by Eoin Colfer
LB nodded. ‘That was good, but I wasn’t ready with the lighting. Give me a second, then try it again.’
‘Okay. Something warm. And not directly overhead. Makes my hair look thin.’
Left Brain interfaced with the ship’s illuminations, putting a yellow spotlight on Zaphod’s face.
‘Ready?’
‘What would you say my motivation was?’
‘Greatness. Pure, undiluted greatness.’
Zaphod nodded gravely, accepting the truth of this. He steepled his fingers and spoke slowly.
‘People like me…’ he began, then Left Brain opened a tube and shot him into space.
Guide Note: As divine dynasties go, the Aesir, the gods of Asgard, are not exactly the biggest pseudopods on the amoeboid. Adored on less than a thousand worlds, they can fairly be classed as middle-tier gods. Zeus, the father of the rival Olympians, has often publicly claimed that he has ‘pulled fluff balls from his navel that were bigger than Asgard’, but this is more than likely simply an attempt to exacerbate Odin’s legendary planet envy. Odin and Zeus have had a ‘bit of a thing’ going for several thousand years, ever since Zeus accidentally turned Odin into a wild boar during one of his ‘take human form and plant some wild oats’ visits to the planet Earth. But even though the gods of Asgard have not achieved the same level of penetration as the Olympians, or even some of the novelty gods such as Pasta Fasta, who began his career as a restaurant chain icon, they are significant for what they have contributed to popular culture, most notably the horn, which they use to decorate their ceremonial helmets, create music and, most importantly, fill with beer. Scientists have postulated that without the phrase ‘do you fancy a horn of beer?’ in their lexicon, several worlds would never have emerged from their cataclysmic planetary war phase.
Heimdall, God of Light, left Zaphod thrashing in the inky void for twenty-nine seconds before lobbing out an atmosphere yo-yo to reel him to safety. In those twenty-nine seconds Zaphod Beeblebrox was forced to think on the inside of his head rather than transmitting his thoughts directly to the Universe as he preferred. His tangent-ridden reflection resulted in the oft-quoted ‘Beeblebrox’s Inner Monologue’, of which there are two published versions: the official one, which Zaphod produced after a weekend on the writer Oolon Colluphid’s estate, and the unofficial version, which was picked up telepathically by Left Brain and included in his memoirs, Life in a Fishbowl. Both accounts will be presented and you can make up your own mind which is more accurate.
The Official Version
And so, the moment has arrived. I grieve bitterly, not for myself, but for those who have been denied the ecstasy of knowing Zaphod Beeblebrox. People will recognize the name, I suppose. Beeblebrox has done a few small things in his short existence. How will I be remembered? As a supernova perhaps, a celestial body that blazes in the night sky, a light in the darkness, granting those that felt its heat on their faces a moment of wonder and perhaps hope. This would be enough. There are those who heap praise upon my shoulders, lauding me as a prophet, a revolutionary, or a great satisfier of women. I accept the praise with gracious modesty, but if I could choose my own epitaph, I would simply say that Zaphod Beeblebrox surprised everyone. In a good way.
And the Unofficial Version
Oh, zark. Big… Big… B-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-G. Space everywhere, but no air! My hair will collapse. And I always bloat in zero g. Heimdall, you total bastard. Look, a ball of ice. Smoothie, shiny, wish I could lick it. What underpants am I wearing? For the autopsy, you need to think about these things. New ones with drainage, I hope. Ford, dude. You were froody, we were froody together. But I was slightly more froody. I bet this gets big coverage. It’s not every day a Galactic President gets dumped out of an airlock by his own head.
There was a third version, that flickered just below the surface of Zaphod’s consciousness. Left Brain didn’t hear it and Zaphod didn’t remember it.
So, Zaphod’s buried personality monologued internally, as I did not hold my breath there will be no lung damage, but that does mean I have less than half a minute before oxygen-deprived blood reaches my brain. I could have done so much more with my time…
Asgard
The Light God watched Zaphod spasm, with no little satisfaction in his all-seeing eyes. He stood on the lip of Bifrost, the portal between Asgard and the rest of the Universe, counting down the seconds until he would have to choose between rescuing Thor’s old manager or letting him die.
