“Spawned of black holes and the devil’s darkest crevices, Voidlings are feared throughout the galaxy,” declared Astroburger rather grandly.
“Sounds like something to be a-Voided.”
“Ah ha ha, my queen. It certainly is,” said Astroburger juicily. “Just how do you suggest a-Voiding the Voidling?”
“Rhomboidise!” cried the inspired queen, making use of an exclamation mark – something that she did only in extreme emergencies.
She narrowed her eyes in concentration, mustering up a memory of remote spatial coordinates, and the intrepid pair vanished.
Juraletta knew that if she were to embark on a quest then she needed companions – a band of friends who could travel with her, sharing good times and bad. Unfortunately, she didn’t know very many people, though she was reasonably confident that teaming up with a dwarf and a giant (and possibly a talking hedge) was a grand idea. And they should be happy to join her, for she was a Qwertian, and Qwertians were surely well suited for quests, for wasn’t the name Qwerty part of the vocabulary, part of the very spelling of that most literate language which had always questioned its own quixoticity?
Soon, Juraletta and Gorgon were Outside.
“Haven’t seen you in these quarters of late,” said a patently dwarfish voice from behind a hedge.
“No,” agreed Juraletta, “I’ve been occupied.”
“She got married,” said the gorgon pointedly.
“And where is your lucky husband?” asked the dwarf, now stepping into plain sight.
“He combusted,” Juraletta confessed sadly. “Gorgie said it was my fault. I shouldn’t have got undressed in front of him.”
“I should think not,” said the dwarf stroking his tiny yet exceptionally bristly beard. “Young wives shouldn’t undress in front of their husbands, however much they might beg for it.”
“And why’s that?” asked Gorgon.
“Who’s your companion?” asked the dwarf, ignoring the snaky one’s question and examining Gorgon with distaste. “She is obviously a woman who knows her own mind.”
“This is Gorgon. My one and only friend.”
“Well, they do say that it’s good for a pretty girl to have ugly friends, as it makes them look even prettier in comparison.”
“Have a care, dwarf,” said Gorgon. “Or you may find yourself turned into a stone midget.”
“I’d prefer a stoned midget.”
“I warning you, shrimp, another word and I’ll –”
“Oh, it’s threats now, is it? We know how to deal with threats around here. Giant! Come here a mo. We have a threatening woman here who, if I’m any judge, needs a haircut. I can see a lot of split ends.”
“Those split ends, as you call them, are vipers’ heads,” said Gorgon. “And one tough look from me will turn you into obsidian.”
“Giant! We have visitors.”
“I hear,” rumbled the giant’s booming bass. “Hey, get a load of this dame! Is she a hot little number!” he asided to an embarrassed Juraletta, while gazing meaningfully at Gorgon.
“I certainly am not a hot little number,” said Gorgon coldly. “And you’ll be a telegraph pole of granite if you’re not careful.”
“Please stop quarrelling – we have a job to do,” said the princess.
“Job?” echoed the dwarf with withering scorn. “What job is that? We don’t tolerate members of the working class around here.”
“Essentially, we’re idle dandies,” proclaimed the giant proudly.
“We have a quest –” Juraletta began, but was interrupted by the giant.
“Say you – yes, you! – the slick chick with the radical hairstyle – what are you doing tonight, dreamboat?”
Gorgon maintained a disdainful silence of unusual duration.
“Sooo… Just what is the quest?” enquired the dwarf. “Despite my earlier wisecracks, I do have some experience of quests.”
“I’m looking for someone to help me maintain the Qwertian line of descent,” said Juraletta.
“A new husband, in short?”
“Well, not too short,” Juraletta muttered to herself, as the dwarf’s eyebrows waggled furiously.
“I overheard that your first husband exploded in mid-connubialising,” said the giant. “You must be a hot little thing.”
“It’s an important mission,” reproached Juraletta. “The entire Qwertian empire depends on it.”
“Your empire can’t be much bigger than the garden in which we stand,” said the dwarf.
“Why don’t we leave these two gentlemen to their devices,” said Gorgon acidly.
