by Adam Roberts
‘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.’
‘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.
‘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.’
‘There’s been a misunderstanding . . .’ said the Dr, stepping forward. A soldier’s bayonet jabbed at his stomach, and he danced back again.
‘Against the wall over there, if you please,’ shouted the captain. ‘The Leader is coming!’
We lined up against the far wall obediently. One of the iron doors opened with a clang. Or perhaps I mean clank. The air of expectation in the room was enormous. Enormous air. Expectationish.
A strange figure, seated in a motorised wheelchair, rolled through.
‘Stavros!’ said the Dr. ‘The real original Stavros - in the flesh!’
And what flesh it was. This Stavros, wheeling now into the centre of the room, appeared to have been most hideously disfigured. Hair sprouted in hectic profusion from his head, from his nose and his ears. His cheeks and chin had been scraped clean of hair, but still bore witness to their essential hirsuteness with a prodigious spread of fat black dots. There was more hair in one of his eyebrows than on my entire head. His upper lip bore a moustache of such dense hirsuteness that, had it been detached from its facial location and nailed along the base of a door, would have functioned as an extremely effective draught excluder.
It’s said that kissing a man without a moustache is like ‘eating a hard-boiled egg without salt’. Not that I’ve ever understood that saying, to be honest. Nor indeed have I kissed any men, with or without moustaches. Unless you count kissing one’s own reflection in the bathroom mirror for, you know. Practice. But, anyway, if we stick with that analogy, the egg-without-salt metaphor, then kissing Stavros would be like eating a hard-boiled egg whilst also consuming the annual production of the entire Siberian salt-mining industry.
On second thoughts, that’s probably an over-elaborate way of explaining that his moustache was extremely hairy.
But the most startling thing about Stavros was his skin: dark brown, leathery, wrinkled, it looked as if he had been baked in an oven for weeks. Like a conker.
Stavros wheeled himself into a central position in the middle of the room. Then he surveyed the small group gathered about him, placed a cigarette between his lips, lit it, inhaled deeply, and then he spoke: ‘hello ever-a-body peeps
.’
‘Hail Stavros!’ cried his followers in unison. ‘Hello!’
‘Is good,’ said Stavros, stubbing out his quarter-smoked cigarette on the panel in front of him and immediately lighting another one. He nodded in our direction, his mighty moustache wobbling. ‘Ooziss?’
‘Prisoners,’ repeated one of his followers. ‘Prisoners, oh Greatest of Greeks. This one claims to be a Doctor.’
‘My cousin Avraam, he’s a Doctor,’ said Stavros. ‘Innit.’
‘I’m not that sort of Doctor,’ said the Dr, stiffly.
‘Oh, oh-oh-oh, Time Gennleman, izzit?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Ah! Enemy alien. They are opposing every-a-thing I stand for, peeps, these time gennlemen. They wanna maintain all the linear order of history and such, and I wanna mash every-a-thin into a big stew.’ He licked his lips, stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one.
‘I pooh-pooh you and your stew!’ defianted the Dr. Stavros looked at him impassively, as if this taunt meant nothing, and as if the word ‘defiant’ couldn’t be used as a verb in that matter.
‘And woziss?’ he said, wheeling himself over to the alpine-horn-shaped TARDY.
‘Leader!’ barked the captain. ‘This is the alien’s time-travel device! It has disguised itself as some kind of police communicator, but there’s no doubt as to its identity.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Stavros, ‘innit. Lucky day. You and you, carry this thing downstairs to my kitchen, er, lab. I am gonna wanna examine this in more detail. Find out how it works, take it apart and put it back together innit. Then I can build my own time-a-travel machine, and send the my evil cyborgs through the complete range of time and space.’
The TARDY was on a wheeled platform of some kind, and Stavros’ soldiers set about pushing it through a door and away.’