It hardly seemed like a choice at all, since Heimdall hated mortals in general (except the noble Sigurd of legend) and Beeblebrox in particular, but letting men die in the vicinity of Asgard was definitely frowned on by Odin, as martyrs had a tendency to live for ever. Which was ironic, as they were dead. Or maybe it was paradoxical, not ironic; one of those tricky terms that Loki bandied around to fluster him. Heimdall was a soldier and didn’t crowd his brain with extraneous vocabulary. Hunt, kill, burn, flay. Those were the kind of words he liked. Especially flay, but it was difficult to work into everyday conversation.
Heimdall pouted for a moment, then sent a gloopy plasma string undulating from the tip of the Gjallarhorn, the legendary harbinger of Ragnarök. Gjallarhorn might seem to the casual observer like your typical twenty-foot, old Norse yelling horn but in the hands of a god it became a tool of great power and a handy vessel for beer-drinking games.
At the tip of the plasma string there was a bubble of atmosphere which Heimdall fly-fished in space until he managed to snare Zaphod. The plasma shell would gave the Betelgeusean quite a shock when he jittered through to the breathable air inside, but Heimdall was not in the least worried about that. The god’s only concern about Zaphod Beeblebrox’s pain was to ensure that there was plenty of it in his immediate future; his immediate past too, if he could get a time pass from Odin.
He reeled Zaphod in and landed him on the Rainbow Bridge.
Guide Note: The term Rainbow Bridge is an example of how gods in general are given to rhetoric and aggrandizement. Osiris did not just have a flu which knocked him sideways for a few weeks, he died and rose again. Aphrodite did not just have a wardrobe full of low-cut blouses and an inexhaustible supply of dirty limericks, she was irresistible to all males everywhere. And the Rainbow Bridge was not just a spectacularly engineered suspension bridge of ice and steel, it was – according to the Aesir – an actual bridge of rainbows.
Zaphod jittered for a minute while the plasma evaporated, then moaned as he realized that his silver boot heels had melted while passing through the charged shell.
‘Oh, come on,’ he moaned. ‘Do you realize how many Silver-Tongued Devils’ tongues went into those heels? This is the worst day of my life.’
Heimdall loomed over him, his grin several yards wide.
‘I am delighted to hear it.’
‘That rainbow bridge is made of ice and steel,’ said Zaphod in petulant revenge for the boot heels.
‘Silence!’ roared Heimdall. ‘Or you shall be flayed!’
‘I’m already afraid.’
‘No, not afraid.’
‘Not afraid. Afraid. Make up your mind.’
‘I said flayed. Flayed! The skin peeled from your body!’
Zaphod gulped comically. ‘Now I am afraid. Is that allowed?’
Heimdall pinched his nose and quietly recited the first verse of the Völsunga saga, which generally calmed him down, but this time even Sigurd’s exploits could not soothe his pounding heart.
While Heimdall was reciting, Zaphod processed the loss of his heels and decided he had bigger porms to wrangle. He jumped to his feet, immediately fell over, tried to cover the embarrassing fall with a backwards tumble, stood upright once more, tottered around for a second until he found a gait that worked with no-heeled high heels, then treated himself to a three-sixty spin.
‘Wow,’ he concluded. ‘I have to say, Heimdall, this is one hoopy world you guys have here. I mean, wow. Is that a waterfall? How big is that?’
Heimdall tried
one last verse before replying. ‘It’s the fountain of youth, if you must know. Frigga fancied a water feature.’
‘That’s great. Landscape gardening – it’s the future.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Heimdall gloomily. ‘Ragnarök is the future. The gods will perish and the Universe will drown in blood.’
Zaphod nodded. ‘Now that would be a fountain worth seeing. But for now, let’s stay positive, eh, big fella? We’re not drowning in blood yet.’
Heimdall was indeed a big fellow, especially seen from directly below. Gazing up at a god’s crotch can do wonders for a person’s lack of low self-esteem. Especially when the crotch contours are tightly bound by the leggings of a red and neon blue striped ski jumpsuit. Heimdall spent his days and nights on the ice and so apparently had decided to dress the part. He had eschewed the traditional mammaloid leggings in favour of snowboarding boots and there was a pair of orange-tinted ski goggles perched on his forehead and a stripe of sun block on his nose.
