by Eoin Colfer
‘Sorry to harp on about this, but you are dead?’
‘For the moment. Yes. I would have to say yes.’
‘But gods cannot die. That’s the whole point.’
Cthulhu wished Hastur could be with him. Hastur was always quick with the comebacks.
‘Well… That’s true. But I suppose, technically – and I stress that technically – I am not actually a god. I am a Great Old One. A demi-god, you might say.’
Hillman closed the file. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’
‘It’s more or less the same thing,’ persisted Cthulhu. ‘I do all the same things: apparitions, impregnating, you name it. I have cards for the lounges in Asgard and Olympus. Gold cards.’
‘These things are all well and good, but…’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Cthulhu disgustedly, gel splattering the desk. ‘You people are all the same. Never give the little guy a chance.’
‘It’s not that, sir. I have nothing against your kind, but the advertisement did specifically say grade-A god. I’m sure you can do lots of things, but we’re looking for someone with a bit of substance. Someone who’s in it for the long haul. Certainly not someone who can die.’
Cthulhu rose from his chair in a furious rage. ‘I will crack open your skull,’ he thundered. ‘I will visit pestilence on your land.’ But he was not needed and was already fading. ‘I will tear your head from your torso and drink your…’
And then he was gone, leaving nothing behind but the smell of a harbour at low tide.
Drink my what? wondered Hillman Hunter, scribbling the words NO CALLBACK in highlighter on the cover of Cthulhu’s résumé.
Blood probably. Unless it was my cerebrospinal fluid.
He leaned back in his chair and turned on the back massager. Hillman was a positive kind of guy, always willing to look on the bright side, but this hunt for a god was getting depressing. Not one of the interviewees had met his standards. Excello, the robot god. Vladirski, the vampire lord. Hecate had a few useful skills, but she was female. Goddess of Nano? Not bloody likely.
And as if the god-hunt wasn’t trouble enough, he had to deal with all the strife from the other colony. Killing people over cheese, did you ever hear anything more ludicrous? A bit of Cheddar was lovely on some crusty bread, but hardly worth dying for. And there was the problem of the staff, who were deserting the town in droves. Some days Hillman Hunter felt like just staying in bed.
‘All you need is a nice cup of tea and a few biscuits!’ Hillman said in a squeaky impersonation of his grandmother, a voice he often used to motivate himself. ‘Then you’ll be grand.’
Even the thought of tea made him feel better. What was an Irishman without tea?
‘Get up off your backside, Hillers,’ he said in Nano’s tones. ‘Those people need you.’
It was true. The colonists did need him, especially after the kidnapping of Jean Claude. What Nano needed was a real live god to thunderbolt a bit of discipline into its residents. But how did you attract a grade-A god to the unfashionable fringe of the Western Spiral Arm of the Dark Nebula of Soulianis and Rahm? It would take one hell of a benefits package, that was for certain.
Hillman took a note of Cthulhu’s Sub-Etha address, just in case.
Guide Note: The gods came into existence a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, which basically means that they did not create the Universe; rather, the Universe created them. This is a sore subject in the halls of the holy and is totally off-limits around the dinner table. If a journalist has the temerity to broach the topic he could find himself punished in a strange and imaginative way. Most of the gods have been alive for so long that they have assembled entire libraries devoted to the topic of strange and unusual punishments. As recently as ten thousand years ago there were seminars on Olympus devoted to the subject. These seminars were discontinued as an increasing number of the minor deities were treating the gathering as an excuse to drink and fornicate, which resulted in a glut of new hybrid godlings who had no mythology to go home to. While the seminar ran, it handed out a yearly award in the shape of a Spiked Puffer Fish in honour of Loki’s famous stroke of turning a sex addict into a puffer fish who would poison anything he tried to embrace. Among the more memorable Puffies awarded was the one given to Heimdall who, in a fit of pique, turned a gang of builders who were overcharging him into the wall that they had refused to complete. Another one went to Dionysus for his punishment of Sir Smoog Nowtall, the Blagulon Kappan actor, who performed the one-man show Playing to the Gods, which was slightly critical of its subject matter. Dionysus, whose area was theatre, was a liberal fellow and would have let the play run had it not been for a scene where he himself was depicted as a flatulent, bingeing fool. So enraged was Dionysus by the scene and the positive notes it garnered that he condemned Nowtall to an eternity of being the rear end in a pantomime donkey suit where the bum cheeks before him were the heads of his two fiercest critics, forever reciting their most scathing reviews. Classic.