‘Hmm,’ said the Dr, watching his TARDY - our only hope of escape, and the key to Stavros’s domination of the galaxy - being hauled out of sight. ‘That’s probably not, on balance, a positive development. Stavros has always hated the Time Gentlemen, and sought to undo everything that we have achieved. And now we have, inadvertently, given him the technological power to do just that.’
‘Oops,’ I said.
‘Surely he can’t be that bad,’ said Linn. ‘I mean, looking around us, this is all pretty rudimentary . . . technologically speaking.’
‘You need to understand the full story of Skaryan history,’ said the Dr, sorrowfully. ‘Once upon a time it was a planet very like Earth. Blue skies, green fields, worldwide satellite television coverage. Stavros Pastapopolos was a celebrity on this world - a celebrity chef on Skaryan television. Then this world was ravaged by global war, and in the aftermath two things mattered more than anything else: firstly control of the food resources, and secondly control of the mass media. Food for the body, and food for the brain. A power-elite seized power: nobody could oppose them because they combined a tight control over food distribution with a propaganda stranglehold over all TV channels. The Celebrity Chefs! Les Chefs du Monde!’
‘That’s not anything,’ said Linn, confidently, ‘that could ever happen on my home world.’
‘Power was seized by a cabal of a dozen Celebrity Chefs,’ said the Dr, picking up the narrative. ‘And they ruled the world with an iron skillet. They brought misery to millions. Eventually the populace rose up and overthrew them . . . they were all thrown into a giant copper braising pot and braised to kingdom come.’
‘Is that how his skin came to be so disfigured? Is that the result of . . . braising?’ I asked.
‘Actually, the reverse is true,’ said the Dr. ‘His skin was so leathery and tough that the braising had little effect upon him. He acquired his marmite-hued dermis as a result of severe ultraviolet burning, a function of the time Stavros had spent under the fierce sun of his native land, far to the south of here. It evidently enabled him to survive the copper pot, and finally to escape, to organise Kababian resistance to the Dhaliesque counter-revolution. But he has carried his seething resentment with him . . .’
‘You must-a-not seethe resentment, innit,’ broke in Stavros. ‘You gonna kill all its flavour. Resentment gotta marinade, OK? I marinaded my resentment for many many years, and I’s ready now to pay the cosmos back. Bring in the first of my Garleks, innit!’
A second iron door clonked open, and a machine glided through. Glid through. Glidened. Came gliding through. The first Garlek I saw with my own eyes.
It was based, obviously, upon the garlic; but was robotized and metallic and terrifying beyond all imagining.
Picture if you will a whole head of garlic: the fat, slightly cardboardy stalk about which are clustered, in a pear-shaped lump, dozens of bulging cloves. Imagine such a structure reproduced eight-feet-tall in metal and plastic; the stalk bent over at the top to provide some form of telescopic sight. Now imagine this creation rolling effortlessly across the floor, swivelling what looked like the barrel of a gun from its midriff, and above all exuding a pungent, unmissable, choking, gagging stench . . .
I coughed. Linn coughed. But Stavros seemed delighted with the reek of his creation.
‘Stop!’ he commanded, and the robot stopped. ‘Ready to bring a little spice to the universe, innit,’ he declared to the whole room.
‘Spice? Genospice more like,’ exclaimed the Dr.
‘No,’ said Linn. ‘No, I don’t get that one at all.’
‘Genocide,’ said the Dr, in a lower voice. ‘I meant.’
‘Same difference,’ said Stavros airily.
‘You’re a megalomaniac!’ cried the Dr.
‘Izza good Greek word,’ Stavros agreed, with some satisfaction. ‘Megalo, that’s meaning big, and Mania is a-meaning frenzy . I like it.’ He smiled broadly. Or I think he smiled. To be honest it was hard to see what was going on behind that moustache.
‘Hail Stavros!’ cried the soldiers.
‘As I was saying,’ Stavros said, wheeling his electric wheelchair in a little circle around the stationary robot. ‘Garlic, or Allium sativum, izza vegetable closely related to the onion.’ He pronounced the word with the emphasis on the final syllable. ‘It don’t grow in the wild, peeps, and was first cultivated in Greece. And not Turkey, as some blokes is arguing, that’s simply a lie. Izza Greek, innit.’