‘So. Hate to hurry things along, but you know, my old buddy, Thor. Any chance you could see your way clear to letting me in to see him…?’
Heimdall’s vision of the apocalypse faded and he peered down at Zaphod.
‘Amends, you said. You wanted to make amends.’
Zaphod pasted on his most disarming smile. ‘Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? In my defence, I didn’t mean a word of it. I was under duress.’
‘You know the drill, Zaphod.’
‘Not tasks! Come on, Heimdall. That’s so oldy-worldy. I thought you guys were getting with the times.’
‘Asgard does not change.’
‘What about that water feature? That wasn’t there on my last visit.’
‘Significantly. Asgard does not change significantly. Three tasks, Beeblebrox, if you really want to talk.’
‘Three! I don’t have time for three. Your tasks take for ever. I’ll do one.’
‘Three,’ insisted Heimdall, eyes bulging in their sockets.
‘One!’ repeated Zaphod.
‘I’m just going to kill you, screw it.’
Zaphod rocked back on his biological heels, then rocked forward a step. ‘You’re bluffing, big boy. I know the rules here. No one gets struck off the coil on Asgard without the Big O’s say so.’
‘Don’t push me, because I’ll call him.’
‘Yeah? What’s stopping you? Maybe Odin doesn’t give out his number to gatekeepers.’
Heimdall shook his massive head. ‘Don’t do it, Beeblebollocks. Don’t make me call the guy. He’s no fan of yours.’
‘Call him, go ahead. You won’t though, because he’s number one and you’re… you don’t even have a number. Odin could be enjoying a nice horn of honey mead and your call might make him drop it, then holy zark, it’s Ragnarök.’
Heimdall pointed a finger the size of a torpedo. ‘Right. That’s it. I am calling.’
‘Are you? Looks like you’re talking to me. Lot of flapping lips, not much number punching.’
‘Be this on your own head, Zaphod,’ muttered the god. ‘All I wanted was three tasks. Four, tops.’ He waggled his horn in a certain way and it collapsed into itself until it fit neatly into the god’s palm. ‘This is it. No turning back.’
‘Of course there is, if you’re full of buffa-biscuit.’
‘Buffa!’ croaked Heimdall in the choked tones of a Folfangan Phlegm Ferret having its throat tickled for the precious pharmacopeia in its mucus. ‘Buffa, you say!’ He punched in a number on the horn’s keypad and hummed his way through a few seconds of ringing.
‘Yep, hello. Odie, it’s me,’ he said into the horn.
Heimdall closed one eye and endured a few seconds of abuse from the father of the gods.
‘Okay. Sorry, I do realize that you have a lot of golden plankton balls to churn out, and I know mead stains. Freeze your shirt, then the mark comes right out. Listen, I got someone here, a mortal. I just want the go-ahead to kill him.’
More abuse. Zaphod could easily catch the tone from ten feet below phone level.
‘I know we don’t… I am aware of policy… Of course I read the document… the bullet points anyway.’
Zaphod drifted away from the conversation, already impatient with a situation that did not feature him. As a child, Zaphod had been diagnosed with ADHDDAAADHD (ntm) ABT which stood for Always Dreaming His Dopey Days Away, Also Attention Deficit Hyperflatulence Disorder (not to mention) A Bit Thick. Even as an adult, Zaphod could not manage the condition because he could never remember what he suffered from.
A couple of Ds, he had told his pill guy on Eroticon VI, maybe an H, and was prescribed ointment for DDH, which was Double Dose Haemorrhoids. Zaphod stopped using the ointment after a couple of days because he couldn’t keep it down.
So even though Heimdall and Odin were discussing his immediate future and the amount of discomfort contained therein, Zaphod found himself distracted by the twinkly lights of Asgard. It was an amazing sight, even for one accustomed to the shiny shiny of wide, wonderful space.
Size-wise, Asgard was no Megabrantis Delta, but what was there made a big impression. For a start, there was the whole encased in ice thing, which cast a flickering silver-blue light show over the entire surface. The surface itself was littered with the kind of dramatic topographic features that would drive a Magrathean to industrial espionage: mighty gushing rivers, high snow-peaked mountains and fjords as intricate as a twitterflitter’s electrocardiogram readout. Glistening ice fields coexisted impossibly alongside tracts of golden corn, all bathed by sunrays that could not be traced back to any star. Towering castles breached the clouds, dragons coiled around their turrets. It was a dream world, if the dreamers were testosterone-fuelled males who were never forced to behave like adults.