“What devices are they?” asked the dwarf indignantly. “You’ll find no devices around here. We endeavour to maintain a sustainable, device-free environment.”
“Anyone who tries it on with devices will have to deal with me,” said the giant in a menacing voice. “I once had a friend who got into devices, and before we knew it he was doing precious little else with his time. I won’t allow any of that nonsense around here. And after all, why play with devices when there are beautiful women like you around?”
The waggling eyebrows appeared to be contagious, for the giant’s brows leapt into suggestive action like small bushes angered by a Texan tornado. Provoked by insult, Gorgon glared at the giant who instantly hardened into cold grey stone.
“Now Gorgie,” rebuked Juraletta, “that’s going too far.”
Gorgon blinked hard and the giant became flesh again.
“That’s quite a trick,” said the dwarf admiringly. “Do you think you could teach me to do that?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Gorgon. “Apart from the vast intelligence and concentration required, you have to have the right hair. Just look at yours – not a snake in sight.”
“Fair enough,” said the dwarf. “Now, tell me of your quest.”
“We’re looking for the Galactic Sperm Bank.”
“Oh, one of those,” said the dwarf with a knowing nod. “That’s easy – there’s a branch in the Sargasso. Part of the Gardens of Fleschimor, I believe.”
“You know where it is, then?” asked Juraletta hopefully.
“Not so fast,” the dwarf said. “We haven’t discussed my fee. It costs plenty to find a Galactic Sperm Bank.”
“They don’t grow on trees,” said the giant, flexing his unstoned limbs.
“I can only offer you friendship,” said Juraletta. “And that is worth rather a lot. A fortune, in fact. Emotionally speaking.”
“What an unexpected gift!” exclaimed the dwarf. “What do you think, giant?”
“Throw in dreamboat here and she’s got a deal,” he growled.
“I have no intention of being his dreamboat,” said Gorgon, said in a voice as cold as frozen helium.
The giant shook his head. “No dreamboat, no quest.”
“Don’t be so mean,” said Juraletta, her face falling. “You can’t blackmail someone who’s going on a quest – it’s a noble venture.”
“And we are perfectly capable of launching a quest without your assistance,” said Gorgon. “Come Juraletta, let us –”
“But Gorgie – this odd pair could be useful,” Juraletta broke in.
“That settles it – we’re not going,” said the dwarf, affronted dignity written large over his diminutive form.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you odd,” said Juraletta. “I think we’re all getting a little overheated.”
“Speak for yourself,” said the giant, “I’m not about to combust – unlike your unfortunate husband.”
“Only because she hasn’t shed her ludicrously scanty clothing,” leered the dwarf.
“I am wearing a dress,” Juraletta said, “And it’s certainly not scanty – it goes all the way from halfway down my bosom to the top of my thighs.”
The dwarf nodded. “And if I’m any judge, you aren’t wearing a brassiere.”
“Her breasts stand up perfectly well without any such device,” said Gorgon proudly
.
“There you go on about devices again,” said the giant.
“For goodness sake,” said the dwarf. “If we’re going to go, then I think we should leave immediately.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” said Juraletta. “I, for one, am sick of this banter, and I’m awfully keen to get things underway. The future of my royal line is at stake.”
The dwarf beamed at her, and burst into song in a surprising high, piping voice.
“A-questing we will go,
Our resting is too slow
Some knowledge we will know –”
“We’re off to fight the foe,” the giant joined in his deep bass.
“What about me?” cried a leafy voice.
Juraletta turned to see who was thus addressing her. It was (needless to say) the hedge that imagined itself to be a unicorn.
“You have to be mobile,” said Juraletta.
“Not a problem,” said the hedge, uprooting itself and gambolling after them. And curiously, the more the hedge gambolled, the more it came to resemble the unicorn it had claimed to be.
“I believe we now have a first class quest team,” observed the dwarf. “We have a violet-skinned princess who is, by virtue of the inordinately rapid combustibility of her departed husband, both a virgin and a widow.”
(“How crudely you put it,” said Juraletta.)
