a lot of ice with me. No offence,” he said with an ear-to-ear grin. (Ear-to-ear grins look quite outlandish, especially on dwarfs, she thought.) “And to answer your query,” he continued, “a VBLFE is a very bumptious life form entity.”

  Juraletta couldn’t recall making any enquiry. Was the little fellow a mind reader?

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I say, would you hold my horn up a bit higher,” said a voice which could only have been the unicorn’s.

  “You’re alive!” she gasped, grateful that any budding political conversation was thus aborted, for she hated politics as it seemed to be nothing more than promising the same set of lies over and over. It was even more boring than Paint a Snake.

  “Of course I’m alive,” said the hedge. “I’m part of the undergrowth.”

  “How can you be?” asked Juraletta. “You’re only a hedge.”

  “You’re quite right,” said a deep voice. On looking around for the source of this booming ululation, Juraletta’s gaze alighted upon a tree.

  “I am a giant,” the tree proudly declared.

  “Not very subtle, I’m afraid,” observed the dwarf. “Always states the obvious.”

  “I am also a ventriloquist,” said the tree, who Juraletta now realised was a giant who needed a haircut.

  “What’s a ventriloquist?” she asked.

  “One who can throw his voice out to inanimate objects so that they seem blessed with life,” said the unicorn.

  “So you are only a hedge,” said Juraletta, a little disappointed. “A chatterbox hedge with nothing to say.”

  “The fact is,” the dwarf said in an insistent let’s-have-no-nonsense-from-either-hedges-deluded-into-thinking-that-they’re-living-unicorns-or-ventriloquistic-giants’-voices tone, “that our lofty friend is both a ventriloquist and a schizophrenic. One of his other personalities is throwing its voice into the unicorn giving him the illusion that he is alive, when in fact he is merely a hedge.”

  “Can’t I at least be a living hedge?” pleaded the unicorn.

  “Hedges don’t talk,” Juraletta pointed out.

  “They do on Qwerty,” said the dwarf.

  “If the hedge can talk, there is no need for a ventriloquist,” Juraletta said.

  “Now you’re being logical – rather uncharacteristic for a moisture bundle who can’t have seen more than a scant eighteen summers,” said the dwarf. “That’s very non-Qwertian.”

  “I don’t care whether it’s Qwertian or non-Qwertian,” said Juraletta. “As for you,” she said, poking the unicorn’s horn, “if you really are a unicorn, why don’t you canter?”

  “Horses canter,” said the unicorn, “but unicorns gambol. In any case, I feel no inclination to perform for your benefit.”

  “I think you should, as you put it, ‘gambol’,” said Juraletta. “That would clearly establish that you are a unicorn and not merely a ventriloquee hedge.”

  “I am alive and I can prove it!” said the unicorn in a loud voice.

  “Very well,” said the dwarf, “reproduce yourself.”

  “Certainly not,” said the unicorn. “That would be indecent – especially in the presence of a princess. Remember I am not a worm, but a mammal. Copulation is required.”

  “Well, at least you know that I’m a princess, which is more than I can say for some people,” observed Juraletta, throwing a contemptuous glance at the dwarf. “As for this term ‘copulation’, it’s a new one on me. It sounds like someone being late for an important appointment.”

  “She’s a virgin,” said the dwarf, ill-disguising his distaste.

  “What’s a virgin?” asked Juraletta.

  She did not think her question humorous, yet to her surprise the dwarf, the giant, and even the unicorn (or was it hedge?) all began laughing.

  “A virgin,” said the dwarf, chewing at his long, drooping moustache, “is a young woman who doesn’t know the facts of Qwerty.”

  “She probably knows the facts of Venera,” rumbled the giant.

  “If she knows the facts of Venera, she probably knows Venerarial facts,” the dwarf drawled dryly. “Have you ever been Rapunzelised?”

  “No. Gorgie insists that I keep my hair inside at all times.”

  “It definitely sounds like she’s a virgin,” the giant sniggered.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said the dwarf, drawing himself up to his full height and apparently preparing to take charge of this odd trio. “That’s to –”

  Whatever virgin-testing method the dwarf was about to divulge was drowned out by the giant’s booming shout of alarm. “The hunter!”

  Both dwarf and giant dived into a mammoth-shaped hedge, which made a small trumpeting sound. The princess was left to her fate.