Gods had a great time of it for millions of years, swanning across the sky in their chariots, showing up in different places at the same time, being all-wise and stuff, but then science developed to the point where it could duplicate many of their tricks. Blighting a crop was no longer as big a deal as it used to be. There were virgin births all the time; in fact, many societies preferred virgin births, as they cut out the need for in-laws, and parents didn’t have to imagine their children doing anything nasty with strangers. The last straw for godkind came when Fenrir, the giant son of Loki, tried to impress his dwindling flock by driving his space cycle into a white hole. The only part of Fenrir intact after the jump was one of his molars, which is now a glowing asteroid orbiting Sagar 7, and can do nothing but influence the tides and communicate vague messages to clairvoyants. The gods were horrified (all except Odin, as it was foretold that Fenrir would devour him at the time of Ragnarök, so he had a little giggle into his fist) and they retreated to their home worlds, vowing nevermore to consort with mortals (the actual sentence was: ‘Mortals, screw ’em,’ which does not read as godly as a sentence containing the words ‘vowing’, ‘nevermore’ and ‘consort’). So serious were the Aesir about this vow that they surrounded their world, Asgard, with a shell of ice, leaving only one point of access, Bifrost the Rainbow Bridge, which was guarded by the all-seeing god Heimdall.
Visitors were not encouraged.
In fact, visitors were actively discouraged from attempting to dock by ravenous flesh-eating dragons, soul-sucking siren succubae and Flyting, a scurrilous Norse technique of insulting a person which focussed on genitalia and parentage.
The gods wanted nothing to do with mortals. Especially investigative journalists, more especially holy people looking for some kind of heavenly reward. But the most unwelcome person in Asgard was Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, and each of the dragons had been given one of his old shirts to sniff.
The Heart of Gold
The Heart of Gold flew through the multicoloured and vari-textured space of everywhere. With the Infinite Improbability Drive engaged, the ship became part of the Universe itself until the coordinates slotted into their tumblers and popped the craft out at the correct destination with the interstellar travel equivalent of a ‘ta-dah’, scaring the hell out of the person parked in the next bay. But until that moment, anything could happen, especially anything that was highly improbable, which of course then made it probable, which rendered it improbable again, repeating ad infinitum.
Most people preferred to shut their eyes during improbability flights to shield their psyches from the impossibilities occurring around them, but Zaphod often taped his eyes open so that he wouldn’t miss a thing.
During the trip to Asgard, Dionah Carlinton-Housney, one of Zaphod’s favourite singer/prostitutes, broke through from the afterlife to sing possibly prophetic lyrics in hysterical falsetto.
‘Oh, Zaphod, b-a-a-a-by, the fist is gonna fall.’
Hey, thought Zaphod. My name in
a song. Froody.
‘Zaphod, my b-a-a-a-by,’ sang Dionah. ‘You gotta climb that wall.’
Zaphod tried to clap along, but his hands were miles away, arms stretching into space.
‘You look good, Dionah. Great, in fact. No decomposition or anything. I always hoped the afterlife would be like that.’
Dionah placed three hands on her hips, using a fourth to hold the microphone stalk.
‘You’re not listening to me, Mr President.’
‘I don’t want to listen. I want to ask stuff. Do you get many Sub-Etha channels where you are? I love CelebStalk. Do you get that?’
Dionah waved away this talk of entertainment, continuing with her song. ‘Zaphod, b-a-a-a-by. You gotta walk across that bridge.’
‘How about alcohol?’
‘You tell him what his secret name is, Zaph, b-a-a-a-by, and he’s gonna let you in.’
‘Yeah, okay. Bridges, whatever. But, seriously, have you had something done, because I think you look better now?’