“We have a mighty giant capable of snapping trees in half with his teeth.”
(“Steady on,” said the giant.)
“We have a snake-headed gorgon, as ugly as sin.”
(“Watch it, midget!”)
“We have a passable simulacrum of a unicorn.”
(“I’m the real thing!” snorted the unicorn, who was in the process of shaking loose the last few leaves that clung stubbornly to its fine, white tail.)
“And lastly myself, a dwarf of surpassing intelligence and a veteran of such tolerably implausible quests as the Quest for an Imaginary Lion, the Quest for a Talking Turnip who Knows the Answer to the Riddle of Existence, and many, many more.”
And so the quest team, more verbosely than most, got underway.
Lord Maledor was excited – he was to have a private session with the Octopus, and this was, to put it mildly, a stunning privilege. Goodness and beauty smelt like roses, a banal bloom that filled Maledor with nausea. Evil smelt juicy. Stench was perfume.
Lord Maledor was a being to whom beauty meant nothing. Beauty was vapid, tiresome, symmetrically insipid and pulseless. Irrelevant, ridiculous, superfluous, and full of its own importance. Beauty was flanked in the dictionary by beauté du diable and beaux arts, words with no purchase on the Skorpean psyche and with meanings so obscure as to be meaningless as Monsieur Derrida tells us in the cold porridge of his neo-theological hokum. When Maledor contemplated the hollow horror of beauty he realised it was a chamber pot brimming with warm ordure, a monsoon bucket topped up with entrails, cold ash, and the dead theories of the destructive deconstructions. Beauty was the under-armpit of a papal courtesan after she had crawled for her chestnuts and been swived by a randy pope in order to get her indulged indulgence. Beauty was the evanescent quality left at the doorstop of arranged marriage. Beauty was the alternative curse that launched a million advertising campaigns and marooned a thousand rotting barges in Nilotic mud. Beauty was as dull as the forms that needed to be filled out to buy an asteroid.
Ugliness and deformity aroused Lord Maledor’s jaded spirit, and the Octopus, who lived in a vat of oil that reeked of decaying blubber and gave off the sound of decadent slither, was said to be the ugliest being in the galaxy. Its ugliness left the banality of beauty in its wake, like a child born with the stump of a tail who would one day learn the trick of standing upright and writing sonnets about the cheerful immensity of the ocean after a dawn as cold as a sharpened axehead. Who could doubt it? Unfortunately, the Octopus was surrounded by a horde of banally beautiful Jezebels who catered to its every whim, of which there were an abundance. For a hideously ugly entity should have whim-caterers – even though, by Lord Maledor’s standards, a power that was so coarsely expressed was, well… barbaric. Still, there was a crude excitement in barbarism, though of course Lord Maledor himself had never been barbaric. He was a plumed aristocrat of evil. Even his masked ravishing of Queen Beia had been accomplished with aristocratic panache.
Proudly crouched by the foyer of the Sargasso pond, he waited patiently. A seven-foot-tall Jezebel parted blood-red lips to inform him that the Octopus would see him presently. Imagine he, Lord Maledor, the greatest evil mind in the galaxy, being kept waiting by a seven-foot chit of a naked Jezebel! He reminded himself that the nude sexpot was only doing her job.
To help pass time, he imagined what deliciously horrible things the Octopus might require of him. Possibly he might have to lick the fabled mollusc’s armpits – a daunting task which had (according to Fleschimorean rumour) defeated some of the most determined sensualists in the galaxy. Lord Maledor felt more than equal to the challenge.
Conversely, there were the lewd delights the Octopus might bestow upon him. Possibly its longest tentacle would…
… take totally obscene liberties, thought Rhameo. He had been stripped naked and dog-collared to a wall through which he could hear the slithering of the well-lubricated Octopus. Rhameo closed his eyes and tried not to imagine what alien voluptuousness might be inflicted upon or demanded of him; yet beneath his eyelids his mind spawned hideous visions of a sensual Gehenna.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw a couple standing in the centre of the dungeon looking as startled as himself.
“Are you fleeing the Voidling as well?” asked Queen Beia.
