by Eoin Colfer
‘Ah. Your people.’
Arthur managed a spurt of indignance. ‘Not my people. That bunch killed all of my people.’
‘Well, not all of them.’
‘Nearly all. Three of us, that’s all that are left.’
‘Soon will be.’
‘Soon? What do you mean soon?’
‘Well, I had a little rummage in their computer. Apparently the Vogons are off to the Dark Nebula of Soulianis and Rahm to hunt down a colony of Earthlings.’
‘What? Earthlings? What the hell is a dark nebula? Shouldn’t you play ominous music when you say things like that? Can their computer give you any details?’
On the ceiling/screen the whirring blue circles suddenly froze, turned white and disappeared, along with the Vogon ship.
‘Too late,’ said Fenchurch. ‘Even my instruments cannot hack through hyperspace.’
Arthur tumbled from his bed, absently jamming the school cap on to his head.
‘We must warn them, surely? Should we warn them? Should we to go to this dark nebula place? Bom-bom-bohhhhm.’
‘Don’t you miss your beach, Arthur?’
And from Arthur’s mind the computer plucked a memory of his beach hut and plastered it on the ceiling.
‘I miss it terribly. Every day was the same. No exploding planets or people screaming at me or aliens invading my personal space. Why do people always feel it necessary to stand nose to nose for a simple conversation? Plus, on my beach, I could stray as far as I wanted off the subject and nobody tried to drag me back on course.’
‘So why would you follow the Vogons? They never fail. Why give yourself the heartache?’
‘I need to go because a large part of me doesn’t want to go. What kind of Earthling would I be if I didn’t want to save my species?’
‘An alive one. Not blown to atoms by Vogon thermonuclear warheads. A little archaic, but they do the job.’
‘We have to turn round, or power up a drive. Push the go-faster button. Something.’
‘Calm yourself, Arthur Dent. Wowbagger goes where his schedule takes him.’
‘He was going to Earth, wasn’t he? To insult Earthlings?’
‘True.’
‘Well, then. The last Earthling colony appears to somehow be in this dark nebula. Couldn’t Wowbagger insult the Earthlings there?’
‘It’s feasible. You state your case well, Arthur Dent.’
Guide Note: Throughout recorded history the ability to ‘state one’s case well’ has generally had about as much success as ‘talking things out reasonably’ or ‘putting aside our differences’. The people who use these tactics generally mean well and would make excellent motivational speakers or kindergarten teachers, but on no account should they be put in charge of situations where lives are at stake. Malapropos comments such as ‘I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye…’ tend to send negotiations spiralling towards disaster, especially if the other species’ representative suffers from globular organ envy or thinks you are being a patronizing git. Successful negotiations are invariably conducted from a position of power, or at least the perception of power. Strolling into a meeting wearing a comfortable robe and smelling of incense with a sincere desire to iron out difficulties is, perversely, a surefire way to get everyone killed. General Anyar Tsista, the acknowledged prince of negotiators, once claimed that while on the job he never used a sentence that did not include at least one zark, two shits and half a dozen asscracks. His final pronouncement contained only a single shit, and was uttered in the form of an authoritative command to his bowels, which had locked up as a result of too many hours seated around the negotiation tables. Unfortunately, because of their thin bowel walls, Golgafrinchans are prone to catastrophic bowel ruptures, so General Anyar Tsista’s final utterance was also what killed him.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Arthur. ‘I do state my case well. I ought to state it to Wowbagger immediately.’
‘Perhaps not so articulately,’ suggested Fenchurch’s image. ‘May I propose a zark and perhaps a couple of pormwranglers?’
Wowbagger sat in his favourite vibro-chair on the bridge, trying not to talk about himself. Outside the corona of the ship’s force field the destruction of the Earth had pulverized the moon, resulting in an elliptical dust ring that was heading for Venus.
‘Look, Trillian Astra. Another planet is about to die. Ask me about that, or something else. I have seen many wonders.’