Dionah’s eyes flashed. ‘Your grandfather told me not to come. “That boy is an idiot,” he said. “He won’t listen, he never does.” ’
‘It was cryptic,’ protested Zaphod. ‘Cryptic is hard.’
‘Cryptic! It was a goddamn nursery rhyme. Any fool could figure it out.’
Zaphod frowned. ‘Something about a wall and a bridge.’
‘And the secret name. Come on, Mr President. This is important.’
‘Wasn’t there a fist in there somewhere? I like things with fists, especially when the thumb is sticking up. I saw a cartoon once where the stupid guy sticks his thumb into his own eye and…’
‘Oh, for zark’s sake,’ said Dionah, and turned into an ice-sculpture of herself, which then proceeded to melt, dripping upwards into the ceiling. As each drop touched the panels, it exploded with a tinkling oh.
‘That girl always could sing,’ murmured Zaphod, then settled back and waited for probability to reassert itself.
He could see two incredible new colours that his brain could only describe as dangerous and shifty, and jagged indents were being hammered into the spaceship walls as though the Heart of Gold was being rammed by a colossal spiked creature.
‘Whoa,’ yelped Zaphod as a spike shot up between his legs. ‘How soon for normality, Left Brain?’
Left Brain popped up from an electrolytic gel flask on the main console.
‘Who knows in an environment like this,’ he said, gel dropping in blobs from his frictionless orb. ‘In actual time, five seconds, but not necessarily in the order or regularity that we are accustomed to.’
Normality returned with a whinny of tiny ponies and a procession of animated, chanting skeletons across the bridge.
‘I can see right through you,’ they chanted. ‘Can you see right through me?’
Then ponies and skeletons were gone and the bridge was as normal as it was ever likely to get, considering the ship’s navigator was the captain’s disembodied head.
Zaphod blinked. ‘Are we normal, LB?’
Left Brain zoomed around the main cabin, touching base with the various infra-red sensors set into the instruments.
‘Affirmative, Zaphod. The Improbability Drive has spiralled down and we are in real space.’
‘Excellent,’ said Zaphod, unstrapping himself from his flight seat. ‘I have trouble telling the difference sometimes, between what and what-not.’
He leaped to his feet, gangling across to the wraparound view screen, his silver boot heels tinging on the ceramic floor.
‘Okay. So what do we got here? A planet covered with ice. That’s exactly what I did not expect to see. Or rather I expected to see it from the inside. Why are we outside the barrier, LB? Oh why, oh why?’
Left Brain screwed one eye shut, the face he made when analysing streamed data.
‘The Aesir have installed a new shield since our last visit.’
Zaphod pounded the air like a frustrated philosopher trying to force an Existentialist concept into a Pragmatist mind.
‘Those crafty immortals with their little beards and horny helmets. I thought shields didn’t work on Improbability Drives.’
Left Brain hung momentarily wordless, running millions of calculations a second, refining his syntax, paring away any superfluous language until he arrived at:
‘You thought? Don’t make me laugh.’
Zaphod executed a misconceived Du-Bart’ah spinning kick which missed the hovering orb by several feet and made his groin tendon sing like a violin.
Guide Note: President Beeblebrox’s kick was misconceived because the ancient art of Du-Bart’ah had been developed by the Shaltanacs of Broop Kidron Thirteen, who were a happy and peaceful race. The spinning kick was employed to knock Joopleberries from their shrubs with minimal disturbance to the plant itself. Any attempt to use Du-Bart’ah for aggressive reasons would activate the subliminal conditioning in the training chants and turn the attacker’s body on itself. Zaphod did not know this, as he learned the technique from a hologram on the back of a ZugaNuggets box.
‘Really, Zaphod,’ said Left Brain, hovering to a safe altitude. ‘We have a task to complete; there is not time for your usual petty antics.’
‘There is always time for antics,’ moaned Zaphod from his foetal position around a chair stem. ‘Antics get me out of bed in the morning.’
Left Brain knew this to be true, but he had never understood why. ‘Is that why we are here, Zaphod? So that you have something to do?’