Heimdall was saying something.
‘Hmm?’ said Zaphod.
‘I got the green light,’ said the god, smiling happily.
‘What green light? What do you want a green light for?’
‘It’s a saying. The green light means go.’
‘Go where?’
‘Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Then why do you need a green light?’
Heimdall pinched his nose. ‘Forth Sigurd fides till he comes to the dwelling of a mighty chief called Heimir; he had to wife a sister of Brynhild, who was known as Bekkhild, as she had bided at home, and learned woman’s work, whereas Brynhild followed unto the wars, so was she called Brynhild.’
‘I see,’ said Zaphod, wondering if he might use the craziness as cover to nip across the bridge.
As if reading his mind, which he probably could, Heimdall blocked Zaphod’s path with a massive fur-trimmed boot.
‘I told Odin it was you.’
Zaphod was suddenly a little more nervous than he had been. ‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that you were a well-known public figure, so to make your death confusing.’
‘Confusing?’
Heimdall bent double, shaking Gjallarhorn to its original length.
‘You’re shaking your horn to its original length,’ noted Zaphod.
‘I’m going to summon the dragons.’
‘So that they can kill me in a confusing way,’ Zaphod surmised.
Heimdall’s grin seemed wide as a crescent moon. ‘That’s right, Beetlepox. I’m going to instruct them to kill you by accident but make it look like murder.’
‘Oh,’ said Zaphod. ‘What about the tasks? There must be a golden axe somewhere you guys need me to find.’
‘You wanted one task,’ said Heimdall. ‘That’s exactly what you’re getting.’
Zaphod blew into his hands. ‘Good. Great. Can we get on with it then? I am freezing. My spare neck hole really feels the cold, which incidentally is the title of my next album.’
‘It’s a simple task,’ said Heimdall innocently. ‘All you need to do is cross the bridge.’
Cross the bridge, Zaphod thought. That sounds familiar. Then again,
‘bridge’ is a common enough word. And often used in a metaphorical sense.
‘Which bridge?’
‘This bridge!’ roared Heimdall, his beard quivering. ‘This bloody bridge that you’re standing on.’
‘Okay. Just trying to get the details straight. Cross this bridge I’m standing on. Anything else?’
‘There’s a tube of false atmosphere, so you won’t drift off. If you make the first wall, you need to climb it.’
I gotta climb that wall. Familiar. But the word ‘wall’ is even more common than ‘bridge’.
‘So, cross and climb. Got it. And no hidden tricks?’
‘Apart from the dragons trying to tumble you into the abyss? No.’
Zaphod frowned. ‘So the dragons are not friendly dragons, singing songs and stuff, like in the kiddy stories?’
‘They do sing death dirges.’
‘Really? What rhymes with “flay”?’ A rare flash of perceptive wit from Zaphod at the worst possible moment.
‘Oh, very good. You just cut ten seconds off your head start.’
Heimdall adopted a heroic stance, which is not easy when one is clad in a garish ski suit, but in fairness the god carried it off. He raised his horn and blew a long, undulating series of notes that sounded suspiciously like the old Betelgeusean nursery rhyme ‘Arkle Schmarkle Sat on a Schmed’, but with a semitone more implied violence.
Zaphod felt a sudden chill in the scar tissue where his second neck used to be. He turned on the spot where one of his silver heels until recently had twinkled and ran like blazes through the tube of false atmosphere across the so-called Rainbow Bridge.
Vogon Bureaucruiser Class Hyperspace Ship, the Business End
Constant Mown sat in the hyperspace cradle in his home office, shivering, as the Business End lurched out of hyperspace in much the same way as a drunken Betelgeusean reporter might lurch out of a convenient bush with an empty bladder. (The reporter being the one with the empty bladder not the bush, unless the bush happened to be a Howhi shrub, which expels its seed in a slightly acidic solution when its foliage detects moisture. In essence, you pee on it and it pees on you.)