Trillian was not in the mood to be distracted. An in-depth profile of Wowbagger would have Sub-Etha editors drooling into their non-fat lo-cal lacto-laxo sim-coffees.
‘The people want to know about you. Who is this green alien who travels the Universe insulting everyone in alphabetical order?’
‘Ah, you see, that’s not the way I do it any more. The whole alphabetical order thing was amusing for a while but then I became a slave to it. People were expecting my insults and began returning the favour.’
Random looked up from a page on which she was drawing a series of savage-looking flaybooz.
‘Saying stuff like: “You’re a pathetic loser”?’
‘To paraphrase, yes.’
‘Or: “I didn’t know lizards wore suits”?’
‘Once or twice. I’m trying to talk to your mother…’
‘Or: “Is that smell considered pleasant where you come from?” ’
Trillian wrapped her daughter in an embrace that looked suspiciously like a headlock.
‘I’m not leaving you, darling. Never again. So there’s no need for all this hostility.’
‘I wish you would leave,’ said Random, scowling. ‘Without you around I turned out pretty well.’
Trillian disguised gritted teeth as a loving smile and turned back to her interview. ‘So, you have abandoned your alphabetical trademark?’
‘Yes,’ said Wowbagger. ‘I do planets now. It’s much simpler and I don’t need to listen to every insult-slinger in town trying to take me on. I simply pull into orbit and drop a data bomb into the atmosphere. Everyone gets an email and a sound file. Believe me, if you press that play button then you are left in no doubt as to how I feel about sentient beings.’
‘And how do you feel about them?’
‘They’re mortal. I despise them.’
‘So underneath all this aloofness is a simple maledicent?’
‘What? You think I enjoy using foul language?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Well, yes. Immensely. But it’s not just that…’
And then Wowbagger told Trillian something that he had never told anyone. Perhaps it was the almost hypnotic tone of her slightly husky voice; perhaps it was time to tell someone.
‘I want them to kill me. I want them to try.’
Oh God, thought Trillian. Recorder chip, don’t fail me now.
She glanced down at her wristwatch and was relieved to see the audio readout flickering.
‘That’s quite a statement.’
‘I s-suppose it is,’ said the green space traveller.
Guide Note: This was Wowbagger’s first stutter since visiting the Castor system where the swearword g-g-grunntivartads increases in potency with each added ‘g’.
‘I am amazed to hear myself saying that.’
‘As am I, Mr Wowbagger.’
‘I think it’s time you called me Bowerick.’
‘Bowerick?’
‘My first name. My father had a sense of humour. Bow Wowbagger?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Trillian, suddenly caring a little less about her recorder.
The Universe cannot suffer tender moments like this to last for very long and there were contenders for the honour of trampling roughshod over this one. First was Random Dent, who was taking a moment to compose a disgusted disparagement before she stalked from the bridge for the second time. But the winner was her father, Arthur Dent, whose comedic arrival nicely counterbalanced the saccharine nature of the moment, thus restoring order to the Universe.
�
�Right, you zarkers!’ said Arthur, rushing on to the bridge. ‘We need to turn this turd bucket around and get our pormwrangling tails to the Dark Nebula of Soulianis and Rahm.’
‘Bom-bom-bohhhhm!’ trumpeted the computer, just trying to help.
And then, for one final cosmic laugh:
‘Was that a bit harsh? Sorry, everyone. What is a pormwrangler, anyway?’
6
The Planet Nano
Far out in the fringes of the Dark Nebula of Soulianis and Rahm there is a small planetoid that hangs on one of the nebula’s curling tendrils like a Christmas tree decoration. This dwarf planet, catalogue number MPB-1001001, ignores the universal law of gravitation to maintain a spinning position 150 million kilometres from the surface of Rahm. At these particular coordinates, the nebula’s clouds of interstellar dust, hydrogen and plasma have been parted by gas streams and magnetic fields to reveal an oasis of clear space devoid of debris and bathed in a nourishing solar wind.