‘Yes Stavros!’ cried his followers.
‘And now it finds its ultimate form, ever-a-body peeps. Inside this robotic case is a genetically modified Kababster. I have used all my culinary and scientific genius, innit, to cross a living Kababster with a big old chunk of garlic.’
‘You crossed a person with a piece of garlic?’ Linn cried in horrified disbelief.
‘Exactly, innit. You might say he’s a half cove and a half clove.’ Stavros seemed to find this very funny, and laughed a cough-y sort of laugh as he lit another cigarette. Nobody else laughed. ‘Anyway, the Garlek is a new breed. Is got the intelligence of a man, and the ruthless bitterness of raw garlic. The universe will never be so bland again!’
‘Hail Stavros!’ cried the soldiers.
‘I gotta twenty thousand of these babies sitting in a big hangar, innit’ said Stavros. ‘And I am passing out the order, ever-a-body, that all military and police duties are now gonna be handled by them! They in charge now! Well, I’m in charge of them, but they in charge of ever-a-thing else!’
‘Hail Stavros,’ the soldiers repeated, a little less enthusiastically.
‘Don’t worry, peeps,’ said Stavros. ‘You’re not gonna be redundant, innit. The old Kababster army is gonna be absorbed into the greater Garlek peace-keeping forces. Sooner or later you all gonna get the treatment, get crossed with garlic and given your own cyborg unit to drive about.’
‘Hail Stavros,’ said the soldiers, weakly.
‘I gonna show you how it goes with these prisoners here. Is nothing to be afraid of, innit.’ He pressed a button on his control panel and the Garlek robot shuddered into life. ‘Garlek, can you hear me, innit?’
&nbs
p; The machine rasped a reply: ‘AFFIRMATIVE !’ Its metallic voice sounded like nails being dragged down a blackboard.
‘You see those prisoners over there?’
‘AFFIRMATIVE !’
‘What are you going to do, Stavros?’ demanded the Dr. ‘Kill us, in cold blood?’
‘Nah,’ said Stavros, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another. ‘My Garlek is gonna take you down to the lab, and I’m gonna turn you all into Garleks. Cross you with cloves, innit. Then you’ll work for me.’
‘Never!’ said the Dr, defiantly.
‘You won’t get no say in the matter, innit,’ snarled Stavros. ‘Garlek?’
‘AFFIRMATIVE!’
‘Take ’em wayaway.’
The cyborg rolled towards us, its gun-stalk quivering.
But the Dr did not seem discouraged. Indeed, he endeavoured to strike up a conversation with the creature.
‘I must say I admire the sheen of your bodywork,’ he said, chattily. ‘On that, er, metal skirt you’re wearing. These half-globes. How do you get them so polished-looking? ’
‘IT ’S LAMINATE! IT’S LAM-IN-ATE!’
‘Is it? I see. Very interesting. Although I wonder if it’s altogether manly to be, you know - wearing a skirt?’
‘A SKIRT MINE AINT!’ responded the cyborg in outraged mechanical tones.
‘I stand corrected. Clearly not a skirt. Evidently something much more masculine. Now, I can see the purpose of that eye-stalk, and of that laser-beam weapon thing you got there. But what’s the point of that whisk-like protuberance on the left? Is it for the stirring of eggs and suchlike?
‘AFFIRMATIVE!’
‘It’s certainly a large one,’ said the Dr, admiringly. ‘I’m sure you could stir three or even four eggs simultaneously with that protuberance.’
The Garlek shuddered, and screeched. ‘EGG-STIRRING—EIGHT! EGGS!-STIR!-RING!-EIGHT! ’
‘As many as eight at one go?’ asked the Dr. ‘Really? How interesting. I’m sure you have several most delicious recipes for eggs. Your creator, after all, is the famous Stavros Pastapopolos.’
The conversation seemed to dry up for a bit.