Zaphod twanged his tendon gently. ‘I am Zaphod Beeblebrox, LB, and with the life I’ve had, it’s only a matter of time before I run into a humongous anti-climax. I aim to put that off as long as possible.’
Left Brain unscrewed his eye. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Not with the amount of firepower pointed at us.’
‘Excellent,’ proclaimed Zaphod, strained tendon forgotten. ‘It seems like ages since we’ve been up against impossible odds with no reasonable chance of survival.’
‘Not long enough,’ said Left Brain, and transferred the incoming call on to the main screen.
‘No,’ said Heimdall, God of Light, emphatically.
‘But I haven’t…’
‘No!’ repeated Heimdall, his huge bald head filling the screen, his eyes boiling red like gas giants.
Zaphod tried again. ‘You don’t even know what…’
‘No. No. No. I don’t care what it is, Beeblebrox. No, is the answer. Now improbable yourself off somewhere else before I set the dragons on you.’
‘Just hear me out,’ pleaded Zaphod.
‘Nope.’
‘Five seconds, what could it hurt?’
‘No. Any question you could ask me, the answer would be no.’
Zaphod spat it out quickly. ‘Is Thor home?’
‘No, he bloody isn’t!’ roared Heimdall, the tips of his waxed moustache quivering.
‘Really?’
The Asgardian god bared his teeth. ‘Actually, yes. Yes, he is home. You’re in bloody Asgard, aren’t you?’
‘He is! Could I…’
‘No. It’s back to negatives again, my friend. And when I say my friend, I actually mean my hated enemy who I would like to see disembowelled and then sprinkled with salt.’
‘Come on, Heimdall. Forget all those misunderstandings and negotiate a little. This is important.’
Heimdall’s cheeks were so red that it seemed quite possible that his head would explode.
‘Misunderstandings? Misunder– zark me. You have a lot of nerve, Crap-prod. You have enough sheer bloody gall for an entire bucket of Gall Stones.’
Guide Note: Gall Stones – Light grey pebbles found on Damogran. Very cheeky.
‘What say we put the past behind us, where it belongs, and just start again? We can do that, can’t we? We’re both rational adults.’
‘We’re both rational adults, but you should see Thor now. He’s just a bag of nerves with a helmet on top after what you did to him
.’
‘That’s why I want to talk to the boy. To explain.’
Heimdall took a moment for some breathing exercises, blowing into the gloved fingers of one hand which he wiggled before his face.
‘Explain?’ he said finally. ‘You want to explain?’
‘Yes, that’s all I want from you wonderful gods,’ said Zaphod in tones that would have the Sucky Crawlers of Sycophantasia reaching for their sick-bags. ‘A chance to explain, and possibly make amends for, my previous mistakes.’
‘Amends, eh?’ Heimdall said. ‘I suppose you do need to make amends.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course I do. I repent and I deserve penance.’
‘I know what you’re doing there,’ said Heimdall, scowling. ‘Pushing my god buttons. Who do you think you’re fooling?’
‘I’m serious. Look at this face.’
Heimdall leaned in until his eyes filled the screen. These were eyes that could slice through the fat of a normal person’s lies and find the bone of truth within.
‘Very well, Zaphod Beeblebastard. Come outside and let’s talk about amends.’
‘Come outside? Into space? Won’t that be cold?’
‘Fear not, mortal. I will extend a bubble of atmosphere to you.’
‘Just step outside, then?’
‘Out you come, Zaphod. Alone. You have one minute to decide.’
Left Brain hovered at Zaphod’s shoulder.
‘I think you should probably go,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine here inside the ship. I’m sure the atmosphere bubble will hold its integrity.’
‘Can you check it?’
Left Brain squinted for a moment, then spasmed as lightning flashed inside his dome.
‘The Asgardian computer doesn’t share information, apparently.’ Little spider-bots clicked along the glass, nipping at the scorch marks. ‘There isn’t a line out from the entire planet. If you go out there, you are on your own.’
Zaphod sighed and straightened his coat. ‘People like me, LB, the truly great ones… we are always alone.’