The tiny planet, Nano, succeeds in defying the pull of its star chiefly because of its huge mass, composed mainly of super-dense matter excreted from white holes, but also because of the revolving dynamic core powering over five thousand servo-mechanical thrusters. This discrete positioning ensures consistently temperate weather conditions and encourages life to flourish in its fertile vastitas, azure oceans and abundant number of fjords… an abundance that is unusual in a planet which had never known an ice age.
Nano’s geography is a cartographer’s dream: a single pangaeaic continent spread along the equator, surrounded by unpolluted seas which are brimming with fish literally waiting to be caught.
Guide Note: In this case the word ‘literally’ is not simply a misrepresentation of the word ‘figuratively’. The Ameglian Major Steelback fish are reared with stories of paradise at the other end of the line and hang around fjords just waiting to be saved. The inaccuracies of these stories would be obvious to most the moment they were dragged from their natural habitat by a hook and tossed whole into a sizzling pan, but such is the faith of the Steelbacks that they simply flap their way through the Twelve Psalms of Deliverance and wait for their promised golden ball of plankton to appear.
The registered name of this continent is Innisfree, after the lake isle in Sligo, Ireland, on the recently vaporized planet Earth, where the movie The Quiet Man was set. The larger of two towns on the continent is called Cong, after the village where The Quiet Man was actually shot. These names have been selected by Nano’s registration officer, a certain Mr Hillman Hunter.
Hillman Hunter is not a particularly religious man, but he does have faith in the traditional order of things, when the traditional order is stacked in favour of the entrepreneur. Hillman Hunter believes in money, and it is very difficult to make money in times of anarchy. How is a fellow to put a few bob together when the little men do not respect their betters and there’s no Big Man to tell everyone how to behave? Men need some god or other to show them their place in the world and ideally that place would be far below Hillman Hunter’s.
Guide Note: The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gurner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles were heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat the gluttonized bipedal frogget followed by the almighty Lily Pad. The frogget community celebrated their freedom from the yoke of religion with an all-night rave party and hallucinogenic dock leaves. Unfortunately they celebrated a little loudly and were massacred by a gurner pike who, for some reason, hadn’t noticed this little pond before.
Hillman Hunter has come to believe that this new world should have a god to issue commandments, smite sinners and declare which forms of conjugality are pleasing in his eyes and which forms are just wrong and gross. Because Nano has been undeniably made by the planet-building Magratheans and not God, it does not have a deity to rule over it, which is causing some debate in the community. The natural order is falling apart and all sorts of people are beginning to consider themselves equal to those who obviously are equal, which is not what religion is about at all. Hillman has decided that a presiding god is needed to restore the pecking order, so on this particular Thursday, in a small conference room beside the town’s municipal building, he was holding interviews for the position.
The Town of Cong, Innisfree, Nano
A huge anthropoid was seated uncomfortably in the interview room’s office chair, its grotesque, scaled torso squirming in the confines of the small seat. Tentacles dripped from its chin like fleeing slugs and hard black eyes glittered from the depths of a pulpy face.
Hillman Hunter shuffled the pages of the creature’s résumé.
‘So, Mr Cthulhu, is it?’
‘Hmmm,’ said the creature.
‘Good,’ said Hillman. ‘A bit of the ineffable, I like that in a deity.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Still, it wouldn’t be much of an in-depth interview if we couldn’t get a few facts out of you, eh, Mr Cthulhu?’
Cthulhu shrugged and dreamed of days of wanton genocide.
‘Anyway, let’s get the show on the road,’ continued Hillman brightly. ‘Or as my Nano used to say, let’s get the steamers on the shovel, which was a reference to cleaning cow doings off the driveway after the herd had been driven through. That’s how I started, Mr Cthulhu, selling dried cow biscuits for people to burn on their fires. And look at me now, bejaysus, I’m running a planet.’
Hillman laughed suddenly with a noise like a rusty machine being fired.