“No – I am wondering what will become of me when I am brought before the Octopus,” Rhameo replied.
“Who is the Octopus?” asked Queen Beia. “Has he come to give obeisance to me?”
“I doubt it,” Astroburger snorted. “I gather it is a sexually depraved mollusc.”
“Excellent,” said Queen Beia. “I admire beings that are my equal in the heroic field of sexual decadence.”
Two Jezebels rushed in and seized them bodily. After a brief struggle in which Queen Beia and Astroburger put up a terrific resistance, one of the Jezebels knocked out Astroburger by swinging her breast against his temple, while Queen Beia was rendered unconscious when the other sinewy giantess crushed her between milky-white thighs. The pair had been trained too well in the ancient arts of jezebjitsu, and the new arrivals never stood a chance.
When they came to, Astroburger and Queen Beia were also dog-collared to the wall, and naked.
“There’s only one thing to do when chained to a wall and left naked and helpless,” said Astroburger, “and that is to play I Spy. I’ll go first. I spy with my little eye –”
“ – something beginning with o,” concluded Rhameo.
“Unfortunately, I think the answer will be ‘Octopus’,” said Queen Beia, shuddering. She made a mental note that, if she survived and managed to return to Simulacra with her drones, Astroburger would be suitably punished for getting her into this mess.
“Are you sure this is the way?” Juraletta asked the dwarf.
They were making their way cautiously through a forest made of luminously coloured liquid crystal. The exquisite splendour of the myriad shapes mocked the seriousness and urgency of their enterprise, hindering their progress by the sparkle of cold, relentless beauty. They had walked east from Venera Castle, in what the dwarf assured them was the direction of the spaceport. After four hours, there was no sign of it, and multiple suns were sinking low in the sky.
“Didn’t I tell you I was experienced in spiritual steeplechases?” answered the dwarf. “That I am a veteran quester? Our lingering in the Crystalline Forest may appear to be an unwarranted deviation, but have you sampled the crystal? Those with an opalescent tinge are positively divine. Let me wax philosophical for a moment –”
“Only for a moment,” said Juraletta. “I’m not overly partial
to philosophic dwarfs.”
“Then to continue – often the sorties made en route to a quest’s end turn out to be more significant than the goal itself. From your expression I see that you think that sounds like heresy, yes? Tarry a moment with this thought. We must pounce with elan upon every adventure that chances our way, otherwise, despite all our erstwhile pilgrimages, we learn nothing.”
“Doesn’t some troll-like character appear at a bridge and bombard us with tiresomely perplexing riddles?” asked the giant.
“Surely our lives are riddled enough,” said Gorgon.
“There’s only one sure way to achieve a successful quest,” said the now fully fledged unicorn, “and that is to act nobly at all times. Having a lovely white tail to lash when under moral pressure is an advantage,” he added, whinnying modestly.
“Enough of this crystalline debauchery,” said Gorgon. “Dwarf – let us begone in search of the Galactic Sperm Bank. The future of Qwerty depends on it!”
“Qwerty, Qwerty, Qwerty,” said the dwarf, shaking his head to and fro so quickly that Juraletta thought it might break off and soar into the sky like some musical skyray. “That’s all I ever hear!”
“For God’s sake,” cried Juraletta, “can we please stop arguing – this isn’t getting us one jot closer to a Galactic Sperm Bank.”
Everyone looked crestfallen.
Eventually the dwarf, upon whom silence did not rest easily for long, remarked, “If you think you can do any better, you lead this expedition. The fact is, all quests go through stages – and the Crystalline Forest is one of them. And so is this rather wordy phase which I have not been alone in indulging in.”
“The phase being referred to,” said Juraletta icily, “is, I presume, your self-conscious discussion of the very postulates that made this journey feasible.”
Gorgon’s snakes all began hissing at once. “Would you all shut up! If we don’t get a-questing this instant I shall turn every living thing within my sight to stone.”
“I’ll thank you not to be so threatening, Gorgie,” said Juraletta. “After all, the best things in life are –”
Tropic of Skorpeo Page 13