  Juraletta heard a sharp noise overhead, looked up, and saw a flying man clutching a bow and arrow, and clad in nothing but a very brief pair of briefs. She saw his eyes narrow in concentration as he aimed and then fired, and his arrow flashed across the sky and struck her in the thigh. It did not hurt, though she noticed that the place it pierced her purple skin had immediately turned orange. The man (who she noted had bright green skin and rippling muscles, and apparently half a picnic basket stashed in his meagre attire) landed some fifty yards away.

  An invisible force compelled her to move in his direction.

  Queen Beia, Queen of Reflections, Ruler of Simulacra, and monarch supreme in her alabaster, many-roomed palace, stared into the screen’s silvery eye and asked, “Who is the finest Replicoid of them all?”

  The screen’s sheen refocused into a diabolic-looking form. “You are, my queen.”

  “You were tardy in replying, Lord Maledor.”

  “Forgive me, my queen,” said the tall, lean aristocrat. “I was a trifle slow in returning from Naziworld.”

  “You prefer the company of those swastika-ed louts to that of your queen?”

  “Of course not,” Lord Maledor said. “I’ll confess I was playing a game with them. I am engaged in a war of chess with Herr Adolf. If he wins, then I let him take Russia – with consequences you can well imagine.”

  “I suppose you need these little amusements to stay sane,” yawned the queen. “Tell me truthfully, I’m not actually a Replicoid, am I? Answer me quickly, or I shall set the time tortoise on you.”

  “Of course not, my queen,” Lord Maledor lied smoothly. “Your beauty is as striking as your originality.”

  “Lord Maledor is wise, and he is also shrewd. If he does not flatter me, he knows I would let him be bitten by his very own time tortoise.”

  The Queen of Reflections watched with satisfaction as Lord Maledor’s face blanched. In all the known universe there was no torture more feared than the bite of the time tortoise. The bite was not poisonous – it simply slowed the time sense of the bitee to an infinitesimal rate of progression. Thus, while outwardly only half an hour had elapsed, the unfortunate prey felt that a thousand years had crept by. The victim felt no pain, just the frozen tedium of being in the same pose for a millennium.

  The threat of the terrible time tortoise was so effective that not a single drone, lackey, or ‘fixed’ bee had yet been bitten, which was rather a shame – the socially malaised creature was beginning to look forlorn, as having no one to bite inevitably left him feeling rather redundant.

  Having extracted an affirmation of loyalty from Lord Maledor, she dismissed him. The fellow was becoming a little tedious, hairy-lipped, and full of delusions of power. Playing chess with Hitler! And who was this Hitler? – a sometime dictator of a handful of Terranean countries for a decade or so. She had been ruler of all Simulacra for over four hundred years. During this time she had defeated fifty coups, quelled one hundred rebellions, put down five hundred riots, and crucified 43,000 scarfies. However, things had become rather quie
t since the time tortoise had come onto the scene. It seemed that the universe’s most feared creature was a little too effective at controlling her subjects.

  Though ruling by fear, the Queen of Reflections also wanted to rule by love – as do all dictators. While playing at being a jealous god, their tantrums are more extreme than those of any deity. And what finer form of love than emulation? In the Palace of Images, her own visage ruled supreme. Among her subjects, eighty percent of the women had their hair styled in golden ringlets like hers. But while her subjects’ hair fell to the shoulders only she, the Queen of Reflections, was allowed to have them to her waist. An eighty-percent emulation rate was the cut-off point – the remaining twenty percent must, by royal decree, be either brunette or redheads. Wasn’t that a Law of the Universe, as Astroburger had once told her? Red giants, white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, average yellows, hot little blue buggers… and why not, she had asked, orange, green, or even grey stars?

  “Grey stars, madam?”

  “Do I have to repeat myself?”

  “A repetition, madam, is surely not out of character for the Queen of Reflections?” Astroburger smirked.

  “Kindly apologise or I’ll have you stung.”

  “I apologise, Your Beeness.”

  “Go back to your heavenly bodies, Astroburger,” ordered the Queen, “We shall converse with Hedrone and attend the Celestial Union of Hive.”

  “Yes, Your Beeness.”

  She looked up as Hedrone entered the room and made his way cautiously towards the throne.

  “Your Honnnneynessss,” buzzed Hedrone. “The dronessss are getting lazeee and the workersss are shirkinnng. What they need isss more dissscipline. They need their winggsss clippeddd.”

  “And what are you paying them?” asked the empress.

  “As little as possssible, Your Beeeeenesss.”

  “That is far too much. Pay them less.”

  “I beg Beeeness’sss pardon, I cannnn’t do thatttt.”

  “Why not, you miserable insect?”

  “Because the workerrsss have formed a unionnnn.”