‘Sorry, Mr Cthulhu. I smoked like a train back in the old country and I haven’t had a minute to check in for the new lungs. Being in charge of this crowd of bloody eejits is running me ragged.’ He danced his fingers down the pages of Cthulhu’s résumé. ‘Let me see. What do we have here? What calibre of a deity am I dealing with? Ah… I see here you were in people’s minds a lot a century ago thanks to Love-craft. Not much since then?’
Cthulhu spoke in a voice of meat and metal. ‘Well, you know. Science and all that. Put a bit of a kibosh on the god business.’ Clear gel dripped from his tentacles as he spoke. ‘I kicked around Asia Minor for a while, trying to drum up a little fear. But people have penicillin now, even poor people have reading material. What do they want gods for?’
Hillman nodded along, with Cthulhu all the way. ‘You are so right, sir. So right. People think they are too good for gods. Too smart. But not here on Nano. We are the last outpost of Earth and we will not be destroyed because we have driven away our protector.’ By the time he had finished his little speech, Hillman’s chubby cheeks glowed a proud red. ‘Next question. Our last god was a less is more kinda guy. Sent his son down, but didn’t show up too often himself. I think, and no disrespect to the man himself, that was probably a mistake. I honestly believe that he would put his hand up to that himself now if we could ask him. What I’m asking you, Mr Cthulhu, is: are you going to be a hands-on god or an absentee landlord?’
Cthulhu was ready for that one; he had been practising his answer for that very question with Hastur the Unspeakable only the previous night.
‘Oh, hands-on, absolutely,’ he said, leaning forward to make clear eye contact as Hastur had advised. ‘The days of blind faith are over. People need to know who is blighting their crops or demanding virgin sacrifice. And now I am going to look away, but only because prolonged eye contact will drive you insane.’
Hillman shook the sudden torpor from his head. ‘Good. Good. Quite a stare you have there, Mr Cthulhu. Handy weapon to have in the arsenal.’
Cthulhu accepted the compliment with a flap of one prodigious tentacle.
‘Let’s move on, shall we? Where do you
stand on the whole Babel fish argument? Proof denies faith and so forth.’
‘My subjects will have proof and faith,’ rasped Cthulhu agitatedly. ‘I will bind them to slavery and trample the weak underfoot.’
‘I seem to have hit a nerve there,’ chuckled Hillman. ‘Again, I think you’re on the right track – maybe you might want to pull back a little on the slavery and the trampling. We have quite a lot of weak people here but they are big supporters of the church, whatever church we eventually pledge to. Money builds temples, or – as my Nano used to say – many mickles make a muckle.’
‘Mickles?’ said Cthulhu, confused, and it is not easy to confuse a Great Old One.
Hillman scratched his chin. ‘I never knew what a muckle was, or a mickle, for that matter. But it takes many of one to make the other, if you see what I mean.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Cthulhu.
‘So. An old standard next. Presuming your application is successful, where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’
Cthulhu brightened. Thank you, Hastur, he beamed into space.
‘In five years I will have razed this planet, eaten its young and stacked your skulls high in my honour.’ He sat back, satisfied. Succinct and informative, a textbook answer.
A spluttering cough blurted from Hillman’s lips. ‘Skull stacking! Come on, Mr Cthulhu. Really? Do you think that’s what gods do today? These are interstellar times we’ve got here. Space travel, time travel. What we need on Nano is what I like to call an Old Testament god. Strict, sure. Vengeful, fantastic. But indiscriminate eating of young? Those days are gone.’
‘Shows what you know,’ muttered Cthulhu, crossing his legs.
Hillman tapped the résumé. ‘I have something highlighted here. Under current status it reads: “dead but dreaming”. Could you elaborate on that? Are you dead, sir?’
‘It could be said that I’m dead,’ admitted the oozing anthropoid.
‘You don’t seem dead.’
‘Ah, yes, but this tiny form is not me.’ Cthulhu poked his body as if he were not familiar with its workings. ‘This is my dream of me made substantial by dark and terrible forces. I wear this form until my true self is called back to service. My true self is quite a bit bigger.’